Son of a Smaller Hero (15 page)

Louis Peltier, Miriam’s father, had never been quite the same since that turgid afternoon in the summer of 1917 when, working on a ship, a faulty cable had snapped and twenty crates of Sunkist oranges had come crashing down on him. He had never been quite the same and never worked at anything but odd jobs again – the most permanent one being that of night watchman for John McFadden & Sons, Steel. Hidden away there in his small clapboard shack in the corner of the yard he built model ships and guzzled Molson’s Ale under the swaying light of his watchman’s lamp. When he finished one ship he burnt if and built another. Or sometimes when he was halfway through a model he crushed it to bits in his hands. Another thing that Louis Peltier could not understand was why his wife had died and that child had been born to him in 1923. April 1923, in fact. That night when he had come home from the wrestling match at the Stade-Exchange and had found his wife, Yvette Peltier
née
Roland, prostrate on the kitchen floor, all the pots on the stove steaming, and
Leo coming out of the bedroom with the baby swaddled in many towels. Madame Brault had been with him.

“She dead?”

“Yes,” Leo had said.

“And the baby?”

“A girl.”

“Not dead?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t have gone to the wrestling, but, of course, how could I know?”

“You couldn’t have known,” Madame Brault had said.

“Cyr win?”

“He is champion again. What’s all that stuff on the floor?”

“It comes after the baby.”

“It’s a fake,” Leo had said.

“After the … What’s a fake?”

“The wrestling.”

“Oh. The wrestling. I’m going for a walk, I think. Keep the baby away from me. I – you mean all that stuff came out of her?”

“I’ll clean it up,” Madame Brault had said.

And that baby, the one that had been born that night in 1923, had gone unnamed until Paul had returned from a long, long trip four years later and had settled down and called the girl Miriam after a girl whom he had read about in a novel.

Paul was a tall and resolute man who had run away to sea at fourteen and had saved his money and had returned with his face cut by the wind and his heart past ambition and anger but not past longing for something which he could not define, but which was probably beauty, and which fastened on the child Miriam. Paul settled down. He married Brault’s daughter, Louise, and opened up the
Chez-Nous
on the corner of Queen and Common Street. He adored Miriam. He always kept her clean and freshly dressed and it was rumoured that
Miriam had a room of her own and was taking piano lessons from Mademoiselle Trudeau and slept in until ten every morning. Nobody resented that. They were, in fact, proud of it. For Miriam was tall and without pimples or rickets and the people of Queen Street pampered her as though to compensate for the things that they hadn’t had, and that their children weren’t going to get. They liked to brag about her piano lessons and her school marks. And when Miriam came walking down the street, men adjusted their ties and women stroked their hair sadly: everybody was reverent.

Yes, Theo thought, it must be that she is brooding about her father.

That week the Kennedys invited them up to their cottage in the Laurentians for the weekend. Miriam said that she had a cold coming on but she insisted that it would not do to disappoint the Kennedys, who were nice people and subscribed one hundred dollars annually to
Direction
. Theo said that he could put them off for another week, but he was finally persuaded to go.

He left Friday night.

That night Noah read and Miriam sewed. For several days they had been counting on that night, that weekend, all to themselves, but now that they had it they both felt criminal. Noah went to bed early. Soon afterwards she also went to bed. But around one in the morning she came into his room and got into bed with him. He held her in his arms tenderly. Finally, she said: “Noah, love, say something kind.”

“This apartment is intimidating both of us. We’ve got to get out, Miriam. Unless you’ve changed your mind.…”

“Changed my mind?”

He moved, and sat up on the edge of the bed with his back turned to her. The room was dark, but when he puffed on his cigarette he could make out many things in the brief light. He noticed that he had forgotten to hang up his trousers. At home his mother had used to
do that for him. He hoped that
she
would never do that. “I visited my family last week,” he said.

“And?”

He felt her cheek cool against his back, her hands a restraining thing on his shoulders, and he turned around and kissed her gently. Then he took her face in his hands and kissed her again. She clung to him urgently, her head hard to his chest. He stroked her hair. “When I am not with you,” he said, “when there are others around, it is as though that time was wasted or of no account. I keep thinking up the most romantic things. I would like there to be tests that you could put me to.”

She touched his ear with her mouth and said a poignant thing. “If there were a war, and we were separated, I could write you love letters. I keep thinking about things like that.…

“I’ll tell you something stupider,” she said. “Is that right? Stupider?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“When I was a child I used to save up funny things that I would not tell anyone except my lover. Like” – and she laughed – “I like the smell of gasoline. Do you?” He didn’t reply. “You don’t have to,” she said. “But you mustn’t laugh.” She kissed his chest. “I was told that when you love a man there is nothing that you wouldn’t do for him. I used to be sceptical. But now I know differently.”

“I should hope so,” he said.

“Oh, aren’t you tough?”

He kissed her lightly and laughed and bit her ear. “I’m as hard as nails,” he said. “You watch out. Sleeping dogs should be taken with a grain of salt. I feel like standing on my head. Can you stand on your head?”

“I can sing all of
God Save the King
with my head under water.”

“Hot or cold?”

“Take your pick.”

“With choruses?”

“I’ll even throw in a stanza or two in French.”

“Well, I’m impressed. I really am. But can you stand on your head?”

“I can whistle with two fingers in my mouth and I can cross my eyes and burp at will and …”

“Big talker, you. But can you …”

“I can do anything you want me to. I can …”

“Look, this is serious. We may go through life without ever having stood on our heads. Gym teachers do it every day. They seem a cheerful lot too, don’t they? Maybe standing on your head gives you a new outlook on life. Perhaps …”

She rolled over onto his chest and, suddenly serious, kissed him strongly. “You are the only peace that I have known,” she said.

“Have you known many men?” he said, stroking her hair.

“Yes.”

“Many?”

“Many.”

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at her solemnly. “I … There are things that I’ve read about in books,” he said shyly. “I don’t know how to do them. If I can do …”

“Noah. Noah, I love
you.”

“Yes, but …”

She pressed her hand to his mouth and kissed him again.

They did not talk for some time and then she told him about Queen Street.

Queen Street is in Griffintown, near the waterfront. In that maze of streets – Queen Street among them – between the waterfront and Wellington Street many tall brick chimneys poke skywards and all day long there is the banging and clanging of machinery and blast from the furnaces. Interlaced between the factories and workshops, like putty between bricks, are the tenements where the longshoremen, the welders, and machinists live. Many of them are Irish, others
are French Canadian. On a summer’s day grubby children, many of them with tuberculosis, play, cough blood, and pummel each other with rocks, moving between the machines and trucks and junk piles like frantic lice. At night the heat drives the people out into the streets where they gossip loudly, being used to yelling over the racket of the machines.

“I didn’t know that you had been poor,” he said.

“My father was afraid of me but beer changed him. Sober, he stooped and his eyes were dead. But when he was drunk he seemed to feel himself taller and a kind of yearning came into his eyes. He fixed up an adorable little garden in the corner of the junk yard, just beside his shack. There was a chair for him and I used to sit on an empty beer case. He used to make things for me. A doll’s house out of old orange crates. Rag dolls. Holding my hand he used to tell me stories. Shut your eyes, he’d say. We are sailing down the Yellow River in China. We’ve already been down the Amazon, remember? We got caught in a blizzard on the Bug and the Nile had too much sun for the likes of us. But the Yellow River is perfect. Look! Flowers are floating downstream with us. Listen to the men singing on the banks! What is that lovely child doing with a broken old man? a Chinaman asked. You tell him, child. He’s your father. Say that.… Sometimes, when he had too much to drink, we used to sneak off to the harbour together. But we had to watch out for Paul. He didn’t like Papa to come near me when he was drunk. Papa would cry, you know. He would wring his hands and look at me imploringly and weep. Oh, if only I had been older,” she said, “I would have understood. But I was only twelve at the most. From time to time he would point at the foundries or at the ships in the canal. ‘Machines,’ he would say, ‘ships.… Everywhere there are machines.’ Then he would imitate the noises of the various hoists and presses. Oh, Noah, when I think that I told Paul about it.” She held her hand to her cheek. “But he frightened me so badly when he did that. Anyway,
Paul gave him hell. Papa never came near me again when he was drunk. He spent most of his time in that horrid shack.…”

Noah kissed her throat and, undoing her pyjama-top, rested his head on her breasts. Her hand was in his hair. A kind of lethargy came over him. That world, which was turbulent and chaotic; outside, where strangers had ambitions, needs, contests; there, where there was dying – no longer existed. All that remained was him, the woman in his bed. The darkness around us, he thought, belongs to others. We will be a light burning in the city. Let the others gather round and be amazed. Or let them stay away.

“My grandfather, the poet, used to say love the rich. All they have is money. The poor have injustice and the future and …”

“Being poor
is
awful, Noah. I don’t want it again.”

They lit cigarettes.

“The day he died was a hot, bright day in summer,” she said. “He must have been planning it for months in his shack. It was a Wednesday, and for no apparent reason he had put on his good suit. But by that time nobody cared or noticed what Papa did. He was a kind of joke on the street. The men, when they saw him all dressed up, teased him mercilessly. ‘Going to meet your girl, Louis?’ I looked out of the window and they stopped. I remember – funny – I remember that leaning out of the window I was afraid that I might soil my dress. I waited for my father to pass down the street so that I could shut the window again. But he took his time and I was so annoyed. He tottered off the pavement. Then he postured defiantly in the middle of the street, his hands on his hips and his legs spread apart. Everybody laughed. I laughed myself. Then Claire screamed. She saw the truck coming and she understood. I, the others, didn’t.…” Miriam brushed her hair back nervously and swallowed hard. “Noah, he ran towards that truck waving his fists in the air as though to break it. The yell that came from his lips.… It all happened so quickly – I honestly think that he meant to smash that truck. I didn’t
even have courage to look. I turned away and collapsed on my bed. When I looked again he – it – was covered with a blanket. There was a crowd. Paul came upstairs with his wife and she took me away to the nuns. I wanted to stay. He was my father. I had betrayed him. But Paul wouldn’t let me. That’s when I began to hate him.”

“He sounds like an awful bastard. He …”

“The next day I saw the inside of that shack for the first time. He had made landscapes on the walls. They were made out of an arrangement of different-coloured beer-bottle tops – each one nailed into the wood.… There were several pictures of me on the ceiling. There was one of us together in his ‘garden’.… The shack was torn down long ago. God, when I think of all the loving work that went into that arrangement of bottle tops …”

Her passion surprised him that night. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he had been able to watch the swift changes that her face had undergone as desire, then urgency, finally gave way to a splendid languor. Afterwards she insisted on rubbing down the fierce scratches on his back with iodine. Then she snuggled up tight to him, and they dozed for a bit. Miriam, who had run and run and run, and who had found most men as satisfactory, as expendable, as cosmetics, felt, now that she had arrived, a tremendous need to rest.

“I’ll quit college on Monday,” he said, “and look for an apartment.”

“Noah, you mustn’t quit. I’ll work. What would you do if you quit?”

“I’ll drive a cab again. I was thinking that if we both worked for about six months we’d have enough money to go to Europe. Would you like to come to Europe? Would you like to come to Europe with me?”

“Yes, of course, but …”

“But what?”

“We should make plans. What do you want to do? We can’t just …”

“Drift?”

“Yes, drift.”

“Let it be said of us that we made no plans. That the others schemed, got money and position, honours, futures, but that we – who dissented – ruined ourselves with loving.”

She giggled. “Aren’t you being just
slightly
pompous?” she said. “However, let’s leave it for now. I’ve got some money saved. We can go up to Ste. Adele for the summer. We’ll take a cottage.”

“Ste. Adele is restricted.”

“I’ll tell them you’re an Arab.”

Noah’s anxiety passed quickly. He laughed. “We’ll fart when we have visitors and drop rocks on passing cars.” He turned to her suddenly. “Let’s get a shack that’s really beat up. Early every morning you can rush out on to the moors in your nightgown. We’ll fix up your hair with seaweed and order a god from Eaton’s. I’ll hang out of the upstairs window with a bottle of Javel in my hands and then you yell up to me – very distant-like though – ‘Heathcliffe. Heathcliffe.’ There’ll be a catch or two in your voice and my hair is streaked with head. ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ I yell, ‘or this too, too solid flesh may resolve itself into a Jew.’ Then …” He pulled her to him and kissed her and she responded gladly. “I was thinking the same thing myself,” she said.