The O'Briens (24 page)

The train picked up even more speed coming off the bridge. It was too late to jump off. His face stung in the wind. He had forgotten to bring water and suddenly he was very thirsty.

Starting off in the wrong direction was a stupid, basic, humiliating mistake. Huddled against the wind, he wondered how long he could keep holding on. He didn't trust that the peeling wind wouldn't blow him right off the top of the car. He tried to shut down his thoughts and just watch the country slipping by: meadows, bean fields, orchards. After a while he started feeling a little more normal. He didn't need to hold on so tightly; the constant breeze wasn't going to blow him off after all.

People were always being killed by trains. If he'd read about an accident like that in the newspaper he probably wouldn't have thought much about it, would have forgotten all about it after turning the page.

Three hours after crossing the St. Lawrence, the train halted on a siding at a pulp mill. By then he'd had enough of going the wrong way. The Greek's bluish jaw and bright smile were coming back to him. He knew the trip was over and he'd have to go home.

What would they find on the tracks? A lump of blood and meat and whatever was left of the blue suit? How did they bury a person after something like that?

The stench of wood pulp was sour. He climbed down from the boxcar and asked a startled yardman if there was a telephone somewhere. The man collared him and dragged him into a shack where a foreman was smoking a cigar. Mike asked in French if he could telephone Montreal and have someone come and fetch him.

The foreman said there was no phone in the shack but there was one in the mill's main office, which was, unfortunately, closed because it was Saturday afternoon. Mike could use that phone, but it would cost money to pay for the call.

“Combien?”

“Puis, un piastre.”

The foreman tucked the dollar into his pocket, then led Mike through the noisy, steamy mill and up to the office. The room was deserted but there was a phone. He gave the operator Grattan and Elise's number; his aunt answered the phone.

“Are you all right, Mike? What's going on? Where are you?”

“I'm okay. I just need to talk to Uncle Grattan, please.”

Grattan agreed to come and fetch him. “I'll be there in a couple of hours. Sit tight.”

After he hung up there was little to do but watch the workers tending the giant newsprint machines. In a while the men started shutting everything down. The shift was over.

He went back out to the railway siding, found the boxcar, and inspected the wheels and undercarriage. There was no trace of blood or gore — just grease, flecks of sand and gravel, and the acrid smell of brakes. Across fifty or sixty miles everything else had dissolved or been blown away. He didn't know if he was going to tell someone or not. It would start feeling very different once he began talking about it, he knew. He would keep it to himself a while longer, think it over some more.

He followed a group of workers leaving the mill and crossing the highway. The evening damp smelled of hay from meadows that sprawled towards a river. A few men got into ancient cars but most set off walking down the highway towards the lights of the town.

He went back inside the mill and played barbotte with a night watchman who was missing his right arm. They rolled dice at a nickel a game. The watchman said his wound had been
un petit bleu, vraiment non plus qu'une éraflure
,
but instead of healing it had grown very tender, and the next thing he knew he was at a dressing station, then a field hospital, where a surgeon told him he had
septicémie
and was going to lose the arm. “
Je lui ai dis, okay, je vais vous donner mon bras si vous me permettriez de revenir au Canada.
”

After giving Mike a cigarette, which made him dizzy, the watchmen stretched out on a cot and fell asleep. Mike wandered across the highway to a brightly lit lunch wagon with a tin Kik Cola sign and a half-dozen trucks parked out front. Behind the lunch wagon the fields were planted in corn and beans.

He sat down at the counter and asked the waitress for a glass of milk.
Un verre du lait, s'il vous plaît
.

Did the Greek's brother really work in a Chicago restaurant? Would he ever learn what had happened?

He felt as though he wasn't really in the café, wasn't really anywhere. He'd started for the West and this was as far as he had gotten. He knew he hadn't the strength to go farther, not just then, anyway.

He'd finished the milk and was about to ask for a slice of apple pie when Uncle Grattan suddenly sat down on the stool beside him. Grattan wore a tweed jacket and old grey flannels and a gold ring on his left hand that Elise had given him on their fifteenth wedding anniversary.

“Thanks for coming, Uncle.”

“I'm glad you called. Your mother was getting worried.”

“I left her a note.”

“Yes. That's what had her worried.”

The waitress came over and Grattan asked for a cup of coffee.

“Tell me what the plan was,” he said to Mike after the waitress left. “Did you have a plan? Or were you just hightailing it?”

He needed to hold on to what had happened a little longer. Keep it in his hands a while and just think it over. “I was going out to Alberta,” he said, “but I got on the wrong train.”

“Ever hopped a train before?”

“No.”

“Not that easy, is it. I used to bum into L.A. on the lemon cars out of Santa Paula. I'm not going to ask why you left. Maybe I have a general idea, and I guess the details don't matter. But I want you to promise me something.”

“I was born out west, Uncle. I'm not from here. I don't belong here.”

“Nonsense. A person belongs wherever he's willing to stop and dig in. I've experienced a vivid sense of belonging in certain shell holes. I want your word of honour you won't try it again. Too hard on your mother. Train yards aren't the place for a boy. Easy to get hurt. People get killed.”

For a moment he considered telling Grattan, but something made him hold back. “I'm not a boy, Uncle.”

“No? What are you, then?”

“Well, I guess I am.”

“Before you try something like this again, talk it over with your parents. Come to some sort of understanding.
Tu comprends? Donne-moi ta parole
.”

“I swear.”

“Don't go boasting about this escapade to your pals: you'll start a train-jumping craze. And don't tell your sisters, or you'll just scare the pants off them. Do you want anything else? Another glass of milk?
Mademoiselle, s'il vous plaît, apportez un verre du lait pour ce gars
.”

They walked out into the fresh-smelling dark. Grattan's car was a brand-new Chevy Capitol, maroon, with a black cabriolet roof. The previous autumn Grattan had taught Mike to drive on a range road up north. He didn't have his licence yet but he knew how to handle a machine.

Grattan had set the choke and was about to push the starter when Mike resolved that he wasn't going to tell anyone, certainly not his father and maybe not even Grattan. Not for a while anyway, maybe never. If he told it would become just a story. Right now it felt like a part of him, a limb, an eye, a pint of his own blood.

“Uncle?”

“Yes?”

“I want to be like you, not like him.”

Grattan sat back in his seat. Taking a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, he stuck one in his mouth and struck a match.

“I'd like to save you some grief, pass along my manly wisdom. But I don't have any. I've always looked up to Joe. You can learn a lot from successful men like your father. A father's protection and love are rare, rare things. We lost our old man, and things got pretty rough after that, believe me.”

“I don't know what I'd learn from him except sneaking off and getting drunk.”

“Now you're sounding like a kid again.”

Grattan pressed the starter with his foot and the engine caught. As his uncle steered the nimble little Chevrolet out onto the highway, Mike let the acceleration push him back against the seat. Sweet engine noise filled the silence. His uncle spoke from the other side of experience, and that counted for a lot, but the only way he would ever get to that other side was to go there himself someday, and on his own. Maybe he'd already started.

Disorder

M
other superior stalked
into geography class, interrupting the lesson. She looked angry, and the little nun teaching the class looked scared. Boarders, day girls, teachers — everyone at the convent was scared of Mother Superior. Born a Protestant, she had all the rage and zeal of a convert.

“Margo O'Brien! Gather up your books and come with me.”

Margo glanced at her best friend, Lulu Taschereau, who gave a little shrug. Tasch had been teaching Margo, Mary Cohen, and Lulu's cousin Mathilde to play bridge, and they had been playing rubbers in the dormitory by candlelight and flashlight. Had Mother Superior found them out?

Margo wondered if she was being expelled. But why weren't Tasch and the other bridge players being summoned?

In the corridor Mother Superior impatiently clacked the string of black rosary beads she wore around her waist, each bead nearly the size of a walnut.

“A taxi has been called for you and your sister.” The nun's cheeks were pink, her blue eyes sparking behind steel-rimmed spectacles. She was angry about something. “It will be at the front door in exactly half an hour. Go upstairs and start packing. You and your sister. There's no time to waste.”

“Am I being expelled?”

“Do you deserve to be?”

Maybe it was a set-up so she would rat on the other bridge players. Margo stared at the nun boldly. She wasn't going to play that game.

“You're not being expelled,” Mother Superior admitted. “Your mother is taking you all to California tonight.”

“California?” Margo was stunned.

“I can't imagine what she's thinking.” Mother Superior clacked her prayer beads. “Now get cracking, O'Brien! Help your sister pack her things. Hurry! No time to waste!”

“But I have to say goodbye to Lulu.”

“I will not have class disturbed again. Pack your things and see to your sister. I'm sending Monsieur Desjardins up in fifteen minutes to fetch your trunks. I want you and Frances down here waiting for the cab when it arrives. Off with you now!”

Margo had no choice but to head for the stairs, passing the chapel and its sick-sweet scent of old candles and holy water. They went out to Santa Barbara most years, but in summer, after the school year ended. What was her mother thinking of, pulling them out at the very start of winter term, so soon after the Christmas holidays?

She found her nine-year-old sister sitting on her little bed in the junior-school dormitory. All the cubicle curtains were pushed back and Frankie, alone in the long white room, looked small. Her trunk was on the floor at the foot of her bed. There was nothing in it yet.

Seeing Margo, Frankie broke into sobs, shoulders heaving. Sitting down beside her, Margo began rubbing Frankie's back. Sometimes it calmed her, helped her get control of herself. Sometimes nothing worked.

After a minute or so Frankie began to quiet down. Looking up at Margo, exhausted, eyes haunted, she whispered, “Something's wrong with Mummy or Daddy. Are they in hospital, Margo? Are they dead?”

“Of course not. Don't even talk like that. Mother wants us to go to California, that's all. No one is dead. Period.”

“Someone is. I know someone is.” Frankie started crying again.

“Frankie, will you dry up, please? We have to get packed. We've only got ten minutes.”

Your mother's taking you to California
. What about their father — wasn't he coming? He loved California, loved the beach.

Frankie had always been the emotional one. Gusts of sadness and fear would break loose and she would fall into crying fits. More than once their mother had had to summon Dr. O'Neill to give her a shot that put her to sleep for the rest of the day and through the night.

Margo wetted a face cloth and began dabbing her sister's face.

“Are Mother and Daddy really okay?” Frankie whispered.

“Yes, of course.”

“And Mike too?”

“Of course.”

Frankie was trying hard to pull herself out of the crying jag, Margo could see. Once they really got going, the tears were unstoppable.

“We're going to California. It's exciting, Frankie.”

But it wasn't. It was awful, depressing, humiliating. Maybe their mother was planning to get divorced in California, the way movie stars did. No one ever got divorced in the province of Quebec. If their parents divorced there was no way she and Frankie would be allowed back at the convent, and their friends would certainly drop them.

And her best friend, Tasch, whose uncle was a bishop and great-uncle an archbishop, had just invited her to spend the weekend on Edgehill Road. It was likely that Tasch's brother Johnny would be home from boarding school as well, though Margo had been careful not to inquire. Tasch said terrible things about any girl who showed interest in her brother.

The weekend before, she and Tasch and Mary Cohen had stopped at Murray's Drugstore on the way home, to try on lipsticks. According to Tasch every girl had one shade of lipstick that was her most flattering colour, but to find it you had to experiment. Margo had not yet found her shade. And applying lipstick was not easy: lipstick smeared on the teeth was disgusting, Tasch said, even worse than your slip showing, and nearly as horrible as farting in a plié
.

When the salesgirl finally refused to let them try any more lipstick until they bought some, Tasch said haughtily, “
Nous n'achetons pas nos cosmétiques dans les pharmacies
.” Margo was impressed by her friend's boldness and rudeness, though the salesgirl probably didn't understand a word of French.

“Look, kids, buy something or get lost,” she snapped.

They headed for the magazine rack. Tasch and Mary Cohen grabbed movie magazines, then slid into a booth and ordered tea with extra honey and toasted cinnamon buns, which they spread with butter and more honey and devoured while Tasch read aloud a story about Hollywood stars who sunbathed in the nude.

Margo had been facing the door, so she had seen Johnny Taschereau entering with some other Brébeuf boys. Each time she saw him she felt a thrill, though he had no single feature that could be called handsome. He'd had bad skin for a while and his cheeks were lightly scarred. But he laughed readily and his teeth were white and straight and friends always surrounded him.

Hearing her brother's laugh, Tasch turned and stuck out her tongue at him. Johnny waved at them. According to Tasch, her grandmother expected Johnny to become an archbishop and her father expected him to be a Rhodes scholar and lawyer, then prime minister of Canada.

Margo licked honey from the toasted bun. Johnny was saying something that coaxed a smile from the grumpy Scotch waitress and had all his Brébeuf pals laughing. He certainly wasn't handsome, but he seemed to enjoy being alive, every second. Maybe that was it.

And now her projected weekend
chez Taschereau
was not going to happen unless her mother let her stay behind for a few days, which was most unlikely.

The windows in the dorm had been locked and sealed ever since the furnace was lit back in October. Glass lacquered with white frost glowed in the daylight. There'd been a blizzard the day before; sleighs had been the only vehicles moving on Côte-des-Neiges Road. After study hall Margo and Tasch had tobogganed down the hill to the seminary, and after supper twenty nuns and girls had shovelled off the ice rink and gone skating, the tips of their noses red and stinging, breath and laughter exploding in white clouds from their mouths. After lights out she and Tasch and Mary Cohen and Mathilde Rousseau had played three brilliant rubbers of bridge by flashlight.

It was hard to imagine California sunlight and the house on Butterfly Beach. Her parents had never pulled her out of school before. Her father often went away on business, but family routine had followed the same cycle for years: Montreal and school in winter, Butterfly Beach in summer. Frankie had sensed something seriously wrong, and now Margo wondered if her sister was correct. Were they really leaving without their father?

~

After hauling their trunks downstairs, the porter, M. Desjardins, went to tend the furnace. The porter's little room was just inside the main door of the convent and there was a phone on the table. Margo checked up and down the gleaming hallway for Mother Superior and didn't see her.

“Frankie, tell me if you see the witch coming.”

Ducking into the little room, Margo quickly dialled her father's office.

“I'd put you through in a jiff,” the receptionist said, “but your dad's not here. Might be in Duluth, or New York. Want to leave a message?”

“Margo, she's coming!” Frankie whispered.

Margo heard Mother Superior's prayer beads click-clacking and hung up the phone. A cab was pulling up under the stone portico outside. The blue sky had clouded over. It looked as though more snow was on the way.

As the taxi driver was fitting their trunks into his car, the exhaust pipe fumed white smoke. The cold air smelled harsh and unsettled.

“Tell your mother she'll have to write well in advance if she hopes to have you back here,” Mother Superior said. “I make no promises. Tell her I'm surprised and disappointed by this very abrupt withdrawal.”

You old witch
, Margo thought,
what do you know about her, or us, or anything?

~

The taxi fishtailed up Côte-des-Neiges, tires churning and slipping while Margo gazed out her window and Frankie sat very close, practically clinging. The city was still buried under snow from yesterday's storm.

“Nothing is wrong,” Margo said.

“When people say nothing's wrong, something always is.” Frankie started to cry again, quietly.

“Here, use this.” Margo fished a handkerchief out of the pocket of her coat. She also had a pack of Sweet Caps cigarettes in there. She and Tasch had shared a few furtive puffs the night before, after skating, and remembering this in a smelly taxi that was taking her away from her friend caused a fresh pang of dislocation and anger. She gazed out at the snowed-in city. Everything important was rooted here.

She wondered if her mother planned to photograph their departure. Two years before, Frankie had crashed her bike on the steepest part of Murray Hill Avenue, then stood in the middle of the road wailing, skin peeled off her knees. Their mother raced out of the house, but before reaching Frankie she stopped, peered through the viewfinder of the little Leica she wore on a strap around her neck, and snapped a photo of poor Frankie with her bloody knees, wailing.

Iseult snapped them so often and they were all so used to it that Frankie probably hadn't even noticed, but Margo had.

She'd better not be taking any pictures tonight
, Margo told herself.

~

On Skye Avenue the front path and steps had been shovelled out and swept clean of snow. Frankie raced for the front door and rang the bell. Margo followed slowly.

Alicette opened the door.
“
Ah, bienvenues, mes filles
.”

The maid waited to pay the cab driver, who was bringing in their trunks. In the front hall Mike was pasting labels on a trunk and a couple of suitcases. The grandfather clock on the stair landing started to bong; it was quarter past four, very nearly dark outside.

“We're booked on the International Limited at five thirty,”
Mike told them. He always knew the names of the trains.

“I don't want to go,” said Margo. “Dad isn't even home. He's gone to New York.”

“Margo, is that you?” Her mother called from upstairs. “Come help me get organized.”

“Where's Daddy?” Frankie yelled.

Their mother appeared on the second floor, smiling down at them. “Daddy's away.”

“Isn't he coming?” Margo asked.

“Come up and lend a hand, Margo. There isn't much time.”

“Where is he?”

“In New York. I want you to sort your and Frankie's summer clothes.”

“Mother Superior said if we leave we might not be allowed back.”

“Don't be silly.”

“How long are we going for?”

“We'll talk about it on the train.”

“I have to know how long if you expect me to pack properly.”

“The winter. Maybe longer. Come upstairs; I don't have time to argue with you.”

“The whole winter? What about Daddy?”

Her mother didn't answer, had already turned away. Margo's legs felt stiff, numb. She didn't think she could climb the stairs. It was horrid leaving everything like this, hurtling away.

“Mother!”

Their mother reappeared at the top of the stairs. “Please, I need your help, Margo.”

“Why are we going so all of a sudden?” Frankie said fiercely. “Where is Daddy?”

“Why doesn't he meet us in Chicago?” Margo said.

“We'll be on the beach in a few days. You love California.” She disappeared again.

There was nothing to do but go upstairs, drag out the trunks, find the summer clothes, and start packing. Margo had always been organized — Frankie was the scatterbrain — but this time her packing was anything but thorough. She dragged some things from the cedar chests in the attic and tossed them into the trunks — bathing costumes and tennis shoes, polo jerseys, summer frocks and sun hats — but she knew she was leaving many useful things behind. They would be missing all sorts of gear once they got to Santa Barbara. If her mother really believed they could be uprooted so handily, so easily, she'd find out she was wrong.

Mike and the maids dragged the trunks downstairs. Two cab drivers waiting in the front hall began hauling luggage outside. Their cabs were hidden by the heaps of snow in the front garden but Margo could see smoke from the tailpipes curdling and gleaming in the moonlight. The sky had cleared again. It was starry and very cold, and Frankie was fussing over which coat to wear to the station.

“Your Red River, of course,” Margo said. “Hurry it up.” Red Rivers were navy blue wool coats with scarlet piping and scarlet sashes that tied around the waist.