The O'Briens (35 page)

Prodigal

T
he doorbell rang
just as Frankie and her parents were sitting down to dinner. She exchanged glances with her mother — they weren't expecting visitors. Ever since Mike, then Johnny Taschereau, had gone overseas, a doorbell ringing unexpectedly had been enough to spook them at Skye Avenue. Mike had what sounded like a safe desk job in Africa, but everyone knew the Canadians were fighting in Sicily, and Johnny could be one of them. Margo had been having trouble sleeping. She was drinking too much lately, Frankie thought, and was often short-tempered and snappish with Madeleine, her three-year-old.

Doorbell dread was like a sliver of ice entering the intestinal tract. Her father sat at the head of the table, and even she couldn't tell what he was feeling: nerves or gloom or wonder.

Her mother nodded at Helen, the new West Indian maid, who set the salad bowl down on the sideboard with a crash and hurried to answer the door. It seemed to Frankie that her mother had became old the day the war started. She had not bought any new clothes in years. She still ran the free-milk clinic in Sainte-Cunégonde and travelled a lot and gave speeches to raise money for soldiers' families. But she never took a camera with her anymore and hadn't spent any time in her darkroom since just after Madeleine was born. When Iseult was at home, she usually stayed in bed all morning, reading stacks of mail and writing letters that Frankie typed up on the machine at her office downtown.

Without moving from her chair, Frankie glanced out the window, caught a glimpse of a taxi driving away, and felt relieved. Had her brother-in-law or brother been wounded or killed, word would have come by telegram, not by taxi.

She heard a male voice in the hall, and a moment later a gaunt brown figure in tropical uniform strolled into the dining room.

“What's for dessert?” Mike said. “Chocolate cake, I hope. All hail the returning hero.”

~

When Mike went overseas, their father had blamed their mother and Uncle Grattan, which was ridiculous, Frankie thought, because Mike would have gone no matter what anyone said or thought or wrote in a newspaper column. When their father had tried to shut down his firm, a friend of Uncle Grattan's — a federal cabinet minister — told him he had to keep it going, not just to stay out of jail but also for Mike's sake. Abandoning important wartime contracts would embarrass and disgrace Mike, who would certainly feel responsible; how could he not? And hadn't Joe planned on handing the firm over to his son one day?

So her father kept the firm going, and they'd been building war things for almost three years now. Whether it was making him richer than ever, Frankie couldn't say. She only knew that during the long winter weeks after they heard Mike was wounded, when it had been so difficult getting any information about his condition, her father and mother had been kind and gentle with each other.

Even the United States was in the war by then. Maps of England, North Africa, Russia, and Italy had long since replaced the Canadian railway maps on the walls of her father's study, with red and blue pins marking every place where his son and son-in-law had been stationed.

And now Mike was home. She hardly recognized him, but he was home. Hugging him, she could feel his bones through the frayed khaki tunic he wore.

“Awfully chic, being killed,” Lulu Taschereau had remarked at the Normandie Roof one evening, a few weeks before her fiancé was killed at Dieppe. Everyone at the table, including Frankie, had smiled. What life had been like before
1939
, she barely remembered.

Her two serious romances so far had been with soldiers, a lieutenant with the Loyal Edmontons and an anti-tank captain in the RCA. Both might now be in Sicily, and Johnny Taschereau, who had left the Maisies to take over a company in another French-Canadian infantry battalion, the
22
ième, might be fighting in Sicily too, though no one knew his whereabouts for certain. Or even if he was still alive.

Her father had not risen from his chair; he watched silently while Frankie and her mother made a female fuss over Mike. Her brother was telling them about hitching a ride on a B-
17
out of Prestwick, Scotland, flying at a hundred feet across the North Atlantic. She could tell from the blue rings on his sleeve that he was now Flight Lieutenant O'Brien, equivalent to the army rank of captain. For the past year she had been booking transatlantic flights on bombers for VIP passengers. It was a glamour job and all her pals envied her, but she'd never heard of an officer below the rank of major general or air commodore rating a seat on such a flight. No soldier, no airman ever arrived home in the middle of a campaign, unannounced, without there being some piece of trouble attached. From her father's silence, from the set of his mouth, she guessed that he too sensed trouble: all kinds of suffering, sorrow, the crash of dreams.

Her brother was exotic, strange. His speech had a clipped edge now, very English.
Frightfully cold
.
Bloody awful
.

He'd lost weight and his teeth were blazing white in his mahogany face. He had a glow. He'd been in the desert at least a year: of course it had marked him. He had always loved the sun. What was Tunisia like in summer — dusty olive groves, or did it rain there? The brother she had known would have found the most beautiful, most deserted beach and stripped down to take a long, solitary swim in the Mediterranean.

His face was built differently somehow. He smiled in a way she didn't remember. The bones were bold in his face, giving him a ferocious look. Around his blue eyes the skin was stretched, withered. He'd had a haircut recently, shorn at the sides and neck, thicker on top.

She felt dizzy. It was the shock of seeing him. And she'd had a long day, with hardly anything to eat.

The West Indian maid was trying to put down three little plates of salad. “Set a fourth place, Helen, please,” Iseult said. Just back from a fundraising trip through the Maritimes, she looked thinner than ever. She had spent a few days in Maine back in June and it had done her good, but now she was very pale for the middle of summer.

The chandelier twinkled in the mirror over the sideboard. It was like having a male stranger in the house. Her brother might be called handsome, but his youth was gone. He was parched, spare. War had desiccated him. His uniform was sizes too large. His face, wrists, hands were nearly as black as Helen's.

If he weren't her brother she might have fallen for him. He looked extraordinary. Damaged, too. His glow had an animal ferocity. He was no longer who he had been.

He was nodding vaguely without responding to their mother's questions: Was he on leave? How long would he stay? Frankie kept reminding herself to go and telephone Margo, but she couldn't move somehow.

As Mike approached the end of the table where their father was sitting, Joe reached out his hand, almost reluctantly. Mike's wrists thrust out from the threadbare cuffs of his uniform like polished sticks of wood.
It must be what the desert does
, Frankie told herself. The desert had polished him down to the bone. Frankie watched him grasp their father's hand and, bending over, bring it to his lips and kiss it.

For a few seconds the air was still. She heard plates clatter in the kitchen, bits of a radio program in French. The dining-room aroma of crystal, salt, lemon oil.

“Are you on leave or aren't you?” their father demanded.

Letting go his hand, Mike pulled out a chair and sat down, and Frankie started breathing again. “My orders say report to Rockcliffe Station, but I figured I was due a little unofficial leave.”

Rockcliffe was the big airbase at Ottawa, and from the thrust of his jaw Frankie knew their father didn't like the sound of “unofficial leave
.
” Light from the chandelier blinked in his spectacles like Morse code; she knew what he was thinking:
the war doesn't send home good news, ever
. A boy she remembered from kindergarten had drowned when his destroyer sank in the Strait of Belle Isle. The twins across the street had both died at Dieppe — she had heard their mother's screams. Montreal held only the sickly and the lame and the most devout French-Canadian nationalists, along with resplendently uniformed middle-aged businessmen and plenty of zoot-suiters and black marketeers. The best men were in bombers over Germany; in convoys on the North Atlantic; in England, training and waiting; or in Sicily, fighting.

Helen lay a place setting in front of Mike. Helen's fiancé was a corporal in the RMR. Their previous maid, also West Indian, had quit to follow her boyfriend, a quartermaster corporal in the Lincs and Wellands, to a training camp in Ontario. Men were moving further and further out of sight.

Where was Johnny Taschereau at that moment, while the daughter he'd never seen slept upstairs? Frankie pushed back her chair. “I'm going to call Margo.” Her sister was on duty at the canteen she ran in Windsor Station. Before he went overseas Johnny had rented a flat for them on Northcliffe Avenue, but Margo had moved back to Skye Avenue when Maddie was born.

She decided to use the telephone in her father's study.

“What news of Johnny?” Mike was asking as she left the room.

~

Their father's study was stifling and dim. Canvas awnings folded the light of the summer evening in half. His ticker-tape machine had long since been extracted. He had a radio so he could listen to the war news while fussing over stocks and bonds and bank accounts and Iseult's committee accounts and ledgers.

Mike's letters had all ended up in a green metal filing cabinet, in folders meticulously arranged by date. Joe had wanted to file Johnny's letters as well but Margo insisted on keeping those in her room. His walls were covered with survey maps of southeast England, the Middle East, North Africa, and Sicily, red pins marking where Johnny Taschereau had been stationed, blue pins for Mike. Along another wall, three charts fitted together showed the coast between the mouth of the Kennebunk River and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Pencilled lines and pinpricks marked the courses Joe had sailed along the Maine coast, the bearings he had taken.

She knew the telephone number of Margo's canteen by heart. A troop train was coming through tonight, three battalions of a western brigade on their way to Halifax and England. Or possibly Sicily. The soldiers would want their free doughnuts and coffee, and Frankie had promised her sister she would go down and lend a hand — there were never enough volunteers for night duty. Sometimes the men were rowdy, especially if they had been on the train for days, but usually they were shy, and grateful for the coffee and doughnuts. They might have been heading off to work on the wheat harvest, or up north to the mines or the logging camps. Swagger had gone out of style, perhaps never had been the style in the towns and farmlands much of the Canadian army seemed to be from.

The phone rang and rang and she was about to hang up when one of the volunteers answered.

“No, you can't, she's busy,” the girl replied, when Frankie asked to speak to Margo. “Try later. We're just getting a whole brigade in.”

“This is her sister. I need to talk to her. It's important.”

There was a pause. “Oh, jeepers,” the girl said. “Not bad news, is it? Not about Johnny?”

“No. Can I speak to her, please?”

“Hang on a sec.”

While she waited she rummaged in a desk drawer and found a pack of her father's cigarettes. She shook one out and lit it. Everyone smoked now: it was the signature of the war.

What she needed was a man her own age, someone to take her to the Normandie Roof for supper and dancing, and Ruby Foo's afterwards for jazz and Brandy Alexanders and scrambled eggs. Scanning casualty lists for names she recognized was no fun. There weren't many Montreal boys in Sicily but there were some. She needed a man present and available, not four thousand miles away fighting Germans.

“Frankie, what's wrong?” Margo sounded tense.

“Mike's home.”

“What? No. He can't be, he's in North Africa.”

“He came over in a bomber.”

“Does he have news about Johnny? Was he in England? Have they sent him with news about Johnny?”

“What?”

“Frankie, is this some trick to get me home?”

“No, no, he doesn't know anything about Johnny. He's just come home, that's all.” Frankie could hear her sister breathing.

“If there ever is bad news, you tell me right away,” Margo said urgently. “Don't ever wait. Tell me right away, promise?”

“Sure.”

Another pause. She listened to Margo exhale.

“I put Maddie down at six,” Frankie said. “Hasn't been a peep.”

“Oh, Frankie, I'm shaking. Maybe the war's almost over, maybe Johnny will be coming home soon. I'll find a cab and come right way.”

~

Margo had awakened Maddie and brought her downstairs, and Mike held the sleepy little girl on his lap while he told them about sailing from Sicily to Portsmouth with hundreds of wounded soldiers, on a ship that had once carried cargoes of frozen meat from Argentina to France.

“Orders came in and I had to leave so fast, most of my kit's still in Catania. I've got shaving gear and an extra shirt, that's about all.”

Frankie glanced at her sister. For all anyone knew, Johnny's regiment, the
22
ième — the Van Doos — was in Sicily and Johnny might already be wounded or dead, might have been for days. Sometimes it took that long to find out. She'd heard of people getting the telegram weeks later.

“Why'd they send you back to England?” their father demanded.

Mike was touching Maddie's hair, his fingers gentle but quick and nervous. His khaki uniform was shiny at the knees and frayed at the cuffs. Frankie didn't recognize most of his ribbons. The wings on his chest signified that, desk job or not, he would always be a pilot.

Frankie now wondered if there was something wrong with him after all. His dark, latigo-leather skin reminded her of the men who had come to the kitchen door before the war, asking for handouts, odd jobs. Exhaustion was built into his every word and gesture; he seemed tired the way very fat people were fat. It had accumulated steadily and was a part of him.