The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  Aside from Zucker, no one in the parish of Saint-François-Xavier could ever have imagined that the undertaker’s daughter would one day turn the restaurant world on its head, revolutionizing how North Americans defined breakfast. Madeleine seemed predisposed to nothing but the ordinary, tedious, and laborious life of any French-Canadian woman. But from the moment she entered the convent school, the nuns discovered she had a gift for mental arithmetic. As it happened, her brothers had been the first to realize her talent the day all three of them had been watching The Horse do a bench press and Marc had wondered out loud how much the barbell weighed.

  “How much do you think, Madeleine?”

  In a split second, Madeleine had, to her brother’s astonishment, added and multiplied the round weights plus the bar.

  “Two hundred and thirty-five pounds.”

  Then, at the age of eight, she had, without really meaning to and in the offhand way that only little girls can manage, surprised an entire grieving family with her math skills. It was at the wake of the widow, April. Madeleine, holding a tray of cookies, was following her mother about while she poured coffee into the cups of the family come to keep vigil over the wrinkled corpse of the old woman whose niece had found her sitting dead in her rocking chair. The niece, a woman in her thirties whom grief had made voluble to a fault, chattered incessantly while the other relatives, absorbed by their rosary, seemed oblivious to her.

  “It’s strange just to go like that. She wasn’t even ill. Of course, considering her age . . . How old was Aunt Jeanne anyway? Let’s see, she was three years younger than her husband and he was born in 1891, so that would make her, uh . . .”

  “Sixty-four,” Madeleine piped up, as she proffered the tray of cookies, instantly reducing the woman to silence, much to the relief of the rest of the family.

  Besides this gift for numbers and the effect the stories of Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne—a man she considered a demigod—had on her, Madeleine had only one other exceptional character trait: she had a jealous streak, a poison she had begun imbibing without reserve the day the letter from Potsdam, New York, arrived. In theory, the letter from Potsdam should never have fallen into Madeleine’s hands, but fate had decided otherwise. On that particular day in September 1958, Irene had kept her daughter home so that she could catch chicken pox from her little brother Marc, who had caught it at the boys’ school.

  “Better to have it at her age than once she’s an adult. It’ll be over and done with.”

  Irene tucked the still-sleeping Madeleine into the bed of her crying brother, whose hands Papa Louis had tied behind his back to keep him from scratching himself raw. There he was, trussed up like a turkey and itching all over, when his sister arrived in his bed. Irene had to go out for a few minutes and Louis had left to pick up a corpse from a house on Rue Saint-Pierre. Which meant that the children were all by themselves when the letter dropped into the letterbox on Rue Saint-François-Xavier. Madeleine heard the metal click and the postman’s footsteps on the wooden porch. Curious, she went downstairs, ignoring Marc’s pleas.

  “Scratch me or untie me, will you!”

  The envelope with the red and blue border caught her attention. It bore an American stamp with an old man on it. And the address, which wasn’t easy to read for a youngster of eight:

  Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne

  Rivière-du-Loup

  Province of Quebec, Canada

  The sender, a lady by the name of Floria Ironstone, had written the return address on the back of the envelope. Potsdam, New York. Madeleine read the name one syllable at a time, stumbling when she got to the impossible-to-pronounce Ironstone. She took an instant dislike to the name Floria. This person—she could feel it—wanted to steal her Horse away from her. She immediately sensed the letter was a threat to her happiness and decided then and there that it would never reach its intended recipient. Seeing her mother at the end of the road, she scampered up the stairs, holding her booty at arm’s length. She barely had time to hide the letter behind a baseboard and race back to her brother’s room (where poor Marc was being driven mad by the itching) before Irene opened the door downstairs. Apart from this letter from America that she had intercepted in the nick of time, Madeleine used to hide all kinds of valued finds behind that board, little treasures she had “discovered” here and there, and that glinted and gleamed. Sometimes at night she would pry back the board, the door to her secret safe, to admire her fortune by the light of a polished-glass lamp. And this is what she would see there, shining in the magpie’s dusty nest:

  —a wedding band stripped from a dead man’s hand at a boisterous wake where the grieving relatives had decided, just before closing the casket for the last time, to settle a few old scores over fisticuffs on Louis Lamontagne’s lawn. While Papa Louis separated the men, Madeleine had snuck up to the casket and pocketed the shiny ring that had been calling out to her with every ray it had for the past two days;

  —a silver spoon given to her brother Luc and every other child in the Commonwealth who had been born on June 2, 1953, to commemorate the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II;

  —and a cheap flower-shaped earring her brother Marc had found in the mud in the spring of 1957.

  Irene was upstairs now.

  Madeleine pushed the board back in place.

  “Put that on your brother’s spots, Madeleine. It’s calamine lotion, it’ll help.”

  Madeleine made a face. Marc begged his mother to untie him.

  “It itches so bad!”

  “It’s perfectly normal. It’ll pass.”

  Ten days later, it was Madeleine’s turn to be smeared in pink calamine lotion, her wrists tied tight behind her back.

  “It’s for your own good.”

  Now, you may well wonder why Madeleine refused to open Floria Ironstone’s letter. The explanation is quite simple. She was convinced that its contents, for as long as they remained imprisoned inside the envelope, wouldn’t be able to disrupt things. To the little girl’s mind, a letter is only a letter once it has been opened. By opening the envelope, she risked setting free a virus that she knew would prove fatal to The Horse.

  Far from Rivière-du-Loup, in St. Lawrence County, New York, Floria Ironstone waited and waited to hear back from The Horse, until she finally came to the realization that he would not be writing. The letter had been delivered to the wrong stallion. At least she’d tried.

  “He was French Canadian, your daddy,” she would later tell her daughter.

  She’d christened her Penelope, the perfect name for a little girl who would wait her whole life to hear from her father. Floria had been a singer before becoming an acrobat, but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize that her future was on the trapeze. Penelope must have heard the story a dozen times, “He was French Canadian, your daddy . . .” and so would begin the story of the time her mom met her dad in 1939, a frightfully odd-numbered year. What makes the story so tragic is that Madeleine would never get to hear it, Madeleine who so loved Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne’s stories. She had, of course, heard snatches of it from the Horse’s mouth before, but not all the details, not those that Floria Ironstone would share with her teal-eyed daughter, Penelope Ironstone. It happened at the county fair.

  The St. Lawrence County Fair was, until the invention of the television, both the most predictable and the most surprising fair in all of New York State. The 1939 edition was no exception, so much so that for a long time afterward many believed that the devil himself had marked the date on his calendar. Floria Ironstone wouldn’t have missed the St. Lawrence County Fair for the world. She had checked with Old Whitman no fewer than eight times: he had promised to come by to pick her and her sister Beth up in his truck on the first Saturday in August at 7 a.m. sharp. When there was no sign of the truck at the time they had agreed on, Beth sighed.

  “We’ll go next year. There’ll still be music next year, Floria.”

  Floria was in tears on the porch. She hadn
’t missed a single St. Lawrence County Fair since she’d turned eighteen. She’d always found a way to get there, in Old Whitman’s truck or by bus, and writing it off altogether was out of the question. Now where had Old Whitman gotten to?

  Just as all seemed lost, the Ironstone sisters heard the truck’s engine rev and splutter.

  “Sorry I’m late, ladies. Little Adolf here wasn’t too keen. He’s a bit of a nervous nelly, but if you ask me that’s a sign of character.”

  “Why, Mr. Whitman! He’s absolutely enormous! You won’t be coming home empty-handed this year, I’m sure of it! Now what do you think of my skirt? Mamma made it.”

  “Not bad at all. But why so red? You’ll be seen for miles around!”

  “Let’s just say I don’t plan to go unnoticed.”

  The truck had pulled up in front of the two young women, both dressed in their Sunday best, now radiant in the morning sun. Behind the slats a curious black eye looked out at them. It belonged to Adolf, an oversized calf that had been lovingly fattened on a steady diet of grain. Whitman’s every hope rested on the calf that Saturday in August 1939. An ardent admirer of Nazi Germany from the very beginning, Old Whitman had named his calf after the Führer, the same Führer whose photograph he had pinned above the calf’s paddock and stall in the hopes that the dictator’s unwavering stare, which had saved Germany from destitution and famine, would work the same magic on the animal. His hopes were realized beyond even his wildest dreams. The animal thrived and grew, valiantly turning into muscle all the grain and hay that could be found for him. Its coat took on the sheen of a ribbon winner and the animal, through some inexplicable phenomenon of transubstantiation, developed the same gaze as the man whose first name it bore: it was as though the calf could peer right into the depths of your soul, a certain jaded affection in its eyes, with a je ne sais quoi of Alpine ingenuousness that had convinced Whitman that glory was lying in wait, that he would be returning home that very evening brandishing the three-colored ribbon of the St. Lawrence County Fair. Where there is discipline and self-sacrifice there is hope, as would soon be proven to the state of New York.

  “He’s as clear-sighted as the Führer!” Whitman thundered as he slammed the door of his Ford.

  No, Whitman would not be returning home empty-handed. He looked the two sisters up and down. It all depends how you look at it, he thought to himself: in the eyes of the young men of St. Lawrence County, the girls, so eager to whirl their skirts at the county fair, could pass for two fine ladies; but to the ladies of the Temperance League, they’d be denounced as a couple of shameless hussies.

  “Dressed like that, you might not be coming home at all!”

  Old Whitman was fond of the girls, even if they were a bit odd. They had been raised by a crotchety Hungarian widow who’d lived in an old wooden home on the outskirts of Potsdam since 1933. Born a Nowak in Vienna and later married to an Eisenstein from Budapest, the Hungarian lady had become an Ironstone in America. The name, it seemed to him, brought to mind her strong character and robust constitution. The two girls, born in Budapest to different fathers who happened to be sworn enemies, had come to America before they had time to form a single memory of the Old World. First came Floria, the eldest, named after the heroine of Tosca, an opera that Mrs. Eisenstein—now Ironstone—had seen several times in Vienna and that had shaken her to the core, particularly the scene in Act II in which the heroine, Floria Tosca, stabs to death the frightful Scarpia, head of the police in Rome, before removing from his still-warm clutches the safe conduct that will allow her to flee the city with her lover. Floria Ironstone’s sister Beth, born two months before the family left for America, was named after Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Every summer, Whitman would take the Ironstone sisters to the St. Lawrence County Fair out of Christian charity. “If I don’t, who will?” would say the old cattle breeder who, in 1939, after a series of lean years brought about by lean cattle, was about to present handsome Adolf, the biggest, the fattest, the strongest, and the most mouth-watering calf ever seen south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi.

  At the behest of Old Whitman, who wanted to get his calf in the right frame of mind for the fair, the Ironstone sisters sang as they made their way along the road to Gouverneur; then the old cattle man gave them a lesson on hard-working Germany and its great Führer, explaining among other things that the German chancellor had managed to accomplish in four years what no American president would ever achieve in a lifetime: give every citizen a motor car.

  “They all have Volkswagens. The people’s car! And just look at our jalopies, still dragged along by horses. America the beautiful indeed!”

  Flooring his poor old Ford pickup, Whitman overtook a buggy drawn by an emaciated grey mare, and as he passed it he bellowed out a “Heil Hitler!” loud enough to be heard on the other side of the Adirondacks. The poor countryfolk, who could see nothing but the head of the hulking brown calf staring out at them from the back of the truck, thought for a moment they were under attack as the driver struggled to prevent the startled horse from dragging the carriage and its occupants into the ditch.

  Whitman and the girls arrived at the fairground around eight o’clock, agreed to meet that afternoon at the paddock where the ribbons and awards were to be handed out, then joined the crowds of fairgoers. Floria and Beth spent the first hour walking arm in arm between the shooting galleries, canvas tents, and enclosures where terrifically fat peony-pink piglets sniffed and snorted. Beyond the stands that had been erected for the occasion and beneath a sky alive with swooping swallows, there stood columns of cages filled with farmyard birds and their comical-looking feathers: spherical guinea-fowl speckled with white, immaculate Cochin China chickens, Rhode Island Reds with their scarlet combs, geese that stuck out their necks to nip at Floria’s and Beth’s stockinged legs, quails that clucked tenderly, a handful of domesticated partridges, and ruling proudly over the rest of the farmyard, having left its cage to parade before the people of New York State, a large, magnificent peacock whose beauty instantly turned the Ironstone sisters into pillars of salt.

  “Look, Floria! A peacock!”

  “How handsome he is. He’s the handsomest of all the birds.”

  “Do you think he’ll fan his tail?”

  “We’ll have to find him a peahen.”

  “No peahen . . . Poor little peacock.”

  “Don’t you worry about him, Beth. When you’re that handsome, being unhappy isn’t even an option.”

  As though to show the Ironstone sisters he could read their minds, and for their own pure wonderment, the peacock half displayed its feathers’ color. Fairgoers bunched around the crates to admire the huge, vain bird that was visibly aware of the commotion it was causing. Then the miracle happened: the peacock fanned its tail wide, to the applause of the crowd. The bird seemed more surprised than anyone at how big its body had become, as though this morning pavane was the very first time it had ever unfurled its feathers. The bird haughtily studied the people who were so fascinated by its colors. One idiot thought it a good idea to throw the bird a piece of bread as a reward. The peacock took it as a provocation, stood stock-still, looked out at the crowd, and drawled: Leooona! Leooona! Floria and Beth Ironstone clapped in delight. The audience, charmed by the display, looked on at the young girl in the red skirt who was filled with wonder at such a simple spectacle.

  “His bride-to-be is called Leona! Ha! Ha!”

  At noon, after the first horse and buggy races were over, the Ironstone sisters ate the hunk of dark bread and the apples they had brought with them from Potsdam and bought lemonade. Sitting on the grass beneath a maple tree, they discussed handsome Adolf’s chances of winning the three-colored ribbon. What they had seen in the enclosures had worried them. Other animals from Utica, Watertown, Canton, and even Canada might just as easily take home the honors. Beth was pensive.

  “Do you think Adolf realizes he’s being watched and judged? He’s only a calf
, after all!”

  “Of course he does. The peacock knew we were watching, didn’t it? Why wouldn’t the calf?”

  “You’re right. Handsome Adolf is probably polishing his hoofs as we speak.”

  On the main stage, the Ogdensburg brass band had just given way to a square-dancing performance that was boring Floria and Beth silly. They redid their hair, shook off the dust and straw that clung to their skirts, and decided to explore the parts of the exhibition they had never visited before, on the other side of the horse-racing track.

  A large tent of coarse canvas loomed before them, set a little back from the fairground. From it emanated occasional deep manly cheers, rounds of applause, dull thuds, and, now and then, for no more than a second or two at a time, absolute silence. Whatever was happening there appeared to be taking the audience’s breath away. Each silence was followed by a spontaneous explosion of shouting, whistling, and exclamations of astonishment and amazement. Floria and Beth approached the entrance to the tent, which had been tied closed with rope. Consumed by curiosity, they called out four or five times before a portly gentleman with a moustache came to untie one of the cords that was keeping the mysterious performance hidden away from curious eyes.

  “And what can I do for you ladies?”

  “We want to see what’s in here,” replied Floria.

  “It’s a show for gentlemen.”

  “What do you mean, gentlemen?” asked Floria, more curious than ever.

  “Strongmen. It’s no show for ladies.”

  “Well then, today we’re no ladies,” Floria retorted, shoving the huge man aside.

  The man watched the sisters walk inside, his gaze lingering on Floria’s red skirt, and thought to himself: “Not today, and not tomorrow either.”

  The older sister took the younger by the hand and now they were pushing their way through a crowd of men, all of whom were taller, bigger, and sturdier than they were. An indefinable perfume of leather, sweat, and testosterone hung in the air. Floria noticed right away that the doorman had lied: they weren’t the only women in the crowd. A few old biddies were sitting in the lowest tiers, one of them shaking her fist and shouting something in a Slavic language. As her eyes took in the stage, Floria realized that the contestants were lifting off the dirt floor a black weight on which “300 lb.” had been painted in white. A tall blond man with blue eyes stood to let the newcomers take his place in the stands. “Please, ladies . . .” How many people were looking on from the V-shaped stands? Three hundred? Four hundred? One thousand, by the sounds of it. A master of ceremonies—black suit, bow tie, slicked-back hair, shiny shoes, gold watch, eyes puffy from the heat in the tent—announced the upcoming contest.