The Disappeared (2 page)

Charlotte and the girls at my table were putting on their coats, pulling bags over their shoulders, flipping their long hair from inside warm collars like shirts flapping on a clothesline, and I said to them, See you.

We walked north on cobbled streets through the chill autumn air. You said, Would you like to come and see my band?

Maybe, I said. Where do you come from?

Cambodia.

Halloween revelers passed us, laughing and calling to each other in joual, hurrying through the darkness wrapped in black capes and devil masks and angel wings. Cambodia? I pulled my eye mask down.

You touched the feathers and said, Anne Greves, I like it here. Things are unimaginably free here.

I knew from that first walk home.

Outside my father’s apartment on l’avenue du Parc I turned to face you and drew you under the iron staircase. You put your lips on my lips and I remember your eyes through the holes in my mask and the touch of your hand against my skull. You pulled me to you and I felt the first touch your fingers on my skin. Through the gratings on the stairs I sensed the movement of a neighbor boy with his Halloween basket, staring at us from the shadows, chewing on a candy-kiss. I caught his eye and said,
Jean Michel, pourquoi tu n’es pas au lit? Then I looked at you and said,
O malheureux mortels! O terre déplorable!
You laughed and released me, said, I want the whole world to see, and reached your hand up as if you were going to steal the boy’s candy. Then we joined the child on the steps and you took a piece of string from your pocket and showed him a trick. There we were, an exile, a small boy and a girl-almost-woman, together in the darkness. I still hear your voice singing Buddy Guy’s “I Found a True Love,” and I remember how we sat that night and watched the clouds roll in across the moon.

Papa was a tall, husky man with thick hair and a shy smile that camouflaged his driven nature. He took me to a protestant church when I was a small child. I do not think he was a believer but I think he would have liked to be. He used to slide into the pew, close his eyes, drop his head and hold the bridge of his nose between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand. Watching him in this attitude of prayer I saw a man, unmasked and vulnerable, trying to be with his god. On the wall of the children’s room in the basement was a picture torn from a magazine of a tall Christ with gentle eyes, standing in front of two sheep and a donkey, his arms around two children. This Christ’s shoulders were a little stooped; he had a shy smile like Papa’s.

I once complained to Papa about having no mother. He said, There are things we cannot change. One learns this: Get up, keep trying, you will find your way.

I listened and still longed for tenderness. I wanted him to say, I will help you. But he did not. He said, Think of yourself as a solitaire, a unique gem in the crown of the king, the philosopher’s stone.

Why can’t I be the gem in my own crown? I said.

He laughed then, his big Danish laugh. I amused him when I behaved most like him, determined, stubborn, and I was never afraid to be free, a thing I put down to my mother’s early death. She had been a student in one of my father’s classes. He was fifteen years her senior and I was the product of their late afternoon passion. There is something in the hard dying of the light on a frigid afternoon in Montreal that drives strangers to each other. My mother quit school to raise me, but when I was two, a truck crushed her car on an icy autoroute. Papa hired a French-Canadian housekeeper called Berthe Gagnon to take care of me. Berthe laughed easily, looked at me with fond eyes and filled my mother’s absence. I am told that after a short time I did not miss my mother. But my father did. He was not interested in domestic life. Berthe went to my teacher meetings and took me to choir practice and watched my sports games.

Papa had no time for play. He had grown up poor and hardworking and ambitious, the only son of a Danish immigrant fisherman who died at sea on the Grand Banks when Papa was a boy.

My father liked to say, The war gave a poor boy like me a chance to be educated.

He was a tool and die maker and he had to beg to join the navy because they needed his skills at home. By the time he managed to get himself enlisted, the war was over. But he was lucky. He traded in his uniform with its handsome gold buttons and raised anchors for a veteran’s education. He studied engineering and specialized in medical prosthetics.

It did not seem strange to me that he was rarely home. None of the fathers I knew spent much time at home in those years of rebuilding after the war. Papa liked his routines, mornings in
the lab, afternoons teaching, evenings reading. He and my mother were together for only two years. I imagine them in that newly married state, each still trying to please the other. I imagine her charming him with her youth and her
joie
. After she died, Papa read to me at night when he got home in time and he took me fishing every summer for a week. He taught me the names of all the bones in the human body and I learned to recite them. He taught me to memorize Latin declensions,
amo, amas, amat
, and the Lord’s Prayer in Latin,
pater noster, qui es in caelis
. He said Latin is the sign of a cultivated mind. I learned the prayers but not to pray. I learned to say I love you in a language my father called dead.

When he read to me he sometimes looked at the black and white picture of my mother on my bedside table. The focus is soft on the young woman holding a baby, me, and our eyes are locked together. Papa’s voice would drift away and I learned to wait quietly until his attention flickered from the photograph back to the page. I think I began to read this way, studying the words in an open book, waiting for absence to be filled.

I have no clear memory of my mother. There is a photo of Papa and her standing behind a snowman on the mountain. His arms are wrapped around her waist and her eyes are laughing and her full lips are open in a wide, wild smile. It is cold but she does not wear a hat. Her hair is loose and long and windblown. I have her hair, kinked, gold streaked. I
do
remember lying on my back in the living room and the smell of warm cotton under her iron in the kitchen. And I do remember a black hole in the chill earth. I remember a lily in my hand, its white petals unnaturally waxen, someone called it Eve’s tears. I was supposed to
drop it on the coffin. I remember looking down and I was afraid of the depth and the hard lines of the cut earth.

This thing is sure: Time is no healer.

I remember fragments, bits of moving light on a winter wall.

Berthe took me to hear Etta James at a blues club on St. Laurent, on a night my father was away. She said, They can’t see me bringing you in but once we’re inside I know le gars, he’ll let you stay. Alors, mon p’tit chou, you will come in with my groceries.

I pulled her grocery trolley with two wheels, its plaid sack attached to the frame. A block from the club, she helped me climb in, tucked a dish towel over my head and bumped me up two steps through the door.

Etta had a blond afro and a heart-shaped face and those huge painted black eyebrows and when she sang I was sure her eyes were looking deep into mine. She sang about blind girls and her lips were sad, and shrewd too. I knew that she cried like I did from a hidden place, ow, ow, ow, ow, as I listened to her talk-singing betrayals and epic quests for love, and I sank into the warmth of Berthe’s lap, her arms around me, the woody scent of pine-tar soap on her skin. That night I understood why sound was first in the world, before even light or water.

Berthe was sent very young to work as a maid in an English-speaking house in Westmount. She looked at their art and listened to their music while she cleaned. She told me, That was worth more than the little money I got there, learning English and listening to Ray Charles and Robert Johnson.

At the end of my days at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s school, Berthe and I used to lie on the floor together looking at the pictures on the covers of her long-playing records, listening to the scratch of Mississippi Delta blues and that ocean-deep Etta-voice pray-singing “Tell Mama” and “Sunday Kind of Love.”

My father let Berthe go when I was thirteen because he said I did not need her anymore. She anticipated this and by the time she left she had taught me to cook for myself, to do my own laundry and homework. After school the thin winter sunlight disappeared into early darkness in our lonely apartment. I used to sit wrapped in a big eiderdown, reading under a single lamp with a chipped shade, the room’s eclipse of the moon. I tried to get Papa’s attention by letting my wild hair go wilder, wearing the tightest jeans, being the cleverest girl in my class. I bought some wire-rimmed granny glasses that neither helped nor hindered my vision. I told him I was going to friends’ houses and sneaked into blues clubs until one night the owner of a little hole in the wall club in the north end stopped me when I was trying to slip in to hear Willie Dixon sing “I Ain’t Superstitious.” The doorman brought me to the manager’s office and he called my father to come pick me up. Papa parked the car, walked past drug dealers and prostitutes and blues fans to the office, where I was studying musicians’ signed photographs in cheap wooden frames on the manager’s wall. On the drive home I told him it was unfair that I could not go inside, I had been taking the metro for years, listening to the blues for years. He nodded in a neutral way without taking his eyes from the road and said, It won’t be long now.

I wanted him to say, I will take you. I will listen to music with you.

He hired Charlotte, one of his students, to tutor me in Latin, and as chance and my father had it, she liked the blues too and she started taking me along. I was an escaped green and yellow budgie protected by a flock of wild sparrows. Charlotte and her friends closed around me, standing in line for clubs, hiding this dangerously bright-feathered creature thrust upon them. And for a long time I felt that this was not an unsatisfactory way to grow up.

The snow the winter I met you was always blue. You came to fetch me on your old Harley at twilight, at the end of my dull days at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s. The girls there spoke only English and were never allowed to come with me at night. They were mothered girls who invited me to spend weekends with them because I gave them cigarettes and told them about the clubs. I played recordings of Etta and B.B. for them in their chintz bedrooms with canopies and shelves of dolls and china. Their parents took us to the Ritz for Sunday brunches. But after I met you, I could not wait for the school days to end, to see you leaning against your bike in your worn leather jacket watching for me. I was always first out the door and I liked the girls’ envying eyes on my back.

I swung onto your motorcycle and put my arms around your waist and we drove to the Yellow Door and listened to folk music and we drank coffee from thick mugs and I opened my books and did my homework and you marked sheets of math. One evening the back wheel of your bike skidded out on a bit of black ice. It crashed and I fell off and landed on my left shoulder. You jumped and landed upright and you lifted me quickly, then pulled up the bike and together we pushed it to
the side of the road, where we shook ourselves off like a pair of pups. Our bodies were so light. Anything could send us hurtling through the air, steal us from each other, a patch of ice, a bit of bad luck. We got back on the bike that slippery night and kept riding, up the mountain to look at the city lights, down to the river to watch the ships.

What we shared was so simple. I remember thinking, I am so awake.

I came in late and my father said, The school called. They say he picks you up every day now. He is too old for you.

I shrugged, Not really. Boys my age m’ennuyent. You never mind when I go with Charlotte. She’s older.

Your tutor, he said. That’s different.

Oh, I said. Because you chose her?

My father studied me briefly. His beard had grayed. He turned away and said, Have you seen my glasses? He got up from his reading chair and walked toward the kitchen table.

I said, They’re on your head.

He raised his right hand to put them back on his nose and I saw his beloved shy smile. He sat down again in his chair and looked at me over the half-glasses and said, You still live under this roof. You must listen to what I say.

When I was a child my father never argued with me. He would say absently, Go ask Berthe. But once, when I would not go to bed he said, All right then. Come sit with me. I will show you how many bones there are in a foot.

I remember his tenderness that night, his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot, listening to the soft wonder in his voice. He said, No one has
ever been able to duplicate the human gait. All we can really do is keep a person upright.

My father did not foresee what was going to become of me as a result of living with his drivenness. My father, my love, never stopped believing that he could lose everything at any moment, the curse of poverty. I was in danger of getting distracted from school, of not succeeding, of not marrying well. I think he believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb. He was afraid of my turbulence at sixteen.

I said, He is not too old for me. You do not even know me.

He said, No one talks to me like that. When did you become so cruel? Go to your room. Out of my sight.

I had no mother to turn to, and what I had learned from her was urgency. What I learned from my mother was that those we love can disappear suddenly, inexplicably. And then there is nothing.

You were so cool in your white shirt, speaking English and French with your band. You were on lead and there were three others, Luc on drums, and two brothers from Westmount, Ray on bass and Mark on a Hammond organ. You played covers of Santana and the Beatles, mixing it up with Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. I sat near the back and I watched the girls in the room watching you. When a boy asked me to dance I shook my head and Charlotte said, I will, and drifted away with him. You cradled and caressed the strings of that cheap guitar and I imagined your arms around me. At the end of the first set you came down from the stage and sat with me and I liked the eyes of the room on me too. You wore black jeans and your body was coiled-up energy and you were excited to be seen with me. Before you went back for the last set you leaned into my hair and said, I’m going to play something for you.