Bilingual Being (15 page)

A MANAGEABLE RELATION WITH DIFFERENCE

So it was, then, that the incomplex frame of what was and was not “catholique,” in every sense of the word, became the means by which my mother and her family enjoyed a manageable balance of religion and culture, and how her insular family was able to get along with everything beyond its immediate sphere, with «c'qui est différent» [what is different]. A black couple from Chicago came for dinner once, Phyllis and Eddy, I believe. It was around 1967, when Sidney Poitier released the movie
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, and it had the same flourish.

It's unclear to me even now whether our family was just reflective of the changing times the movie was attempting to portray, the blurring of social boundaries, or whether my parents had seen the movie and deliberately sought what they saw as a hallmark experience of their era.
I never understood how my parents knew these individuals, given their life circle then or later. My father seldom socialized outside work and home, and my mother even less so. Perhaps Phyllis and Eddy had come through my grand-maman's boarding house at some point – after all, she rented rooms to tourists in the summers when the students were away. Or were they connected to an uncle and his wife, an American, living in Chicago at the time?

The fact that I never knew how they came to be there and never saw them again made the whole event that much more exotic in my mind, wee white girl that I was in my wee white world. For other than these new black faces, I'd only seen people of colour in photographs in the halls of nunneries, where the missions of «les soeurs d'l'Afrique» were displayed here and there. It would be decades before, placing linguistic considerations above all other immigration criteria, Quebec would open its doors to Haitians, Moroccans, Algerians, and others who would begin to give depth and complexity to the uniform sea of light-coloured faces.

Conceivably, hosting a black couple in the '60s was a bit like my parents' experiment growing marijuana on the dining room buffet «pour essayer ça comme y faut» [to experience life the right way], or hosting folk-music nights with another uncle and his American wife. Three guitars offered their tributes to Joan Baez as my mother fetched wine and hors d'oeuvres. In any event, having a black family in our home and in the city was «un très gros événement» [a huge event] marked by a thoughtful menu and an equally considered conversation about American politics. It was a subject that my father actually despised (hating Americans more than any other group of humans) and my mother usually ignored, knowing few people of relevance, in her eyes, from «les États.»

In fact, «les États» in the French-Canadian worldview was a common idiom for Never-Never Land, a place where one was considered functionally lost to friend and country, so that to say «y est parti aux États» [he's left for the United States] meant that someone was gone for good and we could just forget about him.

I still remember my mother's English that day around the dining room table, perfectly set, as I worked in the kitchen to ready the plates and assist, complete with a matching apron, uninvited to the adults'
table but indulged by our polite company into a conversation about my studies. My mother smiled with exaggerated civility, a cigarette in her mouth for added effect (she wasn't a smoker) – «Ej trouve qu'ça donne un certain air à'ne femme, ça' l'air sophistiqué, non?» [I think it gives a woman a certain air, it looks sophisticated, no?]

Excessive niceties were extended as, for the one and only time in my life until I married «un homme brun» [a brown man] myself decades later, a person of colour sat at our table, shared our meal. My own «immigrant,» as my mother puts it, would be a man with an unpronounceable name who'd continue to be considered «un étranger» [a stranger, even more “a man from afar” in common usage] after seven years of marriage. Colour, then, was another thing like religion that formed a potent barrier between us and others. It wasn't viewed at all like French and English, which were, as they always had been, the warp and weft of society.

__________

*
The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, from 1962 to 1965 (generally known as “Vatican II”), which allowed this choice.

Daisies

I played with daisies

when I was small.

It was almost an obsession.

I grabbed them all.

Stripped them

of their tiny petals.

I wanted to know:

He loves me?

He loves me not?

But the daisies

never gave me

an answer I could use.

They hung limp

like empty heads

on a dying stalk.

They could not solve

the riddles of those men,

their empty words.

So I gave up

on the question:

was it love or not love?

Now I let the daisies

grow in peace.

8

RELIGION: THE LANGUAGE OF THE BEDROOM

AN ENGLISH-BUT-NOT-IRISH MAN

That perfect dichotomy of the world into Catholics and non-Catholics – where what we all really meant was French Canadians and English Canadians – would have worked out perfectly symmetrically, perfectly tidily, if it weren't for one group that straddled the border, spiritually “of us” and yet externally couched in «la langue anglaise» [the English tongue]: the Irish. For reasons no one could explain or understand, the Irish felt like the soulmates of French Canadians, despite and completely beyond the language barrier. Marriages abounded between both peoples, and 80 per cent or more of the bilingual families I knew were an Irish–French Canadian mix.

They agreed on an adherence to the Virgin Mary over Jesus. He was honoured as «p'tit» in French and “baby” for the Irish, compassionate and benevolent but somehow holding a kind of subordinate role to his blessed mother, «Notre Dame». They gave the highest standing to the same saints, mostly Saint-Joseph, Saint-François d'Assise, Saint-Antoine, and Saint-Jean le Baptiste – along with a local favourite, Saint-Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus. And they shared some old threads that none could deny or explain. When their music was played, Celtic and French Canadian reels came together through time, tying them to another life, another place. It was the same after a death, a French-Canadian gettogether after a «funérailles» much resembling an Irish wake – «Y aura'
voulu ça, plein d'joie.» [He'd have wanted it this way, full of joy.] In life and death, French and Irish echoed each other somehow.

I deeply loved an Irish man myself once, for almost three years. Almost lived out, willingly, at least one hereditary expectation. Almost. He was a wonderful human being. Warm, loving, intelligent, kind, funny, diligent, generous, and drop-dead gorgeous. Check every box. And he was bilingual just like me, with a francophone mum and an anglophone dad. As I was in my twenties by then, my parents were hopeful that this would be it, and they were almost more attached to him than I was. For my part, I loved his family too, especially his Irish father and his aunt – his father's twin sister who'd stepped in after his mother's premature death to hold everyone together. She's one of the finest persons I've ever known, a woman-saint higher up the Catholic echelons than my own grand-maman. In her eighties now, she still has a rotation of people in need she visits daily, ignoring her own pains and problems.

Through my many relationship issues after those times, I always visualized my Irish man in my rescue fantasies. He'd show up on my doorstep way out West, ring my doorbell, save me, bring me back, and take care of me. Or I'd bump into him on the street, just like that, and we'd rekindle everything previous and precious. In my hardest stretches, so many men looked like him. I felt, and dreamt, that I saw him everywhere. I told him, some twenty years later, how the years had played out like this. “Why didn't you just call me?” he asked. Why, indeed.

For his part, he'd travelled the world working for the CBC and never married. “I always wondered,” he reflected one summer afternoon, “why you ended it so suddenly that day. Why you just decided it was over, and you never explained it.” We were both about forty by then, and by some miracle in town on the same day. We spent a couple of hours at a «café terrasse» in Place Royale, time sliding by softly like a wide, thin water spill, then evaporating. Pleasant but tense, he looked at his beer and waited. I felt my breathing constricting, my head spinning lightly. A familiar feeling. Behind me, the cliffs that jut out sharply against the narrow, strangled streets loomed – dark, jagged, immovable. Before me, the Traversier de Lévis loaded its joyous passengers, about to take them from this shore, onto the open blue, away.

That afternoon, I couldn't explain what it would take me a dozen more years to figure out. That a voice inside crevasses of self had said
one word –
Run!
– and I'd spent a lifetime learning to listen. That I took refuge in libraries all over Montreal –
Hide!
– reassuming my anorexia like a super-hero disguise, reading and ignoring him until he knew I was serious about ending it. I couldn't tell him then how his career in photography was a cataclysmic challenge I couldn't quite name, only sense. His was a family business in its third generation, housing countless images of old Quebec and giving him access to secret church vaults (for insurance photos). With the best intentions, he once gave my mother an aerial view of L'Église Saint-Sacrement and its parish in poignant sepia. It still hangs in her basement stairway. As our relationship grew, his family moved to Holland Avenue, a two-minute walk from my first home, my “ground zero.” It's cruel whiplash, this business of repressed triggers, a switch you can't reach or see. But it was all too much for me – the cameras and flashes, the religious mysteries, his familiarity with the parish, and his house being so unfortunately located. My deepest fears awoke and wouldn't be still. So it ended.

At any rate, with this ever-present affinity for the Irish among the French – despite general resentment for «'es angla'» – one might wonder why my mother married an English-but-not-Irish man. They met one winter night on La Terasse Dufferin, beside the Château Frontenac where, in winter, a huge ice slide provided (and still does) a playground in the heart of the city. In those days, music played and young people slid and danced along the edge of the cliff under the watchful gaze of countless statues, a handful of miles from the Plains of Abraham where their ancestors had fought old battles in a new land, French against English, two hundred years before.

It was here one night, in the reverie of ice, snow, folk dancing, songs, and soft lights, that my mother and father caught each other's eye. It was love at first sight. And the rest, as they say, is history – a marriage lasting some forty years, through thick and thin.

UN MAUDIT BLOKE

But in those early years, its longevity was anything but assured. There was apparently considerable resistance from some on my mother's side to a marriage with a «maudit bloke» [damned blockhead], in the words of my mother's eldest sister. My bilingual father was fluent in French
and had an equally fluent bilingual father with a family name that could easily trump my aunt's in a quick flash of elite French credentials – but no matter. My father's mother, my granny, was English. Thus, the language of his home, his mother tongue, was English. The French linguistic stock was contaminated somehow, impure. Seems that a single marriage to an Englishwoman was enough to mess up everything, negate hundreds of years of “pure ancestry.”

Worse still, many in my mother's entourage feared this man who'd just survived the most devastating disease of the age, tuberculosis. Was he still contagious? Should she even be allowed to speak to him, let alone date him? Was it safe for her – or for the chaperones? But the reality that he'd barely completed Grade 8 wasn't an issue, it seems. In this worldview a man provided for his family, and it was assumed that he'd manage somehow.

The fact that he spoke French and had a French-Canadian father surely helped settle the matter with my maternal grandparents in the end. After all, my mother's four siblings had all married francophones by then who spoke not a word of English beyond the ability to give sparse directions on the street to lone English passersby in their ubiquitously francophone communities. Yet here was their youngest, the last left at home – a bright, pretty girl who'd unfortunately become half-blind in a childhood accident. And here was a reasonably good-looking suitor, «un jeune blond,» half-French. Quite likely, from her parents' perspective, it was more than could be reasonably expected.

Exploring my mother's sociolinguistic universe for a minute, I reflect on her only other marriage prospect, as she once shared it with me: the butcher's son. He was apparently a decent young man – «un bon gars,» my mother remembers – «mais erien d'spécial» [but nothing special]. Claude, I'll call him here, was her age, and they'd grown up playing together behind my grandparents' home – between the house and the old shed where my grand-papa stored his car, tools, unwanted furniture, vats of varnishes and tar paint, and a few other things. Claude and his siblings shared this play area with my mother and her siblings, running past the dentist and some shops, to the corner and back.

They played «cachette» [hide and seek], «aux billes» [marbles] and «à corde» [jump rope] on dusty gravel spread out unevenly under
clotheslines that criss-crossed one another in all directions, an impassable net that was still there when I visited as a child. Sheets and underwear flapped wildly, barely keeping their edges clear of the worn corrugated tin sheets that covered iron staircases and back doors. Shields against the snow in season, each metal «cabanon» [small rustic house, hideout] gave its home a sense of closure and insularity, a thin degree of separation in that thick mesh of life beneath the string-and-sock cobwebs.