The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  The wastrel, bearing gifts.

  Presents were a form of apology, even if they didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d been doing. Apology or not, the things he was bringing home would give them pleasure, he believed.

  ~

  But something was wrong. As the taxi climbed around the steep corner from Murray Hill onto Skye Avenue, he saw that the house was almost completely dark. By the time the taxi stopped, a parlour maid — she must have seen the headlamps — was switching on lights in the downstairs hall.

  As he came up the path in short, rapid steps, valise in one hand, stick in the other, the maid opened the front door and stood waiting. Alicette, from Lac-Mégantic.

  “Where is everyone? Où sont madame et les enfants?” Joe called.

  The Christmas snow had been washed away by wild rains, but everything was freezing up; the path was a curdle of ice laced with salt and ashes.

  Alicette opened her mouth but nothing came out. She had very small, very brown country teeth. Iseult had met the girl at the Sainte-Cunégonde clinic when she was just in from the country, living with a sister, brother-in-law, and seven nieces and nephews in a tenement on Atwater Avenue that had once been a stable. She’d owned one dress, one pair of shoes, much mended, and no winter clothes to speak of. Now she wore a maid’s uniform with starched white cap and apron.

  “Pourquoi la maison est dans les ténèbres?” he demanded. A house in darkness was like a goddamn funeral parlour. He wanted lights blazing when he came home. He loved coming up Murray Hill in a taxi and seeing the place aglow. “Où est madame?”

  “À Californie,” the girl murmured. “Ils ont quittés pour la Californie. Voulez-vous votre souper, monsieur?”

  He stared at her, unable to absorb what she was saying. What had happened to them? Were they dead?

  “Cook say, what he want for dinner, monsieur?” She seemed very frightened.

  California?

  He dropped his walking stick in the brass canister, shrugged off his overcoat, and gave it to her, along with his hat and scarf. The closest telephone was in the serving pantry, and he headed for it. He was already grasping for a plan. California?

  He could hear the cook, Belfast Mary, at the kitchen stove, rattling pans. Strips of light leaked into the pantry under a pair of serving doors. The little maid had followed him into the pantry, and as he lifted the receiver off the hook he shooed her into the kitchen.

  They would be somewhere in the middle of the continent, probably on a Los Angeles Limited out of Madison Street Station. He would get the timetable and wire ahead to Kansas City, Cheyenne, or Salt Lake and the wire would be delivered on board. In his head he was already composing it.

  DISEMBARK IMMEDIATELY STOP WIRE PARTICULARS STOP AWAIT MY ARRIVAL

  “Mr. O’Brien, sir!” Belfast Mary called from the kitchen. “I’m doing scrambled eggs on toast. Will it do for you, or is it something else you’ll be wanting?”

  Twice during his days in the bush, branches snapping off felled trees had clocked him on their way down. Such accidents were known as “widow-makers.” For a second or two after the hot blow on his skull, he’d felt a riotous starburst of fury before it laid him out cold in the snow. That was what he felt now: stricken, leaden, uncontrolled. He must gather his thoughts before doing anything. Without making the call, he replaced the telephone receiver.

  “That will do, Mary,” he called. “Send a tray upstairs to the study.”

  The house was warm and smelled of lemon oil. Whenever the family was away, the maids tended to go mad with polishing, and when the family came back, the rooms gleamed, like rooms in the pictures Hollywood made about rich people. Iseult disliked so much shine on everything, such a glimmer of dark wood, such a burnished gleam of table silver. The fanatic neatness the French-Canadian maids imposed was inhumane, she said. “We need to feel at home, not like actors in a play. I don’t want the children terrified of disturbing things. A house is to be lived in.”

  He too had felt the charm of their scattered toys when the children were young, but he had always secretly preferred the house the way it appeared after they had been away — usually in California — and returned. When it was briefly perfect, like English mansions or Park Avenue apartments in Hollywood pictures.

  He liked things orderly, always had, though the chambermaids who’d had to clean his room at the Plaza might not buy that. Empty bottles in the wastebasket, towels on the floor, bed sheets pulled off, ashtrays overflowing. After showering long and hard he had shaved, dressed, and gotten out fast that morning, leaving the mess along with a two-dollar tip.

  Tonight the shining house felt hollow and empty, like the inside of a drum. Static from woollen carpets scratched at his shoes. There was another telephone in his study. Quickly he went upstairs and found her note.

  I O’B

  TEN SKYE AVENUE

  WESTMOUNT, P.Q.

  Tues., January 18th

  We depart for Calif. as I warned we would. When you read this we’ll be most of the way there. It seems the best place to go. I don’t want you following us. You’re no good to us. Please don’t come after us. I don’t seem able to help you and can’t watch it anymore. Don’t come after us now. Face it, whatever that requires. Don’t pretend. So you always told me. You left us, remember that. You left us.—I.

  In boyhood, cold rage had given him the stomach to stand up to his stepfather and protect them all. Did she believe he’d let her get away with stealing his children?

  The flow of anger was so wild and sick it made him stagger. He had to grip the edge of the desk to keep his feet under him. He sat down heavily in his chair.

  Even as the fury had him, he was aware of how wrong he had been about nearly everything. But that awareness was still a weak assembly of bare thoughts, not nearly so powerful as raging feelings. Curling a fist, he smacked the desk so hard it hurt, then picked up the electric lamp and pitched it across the room, just as the little maid, carrying a tray, reached the top of the stairs at the opposite end of the hallway. The lamp broke on the floor and the study flew into darkness, but there was light in the hallway. He could see Alicette standing there frozen, holding his supper tray, another sort of helplessness scrawled across her face.

  Something in the light carried him back to the old priest’s house. Maybe it was the chiaroscuro effect in the hallway. Or the scent of buttered toast and tea.

  Iseult had always preferred white walls, inconspicuous jewellery, rooms plain and barely furnished. He admired the simplicity, the bare energy, of her darkroom, but his tastes were baroque, if that was the word. His beloved rugs were intricate antique Persians, and the oil paintings he’d picked up in Brussels, London, and Paris were in heavy gilded frames. He enjoyed the sombre shine of such possessions, their age, their intricacy. Such qualities spoke of riches to him.

  He was dark. Iseult was light, and on the lightest breeze she had left him.

  The timid girl advanced down the hallway. She entered the room carefully and with a rattle of china set the supper tray on his desk. Yellow eggs on toast, a sprig of fresh parsley, a brown teapot.

  “Y a-t-il quelque chose d’autre, monsieur?”

  “No.”

  “Goodnight, monsieur.”

  “Attends, Alicette.”

  She blinked at him. Did he frighten everyone? Were his children afraid of him? He didn’t like to think so, but maybe they were.

  “Did Madame say anything? Before she left? Tu comprends? Madame n’a dit rien à toi avant son départ?”

  The maid shook her head. She looked about ready to cry.

  “That is all,” he said. “Good night.”

  He ate quickly, shovelling in the food, then telephoned his brother. “Do you know anything about it, Grattan?”

  “Iseult said naught to me. Not a word. Hang on.”

  He could hear Grattan speaking to someone else, Elise no doubt. Then he came back on the line. “Elise doesn’t know anything. We didn’t know you were away
either, Joe. Was it New York?”

  “New York, yes.” He’d often wondered if Iseult had told Elise about his sprees. How many had there been in fifteen years — maybe half a dozen? He and Grattan had never discussed New York themselves.

  “Grattan, are you there?”

  “Right here, brother.”

  “Can I get a mail plane from here to New York, do you suppose?”

  “I believe there’s a Ford Tri-Motor that leaves Saint-Hubert at the crack of dawn and stops in Albany, then New York.”

  “From New York I can get a plane to California, can’t I?”

  “National has a run out to Chicago and the coast.”

  “That’s what I’ll do, then.” Closing his eyes, he saw himself floating in the night sky between Montreal and Glendale Airport in L.A. “Listen, Grattan, you know all the pilots out there at Saint-Hubert, don’t you?”

  “Some of them. The veterans. My era, not the young birds.”

  “Can you call up someone tonight and get me a seat on that mail plane in the morning?”

  “I could try, I suppose.”

  “What time does it leave? Can you drive me across the river?”

  “Let me find out and I’ll call you back, Joe.”

  “Get me on that mail ride. I want to be standing on the platform when they arrive in L.A. Call me back as soon as you can. I’ll pay whatever it takes. My love to Elise. Don’t worry, everything will come out all right.”

  Grattan started to say something but Joe hung up the phone. He was going to get them back, there was no question. Positive steps had to be taken. A man in command of his own affairs couldn’t let things just take their course. Boldness was required.

  ~

  He couldn’t feel the house around him. Usually he could, but not tonight. After swallowing two cups of tea, he removed his suit coat, loosened his collar, and lay down on the horsehair sofa, waiting for the telephone to ring.

  Without Iseult and the children it really was no house at all. A stack of bricks and timbers, enclosing nothing. If he couldn’t get them back he would burn it down. Push the rubble up into a pile and burn it down again and again, until there was nothing left but a cupful of fine grey ash, and he’d stir that into a glass of water and swallow it.

  He got up, went downstairs. The servants had retired and the rooms were dark, moonlight slanting in. The front door was locked and bolted. Peering out through leaded windows in the downstairs drawing room, he saw the air humming blue with frost and moonlight. The window glass was cold to the touch. Arctic air had dropped over Montreal in the past couple of hours, the normal pattern after a January thaw, the North reasserting itself. There were wolves in the outer suburbs when the rivers froze.

  He could feel the furnace chugging. The furnace man would be coming at dawn to stoke it, but he decided to go down himself and check the fire. Flicking on the electric light, he went down varnished stairs into the playroom. The children were too old to spend any time there now. Maybe they were embarrassed by the boxes of their old toys and the faded animal pictures on the walls.

  Off the playroom and along a corridor leading to the garage were box rooms, a laundry room, and a couple of servants’ bedrooms, unoccupied. Passing all these he entered the furnace room, where the boiler sat heavy and round as an elephant. The fire made a seething chatter and the steam pipes were clanking like a stomach digesting food.

  He found a dirty, oily pair of leather gauntlets. Pulling them on, he opened the burner and peered at the glowing red hearth. The fire was adequate now but would be weak by morning. He took up a long-handled shovel and started feeding coal, taking care to distribute the chunks properly, raking them smooth and waiting for gases to burn off in dancing blue flames before adding another layer. There was a way to stoke a furnace so the coal’s energy released in a reliable flow, keeping just enough steam up in the boiler to pack the pipes and pressure the radiators throughout the house. If the fire burned too hot it could explode a pipe. If it wasn’t hot enough, lumps of anthracite fused into clinkers that choked the grate, and then the fire had to be allowed to die out completely so the grate could be removed and cleaned.

  He had always been a master of fires, lighting them, feeding them, smooring the red-hot coals so they’d light up easily in the morning. Fire had an appetite, fire was a wild child, no good at regulating itself. Fire was the heart of a house. Not once in the years after their father abandoned them had he let the fire in their old kitchen range go out.

  Once he saw that the fresh coal was burning smoothly, he shook it down so that ashes fell through the grate and into the pan. He gave them a minute to settle, then slid out the pan and dumped the ashes into a pail, which he carried out into the narrow lane between the cellar and garage. He emptied the pail into an ashcan glazed with yellow ice. He was in shirtsleeves, perspiring, and the cold was pointed and subtle, like a honed knife; if he stayed out much longer it would start to stun him. When they were cold, men gradually lost the sense to take care of themselves: he’d known station men to perish after a few hours of heavy rain. Tramps riding boxcars would die of cold tonight, and children in tenements.

  The trees creaked and snapped. He had always made sure to keep the house warm for his family. They could not fault him on that score. Through the gaunt spider-work of a maple he peered at the moon and wondered where they were now, and was that moon shining on them?

  He took a long shower, keeping the bathroom door open so he could hear the telephone. In his silk dressing gown, wiping steam from the mirror, he heard the doorbell instead. He raced downstairs, half expecting to see Iseult at the door, but it was Grattan standing there, the collar of his cashmere overcoat turned up against the cold.

  “Jesus, it’s bitter tonight, Joe! Hell to get the car started. The road was slippery as the devil while I was coming up the hill.”

  Joe felt his expression settle into the sternness he couldn’t seem to avoid around his brother, though for the past few years Grattan had been enjoying a run of good luck. He had been one of the first to take up the new sport of skiing and had bought an old hill farm in the Laurentians for practically nothing. After fixing up the farmhouse he’d cleared ski runs, installed a rope tow powered by an old Model T Ford, and turned the place into a skiers’ inn called The Auberge.

  The Laurentian hills with their birches and balsam reminded Joe of poverty, but he had to admit his brother had made a go of it. A ski train ran up north every weekend. Grattan hired local farmers to meet it at the Piedmont station with horse-drawn calèches and bring his guests to the Auberge. The inn had been written up in magazines and had become very popular with vacationing Americans, and Iseult and the children always enjoyed their skiing holidays there. Grattan had named the ski runs after battles the Canadian Corps had fought: Hill Seventy, Hill Sixty-Nine, Mount Sorrel. He spent his autumns up north blazing trails and cutting firewood. Elise stayed in town — she still had her studio on Mountain Street — and spent weekends at the Auberge. Grattan stayed up north most of the winter, except the first half of January, when it was usually too cold for skiing.

  He was well-dressed, as usual, in a grey flannel suit. Joe was barefoot in pyjamas and dressing gown, his hair damp and dishevelled from the shower.

  “Let’s go up to my office.”

  He followed Grattan up the stairs, and while his brother headed for the study he ducked into the bathroom, seized a brush, and began slicking back his damp hair. His face in the mirror looked pouchy and grey, but at least he was clean and had eaten something and the house was in order. He would fix things so that his family was stronger than ever, the way bones could heal stronger after a break. He could manage everything, put it all to rights.

  ~

  Grattan was sitting in the leather club chair, legs elegantly crossed. He had lit a fire, and the little blaze was snapping cheerfully.

  “Well, Joe, I read Iseult’s letter.”

  “Have you got me a seat on the plane? You could have telephoned, you k
now. You didn’t have to come over.”

  “I don’t think you should go. Now, hear me out, Joe. Elise doesn’t think so either. From the looks of that letter, Iseult is running to get some room. If you want her back, brother, you’ll proceed with caution.”

  Shutting his eyes, Joe could still see himself floating in those three thousand miles of cold sky between Montreal and Los Angeles.

  Grattan said, “Do you remember Levasseur and Tourbot, the French aviators? If they hadn’t crashed, you know, they’d have gone straight back to France when the war started and been killed anyway. That bunch — when the war started, they were all done for in a few weeks. Crashes, mostly; I saw hulks from nineteen fourteen and fifteen on every field I flew out of. They didn’t know what the machines were capable of, and they weren’t capable of much. No one had given any thought to tactics either. That all came later.”

  Joe had often thought of the Frenchmen and the aerodrome in the San Fernando Valley, because that was the dusty, crackling afternoon he had told Iseult she must marry him, just before she’d gone up. He had been afraid she would be killed but she had gone up anyway.

  Uncrossing his legs, Grattan leaned forward. “What were you up to in New York, Joe? One of your spells? Holing up?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Remember when I was gunning for Buck, the night runs through Connecticut? You said if I kept that up it would cost me my family, that Elise would pack up and leave. And you were right. A woman can’t live with a man who’s tearing himself to pieces. A woman can’t live with a man who’s lost his sense. Elise was ready to go; she and Virginia were going to catch a train and lose themselves in Brooklyn and I would never find them.