“Raymond wants whatever his mother wants,” said Marie. “He’ll be nice. I promise. He’ll take the garbage down. Won’t you, Raymond? You’ll take the garbage out every night for Aunt Berthe?”
“Not every night,” said his aunt. “Twice a week. Don’t cry. Louis wouldn’t want to see you in tears.”
A quiver of shyness touched all three. Louis returned to memory in superior guise, bringing guidance, advice. “Papa wouldn’t mind if we watched the news,” said Raymond.
For less than a minute they stared at a swaying carpet of jungle green, filmed from a helicopter, and heard a French voice with a Montreal accent describe events in a place the sisters intended never to visit. Raymond jumped to an English channel, without asking if anyone minded. He was the male head of the family now; in any case, they had always given in. Vietnam in English appeared firmly grounded, with a Canadian sergeant in the Marine Corps — shorn, cropped, gray-eyed, at ease. He spoke to Raymond, saying that it was all right for a Canadian to enlist in a foreign army.
“Who cares?” said Marie, fatally. English on television always put her to sleep. She leaned back in her armchair and began very gently to snore. Berthe removed Marie’s glasses and her hat, and covered her bare legs with a lace quilt. Even in the warmest weather she could wake up feeling chilled and unloved. She fainted easily; it was her understanding that the blood in her arms and legs congealed, leaving her brain unattended. She seemed content with this explanation and did not seek another.
Raymond sat up, knocking over the pile of cushions. He gathered his hair into a topknot and held it fast. “They send you to San Diego,” he said. What was he seeing, really? Pacific surf? A parade in sunlight? Berthe should have asked.
When Marie came to, yawning and sighing, Berthe was putting color on her nails (she had removed it for the funeral) and Raymond was eating chocolate cake, watching Rod Laver. He had taken off his shirt, shoes, and socks. “Laver’s the greatest man in the modern world,” he said.
“Ah, Raymond,” said his mother. “You’ve already forgotten your father.”
As Marie had promised, he carried the garbage out, making a good impression on the Portuguese family who lived downstairs. (Louis, who would not speak to strangers, had made no impression at all.) At five o’clock the next morning, Berthe’s neighbor, up because he had an early delivery at his fruit store, saw Raymond throw a duffel kit into his mother’s car and drive away. His hair was tied back with a white leather thong. He wore one of his rodeo outfits and a pair of white boots.
Before leaving Berthe’s flat he had rifled her handbag, forgotten on a kitchen chair — a century before, when they assembled for the funeral feast. Before leaving Montreal he made a long detour to say goodbye to his old home. He was not afraid of ghosts, and he had already invented a father who was going to approve of everything he did. In Louis’s desk he found the gold watch and one or two documents he knew he would need — among them the birth certificate that showed him eighteen. He took away as a last impression the yellowed grass in the backyard. Nothing had been watered since Louis’s death.
Berthe has often wondered what the Marines in the recruiting office down in Plattsburgh made of Raymond, all silver and white, with that lank brick-dust hair and the thin, cracked English. Nothing, probably: they must have expected civilians to resemble fake performers. There was always someone straggling down from Montreal. It was like joining the Foreign Legion. After his first telephone call, Berthe said to Marie, “At least we know where he is,” but it was not so; they never quite knew. He did not go to San Diego: a military rule of geography splits the continent. He had enlisted east of the Mississippi, and so he was sent for training to Parris Island. The Canadian Marine had forgotten to mention that possibility. Berthe bought a number of road maps, so that she could look up these new names. The Mississippi seemed to stop dead at Minneapolis. It had nothing to do with Canada. Raymond should have turned the car around and driven home. (Instead, he left it parked in Plattsburgh. He could not remember, later, the name of the street.)
He has never been back. His excuse used to be that he had nowhere to stay in Montreal. Marie sold the duplex and moved in with Berthe. The last thing he wanted to see on vacation was another standard motel unit, and he knew Berthe wouldn’t have him in the house.
He enlisted for four years, then another three. Marie looked upon him as a prisoner, in time to be released. Released honorably? Yes, or he would not have been allowed to settle in Florida: he was still a Canadian in 1976; he could easily have been deported. When he became an American citizen and called Marie, expecting congratulations, she told him that 98 percent of the world’s forest fires were started by Americans. It was all she could think of to say. He has been down there ever since, moving like a pendulum between Hollywood North and Hollywood Beach, Fort Lauderdale and the stretch of Miami known as Little Quebec, from the number of French-Canadians who spend holidays there. They have their own newspaper, their own radio station and television channel, they import Montreal barbecue. Hearing their voices sometimes irritates him, sometimes makes him homesick for the summer of 1969, for the ease with which he jumped from cloud to cloud.
Marie still believes that “Parris Island” was one of Raymond’s famous spelling mistakes. He must have spent part of his early youth, the least knowable, in a place called Paris, South Carolina. She often wonders about other mothers and sons, and whether children feel any of the pain they inflict. Berthe thinks of how easy it must have been for Raymond to leave, with the sun freshly risen, slanting along side streets, here and there front steps sluiced and dark, the sky not yet a burning glass. He must have supposed the rest of his life was going to be like that. When she and Marie ransacked the house on Boulevard Pie IX, looking for clues, imagining he’d left a letter, left some love, they kept the shades drawn, as if there were another presence in the rooms, tired of daylight.
Florida
BERTHE CARETTE’S SISTER, Marie, spent eight Christmases of her life in Florida, where her son was establishing a future in the motel industry. Every time Marie went down she found Raymond starting over in a new place: his motels seemed to die on his hands. She used to come back to Montreal riddled with static electricity. Berthe couldn’t hand her a teaspoon without receiving a shock, like a small silver bullet. Her sister believed the current was generated by a chemical change that occurred as she flew out of Fort Lauderdale toward a wet, dark, snowy city.
Marie had been living with Berthe ever since 1969, the year her husband died. She still expected what Berthe thought of as husband service: flights met, cabs hailed, doors held, tips attended to. Berthe had to take the bus out to Dorval Airport, with Marie’s second-best fur coat over her arm and her high-heeled boots in a plastic bag. Through a glass barrier she could watch her sister gliding through customs, dressed in a new outfit of some sherbet tone — strawberry, lemon-peach — with everything matching, sometimes even her hair. She knew that Marie had been careful to tear the American store and union labels out of the clothes and sew in Canadian ones, in case customs asked her to strip.
“Don’t tell me it’s still winter,” Marie would wail, kissing Berthe as if she had been away for months rather than just a few days. Guiding Marie’s arms into the second-best-mink sleeves (paws and piecework), Berthe would get the first of the silvery shocks.
One year, when her son, Raymond, had fallen in love with a divorced woman twice his age (it didn’t last), Marie arrived home crackling, exchanging sparks with everything she touched. When she ate a peppermint she felt it detonating in her mouth. Berthe had placed a pot of flowering paper-white narcissi on Marie’s dressing table, a welcome-home present reflected on and on in the three mirrors. Marie shuffled along the carpeted passage, still in her boots. She had on her Florida manner, pretending she was in Berthe’s flat by mistake. As soon as she saw the plant, she went straight over and gave it a kiss. The flower absorbed a charge and hurled it back. Berthe examined the spot on Marie’s lip where the shock had struck. She could find nothing, no trace. Nevertheless Marie applied an ice cube.