The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  Now it was September and four years into the war. Summer was nearly over. Warmth might return but the days were already shrinking. Every evening the light was failing faster and faster.

  Frankie glanced at her sister. Margo had turned her back to the view and was leaning on the balustrade, smoking a cigarette. Aunt Elise was holding onto their mother’s arm. The wind was tearing at them all and Iseult seemed to need anchoring. Their father stood by himself a few feet away, gabardine raincoat still flapping. Why didn’t he button it up? Was he hoping the wind might blow him clean? Blow away all his dastardly thoughts? He ought to know that wouldn’t happen.

  Her parents were like a pair of bedraggled birds exhausted by a long migration. Why couldn’t they hold on to each other? What was wrong with them?

  It started to rain, and everyone quickly got back into the car.

  ~

  When the old Packard pulled up at Number Ten, the sky was stormy and black, lights were blazing inside the house, and Frankie felt like someone on a parachute dropping into mortal combat with a fully realized sense of hell. It was pouring as they hustled from the smelly old machine into the house, just ahead of the first brigade of hungry, thirsty mourners. Frankie scanned the dining room, checking to see that the rented silver-plated teapots and coffee urns were in place, along with the trays of dainty sandwiches and bouchées from Pâtisserie Dubois, and loads of strawberries. The O’Briens were from Ireland but it had been a hundred years since her great-grandfather had sailed up the St. Lawrence on a coffin ship, and any tradition of riotous waking had evolved into a decorous tea party that would develop into a slightly less well-behaved cocktail party as the afternoon lengthened. They were Canadians through and through.

  She recognized the barman, Jerry, from Mother Martin’s, a watering hole for reporters, cab drivers, Ferry Command pilots, stale debutantes, and those who in Montreal passed for people in the know. He had set up the drinks table in the front hall between the living room and the dining room.

  “My condolences, Frankie. Real sorry about your brother.”

  “Thanks, Jerry.”

  “Never knew him, but I guess he was quite a guy. Can I fix you a little something, Frankie? How about a gimlet?”

  She had been drinking gimlets that summer with F/O Basil Fitzgibbon, a car salesman and crop-duster in Western Australia before the war, now an RAF Ferry Command pilot flying brand-new bombers from Long Beach to England every twelve days or so. He had layovers in Montreal when the weather over the North Atlantic was bad. Fitz had wanted to fly low over Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery and waggle his wings. He was a sentimental man and loved florid gestures, but he’d taken off for Newfoundland and Scotland in a brand-new Liberator the day before the funeral.

  “Or a Scotch?” the barman asked. “The Scotch is pretty good stuff — don’t know where you got it.”

  The mourners were feasting on plates crowded with ham and strawberries and sandwiches. No one had asked Jerry the barman to pour anything yet, and he was looking bored.

  “Not yet, Jerry,” she said. “I’m in a holding pattern. Maybe later.”

  The house was filling up. Frankie, Margo, their mother, and Elise and Virginia were all in black. Margo’s little girl, thankfully, was not. Frankie watched her sister kiss Maddie and hand her over to the nanny, who swept her upstairs.

  The only youngish mourners were Frankie’s pals and Margo’s, mostly female and lonely as hell and ready for a good nourishing cry after nibbling a mushroom sandwich and downing a neat Scotch or two. Not many had known Mike well, if at all. His cohort was mostly overseas.

  The rooms smelled of butter and sugar and rain. It was brutal outside, trees swaying, cold. In the living room one of the maids hired for the day was on her knees trying to start a fire in the fireplace.

  Frankie heard ice cubes rattling in a shaker, and looked back to see Jerry the barman diligently pouring what looked like a martini for Father Tom.

  “Life goes on,” she heard someone say.

  But where does it go? she thought. And can I go with it?

  She was overhearing conversations about how green and slow the greens were at the Royal Montreal this year. The price of Scotch, the availability of tires. And she had once thought the world was going to be nice.

  With the possible exception of her brother-in-law, all the people she had ever known ran around burying their feelings the way squirrels bury their nuts then forget where. And Johnny Taschereau had been gone for so long he had become a wartime fantasy, a pin-up poster, a stand-in for all the boys she’d never met who were wasting their youth as ball-turret gunners or in anti-tanks or on destroyers.

  As she stood in the living room without any food or drink, trying to get warm near the paltry fire, longing for a cigarette, stately people she didn’t recognize kept coming up and squeezing her arm and launching conversations at her. She nodded, smiled, and murmured back at them, but she couldn’t seem to get her brain or voice organized into a proper response. It was as if she had been aspirated from her body and become part of something else: a piece of pattern in the Tabriz carpet. A cocktail sandwich. A shaft of light.

  The day after Mike came home their father had swung into action, threatening deputy ministers, rearranging schedules of eminent surgeons, demanding and getting the useless best of everything for his dying boy. A thrilling, nauseating, futile ten days it had been, all culminating in today’s funeral Mass, the burial service with banging guns, the cold drizzle, and this morbid party. It was all giving her a headache and she was ready to ditch the festivities and disappear. There was a little balcony off her bedroom, and if it wasn’t raining too hard she could smoke a cigarette out there in peace. She was about to make a run for it when Helen tapped her on the shoulder, saying, “Tel-lay-phone for you, miss.”

  The only caller she could imagine was Fitz; everyone else was at the party. But Fitz was supposed to be at Gander by now, or somewhere between Newfoundland and Scotland. Poor Fitz, with his red hair, seedy moustache, bogus public-school accent, and taste for low nightclubs. He didn’t know it, but he was of a type familiar to Montreal: the hinterlands-of-Empire cad and bounder, lacking even the modest allowance that would have made him a remittance man. He did have bottomless good humour and a salary, and he was not a bad dancer. Mother Martin’s was near the top of his nightclub range; he preferred nameless blind pigs on de Bullion Street. He was at least twelve years older than Frankie and had never mentioned his wife and daughter back in Perth, though an Aussie air force nurse had spilled those beans in the ladies’ room at the Normandie Roof, the one time Frankie had persuaded Fitz to take her there. But he had never actually claimed he wasn’t married. Maybe neither of them had been interested enough in the subject to raise it. She had never slept with Fitz but thought one day she might, though he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. People didn’t need to fall in love to shack up at the motel out on Pine Beach where the Ferry Command pilots stayed. Affection or loneliness or curiosity or boredom would do the trick.

  It had to be Fitz on the phone, but when she went into the pantry and picked up the receiver and a man’s voice said, “Uh, is this Miss O’Brien?,” it wasn’t.

  “Who’s this?”

  “I’m one of the fellows that was in the church today. The honour guard.”

  Oh Lord, she thought.

  “Are you there, Miss O’Brien? Listen, I realize I’ve no right to be calling you. I understand that. I’m very sorry about your brother. I didn’t know him, but I’m very sorry.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Hell, I’m in this club on — what do you call it? — St. Antoine Street. The Green Lantern. Wonderful joint, lot of class.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  There was silence for a few moments.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I saw you in the church. I thought you were beautiful. I don’t mean disrespect to your brother. I just thought maybe you’d like to have some fun, a couple of drinks
.”

  “Sorry, chum, I’m not quite ready to kick up my heels.”

  All around her the noise of mourners talking, voices roaring, teacups clinking on saucers like screams, like tiny bones being snapped.

  “If someone dies, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to get out.”

  “Which one were you?” she said.

  “The one who kept staring at you.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “My name’s Vic McCracken.”

  “Vick? As in the cough drops?”

  “Minus the K. Short for Victor.”

  “Have you been victorious lately?”

  “Well, I just earned my wings out in Manitoba.”

  “You’re a pilot?”

  “Halifaxes and Lancs. The fellows in the church today were my crew. We’re headed overseas. They gave us forty-eight hours’ leave at Montreal, then rounded us up this morning for an honour guard. I hope we did all right.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “We’re on our way tomorrow,” he said. “Eleven hundred hours, train to Halifax or New York and a ship overseas. I’ve never even seen the ocean. You look like a girl who likes to dance.”

  “You didn’t know my brother.”

  “No, sorry.”

  She heard him pull on his cigarette. She knew she ought to hang up, but she had always been fascinated by people behaving badly, usually felt closer to them than to those behaving well.

  “May I call you Frances?”

  “No, Frankie.”

  “Say again?”

  “No one calls me Frances. It’s Frankie.”

  There was a pause and she could almost hear him thinking, or whatever lonely, randy men do that passes for thinking. Calculating. Reckoning odds, measuring appetites. Brutal and simple. She tried recalling the faces of the honour guard but couldn’t.

  “Listen to me, Frankie. If you’re worried about anything, you’ll be safe with me. Your brother — hell, if we’d known each other we probably would’ve been pals. I was going to be a schoolteacher in Alberta until the war came along. I think you ought to get in a taxi and come down here and let me buy you one little drink. Then if you want to go home, go home. But you should come down and give it a try. Life is better than death.” He had a hard western voice and had probably spent long blue afternoons playing hockey on some frozen slough, chasing the puck into a headwind screaming out of nowhere. “What do you say, Frankie?”

  “The Green Lantern’s a dive, strictly a clip joint. Everyone knows that. It’s pathetic that you can’t tell the difference.”

  She hung up and went back to the party, feeling hard and bleak. In the front hall mourners were discussing golf, car repairs, and gasoline coupons.

  “Jerry, pour me a swift one, will you please,” she said to the barman.

  “What’s your poison, Frankie?”

  “Got any cherries? Can you mix me a manhattan?”

  “Sure thing.”

  She took a sip of her drink and wandered out through the living room, dodging the sympathetic, awful smiles people kept throwing her way. Her sister was in a corner surrounded by a coterie of former convent girls — Margo’s bridge club called itself the Ex-Cons — all wives and mothers now, many with husbands overseas.

  Elise and Cousin Virginia were standing near the fire chatting to Father Tom. He had gone out west with Elise earlier in the summer to visit Grattan at his Commonwealth Air Training field on the high plains south of Calgary. Grattan was getting awfully tired, Elise had said. She intended to move out to Alberta to be with him if the war lasted much longer.

  Virginia saw Frankie and blew her a kiss. Frankie went out to the conservatory, where geraniums bloomed explosively, stinking of earth and bone and wire. She sipped her manhattan as rain hammered on the glass roof. Women in hideous hats were drinking tea and boasting to one another of their victory gardens, though it was their West Indian maids who did all the work. She almost regretted having hung up on the boy from Saskatchewan, or Alberta. The brand-new pilot. Maybe she ought to have called a cab and sped straight the hell down to St. Antoine Street, or wherever the kid was doing his lonesome drinking.

  Daylight even in the conservatory was dead yellow and brown, not summer light at all. She went back through the living room, avoiding all contact, across the front hall, and up the stairs. She had not seen her father since they’d come back from the cemetery. He had scampered straight upstairs.

  She knocked gently on the door of the study.

  “Go away.” His rumble sounded like a transmission in low gear.

  She waited a whole minute before she knocked again. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap. Shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits. Blessed Frankie of the Knock.

  She heard the squeal of casters from his desk chair, and the door unlocking. He sat down again at his desk as she walked in. He wore a silk smoking jacket her mother had given him and was holding a Mass card. A photograph of Mike on the balcony of the New Zealand army hospital in Egypt, looking tanned and healthy — Merry Xmas to you all — was in a silver frame, right next to a bottle of Seagram’s VO. She had never actually seen her father take a drink, not in the house, not anywhere.

  He slit open a fresh pack of cigarettes, took one out, and stuck it between his lips, lighting it with his desk lighter. “Want a snort?” he said.

  Frankie shook her head. She sat down on the horsehair sofa. French doors led out to the little balcony where in summer the swallows nested under the eaves. “I’ll take a cigarette though.”

  He raised one eyebrow, then tossed the pack to her so abruptly she nearly missed it.

  When she was small she used to go on drives around the city with her father, he never saying a word if he could help it. She’d play with her dolls in the back seat while he drove through districts that no one else she knew had ever visited, or even heard of. Sainte-Marie Ward, Ahuntsic, Goose Village. Nether regions, poor and ramshackle. Horses pulling junk wagons. People sitting on balconies drinking beer from brown quart bottles. Kids everywhere. Long, strange streets unreeling.

  He hadn’t been driving to get anywhere or see anyone. Maybe in the beginning he might have told himself he was scouting for property, finding his feet in the city, getting to know the island of Montreal, but the drives she remembered were really a kind of floating loose, a detachment. She’d never expected a destination or a clear purpose. He was not on any errand. He almost always kept going past where the city stopped, where the grid of broken streets and tenements petered out. He drove until there was nothing flanking whichever boulevard they were on but ragged fields, ancient farmhouses, and cold glimpses of the river. He kept on going. When he’d gone far enough, he’d slow down, swing the car around, and start to find his way back. When she was little, Frankie had wondered how he did it, how he found his way home without dropping breadcrumbs in the forest like Hansel and Gretel.

  “When are you going to get married?” He spoke suddenly, peering at her through a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “I’m not getting married, Daddy.”

  “You will.”

  “Is that what you’re worrying about?”

  He didn’t say anything. He was gazing at Mike’s picture.

  “What will you do, Daddy, when I do get married? Will you get plastered at my wedding? Will you go on a spree?” She had never talked to him this way before, but any house, any family would be changed by a corpse’s being laid out in its living room. It excited her to suddenly feel capable of saying something.

  “I’m not getting married anyway. Why should I want to do that? But I am moving out, Daddy. I’m going to get a place of my own downtown.” She had never given much thought to moving out, but the moment she said it she believed that she would. “I’ve a good job. Plenty of girls live downtown. I could get a little flat. Margo and I might share one together.”

  Smoke dribbled from the cigarette between his fingers. He was studying the photograph of her brother. “I don’t believe I can face it,” he sai
d. “I don’t believe so. I am going to wrap it up and go away.”

  She rose from the sofa, stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray on his desk, and took hold of the whisky bottle. “You don’t need this, do you.”

  “It’s supposed to be pretty good stuff.”

  “You ought to come downstairs, Daddy. Mother needs all the help she can get.”

  He was looking at his hands; he wasn’t listening.

  “Next summer you’ll go cruising,” Frankie said. “Get on the boat and sail. Daddy, that will seem as real as this. You just have to get there.”

  “Why did they have to take my boy?” he demanded.

  The only answer she knew was silence.

  “Jesus Christ, do you know what I was hearing today? The fiddle Mick Heaney used to play — our stepfather, the son of a bitch that married our mother. ‘Road to Boston,’ ‘Cheticamp,’ ‘Angel Death No Mercy’ — by God, they’d hire that bastard for all the weddings and wakes; he knew all the jigs, all the reels. He’d never stop once he started; he’d saw away all night. I used to think he was the devil. We should have had him down at the church today.”

  She lifted the bottle from his desk. It was unopened and had an excise seal, so it wasn’t from their black market supply. One of Margo’s. “Daddy, I don’t think this is going to help.”

  “What would you know about it?” he said sharply.

  “Not much.” Bending over, she kissed the top of his head. When he could be strong and when he couldn’t was something no one had ever been able to predict. His love had always been tenacious and without limits. It had sometimes felt like being hated. Still, they were a family.

  “Did your mother send you up here?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell her, then.”

  “I won’t. Won’t you come downstairs, Daddy?”

  “And join the party?” he said. “Don’t know if I’ve got the stomach for it. But if I can keep straight, maybe I’ll figure it out. Maybe I’ll come down and show you all how it’s done.”

  Like most people he was a mystery walking through his own land, and when she thought she understood him, it was only in the way she understood certain tones, notes, and chords when a prodigy such as Oscar Peterson happened to be playing at Ruby Foo’s, the roadhouse out on Decarie Boulevard that she loved because it was poised on the edge of the city and the edge of nothing, almost nowhere. Late at night, or very early in the morning, horns and bass dropping into the background while the young Negro’s piano — sometimes sad but never gloomy — whispered secrets, fed her scraps of knowledge about the completeness, roundness, and implacability of the world.