For Fortune, this was the worst thing in the world. He didn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand it, and the more he tried, the more it worried him. He did not want to tell his mother. His father had died years ago – a horse had kicked him in the back.
“No, I won’t tell Mama,” he said, and this seemed to relieve him.
There was still sun on the ground and he went out for a walk.
He walked by Armand’s office – which before had seemed so important to him. But now, to him at least, it only seemed lonely and entirely insignificant, with sunlight on the window – as if it had been always meant to be there, but Armand himself did not know this.
“It’s better,” Armand told him, when he asked about it. Fortune was so shaken up he could hardly ask. He didn’t understand it. But Armand really didn’t know how to explain it and only could say: “It’s better.”
“It’s better,” Fortune nodded in a peculiar way. He thought his brother would deny it. But Armand, looking up at him over the top of a magazine, only said: “It’s better.”
He told him that there were lots of young girls now who got pregnant, and had no other recourse – some were raped or molested, or unmarried. But at any rate they did not want to bring unwanted children into the world, and anyway, it was better – he had always agreed with it. Besides, he only did fifteen or twenty a year.
“Fifteen or twenty,” Fortune said, his broad ignorant back, in a woollen shirt catching the sun. Armand looked at his brother. Fortune’s eyes showed that he was in disbelief. He sat there, with his hands folded together. Two of his big brown fingers were missing. He had lost them with an axe, when Armand was fifteen.
“Fifteen or twenty.”
“Oh, you’ll understand,” Armand said, smiling and trying to be reasonable. “Of all people you should know how Mom suffered with all of her children. It’s a good thing if they are unwanted and an unneeded burden.”
Armand had been premature. When he was born they put him in a shoe box near the stove. He was so tiny. Even now his eyes were weak, which made him appear more meticulous than he actually was, and he had allergies and caught colds. Fortune was always asking about his health, and every Christmas Fortune’s wife knitted Armand a sweater.
“And that’s the problem – they are unwanted,” Armand was saying. “And will end up as a burden, in jail or something, and you take how many kids are abused – or things like that.”
Fortune sat with his head down, as if he was being scolded. The big shoulders were still, and Armand could not help remembering how men had jumped on those shoulders when Fortune was protecting him, while he himself was frightened, and only managed to run away.
And Armand looked at those strong burdened shoulders, and felt sad when he remembered how the men had hit his brother with a stone over the head.
Strange how men see things. Mrs. Savard, who had a pale-reddish complexion, and deep lines under her eyes, whose hair was too long, and hung down her back when she pushed her shopping cart with her four children, took pills.
And that’s why Fortune thought their lives were so above his own, and why he thought Jennifer Savard was so beautiful.
If she was not frail, if she did not laugh at the wrong time because she was nervous, if she did not get tired, Fortune would not have thought this. And each of her kids had a problem of some slightly indefinite nature. One was hyperactive and had painted his entire body silver and walked to school. The oldest girl, who was twelve, still sucked her thumb.
There was also a problem with their education. To Fortune, they always seemed to be bussed somewhere. They just did not go to school like everyone else – which Fortune’s wife mistook as being very grandiose. But because there was a fight between Mr. and Mrs. Savard about where they should go to school, the children were sent one place and then another with no real foundation. The youngest, a boy who looked so much like Armand, went to a French kindergarten.
Armand and Jennifer lived in a huge brick house near the edge of the village – two miles down the road from where Armand had grown up, and, in fact, quite near the local dump. His wife hated it there. It smelled of burnt embers in the dying autumn sunlight, smelled of the ghosts of fishing nets, and the pale empty sky.
But Armand could think of nowhere else to go.
One day last autumn the oldest girl, Teddy, had pooped herself at a recital at school. Armand and Jennifer had not known there was a problem. But now they did all the things other middle-class families did. They got her to a psychiatrist, in Moncton, three times a month.
Jennifer was the one who took her, and paid for it. She drove the long monotonous tortured way, through Rogersville – in the spring it didn’t seem to be a road at all but just a grey ugly marker.
Jennifer had her own bank account. Armand never gave her any money and they were in debt, but still and all she managed to save fifteen hundred dollars – and this was the money she used for Teddy.
Teddy sucked her thumb and stared out the window as they drove back and forth.
What the psychiatrist doubtlessly found out was what Fortune had seen. Their large house was empty. There were one or two pictures on the walls, but Armand didn’t collect art like people thought. He’d only seen two pictures that he’d liked, and thought that he should collect them. Other than that the house was large and barren, and certain parts of it seemed to crack. The worst of it was it was entirely new. The psychiatrist likely found out from Teddy that Jennifer hated it, especially in November before the snow – when the ground, and the windows were raw, and the whole sky seemed to bleed into the earth.
And the psychiatrist might have found out about the bicycle. All last summer Daniel, the boy who’d painted himself silver, wanted a bicycle. But they just couldn’t go to a store.
Armand was against that. It was here where his meticulous nature showed itself. It was always shown in a slightly perverse way, over seemingly mundane things.
“No, I’m not going to a store here,” he said.
And when they asked why, he said that he didn’t want others, especially in his family, to know their business.
And so they ordered a bike from the catalogue. And there began the wait. Daniel waited the whole summer for his bicycle to come on the bus.
He would go down to the small store where the bus pulled in every afternoon, and wait on the steps with his two sisters. But the bike did not come. Until August. And when it did come, it was not like other bikes.
It wasn’t like the bikes in the store window. It hadn’t been put together.
Jennifer was so outraged at this final wound to her child she refused to allow Fortune to put it together. The children had naturally run to Fortune, who had taken them fishing, who had helped them make kites.
But when he came over to put the bike together, Jennifer said, “No, his father will.”
And the boy stood in the breezeway crying. Fortune nodded simple-heartedly. He smelled of holy water, which his wife gave him to bless the bike.
Finally, in September, Jennifer and Teddy got the instructions out. The air was filled with the smell of heavy rain and already the leaves were blowing from the trees through the banging breezeway doors.
Then the youngster got on the bike, went round the lane as fast as he could, shifted gears, looked back, and waved to his mother, who stood alone at the side of the garage, watching him. Then the handle bars came loose, and the wheel wobbled, and they had to put it away.
Perhaps the psychiatrist learned that Jennifer thought Armand shouldn’t leave them alone so much, which showed in the summer when he spent time with his friends at the lodge far away from them in Doaktown and played golf fanatically, while they sat in a rented cottage in Shediac. Perhaps this is what the fights were about – about the veneer of life that Armand had rested his hopes on – which he took to be worldly.
Perhaps the psychiatrist had no answers for them. But after a while, they stopped going to her.
Now, Jennifer was sometimes see
n driving her old Datsun station wagon through town, chain-smoking, with one or two of the kids in the back seat.
Because of the emptiness in their lives, the seeming emptiness, at any rate, Jennifer started to take the children to Mass. She looked helpless with her four children in church.
Not a Catholic herself, she did not know when to genuflect or bless herself – and two of the children had not been to church before.
Jennifer had lost her direction, and only wanted to do something for her children whom she loved.
The priest, Father LeBlanc, the same priest who had hit Ivan, had now reformed himself. It was a hard struggle – but that’s what life is finally about – and he had become a kinder, gentler man. He had not lost his temper in twelve years.
Perhaps at first he wasn’t meant to be a priest, as many priests perhaps aren’t. But over the years he realized that he had a God. He always had been an abrupt, short-tempered Frenchman, with dark blistering eyes. But he had seen the wounded, the ill, and the sick, and he found out he could help them by counting himself among them.
And there was prosperity also – he knew some ten millionaires who had made their money on what fascinated Antony so much, the snow-crab industry. But with their money came more problems, rivalry amongst the family members that was unheard of before. And he walked amongst them, carrying the stigma of his past, his bullying, his bigotry, like a rock up a hill.
He often thought about Ivan, whose name he did not remember, and whose whereabouts he did not know. But that was one of the regrets of life, the inability to atone to those sad contemplative faces, which visit you in the dark or when the snow is falling down.
Jennifer and her children helped him as much as he helped them. Because he laughed good-naturedly with them – all the children wanting to go to confession immediately because they had terrible sins to confess.
They seemed to cling to him, too, as if they were insecure birds.
But when Jennifer was making plans for Teddy’s confirmation she began to lose sight of what she wanted. After a while they didn’t come back. Where they stood, all about him near the altar that day, all ready to confess to great crimes, with Jennifer smiling on their behalf, seemed now to be an empty spot.
He didn’t see the children again unless they were driving with their mother in the old Datsun station wagon, the brake lights caked with mud.
He discovered that it was Jennifer herself. She had turned, bolted in another direction, looking for another way.
Savard spent a good deal of time with Ruby. And for a while that summer he believed the reason he was free was because he was trapped. If he wasn’t trapped by his marriage, then he couldn’t possibly show how he was broad-minded enough to be free.
Savard felt estranged now from his own children. They all looked at him with wounded eyes, they all seemed to think he was a contributor to their unhappiness.
It was not just the bicycle. It was the light fixtures for the house. He had to argue with salesmen so much, and be so abrupt, that finally he didn’t buy any. And so the light fixtures did not come, and bare bulbs hung from the walls and ceilings.
Everyone talked about his car, but he hid it, and sometimes he would not park it in his yard, but in the garage down the street.
When Savard swung a golf club, one could see how impatient he was by his short, fierce little chops. And he would always look about after he swung the club, as if he had demonstrated something in his nature that he secretly disliked and was trying to improve.
He did not give his wife money. And at the grocery store they would stand together, and in front of people he would count out the tens and twenties she would have to use to pay for the food, with a golf tartan on his head, his hair curly. He was shorter than his wife by three inches.
Other men had done this, he had seen it all his life, and he would do it also.
His oldest boy was forty pounds overweight and took piano lessons at the Ecole Musique from Mrs. McGraw. And when Jennifer drove her children downtown, his huge head was seen in the back seat, in the middle of his siblings’ little heads.
Armand couldn’t give up his family – that is, his own brothers and sisters. Almost to a man, or woman, they envied him, so there were no light fixtures in his house, and there was no bicycle from a store, and there was no new car for his wife – and his wonderful car, which he couldn’t afford, sat in a garage down the street.
Except for Fortune, his brothers sneered at him, phoned him drunk in the middle of the night to bawl him out for giving them the wrong medicine, and then seeing him the next day they would be overcome with shame, apologize, and ask for money.
He hated it here and yet he wouldn’t go.
This idea that Ruby and he cared for each other came partly from this.
But gradually he found that she wanted to be seen and needed to do things that attracted attention to herself. One day she followed him about the golf course, laughing whenever he hit a shot poorly. She was wearing a short summer skirt and a loose top, so the nipples of her breasts were visible.
And, later that afternoon, when they were alone, he had to make up a lie and tell her that he was happy she had come. And she simply looked at him, and snapped a match to light her cigarette.
Armand liked to believe he didn’t consider these things wrong – the church he hated did. Yet once he found himself embroiled with Ruby, he was priggish, deep in his heart. This priggishness was borne out in tantrums at home and in his needless anger with Jennifer and the children.
His oldest son’s birthday was the day Cindi went to the office. Coming into the house he gave his wife and children a terrible lecture. That was brought on because of the nervousness he felt over the abortion. Why did they wait for him? Didn’t they know – what? Wasn’t he busy?
They had not wanted to cut the cake until their father got home, and yet he was angry and didn’t want any cake. Jennifer tried to be happy, but this only dampened his mood, and he callously derided his son for being overweight. Then he went to leave the dining room.
Only then Armand realized that his son’s friend – a little girl from the Ecole Musique – was standing behind him. Up until this point she had been smiling. But, when Armand noticed her, she looked frightened.
Suddenly she turned and tried to run away.
Before Jennifer got to her, she was at the back door. Armand could hear her trying not to cry.
He turned to go to the little girl to apologize.
Then he looked at his son.
“You shouldn’t have more than two pieces,” he said, trying to be brave and joke.
He felt ashamed. He went upstairs, and phoned the Moncton Hospital to see how Brenda Corrigan was doing. And at this moment he was deeply concerned and wished he could have acted better towards her. He remembered how Brenda spoke, with such a twang, and suddenly he loved the memory of her voice because it reminded him of all things that were innocent.
“Tell her husband to phone me,” he said.
He put the phone it its cradle and sat all night in the dark.
After Ruby brought Cindi to his office – a small, slow girl with a damp face – whom he for some reason (he did not know why) did not like and could not look in the eye – the summer was finished for them both.
He wanted to act kindly to his family but he did not know how. Jennifer painted the kitchen cupboards. She was obsessively painting. The air was scalded with paint, which Armand was allergic to, so it was like a bright yellow hell.
And Ruby flew zigzagging into the dark once again.
11
Though both Eugene and Cindi were scared of Ruby, both of them pretended to themselves and to each other that they weren’t. He did not know why he felt he musn’t disappoint Ruby, but he knew he was certain of doing it sooner or later.
The very idea that he was from Montreal allowed Ruby to control everything by saying: “Well you understand – you’re from Montreal.”
And so he would walk about understan
ding things, being from Montreal.
In fact, all about him was proof that things were just as accessible here as they were anywhere else. And within everything, within the parties, the lobster boils, and the convertible rides at night, within all of this, from the Mateus wine he got sick on to his spontaneous acceptance that he was from Montreal and therefore was cosmopolitan enough to agree with things – within all of this was a falseness about his position that he understood, and he knew that everyone else did too.
He was also, as many men are of women they know, frightened of Ruby’s temper. When she got angry he witnessed some terrible scenes, in the house and at work. She had taken her last car, a Pinto, and had driven it through a tavern window because her high school boyfriend was sitting with someone she didn’t like. And when she got angry, as all people, she was compelled to continue and delighted in her ability to lose control.
By now the hot flagging days, the retarred roadways, the dust-covered leaves, the shapes and smells of flat tires hanging down from silent backyard branches, made everyone in the group tired of one another. Dorval wanted to go home, back to Montreal.
“You have to stay with me and help me out,” Ruby said. “Besides, what’s in Montreal?”
Cindi would stand between them, looking up at one, and then at the other, as they argued.
“What’s in Montreal?” Dorval would say. But then he would shrug, look out the open window with its chipped paint ledge, and stare down at a few dusty small sparrows twittering near a puddle in the dirt parking lot.
“You don’t have to stay on my account,” Cindi would say. “I’m fine.”
Her mother had come down finally to visit her, and kept hoping that Cindi wasn’t causing all kinds of trouble for them. Cindi sat rigidly at the other end of the metal table and watched everyone with eyes of terror. Her mother was still trying to look like an actress out of the fifties. She was good-natured and only wanted to be part of the good time everyone seemed to be having here. Now and then she put her hand on Dorval’s thigh, and patted it maternally.
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Page 12