Archibald Samuel: Arvida

ARVIDA I

My grandmother, mother of my father, often said:

“There are no thieves in Arvida.”

For a long time, it’s true, there were only good people in Arvida. Honest and industrious Catholics, and the Protestant owners and managers of the aluminum plant, who were basically, if you could believe my father, good human beings. You could leave your tools lying around in the garage. You could leave car doors unlocked and house doors open.

There was a very beautiful photo from after the war, which was, like all beautiful photos, an empty picture, with practically nothing in it and everything outside it. In it, a dozen bicycles were strewn over the lawn in front of the clinic. Outside the photo, in the building’s basement, children were lined up before a large white curtain, waiting to be vaccinated against polio. Outside the photo, the few times I saw it, my grandmother pressed her finger down on it, saying:

“You see? There are no thieves in Arvida.”

That’s what she said all her life, my grandmother, mother of my father. Except for about twenty years when, from time to time, she looked at my father and said:

“There were no thieves in Arvida. Now there’s you.”

*

It’s true that almost all the family stories relating to my father were tales of larceny. Including the very first. At the age of three my father was overwhelmed for the very first time by desire for the giant May Wests beckoning from the baker’s basket. They were called Mae Wests then, after the actress. Vachon kept this spelling until Mae West’s estate sent them a legal letter, in 1980. May Wests cost five cents, and the family budget did not allow for this kind of extravagance. After being told no by his mother a good dozen times, my father decided to change his strategy.

A bit later that year, my Aunt Lise received fifteen cents from her godmother Monique for her birthday. One morning, while his mother was dealing with the baker, my father entered the girls’ room and stole the money from their chest of drawers. He went downstairs on tiptoe, snuck outside without his mother seeing, and hid behind a tree. When the baker went to get back in his truck, my father came out of hiding and intercepted him, hanging onto his legs.

He opened his hand and held out fifteen cents.

“My mother forgot to give you this.”

“What for?”

“Some May Wests.”

“What you have there would give you three big May Wests.”

“It was my birthday this week.”

“How old are you?”

“Ten.”

The baker knew perfectly well that my father was lying about his age and everything else. But he’d seen the little man drooling over his basket for so long that he didn’t want to play the policeman. He sold him the cakes. My father went and hid himself away in the shadows under the porch. He crouched down among the dry leaves and the rotten boards along with the spiders and centipedes. In no time at all he devoured the May Wests, taking huge mouthfuls, like a starving creature that had had nothing to eat all winter.

When his mother began calling him he went into the house, certain of having perpetrated the perfect crime, until she asked him why he had chocolate all over his face and even in his hair. He spent the entire afternoon in solitary confinement, and was freed only once, to give rein to a colossal diarrhea. So began a long series of weeks that my father spent in his penitential bedroom.

On another occasion, my grandmother had bought a box of factory-made cakes for Sunday supper. That seems a bit gauche today, to serve that kind of dessert to the whole family plus two or three priests. But it wasn’t at the time, in the mid-sixties, when even in families as traditional as that of my grandparents there reigned a fascination for all things modern. It was a cardboard box with a diamond-shaped film of transparent plastic in the lower right corner, through which you could glimpse the whipped cream topping and little caramel coulis of a Saint-Joseph cake pre-cut into individual portions. Flushed with pride, my grandmother set the object down on the table and raised the lid, only to discover, at the same time as her guests, and to her own stupefaction, that the whole cake had been eaten except for the pitiful portion visible through the plastic. She might have torn my father limb from limb, but he had already fled, and was roaming the Arvida streets on his bicycle. As usual, when he knew that he wouldn’t be leaving his room for quite a while, he rode very slowly through the town, taking in his favourite sights: the baseball park on Rue Castner, the two coulees where he went with his brothers to toss rocks at skunks, and the spacious no man’s lands near the Alcan factory where he practised his golf shots. He gazed on them and touched them with his child’s hands long enough to be able to inhabit them in his imagination during the weeks his sentence would last.

My father told dozens of stories like that. I thought for a long time that this litany of stolen treats and confiscated desserts had something Proustian about it.

Only later did I see how wrong I was.

When I was an adolescent myself, my father would sit at the head of the table and pass his time conveying an unlit cigarette from his mouth to a pristine ashtray. He drank a little wine, constantly refilling his half-empty glass. He didn’t eat. He sat there, his legs crossed and his shoulders bowed, staring at us thoughtfully.

“You’re not eating?” Nadia asked him.

“Eat. I’ll eat afterwards.”

When everyone had finished, he lit his cigarette. Often, he didn’t eat at all. For a long time Nadia, my brother, and I, wondered why he did that. We couldn’t explain it because Nadia was an excellent cook. The devil only knows if he did it on purpose, but my father contrived to have Nadia live her life surrounded by enough cooking pots for twenty grandmothers. It’s often thought that men choose younger women so as not to have to deal with those who are mature. There’s some truth in that, but real life has its way with these men just as it does with all others. In many respects, young women are the scourge God invented to punish men who prefer young women.1

Nadia was just out of adolescence when she became part of my father’s life, and he himself was a belated adolescent of thirty years and a bit, but over the years she became a woman, her own woman, very different from and often the diametric opposite of what my father would have wished her to be. But in the kitchen she was the amalgam of all the women my father had known. Who knows whether he’d planned it that way, but the evidence is there. Since he was small he’d always behaved as if he had a plan in mind. Whenever he ate something good, he showered his hostess with compliments, so as to get the recipe. My father knows that women accomplish and become what they want, but he also knows that at certain times women are not their own creatures, and that flattery is the best way to induce that state.

The devil only knows how he did it, but ten years after having met my father, Nadia had become a fabulous cook, haunted by the ghosts of dozens of women she had never known. She made extraordinarily good meals, and David and I told her so often, as did my father, after supper, walking the streets of Arvida.

“The first course was delicious.”

“That was Mrs. Whitney’s recipe. She was our neighbour when I was little, before Reynolds hired Mr. Whitney and they moved to Pittsburgh.”

“And the main course?”

“Your grandmother’s recipe.”

“Your mother?”

“No. The mother of your mother. Éliane.”

And yet, after the world had blessed him with the sum of all the cooks in his life, he sometimes never even touched his plate, or put anything on it. We saw this during the holidays, when I was visiting. I hadn’t been back to Arvida very often since my leaving six years earlier, and I hadn’t seen my father on a hunger strike for years. It may have been a reunion, but my father, at the head of the table, watched us eat in silence, sipping two fingers of wine from a water glass.