Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  On Pennsylvania Avenue, we saw the Capitol in the distance, shining and majestic, its dome like a wedding cake. With a nudge and a wave, Moïse pointed out the White House on the right, more unreal than on television, and I shivered at the thought of John F. Kennedy being only a few metres away, breathing the same air. I promised myself I’d buy a postcard and send it to my mother.

  I was apprehensive at the flood of people marching. As many as two hundred and fifty thousand people, the organizers said. Thinking with some apprehension of the race riots shown on television, and the crowds of peaceful protestors in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated city in the country, being pushed back with water cannons, protecting themselves as best they could against police dogs. But that day, it would be different. For once, blacks were in a position of strength, and nothing would happen to the crowd.

  Excited, Moïse grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the still-growing march. With difficulty, we found our way to the Washington Monument. “Freedom! Freedom!” some called out. “Do you want to be free?” Others replied, “Yes!” They all answered. “Freedom, now!” Farther off, small groups sung gospel hymns, calling on Jesus and God in heaven, a wonderful, joyous cacophony. All of these people, robbed of their rights, marching with dignity and good humour, it brought tears to our eyes.

  We walked towards the Lincoln Memorial, the end point of the march. The heavy August sun, and nothing to drink. We couldn’t reach the great basin to refresh ourselves; everywhere we bumped into a human wall, impossible to cross. “Shit, man!” Sweat running down my face, my neck; my shirt drenched in the back, under my arms. Moïse grumbled. I tried to distract him, get him to think of something else. I feared his tendency towards excess might get us into trouble. “Think of all these people around us. They’ve got a lot more reasons to be impatient than you and I do.” But he wasn’t listening, and as soon as the first few notes of folk music drifted towards us, he let out a desperate, animal cry.

  “Oooooh, man … We’re missing everything.…” First, Joan Baez’s crystalline voice reached us; then Bob Dylan’s rough one — Only a Pawn in Their Game and When the Ship Comes In with Joan Baez. Overexcited, he gripped me and climbed on my back, his desperate eyes looking for them in the crowd.

  “Stop it, Moïse, you’re hurting me.” Around us, a few annoyed glances, then disgusted stares as Moïse threw up his breakfast on the ground, splattering our shoes.

  With patience and determination, we managed to get near the Lincoln Memorial, or near enough to see Martin Luther King. Moïse had forgotten his misfortunes already. He still looked weak, yet he fixed his eyes on the distant pastor, listening intently, his brow furrowed in concentration, the pastor’s voice like an impetuous wind, leaving us shivering. The fear we felt! The fear that he might say too much, and that it would turn against his people. The fear that he might say too little, leaving his people wanting more. But with eloquence and firmness, Martin Luther King found the right words: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!

  And the crowd roared like a thousand planes taking flight, applause bursting like a rain of shells. Our ears rung from this torrent of freedom that the pastor had shown might be possible — a torrent whose strength would break the chains of injustice, eradicate hate and ugliness. People grabbed the nearest hand and began chanting together. Later, the crowd would start clearing under the warm sun, leaving the ground littered with paper and trash. The crowd fragmented, and smaller groups ventured onto the surrounding avenues. Thousands upon thousands climbed back onto their buses that had besieged the city and that would bring them home, in the expectation of the full recognition of their rights. A year later, President Johnson signed a law that put an end to segregation in public places and workplaces, and then in 1965 another law that removed restrictions on blacks’ right to vote.

  It was hard to think of Dana and my life in New York in tragic terms. Moïse was right when he said, “When you see all this, you can’t really pity yourself over an enviable fate, man. It’s indecent.”

  Moïse decided we should spend the night in Washington; the city still quivered with energy, an effervescence that would have made us regret not staying. After finding a few cans of soda and sandwiches in a grocery store near the station, we found a cool place to sit in West Potomac Park, where Moïse began checking the girls out insistently. He called out lewd comments to every pretty girl who passed us. “You’re gross, Moïse. Stop it.” He saw two blondes in twin sets and close-fitting pants, they looked like sisters; he got up, walked towards them with his Dylan walk, passing his hand through his hair to make himself look cool, an indifferent pout on his face.

  One of the girls with long hair, pretty, though not as pretty as the one with short hair, approached him excitedly, “You wouldn’t happen to be Bob Dylan, by any chance?” And Moïse had them, hook, line, and sinker.

  Two nice girls who’d just arrived from Little Rock, Arkansas, both of them with southern drawls. The small blonde with short hair kept smiling at me. When night fell on the Potomac, we invited them for hamburgers. Seeing that behind their innocent airs they had a plan, we made our way to Union Station and found a cheap hotel, where we got two rooms with no bathrooms. The small blonde with short hair was tender, sweet as honey; the day had been so filled with emotion that we spent a good part of the night simply holding each other, without speaking, giggling each time we heard Moïse’s wet grunting through the thin wall.

  The next day, in the bus driving back to New York, Moïse said, his tone sombre, “If women dream of sleeping with Bob Dylan, it isn’t because he’s handsome. It’s because he’s a great artist. When you’ve got my face, you need to be famous to attract women. That’s why I need to become famous, man. And that’s why you’ll never be famous. You’re too pretty. You don’t need to make an effort. Even rich and famous women … oh, sorry, man. That’s not what I meant to say.…”

  “It’s okay.”

  He slapped me on the back — “What a night, man! What a night!” — and he squared himself in his seat. I turned my head to look at the moving landscape, and thought of Dana. Back in New York, I would need to have a long discussion with her, and the prospect calmed me. I chuckled, thinking of the young blonde from Arkansas with long hair who would think, for the rest of her life, that she had slept with Bob Dylan on the night of August 28, 1963.

  10

  “Okay. Good. There’s a pile of correspondence on your desk. I haven’t touched it. Didn’t have the time. At least three large piles, this high. You’ve got one last chance, but at the first wrong move, you’re out. Got it?”

  “Couldn’t be clearer.”

  My conversation with Dana had been honest and instructive. She allowed me to return to Harperley Hall and announced in the same breath that she’d begun seeing Burke, her editor.

  “You’re jealous, man. It’s clear as day.”

  Okay. I might have been. Anybody but Burke! He was one of those asexual figures in a Norman Rockwell illustration. A sort of Mr. Anderson in Father Knows Best, though heavy in the belly and bald. A widower, barely older than Dana, but he looked like an old man two steps from a hole in the ground, with his three-piece suits and his embroidered kerchiefs. Imagining them naked made me nauseous. As did seeing his trench coat on the coat peg in the vestibule. Under it, of course, his horrible galoshes.

  I couldn’t understand Dana — she could have any man, and she chose Burke? Why him? When he spoke, you had to strain to hear, he always seemed to be falling asleep halfway through his sentences. Timid? No, Dana assured me. An intellectual. A scholar. He knew everything, had read everything. She said she loved their long, rich conversations about writers, philosophers, and great musicians. Another way of saying I didn’t measure up. Burke adopted a paternalistic attitude towards me, calling me Sonny boy. Then, little by little, he started taking care of Dana’s affairs, accompanying her to all her events when time permitted. Go
od God, why couldn’t I be happy for her? Wasn’t Burke the best insurance against Dana and me falling into each other’s arms again?

  “You need another girl, man. And we’ll find you one.”

  Moïse, restless, had become obsessed with his adventure in Washington. Obsessed with the ease with which he’d slept with the girl from Little Rock. In New York he rarely met girls; each time he approached one, he got the cold shoulder. Too weird. Too all over the place. As soon as he saw a girl he liked, he spoke too loudly, laughed too hard, tried too hard. He filled the silences like a soldier jumping on a live grenade to save his comrades. Perhaps I was wrong, but I thought the girl in Washington had been his first time. Since then, he got it in his head that if he wanted to get with a woman, he had to pretend to be someone else. I saw him once giving out autographs to women on Washington Square. Another time as we were drinking a pitcher of Schlitz — Moïse was twenty-one, making life easier — a girl called out to him,“Hey! You’re Bob Dylan, right?” He motioned me to keep quiet, both supplication and threat: please, don’t fuck this up for me, I’ve got a plan. His hair all over the place, seen-it-all pout on his face, he was about to invite the girl to our table when the waiter, who knew him, called out, “Go on, Charlie! Show us your guitar!” prompting the surrounding tables to mock and laugh.

  Hurt, Moïse turned to me and said, “Okay, man. When my novel is finally published, and I’m rich, I’ll buy myself a car and go to San Francisco, like Kerouac. There, the girls aren’t stuck up. They’re just waiting for it. If you want, we’ll go together.”

  But Moïse wouldn’t have time to publish a novel, or buy a car, or set sail for Frisco.

  III

  MOÏSE

  1

  Summer of 1964, and Dana left me alone in New York. Burke convinced her to spend part of her summer vacation in Métis Beach, which she thought she would never be able to return to after Robert Egan’s threats. He had spread the worst sort of lies about her in town. Burke — whom I’d come to call Jurke — usually soft and unpersuasive, managed to convince her. “Don’t let your actions be determined by those provincials.” I heard the words through the door to Dana’s room, words that must have made her lips curl. Was it that they wanted her to abandon the house she loved? Was that it?

  “No!” she cried, furious. “That house is mine!”

  “So? What’s the problem?” Burke demanded. He was certainly not a man who usually turned combative, but this time he fought back against each argument Dana brandished.

  “They hate me! I’m an accomplice. A traitor! They’re full of hate. I feel like I just can’t face them.…”

  “You? Dana Feldman? Letting yourself be intimidated?”

  “You don’t understand, Burke.”

  “You’ve nothing to blame yourself for. And Sonny boy there was imprudent. He didn’t act right, but he didn’t rape her.”

  So, Burke knew. Dana had told him.

  What a Jurke! You should have seen him, like a child all excited with his new toy when he came back from Gimbels with a fishing hat he’d bought for the occasion. “You think I’ll cut a fine figure with it, Sonny boy?” I gritted my teeth: You’re going to my village, idiot! Not to the Amazon!

  The idea that this man would go to my village, admire my river, breathe my air, and wander in my place … it made me sick with jealousy.

  August 1964, and Moïse learned his life would never be the same.

  We were both glued to the television in my room, which was a complete mess; the carpet strewn with beer bottles that Rosie picked up, shaking her head disapprovingly. We were following the most recent developments in the Gulf of Tonkin — two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy claimed they’d been attacked by North Vietnamese skiffs. A consensus emerged on television and in the newspapers — humiliation and reprisal. Moïse shivered, “They’re gonna send us there, man.”

  I replied, aghast, “You think so? You think it’ll really be war?”

  “No doubt. It’s exactly what that bastard Johnson was waiting for. Vietnam, for crying out loud! What the fuck are we going to do there?” He sniffed loudly. “Go get us another beer, will you? Soon it won’t taste the same at all.”

  I thought I was safe, but I wasn’t. Burke told me that if you had a green card, you could be drafted just like a U.S. citizen, if you had lived a year in the country. “Me in Vietnam?” There were two ways to avoid it — go back to Quebec or enroll in college. “Me? In university?” I couldn’t think straight. Dana was nodding, an exaggerated smile on her face, the sort of smile that’s trying to convince you of something. My first reflex was to say I wasn’t up to it.

  Surprised by the reaction, Burke said, “A smart young man like you? With the courses you took with Darren and Ian? You’ll do great, I’m sure.” He placed his warm hand on my shoulder, and not a Sonny boy to be heard this time. Burke, kind, full of good intentions, making me regret having judged him so harshly.

  He was right, too. I took an exam and was accepted in Art History at New York University. Classes began in January 1965, right when the first conscripts started making their way to their draft boards. I’d be left alone until I got my diploma, in June 1968. Being a college student didn’t exempt you from the draft — the 2-S status was only a delayed sentence, pushing your military service to a later date, though you had to show proof of commitment and good grades.

  “Everything will be fine, Romain, you’ll see.” Dana was confident, convinced this “dirty useless war” would be over by then. I sure hoped so; the idea of having to return to Quebec terrified me.

  Dana decided we should celebrate my enrolment with a party at Harperley Hall. Ethel, Burke, Darren, Ian, Moïse — everyone was there. And they were proud of me, happy for me. Going to university — a dream come true, though hard to savour. Moïse drank his fair share and more of cocktails that night, his head deep in his shoulders, fake enthusiasm on his face. “You okay, Moïse? You’re not too angry with me?” A stupid question that a friend shouldn’t need to ask, but I asked anyway, in anxious expectation of his answer.

  He returned a quickly fading smile. “Why would I be mad, man? You’re not American. It’s not the same.”

  Moïse wasn’t the same either. He quickly became irritable, furious, agitated. He went to any and all anti-war demonstrations in New York — Union Square, Washington Square, Central Park. He was part of every crowd, his sign held high in his arms — FUCK THE WAR! He called out to groups of passing students, with such anger I felt he was hurling his insults at me, “They’ve got nothing to fear. Our lives mean nothing more than a shit stain on the bottom of their polished shoes!”

  “Moïse, you can’t really be mad at them….”

  But he disappeared into the crowd, shouting, barking with the other protesters — “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”— shouting at passing students, especially those who seemed to be from wealthy families. He questioned the ones he saw as rich kids, testing their knowledge about Southeast Asia. “An unjust war, you say? Tell me, why exactly?” Some of the students, surprised by his aggressiveness, would look at him confused, then answer, in various incarnations, something like, “We can’t kill people because they think differently than us.” “That’s sentimentalism!” Moïse would answer. He stared at them impudently, with a haughty air I’d never seen on him. He quoted Bernard Fall on Indochina and the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu, reciting, article by article, the Geneva Accords that should have led to the reunification of the two Vietnams and free elections, but that the United States hadn’t respected. “Hey! Did you know that? I’m talking to you! What? You didn’t take that class yet?” Other times, he recited from memory passages out of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. “Who said that? Do you know?” Embarrassed, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him aside. “Why are these idiots protected from the draft and I’m not? There’s no justice! I know more th
an they do, man! My brain is worth more than theirs, those goddamn silver-spoon bird-brain bastards!”

  “You can claim conscientious objector status, no?”

  He laughed out loud. “You really think that’s how it works? That if I say I’m against war, it’s done and dusted? No, man. Not a chance. I’m not Rockefeller, Hearst, or Charlie Thurston Moses III, like these goddamn rich kids!”

  As the protests grew, Johnson increased the monthly quotas from six thousand to thirty-five thousand, to forty-five thousand… Forty-five thousand kids ripped from their homes every month. For what? To fight whom?

  Slowly but surely, the rope was tightening around Moïse’s neck. And I began my new life as a student with my enthusiasm somewhat spoiled by the anxiety of seeing my friend go off to war.

  Moïse began drinking excessively, sometimes from morning to night.

  “Moïse, you can’t keep this up.” And he cackled, shrugging.

  “I’ll be in such a mess they won’t want me. A goddamn shipwreck.” A shipwreck.

  “But you’re not a shipwreck.”

  Again that unbearable cackling. “For the bastards, we’re all goddamn shipwrecks.” He opened another beer, swallowed almost half in a single swallow, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There’s nothing to do but drink until they call me.” He got up, staggered, brought a weak hand to his right temple. “Private Moses, welcome to the greatest, most powerful army in the world!” Then he fell on his ass.

  One day, at the bookstore, he’d been drinking and customers complained. He got suspended for a week. I found him dazed, sitting on the sidewalk, his back against the storefront. “You’re in no state to work, Moïse. Look at yourself.”