Nightfall

by Richard B. Wright

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the acclaimed writer of the beloved Clara Callan comes a memorable new novel about first loves, love-after-love, and the end of things, set during summer in Quebec City. James Hillyer, a retired university professor whose life was evocatively described in Wright's novel October, is now barely existing after the death of his beloved daughter in her forties. On a whim, he tries to locate the woman he fell in love with so many years ago on a summer trip to Quebec and through the magic of the Internet he is able to find her. But Odette’s present existence seems to be haunted by ghosts from her own past, in particular, the tough ex-con Raoul, with his long-standing grievances and the beginnings of dementia. The collision of past and present leads to violence nobody could have predicted and alters the lives of James and Odette forever. Nightfall skillfully captures the way in which our past is ever-present in our minds as we grow older, casting its spell of lost loves and the innocent joys of youth over the realities of aging and death. The novel is skillfully grounded in observation, propelled by unforgettable characters, and filled with wisdom about young love and old love. Drawing on the author’s profound understanding of the intimate bonds between men and women, Nightfall is classic Richard B. Wright.

Release date: May 3, 2016

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 192

Sample

Nightfall

James

In the months following his daughter’s death, James Hillyer’s life collapsed into lethargy and meaninglessness. During those anguished nights, his mind circled around Susan’s death countless times, and he found a few scraps of sleep only after the whisky had dulled his senses.

He had endured that terrible year with her following the diagnosis of stage four breast cancer in England in October 2004. And by strange coincidence in that same fall, he had also witnessed the death of a boyhood acquaintance, Gabriel Fontaine, whom he had met by accident in London. He and Gabriel had not seen one another for over sixty years, and Gabriel was still in a wheelchair after a lifetime with polio. Over dinner he told Hillyer he had pancreatic cancer and had therefore made arrangements to be helped towards his death by a clinic in Switzerland. He pleaded with Hillyer to accompany him to Zurich as a long-ago friend, though Hillyer’s recollection was that they had not been particularly close during that summer with his uncle Chester in Gaspé, Quebec, where in his own way he had sought the affection of a young girl named Odette Huard. Yet perhaps out of sympathy for another cancer victim, Hillyer went to Switzerland with Gabriel.

But all this dying had left him with a life so bereft of meaning that he sometimes wished for the end himself, as he lay awake at three o’clock in the morning.

He and his uncle Chester didn’t like one another much; his uncle was easily irritated by a nephew who seemed deliberately contrary and sullen, while he in turn thought his uncle was a pretentious ass. Chester was a retired teacher at the Groveland School, where James was then in his second year. Or was it his third? It didn’t matter. It was all so long ago. Yet thinking about all this, he could still see Odette Huard. She was fifteen and had grown up in the slums of St. Henri in Montreal, as he would learn. She and her mother and seven brothers and sisters were renting the house across the field from where he lived. She would tell him later that summer that her father, who worked in a munitions factory in Montreal, could not find a flat for them and so they had come to this village to live in a house owned by a cousin. That first day in July 1944, he had watched Odette from his little attic room.

• •

From my window, I could also look across a field to an unpainted house, grey from the years and weather. On that first day, even before I had unpacked my valise, I was drawn to the window by the cries of children and a persistent creaking sound, which turned out to be a clothesline pulley in motion. On the little gallery at the front of the house a girl was taking in clothes, drawing the trousers and flannel shirts towards her and stuffing them into a hamper. The wind was blowing the girl’s dark hair about her face and flattening the dress against her body. I could see the outline of her breasts. Sheer delicious torment to a boy in an age when the sight of a girl’s breasts, even the outline of them, was rare and therefore precious. Behind the house was a shed and a woodpile and an old car without wheels, which over the years had sunk into the grass, rusted and windowless. Several children were running about; a boy was trying to roll an old wheel with a stick, and a girl was pulling a smaller child in a wagon down the lane towards the gate. She was running and the dust from the lane was stirred up and snatched away by the wind. How entirely clear is my recollection of the Huards’ yard on that long-ago summer afternoon! I remember how at the gate the girl veered too quickly and the wagon overturned, spilling the child into the grass. He wailed at once and the girl picked him up and, labouring with his weight, carried him back towards the house. The others ran down the lane towards her, but the girl at the clothesline ignored the commotion, and after gathering the last sweater, settled the basket on her hip, opened the door, and disappeared into the house.

That was my first view of Odette, though I soon learned her weekly routine. Except for Mondays, she was away most of the time, and I assumed she worked somewhere. At seven o’clock in the morning, she walked down the lane to the gate. Resting my chin on the ledge of the window, I watched her through the screen. After a few minutes, an old Ford truck would stop and I could hear the voices speaking French, the quick, run-together notes of another language coming across the field on the early morning air. There was another girl with the driver and often there was laughter as Odette climbed into the truck. I used to wonder how people could be so good-natured so early in the day. In the late afternoon, the truck returned and Odette got out and waved goodbye and walked up the lane, the children running to meet her and calling out, “Odette, Odette, Odette.” A black-and-white dog ran down the lane too, barking with excitement. Like her family, I also looked forward to Odette’s return, and after she went into the house, nothing else was left in my day except dinner with my uncle and the long summer evening ahead.

• •

When he had been there for a few days, his uncle thought he was spending too much time by himself and arranged for him to visit a boy who had been stricken with polio. His uncle told him that the boy was touchy about his disease and he was not to say anything about his legs. Above all he was not to mention the word cripple. Gabriel, he said, hated that word and would fly into a rage if it were mentioned in his company. James didn’t want to meet this rich American brat, but he really had no choice, and that afternoon they drove in his uncle’s little Willys coupe through the mountains to Percé ten miles away, where Gabriel was staying with his mother at the St. Lawrence Hotel and Uncle Chester had become her bridge partner. They played several afternoons a week in the lounge or on the deck with another American couple. The war was then in its fifth year, but it all seemed remote in that little village on the edge of the continent.

He had expected to see a thin, shrunken figure in a wheelchair, but in fact Gabriel Fontaine was tanned and healthy-looking, handsome enough to pass for the younger brother of a movie star whose name he could now no longer recall. Yes, Gabriel had looked like the actor’s kid brother with his neat dark hair and eyebrows. Later that afternoon he pushed Gabriel’s wheelchair along the main village street to the wharf, where they saw the tourist boats taking passengers around Bonaventure Island to see the birds. From that first day James could see how girls were attracted to the handsome boy in front of him. They didn’t cast a glance at James. In the eyes of the smiling girls, he thought he saw what they were thinking as they looked at Gabriel: What a shame! A good-looking guy like that, but crippled.

When they returned to the hotel, James guided the chair into the elevator and they went up to the third floor. Gabriel wanted to show him his hotel room, where they could listen to some of his big band recordings. Tommy Dorsey and Harry James and Benny Goodman. As he pushed Gabriel’s chair along the hallway, they passed an open door where two chambermaids were cleaning a room. One girl was bent over making the beds and the other, a plumper girl, was dusting the furniture. Gabriel began to joke with the girls, but they seemed to be used to him as they talked in French to one another. When the one making the bed looked up, he recognized her as the girl from the house across the field.

In the hotel he noticed the cast in Odette’s left eye and he liked it. He saw it almost as a beauty mark suggesting something mysterious. Gabriel said things that made the girls laugh. Life in a wheelchair had not kept him from being funny, and James could see how girls liked that in a boy. He would have given anything for the look that Odette gave to Gabriel in the hallway of that hotel. But after the girls left and he and Gabriel were in his room, Gabriel made fun of Odette’s eye. He called her something. What was it? James thought it was unkind, especially as Gabriel had also told him that Odette was his summer girlfriend and they had kissed and fooled around in his room. It was all very maddening. What had the bastard called her anyway?

Thinking about that summer of 1944 was like being diverted by an old movie that only he and Odette and Gabriel were in, and during the dark hours in the winter of 2005 it kept him from dwelling on Susan’s absence in his life. Then one rainy April night he couldn’t stop thinking about Odette Huard. Gabriel was gone, of course, but was Odette still alive? What had her life been like? Had she married? Had children? Travelled the world or stayed in one place? Getting up, he padded barefoot to the window in the front room of his apartment and looked out at the wet night. Now and then he saw a car passing along Avenue Road. For a year now he had been looking for something to do with his life. Anything to distract him; anything that would at least make his days more bearable. If Odette were still alive, she would be what? A year older than him, that would make her seventy-seven. Good Lord! But still he felt this strange excitement at the thought of doing something that no one who knew him would expect. He would try to find her.

At the window on that April night he thought about his life and how unadventurous it had been. For forty years he had been a professor of English literature, teaching the poetry of Tennyson and Hopkins and other long-dead poets to bored students. Now none of it seemed to help him with this emptiness. His son, David, had moved to San Diego with his girlfriend, Nikki, leaving a fourteen-year-old son and a sixteen-year-old daughter with their mother. They lived on a good street in north Toronto, but still David was no longer an active part of their family. As for Hillyer, his daughter-in-law, Brenda, was now his only visitor. He suspected that his glumness had scared away old friends from his university days. And Brenda was a resourceful and realistic woman who after her husband’s departure had returned to her former job as an emergency room nurse. She was getting on with her life and she urged Hillyer to do the same, with her pithy way of describing how to cope with misfortune. “Shit happens, James, and you have to shovel it out of the way and get on with things. The kids are trying to do that and so am I and so should you.” On her visit that afternoon he had wanted to ask her what was in his life now to get on with. What kind of things should he get on with? But he didn’t. She would only have frowned and told him to stop being the academic who can’t see life clearly for stepping on it. Brenda was a tonic in his life, and though she was doubtless correct about his persistent ennui, he still thought “shit happens” was a strange and rather hurtful way to describe the death of his daughter.

Brenda, however, always meant well, and her bluff manner only reflected the earthiness of growing up in straitened circumstances in a small northern Ontario town. Now she was coping with her husband’s defection, accepting the circumstances and moving on. She had met a young doctor at the hospital and they were seeing one another, though how serious it all was Hillyer didn’t know and didn’t ask. Brenda, in fact, was rather circumspect about it. But she faithfully saw Hillyer once a week, usually on Sundays, if she wasn’t working that weekend, and he looked forward to her visits not minding her bossiness, surmising that he probably deserved it. After all, Brenda watched people facing death every day in that emergency room and so we should all be grateful for life itself, etc., etc. As she told him on one of those Sunday afternoons, “Moping around the apartment all day will get you nowhere, James. Except to that whisky bottle over there,” she added pointing to the bottle of Johnny Walker Black on the mantel. “And don’t tell me it’s none of my business, because it is my business, James. You and I and the kids are family. We have to look out for one another.” He told her then how he wished he were able to be a more responsible surrogate father to Brian and Gillian, but he just didn’t have the heart for it. Not yet anyway.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “The kids will be okay. Don’t worry about the kids. What I’m really talking about is you, James. I don’t like seeing my father-in-law, who, by the way I just happen to love, turning into an elderly man with a drinking problem. Drinking alone is a killer, James, and I know it’s what you do to find some temporary release from your grief over Susan. But believe me, it can destroy you.” She paused, frowning. “Look. I’ve never told this to anyone else. But I saw my own father, who I didn’t get along with and didn’t even particularly like, drink himself into a stupor every day for a couple of years after Mom died. He treated her like shit all his life, but there he was drinking himself to an early death. I don’t want that to happen to you. What I think you are dying from, James, is loneliness. Somehow you have to let another person into your life. You have to relearn how to share things with another person. You’ve been a widower for a long time. What is it now, about twenty years since Leah died?”

“Twenty-six,” he said. “It will be twenty-six at the end of January.”

“Jesus, that is a long time. And now you have lost Susan. Is it doing anything for you, just sitting in this place day after day looking for something in that whisky bottle? Why don’t you consider going on a cruise? You can afford it. Go high-end. Stay away from the buffet fatties on the Caribbean trips. Go Holland America or Cunard to the Mediterranean for a couple of weeks this spring. You’ll meet a lot of nice people. Educated people. Those ships are filled with women who have lost husbands through death or divorce. And they are not all fortune hunters. Many, I am sure, are decent women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and they are looking for companionship. You would be in demand, James.”

But he couldn’t picture himself on one of those cruises, hovering on the edge of the ballroom dance floor on Big Band Night watching elderly people try to boogie-woogie. Yes, Brenda meant well, and now that he thought of looking for Odette as a project, he could imagine Brenda’s enthusiasm when he told her. “Looking for an old girlfriend? That’s a great idea, James. Why not? Go for it.”

Odette had not exactly been his girlfriend, but she was someone in his life he had never forgotten, and how many people can you say that about after sixty years? Why was that? Was it because of her loyalty to Gabriel, who after all had not treated her well and left her pregnant that summer, a fifteen-year-old girl who would have to tell her parents? Or was it just her intrinsic vividness that had locked her permanently into his memory. It didn’t matter now because the whole idea of trying to find her had overtaken him. He saw it now as a project, a puzzle to solve. Something to look forward to each day. And when he returned to bed that night, he felt settled in his mind for the first time in months. And he slept through until morning.

But where to begin? he asked himself the next day. Yet when he thought further, was it all that complicated? He would start with the Montreal phone book. But what if she had married and was living under her married name in Chicoutimi. Or Lima, Peru, for that matter. If that were the case, he might never find her and have to accept honourable defeat. Look for something else to do. That afternoon in the public library he was not surprised to discover two pages of Huards, hundreds in the Montreal phone book. No point in even starting there. The best strategy was probably an advertisement in the classified section of a newspaper. He had seen them now and then in the Globe and Mail. Somebody looking for a son or daughter who had lost contact with a family. Does anyone know the whereabouts, etc. Reward. It was worth a try. He would explore those barren regions where someone was looking for a daughter lost to drugs and last seen in 1976. Or a son, who had drifted away one winter night twenty years ago. He decided to place the advertisement in both Montreal papers, French and English, and he called a former colleague who taught French literature to ask if she would translate an English version into French. Anne Sinclair was only too glad to help and seemed genuinely pleased to hear from him. He had last seen her at Susan’s memorial service six months ago. When he visited her office the next day, he was conscious of being back in the world again, a world where he had spent most of his life. It was nearing final examinations and the campus was alive with the noise of students. It felt good to be out and doing something. He had emailed Anne the English version.

Looking for Odette Huard who lived in Barachois, Gaspé, during the summer of 1944 when she was fifteen. She grew up in St. Henri and returned there after the summer with her family. Pls. phone James Hillyer at 1-416-006-7776.

Email at [email protected]

Within a day Anne emailed him the French version, and that week he phoned and placed the ads in the Saturday editions of both the Gazette and Le Devoir, paying for five Saturdays.

In that first week he felt like a child waiting for some long-sought-after mail-order package. Nowadays, he supposed, youngsters would do it all online, but he remembered, as a skinny twelve-year-old, mailing off the coupon from the back of a comic book for an exercise program that would transform him into a young Adonis. He waited for weeks and eventually gave up, until one day to his delighted surprise, the mailman took a brown package from his mailbag and handed it to Hillyer’s mother at their home on Crescent Road. What on earth was this? she wondered. “Nothing,” he said, and took it upstairs to his bedroom. Inside was a small booklet of exercises that he did faithfully for a few weeks with minimal improvement. He concluded that the best part of it all had been waiting for the magical package. Now he felt a similar anticipation as he checked his email every day. He hardly used it anymore, but each morning he had a reason for opening his little Mac.

After a month with no response, he felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that at least he had tried to track her down. Obviously it hadn’t worked, but at least he could safely assign Odette Huard only to his memory of that summer, a lively, dark-haired fifteen-year-old beauty with a cast in her eye, a willful girl with a good heart. But probably gone forever.

Then on the Sunday of the fifth week, the first week of May, he opened his email to send a message of congratulations to Gillian, who had been cast in the school play, a triumph since she hadn’t thought she had a chance. A momentous event in her young life. And there on the screen was a message from Montreal.

The Odette Huard you are looking for may be my aunt. Please confirm your identity with a reference from employer, parish priest, etc. And reasons for seeking her. [email protected]

Hillyer emailed Anne Sinclair and told her to expect an email from Montreal and would she please verify his credentials. Anne replied,

Of course, James. Looking for an old flame? How terribly romantic!!

Good for you.

Then he replied to [email protected]:

Thanks for getting in touch. Pls. email Anne Sinclair at [email protected]. She helped with the French translation of the advertisement. If your aunt is the Odette Huard I knew that summer of 1944, I just want to say hello after all these years.

This was all like a game and he could not help feeling excited. The next morning he got a call from Montreal.

The caller had a pleasant voice with a trace of French, though she identified herself as Danielle McCann. She had phoned Professor Sinclair, who had been very helpful. “She thinks highly of you, Professor Hillyer. I have to say I find it quite amusing that after all these years you’d be taking all this trouble and expense to look for a childhood sweetheart. Professor Sinclair did too. She said it surprised her. Didn’t sound like you at all.”

“Well, I suppose I always come across as a dry soul.”

“I have a notion that this sweetheart might be Aunty Odette. She’s my mother’s sister. The Huards were a large family, I think ten or eleven, but some died in infancy. I think eight survived. Anyway, Aunty Odette is the second oldest in the family. She lives in Quebec City with my aunt Celeste, who’s been handicapped since birth. In many ways she’s still a child and Aunty Odette has looked after her for years. They just bought this big house in a ritzy part of Quebec City. Only a few months ago, in January, I think. My mother told me the house cost a million dollars, but she always exaggerates. Aunty Odette was very lucky when she won the Quebec lottery last November. Some of the family said it was twenty million, but my aunt told me it was really twelve. But twelve million is a nice surprise late in life.”

“Yes, indeed. And your last name is English?”

“Actually it’s Irish, Professor Hillyer. Montreal Irish. My great-great-grandfather came from County Cork.”

“Well, I’m delighted to learn that your aunt Odette is still with us in the land of the living. I had a crush on her when I was fourteen. I was spending that summer in Gaspé with my uncle. Odette’s family lived in the house across the field from us. I used to watch the kids out playing. One of them would have been your mother, I guess. Odette was just a fifteen-year-old girl then, and we became friends but not boyfriend and girlfriend. She already had a boyfriend though, a rich kid from Boston who was in a wheelchair with polio. The two were almost inseparable. I just seemed to tag along.”

“Aunty Odette never mentioned anything about that summer. At least to me. But my mother once told me of the old white house in the field where they lived. Odette, she said, had a job in one of the hotels. She lied about her age to get the job. The family was renting the house for the summer because they could not find cheap accommodation in Montreal. It was wartime, I believe. They were very poor, my mother’s family.”

“Yes.”

“Aunty Odette has had a rough life in many ways. She met a man when she was young. Barely out of her teens, I think. To be honest, this man was not up to much but he seemed to be a part of her life. When I was a child I can remember her bringing him to the house. He got involved in a number of things and made her life difficult.”

“Did she marry him?”

“No. She never married. She lived with him on and off but had sense enough not to marry him. I’ll get in touch and tell her about you, but I think it should be her decision whether she wants to talk to you or not, though I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t, but she has been a little jumpy since winning all that money. I don’t want to air the details of the family, but some of them think Aunty Odette should have shared the wealth. They think she’s being selfish and that’s made her a little wary of all of us. Anyway, I’ll talk to her.”

“I’m going to write you a cheque for five hundred dollars, Miss McCann.”

“Well, that was the arrangement, wasn’t it? I won’t say don’t bother. I make a good living as a legal secretary but I’m a single woman and I can always use an extra five hundred dollars. But Aunty Odette has had her share of trouble with men. She deserves some peace and quiet now. She looks after Aunt Celeste and I want her to be contented. She’s no longer young.”

“She would now be seventy-seven. A year older than me.”

“I always liked her, but there are family members who don’t. Who thought the way she lived was beneath them. They didn’t like the company she kept. And then she wins all this money. So some are a little jealous and resentful, I think, and that includes my own mother. But I don’t begrudge Aunty Odette her luck.”

“Thanks for all this, Miss McCann.”

“That’s okay, Professor Hillyer. I hope you get together with my aunt.”

That day he paced back and forth in the apartment, sipping whisky to calm himself. But then at ten o’clock Danielle phoned back. She had been talking to her aunt earlier in the evening. “At first when I mentioned your name, she couldn’t place you.”

He was hurt but said only, “That’s understandable. It was a long time ago.”

“Yes, it was. But when I told her what you said about the boy in the wheelchair with polio, she remembered. She talked about you and the boy, Gabriel. It all came back to her. She told me the crippled boy and his mother were guests at the St. Lawrence Hotel, but you lived in a nearby village in a house right next to theirs. You would go for walks along the beach. She said you were a nice enough boy, but clumsy, awkward, gauche, maladroit.”

“Yes, I was all those things.”

Miss McCann seemed not to be listening. “My aunt said she wouldn’t mind talking to you. She began to remember you when I mentioned your friend in the wheelchair. ‘Ah, the blond boy. Yes,’ she said.”

He wrote down the phone number in Quebec City and thanked her for her trouble. Told her a cheque would be in the mail the next day. He thought of the first day he had been alone with Odette. She had Mondays off from her work at the hotel and he guessed it was the one day of the week she liked to get away by herself. Away from the other children and chores. She would tell him later how she turned her wages over to her mother. Her father sent money, but they were always short. So she needed a day off and liked the beach and the long sandbar that separated the sea from a lagoon where herons and gulls nested. He remembered her on the beach beneath the big iron railway bridge.

• •

On that morning I watched Odette walking down the lane wearing a housedress and a cardigan sweater and those awful Mary Jane shoes with ankle socks that girls wore then. Near the gate she stopped to scold one of the younger children who was following her, pointing back to the house until the child obeyed. That too I found alluring, that blend of maternal concern and sexuality. She seemed years older than she looked, but I guessed she was no more than sixteen. The sight of her that summer morning left me turbulent with desire. Following her, I watched with disappointment as she turned in to the general store. On an errand for her mother, then. I had hoped to follow her past the village to a path along the cliff, where I imagined her stopping to gaze out to sea like some girl on the cover of a romance novel, a girl wondering what lay ahead and where was the boy who would rescue her from her life as a chambermaid and surrogate mother, a boy whose heart was also filled with longing and poetry.

Instead I took the path along the cliff by myself and then followed another down to a little cove where I liked to sit on the rocks. I had discovered the cove the day after I arrived in the village, a secluded haven where I thought I was safe from prying eyes. And there beneath the cliff I was free to indulge my dream of undressing Odette Huard. And so I did in a few frantic moments, the seed of Onan spilling once again on the ground. But as I leaned panting against the rock face, I heard something above me, a rustling among the weeds and wildflowers. Unloosed pebbles were falling through the grass. I buttoned myself hastily, but I was mortified because moments later, glancing up, I saw Odette Huard making her way along the path towards me.

Had she seen me, then? Would she be smiling at the thought of telling the other maid at the St. Lawrence Hotel and perhaps even Gabriel Fontaine? I felt like running along the shore as fast as my legs would take me. Running back to my attic room, from which I would not emerge until the end of the summer. Mrs. Moore could leave my meals by the door. But all I did was stand there watching Odette come down the path. She wasn’t smiling; she was frowning in concentration, for it was steep and precarious. As she drew nearer, I could see again the cast in one eye, a slight turning to the right. That was what Gabriel must have been thinking about when he called her his cockeyed little chambermaid.

She didn’t appear surprised to see me there. “You’re staying in the Moores’ house,