Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  No. Dana Feldman taught me everything.

  Oh, the hours I spent in the house with Dana and her sister, Ethel! Dana, bent over her Underwood, her fingers flying over the keys, while Ethel stood at her easel applying the colours she prepared in old Heinz tins, working the canvas with a wide trowel. The Feldman sisters in the midst of creation, with the whole house in joyous disorder! Ashtrays overflowing, the jackets of the albums they listened to constantly (Thelonious Monk, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Kenny Burrell) strewn all over, and the smell of whisky mixed with the Kools they chain-smoked — the perfume of sedition. If my parents had known! Their son, his voice squeaking, about to break, spending whole afternoons at Dana Feldman-McPhail’s home, an American widow of thirty-seven, whose husband, John McPhail, a wealthy industrialist from Montreal, had lost his life in an airplane accident in 1956. Dana and John had met in New York during the Second World War. After John’s death, she left Montreal, to return to that fabled city, from which she sent me fantastic postcards — the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the giant billboards on Times Square that turned passersby into vulnerable insects. A real New Yorker, except in summer, which she loved spending in Métis Beach. She wrote, far from the bustle of the city, surrounded by silence and untamed nature that could only support sparse humanity.

  Dana the American. Dana the Feminist. Dana the Jew. If there was anything that our communities shared, it was the mistrust we felt towards her

  On the living room walls, made of pine, hung a few paintings that Ethel had created as she sat on the veranda, inspired by the work of Jasper Johns, whose palette had begun to veer towards grey at the time. Ethel, secretly in love with Jasper Johns, isn’t that what Dana told me once? They crossed paths a few times in galleries in New York, perhaps they’d even had an affair, I no longer knew. I should call Ethel. It was a sacrilege to see her paintings now dotted with mildew in the glacial house in Métis Beach.

  I climbed the grand staircase, wandered among the rooms, their mattresses bare, and made my way to one of the tower pavilions, where Dana had had her office. The room was small and circular. Stuffy, with boarded-up windows. She used to isolate herself up here for hours when she needed to concentrate. She sometimes forgot to eat, but never to smoke. It would billow out of the room when you opened the door!

  I pulled open the drawer and fell upon a copy of The Next War, a first edition of her 1963 bestseller. A sober cover, red letters. She had the admiration of an entire generation of women for it. And the hatred of a generation of men.

  Laureen Heller, Ann’s mother, was so excited when she heard I’d known Dana. “Dana Feldman? The Dana Feldman?”

  “Who is she?” Ann asked, a hint of annoyance in her voice at feeling out of the loop.

  “Oh, my dear, you’re far too young to know Dana Feldman.” She laughed, and gave me a lecherous smile which I hadn’t known how to interpret. “It’s thanks to her that I left your father. Don’t hate me too much for telling it like it is, sweetheart. All my friends who read her book, The … The War …, what was it called again?”

  “The Next War,” I said.

  “The Next War ! Right! All my friends who read it left their husbands. And your father knows, my dear. Oh, yes, he does! How many nights did I spend reading it right under his nose while he listened to his trivialities on television. I remember it well.…” She barked a hard laugh. “He would chortle at all this ‘feminist racket,’ as he called it, even if I caught him, one day, with the book in his hands, the lout, sorry dear, I know, I know, he’s still your father, but in any case I caught him red-handed and I thought, ‘great, he’s finally interested in a female perspective.’ But no, how foolish I was! He was staring at the back cover, at the picture of Dana Feldman. And he said, ‘What a shame such a beautiful woman is spouting such idiotic ideas.’ You know what I answered him? ‘Well, I’m beautiful, too.’ To tell you the truth I was more than beautiful. Did you know, Romain, that I was an extra on Every Girl Should Be Married ? So I told him, ‘I’m beautiful, too, and just watch me have idiotic ideas!’ And that’s when I asked for a divorce. You should have seen him! But, no, my dear, don’t worry, you know it better than I, he’s far happier today with Loretta. By God! As fat as she is, and she looks fifteen years older than her age. A real slow-motion car crash, but, hey, if that’s what your father was looking for, I respect his tastes, but right there, there’s your proof we weren’t made to be together.…”

  Ann had rolled her eyes, like every time she heard her mother bad-mouth her father’s wife. Then Laureen turned towards me, suspicious. “Did you know her intimately, Dana Feldman? You seem a bit young.…”

  Embarrassed, I’d turned red to the ears.

  Yes, Dana and I had our secrets.

  8

  It was almost noon by the time I woke up from a dreamless sleep, only to be greeted by a terrible headache. It was impossible to make out my surroundings in the thick darkness. My hand searched for the flashlight I’d turned off before falling asleep on the living room couch. The embers were still warm in the hearth, but not enough to heat the room. Shivering, my hands and feet icy, I got up, groggy, unsure of my step, goddamn this headache. I was about to put on my coat and go out to warm up in the Jeep when, suddenly, I heard pounding on the door and a furious man’s voice shouting, “Who’s in there?” Even before reaching the vestibule, I heard the door open and slam against the wall. I stopped cold.

  “Hey!” I shouted, “Who’s there?” No answer. Indistinct grumbling and heavy breathing. “Who is it?” I repeated, my heart racing. Then a powerful white light began dancing along the walls, moving closer, before pointing straight in my face.

  “Romain? What are you doing here?”

  “Fluke? Harry Fluke? Is that you?”

  We faced each other, both of us surprised. Watching each other like two boxers on opposite sides of the ring. An old man, his mouth permanently twisted with scorn, curved like a bishop’s staff. God, he was old! In one of his hands, a baseball bat, in the other his flashlight.

  “For God’s sake, get that light out of my eyes!”

  He obeyed, trembling, wobbly on his legs. He murmured something about a wave of thefts in the past few weeks.

  That bastard Fluke, still sticking his nose everywhere. Like that time when I was a kid and he accosted me on Beach Street, his head poking out of his Plymouth’s window, a derisive smile on his face, “Where are you going, like that?” Of course, Fluke knew. The books under my shirt weren’t particularly subtle. But he never told my parents.

  Seeing him now, I couldn’t help myself, “This is my house. Please get out now!”

  But Fluke didn’t move. His eyes scanned the living room, as if he was looking for something, something forgotten.

  “You came back to vote, right? To vote yes in the referendum?”

  “I told you to get out!”

  “All the same, you Separanazis!”

  “Out!”

  Fluke grimaced, then smiled, as if there was an old joke between us. “Or what,” he jeered. “Or you’ll call the police? Don’t you think they’d be happy to pull up an old file?”

  Seeing the rage in my eyes, he changed his tone, “Fine, fine. Okay. I’m going.”

  He turned around, wobbled towards the open door. An old beat-up Lincoln waited for him, with a bumper sticker on its back, proclaiming, “WE’RE RIGHT TO SAY NO.”

  Get lost, Fluke.

  A grey November sky, opaque. I’d been gone from L.A. for two days, and I was thinking about Ann worrying herself sick over me.

  My head felt like it was splitting open, and there was no Aspirin in the bathroom. Before shuttering the house for winter, Tommy emptied it of anything that might not tolerate changes in temperature or might be destroyed by rodents, like bedding and towels. He kept all of it at his home in Pointe-Leggatt. He also emptied the kitchen cupboards, taking the su
gar, salt, spices, condiments — not even leaving the shadow of a jar of instant coffee. Tommy took care of the house well. Perhaps I didn’t pay him enough. I promised myself I’d look into it; I was lucky to have him.

  I needed a cup of coffee and some food. I splashed water on my face and walked out into Métis Beach’s foggy cold, before deciding that with the welcome I’d received from that idiot Fluke, the anonymity of a snackbar in Mont-Joli would be preferable. I’d come back later to inspect the place.

  “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” old Leo said in The Go-Between, that magnificent film based on the L.P. Hartley novel.

  Warming up in the Jeep parked on Beach Street, I watched the Egans’ home in the pale light of autumn, a grand cedar-shingled mansion, three stories high, with six bedrooms and a tennis court. I felt like Leo, his memory fading, working to remember the summer of his thirteenth year spent at a classmate’s family manor. Called upon to be the messenger between a young lady and a simple farmer, witness to a clandestine and tragic love story, he would be marked for the rest of his days.

  Yes, the past is a foreign country.

  The Egans’ home had lost some of its splendour, with its boarded-up windows, its shingles blackened by the elements, and the driveway and tennis court needing serious work.

  I saw myself thirty-five years earlier on that doorstep, perfectly terrorized, a bouquet of carnations in my hands — flowers I hated, but my mother had insisted, “You can’t go empty-handed, Romain! You should be grateful to be invited!” I was in my Sunday best like a ridiculous choir boy, hair slicked back, parted on the side. My mother had driven me there in our Chevrolet, and before I got out, she flattened a rebellious lock of hair using two fingers wet with saliva. “You’ll be polite, eh? Don’t forget — it’s an honour.”

  In the half-moon gravel driveway, Mr. Egan’s Bentley, Mrs. Egan’s Alfa Romeo, and another car, more ordinary, a white Studebaker I’d never seen — it would end up being Reverend Barnewall’s, a man I would meet for the first time that evening.

  I had received an invitation for supper at the Egans; I, Romain Carrier, son of a carpenter and handyman for the very same Egan home. I was so terrified I’d vomited my breakfast, though I hadn’t told my mother.

  Gail flashed a nervous smile when she opened the door, followed immediately by a puppy, shaking with excitement, appearing out of nowhere and jumping on me. “No, Locki, no!” His paws on my clean pants, a moist nose between my legs. Gail, embarrassed, looked up and told me, “He’s a Labrador. A great swimmer. My father bought him to take care of us. Just in case there was ever another accident.”

  That was the only reference to her father’s misadventure, without which I would never have been invited there.

  “He saved Robert’s life,” Mrs. Egan, still in shock, had told my mother. “Without your courageous boy — an angel, Mrs. Carrier, a guardian angel — Robert would no longer be with us, you understand? He’d no longer be here.…”

  My mother hung up the phone, turned towards me, her tone accusatory, “Is that true? And you didn’t even tell me?”

  July 1960, a Saturday evening, the night Robert Egan humiliated me.

  “How about that, Reverend Barnewall? John Winthrop introduced the fork to America more than three hundred years ago. Looks like they still haven’t learned to use it correctly.”

  Of course, the comment was directed at me. Snide, hurtful words, whose only intention could be to injure. It had been said in French, too, so that there could be no confusion. Red with shame, I put down my fork on the tablecloth, staining it with brown sauce. I had learned how to hold a fork from my father. You held it like you grabbed a handful of sand. I saw Mrs. Egan and Gail wince, as if not knowing which was worse — the stain on the white tablecloth or Robert Egan’s cruelty. No one had spoken over the course of the meal except for Robert Egan and Ralph Barnewall. They talked about how to fund the Métis Beach church, and golf, and cars, and I don’t know what else — two satisfied men not actually listening to one another.

  I sat stiff-backed on my chair, my appetite gone. I was praying I might somehow become invisible, and not reappear until the end of the meal. What torture!

  In the grand living room, before moving to the table, Mr. Egan, a glass of whisky in his hand, had introduced me to Reverend Barnewall of the Anglican Church, a fat, soft man with a turkey neck. I’d been invited to sit, then promptly forgotten. Impossible not to think of Françoise working in the kitchen. Françoise was my neighbour whom my mother loved dearly. She was always singing her praises. To me, no one could be as boring! Always cackling, or prattling on tediously, speaking of marriage and the house she dreamed of having, how fantastic her choux pastry was, how she was the youngest cook to be hired in Métis Beach. With all the excitement of being invited to such a meal, I hadn’t even considered how awkward it would be to see her appear and begin serving the meal, “Does monsieur want his roast beef well done? Would monsieur desire more potatoes?” I imitated the others and answered her coolly, not looking at her in the eye. She was furious, and hadn’t tried to hide it. This is my place here, not yours. Don’t play at being the pretentious little boy, understand?

  She was sixteen, and I was still fifteen. Sometimes her eyes seemed to fill with what I thought was warm concern when she looked at me. Her conversation made strange detours, like when she insisted on how glad she would be to own a business with her future husband, “a business just like the one your mother has.”

  It was indeed in the order of things that one day I would take over my mother’s clothing store, now that I wouldn’t be returning to the Rimouski Seminary.

  At the table, I wondered whether Robert Egan was replaying the scene of his rescue in his head, the way I was. It had happened the previous Tuesday. Louis and I had been walking on the beach, when we’d seen him suddenly sink into the waters of the St. Lawrence, where he’d been swimming. I threw myself into the water and dragged him out. All I could grab was one of his legs — all covered in hair, I remembered — before hooking my arms under his. I pulled him to the surface. When we got back to the beach he pushed me away violently, humiliated and angry at having shown weakness, which is why I couldn’t understand why Mrs. Egan had called my mother to tell her of my exploit and invite me to dinner the following Saturday. After all, I’d seen him relieving himself in his bathing suit out of fear. A proud man like him! Constantly comparing himself to others, always challenging those around him. He had the reputation of being a sore loser. A nasty guy, not particularly tall, though muscled, with his downy brown hair beginning to thin on the top of his head, a thick moustache like Burt Reynolds, brown eyes circled in white that watched others with constant animosity. The infamous Robert W. Egan in front of me, shocked, humiliated in his soiled red bathing suit, but still aware enough to go back in the water and wash himself off before pushing me with the flat of his hand down onto the rocky beach, while from the top of the cliff Mrs. Egan, who hadn’t seen the whole incident, began to shout, with Gail at her side, “Robert! Robert! Are you all right? What happened?”

  Louis had fled. He was far away by then.

  It was only when dessert was served that Robert Egan began pretending to be interested in me. Which made me more uncomfortable than the cold shoulder he’d offered so far. He had had quite a few whiskies. At the other end of the table, Mrs. Egan seemed on edge, stiffening every time he poured himself another glass.

  Reverend Barnewall was in rapture before the dish Françoise had placed in the middle of the table, a spectacular mountain of profiteroles dipped in chocolate. Robert Egan, meanwhile, smiled stupidly, a bitter twist to his mouth.

  He questioned me about my studies, my projects, and my future. I had no idea what to say.

  For me, the seminary was in the past tense now, and without the seminary, no chance of going to university.

  Robert Egan looked at me, feigning curiosit
y, “Why?”

  I felt myself redden. I wasn’t going to mention what I’d come down with the previous winter, and the suspicious looks I’d gotten for it — mononucleosis, the kissing disease, transmitted by saliva and poorly washed glasses, contaminated glasses, perhaps from the seminary canteen. I’d been sent back home. Fever, aches and pains, fatigue, loss of appetite, my ganglions as big as golf balls on my neck, under my armpits, around my groin. Three months’ rest required as my liver had been affected with jaundice. Furious, my father, who didn’t trust clerics, wondered what had been done to his son, and my mother, in a protective mood — even she felt ambivalent towards them — did not insist that I return. No, I shouldn’t go back, not after what I’d seen there but had hidden from my parents. Little Gaby Dumont’s face, his fingers the colour of ink, his eyes bulging, found hanging in the dormitory bathroom. I’d gotten sick right after.

  “So you’re done with your studies? What are you going to do, then?”

  I’d been hired that fall at McArdle’s sawmill. My father had found the job for me. I took no joy from it. It was a hard job — ten, twelve hours a day in the sawmill, the noise of the machines deafening, enough to make you go mad, not to mention the risk of accidents, but it would be money I could set aside, deposit at the caisse populaire at Joe Rousseau’s house. And after? Maybe someone in Métis Beach would offer me a job, a position in Montreal, in their company. Hopefully I’d eventually go to Montreal and knock on every door, and find a job in the big city where there were museums, and movie theatres, and places to listen to music, the sort of music the Tees bothers listened to — Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Johnny and the Hurricanes. Or maybe leave for New York, the incredible city Dana told me about with such enthusiasm. Yes, one day I’d go there, walk in its streets, maybe even live there if I had the money for it, find a new job, why not? Like in The Buccanneers of the Red Sea, that Dana had given me, the story of a young pirate seeking justice who, during a terrible storm, tells a young sailor who can’t swim and is afraid of falling overboard, Your courage will come from the choices you can’t make. The impression that the book was talking directly to me, to the fearful boy I was and yet, for God’s sake, I was dying here, I would have to push myself one day, and build my own story. No time to waste on girls like Françoise who expected that boys would give them their future; they could take care of their own. And anyway she was too tall — a good head taller than me — and too fat — at her age she already had her mother’s chubby ass — and her hair was done up in a bun that smelled like the sour odour of cold oil, like all the women who wore complicated hair and kept it fixed on the top of their heads for days.