8:17 pm rue Darling

by Bernard Emond

  The Inuit say if you get lost in a blizzard, you walk in circles and eventually you end up right back where you started.

  u

  I stood at the window a long time, thinking about my dead. But I had to go on living. I’d been wearing the same clothes for two days and it was time to do something about it. I went to the Glaneuses. I like that place. There are as many stories on the racks of a second-hand clothing store as there are on the shelves in a library. The thing is, you have to want to read them, and most of the people you find at Value Village, the Salvation Army store, or the Glaneuses have too many problems with their own stories to care much about anyone else’s. But I can never look at the rows of dresses, jackets, shoes, and raincoats without wondering about the lives of the people who’d worn them. Modest lives, for the most part, kind souls who would have made sure their clothes were clean before passing them on to someone harder up than themselves. Sometimes you find surprises: this blue silk dress, for example, very glamourous and low-cut, straight out of the forties. What belle of the ball had worn it? She’d be old now, or dead: perhaps her walker was one of those jumbled in the corner. And then the piles of hats: ones like your uncle used to wear, with the little feather on the side, or tweed caps with little ear flaps that tuck up inside. And the black shoes, rows of them, polished for decades by men who wore them only on Sundays. Going to the Glaneuses is like visiting an archaeological excavation of the neighbourhood, peering into a past that will never return.

  I bought a yellow cardboard suitcase, some shirts and sweaters, and a few pairs of pants. While I was at it, I bought a mattress, a table and two chairs, some dishes and kitchen stuff, a reading lamp, and an old vinyl La-Z-Boy that smelled of Brylcreem, all to be delivered the next day to my new address. A volunteer asked, joking, if I’d had a fire. When I told her I’d lived at the place on Darling that blew up, she arranged it so I didn’t have to pay for a thing. Her name was Gaétane Laplante. Merci Gaétane.

  I dropped by the Bien Bon to tell Angéla we were going to be neighbbours. She seemed pleased. After a quick coffee I went over to the Sansregret funeral home. I’m not kidding, that’s its real name: the Sansregret – no regrets. You couldn’t have made it up. It was like Doctor Payne from my childhood days. (“Adélard, the kid’s running a temperature of a hundred and four! Quick, call Doctor Payne!”). In these days of multinational funeral companies listed on the stock exchange; pre-paid, air conditioned columbaria; and funeral homes with multiculti chapels, day-care centres, and lounges fitted with video games, it does the heart good to know there’s still a family-run business that has respect for both the dead and the wallets of the living. At the Sansregret, there’s nothing chichi. They dispatch your dearly departed with dignity and economy. Death is serious stuff, but everyone knows you’ve still got to pay the rent on the first of the month.

  I was surprised to find an open casket. There she was, Adrienne Dumas, the saint, a tiny, beautiful old woman asleep on a satin bed, a crystal rosary entwined in her folded hands. She looked at peace. That’s not usually the case with disaster victims; their faces are usually etched with pain. I don’t know why, but I was moved. I knelt down in front of the casket and pretended to pray. Maybe it counts, for something.

  After a moment, I heard a familiar voice behind me:

  – Did you know her?

  I turned around. It was a woman in her forties. I couldn’t place her.

  – Pas beaucoup, non. We were neighbours. I was away when the building blew up.

  – Lucky you.

  – Oui, je suppose. Was she your mother?

  – My aunt.

  – I wished I’d got to know her better. Would you mind telling me a little about her?

  She didn’t have to be asked twice. She adored her aunt Adrienne. After a minute, it clicked, that beautiful voice: it was the weather lady on the FM. I guess even those kinds of people have dear little old aunts, too.

  Adrienne was from the neighbourhood. She’d been born on a farm but her family had moved to the city during the Depression. Adrienne only got as far as fourth grade, then she went to work at the Viau Biscuits factory. She married late, at 37. Her husband was a mailman. They’d met 20 years earlier at a Young Catholic Workers meeting but had lost touch. The mailman was very religious, an austere man, a churchwarden in the parish, and a knight of the Order of the Holy Sacrament. He coached youth sports. They didn’t have children of their own. Adrienne was always cheerful; it was her nature. She submitted to her husband’s sternness, but never became bitter.

  – She was a sainte femme, as we say, but she never moralized. At 37 she accepted the husband she could get and she made her peace with it. She loved him. He had some good qualities, my uncle Paul, even if he was a little sanctimonious. He died young and Adrienne never considered remarrying. She was a good person, I don’t know how else to put it. For a long time she visited seniors in their homes. She adopted four or five or them. She did their shopping and washed their dishes, even though she was older than they were. And then her eyesight started to go. She became a prisoner in her home. In the end she only had a little peripheral vision left. She would sit about six inches from the TV, to one side of it, and that way she could still follow her shows. But she kept house with almost no help from anyone. She knew where everything was. She could make her own meals without spilling things. She did her own cleaning. She was so afraid we’d put her in a senior’s residence that she did everything she could to make her place look perfect ... We would never have put her in a home.

  – Did she think about death much?

  – She talked about it. But she was in no hurry. She used to say, if I keep my marbles and I don’t go too deaf, I’m ready to live to a hundred. What she liked most was listening to audio books. She got them from the Magnétothèque. She was probably listening to one when the explosion happened.

  A life as simple and beautiful as a tree. I don’t know why, but it got to me. I choked up for a minute, which is definitely not my style. I thanked Miss Weather Lady, offered my condolences, and left. In the hallway I passed a little old lady dressed in garish colours. She often comes into the Bien Bon in the morning to have the poor man’s pudding. I said hello and went out. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I wandered around the neighbourhood for a while. Then I got the idea to phone the Magnétothèque and find out what Adrienne had been listening to the night she died. The young woman who answered seemed surprised by my question and I had to explain the circumstances, but then she found Adrienne’s file and told me:

  – It was Trente Arpents by Ringuet.

  I’d read it in school. I went to the Maison de la culture, borrowed the book, and took it back to my hotel room.

  I was awake the whole night. I couldn’t put it down. The sad story of Euchariste Moisan, a poor habitant farmer who raises his family through sheer determination on a strip of land beside the St. Lawrence River – it reminded me of Adrienne’s childhood. And when I got to the part where Euchariste is an old man living with one of his sons in exile in the United States, surrounded by grandchildren who can’t speak a word of French, it reminded me of Un Canadien errant, my father’s favourite song. By the time I finished the book I realized that, compared with Euchariste and Adrienne, I’d had it easy. It was time to stop whining about my life.

  It was light before I fell asleep. I kept thinking about Adrienne’s last night. I wondered whether she’d said grace before her last supper, and how she’d served herself soup without spilling it. I wondered whether she’d done the dishes right away or left them till morning. I pictured her moving carefully to the living room, settling into her favourite arm-chair, and turning on the tape recorder. ‘Charis usually made no reply to this teasing, which was the only form of tenderness they knew. All the delightful caresses, which married people are allowed, were kept for the evening, when Mélie had gone to sleep upstairs and they had closed the door of their room. Then Euchariste would suddenly take Alphonsine round the waist with a bol
d clumsiness which she would resist with an eager laugh. But in the daytime they dared not kiss each other because of a kind of bashfulness which made them look away when the impulse came to them. Sometimes, though, desire would come upon them in the dimly lit workshop, where Euchariste was repairing a piece of harness, or in the loft, amid the heavy odour of hay, and she would come out, fixing her hair, to be met by a smile and a sidelong glance from Mélie. Maybe she fell asleep listening to it. And then there was a big noise and maybe a flash of light, then a moment of pain and it was all over.

  u

  I must have looked pale when I walked into the Bien Bon the next morning. Angéla tried to be discreet, but I could feel her watching me with a knowing eye. I felt obliged to say something:

  – Don’t worry, Angéla. I read late, that’s all.

  I didn’t know whether to feel pleased or annoyed by her concern. To avoid having to think about it, I started telling her about Adrienne. Suddenly, a hoarse voice interrupted me from the door:

  – I knew Adrienne well! Bonjour monsieur, I saw you at the funeral home yesterday.

  – Bonjour.

  – Bonjour, Madame Poupart, said Angéla.

  It was the little old lady I’d passed in the hall. She came in wearing a bright red coat, a yellow dress with ruffles, and a pair of children’s blue rubber boots with baby ducks on them. She couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. Perched on her head was a kind of bonnet that looked like one of those toilet roll covers women crochet out of Phentex. Her glasses were as thick as Coke bottles and her voice was beyond description: a kind of cavernous croaking interspersed with little girls’ giggles.

  – Gee, we had lots of fun together, elle pis moi. We travelled all over Quebec!

  – Oh ya?

  Two simple words. That’s all it takes to open the floodgates when someone’s dying to tell you their story. A simple “Oh ya?” and – paf! – you get ten years of a life, free of charge.

  I quickly discovered there was a hole in Miss Weather Lady’s account, a big fat hole of about ten years between the Viau cookie factory and marriage to the knight of the Order of the Holy Sacrament. One day, it seems, Adrienne got fed up packing Whippets in boxes and signed on with a burlesque company. The guy who ran the company, a Monsieur Gignac, recruited her at an amateur contest. Madame Poupart’s face lit up as she told the story. She was remembering the best years of her life.

  – We were chorus girls! We sang, too. Her stage name was Hattie. We played every village in Quebec and every petit-Canada in the States. We did shows in parish halls and split the money 50-50 with the priests.

  The girls were poorly paid, poorly housed, and kept on a tight leash by the boss’s wife who was in charge of the troupe’s morals. After three years on the road, Adrienne disappeared, so to speak. A few years later, Madame Poupart bumped into her by accident in Montreal and they started spending time together again. Little by little, the truth emerged: Adrienne had become the mistress of a prominent, married man. He’d kept her, in modest style.

  – He was the love of her life. She never told me his name. Things were different then, it wasn’t like today. Anyway, he died, I don’t know what of, and Adrienne went back to the cookie factory. She lived on her own for a long time, and then she met Paul. She told him everything about her past. He married her anyway. He never reproached her for anything. But he didn’t like her spending time with her old friends, so we didn’t see each other again for thirty years, until he died. That really broke her up. She really loved him. Moi, personellement, I didn’t exactly find him the life of the party. But then I wasn’t in the bedroom with them.

  With that, she gave us a big crocodile wink, popped the last bit of pudding in her mouth, and got up to leave.

  – Adrienne was one of a kind. Gee, we had fun together, she was a barrel of laughs. Well, bye-bye kiddies!

  She was out the door in a flash, as light on her feet as a schoolgirl. I looked at Angéla.

  – Beautiful story, eh?

  – Oui. But don’t count on the others being the same.

  She walked away, leaving me to my coffee. The phone rang. It was for me. It was my contact at the coroner’s office. He told me that a woman named Caron had claimed the body of the mystery man, and that little Josée and her mother Denise had been identified the day before by Denise’s mother. I asked for their contact details and decided to go see Denise’s mother right away. She lived in the neighbourhood. I was just heading out the door when Angéla, looking angry, called after me:

  – You and I’d better have a talk one of these days!

  I smelled it as soon as I stepped into the stairwell: the sure sign of a binge. A rancid odour of beer, sweat, sugar, and vomit. It hit me like a fist in the gut. A rush of visceral memories swept over me: years of mornings-after-the-night-before, waking up in hospital or in a grotty tourist room, shirt filthy, underwear stained, hair matted. Proust had his madeleines, for me it was the smell of a binge. Anyone who thinks alcohol is glamourous has never seen the bottom of a third forty-ouncer of Scotch.

  The lady of the house was out of it. She mistook me for the delivery boy from the dépanneur on the corner.

  – You got my bottles of Rossini?

  Yech. The only good thing about Canadian vermouth is that it’s 18 per cent alcohol and you can have it delivered from the dépanneur. It’s the end of the line for alcoholics. Next stop, delirium tremens. I set Madame Laperrière straight about who I wasn’t and climbed the stairs. She was waiting for me at the top, swaying on her feet, barely focussing. I helped her back inside. Big mistake. I should have known that the only thing you get from someone that drunk is trouble.

  The apartment looked like a war zone. Ashtrays knocked over, broken chairs and glasses, blood stains on the carpet and walls, a half-burnt cushion in a corner, dirty clothes all over the place. The decor of a rock-bottom alcoholic. The lady of the house was wearing an Ottawa Senators T-shirt, boxer shorts with little hearts on them, and slippers with pink pom-poms. She was probably forty but looked seventy-five. I don’t know why, but the commercials by Educ’alcool are never that realistic. I sat Madame Laperrière down on the sofa. She closed her eyes for a moment; her head must have been spinning. Then she looked at me.

  – Who are you?

  – A neighbour of your daughter Denise. I came to offer my condolences.

  – Well, shove them up your ass! She got what she deserved. Tough titty!

  It was her own daughter she was talking about. Anyone with a brain in their head would have walked out at that point. I stayed.

  – Why do you say that, Madame Laperrière?

  – She became a real smart-ass when she started going to university. Started shitting all over us. We weren’t good enough for her. She moved to the west end and got an unlisted number.

  Madame Laperrière burst into tears. Then she stopped.

  – For fuck sake, isn’t there anything to drink around here?

  I brought her a glass of water. She drank it absent-mindedly then put the glass down in mid-air, six inches from the edge of the table. Fortunately, it was almost empty. I tried to steer her back to Denise.

  – Your daughter. Why did she move back to the neighbourhood?

  She looked at me suspiciously.

  – Who are you?

  – I told you, a neighbour.

  – So how come you’re not dead?

  – I don’t know ... Why’d Denise come back to the neighbourhood? Was it a guy?

  – That fucking François can go fuck himself!

  – Why do you say that?

  Not a word. She clammed right up. I tried another approach.

  – Tell me about your grand-daughter. What’s her name?

  Bad move. Madame Laperrière muttered “Josée” and broke down completely. She hunched over and began rocking back and forth, sobbing out of control. Then, just as suddenly, she leapt to her feet and started throwing everything she could get her hands on.

  – Madam
e Laperrière, calmez-vous. Maybe you should lie down, sleep a little.

  I tried to settle her on the sofa. Before I knew it she had her arms around me and was pulling me down on top of her. It was revolting. I’d just managed to disentangle myself and calm her down a little when a huge man appeared, steadying himself against the wall. He was in his sixties, a beached whale in his one-piece Penman long johns. He glared at me with glazed eyes.

  – What the fuck’s going on?

  I didn’t stick around for the introductions. I was out the door in a flash.

  Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other alcoholics. The twelfth and final step. I never got that far. It would have taken someone a lot stronger than me to help the people I’d just run away from, though God knows they needed all the help they could get. I headed over to rue Lafontaine to wait for the furniture delivery. On the way, I passed my old place on Darling. Lieutenant Geoffrion’s van was still parked out front. He must have been rooting around under the rubble, dusting off a piece of gyproc with a make-up brush, working by flashlight. It takes all kinds, I guess.

  A voice called out from above:

  – Monsieur Langlois! Monsieur Langlois!

  It was Madame Kovacs, perched on her third-floor balcony.

  – He’s back!

  – Qui ça?

  – The man with the beard. He came back to get his car. It was parked at the corner of Adam.

  – You saw him?

  – No, but his car is gone. It was either him or the other guys.

  – What other guys?

  – You know ...

  She mouthed the words “Hells Angels.”