by Nancy Young
The children’s clamor woke her out of her momentary depression. Their uncle’s absence disappointed but did not dampen their enthusiasm; they rushed out of the house excitedly, goading each other to get there first and stopping only just before the edge of the lake to step into skates and pull on woolen mittens. Ellen no longer skated with the children, but was glad to see Jocelyn and the older children look after the littler ones in their uncle’s absence. She sat on the veranda and watched from that distance as the small blades carried their joyful giggling passengers in variously delightful and wobbly circles, figure-eights, and angel spins. Beyond the small gliding and circling collection of miniature skaters, the natural amphitheatre of pines, maples, and sycamores encircled them like a colorful clutch of onlookers at a street performance.
When Ellen returned to her home late that afternoon after dropping off the grandchildren, she found her husband sitting in the living room staring into a full blaze inside the fireplace. She pulled her own armchair over to the fire and warmed her hands in its pulsating heat. The fire had a life of its own, spitting sparks and crackling loudly as small molecules of water in the logs met the energetic heat of its flames. Something had disturbed her husband and by the simultaneously weary and exalted look on his craggy and once very handsome face, she knew something extraordinary had happened. He was not usually this quiet and still.
“Are you thinking of New Year’s resolutions?” she asked light-heartedly.
“No … well yes, in a way; I’ve been thinking,” he replied. “I think we should go to Thailand. Take up the post.”
Her eyebrows lifted in small surprise. Over the past twelve months she had been staging a gentle revolution in their house, campaigning lightly for a change of scenery and cajoling him with offers and suggestions to undertake charity work abroad. Ever since Bernard had removed his belongings from their house, she felt the need to forge a new direction in her life. She felt snow-bound and landlocked. “Well, it’s decided then? Shall we go visit with Father Lesley tomorrow and make the arrangements?”
“Yes. The sooner we leave the better.” He turned to the fire again and immersed his full focus into its flames, as if he would find the answer to life’s uncertainties in its flickering ephemeral energy.
“Fine,” she replied, then a moment later added, “And what finally made the decision for you, may I ask?” She turned away from her husband as if he were a patient on her therapist’s couch instead of on his favorite armchair in front of a fire.
“A strange thing happened today. While you were gone with the kids,” he began. “I don’t know if I’m starting to go senile, Ellen. I don’t think so, but I swear I heard an angel in that guitar today!” He pointed at the instrument now lying innocently on a divan before the large window of the living room.
“So, you heard it too?” she replied. Their eyes met; for a moment there was surprise in Col Tenderfield’s eyes, then a silent pact was made between them. The sound was real, that was determined. And, they both heard it. Col contemplated telling his wife about the tall Indian, but decided that may truly have been a figment of his imagination, spawned by the unlikely events that had taken place earlier in front of his fireplace. Perhaps they were related; perhaps not. Whatever the case, a change of scenery seemed advisable under the circumstances. Early senility could be stemmed by a change in environment, he was sure of it.
Col’s father had lived to ninety-eight and his mind was sharp as a tack until the day he died. His mother had gone quite early, however, before he, the eldest was fifteen. The old man was a master ship-builder, moving his entire family — all five boys — out to Canada from Glasgow after his wife died. They had come to Halifax during the middle of the previous century when ship-building was at its peak; their lives were steady and hard work their motto.
When Col was twenty-six he met Ellen May, a headstrong Irish Catholic girl from Boston who had come up to Nova Scotia to teach literature at his youngest brother’s school. They were soon married and decided to try their luck further into the hinterland and settled in St.-Gérard where the timber mills were starting to boom and the need for skilled labor was at a premium. As the hardworking young man advanced through the ranks and eventually became the main superintendent of the mill, his family grew and became the bedrock of the town. The day the horrific accident happened at the mill planted a sorrow in Col’s heart that never truly left him. Bernard’s father had been a worker at the mill for nearly eleven years. He was one of the few Native Indian workers at the mill and how he came to be an employee was Col’s doing.
Joseph Berber was an Iroquois from St.-Régis, and when the mill manager met him, he was a young man of seventeen. The older man was seeking a new apprentice and was keen to extend the opportunity to a deserving boy from the reservations. Col posted a notice and the word was put out through the Indian grapevine. Joseph was the only real contender. The Council of Elders had already decided that he would be the one. His father, Adrien Walk-Tall Berber, was from this area but had a somewhat vague and mysterious background; he had left as a young man to become an ironworker for a brief time in New Brunswick before returning, settling into the St.-Régis reservation, and marrying Joseph’s mother, a local Caughnawaga girl.
It was well known that Joseph’s father left their family when he was just a boy. One day — soon after their second child, a girl, died at birth — he suddenly heard his higher calling and retreated to a Cistercian Trappist monastery in Oka, which had recently been established, and was never heard from again. His mother never married again. The elders believed that because Joseph was bereft of a father, he should be given the opportunity to learn a skill in order to support his mother. Joseph had a quality about him which Col Tenderfield liked straight away and proved in the end to be strong and direct, yet gentle in his demeanor, and a dedicated man who worked hard and well with others.
Three years into the job, the Elders sent Joseph a Caughnawaga girl as a blind date to ensure that he remembered his Iroquois roots while living and working amongst the White Men. Her name was Marianne and she was a plump young woman of twenty-one who was working as a waitress in St.-Régis. Her uncle was an Elder, as well as friend of his mother. Joseph was very shy and awkward with what seemed to him to be an outdated, old-fashioned tribal offering, and sent Marianne politely back to the reservation. It wasn’t known to the Elders that Joseph had already found a young woman, Jeanne — a partially deaf French girl and sister of one of the temporary mill-workers who visited regularly from Montréal. After the “incident” of Marianne, Jeanne decided she needed to visit St.-Gérard more frequently and was pregnant within months.
But tragedy struck and she died of a bowel obstruction four months after the birth. Joseph could not bear to send his son to the reservation and could not leave the mill which had been so good to him, so he resolved to raise the little boy himself with limited help from the local wives. It was more than Christian charity when Joseph’s accident four years later left little Bernard an orphan and the Tenderfields took him in as one of their own. Joseph’s mother died less than a week after the funeral, presumably from heartache. Col Tenderfield felt the burden of responsibility for all the tragedy squarely on his shoulders. Over twenty years later, he felt perhaps he had finally heard his divine calling, and it came from a hand-made guitar.
•
Lorraine crossed the ocean in style and landed at Orly as gracefully as a diva. Feeling somewhat compressed after the tedious fourteen-hour flight, which included a stop in Montréal to pick up three passengers, she rose from her seat to stretch her slim and nubile frame, and no fewer than three gentlemen simultaneously offered to retrieve her hand-bags from the overhead compartments; two proposed to carry them for her. The new Parisian was surrounded by a veritable flock of well-mannered, immaculately dressed, and excellently manicured middle-aged men from both sides of the Atlantic, and each one was enchanted with the newest arrival t
o the French diplomatic landscape.
In the arrival lounge, another well-dressed man with refined manners stood waiting for her. As if to make up for the lack of an official departure party in Québec, Joël met his fiancée at the Orly Aéroport with an entourage of close friends, family, and personal assistants. The small crowd of strangers engulfed the young woman in embraces and multiple baises as they introduced themselves. Unexpectedly she knew what it meant to be someone, to have the world eating out of your hand. She felt like a movie star, a celebrity — Marlene Dietrich. Amelia Earhart. Perhaps a heroine returned from a remarkable around-the-world solo journey, or from long bloody war?
When the crowd finally worked its way through introductions and kisses, they let Joël into the inner circle. He held out a large bouquet of pink roses to Lorraine, and welcomed his fiancée cheerfully into his arms and kissed her lightly. Suddenly she felt shy and embarrassed in front of the adulating crowd; was she not a fraud, a faithless fiancée? Had she not just left another man in her bed? No, stop yourself, you fool, she silently reprimanded herself. You are no more a fraud than every other woman who marries correctly, who finds the path of least resistance, who needs to firmly feel solid foundations beneath her. She gently pushed him away, in seemingly shy deference to the waiting relatives and friends.
They whisked her away in a fleet of limousines that awaited them, as if they were already a wedding entourage rather than an airport welcoming party. Lorraine considered it a practice run for the ceremony in a month’s time, to take place at the family’s château in Aubigny-Sur-Nère in the Loire for 200 guests. It was all taken care of by her mother-in-law and her various secretaries and assistants. The dress, which she was yet to see, had been made for Joël’s great-great-grandmother, the Comtesse de Vogel, in 1795, and now Lorraine would be wearing it. She wondered if Joël had actively sought out a fiancée who would fit the dress, like Cinderella’s glass slipper. As the second son of a family with no daughters, the honors were bestowed first on his brother’s wife, and now it was her turn.
She had no misgivings about donning a wedding dress well-worn by royalty. She only hoped to do it justice and to live up to everything the dress represented: antiquity, family, responsibility, duty, royalty … loyalty … and … fidelity. All at once the dress seemed much too heavy for just one girl. Quickly she swept aside the overbearing thoughts and focused on the passing landscape. A light snow covered the sparse woodlands of the Valle du Marne which fanned out in all directions, divided only by the spare streets of the town of L’Hay-Les Roses, with its painstakingly planned garden paean to the ubiquitous English rose. The Rosaria was a favorite of Joël. He had been part of a plenary committee, as a stand-in for his father, and had a small section dedicated to white blooms named after the family. The sprinkling of snow over the woodland park reminded her of Québec in the fall, as the sycamores and chestnuts begin to lose their definition and stature amongst the blue backdrop of cedars and plane trees. The one tree missing was her favorite, the sugar maple. She was no longer in Canada.
Minutes later the breath-taking spire of the Tour Eiffel struck the girl’s vision and formed, there and then, a permanent snapshot of that monument’s significance in her long-term memory. Its waffled grid-iron scaffolding of steel rose up before her, higher and higher as they approached the City of Light with its wide avenues and circular mayhem. A rolling tour of Paris commenced for her pleasure: Tour Eiffel, Arc de Triômphe, Louvre, Champs Elysées, L’Opéra, Tuileries, Notre Dame, on and on. Before her eyes, the cavalcade of sights passed in an orgy of gothic and Roman architectural wonder, like picture postcards on a carousel spinning at a rousing speed. As she admired these enduring landmarks of the Third Republic, the limousine convoy realigned themselves to ensure that the honored guest was first to alight upon the welcome doormat of the hotel-apartment’s front door.
On arrival, the welcome party dispersed as they entered the grand lobby, each with a separate purpose as if they had arrived at an ornate film set and everyone had rehearsed and staked out their positions. Their names were vague in her mind and the connections even more so. Lorraine felt she was the only one who did not have a script; she had not a single inkling of what she was meant to do. It seemed that large white lilies sprouting from Grecian marble vases graced every table top in every corner of the ostentatiously spacious lobby, and exuberant candles and incandescent lights were trained strategically on gilded mirrors on each and every wall. The combination of soft whiteness and the fairy-glen-like glow had the effect of a magical winter wonderland brought into the vast interior.
Her baggage was being loaded into an ornate gilded elevator and she suffered a panicky moment. Where were her possessions going without her — upstairs to Joël’s apartment, of course — the guitar too, presumably? Seeing the look of consternation on her face, Joël took her hand and led her to the grand staircase that divided the vast lobby evenly down the center. It led to a mezzanine level that looked down on all the splendorous gilding and crystal sumptuousness. From that lofty position, Lorraine could see the young female assistants shed their winter coats and underneath they were dressed in dark evening dresses.
“I will take you upstairs to freshen up, and then I have a surprise for you.” Her weak smile was acknowledged and they retreated to a small private elevator which opened up seven stories above and directly into his apartment. Lorraine was relieved that the apartment was spared the overwrought gilding and tastefully adorned with a combination of traditional and contemporary furniture. The overall effect was decidedly Louis XIV with a bold, masculine brush of Bauhaus. She chose a chaise longue and reclined wearily onto it.
“Do not get too comfortable,” he said ever so sardonically. “This is my apartment; I will take you to yours in a minute. Would you like a little tour?” She was taken aback by the news that they would be living in separate apartments.
“I … I didn’t realize,” she stammered. “Are we to live separately on a permanent basis?” She sat upright.
“Oh, non, ma petite, non — just until the wedding of course! I wouldn’t think of it!” His mood seemed to change mysteriously, and he laughed heartily at her mistake. She was quite relieved and offended at the same time. She stood up and walked stridently to the door.
“Don’t ridicule me, Joël. That is very cruel of you. How was I to know?”
“Forgive me. It is my mistake. I should have told you before. I assumed you would want your own toilette, etc., until we are man and wife.” Then he added, “It was going to be a surprise, but I couldn’t wait. I thought you would be pleased.”
“I … am pleased. Yes. I just didn’t … I misunderstood you.”
“I see. Well, I am glad you are pleased. Shall we have a tour now, or would you prefer later?”
“Later, please. I would like to lie down for a moment. The flight was dreadfully long, you know. No opportunity to recline … most inconvenient.”
When Lorraine arrived at her apartment exactly one floor below, she saw that it was as sumptuously decorated as Joël’s, but more Louis XIV and less Bauhaus. Hothouse orchids and white lilies graced every tabletop. The gilded wall mirrors gleamed, multiplying the incandescent light of the crystal chandeliers in their reflected brilliance. Through the large balcony doors, the rise and fall of the black tile rooftops across the Fifth Arrondissement and the Rive Gauche formed an indelible matrix in her visual memory, which years from now would, like the minute red, blue, and white ferries plying the icy gray waters of the Seine in the distance, creep through her veins like a pulse.
In the bedroom, her luggage was laid out carefully on various sofas, chairs, and dressers, wherever the porter could find a horizontal surface that was not the floor or the bed. The leather case was propped on top of a Louis XIV armoire. She pulled a chair up to it and brought the case down, laying it carefully on the luxuriously quilted queen-size bed. When she opened the case, the instrume
nt made a slight cooing sound as insignificant as a sigh escaping from the tiny beak of a captive dove. Despite everything happening around her, Lorraine began to feel that the guitar was like a friend — an actual living person whose happiness and freedom depended on her — this mysterious Isabelle perhaps? Even as she sat immobile during most of the long trans-Atlantic flight, she could not keep her mind off of the guitar, the lush music it made, and the rustling of skirts that seem to accompany it.
Stripped of her heavy wool traveling clothes, she lay down on the broad expanse of bedding in her underwear and brought the guitar to her body, lightly strumming the open strings, listening to the rich low vibrato of the gut strings and feeling the tingling sensation of the soundboard transferring wave upon wave of sounds down to the soft flesh and viscera beneath her bare stomach. The head stock lay flat against her forehead and the feel of the timber on her skin was cool and consoling, its smoothness like a well-spent afternoon in the sun after a cold winter, and its resonation like the comfort of a contented feline by her side. The weight of it was another thing. It had a modest heaviness which eased upon her like the weight of a careful lover. With an exhausted sigh she drifted into a perambulatory sleep.
She is wending her way through a familiar pine forest carrying a young child, and the accompanying sound of running water tripping over slippery rocks is like a lucent lullaby pulling her in and holding her captive in the cradle of the dream. The warbling of tiny birds invisible in the thicket of trees tells her it is spring. A wide path winds around the monolithic trees and follows the cut and curve of the creek-bed, at one point ascending into a steep glacial ridge of cedars blue with mist and replete with the cries and caws of a mating pair of goshawks, and then it descends, falling fast into a glade of ambling deer. Six pairs of doe’s eyes stare at her with laconic indifference, as if she were one of their ilk.