I'le Dor, page 12
“I look forward to seeing you,” Michelle said. She could scarcely wait now that she knew it was about to happen, but she was afraid to say so. She couldn’t bear the thought that Dawn might change her mind.
24.
LIBBY FOLLOWED THE path past the playground to a small wooden bridge. She expected to see the houses next to the bush loom into view, the first, the one at the end of rue Champlain that the Muir family had moved into just before Sheila was born. Before that they had lived in a semi while the house that awaited them on rue Champlain was being built by a contractor for the mine. As she drew closer, Libby saw new wrought iron numbers on the front porch and bright blue shutters against the familiar white asbestos shingles. In spite of the numbers and new coat of paint, the house still looked much the same. She could imagine the oak dining room table and could almost hear her father saying grace — Benedictus, Benedicat — and her mother asking nervously, “Is everybody happy?”
Libby imagined that she would find the oak table just as it had always been and the same blue cupboards in the kitchen. The photograph of a small boy in a white sailor suit with his black nanny would be hanging on her bedroom wall. A vision of running eagerly to the shelf near the fireplace to find the book with gold letters on the spine, Jock and the Bushveld, to give to her father when he returned from overseas. But when her father came back from the mine that day, it was late.
“Okay, Captain,” Black Steve said under her bedroom window. “Good you come back.”
Her father fumbled with the doorknob.
“See you at the sump,” Black Steve called as he started to sing into the night. “Onward Captain soldier, marching off to war.”
Libby turned away. Maybe it was not the gold that had made him drink. Maybe it was the war. Even though he never saw battle and had ultimately been overseas for only a few months, it was after he came back that he had become preoccupied in odd ways. It was also when the drinking began to become a problem. He must have seen things she could scarcely imagine, injuries and blackouts, younger men who did not return from the front. Although her mother had once told her that even in university he was a quiet man who drank a little more than was good for him. She had not known him until later, so she must have heard that from someone.
It was hard to imagine the life her parents would have from the wedding photograph of the handsome couple on the bureau in her mother’s room. Her mother had worn a wide brimmed white hat and long dress, her head slanted in a mixture of shyness and saucy awareness. In her right arm, she held a large bouquet of daisies. Her other hand held her new husband’s arm. His face was proud and hopeful, his eyes nonetheless cast down toward the ground. In his left hand, he held a hat and a pair of gloves and his dark shoes were highly polished. Since the photograph was in black and white, Libby had to guess at the colours of everything, including the ribbons on the flowers and the tie her father was wearing.
Whenever she saw this photograph, Libby stopped to contemplate it. It was the kind of portrayal that elicited hope that the young couple would find what they wished for, that their lives would be happy. From this photograph, no one would ever guess the treacherous nature of the waters they would encounter.
Libby walked across the street to a narrow laneway and what was once a shortcut to the town’s small Anglican church. It wasn’t long before she found St. Andrew’s, still standing in front of a clump of pine trees and an outcrop of rocks. As a child, she’d squirmed through both Sunday school and regular services. But Charlotte, her mother, had insisted on it. It was the church where she and Barton had married. Guy had not been at the wedding. She hadn’t invited him. Not long before that day, she’d seen him on the street.
“Bonjour,” he’d said and kept on walking. He never said more than that in those days, as if it were only yesterday that she’d broken off with him when it was almost two years by then. She wondered if she should have let him know herself that she was getting married. And if he would have offered good wishes had she done so.
Over dinner the other evening, Lucien told her that Guy had gone to the cabin and stayed there until she left town after the wedding. As she thought about her ceremony, she couldn’t recall any French people there. As if the Paquins, the Dions and all the French families she had known as a child ceased to exist when she married Barton. She reminded herself that it had been a small wedding, but surely she could have invited the Dions and the Paquins. And Michelle Dufresne. Why not Michelle? Surely by then her father wouldn’t have objected. Lucien had also told her that Guy had eventually married, but it didn’t last long.
On the main street, Libby saw a dépanneur where she could buy a few apples, a banana, a container of yoghurt and probably some crackers. Back in the hotel room, she would sit at the window with her purple spiral-bound sketchbook. When she did, she wrote, The Name of the Town is Ile d’Or on the cover. Perhaps it would be the title for an exhibition. They Called Us the English Polacks. She had heard Lucien use that term about kids playing on the street, her sister, her brother and Jeannie Petranovich, when she was in the warm kitchen of the Dion house with Guy. Did Lucien remember? She would remind Sheila some day. It was more likely something her sister would use as a title for one of her short stories. She reached for Vox, the magazine her son had given her just before she left. This time as she flipped the pages she found a review of her latest exhibition with a colour photograph of one of the acrylics. Although the reviewer liked it, she realized it no longer made a difference to her, knowing as she now did that these paintings had been a diversion. The theme of guns and violence that had led her to paint a man stalking a woman along the Seine had been assumed for just such an urbane reviewer.
She crossed the room and lay down on the bed. The mattress was so thin she could feel the springs and she could see a hole in the ceiling. A spider crawled across the floor toward the radiator and disappeared into the shadows of the baseboard. She picked up the telephone and called Dan’s office number, but only an answering machine greeted her. Without leaving a message, she put the receiver back in the cradle.
Libby was assailed by a jumble of images that kept on colliding. The mine-shaft dark against a starlit sky. Dan in a bed somewhere with another woman. Her father taking the brown paper bag out of the drawer of his desk at the office.
She decided to go out and swung her legs over the side of the bed and reached for her coat. When she got to the lobby, through the window she spotted a cab idling at the curb with AL’S TAXI written on it in large, yellow letters. She went outside to speak to the driver.
“I’d like to drive around a bit,” she said.
“All right,” he said. “You have anything in mind?”
“I’ll leave it up to you.”
“Okay. Pourquoi pas?”
They drove along the main street past a new cinema called La Victoire where Bonheur d’Occasion was playing. Libby thought she would likely miss some of the action in the movie without any subtitles. A hardware store with a skidoo in the window made her shudder with the thought of the noisy machines roaring through the quiet trails of her past. As they passed the drug store, the driver glanced at her in the rear view mirror.
“Pharmacie Dion. Hasn’t changed much over the years. You been in, n’est-ce pas? You know Lucien.”
Libby was startled. Now that Ile d’Or had over thirty thousand inhabitants, she had not expected news to travel as if it were still a small town.
“He’s a good man,” the driver said. “It was a tragedy about his brother.”
“Yes, I know. It was a shame.”
They drove through a residential district with ranch style bungalows and two-storey Georgian houses, which, aside from the bleak surroundings, could have been any affluent Toronto suburb.
“Guy’s kids went with the former wife,” the driver said. “Both he and his girlfriend were heavy drinkers, so it’s a good thing. Her mother, the girlfriend’s, spoke only Polish. When her father was fixing the chimney one day, he fell off the roof.” His voice droned on and on. “Once Guy called me from somewhere on the St. Lawrence. He asked me to drive to Montreal, to bring his girlfriend and a twenty-four-ounce bottle of scotch with me.
“‘Do you know how far that is, Guy?’ I asked him. “He knew. Five hundred kilometres.”
The cabbie made the trip, but he could not find Guy in the club on St. Denis where he’d said he would be.
“‘Al, he’s found a whore,’ his girlfriend said. “So we drove all the way back. When Guy got in a day later, he called and asked for the twenty-four ounces. He told me to go get his girlfriend.” He had come in another taxi and had to pay for both of them.
Libby wished the driver would stop talking, but she perked up when he mentioned Lucien.
“His wife left him for an engineer from Montreal who was living at the hotel where you’re staying,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at her. “Some looker, Susan Dion. That dark hair and those eyes. I remember when they were married. She hasn’t changed.”
“I left Ile d’Or not long before that,” she said, aware he’d mentioned a man Susan was involved with and wondered if Lucien knew.
“You mean you used to live here?” the driver asked, eyebrows rising and the lines over his nose scrunched together as he turned to glance at her again.
“Um. Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I guess I came here from Chibougamau just after you left. I’m Al Desjardins.”
“Elizabeth Muir.”
“Muir?” he said, his voice rising. “Muir? I remember your father. I used to bring him home in the taxi.”
Libby could imagine her father staggering out to the curb in front of the Alpha, managing to find the door to the cab and slumping into the back seat. When they passed a vacant lot with a rusted car at the far end of it, she was distracted. “There used to be a greasy spoon restaurant there,” she mused. “With a pool hall behind it.” Guy had taught her how to hold the cue there, how to aim. The first time, she’d almost ripped the green felt when she scratched, but after a while she played so well she sometimes beat him. “I used to play pool with Guy.”
“Moi aussi,” Al said. “Guy was the best until the drinking got him.”
“When was that?”
“It must’ve been getting worse for a long time. I didn’t know until his wife left him.” He pointed to a bank with large windows. “When I came here, that was a beauty parlour.”
“I had my hair cut there when I was a kid. The sidewalks were made of wood then and the streets were all gravel.”
“I met your father after he dried out in that place in Toronto,” he said. “He gave me a couple of bottles. He said he wouldn’t need them any more.”
When he dropped her off in front of the glass doors of the hotel an hour later, he would not take any money.
25.
A MAN STOOD at the front desk of the hotel, talking to the receptionist. The pigeon holes behind the receptionist contained keys for the rooms and Libby could see hers in one of them sitting on top of a piece of yellow paper. There was a message for her. When the man moved away, he left his suitcase with a bellhop who took it and accompanied him down the hall toward the new part of the building. As he left, the receptionist reached for the keys in Libby’s slot. Handing them to Libby, she also gestured toward the slip of paper that said Lucien had called.
“Thanks,” Libby said, thinking that she would go up to her room and call him from there. She wished she’d had the foresight to stay where she would not be depressed by the aura of decrepitude her room evoked.
“I’ll be half an hour late,” Lucien said when she reached him at the pharmacy. “I’ll call from downstairs when I get there, unless you’re already in the lobby.”
”I’ll use the time to draw,” she said. The house on rue Champlain. The mine. A sketch of Jacques Paquin in his yellow hardhat. He must look like his mother. Libby would never have mistaken him for Paul. Perhaps she’d do a sketch of the taxi driver. She could not draw Guy. The young boy she had once played with in a pile of leaves, his fingers the first to touch her budding breasts, could not be the same man who had taken those wild taxi rides Al Desjardins had described. Instead she lay down and rolled over on the bed. The springs creaked. Lucien was coming soon. He had never been more than Guy’s older brother and a familiar face, but now the thought of his naked shoulders moving toward her was like a wave rushing over a bather at the water’s edge. As her mind descended over the hair spreading downwards in an inverted triangle, her throat felt constricted.
Jumping up abruptly, she went to the closet where she brushed her fingers over a bright fuchsia blouse with wide shoulders and long sleeves that she had bought before she left Toronto. There was also an ivory sweater with purple and green woven through it. She almost never wore skirts, but she had brought one. She slipped the sweater on over her blouse, and then cinched the dark skirt at her waist with a wide belt. Next she pulled on a pair of knee high boots. Her coat and purse were over her arm as she went down to the lobby. She would wait for him there.
She was still thinking in English, although occasionally an entire French phrase emerged spontaneously as she spoke to the receptionist. Only as a teenager had it occurred to Libby how odd it was that her parents did not speak French. As a child, she’d tried so hard to learn — stuttering, stammering, longing to know the language that surrounded her. But the children she played with proudly spoke their heavily-accented English. Not until she was working in the drugstore, later in the assay lab at the mine off the highway, did she find people who spoke to her only in French. Once she had asked her parents why they had never learned the language.
“I spoke some French with Thérèse,” her mother had said. “But she soon learned English.” Thérèse had been with them when Wally was born. On Queen Victoria’s birthday, what’s more, her father had said, as if the birthday of some old, dead queen mattered. He had left soon after to go overseas. “Libby, will you get some onions from the basement, from the fruit cellar?” Thérèse had asked.
Libby came up from the basement with her hands empty. “I got the onions. See, Thérèse!”
“Oh, you petite rascal,” Thérèse laughed. “You just have to go back down again.”
Libby was so engrossed when Lucien arrived that she was startled when he greeted her. Smiling broadly, he handed her a small box of Black Magic chocolates. “Would you like to try a different restaurant tonight?” he asked as she tried to thank him.
“Sure,” she said. “Though l’Ange Bleu was very nice.”
“Oui, mais … you might as well see as much as you can while you’re here.” He took her arm as they walked down the steps to the sidewalk. “What about La Cabane?” he asked. “We’ll save The Flamingo for dancing. You can’t come back to Ile d’Or without going dancing at The Flamingo.”
“Do you remember the Rialto?” she asked, recalling the club the Ukrainians or the Poles had started where she and Guy had danced on Saturday nights.
“It burned down years ago.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “My car’s over there.”
Driving down the main street, he headed toward the centre of town.
There was a large map of the surrounding area on the wall of the restaurant. The head of a moose was mounted over the door to the washrooms. She remembered pick-up trucks carrying headless moose that appeared on the main street in the fall. The hunters must already have removed the head and antlers, although sometimes there would be a moose still with its head intact on one of the trucks. When she said something about darker hamburger in hunting season, Lucien laughed.
“Hasn’t changed much,” he said.
The waitress brought two menus, placing them on the table. “Anything from the bar?” she asked, scratching down their order without lifting her face to look at them.
In the next booth, two women with heavy makeup and false teeth talked in quick staccato. They tapped their fingers to Beau Dommage, playing on the jukebox.
Lucien fiddled with his napkin. “This man you told me about, what’s he like, Elizabeth?”
“Oh, you mean Dan,” she said. “Well, he likes people. Art and music. Rides a bicycle. A good sense of humour.”
“Qu’est-ce qu’il fait?” What’s he do?
“He’s a lawyer. Un avocat. He got drawn into civic politics. Now he’s an alderman.” She had brought with her an article Dan had given her to read with his name in large letters on a yellow band across the cover along with the magazine her son had given her, her father’s letters, her sketch pad, and the books by Roch Carrier and Michel Tremblay.
“Does he have time left for you?”
“I don’t know,” she grimaced, surprised at his insight. “He may have more time for someone else, someone called Daphne.” Studying her face in the mirror that hung on the wall behind Lucien, she observed dark shadows in half-moons under her eyes and her mouth drawn tightly. Once she had heard a man talking about her in a bar.
“When I met her, she’d been separated from her husband for a year. She was still sleeping on her side of the bed,” he had said. “The mattress sagged in the middle and the springs were broken.” When he turned around and saw her, his face turned crimson. Would she one day turn Dan into an anecdote? He was careless about details, she would say. There were always cracker crumbs on the sofa, dirty coffee cups on window ledges. No, Dan loomed too large in her life for that. If it were over between them, he was nonetheless interwoven into who she was now. She wanted to hold onto some richness he had given her. Would her father have come to understand his own pervasive racism if he had lived long enough? If he had met Dan? It could be so subtle, something she wished she’d been able to confront, but when her father was still alive she hadn’t understood it well enough to have words rather than inarticulate anger around what he said. It was his generation, where he had come from, all of that, because when she could articulate an argument about anything, he tried to comprehend it. He had changed his mind about women in subtle ways over the years. Yet her mother, who had wanted so much to understand, was more of a problem for Libby as she unexpectedly came out with the most surprising statements. Confused from taking too many pills one night, taken to emergency, she had sat up on the hospital bed.
