He took several deep drags of his cigarette.
"About two weeks." He turned toward her suddenly. "WeVe got time, ,, he shouted, joyous and feverish. "Til go and see your parish priest tomorrow morning, first thing. We can arrange everything for Wednesday, maybe Tuesday. . . And we'd take a beautiful hotel room. They'd sign us in: Monsieur and Madame Létourneau. ..."
He laughed loudly, and stopped as he heard his own laugh. He had not heard it for a very long time.
Now Florentine got in the spirit of the thing, dazzled by the prospect, despite her misgivings: those days at the hotel, and Emmanuel spoiling her, buying presents. . . .
Neither of them seemed to think of anything but those few days which would be filled with youth. For him, they would be days of jealously protected intimacy, an escape into a land of sweet daydreams, of exquisite laziness; for her, the flashing lights of the cinema, the department stores, and Florentine there, radiant. And they were so happy with their respective dreams that they kissed impulsively, without restraint.
Then the final dark of night came down on their interlacing forms.
Emmanuel was talking away:
"You'd have an allowance, Florentine. With what I'd give you out of my pay as well, you wouldn't have to work. You could even have your own house."
He was thinking, Her house, furnished however she'd like it, where she could wait for me. . . .
"It won't be so long," he said again. "I mean waiting for the war to end. We're still young. How old are you, Florentine?''
"Nineteen."
She turned toward him as if she were going to confess: At my age you can make a new start. You can forgive me for everything.
"I'm only twenty-two. We'll still be young, Florentine, when I get back. We'll have our whole lives before us and... "
He stopped, realizing the contradictions that had gone through his mind in the last few minutes. His desires, timid to begin with, foreseeing only a week or two of happiness, then emboldened by the possibility of their realization, were now running off with the future, trying to extract from time the promise of a lifetime's happiness. His instinct warned him that he was compromising the future. He glimpsed all the dangers for himself and Florentine in his long absence. He saw the solitude of their young years. And he murmured:
"But you know, Florentine, to do what we're going to do, you've got to be very sure you love each other. For life."
It was a kind of prayer he was addressing to her. It was a daring call to the future, whose quality neither of them could imagine in advance. It was even a challenge to that shadowy part of life that extended beyond their youth.
From the river there came now no more than a milky illumination that threw no light around it. Darkness and silence surrounded them.
Emmanuel was searching Florentine's face and going over the few words and gestures that made up his knowledge of her. It was so dark that he could not see her eyes, and in his fear of being alone he took her in his arms. She knew he couldn't see her eyes, and was glad of it, for she felt she would not herself have wanted to see what was in them then. She said very quickly:
"Yes, that's true, you have to love each other for life." For once she had spoken from the bottom of her heart. No more tempests. No more ecstasy, no more despair in her life. Just a long, flat road on which she was no longer surprised to be, since it meant salvation.
THIRTY
Rose-Anna came very quietly into the room where Florentine was sleeping. On the foot of the bed she laid the green velvet dress Florentine was to wear at her wedding. She put the dainty shoes on the floor and unfolded a pretty, pale-satin slip which she carefully hung over the back of a chair. Then she looked at Florentine who was still sound asleep, her arm over her face. Rose-Anna gently touched her naked shoulder with her fingertips.
Ever since the night when she suspected Florentine's plight, she had felt ill at ease with her. As if she herself bore a part of the shame. She had hardly dared look at the girl, still less speak to her.
True, this embarrassment had disappeared a few days ago. She had been reassured as she saw the colour come back to Florentine's cheeks, saw her apparently happy with Emmanuel. Ingenuously, she had allowed herself to be happy for Florentine, who was making such a fine match. She had even had a few moments of pride, untroubled by the lack of enthusiasm Florentine displayed. But this morning as she was giving a lick of the iron to Philippe's suit she had found, in a pocket crammed with papers, a letter to Jean Lévesque in Florentine's hand.
Her cruellest doubts returned. It was growing late. Leaning over the bed, Rose-Anna hated to wake her, but finally gave her a little shake.
"Hey, don't you know it's your wedding day? Get up now!"
On her own wedding day, hadn't she wakened at dawn and dressed singing at her sunlit window?
At her words Florentine sat up and looked around, blinking, bewildered. Softened by sleep, her will had lost its power to spur her on, and was replaced by the usual torment of her mind on waking. She bowed her head and dreamed a moment, her eyes staring. Why did she have to wake up this morning? Or ever! But especially this morning. Her stare took on a glint of panic. Then she thought: Oh! This is my wedding day! The day I marry Emmanuel! And the word "wedding," which she had always linked to a perfect happiness, now seemed austere, distressing, full of snares and painful revelations. She saw her mother, heavy and moving with difficulty. A vision of herself as victim of the same deformity was vivid in her mind. She stretched, and felt a shiver in her delicate bones. The thought of the trials she would have to endure filled her with indignation. How she hated this trap into which she had fallen! And wasn't she moving toward it again, this time of her own free will? An expression of refusal and even hate flashed in her eyes. Then she understood the mute reproach in her mother's look, jumped out of bed and began to dress.
Rose-Anna and Azarius had wanted to do things right for their eldest's wedding. Especially Azarius, who had begun to run here and there to scrape up a few days' work. "A time like this, it's no time to count the cost," he said. And for once Rose-Anna had encouraged him. "You're right, Azarius, we have to make it nice for her." They had spared no expense to buy her a beautiful dress that was well beyond their means. "Don't want the Létourneaus to think she's not good enough for them," said Rose-Anna, with a touch of vanity. "They're not going to say we gave her to Emmanuel in rags!"
She had been up all night putting the last touches to Florentine's silk underthings. Now, sad at heart, she waited for a word or a look from Florentine that might reward and reassure her.
Florentine had to brush her hair before the dress went on. She stood in the half-furnished room still cluttered with crates and big cardboard boxes from the move. She appeared so frail that Rose-Anna was emptied of all resentment.
What on earth was behind this cold and cruel silence of Florentine's? Why couldn't she share her troubles? Oh well, perhaps when she had come back to the house, after Emmanuel left, they'd have a good chat, just between women. But would that be too late? Perhaps it was now that Florentine needed help.
She began to hold out the velvet dress to her, then hesitated, her fingers clumsily running over the cloth, rumpling it unintentionally.
"Listen, Florentine, if you think you're making a mistake, if you don't really want to get married or you like somebody else, it's not too late. You've got to say so. . . . "
• Florentine's reply was to grab the dress from her mother.
"Leave me alone," she said. "I can dress myself."
No, she wouldn't go back on her decision. Her life was settled now, once and for all. It wouldn't be what she had imagined, but it would be a thousand times better than what could have happened. And she hurried, she rushed to get dressed up and create a new person, a new Florentine who was about to confront a strange, unknown life and try to forget what she had been before. She tilted her head back and inspected herself, her eyes half closed. Oh, it was good to see her waist still slim, her body young and supple,
after the horrible picture she had had of herself while waking up this morning! She turned, looking over her shoulder, and was so relieved at her reflection that, if her mother had been less severe with her, she would have liked to make some gesture of affection.
For a moment she had been terrified of seeing herself deformed. She must have had a bad dream. . . . Now she was calm. She was going to be pretty, very pretty for her wedding. Emmanuel would take with him a touching image of her when he left. Emmanuel. . . . He'd be far away when she'd lose her slim figure. He'd never suspect a thing.
Rose-Anna saw her daughter's face in the mirror above the table. Her mouth was hard, her eyes determined, almost insolent. This Florentine with the rigid mask, the dark frown, was a stranger to her. The girl she had known could be difficult and irritable, but at heart she was anxious to be pardoned. Rose-Anna felt so sure of defeat that she gave up all hope of asking a direct question. She murmured softly, as if to satisfy the last demands of her conscience:
"Marriage is a serious thing, Florentine."
"Don't preach," said Florentine violently. She was beginning to see the maze of lies and deceptions that lay before her.
"Me, preaching?" said Rose-Anna.
She thought of her old mother, inflexible and cold, and she wondered if she resembled her. She searched for words that wouldn't sound like sermonizing, but it was hard because her whole spiritual life had been nourished by pious brochures. And she couldn't let herself go in her natural warmth and tenderness because of Florentine's hostility. She began to feel it was her own fault. Hadn't she rebuffed the girl's first attempt to confide in her?
"I don't want to preach, Florentine. I just want you to know marriage isn't just a bed of roses. There's a lot of suffering too."
Florentine was putting on her makeup, tight-lipped. She had banished her mother's warnings and her own waking nightmare, and was substituting fantasies more to her taste: the church aisle where she would walk slowly on her father's arm, the flower-decked altar, the wedding breakfast at Emmanuel's parents' house, all the compliments she'd get, and then their departure in a rain of confetti, the photographer. . . . That would be fun! And then. . . She didn't want to think too far ahead. The parties ... all the gaiety 7 . . . . And Emmanuel: he was a good boy, after all. Yesterday, as they made plans together, she'd been struck by his gentleness. She w T asn't moved, but she was reassured.
Suddenly she felt so thoroughly revenged for Jean's jilting her, rehabilitated in her own eyes and those of her family, worthy 7 of their esteem — for otherwise she would have lost that too — she found herself so clever, with her strong will and all, that she smiled a slow, meditative smile which confirmed her unshakeable determination but also her tragic desire to start afresh. She came close to running to her mother's arms, but Rose-Anna turned away, hesitated and went to the kitchen.
Azarius was waiting in his Sunday suit, a rose in his buttonhole. His face, freshly shaved, smelled of talcum powder. In his white shirt with its tight collar he was stiff and hampered, and seemed embarrassed at the thought of leading his daughter to the altar. Didn't he see her still in pigtails? Where had the years gone?
Florentine getting married! And her father still so young!
"You just about ready there, little girP" From the window he surveyed what horizon was visible through the sooty panes. A train was passing, and he had to shout:
"It's a beautiful day out, you know? Nothing but sunshine!"
Their last house had been close enough to the puffing trains behind the embankment which closed off Beaudoin Street. But now they were smack up against the tangle of tracks that fan out from St. Henri station. There was no respite possible. The Transcontinental, the trains from Ottawa and Toronto and the commuter trains all passed by their door. Then there were the freights, ponderous, endless convoys of foodstuffs, or long strings of coal cars. Sometimes they would stop, shunt backwards, then advance, and all around the house there would be nothing but the intermittent trilling of signal bells, the shock of buffers, locomotive whistles and waves of smoke. At other times the engine would race by, whistling loudly, and the house was shaken by a prolonged tremor. The windows rattled, things on the walls or in drawers trembled violently.
To make yourself heard over the racket you had to raise your voice to argument level, and people who constantly shouted at each other in this way came to see their fellows with astonishment and barely hidden animosity. Then, when the howling train had passed and the house settled down with sinister creaking sounds, it seemed as if the sun had fallen, and they must wait for another dull day to dawn through the windows opaque with blackened dust.
Rose-Anna was off dreaming of sunshine and breezes, as one pauses in the midst of afflictions to call up distant, incomprehensible ghosts from the depths of memory, seeing them more as intruders than as friends. She saw her own wedding day, clear and blue, with the sound of bells travelling through the village and out over the fields. There were earth smells, and the whole pathway of her youth which she had travelled so often in memory, joys with the healthy, profound savour of country life.
When she returned to look around her at the disorder of the house, she almost hated the happy scenes she had just left behind. What a mockery, those few days of grace at the beginnings of youth, the beginnings of life! And wasn't today's marriage feast another mockery, in the midst of this filthy house which could never become a part of their life?
The wind attacked the panes with clouds of cinders and soot. It seemed that the horizon could find no better place to dump its clinging soot than on these rattling windows. Azarius was there, with his backdrop of whirling dust; yet she knew that he too was absent, escaping for a moment, as she had tried to do. His hand was tapping absent-mindedly on the windowsill.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye. Oh, she knew he had seen nothing of Florentine's nervousness the last few weeks, and suspected nothing of the drama that was perhaps being played out in their lives. He had seen nothing, felt nothing, yet she had never been less inclined to blame or pity him. During the last few days he seemed to have rid himself of some immense burden. His gait was livelier, less discouraged. His face would redden at times, but he had learned how to be evasive when he knew that he was watched.
Rose-Anna thought he was holding back some secret hope. That he, at his age and after all their misfortunes, could still entertain his hopes so boldly, she found more irritating than his keeping a secret from her. Once or twice she had caught him talking to himself. "There's nothing else to do. I've got to make my mind up." When she had asked what that was all about, he had stood up and brazenly begun making jokes. "Never mind, Rose-Anna, your troubles'll soon be over. The money's on its way, and easy street for us."
She was afraid he'd be disappointed again. And most of all, she had learned to fear the incorrigible youthfulness of this man.
A newspaper was lying on the table. Azarius was buying one every two or three days now. She stared at the printed page without much interest. The headlines said: Refugees on the March. Just like us, she thought. Always on the march. A little lower down she saw: New Contingent of Canadian Troops Lands in England. Mechanically she looked for the date. The paper was yesterday's, May 22.
"I wonder if Eugène's turn is coming? ,, she said.
To herself she added, Eugène, Florentine, who's next? Will we never be together again? Can that happen already? Her tired gaze took in the room. No, they'd never be happy here! She'd felt it the moment they came in the place. What new threat was hovering over her now? Her heart was filled with foreboding. It must be Eugène. With one trouble out of the way, she was already on the lookout for the next trial, awaiting it almost impatiently, as if by anticipating it she could deprive it of some of its malignity.
"Poor child!" she sighed.
Azarius gave a little start. He thought for a second that she had spoken to him. In other days, to cure him of his illusions and console him for his failures, she had sometimes murmured those words
to him, holding him in her arms like a child. A nostalgic desire for tenderness overwhelmed him like a flood tide, and he knew that he would give his life to make her happy. He looked at his wife's face, worn out with fatigue, her forehead with its wrinkles, her hands bleached from the washing. And Florentine's wedding began to arouse old memories in him with a kind of heaviness which must have been there the whole time, only making itself felt now. Finally accepting the fact that Florentine was grown-up and about to leave the nest, he was dumbfounded at what he saw behind him: everything he had done in all those endless days — but above all what he had omitted. That was the worst thing. And Rose-Anna! ... He was certain now that he had loved no one else in his whole life. Yet at no time had he been able to prove it to her. Well, the time had come. He would make sure she would never again suffer because of him. He shut his eyes.
He had perhaps never been so ready to explain himself, never experienced such a desire to justify himself; but Rose-Anna had just risen to her feet. Coming forward a step or two, she made her effort and smiled with a kind of strained gaiety at Florentine who had just come in the kitchen.
She would later remember that she had just had time to see her daughter into her wedding finery and that she had not even given her a kiss.
Florentine asked:
"Does my dress hang okay, Mamma?"
Rose-Anna made her turn slowly as she examined the dress and stooped to pick off a couple of basting threads. Then Azarius took charge.
"Come quick, little girl, we'll get a taxi down below."
They now lived close to the taxi stand where Azarius had worked a few months before. Rose-Anna, peeking out the windows, saw them cross the tracks. Then, a minute later, they entered a shining black limousine. Azarius had had the idea of making a detour through the rue du Couvent so she could have a last look.
Rose-Anna rubbed at the dirty window and leaned forward to catch a glimpse of pale green and a little hat perched on long chestnut hair which gleamed for a second in the sun. She waved, thinking, That's silly, the car's out of sight already. And anyway Florentine hadn't looked back. Even as she left the house, there had been no sign of emotion, not even a lingering look. She had left as if nothing affected her now, thought Rose-Anna. "Almost as if she was a stranger," the poor woman murmured, close to tears. When she realized that her hand was raised for a tender good-bye, she had only one instinct: to hide somewhere, hide her face, and stay all alone for a long time.
The Tin Flute Page 31