Read Online My October by Claire Holden Rothman - Free Book Online Page A

rapt, all of them loving him, even the boys, many of whom grew their hair and sported beards in emulation of his scruffy style. Privately, they called him Lucky Luc.
    And lucky he was. A big man, muscular and well-built. Girls went quiet or else giggled in his presence. But it wasn’t his looks that made Hannah’s legs go weak that first day. It was his voice.
    Tanneur tanné had been published the previous spring and had catapulted his life onto a new path. He was hailed across the province as the literary heir to Gabrielle Roy. When he spoke in the classroom, he was sonorous and self-assured.
    He won a Governor General’s Award, stirring up a scandal when he declined to go to Ottawa to pick up the prize. A publisher in Paris bought French rights for Europe, and Luc received a wildly favourable notice in Le Monde . And then Hannah translated the book. He could have had any translator he wanted, and he chose her. How she had laboured. By that time, of course, she had moved into the triplex in Saint-Henri. People said he was crazy to trust her. She was a child. His English publisher tried hard to dissuade him, but Luc’s mind was made up. He sheltered Hannah in the flat and fed her a steady diet of encouragement and praise until the job was done.
    Her translation won its own Governor General’s Award, which she accepted with gratitude. It helped Luc gain an English readership across North America. And it established Hannah as a literary translator. Luc had gone over every word of the text with her, answering all her questions, alerting her to the slightest nuance of meaning. They were used to the roles of student and teacher. He was opinionated, full of loud certitudes, a lover of argument. Very much like her father, she eventually realized. But by then, she knew how to handle it. She welcomed him into her work as easily as into her bed.
    Now she scrolled dispiritedly through the text on her screen. The book was late. Allison March, her editor at the Word Press, had been sending frequent, increasingly uneasy emails. The unease diminished after Hannah explained about her father, but the emails kept coming, incessant pricks to her conscience.
    Hannah’s resistance to this book had begun long before Alfred Stern’s stroke. She’d been slow from the start, limping along, unable to find her stride. She had a reputation for being reliable with deadlines, but suddenly with Dreamer she did not care.
    And yet. The writing was lovely. The structure worked. Luc’s protagonist faced a series of ever-greater obstacles. But there was no pleasure in the book. No lightness. And it ended in death: a suicide. Perhaps Luc had meant the ending metaphorically, but a metaphor for what? When she asked him about it, he shrugged. That was what had come to him.
    She read over the most recent paragraph she had translated, days ago, in Montreal. The young Cuban woman had just told the protagonist she was pregnant. Her eyes were radiant. She wanted this child, their child. But the man had turned away. He already had a son. The reality, he told her, would only mock the dream.
    Hannah couldn’t help taking it personally. The reality would mock the dream. She and Luc had dreamed once too—of a marriage that would do away with the old divisions of language and culture, and make for them a space in which to live and work, side by side.
    Luc had enrolled in an English class. Every week for a year, he’d walked to the basement of a local school and returned home dutifully to read the English newspaper. He’d asked Hannah to list her favourite novels in English. He had actually planned to read them. Hannah had no idea where that list now was.
    These days he was writing nonsense—men turning their backs on paternity and on the women they purported to love. What had happened to the dream?
    The story was loosely based on Jacques Lanctôt’s life. Very loosely, because Lanctôt didn’t have merely