The O'Briens (29 page)

Gathering Soldiers

J
ohnny Taschereau
was waiting for her in the lobby of the Mount Royal. Margo saw him glance impatiently at his wristwatch and knew right away that something had changed. She was only a few minutes late, and usually Johnny behaved as though there were all the time in the world.

Catching sight of her, he smiled. He was, as usual, almost too well-dressed: the chalk-stripe Savile Row suit that she loved, cut narrow on the leg. She had on a green summer frock and her black straw with the floppy brim.

Johnny kissed her on both cheeks. “There's a rumour we're going to be mobilized,” he said.

She felt a sudden weight, like someone putting a sandbag on her shoulders. “What does it mean, Johnny?”

“
Qui sait?
” He took her arm and they crossed the lobby, heading for the bar. “I doubt they'll dispatch the Régiment de Maisonneuve to confront the panzers immediately. For one thing, we have no bullets. On the other hand, given the general stupidity so far, who knows?”

They had never before taken a room at the Mount Royal — it was risky. Plenty of people who knew them lunched at the hotel; the Mount Royal was a crossroads of Montreal social life. For years the city's biggest bookmaker had operated from a suite on the ninth floor, and the Normandie Roof on the twelfth was Johnny's favourite nightclub. Her father's office in the Sun Life Building was only a few blocks away, and he or Mike sometimes took clients to lunch at the Mount Royal. But she and Johnny were running out of decent hotels. She never wanted to use the same
endroit
twice. They'd taken rooms at the Ritz-Carlton, the Windsor, the Queen's, the Berkeley. Good hotels were expensive. Johnny's father paid him very little, but his Philadelphia grandmother had left him some money. In August they had spent two foggy, rainy afternoons in a tourist cabin a couple of miles inland from Kennebunk Beach, and one night in a cabin in the White Mountains.

Johnny always registered under the name Constant Papineau, a cousin killed in the first war. Margo wore a ring she kept in her purse. Necessary rituals, but she couldn't believe they were fooling the desk clerks, elevator operators, and glum proprietors of tourist cabins, who surely understood perfectly well what she and Johnny had come for.

The lobby bar was cool and dim and they were shown to a banquette. It was not a large room. It was dark but not sombre; the atmosphere felt intimate. The air smelled of ice and of polished wood and polished glasses. Johnny ordered manhattans. She took a few salted almonds from a little silver dish.

Over the summer Johnny had been drilling one night a week with the
Régiment de Maisonneuve, his militia battalion. Margo had spent much of the summer in Maine; Johnny came down for weekends whenever he could get away. Both families owned cottages at Kennebunk Beach. She loved the hard light of the coast, loved seeing Johnny on the beach, his torso brown and wet. Loved standing in breaking surf, holding on to his arm.

Once his battalion mobilized it would be much harder to get together. The Maisies might be rushed overseas at a moment's notice.

Manhattans came in tumblers stuffed with ice, the glass cold and paper-thin, a kind of honed delicacy. She loved the click of ice cubes, the coppery colour of the liquor, and the bright, lascivious cherry.

They had a habit when together of not always filling the air between them with talk. They shared a gift for creating silences that felt as intimate as anything they did. When they were feeling distant, they usually brought themselves together by staying quiet for a little while. In silence their harmony never failed to re-establish itself, though they were quite different sorts of people, really. She was protected, closed; he was fearless and open. She was hard rock made millions of years ago by her family; he was molten, still changing. She was cold, he was warm. Yet beneath his beautiful suits and bon vivant air he was a more serious person than she was. He'd read hundreds of books, spent a year studying the history of European law at the Sorbonne, learned to cook, worked in the kitchen of an inn at Lyons, travelled through Germany on a motorcycle.

Sometimes they didn't say a word when they met. They went into the hotel room or the tourist cabin or whatever it was, took off their clothes in the available light, pulled the covers off the bed, lay down on the clean sheets. He would start kissing her slowly; everything developed from there, and conversation came after. In bed he insisted they speak only French. Her convent French was rusty but improving.

“
M'sieu et dame?
” A waiter in a short red jacket was poised to take their order.

She asked for a cup of lobster bisque and a Waldorf salad. Her arms were bare and still tanned from the beach. Johnny wore a striped shirt and a silk foulard tie, silk the colour of dried blood.

When they did speak, she usually found herself telling Johnny Taschereau things about herself and her family she never spoke of to anyone else, even to Johnny's sister Lulu, her best friend since boarding school. There was something fresh, strong, and unusual about Johnny's willingness to listen, and it had become a kind of drug, their intimacy.

The waiter went away and Margo took another sip of her drink, barely wetting her lips. The complex flavour of chilled liquor always made her aware of the past, reminding her that everything she'd ever experienced — a wild accumulation — had brought her to precisely this moment.

“So now, my dear,” Johnny said, “we must talk of the war coming.”

“Daddy hates the war.”

“It has put him back in business, though.”

“That's all for Mike's sake. Daddy thinks if they have a lot of war work, Mike won't be in such a hurry to go overseas. The government might not let him go.”

Her father had shut the firm during the Depression, but after the storm troopers marched into Prague he had leased offices in the Sun Life Building and begun hiring engineers and office staff. Mike, with his McGill engineering degree, had returned from California, and their father made him project manager on a million-dollar contract to rebuild an old military airfield across the river, promoting him over lots of men with more experience.

She touched Johnny's hand. “I wish I could have one more week in Maine. Could you get away? It wouldn't have to be for long, Johnny.”

“That's certainly something to think about.”

“Just the two of us, alone at the beach.”

“I'm afraid the call-up may happen anytime.”

“Are you my hostage to fortune?”

He smiled and shrugged.

She caught a glimpse of Uncle Grattan in his air force uniform, out in the lobby. Was he coming into the bar? But Grattan — if it was Grattan — passed out of sight, probably headed for the restaurant, a more popular spot for lunch.

After selling his ski resort to American investors, her uncle had started writing about military matters and foreign affairs in the
Montreal Herald
.
Grattan had made three trips to Germany since Hitler came to power; he wrote that the Germans were in love with the Dark Ages. After Prague his column had been syndicated, and now it appeared in newspapers across the Dominion, in Australia, and occasionally in the
London
Evening Standard
.

Grattan had recently gotten himself elected mayor of Westmount, the first Roman Catholic to hold the office. It was a position with little power, according to Margo's father. An enclave surrounded by the city of Montreal, Westmount was run by a professional city manager, responsible to aldermen who happened to be some of the top businessmen in the country. Even with his gold chain of office and the official iron lamp posts planted outside his row house on Carthage Avenue, Grattan wasn't much more than a figure-head, her father said. “What does it pay? Five hundred a year? We pay the dogcatcher more.”

During the royal visit earlier that summer, Grattan, in silk hat and striped pants, medals glittering, had greeted the King and Queen at Westmount City Hall, chatting with them in the royal Cadillac all the way up to Murray Park — renamed King George Park in the monarch's honour. In his tongue-tied address that afternoon, the little king even claimed to remember the ceremony at Buckingham Palace in
1918
when his father pinned the DSO on Captain Grattan O'Brien of the Royal Flying Corps.

In Murray Park that afternoon Grattan had delivered a speech criticizing the Dominion's unpreparedness for war. That was, Margo's father admitted, the truth so far as it went — the country wasn't at all prepared. But he still hated watching his brother performing like a dressed-up donkey for a bunch of bloodthirsty Englishmen. “Didn't you get enough war the last time?” he'd shouted at Grattan on Sunday, when England had already declared war and Canada was about to.

Now, in the Mount Royal bar, Johnny was saying, “I can't leave town the way things are. But maybe after a few weeks, if we're still here.”

She had slipped the room key from his jacket pocket before the drinks were served. They had a well-established routine for their hotel rendezvous. She had furtiveness — and hotel rooms — in common with her father, if nothing else.

Why did she feel so close to Johnny? He was the only man she'd ever slept with. He had a gift for pleasure. He was good at making her feel good. And her body exercised some considerable power over his. Had her mother ever felt that way about her father? Had their bodies engaged in acts of love like a struggle, almost like fighting? In bed with Johnny Taschereau was the only time she felt complete.

They'd never discussed their relationship. Had either of them ever used the word
love
, in French or in English? He certainly had not. Nonetheless she was convinced that love composed the current between them. Being in love made silences intimate and magical. Being in love made her feelings almost unbearable during the lonely, powerful moments in hotel rooms and tourist cabins after he had fallen asleep. After sex he was like a dead bird, warm, glittering, but she always felt supercharged with awareness. These were the moments when she believed she was going to marry him. Otherwise, in the world outside hotel rooms, the prospect seemed less credible: frayed, a bit hopeless.

Johnny Taschereau and her father got on well. Of all the young men she had brought home he was the only one Joe had ever invited into his study.

“What do you two have to talk about?” she'd asked Johnny.

“You,” Johnny replied. “And we have other interests in common. The stock market. Men in government. Your father doesn't have a lot to say, but what he says is usually quite perceptive.”

Johnny was less vulnerable than her father, more supple, more cynical, more at home in the world. It was hard to imagine Johnny fleeing to Manhattan on a night train. Hard to imagine any predicament he could not face up to directly, any emotion or feeling he would not be able to articulate instantly, with wry style and pungent irony. Johnny Taschereau was built to last.

If war came, how was she to get through the days without him? Love had awakened a terrible sense of incompleteness.

~

Her parents had sold the house at Butterfly Beach in
1932
and built a cottage at Kennebunk, Maine. Every summer they went cruising in Penobscot Bay for two or three weeks in their old Friendship sloop, just the two of them, no children invited.

Three weeks after the jackboots stomped into Prague, there had been a telephone call from an assistant manager at the Pierre. Mr O'Brien was ill; would a member of the family please come and fetch him?

As far as she knew it was the first time since California he'd gone on a squawk. She'd gone to New York with her mother to fetch him. They found him in his tower suite at the Pierre, with the windows open and gusts of wind blowing curtains and fluttering hotel stationery off the writing desk.

The male nurse had already cleaned him up and gotten him dressed. While Iseult lay down for a nap, Margo took her father to the hotel barbershop for a shave and a haircut, then to a coffee shop on Madison Avenue, where he swallowed orange juice and dishwater coffee and didn't touch his scrambled eggs, even after she asked the surly waiter to bring him Worcestershire sauce.

On the train back to Montreal, while her father snored in the lounge car and the train ran past congeries of factories around Poughkeepsie, she and her mother sat in the dining car spooning tomato soup, and her mother talked about their trip from Santa Barbara up to the Selkirks in
1931
. She called it a pilgrimage. By going all that way, she said, they reminded themselves of what they had to hold on to, and it saved their marriage. It made a nice story, Margo had thought to herself, but did her mother really believe it? Especially since the other pilgrim was at that moment in a lounge chair two cars back, shined up and shaved but with a hell of a hangover.

There were only a few men her father's age in the bar of the Mount Royal, two of them in uniform. “Captains,” Johnny said, glancing in their direction. “Lots of fifty-year-old captains left over from the last war. They'll all have to be weeded out.”

After coffee, they mimed saying goodbye. Johnny stood up and they kissed politely, both cheeks. She left him standing in the bar. As she crossed the lobby, a herd of American businessmen just off the airport bus was milling at the front desk. People in armchairs were reading day-old London newspapers printed on airmail paper as thin as tissue.

Sometimes it was important not to think too much about what you were doing but just to do it. The room was on the seventh floor, and she didn't want to be seen waiting at the lobby elevator. Passing the newsstand, she continued down a corridor lined with shops, a florist, the hotel barbershop, a fur salon. Sexual hunger — really more like thirst — was impossible to disconnect from a mood of furtiveness. That was certainly part of its pleasure.

A pair of steel doors opened to a service stairwell, brightly lit, painted white, unused. She went up two flights quickly, heels tapping on painted concrete steps, then pushed on another heavy door and stepped out into a carpeted hallway lined with room doors, numbered and painted glossy black. She found the elevator and pressed the button. Waiting, she considered herself in a mirror. The summer frock was all wrong — girlish, not chic. She'd ordered it in the spring, before things got serious with Johnny, before she had come into herself. The black straw hat was more her style now. She still had her glow of tan from the beach. Long waist, long legs. She sometimes worried she was too thin, her breasts too small. Cameras liked her shoulders and the bones in her face. Aunt Elise had photographed her for a story the
Star Weekly
was running on Montreal's nightlife. Elise liked the photograph and wanted to include it in her new brochure, calling it “A Montreal Fiancée.”