The O'Briens (23 page)

“I'll call Elise from the Pic,” Grattan was saying. “Last night was the easiest two hundred bucks I ever made. Drank coffee all the way down, slept all the way home.”

Joe's legs were shorter than his brother's and he had to exert himself to keep up. The pain in his chest seemed to be fading.

At the Piccadilly Tea Room on St. Catherine Street, they were shown to a small table near the window. He rarely went out for lunch. When he did it was a business lunch, usually at one of the downtown clubs, the Mount Royal or the St. James, where he was respectable enough to be offered lunch but not membership. Along with a few French Canadians, the Scots had their cold hands on the wealth of the city, which they had been piling up since the days of the fur trade. An Irishman would never be invited to join their clubs until he got so rich they couldn't ignore him.

A pretty waitress in a stained uniform brought their menus and Grattan headed off to the manager's office to telephone Elise. The café was warm, steamy, and noisy. Conversations were in English and French. Women sat with their furs draped over the backs of their chairs. Most people wore Flanders poppies on their lapels and few men wore war ribbons. Grattan had not worn his decorations.

Thirteen enemy planes. Thirteen dead German flyers equalled one DSO. Maybe all it signified was that Grattan was crazy.

Grattan returned from the manager's office looking sheepish.

“Reach her?” Joe asked.

Grattan nodded.

“Am I supposed to lie for you?” Joe said. “Or did you tell her where you were?”

“She really ran me rough, Joe. Really hauled me over the coals.”

“Did you tell her you're finished with the rumrunner business?”

“Well, Joe, you're the boss.”

“No, I'm not. Take responsibility for your own life.”

“Sure, sure. You are my big brother, though.”

It was Friday, and Joe ordered salmon on brown bread. Grattan hesitated and then ordered the same. As soon as the waitress left he slipped out a flask and added a dollop of amber whisky to his water glass, then glanced at Joe.

“No, I don't want any.” He had no taste for liquor when he didn't need it.

“I was on my way to grab a bite for lunch yesterday afternoon when Buck pulled over in a great black touring car and offered me the run. The trucks were already loaded when we got to the warehouse. There wasn't time to phone Elise.”

“What about the other times?”

“I always told her I was out with the boys.”

In many ways Joe felt closer to his sister-in-law than to his brother, respected her more, yet he and Grattan carried the same seed of whatever it was — mud, blood, hardship. He wouldn't anoint his own children with that legacy. They would come of age in safety in Upper Westmount.

After their food arrived the brothers ate in silence. The plate-glass window facing St. Catherine Street was steamed from the cold outside and the moisture and warmth within. Grattan hardly touched his pepped-up water glass — he never had been much of a drinker. There had always been something fastidious about him. Which was why those wartime letters, with their
mamzelles
,
cunts
, and prostitutes fucking on trains, had been so shocking. The war had cut Grattan loose from decent life, like a kite with a broken string.

While Grattan was putting down money to pay the bill, the waitress returned and said there was a call for him on the telephone in the manager's office. He glanced at Joe, shrugged, and left to take the call. Joe wondered if Buck Cohen had somehow tracked down his brother and wanted him for another job. Another whisky run.

Grattan returned a minute later. “That was Ellie. She just had a call from Iseult. Iseult felt something and she's on her way to the hospital.”

~

The brothers rode up Peel Street in a taxi. Joe felt unwell. Maybe it was the salmon. Maybe it was anxiety over this pregnancy, a weight he had been carrying in his gut all month and trying to ignore.

The day had grown colder, the streets festooned with white smoke and steam. The cab passed between a pair of gates and ran up a carriage road to deliver them at the front door of the hospital's Ross Pavilion.

Joe reached into his pocket for money to pay the fare, but Grattan said, “I'll take care of it, brother. You go on. I'll find you inside.”

The door was held open by a gaunt young commissionaire, a veteran with campaign ribbons on his chest and a scarlet cellophane poppy on his lapel. Taking the elevator to the third floor, Joe hurried to the nursing station, the soles of his English shoes cracking crisply on the linoleum. A little red-headed nurse in starched cap and pinafore led him down the polished corridor and opened a door.

Iseult was barefoot on the floor at the foot of her bed, gripping the white iron bedstead with both hands. Her legs were spread apart, her head was lowered between outstretched arms, her flannel nightgown ballooned over her swollen body, and she was grunting rhythmically.

“Jesus, let's get a doctor in here,” Joe said to the little nurse, who disappeared.

Pain, hot breath, and a smell of shit clouded the room, and for a moment he thought of Mick Heaney sprawled on his back on the frozen dirt in the shed. Weak wintry light smeared the room. Curtains halfway open revealed a pano-rama of grey city and black river. Iseult's face was pale, damp. He pulled off his gloves, dropped them on the bed, then rubbed his hands briskly to warm them and began massaging the small of her back and her hips. Gently at first, then with more firmness.

She stretched, arching like a cat. “We're going to be fine,” she told him.

“I know that.”

“Has Grattan turned up?”

“Yes.”

“He's all right?”

“Yes.”

Grattan and Elise must have run into each other in the lobby, for they entered the room together, followed by a baby-faced doctor and a senior nurse who glared at Joe.

“Good afternoon, Mr. O'Brien,” the doctor said. “Quite a crowd.”

“Good afternoon.”

Joe could feel the senior nurse bristling. She clearly wished to order him from his wife's room, but something in his stance must have warned her it would not be wise. She turned and followed the doctor to Iseult's bedside and briskly drew the curtains around the bed.

While they examined her, Joe stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back. The light over the city was grey and white. The river would freeze soon. In a few more weeks the ice would be thick enough to drive trucks and wagons across.

Fear as much as ambition or intelligence had brought him this far. One slip, one moment of weakness, and the river current would have him.

Elise touched his arm. “Thanks for going to look for Grattan. You're a good brother, Joe.”

He nodded. Those closest to him knew him the least.

The curtains around the bed were swept back. The senior nurse glared at him and he glared back at her. He wasn't ready to leave Iseult to the care of the medical profession, not just yet.

The door opened and the little red-headed nurse wheeled in a tea trolley.

“Everything's quite normal, Mr. O'Brien,” the young doctor said. “Enjoy your tea but don't stay too long. Our patient needs her rest.”

The doctor and nurses left the room. Elise plumped Iseult's pillows and smoothed the covers, then kicked off her shoes and hopped up on the bed, where she sat cross-legged and started pouring tea. Everyone except Iseult took a cup with sugar and milk, buttered toast, raspberry jam, shortbread.

Iseult was silent, absorbed in her body's mysterious processes.

Elise was silent too, probably wondering what crazy scheme Grattan might get involved in next. And Grattan was probably planning his next escapade.

Clink of china, greasy scent of butter, smell of heat glowing off the iron radiators.

The doctor had seemed terribly young, but Joe knew Iseult trusted him. She had asked him to lend a few hours of his time to her clinic. Within her body, protected by her tissue, muscle, blood, their third — fourth — child waited to be born.

Slipping off the bed, Elise crossed the room, her stocking feet making a brushing noise on the linoleum. She switched on the electric light, then went to the window and drew the curtains shut. Returning to the bedside, she murmured something to Iseult that Joe didn't catch, then started massaging Iseult's swollen belly and singing what sounded like a lullaby, or a love song, in a language Joe did not understand, possibly Yiddish. It sounded right, anyhow, like sweet air in the room, like warmth, like safety.

No point in thinking how vulnerable they really were, how exposed.

On the Run

“I
believe he's in detroit,”
his mother said.

The O'Brien Capital Construction Co. Ltd. was building a bridge from Detroit to Windsor. In Detroit Mike's father usually stayed at the Book Cadillac Hotel; he would bring home bars of soap in the shape of books for Frankie, Mike's younger sister. But Mike had also overheard his mother telling Aunt Elise that his father could be in New York, and by then — Mike was nearly fifteen — he had a pretty good idea what New York was all about.

Later that evening he was in his room doing a delicate bit of soldering on his radio set when his mother entered without knocking.

“That radio's taking too much time from your schoolwork!”

He reminded her that the science master at Lower Canada College had encouraged the boys to build sets, even helping them order parts. The radio wasn't taking time from his schoolwork; it
was
schoolwork.

“Do not speak to me like that, Michael!”

“Like what?”

“As if you know everything and I don't know anything! Don't use that tone of voice.”

“What tone of voice?”

“Oh, stop it.” She sat down suddenly on his bed. “Oh, stop it, myself. The smell of that awful gunk has gotten to my head. I can't think straight.”

“Solder doesn't smell any worse than your fixer.”

“I suppose it doesn't.” Flopping backwards, she lay staring up at the ceiling.

At least she wasn't holding a camera. She sometimes came into his room and snapped photos of him doing homework or working on his radio or assembling a model plane. Other parents brought out the camera to record birthday parties or Christmases, but she had always taken pictures of them doing ordinary things. Homework. Eating breakfast. Riding their bikes. Mike and his sisters were so accustomed to it they hardly noticed. Their father filed all her photographs in albums. He used to keep the albums in his office downtown but he had brought them home. Now they were in a special bookcase in his study. Mike and his sisters were allowed to take them out and look through them, but they never did.

He suddenly felt sorry for his mother.

“I'll open my window and leave the door ajar. The draft'll suck out the fumes.”

She got up, came over to where he was sitting, and rubbed his hair. “Don't stay up too late.”

After she left he went back to soldering, most of his consciousness concentrated in his fingers. He was surprised when the notion of leaving home — of running away — came to him all of a sudden, like a flashbulb popping. It wasn't a plan he had been cooking up; it wasn't really even a plan. All of a sudden he just saw himself walking down the Westmount hillside, headed for the train yards.

His parents had been at odds with each other lately, never raising their voices but mostly keeping to separate parts of the house. His sisters had their own lives, their school friends. He'd slip away and they'd hardly notice. He'd be leaving his radio set behind, but he'd come back sooner or later, or maybe he'd build another.

He told himself he'd rather be heating a can of beans over a hobo fire in the Alberta badlands than spending another day on Skye Avenue in Westmount. He'd been born out west; he and Margo were the only real Westerners in the family. Maybe what he felt was a homing instinct, like geese winging north in spring.

~

He had trouble sleeping that night. Anxiety seemed to exist on its own, like a powerful radio signal, especially when he lay in bed. He had never tried describing the feeling to anyone. It didn't seem to fit into words. It didn't have a cause or a reason that he could put his finger on. Even giving the hum of feelings a name —
anxiety
—
had been fairly recent. It had always been the way things inside him were, his tuning for “normal.”

Once he left home, he told himself, he'd be too busy looking out for himself to worry. He liked horses, and maybe out in Alberta he'd become a cowboy and there wouldn't be any time to lie in bed feeling anxious about things he couldn't name.

~

The next day, Saturday, his mother was meeting Aunt Elise for lunch, then going to the art museum. Margo was spending the weekend at her pal Lulu Taschereau's and Frankie was at a birthday party on Roslyn Avenue. The maids and the cook always took long naps on Saturday afternoon.

He packed bread, cheese, and apples in an old Royal Flying Corps haversack that his uncle had given him for a get-well present when he was recuperating from pneumonia. Uncle Grattan had recently quit selling real estate and bought an old farm in the Laurentians, which he planned to turn into a ski lodge. Mike's father had called it another hare-brained scheme and said Grattan needed to grow up and probably never would, but Mike had been with his uncle when strangers came up to him in the street wanting to shake hands with him. Sometimes they even saluted. A stranger had come up to Grattan one Saturday morning in the hardware store on Sherbrooke Street, said something Mike didn't catch, then laid his head on Grattan's shoulder and started crying. Everyone in the store was staring, but Grattan had put his arms around the man as if he were a kid who'd fallen off his bike and needed comforting. Afterwards Mike asked who he was.

“Didn't catch the name. Says he was in my company in the
199
th. Probably was. So many went through I don't remember all the faces.”

“What was wrong with him, Uncle?”

“I guess he's got a little bit of trench fever.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I've had it myself.”

~

The servants were asleep and the rest of the house was empty when he sat down at the typewriter in his father's study. He didn't want his parents worrying any more than they had to. He didn't want any fuss.

May 27th, 1929

Dear Mother,

I'm not running away only taking a trip by myself. Shall let you know when I get there. Shall be all right. Don't worry about me.

your son,

Michael J. O'Brien

P.S. I'll be o.k.

Leaving his note beside the telephone, he quit the house and, with Grattan's RFC haversack slung across his shoulder, walked down Murray Hill and across Murray Park.

The park was their natural home. He and his sisters knew every flowerbed and piece of shrubbery, had climbed every tree worth climbing. They knew how water in the different drinking fountains tasted: metallic in some, salty in others. When he was ten, his father had given him a wristwatch and said a man with a good watch had no excuse for being late ever. What he'd meant was that Mike was responsible for bringing his sisters and himself home from the park in time for their evening curfew. June, just before they left for Santa Barbara, was the luminous month, and he always hated leaving friends and games then while the sky was still bright. The girls never wanted to leave either, but the three of them would cross Westmount Avenue together and trudge up Murray Hill under the canopy of elms and maples, on sidewalks strewn with bright green maple seeds. Their mother might be in her darkroom or off at a committee meeting or washing babies at Sainte-Cunégonde, but their father was always waiting outside under the portico, clutching the evening newspaper and wearing a silk smoking jacket, with his reading glasses pushed back on his head. Maybe he figured that if he didn't watch for them something bad would happen. And something
could
have happened. Frankie could have been hit by a truck losing its brakes on Murray Hill. Margo could have been electrocuted by a power line brought down by a sudden thunderstorm. Mike could have fallen out of his favourite apple tree and broken his neck instead of just scraping his elbow. A thousand things could have happened. Only they never did.

Leaving the park, he continued down into Westmount Glen and through the dank tunnel under the Canadian Pacific main line, which debouched into Sainte-Cunégonde, where poor people lived, where children died of tuberculosis caused by bad milk. He caught a streetcar along Notre-Dame Street, then walked through another seeping tunnel under the Lachine Canal. On the other side of the canal St. Patrick Street was hectic with motor trucks. The weeds growing in pavement cracks had a certain sour smell. A stone wall topped with coils of barbed wire ran along Wellington Street, flanking the Grand Trunk train yards. The air smelled of rust and train brakes and he heard yard engines at work on the other side of the wall, shunting cars, making up trains.

Coming to a gate manned by a railway policeman, Mike crossed the street and waited on the opposite side until a truck pulled up and sounded its horn. As soon as the gate swung open, he crossed the street and slipped through without the cop noticing him.

Cuts of boxcars lined dozens of sidings. Crouching beside a track bed, gravel cutting into his palms, he watched brakemen and a yard engine put a train together. Skirting them, he headed for a switching shack and found the destinations board, but the train and track numbers were in a code he wasn't able to decipher.

The sun was warm. Tar oozed from sleepers. Dodging between boxcars, scrambling over couplers, he was wary of being spotted. When he saw a couple of hoboes climbing into a boxcar, he thought about asking them where the train was headed, then decided not to. He didn't want to expose himself to people who knew everything while he knew nothing. He'd be better off figuring out stuff on his own.

He was hiding behind the embankment, peering over the grade and watching brakemen checking automatic couplers and linking up brake hoses, when a man in a blue suit darted out from behind a cut of tanker cars, ran across the tracks in a crouch, and dropped down beside him on the tarry gravel embankment. Putting a hand on Mike's arm, he gasped, “Train? Yes? Where?”

The words were scraps, harshly pronounced. He wasn't a brakeman or a guard. He didn't look like a hobo, wasn't carrying a bedroll or knapsack. There was a blue shadow of beard on his cheeks and chin. His blue suit was too big for him.

“Where?” he repeated, gesturing at the train.

A foreigner.

“Out west,” Mike answered. “Alberta.”

“Chicago? Toronto, Chicago? My brother, Chicago.”

Cha-cago.

Signal bells started banging and a big
4
-
4
-
2
locomotive and tender coupled up to the train. A brakeman came along the track waving a green flag, and they both ducked heads below the grade.

“I'm going to jump that train.” Mike was suddenly determined.

“Nikos.” The man thumped his chest. “Greek!”

“Mike.”

“My brother is restaurant. Cha-cago.”

With a series of massive clanks and squeals, the couplers pulled snug and the train started moving.

“Cha-cago,” the Greek repeated.

Most trains out of the Montreal yards, Mike knew, were westbound, headed for southern Ontario or up around the Lakehead. He hadn't been able to read the board but there was a better than even chance this train was going in the right direction.

The rank smell of weeds along the embankment made him feel sad for some reason. Scrambling to his feet, he started walking alongside the moving train, keeping up with a wooden boxcar. The doors were open and the car smelled of rotten oranges. The wooden floor was higher than he'd expected. He realized he wouldn't be able to hoist himself aboard while the train was moving.

Falling back a little, he noticed an iron footplate and ladder at the end of the car. If he could get a hold on the ladder he could climb up to the roof and ride there. He'd seen men riding on boxcar roofs in California, so there was probably something to hold on to up there.

The train was moving faster. He started running to keep up. It was amazing how such a giant thing could pick up speed so quickly. He heard someone running behind him and without looking around knew it was the Greek.

Mike knew he wouldn't be able to keep up with the train much longer. Reaching out, he grasped the iron bars on either side of the iron ladder, and as soon as he touched the bars he could feel the train's muscle, its momentum. The iron bars seemed to want to surge right out of his hands, but he held on. The trick was to get his feet up onto the footplate. Once he did that it would just be a matter of holding on and climbing to the roof.

The train was starting to pull him off his feet, and he made himself run faster. If he let go he'd be pulled under the steel wheels by his own momentum and the suck of speed. He swung his legs up, scrabbling for the footplate, and felt a dose of panic as his body swung in the gush of air. Then his feet touched and he was able to stand on the footplate, pull himself inboard, and start climbing.

Looking back down, he saw the Greek loping alongside like a wolf. He looked up at Mike and his lips parted in a smile, exposing teeth that were brilliant and white. As he reached for the ladder the Greek made the mistake of seizing it with only one hand instead of grasping it with both. How could he have guessed the sheer power, the rolling pull of that train, until he'd actually touched it? And as soon as he did, it twisted him sideways. He lost his footing, spun around backwards, and was sucked underneath the wheels.

He didn't scream. Or if he did, Mike didn't hear it; the sound was submerged under the enormous bearing of the train.

Mike scrambled to the roof and crouched, holding on to some iron ribs and shivering, while the train ground along, skirting the factories of southwest Montreal. He had never seen anyone killed. He hadn't imagined it could happen so quickly and be over so suddenly and that everything would just go on afterwards.

The string of boxcars squeaked and crackled. His boxcar was so far back in the train that he could barely hear the engine. He clung on and shivered. It was as if his brain had been rubbed by some giant eraser, and it wasn't until the train started across the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence that he understood they were heading east, not west: to the Eastern Townships and the Maritimes, not Toronto or the Lakehead.