Léona

By Guy Gauthier

Lona left her husband behind, and followed the sun
to Florida. She took fl ight, like a migrating bird, and lay
on the hot sands, hungry for love. She lived like there
was no tomorrow. But her nights of revelry ended
in loneliness. She wandered all over the continent,
searching for something she never found.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469167732

Guy Gauthier

Stanley Nelson, recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Award, is the author of 18 volumes of poetry, and his poems have appeared in over 50 publications. Immigrant, an epic poem in four volumes, has been hailed as "one of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth century". Nelson is also a prolific novelist and playwright. A book of experimental fiction, The Unknowable Light of the Alien, received the Small Press Book of the Year award from Library Journal. There have been over 100 productions of his plays in New York, London, and in college and community theatres throughout the US. His play, Poe: From his Life and Mind, was cited in Best Plays of 1971, and was given a national college tour by the New York Touring Company. Stanley Nelson revels in words. He explores the edges of sound and sense, with a blend of humor and seriousness, in a style all of his own.

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Copyright © 2012 by Guy Gauthier.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012902836

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-6772-5

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-6771-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-6773-2

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Contents

I

GRANDMÈRE LÉONA:

THE FAMILY ALBUM:

WHAT MY MOTHER TOLD ME:

LAST VISIT:

THE YOUNG LÉONA:

THE PHOTOS:

DESCRIPTION OF MORRIS:

LÉONA’S SUITE:

CHARACTER SKETCH:

NOTES:

CHARACTER SKETCH:

THE PHOTOS:

THE PHOTOS:

THE HOUSE ON BOYNE ST:

THE HOUSE ON BOYNE ST:

HER LAST TRIP:

LAST YEARS IN MORRIS:

UNCLE PAUL:

TANTE ADA:

HER OLD AGE:

II

CHARACTER SKETCH:

THE WINNIPEG YEARS:

THE MORRIS YEARS:

HER TRIPS:

THE BREAK:

III

FLIGHT TO WINNIPEG:

LÉONA’S DEATH:

PHOTO OF FLORA GAUTHIER:

MORRIS TRIP:

ST. BONIFACE CEMETERY:

I

Léona

GRANDMÈRE LÉONA:

My earliest memory of her goes back to 1943. Or was it 1942? My grandfather ran a hotel in Morris, and we often ate with him and grandmère, it was a special treat for us, eating in a hotel dining room, with waiter service, and napkins folded in a silver ring. As we sat waiting to be served, I’d start playing with my fork, I was only three or four years old, and my fork was a truck, it was a gleaming silver truck I drove across the table, making the sound of the motor in my throat, like I always did in the sandbox. But the prongs of my fork were digging into the tablecloth, making furrows in the white linen, they were leaving tire tracks on the table, and my grandmother was annoyed, she said, Guy, fais pas ça! and I had to stop, I had to sit and listen to dull, grown-up dinner talk. But I hadn’t given up. My hand was stealing back toward my fork. I was only waiting for the right moment, and as soon as her attention was drawn to something else, I eased my truck out slowly, and ventured out into the open. This time, there was no roaring engine, no squealing brakes. My truck was smuggling contraband, it was running with the motor off, and the lights out. But it was the tracks that gave me away. The fork was biting into the tablecloth, leaving tracks that were easy to follow, and grandmère said, stop it, Guy, you’ll tear the tablecloth! and took my fork away. And that’s my earliest memory of her, that she wouldn’t let me play with my fork, and dig holes in the tablecloth.

 . . . . . . .

I can still see her in black, at the funeral. It was the winter of 1949. My grandfather had sold his hotel, retired to a comfortable house in Norwood, and died. I can still see her in the living room, talking to the friends and relatives who had come over after the funeral, and though I know Aunt Ida was there, and Uncle Alexis, everything is a blur, except for my grandmother. She stood by the door as her friends were leaving, and gave them a last, parting handshake. But it was an odd handshake. She couldn’t raise her right hand, and had to use the left. Her right arm was paralyzed. It hung limp and lifeless at her side. She had come close to dying before her husband. She’d had a stroke while coming out of church, she had fallen on the church steps, and they had rushed her to the hospital. It was apoplexy. The doctors had managed to save her, but they couldn’t do anything about her paralysis. It was a long time before she could walk again. She had to work hard to regain the use of her right leg, and even then, it would remain partly paralyzed for the rest of her life. She could only walk slowly, and with great effort, and she needed a strong arm, un bras fort, as she said, to help her down the stairs, or out into the street. And yet she was to survive her husband Alphonse by almost twenty years.

 . . . . . . .

We went to Norwood almost every Sunday. We drove over to Claremont St., and parked in the driveway, behind the house. Aunt Ida would greet us at the door, and we would give her a hug. But as a boy, I was never eager to hug and kiss my grandmother. I didn’t like her wet kisses, and I tried to avoid her corner, I tried to delay the inevitable kiss as long as I could, until finally, feeling a bit slighted, she said, Guy, aren’t you going to kiss me? and I couldn’t escape my fate any longer, I had to submit to another of her wet kisses, which made me want to wipe my lips dry.

 . . . . . . .

I can still see my grandmother, with her frizzy white hair, I can see her at the table, bending over to swallow a piece of steak. Because of her bulging waist, she couldn’t sit too close to the table, and had to bend over to swallow her food. She ate very slowly, lifting her fork, her glass, doing everything with her left hand. But she couldn’t cut her meat. Not with only one hand. Her steak had to be cut in the kitchen, before it was served. Ida would serve it to her neatly cut in squares or chunks. Léona was always the last one to finish her plate. Her food would grow cold, and she would eat in silence, listening to the dinner conversation, smiling when my father told a joke, but seldom speaking. There was always food left on her plate when she was finished. Yet she was overweight.

 . . . . . . .

She could walk without her cane, and move around the house by herself, but it was like watching a film in slow motion. She could even climb the stairs, because the banister was on the left, and she could hold on to it with her good hand. But the effort was so great, she had to stop at each step to catch her breath. It took so long for her to climb the stairs, you’d forget about her for a while, and your mind would wander to something else, until suddenly, you’d see her again and think, what, is she still climbing the stairs?! But she found it harder to get down, because then, the banister was on the wrong side of her, and Ida had to help her down, and sometimes, it was my father, her son, who took her firmly by the hand, and helped her slowly, painstakingly down the stairs.

 . . . . . . .

She was proud of the fact that she could walk to the beauty parlor. But someone always had to go with her. The simplest things, like stepping down from the sidewalk to the street, were very difficult for her. You had to help her step down from the curb, to make sure she didn’t fall. The beauty parlor was only a couple of blocks away, but with the old lady in tow, it seemed more like a mile. Ida had the patience to help her along, without trying to rush her. She would leave her mother with the hairdresser, and come back to pick her up a couple of hours later. And Léona would walk slowly back home, proud of her new hairdo. But no amount of beauty care could erase the effects of time. The permanent seemed oddly out of place on my grandmother. It only made her look older. Her hair was thinning, and though there were no bald spots, you could see the scalp through her hair. Her nails were manicured, but they couldn’t hide her wrinkled hands. Not even a beautician could make her look beautiful.

 . . . . . . .

Her paralysis didn’t stop her from going out, and often. But she couldn’t walk to the beauty parlor anymore. Now that they had moved to Place Gaboury, the beauty parlor was over a mile away. Yet she kept going to the same hairdresser, in spite of the cab fare. In spite of the fact that she didn’t like riding in taxis. The drivers wouldn’t help her into the cab, and they showed their impatience at her slow movements. They made her feel like a cripple. Getting into the back seat of a car was an embarrassingly awkward process for her, and she didn’t like to do it in front of total strangers, whose faces wore a hardened mask of indifference, or even scorn.

 . . . . . . .

My mother had always wanted a car of her own, and my father finally broke down and bought her a Volkswagen. It was all we could afford at the time. But mom was delighted, and drove her little car as if it was a Cadillac. The only dark cloud on her horizon was my grandmother.

Léona was also delighted. Her transportation problems were solved. She would just call and ask my mother to pick her up, as if she was calling for a cab, she would call and say, I’m going to the beauty parlor, will you come and pick me up? and mom had to do it, just to keep the peace, but she’d complain to my father, I’m not her chauffeur! she’d say, but he only shrugged, and told her to be patient. And sometimes, Léona would call and say, I’m coming over to dinner tonight. Will you pick me up around 4:00? Well, this didn’t go over too well with my mother. She has the nerve to invite herself over to dinner, she’d say to my father. This isn’t a hotel, you can’t just call and reserve a table. But look at Ida, he would say, look at the sacrifices Ida is making, she’s the one who’s taking care of her, and look at Alexis, he never complains, never loses his temper. We’ve got to do our share, he would say, and take some of the load off Ida, and mom would let herself be persuaded once more, she would do her share, and answer the call like a cabby.

I could often see her helping Léona out of the car, which was no easy task. Or helping her up the rising walkway to the house. It seemed like they would take forever to reach the front steps. My mother was fairly bursting with impatience, while the old lady, with her permanent looking the worse for wear, dragged her right leg along as fast as she could.

Mom would set her down on the sofa like a heavy parcel, and go into the kitchen to cook dinner. But Léona would get restless on the sofa, and sometimes, as we sat around waiting for dinner, she would take it into her head to go out for a walk. She’d find some reason to go to the corner drugstore, like renewing a prescription, or buying some hair conditioner, and someone had to go with her, to help her along, and since mom was busy cooking, that someone was usually me. We moved along at a snail’s pace. She held my arm like a crutch. I’d go stir crazy, I’d feel a wild urge to run and jump over fences, and when we finally reached the drugstore at the corner of Dollard and Taché, it was as if my legs had gone numb, as if they had gone to sleep, and I had to stretch them, to get the blood circulating again.

We always had expensive steaks to eat when my grandmother came to dinner. She always insisted on paying for the groceries. It was a gift she forced us to accept. Instead of giving us love, she gave us money. But it was more like a down payment than a gift. Instead of opening her heart, she’d open her purse and say, here, that’s for you. My father called her Old Moneybags, to tease her. But she didn’t seem to mind. I think she even liked it.

He never lost his temper with her. He was always very patient with her. You never heard him say a word against her. Or a word in her favor. In fact, he never talked about her at all. He kept an absolute silence on the subject of his mother.

THE FAMILY ALBUM:

I always knew where I could find our photo album. It was in my mother’s desk, in the second drawer, on the right. The cover was dark brown leather, with a gold trim. The pages were black, and bound together with elegant black laces. But I didn’t know we had a picture of Léona taken around the turn of the century. I had looked through the album several times, and hadn’t seen it. There were pictures of my mother. Pictures of my father. And sometimes, when a third person was holding the camera, you’d find them both in the same picture. It was my mother who had put this album together, and it reflected her taste, her idea of what was important and worth remembering. There were a lot of baby pictures. Many of my sister Gaëtanne. And some of me I didn’t like. . .pictures of an ugly looking baby playing in his crib. And there was one of Uncle Paul standing beside his car, which looked so different from current models. It was a 30’s coupe, and more than anything else in the picture, this coupe served to date it, to show its age, like a vintage label. The trees had no year, no decade stamped on them, but the car was a museum piece, a relic of the Thirties.

My mother had written the date under the pictures. Most of them were taken in 1937, 38, 39, and some in the early forties. Then the pictures thinned out, and stopped around 1950. It’s not that we didn’t take any after that. But my mother didn’t bother mounting them in the album, she left them lying around loose, or stuffed them in a brown manila envelope, in no particular order. The album had been left unfinished. The last pages were empty. She never took it out, never showed the pictures to her guests. It was as if she had forgotten it there, in the second drawer, among the old Christmas cards, and yellowed newspaper clippings.

But this time, when I reached the end of the pictures, instead of closing the album, like I’d always done before, I kept leafing through the empty pages, not even bothering to look at them, just idly, absentmindedly turning the pages, when suddenly, to my surprise, a picture slipped out, and fell on the desk. It had a strange brown color, the color of old pictures when they start fading. I saw a face I had never seen before. She was young and slender, with dense, black hair. Her cheeks were flushed, and her lips were red, a faded red. The edges of the picture were worn and frayed, and my mother had left it lying loose, in the back pages of the album. And yet it was a good picture. It had been taken in a photographer’s studio. There was a little girl in a rocking chair, with a baby in her lap. The baby was bundled in white, and had a white bonnet. The woman was standing behind the rocker. Her hand was resting lightly on it, as if she had been rocking them. The picture had been carefully composed by the photographer, you could tell. He had put the children in the rocking chair, and the mother behind them, and he must have thought, very good, excellent, as he stepped back behind the camera, and pulled the black hood over his head. And they had held the pose, and seen the sudden flash, the puff of smoke. It wasn’t an awkward picture, like those my mother had mounted in the first pages of the album, no, this was very professional work, it was well put together, they looked natural, as if they weren’t posing at all, the girl in the rocking chair had a lovely, little girl smile, full of white teeth, and the mother had a tiny hint of a smile, a kind of Mona Lisa smile, intriguing, mysterious, a smile that made you wonder, and that was all part of the photographer’s art, he had done his job, he had made them look good. And then it hit me. I’m not sure what it was, something about her eyes, or the shape of her nose, but suddenly, I could see the resemblance, and I ran to my mother, who was doing the laundry in the basement, and I showed her the picture, and I said, that’s not my grandmother, it can’t be, and she looked at it and said, yes, it’s her. No, I don’t believe it, I said. And the girl is your Aunt Ida, she told me, pointing to the girl in the rocking chair. I looked at the girl. There was no doubt about it, it was my Aunt Ida, I could see it, I could plainly see my aunt’s features, already there, in the face of this little girl. And the baby is your father, she said. That’s my father?! I said in disbelief. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recognize his features in the baby’s face, I guess he was too young, he was only about 6 months old, too young for his features to show, I guess. I went back to my mother’s desk, and took a last look at Léona’s picture, before putting it away. I couldn’t get over how young she looked. Youth and my grandmother were two things I could never associate in my mind. To me, she was older than Methuselah. Her hair had always been white, her face always wrinkled. She had been born old. She had been born a grandmother. But it wasn’t entirely my fault. She had never spoken to me about her youth. I had never heard her say, as old people often do, when I was young like you. . . It was as if she didn’t remember her past, as if she had no memories at all. And it wasn’t just her, it was my father, my Aunt Ida, all of them, they never spoke of her youth, never mentioned her early years, and this only encouraged the naive notion, inherited from my childhood, that she had no past, and had never been young like me. Grandmothers are old, not young.

But now, for the first time, I had caught a glimpse of another woman, a woman I couldn’t help liking. It wasn’t her beauty that impressed me, it was her vitality, her character. There was something about her, a kind of strength, behind the Mona Lisa smile, a subtle force of will, and even the reserve, the composure imposed on women of that era, couldn’t stop this force from shining through. She was too full of life, she didn’t belong in a photo album. You could feel her breathing. She was about to move. Her red lips were about to open. . . You couldn’t blame Alphonse Gauthier for falling in love with her. How could he help it? She was the kind of woman you couldn’t resist.

 . . . . . . .

The next time I saw my grandmother, I saw her with new eyes. I could see the young Léona behind the old, I could see the smooth skin, the firm, young features behind her wrinkled face, I could see the healthy glow in her cheeks, and the thick head of hair, and I think for the first time, I saw what it means to grow old, I saw how the lines slowly, imperceptibly grow on a face, until finally it looks like a crumpled sheet of paper, when you pry it open, looking for a message you once thought was worthless.

WHAT MY MOTHER TOLD ME:

I often went down into the basement, when my mother was doing the wash, I went down to keep her company, and she would talk to me about Montreal, she would talk about her childhood in Laval des Rapides, and her first impressions of Morris, the long, hard winters, the sense of isolation, and that’s how she happened to tell me about Léona Gauthier, I was sitting on the basement steps, and she was telling me about the Morris days, ah, tu sais, mon Guy, she said, ta grandmère, elle s’est bien amusée dans sa jeunesse. It was winter, and the basement windows were covered with frost. My mother put out her cigarette and got up. She took the wet, soapy clothes out of the washer, and started rinsing them in a tub of water. She was a wild one, your grandmother, she went on in French, you couldn’t keep her at home. She always had to be going places. Two cars, the woman had, as if one wasn’t enough. And her chauffeur. And the clothes she bought, if you could have seen her, she