I'le Dor, page 4
“Just a few days.”
His eyes swept over her face, down to her hands on the table. “Are you married?” he continued in French as he had from the moment they first recognized each other and began to talk.
“I was,” she said. “What about you?”
His hands shook as he pulled out a blue package and lit a cigarette. “My wife just left me and went to Montreal.” He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke off to the side.
Libby didn’t know what to say, so she was quiet. It was a long time since Barton had walked out on her, since her own hands had started to shake at the very mention of marriage.
“Do you have children?” he asked finally.
She nodded. “And you?”
As she listened to him, she felt a reprieve from any conversation about what she was doing here, about the breakdown of her marriage with all the questions that elicited. About why. No, for a while they would talk about their children. She would tell him about Rosemary now living in an apartment she shared with a friend and Paul at home probably tempted to have the wild parties she’d said were “off limits.”
“Sorry, Paul,” she’d said. “Not more than one friend at a time.”
Her mind wandered as she thought of her children until a loud clearing of the throat caught her attention. She looked across at Lucien.
“They’re all living away from here now,” he was saying.
And she could tell that she’d missed things she couldn’t ask about now. How many were there in his family? Were they boys or girls? What were they doing? She supposed she could ask him where they were as he’d just told her none of them were in Ile d’Or any more.
7.
AS MICHELLE DROVE toward the dress shop, up the street from The Flamingo, the car radio was playing. Leonard Cohen sang in one long drone that sent shivers through her, an icon who had pierced the barriers of her existence, moving her into an appreciation of English lyrics she usually reserved for French songs. She thought Nick might understand.
She was surprised to find someone already waiting at the door to Chic Choc when she parked in front of the shop. It was Charmaine, the young woman with a friendly smile who worked in the drug store.
“Est-ce que la robe est arrivée?” Did the dress arrive? Charmaine asked as Michelle walked across the sidewalk. Fair hair pulled back, immaculate makeup on her eyes and lips, Charmaine was becoming a good customer.
Michelle smiled and waved Charmaine into the shop as they exchanged the usual pleasantries. Both of them spoke in French. Since her mother died there was little occasion for Michelle to use English. She hadn’t visited her mother’s grave in a while. Maybe it was time. Although she had been to Francine’s and her father’s only the previous day. What would it have been like if her sister had lived? Nothing would have been the same, but she had no idea how it would have been different. Except her mother’s sadness would not have happened, the blank stares that Michelle began to encounter from the time they heard about the accident. And her Pa’s anger, which acquired a new dimension then. It simmered for days on end and then there would be an explosion. She’d learned to come in late or stay away when she could feel that coming. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising she married young. She wanted to get as far away from her family, and the north, as she could then. For a while, she’d succeeded.
“It’s in the back waiting for you,” Michelle said. A special dress she’d picked out in Montreal, one with two thin shoulder straps holding up a low-cut top that would have the men lining up for a dance on New Year’s Eve. It was dark midnight blue with a sheen and a few beads sewn into the bodice in a delicate pattern. “Come try it on.”
“The dance is at The Flamingo,” Charmaine said.
“Yes.” That was where it had been held for years. Proud of the spirit at his club, her father had started the tradition of a New Year’s Eve dance. Although he’d often told her he wished he’d called the nightclub The Flamenco.
“I should have listened to your mother,” he said. Elaine had told him that Flamingo sounded tacky. “She told me about the wonderful Spanish dance and I didn’t pay attention.”
Instead he was stuck with pink swizzle sticks with flamingos on them. And flamingos everywhere inside the club. At least no one had put any of the pink birds on his grave, Michelle thought, smiling to herself.
Her father had met her mother in Edinburgh during a blackout, which was his story. An English girl from Bristol, he’d said. He was supposed to be meeting a blind date and he had her picture, but he said when he spotted this girl in the beam of the tram scanning the crowd, he tossed the photograph in a nearby bin, strode toward her, and gallantly asked her to go out with him. She was in the army, too, a payroll clerk or something. They saw a Colonel Blimp movie. Later he liked to tell the story of her mother being very shy until she met up with this Frenchie from Canada. They were married on a Sunday, the day before he left for France, the first wedding in England on a Sunday in twenty years. There had to be a special request by wire to the pope.
“Are you going?” Charmaine asked.
“Going? Going where?”
“To the New Year’s dance.”
“I haven’t thought about it yet.” Michelle wasn’t sure why as she still knew almost everyone in town. Ever since she’d delivered the local weekly paper as a child. In those days, the Dion family lived in a shingled house just beyond the company houses. The next one was where the Mitchells lived. Coming back onto mine property, the green house next door to the Mitchell’s seemed a smaller version of one of the bunkhouses closer to the mine, with a lot of rooms. There were so many people in that house, she couldn’t keep them straight. Just as she was getting to know who one was, someone different would pay her. They talked to her in French or heavily accented English and she said thank you or merci when they handed her the money. She figured they all worked either at one of the mines or at the lumber mill.
Charmaine pulled her boots off before taking the dress and entering the change room. Soon her jacket and skirt were flung over the top of the door, her stockinged feet peeking out from underneath where there was an open space. When she came out, she stood in front of the mirror, pulling the bodice up so that it fit snugly over her breasts. Michelle stood behind her and adjusted the material over the young woman’s hips.
“I don’t know,” Charmaine said as if she were visualizing herself at the dance and finding the image wanting.
“It needs to be shortened a bit,” Michelle said, measuring in her mind’s eye the younger woman’s appearance when this one small task was accomplished. Stunning, she thought, although she knew Charmaine couldn’t see that yet. “Do you want me to pin it up?” she asked.
As Michelle pinned up the hem, Charmaine began to smile. She, too, could see now how well the dress suited her. It dawned on Michelle in that moment that she was content here. Her childhood recollections were of a world that still felt safe, it was true. She hadn’t been aware of the rugged nature of the town then, or that there might be places that were different. Until her mother counted airplanes for the Distant Early Warning line, recruited by the government during the Cold War to look for signs of an impending attack from Russia, it hadn’t dawned on Michelle that there might be dangers somewhere out in the world that could affect her. In the winter, she’d imagine she was an Eskimo, living in an igloo. As children, she and her friends hollowed out spaces in the huge snow banks the ploughs left and these became homes or forts. Huddling down behind or inside the snow banks, she could visualize husky dogs pulling sleighs across large, empty expanses. When she skied, she strapped on her skis at the back door and headed out along trails to get across town. No one ever thought a bear or a cougar or some other wild animal might attack. This was how they moved around. Deeper in the woods, the prospectors wore snowshoes.
So once again, Michelle became a northerner. Once again she lived in a town where the neighbours all likely knew what she was doing. It used to bother her, but now it had its advantages. She didn’t think they knew how often she went to the cemetery and stood beside her parents’ graves where, two years after her return, her mother had also been buried, though on the opposite side of the highway from her father and Francine. People often don’t grasp that you have a relationship with your parents that continues after they die, she thought. Her picture of them as well as her relationship to them kept on changing and evolving. What troubled her seemed to alter over time as she understood them better. And her visits at the cemetery had both strengthened and calmed her.
She was often told it had been a brave decision to leave Dominic. She’d known she had to; what would the kids do without a mother? So, with Elise and Dawn in tow, gradually she fit into the life of the town, which had become a thriving northern community. The airstrip was used by planes flying to the hydroelectric development at James Bay, the industrial park flourished, and although some mines closed, there always seemed to be others opening.
“What do you think?” Charmaine asked, gazing intently into the mirror as she turned to inspect herself from every side.
Michelle wished momentarily that she was young again, with endless choices still waiting to surprise her. Waiting for the dance on New Year’s Eve with great expectation, ready to whirl around the floor. Perhaps she’d have a date, perhaps she wouldn’t. Either way, she’d be aware of all the people around the floor watching her, admiring her.
“Wonderful,” she said, smoothing the dress at the back.
“How long would it take for it to be ready?” Charmaine asked.
“Does it feel like the right length now?”
“Oui.”
“Only a day or two,” Michelle said. She finished pinning the dress up all around now that Charmaine had decided, measuring first with a dressmaker’s ruler and pressing a small rubber bulb that sprayed white powdered chalk on the hem line to make sure it was even all the way around. Charmaine went back into the change room and handed the dress to Michelle through the door.
Michelle put it on top of her sewing machine. If business was slow, she could start hemming the dress that afternoon. If she were busy, it would wait until after she closed the shop in the evening. But the more she could do now, before the season was really underway, the easier life would be as the festivities took over.
When Charmaine left, Michelle put a plastic cover over the dress and hung it near the machine. She wished one of her daughters still lived here, but she understood why they had left as soon as they could. Opportunities in a small town could not compare to those they would find in a metropolitan city. But why Dawn had become so much of a wanderer, never able to settle anywhere, worried her. What the girls had experienced would have had an impact. The expression on her daughters’ faces when their father became rough and used filthy language was all she’d needed to convince her that she had to get them as far away from him as possible. He’d found them before she left Montreal and taken both girls to his car, screaming as he dragged them from the house. The neighbours heard something and called the police, but it was hours before they brought Elise and Dawn back.
Michelle felt her own parents had lived out a kind of grand love story, however sordid some of the details seemed at times. Although Maurice Dufresne was her mother’s only love, she never learned his language. At first, they lived on mine property, where most of the other residents lived. Except the men in the bunkhouses whom they rarely saw dressed in anything other than miners’ garb heading underground — the English, French and the DPs who came from Europe. Finns, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians. It was said that the Finns were the best shaft sinkers in the business. Some of them lived on the mine property. One had a sauna and after sitting in it, a bunch of naked Finns would jump out into the snow.
Now when she stood at her father’s grave or kneeled in front of it, she would trace the letters of his name and whisper to him, telling him about his granddaughters, so young when he died that he’d scarcely known them. He was there for the ceremony when a street was named for him, but a year later he was gone.
Dear Michelle, I’m sorry for your loss and my heart is with you. Your father was a man of courage. He gave a lot to this town.
A note had come from Mrs. Allen, the wife of the stockbroker who was there in the early days, another from the daughter of one of the general practitioners, and oddly enough, one from Nick Petranovich. There was no letter from Libby Muir, but she hadn’t expected one. If she’d known Libby’s father had died, she wouldn’t have written a note either. But the hope held for most of her life, that the feeling of being ostracized would go away, that she’d finally been accepted, never happened. To the mine engineer and his daughter, to everyone in that family, Michelle was always her father’s daughter. And yes, I was my father’s daughter. But if he were a high-grader, I didn’t have anything to do with it.
8.
NICK LAY ON the bed in the former bunkhouse, more recently converted into a bed and breakfast, on the main street of what had been Bourlamaque, now absorbed into Ile d’Or. The other mine was just beyond the houses, close enough to Alpha that he wondered if long ago there had been competing claims. He was conscious of history surrounding him, a history that included him. Ile d’Or was a frontier town when he was a child, Bourlamaque where the two mines were and the houses on company property. He supposed that the miners who slept where he now lay must have used a nearby path that went through the bush to the entrance of the mine. He hadn’t walked that way yet. An image of the house in Lawrence Park, a solid brick structure overlooking a ravine on an affluent tree-lined street in north Toronto, where he’d lived with Marie and his daughter, flitted through his mind. A stack of dirty laundry and an unmade bed awaited him there. What good was that house to him now? Maybe he should sell it.
His belongings could go in a locker and he would store whatever furniture he wanted to keep. Maybe he’d move into a hotel room or a flat until he decided whether he wanted to buy a condominium or rent something. For a long time, he’d wanted to go to India and follow the Ganges up to its source in the mountains. He wouldn’t have time to go there now, but he could start to plan such a trip. He would bathe in the Ganges. Maybe write a book about it, although someone had probably already done that. And why would he want to write a book? The few articles he’d written had taken more time than he wanted to spend. As well as more concentration and isolation than he enjoyed. Dealing with individual patients in his practise already required enough of that. But the idea of both the trip and a book wouldn’t go away.
What about a novel about this town? He could remember his father, sitting at the table in the kitchen. Sometimes he’d talk about gold, saying he knew that some men stole it. All he needed was to end up in a jail somewhere, Roman Petranovich had told his family. He was an honest man and Nick respected that about him, but he still bore the wounds of the thick strap his father’s strong right arm had wielded. Not the red marks and bruises of his childhood, but the wounds that were still burned into his psyche.
But the book wouldn’t be about that, rather something to do with high-grading. He could give some of Roman’s characteristics to this high-grader, a tough man, probably not a French man like Maurice Dufresne. He wouldn’t tell Michelle. She might be offended, thinking that he was basing a character on her father even so. To remove any doubt, he’d make him a DP who came from Russia or Poland. A displaced person. That’s what he himself was called as a child. Either that or an Hinglish Polack. His character would be clever, able to fool both the bosses and the police. He wouldn’t get caught. Even when security became more ingenious, he would get enough gold out of the mine to do something that made him stand out. It would be something fancy. Not a dive with hookers like the Purple Pig. In the early days, the man who managed the mill owned the Purple Pig, the local whore house. On payday, he met his men there and that was where they spent their money. It was on the main street of Ile d’Or next to Archie’s, the dry cleaners, not far away from a slight rise in the centre of town where St. Luc’s, the Roman Catholic church, towered over everything. When the first traffic lights were put in, one was installed in front of the rectory. The local priest never thought the red light was for him and after looking both ways, he drove right through it. No, the establishment in Nick’s novel wouldn’t resemble the Purple Pig and it would be even more substantial than The Flamingo. A hotel perhaps. With a dance hall. A dining room. Chandeliers.
The high-grader might have accomplices on surface. After he left the cage that brought him up from underground and before he reached “the dry” where he changed his clothes, he would need someone to pick up what he left beside the path cached in small rock piles. Before that became necessary, he would sometimes hide the contraband on his person, somewhere no one would think to look. Or he might throw it over the fence and retrieve it later. That way he would receive his cut from the big guys in New York and wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else. There were various middlemen involved who would reimburse the miners for a fraction of the gold price. Everyone took his cut on the way to the ultimate buyer.
At some stage, “the dry” was split into two parts — the first an area where miners took off their street clothes and stored them in lockers. After taking showers, they donned clothes that they wore only underground and at quitting time they did the reverse. The work clothes were wet and dirty when the men came up to surface and were hung on a basket and raised high above to dry. Then the miners would walk naked through the security and shower area to where they would don their street clothes again. He’d heard that the rate of thievery fell then.
Nick had heard a lot about “the dry” because every time his father went on or off shift, he went through it. It was from him that Nick knew the revamped “dry” had made it more difficult for anyone to steal anything. How did Maurice get away with it? Nick wondered. It had been rumoured, and believed by many, that his high-grading was what helped him open The Flamingo.
