The O'Briens (25 page)

“It's going to be hot in California,” Frankie complained.

“Well, tonight it's cold as a witch's elbow, and it'll be worse in Chicago. Anyway, a warm coat makes a cozy extra blanket on the train.”

“C'mon, Frankie, skip the fuss,” Mike said.

Frankie began pulling on her Red River and the toque and mittens that matched the scarlet piping. Margo slipped into her Harris tweed overcoat with the velvet collar, a Christmas present from her parents. She liked the silhouette: very sleek and grownup. And her chic velvet cloche hat, picked out at Holt Renfrew with Tasch's help.

They all got into one taxi and their luggage went in the other. Margo and Frankie sat on either side of their mother. As the cab turned onto Westmount Avenue, Mike and the driver were already discussing who had the best team that year, the Maroons or the Canadiens. Margo looked out at hillside streets half buried under snow. Westmount Avenue wasn't much more than a single lane through the drifts. They passed the enormous stone mansion where her pal Mary Cohen lived with her parents. Cars were trapped in driveways by hard furls of frozen slush flipped up by the street plows. Under the moonlight everything had a blue cast. Her mother gave her hand a squeeze.

Margo had been going to California all her life. Changing trains at Chicago always meant changing stations without much time to spare. The frantic taxi rides across town from Dearborn Street to Madison and the Los Angeles Limited had always made her stomach ache with anxiety. When she was little, she would cling to her father's hand, terrified of being left behind, stranded, forgotten. Chicago was where she had first felt the size and recklessness of the world.

“Morenz is the best there is,” Mike was telling the cabby. “He'll stop on a dime and leave you nine cents change.”

Margo suddenly remembered her set of monogrammed silver hairbrushes, a Christmas present from her parents, which she'd left on her dressing table at school. Who might take them? Who would save them? Who would keep them for her?

“Morenz is a scrambler,” the cabby was saying, “but can he take a beating?”

“It was sixty-eight degrees in Los Angeles yesterday,” her mother announced, giving Margo's hand another quick conspiratorial squeeze.

Her mother seemed to want her to think that what they were doing was fun. Jolly. An adventure. Her mother could squeeze as much as she liked, say whatever she wanted, but Margo was not going to be persuaded. It was obvious they were running away from him, and therefore from themselves, and nothing good would come of it.

Wild January Thaw

S
now had melted.
Fields north of the border were black and white under a sky heavy as lead. His head hummed as the train ran up to the St. Lawrence. He worked at the ache with more coffee. His spirits, in general, were all right. The train had pulled out of Grand Central a few minutes after noon and was due at Bonaventure at ten p.m. He'd made himself take lunch in the dining car, then snoozed for a couple of hours.

After a jaunt there was a calm that came along with the lows, and sometimes he could see things more clearly then, or so he imagined. On the other hand, who alone could gauge with accuracy their own powers of seeing or understanding? Who'd be there to point out all they had missed?

He'd started selling off stocks early in
1928
, thereby missing what, in the eighteen months before the crash, had looked like some pretty spry returns. But it had been time to get out. Gusts and blows ruled the stock market, which had much in common with the ocean; plenty of men he knew had drowned there. It was certainly never to be trusted. The market had nosedived but Iseult and the children would never know hardship. No tumplines on their foreheads. No bent backs or shoeless autumns. No Ottawa River rising in April thick with snowmelt, raft pilots drowned, fields flooded, animals carried away.

He wore a striped shirt bought at Brooks Brothers that morning, and a new silk tie. His suit had been sponged and pressed by the Pullman porter before they'd passed Poughkeepsie, and he looked all right, considering. His suits would never fit so well as Grattan's, but then he didn't have Grattan's shoulders or long legs.

Back in the first years of Prohibition, buying liquor from cab drivers and bootblacks in New York, he had never been sure what he was getting: raw alcohol with caramel colouring, bathtub gin. It hadn't mattered much to him — he wasn't in it for the taste — but now the stuff was pure and golden. In this twelfth year of Prohibition, excellent Canadian whisky could be had more cheaply in Manhattan than in Montreal, which said something about the efficiency and acumen of a businessman like Buck Cohen.

He had picked out a brooch at Tiffany's. Iseult didn't like most jewellery, or anything that offered itself easily. This piece was twenty-two-karat gold, filigreed and exquisite, set with one fiery pearl. They had shown him more magnificent things and he'd wanted to buy them, but in the end he had chosen the piece he knew she would like best. Not that she would ever choose jewellery herself. And he had bought slender wristwatches for the two girls and a pair of excellent German binoculars for Mike.

The wastrel, bearing gifts.

Presents were a form of apology, even if they didn't know where he'd been or what he'd been doing. Apology or not, the things he was bringing home would give them pleasure, he believed.

~

But something was wrong. As the taxi climbed around the steep corner from Murray Hill onto Skye Avenue, he saw that the house was almost completely dark. By the time the taxi stopped, a parlour maid — she must have seen the headlamps — was switching on lights in the downstairs hall.

As he came up the path in short, rapid steps, valise in one hand, stick in the other, the maid opened the front door and stood waiting. Alicette, from Lac-Mégantic.

“Where is everyone?
Où sont madame et les enfants?
” Joe called.

The Christmas snow had been washed away by wild rains, but everything was freezing up; the path was a curdle of ice laced with salt and ashes.

Alicette opened her mouth but nothing came out. She had very small, very brown country teeth. Iseult had met the girl at the Sainte-Cunégonde clinic when she was just in from the country, living with a sister, brother-in-law, and seven nieces and nephews in a tenement on Atwater Avenue that had once been a stable. She'd owned one dress, one pair of shoes, much mended, and no winter clothes to speak of. Now she wore a maid's uniform with starched white cap and apron.

“
Pourquoi la maison est dans les ténèbres
?” he demanded. A house in darkness was like a goddamn funeral parlour. He wanted lights blazing when he came home. He loved coming up Murray Hill in a taxi and seeing the place aglow. “
Où est madame
?”

“
À Californie
,” the girl murmured. “
Ils ont quittés pour la Californie. Voulez-vous votre souper, monsieur?
”

He stared at her, unable to absorb what she was saying. What had happened to them? Were they dead?

“Cook say, what he want for dinner,
monsieur
?” She seemed very frightened.

California?

He dropped his walking stick in the brass canister, shrugged off his overcoat, and gave it to her, along with his hat and scarf. The closest telephone was in the serving pantry, and he headed for it. He was already grasping for a plan. California?

He could hear the cook, Belfast Mary, at the kitchen stove, rattling pans. Strips of light leaked into the pantry under a pair of serving doors. The little maid had followed him into the pantry, and as he lifted the receiver off the hook he shooed her into the kitchen.

They would be somewhere in the middle of the continent, probably on a Los Angeles Limited out of Madison Street Station. He would get the timetable and wire ahead to Kansas City, Cheyenne, or Salt Lake and the wire would be delivered on board. In his head he was already composing it.

DISEMBARK IMMEDIATELY STOP WIRE PARTICULARS STOP AWAIT MY ARRIVAL

“Mr. O'Brien, sir!” Belfast Mary called from the kitchen. “I'm doing scrambled eggs on toast. Will it do for you, or is it something else you'll be wanting?”

Twice during his days in the bush, branches snapping off felled trees had clocked him on their way down. Such accidents were known as “widow-makers
.
” For a second or two after the hot blow on his skull, he'd felt a riotous starburst of fury before it laid him out cold in the snow. That was what he felt now: stricken, leaden, uncontrolled. He must gather his thoughts before doing anything. Without making the call, he replaced the telephone receiver.

“That will do, Mary,” he called. “Send a tray upstairs to the study.”

The house was warm and smelled of lemon oil. Whenever the family was away, the maids tended to go mad with polishing, and when the family came back, the rooms gleamed, like rooms in the pictures Hollywood made about rich people. Iseult disliked so much shine on everything, such a glimmer of dark wood, such a burnished gleam of table silver. The fanatic neatness the French-Canadian maids imposed was inhumane, she said. “We need to feel at home, not like actors in a play. I don't want the children terrified of disturbing things. A house is to be lived in.”

He too had felt the charm of their scattered toys when the children were young, but he had always secretly preferred the house the way it appeared after they had been away — usually in California — and returned. When it was briefly perfect, like English mansions or Park Avenue apartments in Hollywood pictures.

He liked things orderly, always had, though the chambermaids who'd had to clean his room at the Plaza might not buy that. Empty bottles in the wastebasket, towels on the floor, bed sheets pulled off, ashtrays overflowing. After showering long and hard he had shaved, dressed, and gotten out fast that morning, leaving the mess along with a two-dollar tip.

Tonight the shining house felt hollow and empty, like the inside of a drum. Static from woollen carpets scratched at his shoes. There was another telephone in his study. Quickly he went upstairs and found her note.

I O'B

TEN SKYE AVENUE

WESTMOUNT, P.Q.

Tues., January 18th

We depart for Calif. as I warned we would. When you read this we'll be most of the way there. It seems the best place to go. I don't want you following us. You're no good to us. Please don't come after us. I don't seem able to help you and can't watch it anymore. Don't come after us now. Face it, whatever that requires. Don't pretend. So you always told me. You left us, remember that.
You
left
us
.—I.

In boyhood, cold rage had given him the stomach to stand up to his stepfather and protect them all. Did she believe he'd let her get away with stealing his children?

The flow of anger was so wild and sick it made him stagger. He had to grip the edge of the desk to keep his feet under him. He sat down heavily in his chair.

Even as the fury had him, he was aware of how wrong he had been about nearly everything. But that awareness was still a weak assembly of bare thoughts, not nearly so powerful as raging feelings. Curling a fist, he smacked the desk so hard it hurt, then picked up the electric lamp and pitched it across the room, just as the little maid, carrying a tray, reached the top of the stairs at the opposite end of the hallway. The lamp broke on the floor and the study flew into darkness, but there was light in the hallway. He could see Alicette standing there frozen, holding his supper tray, another sort of helplessness scrawled across her face.

Something in the light carried him back to the old priest's house. Maybe it was the chiaroscuro effect in the hallway. Or the scent of buttered toast and tea.

Iseult had always preferred white walls, inconspicuous jewellery, rooms plain and barely furnished. He admired the simplicity, the bare energy, of her darkroom, but his tastes were baroque, if that was the word. His beloved rugs were intricate antique Persians, and the oil paintings he'd picked up in Brussels, London, and Paris were in heavy gilded frames. He enjoyed the sombre shine of such possessions, their age, their intricacy. Such qualities spoke of riches to him.

He was dark. Iseult was light, and on the lightest breeze she had left him.

The timid girl advanced down the hallway. She entered the room carefully and with a rattle of china set the supper tray on his desk. Yellow eggs on toast, a sprig of fresh parsley, a brown teapot.

“Y a-t-il quelque chose d'autre, monsieur?”

“No.”

“Goodnight,
monsieur
.”

“
Attends
, Alicette.”

She blinked at him. Did he frighten everyone? Were his children afraid of him? He didn't like to think so, but maybe they were.

“Did Madame say anything? Before she left?
Tu comprends? Madame n'a dit rien à toi avant son départ?
”

The maid shook her head. She looked about ready to cry.

“That is all,” he said. “Good night.”

He ate quickly, shovelling in the food, then telephoned his brother. “Do you know anything about it, Grattan?”

“Iseult said naught to me. Not a word. Hang on.”

He could hear Grattan speaking to someone else, Elise no doubt. Then he came back on the line. “Elise doesn't know anything. We didn't know you were away either, Joe. Was it New York?”

“New York, yes.” He'd often wondered if Iseult had told Elise about his sprees. How many had there been in fifteen years — maybe half a dozen? He and Grattan had never discussed New York themselves.

“Grattan, are you there?”

“Right here, brother.”

“Can I get a mail plane from here to New York, do you suppose?”

“I believe there's a Ford Tri-Motor that leaves Saint-Hubert at the crack of dawn and stops in Albany, then New York.”

“From New York I can get a plane to California, can't I?”

“National has a run out to Chicago and the coast.”

“That's what I'll do, then.” Closing his eyes, he saw himself floating in the night sky between Montreal and Glendale Airport in L.A. “Listen, Grattan, you know all the pilots out there at Saint-Hubert, don't you?”

“Some of them. The veterans. My era, not the young birds.”

“Can you call up someone tonight and get me a seat on that mail plane in the morning?”

“I could try, I suppose.”

“What time does it leave? Can you drive me across the river?”

“Let me find out and I'll call you back, Joe.”

“Get me on that mail ride. I want to be standing on the platform when they arrive in L.A. Call me back as soon as you can. I'll pay whatever it takes. My love to Elise. Don't worry, everything will come out all right.”

Grattan started to say something but Joe hung up the phone. He was going to get them back, there was no question. Positive steps had to be taken. A man in command of his own affairs couldn't let things just take their course. Boldness was required.

~

He couldn't feel the house around him. Usually he could, but not tonight. After swallowing two cups of tea, he removed his suit coat, loosened his collar, and lay down on the horsehair sofa, waiting for the telephone to ring.

Without Iseult and the children it really was no house at all. A stack of bricks and timbers, enclosing nothing. If he couldn't get them back he would burn it down. Push the rubble up into a pile and burn it down again and again, until there was nothing left but a cupful of fine grey ash, and he'd stir that into a glass of water and swallow it.

He got up, went downstairs. The servants had retired and the rooms were dark, moonlight slanting in. The front door was locked and bolted. Peering out through leaded windows in the downstairs drawing room, he saw the air humming blue with frost and moonlight. The window glass was cold to the touch. Arctic air had dropped over Montreal in the past couple of hours, the normal pattern after a January thaw, the North reasserting itself. There were wolves in the outer suburbs when the rivers froze.

He could feel the furnace chugging. The furnace man would be coming at dawn to stoke it, but he decided to go down himself and check the fire. Flicking on the electric light, he went down varnished stairs into the playroom. The children were too old to spend any time there now. Maybe they were embarrassed by the boxes of their old toys and the faded animal pictures on the walls.