The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  They were asleep when the taxi arrived. Lidia was in the kitchen sipping beer and playing cards with her husband when she heard the car, saw Mr. O’Brien getting out, and raced upstairs to warn Iseult.

  Unwilling to wait for the morning local, he had taken a cab all the way from the Los Angeles train station.

  Awakened by footsteps and by Lidia’s and his mother’s voices, Mike came downstairs, saw his father’s suitcase in the hall, and found his parents sitting in the dark living room. His father was on the sofa, his mother in an armchair.

  “Your father’s arrived,” she said calmly. Then she stood up and switched on a table lamp.

  What had they been doing there sitting in the dark? Had they been talking at all or just sitting there, looking at each other? His father smelled of sweat and tobacco. His mother was wearing a summer nightgown, nothing else, no wrapper. Her feet were bare. He couldn’t tell if she was pleased to see the old man or not. Maybe that meant she wasn’t. How thin she had gotten, Mike realized. Her body nothing but wire and tension.

  “I just walked that wall of yours, Mike.” His father stood up. His blue suit was rumpled and he needed a shave. He was pale, his eyes their usual clandestine blue. “I’d like to look it over in the morning. You tied in some sleepers, did you?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “How have you been?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “Good.”

  They stood looking at each other, and Mike didn’t know what to say. While working on his seawall he’d sometimes felt closer to the men he’d hired — Miguel, Guillermo, Ruben — than he had ever felt to his father.

  Not knowing what else to do, Mike stepped forward and stuck out his hand. He and his father shook, but Mike knew his father was disappointed because he had been hoping for something more, even if he didn’t know what it was.

  ~

  The girls didn’t see him until breakfast. By then he had thoroughly inspected the seawall and taken a dip in the ocean. He appeared at the breakfast table showered and shaved and spruce in a seersucker suit, a rose from the garden in his buttonhole, holding a Los Angeles Times he’d picked up in the driveway.

  After kissing Margo and Frankie on their foreheads he sat down and started eating his grapefruit while examining the Times. Mike and his sisters looked at each other across the table. Frankie stifled a giggle.

  It isn’t just me, Mike decided. He really doesn’t know how to talk to any of us.

  As his father turned the front page, Mike glimpsed the headline.

  AUSTRIAN KREDITANSTALT COLLAPSE

  FOUR MILLION UNEMPLOYED IN GERMANY

  “Well, Daddy, you look awfully snappy in that ice-cream suit,” Margo said.

  Without looking up from the newspaper he said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  ~

  The next day he bought them a fourteen-foot gaff-rigged catboat, a Sea Mew built at Santa Barbara. Margo named her Girl Guide and they started going out sailing nearly every day. Their mother was the only one who knew anything about sailing, which she had done in Maine as a girl. She taught them to tack around the harbour, then the bay, and after a week they began venturing out into the thirty-mile-wide channel separating Santa Barbara and the islands. Their father became a handy sailor very quickly, with a sharp instinct for reading tides and wind, and by taking turns at the helm, Margo and Mike learned to handle the boat and sails efficiently. Frankie was the only one who didn’t enjoy sailing. She hated the fog and distrusted the wind, and when land fell out of sight she panicked. She spent most afternoons at the pony club or swimming at the beach club with her pals.

  Their father did not say anything about returning to Montreal — maybe he didn’t intend to. There was a depression on, after all, and business had pretty much dried up everywhere according to the newspapers. Nothing was being built. Maybe they were staying in California for another winter.

  Mike was surprised Margo didn’t raise the subject, since she was usually so outspoken and had a vigorous sense of her own social needs. But mixed up with the question of where they’d spend the coming year was the question of their parents’ marriage, or perhaps their divorce. He knew that Margo, desperate as she was return to her friends, especially the Taschereaus, was as wary as he was of raising that subject for discussion.

  Every Wednesday evening there were barbecues at the beach club, and on the first Saturday night in July a boy escorted Margo to her first club dance. Iseult still went up to Ojai two or three afternoons a week in the old Lincoln, which had been repaired. Their father had offered to buy her a new Ford coupe but she wouldn’t allow him to.

  One afternoon, instead of sailing, he drove up to Arya Vihara in the Lincoln with her. When they got back to Butterfly Beach that night, they were sunburnt and tired, but she was holding onto his arm and both of them were smiling. They said they’d stopped on the way home at the Montecito Inn, where the food was excellent and Charlie Chaplin had been sitting at the next table with a bunch of Hollywood people.

  The next day Iseult came out sailing with them and Frankie was persuaded to come as well. Their father had the helm as they left the harbour. When they had cleared the breakwater and it was time to tack, Mike saw his mother touch his father’s wrist very lightly. Was this a signal that affection was renewed despite all his flaws and mistakes? Or was she just signalling him to loose the jib and come about?

  He knew that his parents believed their strongest and deepest emotions ought never be displayed. Showing their feelings was, for them, being false somehow.

  The swell was gentle that afternoon, the sea was warm, and the offshore breeze came up after three o’clock. They sailed as a family. With Iseult at the helm, Margo on the mainsheet, Frankie on the jib, and Mike and their father holding off with boathooks, they even managed to heave to alongside a fishing boat. Between them all they had enough loose change in their pockets to buy crab and striped bass, which they took home in a bucket of ice and grilled for their dinner.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1931

  Returning

  She went out to the garden every evening to cut flowers for the dinner table, and one evening she noticed him sitting on Mike’s seawall, his back to her, gazing out to sea. Since he had been in California they had been sleeping in the same bed, but he never reached for her and she didn’t know how she would respond if he did. It was difficult to talk to Joe about things that mattered, and she sensed they were both trying to avoid being alone together. She was still in love with Krishnaji.

  But something, some need, had led her to the end of the garden to sit with Joe on the seawall, though not quite beside him. A few feet away.

  “I am thinking we ought to sell this house, Iseult,” he told her.

  He had lost his city pallor by then and was quite dark. A man who’d go to any lengths — he’d always somehow given that impression. The horsepower in his hands, forearms, shoulders, and neck.

  The Pacific was its usual easygoing blue, the Channel islands barely visible through a sheen of mist.

  “California’s awfully far, and as the children get older it’ll be harder to persuade them away from their friends. Our life is in the East now. I’ve been doing some work in Portland, Maine. Maine is much closer to Montreal. There’s a house at Kennebunk that would suit us, I think. We can drive there in six hours from Montreal. We’ll get a bigger sailboat. What do you say?”

  “I don’t say anything for now.”

  Every morning he had been plunging diabolically into the surf, even when the beach was battened with fog and riptides were streaming.

  “You haven’t asked but I’ll tell you anyway, Iseult. I’ve not taken a drink since you left. Just to get that on the record.” He patted the cement wall with his palm. “This is a first-class piece of work. The boy knows how to put through a job. After university he can kick me out and run the firm the way it ought to be run.” This was how he expressed his love for them: by organizing them into his plans and rhythms, his
own needs. “I want to get away, Iseult. The two of us. I was thinking we might go back up to those mountains. We left some happiness up there, Iseult, did we not?”

  She felt something clutch at her throat like a pair of hands, but then it released and she could breathe again. She couldn’t speak, afraid of what might come out of her mouth. There was no point reaching into the past trying to find something alive. Picking up the cut flowers, she went back into the house.

  But the next day, when he mentioned it again, she agreed to go. Things had to be dealt with one way or another, but not in front of the children. Distance might help her see things more clearly, distract her from the swarm of longings infesting her skull every moment.

  He booked a bedroom on the West Coast train to Seattle. On the platform at Los Angeles he offered her a blue velvet box. Opening it, she found a gold brooch set with a pearl, a delicate thing, old-fashioned. She put it on because she knew he’d be hurt if she didn’t, and she didn’t intend to hurt him unnecessarily.

  They shared a double bed on that train, his body heat provoking a mash of feelings in her, mostly anger, resentment. He was trying to annihilate her. Putting on a wrapper, she spent the first night and most of the next in the lounge car in an armchair, reading The Good Earth. They took meals in the dining car and she brought the novel to the table. Joe gazed out at the long yellow agricultural valleys of Oregon and Washington, where he owned land. Every now and then she looked up from the book and their eyes met. The sight of middle-aged couples with nothing to say to one another had always depressed her horribly, and that was what they had become. Her thoughts, furious and confused, circled Krishnaji like birds fluttering around a perch.

  She finished the novel in the Seattle train station. Joe picked up a Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and on the way up to Vancouver she read about Japanese soldiers rampaging in Manchuria. Four hours later, as the train slid through the Vancouver yards, she saw strings of boxcars sitting idly on sidings, tramps in every open doorway, legs dangling, and dozens of men and boys with bedrolls and haversacks slung over their shoulders, tramping along shining tracks in silver rain.

  The last time they had been in Vancouver was in 1914, on their way up to the contract. In those days she and Joe O’Brien had shared a seamless will and one set of longings, but it wasn’t like that anymore.

  After checking into the Hotel Vancouver they ate a late supper in the Timber Club and retired to their room. The Continental Limited was due to leave at nine o’clock the next morning. While Joe undressed she took out her nightgown and drew a bath. When she came out of the bathroom, he was asleep. He wanted her back, that was clear; that was why he’d wanted to take her into the mountains. Joe could not live without her. Krishnamurti certainly could; there was nothing he needed from anyone. She would have liked to be that way herself. Instead she’d ended up wanting him: a humiliating situation.

  They had been sitting on the porch glider at Arya Vihara with the two women — his sister-in-law and her mother — bustling in and out of the cottage like riled bees. Iseult was lost both in her marriage and outside it, living but not living. She blamed Joe, the furtive drinking sprees. She had never been able to understand such irresponsibility — where it came from and how it had survived in a character otherwise so conscientious, so determined and fixed.

  The children thought Krishnaji was stealing her from them, but in fact he had refused to offer her a different story from the one she was living. “You look at me as though I am a pail of water. I am not a pail of water, madam. If you’re thirsty, then go inside the house. Take a glass for yourself, drink.”

  ~

  The next morning the Continental Limited quit Pacific Station and went steaming across the Fraser Delta in slapping rain. Flat cropland looked lush after the tawny valleys of California and Washington. As the train began snaking up the Fraser Canyon, she and Joe sat in the lounge car facing each other. She was reading another newspaper story about the Japanese rampage in China. She could sense Joe watching her.

  The endless train ride from California, the violent mountains, all they did not know about each other: the trip was a facsimile of the first days of their marriage — probably what he had been aiming for — only minus the yearning, perhaps, minus the belief.

  At Hell’s Gate, where the river pinched and the right-of-way clung to the steepest side of the canyon, she stared down into the cauldron of waters hundreds of feet below. She might have put aside her newspaper then and stood up. Walked to the end of the car, stepped out into the vestibule, and quietly pitched herself off the train.

  She put down the newspaper, but instead of standing up, she shut her eyes and touched the velvet nap of the seat cushion with her fingertips. She remained very still. She was going to resist the logic of death; her father had not, but she would. Her children would not come of age abandoned, wrecked, disinformed, without a mother. She might be ungrounded, but she would not give herself up.

  She could feel steel wheels rumbling, hear couplers squealing and grabbing. In that roughness, in that sensation, a kind of life force. Rude and heedless, rushing on. She opened her eyes and saw that Joe was still watching her.

  For the rest of her life, whenever she thought of that passage over Hell’s Gate, she felt a renewed sense of wonder and terror. The memory gradually became a source of strength. Near to drowning in confusion and despair, she hadn’t succumbed. She had resisted, she had survived.

  MONTREAL, SEPTEMBER 1939

  Gathering Soldiers

  Johnny Taschereau was waiting for her in the lobby of the Mount Royal. Margo saw him glance impatiently at his wristwatch and knew right away that something had changed. She was only a few minutes late, and usually Johnny behaved as though there were all the time in the world.

  Catching sight of her, he smiled. He was, as usual, almost too well-dressed: the chalk-stripe Savile Row suit that she loved, cut narrow on the leg. She had on a green summer frock and her black straw with the floppy brim.

  Johnny kissed her on both cheeks. “There’s a rumour we’re going to be mobilized,” he said.

  She felt a sudden weight, like someone putting a sandbag on her shoulders. “What does it mean, Johnny?”

  “Qui sait?” He took her arm and they crossed the lobby, heading for the bar. “I doubt they’ll dispatch the Régiment de Maisonneuve to confront the panzers immediately. For one thing, we have no bullets. On the other hand, given the general stupidity so far, who knows?”

  They had never before taken a room at the Mount Royal — it was risky. Plenty of people who knew them lunched at the hotel; the Mount Royal was a crossroads of Montreal social life. For years the city’s biggest bookmaker had operated from a suite on the ninth floor, and the Normandie Roof on the twelfth was Johnny’s favourite nightclub. Her father’s office in the Sun Life Building was only a few blocks away, and he or Mike sometimes took clients to lunch at the Mount Royal. But she and Johnny were running out of decent hotels. She never wanted to use the same endroit twice. They’d taken rooms at the Ritz-Carlton, the Windsor, the Queen’s, the Berkeley. Good hotels were expensive. Johnny’s father paid him very little, but his Philadelphia grandmother had left him some money. In August they had spent two foggy, rainy afternoons in a tourist cabin a couple of miles inland from Kennebunk Beach, and one night in a cabin in the White Mountains.

  Johnny always registered under the name Constant Papineau, a cousin killed in the first war. Margo wore a ring she kept in her purse. Necessary rituals, but she couldn’t believe they were fooling the desk clerks, elevator operators, and glum proprietors of tourist cabins, who surely understood perfectly well what she and Johnny had come for.

  The lobby bar was cool and dim and they were shown to a banquette. It was not a large room. It was dark but not sombre; the atmosphere felt intimate. The air smelled of ice and of polished wood and polished glasses. Johnny ordered manhattans. She took a few salted almonds from a little silver dish.

  Over the summer Johnny had been dri
lling one night a week with the Régiment de Maisonneuve, his militia battalion. Margo had spent much of the summer in Maine; Johnny came down for weekends whenever he could get away. Both families owned cottages at Kennebunk Beach. She loved the hard light of the coast, loved seeing Johnny on the beach, his torso brown and wet. Loved standing in breaking surf, holding on to his arm.

  Once his battalion mobilized it would be much harder to get together. The Maisies might be rushed overseas at a moment’s notice.

  Manhattans came in tumblers stuffed with ice, the glass cold and paper-thin, a kind of honed delicacy. She loved the click of ice cubes, the coppery colour of the liquor, and the bright, lascivious cherry.

  They had a habit when together of not always filling the air between them with talk. They shared a gift for creating silences that felt as intimate as anything they did. When they were feeling distant, they usually brought themselves together by staying quiet for a little while. In silence their harmony never failed to re-establish itself, though they were quite different sorts of people, really. She was protected, closed; he was fearless and open. She was hard rock made millions of years ago by her family; he was molten, still changing. She was cold, he was warm. Yet beneath his beautiful suits and bon vivant air he was a more serious person than she was. He’d read hundreds of books, spent a year studying the history of European law at the Sorbonne, learned to cook, worked in the kitchen of an inn at Lyons, travelled through Germany on a motorcycle.

  Sometimes they didn’t say a word when they met. They went into the hotel room or the tourist cabin or whatever it was, took off their clothes in the available light, pulled the covers off the bed, lay down on the clean sheets. He would start kissing her slowly; everything developed from there, and conversation came after. In bed he insisted they speak only French. Her convent French was rusty but improving.