I'le Dor, page 30
“The dancing will have begun again,” he said. “Let’s go back for one last dance.”
“Let’s,” Libby said. “He’s a good dancer, you know, Madame Dion. As good as Guy was.”
“He’s a good son,” Madame Dion said. “I try to tell him, but you know, Libby, he doesn’t believe me. He never has. Now you can be my witness. Guy was my baby, but this one was always the one I could count on. Papa, too. Papa wasn’t very good at saying so. He thought it though. He told me. ‘That Lucien, quite a guy.’”
Lucien dropped his head, and then leaned over to hug his mother. “Merci, Maman,” he said. “I guess I know that. Sometimes it’s all so hard. I know you miss Guy and he was always your special boy. But I know you love both of us.”
“I was glad to see Paul,” she said.
“Oui, moi aussi.” Me, too.
“Thank you for your visit, Libby. It’s meant a lot to me,” she said, her face moving through the sadness in her eyes to a smile. “Have a safe trip back to Toronto.”
Lucien touched Libby’s shoulder, afraid she might burst into tears.
“Get on back to your dance,” Maman said.
“Odd, isn’t it,” he said. “Me and Libby.”
“No,” she said. “Not odd at all. We’re all northerners.”
63.
THE LIGHTS WERE turned low, a strobe light circling overhead at the centre of the dance floor. Tables bordered the room with a long bar down the left side and curtains were pulled back that could be draped across the stage before a performance. Rock stars, dancers, singers had graced that stage over the years, young actors and musicians traveling the province as they struggled to open doors in the cities. On many nights, the club became a dance venue.
Seated at a table on one side of the floor close to the bar, Libby watched the dancers. She noticed Michelle with a man she didn’t recognize. When the music stopped between numbers, Michelle came and sat at their table.
“Want a beer?” Lucien asked.
“Sure.”
He went over to the bar, leaving the two women alone.
“You look wonderful,” Michelle said. “The dress suits you so well, the colour, the lines, everything. I’m glad to see you. I thought perhaps you’d decided not to come.”
“We were here for a while and then went to visit Lucien’s mother. We just got back. It’s still the old Flamingo, isn’t it?” Libby said. “Updated, of course. But it brings back all the old nostalgia.”
“I didn’t know you’d ever come here.”
“Of course I did. I came for a drink with one of those out of town engineering students when I was barely seventeen.”
“Your parents must have loved that.”
They both chuckled.
“My mother didn’t, but my father told her he figured I’d likely be taking a drink when I went to Montreal that fall to university and why not have the first one in Ile d’Or.”
The noise of the band had become almost deafening and when Libby leaned over and tried to say something more, it was apparent by her grimace that Michelle couldn’t hear her.
“Do you feel like going for a walk?” Michelle asked, almost shouting.
“Well, we just got back. Maybe after a couple of dances.”
So later, after she had danced a few numbers with Lucien and he had begun to talk and dance with others, the two women found their jackets. Wending their way through the now crowded tables, Michelle stopped occasionally to say a brief hello until they reached a door at the back and stepped out onto a porch above a lane. It was what they might have done as teenagers had it not been for their fathers.
“I wish Nick had stayed another couple of days,” she said.
“Do you think you’ll hear from him?” Libby asked, trying not to sound too curious. She knew Susan was the only woman for Lucien. And that although he was now buried in the cemetery, the one she’d come to find out about here had been Guy. She didn’t know how she would feel about Dan when she saw him and wondered why he kept contacting her if Daphne was the one he loved.
“I think so. About Marcel, at the very least,” Michelle said as she pulled a bright scarf higher around her neck. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
“The time has gone quickly.”
“It has, hasn’t it? I thought at first I’d stay only a couple of days. I wish you and I had had a chance to talk long ago.”
“It is too bad,” Michelle said.
Libby was quiet, waiting to see what more Michelle would say.
“My father was a proud man,” Michelle said. “Maybe you didn’t know that.”
“I guess I never thought very much about it. To me, he was just your father.” How simply she had been able to define everything in those long ago days. Now that naiveté astounded her.
“Like yours to me.”
“Not a falling down…”
“No” Michelle interrupted.
“I think mine was a proud man, too.” Of course, Libby knew that. Not an arrogant or egotistic man, but proud nonetheless. She didn’t know how to tell Michelle that she was sorry for what had happened to their friendship, for the part played by their fathers. But maybe she didn’t have to say anything. Here they were now in spite of their history and it felt as if that made words unnecessary.
“My father was respected in later life when The Flamingo became such a part of the community. And then someone started to talk about him, about the early days and spread rumours again about the high-grading, that he bought the nightclub with stolen gold. Then the gossip started all over again. That’s when he started drinking heavily.”
“Oh, mon Dieu.”
Someone opened the door behind them and the strains of a waltz drifted out. They were quiet until the door closed again. Whoever it was hadn’t come out, perhaps deterred by their presence.
“He could hold a lot,” Michelle continued. “But it released a deluge of talk. About his earlier life. His childhood. His mother. About how terrible it was to work underground. About starting to steal the gold. He talked and talked. Whenever he drank. And then one day, my mother didn’t hear him. Or see him. And thought he’d gone off on a bender. But he was in a room upstairs above the nightclub where he used to go to listen to the radio. She found him hanging from a rafter.”
It was a few moments before Libby caught her breath enough to speak again. How was it that she’d never heard this story? Then it dawned on her that she’d been offered a secret that wasn’t shared in the community. For some reason, Michelle seemed to want her to know that her father had suffered.
“You have his determination and pride,” Libby said. “Although I just thought of him as your father, I thought he was quite something.”
Michelle’s eyes glazed over. Maybe there were tears that did not fall. “Yes, I loved my father.” And then she smiled. “I remember some of my mother’s comments when your father came back from overseas,” she said. “I guess because she came from England, she always thought it was special that he’d gone when he already had a family.”
Libby recalled the photos that were taken next to that Union Jack flying from the fence pole in front of the Muir house on the day the war ended. Michelle was one of the children from the neighbourhood lined up against the fence under the flag. At the other end of the row was Wally. In one photograph, Libby was hanging onto the pole. Perhaps she was wondering when her father would come home. Even with the good news and flags flying, she’d gone on praying every night that he would return safely from overseas. As a child, that he would do so wedded to a bottle was not something she knew enough to imagine.
Some hero!
“That never crossed my mind,” she said. “I do remember that when he finally did get back, he often played military music. And then he would get the three of us marching around the room.”
It had taken a long time for Libby even to begin to understand the horrors of war. Of that war. Of the holocaust. And the expulsion of Japanese Canadians from Canada’s own west coast. Of any war. She never knew if the vicious rounds of drunkenness came from some demons unleashed from what her father knew of battle or because he never did get to see it. Or for reasons too deep to fathom that might have fuelled his need to be at the front in the first place.
“But I loved him, too.”
Michelle nodded, taking a sip from her glass. “It’s getting chilly,” she said.
“Shall we go back inside?”
“I guess so. I hate to see your visit end. Do you think you might come back some time?”
“Well, I could say I would. But it’s a long way. I don’t know.” She’d found something she needed here in Ile d’Or, images, a community, maybe even the courage to go on, but the city was undeniably her home now. “Maybe you’ll come to Toronto. With Marcel Blouin? I could see both of you. And Nick, too.”
“You can see Nick any time.”
“That’s true,” Libby said. “But I never do. I haven’t in all the years we’ve both lived in Toronto except the one time Wally and Jeannie visited after they were married. And, back into our own routines, it probably won’t happen. I can just imagine how busy he is with his practice.”
“I guess. He seemed lost somehow, as if he didn’t know if he really wanted to continue with it. Although by the time he left, he sounded as if he might have had a new burst of energy.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Libby said.
64.
WHEN SHE ENTERED Guy’s cabin after Lucien had parked and walked with her across the path, Libby’s eyes were drawn to the envelope she’d left on the table. After hanging her coat up, she sat on the edge of the bed still wearing her new dress and slit Dan’s letter open with her nail file.
Dear Libby, she read. I miss you.
Dan wrote that he had stopped seeing Daphne, that it was hard to admit he had treated Libby so badly. He was sorry, Libby, sorry. Please believe me, he wrote. I was running away from love. I was afraid. Afraid with all you and I have in common of being drawn together too quickly.
The letter continued as he confessed he’d wanted to meet her even before he saw her paintings at the Moritz gallery, the images of the north she often worked with already drawing him in. And then he’d been confronted that day by the horse emerging from quicksand, a sketch still, not a fully developed painting. Also by a dog with a rifle beside him, a snake in the grass the boy playing there didn’t notice. Something mysterious creeping into the landscape captivated me, he wrote.
Had it not been for that dog her father had as a little boy in South Africa, a small white dog with black spots, a dark nose, pink pads on his feet, the snake would have killed him. The dog sniffed at the long grass, jumping suddenly in the air as the snake bit him. It could have been her father who’d keeled over and died. He would not have come to Canada as a small boy. None of the Muir family would have existed. He would not have gone overseas. She would not be in Ile d’Or now.
Libby wondered how to include some of her father’s letters in the art she was contemplating, perhaps a collage of some sort with drawings and letters linked together.
The war news still seems very good, he wrote on November 26th, 1942. Especially from Russia. However, I’m afraid there will be a lot of hard fighting before even the African show is cleaned up.
Libby wished she had her mother’s replies to this correspondence. It felt as if some important links to her past were missing. Had her father read those letters and kept them? Or had he, moving from army camp to army camp and then sailing to England, had to discard them? She knew where the genealogy charts he had drawn were and that she could use them as the basis for further research. But what she really hoped was that one day she would come across a box somewhere with all her mother’s letters to him that would make the connections tangible.
As she listened to the silence, punctuated at intervals by ice cracking, she thought that when her last exhibition closed, the one Dan had mentioned, that she’d left her own life dangling.
When she stood up, she examined the photographs in the cabin again and held Guy’s journal. She heard the sound of the green canoe slipping through water as they paddled across the lake together. He felt close to her here.
“Once I stole a horse,” she murmured. Guy never knew about that. “I only meant to borrow it, Guy.” What would she have done with a horse? She was eleven. When the time came to ride, she was too afraid. The nightmares began then. The rocky field on the edge of town where the horse grazed on one of the few farms struggling to survive on the barren land around a mining town. Then it was sinking.
“I’m sorry, Guy.” As if had the horse not sunk that would have made a difference. She would explore the mystery in her art somehow; she would mine her terrain. For it was hers. Lib-BEE was what the French kids had called her, the accent on the second syllable. When she heard the lilt of the French language or someone speaking English with the intonations she had grown up with, she would always know where she came from. Maybe she had been the horse struggling in her dreams. She had never thought of that. How could she have lived so long without even the hint that she might have been the one who was caught, the one who needed to be freed?
“Mon dieu,” she murmured, looking down once more at the letter in her hand.
I hope you’ll give me another chance, Dan wrote.
When she’d finished reading to the end, Libby folded the letter and placed it back inside the envelope. It was one she would keep, she thought, with a ribbon around it in safekeeping in a drawer in the house in Toronto.
Dear Dan, she began as her thoughts started to come together. She described some of her ideas for paintings. The sketches she’d done here in Ile d’Or, the images she’d begun to capture in her drawings.
“I can’t wait for you to see them,” she whispered.
65.
THE SUITCASE LAY open on the floor, the sleeves of a red sweater hanging over the edge. As Libby straightened it out and laid her nightgown on top, there was a knock at the door.
Her eyes moved from sink to window, from wood pile to snow shoes, from a row of photographs to Guy’s journal with a sense both of déjà vu and sadness.
“Bye, Guy,” she murmured. “Thank you.” Merci.
As she opened the door, she saw Lucien cast a glance at her open bag.
“Time to get moving,” he said. “Need some help there?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said, unable to look at him right away. Unable to acknowledge that something final was about to happen. Something as simple as a farewell that held within it the likelihood that she would not return. Pressing the lid of the case down and fastening the zipper, she wondered if she would ever see Lucien again.
As they drove into Ile d’Or, both of them remained quiet. When they reached Pharmacie Dion, Lucien said he would be fifteen minutes or so.
“But there’ll be plenty of time to get to the airport,” he added.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll walk around a little.” As she started down the main street, she stopped abruptly at the sight of five small ceramic horses in bright colours, orange, blue, yellow, red, green, dangling on a long string from a hook in a store window. As she pushed the door open, her eyes were glued to the horses.
“Bonjour, madame,” the shopkeeper smiled.
“Bonjour,” Libby said, pointing at the mobile. “I’d like those, please,” she continued in French, which came more easily now.
Taking down the horses and putting them on a piece of tissue paper, he carefully moved the strings on each horse so they did not become entangled.
“The winters used to be much colder than they are now,” he said.
Libby was about to tell him she remembered the long, cold months when the plough left huge snow banks on the streets. When she and her friends built forts and igloos in them. But as she glanced at the horses, she saw a MADE IN TAIWAN sticker on the red one.
“Nine ninety-five,” he said. Neuf quatre-vingt quinze. He looked down to see what had caught her eye. “Do you want me to remove it?”
Her laugh was a short, high-pitched sound that escaped spontaneously. Along with the plastic swizzle stick with the pink flamingo on it from the nightclub the previous evening, this might be the only tangible souvenir of her visit. She thought that had been decided when she first saw the horses. Although she sensed the old imagery would permeate everything for a while as she worked on paintings from her sketches, she wanted these dancing, brightly coloured horses to hang in her studio.
“It’s all right,” she said finally.
Back at the pharmacy, she opened the trunk of the car and rearranged her bag to hold the mobile, folding it gently in her nightgown. When she zipped it up again, she went inside to find Lucien just emerging from the back of the store. She took a pamphlet on hunting and fishing from the counter. Another souvenir. She would paint the Second World War monument with the twenty-seven names on it and the mine shaft with the fleur-de-lys flying, The Flamingo, l’Ange Bleu, the houses covered with insulbrick, the water tower at the end of town, the graveyards, all of it.
Lucien took her arm as they went back out to the car. At the airport, he carried her bag to the Air Canada counter. The other airline, Cree Air, flew north. She saw Al Desjardins with a dark suitcase with a strap around it heading toward the car with AL’S TAXI on the side in yellow letters. A man with a briefcase walked beside him. As they reached the car, Al turned around and saw Libby. As he waved, a smile spread across his face. She waved back.
