My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  Morrie was returning to himself with every bite and had the wit to nudge us over to safer conversational ground. Mum’s question regarding his expertise he parried neatly with a compliment.

  “This meal is delicious Carol. I can’t thank you enough. My late wife was a wonderful cook. This is the first time since I don’t know when that I’ve tasted anything that held a candle to her cooking.”

  “I’m honoured you think so,” Mum said. “May I ask, has she been gone long?”

  “No, not really. It feels like just yesterday she was here for me to talk to. She was sick for quite a while before she passed away, confined to her bed. For the last few years I cooked for us both as best I could, which isn’t saying much. Here,” he said, looking more animated than he had all night thanks to the Lena-effect, “let me show you her picture.”

  Ay! No! Don’t do it! No! No!

  But he did it.

  I must have forgotten to switch my subliminal warning system off vibrate. Morrie went right ahead and reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Yep. The very same wallet he’d theoretically been rolled for earlier in the day. Any idiot could see this wasn’t a replacement wallet or a backup wallet. It was a comfy old friend of a wallet. His wallet and no one else’s. Its arc conformed perfectly to the curvature of his right hemi-tush. It’s a well-know fact that forensics can establish a billfold’s paternity by matching up the two.

  Luckily my family didn’t have a suspicious bone in its body. Witness my mum’s complete and utter cluelessness vis-à-vis my dad’s moonlighting. I rest my case. Anyway, everybody was so focused on the photo of Lena, and it was a great picture I have to admit, that no one seemed to pay any attention to the enchanted wallet that disappeared and reappeared without rhyme or reason. Or if they did, they were discreet enough to keep it to themselves.

  That bobble in the proceedings aside, the rest of dinner moved along without a hitch, all the chatter safely in-bounds. As soon as we set our forks down after dessert, I extricated Morrie from the table to drive him back home. No point pressing our luck.

  “You said you live in Westmount right?” Serge asked him. “It’s on my way. I can give you a lift. Ben doesn’t have to run you back.”

  Uh-oh. A bad equation, the two of them alone in the car together with Morrie off his game. Loose lips and all that. But what could I do? So many lies had been streaming out of my mouth all evening that my cupboard was bare. I couldn’t dredge up a single good reason not to let Serge play good samaritan. So it was settled.

  Mum and I threw our coats over our shoulders and walked the two of them out to the car, leaving the rest of the family to get a head start on the post-game analysis over the dirty dishes. While I was helping Morrie balance all the foil care packages on his lap, Mum and Serge stepped outside the range of the garage light for a low-key goodbye smooch. I could still make them out fine, though. It wasn’t all that dark. That kiss, I’d have to say, was one of considerable finesse. They’d obviously worked out on prior occasions whose job it was to tilt in which direction so there’d be none of that adolescent nose bumping, no awkward clacking of teeth. An easy 9.5 on technical merit. But it wasn’t really the mechanics of their kiss that kept me gawking when I should have turned away and left them to their privacy. It was the tenderness of it, how they paused in the middle to look into each other’s eyes and smile at their private joy before starting in again. See until that moment, the word kiss always tripped the same switch for me, the one that brought up on screen that damned Ritz elevator kiss, with its sloppy guzzling of lips, wet and wild, as if kissing were purely a salivary event. Thanks Dad, for yet another crapola legacy. But now I saw what a kiss was meant to be. I hoped that my brain would cut me a break for once and do the simple bit of rewiring required to bypass the old image in favour of the new.

  “So what did you think?” Mum said once Serge pulled out of the drive.

  “Supper was terrific, Mum. Your normal culinary triumph.”

  “Not supper, goofus. Serge. What did you think of him?”

  “I liked him a lot Mum. Go for it.”

  “So you think he’s a worthy successor to Daddy?”

  Such an innocent sounding question. Except the answer to it was spiked with land mines, and no one ever gave me a map. One wrong step and I’d blow a leg off and probably bring Mum down with me. Her asking me straight out like that caught me with my guard down, and I’d spent every last ounce of my energy for so many years keeping it propped up that my back was permanently cramped with the effort. It would be such a relief just to tell her the truth, that a tree stump would be a worthy successor to Daddy. But my father had one hell of a long reach. After all these years, and from the grave yet, he could sense when my resolve was getting shaky. And that’s when I’d feel it. A good twisting pinch in the arm. You think I was imagining it, do you? Then why was my arm black and blue for days afterward? A reminder pinch it was. A deal is a deal pinch. And so I’d can the urge to tell my mother the truth. It worked every time before and it worked this time too. Besides, it would be demeaning to Serge to lower the husband bar so far that even a cockroach could vault over it. Serge couldn’t help it if he was following in the tracks of a scuzzball. Let the guy think he had big shoes to fill.

  “More than worthy, Mum. More than worthy.” I though that summed it all up with complete accuracy.

  17

  Papal dispensation had been granted to the Bay to stay open all night for the city’s annual Nuit Blanche. Normally, Montreal’s All-Nighter was for cultural stuff strictamente, but since the store housed a museum it was deemed artsy-fartsy enough to get full privileges. This was a seismic coup for my dear place of employment since no other stores would be allowed to stay open to cater to the dusk to dawn crowd. If festival-goers had an urge to do a little shopping and had a gap in their schedule between Poetry Slam at one a.m. and Glass Blowing at two, it was the Bay or nowhere. They had the market cornered.

  Boy did they luck out in head office. Retail was so not the meaning of the night. But the Bay slipped between the Nuit Blanche cracks thanks to the very museum it was oh so happy to trash. At least it meant my place would finally be rubbing shoulders with the Big Macs of the city’s museum world; museums with their own buildings, their own bankrolls, their own bathrooms. Too bad it had to wait to happen till just before they lit the funeral pyre.

  Oh the Bay’d be raking in the bucks all right. The Nuit Blanche was a springtime mega-event. The streets would be gridlocked with people all night long, so many thousands that you’d think they’d taken the wrong turn for a Stanley Cup parade. And they’d be dressed up wild lots of them. Adding themselves to the show. After all those dreary months of greyscale winter, it was break out or bust. How really to describe it? Like Mardi Gras. But not.

  We were expecting more visitors to pour in that one night than in the whole lifetime of the museum. Not that everyone attending the All-Nighter would choose to come see us of course. There were loads of choices of where to go, what to do. The printed program guide was a brick. A couple of hundred activities to pick from. A museum wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. There were people out there who’d prefer to gumboot dance at city hall or build their own totem poles out of recycled tuna cans. Philistines. Their loss.

  It was Mum who tipped me off that we’d be participating in the city’s bedtime blowout for the first time ever. She heard it through the grapevine. So what else is new? By the time the top brass got around to notifying me officially via one of their afterthought memos, I’d already spent a week and a half scrubbing down the place. I’m not talking my ritual Monday morning wash either, soap and water with a shpritz of Windex chaser. No way. For this extravaganza I was treating everything to a facial and a pedicure too. Let no one presume that just because my museum ran on pedal power it was any less pampered than those ivy leaguers I was sharing the program with.

  At least the bigwigs were trusting me to handle things on my end for once. They were too busy worr
ying if the Bay’s clunky cash registers would be zippy enough to handle the mobs. Carte blanche they said I had for the event. Magnanimous buggers. Now they were giving me carte blanche? When my days were numbered? But I accepted the penny they tossed in my cup and kept quiet.

  Those deadheads upstairs whose imaginations dribbled all the way from A to B, they figured it was unrisky to grant me my independence. What could I do in a museum beside set up a rope line? I’m sure they pictured me standing at the entrance like a lump, a fixed smile plastered on my face, doing your typical welcome/bienvenue bit. Yawn. I’d been to museums on Nuit Blanche before. It was way more than just an after-dark visit. Culture wasn’t always an easy sell. You had to give the visitors some bang for their buck, even if it was free. Otherwise they might just as well have stayed home trawling for porn as usual.

  I took my responsibility to heart. If they’d made this my baby, the museum was damn well gonna do itself proud. So what if the job was only mine for a measly two months more. That’s right, two months. I was now in firm possession of the elusive closure date. Deep Throat had finally gotten around to worming it out of Serge and good little spy that she was she passed it on to me as promised concealed inside a cheese sandwich. Me of little faith. Just when I was starting to think that the assignment I’d given her had slipped her mind what with all the fizz of her new romance. I should have known better.

  The date was firm, Mum reported. No wiggle room. The auctioneers from Toronto were booked in and they wanted to prepare the catalogue without any interference from moi. So it was only fifty-seven more days to x out on my calendar before the collection scattered to the four winds and the space occupied by the museum went to expanding the Bay’s nail salon. Yeah, you heard me right. Nails. Those morons…. Well, don’t get me started on them now. I have another story to tell.

  I corralled Renaud, Nick, and Sam into playing supporting roles for the night of. Not that all that much strong-arming was really required once I laid out what I had in mind. It sounded like a hoot to them so they signed right up on the dotted line. I knew I’d be able to count on my kayak crew. Those guys didn’t know the meaning of the word no.

  My idea was this. In the back corner of the museum there was this diorama with three mannequins posed on a piece of scruffy astroturf. They’re gathered around the birchbark canoe, going about their voyageur business. One is meant to be loading a pack into the canoe, another is smoking a pipe, and the third is hunched over a kettle cooking up brunch. A selection of fur trade chazzerai is set out in the foreground for verisimilitude, or whatever the hell that word is that means realism. You’ve got your rum kegs, your flintlocks, your fire bags, your oilskins, and a couple of stuffed beavers looking smiley and upbeat considering the fate that awaits them. Hanging behind this tableau is a set of four interlocking panels painted up to resemble a pine forest and all the little beasties that called it home.

  Now I had a few issues with that diorama. Okay, more than a few. All right, let’s just say many. Take the backdrop for one. The artist got the perspective all wonky. Or maybe he wasn’t trying for perspective. Or maybe he wasn’t even an artist. The birds and the animals did have a paint-by-number look to them if you put your nose right up close. And speaking of forest fauna, did those particular critters on the backdrop really pal around together? I could have sworn that some of them were tropical. It didn’t do to cross-pollinate animals from the Canadian backwoods with animals from the Amazon in the same mural. There’s a logical limit to biodiversity. But even worse than the we-are-the-world forest were the stuffed beavers dressed up in tuques and sashes. I mean come on. What was with this cutesy shit? Either you were aiming to be authentic or not. Which brought me to my last gripe, though definitely not my least, namely the three stooges sitting around the canoe. Voyageurs they were meant to be. You didn’t have to tell me. But with the real and true canoe as the centrepiece of the scene, the plaster-of-paris voyageurs looked that much fakier by comparison. They were clearly twenty-first century implants, their clothing a polyester blend, and if you looked carefully at where their boots met their pants, you could make out that they were dressed in tube socks. What an embarrassment.

  So I welcomed Nuit Blanche as my chance to upgrade that scene which I’d been forbidden from on high to fiddle with before. Now I was free to slap it into shape, make it less Disney-ish, more historically kosher. First off, I planned to take care of minor housekeeping details like putting the beavers back in mufti. Easy enough done. But the sumo revamp I had in mind, my proudest brainwave, was to ditch the mannequins altogether and parachute in real people to replace them. Sort of like those living statues you see on street corners downtown, except mine wouldn’t have their faces bronzed. Actually they wouldn’t even be statues either. My thinking was that they’d move around in front of the piney backdrop as if they were genuine voyageurs in camp. A living crèche kind of thing, but minus Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  I could count on at least one fan of this plan. Alexandre. He and the voyageur mannequins didn’t get on, you might say. For sure they never mixed outside of office hours. He found them too dumb. If they had baseball caps on instead of tuques they’d be wearing them backwards. And even though it was all part and parcel of their gig, he looked down on them for their sweat-soaked clothes, their matted hair, and their lowbrow habits. For their part, they saw Alexandre as snooty and limp-wristed. So there was no love lost there. Junking the voyageurs who stank up the joint would make Alexandre a happier camper for the duration of my tenure, brief as it was going to be.

  As to my role in all this? Well, aside from being producer, director, set designer, prop master, gaffer, and best boy, I’d be playing the archi-voyageur. The bossman. I’d be the one doing most of the talking. My three live recruits would just be backing me up. I figured the kids attending would go for it big time. The four of us voyageurs would stage a little activity every hour on the hour all through the night, although kiddly attendance tended to fall off after midnight so I’d been told. Yeah, kids were my real audience, I calculated. Or rather families. My experience in the museum taught me that mums and dads loved it when their little darlings soaked up history au naturel, rather than from the pages of a book. So that was the description I had them put in the Nuit Blanche program. I called it Little League Voyageurs. Catchy, wouldn’t you say?

  Not everyone in my nuclear family was as high on the plan as Alexandre when I let them in on what I’d dreamt up for Nuit Blanche. We were sitting around chewing on duck bones when the subject came up. It was the anniversary of Dad’s funeral. On that day Mum always rounded us all up so we could drive out to the cemetery and put a pebble on Dad’s marker. Then we’d go out for Chinese. To VIP where Dad used to take us because we kids liked spinning the lazy Susan and it was dirt cheap to feed a family of seven. It was Mum’s homage to the old régime. Personally, I didn’t see the point of going to the graveside. You could think or not think about Dad anywhere. He hardly deserved a special trip out to the boonies. I only went along on the outing for the Kung Pao chicken.

  Predictably, Mum thought my plan was brilliant and Zach insane. He didn’t so much object to my idea for the night as to the fact that I was putting myself out to do anything at all. “I give up,” he said. “I’ll never understand you. Why in the world are you going to all this trouble for the Bay? They’re letting you go. All you ever do is complain about how they treat you. And what do you in your infinite wisdom decide to do? You get down on your knees to them and say, ‘yes massuh, anything you say massuh, of course I’d love to help you squeeze more pennies out of the buying public before you toss me in the dumpster, massuh.’ Jesus. Grow a pair, why don’t you? Sorry, Mum.”

  “It’s not for them, this, it’s for me,” I said. “That’s the crucial difference.”

  “Yeah right. Well, what we’ve got here, I’d say, is your classic self-destructive, love-hate relationship. You really ought to go see someone about getting that straightened out.” Here Mum lifted her e
loquent eyebrows. They clearly stated that I’d seen too many someones in my life and this line of talk was unfunny to her in the extreme. Zach picked up on her message and shut up. But Rena took over right where he left off. Turns out she was pissed off. “Why didn’t you ask me to play one of the voyageurs? All my experience on stage and you skip right over me? Correct me if I’m wrong but do you have any other sisters who happen to be studying acting? You know I could nail a role like that.” She was more steamed than I’d seen her in a good long while. “It’s because voyageurs didn’t wear bras, right? I wasn’t true to life enough to suit you. That’s it, isn’t it?” Shit, they were coming at me from all sides.

  A little footnote here on the question of historical purity. Rena was way off the mark with her Victoria’s Secret crack. I’d come across quite a few cases in the literature of cross-dressing voyageurs, in the woman-to-man direction I mean, who went out as members of fur-trading crews for years on end incognito. Or would that be incognita? Anyway, some of them were actually known to have taken native wives. Started families even. Somehow. But this discussion I so didn’t want to prolong.

  “Sorry, Reen. Really. I should have thought. I’m full up with voyageurs now, but you’ll be in my next production. Swear to God.” She thawed partway with my apology, however worthless it was. “I just wanted to help out,” she said, leftover moody, and in fact I did need help, but none that she could give me. It was Nana I had my eye on.

  See, my Nana was a bit of a pack rat. She had balls of wool that she’d picked up on sale squirreled away all over the house. And since me, Zach, or Rena didn’t show any signs of procreating, she had no immediate need to knit the baby blankets they were intended for. That kind of thing you didn’t do on spec. That we knew. She’d taught us those old-country rules and regs. Pre-knitting could rile up the evil eye. Get it thinking of harelip, club foot, what have you. She couldn’t put a future great-grandbaby at risk, so the wool just sat there, waiting for her plugged-up grandkids to get with the program.