The O'Briens (41 page)

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J
ohnny was in
the office when his father-in-law came by to sign some papers. It was nearly five o'clock, and when Joe offered him a lift home, he accepted. He found his mother-in-law waiting in the Chrysler and climbed into the back seat. The car was pretty worn out. New cars were still hard to come by — you had to be on a list. He was still a little surprised that Margo's old man, with all his contacts, wasn't higher on the list. His own father had just taken delivery of a brand-new Cadillac, a
1941
model, though the dealer was calling it a '
46
.

Louis-Philippe had told him that Joe O'Brien had made a lot of enemies in Ottawa when he tried to shut down his firm with a dozen important military contracts already in hand. “They thought he was trying to — how would you say? — put the squeeze on them. Very nearly he went to jail. Only my excellent counsel and impressive stickhandling saved him from a prison sentence. He paid considerable fines, however, not to mention legal fees. All for the sake of — what, exactly?
Je ne lui comprends pas
. I never have.
Ces irlandais — illogiques
.”

To Margo it was simple. “Daddy hated the war. After Mike left, he didn't want anything to do with it, but he had to do what they wanted. Anyway, he could never bear to break a contract.”

They were almost in Westmount when the old man announced he wanted to detour by Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery to inspect the arborvitae shrubs the O'Briens' gardener was supposed to have planted on each side of the family headstone.

“You don't mind, do you?” Joe said, glancing over his shoulder.

“Joe,” said Iseult, “why now? Johnny just wants to go home.”

It was true. He had been looking forward to getting home, seeing his wife and daughter, sitting down in the living room with the newspaper and a glass of Scotch. But what the hell. “By all means, let's go.”

He'd demobbed in November '
45
, one of the first to get home. His daughter, Maddie, had seemed like any other kid to him: nothing special. He'd found his father amazingly old, his sister Lulu a Sacred Heart nun, and his wife a cold, brittle stranger.

Margo had wanted to stay on at her parents' house for a while longer but he had insisted they find a place of their own immediately. She hated the first apartment he found for them on Victoria Avenue. He had to break the lease, forfeiting a month's rent. Now they were in a flat on Carthage Avenue in Lower Westmount.

A couple of months after getting home he had started an affair with a girl he met on the
105
streetcar. She reminded him of girls he had known in England. He took her to the same hotels he'd gone to with Margo, but he felt trapped, compressed. Waking up, he had to force himself to get out of bed. He'd held on to his service sidearm, an American Colt .
45
, and sometimes he imagined taking the pistol down from its shelf in the hall closet, oiling it, loading it, walking into the woods in Murray Park with the gun heavy in his pocket, sitting down at the base of one of the big elms or maples, and shooting himself in the head.

His father-in-law turned off Côte-des-Neiges Road, passed through the iron gates of the cemetery, and drove along the winding road. Johnny had never visited Notre-Dame-des-Neiges before; all the Taschereaus were buried in Arthabaska. Here the trees weren't yet in leaf. There were fresh beds of daffodils, tulips. The grass was green. Robins hopped between the tombs. Everything smelled of damp ground.

There had been one awful afternoon at a cemetery in Italy — where? Ortona. SS fanatics, children, armed with machine guns and a couple of
88
s, had dug themselves in among the headstones and knocked out a pair of Trois-Rivières tanks.

Notre-Dame was a big, sprawling field of death, but Margo's father knew exactly where he was going. He pulled over onto the grass shoulder and they all got out of the car, which hissed and ticked and smelled of burnt oil.

“Don't come here that often,” the old man said. “Hardly at all over the winter. Snow up to my ass. Came out with Elise and Frankie a couple of weeks ago, at Easter.”

“Margo comes out sometimes,” Johnny told him.

“Yes, she does.”

The ground was soft, a little muddy. Johnny thought of the bodies of SS children laid out in a row and his sergeant — Bellechasse, from Témiscamingue — executing two of the very badly wounded. The battalion had lost four men killed in that cemetery, four badly wounded.

Things were terribly green at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges. His mother-in-law held onto his arm as they followed the old man in the watery April sunshine, shoes slurring in the thick grass. Margo's father wore an overcoat and homburg and was carrying a walking stick; he was headed down a grassy row between gravestones. Some were quite elaborate: marble angels and granite lambs, plaster statues of saints in glass-fronted cases. Brown bedraggled palm leaves and lilies, leftovers from Easter week, were scattered on the ground.

When they reached the O'Brien family plot, Johnny and his mother-in-law stood together and watched the old man peer at the gravestones as though seeing them for the first time. The headstone marking the O'Brien plot was a polished granite slab. There were two smaller, standard military-issue headstones: Margo's brother and her uncle. Grattan had died in a plane crash in Alberta a few days before the war in Europe ended.

“Well, these aren't bad. Not bad at all.” The old man bent over and patted one of the new arborvitae, as yet only a couple of feet high. “Iseult thinks in twenty years they'll be too big and bushy and we won't be able to see the stones. But it won't be my problem. I'll let you and Margo and Madeleine and Frankie worry about that.”

“Sure. We'll chop 'em down.”

“Just get someone out here in October with pruning shears. October — that's when you want to clip these back.”

Margo had said that her parents slipped away after Mike's funeral. For three weeks she hadn't heard a word and couldn't call, as there was no phone at the Kennebunk house. She'd felt abandoned, she said, and it had nearly driven her crazy being left alone in the house with Madeleine, with Mike dead and Johnny at war and Frankie head-over-heels for some flyer. Finally she'd made Frankie borrow a car from one of the pilots she knew and they had driven to Kennebunk and found their parents living quietly, sailing their old sloop and working in their garden. After a week together they had all returned to the city and had remained in Montreal for the duration.

Before Mike's death the old man had never written to his son-in-law, but in the last eighteen months of the war Johnny had received a letter from him every few weeks, always neatly typed on business stationery. Joe reported Madeleine's progress at ice-skating and her reactions to various animals at the Lafontaine Park zoo. He outlined his techniques for raising pumpkins, cucumbers, and potatoes in garden plots he dug into the lawn at Skye Avenue. At the bottom of each letter he transcribed without comment one or two clever things Madeleine had said. His letters had been far easier to read than Margo's outpourings. In one of her last letters just before the war ended, she had confessed an urge to give up Madeleine, to leave her at the door of an orphanage and flee to New York or Los Angeles and start her life over.

“Really, Joe, we ought to get going,” Iseult said. “Johnny wants to get home, I'm sure.”

The old man tapped the metal end of his walking stick on his son's stone, then on Grattan's. “Some people thought Grattan plowed his plane into the ground,” he said, without looking up. “Deliberately. No accident. He was the CO of a base; they were training aircrew from all over. Poles, Australians. He wasn't in good shape, was what I heard. Been drinking.”

“You can't say that,” Iseult said. “You don't know for sure.”

“It was Tom who said so, but you're right, who knows? I'm glad you made it home safe, Johnny. You have your life back, so hold on to it, hold on to what you have.”

Johnny suddenly felt as exposed as any of the hundreds of wounded he'd seen in Italy: men, women, infantrymen, children, their clothes blown to rags, their bodies torn apart or smeared with garish bruises. He was shivering, but his in-laws didn't seem to notice. They were gazing at the stones. Maybe they were praying, but he didn't think so.

At some point it had started to rain, soft, lissome springtime rain, not the hard-driving winter rain of Italy. Rain like smoke.

“Joe,” Iseult said softly.

The old man turned to have another look at his arborvitae
shrubs. Then he started back to the car, which Johnny could see at the end of a row of stone urns and angels. The wet gave a powerful gleam to the grey Chrysler. The moisture had thickened the grass, and when he and Iseult started after the old man, their footsteps made sibilant brushing sounds.

“There's nothing really to say,” Iseult said. “That's the truth of it, Jean. There is absolutely nothing to say.”

And for the first time since coming back from the war he almost felt at home, which was strange, since it was a bloody cemetery, after all, and who the hell wanted to feel at home there.

Lost and Found

T
he squeaking highs
and catches of the tune came flying through the fog and dark like birds — swallows, small and quick. They liked to play a fiddle in that town.

Aboard the yawl
Sea Son
Joe was restless in his berth. After retiring early he had been unable to find sleep. It was densely foggy, but
Son
was safe on her mooring in Baddeck harbour, and God knows he was weary enough.

They had picked up the mooring that morning. What he had seen of Cape Breton so far, sailing up from St. Peter's, reminded him as much as any place had of the Pontiac country, though they didn't have any white pine. Even the local speech was familiar: scraps of French he'd overheard from truck drivers on the government wharf, and two old women at MacIsaac's store gabbling in what sounded like Ottawa Valley Irish. Albert MacIsaac had said firmly, “No, not Irish. The Gaelic. Scotch Gaelic.”

“Speak it yourself?” Joe asked.

“No, no. Hardly!”

The small, nearly bald storekeeper had a way of seeming busy and impatient even when standing still. There was no one else in the IGA but the old women and some Coast Guard men who were doing maintenance on the lighthouse across the harbour. The fishery in the lakes was lobster, oysters, herring, and winter flounder. The store itself was tiny, dim, not particularly clean, with thin stocks of tinned food, crackers, and candy on the shelves. Along the back wall, racks of wellington boots and Stanfields long johns — red or grey, take your pick.

He had lost track of the calendar, as he always did on a cruise. Picking up a copy of the
Cape Breton Post
, he checked the date — Saturday, July
30
,
1960
— and read that John Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president, intended to strengthen the armed forces of the United States.

~

Almost three weeks earlier he had left the Kennebunk River with Iseult. They'd spent six days cruising the southern Maine coast in clear light with favourable winds. They'd rowed ashore and dug for clams at Peaks Island and Bustins. At Little Spruce Head they had taken off their clothes on a scrape of white beach scented with balsam. Iseult was thin. Her long legs were beautifully shaped and she moved lightly, like a deer, approaching the green water. It had been stinging cold. He went in with a yell and a crash, the way he always did, and she'd slipped in as she always did, quietly, swimming out quickly beyond the lap of tiny waves, her long form slipping like a knife through the water.

Iseult had disembarked at Camden, Maine, where their granddaughter Madeleine was waiting with the car that Iseult would drive back to Montreal while Maddie joined him aboard the
Son.
From Camden he and Maddie had sailed Penobscot Bay in bright weather, taking it slowly, dropping the hook at familiar anchorages. They encountered their first Fundy fog in Jericho Bay and lingered at Bar Harbor, waiting for another spell of clear weather before striking out across the Gulf of Maine for Nova Scotia.

~

His daughters had pretty much talked him out of a Cape Breton cruise when Maddie had surprised everyone by saying she wanted to come along. Her mother was fiercely opposed to the idea, but Maddie was a stubborn mule. She had that from him, he figured.

His goal had always been to sail north as far as he could reasonably go. Which meant, after he'd studied the east coast littoral, Cape Breton. The Gaspé Peninsula, Anticosti Island, and Newfoundland were farther but not reasonable — at least not for an old man in a thirty-six-foot yawl. On his first try, during the war, sailing the old Friendship sloop, he'd been stopped by the Coast Guard and ordered back to Kennebunk. That was the luckiest thing that could have happened to him: he hadn't enough experience in those days to realize how little he knew about sailing small boats on the open ocean.

But in his old age he was a fairly accomplished sailor. Since the war he'd sailed the yawl east as far as Grand Manan more times than he could count, and twice he had crossed the Gulf of Maine alone, dropping his hook at Yarmouth but not venturing any farther. He hadn't fixed Cape Breton in his sights again until this year, when he'd made up his mind to do it, alone if necessary. Figuring he didn't have that many seasons left — a case of now or never.

“What's wrong with Casco Bay?” Frankie wanted to know. “Bustins, Harraseeket, Harpswell — haven't you always loved cruising there? Where you already know all the best anchorages? Why go so far from home? And Vic says” — Frankie's husband, Vic McCracken, was a Trans-Canada Airlines pilot — “the airlines have learned that almost all men over fifty-five, no matter how experienced, just can't react fast enough in any sort of crisis. It's a scientifically proven fact.”

“Don't tell Joe what he can't do,” Aunt Elise warned. “Not him.”

Elise had been spending July with them. Her portrait business was as hectic as ever, but for the past few years she had taken the summers off and come down to Maine with them or visited Virginia in Europe. Her daughter was a diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Brussels and married to a Dutchman.

Elise and Iseult had been driving up the coast every Sunday to photograph people at the Old Orchard Pier. Over the course of a month they had visited most of the agricultural fairs in southern Maine and coastal New Hampshire, from Fryeburg to Windsor, taking pictures of fairgoers, farmers, and carnies. They planned to assemble their Venice and Old Orchard photographs into a book. Elise had brought folders of old prints to Maine with her, and so had Iseult; the women spent the afternoons sorting through images from their days on the Venice pier and boardwalk.

“Daddy, Johnny and I are just not going to let Maddie go,” Margo said. “And I have a much better idea, something that would really give you a bit of fun this summer. Don't you think it's time you applied to join the Cape Arundel? The membership committee would love to have you.”

Margo and her husband, Johnny — as of early summer, the Honourable Mr. Justice Taschereau of the Quebec Court of Appeal — were keen golfers.

“I don't play golf, have you noticed?”

“Daddy, that's the wonderful thing about golf. It's never too late to start.”

They had him surrounded, and by the time Iseult stepped out on the porch to summon them to lunch, she probably saw that he was close to folding.

Margo smiled at her and said, “Mother, tell Daddy he has to be sensible for once.”

“Joe, be sensible for once,” Iseult said mildly. “And lunch is ready.”

“Tell him he's seventy three — ”

“Joe, you're seventy-three.”

“I'm not arguing with you,” he said.

She smiled.

“Mother, this isn't funny,” Margo insisted. “If he were going alone that would be one thing, but he can't go alone, and I'm not letting Maddie go. So he'd better just give up the idea. Just give the golf club a try, Daddy, please. It's not at all what you might suppose.”

“All right, girls, you've told him what you think. Your father's no fool. He knows what he can do and what he can't.”

“Well, she's my daughter!”

“Of course she is, dear.”

“And I'm not letting him take her!”

“Mother, you're not agreeing with him, are you?” said Frankie.

“You're right, dear, she's your daughter. It's your decision.”

“And I'm not going to let her go. It's ridiculous. He's seventy-three.”

He knew damn well how old he was, and also what he was still capable of. What Margo was saying could not really be argued against. He understood and respected — not his daughter's unfathomable desire to see him on a golf course, but her reluctance to let her daughter go, because it was herself she'd be letting go of.

Maddie was the eldest of his six grandchildren. She had two brothers, Michel and Jacques. Frankie and Vic had Lizzie, Iseult, and William. All the kids had grown up around boats and were much better sailors than their mothers were. During the past two Augusts he'd handed the
Son
over to Maddie for two weeks. She'd cruised Penobscot Bay with two girlfriends as her crew.

He would not take her unless Margo agreed to let her go, and he would not try to persuade Margo. After working it through carefully he had come to the cold conclusion that Cape Breton was more than he could undertake single-handed. He had no wish to end his sailing days with a disastrous, humiliating failure, so he had quietly put the plan on the shelf. There it remained until the bright, cool morning when his daughter caught up with him on the beach and told him that she and Johnny had changed their minds and were giving the cruise their blessing.

Margo admitted that Johnny had been for it from the start. “He says she was in more danger riding on that boy's motorcycle in Rome last year than she'd ever be with you on the
Son.
”

“I don't know about that,” Joe said. “It is a real voyage, I won't deny it. I guess it seems a lot to take on. I certainly believe we can do it, though.”

They stopped walking. The tide was out, the sand was hard, and they were both barefoot, an inch of clear surf lapping lazily around their toes.

“She is a young woman, not a baby,” Margo said, firmly. She was still trying to convince herself. “Johnny says we can't stop her trying to accomplish things.”

“And what do you say?”

“Don't you dare come back without her,” his daughter whispered. “Don't you dare.”

She was right, of course, and he knew that he wouldn't.

~

From Bar Harbor they'd planned a straight run of thirty hours, in four-hour watches, rounding the hull of Nova Scotia and aiming for Shelburne.

His granddaughter was
aware
, the way a good sailor needed to be. Her eye and her mind logged details. She picked up signs other people missed. She had a sailor's sensitivity to changing weather. All his life he'd been around people who missed clues, with no eye for detail, no sense of the world around them. Sailors with no nose for weather, bankers with no feel for the meaning of the numbers. Maddie could take in a chart with one look and remember every ledge, every rock, every sounding. She had shown him her sketchbooks filled with seabirds, island profiles, boats, many of them rendered with a single flowing line. His favourite was a beautifully detailed drawing she'd made of a winch.

His mother — her great-grandmother — had paid a woman on the other side of the Ottawa River to look into a blue bottle and see the future.
Ashling
, they called it, whatever was revealed: a dream, a vision.

He had always had a suspicion there was a rough justice in the world, that most things happened for a reason. You didn't always know the reason but it didn't mean the future was uninvolved with past. The opposite, in fact.

One afternoon on the Gulf of Maine, halfway across to Nova Scotia, blue sky, blue water, they were munching pilot crackers and cheese when all of a sudden Maddie said, “There's a big fish out there.”

“A whale? You see a spout?”

“Not sure. But he's out there. Fetch the binocs, Granddaddy, please.”

She had the helm. It was blowing maybe fifteen knots east-southeast and they were on broad reach, making good time. After going below for the binoculars, he sat down beside her, and a few minutes later the whale spouted: a jet of water straight as a spear, so close that the moisture flecked over them and they could smell the fish-rank stink.

A minute later the whale breached twenty yards off their port quarter, flying out of the water like a dolphin and crashing down onto the surface, the biggest animal he'd ever seen, bigger than the
Son.
He didn't need binoculars to catch the silvery white pattern on its back and the massive dorsal fin before the whale sounded again, disappearing possibly directly under the boat. They waited, tense, scanning the waters all around, neither of them saying a word.

Another hiss, and they saw the spout maybe twenty yards off the starboard beam. Then nothing, silence. Slight creaking of rigging as the
Son
sped along. They kept scanning. Suddenly the whale breached again, flying across the surface before smashing back into the sea. Seventy or eighty feet in length, twice the length of the
Son.
This time the whale flapped it flukes as it sounded.

“What do you think it was?” Maddie asked.

“Don't know.” He'd seen plenty of humpbacks and minkes, but never a whale that size.

She handed over the helm and went below, returning with a fat paperback,
Moby-Dick
, that she'd been reading since Camden. Flipping through it until she found what she was looking for, she read in silence while he kept a lookout. The whale sighting had shaken him. Not fear, exactly, but the way he sometimes felt when he woke from a dream. Rattled. There was something powerful out there moving below the surface, and he had been ignoring it only because he did not understand it.

Most of the time he was able to sustain a sense of himself as complete, a finished man. A comforting sense that his life story had been filled out for better or for worse. The truth was, he was still empty. So much remained beyond his grasp, things he would never feel or answer or know.

His granddaughter was lost in
Moby-Dick.
“Find anything?” he said.

“I think so. Listen to this.” She began reading aloud. “Finback whale,
Balaenoptera physalus
.”

Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic
. . . 
. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin
 . . . 
some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end
. . . 
. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man. This leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back . . .