“He was driving a convertible and had on silk clothes and brought presents for everyone. Each time we talked, he laughed and said nothing was stopping him. He was going straight up. But he and your grandfather got into an argument. They’d gone for a drive in Edwin’s new convertible. When they came back, your grandfather got out and spit on the floorboards. Edwin was furious. No one knew what had happened. Edwin had been his favorite. He’d been everyone’s favorite. He was the one who decided he hated us. Not us. We loved him. We always wanted him to come back.”
Maybe my father blamed my grandfather for their poverty, their entire way of life. I tried to understand how my grandfather’s violence could have shaped his sons. She explained the rivalry between the brothers, Edwin and Bernard, their eagerness to outdo the other, to win their father’s admiration.
“Bernard,” she said, “used to tell us that he was lucky he’d learned to fight. Ton grand-père would put gloves on Edwin and Bernard, and the family watched as they fought. Bernard was a lot bigger even though he was two years younger, but Edwin was fast. Il était malin et orgueilleux—clever and proud. He always found a way to win.”
“What about Bernard? Tell me about his death.”
“He was a difficult man,” she said after some hesitation. “He drank too much and was aggressive. He didn’t have your father’s charm. Edwin was easy to like, and that must have been hard for Bernard.”
She explained how between voyages as a merchant marine Bernard would occasionally show up at her door, drunk and wanting to talk.
“Once,” she said, “he told me he’d seen your father. He said he’d found him in prison. He said Edwin was in a prison in Tacoma … Y était en prison, he said. Chus allé aux States et je l’ai trouvé.”
She wouldn’t have believed this story if someone else told it, but Bernard, Edwin, and Alphonse were different. “There were men in the family like that, who could go anywhere, do anything.”
Bernard had described to her how he told my father that everyone would know he was a criminal—that he’d go back and tell maman. She’d asked how long ago this was. Plus de cinq ans, he’d answered. More than five years.
My father had claimed he never had a single visit in prison—never mentioned Bernard finding him in a world of impossibility, or whether there were kind words between them before old resentments came up. Maybe Bernard arrived wanting to punish my father for his last, splendid visit home, the way he lavished the family with gifts as the others never could have.
Tout le monde va savoir, he’d told him. They’re all going to know.
My father was behind wire mesh and Plexiglas, and I wondered how they said good-bye. When he returned to his cell, he must have believed he could never go home.
But Bernard then told my aunt another story, a stranger one, more recent. He’d docked in Vancouver and gone to a popular market near the downtown, called Granville. He’d seen Edwin behind the counter in a fish store. Edwin had a large beard and pretended not to know Bernard. He claimed he didn’t speak French. My aunt described perfectly, as Bernard had described to her, Granville Island Market and my father’s shop there, even my father, with his beard.
But Bernard never told their mother any of what he knew. When he spoke to my aunt, it was with anger but also pity. He hadn’t told the family as he’d threatened.
“It made sense,” she said, “why your father called a few times. He must have been trying to find out what we knew. He told me that things were difficult, that he didn’t have much money. Normally, the family would have offered to help. He wouldn’t have needed to ask. That’s how we were. But we’d seen him so rich we couldn’t imagine him poor. And he was too proud to ask … Only now that I’ve seen the photos of your childhood, I understand how poor you were. We would have helped. He should have asked.”
I recalled our years in the valley, how he started businesses and worked constantly to build a life. His effort had hidden the bitterness of loss, the intention that whatever Bernard told the family would no longer matter.
As for Bernard, he told only my aunt. Shortly after that conversation, he called from Montreal and she answered. He asked to speak to his mother, who was at the table for dinner. He told her that he loved her and, still holding the phone, shot himself in the heart.
The year our father opened the shop would have been the same that Bernard found him—the same that he died. Maybe my father believed that some things could never be fixed. Or he couldn’t undo what he’d resolved through pride and strength: to disappear rather than let his family see him as a failure. But though Bernard was the one person who knew of his crimes, he no doubt also loved him as the rest of the family did, this his older brother after all. Perhaps he wanted to say he’d never made true on his threat.
Even now I try to grasp this, the two suicides acted out in each other’s absence, in the ignorance of the other’s solitude and pain—two brothers walking past each other like strangers.
✴
NIGHTS, UNABLE TO sleep, I rewrote drafts of my father’s story. I struggled to give it a shape that made sense, to see other versions of his life, to resolve questions that he’d left unanswered.
Gradually, I realized there were too many fabrications, too much fantasy. I found myself peeling back the fictions. I craved to see the characters clearly and wondered how much of what I was writing was true—not just my embellishments, but his own exaggerations and those of his family. There was so much chronology I could never iron out, so
