by Jack Falla
* * *
You’d need three weeks to hit all the great restaurants in Quebec City. Some of the guys went to Le Continental or Aux Anciens Canadiens, both across the street from the Frontenac. But Cam and I had been to those places in our early days when Quebec City had an NHL team, the Nordiques. That team moved to Denver, where it’s now the Colorado Avalanche. I wanted to try someplace new, so Cam, Luther Brown, and I went to Le Saint-Amour on rue Ste-Ursule, also an easy walk from the hotel. I had the caribou steak grilled with wild berries and served with poached pears in red wine. Cam ordered a château-bottled Bordeaux—“Château de Deuxième Hypothèque,” Cam said to the waiter while pointing to what must have been the most expensive wine on the list. The waiter laughed. “Château de Second Mortgage,” Cam translated for us. He wasn’t kidding. Our bill looked like the tote board at Saratoga. Cam paid.
Luther and I like jazz, so I suggested we catch the first set at L’Emprise, a jazz bar in the Hotel Clarendon. Cam was surprised there was no cover charge or minimum. He laughed at the sign on the door: “Consumption Obligatoire.”
We got the last three seats at the narrow bar that borders three sides of the small stage. The group that night was the Quintette Joelle Clarisse. The woman I assumed was Joelle—a striking young blonde in a black sheath dress—was the vocalist, and four young guys were on piano, drums, bass, and tenor sax.
Joelle said a few words in French—she lost me after “Bon soir, mesdames et messieurs…”—and began a set sung mostly in French but with one song, “Maybe You’ll Be There,” in English and another, “Bésame Mucho,” in Portuguese. The group was good but by no means memorable. Or not until the end of the set, after a guy at the bar handed Joelle a slip of paper. She read it, smiled, turned to the band, and said, “Summertime.”
I nudged Cam. “They’re playing your song,” I said, hitting him with a quick lyric—“Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-lookin’…” Cam flipped me off. Luther laughed.
From the first notes and the woman’s full, clear, sultry “Summertime…” the song ached with sensuality. On the woman’s left the sax player, eyes closed, swayed back and forth losing himself in his instrument, playing with passion and an almost erotic abandon. Most people stopped drinking and the two waiters put down their trays. Halfway through the song the woman turned to the saxophone player—the bass and piano had receded now and the drummer worked softly with the brushes—and it was just the two of them wrapped in the music. Singing and playing to each other. They had to be lovers, I thought. Or to have been lovers once and now the music was all they had left. When the song ended, the sax player leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The woman dropped her head briefly. Then, turning away from the sax player, she said something and the group segued into a break with “Take the A Train.” That’s when the applause began and the people stood.
“Passion beats talent if talent isn’t passionate,” Cam said. I borrowed a pen from Luther and wrote it on a cocktail napkin. I thought it would make a good theme for my season. Or maybe for my life.
We left L’Emprise and walked toward the hotel. As we neared rue des Carrières and the Frontenac I decided it was too early to go to bed, so I walked the fifty yards to Dufferin Terrace, the railed boardwalk on the edge of a cliff, two hundred feet above the river. I stood at the rail and stared at the St. Lawrence. I knew from a history class that I was looking at the stretch of water where, on a moonless night in September 1759, a flotilla of British troops slipped undetected under the French guns guarding the city. The British landed near the only climbable pathway up the cliffs. By dawn more than four thousand English troops had assembled in battle formation on the Plains of Abraham west of the city. In one of the greatest understatements in military history the surprised French commander, the Comte de Montcalm, looking out at the British troops, said, “C’est sérieux.”
The Battle of Quebec was over in minutes with Wolfe dead, Montcalm mortally wounded, and the English in possession of the city and, with that, in control of Canada.
“Don’t jump,” Cam said suddenly appearing beside me.
“Just thinking about the battle,” I said.
“History majors,” Cam said derisively.
“History to you is the Dow Jones Five-Day Moving Average,” I said.
“At least I can make money with that. How’s your room?”
“Cornered the market on oak and mahogany,” I said. “Yours?”
“Great view of the river. Only one problem.”
“No one to share it with.”
“Bingo.”
I told Cam a line Lisa had gotten off on our last vacation at the Frontenac. “The best sex is hotel sex,” she’d said. Cam thought it would be a good marketing slogan for Westin or Fairmont.
* * *
We lost 5–3 to the Canadiens Saturday night and hardly looked like a team that would challenge Montreal for the division title much less one that could compete for the Cup. And this time we couldn’t make the excuse that we were just playing a meaningless exhibition. This was the final preseason game for both teams, and both coaches dressed the guys they planned to play on opening night. But our defense played like a road company rehearsing for a train wreck, our offense got only fifteen shots on goal (to thirty-seven by the Canadiens), and I let in what Lynne Abbott said in her story was “Savard’s soft-serve du jour,” an unscreened fifty-foot slapper by Montreal captain Tim Harcourt, a defenseman who’s lucky if he scores five goals a season.
Kevin Quigley gave us our sole highlight but I was the only one who appreciated it. Early in the first period I got blindsided by the Canadiens’ Rheal Duchamp. There was no penalty on the play. Packy went out of his mind. “You’re going home in a body bag, Duchamp!” he yelled, jumping up on the bench and tapping Quigley on the shoulder. Quig skated out for the face-off, where he lined up opposite Duchamp. I figured the fight would break out as soon as the linesman dropped the puck. Instead I heard Quig say to a nervous Duchamp, “Excuse me, Rheal, but do you plan on doing that to our goaltender any more?”
“Oh, no, no, Kev, that was an accident,” said the chickenshit Duchamp in a reply made up of equal parts fear and common sense. Duchamp didn’t come near me for the rest of the game and Quig didn’t have to serve a penalty for instigating a fight. It’s funny how being known as a good fighter often means not having to fight at all.
Thankfully, that game marked the end of training camp. We’d play for real starting Thursday. C’est sérieux.
* * *
Most of the players don’t bring wives or dates to Meet the Bruins Night, because we have to sit at this long dais and any woman we came with would be left shifting for herself among the season ticket holders and corporate types—the suits—sitting at the round tables set up on the Garden floor. The anal-retentive Mad Hatter makes us sit in the order of our jersey numbers. Because I wear number 1 I sat at the left end of the dais, just above table 1, which was reserved for the trustees of the Boys and Girls Club. Tamara Carter and a half dozen men were already seated when Faith McNeil walked in, moving as she always had with the lupine grace of an athlete, her stride and carriage suggestive of vast reservoirs of strength and speed. Even in low heels and a dark gray wool-and-silk business suit Faith was a head turner. Cam was right. She was alone. Faith took the last open seat at the table, her back to the dais and to me. There was a day I would’ve tossed a sugar packet on her head but instead I called down: “Hey, Faith, I didn’t play that bad. You could at least say hello.”
She turned, smiled up at me, and walked to the end of the dais. I stepped down to meet her.
She told me she’d come to present the Boys and Girls Club Man of the Year Award to Kevin Quigley for the hundreds of hours he volunteers. Then she asked me whom I was with.
“No one. Too awkward. Sheri’s back at the condo.”
“Sheri the Equestrienne?” Faith asked, smiling.
“You’ve been talking to Cam.”
“Oh yeah. And good
luck in the Breeders’ Cup. Ride ’em, cowgirl,” she said, pretending to hit a horse on the flank with a cowboy hat. “Whose silks is she wearing? Kentucky Stables or Victoria’s Secret?” Then she laughed the same throaty Hepburnian laugh I’d first heard echoing up the stairwell of a college dorm.
I couldn’t think of anything to say and I’d started back to the dais when Faith asked me if I could give her a ride home. “I took a taxi because I hate parking in this area. I live close. Chestnut Hill.”
“First castle on the left?” I said. Chestnut Hill is a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar Tudor-style homes near the Boston College campus. It’s an easy drive from the Garden so I said I’d give her a lift. But I’d have said that if she lived in Iowa.
* * *
You might think it’s odd that a guy like Quigley, who most fans see as a brawler, would get the Man of the Year Award from the Boys and Girls Club. But look around the league and you’ll see that in almost every city it’s the enforcers and shit disturbers—Serge Balon in Philly, Davey Canfield in Edmonton, Quig and Cam with us—who do the most community service work. You want someone to give a hockey clinic, open a playground, or visit a hospital, the so-called goon is your guy. Faith, who doesn’t waste a lot of words, did the award presentation. “Most of you know what this man can do with his closed fists,” she said, “but tonight we honor him for what he does with his open heart.” Quig got a standing ovation. Ever since the days of Terry O’Reilly they’ve loved the bighearted, two-fisted Irish guys in Boston.
* * *
Players had to hang around and sign autographs after the dinner, so it was about quarter of ten before Faith and I and Boss Scags headed for Chestnut Hill. It was small talk most of the way until she told me what everyone seems to ask any athlete over thirty. “How much longer are you going to play?”
I said goalies could last a little longer than most players. Some—Johnny Bower and Jacques Plante—played into their forties. “I think I can go another five years.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll retire.”
“And…?”
“And what?”
“What will you DO?”
“Take ten strokes off my handicap.”
“Seriously, JP?”
“I won’t DO anything,” I said. “I’ll be retired.”
“You won’t do anything for what? Thirty years? That’s a long time to not be doing anything. Let me put it another way. What would you do if you weren’t a player?”
“I don’t know. Teach and coach maybe,” I said, though it was only something I made up on the spot. Then, mainly to change the subject, I asked Faith why she was going to medical school. “Cam says you’re set for life. Why put yourself through something as tough as med school?”
“I was a premed major, remember?”
“But that was before you broke the dot-com casino.”
“I think the secret of life—of a happy life—is having something to do. Something you’re good at. I think I can be a good doctor.”
“I think I can be an excellent retiree,” I said. Faith didn’t laugh. She gave me directions to her house.
“Don’t get out,” she said when I pulled up under the portico. “I know this is the part where I’m supposed to invite you in but I can’t. I’ve still got about an hour of studying to do … and you’ve got Sheri the Equestrienne waiting to … um … saddle up?” We both laughed. She started to close the car door, then stopped and said, “We ought to grab lunch sometime.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. But we didn’t set a date, which meant we wouldn’t do it.
Faith went in the front door and flicked the porch light, signaling me that it was OK to leave. I drove west on Beacon Street toward Kenmore Square and directly into a traffic jam caused by 36,692 people leaving Fenway Park after the Sox’ 9–1 win over Oakland in the opening game of the playoffs. The Boss and I sat in traffic through an entire John Coltrane album and it was after eleven when I got home. Sheri the Equestrienne was hotter than a crawfish boil.
It wasn’t so much my being late that bothered her. It was my being, as she put it, “the only person in America besides Charlie Fucking Manson who doesn’t have a cell phone.”
I’ve always seen phones as unlocked gates through which people can barge, univited and usually unwanted, into my life. Not being inclined to barge into anyone else’s life, it irks me when people barge into mine. I have one phone in my condo but it’s mainly for ordering takeout. “If I had a cell phone people might call me and talk to me,” I said.
“That’s the wonderful thing about phones, Jean Pierre,” Sheri said as if she were talking to a six-year-old. “Phones connect people. They let us communicate. They bring us closer.” Then she said she was going home because she had to give an early-morning lesson. Dressage? Undressage? I forget.
When she left, the rodeo announcer in my mind—the one I’d hoped would be yelling, “Good ride, cowboy, good ride”—was instead announcing J. P. Savard as a healthy scratch.
That’s when I decided that maybe Sheri was right about telephones. I grabbed my only phone and called Faith McNeil. We set a date for lunch.
High School
Holly Van Gelder never looked at me. When it came time to pass our geometry homework to the front row, Holly—without turning around—extended her open right hand behind her like a relay runner waiting for the baton. I put my homework paper in her hand; she added her homework and passed the papers up the row. Holly never spoke to me either, probably because she spent most of her class time whispering to Aaron Scanlon, a junior who sat to her left and who was our starting quarterback, point guard, and pitcher, the best athlete in the school and a pretty good guy.
Holly’s family lived in Westview Estates, the part of town where the doctors and lawyers had cornered the market on BMWs and Volvos. I lived in the section of town called Little Canada, which in terms of money and social standing was about as far from Westview Estates as it was from Mars or Venus. Except that she looked like a fifteen-year-old Scarlett Johansson, Holly Van Gelder was enough to make me wish St. Dom’s had stayed an all-boys school. But my attitude changed on a Friday afternoon in late February.
It was the day of our last regular-season varsity hockey game and we were playing crosstown rival Lewiston, the city’s public high school and one of the best teams in the state. I was a sophomore and was on the varsity but only as a backup to Bernie Fortier, a cocaptain and two-year starter. Bernie was being recruited by a lot of NCAA Division I colleges, none of which was Harvard or Princeton. Bernie was so dumb that on the day before the Lewiston game he plagiarized an op-ed column from the Lewiston Sun-Journal, got caught by his English teacher, and was suspended by our assistant principal, Mary “No Charity” Garrity. This meant I was starting.
We usually played Lewiston at night but because of a concert at the old Central Maine Civic Center our game was at 3:30 in the afternoon, which meant that for the first time all season hockey players would get dismissed early. I’d just put my homework paper into Holly Van Gelder’s open hand when the announcement came over the PA system: “Would all varsity hockey players please report to Coach Lennon in the team room.” I scooped up my books and headed for the door.
“Good luck, JP,” Aaron Scanlon said.
“I’ll try to keep it in single numbers,” I said. Lewiston was loaded as usual.
* * *
The Saints (that was us) versus the Blue Devils was about as big as high school hockey gets in Maine. I was used to seeing a few hundred people at our games. It surprised me to see a few thousand in the stands when we took the ice for warm-ups. I was skating behind the net when I heard a rap on the glass and looked up. It was Aaron Scanlon giving me a thumbs-up sign. He was with Holly Van Gelder, who, to my surprise, smiled and waved.
I let in a lot of goals in warm-up but there’s an old saying in hockey: Bad warm-up, good game.
Andre LeBlanc scored for us in the first minute and the cheering wa
s the loudest I’d ever heard. But Lewiston came right back to tie it when one of their wingers ran me over and a trailing defenseman shot the puck high into the net. It should’ve been goalie interference but I think the ref was scared to call it. Lewiston had more fans than we did.
Andre’s gave us a 2–1 lead late in the first period when he buried a rebound off his brother Paul’s shot. And that’s where the score stood right down to the last minute of the third period.
We’d been getting shelled but I was stopping everything. I was also getting tired. I’d seen mop-up duty in a few games but this was my first varsity start. I kept sneaking peeks at the clock wanting the game to be over. With 1:03 to play we got a two-minute penalty and the Blue Devils rolled out their power play, which featured the state’s leading scorer, Geoff Cutting, at center and a couple of howitzers on the points.
Cutting won the face-off and drew the puck to the right point man, who slid it left and, whomp, a shot I didn’t even see bounced off my left leg pad. Cutting got the rebound but I got my stick glove on his shot. Paul LeBlanc grabbed the rebound and started behind the net with two forecheckers hounding him.
“Two on you, Paul … Two on you … Up the boards!” I yelled. Paul rimmed the puck up the boards, where it was intercepted by a Lewiston player and shot back in on me. I held on for the face-off. There was still 0:51 to play. Lewiston pulled its goalie for a six-on-four advantage. Adrenaline canceled fatigue and I was playing on instinct. Arms and legs moving in the ingrained patterns learned on driveways, ponds, and rinks over the previous eight years. No time to think. With less than thirty seconds to play I dived across an open net to get a stick onto a shot that was headed in. Geoff Cutting clanged the rebound off of the crossbar, and one of our defensemen flipped the puck into neutral ice. The Blue Devils went back to retrieve it. 0:27 to play. They came back on us with six players moving to the attack. The puck went left to Cutting, who accelerated past our defenseman, skated to the top of the face-off circle, and blew a laser into our net high to my stick side. Goal. The Lewiston stands erupted in cheers. Then they heard the whistle. Offside. Now the St. Dom’s fans started cheering. I looked at the clock: 0:21. Face-off outside the zone. But it came back in fast. A shot. A skate save. Another shot. The puck went into my glove. “Hold it, JP … Hold it!” It was an exhausted Paul LeBlanc kneeling in front of me, shielding me with his body and not wanting to get up on exhausted legs. 0:11 to play. Fans on their feet. Both sides screaming. Cutting managed a shot off the face-off. It went over the net into the corner. A Blue Devil player slid it up the boards to the point. Two of my teammates blocked my view. “Gimme a look.… Gimme a look!” Our left defenseman spun out of the way just in time for me to get a pad on a low slapshot. The puck skidded into the corner, where they had two guys on it and another headed for the low slot. We were collapsing.…