Miss Montreal (23 page)

On Friday night he had dinner with Esther and her parents and they took a walk after, the two of them, and necked awhile in Fletcher’s Field. For the first time in months he didn’t try to feel her up. And the kissing grew tiresome after a while. Too much spittle passing between them, pooling in the corners of his mouth. He walked her home to Jeanne-Mance after half an hour, saying he was tired and needed sleep before going into the factory for the eight-to-noon shift.

“My parents don’t like that you work Saturdays,” Esther said.

“Mine neither.”

“Once we’re married, I hope you won’t have to. It would be nice to go to synagogue together. Especially once we have children. That’s how you meet other families,” she said. “The kind we want to be friends with.”

That Saturday morning, after his half-day selling goods for cash, Irving Schiff paid him eight dollars, as always, and Artie gave his mother seven.

“Not eight?” she asked.

“I need one,” he said. “To buy something for Esther.” But it wasn’t for Esther. It was to buy ice cream for Micheline and maybe something else.

Sunday wasn’t as hot as the week before so he didn’t need the baby powder. He just worked his shift, pocketing the odd penny tip he got, keeping his eye on the door, looking up every time the bell chimed.

“Watch it, sport,” one customer said. “You almost got black cherry on my shirt.”

By eight-thirty, he started to wonder if she would come. At quarter to nine, he decided she wouldn’t. Why the hell would she? He was English, Jewish, not bad-looking but no Cary Grant. Working in a factory and a soda fountain. If she was ever going to take a second look at a Jew, wouldn’t it make sense to go for a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant? Even the salesmen at Dominion Dress made good money and drove nice cars. They wore suits and ties and some of them had pinkie rings that sparkled, maybe with real diamonds.

Not a minute later he heard the doorbell chime and she walked in alone, in a peach coloured dress, her gold cross shining against her flawless skin. She sat at the counter right in front of him and said, “You have something for me?”

Willy Hammerman, the owner of the shop, let him leave early that night. While Micheline had her three-scoop cone, he
washed up, put on the fresh white shirt he had brought with him just in case, sucked on a mint and combed his hair, and by nine-fifteen they were walking together east on Villeneuve toward the Main. Away from Park Avenue, where someone might see him and say to Esther, “Who was that Artie was walking with last night? The
shiksa
with the cross around her neck?”

They kept going past the Main to St-Denis, then along Gilford, a quiet street, with small two-storey flats crowding close to the sidewalk. As the sky darkened behind them, they spoke to each other in English, because Micheline wanted hers to improve. “Tell me when I make errors,” she said. “I’m not going to stay a shipper, you know. I can type good and I am learning about bookkeeping too.”

Should he tell her that “type good” wasn’t correct, that she should say “type well” instead? No. Nothing she said tonight could be wrong, not when she was walking at his side.

He walked her all the way home to a cold-water flat not unlike his, on Rue Chabot, not far from Delorimier Stadium where the Dodgers’ top farm team, the Montreal Royals, played. She said thank you for the ice cream and he said, “De rien.”

“English only, please,” she said. “Okay, Ar-
tie
?”

“Okay.”

The first kiss came three days later. It came because it had to, because he couldn’t stand it anymore. They were in the basement together, hauling out bolts of light blue wool—one of this year’s big colours, something a woman could match with a white blouse, or cream or navy—and his blood was pounding through his veins, rushing like the St. Lawrence River in spring. He looked at her hand first, pale against the cloth, and he put his hand over it. She turned and looked at him and he knew it was going to happen and when it did the sweetness of it almost made him fall over. Their lips met, her teeth parted, her tongue slipped out and their bodies pressed together. His erection sprang up almost immediately and he pulled away from her but
she moved with him. His back was against the wall then, he had nowhere else to go, and their bodies pressed so close, so completely, that all he could do was whisper her name into her ear and breathe in her scent like he’d dreamed of doing and it was as warm and rich and beguiling as he’d imagined.

That’s as far as it went that day. They broke off the kiss and she smiled and put her hand on his cheek and then they brought the cloth up in the freight elevator. He was sure everyone in the shipping room could see right through him. “I kissed Micheline Mercier” might as well have been stamped on his forehead. And his heart.

Esther could have been in China for all he thought of her. Yes, he had dinner there on Friday, he had to, but on Saturday night, instead of taking Esther to see
All About Eve
as he had promised, he begged off sick.

“But it has Bette Davis,” she complained.

“Next week, okay? I promise. It’s just I don’t feel so good.”

That night, he took Micheline to a place called Rockhead’s Paradise, where they saw a young pianist named Oscar Peterson, along with a bass player, drummer and saxophonist. Abie had told him about Peterson—“A genius, Artie, I swear to God, the Mozart of our time”—and they walked out of there so feverish, so electric, that they were wrapped in each other’s arms the minute they hit the sidewalk.

One week later, on Friday night, after dinner at Esther’s but no trip to Fletcher’s Field, Artie Moscoe lost his virginity to Micheline. They did it in the showroom of Dominion Dress, on the couch where Irving Schiff sat with buyers as his salesmen showed samples of the new lines, the couch covered with a sheet Artie had brought from home. Artie had let them in the back door of the factory with a key Mr. Schiff had given him for early Saturday openings.

He ejaculated almost as soon as he entered her. He barely got to enjoy the sensation, the warmth and wetness of her. Still, it was
like the first breath of air a miner takes in when he emerges from the dark underground, the first pearls of water a man feels on his tongue when he crawls out of the desert into the green of an oasis.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why?”

“That you are not my first.”

So she knew. Knew that this was his first time. But it didn’t matter. She stroked his back and his neck and it wasn’t long before his desire returned and the second time, it all took longer. Now he felt like a lover, in control of himself. What did he know at that age? What did he understand about women’s bodies and orgasms? Nothing. She looked happy enough, naked beneath him, wearing nothing but her cross on its chain.

“Micheline,” he said after coming the second time.

“Ar
-tie
,” she said.

He told her how beautiful she looked and she smiled.

All the next month, he teetered between ecstasy and agony. Ecstasy when they were together, agony when they were apart—especially when he was with Esther, going through the motions, playing the role of fiancé. He saw Micheline at least two or three times a week. He held back more of the money he was making, telling his mother he needed to save for his wedding.

“But her father’s paying,” his mother said.

“For the house then, Ma.”

He used the money to take Micheline to dinner, to Rockhead’s, even once to the Gayety Theatre for a burlesque show. They went for walks, they stole into the showroom. They used the apartment of one of Micheline’s neighbours when they went to the Laurentians for a week.

Miss Montreal, he called her sometimes.

“Because it’s the company name?” she asked.

“Because you’re the prettiest girl in the city.”

“Ben, non.”

“Oh, yes. If they had a contest you’d win.”

“I’m too skinny. The girls who win the Miss America, they have big curves. They have more up here.”

“You don’t need more. You’re perfect the way you are.”

The High Holidays came early that year and things were busy at home in September as his mother cooked and cleaned in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. There were errands he had to run, shopping to help with, floors to sweep, services to attend, relatives to visit. An entire week went by without seeing Micheline once. And before he knew it, it was Yom Kippur. More services, more relatives, more things to help out with.

And after the holidays, back at work, Micheline seemed distant. They never showed affection openly in the factory—Mr. Schiff knew Esther’s father—but he could tell something was wrong. She came out of the washroom one morning crying. She huddled with her sister more than usual. She didn’t want to go down to the basement when cloth needed to be brought up. She didn’t come to the ice cream store on Sunday.

He wondered if she had another boyfriend.

Technically, he had no right to be jealous if she did. He had never told her about Esther, that he was engaged to be married. In the first weeks of infatuation, he never thought anything would actually happen between them, and didn’t want to burst the bubble around him. Then, when the affair began, he didn’t want to say or do anything that would send her running. And it wasn’t like he was sleeping with Esther, so he didn’t feel like he was betraying Micheline. The fact that he was betraying Esther—well, a lot of guys he knew were doing the same thing. Engaged to Jewish girls who wouldn’t have sex, running after French girls who’d go all the way.

None of this mattered. The thought of Micheline with another man filled him with anxiety, sadness, rage. He pictured some smooth French lover seducing her, whispering things in her native tongue that he could never master, taking her to the finest clubs and restaurants, driving her around in a Packard
convertible, her hair streaming behind her in the moonlight. Pictured himself lying in wait, surprising them, beating the man senseless and reclaiming Micheline as his own, crowning her Miss Montreal with a diamond tiara.

It wasn’t until October that she finally took him aside and told him she was pregnant.

I was thinking about the implications of that, the timing, when Reynald Paquette called.

“That’s a pretty wild story you told,” he said. “What’s this evidence you found?”

“You’re familiar with ammonium nitrate? How it can be used to make bombs?”

“We had a seminar on it a couple of years ago.”

“Luc has a hundred kilos of it. I found the empty bags in the boathouse of the place I searched.”

“That you searched,” he said. “Illegally. Broke in, I suppose?”

“You going to pull out the rule book now? Play word games with me?”

“Shut up for once. This isn’t a game to me, it’s my job. How am I supposed to get a search warrant? Tell a judge you broke into someone’s property—what did you do, smash a window or break down a door?”

“Window.”

“Great. At a property which may or may not be owned, rented or otherwise occupied by a member of the Lortie family—and found, what? Some empty bags.”

“You could do a title search on the property.”

“What’s the address?”

“I don’t know the exact address. It was an A-frame cabin on a country road. Chemin Gosselin. I told you this.”

“You told me nothing I can act on. Am I supposed to send officers into the mountains to track down a rural address, based
on that? It’s Friday of the long weekend. I’d be lucky to get two guys on bikes.”

“Isn’t there a municipal force there? They’re probably familiar with the local owners.”

“That’s part of the problem right there,” he said. “Say I call them and ask if the Lortie family owns property up there. The minute I hang up, rumours will start. Why was the Crimes Majeurs squad calling about them? I start to drag that name through the mud, I’ll have problems of my own.”

“Bigger than a bomb levelling a city block? Because the amount of stuff he had, that’s what he can do.”

“All right,” he sighed. “Let me see what I can find. If I need you to pinpoint the location if this cabin, you could do it?”

“Yes. I’ll email you a satellite image that shows exactly where it is.”

Micheline’s pregnancy threw her relationship with Artie into turmoil. For all the romance of it, all the grandness, there were harsh realities to deal with. In 1950, in the small village that was Jewish Montreal, ending his engagement to Esther Felberbaum and marrying a French-Canadian—a Catholic—who was already pregnant would have led to virtual excommunication. His family, her family, his employer, all would have turned against him and turfed him. Maybe not his mother, and probably not his brothers—Bernie probably would have clapped him on the back and said something crude about him finally getting some—but the rest of them? He would cease to exist. His father would say Kaddish over him as if he were already dead.

Despite all that, he was willing to go ahead. He told her so. But Micheline said no. Her family would not have been any more understanding or welcoming, she told him. “I never said nothing to you about this,” she said, “but my father, he hates the Jews. When he was younger, he was a follower of Adrien Arcand and Lionel Groulx. He believed all what they wrote and said
about Jewish people, that we should not shop in their stores or have anything to do with them. When Abbé Groulx supported Vichy France during the war, my father supported it too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Artie said.

“But it does! If we have a baby together and your family won’t have us and mine won’t either, what would we do? Two people alone can’t raise a child. You need grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. You need friends and neighbours. We would have nothing but the two of us.”

“That’s enough for me,” he told her.

“But not me,” she said.

Abortion was out of the question. Even though Artie’s brother Abie, the med student, knew someone who knew someone who could perform the procedure, almost certainly safely, he knew Micheline wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe she wasn’t the staunchest Catholic, but she had been raised to believe in certain fundamentals, one of them being the wrath of God, the hell that would await her if she committed such a sin.