A Three Day Event (16 page)

Roch hated problems, hated conflict, and wanted above all else that
Le
Centre
should be a happy, routinized place. As soon as the stallion looked more normal, as soon as the office was set to rights, he was half way to denying that anything had happened at all. Much more worrying to him, Polo assumed, was Michel’s enigmatic decision to throw over the chance of permanent security and a dream sponsorship deal. But Roch no doubt believed that a lifetime of paternal domination would reassert its normal sway and, in time, put that situation right as well.

Far more evocative had been Hy’s face when he arrived at the office. Polo had seen his shock, of course, but also fear. Suddenly, in Polo’s eyes, he was once again the anxious, insecure child of a demanding, success–obsessed father. Polo had known him since Hy was fifteen and he himself was eleven. Hy had been an obedient only son, totally dominated by a need to vindicate his father’s immigrant struggles from grim poverty to ever–expanding achievement. So Hy had spent most of his adult life fulfilling mandates set first by his father, then by his wife and community. And now, just when he’d claimed his reward for a lifetime of uncomplaining responsiveness to the needs of others, he saw his long–deferred paradise under siege, most likely from within.

Polo was dressed. That is, he wore a clean, crisp, newer version of the denim shirt, and khakis instead of the jeans he wore during the day, and Timberland moccasins instead of paddock boots. But it was still too early. And he was suddenly uneasy, remembering the weird and depressing phone call with Nathalie.

What had she meant by
unfinished business?
And what was that crazy innuendo about Ruthie? Because it
was
crazy. Never once in their whole married life had Nath ever had cause to think that Ruthie was anything but the–well, okay, not his sister exactly–but damn close–of his youth. He’d never even been alone with Ruthie since she got married.
That was over twenty years ago.
It was a complete mystery to him. Nath wasn’t the jealous type. Why now? And was this a good or a bad sign for their marriage? That she was jealous, that is. That she was jealous of
Ruthie
was simply intolerable.
Intolerable
.

He felt his jaw clenching with anger again as he reviewed the accusations she had levelled at him.
Denial. Repression.
God, he hated those buzz words. He hated jargon of any kind: political, psychological, professional. It was the clubbiness, the members–only implications of such words. Pretentious. Nathalie had never been that way before she started taking university courses. And Ruthie too, always quoting from books and poems.

He fought against these prejudices. He knew it had to be envy and a lack of confidence in himself that made him sensitive to what after all was perfectly normal usage for
them.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Who said that? Good advice, though. Except the kitchen is the warmest room in the house, and the people I care most about in the world are perfectly at home there.

He would leave in a few minutes. First he would record a few notes. He took a small notebook from his pocket. It was something he always carried with him. In it was noted information: bits he heard or read, but mostly new vocabulary, expressions he saw in magazines or gleaned in conversation. It was a habit he had acquired in his teens when he had started reading and learning English properly, from the ground up. Every once in a while he would review his notes and transfer the most useful of the material to a file he kept in his computer. Tonight he jotted down the bit about the schizophrenia rates in Ireland. He wanted to check that out.

He flipped to the beginning and scanned entries that went back about a year. He had noted the distinction between ‘gambit/gamut’, for example, because anglophones themselves often confused the two, and he hated making mistakes–really, it had started as a game, and then he’d got addicted. He smiled as he looked at the very last entry–‘nosy parker’–

–
Hey, Sue, you ask an awful lot of questions.

–Yeah, that’s why they call me ‘nosy.’

–Mm.

–Don’t you get it?

–Get what?

–‘Nosy Parker’?

–?

–It’s an expression, it means someone who’s always sticking their nose into other people’s business, I’m sure there must be something like it in French…

He’d got addicted, also, to the good feelings that came from speaking a language in the way educated people did. He liked what it had done for his self–esteem when he was young and needed it badly. And he liked the automatic respect it engendered in other people. It was important to appear to be on a social level with sponsors, and later, clients. Even the appearance of ignorance or cultural inferiority in someone in his position could set up illusions of power in the people he dealt with. Language properly spoken, he had discovered, was a potent commodity, as good, in its own way, as money in certain situations, and better than money in others.

His now excellent English and even his better–than–average French–not to mention a fair sprinkling of Yiddish words and expressions–he owed to the Jacobsons, along with his perfect teeth and properly occluding jaw, his opthalmologist–prescribed–as opposed to drugstore–bought glasses, his table manners, clothes sense, taste for sarcasm, and his brilliant career in horse sport.

Only his marriage had been entirely his own doing… And even then Morrie had warned him.

You’re marrying ‘up’, Polo. It’s not easy. Trust me, I know. What’s a little Yid like me doing in Westmount with all these Wasps? I should be in Cote St. Luc with the rest of the tribe. But no, Cote. St. Luc is a ghetto, she says. I’m a ‘greener’, what do I care, but Clarice’s family–the Levys–goes back like a hundred generations here. One of her ancestors from Germany was peddling steamies and frites to the frenchies or whatever the hell they ate then on the Plains of Abraham. Can you imagine? If there were more Jews jobbing supplies back then, maybe you guys would’ve won, who knows? Seriously, be careful. You’ll always wonder if you’re good enough. It takes confidence. You got enough, kid?

CHAPTER TEN

S
t. Henri is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in
Canada
.
Nobody would choose to be born there, one of eight children in a family dominated by a volatile, hard–drinking father, and badly managed by a credulous, browbeaten mother. One of St. Henri’s positive features, and the one that saved Napoléon Poisson from a life of illiteracy, ignominy and possibly even crime was its proximity to Westmount, one of the country’s wealthiest, and at the time almost exclusively anglophone, communities.

The Poissons lived on the corner of Ste. Marguerite and St. Antoine Streets in a run–down, too–small duplex. His father worked for his brother in a butcher shop. His mother struggled to keep her swarm of children fed, clothed and out of trouble. She hoped they went to school when they left the house in the morning, but if they didn’t, she would be the last to know. The schools of St. Henri had enough to do in those days without calling the parents of absentee children.

Polo was somewhere in the middle of the family pack. He hated school. He couldn’t see the blackboard properly and he had terrible headaches. His stomach hurt too, almost all the time. Nobody knew about food allergies then, and nobody he knew went to doctors unless it was an emergency. He grew up before the advent of Medicare. The school nurse accused him of complaining to get out of doing homework. He couldn’t concentrate on anything the teachers said, and he never learned to read or write.

In Grade Five the teacher called his mother in to tell her that Polo had
‘difficultés d’apprentissage’,
that he was not backward exactly, but eligible for special instruction. Ignorant in these matters and a slave to authority, his mother accepted this diagnosis and presented him to the assigned classroom. Polo took one look at the drooling children playing clumsily with blocks, and informed his mother that he was finished with schooling. He was eleven. His mother sighed and said as long as he looked after his own expenses, got a job, well… And nobody from the old or the new class ever followed up on his case. He was free.

He roamed the streets and thought about how he would look after himself. His teachers, parents and siblings had all by now labeled him stupid or worse. Strangely he himself felt no doubt but that he was very smart, smarter than everyone else in his family. He felt himself to be different in many other ways from his siblings, and somehow slated for a destiny apart from the life he had so far known.

By the age of ten he had already discovered Westmount. You just walked up De Courcelles until it turned into The Glen and kept walking under a bridge and up a hill and suddenly you were in a world of elegant Victorian homes and quiet streets overhung with feathery canopies of gracious old trees, and parks with green playing fields, wading pools and children’s playgrounds, all neatly tended, safe, clean, and serenely monitored by well–dressed mothers and uniformed nannies. Now, in his newly liberated state, he found himself drawn there.

The parks even had an area consecrated to dogs, ‘dog runs’, the equivalent of the children’s playground, where dogs could get exercise and socialize. Squinting to assimilate their expressions, he watched the owners with their dogs. He had never seen such affection, concern and animated discussion so focused on animals in his life. This phenomenon fascinated Polo and his thoughts took an entrepreneurial turning

Polo evolved a scam that soon brought in snack money–he was always hungry in spite of the stomachaches–but wasn’t criminal enough to warrant police intervention if it failed. He would ‘lose’ dogs tied in the front yard, walk them around for an hour and then ‘find’ them.
Les anglais
were mad for their dogs, and the rewards–money, food, sometimes both–were considerable by his standards.

On the day he stole the Jacobsons’ white poodle, his timing was off. Normally he would work the scam around midday and return the dog no later than three, to be sure of being clear of the house before the children or the father got home. On this particular day he had been careless, and didn’t actually take the dog until mid–afternoon. When he brought it back, it was close on four–thirty, uncomfortably late.

The scam worked like a charm at first. The mother, a large–boned lady with a patrician face and upswept hair, had noticed it missing from the front porch about fifteen minutes earlier and was just working up a nice lather of panic. When she saw him with the dog, she laughed with relief and insisted he come in for a treat. Seating him at the kitchen table and fussing over the dog a bit, she peered at him closely and took in the clues to his provenance.

‘
D’où viens–tu, petit?’

He squirmed and pointed vaguely to the south. She just nodded and got busy at the stove. In a few minutes he was working his way through the best bowl of soup he had ever eaten, a golden broth full of noodles and a fluffy dumpling, along with some sweet, soft cakey bread. He ate so fast he almost choked on it, and amazingly there was another bowl, this time with noodles and chunks of chicken, and more bread, as much as he wanted. And a coke! He couldn’t believe his luck.

Noisily scraping the last of the soup into his mouth and stuffing a huge wad of bread in after, he glanced up to see a girl, wearing an expression of fastidious distaste, staring at him from the doorway. She was petite, poised, scrubbed–looking. Her dark, curly hair was drawn up in a high pony tail, decorated with a bow that exactly matched her pretty ruffled blouse, which matched her pedal pusher pants and capezio ballet slippers. Her big gray eyes studied him under pixie bangs and her rosebud mouth was pursed assessingly.

‘What’s your name?’

The mother said something to her, and she began to speak to him in French. But it was not a French that he felt comfortable with. It was fancy. Nobody he knew spoke like that, not his teachers or even people on the radio. And his mouth was still crammed with bread. So he didn’t answer her.

‘You may see my room, if you wish,’ she said haughtily. He felt like smacking her, she was a spoiled little bitch and no mistake, but he had eaten their food, so he got up and followed her upstairs.

Her room was bigger than the living room and kitchen combined of his duplex. It was like a picture in a magazine. The windows were swathed in some gauzy pink stuff. Plush toys spilled from shelves. There were dolls and a huge dollhouse in one corner. Whole shelves were stuffed full of books of every size and colour. Comic books were piled high on a little night table. Her canopied bed was covered in a thick quilted fabric, and decoratively frilled pillows of different sizes and shapes were scattered at the head. A cozy, plump chair, slipcovered in a pattern of giant roses, sat near her bed, with a pretty white ceramic floor lamp beside it. He was aware that his feet were cushioned–a new sensation–by a thick, shaggy carpet, pink to match the curtains.

She watched him taking in her possessions with frosty pleasure. ‘Would you care to cast an eye on my schoolroom?’ she asked in her impossibly precise and rolling French.

Schoolroom!
He had thought she was a spoiled brat, but now he began to think she was not quite right in the head. He started to back out of the room, but she motioned imperiously to him to follow her through a door at the end of the room. Curiosity drove him forward and he peeked around the door to find another room, a winterized porch, where someone had created an exact replica of a schoolroom for her: a fullsize blackboard covering one wall, in front of which was placed a real teacher’s desk and chair. Facing this desk were three one–piece school desks, the kind where the desktop opened up. There were more bookshelves, chalk, erasers, a map of the world…
it was the real thing
!

He stared at her with incredulity and a little fear. She was
insane.

She took a book down from the shelf. ‘I can read Hebrew’, she said airily. ‘Look!’ She opened the book the wrong way, from back to front, held out a page with funny black dots and squiggles on it. Then she started to make weird gutteral noises, pretending to read. Now he was angry and flushed up. He was tired of being polite. He felt his fists balling up and suppressed an impulse to strike her.

‘You’re making fun of me. That’s not writing. Those aren’t words. You’re a real bitch. And you’re crazy, too.’

He backed out of the room before she could say anything. Her mouth was open in a big round O of surprise. He tried to look for the stairs, but his eyes were inexplicably glazed with tears, and he blundered instead into another bedroom. He swiped at his eyes and oriented himself. He couldn’t help stopping to look around. This room was also like a picture in a magazine, but it appealed to him. It was simple, done all in brown and gold. The materials were nice and ordinary, not fluffy and mysterious. There were bookshelves here too, and they were full of books, but a lot of them he could see had pictures of airplanes and warships on them. There were models of ships and airplanes too.

Then his glance fell on a photograph on the bureau, and his heart started knocking painfully in his chest. It was a picture of a boy, maybe the owner of this room. The boy was riding a horse over a jump. Polo reached for the frame with both hands and held it up close to his eyes. He put a hand over the boy’s face. Then he imagined himself in the photograph.

He felt himself on the horse. He knew what it must feel like. The muscles in his legs tensed. He remembered this moment all his life, and always wondered if he had superimposed a later knowledge, because though it seemed impossible, incredible, he knew that the boy was not in perfect balance, he felt the extra weight in the boy’s hands pulling the horse out of alignment in his trajectory and the tension in the horse’s back. He felt a pure desire for something, for this experience, the first time ever, he felt light–headed and frightened, he…

‘
T’aimes les chevaux?
You like horses, kid?’

Startled by the man’s gravelly voice, and dazed by the clarity of his vision, Polo dropped the picture in its heavy metal frame onto the bureau. The glass cracked loudly. Horrified, Polo threw a hand up to protect his head from the blow.

‘For Christ’s sake, kid, I’m not gonna hit you!’ the man barked. Warily Polo brought his hand down and tried to look at him without panic. The man was a dapper little guy with an elfin, heart–shaped face, a shock of thick, graying hair and, under a set of steepled devilish eyebrows, fervid black eyes, which were drilling into Polo’s at the moment with a disturbing intensity.

He knows. I’m fucked,
thought Polo.

‘I asked you if you like horses,’ the man said calmly, but in a tone that demanded an answer and pronto.
What was the right answer?
‘Ch’ suppose,’
Polo shrugged.

The man just kept staring at him, and Polo started to be afraid. He looked around. The man was blocking the only exit. ‘Don’t be scared, kid,’ he finally said. ‘I’m gonna take you home now.’ At least
his
French was normal, not even as good as Polo’s, it was actually full of mistakes, so that was a little more comforting.

Polo said he didn’t have to bother, but he could see there was no hope, the guy wasn’t letting him off. He marched stoically downstairs and, passing the kitchen, thanked
madame
for the good food. She smiled and murmured something conciliatory to
monsieur.

The man settled him into the front seat of a late model Cadillac with all the gimmicks. Momentarily Polo forgot to be afraid as his eyes darted around the dashboard, and his body registered the plushness of the seat.

‘St. Henri?’ the man asked. Polo nodded. They set off.

‘My name is Morrie Jacobson. My next door neighbour’s kid asked me why I don’t pay
her
to walk my dog if my own kids don’t want to, why should I get a kid who’s not even from around here.’

There was nothing to say. It had to happen sooner or later. Fatalistically he gave himself up to the pleasure of the cushioned ride. In a few minutes they were sitting across the street from the duplex. Polo had never looked at it objectively before. Now he knew it was a dump and he wanted to get away from the man who had made him see it for what it was. Mr. Jacobson was looking at it too and Polo could see he was thinking hard, he was that kind of guy, so intense you could practically hear the wheels turning in his brain. Polo reached cautiously for the door handle.

‘You strike me as a smart kid,’ the man said brusquely. Nobody had ever said that to him before. Polo turned to look at him to see if he was joking. Mr. Jacobson looked gravely back at him.

‘I take my son Hymie riding on the weekends. That was Hymie in the picture. We have a horse. You want to come this Saturday?’

Again that painful thumping in his chest and the lightheadedness. He was scared, but he knew that this was his chance, and maybe the only one. Even if the guy was a pervert–it wouldn’t be the first time some old guy had approached him–he reckoned he could handle it. No guy could hold on to you if you were prepared to fight really dirty, and he certainly was, so…

The next thing he knew, Mr. Jacobson was talking to his mother, showing her his business card from
Tissus Clar–Mor
, asking her if she liked to sew. She nodded yes, but explained that her machine was not the very best and often broke down, so she couldn’t sew as much as she would like, and threw an embarrassed glance at Polo’s torn clothes, seeing them through the eyes of this rich man in his impeccable gray suit. Overwhelmed by the Cadillac and his courteous solicitation of her permission to take Polo out with his family–he showed her a photo of himself with his wife and two children–she nodded dumbly that it would be alright…

The next day a Singer sewing machine from the distributor arrived at the duplex, the top of the line model with all the fancy options, and later on a
Clar–Mor
truck screeched to a stop outside, and the driver dumped a package of materials in the hall, there must have been forty yards of chintzes, boucle, batiste cottons, liner material, denim, corduroy, everything… His parents stared at each other with ambiguous excitement and then at Polo. ‘If he lays a hand on you, tell him I’ll kill him,’ his father growled.