I'le Dor, page 2
During the placement, he worked even longer hours than in the northern locum. Marie did not make new friends quickly or easily. Home alone with their toddler, she’d been morose and had begun to be more critical of him. To his discomfort, it escalated.
“You’re such a cold fish,” she’d said more times than he cared to remember, something he’d never been able to fathom. Always more demonstrative than Marie, he’d frequently returned home with bouquets of flowers or a bottle of wine. A box of chocolates. He loved her. Hadn’t she known that? It was hard to imagine her now in Texas, married to another man. The twinges of depression that had led him back to Ile d’Or sent tendrils twisting through him. Anger around women who were separated or divorced had alerted him that this hiatus was necessary. He could joke about this anger all he wanted, but it was an underlying truth he would have to surmount somehow. So he’d managed to arrange for a month’s break quite quickly. Longer would have been better, but not possible on such short notice.
By the time of the divorce, his daughter had her own flat on the top floor of a three-storey brick house in midtown Toronto. Just before Nick left on this trip, he’d been there for a late supper with Diana, hummus and pita bread with a salad. Grateful that he and Diana were close, he was startled when she’d become exasperated and said she’d never met such a self-absorbed person in her life as her father. That hurt.
“Don’t use any labels from the DSM,” she’d said. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“I’m sorry, Diana,” he’d said. “I guess everything’s been getting me down lately. I haven’t meant to be remote.” At twenty-one, she often seemed self-absorbed herself, going off to clubs and bars, drinking and dancing, but he didn’t say so.
Nick leaned down to pick up something in a crevice of the rock, an empty Mars bar wrapper, reminding him that this place wasn’t any more his own fiefdom than it had been in his childhood. There must be a whole new generation in Ile d’Or who knew nothing of his family. His sister, Jeannie, was now living in California and both his parents were long dead. But he was also sure there’d be some people who’d never left. He supposed if he stuck around, there would be a lot of questions about why he’d come. He knew only it had something to do with his parents’ graves in the cemetery by the side of the highway.
A mass of curly, dark hair popped up on the other side of the rock. A boy of about ten climbed to a flat spot. He looked like a startled bear cub when he spotted Nick, and he stooped down low until he was hidden behind the peak of the rock again.
“It’s all right,” Nick said. “I won’t eat you.”
“What are you doing here?” the boy asked, approaching warily. He spoke in French. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“I used to live here.” Nick shoved his hands in his pants pockets, reaching for some gum or candy.
“Where do you live now?”
“Toronto.” He couldn’t find anything to offer this child he already thought of as a nuisance.
The boy let out a breath that sounded like a mixture of a burp and a sneer. “Where did you live when you lived here?”
“On that street we can see from here. On the corner of Champlain.” Nick gestured toward the town.
The boy pulled out a package of Du Maurier cigarettes.
“You’re too young for those things,” Nick said.
“None of your business.”
“I suppose it isn’t.”
The boy lit the cigarette and started puffing. He didn’t inhale so much as pull his cheeks in so his whole demeanour was that of concentration. Then he drew himself up to his full height and looked Nick right in the eyes.
“Where are you staying, Mister?”
“You know the old bunkhouses on the main street? I’m staying there.”
“Pay me something to show you around.” The boy was cocky now, sure of himself.
“I know my way around. I used to live here, remember?”
“I bet you don’t know where to gamble,” the boy said, his eyes grazing over Nick’s frame. “Or where the whores are.”
“Do you?”
He listened to the adults and he knew everything, he said. Some kid. Should be in school. None of his business, Nick’s.
“So where do I go to gamble?”
“I’ll show you. Ten bucks.”
“That’s too much.”
“Too bad,” he said. “That’s the price.”
In his day, a kid that age would have delivered newspapers. Or maybe run more lucrative errands for prostitutes or high-graders and Nick hadn’t known it. Anyway, he’d say good-bye and go back to town, buy a newspaper. A beer. Something.
“No, thanks.”
The kid shrugged.
Next time, Nick could sense him thinking. Something else will hook the Anglo. Ultimately that’s what became of the Hinglish Polacks. They were all Anglos. What would his mother have thought of that?
3.
MICHELLE LOOKED FOR an old photograph album in a chest in a corner of her living room. In the album were pictures of her childhood friends and schoolmates. She couldn’t find one of Nick Petranovich. He’d been enough ahead of her in high school that the yearbook for her graduation wasn’t any help. A niggling question intruded that she knew was ridiculous. He was an attractive man and she was lonely for male company. He’d be around for a few days at most and would move on again. Last thing she wanted was to set herself up for disappointment.
Besides did she really want to have a man in her life again? She recalled how smoothly the early dates with Dominic had gone. She’d met him at a party in Montreal where she was studying fashion. Very quickly he’d told her she was wonderful and he courted her with chocolates and flowers, intimate dinners at the best restaurants. He’d told her he wanted to spend all his free time with her and didn’t want her to see anyone else. She had thought that meant he truly loved her. She was still so young then. It wasn’t until they were married and he demanded she not see her girlfriends anymore that she became uneasy. He would phone from his job at the fire hall often, having told her to wait for his calls. Not as if he cared about her, more as if he were watching her every move. Nothing in her childhood had prepared her for this behaviour, not even the arguments between her parents she’d overheard that going to different churches had sometimes elicited.
Michelle, distracted by this thought of the ongoing battle between her parents, laughed out loud. Imagine that irrepressible little French guy who was her father meeting the tall English girl, Elaine, overseas during the war. When they fell in love, it must never have crossed their minds how difficult it would be for her in a Catholic and French environment. It must have been such a relief to find love in those war years. But those differences had created an ongoing struggle that affected almost every aspect of their family life. Her father, the papa Michelle had thought was almost perfect, regularly attended Sunday mass at St. Luc’s, the Catholic church, in the early days of his marriage. For a while, he’d insisted she and her older sister, Francine, go with him. Later, when he’d stopped going there himself, she and Francine often went to the small Anglican church in Bourlamaque, St. Andrew’s, with their mother. Built of wood, it was set next to a stretch of fir trees and rocks. Michelle fidgeted in whichever church they attended. Francine was disdainful of both churches and hadn’t hidden that. She would sneak off instead of going with either parent. For the only time in her life she could remember, Michelle had briefly been their model daughter. Then Francine was killed in a car accident when she was only sixteen and was buried in the Catholic cemetery. Michelle was the only one left now.
Later, lying in bed, Michelle lay awake pondering why Nick’s unexpected arrival in Ile d’Or was unsettling her equilibrium. She didn’t think that seeing him would really ease her loneliness. If anything, when he packed that duffel bag and left town, she would probably feel even more desolate. She listened for the sound of the blasting. Because it happened at the same time every night, it had always reassured her. Even as a child. And she always fell asleep just after. But not tonight, when she needed her rest. In the morning, she had to go into the shop early to start unpacking orders for the next season. The Christmas season would soon be over and November wasn’t too early to think of lowering prices on some of the fall and winter merchandise. As soon as that sale ended in January, spring colours and materials would go onto the racks. Next to raising her children, this store, which allowed her to use her flair and creativity as well as her business acumen, was her greatest pleasure.
When finally she slept, Michelle dreamed of a time when she was still married and living in Montreal, when the girls were young children. A night when Dominic, drunk, broke the door down to get into the house. He was arrested, but was released shortly after. There were court orders, but that didn’t stop him. She awakened screaming.
As she rolled over in the bed, it seemed the wall facing her was the pale blue of the first apartment she and Dominic had shared. It was only when she got up and walked from room to room, observing the clock flickering in the kitchen and the photograph albums still out on the dining room table, that she felt calmer.
When Michelle left Ile d’Or and went to Montreal, she didn’t intend to return to the north, to live there ever again. It wasn’t en route to anywhere she wanted to go. But when her father died, everything changed. Her mother seemed so small afterward, as if she had shrunk four or five inches, retreating into herself. It would help, she said, if Michelle could come back, manage the business. It just happened to coincide with the time when she wanted to be as far away from Dominic as possible. After the times he’d tried to choke her, she had never doubted she was in danger. While still in Montreal, she’d hid at a girlfriend’s apartment with the children because she was afraid he would carry out his threats to kill her. The only place she could think of to go was Ile d’Or and, anyway, her mother needed her. Many times she’d vowed vehemently never to return to the north and he knew that, so she hoped he wouldn’t look for her there. It was a tough town under the surface, not a place she’d wanted to raise her children. But after a while, its familiarity made it seem like it had been a good idea to return home. She loved her shop. And her customers trusted her. On days when she felt almost like a stranger in spite of her early experience of the town, that made all the difference.
4.
LIBBY MORLEY STOOD at the window overlooking the street, sipping the last of her coffee. Soon a taxi would pull up in front of the house to take her to the airport. Everything was quiet with the calm of early morning in the city. Her son, asleep in a room above, had wished her “bon voyage” the night before with a heartiness she treasured. Her daughter, with some of that same enthusiasm that was only slightly quieter, had called her.
Any sane person would be heading in another direction, Libby thought. Montego Bay. Acapulco. The Algarve. Anywhere but Ile d’Or. But ever since Libby had heard Michel Tremblay and Roch Carrier read to a crowd at Harbourfront in downtown Toronto, the trip north had become inevitable. On that evening, just a little over two weeks earlier, there were long moments when she stopped hearing the words. Instead, in the inflection of both men’s voices were the familiar cadences and sounds of her childhood. French accents that had existed on the periphery of everything for her. Sounds that brought back the crunch of high-buckled galoshes on hard-packed snow. The sight and feel of potholes in gravel roads and the flaming red and yellow leaves of autumn. Spring rivulets turning to mud as ice melted.
I want to go home, was the message all this evoked in her.
A pull so strong she hadn’t been able to resist it. She might be Elizabeth Morley now, but for almost two decades she had been Libby Muir. And the home that now drew her was the town where she’d spent her childhood. The town where her father, Walter Muir, had been the mine engineer. His office had been ‘on surface’, behind a metal link fence that separated the property from the company houses and the rest of the town beyond them.
Libby walked down the front steps from the verandah just as the man with light brown skin and dark hair stepped out of the airflight car. He wore a navy blue uniform and his stomach protruded slightly over the belt of his trousers. He took the suitcase from her, the one with the green pompon her mother had once attached to the handle.
As the car headed down Spadina toward the Gardiner, the first snow of the season began to fall, delicate flakes melting on the windshield.
“Where are you flying?” the driver asked.
“North,” she said.
Long ago, she’d read Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. Even then, before she had really left the north, she’d felt the nostalgia that would one day propel her to return. So strong was the longing now that soon after hearing Carrier and Tremblay, she’d bought a ticket. Would her childhood home still be there as vividly as it was in her memory, separated from the bush at the edge of town by a gravel road? Their house had had white asbestos shingles, dark green shutters and a porch roof she could climb onto from her window. The mailing address was c/o Alpha Mines, Bourlamaque, Quebec. It was a company house, as were the log cabins the miners lived in at the other mine in town, which meant her father had rented it from Alpha. For many years, Libby’s father paid twelve dollars a month for the house; later it was raised to twenty-five.
One year her father had the mine carpenter build a garage covered with green insulbrick in the bush across from their back yard. He parked their new red Desoto there. Libby learned to drive before she was sixteen in the car that preceded the Desoto, a two-toned blue Nash.
Further down the street, around the bend before it hit the main street, were the Dions and the Paquins. The Petranovich family lived two doors away. The son, Nick, was the oldest. Then there was Jeannie. It had surprised everyone when Jeannie married Libby’s brother, Wally, because she was older than he was. They’d met in California where they still lived and sent news of their wedding after it happened. Libby almost never heard from them. She recalled how much she’d hated it when the Dion boy called her younger sister, Sheila, and Jeannie Petranovich the Hinglish Polacks. Back then it seemed all the kids who weren’t French were lumped together.
Across the backyard and a lane was the bungalow where the Dufresne family lived. She’d been friends for a while with the girl who had lived there. The girl’s father, Maurice Dufresne, worked underground. The men were taken down into the depths of the earth in a cage. They spread out through dark tunnels to rock faces where they drilled holes for dynamite. After the blasts, they piled the splintered pieces of rock that were blown out into the tunnel in trolley cars that were carried on lifts up to surface. Sometimes there were still sticks of dynamite in the rock that would go off and kill someone. It was dangerous and dirty work for the men who worked underground to make a living from gold.
“You have family there?” the driver asked.
Family there? These words were the only ones Libby heard and she pondered what constituted a family. Although she suspected everyone she once knew would be gone, if there was anyone at all left they would be family, she thought. That was how it was in the north, the town so far from any large centres, none less than a day’s journey away then, that it was too far to see relatives very often. You built your connections where you were, her mother had often said.
“Not any more,” Libby said in answer to his question, thinking about the house on rue Champlain again. Icicles had formed on the inside of her bedroom window on long, cold winter nights. Something else, too, reverberated. A dream about a black stallion galloping toward her across a green meadow. The horse slowed as he drew nearer, a young girl with dark eyes and hair clinging to his mane. Libby longed to ride him, but her legs seemed to have turned to cement. The horse picked up speed again and galloped off toward a lake. She heard a high-pitched wail in the distance and ran toward it. As she came over a rise in the meadow, she saw the horse sinking in quicksand. The girl was on a rock, crying for help. The neighing was a piercing scream as the horse kept sinking.
“How do you get there?” the driver asked, the cab now speeding along beside the lake.
“Via Montreal,” she said abruptly.
It was not like the good old days. Everyone took the train then. It was the only way to get in or out of Ile d’Or for most people. In the days when train routes and radio signals were the only things that connected the whole country.
“I come from Pakistan,” he continued, not seeming to notice that she might be either disinterested or distracted. All his brothers had also come to live in Toronto. “The connecting flight from Karachi was in Paris.”
Why hadn’t she bought a ticket to Paris? Libby wondered. Late fall might not be the time to visit there either, but clouds and drizzle wouldn’t have kept her from walking from l’Arc de Triomphe right across the centre of the city to Place de la Nation. She knew about rain from her visits to her sister, Sheila, in Vancouver. She had no trouble visualizing Paris in that kind of dull, grey weather. She could have wandered along the Seine and bought magazines from one of the stalls or sat in small cafes and sketched the people. The buildings. But that wasn’t where she’d felt compelled to go. She had to admit to not having any sound reason for doing what she was doing, but she knew she had to.
“Only my sister is still in Karachi,” he said.
By the time they reached High Park, she knew about his five brothers as well as the sister in Pakistan. She was easily drawn into conversations with strangers. Whether she liked it or not, Libby took after her mother in some ways. Sometimes she liked the similarities of this penchant for conversation and sometimes she would recall incidents when her mother had embarrassed her. Particularly when, as a shy child, she would as soon have remained invisible. Instead her mother had drawn attention to both of them with some exuberant gesture. Still, she’d grown closer to her mother in the years since her father died.
