River City

by John Farrow

  She had to educate her sitters, though. One guy, when she was nine, asked if she wanted a beer. She told him that he shouldn’t offer young girls beer, that it was his job to make certain that she didn’t drink beer. That it was his job, even, to make sure that she got to bed at a decent hour.

  He shrugged and swigged his Molson Ex. After a while, he asked, “So what’s a decent hour?”

  She wasn’t sure how honest she should be. “It depends.”

  “On what?” He was a thin man with a bald head and a waxed handlebar moustache he constantly shaped. He wore two gold bands through his left earlobe, unheard of at the time.

  “On what’s on television. The Honeymooners starts soon. I should be allowed to watch that. Then I got homework because it’s a school night. After that, I should read a little. If a good show’s on—I like westerns—I could watch them, too, to keep you company. How late, I dunno for sure—midnight?”

  Midnight, then, but no beer.

  As a further bonus, Anik had places to go during the day whenever she was not in school and her mother busily sewed. The child was introduced to a world that stimulated her interests beyond the meagre poverty of her district. Carole Clément made certain that the men understood to not expose her daughter to anything shady, but they all pooh-poohed her concerns, reminding her that Anik was Roger’s little girl.

  “You think I’m gonna risk crawling halfway to heaven—if I’m lucky enough to get that far—on my hands and knees, my knuckles all scraped and bloody, every inch of the way beggin’ my Lord and Saviour to gimme a half-assed chance here, only to find out I gotta answer to Roger ‘cause I did sumthin’ wrong to his kid? Lady, are you plain crazy or just nuts?”

  After a time, she trusted Anik to their company. The men enjoyed protecting the fatherless child, taking care of their extended family on behalf of the one who’d been struck down. Apart from her sitters, Anik could depend upon half a dozen of her dad’s buddies to keep an eye peeled for her welfare, and among these, no one paid closer attention than the former mayor.

  As she walked on her own to his house she was daydreaming and playing with her yo-yo. Working on her sleepers. She needed a new one, she believed, a Master’s Series, if she wanted to improve on a minute, but putting her old one away seemed wrong to her and probably unlucky. So she settled for the sixty seconds she could make hers sleep now. Bouncing along, she threw in a Walk the Dog and a Rock the Baby, tricks she could perform without concentrating, and waiting for a red light, she shyly demonstrated her latest moves for a little old lady who seemed nearsighted but quite enthralled. Saddle the Pony. Snake the Ladder. Anik smiled bashfully as the woman bent lower and closer to peer at her showing off, and she received an approving nod before stepping smartly across on the green.

  Pat the Monkey—or, as she and her friends called it, Pat the Monkey’s Butt.

  She took long, bobbing strides.

  Anik had sprouted, becoming tall among her peers, skinny and lanky-looking, like a boy. She wore her hair cut similarly to a boy’s trim, a tad longer because she adored Elvis Presley’s hair. She had a D.A. like his at the back—a duck’s ass. Her mom didn’t allow her to go totally boyish on the cut. Close enough, though. Some of the men were calling her a tomboy, and they chuckled when they said it, loving the idea. “Eleven’s the perfect age,” the old mayor said. She didn’t know about that. She had big brown eyes and a sprinkle of freckles across her thin dewdrop nose. The first girl in her neighbourhood to routinely wear jeans, she was also the only one to wear a denim jacket on cool days. Her mom had made it for her. Walking to see the mayor, she wore a light-blue sleeveless blouse without a collar, the most feminine top she owned. He’d warned her, “Next year at this time, we’ll send a limo to pick you up. A Cadillac! Armed guards, we’ll need, to keep the boys away.”

  She didn’t know about that, but guessed that next year would never arrive for the old mayor.

  He adored her.

  She loved him back. She was going to miss him.

  Such a huge man! He made her laugh all the time. On her birthday and at Christmas, he gave her wonderful presents. She’d not been accustomed to that, except from her dad. At Easter, he planned hunts. She scoured his entire house to bring back chocolate eggs tucked under furnishings and collect them in a big bowl. All the while, the fat old mayor would help himself from the bowl, unwrapping and eating up the chocolates almost as quickly as she could gather them, so that she had to go faster, faster, racing around, and only when she had it filled up, despite his best efforts to maintain her pace, would he stop eating, his lips and fingers all smeared with gooey chocolate, and concede, “Yep, I think you’ve found more than I can eat. You whupped me, fair and square.”

  She’d stumble home with the big bowl of chocolate Easter eggs in her arms.

  Best of all, the old mayor would sometimes talk about her dad. He might say, “I used to go outside to watch him play on the river.” Anik would know that he was talking about the rink in the internment camp, because her mother had explained that to her, although the old mayor would hedge on that part of the story. Everything was large about him: his nose, his chin, the way his cheeks expanded as he smiled, which widened his big face, and his voice, immense, filled a room even when he spoke softly. The big voice caused everything he had to say sound more substantial. Especially if he was talking about her dad. “It wasn’t fair, him playing in that pickup game. He was better than the rest. In the NHL, okay, maybe he was no All-Star. He was a tough guy, not a skater, not a shooter, but on the river in that pickup game among the pris—” Everything he talked about felt so large that, if he inserted a gap into a story, the space felt cavernous. “On the river in that game, he skated circles around everybody. Scored a few goals, too. I always bet on his team, and me, I never bet dumb.”

  Her mother had explained to her that the old mayor was dying. If she wanted to see him again, she’d better get cracking.

  Yet Anik put off the visit. She was scared of that, someone dying.

  She didn’t like it that her dad had died. That he’d been killed. She missed his presence in the house—the way his heavy shoes would tromp across the floor and the old, slumping house would rattle. She felt so safe then, and hadn’t felt safe since. She missed him tucking her in at night. Although she probably wouldn’t let it happen now, after he was gone Anik had missed being tickled. Her dad had been such a great tickler, which remained an easy thing to remember, and sometimes that worried her the most: that someday she wouldn’t remember everything important. She might forget him. One thing she wouldn’t forget, she knew, was the way he died. A dagger. Stuck in him. She could never get that thought out of her head and it made her feel sad whenever she dwelled on it. She imagined that her dad had felt very lonely, bleeding to death in the park. She liked to imagine that he died thinking of her, but that thought made her even sadder.

  The old mayor kept her in stitches with his stories. If he died and stopped telling stories, her dad, she felt, might be further away. He might disappear.

  She liked the old mayor’s stories about himself, too. He’d had dinner with the king and queen of England! He made the king laugh. Everyone in the banquet hall noticed and wondered what on earth the mayor of Montreal could be saying to cause the king to laugh so hard.

  “He was sitting beside me, the king, back before the war,” Camillien Houde confided to the girl, “and he said to me, ‘Mr. Mayor, what are you reading?’ For always, my head was down, reading, even though we were at the dinner table. And I said, ‘Your Majesty’—that’s what you call a king, you know,” the old mayor explained to the girl, whispering. “‘Your Majesty,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to memorize this list. It’s a very important list. My advisors worked on it for a day and a half before they gave it to me. It’s all the things I’m not supposed to talk to you about.’ Then I said, ‘Here, Your Majesty, why don’t you take the list. If I talk about anything that’s on it, remind me to be quiet.’ I handed him my list, and the kin
g, he just laughed and laughed. He loved my list! Do you know what?”

  “What?” Anik would always ask, although she heard the story often.

  “That’s what we talked about for the rest of the night. The items on my list. King George, he went down my forbidden list. One by one.”

  She knew a man who had dined with a king. That made her feel that she, too, was special. Her father, she remembered, used to call her Princess. Hadn’t he? Or was it only the old mayor who called her that? Was she already forgetting?

  As she approached the house on St. Hubert Street in the quartier east of the mountain known as the Plateau, she noticed a heightened level of activity. Comings and goings were common around the home of Camillien Houde, which was one reason she liked being there. She felt at times that she lived at the centre of the world, where all decisions were made, but today the number of vehicles and the solemn huddle of men in their trench coats and fedoras worried her. She slowed down. She’d been Walking the Dog, but the yo-yo spun out of control. She had to catch it and rewind the string after working a knot free.

  Anik continued towards the house, yet her pace had slowed so much she was easily overtaken by her mother’s best friend, Father François, who clamped an arm around her shoulder, gave her a quick squeeze, and urged her to keep up as he dashed on ahead. He seemed to have an inkling of what troubled her.

  “Not to worry. Nothing bad will happen today.”

  “Why are you running?” Anik asked him, skipping a few steps to catch up. For a large, rather sloppy, man, the priest walked fast.

  “Do you call this running? I’m walking briskly.” He swung his arms and marched along. Except for his stride, he looked like a priest today, wearing his black cassock. She rarely saw him on the street in a robe.

  “Then why are you walking briskly?”

  “That’s my business, young lady. I’m not telling you.”

  “Walk by yourself, then.” She broke pace, deliberately dragging her heels.

  Father François spun around. “I’m trying to lose weight. Or, shall we say, restrict how much I gain. There. Are you satisfied now?”

  She had one more critical question to ask before skipping along beside him again. “Why are those people over there just standing?”

  “Reporters do that. They stand around,” Father François explained, and he returned to his enforced gait. “How they do it yet remain thin is beyond me. They’re vultures, Anik. They wait for death so they can gnaw on the bones. Maybe that’s why they’re so thin. It’s their shabby vulture diets.”

  He cast a glance over his shoulder. The girl appeared to be taking him seriously, so he abruptly changed his tone. He slowed down and clamped an arm around her again. “They want to be the first to praise him. When a man of his stature dies, everyone wants to say what a wonderful man he was. For a while, we forget the bad and talk only about the good.”

  “Even you?” Anik assessed.

  The priest shot her a glance. He considered her question alarmingly adult. “Even me,” he said. “We don’t speak poorly of the dead in case someone up above is listening while the man’s fate is being assessed. Once he’s found his place on the other side, what we say won’t matter. That’s the logic behind it all. Anik, for what it’s worth, I share such superstitions. I’m only too human. Come on, let’s go in.”

  First, she wanted to know, “Is he sick today? Will he die?” She grabbed his wrist to keep him from going straight in. The gathering of the press—down the block, a television crew had set up its apparatus—made her apprehensive.

  Father François caught the distress in her voice. “He’s a tired man,” he assured her quietly, “but nothing should be awful today. The end will come soon, the doctor says. Prepare yourself for that. You must. But I’ve spoken to him on the phone, he’s in good spirits. He’s himself. He’ll be his old self again once he sees you. For a man in his condition, a boost to the spirits is a good thing.”

  She took a few steps with him before she asked, “Is that what I am? A boost?” She wondered at times why a man who had dined with a king ever bothered with her.

  He hesitated. Sometimes the young grew up more quickly than he realized. “We’ll go in together, shall we?”

  Camillien Houde was delighted to greet Anik, and equally content to spot the priest. As Father François entered the room, a bevy of older women hovered in attendance, a few at prayer, others in full throttle. They had come to attend to the mayor’s passing, and Houde was clearly bored by them while detesting the solemnity of their project.

  “Ladies! Ladies!” he cried. “As you can plainly see, my spiritual advisor has arrived. Leave us now. A dying man must make time for his spiritual advisor.”

  The flap of women in their rustling crinolines departed the death chamber. Anik was wondering if she should leave as well when a covert bob of Houde’s chin kept her in the room.

  “Ah,” Houde sighed, once the three of them were alone together, “my spiritual advisor. What advice do you have for me today?”

  From under his cassock, Father François pulled out a flask. “Mountain whiskey.”

  “Oh, it’s my good friend Jack! Come to pay me a visit.” The old mayor ripped off the cap and helped himself to a long pull. “Aaahhh,” he said with exaggerated satisfaction. “That’s so good.”

  A discreet knock on the door caught their attention. Anik opened up while the old mayor hid his bottle under the quilt. One of the little old ladies who’d been shooed outside had something to add. “We realized, after we were gone, that the young lady …” she let her voice trail off.

  “She may stay,” Houde told her. If he’d had the strength, he would have dressed her down for being a busybody. Instead, he told a fib to get rid of her. “She’s in training. For the convent. It’s good for her to listen to a priest counsel the dying.”

  The wee grey-headed woman nodded. With some misgiving she gazed at the girl with the yo-yo, who wore blue jeans and didn’t look anything like a novitiate. The woman told the old mayor, “You’re looking better, Mayor Houde. Your cheeks are flushed. You have your colour back!”

  The old mayor shook his left forefinger at her. “Remember that! When your final days come. Always make time for your spiritual advisor.”

  Father François crossed the floor and, smiling, closed the door on the woman.

  “What do they want from me?” Houde carped. “If I close my eyes they mention it and do the sign of the cross. If my eyes blink open again, you should hear them gasp. They thank God, as if they’re present at a miracle. Father, if a failing heart and bad blood won’t kill me, the sight of those old biddies will.”

  “We all have our crosses to bear,” Father François pointed out to him. “For you, it’s your popularity.”

  “A priest who speaks the truth. You’re a rare find, Father. Where’s that flask?”

  “In your right hand.”

  Together they comprised an odd coupling—the aging, madcap politician and the youthful, opinionated priest. They were of similar shape, although the older man, taller when upright, was also significantly more rotund. The younger man might match his girth one day, but just as a comparable height was out of the question, so would he never command the attention of a room with the old man’s panache. People felt themselves aglow in the former mayor’s presence. What made the pair seem odd to others was their political disparity. While it was true that the mayor had initially made his reputation through make-work projects during the Great Depression, creating swimming pools and baths and viaducts that drove the city into bankruptcy while allowing working people to earn a living wage, he had not identified with the left. He had frequently cussed the communists whenever mocking them might charm a vote. His support for Mussolini and the Vichy regime in France attested to a far-right bent that seemed incompatible with his choice of the notorious socialist as his priest for his final days. When Houde had first called Father François to his sickbed, he was weakening but still his old self. He broached t
he subject with the priest, who expressed his reservations. “Why me?” the younger man asked.

  They had met through Carole Clément, but neither man had had many dealings with the other.

  “Some people, reaching the end, look around for an appropriate priest,” Houde had explained.

  “What makes me appropriate?”

  “Some people, they don’t know too many priests.”

  “That’s true.” He remained skeptical. He really only knew Houde through his public image, although they shared some experiences of note. He suspected that the old mayor was Machiavellian at heart—that every decision he made contained hidden manipulations.

  “Not true of me, Father. I know more priests than I can count. Anik will tell you I have dined with kings. Well, I’ve dined with bishops, too, and a cardinal. It’s her I asked, you know, to find me a good priest.”

  Father François found himself increasingly confused. “She orchestrated this?”

  “She will confirm it. Father, you may not agree, but I am a religious man. In my way. I need a priest to attend to me. The prelates I know are political men, the lot of them. How can I possibly say my last confession to men I’ve butted heads with throughout my career? We shared good times, a few laughs … once in a blue moon we came to a meeting of the minds. We also enjoyed our share of royal fights. They may keep my secrets, Father, but the sparkle in their eyes, that light, the sense of superiority that would shine upon me in my final hour as I admit to my follies—not to mention confess to my sins—that light would not represent the warm glow of heaven. Father, it might kill me before my heart fails. Besides …” he added.