Читать книгу Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes - Jan David Blais - Страница 6

JONATHAN SLIDES OPEN THE DOOR to the deck. It has dried out enough to work outside. “I just got off the phone with my editor,” he says. “Peter Jennings has a segment on Paul tomorrow night. Six-thirty.”

“I like Jennings but I always watched Paul. Though I switched channels as soon as he was finished.”

“Couldn’t take all that right-wing talk?”

“What got to me was the arrogance and ignorance – no, not ignorance, distortion. Those people aren’t dumb, they know exactly what they’re doing.”

“‘All Points of View, Fairly Presented.’”

“Horseshit.”

“Agreed. Let’s push ahead.”

Later in the day Jonathan is poking around the study, which is fine, I am happy to share my library with him. “That your wife?” He points to a picture on the credenza.

I pick up the picture. Akiko and I on the deck, house in the background. “That was about seventy-five. The campus had pretty well settled down by then.”

He moves to a series of pictures hanging nearby. “Your boarders?”

“Every year we took a group shot.” I bend forward toward one. “Sixty-four,” I point to the legend. “That’s Paul in the middle next to Akiko.”

“What are those, may I ask?” He points to a shelf full of video cassettes.

I smile. “I recorded all of Paul’s big broadcasts. The John Paul II interviews, the Berlin Wall, Colin Powell after the Gulf War. They’re all here.”

“I know how I’ll be spending my evenings.” He runs his finger along the spines, neatly hand-lettered with topic and date. “Yeltsin, 10-16-92 – the Yeltsin debate?”

“It didn’t start out that way but things got out of hand...”

“...and they end up shouting at each other.”

“Then the apologies, the hugs, all on camera. Ever hear what happened after they left Yeltsin’s office that night? Not many people know about that.”

Jonathan shook his head.

“As Paul told it, it involved a considerable amount of vodka and the worst hangover he ever had. Remind me, I’ll tell you later.”

Jonathan puts the cassette back. “Paul Bernard was a hero to my generation of journalists. Some say he was a more effective Secretary of State than the real one.”

“I don’t know about that, but he told me he’d get calls from the White House asking him to carry a message. Or telling him to back off, depending. Everybody respected him, those who didn’t hate his guts, that is. Then came the Iraq business – very ugly, that.

“My sense is the harder people beat on him the more he dug his heels in.”

“You got that exactly right.”

* * * * * * *

GUS, WHY IS IT SOME OF OUR EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS are the most vivid? Because the child isn’t yet burdened with the baggage of reason? Or is it the drama of seeing, hearing, touching for the first time? To this day a singular sound or scent or color can summon those first experiences to mind. Proust had his madeleines, I offer you my first-grade schoolroom.

Sunlight streaming through the patched brown shades, a long hooked pole for raising and lowering. Tree shadows stirring, a movie screen where nothing happens and everything happens. Above the blackboards, maps of the United States, the Holy Land, Ireland, Rome. Saints’ pictures, Christ Child on a ledge, his plaster gown falling in folds from a raised arm, faint smile beneath the gold leaf crown. Our teacher’s face, ruddy above the shapeless habit which provokes the curious or, some said, filthy minds of her charges. What is black and white and red all over? Most amazing, the triple chin forced by her high collar, and that starched white bib. Does she take it off to eat? Does she eat at all? None of us has ever seen this. If not, she wouldn’t need to go to the bathroom. For all we know she doesn’t!

The long day proceeded into afternoon and her robes were covered with chalk dust from filling the blackboard with incredibly precise handwriting, example to us all, every letter identically inclined, every loop the same, every line parallel. “Piece,” “receive,” “neighbor,” “weigh.” The sound of young minds being stretched. Ssstamargramary, for that was her name, peered over the small faces, some attentive, some not, continuous motion, sunflowers in a breeze. This afternoon her face had attained a new hue.

“The rule in this case, what is the rule!” Not a hand. “Someone must know!” She cracked her pointer against the blackboard. “Omer Arsenault!”

Omer and I sat side-by-side in the middle of the room. His face was a triangle, slanting down to a severely pointed chin. His ears were adult-size, cupped forward like handles, which is how some of the older kids treated them during recess. This feature accounted for his nickname, Dumbo, which was unfair, for Omer was plenty smart, though he did often panic. At this moment his face was frozen in the downward position, as if the surface of his desk was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. The boy behind him whispered but too late. Omer looked up, shaking his head.

“I knew it yesterday, I really did, but I can’t remember it.”

I shrank in my seat until my eyes were at inkwell level. I wouldn’t put my hand up against Omer, not for anything would I do that. I squeezed my eyes shut, but when I opened them Ssstamargramary had me in her sights. “Well, class, luckily there is one person we can always count on. Paul, give us the answer, please.”

I stood, swallowing hard. “’I’ before ‘e’...” I began inaudibly, “except after ‘c.’”

“Louder! Everyone wants to hear you!”

Sure they did. “‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’,” I mumbled and sat down quickly.

“And... and... on your feet again. The rest, please.”

“Andinwordssoundedaylikeneighborandweigh.” Score one for the class brain.

“Thank the Lord somebody in here pays attention!” Her mocking voice enveloped us. “Class, what would we ever do without Paul?”

I sat down, ears burning. After a minute I snuck a look at Omer. His chin was trembling and a thin, wet trail tracked down his cheek. In front of him, Tony Marino was applauding, a smug grin on his pudgy face. Next row, Tommy Clark was making four-eyes at me. Look who’s talking, I thought loudly, don’t need eyes to tell when you’re around. Not for nothing did we call him Skunkweed.

I was the youngest kid in first grade and the only one with glasses, not counting two girls. The girls had their own separate classroom and teacher. Bad enough I was one of the shortest and, I say reluctantly, smartest boys, but those glasses were a killer. Pink horn-rims, the kind that turn amber after a few months. I was already on my second pair! This first classroom was the crucible for that insatiable desire to please adults which bedeviled my young life. I longed to be ordinary and fit in, but as I learned and absorbed I distanced myself from others, others whose offhand attitude I admired, carefree spirits who might have been my friends but were not.

I could read, and pretty hard stuff too, before I ever set foot in St. Teresa’s. This alone was enough to make me a freak or, as Ssstamargramary put it, an “outstanding pupil.” Same difference. I also shone in Deportment, was never kept after, never confined to that cool, dank cellar room with the cartons of milk and Coca-Cola stored for lunch. Sadistic grown-ups had conspired to set me apart, designing not a child but an adult in a child suit. It was like they needed a small, compliant version of themselves as pathetic reassurance of who knows what.

A lot of what we learned was interesting. I loved geography. Augusta, Maine on the Kennebec River. Hartford, Connecticut on the Connecticut River. The Grand Canyon. Teak floating down the Irrawaddy. Australia’s peculiar animals. But nothing could top a book about the Panama Canal that a well-traveled friend had given my mother. There was one page, actually this one particular picture, where two dark-skinned women look straight at you and the only thing they have on is... grass skirts! This astonishing sight prompted me to approach my father.

“Who are these people? And what are those... things hanging off them?”

“Those are natives, ti-Paul,” he stammered. “That’s how... how God makes natives.” The truth came out later, but Panama fueled my curiosity about what might lie over the horizon. Or under, as the case may be.

Religion occupied much of our time. First time I peeked into the thick, soft-covered catechism book I thought, neat! A question-answer game, page after page. How wrong I was! Every night, twenty sets of questions to memorize. Spelling and arithmetic mattered, but in the most solemn tone Ssstamargramary said this little book was something far, far greater, our guidebook to eternal life. Even the music we studied, most of it, was for Church. Chant, with little square notes.

So all right, why was I put on this earth? Why did God make me? What kind of person does He want me to be? All of a sudden I had answers to questions I had never asked. My world, the only world I knew, to which I was attached with a mostly pleasant bond, was a stepping stone to something else, and a slippery step at that, a place of sorrow and danger for piling up credits for the next life. Disobey the commandments of God or His Church? Better you had never been born! Heaven! Hell! Eternity! More than forever, if you can imagine, which you can’t, so don’t even try.

I was astonished to learn the dismal legacy of our first parents which somehow led straight to me. It was unsettling to learn about my evil tendencies, worse yet, that they were about to erupt. I had shown some limited talent for getting into trouble, but never had I felt evil or ashamed. Yet there it was in writing and the person of Ssstamargramary. All God’s children are connected to each other under Him, but what was supposed to be a beautiful and happy time had turned to ashes. Literally.

O God I am not worthy, that Thou shouldst come to me.

But speak the words of comfort, my spirit healed shall be!

Not worthy? That made no sense. Punished for things that happened long before I was born or my parents or my grandparents. But I was reminded of certain indisputable facts. I had the dark hair and eyes of my father, didn’t I? A fact. Some unfortunates were deformed or sightless from birth, I was not. A fact, though I’d never met anybody like that. Some people were rich men’s sons but I was not. A fact. The Divine Plan touches every one of us, and just because I had nothing to say about it doesn’t make it unfair. God is the Creator, I am the creature. Big difference. If God had wanted my opinion, He would have asked. But to my vast relief, I discovered our weak human condition is not the end of the story, not by a long shot.

I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord... crucified, died and was buried... rose from the dead... seated at the right hand of the Father... will come again to judge the living and the dead...

The God of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and David, the one with long gray hair and flowing robes, He turns out to be the only true God. And astonishingly, He so loved the world He sent His only Son to heal our sin and help us to heaven. God acts, we conform. The try counts but results do too, and there’d better be plenty of those or He’ll know you’re faking. He knows everything. Even before it happens, He knows.

What a world! How wonderful to be part of it!

TRAINING INTENSIFIED as we prepared for our First Holy Communion. Sister Perpetua, our second grade teacher, looked on as the pastor questioned, prodded, explained. Father Donnelly was tall, with a shock of thick white hair. His voice was low and chalky but Sundays when he wound up you had no trouble hearing him, even in back. He wasn’t gloomy like Father Maloney, but sometimes he exploded for no particular reason. My mother said he talked too much about money. Here also began my acquaintance with Latin, the mumbling from the altar I had only a foggy idea about. Et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam...in remissionem peccatorum.

I finally figured out what it meant to believe. If people you know really well tell you something it must be true, especially if they’re all saying the same thing. Your parents, the nuns, the priests, especially the priests. Things written in books can be believed, but you don’t know the people who wrote them so better you listen to who you know. This belief thing is complicated, but fortunately there are people whose job it is to steer us straight.

Never was I asked whether I believed. It never entered my mind I might choose not to believe. The nuns and priests expected what they told us to stick, and with me it certainly did. Saints and angels, the Blessed Virgin, bells and candles, I believed in them the same way I believed in the air I breathed. Later, I was surprised to meet normal people who disagreed with what to me was so obvious. Back then I didn’t know anybody like that, having heard only vaguely about such people. From my haven I felt sorry for them, whoever they were, missing out on the joy of my wonderful world. No wonder they were lost. I’d have been lost too, without the divine roadmap it was my privilege to inherit. I figured, if God wanted their opinion, He would have asked.

With the big day nearing, arithmetic, geography, all worldly concerns were set aside. How does the Sacrament of Penance remit sin and restore to the soul the friendship of God? What is the Holy Eucharist? Why did Christ institute it? And the question that bothered me most – how can the wafer look so different from what it has become? Father Donnelly had the answer to that one, too – it is a mystery. If we could see God, there’d be no need for faith, would there? If we knew everything God knows, we would ourselves be God, which deserves no comment. I closed my eyes. What is mystery? Does it have color? Is it like the sun that helps you see but if you stare at it you go blind? No, mystery can’t be like that because light reveals things. Mystery must be dark. Black.

Once when I was small, I bought a vanilla cone from the truck that drove down our street ringing a bell. It was a hot day and my cone began to leak. I licked so hard the scoop fell off and onto the sidewalk. I put it back on the cone but now there was this little puddle on the sidewalk. Here’s what I could never understand. To this very day, through rain, snow and countless feet, there exists a chalky white patch in that very spot on the sidewalk in front of Malloy’s house. Was this a mystery? Or is mystery tied up only with religion? I thought of asking Father Donnelly but didn’t have the nerve.

With so much at stake I couldn’t fail, I wouldn’t fail. How much time we spent in church I don’t know, but we were there early and late, rising, sitting, kneeling in the cavernous space, dark except for a few lights and candles and the red lamp telling us Jesus was present in the tabernacle. The radiators clanged against the chill, and sweet incense hung in the air. Wooden pews that turn sticky in the heat of summer were cool and smooth, grooved from generations of fingernails, wads of gum under the benches.

The girls whispered and giggled and my friends fooled around, but that ended when our teacher came up the aisle with her weapon, two pieces of hard wood hinged with a rubber band she’d snap to warn of a rap on the ear or across the knuckles. Tall, sandy-haired Father McAdam was in charge. He was the only one of our priests you dared talk to. Younger than the others, he helped with the CYO. It was strange seeing a priest shooting baskets, though he always wore black pants in the gym, I guess that was a rule. When they weren’t snapping those knuckle killers, the nuns fussed over Father McAdam, especially the girls’ teacher, who was kind of pretty, which I also thought odd.

I was fifth in line as our class lined up in the center aisle. The girl beside me was quite a bit taller, which would have been embarrassing except my attention was on the back of Margaret Foley’s head. I was taller than Margaret, which was fortunate, because I was in love with her. When she walked, her banana curls swayed side to side and even from behind I could picture the freckles on her face. I’d never really spoken to her because we didn’t see the girls much and you wouldn’t be caught dead at recess talking to one. My brother Jim was big enough to get away with talking to girls. My only chance would have been at dismissal when everyone filed out to the march music from the loudspeaker on the side of the school building.

Sometimes I could have walked near or even beside (but not with!) Margaret since she lived up my way. But I didn’t. Most days Father Donnelly paced up and down Pope Street in his black windbreaker, hands behind his back, making sure our lines were straight and nobody got run over, but really looking for crimes to write in his notebook. Walking a girl home was serious because it set in motion a whole chain of events, none of them pleasant. No one knew of my crush on Margaret and I wasn’t about to ruin my sweet, sad secret by doing anything dumb like talking to her. Anyway, what would I say? Girls were strange, unfathomable creatures (not my sister, that was different) and Margaret Foley the most mysterious of all.

Shuffling toward the altar I watched Margaret return, her eyes fixed prayerfully on the tips of her fingers pointed to heaven, palms together. So perfect, she was. I held my breath... our shoulders nearly touched. She smelled beautiful, like soap. Now it was my turn to kneel on the hard rubber pad. My chin barely reached the rail. For this final rehearsal, Father McAdam was giving out wafers, unconsecrated, of course. The hum grew louder. Omer, then Eugene Sullivan who always whined he was taller so should be behind me. Finished with Eugene, Father McAdam’s server jammed the cold, hard, plate against my Adam’s apple. Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi... he traced the sign of the cross with the small white host...custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam.

Amen, I replied. May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve your soul unto life everlasting. I opened wide and stuck out my tongue. What a letdown! It was a piece of... cardboard! Oh well, maybe tomorrow it will be different. This was only practice, after all.

At confession I went through my catalogue of sins, then it was five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, say a good Act of Contrition. The Fourth Commandment came in for special attention, also the time I took Jim’s baseball after mine went down the sewer and didn’t give it back until he found it in my closet. For all the mean things he did to me, I wasn’t sorry at all, which as you know creates a whole new problem on top of the first one.

At home, preparations were well along for the celebration. The kitchen was fragrant with apple and cinnamon. Aunt Moira was sitting at the table drinking coffee. My favorite aunt, always had a nice word and a smile, dark as my mother was fair, and taller. She lived up Chalkstone Avenue past the golf course. Her husband, Uncle Eddie the policeman, told great jokes but people said he drank too much and had an awful temper when he did. One time I rode my bike to their house to deliver something and through the window I saw Aunt Moira crying, sweeping up a mess of broken dishes. I left whatever it was on the step and took off. Uncle Eddie was a sergeant. He used to be a lieutenant but they said he got into some kind of trouble at work.

“How did it go,” my mother asked, “your confession.”

“I hope you had something interesting to tell,” Aunt Moira laughed, tapping her cigarette against the ashtray.

I shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”

Aunt Moira nodded, “I never do either.”

“You’re not supposed to feel different!” My mother wiped her hands on her apron. “What’s different is how your soul looks to God.”

I opened the fridge for a look but there was a gaping hole where the shelves usually were. Looking around I saw why, a giant ham, thick, round and tapered to a stub, sitting on top of the stove in one of those heavy blue speckled baking pans. The skin was x’d all over with little brown things sticking out of it. “As soon as the pies are done, in it goes.” Baking into the evening, then a warm-up for tomorrow’s feast. Low and slow where pork is concerned. If my mother said that once, she said it a thousand times.

Grandmother Kelley would be at the party but not Grandfather Kelley who died before I was born. Many cousins, all older, since my parents were last in their families to marry. My father’s parents still lived in their little town in Canada but Mémère had been sick. They’d send a card, they always did holidays and special events, and there’d be other cards with bills. Ones and twos for sure, if I got lucky a few fives. It would go into my savings account at the Old Stone Bank in Olneyville but I’d keep a little out for essentials. I liked my bank a lot. It looked like a bank, old and stone.

The mail was late but not to worry. Most days, Francis O’Rourke, our mailman, stopped for a “quickie” at the Melody Lounge which was conveniently located in the late morning of his route. Sometimes I was home from school and still no Francis. When he showed, I could smell the quickie as he handed me our magazines and letters. Francis had been delivering mail so long nobody complained except to him. Francis was one of the many Men who plied their trades in our neighborhood. Henry The Milk Man. Pete The Egg Man who doubled as The Chicken Man and at Thanksgiving, The Turkey Man. Arthur The Garage Man. Mario The Garbage Man. The Rag Man clattered by every Tuesday in his horse-drawn wagon, wearing a top hat and a suit coat winter or summer. He was my favorite Man though I didn’t know his name because for some reason we never asked him to stop.

After dinner, my father was relaxing in his red leather chair, smoking his pipe and reading the paper. Sprawled on the floor I sorted my picture cards. I had decided by team was better than by name. Williams and Pesky and Doerr would now be together as in real life, Sain and Spahn of the Braves and so on. Some of them had wonderful names, especially Spahn, Warrrren Spaahhhnn. Just like my bank, his name was exactly right. It sounded like he pitched, slow, graceful, with a leg kick that floated up and above his head. “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain,” they said all last summer though Cleveland killed them in the Series.

We’d been to a couple of games, my father and I. The first time he picked me up at school and as I got in the waiting car I couldn’t help smirking at the other kids slaving away. My mother fixed it with the nuns. They knew her because she did all kinds of work for the school since she didn’t have a real job. She even knew Father Donnelly personally, though she didn’t like him. Somewhere on Route 1 we pulled off the road and broke out the lunch she had packed. Ham on white bread, the good kind where you can see your fingerprints. For me a thermos of milk, coffee for my Dad.

My first game was against the Yankees. My mother won the tickets by calling a radio station and giving the name of some song, the kind with no words that didn’t interest me until much later. Our seats were down the first base line and about the fifth inning the shade came across and it got cold. We were so close to the field you could even hear the game, that wonderful, milky sound when the bat’s sweet spot meets the ball dead on, fast balls popping the catcher’s mitt, the umpire’s calls, the players yelling at him and everybody else.

The Yankees, the despised Yankees. Okay, I admit I had Yankee cards too – Raschi and Rizutto and Berra, staccato sounds, harsh to the ear. Our neighborhood used to be Irish but it was mostly Italian now and I had many friends and enemies with names like that. Wops, my father called them sometimes, not my friends but their parents, but only when they weren’t around. I didn’t know why wop was so bad but my friends went crazy if I called them that when we were having a fight, usually just names and shoving but sometimes punches. Wop. It got them going every time.

But it was the Irish my Dad really lit into. Drunks and bums, good for nothing but talking and drinking. I remember one time he told Uncle Eddie the Irish were the most arrogant people ever walked the face of the earth, staggered is what he actually said. “And your unions, damn bunch of socialists! The only part of you that works is your mouth!” Now his finger was in Uncle Eddie’s face. “And your so-called failin’ – what a load of crap! Rummies is all you are!” That’s when Uncle Eddie asked him to step outside.

After that my mother didn’t talk to my father for a long time. For her part, she scoffed at his plodding Canucks – nothing above the neck, no literature, no music, no theater. “If excess be the price of culture,” she would say, “then I welcome excess!” How could such different people have ever got married?

Speaking of Uncle Eddie, when I mentioned cousins coming to my party, I forgot the twins, Martha and Mary. They didn’t count, being girls. Of course my sister was thick with them.

Many kinds of people lived in our neighborhood. As I said, my parish, St. Teresa’s, was mostly Irish and Italian with a few French families. You were in the parish your house was in, so we belonged to St. Teresa’s, St. Teresa of Avila which is in Spain. There was the French Church, Our Lady of Lourdes, and the Polish Church whose name I was never clear about. The names up there had a lot of cz’s and ski’s. Holy Ghost was in Federal Hill, the really Italian section where we rarely ventured. One time thieves stole a gold crucifix from Holy Ghost. The parishioners wanted to call the police but the pastor said, no, I will make a phone call. Next day the crucifix was back, good as new. My mother had bad things to say about the mob but at the time it seemed a decent thing for them to do.

We were all Catholics, of course. Some Protestants lived in the area but I didn’t know any. The children of Protestants went to public schools and we felt sorry for them because they were in error and didn’t have the sacraments or God’s grace. Jews I knew nothing at all about except they killed Christ and were still paying the price. Chinese and Japs? Cartoons in the back pages of the Bulletin. It never occurred to me they might have churches, too. For me the world was either Catholic or non-Catholic. I had the same pride being a Catholic as I did being American. It was something precious, something everyone would have wanted if they really understood things. America, America! God shed His grace on thee! Just as God was a Catholic, deep down I knew He was an American, too.

My mother never missed a chance to rail against politicians. She had gone to school with some of them and said their hat size was bigger than it had any right to be. My father liked to remind her that living on the same block as the ward chairman brought certain benefits – garbage collection, snow plowing – and anyway, when you’re in business like he was you need to get along with people, not knock them all the time.

Most of their fights were over religion. My mother had nothing good to say about the big-shot bishop downtown and our parish priests except Father McAdam, yet she never missed Mass and we always had fish on Fridays, deep-fried hard and brown or finan haddie creamed and cratered in mounds of mashed potatoes. My father said bad things about her saying bad things, but he often slept late Sundays then ambled down to the shop to get caught up for the week. Some nights he disappeared there too, and my mother would read, enjoying some peace and quiet, she claimed, though I noticed she didn’t turn the pages as fast as usual and sometimes seemed out of sorts.

IT WAS ABOUT EIGHT. My mother was in her room, recovering from her labors. The house was filled with the friendly aroma of ham. Suddenly I heard noises, a car outside. There were footsteps and voices. Before the doorbell rang I was at the door.

“Ti-Paul! Ti-Paul!”

I couldn’t believe my eyes! Tante Jeanette! And Uncle Albert! “Ça va, mon petit?” he said, hoisting me in the air. “My, how big you got!” Uncle Albert was a giant, with a rough, leathery face that scratched mine as I flew up over his head. From my perch I looked over his shoulder... not one car but two! And more people coming up the walk! Laughing, Uncle Albert put me down. “Ah, ti-Paul, you’re so heavy you give me a rupture!” That pleased me. I was still trying to break fifty pounds but had been stuck a long time at forty-six. His laugh boomed up at you from way down near his shoes. I really liked Uncle Albert. My father was at the door, beaming, as everybody threw their arms around everybody else. Uncle Albert was my father’s oldest brother and Tante Jeanette his sister. She was always smiling, I swear, even in pictures. She was also tall, though of course not as tall as Uncle Albert.

“Entrée! Entrée!” My father waved everybody in. Tante Geneviève, Uncle Albert’s wife, as tiny as he was tall, squeezed my hand and kissed me silently on the cheek. She didn’t talk much, I remembered that from the last visit. In all, nine people including cousins I’d never even heard of. Just then, my mother appeared, finger marking the place in her book. She had this funny look on her face.

“Albert! And Geneviève! My, this is a surprise!”

One by one she greeted our visitors so I got to hear the names again. Cousin François was a younger copy of Uncle Albert, and two men who didn’t look much older than Buddy Malloy next door, plus their wives. As usual, no kids my age. The women all were wearing nice clothes, dresses and sweaters, and the men had on plaid work shirts and baggy pants. My mother was staring at the tracks on the carpet.

“We heard something about tomorrow being ti-Paul’s big day,” Tante Jeanette was saying, her face red and shiny as she tousled my hair, “so we come by to say hello. And Catherine! Jolie! Si jolie!” Catherine had slipped in behind my mother. She was always slipping in somewhere.

My father was counting heads. “How long on the road?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he yelled at me through the hubbub, “Ti-Paul!” He hardly ever called me that, “two chairs from the dining room.”

Well, I had to move four chairs because he forgot my mother and Catherine. Jim was out, as usual. Conversations criss-crossed the room which suddenly seemed small and inadequate. By the time I dragged the last chair in my mother was in the kitchen, opening bottles of Narragansett – that’s beer – and boiling water for coffee. I couldn’t figure out why, but she kept shaking her head and looked like she was going to cry.

In the living room, my father was sitting with Uncle Albert. My father was the oldest of les Bernards américains, as they called themselves, so he was in charge of parceling out the visitors among the local clan. My uncle kept nodding and waving his hands and saying “way, way.” Once in a while he’d throw in a “you bet!” and an “oh boy!” and nod even faster. His English sounded a lot like my father’s French. My mother placed a bottle on the table beside him with a coaster. She was big on coasters.

The plan, they’d stay two nights, then hit the road Sunday, arriving back in Québec for work the next day. Farmers and mechanics they were, who my father said never took a day off in their lives, even weekends, so it was a big deal they came all this way just for me. I noticed my father heading for the phone with my mother on his heels. She was waving her hands like Uncle Albert then she disappeared into the kitchen.

“Ti-Paul!” Tante Jeanette was beckoning me over. She was holding a small package wrapped in white paper tied with a red ribbon. “Here! For you!”

I took the package and turned it over in my hand. “Ouvrez! Vite! Vite!”

I knew enough French to undo the ribbon and tear off the wrapping. Of course my nosy sister was there taking it all in. When the paper fell away I saw a small, thin box. I lifted the lid... it was a watch! A real watch! With a leather band! “We was afraid maybe you had one already,” Uncle Albert was saying, but I shook my head. My heart was beating fast. “Waltham,” the dial said in gold letters. It also said twelve-fifteen. For as long as I could remember I could tell time and it wasn’t twelve-fifteen. I stuck my thumbnail under the stem and started to pull it out like I’d seen my father do. Tell the truth, I had tried that a couple of times with his watch when he left it out, though I never dared touch his pocket watch, the one he wore on a chain with his best suit and vest, the brown one. “Here.” The watch disappeared in my uncle’s palm. He fitted it to my wrist, inserting the little gold point in the band.

“Always put it on before you wind it,” Tante Jeanette said, “over the bed is best.”

I pulled out the stem, a real trick with one hand, and set the time by the mantle clock, seven fifty-two. “I’ve been wanting one a long time,” I said.

Tante Jeanette beamed. “Don’t wind too far. When it feels tight, stop.”

As my mother replaced Uncle Albert’s empty Narragansett she nodded at the watch. “I hope you’ve thanked them properly.”

Tante Jeanette winked. She knew I was getting to that. “Fiona, something for the house.” She handed over a larger package with the same wrapper as mine. My mother opened it – a tin of maple syrup with a picture of trees and a red maple leaf.

“How nice. We’ll have it for breakfast tomorrow.”

“Non! Non!” Tante Jeanette shook her head. “Save it! It is for you to enjoy!”

“We’ll see,” my mother replied, placing the container on the table next to Tante Jeannette, kind of like a trophy.

A few minutes later Catherine came parading in with a platter of sandwiches but they were gone before it got to me. Luckily she was right back with another plate. I grabbed one, the meat still warm from the oven, butter melting into the bread, that good kind with the fingerprints. I was feeling great when I realized – we’re eating my ham! There won’t be any left for tomorrow! After a couple more bites, though, I decided it was okay. My mother would take care of everything, she always did. Besides, fasting from midnight meant a long wait for my next meal. So I did what I had to do. I reached for another sandwich.