by André Alexis
I stayed to drink with Franklin and Edward.
Outside the tavern, van Leuwen said
– Should we walk?
– Certainly, said Henry.
But as soon as he saw a taxi, van Leuwen flagged it, apologized to Henry, folded himself into the backseat, and went off.
Henry walked on, unperturbed by his friend’s departure. He walked back, not unsteadily, in the direction from which they’d first come: north, north over the bridge, contemplating the night sky, the black water of the canal, the lights along the promenade, the hard emptiness of Landsdowne, thinking again of Aquinas, of black metal railings, stone bridges, maple trees, tarred roads, the city and his contemporaries, his contemporaries all wandering through the same warren.
He thought, too, of women, of a certain woman, and of love, a subject never far from his thoughts. Tonight, for instance, it seemed to him that Aquinas, if he’d speculated less about what God wanted and more about what He is, would have anticipated all the philosophers of love who came after him. But, then, who were these philosophers of love? The only one who came to mind (as he crossed MacLaren) was…Sartre, an atheist. So, if he’d thought more about what God is, would Aquinas have come to atheism? Really, if it came to that, the only true “philosophers” love had were poets, and they brought almost as much confusion to love as philosophers did to the world. The problem, as Henry saw it, was that poets replaced one incoherence with another. Then again, the poet’s incoherence was easier to bear, wasn’t it?
It often was for him, at least.
* * *
—
When van Leuwen and Wing had gone, Franklin Dupuis held court on his own. He was, it seemed, an intellectual with little patience for intellectuals, a man who did not take himself seriously, though certain moral notions and political ideas were important to him. He was, for instance, devoutly Conservative, liberalism being to him a vile cast of mind. (It had its purpose, of course, what with democracy being, at very least, a two-stroke engine. Still, there was something about the word that suggested a deluge, a deluge of false emotion, hypocritical concern, and endless squirming.) This was not an unusual opinion in Ottawa, but Franklin expressed it with such élan it had the force of original thought. At least, it did for me, that night. For me, it was illuminating to hear belief rather than consideration, feeling before thought.
Edward was a different story altogether. He was as quiet as a shadow, until late in the evening when he’d drunk enough to let himself shed a few opinions. Above all, one felt Edward’s devotion to Franklin, his admiration. The only time he expressed an idea that was not an echo of Franklin’s, Franklin himself said
– You’ve been drinking, haven’t you, Eddy?
and both men laughed. I felt, in that moment, as if I’d missed something important, but Franklin waved his hand, as at a fly, and returned to the conversation I’d begun: Art, true Art, as a civilizing influence, as a way to take joy and depth of feeling from Nature, which, without Art, was nothing but twigs and violence.
Later still, when we’d drunk enough to make us wobble, the conversation grew less abstract.
– Don’t forget we’re going to Reinhart’s studio, said Edward.
– Oh, yes? said Franklin. I haven’t seen him for years.
– You saw him last week, said Edward.
– That’s true, said Franklin.
And then, to me:
– Reinhart is Edward’s closest friend.
– He’s your friend too, said Edward.
– I admire Reinhart, said Franklin. He’s a real artist, but aside from you, hI ’aven’t ’ad a close friend since hI was a hinfant.
– Where you from? I asked.
– I’m from Québec, said Franklin. Can’t you tell?
– You don’t have an accent. Montréal?
– No, said Franklin. I’m from Baie des Brumes, the Bay of Fog.
– Where’s that?
– Far away, said Franklin.
Which is all he would say about it that night, insisting he’d had such a happy childhood his past was obliterated by the warm glow. Really, he remembered very little, save for a handful of impressions (cold grey water and deep blue skies, mostly) and meaningless occasions. For instance, there was the time he pulled a pot of boiling chocolate down on his arm or, again, the time he visited the Kingston pen with his father and couldn’t sleep for days, disturbed as he’d been by the harsh lights and the smell of bleach.
– Yes, I said, prisons just aren’t civilized.
This was the best my wit would surrender after a tenth beer, but Franklin laughed. (Edward laughed as well, though he didn’t seem to know why he was laughing.) So, there was no reason to think my comment had any serious significance. And yet, in retrospect…
After we’d had another round, and talked about nothing in particular, after we’d walked homeward, and talked of nothing specific, after I’d suggested Franklin join the Fortnightly Club, his intelligence having impressed me, and long after I’d passed out, head down on my kitchen table…The following day, in other words, it seemed to me that my errant comment about uncivilized prisons must have had some significance for Franklin, his last words to me having been thanks for my “observation.”
– You’re absolutely right about prisons, Franklin had said.
{4}
FRANKLIN DUPUIS
Franklin Dupuis had, in fact, been born in Anse Bleu, not Baie des Brumes, in 1938. Anse Bleu (of which Franklin was ashamed) was newly minted, no more than a year old when his parents, Dr. and Mrs. Dupuis, settled there. It was a scattering of houses by the mouth of the St. Lawrence River: trawlers in the harbour, nets draped over prows; seagulls, seagulls, and sparrows. Whales passed in the St. Lawrence, their grey backs like a school of wandering shale. To the north, the modest mountains held back the world, and the waters of the Manicouagan ran to the sea. Anse Bleu was, in its way, a version of the country itself, holding all of Canada in a few strong lines: trees, rivers, mountains, birds, fish, winter.
It was not, however, a place for Franklin. To begin with, there was the matter of language. His father was francophone, spoke little English, and belonged to the community as the community belonged to him. Dr. Dupuis was not at odds with himself or his world, but his wife, a woman from Neguac, was an outsider who found it difficult to live so far from New Brunswick. Mrs. Dupuis was francophone, but she spoke English to her son, creating for herself a smaller world she shared with her son alone. So, although Franklin grew up in both languages, one (English) was intimate, the other (French) communal.
Franklin could recall his mother’s accent, her thick eyebrows, a mole on the side of her nose, her shade of nail polish, and the dress she wore (long and red) on those evenings his parents went out. It wasn’t much, but each detail was vivid, and they were, along with English, her only conspicuous legacy because, when Franklin was seven, she died giving birth to a second child, a child that followed her into nothingness, dying fitfully, hours after she did.
Franklin’s mother died before he’d learned to live without her, but Anse Bleu lived mindlessly on, flowering into a new self, with aluminium works, hydro-electricity, and whale watching. Dr. Dupuis gradually receded into a second family, marrying a young woman named Hélène, siring a few more children, all girls, a new family that had no special place for a Franklin who, at eleven, spent much of his time in his room speaking English to himself.
Around this time, Dr. Dupuis took his son with him to Kingston, Ontario (the name Ontario sounding to Franklin like that of a mysterious and hidden waterfall). It was the doctor’s last serious effort to bridge the distance between himself and his son. They drove first to Montréal, where they spent the night, and then on to Kingston where Dr. Dupuis’ sister, Hortense, had moved. The road took them through the heart of Québec: passed the swollen bay at Chute-aux-Outardes, along the highway b
y the wide, blue St. Lawrence, onto the ferry at Les Escoumins, and then to Montréal, at the sight of whose ramshackle outskirts Franklin felt a thrill. Dr. Dupuis tried to engage his son in conversation but, Franklin being quiet, silence overtook them at Trois-Pistoles. And from La Pocatière to Montréal, no further efforts were made by the good doctor.
The following day, Dr. Dupuis was more persistent. Putting discretion aside, the doctor spoke of whatever came to mind. He spoke of everything – except, naturally, of Franklin’s mother, a subject neither ever mentioned to the other. He asked about Franklin’s plans and Franklin’s hopes, but although Franklin appreciated his father’s efforts, he could not bring himself to answer with anything more than a few opaque words. (Well, the father having taught the son silence and discretion, the so-called dark virtues, it’s no surprise that neither ever quite managed to open up to the other, is it?) So, the trip from Montréal to Kingston was as mournful as the previous day’s had been.
In Kingston, Franklin’s aunt suggested they visit the penitentiary where her husband worked. And from his first sight of the pen, Franklin was intimidated. It wasn’t only that the main building was physically impressive. It had a psychological density as well. The building was a disturbing mélange of regal grandeur and near-religious menace.
If the forecourt was intimidating, the interior of the prison was mystifying. The smoothness of the walls and the place’s institutional smell filled Franklin with such deep discomfort he felt a kinship with the prisoners, one of whom, for months, haunted his dreams of the penitentiary: a tall black man in prison garb, his hair greying, who walked with a limp. This was the first black man Franklin had seen and the sight puzzled him, because although the man was a prisoner, was being led by two officers, he carried himself with the kind of dignity Franklin associated with pastors or politicians, with men for whom one felt friendship as a matter of course.
As he passed, the prisoner smiled at Franklin and winked. The man’s teeth were missing on one side of his mouth, so that Franklin saw, or imagined he saw, the man’s tongue. It seemed dreadful that anyone should be so vulnerable.
– Why is he here? Franklin asked his uncle.
– Because he killed his children, was the answer.
Whether this was true or not, Franklin never discovered. It is difficult to tell by a look if a man is murderous, and his uncle, a practical joker, may have been trying to frighten him. If so, he succeeded. Franklin was frightened by the idea of a child killer. And yet, he was also fascinated. Something in his young psyche responded to the suffering he imagined at the heart of the man’s being, was attracted to the suffering. And when, in the months that followed, he dreamed recurrently of the prisoner, he dreamed of him as a good man who became evil only when he spoke. This made for unpredictable dreams: Franklin could never tell if the prisoner were going to speak or not, though he himself was always, for some reason, compelled to talk to the man.
The dream stopped as suddenly as it had begun and, for a time, Franklin was not disappointed exactly but dismayed that the dream he anticipated (and feared) no longer came.
So…his mother died. He and his father lived on opposite sides of a silence. He did not feel part of Anse Bleu, and he was born with a premonition of his destiny, with the conviction he was meant for more than his hometown could provide. He was, as they say, sleepless in the bed of Being, saved from raw unhappiness by a vivid and distracting imagination and by his ability to keep himself entertained.
* * *
—
Naturally, Franklin fled Anse Bleu as soon as he could, attending Acadia for his first degree (a B.A. in history). But despite the charm of Nova Scotia, despite his repeated and uninhibited exploration of a young woman of Russian descent (Alexandra Byeli, his first love), despite the small, sea-blue beauty of Halifax, a city he visited often, despite his first friendships and his first steps taken in Politics (Conservative), Franklin was not at home in Wolfville. He was in flux, returning to Anse Bleu for the endless and lonely summers spent working at his father’s office. It wasn’t until 1959, when he went to McGill, that Franklin left Anse Bleu for good. His final impression of the town was of grey sky, grey water, and white houses.
His father paid for his education. His family visited him, from time to time, first in Montréal, where he studied law, and then in Ottawa, where he worked as secretary to Mr. Diefenbaker. But Franklin never set foot in Anse Bleu again, not for his father’s funeral, when it came, not for the weddings of his half-sisters, not for any reason, sentimental or otherwise.
* * *
—
Franklin’s Montréal was all pavement, noise, and a peculiar impermanence. It was a sense of possibility, a vantage on the wide world. It was a place on which one might impose a vision, if one had the will, but, at McGill, Franklin spent much of his time carousing. There were reasons for this, of course. First, there was something “exotic” about Montreal. Meaning: Franklin did not feel part of the city, though he didn’t resent his alienation. Also, he had little sympathy for the new politics; the Catholic mysticism of Cité Libre was more appealing than the Maître chez nous–ism of Jean Lesage, but they were both “vague.” (It seemed to him that Lesage was speaking of a Québec that was not credible. Christmas fiddles, tourtière, endless coffee on Ste-Catherine…It was ridiculous to call a collection of bad habits home.) And then again, though he knew in his heart Montréal was not his city, it was at McGill that he discovered he had charm, that he could be charming when he wished, and that charm was a perfect counterweight to the solitude he often needed. That is, when he smiled and spoke and put others at ease, they seemed to forgive him his absences, the time spent alone reading Turgeniev’s Spring Thaw (an inexhaustible gift from Ms. Byeli) and contemplating the painting of Antonio Pollaiuolo, which, even in reproduction, brought him solace.
(When Franklin told me of his admiration for Pollaiuolo, whose paintings he first saw at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, I was a little surprised. I mean, I know of few paintings more brutal than those of Antonio Pollaiuolo, but on reflection, I think I understand. Franklin was sensitive to suffering. He felt great empathy for those he imagined in physical or mental distress. So it’s possible that, in the paintings of Pollaiuolo, he constantly encountered his deepest, most empathetic self, something that would bring solace to most of us, I imagine. On the other hand, though Pollaiuolo’s paintings of men are almost unbearably brutal, his portraits of women are inexpressibly graceful. The contrast is striking and I don’t know which of Pollaiuolo’s paintings he dwelt on, the women or the men. In the end, Franklin’s solace in the paintings is, like so many of the details one knows about others, only fleetingly meaningful.)
He did manage to study at McGill, assiduously even, but he was never more than a mediocre student, a bright man with only a middling interest in law. During his years in Montréal, his attention was given to drink, camaraderie, and friendly argument: good-natured naysaying that usually ended, at the end of an evening, with a dismissal of God or any position that smacked of intemperate belief. Of course, Franklin’s nihilism was largely conversational, the product of his desire to please. He believed, lightly, in God, but his secular beliefs were unshakeable. At McGill, he was president of the Young Conservatives Club for three terms, and when he earned his degree, he moved to Ottawa to work for the prime minister.
Not a nihilist at all, then; a believer, rather.
* * *
—
From the beginning, Ottawa was a disappointment. Franklin walked into a dull city that smelled faintly of a pulp and paper works. The train station, at the centre of town, was squalid, despite its high ceiling and high windows. It’s true that his first view of Centretown, when he stepped from the terminal, was of the Château Laurier in its copper-roofed glory, but right beside the Château was the Daly Building, a soulless box, and the city streets were empty, though it was midday.
Ottawa
was a contradiction: a city on the surface, a town in essence, as if Cornwall had conquered Montréal. Nothing of importance was far away; no one lived south of Riverside, no one west of Bronson. You could not be anonymous, as you could in a real city. Instead, you lived on the verge of anonymity. It was not a capital in the manner of Rome, Paris, or St. Petersburg. It was an industry town on which the instruments of state (office buildings, politicians, bureaucrats) were imposed. It was a place that drank itself, politely but determinedly, insensate every Friday, and Franklin did not imagine he would stay long.
And yet…
In 1962, the presiding spirit, the heart of the city, belonged to Mr. Diefenbaker. Mr. Diefenbaker, owl-faced and tall, genuinely kind and sweetly uxorious, possessed a vision not of himself but of a country like his better self: generous and plain speaking. A smidgen of his charm adhered to the city itself, so it was possible, from the proper angle, to see in Ottawa more than its drab exterior, more than its pasty soul. Of course, some aspect of a prime minister inevitably rubbed off on the city. With MacKenzie King, Ottawa was paranoid and grey; with Bennett, poor and resentful. With St. Laurent, the city was optimistic; with Pearson, it would be fresh scrubbed and outward-looking, and with Trudeau, it would become its most splendid self: proud, flamboyant, wilful, and secretive. But when Franklin came to Ottawa, the city held something of Diefenbaker, a man he admired, and that small fact would have great influence on his life.
Not that the Chief was flawless. Franklin, who worked in his office as a clerk or, more accurately, un homme à tout faire, was not quite certain what to make of the man. Every morning, Mr. Diefenbaker would greet him in execrable French