Serafim and Claire (3 page)

Claire's memory worked
like
a radio station: memories that were pleasant and popular were repeated again and again. And with each reminiscence, Claire found that she could discover something new, some hidden timbre or cadence that she hadn't quite appreciated before. And like a radio station, the selection of her memories changed with the times. A popular recollection one year might become forgotten or outmoded the next. Recently, it had been playing a countdown of her all-time favourite moments, the ones that had set her and her career on its bold trajectory.

One particular memory she'd been recalling was an underhanded threat she had been prepared to make to Dr. Bertrand. It was a threat she had rehearsed but couldn't quite remember if she'd delivered. It was a sly implication of how she knew exactly what he'd done for her brother; and how he could go to prison for it. Other doctors certainly had, while Dr. Bertrand remained a free man, untarnished and unapologetic.

She could remember perfectly the feeling in the city that day. Music, the mayhem of mass celebration, the streets of Montreal roiling in dance, bells, singing, the clatter of pots and pans, horns, comet-like streamers tailing through the air above the streetcar wires and landing amid a brass-band frenzy.

For Claire, dancing with Dr. Bertrand the day of the false armistice was only the end of this memory song. The beginning, like most controversial things, featured her grandmother.

Claire's paternal grandmother was an eccentric. She had been widowed early, and had raised Claire's father by scraping by on what little money her husband had left behind. She read voraciously, blasphemed at will, and every year she lived she'd become less and less of a believer, first renouncing the sacraments. By the time she'd come to live with her son, his straitlaced wife, and their three children, Claire, Cécile, and Daniel, she had stopped going to church altogether.

Instead, on the Sabbath, with no one else home, she would shuffle over to the neighbours' apartment — immigrants from France, and non-believers as well — where she would sip cognac on their terrace, discussing books, news, and politics. It was unheard of, scandalous even. But what tipped her scale into the realm of eccentricity was how unashamed she was. “
Je m'en fous
,” she would say, whenever Claire's father or mother challenged her to consider what other people might say about the things she did or didn't do. “If you do come across someone who has issue with me,” her grandmother would calmly say, “tell them that I am always right here. They are more than welcome to discuss their qualms, with me, to my face.” At which point she would retire to her boudoir, and close the door conclusively behind her.

Her grandmother's boudoir was a tiny room filled with sofas, as well as a rocking chair and an anniversary clock that didn't keep time so well. Several small paintings — rollingly idyllic Quebec landscapes — adorned the walls, interrupted by a window that looked out onto the dreary brick partition of the next apartment. It was a room designated for the women in the house to sit in quietly with their needlework, but it was really only used by Claire's grandmother for reading, and for “poisoning her granddaughters,” as Claire's mother liked to say, “with her audacious ideas.”

Claire and Cécile adored their grandmother. Once the door to the boudoir was closed, she was easily distracted from her reading and took a genuine interest in the girls and their fantastical whims and play worlds. She would gently clap and hum a tune and Claire would dance and spin on the rectangle of a second-hand rug in the centre of the room, which acted as a padded stage. She would endlessly reread the same fairy tales and stories to Cécile, who learned the words by heart and would mouth them as they were being read, her legs draped over her grandmother's lap, enveloped by her large arms, as a wrinkled hand was lifted to lick a finger for turning the page.

When Claire's grandmother first moved into their apartment, in 1910, Claire was seven, Cécile ten, and Daniel fourteen. That same year, a man named Henri Bourassa started up the newspaper
Le Devoir
, which had a liberal, anti-imperialist, intellectual tilt, and of which Claire's grandmother became an instant disciple. Its daily reading was the only thing she did religiously. But the next two years saw her sight, already feeble, begin to fail, until it was so much work to squint and decipher — hunched-over, magnifying-glass cryptology — that she began asking Cécile to read certain passages aloud to her, to give her eyes some needed rest. She would insist, however, after Cécile had painstakingly sounded out each word individually, that the girl reread the words as a coherent sentence, and once she had, she would get her to repeat it — without its sounding so wooden this time, she would say factually, without malice. Then the entire paragraph again, only with inflection and confidence, like an adult. When she was finally satisfied, she would murmur, “
Excellent, ma petite fille
—
impeccable
.
On continue
,” and on it was to the next paragraph, the next page.

Soon enough, Cécile was charged with reading the entire journal, from cover to cover. As she got older, she was asked her opinion on what she was reading. Did she agree that the ruling class was grossly neglecting the rights of the working class? Did she agree that Canada's responsibility began and ended with the defence of its own terrain, that it had no business sending troops to fight in British wars, as it had done in South Africa only a few years ago and seemed itching to do again? For her part, Cécile wasn't exactly sure how one formed an opinion, though she became increasingly certain that an opinion was an important thing to have.

She hadn't quite gotten around to choosing her position on Canada's involvement in British wars before troops were being sent in throngs to fight in Europe. At the outbreak of the Great War, Daniel was eighteen, and by the time he was twenty, several of his friends had either signed up or quietly moved out of the city to relatives' homes in the country, where the army officers who patrolled the cities could be more easily evaded. Officers stopped young men at will on the streets, and handed them papers with instructions to receive a physical and report for service immediately. One spring day, Daniel, who stayed in Montreal throughout the war, working as a shop assistant for a grocer — and who was devout in his boycott of beer as a patriotic gesture, saving on grain while withdrawing his support of the German-dominated brewery sector — was stopped by one such officer and handed his fateful papers. He brought them home shrugging, a sheeplike grin on his face, obedient and oblivious to the danger he faced.

He hadn't taken his hat off at the door before his grandmother doggedly limped towards him, snatched him by the wrist, and dragged him back outside, down the steps, and up the street. They didn't return to the apartment for hours, and when they did, it was with a note from Dr. Bertrand, with the somewhat shocking news that Daniel was suddenly found to have a rare, though minor, heart condition. Daniel moped around for weeks afterwards, sure he was going to be called a coward, insisting in a whisper that he'd even
wanted
to go and fight. Not die, of course, but fight. His mother, lowering her voice as well, would tell him, behind closed doors, that he could just tell the truth. “It was your grandmother's doing. Her fault. Everyone knows what kind of woman she is, anyway. Now, stop fretting about it and set off for work. You're needed here more than there . . .” Her words broke up as she smoothed the collar of her twenty-year-old son and pulled his jacket down straight.

In Claire's family, each child was, in a way, a favourite. Daniel was clearly their mother's, while Cécile always had her grandmother and Claire her father. During the five years of the Great War, when Montreal was the scene of national turmoil and heated polemics, of economic hardship and individual sacrifice, Claire's father was eager to keep her unconcerned and sheltered from it all. Despite being a luxury that the family could ill afford, he somehow found a way to pay for her weekly dance classes at the École de Danse Lacasse-Morenoff, and attended every recital to clap as loudly as he could. He was also the only parent who would whistle, piercingly, with his thumb and forefinger in his mouth. Whenever talk in their house, especially with visitors from church, began to seethe about the gravest of issues — infant mortality among francophones reaching the highest in the Western world, the patent dismissal of their every concern by Ottawa, or the grisly scene of a horse-drawn trolley carting away corpses of those who had succumbed to the Spanish influenza, with one or two of the bodies still in their death throes — Claire's father would pull her close to keep her from hearing any more, asking her about the dances she was rehearsing, or even taking her to another room, where he would wind up the gramophone and close the door behind him, leaving her to practise in peace.

Claire was fifteen years old and in her last year of school when, on a mild day in November, the news rippled through the city like a tsunami of cheers: the war was over. The school bells were suddenly ringing continuously, following the students out into the streets, where the chimes spread into the urban distance, infectiously, to church bells, firemen's sirens, the klaxons of vehicles, descending all the way to the St. Lawrence and the harbour, where ship horns could be heard yawning and bellowing above the boom of cannon fire. Claire, thinking of her father, headed to St. James Street, where he was a lowly record keeper for a small accounting firm. Along the way, the traffic at intersections was sometimes clogged and stagnant, people in the crossroads playing instruments, groups of singers and dancers flocking around them, and annoyed drivers leaving their vehicles only to join in the revelry a few minutes later, clapping their hands with their heads thrown back. The war was really over.

Claire bumped into her father as he was heading towards his favourite tavern. Upon seeing her, he picked her up, swung her in a circle, and kissed her cheeks ecstatically before leading her by the arm through the crowd that was amassing in ever-greater numbers. Inside the tavern, an accordion player stood on a table, his back to the wall to make room for a few more people to dance, while a fiddle player carefully stepped onto another tabletop to do the same. Two navy men, bristling with elation, swung each other by the arms in the centre of the room. The circle of people closest to them, mostly men in straw hats, clapped in unison, cigarettes clamped between their lips. Claire's father ordered drinks, a whiskey for himself and a cocktail for her, and they had just clinked glasses and taken a sip when Claire's father straightened up and exclaimed, “Why, Dr. Bertrand!” and hailed the man to come over.

Dr. Bertrand was a much-respected physician who, everyone knew, had gone to London and Paris just before war had broken out, where he had learned to perform surgical operations. His status in the francophone community was of the highest, and the Audettes were among the few lucky enough to be able to call him their family doctor. Claire's father vigorously shook his hand, clasping the man's shoulder as if to steady him, a dribble of whiskey spilling from the glass in the doctor's left hand. He kissed Claire hello, and all three of them clanked glasses, drinking to the end of all wars.

The two men exchanged small talk for a few minutes, watching the sailors dance. Then, looking into his glass, and half under his breath, Claire's father uttered, “You know, about Daniel, I have never thanked you.”

Dr. Bertrand, draining the last thimble of whiskey from his tumbler, continued looking out into the tavern. “With much respect, Mr. Audette, I didn't do it for your gratitude, or anyone else's for that matter. I was just staying true to my own code of conduct. There are things that, unfortunately, we must pay for out of our souls, and I am not a man who is rich in that currency. Brave acts, Mr. Audette, are at times done merely out of weakness.”

Claire's father chuckled uncomfortably, threw back the rest of his glass, and shouldered his way closer to the bar. “Of course, of course. Which I imagine is another way of saying I should buy you another whiskey.”

Dr. Bertrand turned to him, gave him a hearty slap on the back. “And yourself one too, I hope.”

But before the glasses could be poured, the song ended and another began, this one more upbeat, pulsing wildly, and Claire's father was suddenly shooing his daughter and the doctor out into the centre of the room. “
Allez! Dansez, dansez!
” Claire, who had listened hungrily to the conversation, was now seeing the doctor, for the first time, in a duller, more human light; made even more so by his awkward dancing, his lack of rhythm and musicality. Claire soon stepped back from him, lifted one of his hands and passed beneath it, twirling, swaying, swinging her body gracefully around the dance floor. She was young and beautiful, and her dancing held the attention of the room. As the navy men clapped and whistled around her, Claire reached back and let her hair down, where it splashed over her shoulders with every spin, an auburn aura. As she danced, conversations stopped, sentences hovered, hanging adrift in the smoke, then dissipated, until the words were forgotten entirely.

After an hour of dancing on and off, Claire sensed something troubling passing through the room. She saw her father and Dr. Bertrand exchange a few quick words, followed by a strained return to their previous jovial state. Not wanting to interrupt the two men, she asked one of the naval ratings what was wrong, and he told her that the war, in fact, had not ended. It was a mistake. No armistice had been signed, nor had negotiations even begun. Casualties were still being reported on the Western Front. Yet — and this was the strangest part for Claire — the dancing hadn't stopped. Out in the street, where everyone had doubtlessly heard the news, people were still celebrating, and were now clearing the way for a float to pass. The float — a giant papier mâché Canadian soldier with his bayonet to the throat of a kneeling kaiser — had been prepared for the Victory Bond parade that was scheduled for the following Monday. Claire watched as two men jumped onto the float and began the process of cutting off the kaiser's head.