CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SEPTEMBER 1998
SAINTE-ANNE-DES-MONTS, QC
In the letter Albert sent Thomas, care of Mary, he talked about “mending fences” and about “family ties,” as if their relationship were a frayed but sturdy length of rope, and all they had to do was tie a few good knots where it had snapped ten years ago, and everything would be made whole again. The tone was that of a changed man, one freed of a weight that had made him a burden to others; if, now, he were given one last chance, everything would be different, you’d see. As Thomas reread his father’s words it seemed he was speaking less to his son than to Laura, in a sense; it was as if he’d waited too long, and now there was only Thomas left to accept his remorse. He felt like asking the question, but the opportunity never arose. It would have been awkward to bring up Laura, he thought, in the middle of his father’s barely controlled excitement and his sincere, contagious joy at their reunion.
For a month Thomas had been living under Albert’s roof, on the edge of the village, next to that boundless body of water covered at dawn by mist that hid the sky through morning. He could see the St. Lawrence from his bay window, and often lost himself in contemplation. The cool smell worked its way into the house and spread from room to room, one at a time, and the old floors creaked wherever he went. The people who had built this house were dead, but life emanated from every hinge and bolt, in the lingering humidity and echoes and incongruous angles where the walls met. The keyholes were like the ones in old movies: you could bend over and look through them.
Albert had welcomed him with enthusiasm tempered by restraint, going toward him and holding back at the same time. He moved to kiss him, then cut it short at the last second when he suddenly understood that it wasn’t appropriate at Thomas’s age, and settled for an awkward hug that Thomas accepted as naturally as possible. With his arms shyly wrapped around his father’s torso, so his hands could touch, he could physically feel the passage of time and every lost opportunity. Despite it all, Albert’s smile was beaming, brimming with affection and remembrance. They separated and Thomas went to pick up his bag, but Albert jumped on it in a way that reminded Thomas of the loving, urgent movements of the man he’d seen through the bus window in Richmond, Virginia.
Albert put his son in his childhood bedroom. He thought it was the right thing to do, unaware that Wright and Jo had done the same. Thomas didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t like it didn’t matter, but it wasn’t a bad thing either, there was no way he could see it as a bad thing. It was a good idea, in fact, proof that Albert had put some thought into his stay and was taking it seriously. Yet, when he sat on the hard mattress, once he was finally alone with the door shut behind him, he felt like crying for the first time since his mother’s death. As if, in this place impregnated with his father’s personality, Laura’s irremediable absence took on its full meaning.
So Thomas slept in Albert’s old room upstairs, the one he had shared with a brother Thomas didn’t know. The room was spartan but welcoming, with a sloping floor and inviting symmetry: two beds separated by a nightstand; no football pennants or photos of singers.
They spent entire nights outside enjoying the last of the day’s warmth as they talked around the fire. Albert stacked the logs and Thomas watched him, making mental notes. The backyard was big, hundreds of yards, several hectares. You could walk all the way to the road without crossing the property line. The first time he passed under a certain tree planted all alone in the middle of a field, Thomas noticed a treehouse in the branches. Albert told him that he and his brother had built it back in the 1970s, with lumber salvaged from an old shed. They’d done a nice job. Polka-dot curtains still hung from an old window, they’d held on through twenty years of bad weather. Their discussions were friendly, spread out in both space and time; they talked about the area the same way they talked about the past, and the sea, and the salt water that turned fresh, and walks in Chattanooga back when Thomas went to Brainerd High.
Albert liked to make coffee late in the evening, and add a splash of bourbon. He would put two wooden recliners around the fire, comfortable chairs in which two people could look at each other face to face, and also watch the sky, where burning embers floated through the air along with several thousand visible stars. Thomas understood that from here, even here within it, you could see the Milky Way.
Practical matters had been quickly settled. Thomas would sign up for university next year, there was no rush, they’d look into equivalency rules and straighten up his legal status. He was the son of a Canadian, born outside the country. He was an adult. They’d wait and see. He could spend fall and winter here, resting and building up strength. Albert would support him. Thomas could do whatever he wanted. They had plenty of time: they had so many things to say to each other, so many memories to share and discuss. If he wanted to go walking along the banks of the St. Lawrence, go camping, go climbing in the mountains, or tour around the Gaspé Peninsula, the Baie des Chaleurs, all he had to do was say so. If he didn’t feel like doing anything, that was fine too, he just had to say so, Albert would leave him alone.
Thomas would learn French that year — it was one of his priorities. Albert had never taught him anything about the language, except involuntarily, when Thomas heard him talking to Laura, in the kitchen, and they’d switch accents. Then it was Laura’s turn to struggle and stumble over strange, complicated words, which Albert sometimes made her repeat because he hadn’t understood. This, he often said, was one regret that never left him. His failure to pass on his language to his son, when he’d had the chance, struck Albert as a symbol of the larger failure that was his life. Just last week he’d talked to a woman in the village, a former teacher he knew well, who’d known his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Langlois, and was willing to help Thomas learn. She was a kind, patient woman. Thomas walked to her house, stretching his jaw as if to warm up before their elocution lessons. After a few short months he would speak in full sentences, know enough to get by and ask for what he needed, enough to explore the village and talk to people. He’d go fishing for cod at the municipal dock, throw out his line in his spot between the Ford pickups and the foreign workers. Everyone he met in town greeted Thomas with a smile.
The first story Albert told him was about the house and how it came to be his. He’d returned to his hometown in 1987, Thomas remembered, and his parents had died the following year, first one and the other soon after. Albert was the sole heir, though he wasn’t the eldest child. In fact he was the youngest. Albert was born in 1959, was six years younger than his brother Charles. But no one else was left to claim a share. The eldest, his sister Monique, died of leukemia in 1985. Charles, the brother he’d built the treehouse with and shared a room with, was killed in a car crash not long after he turned twenty-five in 1978, the year Albert left for the States. He’d known for a long time that he stood to inherit everything when his parents died: the estate, the house, the land, and his father’s debts as well. He’d talked about it with Laura often, in their little apartment, with the newborn in their arms, he’d told her about Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, the family property, as if talking about something to be reconquered. But that’s not why he’d come back. He’d come back because his marriage had failed, over in Tennessee. That’s what had forced him to leave. To take a step backwards. There was one thing Thomas had to understand: despite everything Laura had told him, they’d never officially separated and, until he learned what happened, about the plane crash, he’d never stopped believing that they might get back together.
He came closer to the dying fire and gave one of the logs a nudge with a metal poker he’d brought outside. Thomas stood up to get a few more logs but Albert told him to leave them beside the fire, he’d take care of it. It had been a strange year, Albert said, as the flames kicked up again. Had Thomas heard about it? In January, southern Quebec had been hit with the worst power outage in history, an ice storm had blown transformers and kn
ocked over pylons and paralyzed Hydro-Québec’s entire grid. Had Thomas heard about it? Albert pushed his hands together, forming a circle around an invisible branch:
“The ice was this thick. Everything gave out at the same time. We were lucky up here, but Montreal got hit bad.”
As he sat down in the chair he sighed, a sigh of comfort or nostalgia, probably both.
In the weeks after his move back to the village, he’d watched his father Jean die quickly. His mother Lorraine followed not long after. They weren’t especially old, but the illness had come for each of them in its own way: Jean silently, Lorraine violently. When he found himself in an empty house after his mother’s funeral, Albert had understood just how alone he was in the world, a feeling compounded by the fact that he’d abandoned his wife and son thousands of miles from here. The river wind whistled in the shutters and blew right in through the open door. When he turned to close it, a silence descended. It had lasted for years, until Thomas showed up on his doorstep with a khaki bag and a bruised face.
Then he talked about his parents, his brother and sister, people Thomas had never met but whose pictures adorned the walls of the house. The oldest photos on the staircase showed an eighteen-year-old Lorraine Sénéchal in the arms of Jean Langlois. Behind them, in black-and-white, a gleaming new Packard waited to take them away on their honeymoon somewhere in New York State. There were lots of other portraits, in the staircase and the other rooms, above the mantle, near the clock, and on commodes and sideboards in the room where Albert slept, which had been his parents’ room before. Albert described these people to Thomas for the first time, revealing their private lives, hidden secrets, and faults. He wasn’t driven by malice, at least as far as Thomas could tell. Albert would smile when he talked about things like the coldness of his father, who’d nonetheless managed to instill certain values — integrity, rectitude, honesty — values that made Thomas think of Wright. Maybe he and Jean would have gotten along. It seemed unlikely. Jean Langlois had been an important union leader in the thirties and forties. He’d helped set up one of the United Steelworkers’ first Quebec locals, at the Stelco plant in Montreal. He’d fought against Duplessis and the ultramontanists. While Wright climbed the ranks of the Methodist church in Tennessee, Jean was struggling to chisel away at the power of the Catholic priests in Quebec.
There was also no malice, none Thomas could discern at least, when Albert talked about his brother Charles, with his innumerable conquests and legendary vanity. Albert remembered the smell of gel and hairspray that permeated their room when he was a kid. He recalled the mirror they’d finally installed behind the door one afternoon in 1965. Charles had managed to convince his mother and was free to admire himself to his heart’s content before heading out. Albert could still imagine his young self reflected back as he sat open-mouthed on the bed while his big brother gazed into the mirror, turning in profile and then turning again to make sure the razor line on the back of his neck was perfect.
Charles died doing ninety miles an hour on the 132, outside Rimouski, where he had a girl he went to visit. Around midnight on May 27, 1978, he lost control of his car, which first rolled and then hit a tree a little further down. His death was an indescribable shock for Jean and Lorraine, and for his brother and sister too. Albert told Thomas that Charles was the kind of guy everyone loved, despite his shortcomings. They only made him that much more lovable. He was that guy, a walking cliché but that’s the way it was, there was nothing to be done about it. Charles was handsome and generous. He loved a good laugh, but never at others’ expense. He stuck up for his little brother, had once gotten into a fight with a much bigger guy to defend Albert. On one of the stairway photos he appeared in all his splendour, leather jacket and pomade in his hair, a sixties teenager leaning on a chromed Chevy with a smoke dangling from his mouth. Looking at the photo, Thomas had no difficulty seeing what Albert meant. Charles emanated confidence. He had that combination of happiness and confidence that had rubbed off on all the family and friends who gravitated around him like satellites and planets. This made him the odd man out in the Langlois family.
Albert had always been more like his sister, Monique, the oldest child. He’d never known her well: she’d left Sainte-Anne-des-Monts to work in a Quebec City department store. A taciturn, solitary girl who kept to herself: that was how he described her, and not like it was a bad thing. In the entire house there was only one photo of Monique. She was laughing with her head thrown back, it was before the first symptoms of leukemia showed up. In summer 1980 she came home to live with her parents. The framed photo on the mantelpiece of the big living room shows her in a blue-and-white striped summer dress, almost from behind, looking a touch mischievous and carefree, a forty-year-old woman with dark curly hair and massive glasses. On closer inspection you could see freckles.
Thomas didn’t feel intimidated by these portraits or this family he had never met. Nor did he feel filial attachment. He stopped before the photo of Charles and Albert playing together in front of the house, an old photo whose colours were strangely faded and vivid at once, whose frame was still crooked against the wall, and he contemplated the sheer joy captured on film, without feeling that he was part of it, or belonged to it. No matter how alive these people had once been, they were frozen in the portrait nailed to the wall, prisoners of whatever would be said about them from time to time. When Albert talked about his dead family, whose members had left at various times in his life, punctuating it with deaths and births, he felt no bitterness, but you could tell from listening that he wanted to pass on something that was slipping away from him. Thomas figured his father might be like him, deep down, and could only experience these ties by talking about them, reliving them in his mind, through his memories, putting them back together in order, like a story. He brought these people back to life, blew colour back into them like a bed of coals, for Thomas’s sake, but they were growing irrevocably colder, he realized.
One evening, Albert told Thomas that it was strange, or maybe sad, but he was no longer sure what colour his mother’s eyes had been. Green? Grey? He stared into the emptiness in front of him, dreaming, and Thomas couldn’t help himself from reading between the lines where he heard something like, “I never paid attention.”
In September the nights started getting colder and Thomas wanted to know whether Albert had finally found what he’d spent all those years searching for, those years after he’d left Laura and himself. And even before he left, when Thomas was a little kid, when he had been distant and unfathomable, disappearing without warning, or when he would lean over and get down on his knees, to be at Thomas’s height (though he never quite was), to try to convince his own son that he was extraordinary, that he wasn’t like the others, that he had to cherish this difference. Those years when this endeavour had achieved the opposite of its desired effect, as Thomas felt above all inadequate, sidelined, and rejected. He wasn’t criticizing, he wanted to make that clear. He bore no resentment, not really, at least not anymore; he’d managed to find a happy medium between his most private feelings and Laura’s stories, his memories and his mother’s truncated recollections.
Had he finally found what he was looking for, the thing that had led him to Tennessee, to another country, another culture not his own? In early September Thomas felt ready to ask his father for an explanation. He wanted to know what was behind all the departures, fleeing, research, separations, and midnight farewells in dark rooms. Albert answered that he’d simply wanted to fix his errors, and his errancy, and that meant a clean break and new beginning. When he thought about what he’d put Laura through, it made him shake, he lost his balance. That was why he’d left, that morning. No, he hadn’t found anything. There was nothing to find.
He looked at him face to face, and in profile, and from behind, this man who fixed his mistakes in the most cowardly and absurd of all possible ways, by running away and disappearing, and yet could describe the rationale behind h
is choices so convincingly, with such intensity and undeniable conviction in his eye. Of all Albert’s qualities that Thomas couldn’t bring himself to hold in contempt or dismiss as mere whims, it was this radical streak that most impressed him. Albert had built his entire adult life around a single obsession, then drawn out his quest over nearly two decades. His obsession forced him to persist, and eventually to self-destruct, like an addict powerless to stop taking a potent, toxic drug. Then all at once, after so much effort, he’d just thrown it all away, taken it upon himself to find forgiveness, far from his loved ones, like an exile.
He didn’t tell Thomas that he wouldn’t be able to understand, that he was too young, that he could never hope to fully grasp the meaning of his father’s actions. He talked to Thomas like an adult, and that impressed Thomas as well, to be treated as an equal, as if he had somehow lost his filial status and become an individual in his own right, a man, in Albert’s eyes. He listened to him talk about errors, and redemption, bandying about these esoteric terms, and felt respected by the speaker and transported by this story unfolding one piece at a time. The words floated between them and took on their full meaning, finally spoken directly and out loud.
And in the gaspesian night while these two men renewed acquaintance, in the light of a fire burning in front of them, or will-o’-the-wisps in the distance, to the sounds of crickets singing and firewood crackling and pine needles whistling, Albert talked about Aimé, at length, because the story was worth telling. In his attempt to avoid confusion and not get carried away, no matter how emotional the subject was for him, Albert told his son about the origins of his obsession.
He talked about discovering the journal of Jeanne, née Beaudry, who grew up in Saint-Henri next to the Lachine Canal, and in 1864 got swept up in a mysterious love affair, only to marry Victor Langlois a few months later. The story of his great-grandmother ended with her death, from an aggressive cancer, at the dawn of the twentieth century. He went into detail about the cryptic references he’d discovered in the journal, and the episodic reappearance of this man, in photos described by Jeanne, and in moments of distress and anguish. Thomas was already hooked. He listened patiently, waiting for his own role in this story to become clear. He was aware that he’d been waiting a long time for this moment, this exact moment. Now he was experiencing it. His eyes glued to the orange and yellow flames, he listened to Albert and tried, at all costs, not to be disappointed. Finally his father told him about his research into leap years and the movements of the stars, stellar objects, the Council of Trent. The planets began to align in his mind, and Albert was once again that tall man leaning in front of him, repeating that his birthday was going to have to wait a little longer, for reasons larger than his life and those of his mother and his father. No one could do anything about it: there was a hole in time, so small that only exceptional beings like Thomas could slip through. Suddenly Albert’s voice was once again the one he had heard then, with his barely formed ears, his four-year-old’s eardrums. The voice was authoritative, competent, undeniably strong, omniscient in scope.
The Longest Year Page 24