We came with our mothers. The restaurant was called Le François Premier, but we called it the Ninth or, if we were French, Le Neuvième. It was downtown, on the ninth floor of the Eaton department store on Rue Sainte-Catherine. We wore corduroy slacks and turtleneck sweaters, but our mothers dressed up. In high heels and fur coats, they looked like dancing bears at a circus. They spritzed themselves with Chanel No. 5. 

We first browsed the store’s lower levels before stepping into the elevators and being whisked to the Ninth. When the doors slid open, we found ourselves in a world of luxury and modernity. The dining hall was a rounded nave done in light grey and beige, its ceiling thirty feet high. Alabaster lamps in the shape of urns sat on bases of polished marble. The floor was linoleum, the pattern a cubist motif. 

We were the kind of sixteen-year-old boys who could appreciate the bold features of Art Deco. The space, we had read in the paper, was designed to resemble the chic dining room of an ocean liner. We could not help but think of the 1970s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. At one end of the hall, a vertical fresco depicted women lazing on a riverbank alongside dogs, horses and birds. These women, we recognized, were history’s most powerful—Amazons. They were what our mothers had once hoped to be.

The Ninth was populated mostly by women. They came here for what they called luncheons. We sat down with our mothers at tables for two covered in white tablecloths and were served by a team of busy, efficient waitresses wearing starched aprons and carrying silver platters. We ordered à la carte: chicken gumbo or cream of tomato soup, club sandwiches with pickles, roast turkey with cranberry sauce. Our mothers ate little; they picked at salads with cottage cheese, nibbled on bran muffins. Some drank cocktails made of pineapple or plum spirits; others drank café au lait in large cups. 

Throughout the meal, they smoked cigarettes, their smoke wafting upward. They talked about the shipwrecks of their lives. They talked about their husbands, our fathers, men who belittled and humiliated them, gambled, drank to excess, disappeared for days on end. As their confidants, we listened dutifully, nodding in the right places. Near the end of the meal, our mothers fished through their purses and pulled out little square wrappers. They paused, then laid them down beside our glasses of ginger ale. 

They were empty condom wrappers. 

“I found this on the floor of our bathroom,” they told us. “Does it belong to you?”

We eyed the wrappers warily. “No,” we said.

They let out an exasperated sigh. “He’s at it again,” they said.

As our mothers had told us many times before, our fathers cheated on them. They slept around—with secretaries, neighbours, occasionally their own daughters. Our mothers teared up and cursed under their breath. We boys, scattered at tables around the hall, threw one another embarrassed glances. We wondered whether to tell our mothers the truth: that the condom wrappers were in fact ours. That we had accidentally dropped them in the bathroom. That we boys—neatly dressed, obedient, good listeners—were sleeping with each other.

But we kept our mouths shut. We let our Amazons cry silently into their drinks. Outside, in the distance, but drawing ever closer, was a tidal wave. We could feel it bearing down on us. The Ninth, our ocean liner, shook lightly, the fine china and heavy cutlery rattling against the tables. It was just a matter of time before disaster struck, turning our lives upside down. But we boys would climb through the wreckage of our capsized ship, leaving our broken mothers behind. We would emerge through the hull into daylight—dirty and bruised but alive. ⁂

Note: The iconic Ninth restaurant closed in 1999 after the Eaton department store filed for bankruptcy. The space, located in what's now the Montreal Eaton Centre, was reopened in 2024 to hold an event hall, multipurpose rooms and the Île-de-France restaurant. 

Neil Smith has published three books of fiction with Penguin Random House Canada. He also translates novels.

Peter Currie is on Instagram @peterdcurrie