“Tattoo.”
“Tattoo, right! He seems nice.”
“He died.”
“Tattoo?”
“The actor. Hervé Villechaize.”
“Oh? They do say dwarves don’t live very long.”
“He killed himself, two years ago.”
My answer was ignored. She refused to be distracted and went on excitedly, “And the other one, the tall one? Ricardo … Ricardo what?”
“Ricardo Montalbán.”
“Oh, yes! I’d put my slippers under his bed any day!”
Alcohol was making her exuberant, and Jérôme didn’t seem to be enjoying himself, “I’m just kidding around, honey … you know that.”
I told them I only worked on the scripts and, consequently, I’d never actually been on a set or met the actors. Françoise made no attempt to hide her disappointment. I could have won back their attention by telling them all sorts of savoury anecdotes I’d been told by Aaron Spelling himself, like how ABC would have preferred to have the great Orson Welles play Mr. Roarke instead of Ricardo Montalbán (the erstwhile legend hadn’t found work in a while, dragging his two hundred thirty-eight pounds to Pink’s in Hollywood to order nine hot dogs at a time); but what did Françoise and her brothers know about Orson Welles?
No chance in hell they’d talk to me about In Gad. I still remembered a conversation with Josh when we spoke of distribution rights for the first time. The show would be broadcast in Canada, but only out West and in parts of Ontario. Something about cable, antennas, and territories. It wasn’t likely they had heard about it, which reassured me. I had no inclination to launch into fastidious explanations and justifications about Chastity’s abortions and the complaints we had received. I didn’t want to face Françoise’s shocked look. She seemed to have kept a sentimental attachment to the God of our childhood. I’d noticed my mother’s bleeding crucifix, looking like raw meat, hanging above the marriage bed when I’d gone to the bathroom. There were other things that had been owned by my mother in her house too — the silverware, the d’Arques crystal glasses on the dining room table — but I felt no nostalgia, only a twinge of tenderness. But Françoise quickly explained, “Your father gave them to me after your mother’s death. I said no, I couldn’t accept it, but he insisted.…”
My father. Of course he’d given my mother’s things to Françoise. Like the rest of it. Everything was clearer now, Françoise’s discomfort that afternoon, her insistence on giving me the coat and the gloves. I said, without a trace of bitterness, “If I understand correctly, he left you the store as well.”
The colour drained out of her. “If you want, we can figure something out, Romain.”
“Why? He gave it to you. And what do you want me to do with a clothing store?”
“Money. If you sold it.”
“Money? I don’t need any, Françoise.”
“It’s not fair. I tried to reason with him.…”
I burst out laughing. “Reason with the old man?”
“Romain, I don’t want you to think.…”
“Think what?”
“I … well … never mind.”
Perplexed, I watched her turn tragic in her inebriation. What would I do with a store? Jean, protective brother that he was, turned the conversation onto another track and became briefly interested in Gail and her disease, “Cancer?” “Leukemia.” “How old?” “Fifty-one.” Silence, then.
“And Louis?”
I asked the question with a far dryer tone than I’d anticipated, and Jean gave a half smile, as if we were finally getting to the conversation he’d been waiting for.
“What about Louis?”
“He’s probably in prison somewhere, after everything he did.”
“Louis is doing time in Orsainville.”
“Well, there we go!” I exclaimed. “It’s what I was saying, right? And for what? Murder? Did Louis ended up killing someone?”
Jean bit his lip, then swallowed the rest of his rum and Coke — he didn’t drink wine, didn’t like it. “No, not for murder.”
“So for what?”
“Robbery.”
I laughed harshly. “After robbery, it’ll be murder. He’ll get there. Believe me. When you kill animals, that’s the next step. All serial killers begin that way. It’s well documented.”
Françoise became very nervous; her hands trembling. She took our plates, almost knocking over our glasses, but we held onto them. I had the feeling I was the only one around the table to see that something was wrong with her, her moist forehead, visible sweat under her arms, and no one to help her, nobody to say, Are you okay, Françoise?
Jean said, “Louis didn’t kill the Egan dog, if that’s what you think.”
Again a nervous laugh broke in my throat.
“Don’t laugh,” Paul said, “It’s true.”
“Sure it is,” I heard myself say in a voice that was quickly losing its confidence. “The cats, the seagulls, Clifford Wiggs’ swans.…”
“Louis is innocent.”
Françoise stiffened, inexplicable tears in her eyes, and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving a pile of dirty plates on the table. What was happening, good God?
“I was with Louis, that night.”
Paul spoke, his face red with the sudden attention.
“You?”
“Tell him,” Jean ordered. “Tell him so he stops thinking we’re liars.”
Were they making fun of me? I was convinced I’d seen Louis’ silhouette under the almost full moon, his black clothes, the way he had of running with his fists clenched, head forward.…
In a tired voice, Paul began his tale of that evening’s events. The Buick Louis had stolen in Baie-des-Sables, which he drove through the village, bottle of whisky — stolen as well — in hand. Louis was drunk, red, glassy eyes, dumb smile drawn on his face. “Hey, Paul! I’ve got good whisky! Come on, let’s go for a ride!” Paul hadn’t been able to resist the temptation. “I climbed in,” he said. “I shouldn’t have, but I did. I liked to drink in those days. We got on the road to Mont-Joli and went to visit one of his friends. We drank the whole bottle, just the three of us. We were too drunk to get back on the road, and the cops found the car easily. They knocked on the door, nearly knocked it off its hinges, but we escaped through a window, hard to believe, we were so drunk we could barely stand. It was past ten o’clock by then, and it was dark. We roamed around part of the night, avoiding cop cars, and ended up finding a shed in the back of a house, where we slept a little until the next morning. You couldn’t have seen him that night in Métis Beach.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No?” Jean was speaking now, anger in his voice. “When Paul came back home the next day, our father was waiting for him. Believe me, he got it good. We didn’t forget it.”
“Exactly,” Paul added, with the tone of someone telling a tale of derring-do. “The old man wasn’t big, but he was strong. My eye was like a grapefruit for two weeks. You wouldn’t remember it, you disappeared that day.”
Jean gave me another of his satisfied smiles. “Exactly. You ran away to the States. Just like a criminal.”
I chose to ignore that last comment. “So who killed the dog? One of you?”
Jean laughed unpleasantly. “You really want to know? That’s what you want? Well, sit your ass down because you’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you.”
They thought it was me. It was my turn to laugh, “Me? I would have killed Locki? Why?”
“To make sure Louis would be accused of raping Gail.”
I smirked this time. “You know this whole rape thing, it’s a lie. It’s crazy old Robert Egan’s invention.”
“That’s not what people here thought.”
Jean was having fun, that much was clear. He was on his fourth rum and Coke. Jérô
me had brought the Bacardi bottle to the table, and Jean was pouring drinks for himself. In an authoritarian voice that clearly annoyed Jérôme, he called out to Françoise in the kitchen. She reappeared, distraught, mascara smudged.
“Françoise, tell him what you heard the next morning at the Egan place. It’ll help him remember, maybe.”
Françoise protested, “It’s ancient history. I don’t think it’s worth us talking about it.…”
“Romain has come all the way from Los Angeles to understand things. He’s an important man over there,” he declared, with undisguised irony. “A man who probably isn’t used to wasting his time. So tell him, tell him what you know.”
“I … I don’t know, Jean.”
“Come now, sis! You know the story by heart. How many times did you spin us that yarn, eh?”
I shuddered. How many times did you spin us that yarn? Like a dirty joke you never get tired of repeating.
“Go on, now,” Jean insisted, “what are you waiting for?”
Françoise lifted her eyes to mine. Discouraged, she began speaking, stuttering slightly. I could feel Jean’s eyes on me, penetrating like the blade of a knife, but I ignored him. Françoise looked tired all of a sudden, weariness dragging her face down.
“The next morning, it was Sunday. I didn’t work on Sundays, but Mrs. Egan called me, crying, telling me I should come over immediately. I skipped Mass, just to tell you how much I hurried. I got there, there were suitcases piled in the vestibule. Gail was in the room upstairs, and I could hear her crying. Her father and mother were shouting at each other in the living room. They ordered me to help them pack everything up because they were leaving that evening. I couldn’t understand why, it was only August 19, I remember the date, they still had a week left.… I thought a member of the family in Montreal had died, someone that Gail liked a lot because she couldn’t stop crying.…”
She turned to Jérôme and asked him to fill her glass. She took a long swallow. “Mr. Egan said something about the police, to make sure someone got arrested. Gail was yelling from her room that it wasn’t him.”
“Who, me?” I asked.
Françoise didn’t answer. Jean encouraged her to continue. “The phone rang. Mrs. Egan picked up. She was on edge. She was talking to someone, I don’t know who, but someone close enough to the family for her to tell them everything.…”
She returned to her wine glass.
“Tell them what?”
“That when Mr. Egan and she hurried back from the garden party at the Tees’, Gail was in a state of shock. She had shrieked so loudly on the veranda that the neighbours, the Riddingtons, who had gone to bed already, came out of their house in a panic to see what was happening. Mr. Riddington drove to the Tees in his bathrobe to tell Mr. Egan, while Mrs. Riddington tried to calm Gail in the house. Mr. and Mrs. Riddington discovered Gail in tears, half-naked. Mrs. Egan had been a nurse in London during the Second World War. She said she had experience in … those kinds of situations.… She’d seen cases like Gail’s in the hospitals.”
Was all of that true? Why did Gail never say anything? The few times I tried talking about it with her.… “What happened after? Your father, your mother, what did they do?” I had asked. She had told me nothing, closing up entirely like a pouting child, a sort of amnesia or incomprehensible stubbornness. She didn’t want to talk about it. Why? Because of Len?
“Go on,” Jean said.
Françoise lowered her eyes, and said in a suddenly reserved voice, “Mrs. Egan was saying how the first thing she did when she got back from the garden party was open her daughter’s thighs and stick a cloth well … you know where … she pulled it out and sniffed it. She said over the phone, ‘My daughter was raped by a French-Canadian bastard.’ And then she said your name.”
“And you believed her? Tell me you didn’t believe her, Françoise.”
Jean came to her sister’s rescue, “The Riddingtons saw you running along the beach. The Hayes as well. They were all clear: it was you. And you didn’t look like you were out for a jog.”
“That doesn’t make me a rapist!”
Jean smiled. “Why did you run off to New York if you had nothing to hide?”
“Exactly,” Paul added.
“When you have nothing to hide,” Jean said, “you don’t just flee. Your mother died of a broken heart, and that’s on you. And you poisoned your father’s life. Seems to me you’re pretty much responsible for all of it, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, “I had to save my skin! That goddamn Robert Egan bought off whoever counted as a judge in those days. They were going to lock me up! I slept with Gail! I didn’t rape her! And why the hell am I justifying myself to you people?”
“You’re the one who came here looking for the past.”
“The dog, who the fuck killed the dog, then? Who?”
“It wasn’t Louis.”
Jean stared at me, challenging. Knowing he was going to score a few points, he said, “You see, Romain, we don’t really care about the dog. In fact, we don’t really care about what happened to you. You made it, right? Look at you. Expensive jacket. Rolex on your wrist. I can’t even imagine where you live. We, well, we had to take care of your parents when you left. The dog, rape or no rape, it’s all the same to us. You ruined your parents’ life. You left and you never came back. Oh no, excuse me, once, you came back once, to bury your mother, but it was too late by then. And now, now you come back just like that because you want answers to your questions. What, all of a sudden, after all these years, you’re having trouble sleeping? Who cares? It’s nothing compared to what you forced your parents to live through. You might not know it, but a few years before dying, your father could barely walk anymore. Stubborn as he was, he refused to move out of the apartment over the store. Françoise ran his errands, prepared his meals, gave him a bath every two days. A bath! Can you imagine what that meant to him? And when he wanted to go out, like on Sundays, for Mass, we would go get him. Took two of us, and we’d pick him up in our arms and carry him down the stairs to put him in the wheelchair we bought for him. He couldn’t accept what he’d become. He complained, sure enough, when we helped him, but he always agreed in the end to be rolled up to the church, where we lifted him up a second time to get him up and sit him on his pew, third row, on the right side. You remember that, at least? Probably not.…”
Françoise was crying now.
“Tell us. Tell us what you were doing when we were taking care of your old man? Tanning on a beach in California? Probably more interesting than feeding your father and wiping his ass. You see, Romain, Françoise never stopped feeling guilty about the store. She felt guilty towards you, because she inherited what should have been yours. Well, I think she deserved the store.”
“It’s late, Romain. You need to leave.”
This time, Jérôme spoke. His voice was strong, peremptory. It surprised everyone. I got up without saying a word, their hostile eyes on me. On unsteady legs, I made my way to the door. I heard Françoise moaning and her brothers trying to console her.
II
DANA
1
Twenty-one dollars and eighty-five cents. That’s all that was left of the thirty-five dollars I’d grabbed in a panic from my dresser drawer. Standing in front of the ticket counter at the Montreal Greyhound station on Drummond Street, I counted and re-counted my money, my hands shaking. How could I survive with this little in New York? In my back pocket, I had a postcard Dana Feldman had sent me. I kept reaching for it, like checking your gun before a robbery, just to make sure it was still there. Her address was on the back:
Harperley Hall
41 Central Park West, Apt. 8E
New York
As fantastic as the city was on glossy paper, it was monstrous once you got there. Buildings gave you vertigo when you stood at their base, enough to
make you doubt there was a sun above. The strident cry of cars and the deafening grumble of air conditioning units filled the air.
The smoke that rose from the city! As if it was built on an active volcano, or a cozy plot in hell. Torrents of pedestrians hurtling down large avenues, pushing you out of their way if you didn’t walk fast enough. Disgusted looks of harried travellers in Penn Station, where the bus abandoned me to my fate after an endless night on the road where, wracked by nausea, I vomited on the bathroom floor. There were so many people here, I’d never seen so many in my life. The whole thing made me dizzy. All these people on their way to work on a Monday morning — August 20, 1962. I remember making an effort to record that date in my clouded mind, knowing that nothing would be as it had been, a violent break with my past. All the men and women around me were dressed in modern clothes, though at that point I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. They were different down to their physical features, and there were blacks as well, my first time seeing black people outside of Thomas Riddington’s National Geographic and Sidney Poitier movies at the clubhouse. And there were young people with surprising hairstyles, long fringes on their foreheads, hiding their laughing eyes, idling about, eyeballing me impudently, pushing me out of the way when I came too close. It was unreal, frightening. Less than thirty-six hours ago I’d been in a different country, busy losing my virginity in circumstances I couldn’t quite remember, and here I was catapulted by the brutality of fate into this unmeasurable place, alone and terrified, waiting for Dana Feldman to return from Métis Beach — and she never returned to New York before Labour Day. I had two long weeks when I would have to find a way to survive, while hoping that Dana could save me from this nightmare.
What would they say about me in Métis Beach? How would my parents react? Anxiety rose in me as I thought back to Métis Beach’s private policeman, Frank Brodie, who had appeared at our door, “Police!” Police? The soles of his shoes slapped on the kitchen linoleum, his voice more suspicious than usual, and far more excited. It was barely seven, my father was out already, and my mother had gotten up at dawn to begin preparing Sunday lunch.
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