My October (36 page)

When the lights came up, Hannah sat blinking at the screen, which was once again an unassuming blank square suspended above the stage. At the front of the auditorium, someone stood up. It was Monsieur Bonnaire. He held up his hands and began to clap. The teachers started applauding too, and soon everyone was on their feet, hooting and whistling and stamping.

Hannah looked behind her, trying to locate Luc, but there was a commotion around his seat. People were standing up, blocking her view. Hannah recognized a columnist from
La Presse
trying to nudge her way through the crowd. A younger man in jeans, probably from one of the local arts weeklies, bumped the
La Presse
woman aside, and for a second Hannah caught a glimpse of Luc's startled face. The Radio-Canada man was in there too, elbows out, jostling for position. Did the film signal a shift in Luc's politics? the
La Presse
woman asked shrilly. How had he managed to locate James Cross after all these years? How had he convinced him to talk? They were shouting their questions, clearly audible now that the applause was dying down. Had Luc given up on the nationalist dream?

Luc did not answer. He'd stood up and was trying to make his way to Hugo, but he couldn't push through. The journalists blocked him. He got as far as the aisle and stopped in exasperation.

“Look,” he said, loudly enough for Hannah to catch it. “I have nothing to say. This isn't my project. It's my son's.”

The
La Presse
woman was the first to head for the podium. The Radio-Canada man was next. Soon the others followed, moving in a pack to the front of the room, where Hugo was standing.

“Nice,” said Hannah, walking over to her ex-husband. “Set the jackals on him.”

Luc straightened his jacket, which seemed baggier than usual. He had taken up jogging over the winter. He looked youthful, she thought, and not just because he'd shed a few pounds. There was a new tentativeness about him. He kept looking into people's eyes as if he wasn't sure what he would find there.

“He's got to learn to deal with it sooner or later,” he said, shrugging. Then he noticed the flowers in her arms.

“For Hugo,” she said.

“They're spectacular.”

She shrugged. “He was the spectacular one.”

Luc was looking at her in that odd, uncertain way he'd acquired. How funny they were together, she thought. You'd hardly guess they'd spent so many years sleeping in the same bed. It was ridiculous, but she felt shy in his presence, as if they'd only just met.

He was back on Laporte Street, although not living with them, exactly. He slept downstairs in the first-floor flat with Rémi, who was home from the Plateau. For the first time since Hannah had met him, he wasn't writing. He didn't seem too upset about this fact. He had enjoyed his stint as a cameraman on Hugo's film, although “cameraman” hardly covered all the roles he'd played, first in England, then after their return. He had bought editing software and spent hours reading manuals, and more hours reviewing the vast amount of footage he and Hugo had logged. More recently, he had put together a promotion package and mailed it to every contact he had in the media. No one had expected any reporters to show up at the school today, but now that they had, he was in no position to complain.
Eventually, he would get back to his desk, he had confided to Hannah, but for the time being he was taking unexpected pleasure in the break.

Hannah checked her watch. She, on the other hand, was busier than she'd ever been. She had to get home right now. The Word was supposed to call, and for the first time in months, she could offer them good news.
Death of a Dreamer
was done.

She had already called Allison March, who was home on maternity leave. Not that Allison seemed to care much anymore about translations or any other book-related matters. All she could talk about was her baby.

She'd had a son, not the daughter her doctor had confidently predicted. He was napping when Hannah had last spoken with her, in the pink room that Allison had so meticulously prepared for a little girl. The birth had not taken place at home, as Allison had hoped. Despite the Lamaze baths and massages and ethnic lullabies sung by her doula, all of which Allison described to Hannah in great detail over the telephone, Allison had ended up having a C-section in an operating room of Toronto's largest hospital.

“Nothing went the way I'd planned,” Allison had reported, laughing with what sounded like genuine mirth. “But you know what? That's just fine.”

Hannah could have said the same. Her parents were still struggling in the aftermath of her father's stroke, but she felt closer to them than she had in years. Luc's departure hadn't been such a disaster either. It had led her to Manny Mandelbaum, initially for Hugo, but then to help her sort out her own confusion. He had helped her understand that her career as a translator was over. In October, this had seemed like a calamity, but now,
nearly nine months later, it was a simple fact. Translation no longer interested her. On Manny's counsel, she had kept her contract with the Word Press but farmed out the last chapters of
Dreamer
to a young woman who had just graduated from the translation department at Concordia University.

And she had started to read fiction again. Not searching for books to translate, but the way she had read years ago when she was young, eclectically and for pleasure. She had found her old copy of
Bonheur d'occasion
, dog-eared and marked up, from her days at Dawson College. What she found in its pages surprised her. It wasn't anything like Luc's novels, despite what the critics claimed. The setting was Saint-Henri, as in Luc's books. And the characters were working class, like Luc's characters. But the similarities ended there.

What struck her in
Bonheur
were the voices. Weary Rose-Anna and her dreamer of a husband, Azarius. Flighty, self-involved Florentine Lacasse and her equally self-involved lover, Jean Lévesque, all of them so closely observed that it was easy to forget they were fictional. Gabrielle Roy's emotional antennae picked up frequencies missed by most people and transmitted them whole and true in her writing. Hannah had forgotten how she had once known each member of the Lacasse clan as intimately as the members of her own family. She told all of this to Manny Mandelbaum, whom she was still visiting periodically, and whose expensive Westmount office rent she was now helping to subsidize. She wasn't sure she would call it therapy— it felt more like chatting with a friend—but it was helping.

The young translator's work on
Dreamer
had been excellent. After Hannah finished the edits, she had no more excuses. At the Bureau en Gros, she bought a Hilroy notebook with three
subject dividers and a pack of econo-brand ballpoint pens. And she began. This also had been inspired by Manny. His definition of adulthood could be applied to other types of people—writers of fiction, for instance. It was all about telling someone's story, getting under the skin, catching the intricate truth of personal history.

Hannah still wasn't sure what it was that she had begun, or what shape it might eventually take. But she knew she wanted voices. More than one, and each of them telling a story. She wanted a character, based loosely on Alfred Stern, whose voice would be extinguished. She wanted a boy like her son at this precise moment, age fourteen, daring to speak out. She wanted a writer like Luc, with his bright eye and his oh-so-human heart. And she wanted a woman facing the difficulties she had faced, a translator who for reasons she didn't understand found herself unable to translate.

Eventually, she would have to let Luc know about the project. He had been dropping by with increasing frequency, supposedly to help finish the film, but occasionally staying on after the work was done and joining her and Hugo for dinner. So far, she had kept her writing a secret, but she couldn't keep it from him forever. Every day, she sat a little longer at her desk in the pantry, filling the spiral notebook with words. This book, or whatever it would turn out to be, was no longer inside her. Quite the contrary. It had swallowed her up, and she knew that sooner or later Luc or Hugo would ask about it. By that time, she hoped, she would have figured out what to say.

BOOKS, FILMS, AND WEBSITES REFERRED TO IN THIS NOVEL

“The British Diplomatic Oral History Programme,” 1996,
www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/BDOHP/Cross.pdf
.

Fanon, Frantz.
The Wretched of the Earth
. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2001. Originally published as
Les damnés de la terre
, 1961.

Kaufman, Fred.
Searching for Justice: An Autobiography
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Leblanc, Carl.
L'Otage
(The Hostage). Ad Hoc Films, 2004.

Rosenberg, Marshall B.
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.
Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2003.

Roy, Gabrielle.
The Tin Flute
. Translated by Alan Brown. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1980. Originally published as
Bonheur d'occasion
, 1945.

Vallières, Pierre.
White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec “Terrorist.”
Translated by Joan Pinkham. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971. Originally published as
Nègres blancs d'Amérique: Autobiographie précoce d'un “terroriste” québécois
, 1968.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I am indebted to Carl Leblanc for his fine, probing film
L'Otage
(The Hostage), which filled me with questions and inspired this novel.

Véronique Boscart of the E.W. Bickle Centre for Complex Continuing Care and the late Electra Risacher offered generous assistance while I was researching strokes and aphasia. Archivist Phil Gold of Sunnybrook Hospital provided invaluable historical details about that Toronto institution. Michael Rudder took me on a personal tour of Laporte Street in Saint-Henri, and the Saint-Henri Historical Society helped me research the novel's setting. Its “Gabrielle Roy Tour” pamphlet and map were particularly useful. For research about English-speaking Montreal families and the October Crisis, I extend my thanks to Sheila Goldbloom and Fred Kaufman (who also provided editorial input on the manuscript). For research about the anglophone exodus, I thank Collin Mills.

I am deeply grateful to my agent, Samantha Haywood of the Transatlantic Literary Agency, and to her associate Shaun
Bradley, for buoying my spirits at key moments in the creative process and, more generally, for handling all the real-world issues that arise as one turns an idea into a manuscript and a manuscript into a book. Shima Aoki of Penguin Canada, with her delicate, probing questions, and sharp-eyed Alex Schultz, helped me arrive at a final draft. I thank my partner in life, Arthur Holden, for the attentive care he bestowed on this book at various stages, and—just as importantly—on its author.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts, provider of the generous grant that financed the first draft of
My October
.

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First published 2014

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Copyright © Claire Holden Rothman, 2014

Crown copyright information taken from James Richard Cross's testimonial in the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1996, is re-used under the terms of the Open Government Licence (U.K.).

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.