“You do that, Milo, I’ll kill you.”
“If you don’t want me to tell, get me out of here. Right now. Today.”
By nightfall he is home.
• • • • •
Neil, 1919
IF YOU DON’T mind, Milo, I think we should use only interiors for the sequence about Neil’s first months in Canada. That all right with you? Trying to reconstitute post — First World War Old Montreal would put Blackout Productions into the red for a decade.
So we could find him. . say, seated at a tiny table next to the window in a corner of a frilly, curtained, doilied, lacy, flowery-wallpapered bedroom, reading Shakespeare’s Henry V by dim lamplight and shivering as the venomous wind snakes round the window frame and licks him with its cold tongue. It’s late January; Neil has been in Montreal for two months and they’ve been the most miserable two months of his life. Horrendous cold — at forty below, the Celsius and Fahrenheit thermometers agree wholeheartedly. Feels like forty below, they say, staring at each other and echoing their verdict back and forth in the icy silence. Forty below!
Stones would freeze in this weather; souls would freeze.
We hear Act III, Scene 4 as Neil reads it out loud to himself in two different, mock-female voices: a dialogue between Catherine, the French princess and Alice, her chambermaid. His accent in French is perfectly abominable.
“Je m’en fais la repetition de tous les mots que vous m’avez appris des a present.”
“Il est trop difficile, madame, comme je pense.”
“Excusez-moi, Alice. Écoutez: de hand, de fingres, de nails, de arma, de bilbow.”
“D’elbow, madame.”
“Ô Seigneur Dieu! Je m’en oublie; d’elbow. Comment appelezvous le col?”
“De neck, madame.”
“De nick. Et le menton?”
“De chin.”
“De sin. Le col, de nick; le menton, de sin.”
“Oui. Sauf votre honneur, en vérité, vous prononcez les mots aussi droit que les natifs d’Angleterre.”
He snorts. Who would have thought that Shakespeare could teach him French? All he has to do is work backward: elbow is coude, neck is col, nails are ongles. . Now, if only he had an Alice!
CUT to dinner that evening. We’re in the pseudo-Victorian Sherbrooke Street home of Judge Ross McGuire, friend and former colleague of Neil’s father, who has unenthusiastically agreed to provide lodgings for the young man until he gets his bearings in the new country. Now twenty-seven and burning to be free, Neil is dismayed to find himself once again eating Irish food (roast beef, potatoes, gravy, green beans and creamed onions), served by an Irish maid to an Irish magistrate and his Irish wife. His father explicitly instructed him never, in this household, to broach the topics of James Joyce, Maud Gonne, or the Easter Rising.
“Yesterday,” mutters Judge McGuire as he swallows a large slice of roast beef almost whole, including fat and gristle, “Sinn Féin went ahead and proclaimed independence. Looks like war to me.”
“War, war, haven’t we had enough war?” Mrs. McGuire asks rhetorically. “First the Great War in Europe, then the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. . and now, no sooner have our men come home than the Sinn Féiners start acting up again.”
“Forgive me,” Neil says. “But having arrived so recently from Dublin, I must say I understand their point of view. It would be worse than frustrating, humiliating, to come so close to independence and see it snatched away from us at the last minute.”
In excitement, Mrs. McGuire’s narrow rear end bobs up and down on her chair.
“But why could they not be content with what they were given? Every single one of their sixty-nine candidates was victorious in last month’s elections!”
“Including twelve with death sentences on their heads,” her husband interrupts, his mouth full of mashed potatoes, “and twenty-one others currently serving prison terms.”
“Still,” insists Mrs. McGuire, “they did win fully three-quarters of the seats! It would have given them a powerful voice in Parliament. They would have been able to make themselves heard!”
“Yes, but in British Parliament,” Neil points out. “They don’t want a powerful voice in British Parliament, Mrs. McGuire. After all the sacrifices they’ve made, they feel it would be an unforgivable compromise.”
“Yes, they were most generous about sacrificing other people’s lives, weren’t they?” says the judge while chewing, gravy dribbling down his chin. “The lives of poor, ordinary, run-of-the-mill Catholics, who found themselves caught up in strikes, lockouts and riots, and corralled into a political movement about which they knew nothing.”
“They want a parliament of their own,” intones Neil with dignity. “The Dáil Éireann. From all I can gather, that is what has just been ratified.”
“It means war, I tell you!” splutters McGuire. “The new chief of state will be Éamon de Valera, who also happens to be in jail in England! Frankly, my boy, would you not rather see Ireland run from Westminster than from Holloway?”
“Con Markiewicz wasn’t above saying yes,” Mrs. McGuire points out. “I must admit I’m proud of that woman. Just think: the first female member of Parliament ever, an Irishwoman! British women have voting rights now,” she adds, in a bit of a non sequitur. “Canadian women, too; well, except here in Quebec. .”
“I knew her,” Neil blurts out.
“Who? Lady Constance?”
“Yes. I mean, I saw her a few times.”
“And where would that have been?”
Mercifully, the maid barges in.
“Shall I warm the apple torte now, ma’am?”
“Yes, do, Maggie. We should be ready for it in three or four minutes.”
CUT to Neil walking the streets of Old Montreal. At these temperatures, the wind is searing. It burns your cheeks, whips powdery snow up your trouser legs, and dives into the space between your scarf and neck, attacking your vulnerable, warm flesh. In a matter of minutes your nose can freeze; your ears can freeze; your fingers and toes can freeze.
It’s a miserable city in which to pound the pavement in search of employment. Neil had thought that being a river port like Dublin, Montreal would feel familiar to him, but nowhere along the Saint Lawrence can one hop and skip from bridge to bridge as along the Liffey, cutting capers and dreaming of one’s green-as-a-meadow future (ah! that memory’s nearly a decade old!). All is harsh and cold and hard and cold and gray and cold and dark and cold and hostile; and cold. The pavement beneath his feet is sharp and slippery with frozen slush. His shoes are wearing thin; even new, they could not have withstood this punishing climate. To survive in Canada, he’ll need not only new shoes but a new personality, new hopes, new values.
On his first evening in Montreal, Judge McGuire had plunged him into a bottomless melancholy merely by showing him a map of the province. Half a dozen Irelands could fit into it, the judge had told him, but it is empty. Apart from the small towns and smaller villages spaced out along the river that plunges its sharp wedge diagonally through the province’s southernmost section all the way to the Great Lakes, it is unpopulated. Nothing but Indian and Eskimo tribes of a few hundred members each, scattered over an inconceivably gigantic, uninhabitable, icy tundra dotted with a zillion frozen lakes.