The O'Briens (30 page)

“But that's not fair. I'm not engaged, Elise. He hasn't said a single word about getting married.”

“Look at you. You're the girl everyone wants to marry.”

“Not him,” she had murmured.

Would they be spending the afternoon in bed together or must he return to the office? The Taschereaus had been lawyers for generations, and Sir Louis-Philippe would have been angry and hurt if his only son had refused to join the firm. Johnny never complained, but she knew he found the work dull.

She wore her hat tipped low, a woman with something to conceal, a provocative mess of feelings, like a suitcase full of dirty clothes. Rancid and brutal and plaintive with desire. So this was what people called love. Literally it caused a weakness in the knees. Or maybe that was just two manhattans at lunch and her high-heeled dash up the service stairway.

She watched the elevator arrow move languidly around the dial. If she'd waited down in the lobby she felt certain she would have encountered her father. What would he have done? What would he say?

“He'll make a good husband if he doesn't get himself killed,” he'd said, when Johnny had turned up at Skye Avenue in uniform after a church parade.

If she lost Johnny to the war would she tighten up, curl up into herself, like a shrimp dropped into a glass of gin? Or would she need to keep on living this way — sexually, wantonly — with some other man? She did not know. Here was life, her real life. Scars were being applied; she could feel them going in.

The elevator arrived, settled, doors punched open. It was packed with bellboys, luggage, and grey-flannelled American businessmen. What she wanted, what she needed — she'd have to work it all out later; there wasn't time now.

“Room for one more?” She smiled at the elevator operator.

“Bien sûr, mademoiselle.”

~

A couple of hours later she awoke in the mussed bed and heard Johnny speaking into the phone. The room was dark except for a crack of light a couple of inches wide where the drapes did not come together perfectly. There was enough light to see him sitting in the chair at the little writing desk, holding the telephone to his ear. He was naked.

“Oui, oui, je comprends.”

She felt ragged, sore. Hotel-room dreams were so steep and so heavy, though she was already losing the sense of this one. She struggled to remember if there was anywhere else she was supposed to be.

“Tiens. À bientôt.”

Johnny replaced the phone receiver. He had a beautiful neck and shoulders.

“Who was it?” she asked, her voice sounding furry.

He looked around. His blunt face was very French. So was the dark brown hair he wore rather long.

“Well, I decided to call Rainville, our adjutant. I thought if anyone knew what was up, he would.”

Naked in bed at the Mount Royal Hotel, Peel Street, Montreal, province of Quebec, in the Dominion of Canada, coloured red on the globe, part of the British Empire and committed to joining England in war.

“Lucky I checked in. He's just received mobilization orders in a telegram delivered to his office. He's a publisher, you know. He's in a bit of a flurry. Very annoyed the orders were in English.
Mon dieu
, you are a lovely woman.”

“What does it mean?”

“Well, my platoon is to mount a guard at Victoria Pier tonight. I don't know what after that. It's going to be a hell of a job rounding men up. Not many have telephones. I need to go home first and get into uniform. Can you drive me?”

“
Reviens au lit
, Johnny.”

He smiled and came back and lay beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder and they were quiet for a while. Hotel rooms were so sombre and thick in the middle of the afternoon. She could smell the scented soap in the bathroom. His skin felt warm.

She sensed the excitement he was trying to conceal because it had nothing to do with her and he didn't want to hurt her feelings. He was impatient to get up, dress, head out into the next chapter of his life, but he also had very good manners.

A kind of remove had already occurred. Taking one of his well-shaped, masculine hands, she began kissing the fingertips.

“
Jolie
,” he said.

She could see everything. The war unrolling like a hotel-room carpet, heavy and dark, smelling of moth powder and stealing the light. She had wanted this war, as most of her friends had, more from boredom than anything else.

“If you'll drive me around the East End I can try to track down my men. Perhaps it will all blow over. But those are my orders.”

All the intimacy left the room when he spoke English. It was suddenly as though he had another woman somewhere, as if he suddenly had a wife. The pain of the situation stimulated her in a deep way. “Come into me, Johnny, just come into me.”

He was hard very quickly and touching her and she was open. Then he was inside her, rocking them both, her legs locked around his hips. The encounter had a bolting, panicked quality. They were digging something deep and nervous out of each other. It was like driving very fast because they had to, because even Johnny Taschereau was scared of something. The sense of dangerously high speed, at the very limit of control. She couldn't know for certain everything he was feeling, but underneath his excitement, the fear was there.

He came into her powerfully and she held onto his shoulders, then let herself go, riding the panic, shuddering, shaking tears out of her eyes, tasting her own breath.

She wasn't wearing her diaphragm; he must have noticed but hadn't said anything.

He stayed on her another minute, neither of them saying a word. She could feel his heart. Then he kissed her, got up, and went into the bathroom. A moment later she heard the shower running. A phase of their courtship was over: something new and even more dangerous had begun.

~

A hotel garage man brought around the cream convertible and she picked up Johnny on the corner of Mansfield and Sherbrooke, two blocks from the Mount Royal. She seemed to have an instinct for subterfuge, for concealment and deception. She disliked wearing the phony ring but she had been rather good, on the whole, at sneaking around. It was another aspect of the intimacy they shared.

They drove into Westmount. Heading up Murray Hill, they passed Skye Avenue and she glanced at the house. There was no one home except the cook and the maids; her parents were always busy, and even Frankie was doing volunteer work at the clinic and hoping for a war job. Mike was across the river seven days a week building his airfield. He had been seeing a lot of her old convent pal Mary Cohen, who was back in Montreal after several years in Europe — Margo had seen them together at the Normandie Roof and Mother Martin's. People said Buck Cohen had gone to Europe after New York gangsters tried to murder him; he'd died of a heart attack on the Côte d'Azur. Mary and her Irish mother now lived on Carthage Avenue. Mary was a secretary at a Jewish law firm in the Sun Life Building.

Mike had his OTC commission in the Royal Montreal Regiment, another militia outfit, and Margo knew boys in the RMR who were expecting to be shipped overseas any day. But the Ministry of Munitions and Supply had classified Mike's work as “vital to the Imperial war effort,” so he would not be summoned to active duty. She was a little surprised he had gone along with it, but building airfields was probably more important than drilling recruits in Westmount Park, and her brother had never shown much interest in soldiering.

No one was home at the Taschereaus' either, except the cook, who was asleep, and the elderly maid, Albertine. While Johnny went upstairs to change, she stiffly steered Margo into the drawing room and asked if she wanted tea.

“Non, merci.”

Margo knew Albertine was a distant relation of the family and came from Arthabaska County, where the Taschereaus still owned farms. She'd been Johnny's nurse until a Scottish woman replaced her. After twenty-five years in Westmount and as many summers in Maine, Albertine still would not speak English. She attended Mass at Saint-Léon-de-Westmount four or five times a week, sitting in one of the Taschereau family pews.

Margo crossed the room, feeling the kinswoman's dark, shiny little eyes watching her, and stood self-consciously before the window. She could see a bit of the playing field in Murray Park — no one ever called it King George Park. The tennis courts had been deserted lately. Was it the news from Europe that kept people from playing games? Maybe it was just summer closing down. She didn't want to let go of summer, not yet.

But layers of cloud were moving in over the park, where a couple of boys were tossing a football back and forth — another sign of autumn. The day was losing its abundant light. The sky was shades of grey now, with black thunderheads. It looked like rain. Maybe an electrical storm.

Johnny had never taken his part-time soldiering very seriously. He insisted that his CO, Colonel Rivard, though he hated
les boches
, would rather be fighting the English in Ontario. Most of the Maisies' energies were focused on hockey and softball games. The junior officers were OTC from Laval University, except for a few Loyola men like Johnny. The captains and majors were all trench veterans, average age forty-six.

Johnny was still upstairs. Margo couldn't hear him. If it weren't for Albertine watching her with beady eyes, she'd go upstairs herself. She'd love to see his bedroom.

At Kennebunk Beach most of the cottages would be shut for the season, boards nailed up over any windows facing the sea. There was always a big September storm, with wild green waves and buckets of warm rain. But Kennebunk was three hundred miles away, and people said if the war lasted there would be rationing of gasoline and tires. It was already getting difficult to exchange Canadian money for American. She wondered when she would see the ocean again.

She had always admired the Taschereaus' drawing room. The sleek furniture was more modern than anything she was used to. She liked the pale grey rug and the Japanese lamps. Mme Taschereau was from a Philadelphia family and collected art by Canadian painters. Landscapes of the northern wilderness,
pays sauvage
, were hung on the walls along with more abstract works by the same Montreal painters Margo's mother admired: Borduas, Alexander Bercovitch, Jack Humphrey.

Conscious of Albertine still watching, Margo went to the grand piano, where Aunt Elise's portrait of Johnny, taken before he left for his European year, stood in a silver frame. Johnny at twenty-one didn't look particularly happy, but not sad either. Elise had located a wariness in him that most people never noticed, since it was camouflaged so well by his bon vivant
style. She had chosen to photograph Johnny outside,
en plein air
, unusual for her. Johnny told her they'd walked all around downtown before Elise chose a spot in front of an old maple tree at the top of Peel Street, on the edge of Mount Royal Park.

“What did you talk about while you were walking around?”

“The light.”

“Did she talk about our family?”

“Not really.”

“People used to say Uncle Grattan was crazy.”

“Well, they don't anymore.”

In the photograph Johnny's hair was rough and windblown and he seemed to be looking at something far away.
The war
, Margo thought.
Was it the war he saw coming?

But the picture had been taken in
1935
or '
36
. No one had been thinking about a war in those days. He could have been looking at a squirrel, or a bus wheezing along Pine Avenue. Elise had taken him up there for the raised light. Margo had worked with enough photographers to know they would go anywhere for the right sort of light.

“Alors.”

She looked around. Albertine had disappeared and Johnny stood in the doorway in his new khaki battledress, haversack slung over his shoulder.

“On y va.”

She watched him scribble a note to his parents. He went out to the kitchen and she heard him saying goodbye to the cook and Albertine, who came out with him, held open the front door, and stood watching them walk out to the car. Johnny turned and waved, but the little woman in the black dress and starched maid's apron stayed perfectly still in the doorway, like a French-Canadian folk sculpture crudely carved in pine.

The first of his goodbyes. The thought struck her like a blow on the cheek, and it was all she could do to keep walking, heels click-clacking on the slate path. If he hadn't had such a steely, military grip on her arm she would have fallen down on the grass on hands and knees and wept and spat and howled.

~

It started to rain as they were driving over the mountain. Johnny had the address of every man in his platoon listed in a black notebook. Only four had telephone numbers, and the adjutant would be trying to reach them. Johnny was supposed to collect as many of the others as he could find and report to the Craig Street Armoury by eight p.m.

The rain came on sweeps of warm wind. The road over the mountain was already littered with branches and green leaves, and they passed a dozen cars pulled over on the shoulder. The windshield was foggy and the wipers weren't much good on the uphill. As she drove over the crest, Margo could feel the car being pushed and swayed by the wind. Rain drummed the canvas roof. Johnny reached across to wipe the glass with his handkerchief but it was still difficult to see out the windshield. Shifting down to second, she switched on her headlights. It was like driving through a violent cloud, but on the downhill grade at least the wipers were going a little faster.

Johnny lit a cigarette and handed it to her. They had fallen into another of their silences.

Back in August, when everyone else had returned to Montreal, Margo and Frankie had stayed on alone at the O'Brien summer cottage, and Johnny at the Taschereaus'. They'd made plans to leave together, but at the last minute Frankie received an invitation to stay with friends at Ogunquit, so Margo and Johnny were able to set off for home alone. Their families were not expecting them. They stopped at a tourist court at Franconia, bought groceries and beer at a country store, built a fire in their cabin, and spent the night together. The next morning, driving down into the St. Lawrence Valley past lush meadows of sweet-smelling hay, Margo had felt clean, powerful, safe.