It was Arthur Vining Davis’s dream, and he christened it with an acronym drawn from the first two letters of his own three names. Andrew Mellon, the richest man in the world, financed the construction. There were men who designed it and others who built it, and the employees of Alcoa and Alcan have lived there ever since.
From time to time there is talk of its possible consecration as a UNESCO heritage site. I think that began even as it was being built, and it’s become a running gag between my father and me. Whenever we pass an Arvidian house to which the years have not been kind, a duplex whose owners have painted their halves in different colours, or a lawn indifferently tended, one of us says:
“Now that one, it’d be best not to show it to the guys from UNESCO.”
It all started up again in 2010. In an interview, the municipal counsellor Carl Dufour declared:
“Without Arvida, the Germans might have won the war.”
A grotesque claim with one merit: that of being the most outrageous exaggeration in the history of a town that had all the same witnessed the birth of my father. It’s true that almost all the aluminum that went into the fuselage of allied planes was produced at the Vaudreuil factory. The installations were protected during most of the war by anti-aircraft batteries that formed strange totems on the grass around the buildings. Of course, Arvida was not Pearl Harbor, nor London, nor even Dresden. The Japanese and the Germans had plenty to keep them busy on the Russian steppes or in the great Pacific powder keg without coming over to disturb the uneasy calm of the population of Arvida.2
I understand, of course, what Councillor Dufour was trying to say, but it seems to me that in wanting to revive the town’s obscure historical importance, he seriously misrepresented its nature.
Arvida has never been a town at the crux of history, but rather a place resolutely outside it. There were no thieves in Arvida, at least not many, but there were, drawn by the wealth to be found there or sought out by its laboratories, Americans, Englishmen, and people from the four corners of the earth.
From Russia came the Marinoffs, one of whose daughters, Sonia, is my godmother.
From Italy came the machinist Dan Belladonne, Brian Santoni of the employment office, the restaurant owner Amato Verdone, and old man Zampieri, who laid down marble and terrazzo, and who was the grandfather of the Bourque brothers.
From Poland came Matt Barkovitz, the mechanic Joe Pollock, and my grandparents’ neighbour, Mister Belinak.
From Holland had come the chemist Neil Van Dalen.
From Greece came Gus Tectonidis, and the friend of the family Vic Kostopoulos.
From Japan came Frank Watanabe, the engineer. It appears he was not alone: a photo from between the wars shows the former factory pay office, a shed that looked like a train station out of an old Western, with in front of it, swaying in the breeze and suspended from two chains, a sign with the words PAY OFFICE written in French, English, and in Japanese characters.
From Catalonia came Jordi Bonet, just long enough to create a large mural on the front of the city hall.
From the pasturelands of Ireland and the heaths of Scotland came, try to sort them out: the other Archibald family, the Burrows, Terry Loucks, Neil Balcon, Reidy Smith of the Arvida orchestra, the Duffys, the O’Dorthys and the Fountains, Teddy Hallahan, Stephen Lee (Peter Lee’s father), the expert carpenter Médéric McLaughlin, father of Popeye McLaughlin and fourteen other children who looked as alike as two drops of water.
I’ve forgotten some, obviously. All these people had come to Arvida, drawn to a Nordic version of El Dorado, an American Dream that had veered some thousands of kilometres off course. They’d often come to forget things, and never, never ever, to remember anything. Certainly not a war.
Another paternal story of larceny illustrates this principle in catastrophic fashion. My grandfather, a foreman in the painting workshop, was responsible for purchases, and sometimes received a visit from Mister Addams, who dealt in products to be used in industrial renovation. Mister Addams was a tall, strapping Welshman, blond and blue-eyed, good looking but with equine teeth. He’d arrive with an armful of alcohol, cheap gin especially, and ate with the family and the Polish neighbour Mister Belinak, who always found a way to get himself invited.
After dinner the children were sent right to bed and my grandmother was thanked for her help, free, for once, to relax in the basement in front of the television set. My grandfather, Mister Addams, and Mister Belinak talked together late into the night, until their stock of hard liquor was totally depleted. For my father, still very young, those evenings were shrouded in a certain mystery. It never entered his mind that they were hidden from his eyes only to spare him the shocking spectacle of seeing his father drunk.
Georges-Émile Archibald didn’t drink, except for a porter thick as molasses at Saturday breakfast to go with his eggs and mustard, and, in hiding, in the garage. In the unbridled imagination of my father, these meetings assumed the proportion of Yalta conferences in miniature. The men were clearly making important decisions, either in sharing out the free world or for the better good of those living on Rues Moisan, Castner, and Foucault.
Once, at the hour when the oldsters ought to be retiring to read in bed and the youngsters heading to sleep, my father, without anyone noticing, slipped into the sideboard next to the dining room table, installed himself like a contortionist, and closed himself in. His plan having succeeded, he waited patiently for the evening to reveal its secrets.
In vain.
Made bold by drink, my grandfather, Mister Belinak, and Mister Addams had no more to exchange than dirty jokes, which might have interested my father were he two or three years older. For the time being he understood nothing at all.
The men talked in a kind of drunken Esperanto composed of mispronounced fragments of each other’s language, belches, and slaps on the back. My father fell asleep, not knowing that the latch on the door he’d closed was holding him prisoner. It was apparently a good latch, which stood in the way of a logical course of events. Under normal circumstances, my father, his weight bearing forward as he lapsed into sleep, would have forced open the door and fallen to the floor with a thump in front of the guests. Instead, the latch held true, and it was the entire dish-laden cabinet high on its legs that my father dragged with him in his descent. It crashed down on the table, exploding in all directions in splinters of wood and broken glass, almost killing Mister Belinak by fracturing his skull or giving him a heart attack. The men, who had jumped up in unison, stood there dazed for several seconds, before hearing a child weeping beneath the debris.
Usually the story ended there. But on one occasion my father thought good to add this addendum.
We were in the woods, just the two of us, and he said:
“Welsh, my ass. Addams, his real name was Himmler or Goebbels. And Mister Belinak liked him even if he’d killed all his brothers and sisters.”
*
The revelation was doubtless apocryphal and a bit forced, but it said what there was to say about our town, that it was a place of refuge where almost everything could be wiped away and forgotten.
Arvida was a town for second chances, undue hopes, and also games.
My grandparents themselves had landed up there in part to hide from their families a shameful secret. My grandfather was a pious man who hadn’t sworn twice in his life. He said his rosary at night like an old woman knits. He was a miracle-worker his friends and family phoned from all over, because his prayers stopped bleeding, cured migraines, and helped find lost objects.