The O'Briens (38 page)

Then Helen brought in tea and plates of sandwiches and cookies left over from the afternoon's horde.

“
Mais ton frère a l'air si heureux!
” Souer Saint-Nom-de-Marie squeezed Frankie's arm with her bony little hand. “
Il a trouvé la paix du Christ!
”

Really? Happy? Peace?
When Frankie had looked into the coffin, she'd seen only absence, disappearance.

The dead must not be left alone — that was the custom — and the nuns would spend the night in the living room sitting with Mike's body. They had brought their sewing baskets. They were the only ones who seemed entirely comfortable, cheerful even, in the presence of death. They enjoyed leafing through the
Life
magazines and
National Geographic
s, and Frankie's mother tuned the dial to Radio-Canada so they would be able to hear the news in French. Their bright chatter sounded like a flock of small birds in the living room.

An hour later Frankie was lying in bed with the current issue of
Life
when there was knock on her door.

“Come in.”

Margo was wearing her red doeskin dressing gown and holding a drink in her hand, a short one, the ice cubes clicking as she shut the door and came over to sit down on the edge of Frankie's bed. “Frankie, tell me honestly. Is Johnny going to come home?”

Frankie put down her magazine and reached for her cigarettes from the night table.

“Just tell me,” Margo said. “Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

For a long time Margo looked at her without saying anything. She needed Frankie to say yes, and maybe it didn't matter if Frankie really knew or not. How could she? Not for sure, not enough to put money on. If the war were a barbotte game she'd have picked up her money and quit the table.

She shook out a cigarette for her sister and one for herself and lit them both. They puffed in silence. She could smell the winey fragrance of the cocktail. Ice cubes crackled and a gust of rain dashed against the window. The trees were swaying. Summer was turning to fall, and the next day, the day of the funeral, was predicted to be cold, blustery, and wet.

The drifting smoke of their cigarettes was so thick it looked blue in the light, but Frankie didn't mind: it slowed things down. Suddenly Margo, without saying a word, put her glass down on the floor, pulled aside the covers, and climbed into bed with her.

They hadn't shared a bed since they were children in a Pullman berth on the way home from California. Frankie let her magazine fall to the floor and reached to switch off the light. Rolling onto her side, she threw her arm over Margo's hip and pressed herself against the solid warmth of her body. In the darkness Frankie could smell their cigarette smoke and the nauseating ripeness of the lilies. Their parents were old and wounded and could no longer pretend to protect them, or even each other. At least Margo had a daughter and — if Johnny Taschereau were still alive — a husband. But Frankie was alone, definitely. She'd not realized just how alone a death could make her feel.

~

No one cried in church except a couple of Mike's old flames, girls he'd taken to dances at Victoria Hall: all married women now. Their mother did not, and Margo didn't, though she was very near.

Frankie wouldn't. Of course it was vanity. Of course it was pride. Pride was nothing to be proud of, Frankie told herself, but it could get you through certain situations.

Her mother had asked her to write Mary Cohen to let her know. “Let her know what?” Frankie had snapped. Let her know she was an idiotic bitch for dumping Mike? That he had been too good for her? Or let her know she'd been wise not to hitch her nuptial wagon to a dying, now dead, star? But Frankie had indeed written to Mary Brayton, née Cohen, wife of Commander Douglas Brayton, USNR, in San Diego, though she wouldn't have received the letter yet.

The undertaker's men had brought the coffin to the church early that morning. Now it was front and centre, just before the altar rail, wrapped in a Red Ensign, and six airmen in blue uniforms sat erect in a side pew: the honour guard. A shiny air force flatbed truck was parked outside on Sherbrooke Street. When the funeral Mass was over, the airmen would carry the coffin out and slide it onto their truck, which would haul it over the hill to Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery.

She still didn't know how her father would handle the funeral. For two days people had been congratulating her on her family's “remarkable stoicism.”

“
Ça montre la force de ta foi
,”
whispered Lulu Taschereau.

The power of her faith? How could she respect people, even old friends of the family like Lulu, who said things like that, who built their nests of words and wouldn't leave them? Poor Lulu had gotten awfully devout, was always after Frankie and Margo to go with her to dawn Mass at Saint-Léon-de-Westmount.

Frankie went into Mike's room, found his
Oxford Pocket Dictionary
on a bookshelf above an old radio he had built, and looked up

sto·i·cism
noun
emotional indifference, especially admirable patience and endurance shown in the face of adversity

As she put the book back on the shelf she wondered just how much patience and endurance her father possessed.

Mike's radio was a naked collection of tubes, dials, and wires. He had built it almost by instinct: the first radio in their house. She remembered Margo teasing him, and their mother hadn't liked it either: the sour smell of solder and all the time he'd spent alone, tinkering, up in his room. Their brother had been thirsty for outside connection, was determined to send and receive. He'd never been afraid of the world.

While he was in hospital she had felt blindly impatient, even angry. How dare he fly across the ocean like a piece of evil news, knowing it would tip the fanatic balance, send their father back into his dark forest like a misguided child in a nasty German fairytale?

She had tried telling herself that once the dying was over and done with, there'd be no use moping. They would all just have to get on with their lives.

Over and done with. Get on with our lives.

Language thickened like cake mix unless you were watchful — and she was no better than anyone else. Those phrases tasted like rough straw in her mouth now. They sickened her.

Iseult would never, ever break down in public, never hand her grief around, and Frankie had made up her mind that she wouldn't either. Certainly not in the chill grey church, one of six parish churches the O'Brien Capital Construction Company had built for the archdiocese twenty years before. She was holding hands with Elise, who was crying quietly. Cousin Virginia — a University of Toronto grad with a master's degree, unmarried at thirty-one and exceedingly proud of her job as secretary to an important cabinet minister — sniffled from time to time.

Margo was doing her best to be
stoic
,
though close-up, Johnny's absence and silence showed on her like a wound.

Frankie wondered if what she was feeling could be called grief. People would say it was, of course they would, but it was hard to collate her feelings into a single noun.
Grief
suggested a stately music that her feelings entirely lacked. They were as squalid and messy as dirty sheets in a room reeking of last night's cigarette smoke. Her grief was charred with resentment and tasted foul. It could be that grieving her brother was another test she'd fail. One that she ought to have passed, and would have, if she hadn't been so irresponsible and lazy.

The church smelled of wet wool and nylons and hair tonic and too many people, most of them strangers. It was damp and chilly, but when Margo had phoned ahead to ask the sacristan to turn on the furnace, he'd refused. “Still only August, miss, after all.”

Frankie's knee kept scraping on a sharp corner of the Speed Graphic hanging by its strap from one of her purse hooks. If that damn camera started a run in her last pair of silk stockings, that would be the end. She'd peel them off and toss them into the grave with the coffin and let Elise, or her mother, take a picture of it. Or maybe she'd smash the Speed Graphic first and throw it in too.

She'd only noticed the bulky camera as they were leaving the house. It was her mother's but Elise was carrying it, the strap over her shoulder.

“What are you doing with that?”

Elise shrugged. “Your mother wants me to take some pictures.”

“It's part of his life. I want it recorded,” her mother said calmly.

“What for? It's not a wedding, it's a funeral! No one takes pictures at funerals!”

Their mother's determination to register their childhoods with almost daily photography had annoyed them all, although Frankie had figured out early that Iseult needed to capture them on film because that first baby had slipped in and out of life so fast. When she was small, her mother used to claim she remembered the baby perfectly, that in fact she had looked an awful lot like Frankie. Later Frankie learned that Margo had been told the same thing, and Margo as a youngster was blonde and chubby, whereas Frankie had always been Black Irish and bony. Probably their mother didn't remember anything about the baby they'd left in a grave that no one had been able to find again, so that it was almost as if she had never been born — which raised questions Frankie had always been willing to leave lying there unexplored, like bad neighbourhoods. It was no use getting too steep, deep, and philosophical when you were living with your parents, unmarried, uncollected, and semi-educated.

Her mother photographed them to hold on to them, so they would not disappear. And the damn snapshots had often got in the way of — been a substitute for — actual holding. Frankie had never forgotten spilling off her bicycle on Murray Hill Avenue and skinning her knees, and her mother galloping out of the house with the little Leica and stopping to snap a picture before comforting her.

And now, recruiting Elise to shoot Mike's funeral. It was too bloody much. “No, Mother! Not today. No camera! No pictures! I won't let you!”

And there on the front steps, while the undertaker's unholy limousine grumbled at the curb, Frankie let loose her one and only crying jag. Her mother burst into tears too, and her father squinted at them as though they were the front page of a newspaper he was trying to read.

Under a black silk umbrella, in cold, dripping late summer rain, Frankie wailed and shook like a sick cat, ruining her mascara, while Cousin Virginia clumsily tried to hug her. Margo lit a cigarette and finally took charge, leading Frankie back inside and upstairs, sitting her down on the toilet seat, and gently washing her face while the rest of them waited in the Packard.

“It's not so terrible,” Margo soothed. “She needs to, that's all. You have to let things happen. We'll probably be glad to have the pictures when we're old.”

By then Frankie was sitting on the john, smoking, while Margo powdered her face. Frankie hated to think of their brother's life receding to nothing but photographs. She didn't want to think of herself in twenty or thirty years looking at pictures of his funeral. By then he'd just be compounds of light and dark on pieces of treated paper. Just a bit of chemistry.

Her father sat in the pew like a freshly sedated casualty while the choir belted out the Dies Irae. Frankie hadn't been to many funerals, at least not where the body was present, but she had been to four memorial services for boys killed overseas, and at Catholic ceremonies the Dies Irae had always been sung. She glanced at the English translation on the specially printed Mass card:

Day of wrath! O day of mourning

See fulfilled the prophets' warning,

Heaven and earth in ashes burning

Then she dropped the card back into the hymnal rack. Who needed more burning and ashes?

She looked at her father sitting at the other end of the pew. She and Margo had both worried he would come downstairs drunk, but he'd been perfectly sober so far, and well turned out: shoes gleaming, hair combed, suit pressed. As far as she knew the only liquor in the house was the stash of bottles in Margo's closet and what remained of two mixed cases of Scotch, rye, gin, and vermouth her mother had her buy for the visitation days and the reception after the cemetery. The day after Mike died, Frankie had gone downtown and placed the booze order with Jockey Fleming, the black market hustler who kept a newsstand at the corner of Peel and St. Catherine, one block from her office in the Mount Royal.

“Jeez, Frankie, these days that's a lot of liquor, practically a boatload,” the little hustler had said. He was a Jew from Griffintown, with hands like monkey's paws. “Good stuff's getting hard to come by. For the wake, am I right?”

“That's right, Jock, and the visitation. Can you deliver?”

“I'll get the goods, by scrim or by scram. For you, Frankie. Honour of your brother.”

“Thanks, Jock. And good stuff, right?”

“On my mother's grave, the best, I promise. I'll send it up tomorrow in a cab.”

Over the past couple of days their visitors had gone through plenty of drink, but she calculated there was just enough left over for today's shindig. The booze was stored in the pantry in preparation for the wake or reception or party or whatever it was called. Hordes would be coming back to Skye Avenue expecting food and drink, and there'd be plenty of everything: Scotch, gin, rye, vermouth, baked hams, a salmon, plates of cocktail sandwiches, cream of mushroom soup, sausage rolls, cakes. Frankie had hired a bartender from Mother Martin's. He'd probably be pouring more Scotch than gin: people seemed to prefer dark liquor in dark weather, and the day was dark, wet, and blowy, perfect weather for death.

Her father was looking stunned, and dapper. He'd be damned if he'd let anybody pity him. He could almost pass for stoic, but how long before he caught the next train for New York? She had checked the timetables. The Delaware and Hudson's Montreal Limited was scheduled to leave at eight p.m.