The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Perhaps it was simply that my father would repeatedly report the progress of his vows to me with the kind of curdling respect which hurled my own haphazard trajectory squarely into the devil’s court. Indeed throughout my childhood and adolescence, my brother was constantly invoked as a moral authority, a saintly double. In the pure light of his mirror, all my rebellions big and small, took on a depraved cast. I began to relish the difference.

  When I was growing up and the church’s stultifying effect on the social development of my province became a point of common knowledge amongst anyone who wanted to launch Québec, a little late, into the twentieth century, I could never analyse the mantle of backwardness the church had shrouded us in without thinking of my brother’s black robes. It gave an added fervour to my denunciations. Ignorance, superstition, prejudice, underdevelopment, passive acquiescence to the oppressor - all these could be laid at the door of the church which had increased its own wealth and status and power at the expense of the rest of us. And behind the door of the church stood my brother with his stern countenance.

  In this image I have of him, it is always a large gold key, not a cross, he is swinging. The key turns the lock to all the precious things which, until the mid-sixties were forbidden to us: not the obvious things like guiltless pleasure, but all those other things like access to a philosophy which wasn’t only Aquinas; to science; to books. Even maps had to be approved by the Catholic Commission for use in class. In the schools of Québec, the Papal index had burgeoned to forbid ordinary French classics. Discussion of Flaubert was prohibited. Reading Baudelaire was equivalent to an act of black magic. When I bought my first copy of The Flowers of Evil, I kept it hidden in brown paper covers, under my mattress.

  Detective Contini tugs at my sleeve. The sparse congregation, largely made up of elderly women, has begun its slow shuffle towards the door.

  ‘Any regulars who knew Madeleine Blais and who would have been here on Christmas Eve?’ he whispers to me.

  I spy Mme Groulx arm in arm with Mme Préfontaine and hasten towards them.

  Mme Groulx is encased in a mink which thirty years ago must have been the envy of Ste-Anne. It sits around her as voluminous as the Cadillac her son used to drive. At the two traffic lights in town, he would pause for exaggerated lengths of time and puff away at a cigar which was only slightly shorter than his car in order to give anyone who was watching the extended pleasure of his opulent presence. Even by then the piano factory the Groulx had long owned was in financial difficulties. A few years later, it burned to the ground taking everything but the insurance papers with it. On the advice of my father, Mme Groulx made a few shrewd investments. She has been threatening her numerous offspring with their proceeds ever since.

  She puts a wrinkled hand on my arm now and gives me a soulful look from her sly eyes. ‘Mon p’tit Pierre, mon pauvre,’ she murmurs. ‘What an ordeal. For all of us. Still, perhaps it’s better this way.’ She crosses herself quickly. ‘She can do no more harm now.’

  I swallow and try to keep my voice even. ‘Mme Groulx, Mme Préfontaine, This is Detective Contini. If either of you were here for Midnight Mass, he’d like to ask you some questions.’

  Mme Rossignol has joined our little huddle. Her eyes are vast and watery beneath the thick lenses of her spectacles. This doesn’t deter her from instantly proclaiming herself a plausible witness. ‘You want to know about that stuck-up Mme Tremblay’s granddaughter, is that it?’ she asks in the loud voice of the partly deaf.

  Mme Préfontaine hushes her to no avail.

  ‘I saw her here. Indecent. She was wearing next to nothing.’ She gestures towards her thighs and makes a movement which takes on greater obscenity because of the inappropriateness of her bulk. ‘No hat, nothing! And she and that friend of hers. Whispering, giggling. Touching each other. No respect! That’s what it is. No respect. She’ll learn now,’ she adds ominously.

  ‘Her friend?’ It is the first time Detective Contini has had the opportunity to throw in a word.

  ‘Mafia,’ Mme Groulx says with irrefutable authority. ‘Not one of us. Some Hollywood gangster.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ the quiet Mme Préfontaine interrupts. ‘He was just an ordinary young man.’

  ‘A lot younger than her that’s for sure.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’ She turns towards Detective Contini. ‘He had a black leather jacket and one of those ties, you know like a string, with a gold badge or something under the collar.

  ‘And he had his hand on her bottom when they were kneeling. I saw it. I was right behind them. Poor old Michel who was sitting a few seats away couldn’t take his eyes off them. And that oaf George, not to mention Pascal Mackenzie - all of them, staring.’

  ‘Michel who, Mme Groulx? George who?’ Contini interjects.

  ‘Michel Dubois. George Lavigueur’

  ‘So, did you hear Madeleine Blais and her friend say anything to each other?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t like to repeat it. This is a holy place.’

  He gives her the first look of impatience I have seen cross his face. ‘Shall we go outside then? You can join us in a moment, ladies.’

  Mme Groulx looks suddenly lost without her cronies. She casts them a backward glance, then seeing us watching her, raises her shoulders in a kind of stubborn defiance.

  I want to follow them, but Mme Préfontaine, has her hand on my arm. She is murmuring something which I take to be condolences. Even though I like Mme Préfontaine, I don’t want to hear Madeleine’s name anymore on her or anyone else’s lips. They are ripping her away from me.

  I block my ears and nod and focus on the wispy white hair beneath the knitted grey beret. Mme Préfontaine has been white ever since I can remember. Story has it that she turned white the day her daughter gave birth to a black baby. During the war it was. Mme Préfontaine put it round that the child was the son of a black prince from Haiti whom her daughter had met in Montréal and who had then gone off to war and been bravely killed. But everyone knew he was really the child of one of the American soldiers who had been briefly stationed at the base some miles out of town.

  It didn’t matter. By the time the child was three, everyone half-believed her, such was the quiet dignity with which she and her daughter brought the boy up. And after a while, the truth grew obscure. The town preferred the illusion in any case. The son of a prince brought more credit on us.

  My father told me all this when we were having one of our arguments about what with my adolescent severity I judged as the appalling hypocrisy of Ste-Anne. He was trying to show me that there were gradations of untruth and some of it was to good purpose.

  In the midst of Mme Préfontaine’s speech I hear an authoritative clack of footsteps behind me. I know that tread. I turn and see my brother coming slowly down the aisle. He has shed his glittering robe and is now black suited and collared, his long, bony face a beneficient if austere mask beneath his steel grey hair. Something in the way he nods at the women, makes them bow their heads and take flight.

  From a certain angle, my brother is the exact replica of my father, right down to the working of the muscle in his cheek when he is repressing his anger. It is working now above the thin lips set in sympathy and I imagine my own face, which is like my mother’s, taking on a quiet impassivity.

  His hand rests on my shoulder. ‘I’m glad you picked up my message so promptly. We need to talk.’

  I have had no message, but I don’t bother to contradict him.

  ‘Will you join me in my office?’

  ‘Not right now. I’m here with somebody.’

  ‘I noticed. But he seems to be gone.’ My brother misses nothing, even as he holds up his sacred vessels and intones the mass.

  ‘He’s waiting outside.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Detective Richard Contini.’

  ‘I see. Well ask him to wait a little longer.’

  ‘I don’t think that wou
ld be wise.’

  ‘Oh?’ He gives me a look, more gloomy than my response warrants.

  ‘Too late in any case.’ I am relieved to see Detective Contini put his boxer’s face through the door. He blinks for a moment to accustom his eyes to the dimness than comes purposefully towards us.

  ‘Père Jerome Rousseau. The very man I want to see. I have just had a back view of Madeleine Blais and now I imagine you can give me the front.’

  My brother shudders slightly. He doesn’t like the Detective’s off-hand tone.

  ‘I take it you officiated Midnight Mass?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did you happen to notice Madeleine Blais in the congregation.’

  ‘Detective, Madeleine Blais did not have the gift of rendering herself invisible. Quite the contrary. She lived for the limelight, for the spectacle of herself. And now I note she has chosen to die in a similar manner.’

  My brother divests himself of this speech with dry aplomb.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Detective Contini is equally dry. ‘So you saw her on Sunday night?’

  ‘She waved to me Detective. Right in the midst of Mass. A long deliberate wave.’

  ‘I take it you didn’t wave back,’ Contini chuckles beneath my brother’s disapproving gaze.

  ‘She also had the audacity to step forward to take communion.’

  ‘No bad thing, given what followed that night. You’ll agree, I’m sure?’

  The muscle is working in my brother’s cheek. His eyes are on the floor.

  Contini doesn’t give him time to answer. ‘Though given her gaiety, I’m beginning to find that last act a little difficult to imagine. And the man who was with her. Did you recognize him?’

  My brother shakes his head. ‘No. I had never laid eyes on him before, though I can’t say I had too good a look at him. He didn’t take the host.’

  ‘Father, is there anyone in the parish whom you know to be hostile to Mademoiselle Blais? I mean really hostile.’

  My brother stares at him for a long moment. ‘I don’t quite see what you’re driving at Detective. But you should know that Madeleine Blais was not universally liked in Ste-Anne, though she was on occasion admired from a distance.’

  ‘I’m not trying to pry into the secrets of the confessional, Father, but if anything should come to mind, something more than generalized dislike or envy…’

  ‘I shall think on it. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a few words in private with Pierre.’

  ‘You might wait at Senegal’s,’ I murmur to Contini. ‘The café over the road. The old man has the thousand eyes of a born concierge.’

  I follow my brother out the side door, across the yard and up the stairs to his office. It is a pleasant, unpretentious room, clean and ordered. A few books, - the main library is in the seminary - a well-polished and immaculate desk, a tolerable oil depicting Ste Anne teaching Mary to read.

  My brother gestures me towards a chair and perches on the one behind the desk. He plays out a rhythm with a pencil for a moment then gives me a long, hard look. ‘I hope you’ll put that woman out of your mind now.’

  ‘Gone,’ I say flippantly. I lean into the chair and prepare myself for the inevitable lecture. But my mind is not on my brother’s words. I am thinking that it is significant, whatever her surface manner, that Madeleine took communion. She must have been preparing herself for death. She wouldn’t have done it otherwise. There wasn’t much religion left in her, but there was a lot of superstition.

  Suddenly I have a clear picture of the two of us that first summer of our friendship. We are lying beneath an old spreading beech and gazing through leaves at the clarity of a sky made bluer by the occasional froth of a passing cloud. Madeleine says, ‘I almost wish myself up there. Wish myself dead. I can see myself walking through the portals of heaven. There are two shimmering wings waiting for me and a wonderful white robe, soft and flowing. And a deep voice calls to me, our Father’s voice, and says, “Try it on, Madeleine. Welcome to eternity.” ’

  She was still at school with the nuns then. The following year, her grandmother took her off to Europe, six months in England, six months in Paris. She came back with wonderful accents and without religion. But occasionally, when things got her down, even when we were living together, she would sneak into a church and make a rapid confession. It made her feel better, she said with an apologetic smile.

  ‘I warned you, didn’t I?’

  Jerome’s face moves slowly into focus.

  ‘You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, Pierre. Listen for once, will you. Vice is infectious. And malignant. It spreads through the community more quickly than a virus.’

  I am wriggling in my chair like a guilty schoolboy who has been caught with a friend in the toilet and I have to remind myself that Jerome is not a bad man, that he means well. Yet he suffers from institutional deformation. He has spent so much time in schools and seminaries that his vision of evil is askew. Wars, exploitation, political terror are not in his purview. Instead, he has a heightened sensitivity to sex, to rebellion against authority, to pride. He is as alert to these homely transgressions as a medieval inquisitor.

  Madeleine was never a model pupil and he has always disapproved of my association with her. The brother of a respected cleric should not be linked to scandal, however remotely.

  ‘We’re all sinners, Jerome,’ I say softly. ‘If we weren’t there would be no job for you to do.’

  Anger hovers over his face and is instantly banished. It is replaced by pity. My brother has decided to pity me. It is an emotion he enjoys.

  ‘Listen Pierre. I want you to go off for a few weeks, longer if necessary. Get away from this whole sordid business of Madeleine’s suicide. I don’t want you gushing to the press. You’re not to be mixed up with it all.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t you know what I’m talking about?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  He examines my face, shifts uneasily in his chair. ‘I did try. I tried to warn you about her years ago. You refused to listen. It really is time that you woke up.’

  I am about to lurch out of the room, but there is something about the gravity of his face which makes me pause.

  ‘Alright, tell me then. What is it that I’m supposed to listen to?’

  My sudden and unusual acquiescence unnerves him. He passes a finger under his collar as if it has grown too hot in the room. For a moment, he scans my face. Then he lowers his gaze to his desk and takes a deep breath. ‘Madeleine was illegitimate.’

  ‘You amaze me!’ Irony drips from my voice. ‘Illegitimate. It’s not a word we use much these days. Not in the real world.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘It hardly takes much intelligence.’

  ‘Madeleine, too?’

  His childlike naiveté surprises me and I quiet myself into patience.

  ‘Madeleine always knew that Blais was her stepfather’s name. Her mother married him in Maine, when Madeleine was tiny. It wasn’t hard to work out the rest…’

  I have the sudden urge to explain Madeleine to him.

  ‘Look, Madeleine realised early on that she was an unwanted party in the new marriage. During the time that I knew her, on the single occasion she went to visit her mother, she came rushing home after two days and said she would never repeat the experience. She hated the disorder of the household, the squabbling heap of children, her sullen heavy-drinking stepfather. She even talked of changing her name. Somehow she never got round to doing that. But it was because of the turmoil in the household, because Madeleine had no place there, that Mme Tremblay took her over. You must have known that…

  ‘She took her right away. They spent a year together in England then came back to Ste-Anne when Madeleine was about six. Later on, Mme Tremblay officially adopted her. The line was that Madeleine’s natural father was dead. Maybe by the time I met her that was true. Maybe not. It didn’t matter to Madeleine. Mme Tremblay was
quite enough parent for her.’

  Something in my brother’s face makes me stop.

  ‘You didn’t know about the adoption?’

  He doesn’t answer. His hands are clenched in front of him, the fingers very white. ‘So her mother won’t come rushing back here for the funeral?’ he asks after a moment. ‘She won’t want to share in the spoils?’

  I shrug. ‘I’m not a clairvoyant. I don’t remember her ever asking Madeleine for very much.’

  ‘Frightened of her mother, probably. Of old Mme Tremblay.’

  ‘What is it that you’re frightened of Jerome?’ I ask, for I suddenly have the distinct and uncanny sense that he is frightened. ‘You didn’t by any chance have a fling with Monique Tremblay some time in the dim and distant past.’

  ‘Certainly not.’ He is all virtue now, despite the sudden flush of his face. ‘But I remember…’

  He scrapes his chair back from his desk and starts to pace. ‘I didn’t really want to talk about this, but…’ Memory etches his frown into deep grooves. I have to strain to hear his voice when it comes.

  ‘You know that father and Claire Tremblay were friends from way back. Her husband was father’s oldest boyhood friend. They enlisted together during the war, the only two from Ste-Anne to do so. The town didn’t much care for the war. It was European business, had nothing to do with us, people said. There was even a demonstration against conscription. I remember that. It made mother very nervous. We didn’t go to church for three weeks, for fear of being singled out, though by then I could barely remember father. He was just a picture in uniform on the mantlepiece.’

  He pauses, but I don’t interrupt the flow of memory. This is a time before my birth and what I know about it comes from history books and the brief wartime episodes in my father’s journal.

  ‘Mother used to say that they had enlisted for Claire’s sake, both of them, because she was British. Mother was very anxious in those days and Claire Tremblay used to come round and try to comfort her. I think she was lonely too. In any case, she was very solemn. I can still see her back then - a very tall woman with honey-gold hair coiled into a thick plait at the neck. She wore men’s trousers. Maybe she didn’t have money for dresses. But she always brought a cake with her and she and mother would sit and drink tea, while Monique, the daughter, bullied me into stupid games. Monique was only five or six years older than me. But that’s a lot when you’re small.’