Gaston spoke of his brother, he always said “Denis” in a piping voice in which all too much pride was revealed.
Misfortune for him had been a kind of vocation. Having suffered an attack of pleurisy accompanied by a pus infection at the age of four, he had later had a severe case of the measles, which, as his mother put it, “had gone to his ears.” Becoming deaf, he had afterwards developed a falsetto voice. Later still, in the days when a thoracoplasty was regarded as a daring operation, he had undergone a rib-section. He had recovered, but from year to year they noticed that he bent over more and more, for an alarming spinal curvature had set in. His right shoulder, lacking ribs to support it, had sagged to such an extent that, the heart being imprisoned in too narrow a space, a cardiac affection had resulted. Today, the invalid found himself a prey to the slightest emotion; and here he was now, confronting his big brother and breathing hard.
Denis surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then offered him a couple of apples.
Gaston shook his head: “Don’t want them, not ripe.” Then he changed his mind and took them. “Still stealing? The police will get you.”
“The cops? To the devil with them, old man.” And Denis ran his hand through Gaston’s hair, rumpling it until it stood up in rigid tufts around the oversized head. The sick lad grumbled and bit his brother’s wrists.
Denis now proceeded to clear the yard of the brats who infested it, whose hands, stretched out toward his shirt front, were threatening to undress him. Laughing as he did so, he suddenly stopped short: his mother was talking to that gendarme again! Motionless, a mist in front of his eyes, the young man wet his lips. He remembered the feeling of despair that had come over him when they told him that this guardian of deserted streets had been his mother’s lover for the last four years. What had become of that beautiful legend about the love that existed between his parents, who, he had believed, cared for no one but each other? Aware of her son’s presence, Flora Boucher turned pale and took a step or two backward from the wall over which she had been leaning.
“That’s my lad, Noré. Do you think he’s big enough to get on the force?”
Denis stared at them without saying a word and began juggling his apples. By way of ridding himself of his embarrassment, Noré started speaking of Gaston’s hens, which the boy was in the habit of raffling off at ten cents a ticket when they had reached their full growth, and Flora took advantage of that situation to sell him three chances. A look of avarice distorted the invalid’s queer face as he snatched the silver coins. They would go to swell his savings toward the purchase of an automobile. Madame Boucher, who would set out with the raffle tickets as soon as one of the hens weighed eight pounds, was fast becoming a serious competitor of the Latruche sisters, who went about selling photographs of the young parish saint, a recent discovery.
“At least,” they would remark insinuatingly, “we are working for the Lord.”
As Flora was pointing out the site of the confectionery shop which they were about to open for her ailing son, Gaston painfully mounted the stairs that led to the place where he kept his savings, beneath the image of the Sacred Heart. Halfway up, he paused and put out his hand to the hollow of his hip to get his breath. Then he began counting on his fingers: “That makes five times my fingers in dollars, with three dimes. Father says I’ll need ten times my fingers. That takes time.” He sighed, and his sagging shoulders appeared to sink down to his hips. Meanwhile, the gendarme had managed to slip away without being too obvious about it. As he went off whistling, Flora, her eyes flaming, seized Denis by the arm and shook him impatiently as she had done when he was small.
“Leave me alone, will you?” he said. “Don’t be playing that farce about whipping me, to hide your embarrassment. That doesn’t go.”
Flora’s eyes were bloodshot. “Thief! Thief!” she screamed at him. “What shame! We have you educated at a private school so that you can become a clerk in an office, and you’re a bigger rowdy than the worst of the Mulots.”
“I notice you always use my apples for your jelly.” He spilled his booty on the table as the young ones came running up. Then he drew himself sharply erect.
“Yes,” he said aggressively, “that humiliates you in view of your relations with the police. But you are the real thief, for you have stolen Father’s confidence.” He pointed to Noré, who was going down the street.
Mother and son now faced each other threateningly. Theirs was a violent, unrestrained anger, one that revealed the true character of each of them.
If one had not noted a certain bagginess under the eyes, Flora Boucher might have passed for a young woman inclined to stoutness. Her shoulders were square-set and her movements forceful and abrupt, but she was pretty and it was natural for her to laugh when she was not involved in a dispute of some sort. She displayed a certain affectation which rendered her speech all the more picturesque, considering her illiterate working-class background. Since her father had been one of those men of all work who never work, while her mother with ten children to support had been compelled to go from one household to another among the “foreigners” of the Upper Town, she looked upon herself as a woman who had attained a certain rank, a certain social position. She was no longer, or rather she strove not to be any longer, a Mulote. She had arrived; she now belonged to that class of workers who, at Saint-Sauveur, may envisage the possibility of becoming churchwardens and enjoying their day of triumph. A hope that was all the better founded in her case in view of the fact that Joseph Boucher, her husband, was a calm, silent man — and therefore endowed with an air of dignity — whose parents had been middle-class people who had come down in the world.
It was originally intended that he should marry a notary’s daughter who had a dowry of eight hundred dollars. (Flora always spoke of this young woman with a contemptuous curl of her lips.) But Joseph Boucher, alas, had been born with a roving disposition and had left school to go and live in the west. Having come back to Quebec stranded, some years later, he had met Flora in the Saint-Sauveur quarter while searching for a dog which had been stolen from his aunt, a lady of means. (In speaking to the neighbouring women, Madame Boucher would frequently mention inheritances that were soon to be expected from her husband’s side of the family.) Despite his unstable temperament and because he was so sentimental and passionate, Denis’s father had quickly fallen love with Flora’s brown eyes, her coquettish ways, and her lively and exotic mannerisms; and she did indeed possess a keen intelligence and a heart of gold. When Joseph first met her, she was just recovering from the pain she had experienced in dismissing a certain jealous and exacting suitor — the same Noré, now a Saint-Joseph gendarme. She had shed many tears over it, even though the years that they had gone about together had been stormy ones.
And so Joseph, an expert in psychological sedatives, had at once begun flooding her with his free-verse compositions. How splendid! A poet all her own who could cause her to forget her sorrow! But Flora’s father, a practical-minded drunkard, was unable to see a possible drinking companion in his daughter’s “young man.” Of an evening, he would spy upon Joseph from behind his newspaper, stealing a glance at the pictures now and then, since he could not read. This young fellow was for him an antipathetic enigma, an unsociable individual with long slender hands and a pale face. By way of getting him out of the house at an early hour, he would hover around the grandfather clock, winding it energetically and coughing all the while. Then he would take off his slippers, hold them side by side in his hand, and wait.
“That lad, my girl, is too easygoing,” he would say. “He’s too sweet on you. If he doesn’t work, he has no business wanting to marry you. I’ll have to give him his walking papers.”
Inasmuch as his prospective father-in-law was near to being a colossus, Joseph was led to reflect that perhaps it would be better for him to look for a job. He would hang about the corridors
