My Grandmother’s Bedroom

 

Grand-maman’s bedroom was on the left of the stairs, next to Tante Jeanne’s. An alcove between the stairs and the bedroom held a secrétaire which was a small desk where my grandmother sat to pay her bills and write her correspondence to family abroad like Tante Helmina in Rome or Jean Désy, her brother-in-law, who was a diplomat in Paris.

Grand-maman’s bedroom was painted café-au-lait beige. It had a European style. She had matching rosewood dressers with Italian marble tops that had been shipped from France by boat. She had bought these on her honeymoon. My grandfather’s black and white portrait in a silver frame sat on one dresser. I didn’t like to look at it. The middle-aged man who stared out had a severe look and glacial eyes. I don’t recall my grandmother speaking of him though my mother talked about him incessantly. She was haunted by his memory. She felt that he had never wanted her and in fact found fault in her always. He had died suddenly in his mid-fifties from a heart attack after eating a large meal and then going out to shovel snow. At that time, my mother was twenty and dating my father, whom she said, she would never have married if her father had lived. He would have forbidden it. Did that mean that my existence had happened because of my grandfather’s early death?

My grandmother and aunts were close to my grandfather’s three sisters, Tante Pauline, Lucile (the same name as my grandmother), and Beatrice (called Tante Bea). They lived a few streets away and were invited to holiday and birthday dinners and any other celebration in between. They all met at Saint-Viateur Church on Laurier Avenue for Sunday mass.

My eyes were always on my beautiful round-faced grandmother. She was short, not quite five feet and had a bit of “embonpoint.” Her hair was silver grey and thick, permed into soft curls. Her best feature was her glowing skin with few wrinkles even late in life. Her signature perfume was Nina Ricci’s L’Air du temps which she would spray not only on the pulse points of her neck and wrists but also on her clothing.

I sat patiently on her narrow bed. I liked the beige toile de Jouy she had chosen as the material for her floor length drapes and matching bedspread. The tiny dark brown shepherds and shepherdesses in the pastoral print were cheerful company in the small room. The bed was by a tall window with leaded panes. A door opened onto the balcony and a towering maple tree.

I liked to watch my grandmother as she prepared for a “sortie.” As I grew older, she treated me to restaurants like Da Giovanni on St-Denis Street or the fancier Café at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Since I dedicated myself to my ballet lessons, she also liked to take me to the newly constructed Place des Arts to see performances of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Les Sylphides, Swan Lake, or The Nutcracker. She also took me to see the flamboyant Spanish dancer José Greco. My favourite was to go to the Gésù theatre and see the Quebec folk dance troupe Les Feux Follets.

In her bedroom, my grandmother would stand in her silky slip and choose one of her dresses from the closet. All her dresses were tailor made by an Italian seamstress who lived on Durocher Street. I was impressed at how the belt matched the dress as it was made from the same material.

My eyes would wander to the curio shelves on the wall above her bed. My grandmother liked to collect miniatures on her trips and she kept them on this delicate wooden shelf construction. She had a glass cat from New York City, a mini cowbell from Switzerland, and other treasures from Spain and Italy. She also collected charms that dangled on a silver bracelet. I liked the mini whale and the silver ballet slipper best. Her bracelet made a clinking sound whenever she moved her arm.

Grand-maman kept a jewellery box on top of her dresser and had another in a drawer.

Strands of pearls, silver and gold chains, a sapphire necklace with a matching ring all neatly fit in the velvet interior. She also had rings with agate stones she had found on the beach at Percé.

While she dressed, Grand-maman would talk to me about subjects that meant a lot to her like the beauty of nature. She loved the night sky. In her sixties, she joined an amateur astronomy club and invested in a telescope that she installed at her window to look up at the constellations.

I remember how she liked to return to her bedroom after her morning coffee in the dining room. She sat in the tiny fauteuil squeezed between the balcony door and a dresser. She wore her horn-rimmed glasses as she did the newspaper crossword puzzle. Her pencil poised as she thought of the answer, she would lose her worries about my mother and me. She also read pocket books every day. My grandmother and aunts were all enthusiastic readers and the bookcases throughout the house held classics by Charles Dickens, Balzac, Victor Hugo, as well as best-selling novelists of their time like Frank G. Slaughter and Paul Gallico.

My grandmother’s favourite author was Canadian Gabrielle Roy. She loved La petite poule d’eau (Where Nests the Water Hen) and had an autographed copy. She encouraged me to read this author though I only did in university when I studied Roy’s first novel The Tin Flute. Throughout my childhood, my grandmother would give me gifts of books which I devoured since I shared her love for books. I remember the first time I felt the desire to read at around three years old. It happened as I sat beside Tante Jeanne on the living-room sofa. She was reading to me from one of my favourite fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood. I stared at the letters which were indecipherable black signs against the white page. I could look at the colorful pictures on my own but I wanted to be able to pick up the book and not have to ask anyone to read it for me. Still, I loved how Tante Jeanne could make me shudder when she imitated the growl of the big bad wolf who ate the grandmother.

In her seventies, my grandmother became less content with her bedroom. She complained of increasing noise and pollution from the cars going up and down Stuart Avenue, which connected the busy Cote Ste-Catherine Road to Bernard Avenue. She also began to complain of the boys who shouted as they played football in Beaubien Park across the street. She lost her equanimity as her health began to fail and she became more judgemental. She disliked the rock’n’roll music I loved; she hated my blue jeans; she was appalled by the sexuality in films and on TV. She sensed the coming breakdown of relationships between men and women:

“Look how they dance today,” she exclaimed as we sat in the living room watching one of my favourite local programs for teens, Like Young. “When we were young, the boy led the girl in his arms. Now they don’t even touch, or smile at each other.”

She liked to go to the cinema and had seen the film The Graduate. She deplored the final scene. The character played by Dustin Hoffman burst into the church to stop the girl he had fallen in love with from marrying another man. Still in her wedding gown, the girl had fled with him and they had climbed into a bus. They sat at the back of the bus together with glum faces.

“After all that,” my grandmother remarked acidly, “they weren’t even happy.”

This was the kind of criticism that I was sensitive to for I was taken by pop culture and had become a flower child. “Une fille des rues,” my grandmother would say to my mother. The “sage fille” had become a rebel. Yet the hours and hours my grandmother spent teaching me what is good, and the peacefulness I had found in her bedroom, nourish me still like warm milk and honey.

 

 

 

©2009 Anne Cimon