Tante Marcelle’s Bedroom

 

As I grew older, Tante Marcelle's bedroom, next to Tante Gaby's, became more interesting. Tante Marcelle was the youngest of the five sisters and was said to resemble their late brother Paul who had become a Dominican friar. He died tragically in his thirties when he was doing some repair work on  a roof, touched a live wire by mistake, and was electrocuted. Tante Marcelle always seemed vaguely masculine to me, her features sharp, her manner brisk and her clothing without frills.

Her room was more like a bachelor study than a bedroom. What I liked best was her electric typewriter that sat like a black metallic pet atop her plain desk. I would climb on the wooden chair and stare at the white letters, A B C D X Y, which I  had learned in school. I dared not touch even one key. I liked to watch Tante Marcelle typing away, a cigarette burning in the ceramic ashtray amid the piles of bills and blue air mail letters from family and friends in Europe. In the summer, a breeze from the open balcony door would cleanse the room of the smoke. I would stand and listen to the sound of the keys against the roller, and see the black sentences shaping onto the white bond paper. Tante Marcelle was a fast typist who worked for the Coty cosmetics firm. She was the least "coquette" of the sisters but she did bring home samples of powder puffs, sticks of multi-coloured eyeshadows, and bottles of cologne which she distributed to us at Christmas.

Later, she worked as a secretary for the Catholic diocese of Outremont. She had us in stitches at the dining room table whenever she regaled the family with a list of old-fashioned names she had copied from baptismal registers, bulky turn-of-the-century names such as Cléonphe Anastase and Eugénie Chrisostome, among others.

Tante Marcelle's bedroom was much narrower than Tante Gaby's, its ivory walls yellowed by the smoke from her Matinée cigarettes. This vice was considered particularly shocking since Tante Marcelle had suffered from tuberculosis as a young woman and had spent time in a sanatarium in the Laurentians. Her illness ended her studies to be a nurse.

Her single bed was pushed against one wall. High wooden bookcases jutted out, filled with novels from the Book-of-the-Month Club such as Gone with the Wind and stacks of yellow-bordered National Geographic magazines. These were her passion and her lifetime membership had cost her a lot of money. I owed the high grades of many of my school projects to the gift subscription she renewed every Christmas for my parents. How I pored over those glossy photos of elephants and polar bears, gazed at the African children wearing beaded bracelets and learned about art. One of my most successful school projects featured the Spanish painter Goya. I had been allowed to cut out some of the artist's dark paintings reproduced in that National Geographic feature, to illustrate my text.

Tante Marcelle was an active member of the club "Les Amis de l'Art" which promoted culture. This group attracted artists of that time and Tante Marcelle developed a friendship with the poet and painter Cécile Chabot. She hung some of Cécile's pretty landscape paintings on her bedroom walls, and owned signed copies of her slim books. I remember Cécile Chabot as a fragile, soft-spoken woman with pale blond hair cut in a pageboy, my first encounter with a poet. Gabrielle Roy, a close friend of Cécile's,  once visited the house with her. My grandmother and aunts were great admirers of Roy's works and treasured their autographed copies of her books. My grandmother favored La Petite Poule d'Eau (Where Nests the Water Hen: the English translation.)

As a young woman, Tante Marcelle had fallen in love but had been denied permission by her father to marry because the young man was a Protestant. In the 1920s, it was still considered a sin for a Catholic to marry a Protestant. Tante Marcelle seemed to have overcome her broken heart, although she still kept a framed photograph of a handsome young man in naval uniform on her desk .

I was a little fearful of Tante Marcelle who was gifted with a sharp tongue. Around the age of eight, I fell victim to that gift. I had finally been given permission to use her electric typewriter and was filled with joy. At last I too could sit like Tante Marcelle and compose a letter, or even a story.

She had carefully placed the paper into the roller for me, and left me alone in her bedroom to make a phone call. I sat on the swivel office chair, my dress short and fluffy. I probably thought for a long time as I stared at the keys like a real author. Finally seized by a flowery idea, I pressed a key, then another, a finger at a time. I listened to what sounded like a melody to me as the black letters pressed against the paper and formed a sentence before my blue eyes. What happened next was unfortunate: in my excitement, I began to type faster and faster, and two keys, maybe the v and e, jammed together bringing the machine to a dead stop. O how my fingers grew numb and cold, my joy draining in one quick sob. What had I done? I was in trouble.

I don't remember being able to tell Tante Marcelle what had happened and quickly fled her room in search of a place to hide. Where did I go? All I remember now was overhearing my aunt tell my mother that I would never be allowed to use her typewriter again, that it would cost her a lot of money to repair, and that it was all a bother. The next time she lay eyes on me, she had a scowl and repeated that I was not allowed to use her typewriter anymore. After that, she became my least favourite aunt.

My indulgent, tender grandmother soon bought me my own typewriter, a toy one, which I gratefully played with in my bedroom. I sat on the floor, the small machine in my lap. I had to press hard on each key for the letter to appear on the sheet of paper and before long, the ink ribbon became faint.

 

 

©2009 Anne Cimon