what was said, and all torn out at the end of the summer, what a waste! And that one summer when, with his gardener — rumours swirled about the two men — he brought over fifty pink flamingos from the Quebec City zoo to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. The news had burned through town within minutes it seemed, and my parents and I, like most everyone else, had driven past his property to look at the strange creatures. There they were, cackling, shitting on the lawn in front of some twenty guests, and my scandalized mother had said from our Chevrolet with its windows down, “That sodomite will burn in hell.”
I smiled thinly, my first smile in forty-eight hours.
I’d lost my bearings. No sign of the pretentious wrought iron sentry box that Clifford Wiggs had ordered from an Italian ironworker in Montreal, which the other vacationers had viewed with disgust. The English of Métis Beach considered ostentation a sin, doubly so if you had a lot of money to spare.
On my left, the Riddingtons’ home? The Babcocks’? Everything was black, deserted. This place wasn’t speaking to me, for Christ’s sake! This place wouldn’t speak to me. So what was I hoping to find?
At the hospital, Gail hadn’t had time to explain. Jack, his face ashen, had made me understand that I shouldn’t tire her out with my questions, “It’s hard enough as it is for her.” As if I couldn’t see death going about its sinister business, slipping into her like water into a car fallen off a bridge.
He’s your son, Romain. Len Albiston is your son.
Why hadn’t she mentioned it to me in San Francisco, when we lived together? Was this why she’d been so depressed at the time? It was that — she had a child and had abandoned him. In secrecy and in shame. A girl-mother, irresponsible. A slut.
When we’d sharply debated abortion at my place with the It’s All Comedy! gang, Matt’s wife, a small brunette with a strident laugh, had asked me, all aflutter at the idea of digging up my secrets, “For a man to speak as you do about women, their rights, their bodies, you must have seen it up close and personal, no? An abortion, I mean.” My answer had disappointed her, no, it had never happened to me; none of the girls I’d been with had found herself in that situation, and I was proud of that. I was a responsible man. She snickered, as if she didn’t believe me, “Are you certain? I had one once, and the guy never knew.”
Matt was suddenly worried, “Are you talking about me?”
“No, honey, of course not. It was a long time ago.” I made an effort to search through my memory, trying to find a woman who might have done that, to me. Women who got pregnant and said nothing?
I had been so sure of myself. What an idiot.
Had Gail considered getting an abortion? Had she been forced to keep the child? Why, for heaven’s sake, hadn’t she told me?
Then, suddenly, at the near edge of Beach Street, a sight as comforting as a familiar face in a room filled with strangers: THE FELDMAN-MCPHAIL WELCOME. My heart in my throat, I turned left and entered the driveway. The crackling of gravel under the Jeep’s tires sounded like a small happy chortle. All my childhood I’d associated that sound with Métis Beach. It wasn’t like in the village, where we were proud of our asphalted driveways, something you never saw among the English.
And there it was, behind the hundred-year-old cedars, enveloped in the milky fog, one of the most beautiful houses in Métis Beach — my home.
7
Cold wind whipped in from the sea. I stepped out of the Jeep with my buckskin vest on my back and no gloves. I was staggering with exhaustion on my stiff legs, and my whole body shook. I turned the rusty key John Kinnear’s son kept hidden under the veranda, fearing it might break and I’d be stuck outside.
The house was cold and dark thanks to its covered windows. I immediately felt that mix of apprehension and excitement I used to feel as a boy, when my father left me in the dusty dark of these grand mansions for the time it took him to go outside and stand in front of the windows so that I could push out the protective planks, now freed from their hooks. Light would flow through the rooms, like magic. I so enjoyed accompanying him to Métis Beach in late spring! Visiting the homes of Egan, Bradley, Hayes, Newell, Pounden, Curran, and Riddington — all properties in his care. I followed him, proud and excited, as if we owned the houses ourselves. We had to prepare the homes by St. Jean Baptist Day, inspecting them for winter damage. The sheer number of dead flies! Piles of them on the windowsills, which I was tasked with cleaning up, sometimes grimacing when their wings stuck to my fingers. “I don’t want to see a single one, you hear?” My father’s authoritarian, paralyzing voice. And so I tracked dead flies with excessive zeal, all the while making sure I didn’t touch anything — my father’s orders — in the vast and echoing rooms, almost ballrooms, with a slight whiff of a closed-in smell, perfume to my nose.
In the darkness, I fumbled my way to the kitchen, found the main breaker and turned the power on. I remembered doing that too, with my father.
A few burnt bulbs, spider webs, and fly carcasses.
The place hadn’t changed much. Simple furniture with pure lines, of the Shaker style that Dana Feldman had liked so much. The appliances were new. Tommy, John’s son, who took care of the house for the Americans who rented it in summer, had replaced the oven and refrigerator last year, and also bought a washing machine and a microwave for a total of more than $2,000; the tourists were becoming more and more demanding, Tommy said. Dick never understood my stubbornness in keeping the house, “If you never go there, what’s the point?” I rented it out for nine hundred dollars a week, to New Yorkers especially, and gave three hundred to Tommy. The rest served to pay taxes and upkeep; no profit, quite the opposite — I lost money on the house, and yet I couldn’t get rid of it. “You’re too sentimental,” Dick said. Maybe. Even Ann was surprised, she who would have loved to see the place. “Let’s go together, just once.” But I couldn’t, always stopped by fear of dwelling on the past. And now, here I was.
In the living room, the bookshelves that had once been filled with works of all kinds now held only a few paperbacks with garish covers, left behind by renters. The sort of books you tore through in a few days and left behind like empty packages.
“Let’s see,” Dana had said, cigarette between her lips, her hand drawing a line along the spines. “Steinbeck … I’ve got The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, and East of Eden. Here, take them. Ah! And here I’ve got A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, my personal favourite.”
And in the evenings, under the beam of my flashlight, I devoured them in my bed, leaving burn marks on the pages of the Merriam-Webster Dana had lent me for when I didn’t know a word. My English got better by leaps and bounds as I learned more and more complicated words: ludicrous, gambit, looting. Reading books at full steam, barely taking in their message, a glutton going through a box of cookies, attacking them with an insatiable appetite. Dana would give me a surprised look when I came to her place to cut the lawn, with three or four books under my shirt, “Already, you’ve read them all?” And so she pulled out other volumes, books in English with ever more complicated words, and sometimes French books, like Prévert and his spectacular Paroles: “Pope Pius’ papa’s pipe stinks.”
The more I read, the further my horizon stretched.
Then, one day, “Here, read this. Better educate you now, before you get into any bad habits.”
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe. A book on the Index.
“What is it?”
“What
