The Smell of Smoke

Green remembers the quality of sunlight on the afternoon he last saw Maggie, August 23, 1968, beside his parents’ swimming pool. It was late in the season so there was a distinct feeling of summer declining. He witnessed it in the length and speed of shadows sliding across the lawn from the arborvitae hedge and the maples, firs, and birches.

His mother and a couple of his aunts were reclining on chaises longues. The women had been sunbathing, and were just starting to notice the freshness in the air. Maggie had disappeared into the cabana wearing a two-piece bathing suit. She came out rubbing her wet hair with a towel, dressed in blue-and-white striped bell bottoms, a wide leather belt with a brass buckle, a T-shirt, and sandals. She was tan from days sailing on Green’s little Pram, the Nutshell.

He was stretched out on a chaise on the same side of the pool as the women, but separate from them. Turquoise water glinted between him and Maggie. He was still wet. They had raced twenty-five lengths and he had won. His skin stank of chlorine. He was shivering.

When Maggie called goodbye from across the pool, his mother and aunts waved. As far as they were concerned, it was only the beginning of the end of another summer, and Maggie was only returning to Boston, where she took studio classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts —- “the Museum of Fine Rats,” she called it. Green watched her walk down the gravel path carrying her bathing suit and towel, pass through the gate, get into the white sports car, and drive away down Bord-du-Lac Road.

Maggie’s parents’ house was one of the oldest on the lakeshore. In the days of New France it had been a manor home and a fur-trading post. There were gun slits in the basement, where the seigneur and his family and servants barricaded themselves when the Iroquois and the New Englanders —- les Bostonnais —- raided up and down the St. Lawrence. The fieldstone and rubble walls were three feet thick. The gun slits were stuffed with pink insulation fiber.

People called it “the Lakeshore” but the lake was really just a widening in the St. Lawrence River. The water had current, it had a flow.

The restless youngsters of New France and fanatical priests in black robes used to set off from there, paddling upstream, plunging into the Ohio then down the Mississippi, baptizing Indians and claiming an endless Louisiane for the kings of France.

Now the Lakeshore was merely a Montreal suburb where businessmen built comfortable houses, paid yacht-club dues, and took the train into the city. There were Indians in a village on the other side of the golf course but they kept to themselves.

Blood and furs, fortune hunting, holy anointing oil, the transportation of faith —- all that had been forgotten.

The Harrisons had no roots in Montreal. Maggie was born on an air base in Labrador and her parents were from out West. Mrs. Harrison wore turquoise eye shadow and a matching hair band. Maggie’s father was an Air Canada pilot, flying dc-8s across the Atlantic every week. He drank rye and played golf. According to Maggie, he grew up on a ranch in Alberta, and he walked the fairways with a bow-legged strut.