4   10 May 87   The school year is drawing to a close, only a month to go. Both B & D seem to be content at NAA. Betty is at the junior campus (Sec. I and II) and has made lots of friends; Amy Kenner is one of them, though not among the closest. Daniel is happy to be studying German and to be going to school again with Harvey after all these years. His teachers in the French schools used to call him un solitaire, a loner, but of course they didn’t know that he had an old friend outside of school. He seems to have made some new friends too, but he hasn’t talked about them yet. Girls? I don’t know. This time it is three months, my journal, since my last entry. I am sorry, my journal, that I am not the constant writer that I had set out to be. A doctor who is the single mother of two adolescents can get quite busy and so neglect her journal. And besides, as Tina has often told me, constancy was never my greatest virtue. And, to be frank, my journal, I no longer feel that I need you for the original purpose. That is, after living for a year with two anglophone kids I no longer find myself translating from French. On the contrary, in my practice I sometimes find myself, with francophone patients, translating from English into French. Our relationship, then, my dear journal, is no longer one of necessity but of choice. Are you cool with that? But today, my dear journal, I have to confide in you. This morning Daniel blew my mind. We were talking about vacations, and he proposed that we go to the Magdalen Islands again. We were there last in 83. And why does that blow my mind? Because George Kenner will be there for the summer, as he has for the last two years. Alone. Working at the medical centre during the tourist season. Betty is eager to go. She will get a chance to wear a bikini. She is not quite thirteen, and she already has breasts bigger than mine. (Which is not saying much. Don’t get me wrong, my journal. I love my breasts. A number of men have told me that they are small but perfect. Or at least they did when my breasts were younger. End of digression.) She has been developing so rapidly that for a while I worried about VBH. At first she could wear my bras; she enjoyed wearing the more revealing ones, even though she wore high-necked tops over them, but since March she nee has needed her own. She knows that there is no point in getting expensive bras while she is still growing. But a bikini is another matter. Yes, George. Knowing him, there will be no stopping him from going after me, kids or no kids. What shall I do? Maybe it’s time to stop hiding them my personal life from them. I would not go so far as to have Tina over to the house, or even introduce them to her. Tina understands. She knew me in the days before Miki. She knew the wild Mireille Bouchard. (She was even wilder. When she was 18 she went to see The Doors in Toronto, hung out with them, and, as she likes to say, she “fucked Jim fucking Morrison.”) And she likes to talk, and will say anything that pops into her head. She knew me with Jean-Marc. She kept up with Jean-Marc for a while longer. And she is the one who told me in February that Jean-Marc was dead. February? Yes, it was when I took Betty to Amy’s 13th birthday party and then went over to Tina’s. Tina lives near the Kenners. She also told me that Jean-Marc, on his deathbed, ordered all of his artwork destroyed, except of course whatever had been bought by private collectors. I suppose that the portrait that he painted of me, which I returned to him the last time I saw him, was also destroyed. Later I had dreams about Jean-Marc. Recurrent dreams. Always about that last time with him. And each time I woke up frightened. Why? Better not to dwell on it. By now I haven’t dreamt about Jean-Marc in almost a month. Better to think about George. And about Daniel. He is still not showing any sexual interest. He is so handsome, like Miki and yet different. The girls at NAA must be panting for him. Or does he have a personal life that he is hiding from me? Is that what he learned from me? Then I must change. I will not hide George from them. Or rather: I will not hide myself, and my attraction to George, from them. Some day I may even tell them about Sam. But about Jean-Marc? Probably never, my journal. Good night. Magdalen Islands   Early in May Daniel received a long letter from Brigitte, written on beautifully printed personal stationery. In it she apologized for not having had enough time, during their encounter in New York, to tell him as much about his father as she would have liked, and promised that she would make up for it in letters, beginning with this one. This letter was a summary chronology of her life, before Miki and with him. She and her older sister Renate were born in Breslau, which is now Polish. Their father, who was a quarter-Jew, was a soldier who fell on the Eastern Front. After the war Brigitte, Renate and their mother made their way, with some difficulties, to West Germany and settled in the pretty resort town of Bad Harzburg. This was where she met Miki Wilner, who was living there with his uncle Leon, first in high school – in French class – and then at her house when he began to study piano with her mother. When Miki came back from Israel Leon was living in Hanover and was about to move to Canada with Fela. About the same time Renate had moved to Frankfurt to be with her boyfriend Jürgen, and Miki moved into Renate’s room. When Brigitte finished high school she moved to Hanover to go the drama school, but Miki had to stay in high school for another year in order to get the Abitur so that he could go to the University of Göttingen. For three years Brigitte and Miki lived apart, but saw each other very often because Hanover, Göttingen and Bad Harzburg are close to one another. They began living together, and got married, in 1956 when they moved to Frankfurt for a year, Brigitte for a television acting job and Miki to study at the university there. (In Germany, she explained parenthetically, it is quite common for students to move from one university to another.) Then they moved to Hamburg for a year, Göttingen for another two years – Brigitte worked in two different theaters and made her first film there – and finally, in 1960 to Hamburg for good, except for half a year in Berlin, in 1963-64, when Brigitte played Lois Lane in a long run of Kiss Me Kate. The envelope also contained a photograph on glossy newsprint, clipped from a magazine dated August 1964, of Brigitte Wilner and her husband Michael strolling hand in hand on the beach on Norderney. Brigitte was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, completely shading her face, with wisps of her blond hair peering from underneath, and a transparent white mesh robe over a gold bikini. She looked spectacularly sexy. Miki wore a kind of Greek fisherman’s cap, a light-blue short-sleeved shirt and navy-blue shorts. Seven or eight years separated this image from the more recent ones that Daniel knew (except for one of sixteen-year-old Miki at Fela’s), but the difference was slight. The photograph, together with Brigitte’s reminiscences about their Norderney vacations, inspired in Daniel a yen for an island vacation that summer. He proposed to his mother – without mentioning the inspiration – that they go to the Magdalen Islands, where they had been four years before. He felt sure that Zoë, who was about to turn thirteen and was filling out nicely, would appreciate the opportunity of displaying her newly womanly body in a bikini. His hunch was right, and before long his sister was chanting, “Ya ya! Amen! Let’s go to Îles de la Madeleine!” Their mother hesitated for a brief moment, but in the end had no objection. Mireille, only a few years older than Brigitte in the photograph, would also look good in a bikini. She said that she would negotiate with her clinic colleagues to get at least three weeks off in July. Daniel finished the school year with a cumulative percentage of 93.9 (96 in German), which according to Ms. Casey was the equivalent of an A for the purposes of admission to an American university. His letter grades were of course all A, but in Canada, or at least in Quebec, anything over 80 qualifies as an A.   After their first afternoon on the beach of Havre-aux-Maisons Island, with the sun shining and the breeze blowing on the wonderful surf and sand, brother and sister were walking back to the hotel; their mother had preceded them in order to change for dinner. “That was a great idea, coming here,” Zoë said. “What inspired you?” “I’ll show you when we get back to our room.” And, in the room that they shared (as always on their vacations), he showed her the photograph of their father and Brigitte on Norderney. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Papa and Brigitte, his first wife. You know about her.” Zoë smirked. “Who’s papa?” “What are you talking about? You don’t know who it is?” “I meant whose papa? Yours? I don’t think of him as my father. There are no pictures of him and me. I know he made love with maman and I was born, but he died and never knew me. As far as I’m concerned I have no papa. I know maman talks about him as ton papa when she talks to you, but not to me.” He felt speechless. Not only did his sister sound angry, but for the first time in his experience she sounded like an angry young woman, not an angry little girl. He suddenly felt uncomfortable about sharing a room with her. This would be the last time, he decided, knowing now that they could afford separate rooms. “Maman has been talking about how obsessed you’ve become with your father,” Zoë went on, more softly this time. “It’s not that she minds – I don’t know – but when she talks to me about it, it’s always son papa, ‘his father,’ not ‘your father’ or votre papa. I once said to her, ‘Isn’t he my father too?’ And she just laughed and said, biologiquement, bien sûr.” Daniel felt was thoroughly confused. It was his first more-or-less-adult conversation with his sister, and it had him on the defensive. Then he thought of a way out. “Did she ever tell you about the money?” he asked. “Money? What money?” “She just told me about it last December, when I came back from New York. Our father left us quite a bit of money; we’re pretty rich. I never thought about us like that, but maman told me that with her income as a Canadian doctor we could never live the way we do. Anyway, in his will he left one-third of it to his widow, and two-thirds to his offspring, but at that time his offspring was only me, and no one expected another child, so only my name was put into the will, and there was no provision for you.” “I was an accident, huh?” “I guess so.” “So? That just proves what I was saying.” “But I don’t agree, and when I’m eighteen I’m going to write half of my share over to you.” “Really?” “Sure. You’re my sister, not half-sister. That means you’re our father’s daughter, and just because someone made a mistake because they wrote the will in a hurry doesn’t mean you have to suffer.” “But… when you’re eighteen, that’s only a little more than two years from now! So I’ll be rich when I’m fifteen?” “The money will belong to you, but maman will be in charge of it until you’re eighteen, just like she is for me.” “Wow!” was all that Zoë could manage to say. Daniel felt a sense of triumph. Just then Mireille knocked on their door. It was time for dinner. The restaurant was a few doors away from the hotel. As they walked in, a man who was seated at a table set for four waved at them. Mireille waved back. “Kids,” she said, “we are going to have dinner with a friend of mine, George Kenner.” “You didn’t tell us you had friends here,” Zoë said. “Not friends, just a friend. He’s an ER doctor in Montreal, and he’s spending the summer here, taking care of tourist emergencies.” “Nice work if you can get it,” Daniel sang, accompanying himself on an air guitar as they approached the table. “And you can get it if you try,” George completed as he stood up to greet them. Daniel had the strong impression that his sister and George Kenner were not strangers to each other, though nothing in the dinner conversation, which was mainly about the excellent food, seemed to bear it out. He would ask her about it later.   Back in their room after dinner and a postprandial walk on a beach lit by a very late-setting sun – it didn’t get dark until nine o’clock – Zoë said to Daniel, giddily, “How did you like maman acting all flirty and sexy?” “I don’t know,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Was she?” “Come on! Don’t act dumb!” “Leave me alone,” he said. “Let me read.” And he gave up on asking Zoë if she knew George Kenner. Within a few days it became clear that, whatever George’s relationship with Mireille in Montreal might be, here he was not just a friend. For the first time, perhaps because her children were now formally teenagers, she made no attempt to hide her sexuality from them. In the course of their stay on the islands he joined them for lunch or dinner about half the time. Occasionally he would bring other people with him, and then the conversation would usually be in French, which he spoke quite well. One of his friends was a young doctor with the same name as a famous now-retired hockey player. George said that his doctor friend would one day be just as famous as his namesake, only as a writer. Mireille asked the young doctor what he wrote about. He said that he was working on a novel about the people of Entry Island, who were English and mostly crazy. George was staying in a converted fisherman’s house on Cap-aux-Meules, near the hospital, and about halfway through their stay he gave a party there, for Mireille’s thirty-eighth birthday. After a bilingual singing of Happy Birthday they kissed unabashedly.   On their last morning on the island, George came by with his Land Rover to drive them to the airport. He went into Mireille’s room in order to get her very large suitcase and spent a few minutes alone with her, but after that, until he dropped them off, the grownups’ behavior with each other was like that of casual acquaintances; their good-bye kiss was an exchange of pecks on the cheek. After they walked into the terminal, just before going to the counter to check them in, Mireille said, “Remember, kids, what happened on the islands stays on the islands.” “I wonder what she means,” Daniel said to Zoë, not expecting any elucidation from her. “George Kenner is married,” she said. “I know, because I’m friends with his daughter Amy. She’s in my class.” “You never told me that!” “Sometimes it’s hard to tell you things.” Daniel felt himself blushing and turned inward. After Mireille came back with their boarding passes and they began their walk to the gate, she and Zoë began chatting and giggling like girlfriends; Daniel paid no attention. On the plane they sat next to each other and continuing chatting. Daniel sat next to a heavyset older woman, with his thoughts swirling around the mystery of adult relationships. He was almost sixteen; adulthood was not so far away. When Miki and Brigitte were that age, they were already lovers, and after their reunion he remained faithful to her for eighteen years, despite their separate travels. Dr. George Kenner, on the other hand, fooled around with a widowed colleague. Daniel began to wonder whether they also carried on in Montreal. Willy-nilly, his mother’s sex life had become a subject of rumination for him. And it was more nilly than willy. Questions about boyfriends that Mireille Bouchard may have had before meeting Miki, or lovers after losing him, would timidly enter his conscious mind only to be pushed back. This was different from his curiosity about Miki Wilner’s vie intime avec d’autres que Brigitte et Mireille, and possibly Nili, a curiosity that in all likelihood would never be satisfied except perhaps by accident. For the questions about his mother, the oracle with the answers was right there in his house, and the difficulty lay in asking them. In order to push the questions back into the subconscious he needed to occupy himself. Reading did not work, because almost any allusion, however irrelevant, might set his cognitive gears going. The best way to distract himself in such moments would be, if the weather allowed it, to take his soccer ball into the backyard and dribble it, imagining himself as Maradona on the way to his second goal against England. Or else he would take his guitar down from its hook and practice, first improvising a run similar to one he had recently heard, not necessarily on the guitar and in whatever style – jazz, flamenco, country, blues, even opera (which Mireille often listened to on the radio on Saturdays) – and then repeating it note for note (notatim, as he and Harvey liked to say) endlessly, ever faster, until he could play it without thinking. He had in this way built up a repertoire of runs that he could use once he began to play in a band. Harvey, who had been studying cello for years, had recently taken up the bass guitar, and the two friends had been talking about forming a band once Grade 11 began.