My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Across the table, Vien smiled cynically. “Small child, small problems. Give her a few years,” he said, and winked his bad eye.

  Luc shrugged. The little girl was already laughing and talking with her siblings. “You never know. Some children work out fine.”

  “They all have to go through adolescence. If they don’t act out, it’s probably grounds for worry.”

  “Not all of them bring guns to school.”

  “No,” said Vien. “No, they don’t.”

  “There have to be consequences.”

  “There will be,” said Vien. “But I don’t think expulsion will be one of them. Not this time. Think of it, Luc. If Bonnaire kicks Hugo out, how’s it going to look? We can’t risk that kind of publicity. Not right now, with our numbers so weak.”

  He sighed and reached out to retrieve the menus again from between the sugar container and their darkened jukebox. He flipped it open but didn’t look down.

  “If you ask me, the worst is already over. He’s been slapped with a suspension. And a disciplinary hearing. Bonnaire will deliver a sermon, make him feel two feet tall. But that will probably be the end of it. He’ll get some sort of a punishment— lines to copy or something. A kid who spray-painted graffiti in the schoolyard last spring spent four weekends scrubbing off the damage. That sort of thing.”

  He searched Luc’s face for a moment, then turned to the dessert list. “Can I interest you, perchance, in a bowl of Green Spot Jell-O?” He grinned, but Luc shook his head. His stomach was already burning from all the sugar in the Coke.

  Vien replaced the menu in its slot. “Have you talked to him yet?” he asked.

  Luc shook his head.

  “You should.”

  Heat flared between Luc’s ribs. He gave Vien a sharp look.

  “He’s not a bad kid,” Vien said. He looked suddenly old, a sad, asymmetrical man with uncombed hair. “He’s fourteen, Luc. Remember fourteen?”

  The heat in Luc’s chest was pulsing now. Yes, he remembered fourteen. That was how old he’d been when his father shot himself. That was how old he’d been when he swore to himself he would never, ever fail at anything.

  “Has he talked to you about anger? Bullying? Did he ever mention anybody bugging him at school?”

  Luc rubbed his solar plexus with his knuckles. He saw where Vien was going. The teachers would have talked about it. About his son, the boy with a gun and a chip on his shoulder.

  “I’m trying to help,” said Vien.

  Luc tried to look grateful. “I appreciate it,” he said, but he knew Vien saw right through him. They were back in their old dynamic. Vien meant well, but Luc had always found him irritating. Their years without contact hadn’t changed this.

  The placemats here were thin grey newsprint covered with the logos of local businesses in pale green ink: a pet store, a dry cleaner, a shop that sold fitness equipment. Luc took an edge of paper between his thumb and index finger and rolled it into a cylinder.

  “What’s behind the name change?”

  Luc looked up.

  “Why Stern, I mean?” asked Vien, unaware of how sensitive the issue was in the Lévesque household. “He even asked the school to put it on his transcripts.”

  Luc tried to compose his face, tried not to think about his burning stomach. “It’s his mother’s name.”

  “I thought she went by Lévesque,” said Vien, still oblivious.

  “She does.”

  Vien frowned.

  “He admires his grandfather,” Luc said. “When Hugo was in the sixth grade, he did a project on him. You know the kind of thing they do. A mini-biography of someone close to him. Someone he looked up to. He picked Alfred Stern.”

  Vien’s mouth fell open. “The Alfred Stern? That’s his grandfather?”

  Luc sighed.

  “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” Vien said in English, shaking his head. He frowned again. “I thought your wife was from Toronto.”

  “She grew up here,” said Luc. Hannah’s history was the last thing he felt like discussing, but Vien wasn’t about to let it go. “Her parents left during the Anglo exodus in the late seventies. Hannah and I were together by then, so she stayed.”

  “You married Alfred Stern’s daughter.”

  “Yes. We’ve established that,” said Luc. “Fuck you, anyway.” He looked up to check that he hadn’t offended. This was how they’d talked in high school, throwing punches like tough guys, even though they were both frightened little boys.

  “He charged me, you know,” said Vien. “In 1970? All I’d done was attend a couple of rallies, and I got slapped with a criminal charge.” He paused. “You knew I was arrested?”

  Luc had heard about it. The news had come to him second-hand. By the autumn of 1970, he and Vien had parted ways. Luc looked at him now, still proud of his little moment of defiance. If they hadn’t parted ways, Luc would long ago have said something cruel.

  Vien the rebel. Luc could picture him being mouthy with a cop. He had always been mouthy with figures of authority, even with old Monsieur Hervé, the pockmarked, half-deaf principal. Luc had been more obedient, though in the fall of 1970 he had taken risks too. Everyone had. If you were in Montreal and under thirty, how could you not take risks? Luc had attended the legendary rally at the Paul Sauvé Arena. He had shouted out “FLQ! FLQ! FLQ!” in the same delirium as everyone else. He had felt the rush of tribal belonging. When Pierre Vallières, Quebec’s answer to Che, had stood up at that rally to speak, Luc had stood too, whistling and clapping until his hands hurt.

  “Alfred Stern’s daughter,” Vien said again.

  “Let it go.”

  Vien stroked his chin. “Family dinners must be fun.”

  Luc picked up the edge of his placemat and started rolling again, his irritation rising. Vien had hit a nerve. He hadn’t seen his father-in-law in seven years.

  “And your son admires him enough to take his name.”

  “My son can play all the games he likes,” Luc snapped. “He’s still a Lévesque.”

  “Listen,” said Vien, more kindly. “I can help with this. Smooth things with Bonnaire. We’re on good terms.”

  Luc forced himself to nod. He wasn’t used to begging for things. He didn’t like it, but he really had no choice.

  “Talk to Hugo,” said Vien. “We can’t do anything unless he cooperates.”

  Somehow, in the course of an hour at the Green Spot, Vien and he had become a we. So be it. Luc nodded to this hapless, childless friend of his youth. Ah, how low fatherhood could bring a man.

  9

  T he Peugeot’s windshield was streaming with rain. It was coming down so hard that the wipers were next to useless. Luc leaned forward. Tail lights blinked blurrily in front of him. Beside him in the passenger seat, Hannah unbuckled her belt and rummaged in her purse. They were at Atwater and Sherbrooke, stopped at the traffic light. She extracted a Kleenex and began rubbing the inside of the windshield.

  The traffic light was about to turn green. “Your belt,” he said, nodding at her. The rubbing wasn’t doing any good, anyway. Shreds of Kleenex clung to the wet glass.

  Luc stepped on the gas too hard, throwing Hannah back against her seat.

  Behind them, Hugo, who was slumped against the door, eyes shut, jerked too.

  “Sorry,” said Luc, although really he wasn’t. Certainly not about rousing his slumping son.

  The boy didn’t move or open his eyes.

  “Sit up,” he said, watching in the rear-view mirror.

  Hugo needed firmness. Like the child at the Green Spot. Luc had told Hannah about her last night, while they were discussing strategy. Discipline was what Hugo needed. Rules and expectations.

  The stone ramparts of the Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste loomed into view. They dated from a time when intruders— Iroquois, then British soldiers—had to be physically repelled. In the era during which these walls were erected, no man in this place would have married an Englishwoman. They probably never would have m
et. Luc turned the steering wheel hard and stepped on the gas, cutting across Sherbrooke Street into the school drive. The car sputtered up the little slope to the parking area and stopped. “Okay,” said Luc, “let’s do this.”

  He unlatched his seat belt and started to get out of the car, but he could feel Hannah looking at him anxiously. He turned back to her. “What?” he asked, more sharply than he’d intended.

  She shrank back a little in her seat, so he reached out for her hand. “It’ll be okay. Just let me do the talking.”

  There was a sigh from the back seat.

  Luc twisted around to face his son. “You have something to add?”

  The boy looked away.

  “Good,” he said. “Just remember. You speak only when spoken to. You answer only what they ask. You do not extemporize. You do not justify. And you address the principal as monsieur. Got it?”

  “It’s going to be fine,” Hannah said.

  She was trying to reassure Hugo, but Luc found it irritating. He wasn’t at all sure the boy would get it right. He was irritated all the time these days. It was a precise physical sensation, a feeling of constriction in the centre of his torso, just below the sternum. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a full, deep breath. He opened his mouth experimentally and inhaled, but his lungs blocked defensively.

  “I know these people,” he said, not looking at either of them. “I know exactly how they think.”

  He did. He knew this place. This institution. This culture. Saint-Jean-Baptiste was the oldest school in Quebec. Men like Louis-Joseph Papineau and the poet Émile Nelligan had studied in its halls. You couldn’t get more Québécois than that.

  Hannah didn’t respond. In the back seat, Hugo stared stonily into the distance.

  “Wipe that look off your face.”

  The boy blinked.

  “Hugo!”

  He rolled his eyes and muttered, very softly, a profanity.

  “It just slips out, doesn’t it? You don’t even realize you’re doing it, and out it comes.” Luc slumped in the driver’s seat, exhausted before they’d even begun. “If that happens in there,” he said, “you’re sunk, Hugo. You get that, don’t you? This isn’t a game. Your future is at stake here.”

  Rain struck Luc’s face and chest as he left the car. Hannah was taking her time, and Hugo was fidgeting in the back with the door lock. Instead of waiting for them, which he knew he ought to do, Luc ran across the asphalt, ran as if he couldn’t be touched, as if by will alone he could rid himself of his wife and son and the whole fraught world of choices and coincidences that had brought him back to the imposing grounds of his old school.

  After they had made it through the front door and been buzzed in by the receptionist, they were forced to wait outside the hearing room for twenty minutes. Students passed, glancing furtively at them. No one stopped to talk to Hugo, which Luc found strange. He had assumed things were okay at school for his son. Not great. Not fun, but okay, the way high school had been for Luc himself, and for most people he knew. Now he wasn’t so sure. Was his son a misfit? One of those kids you never noticed, ticking quietly but lethally away in a corner until some little thing tripped him, releasing the catch? It was harder for intelligent boys. Luc knew that story well enough, although, in his own case, brains had always helped, not hurt him.

  After his meeting at the Green Spot with Vien, Luc had decided to get tough. He’d started with Hugo’s bedroom, stripping it of anything that smacked of provocation. No more war games. In fact, no more games of any kind until Hugo shaped up. Luc trashed a little clay pipe Hugo had fashioned in art class. It had never been used, but there it was, in plain view on his desk, a reification of insolence. What had he and Hannah been thinking, allowing the boy to keep it? He also threw out a wallet stamped brazenly with a seven-pointed green leaf, and a T-shirt with fifteen different English terms for marijuana. Boundaries. That was what Hugo needed.

  Over the last week, Hugo had followed a clear list of dos and don’ts, hand-printed by Luc with a red pen. To Luc’s surprise, he’d submitted to it. Not with grace. Far from it. But there had been no shouting matches, no open resistance. Luc had not been proud of the fight the day Hannah returned from Toronto, but perhaps it had been necessary. Hugo moved about the house now with considerably more caution.

  The receptionist appeared, finally, and told them they could enter. The room in which the hearing was to be held was spacious and high-ceilinged, with stained glass windows along one wall. Formerly a chapel, surely. Luc wondered whether he had ever been in here before. If so, he had forgotten.

  A long folding conference table had been positioned in the room’s centre. Six people stood beside their chairs on one side. Vien was among them, Luc noticed with relief, just as he had said he would be. A woman with a laptop was also sitting directly behind Bonnaire, observing him. Luc was taken aback by the scale of the proceedings. He had pictured something more intimate, a meeting in Bonnaire’s office, perhaps, with just the principal and vice-principal, Vien, and themselves. Hugo would apologize and Bonnaire would give him a lecture, as Vien had said. End of story, as long as Hugo managed not to scowl or swear. Luc would speak too, express in his most elegant phrasings his regret for a son who had caused such trouble to the Saint-Jean-Baptiste community. He really did feel sorry about it. From the bottom of his heart. Bonnaire would sense the sincerity.

  Three chairs had been placed on the table’s other side. “Hugo in the middle,” Bonnaire said without ceremony, pointing.

  Hugo moved to the designated chair. Luc chose the chair to his left, and Hannah walked to the other side of him, directly across the table from Vien. They waited for permission to sit down. Like prisoners in the dock, thought Luc. Across from them, the faces of their judges were uniformly grim.

  The gun was in the middle of the table, its barrel pointing straight at Hugo. Was that intentional? A little strategy by Napoléon Bonnaire to shake them up? A label had been affixed to it with a string tied neatly in a bow. Such careful preparations. Three manila folders in different colours—purple, red, and blue—were stacked next to the gun. Each committee member also had a red folder and a notepad and pen. The whole scenario struck Luc as over-serious and vaguely hokey—as one might expect of a high school trial.

  Bonnaire did the introductions, starting at his far right with a fat young woman with multiple chins and a sullen glare. She was Hugo’s drama teacher, Madame Antoine. Beside her was an older, thinner woman, Madame Laflamme, chair of the parents’ committee. Vice-principal Ducharme and Principal Bonnaire introduced themselves next. Then came a big fair-haired man with the flattened nose of a boxer, sitting immediately to their left. Monsieur Groulx, the school security guard. Serge Vien was last in line. He had donned a tie for the occasion and seemed to have combed his hair. Bonnaire thanked them all for their attendance. He made a special point of welcoming Luc. The assembly was doubly regrettable, he said, given the esteem with which Luc Lévesque was regarded by the Saint-Jean-Baptiste community.

  A wave of gratitude washed over Luc. He had capital here, and Bonnaire was man enough to acknowledge it. They taught his books in their classrooms, after all. He was on the school curriculum.

  After they had sat down, Bonnaire put on his chromeframed reading glasses. “These are the facts,” he said, opening one of the files and reading in a voice much louder and more theatrical than Luc thought necessary. “On Tuesday, October 2, 2001, during the morning recess, Hugo Lévesque, a student in secondaire trois at Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste, was discovered on the school premises in possession of a nine-millimetre Mauser Luger pistol.” He looked over the top of his reading glasses, pausing for a beat like an actor in a play.

  “The weapon was unloaded and no ammunition was found on Hugo Lévesque’s person. The search was conducted by our security personnel, Monsieur Jean-Claude Groulx.” He looked up again and nodded at the fair-haired man. “The utmost care for the student was exercised. We had been alerted by anoth
er student of the existence of a gun, but had no idea whether it was loaded or what the state of mind or intent of the gun’s possessor might be. Hugo Lévesque did not resist when approached. Monsieur Groulx was able to speak calmly with him and then to search his schoolbag, in which the gun, laid out on the table as our chief exhibit, was discovered.”

  The chair of the parents’ committee glowered at Luc, as if he, personally, had committed the heinous act.

  “As I have told the offending student and his family,” Bonnaire continued, “this school has never, in the two hundred and thirty-four years of its existence, dealt with an issue such as this one. In over two centuries, no one has ever dared to bring a firearm onto its grounds. This is a first in our history, and believe me, I hope it is an act that no one will ever think to repeat.”

  Such theatrics. Such pomp without dignity. Under his sense of shame, Luc felt the coals of anger catch and glow. He reached for the glass of water that had been set out in front of his seat and took a sip.

  Bonnaire asked Hugo to stand and to enunciate his name loudly and clearly for the benefit of the school secretary, the woman with the laptop who was playing the role of court stenographer.

  The arms of Hugo’s jacket were too short, Luc saw immediately. How had that escaped him? They should have bought something new for him. He looked ridiculous, his vulnerability and adolescent gawkiness on display for everyone to see.

  Luc pretended he’d never set eyes on him before. He pretended, for a moment, that he was the pinched woman chairing the parents’ committee, the regrettable Madame Laflamme. He used this trick quite often in writing fiction. What would she see as she looked across the table with those ugly eyes of hers? A boy too small for his age in tight clothes, thin and Jewish-looking, with a gaze that shifted constantly. Not good.

  “Do you recognize this?” Bonnaire said, picking up the gun.

  Hugo nodded.

  “You must answer in words, Hugo,” said Bonnaire, gesturing at the secretary behind him. “Say yes or no. Enunciate clearly.”