Across the Bridge by Mavis Gallant Read Free Book Online Page A

mother’s car and drive away. His hair was tied back with a white leather thong. He wore one of his rodeo outfits and a pair of white boots.
    Before leaving Berthe’s flat he had rifled her handbag, forgotten on a kitchen chair – a century before, when they assembled for the funeral feast. Before leaving Montreal he made a long detour to say goodbye to his old home. He was not afraid of ghosts, and he had already invented a father who was going to approve of everything he did. In Louis’s desk he found the gold watch and one or two documents he knew he would need – among them the birth certificate that showed him eighteen. He took away as a last impression the yellowed grass in the backyard. Nothing had been watered since Louis’s death.
    Berthe has often wondered what the Marines in the recruiting office down in Plattsburgh made of Raymond, all silver and white, with that lank brick-dust hair and the thin, cracked English. Nothing, probably: they must have expected civilians to resemble fake performers. There was always someone straggling down from Montreal. It was like joining the Foreign Legion. After his first telephone call, Berthe said to Marie, “At least we know where he is,” but it was not so; they never quite knew. He did not go to San Diego: a military rule of geography splits the continent. He had enlisted east of the Mississippi, and so he was sent for training to Parris Island. The Canadian Marine had forgotten to mention that possibility. Berthe bought a number of road maps, so that she could look up these new names. The Mississippi seemed tostop dead at Minneapolis. It had nothing to do with Canada. Raymond should have turned the car around and driven home. (Instead, he left it parked in Plattsburgh. He could not remember, later, the name of the street.)
    He has never been back. His excuse used to be that he had nowhere to stay in Montreal. Marie sold the duplex and moved in with Berthe. The last thing he wanted to see on vacation was another standard motel unit, and he knew Berthe wouldn’t have him in the house.
    He enlisted for four years, then another three. Marie looked upon him as a prisoner, in time to be released. Released honorably? Yes, or he would not have been allowed to settle in Florida: he was still a Canadian in 1976; he could easily have been deported. When he became an American citizen and called Marie, expecting congratulations, she told him that 98 percent of the world’s forest fires were started by Americans. It was all she could think of to say. He has been down there ever since, moving like a pendulum between Hollywood North and Hollywood Beach, Fort Lauderdale and the stretch of Miami known as Little Quebec, from the number of French-Canadians who spend holidays there. They have their own newspaper, their own radio station and television channel, they import Montreal barbecue. Hearing their voices sometimes irritates him, sometimes makes him homesick for the summer of 1969, for the ease with which he jumped from cloud to cloud.
    Marie still believes that “Parris Island” was one of Raymond’s famous spelling mistakes. He must have spent part of his early youth, the least knowable, in a place called Paris, South Carolina. She often wonders about other mothers and sons, and whether children feel any of the pain they inflict. Berthe thinks of how easy it must have been for Raymond to leave, with the sun freshly risen, slanting along side streets, here and there front steps sluiced and dark, thesky not yet a burning glass. He must have supposed the rest of his life was going to be like that. When she and Marie ransacked the house on Boulevard Pie IX, looking for clues, imagining he’d left a letter, left some love, they kept the shades drawn, as if there were another presence in the rooms, tired of daylight.

Florida
    B ERTHE CARETTE’S SISTER , Marie, spent eight Christmases of her life in Florida, where her son was establishing a future in the motel industry. Every time