Serafim and Claire Read Free Page B

underhanded threat she had been prepared to make to Dr. Bertrand. It was a threat she had rehearsed but couldn’t quite remember if she’d delivered. It was a sly implication of how she knew exactly what he’d done for her brother; and how he could go to prison for it. Other doctors certainly had, while Dr. Bertrand remained a free man, untarnished and unapologetic.
    She could remember perfectly the feeling in the city that day. Music, the mayhem of mass celebration, the streets of Montreal roiling in dance, bells, singing, the clatter of pots and pans, horns, comet-like streamers tailing through the air above the streetcar wires and landing amid a brass-band frenzy.
    For Claire, dancing with Dr. Bertrand the day of the false armistice was only the end of this memory song. The beginning, like most controversial things, featured her grandmother.
    Claire’s paternal grandmother was an eccentric. She had been widowed early, and had raised Claire’s father by scraping by on what little money her husband had left behind. She read voraciously, blasphemed at will, and every year she lived she’d become less and less of a believer, first renouncing the sacraments. By the time she’d come to live with her son, his straitlaced wife, and their three children, Claire, Cécile, and Daniel, she had stopped going to church altogether.
    Instead, on the Sabbath, with no one else home, she would shuffle over to the neighbours’ apartment — immigrants from France, and non-believers as well — where she would sip cognac on their terrace, discussing books, news, and politics. It was unheard of, scandalous even. But what tipped her scale into the realm of eccentricity was how unashamed she was. “ Je m’en fous ,” she would say, whenever Claire’s father or mother challenged her to consider what other people might say about the things she did or didn’t do. “If you do come across someone who has issue with me,” her grandmother would calmly say, “tell them that I am always right here. They are more than welcome to discuss their qualms, with me, to my face.” At which point she would retire to her boudoir, and close the door conclusively behind her.
    Her grandmother’s boudoir was a tiny room filled with sofas, as well as a rocking chair and an anniversary clock that didn’t keep time so well. Several small paintings — rollingly idyllic Quebec landscapes — adorned the walls, interrupted by a window that looked out onto the dreary brick partition of the next apartment. It was a room designated for the women in the house to sit in quietly with their needlework, but it was really only used by Claire’s grandmother for reading, and for “poisoning her granddaughters,” as Claire’s mother liked to say, “with her audacious ideas.”
    Claire and Cécile adored their grandmother. Once the door to the boudoir was closed, she was easily distracted from her reading and took a genuine interest in the girls and their fantastical whims and play worlds. She would gently clap and hum a tune and Claire would dance and spin on the rectangle of a second-hand rug in the centre of the room, which acted as a padded stage. She would endlessly reread the same fairy tales and stories to Cécile, who learned the words by heart and would mouth them as they were being read, her legs draped over her grandmother’s lap, enveloped by her large arms, as a wrinkled hand was lifted to lick a finger for turning the page.
    When Claire’s grandmother first moved into their apartment, in 1910, Claire was seven, Cécile ten, and Daniel fourteen. That same year, a man named Henri Bourassa started up the newspaper Le Devoir , which had a liberal, anti-imperialist, intellectual tilt, and of which Claire’s grandmother became an instant disciple. Its daily reading was the only thing she did religiously. But the next two years saw her sight, already