Feel This

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Art by John Stezaker. The doorbell rang as we were sitting down. A maid went to answer, and a few moments later my brother walked into the dining room. He had been overseas three years. We all thought he was in Africa.

I’m sure Daddy sensed trouble right away. This was July 1944. You don’t expect a soldier — an airman — to come home from the war unannounced, not when the war’s still on. Jack had joined the air force as an enlisted man because he had wanted to get overseas fast. He’d shipped out when most of the boys we knew were still at training camp in Ontario, and the last we’d heard from him he was in Gambia. Now he was home. Maybe it meant the war was nearly over. I ran to telephone my sister Margo, who ran a canteen for servicemen at Windsor Station. Margo hadn’t heard from her husband, Johnny Taschereau, since D-Day, and every time the phone rang or an unfamiliar car drew up outside the house, we all felt sick to our stomachs. We didn’t talk to each other about it — we believed it was weak and ill bred to talk about things we were afraid or ashamed of. Silence was strength. Talk demonstrated a lack of faith, and was unnecessary besides. God already knew everything we were feeling, and that ought to be enough.

At first, Margo thought I was calling to say there’d been a letter from Johnny Taschereau. I told her about Jack, and she promised to grab a cab as soon as she could get away.

In the dining room, Jack was telling them about flying across the Atlantic from Prestwick, Scotland, in a B-17. I knew it was rare for enlisted men to rate air transport. Most passengers on the bombers were vips, generals, or politicians.

“Are you on leave?”

“Unofficial leave. Supposed to report to base in Ottawa, but I hooked a cab at the airport.”

I could tell from the thrust of his jaw that Daddy didn’t like the sound of “unofficial,” but he didn’t say anything. Since D-Day, there had been an atmosphere of tension and dread in the house, because Johnny Taschereau’s regiment was almost certainly in France, and the casualty lists in the Montreal Star were longer every day. Jack had been away for so long by then that he wasn’t in our thoughts in quite the same way, and anyway West Africa had seemed a long way away from the fighting.

I could see Daddy at the head of the table, light from the chandelier blinking in his spectacles like semaphore code. His eyes were fixed on Jack, and I guess he was wondering why his son had flown home across the ocean, and whether he was in some kind of trouble.

We heard the cab pulling up outside, and my brother went to meet Margo. They were the two eldest and had always been close. Whenever Daddy had one of his spells, it was always Jack or Margo who would be sent down to New York City to bring him home.

Spells always began with Daddy saying he was going away on a business trip to Detroit, Boston, or Quebec City. Then Mother wouldn’t hear from him for a week or so. Then the telephone call came, always from an assistant manager in some large New York hotel. They sounded embarrassed, reluctant to spill secrets, but it was always the same story. A do not disturb sign had hung on Daddy’s door for four or five days before the chambermaids finally entered and found him passed out across the bed or on the floor, surrounded by empty Powers Irish whiskey bottles, with the windows shut and all the ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts.