The O'Briens (31 page)

Johnny now switched on the news in French. The Poles were pleading with London and Paris to send troops. Hurricane winds had derailed a train north of Boston, and Montreal could expect the same storm, which had started in the Caribbean. A boy and girl playing on the street in St. Henry had been electrocuted by a downed power line. The radio announcer did not mention any troop mobilizations.

“We're a military secret,” Johnny remarked. “Nobody knows about us — not even us. Germany, beware.”

She was steering down Mount Royal Boulevard into the heart of the French-speaking city. Johnny studied his list.

“Gingras, Jean-Louis, Private.
3412
Boulevard Saint-Joseph. Let's take a right here. Go to Boulevard Saint-Joseph, then take a left.”

Rain thrummed on the roof. The storm was a harbinger. Summer was being lost, and her world was changing fast.

They found Private Gingras sitting on the balcony of his family's third-floor flat, watching the downpour. Johnny called up to him from the sidewalk and the boy hurried inside to change into uniform. While Margo waited behind the wheel, Johnny rang two more doorbells on the same block. One of the soldiers, a corporal, was at work at the big bakery on Marie-Anne Street, but the other was at home, and he came out wearing battledress and climbed into the back seat alongside Private Gingras. With the two young soldiers aboard, they headed for the bakery, where Johnny located his corporal, told him to go home and get into uniform, and gave him money to take a streetcar to Craig Street. They gathered the rest of the platoon from flats and tenements on a dozen streets east of Boulevard Saint-Denis. The district was unfamiliar to Margo; it seemed buttoned up, grey. There were hardly any shops. Johnny kept flagging down taxis, filling them with young soldiers, then dispatching the taxis to the armoury. The streets were empty of people, probably on account of the violence of the storm, and few cars were on the road. They kept passing by enormous grey stone parish churches.

After two hours Johnny had filled three more taxis and dispatched them to Craig Street, and four young men in battledress were sitting practically on top of one another in the back seat of Margo's car. They sounded excited and happy. It was dark. Rain was still crashing down, and Johnny kept leaning forward to wipe the steamy windshield.

As she steered along Park Avenue Margo saw a streetcar stalled on its track in the middle of the road. The road was flooded and the streetcar was shorting out, white bolts of electricity lashing from its cable and connector. Something about it terrified her. She wanted to pull over, jump out of the car, start running. She dabbed the brake pedal, but then a cold calm came over her, numbing, maybe instinctive, as though she were a bird in a great migrating flock, about to give herself up to an almost endless journey. Her grip tightened on the wheel. Instead of braking she punched the accelerator and swerved neatly around the streetcar and its fiery connection, her tires slashing through the black water.

Johnny, holding a flashlight and studying his black book, hardly noticed. He had been checking names off the list, and now he resumed giving her extraordinarily precise directions, guiding them from street to street, tenement to tenement. Margo tried to let go of everything else — every speck of self-pity, of terror — and just follow the directions and keep going.

Violence

M
onday was frankie's
day off so she headed downtown to shop for shoes. People said there were bound to be all sorts of shortages coming, and good shoes were one thing she could not imagine doing without.

She and Margo rode the streetcar together as far as Phillips Square. Margo was going to Craig Street to see Johnny Taschereau and discuss their wedding plans, which were being slapped together in hurry, since his regiment expected to receive overseas orders any day.

Frankie knew how trivial, how frivolous her own mission was. She had seen boys drilling in Westmount Park and watched the newsreels from Poland showing refugee children and white horses dead on the road, machine-gunned by Nazi planes. And her sister was marrying a man who might very soon to be sent into battle. But no new shoes for the duration — how terrible, how strange.

There was nothing interesting in any of the department stores, but as she walked into Holt Renfrew she suddenly knew she would find exactly what she wanted there. She rode the elevator up to the third floor, got out, and immediately saw a gorgeous pair of Italian pumps. Pale yellow. Kid lining. Her size exactly.

It had happened before, often, knowing what was going to happen just before it did. It was why she loved playing cards, and why people were always telling her she was lucky. Of course, yellow was a summer colour and summer was long gone, but she could wear the shoes on warm days and they would be nice to have for spring. The toes pinched a little but the leather would stretch.

She came out of Holt's carrying her new shoes in a shopping bag, feeling gifted and lucky. The October morning was fine, stuffed with light, and she didn't feel like going inside again now that she'd accomplished her mission. It had been sultry for weeks, the city stinking of gunpowder, it had seemed to her, though she knew it wasn't that, not really. Now the atmosphere was clear; the strongest scent was autumn leaves and earth.

She wondered if Margo might be willing to drive down to Maine with her for one last holiday. October light was gorgeous at the beach and they could have a nice time at the cottage, just the two of them. She could probably wangle a few days off from the clinic on Notre-Dame Street where she was volunteering four days a week — when the war started it hadn't felt right not to have some job. Her mother wanted her to go off to college the way American girls did, but after eleven years at the convent she wasn't interested in more studying.

She'd have preferred modelling clothes at Holt's to handing out vitamins and delousing little boys, but her mother had insisted she go down to the slums and do something useful. She didn't know how useful she was, but some of the medical students at the clinic were charming. Others seemed to despise her but she believed she'd win them over eventually. She wouldn't wear her new shoes to work, though. Yellow pumps, however comely, were not going to win the hearts of Catholic socialists.

As she strolled along Sherbrooke Street then turned down Peel, the only signs of the war were bold black headlines slathered across the newsstands. She decided she would stop by the Sun Life Building to pick up her tennis racquet, which her father had had restrung at a sports store on St. Catherine Street. When the war started, no one played tennis for a couple of weeks, but it was too sweet a pleasure to give up for the duration. There were still two or three weeks of playable weather left and she liked how she looked in a tennis dress. There was even the possibility of a match that afternoon, with a twenty-one-year-old captain in the RMR, if he could swing a couple of hours' leave. Meanwhile, her brother might be persuaded to take her out to lunch.

A shiny green army truck with an artillery piece in tow was parked on Mansfield Street. She read the hand-painted sign attached to the truck:

5
th (Westmount) Field Battery

Royal Canadian Artillery

RECRUITS WANTED

Radio operators — Mechanics — Surveyors

Apply this truck or the Craig St. Drill Hall

One of the recruiting sergeants was speaking earnestly to a telegraph boy astride a bicycle. Another soldier, leaning on the truck, was picking his teeth when he noticed Frankie and winked at her. She tried not to smile as she ran up the granite steps, entered through bronze doors, and crossed the lobby towards the elevator bank.

The moment she stepped out on the twenty-second floor she heard her father yelling. The people she passed in the hallway ignored her or smiled quickly, keeping their heads down, bombarded by the angry noises from his corner office. She started wishing she'd made other plans for lunch, but she couldn't retreat now and leave them thinking she was scared of her papa, even at his most ogreish.

“What's going on?” she asked the pert little receptionist. “Has the sky fallen?”

“M'sieu Mike is with your papa.” The girl was afraid to say more.

Clutching her purse and Holt's shopping bag, Frankie went up to his door and rapped sharply
— shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits
. He'd taught her that knock when she was little, and she always used it with him: their private signal.
“Blessed Frankie of the Knock,” Mike used to call her.

“Not now!” her father shouted.

But she was already opening the door. “Only me,” she said, slipping inside and shutting it softly behind her.

Mike was leaning on a corner of their father's desk, lighting a cigarette from a silver lighter shaped like a pineapple. Their father paced in front of windows that looked across the city and the St. Lawrence River to the purple mountains of New York State on the horizon. The windows on the other side of the room overlooked Dominion Square, with its trees and flowerbeds and ugly statues.

“Mike, how about taking me to lunch?”

Mike smiled at her. Their father drew on his cigarette and looked at her through narrowed eyes. All summer he'd been distracted and in a foul mood. In July he had left their cook behind at a filling station in the White Mountains when she had gone to use the bathroom. Listening to the news from Europe on his car radio, he'd forgotten all about the poor woman and driven away.

Frankie watched him place his smouldering cigarette on the edge of his desk, which was already scored with burn marks, and pick up a hardcover notebook, something like a ledger.

“Most of the estimates for the new airport job are in there,” Mike said. “Wing Commander Blades says the field at St. Hubert, no matter how we stretch it, is never going to be big enough to handle the new bombers, so they're going to want a brand-new field somewhere else, probably Dorval. The squeeze is on with materials and labour and everything's up fifteen percent in the past two weeks, so you'll have to keep an eye on prices. But Blades says the main thing is to bid low enough to be sure you're in, even if it looks like losing money at first. They're going to be building a lot more big fields after that one. Gander's really going to get the build-up, maybe the Azores, and they are planning a bunch of new fields out on the prairies to train aircrew from all over.”

“Your numbers don't add up,” their father said. “I'd lose my fucking shirt.” He started ripping out a page from the notebook, so slowly Frankie could hear every inch of the tear. Mike stared as their father slowly crumpled the page in his fist, then started tearing out more pages, crumpling them, dropping them on the floor. Finally he dumped the entire book into the wastebasket, sat down in his desk chair, and started spinning around slowly, like a little kid, the tips of his handmade shoes hardly touching the carpet. He dressed well, but next to Mike he'd always look like a tree stump in an expensive suit. The only noise was the
squeak squeak squeak
from the chair.

“Mike,” Frankie said. “Lunch?”

“Yeah, sure.” Mike was gazing at their father as if he could not believe how the old man was behaving.

“Where'll we go?”

“I have a lunch date with Mary Cohen but you're welcome to come along.”

“Okay.”

“Aerodromes, weather stations, aircraft plants — it'll be an air war, Dad,” Mike said. “Somebody's going to get their foot in that door. Might as well be us.”

“What the fuck do you mean ‘us'?”

Mike shrugged. “I'm sorry.”

Their father stopped spinning and reached for another cigarette.

“Going to grab my hat, Frankie,” Mike told her. “Meet you by the elevators.”

“Okey-doke.”

Mike left the room without shutting the door. Their father lit his cigarette, then slowly spun in his chair.

They'd always gotten along, Frankie and her father. Most of the time she was able to feel what he was feeling. They were both Black Irish, with the same dark hair and blue eyes. She knew him, Frankie thought, the way she knew herself.

He stopped spinning. “Know what?” he said softly.

“No, Daddy, what?”

“That wing commander, that Englishman your mother had to lunch last Sunday, that Blades — he's cooked it up. They're shipping your brother to England with a bunch of college boys from McGill to make fighter pilots out of them. I said, ‘If you want to win the war, do your job here. You don't need to prove anything. Do the work here — there's plenty. After you build that airfield there'll be another.'”

“Daddy, you know Mike. You're not going to be able to stop him.”

He looked up at her.

“Of course Mike has to go. He isn't the only one, after all,” she added. Maybe it wasn't the right thing to say. She wished she could help her father, get him thinking instead of just feeling. She could see that underneath the soft voice and the stillness he was terribly upset. He could always see things coming; they both could. That was the Black Irish: they knew things and didn't know how they knew them, and it scared them sometimes.

“Daddy, why don't you go home for the afternoon? You ought to talk to Mother.”

“Why? He's already told her. Your uncle too. They think it's great. They're all for it. They wanted this goddamn war.”

That was unfair. No one had really wanted the war. People were excited, that was all.

Or, to be honest, maybe some people — people her age — had wanted the war. To be perfectly honest, she'd wanted the war, the same way she sometimes wanted to kick a can down the middle of a dark street when coming home from a party, walking through the sleeping neighbourhood with her date. Just to make a noise. To show — to know — that she was alive.

Her father had forgotten his cigarette burning on the ashtray; he was lighting another. She watched his hands trembling as he held the heavy desk lighter and touched its flame to his fresh cigarette, which looked so small between his thick fingers.

Frankie had never before felt stronger than her father, calmer and wiser. Maybe Margo had felt that way when she went to New York to fetch him. It was a strange feeling.

“Why don't you go home and rest, Daddy?”

He turned in his chair and looked at her. There weren't any thoughts scribed on his face, none that she could read, anyhow. She realized he wasn't even seeing her.

Who would go to New York to fetch him next time? If Mike was joining the air force and Margo getting married, maybe it would be Frankie's turn. And she wanted to go. In a strange way she wanted to see her father broken down, not because she was angry with him or despised him, but because she loved him and needed to feel closer to him. She needed to see what her sister had seen, the hotel suite, the overflowing ashtray, the whisky bottles, him lying there like an animal hit by a car. She wanted to see him exactly as he was.

“Frankie! Let's go.” Her brother was threading his way between desks and drafting tables in the outer office, carrying his hat. Their father stood up and went to the windows looking down on the square. For a second she thought,
He's going to jump.
Instead he reached down and picked up her tennis racquet in its heavy press from where it was leaning against the wall.

“Frankie! Coming or not? Mary's meeting us in the lobby.”

Her father went to the doorway, hefting the racquet in hand. “That kike,” he said, “that little moll of yours — don't think you'll ever bring her home.”

Frankie could see her brother out in the main office. Mike stopped, turned around, and was facing their father. She could hear the ceiling fan creaking. Somewhere a phone jangled. It was lunch hour, so most people were away from their desks, but a couple of secretaries and perhaps a dozen men — engineers, draftsmen, purchasing agents — were working or unwrapping their sandwiches. Some of them were even smiling, as though Frankie's father had cracked a joke that wasn't funny but required them to smile because he was the boss. Maybe if one of them had started laughing they all would have.

Mike stood in an aisle between drafting tables, hat in one hand, suit coat unbuttoned. “You know what, Dad?” He didn't sound angry; he sounded tired. “That's a terrible thing to say. Why don't you go back to the bush? That's where you belong.”

Their father started towards him, gripping the tennis racquet in his right hand. Frankie wanted to get out of there, run for the elevator, escape the building, but there wasn't time, and anyway, she couldn't move. No one seemed able to move except her father, picking his way between desks and drafting tables, men and girls watching him as if this were the circus and here was the elephant. Not even Mike moved a muscle.

And when their father raised the tennis racquet, maybe Frankie's brother still did not believe what was happening. Or maybe some part of him thought he deserved it — that he ought to take his licking — because he didn't try to duck or protect himself in any way. He just stood there, and as their father raised the racquet there was one big sigh in the room, as though everyone who was holding their breath had let it out at once. Then their father hit Mike over the head with the tennis racquet in its press.