23

WE LIVED IN CAREFREE TIMES, thought Valerie, clutching her parcel. That’s what they say about the sixties, but not for everyone. Not for Gerard. The past was in flood through the wide-open sluice of memory, how one evening in Toronto Gerard sat, eyes lowered in concentration on his dinner, his hand fiddling with a day-glo daisy coaster, pushing it around as if he were trying to shove a puck past the goal line. The radio was tuned to CHUM, playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel. Valerie told him it was her favourite song.

“What is?” Gerard got up, went to the fridge, pulled out a beer. She mentioned the title.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I have not been paying attention to music.”

He lowered his eyes as he said it, as if he wanted mercy.

“It’s nothing,” she replied.

Yet Valerie knew it mattered, that a guy her own age was clueless about such a great song. He opened the beer, swigged it down, fidgeted with the tab, a fork, a knife. He didn’t seem to hear her, and then she felt his gaze touching her skin, as if he’d never set eyes on her before. His gaze filled up with wonderment, then — horror. There was no other word for it. Gerard’s shaken look passed and he managed a smile. “I hope you are enjoying my father’s house,” he said.

She felt chilled.

“It’s a nice house,” she replied.

Gerard explained that his dad was a Montrealer, buying up Toronto properties for the day when the indépendentistes would come to power and kick the Anglos out of Quebec.

“He lets me live here, as long as I find tenants,” he explained.

“So you’re the super,” said Matt.

“Yes, but I work for the Parks Department.”

“Outdoors?” asked Valerie. “That’s a nice job for a student.”

“Yes, outdoors, but I am not a student. I am graduated since two years.”

It puzzled her — a Montrealer with money and a degree, moving to Toronto to shovel up dog poop. Then she remembered what Rita said. He’s only here until he sorts himself out.

Gerard asked if they were students. Valerie told him she was an English major. “I’m studying journalism,” Matt said.

“That is my field also,” said Gerard. “I was reporting business news on TV in Montreal.”

And now you’re sweeping up cigarette butts with a flip-top shovel. What did they fire you for? Valerie wondered.

“This spring, I have taken congé exceptionnelle—”

“Leave of absence,” she said to him. She was doing a minor in French, but she knew zero about the indépendentistes or the extremists who called themselves the Front de Libération Québequoise. Yet she could feel a rumbling in his words — an intimation of something about to happen, an explosion, people running from a collapsing ceiling, buckling walls, wires dangling in a mass of rubble and shattered glass, the chaotic floor of an office filled with smoke.

“In the Montreal Stock Exchange, a bomb went off,” Gerard began. He spoke in a quiet, measured voice, as if he were giving testimony in court, as if a tape recorder were running. “I was there when it happened. My brother was thrown by the force of the bomb on the trading floor. He hurt his back.”

“I read about it in the Times,” said Matt.

It had happened in 1969, over a year earlier — an attack that drew ambulances, firemen, police; the ticker-tape machine jammed and spewing out the soybean futures report; a bomb that hit a bank of telephones under the visitors’ gallery — the traders’ lines to Wall Street. It was fortunate that the New York Stock Exchange was closed that day. No Montreal traders had been working the phones.

“Thank God,” said Gerard, “for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Otherwise my brother would be dead.”

I guess I know why you moved here, Valerie thought. A business reporter in Montreal would have to cover the Stock Exchange. The sight of it must have overwhelmed him.

Yet he’d waited a year before he left work.

As she thought this, all kinds of switchboard circuitry started flashing in the nosybody centre of her brain, telling her to buzz off, beat it, MYOB, take a hike because of the look Gerard turned on her. It wasn’t anguish she saw on his face that evening. It was fright.

***

“You’ve got Frenchie’s batteries charged, is all,” said Matt. “Enough voltage there to burn the house down.”

“C’mon, Matt, you’re in J-school. Where the hell’s your Snoopy gene?”

“Huh?”

“Aren’t you curious about this place? What the hell’s going on?”

“You mean with Gerard?” Matt calmed down like a boiling kettle that had just been removed from the heat.

“Why did he wait a year to take a leave of absence?”

Matt shrugged. “Maybe it took a year to hit him.”

“A bomb in the Stock Exchange? It would have caught up with him faster than that.”

“Nuh-uh. Remember what our dads went through. It was years before it got to them.”

“This is different,” said Valerie. She just couldn’t say how.