House of Rougeaux(33)
The two women smile up at her, and her mother waves her over to join them.
“Here’s my baby,” says Momma.
A framed photograph lies on the table, of a much younger Martine with her late husband and their two little boys. The older one must be Gus, thinks Rosalie, the one she lost. Auntie Martine stirs her coffee thoughtfully. Rosalie takes in the delicate way she holds her spoon, the fine lines etched around her eyes. If hardship is part of the necessary clay of life, grace is the hand that has shaped it. Rosalie swallows at the sudden lump in her throat.
Marc-Pierre and Pauline come to take them to the station. Pauline has a small gift for Rosalie wrapped in tissue paper. It’s a diary, bound in thin powder-blue leather, with the words mon journal embossed on the front cover in tiny gold script.
On the platform the tears are inevitable, and there isn’t a whole lot more to say. Take care, and Be good, and Write, and Don’t worry, and that most inadequate of phrases, Love you.
Rosalie and her mother board the train, take their seats and wave out the window. Marc-Pierre has an arm around Junior’s shoulders and Pauline stands at his other side, her hands occupied with her purse and handkerchief.
Momma takes Rosalie’s hand in hers as the train pulls away and gains speed, huffing and screeching, whipping through the city. They cross the St. Lawrence River, and head south toward home.
Sometime later Virginia gets out her knitting bag. Junior’s going to need another muffler. A spare. Rosalie takes out a ball point pen from her handbag, and her new powder-blue diary, which she opens to the first page. She watches out the window, at the trees, rivers and buildings speeding past. The train rumbles across a trestle over an arm of Lake Champlain, and then enters an area of dense forest. Rosalie is just imagining someday writing an article on rail travel when the train emerges from the trees and shoots out straight over the open water.
The arc of tracks follows a curving line of land scarcely wider than the train itself, with the blue expanse of water on both sides extending almost as far as the eye can see. In that second there seems to be hardly any motion at all, just an unbroken sky, and some distant mountains, and everything invisible on the other side.
4
Martine
Montreal, 1925
At twenty years old, Martine Rougeaux lived with her parents and her younger brother Maxwell on the Rue Normand, in the district of St. Antoine. Her sister Elodie, the oldest, lived several blocks away with her husband and three children, and her brother Albert-Ross was just married and living just a little further over in Saint-Henri. With the two oldest married, and Martine working steadily as a domestic, Papa and Momma laid their focus on Maxwell, seeing to it that he finish school and maybe even go on to college. Martine stayed out of the tussle. Maxwell didn’t exactly adhere to his parents’ ambitions, even when Momma enlisted Martine to help him with his studies. Her brother’s lack of interest baffled her. Martine had had to leave school five years earlier and missed it dearly.
Often enough she sat with Maxwell in the evening, his history or English book open on her lap, while he leaned back in his chair, tipping it back on two legs, and walking his own feet up the wall.
“The War of 1812,” she’d say.
“Barneymug that shit,” he’d say, smirking as Martine would hurriedly reach to close the bedroom door. Momma did not abide foul language.
“Have you heard that new song?” he’d say next. “That one that goes, Saint Louis woman with her diamond rings, pulls that man round by her apron strings.…”
He had a good voice, she had to admit, but she’d say instead, “What is wrong with you?”
And he’d say, “Aw, you sound just like Momma. Why don’t you come help me figure it out?” They both played the piano, Papa had left them no choice on that, and she would relent, leaving the War of 1812 for some other time.
Like the majority of the men in the community, Papa was for years a sleeping car porter with the Canadian National Railway, spending the better part of every month away on a train and working twenty-hour days for twenty-one days straight. When he was at home he slept most of the time. And he sat by the fire with his pipe and listened to his children play the piano. Momma was the one who kept the order, made sure the wheels of the household kept rolling, with chores and school work, and all manner of community commitments. The study of music was obligatory in the family, with lessons paid for with hard-won funds for the older children, who then had to turn around and instruct the younger siblings.
Papa’s grandmother, Hetty Rougeaux, had taught him to play as a child. When Martine was small he came across the remains of a spinet piano, half burned up in a saloon fire and ready to be carted away by the garbage man. He hauled it home in a wagon and set it up in the tiny family parlor, where he and his youngest brother, Martine’s Uncle Dax, worked on their days off to replace the damaged parts. Papa bartered with the piano tuner, when the time came, who left with a keg of Papa’s home-brewed beer. That was the beginning of all the music. The Rougeaux children were to have a skill that paid. If they enjoyed the music that was a bonus, but it was certainly not a requirement.
The Rougeaux boys might find work in the cabarets, hotels and nightclubs, and the girls might teach lessons, or accompany singers at private celebrations, since the nightclubs were no place for them. If the boys played the clubs they were not to take up with any dancers, as they were considered one step up from prostitutes, if that. The pillars of their community did not embrace the girls who went around in their drawers, such as did Martine’s childhood friend Lucille Travis.