Just Once, No More by Charles Foran

Author:Charles Foran [Foran, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2023-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

15

“Are you the boy who keeps using my name?”

This is how your grandfather greets you at the door to his house.

“You look like your mother,” he adds.

“My mom is French,” you say.

“And your old man is Ottawa Irish. Long line of Forans and McGradys and O’Neils. Your parents are Catholic with Catholic—a sensible match.”

Your older sister, Debbie, almost eleven, kisses her grandfather on the cheek. She seems to know him better.

“Your sister is a dead ringer for Barb,” Grandpa Charlie says to you.

“Who’s Barb?”

He drags on a cigarette. He has silver hair and a pencil-black mustache and smells the same as your father does: Old Spice and Brylcreem, top shelf in the bathroom cupboard.

“She’s my only daughter,” he finally says. “Your only aunt.”

About this, you are puzzled. You have ten aunts, called tantes in French, whose names you recite during the long drives to visit them: Marie, Helene, Lucille, Anna, Betty, Catherine, Delisca, Rita, Pauline. Plus, Cecile, a nun living in Rome with the Pope. Then you remember the orange-haired woman who looks like your dad in a wig. “Oh yeah,” you say. “Aunt Barb.”

“That’s her.”

Your family are visiting Charlie and Shirley Foran on their farm outside the city. Unlike trips to your tantes and oncles and cousins et cousines, which are frequent and last for weeks, you can’t remember the last time you saw the farm. It has a barn with horses and a pond with frogs and small fish. There is an in-ground pool for summer swims. The house is made of stone, with a curving staircase off the front hallway. On the walls are paintings of horses and photos of Colonel Foran in uniform, of him and Shirley in restaurants. On the tables in those photos are bottles and glasses and ashtrays laid out like cemeteries, some of the stones upright, others toppled.

In the family room you perch on the stool that your grandfather, seated in the armchair, uses for his feet. Your sister and mother are in the kitchen helping with lunch, and your dad has taken your five-year-old brother to see the barn. They went there right after Mike said, “Who’s Shirley?” in front of her.

“Did your nose really get blown off during the war?” you ask, gazing up at your namesake.

“The bridge I was on got blown up. A plank ripped the nose right from my face.”

“And broke your back too?”

“Your dad’s been telling you all this?” he asks, like a kid in the schoolyard asking his friends if a girl really said she liked him.

“Just one time,” you answer. Your father has probably told the story ten times, but you don’t want your grandfather knowing it. You aren’t sure why.

“That was a different accident. Blackout on the base, the air-raid sirens blaring. I’m crossing the tarmac in a Jeep. Can’t see my hand in front of me. Can’t hear myself think either. My batman, fellow by the name of George Smythe, a good guy, family man, he’s driving, of course, and cuts the headlights, as per regulations.

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