The O'Briens (40 page)

Daylight even in the conservatory was dead yellow and brown, not summer light at all. She went back through the living room, avoiding all contact, across the front hall, and up the stairs. She had not seen her father since they'd come back from the cemetery. He had scampered straight upstairs.

She knocked gently on the door of the study.

“Go away.” His rumble sounded like a transmission in low gear.

She waited a whole minute before she knocked again.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap. Shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits
. Blessed Frankie of the Knock.

She heard the squeal of casters from his desk chair, and the door unlocking. He sat down again at his desk as she walked in. He wore a silk smoking jacket her mother had given him and was holding a Mass card. A photograph of Mike on the balcony of the New Zealand army hospital in Egypt, looking tanned and healthy —
Merry Xmas to you all —
was in a silver frame, right next to a bottle of Seagram's VO. She had never actually seen her father take a drink, not in the house, not anywhere.

He slit open a fresh pack of cigarettes, took one out, and stuck it between his lips, lighting it with his desk lighter. “Want a snort?” he said.

Frankie shook her head. She sat down on the horsehair sofa. French doors led out to the little balcony where in summer the swallows nested under the eaves. “I'll take a cigarette though.”

He raised one eyebrow, then tossed the pack to her so abruptly she nearly missed it.

When she was small she used to go on drives around the city with her father, he never saying a word if he could help it. She'd play with her dolls in the back seat while he drove through districts that no one else she knew had ever visited, or even heard of. Sainte-Marie Ward, Ahuntsic, Goose Village. Nether regions, poor and ramshackle. Horses pulling junk wagons. People sitting on balconies drinking beer from brown quart bottles. Kids everywhere. Long, strange streets unreeling.

He hadn't been driving to get anywhere or see anyone. Maybe in the beginning he might have told himself he was scouting for property, finding his feet in the city, getting to know the island of Montreal, but the drives she remembered were really a kind of floating loose, a detachment. She'd never expected a destination or a clear purpose. He was not on any errand. He almost always kept going past where the city stopped, where the grid of broken streets and tenements petered out. He drove until there was nothing flanking whichever boulevard they were on but ragged fields, ancient farmhouses, and cold glimpses of the river. He kept on going. When he'd gone far enough, he'd slow down, swing the car around, and start to find his way back. When she was little, Frankie had wondered how he did it, how he found his way home without dropping breadcrumbs in the forest like Hansel and Gretel.

“When are you going to get married?” He spoke suddenly, peering at her through a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

“I'm not getting married, Daddy.”

“You will.”

“Is that what you're worrying about?”

He didn't say anything. He was gazing at Mike's picture.

“What will you do, Daddy, when I do get married? Will you get plastered at my wedding? Will you go on a spree?” She had never talked to him this way before, but any house, any family would be changed by a corpse's being laid out in its living room. It excited her to suddenly feel capable of saying something.

“I'm not getting married anyway. Why should I want to do that? But I am moving out, Daddy. I'm going to get a place of my own downtown.” She had never given much thought to moving out, but the moment she said it she believed that she would. “I've a good job. Plenty of girls live downtown. I could get a little flat. Margo and I might share one together.”

Smoke dribbled from the cigarette between his fingers. He was studying the photograph of her brother. “I don't believe I can face it,” he said. “I don't believe so. I am going to wrap it up and go away.”

She rose from the sofa, stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray on his desk, and took hold of the whisky bottle. “You don't need this, do you.”

“It's supposed to be pretty good stuff.”

“You ought to come downstairs, Daddy. Mother needs all the help she can get.”

He was looking at his hands; he wasn't listening.

“Next summer you'll go cruising,” Frankie said. “Get on the boat and sail. Daddy, that will seem as real as this. You just have to get there.”

“Why did they have to take my boy?” he demanded.

The only answer she knew was silence.

“Jesus Christ, do you know what I was hearing today? The fiddle Mick Heaney used to play — our stepfather, the son of a bitch that married our mother. ‘Road to Boston,' ‘Cheticamp,' ‘Angel Death No Mercy'
—
by God, they'd hire that bastard for all the weddings and wakes; he knew all the jigs, all the reels. He'd never stop once he started; he'd saw away all night. I used to think he was the devil. We should have had him down at the church today.”

She lifted the bottle from his desk. It was unopened and had an excise seal, so it wasn't from their black market supply. One of Margo's. “Daddy, I don't think this is going to help.”

“What would you know about it?” he said sharply.

“Not much.” Bending over, she kissed the top of his head. When he could be strong and when he couldn't was something no one had ever been able to predict. His love had always been tenacious and without limits. It had sometimes felt like being hated. Still, they were a family.

“Did your mother send you up here?”

“No.”

“Don't tell her, then.”

“I won't. Won't you come downstairs, Daddy?”

“And join the party?” he said. “Don't know if I've got the stomach for it. But if I can keep straight, maybe I'll figure it out. Maybe I'll come down and show you all how it's done.”

Like most people he was a mystery walking through his own land, and when she thought she understood him, it was only in the way she understood certain tones, notes, and chords when a prodigy such as Oscar Peterson happened to be playing at Ruby Foo's, the roadhouse out on Decarie Boulevard that she loved because it was poised on the edge of the city and the edge of nothing, almost nowhere. Late at night, or very early in the morning, horns and bass dropping into the background while the young Negro's piano — sometimes sad but never gloomy — whispered secrets, fed her scraps of knowledge about the completeness, roundness, and implacability of the world.

“I'm going back downstairs,” she said. “Will you be coming down?”

“Maybe in a little while.”

She left his door open and, carrying the bottle, went down the hall and into Margo's room. She fetched the vermouth and gin from her sister's closet and took all three downstairs. The tea party had perked up, shaken its tail. Important men with important wartime jobs who had not been able to show up for a midday funeral were putting in appearances now, keeping Jerry the barman busy and keeping one eye cocked for Frankie's father, who was no longer important but might still, for all they knew, be dangerous. Some of the middle-aged were in uniform but they all looked like businessmen. It was starting to feel like a hundred cocktail parties she had been to since the war began.

Iseult was busy organizing sandwiches and coffee for the army drivers and chauffeurs who were waiting out in the cold and wet. Frankie knew her mother had seen her slinking downstairs with the bottles in her arms, but she hadn't said anything. If her father was determined to flee to New York City, her mother wouldn't try to stop him. Maybe she'd go to fetch him afterwards, maybe she wouldn't. Maybe this time he'd have to bring himself home or not come back at all.

Jerry gave Frankie a nod as she set down the bottles on the bar. He was mixing up a crystal shaker of martinis.

“Reinforcements,” she said. “Looks like you might need them.”

He smiled. The crackling, slushing sound of ice in the shaker reminded Frankie of the world outside the house. Suddenly she wanted to go there, and someone to take her. This party was no good, not what her soul needed, and if she retreated upstairs to her maidenly boudoir or walked down Murray Hill to sit brooding and decorously weeping on a bench in the lilac park, she'd only feel nastier and more wicked.

“Jerry, I'm going to the Green Lantern to meet a few friends.”

Jerry raised his eyebrows. He was busy filling glasses. She watched him start handing out the martinis.

“Do you think that's terrible?” she said.

“I'm not the one that just buried my brother, Frankie. If you want to duck out, who's to say you can't?”

“Can you do me a favour?”

“Probably.”

“I don't want to disturb Mother but I don't want her getting worried when she sees I'm gone. Will you tell her I've gone out to meet some pals? Tell her I won't be late but not to wait up for me either.”

“Sure thing, Frankie.”

“You don't have to say the Green Lantern. You can just say you don't know where.”

“Comme vous voulez.”

In the pantry she picked up the wall phone. Maids galloped by with trays of cocktail sandwiches and clean glasses while she dialled for a cab. She gave the dispatcher the address, then changed her mind. “Tell your driver not to come to the house,” she said. “He should meet me at the corner: Skye Avenue and Murray Hill.”

Feeling a pang of guilt over abandoning her mother and Margo, she went back to the party and worked the crowd for a few minutes. Father Tom was on his second or third martini. People were stuffing themselves on sandwiches and
bouchées
and getting plastered, all in honour of Mike. Keeping an eye on her wristwatch, she was working her way towards the stairs when Iseult came out of the kitchen looking crazily distinguished in her old black dress, so removed from the edges of her own feelings, so scared.

Frankie stood waiting on the stairs while her mother made her way towards her through the jolly, vibrant crowd, ignoring any mourners who tried to speak to her. “I have to see your father,” she told Frankie.

So Frankie grabbed her hand and they went upstairs together, treading on the Persian runner — purple, blue, scarlet, and gold — that Joe had bought years before from an Armenian in — Atlanta? Tampa? Havana? Somewhere down south.

The door of the study was shut. “Joe,” her mother said. Iseult wasn't pleading, wasn't even summoning him. She said his name as if it was the name of a place, an island, a country where they'd all lived once.

Frankie heard the squeal of casters and him getting to his feet. She waited for him to open the door, but he didn't. She jiggled the knob. The door was locked. Still holding her mother by the hand, she rapped on the wood panels.

“Go away,” he murmured.

“Daddy, it's Mother. Mother's here. You have to let her in, Daddy.” Frankie didn't dare look at Iseult. There were no sounds from the other side of the door. They all just stood there.

Everything's coming apart
, Frankie thought.
Nothing is left, nothing that will hold
.

“Joe.” Her mother's voice was a weak scrape of sound. Hardly any air made it out of her throat.

No response from him.

She would take her mother with her in the cab and run away somewhere, just the two of them. Or Margo too, if she wanted to come, and Maddie. Maybe to a hotel. It was just about impossible to get a decent hotel room on short notice in wartime, but she had pull at the Mount Royal, thanks to her job; she could probably get them the Vice-regal Suite. Or maybe they'd go down to Maine.

The bolt slid back, the door opened, and her father stood there in his silk smoking jacket, a cigarette curdling between his fingers. She could see one of the volumes of her mother's photographs open on the desk. Ignoring Frankie, he reached out and took Iseult by the hand. As he drew her into the room she almost tripped over the doorsill, but he caught and held her. She was crying.

Frankie turned and walked away. She knew she was deserting her parents, or maybe she was just saving herself. When she was halfway down the hall, she heard her father's door shut, and she glanced back. They were inside together. She hoped they'd stay there for the duration.

She hurried to her room, kicking off her shoes and quickly exchanging the black dress for her favourite red one. Sitting down at her dressing table, she lit a cigarette, gave her hair a good, fierce brushing, and put on fresh lipstick. Then she grabbed her pocketbook and ran down the back stairs.

Cars were parked up and down the street. The black rain had let up. All the chauffeurs and army drivers had gathered around one big Packard, where they were eating the sandwiches and drinking the coffee Iseult had sent out. Frankie greeted a couple of boys she recognized from the crap game that always seemed to be running on one floor or another at the Mount Royal Hotel. She was at the corner when the old Dodge taxi made the turn from Westmount Avenue and came chugging and clanking up the hill. She recognized the driver from the stand of cabs outside the Mount Royal. Part of her job was putting important people into taxis.

“Sorry about your brother, Frankie,” the cabby said, as she settled into the front seat. “Nice guy, I heard. Too bad.”

She could have been in a bomber lifting off: that was how it felt leaving behind the house on Skye Avenue with all the people and the feelings it contained. She was light-headed from having gotten away so quickly.

“Where for?” the cabby asked.

“The Green Lantern.” It would be flashy and noisy, jammed with zoots and black marketeers and sailors and airmen.

The cabby made a face. “They water their booze.”

“Everywhere does,” she snapped. “It's wartime.”

That closed the conversation, which was just fine with her. She was glad to be in the old car, to be moving. She had that giddy feeling she got in cars sometimes: that nothing could touch her. Would her parents survive? It was up to them, she told herself, as the cab swung around in the street and started down the hill. The only person she could handle was herself.