In the darkness, I fumbled my way to the kitchen, found the main breaker and turned the power on. I remembered doing that too, with my father.
A few burnt bulbs, spider webs, and fly carcasses.
The place hadn’t changed much. Simple furniture with pure lines, of the Shaker style that Dana Feldman had liked so much. The appliances were new. Tommy, John’s son, who took care of the house for the Americans who rented it in summer, had replaced the oven and refrigerator last year, and also bought a washing machine and a microwave for a total of more than $2,000; the tourists were becoming more and more demanding, Tommy said. Dick never understood my stubbornness in keeping the house, “If you never go there, what’s the point?” I rented it out for nine hundred dollars a week, to New Yorkers especially, and gave three hundred to Tommy. The rest served to pay taxes and upkeep; no profit, quite the opposite — I lost money on the house, and yet I couldn’t get rid of it. “You’re too sentimental,” Dick said. Maybe. Even Ann was surprised, she who would have loved to see the place. “Let’s go together, just once.” But I couldn’t, always stopped by fear of dwelling on the past. And now, here I was.
In the living room, the bookshelves that had once been filled with works of all kinds now held only a few paperbacks with garish covers, left behind by renters. The sort of books you tore through in a few days and left behind like empty packages.
“Let’s see,” Dana had said, cigarette between her lips, her hand drawing a line along the spines. “Steinbeck … I’ve got The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, and East of Eden. Here, take them. Ah! And here I’ve got A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, my personal favourite.”
And in the evenings, under the beam of my flashlight, I devoured them in my bed, leaving burn marks on the pages of the Merriam-Webster Dana had lent me for when I didn’t know a word. My English got better by leaps and bounds as I learned more and more complicated words: ludicrous, gambit, looting. Reading books at full steam, barely taking in their message, a glutton going through a box of cookies, attacking them with an insatiable appetite. Dana would give me a surprised look when I came to her place to cut the lawn, with three or four books under my shirt, “Already, you’ve read them all?” And so she pulled out other volumes, books in English with ever more complicated words, and sometimes French books, like Prévert and his spectacular Paroles: “Pope Pius’ papa’s pipe stinks.”
The more I read, the further my horizon stretched.
Then, one day, “Here, read this. Better educate you now, before you get into any bad habits.”
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe. A book on the Index.
“What is it?”
“What every man should know.”
Man. It had been pronounced with such solemnity that I was flattered. My shaking hands, ready to turn its pages — what wonderful knowledge was hidden within? I was so disappointed when I read its first few lines, some scholarly gibberish — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” An obscure impenetrable jargon in two volumes that I read as a challenge during my convalescence in the winter of 1960, mononucleosis having forced me out of the Rimouski Seminary during the first term of my second year. A winter of boredom spent reading and sleeping, exhausted by the smallest effort, Simone de Beauvoir’s words finding their way into my dreams, violent erections that would wake me and that I looked on with consternation, too tired to do anything about them.
And so my education about women’s struggles began, associated with exhaustion, during an obstinate battle against a resistant virus. In my mind, I formed a clear impression of having drawn the lucky number in the human lottery — being born a man. For a man to speak as you do about women, their rights, their bodies, you must have seen it up close and personal, no?
No. Dana Feldman taught me everything.
Oh, the hours I spent in the house with Dana and her sister, Ethel! Dana, bent over her Underwood, her fingers flying over the keys, while Ethel stood at her easel applying the colours she prepared in old Heinz tins, working the canvas with a wide trowel. The Feldman sisters in the midst of creation, with the whole house in joyous disorder! Ashtrays overflowing, the jackets of the albums they listened to constantly (Thelonious Monk, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Kenny Burrell) strewn all over, and the smell of whisky mixed with the Kools they chain-smoked — the perfume of sedition. If my parents had known! Their son, his voice squeaking, about to break, spending whole afternoons at Dana Feldman-McPhail’s home, an American widow of thirty-seven, whose husband, John McPhail, a wealthy industrialist from Montreal, had lost his life in an airplane accident in 1956. Dana and John had met in New York during the Second World War. After John’s death, she left Montreal, to return to that fabled city, from which she sent me fantastic postcards — the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the giant billboards on Times Square that turned passersby into vulnerable insects. A real New Yorker, except in summer, which she loved spending in Métis Beach. She wrote, far from the bustle of the city, surrounded by silence and untamed nature that could only support sparse humanity.
Dana the American. Dana the Feminist. Dana the Jew. If there was anything that our communities shared, it was the mistrust we felt towards her
On the living room walls, made of pine, hung a few paintings that Ethel had created as she sat on the veranda, inspired by the work of Jasper Johns, whose palette had begun to veer towards grey at the time. Ethel, secretly in love with Jasper Johns, isn’t that what Dana told me once? They crossed paths a few times in galleries in New York, perhaps they’d even had an affair, I no longer knew. I should call Ethel. It was a sacrilege to see her paintings now dotted with mildew in the glacial house in Métis Beach.
I climbed the grand staircase, wandered among the rooms, their mattresses bare, and made my way to one of the tower pavilions, where Dana had had her office. The room was small and circular. Stuffy, with boarded-up windows. She used to isolate herself up here for hours when she needed to concentrate. She sometimes forgot to eat, but never to smoke. It would billow out of the room when you opened the door!
I pulled open the drawer and fell upon a copy of The Next War, a first edition of her 1963 bestseller. A sober cover, red letters. She had the admiration of an entire generation of women for it. And the hatred of a generation of men.
Laureen Heller, Ann’s mother, was so excited when she heard I’d known Dana. “Dana Feldman? The Dana Feldman?”
“Who is she?” Ann asked, a hint of annoyance in her voice at feeling out of the loop.
“Oh, my dear, you’re far too young to know Dana Feldman.” She laughed, and gave me a lecherous smile which I hadn’t known how to interpret. “It’s thanks to her that I left your father. Don’t hate me too much for telling it like it is, sweetheart. All my friends who read her book, The … The War …, what was it called again?”
“The Next War,” I said.
“The Next War ! Right! All my friends who read it left their husbands. And your father knows, my dear. Oh, yes, he does! How many nights did I spend reading it right under his nose while he listened to his trivialities on television. I remember it well.…” She barked a hard laugh. “He would chortle at all this ‘feminist racket,’ as he called it, even if I caught him, one day, with the book in his hands, the lout, sorry dear, I know, I know, he’s still your father, but in any case I caught him red-handed and I thought, ‘great, he’s finally interested in a female perspective.’ But no, how foolish I was! He was staring at the back cover, at the picture of Dana Feldman. And he said, ‘What a shame such a beautiful woman is spouting such idiotic ideas.’ You know what I answered him? ‘Well, I’m beautiful, too.’ To tell you the truth I was more than beautiful. Did you know, Romain, that I was an extra on Every Girl Should Be Married ? So I told him, ‘I’m beautiful, too, and just watch me have idiotic ideas!’ And that’s when I asked for a divorce. You should have seen him! But, no, my dear, don’t worry, you know it