Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

When they were standing next to each other, Grandmother and Marie would always be touching. They always walked down the street with their arms linked. But one chilly afternoon, when Grandmother tried to take her hand, Marie jerked it angrily away. Then when they were in the secrecy of the stairwell up to the apartment, Grandmother tried to kiss Marie. Marie gave her a violent little shove.

“Why do you want to kiss me?” Marie asked. “You spend all day kissing people. You must be exhausted.”

“Why would you say something like that?” Grandmother demanded, helplessly.

“Anyways, I can’t afford it. I know that it’s very expensive to kiss you. I guess that I have no choice but to find somebody who kisses for free.”

“You’re not going to get a boyfriend, are you? You’re not going to let anybody touch you?” Grandmother asked. She was seized by panic.

“Are you nuts? How can you ask me something like that? You let men stick their things in you? And you don’t want me to even hold hands with a boy?”

“It’s not the same.”

“You think I’m wicked and that I have no feelings at all. You think that it doesn’t bother me that you sleep with those men. You think that I have a rock for a heart.”

“Do you want me to stop? I will.”

“What, so then you can mooch off my family again and go around acting like you’re afraid of your own shadow? No, thanks.”

She stormed ahead of Grandmother into the apartment. Grandmother sat down on a step and started to weep in frustration, and her sobs echoed so loudly in the stairwell that it was as though she were a monster. Coming down the stairs, the neighbours stepped nervously around her as though her crying might be contagious. It was so difficult to love Marie. If only she could make Marie happy, then all her problems would go away. Not even the war or the winter would matter.

Grandmother knew that Marie had feelings for her. But she also knew that Marie was ashamed. After they made love one night, Marie sat up in bed and glared at Grandmother angrily.

“This is what you do, isn’t it? You seduce people. You imagine that I’m going to continue doing this filthy thing with you for the rest of your life. Well, you’re wrong. This is disgusting. I can’t wait for the liberation.”

Marie knew that any mention of the end of the occupation bothered Grandmother. She would bring it up every time they were together. Marie said that, once the Germans were out, they were going to serve cake to everyone and give out medals for valorous deeds. She said that there would be fireworks. People would throw their boots into the sea. She said that there would be black jazz players on the roof who would play all night. Marie was even practising some English words in order to make a speech to thank the American soldiers for helping to liberate her country.

For some reason, Grandmother was never included in any of these plans. It was somehow implicit that she wasn’t going to be a part of the festivities. Moreover, Marie seemed to imply that Grandmother would be punished for what she had been up to with German soldiers. Marie informed Grandmother that they would give twelve-page reports on what each citizen had been up to during the war. All the other children would go back to being children, but she didn’t know if she would be allowed to. Where was she going to live? Who would look after her? She had such a bad reputation that nobody would marry her.

Once the war was over, everyone could stop pretending certain things. You could stop pretending that people who hadn’t come home were coming home. Her father wasn’t coming back. She would be homeless. Marie was her only home now. And so time passed.

When the occupation was over, a new sort of terror immediately began. They had to take their aggression out on someone and the Germans were leaving. They couldn’t just go back to ordinary life. They were like a cat that had climbed up on a table and had lapped up a glass of whiskey and was now so drunk that it was taunting dogs. They looked for collaborators to prove that they were not collaborators. They ferreted out the weak to prove that they were strong. They wanted to be good, so they acted in an evil way.

People were going crazy when Charles de Gaulle took over as president. As a form of celebration, people threw tomatoes and rocks at Grandmother as she walked down the street. They called her a whore for having slept with Germans. Her head was shorn, because she had been cornered by a group of men who shaved her hair off. A girl who had fallen in love with a German soldier and had been living with him was tied up and forced to walk down the street naked while three-year-olds screamed at her, calling her a whore.

It was Marie who had turned Grandmother in. As she walked down the street, she held her head high. She didn’t care. Her heart was already broken. They could not touch her.

A year later, Grandfather was still dressed in his Canadian uniform, celebrating the end of the war in the streets of Paris, when he chanced upon her. Grandfather had spent the whole war hoping most of all to stay alive, but also, when he had a moment to daydream, hoping that he might get a chance to see Paris. And here it was, in its wonderful glory. The buildings were so elegant and the cast iron balconies grew on the sides of them like beautiful climbing vines that covered the whole city. Who would imagine that a boy from Saint-Henri in Montreal would find himself here, in the city of culture and refinement?

When he saw Grandmother leaning against a stone wall, it was love at first sight. She was eighteen years old. She had a black top hat perched at an angle on her head. Her hair had grown out since it had been so brutally cut, and it now curled around her earlobes. She was so pretty in her black dress and high-heeled shoes. She had a brand new coat slung over a suitcase that she was carrying in one hand. She was smoking a cigarette with her other and she was the only person in the huge mob who wasn’t smiling. He knew right away that she was a displaced aristocrat. She had ridden out of Paris when it was first occupied in a car with a pile of birdcages, a poodle and three maids. She was the type of girl who could write poems in cursive with a piece of chalk. She knew magical things about forks. There were probably philosophical texts that had been dedicated to her. She was exactly the type of girl that she was before the war. He took her away from France when she asked him to.

And when she was done her story that day, she held up a hand mirror in front of her that had a painting of a rose on the back of it.

“I wonder what Marie would think of me now,” she said. “She wouldn’t be so angry with me. She wouldn’t be jealous of me now. I wonder if her hair is still so dark. It was so pretty. A lot of people didn’t think that she was pretty, but I really thought she was so lovely.”

Grandmother could get lost looking in a mirror and wondering out loud to herself about what Marie was up to, for hours sometimes.

“She must have gotten old just like me. Of course, she would have had to. How strange? We were the same age, you know. She was three days older than me. We both named our cats Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Grandmother was always wondering what on earth had ever happened to the magnificent Marie. After all these years, she still longed to have Marie whispering questions to her in the dark.

“The way that air smells like snow reminds me of Marie. I can’t imagine why.”

She sighed, and we knew that for a moment she had forgotten about my brother and me. This was what had enraged our mother so much when she was young.

You might assume that our grandparents had an unhappy marriage. But Grandfather never seemed to mind coming second place to Marie or that he could never live up to the events that had happened in Grandmother’s past. Grandfather felt that he had pulled a fast one on the world by marrying someone so classy and refined. Naturally she was harder to please than the wives of his friends, but that was because she had much more sophisticated tastes.