Black Bird (2 page)

Grandfather thought he remarried out of remorse. It occurred to him, in a rare moment of self-reflection, that he had devoted his life to his late wife’s misery, and that wasn’t enough. A man’s life should count for more than one woman’s. He would spend the rest of his days making up for this disappointment by ruining the life of another. He chose a woman from a neighbourhood where he was unknown, and won her by the simple process that worked on his first wife. He paid calls on her, smiled at her, told her amusing stories, looked her directly in the eye, gave her small presents, affected shyness and modesty. He lied and deceived with a practised hand, which
a more sophisticated woman would have seen through. But a more sophisticated woman would have been a harder conquest and a tougher opponent. Grandfather chose his second wife precisely because she was unused to the attentions of men, unfamiliar with the real cruelty that exists outside of television, and unlikely to be self-assured enough to refuse his offer of marriage.

It’s true that when invited to family dinners, she was puzzled how more than one of his own relatives, who seemed as well-meaning and kind as he was, took her aside to warn her he wasn’t what he appeared, that he could only harm her. But she reasoned that they, like so many people, must be unable to understand the kind of friendship that she and Grandfather had found together despite the difference in their ages—a common prejudice that was hard to overcome. And if it were true that he was normally not as outgoing, friendly and generous as he seemed, mightn’t that just be a sign that she’d brought him a kind of happiness? Couldn’t he have fallen in love with her?

He couldn’t. Despite his best efforts, his first wife resisted being driven to the grave long enough to die of natural causes; he saw this as a failure on his part, and for his second attempt he chose an easier mark. He considered this act as a kind of penance for the work to which he’d devoted his life: grave robbery. He felt that since death provided for his livelihood he might return at least one corpse. He was always attempting the least in everything. If he were a lumberjack, he might plant a single sapling on the same
principle: an eye for an eye. When he proposed to Aline, he thought he was making up for an earlier error, nothing more. And when she moved into the Desouche house to live the claustrophobic, uncertain and oppressive existence he laid upon her, with his small insults, sharp words, disappointed looks and everyday denials, he thought he was just being himself and could find no reason to put himself out on her behalf.

Now he worried how they would manage through the winter. Not that he was eager to work, especially since the digging got tougher every year; and then, the markets were drying up at the same time, what with so many people donating their bodies to science. Still, a living had to be made somehow.

The two men padded through the light snow to the unlit road. With the tall, empty trees overhanging the gravel path, they might have been in the country. Except for the continuous screaming of the sirens, the woods blocked the sounds of the city, and the sense of isolation was almost complete. Grandfather removed his gloves, brought cigarettes from his coat and silently offered them to Uncle. The lighted ends shone red. The men let smoke out through their nostrils, like dragons.

The road led them down to the lights and noises of the city, where it was warmer, but less comforting.

Once Aline Souris became Stepmother Desouche she quietly took over the kitchen. Although she was
neither fond of nor good at cooking, it gave her an immediate and definite position in the house and kept her from feeling underfoot. Her natural shyness was brought out by her surprise at Grandfather’s change in attitude towards her now that they were married, and reinforced by the Desouches’ habit of speaking English, a phenomenon that made her feel as if she’d landed in a foreign country. In her previous life English had been as distant as England itself. It was the language of employers, bankers and politicians, not the language of friends or relatives.

The Desouche household was a fixture in its neighbourhood for several reasons, not the least being the sheer number of years they occupied the same building (much to the consternation of their landlord) in a city where families commonly packed up every July to move across the street or around the corner. Aside from legal responsibilities, because everyone eventually occupied everyone else’s former premises, it was held sacred that the buildings not be abused or endangered by the tenants.

The Desouches were freed from this obligation by their immobility. They neither owned the property nor intended to leave, and practised a game of paying the rent just frequently enough to avoid a visit from the bailiff. All the landlord’s efforts to have them legally removed were thwarted by the local laws protecting tenants, which the Desouches learned to manipulate to their benefit. The rental board was forced to rule in their favour even in cases where it was clearly reluctant. So the Desouches felt at liberty, over the years,
to do to the house as they pleased, without the worry of any consequences.

Doors were moved, walls were struck down or created, windows bricked up, staircases added, balconies enlarged or destroyed. All this work the family undertook themselves because they couldn’t conceive of paying the costs of unionized labour. So the neighbours became used to seeing deliveries of lumber, wallboard, sacks of plaster or other materials, and to hearing the sounds of power tools and hammering, not just during working hours, but at all times.

Of course, though each project began with a burst of enthusiasm, as soon as the inspiration had lost its novelty, work slowed to a crawl. Jobs that should have taken a few days stretched into weeks—even months. Simple tasks like putting up a new shelf consumed a week; repainting the kitchen was a month’s toil; refinishing the living-room floor had been going on for a year. And there were even unfinished schemes older than Jean-Baptiste and Marie, who by this time were considered adults.

Aline found herself floundering in this ménage. The bared walls and rolled-up carpets had not been a surprise, but she’d assumed they were temporary and forgiven them accordingly. And now she realized, too, that her new relatives had been making a special effort to speak in French on her previous visits. As happens so often, special efforts were abandoned when the visitor became an in-law. She was hardly spoken to at all, and even then most often in English first. Only when she presented her
pleading, puzzled face would they repeat themselves in French.

One exception was Marie, who hated speaking English even though her own mother was as Anglo as Aline herself was francophone. For this reason, Aline developed a certain fondness for her new granddaughter, who after all was not so very much younger than herself—a decade? More? Less? She excused in Marie habits and actions she wouldn’t tolerate in the others. Although she would never express criticism of anyone, she took her revenge by leaving them out of her nightly prayers. But for Marie she’d make special allowances and requests to the Lord, minimizing her rudeness to the family—especially to her brother—her neglect of common decencies, and even her blasphemies. “She is young,” Aline murmured into her fingertips, “and has endured unpleasantness. I am sure, just as for anyone else, enough success and encouragement would develop into happiness and then kindness. Do not forget her, Lord, and I will be grateful.”

For the sake of the Lord, Aline prayed in formal French, not the joual in which she lived her daily life. It was sometimes hard to remember the elusive constructions that had been rapped into her head through her knuckles at school, but as her father always pointed out, only hard work earned results. She felt free to speak more colloquially with Marie, whose familiarity with vulgar phrases was astounding, and who expressed political opinions Aline had been used to hearing from her father. Both were
summed up in the motto Marie cited most often: “maudits anglais”—damned English. However, Marie was less fond of Aline, whom she considered a yokel precisely because she was so astounded by common expressions, and because although she never disagreed with Marie on political issues, she seemed only to be avoiding discussing something she really knew nothing about.

Aline would have had more luck bonding with Marie’s mother, who was now actually Aline’s stepdaughter, though she was older by almost two decades. The two were alike, not only in temperament but also in situation, and Mother was the reason English had been adopted by the Desouches. Her case proved that the family didn’t consider themselves above adapting to suit the needs of a new member of the clan, but also that they sometimes refused. Both of the women had married into the house, both were accepted only as necessary additions, neither was happy or comfortable. But the barrier of language kept them apart at home, just as it would have if they’d met on the street or in some shop. The two seemed to have an intimation that they were in some ways kindred spirits. They exchanged smiles and awkward hellos in each other’s language, occasionally asked simple questions while pointing, helped one another carry things or fold sheets, even felt sympathy when the other was fighting with her husband. Aline and Grandfather, or Mother and Father, the scene was the same: the husband was angry and loud, the wife offered a moderate rebuke and then suffered an
explosive retaliation that left her near tears and acquiescing in silence.

But neither could overcome the embarrassment of remaining ignorant of the other’s way of speaking. Although each felt the possibility of a real friendship, comforting and fun, lying just beyond that linguistic horizon, neither could overcome the feeling that learning the other’s tongue was a task too hard for her.

And then, relations with the rest of the household were equally confused. To begin with, as Grandfather’s second wife, Aline was now stepmother to the older twins, Uncle and Father, as well as Mother, and grandmother to Jean-Baptiste and Marie. She couldn’t tell Uncle and Father apart, and so never knew how to address them, until she saw that Uncle was missing a finger on his left hand. If it gave her some comfort to have a method of distinguishing her stepsons, it nevertheless made her uneasy to see that naked, tiny stump at the dinner table. But Uncle almost never said a word anyway, which relieved her of the obligation of making small talk with him. He spent much of his time following her husband in silence; the two worked together at the family business, an occupation no one had yet explained to her. On occasion Uncle sat with Father in the evenings, and over a table of empty beer bottles in the kitchen the two would trade stories back and forth, in English. It was practically the only time Uncle was talkative, as if he were releasing words that had been pent up in him until then.

At these times, Aline was uncomfortable even in the kitchen. She felt like an intruder in their private world, a world made up of anecdotes and tales that she suspected were crude, sensationalistic and unbelievable. She felt the brothers considered her immature because they were so much older than she was; and she felt their eyes on her body, which scandalized her. She was their stepmother, after all, a married woman and a relative. Because they displaced her, belittled her and looked at her as if she were a whore, she resented them even more than she was beginning to resent the new and unwelcome way Grandfather was treating her.

The only member of the family with whom she felt at ease was her new grandson, Jean-Baptiste. He had in common with his twin sister, Marie, the desire for a better life than that lived in the Desouche house. But while Marie was convinced of the necessity of political action, considering their problems the fault of the English, Jean-Baptiste felt the answer was internal and spiritual. They agreed, however, that the Catholic Church was an impediment to almost everything reasonable; and so he had turned to poetry, while his sister chose revolution.

Jean-Baptiste had taken the room on the top floor at the back end, the most remote and quiet in the house. Here, in what was almost an attic, he was insulated from the noise of the family and the street, free to read or compose his poems. His room was awash in books and magazines, papers and stationery. Since no one else would publish his works, he had decided to
print them himself, and had installed a second-hand mimeograph machine in the attic, hemmed in by boxes of manuscript on one side and pamphlets on the other.

Jean-Baptiste was the only one aside from Marie who remembered that Aline didn’t speak English. He understood perfectly well her feelings of isolation, since no one else in the family shared his interest in the arts. And since his mother tongue was English, he knew how hard it could be to learn another way of thinking. His French was not perfect, but he attempted to use it for her sake. However, he avoided spending time with Aline because he had no patience for those incapable of helping themselves, and it broke his heart to see her suffering. It’s true he could have invested his own efforts in helping her, but he knew that she would never learn to walk for herself, without whatever crutch was at hand. Obviously, that’s why she’d married Grandfather, who had behaved so much like a crutch during their courtship.

It was Jean-Baptiste who had warned her, in the first place, that she was making a mistake taking up with the Desouches, and now he felt the case was out of his hands: he’d done what he could and failed. But the more he avoided her, the more she followed him with her eyes, silently wishing she could win more real allies in the house, not knowing that this habit of hers gave him exactly the same feeling of being ogled that she got from Father and Uncle. It wasn’t the arguing and yelling of the family, the small tricks and cruelties they played upon one another, the disrespect they
showed for his work; it wasn’t even the impossibly run-down physical condition of the house that made living there unbearable for him. More than anything else it was the quiet way in which Aline meekly tracked him from room to room, from dinner table to living-room couch to bathroom.

But Aline knew nothing of the others’ feelings or reasons for behaving as they did; she only knew her own anxiety and unhappiness. She was baffled by their irritability, their relations to one another, their ideas, their jokes, their very being. Nothing turned out as she expected, and she was afraid of trying to change anything. Her only respite was in the kitchen, where, if she had no natural talents, at least she had cookbooks. So she timidly advanced from frying eggs and bacon, soaking peas for soup, boiling beef and potatoes, to stuffing chickens, making simple spaghetti sauces and packaged cake mixes. She had no kitchen timer and relied on the clock, but was always forgetting to consult it because she was listening to the radio, so that her dishes were always either over- or undercooked. But if she treated food as if it were someone else’s children, she at least became familiar enough with that one room to feel at ease when she was alone in it. The worn table, the overpainted cupboards, the ancient, round-edged refrigerator under which linoleum had never settled: these were the physical things, along with Grandfather’s body, which by their own age had drained her of enthusiasm, ambition and self-confidence. Hers was the domain of the defeated, the
unrealized and the barely adequate; and only there was she comfortable.