Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  Gail moved slowly, as Jack looked on. She lolled, almost as if nodding, and Jack helped her up in her bed, placing a pillow against her back. Shoulders bent, he left the room and returned immediately with a burly young man, reddish brown hair, my height. A nervous type, briefcase under his arm. Gail’s face brightened. Who was this man? A mastodon, really, at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He walked towards me and offered me a moist hand, as Gail introduced us in such a hushed voice we could barely understand, “Romain, this is Len Albiston … Len, Romain Carrier.…” Then Jack took over, and gave an embarrassed, hazy explanation — Len was a reporter, he worked for the Calgary Herald; he was in Montreal to cover the Quebec referendum.…

  All well and good, but what was he doing in this hospital room? Why introduce him to me now?

  Gail seemed to have read my thoughts. She spoke, her voice barely audible, “I know, Romain … It’s a strange moment.…” Len’s face reddened so suddenly that I began thinking unpleasant thoughts.

  Suddenly tense, I said, “Gail?”’ Then turning towards Jack, “What does all this mean?”

  Jack raised his shoulders, helpless. “Be patient. She’ll explain.”

  After, I couldn’t remember how it was told to me. Gail had become animated all of a sudden, a sort of miracle, her eyes full of life, her voice energized. Len had stood in the corner of the room, shooting anxious glances at the television, raising the sound a little. He had an article to write for the next morning, and it was late, past ten, in strange and painful circumstances, but he was a professional, a conscientious journalist who was the pride of his … mother?

  “My son, Romain. Our son. Summer of ’62.”

  Len’s cheeks burned. This young man who seemed to have no connection to me, my son? My heart beating, I was too stunned to speak, too shaken to know whether I should even speak. Gail? What did you just say?

  She gave Len a relieved look, and her face softened with a glow of serene resignation that the dying have when all of life’s files are finally closed. You see, Len. It’s done, it’s done.

  What was I supposed to say to that? Wonderful! Or, Come here, my boy!

  Embarrassed, Len looked at his watch, then went through his pockets and pulled his wallet out, from which appeared a card, his business card. He handed it to me, hands shaking. He had to leave and make his way to the Yes camp’s headquarters before the speeches, before the results. He went to Gail, took both her hands and kissed her on her forehead, the sort of kiss that people who love each other give. He seemed to know, somehow, that she wouldn’t be there anymore when he was done with his article. He was overflowing with emotion, tears in his eyes, the way he took Jack in his arms and, finally, the way he shook my hand, saying that he’d like to see me again, for lunch, maybe, but not now because he was so busy and he had to return to Calgary, but maybe in a few weeks. He’d come to L.A. if I wanted him to. And that was that. He took his raincoat, put his briefcase under his arm, and walked out.

  I took my head in my hands. Why had she hidden this from me for all these years? Yes, why, Gail?

  The strange vitality that had filled her was gone. Sudden pain contorted her face. Worried, Jack pressed a button that alerted a young nurse. Another dose of morphine, and the lines in Gail’s face were soothed.

  On the television, talking heads babbled away. Then, shouts of joy from one side of the question — the game was over.

  Through the window, day would come soon, autumn light would illuminate the city. Montreal, a battleground, its streets filled with election signs like so many abandoned flags.

  A weary feeling overtook me — the love of my youth had died, and I was the father of a complete stranger.

  6

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot, Romain. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, Ann.”

  “Are you coming home today?”

  “No. Tell Matt and Dick they can do what they want.”

  “What they want? You’re joking, right? Are you sure you’re okay? Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone. I know you. Why don’t you come back to L.A. this afternoon?”

  “I need to … understand.”

  “What?”

  “To rest.… Jack and I, well, we kept a vigil for Gail, all night.”

  “Oh, Romain! It must have been terrible.”

  “Give me a day or two, okay?”

  “A day or two? But … why? I’m worried Romain, worried for you.”

  “Don’t be. It’s just shock, is all. I’ll call you back, okay?”

  She sighed. “Okay, but please, take care of yourself.…”

  “I love you, Ann.”

  And, of course, I said nothing about Len.

  I was exhausted. After five hours of agitated sleep in a motel just outside of Montreal, I drove some six hundred kilometres, stopping only to get gas, fill up on coffee, and swallow a hamburger — which meant I now had a stomach ache. With nausea in the back of my throat, my hands shaking on the wheel, I scanned the cone of light at the edge of my Jeep’s headlights, but I could barely distinguish the various Métis Beach properties, in front of which vegetation had grown even denser over time. I sought the silhouette of the grand hotels that had filled the summers of my childhood; fire had probably got the best of them. After all, they were old wood structures that even then weren’t considered particularly safe. And, suddenly, I was overtaken by a clear memory of the Métis Lodge fire of 1957, with flames as a high as towers, panic at the idea it might spread to surrounding buildings, infernal heat that melted the tires of surrounding cars. I was twelve when I’d watched the terrifying spectacle, shuddering at the frightening vulnerability that consumed me for days, the brutal understanding that everything held on to the thinnest of nothings.

  Had Gail’s house been there? The Egans’ shingled home, with its white shutters, right next to Kirk on the Hill, the Presbyterian church of Petit-Métis; it was a true curiosity with its steeple built beside the church itself, right on the ground. No, I couldn’t see a thing. The fog was too dense, reflecting my headlights back at me — a fog to split your soul in two.

  My thoughts wandered to yesterday morning with Ann, as we inched forward through Laurel Canyon, where you couldn’t see past your nose because of the smog. It was as if an eternity had passed since, but fast-forwarded — Jack’s phone call, Gail gone, and I, the father of a thirty-two-year-old.

  What would Ann say to all this?

  In the past two or three years, her hints had become more and more insistent: “A child, Romain. Why not?” And each time, I had to remind her of the promise we’d made before moving in together. “It isn’t for me, Ann. Not at my age.” I was forty-three then, and she was only twenty-eight, a very young woman who didn’t yet think about these things seriously. Jokingly yet with underlying seriousness, her dark braids framing her pretty face, she’d said, “I don’t have that narcissistic ambition to reproduce, if that’s what you want to know.” And I asked her whether she was sincere or making fun of me. “I’m serious, Romain. Too many people have babies for the wrong reasons. And what about the child? He becomes a chain that ties them together for life, and they end up hating each other.”

  I shuddered when she said that, then understood that her parents’ divorce had affected her far more than she let on. But she was thirty-five now, almost thirty-six; she knew that it would soon no longer be a choice, but an actual impossibility, and that impossibility gave her the feeling that she’d be losing something she’d regret forever, something essential. Sometimes I feared that her desire for children would break us apart. I tried not to think about it too much.

  As the Jeep cut through the thick fog, the absurdity of the situation became clearer. What was I doing here? What was I looking for, exactly? Unrecognizable places, as full of life as a cemetery, with villas readied for winter, windows shutt
ered.

  There, on the right, wasn’t that the house of that old madman, Clifford Wiggs?

  In my memories, it was the most impressive mansion in Métis Beach, despite the fact that Clifford Wiggs wasn’t the richest among them. William Tees, Art and Geoff’s father, was that man, with his Phantom V, the same car as the Queen of England, as shiny as church silver, a car we salivated over, enthralled when its driver had it washed and waxed at Jeff Loiseau’s. The Tees’ home was on the cliff, immense with its smaller cottages for guests, but far more discreet than Clifford Wiggs’ place with its costly artificial pond, home to two swans, and flowerbeds that extended as far as you could see, filled with annuals. That alone cost him a fortune, hundreds of dollars is what was said, and all torn out at the end of the summer, what a waste! And that one summer when, with his gardener — rumours swirled about the two men — he brought over fifty pink flamingos from the Quebec City zoo to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. The news had burned through town within minutes it seemed, and my parents and I, like most everyone else, had driven past his property to look at the strange creatures. There they were, cackling, shitting on the lawn in front of some twenty guests, and my scandalized mother had said from our Chevrolet with its windows down, “That sodomite will burn in hell.”

  I smiled thinly, my first smile in forty-eight hours.

  I’d lost my bearings. No sign of the pretentious wrought iron sentry box that Clifford Wiggs had ordered from an Italian ironworker in Montreal, which the other vacationers had viewed with disgust. The English of Métis Beach considered ostentation a sin, doubly so if you had a lot of money to spare.

  On my left, the Riddingtons’ home? The Babcocks’? Everything was black, deserted. This place wasn’t speaking to me, for Christ’s sake! This place wouldn’t speak to me. So what was I hoping to find?

  At the hospital, Gail hadn’t had time to explain. Jack, his face ashen, had made me understand that I shouldn’t tire her out with my questions, “It’s hard enough as it is for her.” As if I couldn’t see death going about its sinister business, slipping into her like water into a car fallen off a bridge.

  He’s your son, Romain. Len Albiston is your son.

  Why hadn’t she mentioned it to me in San Francisco, when we lived together? Was this why she’d been so depressed at the time? It was that — she had a child and had abandoned him. In secrecy and in shame. A girl-mother, irresponsible. A slut.

  When we’d sharply debated abortion at my place with the It’s All Comedy! gang, Matt’s wife, a small brunette with a strident laugh, had asked me, all aflutter at the idea of digging up my secrets, “For a man to speak as you do about women, their rights, their bodies, you must have seen it up close and personal, no? An abortion, I mean.” My answer had disappointed her, no, it had never happened to me; none of the girls I’d been with had found herself in that situation, and I was proud of that. I was a responsible man. She snickered, as if she didn’t believe me, “Are you certain? I had one once, and the guy never knew.”

  Matt was suddenly worried, “Are you talking about me?”

  “No, honey, of course not. It was a long time ago.” I made an effort to search through my memory, trying to find a woman who might have done that, to me. Women who got pregnant and said nothing?

  I had been so sure of myself. What an idiot.

  Had Gail considered getting an abortion? Had she been forced to keep the child? Why, for heaven’s sake, hadn’t she told me?

  Then, suddenly, at the near edge of Beach Street, a sight as comforting as a familiar face in a room filled with strangers: THE FELDMAN-MCPHAIL WELCOME. My heart in my throat, I turned left and entered the driveway. The crackling of gravel under the Jeep’s tires sounded like a small happy chortle. All my childhood I’d associated that sound with Métis Beach. It wasn’t like in the village, where we were proud of our asphalted driveways, something you never saw among the English.

  And there it was, behind the hundred-year-old cedars, enveloped in the milky fog, one of the most beautiful houses in Métis Beach — my home.

  7

  Cold wind whipped in from the sea. I stepped out of the Jeep with my buckskin vest on my back and no gloves. I was staggering with exhaustion on my stiff legs, and my whole body shook. I turned the rusty key John Kinnear’s son kept hidden under the veranda, fearing it might break and I’d be stuck outside.

  The house was cold and dark thanks to its covered windows. I immediately felt that mix of apprehension and excitement I used to feel as a boy, when my father left me in the dusty dark of these grand mansions for the time it took him to go outside and stand in front of the windows so that I could push out the protective planks, now freed from their hooks. Light would flow through the rooms, like magic. I so enjoyed accompanying him to Métis Beach in late spring! Visiting the homes of Egan, Bradley, Hayes, Newell, Pounden, Curran, and Riddington — all properties in his care. I followed him, proud and excited, as if we owned the houses ourselves. We had to prepare the homes by St. Jean Baptist Day, inspecting them for winter damage. The sheer number of dead flies! Piles of them on the windowsills, which I was tasked with cleaning up, sometimes grimacing when their wings stuck to my fingers. “I don’t want to see a single one, you hear?” My father’s authoritarian, paralyzing voice. And so I tracked dead flies with excessive zeal, all the while making sure I didn’t touch anything — my father’s orders — in the vast and echoing rooms, almost ballrooms, with a slight whiff of a closed-in smell, perfume to my nose.

  In the darkness, I fumbled my way to the kitchen, found the main breaker and turned the power on. I remembered doing that too, with my father.

  A few burnt bulbs, spider webs, and fly carcasses.

  The place hadn’t changed much. Simple furniture with pure lines, of the Shaker style that Dana Feldman had liked so much. The appliances were new. Tommy, John’s son, who took care of the house for the Americans who rented it in summer, had replaced the oven and refrigerator last year, and also bought a washing machine and a microwave for a total of more than $2,000; the tourists were becoming more and more demanding, Tommy said. Dick never understood my stubbornness in keeping the house, “If you never go there, what’s the point?” I rented it out for nine hundred dollars a week, to New Yorkers especially, and gave three hundred to Tommy. The rest served to pay taxes and upkeep; no profit, quite the opposite — I lost money on the house, and yet I couldn’t get rid of it. “You’re too sentimental,” Dick said. Maybe. Even Ann was surprised, she who would have loved to see the place. “Let’s go together, just once.” But I couldn’t, always stopped by fear of dwelling on the past. And now, here I was.

  In the living room, the bookshelves that had once been filled with works of all kinds now held only a few paperbacks with garish covers, left behind by renters. The sort of books you tore through in a few days and left behind like empty packages.

  “Let’s see,” Dana had said, cigarette between her lips, her hand drawing a line along the spines. “Steinbeck … I’ve got The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, and East of Eden. Here, take them. Ah! And here I’ve got A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, my personal favourite.”

  And in the evenings, under the beam of my flashlight, I devoured them in my bed, leaving burn marks on the pages of the Merriam-Webster Dana had lent me for when I didn’t know a word. My English got better by leaps and bounds as I learned more and more complicated words: ludicrous, gambit, looting. Reading books at full steam, barely taking in their message, a glutton going through a box of cookies, attacking them with an insatiable appetite. Dana would give me a surprised look when I came to her place to cut the lawn, with three or four books under my shirt, “Already, you’ve read them all?” And so she pulled out other volumes, books in English with ever more complicated words, and sometimes French books, like Prévert and his spectacular Paroles: “Pope Pius’ papa’s pipe stinks.”

  The more I read, the further my horizon stretc
hed.

  Then, one day, “Here, read this. Better educate you now, before you get into any bad habits.”

  Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe. A book on the Index.

  “What is it?”

  “What every man should know.”

  Man. It had been pronounced with such solemnity that I was flattered. My shaking hands, ready to turn its pages — what wonderful knowledge was hidden within? I was so disappointed when I read its first few lines, some scholarly gibberish — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” An obscure impenetrable jargon in two volumes that I read as a challenge during my convalescence in the winter of 1960, mononucleosis having forced me out of the Rimouski Seminary during the first term of my second year. A winter of boredom spent reading and sleeping, exhausted by the smallest effort, Simone de Beauvoir’s words finding their way into my dreams, violent erections that would wake me and that I looked on with consternation, too tired to do anything about them.

  And so my education about women’s struggles began, associated with exhaustion, during an obstinate battle against a resistant virus. In my mind, I formed a clear impression of having drawn the lucky number in the human lottery — being born a man. For a man to speak as you do about women, their rights, their bodies, you must have seen it up close and personal, no?