The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

  Suddenly he turned the lights off.

  ‘You will see nothing. The darkness will be for ever.’

  Marlisse Franck cried.

  ‘Death already creeps down the walls of your homes,’ Father Ybert said. ‘Death watches in the leaves that fall. Death creeps down your chimneys at night and steals pennies. Death sees when you touch yourselves in an impure manner. Death lives with Lutherans.’

  Peewee Zelich hid under his desk.

  ‘You have one hope …’ Father Ybert said.

  He turned the lights on. In the flickering fluorescent lights we saw he had changed into a white surplice with gold trim. The two older students wore surplices, too, and held a censer and chrism box. They all smiled.

  ‘The Holy Roman Catholic Church!’ we shouted happily.

  On the thirteenth day of school Jackson Higgins ran off the roof of St Bona venture’s old wing and dashed his brains against Father Przybilski’s parking meter.

  The pretty girls of St Bonaventure stood at the bicycle rack. Maple leafs blew into the transom. Claire Pic wore a gold locket with rosemary against menstrual cramps. Frances Grgic’s crucifix opened and held a blessed violet against polio. Antoinette Hartmann wore a cameo on her red sweater. It contained jasmine, against atheists. These were the pretty girls of St Bonaventure.

  ‘Look at Jean-Michel Verhaeren!’ Frances Grgic called. ‘Look! He talks to himself!’

  I threw away my tangerine. I got confused.

  ‘Maybe he has to go to the bathroom,’ Frances Grgic said.

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ Claire Pic laughed.

  Frances tousled my hair.

  ‘What a character!’

  Antoinette gave me a kiss.

  ‘What a little man!’

  I ran a gang called les buveurs.

  Paul Hartmann was Undeceiver-General. Danny Auban was Sergeant at Arms, Lawrence Otto was First Soldier, Roland Zelich and Herman Pic, my cousin, were Second Soldiers. We met in a railroad shack. From the window we saw the trunk-line station, Galtieau Cement Works, the bleach factory.

  I was buscher (bossman). They sang to me in patois.

  Oh a me buscher, in a me buscher garden

  Me a beg a me buscher pardon!

  Then I would let somebody do something, or not, depending if I felt like it. I was the jailer, and the jailer’s son, and I stole a bagatelle billiards. The buveurs played trou-madame and sans égal. I was the Policier, and the Capitaine, the Prince du Sang, La Putain and the Procuresse. I spread my cards: La Morte, Le Cadavre and the Prince Etranger.

  We dragged little Protestants into alleys and stuffed red chillies in their mouths. We drew women’s breasts on their school. We caught a rabbit, two dogs, a pigeon, three sand turtles and a sick squirrel and made them pay to see our zoo.

  We believed in Wild Bill Hickok, shérif du quartier Deadwood, ville d’amour, also Jean Gabin. The Deadwood Chair was in front of a poster of Quai des Brumes. We kept a blue bowl of lavender talc. The Deadwood whip permitted speech.

  ‘Catholic girls,’ Roland Zelich complained, ‘become whores.’

  ‘Protestant girls work for Prange’s and get married,’ Danny Auban said.

  ‘Catholic girls walk afterward like they had bowling balls between their legs,’ Herman Pic said.

  ‘Protestant girls walk with their legs closed,’ Danny said.

  ‘Catholic girls have an extra hole,’ Herman Pic whispered.

  ‘And they say,’ Paul Hartmann blurted, ‘to stick it in – !’

  I stood and proposed a motion:

  ‘The best is to keep your hands off and your mouth shut.’

  I visited Uncle Emil.

  Emil was foreman of the bleaching factory. It was a yellow building where magnesium salts had corroded the concrete ramps. The drains were clogged with grey wet strands of cotton. Under dirty skylights boys climbed to the top of the huge boiler, the kier. They packed cotton in with bare feet. In the next room bleached cotton shot through rollers and Emil tossed cold water on the sparking hot copper plate.

  Emil came into the kier room.

  ‘Awaye!’ Emil shouted.

  Boys jumped out of the kier. Didi Ligne pulled a lever. Chemicals began percolating. Emil locked the hatch.

  Emil we called le marocain because of his thick lips. He had red hair, like all the Verhaerens. He was impotent from the chemicals. When his wife became pregnant by her cousin Felix, he went into couvade anyway and lay in a shack on an island, groaning. I kissed his hand and put it against my cheek.

  ‘Why aren’t you in school?’ he asked.

  ‘Priests make me a diarrhoea.’

  I kissed his knees.

  ‘Stop that,’ he said. ‘You must want something from me. What is it?’

  ‘I want to live in your house,’ I said.

  ‘You? You buveur? To steal from me?’

  ‘My family makes me crazy.’

  ‘Ah. You will put up with worse. Tu m’comprends-tu là?’ Emil said. ‘Much worse.’

  Steam shot to the skylights. The chemicals, now shit brown, gurgled into the drain. But the cotton was white!

  My cousin Estée died.

  It was a freak. She choked on a safety-pin. We went to her house, a brown wood-frame house on St Pierre Street. Black crepe covered the porch columns. Ferns hung in bunches, with black satin ribbon. The clocks had been taken from the house and now Estée’s family sat on a blue couch. An electric bulb hung over the corpse.

  ‘I learned of the great misfortune that has befallen,’ my father said, taking off his hat. ‘Who could have expected it?’

  ‘I learned of the great misfortune that has befallen,’ my mother said, lifting her black veil. ‘Life hangs by a hair.’

  ‘I learned of the great misfortune that has befallen,’ Ignace said, touching Estée’s mother’s hand. ‘Le bon Dieu is terrible in his mercy.’

  ‘I learned of the great misfortune that has befallen,’ I said. ‘Estée was a friend of mine, too.’

  Estée’s mother started crying. My mother shook the evergreen branch soaking in holy water so that three drops fell on Estée. I touched Estée’s cheek.

  ‘She’s cold,’ I said.

  The Szegy mortuary took Estée in a hearse up the road. It was blowing hard. The cimetière smelled of wet sand, dead flies, plastic flowers, candle-wax. We marched into the Verhaeren vault. Below, the French quarter, dull roofs, stretched to the harbour. We buried Estée and sang En voyageant sur la mer. Estée’s lamps burned out at seven o’clock, and we went back to her house. Her uncle René grilled sturgeon. Uncle Emil made piquant rice and okra. Uncle Bobo brought cigars. We had Ojibway corn, potatoes, grilled tomatoes, leeks and cider. Estée’s brother Jim brought Ontario wine. Orange stain appeared on our father’s fingers.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Jim said. ‘You had impure thoughts of Estée.’

  ‘The girl was only thirteen,’ my father objected.

  ‘Then you admit it.’

  ‘I admit nothing.’

  ‘We know you, Happy Jack, what makes you happy!’

  Our mother became hysterical. She believed that birds flew upside down when they passed over the house of the dead. She heard Estée’s voice. She became afraid of Estée. The wind shrieked up Isle of May Street. She drank too much wine and threw up on the porch. Estée’s brother Allen accused our father of having touched Estée.

  ‘I deny that!’ my father yelled.

  ‘Then you are a perjurer!’

  Our mother ran around the living room. Ignace screamed from the roof.

  ‘Estée!’ he yelled. ‘In the trees!’

  We ran to the windows. Over steep dark roofs Estée’s soul rose in the howling winds. In bare, black branches a lavender mist dispersed.

  ‘Estée!’ we yelled.

  There was a fist fight. My father broke Gustave Verhaeren’s nose. All night men were chasing men and breaking windows until the police came. By morning everybody was draped over the furniture and our mouths
tasted like ash.

  Two

  Bill Aubourg unlocked the St Croix fish museum. Bill’s leg was crippled. It flopped down the slimy wooden floor as he fed the fish. The aquariums held six flounders, two dogfish, a silver dace, seven shiners, a kokanee, and a birdfish with gills where the beak should be, its eye twisted. Our museum, we believed, would be a tourist site during the September fête. The Fisherman – His Music – His Museum. That would be our theme in electric lights, an arcade visible over the north shore. There would be oils by Bill’s wife: Le Pêcheur au soleil levant. My Uncle Georges would grill fish. My father would play the accordion. M. d’Aube would bring floodlights from the fisheries. St Croix would have son et lumière.

  Americans would cross the International Border and lay our Catholic girls on gunny sacks.

  We smoked pipes. We talked about the Canadian winter, Ojibways, Basques, lamprey eels and women, all the things le bon Dieu has seen fit to trouble us with. Those were the days, we had a future.

  M. d’Aube leaned over.

  ‘Who salutes standing in the morning, horizontal at noon, and bowing low in the evening?’

  ‘The three stages of erection!’

  He put an arm around my shoulder.

  ‘Now you are twelve, Jean, with a petit moustache. You are ready to fall in love. I must tell you about women.’

  ‘Oui, Monsieur d’Aube.’

  ‘What is a woman?’

  ‘A person.’

  ‘They have certain anatomical features,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And these features contain the woman’s nature.’

  ‘There are many kinds of women on the earth,’ my father interrupted. ‘But the worst are the French. They trap boys in birdhouses and feed them double-pointed nails. Some fly in the air and become like owls and swoop down. Ecoute bien. In the meadows I have seen women with hair in their nostrils. They grind boys. They burn their heads with hot irons. Tu m’comprends-tu là?’

  ‘Oui, Papa.’

  Bill Aubourg showed me his pack of pornographic cards. White women in black leather straddled chairs with Negroes.

  ‘Listen,’ Bill said. ‘When you come home from the tavern your wife shrieks. Well, the hell with that. Beat off her monkeyskin. Punch her in the stomach. Knock off her bearskin. Put a fist in her face. Knock off her catskin.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When she hops out bleeding, bite off her rabbitskin. Belt off her muleskin. Drub her on the pigskin. If she falls on her knees smash her. Knock off the insect-skin. You got to bust through to the woman-skin. Then she’ll put her tongue in your ear.’

  ‘Cé ça,’ M. d’Aube said. ‘She’ll put that tongue anywhere you want.’

  My mother bought a breviary. It was painted with facsimile medieval illuminations. It had psalms, matins, vespers, lauds, patristic homilies, prayer schedules. It had a list of martyrs, which she painted.

  Zena Courennes brought her a parchment from Lourdes. Zelda Zylch gave her a brass pater noster that told the hours. Old Woman Dyb got from my mother a Belgian amber with the Virgin Mary’s fingernail. Father Przybilski could not stop the relics trade. My mother took me to a wrestling match, went to the parking lot, and traded a mother-of-pearl rosary for an oil portrait of Catherine Labouré.

  This was the time of the decency crusade. Catholic women marched into Hebbard’s Stationers, ripped up the pornographic magazines, stole seventeen books by Zane Grey, and dumped stacks of The Watchtower off the embankment.

  Zena Courennes came for brandied tea. Legs crossed, she sat on my mother’s wicker chair. My mother was at the Dybs’ and I came in from playing hockey. I felt uncomfortable. It was warm and no place to hide. Mrs Courennes had thick red lipstick and her smile looked rubbery.

  ‘Would you like some cake, Michel?’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Courennes.’

  ‘I hear you have become a bad boy at St Bonaventure.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I am the theatre, I guess.’

  I couldn’t take my eye off her legs, which she knew, and refused to withdraw.

  ‘Boys are cruel,’ she suggested.

  ‘And the girls.’

  ‘Ah. The girls.’

  ‘Especially the girls.’

  ‘One hears Antoinette Hartmann is cruel,’ she said.

  ‘It is more a power.’

  ‘Women have power, too.’

  ‘They do, Mrs Courennes.’

  ‘Right now, for example.’

  It was suffocatingly warm.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  She laughed musically.

  ‘Your legs are concrete,’ she suggested.

  ‘Indeed. I am paralysed.’

  There was a movement outside. My mother waved through the window. She wore only an autumn sweater, carrot orange, braided. She was going down to the Bergs’. As she went away Zena Courennes poured a bit more brandy into her tea and luxuriantly ate her fruit cake. She carefully wiped her thick red lips.

  ‘You skate?’ she asked.

  ‘I am a good hockey player.’

  ‘But you are small.’

  ‘I am a little rough one, as they say.’

  ‘Your legs are strong.’

  ‘Like concrete.’

  ‘And do you go fast?’

  ‘Nobody stops me.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I’ll bet nobody stops you.’

  She stopped smiling.

  ‘So. Women have this power,’ she repeated.

  ‘Is it not so?’

  ‘Even now?’

  ‘Especially now.’

  ‘Come here, Jean.’

  ‘No. No. I mustn’t.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. It’s good for you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I beg you.’

  ‘No.’

  She smiled.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘It must be very good with you.’

  ‘So very good – ’

  The door flew open. My mother, carrying a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee, came in from the cold, blowing.

  ‘Jesu – it’s cold enough to freeze a Norwegian’s ass!’ she said.

  Zena Courennes turned away. We had tea with my mother.

  Father Przybilski called me to his office. Pius XII looked down from the fireplace mantel. Father Przybilski had gained weight. The buttons of his cassock bulged. He must have had piles, too, because he couldn’t sit still.

  ‘You have been with a woman?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Women are a source of venereal disease.’

  ‘And many other things.’

  ‘From women one obtains insanity, melancholy, delusions. Isn’t that true?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And yet you think about women.’

  ‘They have a strange sparkle.’

  ‘Only to you.’

  Father Przybilski beat me with a yardstick. I held tight to my vision of women.

  I discovered Father Ybert.

  He had a private chamber inside the chemistry stockroom. A baboon head was stuck on a red and white pole and a sign around its ears read ‘Darwin’. Over the head was an umbrella. Sharp sticks stood in a circle around the head. Father Ybert was shaking incense smoke at the baboon fur when he saw me in the doorway.

  ‘Go away, Jean-Michel.’

  That September Kelly’s Nursing Home put in new black and white tiles. I found my mother kneeling, sponging up red from a broken bottle. She was so pretty, her cornelian glowing in a shaft of sunlight. Her hair was damp from perspiration, strands curled over her forehead. She saw me in the doorway.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

  ‘Nobody, Mama.’

  She sponged furiously. The red did not come up.

  ‘GO AWAY,’ she said. ‘YOU KNOW THIS HAPPENS ONCE A MONTH!’

  In Kelly’s Nursing Home old Dieter Veck went into convulsions. T
he nurse, Annie Fer, flipped open a trap in his throat, syringed out the fluid and flicked it on the floor.

  ‘Nearly, nearly, dead,’ she sang. ‘Dead, dead, dead.’

  Herman Lang lost his leg under a bus. The thigh was ripped open and they sewed it up in Rutherford hospital. Then he came to Kelly’s to convalesce. After two weeks a strange callous formed. The doctors were astounded. The callous grew larger and larger. Finally, when it broke open, there was a rubbery little leg inside.

  ‘Mon Dieu merci!’ my mother said, crossing herself.

  Our mother and Ignace fought. In the living room, the kitchen, the halls and the bedroom. From the basement my father and I heard bodies flying against posts, knocking tins off pantry shelves.

  ‘Maudit qu’t’é fou!’ she shouted. ‘You are a fool!’

  ‘I am not a fool!’

  ‘A hairless albino!’

  ‘I am but blond!’

  The ironing board crashed into the door. Our mother must have grabbed him because he squealed and there was a sudden flurry of falling hammers and screwdrivers. Then the chase was on again, up the stairs, Ignace yelling, our mother swearing. He ran through the bedroom and down the lattice into the driveway.

  ‘Come back, Ignace!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ignace!’

  ‘NEVER!’

  He ran down LeClerc, his shirt streaming out.

  ‘IGNAAAACE!’ she yelled.

  What did they fight about? It was their secret.

  St Croix attended the Swallowfield variétés. My father played the accordion québécois style, keeping time with his feet on wood blocks. Oberlander sang German lullabies. Semml and Gruel put on puppet shows. Heads of Diefenbaker and Eisenhower, Cardinal Léger, Hitler, Pope Pius XII and Chief Pontiac bobbed in the miniature world. In the gangways after midnight priests ran up and down the corridors keeping personalities from collapse.

  Prisoners pedalled bicycles wired to batteries. When they pedalled hard enough, one electric bulb glowed. Prisoners cranked drills into a stone wall. When they broke through my father filled the hole with concrete blocks and they started again.

  Barrault was strapped to a cart. His head swung into walls as the guards careened him around corners. Barrault was put in the cold boiler, water poured in, and when he fainted Gruel dragged him out. Oberlander oiled the drop hinge of the old gallows, laid a rope around Barrault’s neck. Barrault fell in a dark rush to gunny sacks.