Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  I was in the back of the room. As had been the case recently, Dana was unpleasant and distant in the taxi. I hadn’t mentioned it, but there, on stage, she seemed happy. For a moment, our eyes met and she smiled at me because she knew that I knew something secret about her, and that secret was a shared thing between the two of us. Her voice broke, and she stopped talking. A worried silence fell over the room. Dana lifted her hand to reassure us, took a sip of water, then went on, jokingly, that it would teach her for talking too much, a quip at a Mirror columnist who’d written a few days earlier, “Women already talk too much, we shouldn’t encourage them.” Everyone laughed. She slowly sifted through her notes on the lectern, clearing her throat. Then, with tears in her eyes, she began talking about her childhood, the little girl from Queens raised in a family of modest means. She spoke of her parents’ love of music and the arts, a love transmitted to her sister and herself, the confidence her father always had in his two daughters, and the promise she’d made — to carve out a life for herself, to be the master of her own fate. A fulfilling life. She’d been laughed at and teased at Barnard College. But today, she was sure, her life was far more exhilarating than that of most of her old classmates, imprisoned in beautiful homes now emptied of children. “You can do great things with your lives, ladies. Don’t wait for a man to start working on your future. You can accomplish big things!” And the auditorium shook with the sound of applause and cries of admiration, and a small group of women intoned “Nellie Bly,” and we all joined in.

  “Well, that’s worth a glass of champagne!”

  Dana returned to Harperley Hall euphoric. She had been energized by the crowd of young women. In the taxi, she took my hands and kissed them. “Romain, isn’t it wonderful! All these young women with brilliant futures before them!” My pulse quickened, a growing discomfort between my legs. Oblivious, she continued gaily, holding my hands, kissing them — “I’m still shaking all over. What about you?” Apparently she didn’t notice the effect she was having on me. Good God, Dana! What game are you playing?

  Rosie wasn’t at Harperley Hall; she was spending a few days with her elderly mother in New Jersey. Left to ourselves, we started going through every cupboard in the kitchen, looking for a bottle of champagne. (Dana giggled when she found Rosie’s personal beer stash — a dozen bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Rosie, my Rosie? Is it possible?”) I found champagne in the pantry, Veuve Clicquot, and put it in the freezer to chill. Dana, who wanted a bath, disappeared into her quarters, drunk with happiness. Not even caring to close the door to her room or her bathroom. What game are you playing, Dana? I heard her drawing her bath, then climbing into the bathtub. Again, my pulse quickened, and again, that pain between my legs, a match struck. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then twenty. The sounds of water, a delightful gurgle, terribly inviting. Good God, Dana!

  I hurried to the living room, went through the albums and found Someday My Prince Will Come. I let Miles Davis, volume turned up high, fill the space, as if I was trying to drown out the last coughs of a dying man.

  I returned to the kitchen, my brain buzzing. The bottle! My hands shaking, I brought it out of the freezer; it wasn’t as cold as I’d hoped. Too bad. I clumsily popped the cork, which crashed against the wall. Then I had an impudent idea.

  “Give me two minutes, I’m not ready.”

  I knocked a few times on the half-open door to her room, champagne glass in hand. I said, my heart beating in my chest,“I’ve got a glass for you. You can have it in the bath if you want.” She was quiet. I continued in a faltering voice, “It’ll help you relax. And delivery is free.” But she didn’t laugh. “Okay,” her tone was dry, suspicious, “leave it on the table next to the door.” I slipped into her room, my legs like cotton. A perfume of jasmine and citrus filled the air. In the living room, a Walt Disney tune, played divinely by the great Miles Davis. I placed the glass on the table, hesitated a long time —“Romain, are you still there?” — and left immediately, intimidated.

  Back in the kitchen, back at the starting line. My hands trembled, my breath so tense a black veil covered my sight. I poured myself a glass. What are you doing, Romain Carrier? You’re going to fuck everything up! Then, as if I couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t reason, I started pulling my clothes off, as if they’d been contaminated by poison ivy. Naked? Look how ridiculous you are! I grabbed the bottle with one hand, my glass with the other. I made my way towards her room again, my heart beating, my mouth dry. Her back was to me, her hair held up with clips, in a bathtub filled with foam. She was smiling, maybe even laughing a little at the thought of her unforgettable evening. The young women had saluted her at the end, so moved, some of them with red faces smeared with mascara. I knocked one of her shoes over — “Romain, is that you?” — and I didn’t answer. She repeated, worried, “Romain? If you’re there, it isn’t funny.” Then she saw my reflection in her large mirror. She began shouting, insulting me, throwing water in my direction, but it was too late to turn around. I put one foot in the bathtub.… “No, Romain!” And the other foot.… “I said no!” And my calves, and knees, and my thighs, and the rest.… “No!” Then her protests transformed into violent, mocking laughter faced with this tall, skinny, naked boy. We fought comically, like kids, foaming water splashing to the floor.

  Miles Davis had fallen silent long ago. The A-side of Someday My Prince Will Come was over, the needle floating over emptiness, and it would do that for a long time to come.

  “Shit, man!” Jealousy burned in Moïse’s eyes. “How did you do it? Tell me, man!”

  Sitting like a man condemned, at a table under the fogged-up window of the New York City Lights Bookshop, I held my head in my hands. “What did I do … I’m done. Completely done.…”

  “Hey, man! Think of how lucky you are! One of the most beautiful women in New York!”

  “She could be my mother!”

  “Who cares! You know a lot of mothers who look like her?”

  “She’s going to throw me out!”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “No. But it can’t end any other way. It isn’t normal. It isn’t moral!”

  “Morality?” He laughed. “Hey, man, you’re in New York, not the Vatican!”

  The next day, Dana ignored me, until we heard Rosie’s key in the door; she was back from New Jersey. Dana looked me straight in the eye, her nails dug into my arm, “Nothing happened between us, okay?”

  Nothing? Was she joking?

  The atmosphere wasn’t the same at Harperley Hall. The air had a tension to it that Rosie quickly picked up on, immediately becoming suspicious. Our routine had changed without her knowing why; Dana now took her breakfast before I woke up, and in the evenings, she often went out for dinner — with Burke, apparently. “Ma’am?” Rosie asked, hesitant. Dana responded, “Don’t look at me like that, Rosie. There’s no problem, if that’s what you want to know.” Poor Rosie looked at us with her pale, worried eyes, desperately trying to understand, as if we had changed the backdrop when she was away, and she no longer knew where she was.

  Despite the toxic atmosphere at Harperley Hall, Dana let me take care of the daily tasks — letters, newspapers, interview requests — but it wouldn’t last, I knew it. Good God! I just couldn’t forget the night I made love for real, the way a man would, not like it had been with Gail. And those words she whispered to me, “My body feels something again, finally, Romain!” And nothing had happened between us?

  And then, one night, after an exhausting day, we fell into each other’s arms again, and then again, and another time still.

  “Enough, Romain! You’re eighteen! Do you know what that means?” She looked pale, distraught. Wringing her hands. Her ring mounted with a sapphire that John had given her. As if what we’d done had profaned the memory of her beloved husband. “Of course, you don’t care! But I feel like I’m living a nightmare!”

  The next night, sh
e didn’t return to Harperley Hall, and Rosie refused to tell me where she was. At two in the morning, still no news from Dana. I couldn’t wait any longer. I picked up the phone and woke Ethel.

  “Romain? Ah, the two of you, I’m sick of it!”

  “I’m looking for Dana. I’m worried sick.”

  “She’s okay, she’s fine! She’s here. She wanted to talk with me. She’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Yes, yes, she’s fine. She’s sleeping. Don’t worry, she’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “She could have called me to tell me she wasn’t coming home.”

  “She thought you’d be in bed and didn’t want to wake you. Come now, go to sleep, there’s no reason to worry.”

  I felt the end coming.

  8

  “You’re disgusting! How could you!”

  Mark Feldman. Her son. On the other end of the line. Colleagues in London had shown him (laughing? pretending to be shocked?) a News of the World article. His mother, Dana Feldman, and her young Canadian lover. The same picture that had been published in the Daily Mirror months before. This time, the copy mentioned her son, describing him as a young, well-connected broker, husband to Sarah Rosner, the daughter of the extraordinarily rich Ab Rosner.

  In the kitchen, Dana had collapsed on a chair, her face ashen. Mad with rage, Mark spoke so loudly I could hear every word. I was petrified by his cruelty, “You’re disgusting! Your book of feminist nonsense wasn’t enough! You had to find yourself a gigolo to soil my name!”

  “Your name? Just take your own, then! Your father’s name, John McPhail! The one he gave you and you shamefully rejected!”

  “Leave my father out of this, will you? We’re talking about you. You brought shame on all of us with your pitiful book. And now this … revolting picture of your … lover! It’s enough to make me sick!”

  So, he knew. But that was no reason for Dana to let herself be insulted this way. There she was, curled around her son’s contempt. I said, as softly as possible, so as not to vex her, “Hang up, Dana. You’re only hurting yourself. Your son has no right to talk to you in that tone.” She turned her anger towards me, dismissing me with an impatient hand. Her anger was clear. She was angry at me, It’s your fault all this is happening! Get out of here! I left the kitchen.

  It was hard for me to understand the nature of their relationship. Dana rarely spoke of Mark, and when she did, it was always with some embarrassment. She had loved her son with surprising ferocity when he was a child, but at puberty, he had become a tyrant. He was only twelve when he blurted out one day, just back from school, “What sort of mother are you?” throwing his schoolbag down with one hand while with the other smashing a small statuette Dana had always been fond of. He was in such a fury, Dana told me, that his face and neck were covered in red blotches, “I’m as Jewish as my friends Marty and Benny! And I’ll have my bar mitzvah! And I want to be called Feldman from now on, like you and Aunt Ethel, like Grandpa and Grandma. McPhail is a name for goyim!” And he spat on the ground. Dana’s blood turned to ice.

  When she was pregnant, Dana hadn’t given a thought to whether her child would be Protestant or Jewish. Dana didn’t practise Judaism; she saw it as a rich and living culture — birthdays, marriages, funerals, remembrance — the rest didn’t really matter. Her in-laws, the McPhails, didn’t see things in the same light. They were worried for their unborn grandson. There had been a particularly tense dinner in Montreal one evening that she told me about once, in which her anxious mother-in-law had asked, “Is it true that religion is transmitted through the mother?” Though the question was incomplete, it was recognizable: Will Mark be Jewish? In the car that evening, Dana told John, “I don’t care if he becomes Presbyterian or Buddhist. All that matters is that your mother leave us be. And that we don’t butcher our son. No circumcision under any circumstances.”

  But John had died. And Dana and Mark had settled down in New York, with Mark attending a school where half the students were Jewish. Peer pressure or the horrible stories of the Holocaust his teacher told, it was impossible to tell what got to him. He progressively became uncompromising — he started refusing to eat certain types of food, demanding a circumcision, visiting the synagogue. Then he began wearing a kippa, studying the Torah. This was followed by a pilgrimage to Israel and his marriage, at nineteen, to Sarah Rosner, the daughter of an extraordinarily rich and influential orthodox Jew from Lexington, in London. “I raised him in an environment I hoped was as liberal and open as possible, and this is how he thanks me. I thought I’d given him a leg up, to make him a man of his age, and instead I made him a fundamentalist who married a submissive wife who wears a sheitel. Why do children need to always be at odds with their parents?”

  And now, this News of the World article that filled her son with such hate. They were still on the phone, the tone had gotten louder, so much so that Rosie knocked on the door to my room, imploring me to do something. Dana shouting, crying now, she just couldn’t bear it. I returned to the kitchen, finding a teary Dana, her fingers gripping the phone so tightly you’d think it would crack. “You would have never talked to me like that if your father were still here.”

  “If he were still here!” Mark choked back a growl. “If he were still here you wouldn’t be sleeping with children!”

  “Mark!”

  “He’s younger than I am, for crying out loud.”

  Mark hung up suddenly and violently; the phone slipped out of Dana’s hands and crashed to the floor.

  Dana locked herself in her room for the next few days. The pain of having lost her husband returned, almost as strongly as in 1956. In the fog of sedatives, she told us off every time we came to speak with her. Like all the other times, Rosie came into her room every two or three hours to leave food out for her, which she ignored.

  After two days of this, I knocked on her door and opened it a crack. The room was dark, filled with a smell of stale smoke and moist sheets.

  “What do you want?” Her voice was weak, pasty.

  “I want you to leave this room and get some fresh air. Maybe a walk in Central Park would be nice.”

  “No, leave me alone.”

  “You can’t just stay here in the dark, dumb with sedatives. You have new interview requests.”

  “Tell them I’m done giving interviews.”

  I held out my arm to help her get up; she stiffened visibly, kicking with her feet under the sheets. “Don’t touch me!” I stepped back. “What a mess! John died seven years ago! And for seven years I didn’t touch a man. To respect his memory! And now I fall into the arms of a boy younger than my own son! My God! What must John be thinking of me, up there? What must he be thinking of me?”

  She jumped out of bed and staggered into the bathroom. Her hair was dirty, stuck to her skull.

  “We can’t go on like this, Romain. It needs to stop.”

  “I … What needs to stop?”

  “You need to go. It’s unbearable for both of us.”

  9

  “You need to think about something else, man! You can’t just mope around, man.”

  Moïse playing the father figure. I had spent the evening and part of the night being consoled in his small dirty apartment in East Harlem, as he tried to make me swallow the canned stew he managed to burn in a beat-up saucepan. Around three in the morning, he gave up, exasperated, and began loudly gathering up the dozen empty beer bottles on the table. “Enough, man! Time to go to bed. We only have a few hours to sleep.”

  My head was going to burst; alcohol made the whole room pitch and reel. I said, my mouth full of cotton, “I thought you weren’t working tomorrow.…”

  “Right. But no way you’re sleeping in. I’ve got a plan. Exactly what the doctor ordered.”

  “Forget it, Moïse … I’m too tired.”

  “Certainly not! You’re goin
g to wake up early tomorrow. We’re going on a little trip.”

  “Trip?”

  Moïse went through his pockets and picked out some ten-dollar bills. “You got a few bucks?”

  “Fuck, Moïse, I’m not moving an inch!”

  Furious, he grabbed my vest off the collapsed sofa in the corner of the living room, went through my pockets, and found twenty dollars, maybe more. “Okay. That’s more than enough. We’re going to Washington, man. We’re leaving at dawn.”

  “And Dana?”

  “No way. Don’t start!”

  I’d never seen so many buses in my life. Besides ours, there were at least a good hundred of them on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, and the closer we got to Washington, the more buses there were, hundreds and hundreds of them, all heading straight for the capital. It was around noon when we made it into the besieged city. Its great avenues were filled with a dense crowd, seventy-five percent black. Blacks dressed in their Sunday best, with their spouses, their families, or in groups with the rest of their congregation. They held signs in their hands and had pins on their shirts. They came from across the country. Moïse said you could recognize those who came from down South from their sad eyes, since it was in the South that the blacks were the most severely mistreated. Some of them had come to Washington on a Wednesday against the direct orders of their employers. They would pay a price for it when they got back, if they still had a job. That’s why they were in Washington that day — jobs and freedom.

  But there were no sad faces. People were walking about, most of them smiling, sporting sunglasses and fine hats, as if they were off to a picnic — that’s how Malcolm X described the event and had decided to boycott it. The weather was wonderful, only a few clouds in the taut azure canopy over us.