The Second Son (11 page)

In the 1880s, Isadore Gervais went to the gold mines in Colorado and made a small fortune hauling supplies up to the miners. In fact, my grandmother and one of her brothers were born there. Isadore returned home with his young family and bought a farm southeast of town, along with a hotel and a general store in Alexandria. In those days the French were a minority in town, and there were no French schools or anything like that, so his kids grew up speaking as much English as French.

Isadore did all right up until the end of the First World War, when a bad case of false pride started catching up with him. Apparently his big thing was getting dressed up in his three-piece suit and walking downtown with his ivory-handled cane. “Putting on the dog,” my grandmother used to call it. According to her, he cared more about a stranger’s good opinion than he did for his own wife and children. The story must have had some truth in it. My father talked fondly of his grandmother but didn’t have much good to say about his grandfather. I guess the old man was a tightwad with his own family at the same time as he would sell goods at a loss just to show up his competitors. He had four sons and two daughters, and every one of them got fed up and left. They were spread all over Canada and the United States by the time I was a kid. Uncle Gustave was the only one who ever came back to stay. Apparently the old man expected them to work for half-nothing, and wouldn’t think of signing over any part of his business to them. My grandmother fought with him for years as she tried to make a go of the general store, with the help of my grandfather, Michel Landry, who came from Glen Nevis, just across the border from Quebec. They finally gave up and moved with my father and his three sisters to Montreal. Grandpa Landry got a job in the clothing department at Eaton’s and Grandma took in roomers to make ends meet.

Back in Alexandria, the Depression finally did old Isadore in. He lost the hotel for back taxes in 1932 and had to close the general store on Main Street in 1934. That was when his youngest son, Gustave, came back home and took over the farm. The old man and his wife lived there with Uncle Gustave and his family until they died, in the forties. It was on the Gervais family farm that the whole clan would descend every time they had an excuse for a celebration, like when one of the brothers or sisters was back for a visit.

The general store sat vacant, like a lot of properties during the thirties, until my father came back to town in 1939 and paid the taxes on it. He had worked his way up to assistant manager in the grocery business in Montreal and figured he could make a go of it in Alexandria, with the war and all. At twenty-four he was a shy young man, without girlfriends or much of a social life, according to my grandmother. She said he was spoiled by his three older sisters but I never heard him admit to that. And he sure wasn’t shy with the customers, as I remember it. When I got older and saw how my aunts liked to fuss over him, I wondered if maybe he had left Montreal to escape being bossed around by four women.

It must have been a hell of time, the forties, if you were lucky enough to survive the war. With so much action squeezed into so few years people must have felt a great rush of excitement. When you hear about the war today, you’re hit by the death and destruction, all those young people killed, and what they did to the Jews — yet I can’t remember any of that in my parents’ talk of the war. That must have been why I was so upset the first time a teacher told us what happened to all the Jewish people in Europe. I don’t even think she used the word “holocaust.” I just remember trying to understand how six million people could be murdered, especially when she said it was more than six times all the people in Montreal, which I had travelled through in my father’s car, wondering if it would ever end.

I came rushing home for lunch that day to confront my mother with this horrendous event, demanding to know why she had hidden it from me. I don’t recall her explanation at the time. I’m sure it was something logical about protecting children from the horror of war. It didn’t satisfy me. I mean, we had Jewish people right there in Alexandria. Did people want to kill them, too? I had heard my father talk about Jews often enough to know they had to be aware of this stuff. And if they had kept quiet about that, what else were they hiding from me?

The only unpleasant facts they had shared to that point were about my mother’s brother, Gerry, who was killed in Sicily. My mother had a picture of him in his uniform, on the piano. And I think my Aunt Sissy had a box somewhere with medals in it. They would often wonder out loud what would have become of him if he had lived. Then they would start talking about the big party they threw for him at the Armouries the night before he left. Maybe that’s what you do when you’re faced with such darkness. You turn on all the lights and throw a party, the more the merrier. At least that’s what it sounded like when they’d talk about it — the best days of their lives.

When I think about it, it seems like they spent most of the fifties lamenting the loss of the forties. They met at a dance, in forty-one, I think it was. My mother said she had gone there with Alec MacDonald. Aunt Gertie was anxious for her to pair up with one of the MacDonalds. Like Jean’s people, the McEwans, they were big shots along that concession, and Alec was considered a good catch. Aunt Gertie was right, because the younger brother, Donald, ended up the mayor of Alexandria. Alec wanted to farm, though, and I guess my mother had seen enough of farm life.

She always claimed it was the dancing that did her in. She said she was a little nervous at first, when a French Canadian with black hair and dark eyes asked her to dance. But his smart brown suit, with a belt in the back of the jacket that accentuated his broad shoulders, made her look twice. And his shiny brown brogues made her think he’d be a good dancer, and wouldn’t step on her feet like Alec MacDonald with his scruffy black boots. He turned out, she said, to be a great partner, who swept her around the floor like they’d been doing it all their lives. She said everybody seemed to be watching. I saw them dancing in later years, at my aunt Sissy’s wedding. I was old enough to know I was seeing something special, the way they moved as one with the rhythm of the music. My cousin Johnny was right. Dancing was their thing. I have often wondered if it was the one sure way they had to communicate, a chance for them to touch, and be close, without fear of rejection.

It sure seemed like it, the way they talked about those dances they used to go to during the war years, when there were parties almost every night of the week, either giving a soldier a send-off or welcoming one back. They travelled miles and miles on dusty roads, bouncing over washboard gravel with bald tires on pre-war cars, never hesitating to take off in search of a party, seeking that next gathering, that next celebration, anything to keep the excitement alive. They talked about coming home from a house party on some back-country road, with three young couples jammed into my father’s ’39 Pontiac on a hot July night, and sighing with relief when they hit that smooth new pavement in Lancaster. Then just south of town their favourite Glen Miller tune, “String of Pearls,” came on the air. My father pulled the car over and turned up the radio, and the three couples got out and danced on the fresh blacktop. Every time they told that story the look in my mother’s eyes would make me feel like I had been born thirty years too late.

When I heard all this stuff I thought they were talking about the good old days, like Grandma Landry did, ancient history to a tenyear-old. Now I know it was just yesterday they were missing, just yesterday they wanted back. Andrew and I used to pull the old pictures out of the cedar box and look for the people we knew in those glimpses of yesterday. I remember loving the smell of that box, as though its pleasant aroma was connected to the good times captured by the photographs. The trouble was, the good times seemed stuck in the past, like those fading photos — happy, hopeful faces, posed in front of swept-back fenders and flashy grills, against backdrops like Niagara Falls and Dionne Quintuplets billboards. It was easy to see why they wanted them back.

From the sound of it, my father came into his own in the forties, more than making up for the dark days of the Depression, when he graduated high school and spent the next two years looking for work, dependent on meagre handouts from his mother. When he finally got a job, it was delivering groceries with a bicycle, seventy-two hours a week for the princely sum of four dollars, plus tips. As though people had money for tips in the thirties. He’d worked his way up, though, and now he was back in town, back where he had grown up, back on Main Street. He had it all — new car, new clothes, and new friends. And the women loved him. No wonder Ed Landry gave his heart to Alexandria.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why they remembered the war years with such fondness. They were probably high half the time and working up to it the other half. Their good-time stories always seemed to flow on a stream of booze. “Do you remember the time,” my father would say, “that we ran over Alec Red Rory.” His last name I never learned, although I do know that one night he passed out drunk in the parking lot behind the Atlantic Hotel. Sometime in the early morning my father emerged from the hotel with his favourite drinking crowd and climbed into his car. He proceeded to back up, over an obstacle, first with the back wheel and then the front. “Jeez,” someone said, “what was that bump?” They backed up some more and found Alec Red Rory in the headlights, anaesthetized by alcohol and oblivious to the fact that someone had just run over his leg. Twice.

Just about the time they assured themselves his leg wasn’t broken, some bright light got an idea. They lifted the poor man into the back seat and drove to the nearest graveyard, where they propped him up against a tombstone. The whole town laughed for weeks at the plight of poor Alec, who couldn’t figure out how he came by such a sore leg, or how a good Catholic like himself had been planted in the Protestant graveyard. He’d gotten such a fright, waking up with the dead, that he was moved to take the pledge — an oath sworn before a priest to abstain from alcohol. People said he was dry for at least six weeks, a new record.

My father’s favourite stories always seemed to have a hotel in them. “We were sitting in the Atlantic,” he would begin, “on a Halloween night, when Bernie Leblanc started telling me about the buggy someone had hung from the hydro pole down on Main Street. ‘What about the horse?’ I asked Bernie. ‘What did they do with the horse?’ ”

“Damned if I know,” Bernie answered. “I guess old man MacMillan is still looking for it.”

“Jesus, Bernie, we should do something,” my father said. “Hide someone’s car, maybe.” It wouldn’t have been hard. In those days lots of people left their keys in the ignition.

“Naw, we did that last year,” Bernie answered as he thought some more. “Hey, I know. My aunt just bought this new parlour lamp, thinks it’s the cat’s meow. Let’s sneak in and steal it.”

“Yeah,” my father laughed, “we’ll stick it in my store window with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. Albert will go nuts when he walks by and sees it.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost midnight. You think they’ll be asleep?”

“Oh, sure,” Bernie said. “Albert has to be up at six.”

So the two men walked the block over to Albert Ouimet’s house and snuck in the back door. My father had the lamp in hand and they were almost out of the house when they knocked over a kitchen chair and woke up Bernie’s aunt. “Who’s there?” she called from the head of the stairs as she turned on the light. “What do you want?”

They quickened their pace out the back door and into the yard, where my father whispered, “Follow me. I know these yards like the back of my hand.” So Bernie followed him as he groped his way along the wooden fence. By the time Mrs. Ouimet came out the back door and switched on the porch light, my father had located the neighbour’s outhouse with his free hand. “Let’s jump the fence,” he said, “and cut through the Fergusons’ yard.”

With one hand on a post he vaulted over the fence and landed right in the outhouse hole. It seemed they weren’t the only ones playing Halloween pranks — someone had moved the Fergusons’ outhouse. My father was waist deep in the shit, struggling to hold the lamp over his head, even as he began to vomit. Luckily, Bernie Leblanc had jumped the fence in a different spot. As soon as he heard the sound of my father’s retching, he knew what had happened. Or, as he liked to joke later, he “could tell by the smell that something was up.”

My father cursed at his wild laughter, “Jesus Christ, Leblanc, this was your goddamn idea,” even as he accepted his hand to pull him out of the hole. They were pretty quick covering the three blocks to my parents’ house on Elm Street, where Bernie went to the door and asked my mother to hook up the garden hose to the tap in the kitchen.

“What are you guys up to?” she asked, looking over Bernie’s shoulder at my father standing in the driveway with a floor lamp in his hand, a disgusting mess from the waist down. Even before Bernie told her, she had guessed, having smelled him from twenty feet away. “You’re not coming in here. Hook the hose up outside.”

“But it’s November, woman,” my father called out. “That water will be freezing.”

“Only just,” my mother snapped, “and I don’t want those clothes in the house, either. Leave them in the shed.”

Then she got him some dry clothes and traded them for the lamp, which she returned to Bernie’s aunt the next day and started spreading the story that had the whole town laughing at Ed Landry’s antics. My father liked that, actually. I could tell when he used to talk about Bernie hosing him off with ice-cold water, laughing so hard he kept spraying him in the face. Ed Landry didn’t care who the joke was on, he just revelled in the good times.

There was no darkness in my parents’ stories. Even at the dance halls, where liquor wasn’t legal, the good times flowed freely from a case of beer in the trunk or a mickey of rye in the pocket. They were always laughing when they told of being stuck in the ditch during a snowstorm, or being chased out of a dance hall for stuffing cake and sandwiches down someone’s saxophone. I can still see them, talking about those days with longing in their eyes and love in their voices. I think now that they must have inspired me with a longing of my own — to have been there with them, when they were so much in love. And might have loved me, too, even as they loved each other.