The O'Briens (22 page)

“If you want to call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“I don't want to call it anything, Joe. I just want him home! This time of year he always gets crazy. I want him to be all right. Oh God.”

“Ellie, listen, he's probably out on a tear. If you'd been downtown this morning you'd have seen the vets on St. Catherine Street, celebrating. They've been at it since last night. He's probably celebrating too, the fool.”

Elise sniffled. “It could be, Joe. Maybe he's tying one on. It could be that.”

Joe looked at his wristwatch. “The Governor General's unveiling the new war memorial in Dominion Square in an hour. There'll be a crowd. I'll bet Grattan shows up. I'll walk over and see if I can't find him.”

“Joe, what if he went in the river?” Her voice sounded small and far away. “They'll never find him then; they'll never fish him out.”

“Don't think that way. He'll turn up.”

“He isn't strong, Joe. He isn't. Not like you.”

She was weeping again. His sister-in-law was almost as tough as he was but she'd probably been dreading Armistice Day for weeks. She must have had a sleepless night.

“I'm going to the unveiling. I'll call you as soon as I find out anything.” He hung up the phone.

The newspapers had been referring to the new war memorial as the “Cenotaph,” whatever that meant. When people feared a thing, they dressed it in language to blur its shape. Dead soldiers were now “the fallen.” Death in the war was “sacrifice
.
”

Rising from his desk, he walked over to the windows. Bits of snow were swirling again between grey buildings. The sky was pale and looked cold. He ought to get hold of his driver and make sure he had chains ready for mounting on the tires. The streets approaching the Royal Victoria were the steepest in the city.

Intending to check the weather forecast, he picked up a copy of the
Montreal Herald
that lay folded on his desk. The front-page story was yet another gun battle in Vermont between rumrunners and hijackers. Two Italians from Montreal had been found shot to death in a highway ditch outside St. Albans. There had been many similar stories lately in the
Herald
. Every night, trucks loaded with Canadian liquor sped down the back roads of New England, headed for New York City. He'd recently heard that Louis-Philippe Taschereau's young client Buck Cohen was one of New York's major suppliers of contraband liquor, and on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the Dominion of Canada.

A thought struck him. Joe crossed the room and opened his door. His secretary, Miss Esther Dalrymple, looked up from her desk.

“Get Louis-Philippe Taschereau on the line, please.”

“Certainly. Oh, Mr. O'Brien?”

“Yes?”

“The girls at the switchboard are holding a line free in case Mrs. O'Brien calls.”

“Excellent. Thank you.” He respected Protestants like Miss Dalrymple, who lived with her mother in Verdun. She was not beautiful but she was punctual, efficient, and quick. A few moments later, Taschereau's office was on the line.

“I connect you now,” a French-Canadian secretarial voice intoned.

“Oui? Monsieur O'Brien? Comment allez-vous?”

“Ça va bien, merci. Et vous?”

Joe deployed his lumber-camp French for the polite preliminaries before switching to English. “M'sieu, the reason I called is that I've a brother who may be in some trouble down below the border.” It was a guess, but his hunches had often proved correct.

“Well, I'm sorry to hear that,” said the lawyer. “What sort of trouble?”

“He may have been doing some trucking business down there.”

There was a pause.

“Your brother? This would be Captain O'Brien?”

“Yes. The fact is, he never came home last night. One of your clients has trucking interests, and I thought he might have heard something.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. Had he annoyed Taschereau by referring to his connection with a rumrunner? He didn't know the lawyer well. On the other hand, it was a fact that Taschereau represented Cohen, who had sold more liquor last year than anyone else in the world, according to a story in the
Toronto Telegram.

“Well,” said Taschereau, “these matters are obscure to me, but I can certainly try to find out.”

“If something's happened I wouldn't want his wife to find out from the newspapers.”

The lawyer sighed. “These people
 . . . 
” He let the sentence trail away.

Your clients, you mean
, Joe thought. “Thank you, monsieur. I'm much obliged.”

“Not at all. I'll call you by the end of the day.”

Joe next placed a call to his home. Iseult's voice came clearly over the wire. “Nothing to report,” she said. “This is getting very boring.”

“What are you doing?”

“Sitting in the sunroom and looking through
Vanity Fair
.”

She usually spent three days a week at the Sainte-Cunégonde clinic, delousing children, keeping records, and paying bills, but she had agreed to stop going there until after the baby was born.

“I feel like a beached whale, Joe. I don't like this house. I can't wait to be in our own home.”

“You haven't spoken with Elise this morning, have you?”

“No. Why? Is anything wrong?”

“Grattan didn't come home last night. And it's Armistice Day.”

“Oh, Joe.”

“I'm going to Dominion Square. They're unveiling the war memorial. Maybe I'll see him there.”

~

In Dominion Square, hundreds of people wrapped in overcoats stamped their feet against the bright cold. Women clutched wreaths, sprays of poppies in cellophane, lilies wrapped in newspaper. There were red-cheeked schoolboy cadets and plenty of young men wearing medals, but women outnumbered the men. The sky had cleared, the wind was sharp, and the light snow that had fallen was being tossed around on hard ground.

A flight of pigeons whipped overhead. The Governor General and an array of officers and aides-de-camp were on the reviewing stand in their polished boots, with moustaches and chests of ribbons, clutching leather riding crops. The Anglican bishop of Montreal was addressing the crowd in an elderly Englishman's quaver: “Sacrifice
. . .
gallant
. . .
glorious
. . .
Empire
. . .
blessed
. . .
” Joe couldn't tell if he was speechifying or praying, the words were being tossed around so by the wind.

The crowd was dense near the new war memorial but there was plenty of open space in the square: acres of frozen yellow grass and brown flowerbeds. The South African War Memorial — a bronze cavalry trooper holding down a restless bronze horse — was on the other side, opposite the new Sun Life Building. He usually ignored it, but sometimes, on his way to the train station and New York City, he stopped and read the inscription.

TO

COMMEMORATE

THE HEROIC DEVOTION OF THE

CANADIANS WHO FELL IN THE

SOUTH AFRICAN WAR

AND THE VALOUR OF THEIR COMRADES

Heroic
,
devotion
,
valour
— ten-dollar words.
Abandonment
,
early sorrow
, and
poverty
were the plain real words, and they ought to have left space on their monument for a few of them.

Looking up, he saw bare branches, wild sky, and restless pigeons. It was warmer within the pack of bodies, sharing heat. The brand-new monument — the Cenotaph — just unsheathed, stood twenty feet tall. No bronze figures, no decoration, just polished granite fitted together almost seamlessly. It was good stone. He wondered where it had been quarried and at what price.

Archbishop Bruchési was speaking in French and Joe felt the mostly English crowd getting restless. War had divided the city, with French Canadians rioting against conscription. All that was supposed to be forgotten now.

The Archbishop shifted to Latin for his benediction, and as Joe scanned for his brother the crowd began singing a Protestant hymn, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A dowdy middle-aged woman clutching a wreath was escorted to the foot of the Cenotaph by a cadet, and Joe felt a narrow slice of pain enter his chest as he watched her lay the tribute. He would kill anyone who threatened his
Mike. If they came at his boy waving their flags, he'd kill them.

He glanced at his watch. Just about eleven o'clock. Out on Dorchester Boulevard cars and trucks were pulling over to the curb. Buildings and sidewalk grates still spewed steam and smoke, but the noise of the city had abruptly died away. The silence — a novelty in
1919
, dogma now — was being strictly observed.

The railway men hated it, he knew. It played hell with the timetables. People were making a fetish out of remembering the war when most of them would be better off forgetting all about it. Life ran forward, never back.

He gripped his walking stick. This was his city now, a shining collection of death and memory. Opposite the South African War Memorial, the Sun Life Insurance Company was building a new headquarters, the biggest building in the British Empire. Saint-Jacques Cathedral, St. George's Anglican, the battlements of Windsor Station — all grey stone, coldness. There was permanence here, and he liked that. Everything he had done had brought him this far.

A sharp squawk broke the silence and a murmur of disapproval passed through the crowd. Another squawk, a little louder — then some notes scratched the air, a lick of melody, and he suddenly realized that someone, somewhere, was playing a fiddle.

Looking across the square he spotted his brother, the tallest in a group of five or six other men, all wearing trench coats except one fellow in a woollen cap and mackinaw, who was striking away at a fiddle perched at his neck. The tune snarling across the frozen silence was “Cheticamp Jig,” one of the bawdy pieces Mick Heaney used to play.

The two minutes ended. Official silence began to loosen and dissolve. People started chatting, stamping their feet, coughing. Out on Dorchester Boulevard the automobiles began moving. Streetcars jangled their bells and resumed their metallic slither, but above everything Joe could still hear the taunting, raucous fiddle.

He started towards his brother.

Grattan saw him coming and saluted. “Hello, Joe! Cold enough for you?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Same as everyone, I guess.”

The fiddler had moved a little way off and seemed to be locked in a furious struggle with his instrument, bow flying and music sputtering into the cold air, banging into the brutish surround of stone buildings. With his black hair and chipped face he could be an Indian, a Caughnawaga Mohawk from across the river.

Joe shuddered. The squawking notes were like insects pecking at him, needles jabbing. “Where the hell have you been, Grattan?”

The velvet collar of Grattan's cashmere overcoat was turned up against the cold. Joe had always been secretly proud of his younger brother's distinguished appearance. No one looking at Grattan would ever guess he'd been raised in the clearings.

“You've been running whisky for Buck Cohen, haven't you?”

Grattan nodded. “I sure have, Joe. Delivered a cargo at Stockbridge, Mass., last night and ran straight back. Jesus, it was cold in the truck.”

“You got shot, didn't you? Back in September. It wasn't any goddamn barbed wire.”

Grattan shrugged. “Bullet just scratched me, but it wasn't clean.”

“Let's get out of here,” Joe said. “Walk back to the office with me. I've had a telephone call from Elise. You'd better speak to her.”

Grattan shook hands with a couple of the men in trench coats, then he and Joe started across the square. The fiddler was still playing but his melody was slower now, not a jig. Mournful. A lament.

“What the hell did he bring that goddamn thing to a wreath-laying for?” Joe said.

“Don't know. There were a few Caughnawagas in the battalion. Joe, I couldn't tell Elise or she would have made a fuss. I make two hundred bucks for a night's work and don't have to do anything but ride along. Buck's always worried about his trucks getting jumped.”

“What are you, some sort of gunner for the gangsters? Is that what you've come to, Grattan?”

“Well, I haven't done much gunning, but that's what it comes down to, in a pinch.”

“Did you see the paper this morning?”

“That wasn't us. We stay clear of St. Albans.”

They were passing brown flowerbeds, bare and lumpy. Feeling overwhelmed, Joe suddenly halted. “I can't stand that music.”

“Pay it no mind, brother. Let's go someplace warm. I could use a nice lunch.”

A small ache in Joe's chest was radiating into his shoulder and right arm, tingling down to the elbow. His eyelashes were sticky with tears as he stared down at his shoes. He was wearing doeskin spats, buttoned up the sides. When had he started wearing spats? A year ago? Ridiculous things. Grattan didn't wear spats.

“Grattan, do you suppose Mick Heaney is dead?”

“Christ, I sure hope so. I used to dream of running into him in France.”

“I wish we'd killed him when we had the chance.”

“Well, we damn near did. Where'll we lunch? How about the Piccadilly? My treat.”

They resumed walking. Joe had heard of businessmen suffering heart attacks in the middle of the day. At the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association pool, where he swam twice a week, he'd overheard a member compare the pain of his heart attack to being shot in the breast at dawn by a firing squad. Was he going to keel over and die in Dominion Square?