CHANGES, ALWAYS CHANGES
(Chapter 1 of the novella His North Star)
“What do you mean?” he raised his voice to reach his mother. She had not followed him into the room where she wanted her winter clothing stored on the shelf in the closet. He had taken down a box which was fairly light and had placed it on a chair. The room had been his when he was a boy, but it didn’t look anything like it did then.
He and Henri Breton, on those afternoons when his parents were working, had played in that room, and it was there he had begun to learn the joys of a male body. Henri and he had dated girls at the same time, and then later they had both married. He saw Henri around town, but they were no longer friends. They had grown into different lives. With Henri, it had only been playing; there was no personal attraction—just availability. “Attraction” wasn’t even on their radar screen—not that they said “radar screen” then.
“What do you mean?” Roger repeated. It was as if he had heard wrong, but of course, he knew he had not. She had actually said that word. It had startled him to hear his mother speaking this way. When his son Charles, who was only five at the time, had used the “f” word, he and his wife Simonne had found it humorous—but, of course, they hadn’t let on. They didn’t want Charles speaking that way in front of his grandmother, but Charles’s mémère was speaking that way herself now. Roger had never heard his mother Adèle speak like this—never—so that, when she called the new curate at St. Peter and St. Paul’s an “asshole,” he wanted to laugh but he did not.
“Why would you say that?” he asked, taking a second box down and placing it on the couch as she had asked him to. “He seems a nice enough young man to me.” Then, he lifted the ready boxes of winter clothes to the closet shelf.
Adèle did not answer his second question any more than she had his first.
Once, Henri and he had finished fondling each other and were dressing when they heard his father coming home early—something about not feeling well.
The room had been painted since then as had the kitchen. He especially liked the change in the kitchen. The bright yellow was now a soft green.
Sitting in her rocking chair, looking over the tenement roofs, Adèle was staring at the spires of the church that was the focus of her anger.
“Ma, it’s late June! Why didn’t you ask me to help you sooner?”
“You’re so busy. It’s been a cold June anyway.”
“I’m not too busy to help my mother.”
“Well, it’s done.” She turned again from Roger to the window. Late at night, when she walked into the kitchen and stood at one of the windows, she saw the immense hulk of the basilica. She knew God was everywhere, not just in the church, but the church was all set up to talk to God, wasn’t it?
The apartment had been her grandparents’. She had visited them there often as a girl. Not that it had been passed down in a direct line but that, years later, when she was newly married—that was in 1952—and she and Bert were looking for an apartment, they had found her grandparents’ place for rent. That had been over six decades earlier, and she still lived in the apartment. It wasn’t that she had lived in the same place all those years that so much amazed Roger as that she had only rented—that is, she and his father could have paid a mortgage several times over with what they had paid in rent.
“Back then, my mother would give me a nickel to drop in the collection basket for the building fund. We only had the lower church then.”
“So they build the church on nickels and dimes?”
He knew the story but he was letting his mother tell it again.
“French people built it with their nickels and dimes, and now they are taking our language away.”
“So that’s why you’re calling Father D’Amboise an “asshole?” What’s he got to do with the English mass?”
“He comes in and thinks he can change everything. Who does he think he is?”
“You don’t know it was him.”
“He makes the four-o’clock mass on Saturday into another English mass. Now they have the four o’clock and the seven. We’re left with just the eight-o’clock Sunday mass. That’s it—eight o’clock! That’s all we have left. What if I don’t want to get up in time to go to the eight o’clock?”
“Ma, you’re always up in time for the eight o’clock. You’d be up in enough time if the French mass were at six o’clock.”
“And when are the kids supposed to hear French? You think they’re going to get up on Sundays for eight?”
“Ma, the kids don’t speak French like we did.”
“Of course not. They’re not up at eight, are they!” Shaking her head, she muttered, “Asshole.”
There she was saying the “a” word again. The third time. How had she permitted herself to use such a word when, his entire life, he had never heard her say something like that! And it wasn’t only the word that bothered him. Intransigence, of late, dominated her thinking and made it difficult to converse with her. Where had that, too, come from?
The new curate, Father D’Amboise, was a handsome, young man—“why waste good looks like that,” Roger thought, “on a celibate!”—who had been ordained just the year before. It did not seem likely that the pastor would have given him the power to “change everything.” Admittedly, the changeover of the four-o’clock Mass from French to English had occurred soon after he arrived, but was that really a causal link? Wouldn’t the change be the pastor’s doing? Or, perhaps the bishop’s? The bishop was Irish—they were always Irish. What did an Irish bishop care about a French Mass?
“Father D’Amboise seems nice enough to me,” Roger offered again, and as soon as he had said “nice enough,” he realized that the words would inflame her.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t go to church so you don’t have to put up with all the changes he’s made.”
It was true he did not go to church anymore except to take her. When the weather was good, she would walk, or often when it wasn’t, someone would stop by to take her. But, there were days when it was too cold or it was raining or snowing and no one she knew could take her. If she called him, he always said oui and came over to drive her the few blocks. It was really not difficult for him to come into town to ensure that she did not venture out over icy sidewalks or catch a cold in frigid weather.
Since his father had died, it gave her pleasure to have Roger with her. Often, he sat next to her at mass and he imagined she fantasized it was a first step to his coming back to church—which was not going to happen. It was simply easier, especially in the winter, for him to stay than to go off and really not have enough time to do anything before coming back to fetch her.
Now with her husband Bertrand gone, Adèle leaned on Roger. She was usually quite independent, but when she needed help, there was only him.
Her rent was affixed to a government program wherein she paid a percentage of her income. It was something he had managed to enroll her in. He himself owned his home—something his father had referred to enviously. Now that the children were gone—Charles, the youngest, had graduated from college the previous year and had an apartment in Portland—the house was bigger than what he and Simonne needed. There would be plenty of room for his mother were she to live with them—plenty of room even on the first floor where he had an extra room—two, really, if he counted his office which he could move.
Simonne said she was okay with Adèle moving in with them, but he held back from asking his mother if that was something she wanted to do. Well, he held back on a lot of things. Opening up to Simonne, for instance! But, he was not ready to go there, to live what opening up to the truth might entail.
His father had been proud that Roger had gone to college and had become a teacher. His father had worked in the mills that had dominated the city. He might have done something else had the times been different for him, but they had not been different, and so he had taken pride that Roger had done something he himself had not. All those years working on the second shift to enable Roger to fulfill his ambitions!
When Roger looked at his mother’ face, looked beneath the wrinkles, he could see the woman she had once been. Although he had never known her when she was young, he imagined he could see her before the time she had become his mother. That was a long time ago. He was forty-nine now.
The late June morning she called the new curate an “asshole” was a weekday. He could be at his mother’s house on such a morning because the school year was done with. That morning, he had dropped by the school to pick up accumulated mail which he was expected to fetch regularly as history department head. He had been on staff for years and planned to continue to teach until he retired. He enjoyed working with students. Not all of them, of course—he had his share of the ones who didn’t want to work and the ones who complained about “why do we have to learn this ‘shit’!”—but he enjoyed being with enough of his students to make the effort mostly a pleasure. He loved it when those kids who understood the opportunity they were being given saw something beyond the facts—beyond the names and the dates—of history and grasped some of what he considered the essence of his subject—how history repeats itself even if it features apparent differences, how history can be affected by decisions of important people like Louis XV who made terrible decisions that let the British have Canada and of the masses of people rising up to say, “Enough is enough!” as the people of France had in 1789.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This was the tri-partite drama that history was always playing, the drama of constant change. When his engaged students got it, their “aha!” moments energized him.
Of course, he loved the summers off, too. Not that he did anything special—and that was all right. This summer, he was taking it easy. He would be in nominal charge of keeping an eye on the construction of the sunroom Simonne had wanted for a long time. The previous winter, she had cut out a lot of magazine pictures and gone searching on the Internet for more ideas and had printed out photos of features she wanted and then had bought design software. Finally, a building plan had emerged—a plan with a schedule and a room design. She wasn’t a real estate agent for nothing!
So, that was his summer task—to oversee the carpenters who would do the work. Not much of a task. The company they chose was led by two men who each worked with a helper. In the spring, Simonne and he had met with one of the partners, an overweight man, who scheduled himself to do the work but later they had received a call saying it would be the other company partner who would be coming to build the sunroom with his helper. Something about a job overrun occupying the first man’s attention. Simonne and Roger had been assured that the new team—the partner and his helper—was experienced and would deliver the sunroom they wanted. The unknown partner—the new man—had come by one evening—impromptu—to meet with them, but Roger had been out and so Simonne had handled the meeting. She said she felt good about the new man and had seen no need to have him come back to talk with Roger. Wasn’t it ok to have signed him on?
Roger, who would be at home all summer, was asked to check in on the men every once in a while, to keep them feeling they were being supervised—like when the kids were little and you wanted them to know you could drop in on them at any moment so they better be on their best behavior. That was his summer “job.”
The cement footing for the room had already been laid and had, as the workmen from the foundation company said, been “cured.” Materials had been delivered—boards, beams for joists, plywood—and were under blue tarps in the yard, ready for the construction crew. The carpenters themselves were starting that day after lunch.
Simonne always said she envied his summers, but she had her own real estate agency now and she loved the independence and the wheeler-dealing. Who would have guessed she would be good at this? She loved being her own boss so much he doubted she would trade the independence she had—even for summers off.
After leaving his mother, Roger drove to the grocery store. Not that he needed anything much, but he was getting into cooking and he had to pick up sundry ingredients for several recipes. Odd about how, after so many years of Simonne doing the cooking and her insistence that she do it because it had to be “done right,” he had picked up on preparing meals. She no longer objected to his cooking as she had for years. No, now that her agency took up so much of her time, she was pleased to come home to a meal. Cooking gave him a strong sense of creativity. Of autonomy. Strange that his life now called for autonomy from Simonne, and it should be cooking that was leading the way for him.
Simonne was respectful of his needs and wants. But, the changes he was experiencing were beyond what he had ever been able to share with her. He was distancing from her, not willing—or perhaps that was not ready—to reveal his awakening. He was sure he was in danger of giving himself away, somehow, as it had become evident when, in adolescence, hair had begun to show on his upper lip and chin that something was going on inside his teenage body. He half hoped he would be that evident so that, as his father had, Simonne would realize something was going on. It would be easier to speak to her if this were the case, wouldn’t it? In the past, he had shared so much with her. When she had said about a project he wanted to undertake, “Roger, I’ll support you if this is what you really want,” her words had been a balm on any worry. Now he was sad that asking for her input would be inappropriate. Well, what kind of support could he expect from a wife for what he was experiencing!
After visiting with his mother, Roger wanted a sort of transition. Her anger seemed futile, a child-like reaction, and it had depressed him. He found lurking in his mind the thought, “She is in a new place in her aging,” but he did not want to acknowledge this just yet. If they were entering a new stage with her, what would that be like? As an only child, it fell on him to take care of his mother. Simonne, of course, would consider herself a part of the “we” who would measure up, but he was reluctant to ask her to. After years of raising children and working “secure” jobs, she had her business and her new interests.
When his mother had called Father D’Amboise an “asshole,” she had been serious. This French mass thing had really riled her! The man seemed pleasant enough—and handsome. A nice body, too.
A stop at the grocery store would change his reference point. It was like what Madeleine Côté did with her French class. She would play French-language music as the kids walked into her room. It was her way of transitioning them from the anglophone environment of their day into the francophone experience she had prepared for them . Grocery shopping would be that sort of interlude for him. Then, in a short while, he would be ready for the bustle of the construction site—as he thought regretfully of what was his usually quiet home.
The sunroom was Simonne’s idea. In some way, it was a good choice to create a room that would bring a bit of summer—sun—into their home all year long, but they really didn’t need the space. Sometimes now, he wondered what Simonne was thinking. Is that why he didn’t want to go home: was the sunroom a reminder of how their goals now seemed different from each other’s? Or was it he who was different?
This week, different men would lay the joists on the cement foundation that had been poured the previous week and, over that, the plywood subflooring. He wasn’t looking forward to the movement, to the hubbub, the shouting of instructions, the construction would generate.
Meanwhile, Roger needed matches and honey, as well as olive oil and butter, and he was almost at the honey shelf when he looked down the aisle to see a woman about his age or possibly younger than his forty-nine years—it was hard to tell with women sometimes because they dyed their hair. She was attractive enough and well put together. The woman smiled at him. She seemed to be saying, “I’m finding you attractive. I could be interested if you could be.”
He smiled back what he presumed to be a friendly, “Thank you, but I’m not,” and having placed the honey in his shopping bag, he moved on.
He was not interested in this play between men and women. He even had to acknowledge he even had a lack of interest in being sexual—somehow some visceral connection with Simonne had cooled. Simonne was a very good woman. He loved her, but the thought also arose that his loving—was he willing to go this far in his thinking?—had become “in a brotherly way.” Was it possible he loved her but was no longer “in love” with her? Do people leave their wives of almost twenty-eight years because they are no longer “in love?” How could he speak with her about it: he didn’t know himself what was happening! Would she be angry, blaming, and hold on to him if he spoke? Or, would she say, “I feel the same way?” Somehow, he suspected she would not say that.
You hear about couples, he thought, who say they stayed together—miserable as they were—for the kids. That was not what he felt at all. He was not miserable. When the kids were little or even when they had been less little, he had enjoyed being Simonne’s husband. It had been good, but now the kids were grown up. Was the habit of being together the thing keeping Simonne and him as a couple? But, was there anything wrong with “the habit of being together?”
There were two aisles devoted to household items. Were matches more likely to be with the soaps and powders or with the dustpans and pots? He decided on the dustpans and pots. Walking down the aisle, he scrutinized the shelves and was almost to the end when a man, his size, wearing a t-shirt that was like a skin over his chest, a chest that made Roger think “hirsute,” turned into the aisle.
The curve in the crotch of the man’s shorts caught Roger’s attention. This much had changed. He had given himself permission to look at men’s bulges, but even so, his eyes moved away before the man could notice what Roger was doing.
“Can I help you find something?” he heard the woman who had smiled earlier ask. She was in back of him, and he smiled back and said, “I’m looking for matches.”
She pointed to where the matches were but did not engage him in conversation for which he was relieved. He knew what he was interested in, thought about a lot, and it was not another woman. He had Simonne for that.
When he got home, the two carpenters were already there, lifting joists to set them in place. There was now a lineup of joists, one next to the other on the foundation walls. They would be spaced evenly, of course, but that was for later. The older man was a bit heavy and somewhat slower while the other, who was perhaps Roger’s age, was lean and muscular. His chest and arms pushed against his T-shirt so that, like the man’s in the store, the shirt was like a skin that clung to his chest, Roger thought, as he went up to them to introduce himself. The muscular man stopped his work to acknowledge Roger. It was hard to imagine, after working all day as a handler of heavy materials, that this man would go to the gym, but the body of the carpenter whose name was Jack certainly gave the impression of “gym.”
As he shelved his groceries in the kitchen, Roger admired, through the window that would soon be removed for an archway into the sunroom, the man’s upper arms and pectorals.
“Nice.”