Corn typically gets the spotlight. She always does very well with the original grow strain of Golden Bantam, and as she starts typing the blurb that will accompany her photographs, she decides to do a special promotion. Thirty cents for a package of a hundred seeds.
When she’s done, she double- and triple-checks for typos—her father abhorred errors in the catalogue and passed down his obsession to Maggie—and then she pulls the paper out with a dramatic flick of the wrist, as though she’s just completed a novel.
As she’s getting up to replenish her coffee, the phone rings. Maggie’s mood dips; she assumes it’s her mother calling to complain about her pending move into the seniors’ home. She contemplates ignoring the call, but guiltily grabs the phone at the last minute. With all the siblings moved away—Geri and Nicole in Montreal, Peter in Toronto, and Violet in Val Racine—Maman has no one else left to make miserable.
“Maggie? It’s Clémentine. Have you read today’s Journal de Montréal?”
“No, why?” Maggie asks, realizing her heart is pounding. Something about the urgency in Clémentine’s voice.
“There’s a story on page three,” Clémentine says. “About the Duplessis orphans.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Maggie. I think it could be her—”
Maggie hangs up and goes off in search of the paper. She finds it untouched on the bathroom vanity, where Gabriel has left it for his after-dinner reading. She doesn’t even bother going into another room, just sits down on the cold tiles beside the toilet and turns straight to page three.
Grown-Up Duplessis Orphans Transition Back Into Society
On a warm spring day in 1967, seventeen-year-old Monique (not her real name) stepped outside the doors of Montreal’s Saint-Nazarius Hospital to claim her freedom. Monique grew up behind the barred windows of the Saint-Nazarius mental ward, not because she was mentally deficient but because she was an orphan. Monique is but one of thousands of healthy, illegitimate children who were diagnosed mentally incompetent in the 1950s under Premier Maurice Duplessis’s government and sent to psychiatric hospitals across the province.
In 1954, Duplessis signed an order-in-council converting the province’s orphanages into hospitals as a way to provide more federal funding to the religious orders that were caring for the orphans. At that time, the Quebec government received federal subsidies for hospitals, but almost nothing for orphanages. Financial contributions for orphans were only $1.25 a day, compared with $2.75 a day for psychiatric patients.
These children weren’t just orphans; they were the province’s abandoned “children of sin,” born out of wedlock, with no one to advocate for them. Monique’s earliest memory is of life at the Saint-Sulpice Orphanage in Farnham, where she lived until she was seven. In those days, it was known as the Home for Unwanted Girls. “But it wasn’t a bad place,” she recalls. “I have no bad memories of it, until they turned it into a mental hospital.”
Monique remembers the day the bus pulled up and a group of elderly mental patients debarked and moved into the place Monique called home. School stopped abruptly that day, and Monique was given the job of caring for the mental patients, right up until her transfer to Saint-Nazarius in 1957.
What was life like for a normal-functioning child growing up in a mental institution? At her basement apartment in Pointe Saint-Charles, Monique pulls out a notebook filled with detailed documentation of her experience there—her drawings, journal entries, and dreams. If not for the benevolence and quotidian care of the Sisters of Saint-Nazarius, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of children like Monique. The nuns in charge of the overcrowded mental wards had their work cut out for them. It was the norm to have just one nun overseeing at least fifty children on a ward without any assistance. Stretched to their limits, they had to run a tight ship and could be strict disciplinarians.
“I was put to work right away,” Monique says. “Cleaning toilets, sewing. We were harshly punished for even the smallest mistakes.”
But there were happy times, too. Christmas concerts, excursions to nearby towns, friendships that will last a lifetime. After she left the hospital, Monique lived with a former roommate from Saint-Nazarius, who was also released as a result of a commission in the early sixties tasked with investigating these institutions. It was reported in 1962 that more than twenty thousand patients did not belong, after which followed the steady release of many of the now grown orphans, who were sent out into the world to find work and live normal lives.
Like most of the orphans in her situation, Monique left Saint-Nazarius with few life skills. Describing herself as childlike and “backwards,” Monique says, “I didn’t even know how to peel and boil a potato.”
And yet thanks to the diligence of the Sisters of Saint-Nazarius, Monique could sew and was able to find work almost immediately as a seamstress. She’s been able to support herself and transition back into the fold of regular society. Time will tell the full story about the ramifications of Duplessis’s initiatives, but for now, Monique is leading a quiet, normal life, which, she says, is all she ever wanted. “I’m not crazy,” she says. “I never was. I’m just like everyone else you see on the street.”
Maggie finishes the article and gets up off the floor. She doesn’t bother calling Clémentine back; instead, she runs outside, wildly waving the paper in her hand and calling out to Gabriel.
Chapter 52
Elodie
Elodie stares at the sketch in her notebook and realizes she’s made a mistake. She erases what she’s drawn and makes the correction: there were three buckled straps that ran across the front of the straitjacket, not four. The fourth buckle was actually at the bottom; it was for the strap that went between her legs and fastened behind her back.
Satisfied, she closes her notebook for the day and tucks it safely inside the drawer of her nightstand. It’s become quite a tome, this book containing page after page of hand-drawn sketches and detailed notes about what happened to her at Saint-Nazarius—chronicled with agonizing precision, the memories still raw and vivid in her mind.
She has no plans to show the notebook to anyone else. She bared her soul to that journalist, and instead of telling the truth, he wrote a fairy tale with a happy ending. The morning the piece was published, she could hardly wait to read it. It was a week ago Saturday. She thought, Finally, I’ll get my revenge. She figured the whole province would soon learn about what the nuns had done to the orphans and consequences would follow at last.
By the time Elodie was finished reading the article, she was sobbing on the floor, devastated. The story made no mention of the torture and abuse she’d suffered on a daily basis, no mention of Sister Ignatia’s name or the fact that “Monique” was raising her own illegitimate child now. That would have interfered with the journalist’s happy ending; it would have sullied the idea he’d put forth of her leading a “quiet, normal life.”
It was bullshit, all of it. Lies by omission—and worse. “Christmas concerts”? “Friendships that will last a lifetime”? Elodie wanted to throw up reading that part. And most egregious of all was his description of the nuns’ “benevolence” and “quotidian care.”
That’s when she tore the newspaper to shreds and set it on fire in her sink and then stood there watching the flames destroy her first, but not her last, attempt at retribution.
She’s not a good enough writer to tackle her own autobiography, but she’s vowed to herself that one day she will tell her story to someone willing to expose the truth: not some whitewashed fluff piece that continues to protect the church, but an unsparing, graphic account of the horrors the orphans endured. She only hopes Sister Ignatia will still be alive when the world finds out what she did.
“Maman?”
Elodie looks up to find Nancy standing there, watching her with those worshipful blue eyes. She’s almost three now, with fine blond hair and a round, rosy face. It still amazes Elodie that she’s somehow managed to create this exuberant angel
, this spark of light and joy who doesn’t sit still, laughs at everything, stomps her feet when she doesn’t get her way; this child who is fearless and confident and inherently happy.
Not a day passes that Elodie does not wonder, How did I make this creature?
They’re nothing alike. Nancy is curious and clever, optimistic. Elodie’s passing dark moods hardly seem to deflate the little girl’s buoyant spirit or deter her from her mission to explore, entertain, or get her way. In fact, very little dampens her zest, other than being told no. Compared to her own childhood, Nancy has had a marvelous life so far, which is a point of great pride for Elodie.
She may not be the best mother; she’ll be the first to admit it. She waitresses five nights a week and they’re still on welfare. When she’s home, she spends far too much time with her nose buried in her grievance notebook, obsessively trying to record every single abuse she ever suffered. But Nancy is safe and well fed, has no bruises or scars, has never been locked up. She’s been snuggled and kissed and tickled and told “I love you” a thousand times. Elodie has surpassed all her expectations for the kind of mother she’d be and managed, in spite of everything, to transcend her many limitations.
“Maman, up,” Nancy says, raising her plump arms above her head.
Elodie lifts her onto the pullout couch they share, and Nancy curls up in her lap like a kitten. “Je t’aime, Maman,” she coos.
Elodie still finds it jarring to hear those words so freely uttered. I love you. She’s had to do so little to earn them. “I love you, too,” she says, lighting a cigarette.
“When am I going to Grand-Maman’s?” Nancy asks, looking up at Elodie with unfiltered adoration.
“Who?” Elodie says. “You don’t have a grandmother.”
“Mme. Drouin told me she’s my grand-maman and that’s what I’m supposed to call her.”
Elodie has a long drag from her cigarette and tries to calm her racing pulse. “Well, she’s not,” she says angrily.
“Then who is?”
Elodie opens her mouth to tell Nancy the truth, but quickly reconsiders. Nancy is watching her expectantly, the way children do. “Mme. Drouin is not your grandmother,” she says carefully.
“But she takes care of me.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“All the other kids on the street have grandmothers and aunties and uncles and cousins,” she says. “Where are mine?”
Elodie stubs out her cigarette in a mug by her bed, blinking against the threat of tears. “Aren’t I enough for you?” she asks the little girl.
Nancy looks thoughtful, her golden brows adorably furrowed. “Can’t I have both?” she says.
“Maybe one day, chouette,” Elodie says, never giving up on the possibility of one day finding a relative. “Now go get Maman a Pepsi.”
Nancy scrambles out of bed, singing “Frère Jacques” on her way to the kitchenette.
“Don’t shake the can!” Elodie calls out.
Moments later, Nancy returns with a can of Pepsi. She holds it out and Elodie opens it, and sure enough, it explodes, the frothy soda spilling out like lava all over her shirt and sheets. Nancy bursts out laughing, completely unafraid of any consequences. Elodie laughs with her, knowing for certain that Nancy must be the universe’s gift for the terrible childhood she endured.
The phone rings and Elodie slides across the bed to grab it. “Allô?”
“Elodie, it’s Gilles Leduc from the Journal de Montréal.”
Elodie tenses and her face feels hot. “Your article was bullshit,” she says. “You’re as bad as them, protecting the nuns like that. You call yourself a journalist, but you’re just a liar. You left everything important out. My ‘quiet, normal life’? Are you blind?” She hears him sighing on the other end, but she goes on. “You made it sound like I had an enchanted childhood in that place, for Christ’s sake. Why didn’t you just tell the truth? It would have made for a much better story!”
Nancy is watching her with her big eyes.
“Do you read the classifieds?” he interrupts, silencing her rant.
“No.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I won’t ever read your paper again, asshole. You don’t write the truth!”
“I really think you need to buy today’s paper.”
“Why?”
“A copy editor I know in the classifieds department mentioned there’s someone who’s been running an ad for years, the first Saturday of every month. I think it could be you he’s looking for.”
“Me? What are you talking about?”
“Your story matches the details in this classified ad. Just go buy the goddamn paper.”
He hangs up. In spite of her vow never to read a newspaper again, she drags Nancy to the corner store to pick up the Journal de Montréal. She scans the entire classifieds section right there, until she comes to the ad that just about stops her heart.
I am in search of a young woman with the given name Elodie, born March 6, 1950, at the Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital in the Eastern Townships. She was transferred in 1957 from the Saint-Sulpice Orphanage near Farnham to Saint-Nazarius Hospital in Montreal. I have information about her birth family. Please call—
And just like that, everything changes.
Her birth family. She repeats those words over and over in her head as she rushes home, clutching the newspaper to her heart.
“What’s wrong, Maman?” Nancy asks, trying to keep pace with Elodie.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Elodie says, crouching down to her daughter’s eye level. “It’s just the opposite. I think everything might finally be all right.”
Chapter 53
Maggie
It’s the usual Saturday evening chaos. Gabriel is over at the farm, and Maggie is by herself with the kids. The phone is ringing and Stephanie is having a tantrum because she wants to wear her rain boots in the bath. James is at the kitchen table watching an Expos game and eating his third supper of the night—he’s a bottomless pit these days. The TV is blaring.
Maggie grabs the phone, ignoring Stephanie, who’s pulling on her bell-bottoms and wailing about needing to wear the boots in the bathtub so she can pretend it’s a puddle.
“Allô?” Maggie answers.
“I saw your ad in the Journal de Montréal today,” a woman says.
“I’m sorry, what ad?”
“It said you have information about my birth family? My name is Elodie.”
Maggie’s knees buckle. She reaches her arm out to the counter to hold herself up.
“Madame?” Elodie says.
“Yes. I’m here. Sorry.”
“The ad said to call this number.”
“Of course,” Maggie manages, reeling. Gabriel must have placed it. All this time he’s let her do the crusading, but quietly he’s been looking for Elodie, too.
“So this is the right number?” the woman says.
“Yes,” Maggie manages. “Yes.”
She’s not dead. It’s her.
When she read the article in the paper last week about “Monique” and the Duplessis orphans, she felt a resurgence of hope. She thought there was a strong possibility that Monique could be Elodie. The problem was Maggie still didn’t know how to find her. She suggested to Gabriel that they drive around Pointe Saint-Charles, patrolling up and down the streets in search of a twenty-four-year-old woman they might hopefully recognize, but Gabriel put his foot down, told her she was being irrational and manic. They did visit every sewing factory in the Pointe, Saint-Henri, and Griffintown, but no one fitting Elodie’s description worked at any of them. Maggie even went to the Centre de Retrouvailles, but all she could do was leave her own information and hope that Elodie would show up there one day looking for her birth mother.
“The ad says you have information about my birth family?”
“I—Yes, I do,” Maggie stammers, trying to sound normal.
Stephanie is still tugging on Maggie’s bell-bottoms, whining about
the goddamn rubber boots. Maggie holds the phone away from her mouth and says to James, “Get her out of here!”
James ignores her.
“Do it now,” Maggie hisses. “Put her in a bath.”
“With my boots on?” Stephanie wants to know.
“Yes,” Maggie says impatiently. Stephanie immediately perks up and skips off. James turns off the TV and follows her begrudgingly out of the kitchen, leaving Maggie alone.
“Do you know anything about your background?” she asks Elodie, hoping to establish it’s really her.
“I was born in 1950,” Elodie says. “I don’t know the date. Nobody adopted me because I was small and sickly. I don’t know much else. My mother died giving birth to me.”
Maggie clamps a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. Died giving birth? Why the hell would the nuns tell her that?
“Who am I?” Elodie asks her again. “What’s my family name?”
“Your name is Elodie Phénix,” Maggie says, trying to steady her breathing and stay calm.
“And who are you?”
Maggie hesitates, not sure how to respond. The poor girl thinks her mother is dead. How can Maggie tell her the truth over the phone?
“I’m Maggie,” she says, at last. “I think I might be your aunt.”
“My mother’s sister?”
“Yes,” Maggie lies. “She had a daughter born March 6, 1950, a few weeks early. The baby was at Saint-Sulpice until 1957, and then transferred to Saint-Nazarius. My sister gave her the name Elodie.”
The Home for Unwanted Girls Page 28