The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “A woman in Michigan once told me that.”

  “Kiss me, Louis.”

  The night Podgórski died, it rained in Gouverneur. Torrential storms straight out of a Wagner opera. Thick clouds sent to cleanse the earth of the stains of humanity. Once Floria left to spend the night in Gouverneur ahead of Podgórski’s funeral, Louis slept like a baby amid the thunder and lightning. The US Army recruiters were waiting for him the next morning.

  “Your mother was an American, we hear . . .”

  Two years later, wearing an infantry uniform and having piled on a few extra pounds at Uncle Sam’s mess, handsome Louis set sail for England aboard a ship accompanied by a minesweeper, Will you love me all the time? playing in his mind, his knowledge of Europe amounting to no more than a blurry, quaint image of a small country densely populated with nothing but Polish nuns, strongmen, and mad dictators. Of all the members of his division, Louis Lamontagne was probably the only man there out of love for Poland. He was also the most attractive man aboard. That was beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  It wasn’t until December 31, 1999, at the age of forty-nine, that Madeleine decided it was safe to open the letter from Floria Ironstone she had intercepted in 1958. She found two plea-filled pages covered with kisses. The word please appeared six times. Attached to the letter was a photograph of a little girl who had been conceived at the St. Lawrence County Fair in August 1939—Penelope Ironstone, who would wait for her father’s reply for the rest of her life. Madeleine never did try to contact her half-sister, thereby missing out on one of Louis Lamontagne’s most colorful stories.

  Like Puccini’s heroine Floria Tosca, Madeleine Lamontagne wasn’t fond of competition. Although it must be said in her defense that most of the women who fell head over heels in love with Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne never did manage to completely recover. His daughter was no exception to the rule.

  The Neighbor

  SHE SAW HER for the very first time over the willow hedge. She was five. They hadn’t started school yet. On Sundays, the Lamontagnes would drive out to the Point in Papa Louis’s Oldsmobile to eat ice cream. Irene Caron, their mother, would invariably slam the car door on her way back into the house. Hiding behind the willows, just a few feet away, Solange Bérubé first set eyes on Madeleine Lamontagne’s face. Madeleine was clinging to her dad’s grey pants. Her dad was a kind of fine-whiskered giant, a legendary beast of burden, an undertaker by trade.

  “Solange, you’re not to go over to the Lamontagnes’. Do I make myself clear? You’re not to go to the undertaker’s. Tell Mommy you won’t go over to the Lamontagnes’. Tell me right this minute. Or you won’t be having anything to eat.”

  Solange didn’t eat.

  Since it was June and the willow leaves had come out a little earlier than usual that year, nobody spotted Solange Bérubé, which already gave her a certain advantage. She and her brother Marcel were used to spying on Louis Lamontagne from the willow hedge, watching him bring the caskets down from his porch and slide them into the hearse, usually unassisted. She also loved, safely hidden behind a lilac bush, watching mourners file into the Lamontagnes’ for a wake. From her hiding place, Solange could hear Old Ma Madeleine greeting the relatives with a few words of comfort.

  A dead woman acting as a welcoming committee for a funeral home only stood to reason. Who better to reassure a grieving family than someone who had passed to the other side herself? But on that particular Sunday, the Sunday of first contact, the funeral parlor was empty. Not a soul. Alone in the yard, Madeleine Lamontagne seemed to be looking for something.

  She turned around. From the corner of the big house, a little cat had begun to walk toward the willows, threatening to reveal the spy. Luc had stayed behind in the car, and now his mother came to fetch him. And the little cat continued on its uncertain path toward Solange.

  “If I don’t move, it’ll never see me.”

  But curiosity killed the cat. The animal approached the hedge and sensed the presence of a child. Madeleine ran over to stop the cat going next door, bent down to scoop him up, and, as she stood, set her teal eyes on Solange Bérubé for the very first time. Pretending not to have seen a thing, she left with the little grey and white cat, which was still staring at Solange. At the door to the house, just before going back inside, Madeleine Lamontagne, all of five years old, turned around one last time and looked Solange straight in the eye. One second later, the little Bérubé girl collapsed in silence among the tender green willow foliage in Rivière-du-Loup.

  Old Ma Madeleine, as old as time itself and stooped over like a venerable oak tree, was struggling to push a rocking chair across the Lamontagnes’ porch to sit down on. It was she who first noticed Solange’s body lying in the grass on the other side of the willows. She knocked on the Bérubés’ door, scaring everyone half to death, as she was inclined to do.

  “Your little girl isn’t well!” she informed the Bérubé family through the screen door. They didn’t hear her at first because since her sudden death in 1933, Old Ma Madeleine spoke only when absolutely necessary and her voice came out as little more than a croak. Mind you, anyone would have had a hard time making themselves heard over at the Bérubés’, even someone equipped with an entirely normal vocal apparatus.

  Were there ten or twelve of them crammed into the smoke-filled kitchen waiting for a ham to arrive? Solange, the youngest, wasn’t always able to squeeze a word in. Old Ma Madeleine, as she watched everyone bustle about, gesticulate, cough, talk, explain, laugh, and belch, was losing patience. She banged three times on the doorframe.

  “You’d best go get your daughter before the ants do!”

  They fell silent at last.

  It was the Bérubés’ simple-minded fourth son who found Solange passed out beside the willows. Madeleine Lamontagne watched the scene unfold from her bedroom window. So many people gathered around the young neighbor she had just smiled at. Had she suddenly fallen ill? Solange, who was laid out on the living-room sofa, gradually came around. Ice-cold water. Face-slapping. Prayers. Old Ma Madeleine had gone back home, much to everyone’s relief. Mr. Bérubé had thanked her all the same. Solange felt as though she had a pumpkin for a heart, a whale in her head. Mrs. Bérubé shook her. “Well, speak then, would you? What’s the matter? Will you live?” Solange had two choices: the first was to diligently describe the harm she had just suffered, the second was to lie. Telling the truth would have meant explaining to the twelve heads leaning in over her that she had just seen the rest of her life flash before her eyes, that it had happened in the instant Madeleine-Lamontagne-Holding-Kitten-Standing-In-Front-Of-Door had looked her up and down with her teal-colored eyes. Solange lied. She didn’t say the words that would come to her only years later—when so many witnesses had disappeared—which just goes to show that our best thoughts always come too late. She wouldn’t have been able to adequately describe the experience anyway. She hadn’t started school yet and still didn’t have the words to say: “I’ve just seen a quite incredible person, who looked at me like no one has ever looked at me before. I saw, in the depths of her teal-colored eyes, the answers to my fraught existence. Never again will I be able to begin another day without first dedicating it to this being of light who lives in the house beside mine. In her absence, I will be no more than a lost, hopeless animal. I understood as I fell to the lush green grass that never again would I be the same, that life without this being would be nothing more than a dreadful, tiresome sham. I will spend the rest of my existence praying to God for this being to set eyes on me a second time. Until then, every move I make, every word I speak, every person who passes through my life, everything I eat, the stars in the sky, the animals of Creation—all will be relegated to the realm of nonsense and foolishness. My name is Solange Bérubé and I exist only for the eyes of Madeleine Lamontagne.”

  Mrs. Bérubé scolded her daughter anew. “You’re not to go over there. I forbid it. Do I make myself clear? Now eat your potatoes and don’t even think about going
near those willows.” Every mother in Rivière-du-Loup used to repeat the very same words to their children. Ask anyone who can remember and they’ll tell you.

  “He was an undertaker, you see . . . and the bodies were right there in his parlor . . .”

  “And that’s not all. He liked to have a drink or two, did old Louis Lamontagne. And he had a real temper on him!”

  “Especially after he came back from the war. Never spoke a word about it. But he wasn’t the same man. Did you know he liberated Dachau?”

  “And you’re forgetting the wife! Irene Caron! Pure poison . . .”

  “And Madeleine’s brothers, Marc and Luc. They weren’t all there either. Strange, the pair of them . . . Not quite right in the head. Un-hinged.”

  “But as strong as oxen!”

  “Not crazy enough to set the place on fire, but in no rush to put it out either!”

  “I wouldn’t want them for neighbors, I’m telling you!”

  “And the grandmother who just won’t die! Hanging on to them like a ball and chain!”

  And yet, the Lamontagnes were rather quiet folks. Apart from Old Ma Madeleine, who would sometimes knock on the neighbors’ door to tell them to keep an eye on their kids, the Lamontagnes kept themselves to themselves. On Sunday mornings, they occupied pew number four in the church of Saint-François-Xavier, just yards away from where Madeleine the American had died giving birth to Louis. On Sunday afternoons, Papa Louis would take the family out to the Point for an ice cream. Despite his past as a strongman and his work as an undertaker, Louis Lamontagne made a point of behaving in a way that was never anything but normal, that nothing he did might be interpreted as an extravagance. With a grandmother who belonged to the ranks of the living dead, there was enough to set tongues wagging already, without him adding to it. Old Ma Madeleine didn’t much like ice cream and preferred to stay home and rock herself on the veranda and wave at passersby. To put on a bit of a show, she would sometimes pretend to puff on a snuffed-out pipe. Solange barely knew Old Ma Madeleine. Her only memory of her was of the old woman who had died in 1933 and was still there, rocking away on the Lamontagnes’ veranda in 1955.

  The first time Madeleine Lamontagne had spoken to Solange Bérubé was at the convent. Grade 1A. In September 1957. Mrs. Bérubé had been very clear:

  “Just you be careful, Solange Bérubé. If that little Lamontagne girl speaks to you, you don’t answer. Do you hear me? Don’t go near her, don’t sit beside her, and don’t go talking to her on the way home either. Not to her and not to her brother Marc. I know we’re neighbors, but that doesn’t mean we have to be friends. You take the other sidewalk on the way home. If Mommy catches you talking to Madeleine, you’ll be in trouble, understand? Just as much trouble as last Saturday, remember?”

  The child didn’t reply.

  “Solange Bérubé, I’m talking to you! Do you understand?” she shouted, twisting the little girl’s arm.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Mrs. Bérubé was referring to the punishment to end all punishments she’d handed out to her youngest daughter two days before. A regrettable situation that could have been avoided if attention had been paid to detail. But Mrs. Bérubé, in baptizing her ninth child Solange—because it rhymed with ange—had sworn deep down it would be her last. Saint Solange, the virgin martyr, was decapitated for rejecting the advances of the Count of Poitiers’s son, who carried her off while she tended to her sheep. A proud and fierce girl, she had struggled until her kidnapper decapitated her with his sword. Mrs. Bérubé would never have suspected that her little girl would become, in her own way, a reincarnation of the saint. By 1950, she had brought nine children into the world. Two girls and seven boys. Knock-kneed and tubercular, the Bérubé kids tended to live for ten or twelve years before coming down with some incurable, albeit not deadly, disease or other: diabetes, emaciation, polio, bronchitis, various and varied degrees of ataxia. Only Solange was an exception to the rule.

  “Always something wrong with those Bérubés!” the gossips of Rue Lafontaine would say as they watched one of the sickly boys shuffle past.

  The family’s eldest daughter, the picture of ill health, was a tall, wan girl by the name of Antonine. She cried with joy when her little sister Solange was born. At last someone to fuss over, someone whose diapers she could change, someone to shape in her image. She was delighted to take over from her mother, exhausted after nine pregnancies in twelve years, and proclaimed herself little Solange’s nanny, throwing herself into the role of big sister. The doctor having declared a general boycott on cesareans, Mrs. Bérubé had taken four months to get back on her feet again after the birth.

  “She’s had eight already. I don’t see why the ninth wouldn’t make it through just fine!” he’d said, in between Mrs. Bérubé’s howls.

  Solange had been heftier than the rest, and a repeat of the Christmas drama of 1918 was only narrowly avoided in Rivière-du-Loup. But her mother survived. Antonine took charge of the little girl immediately, unaware that disappointment was just around the corner. It wouldn’t be fair to Solange to say that she had been bad-tempered from birth: after all, it takes a few good years of fight on this earth to form character. They say that for infants, we should refer instead to their nature and, in the case of Solange, her nature was, to put it mildly, untamable.

  For instance, when Mrs. Bérubé warned Solange off the Lamontagne family on the first day of school and brought up the incident of the previous Saturday, she had been referring to the unfortunate tutu episode.

  Antonine might have been twenty years old and still living with her parents, though she was engaged to be married, but she had not given up on the idea that Solange was a doll that the Lord himself had given her in the springtime of 1950 after a few timely novenas. Antonine had prayed with a martyr’s fervor to the Almighty that He might send her a little sister. She’d had enough of sickly little boys that had to be dragged from the sanatorium to the hospital to the next pilgrimage (and back again), boys who would grow up only to have sons with hacking coughs of their own. And now she saw little Solange as an outlet for her own artistic inclinations. No surprise then that on the Saturday before Solange’s first day of school, Antonine decided to give her the most girlish of surprises. She led her into her room, dressed her in a ballerina costume complete with a tutu she’d found at the haberdasher’s, made her up like Shirley Temple, and adorned her with broaches, barrettes, and other assorted sparkly accessories.

  More than a little proud of her handiwork, she then had the little girl get up on a chair to gaze at her reflection in her dressing-table mirror. The scene that ensued passed into the annals of Bérubé family lore. Antonine had forgotten that two weeks previously the whole family had been at a wake for a cousin, Annette Rossignol, who had died at the age of twelve from fever and a stomach ache. The image of the dead girl, lying in her casket in a white dress, had remained fixed in Solange’s memory. When she saw herself in the mirror, all made-up and adorned in chiffon, she thought she must be dead, too, and that her big sister was getting her ready for her funeral. She began to shout and scream, turned Antonine’s bedroom upside down and tried to wipe off her makeup with a corner of the bedspread, biting and hitting her sister all the while. Finally she whacked Antonine over the head with a drawer from the dresser. Alarmed by the racket, the entire Bérubé family came limping and hobbling into the room. Three of the brothers held the furious child while Mrs. Bérubé administered twenty lashes of the cane, the usual sentence for such misbehavior. It wasn’t until much later, only once she had moved to Montreal, that Solange dared apply makeup to her face, on the advice of an image consultant.

  “Otherwise you’ll look like a corpse!” the well-coiffed young man had told her, utterly oblivious to the irony of his remark.

  The first time she’d worn makeup, Solange had thought she was dead. The second was so as not to look like a cadaver. She clearly had a troubled relationship with makeup and all traditional signs of femininity. />
  Solange had agreed to the convent braids and the dresses, too, provided they were just one color—no motifs, no flowers, no tiny giraffes. At age eight, she had been given twenty-five lashes for trying to start her father Armand’s car while he napped one winter’s afternoon. The little girl had slipped up beside him, moving closer each time he snored, and stolen his keys with a single catlike movement. Sitting behind the wheel of the 1952 Dodge, she had managed to start the engine and was getting ready to put the car into reverse when Irene Lamontagne spotted her from the kitchen window and alerted Mrs. Bérubé. But the little girl was not about to concede defeat, and swore, between her father’s fifteenth and sixteenth stroke of the cane, that she’d try again soon enough. Her father, an otherwise mild-mannered man, beat her not with any conviction, but rather because his wife’s screams had roused him from a deep sleep from which he had emerged grouchy, impatient, and irritated. Solange’s long-standing fascination for motor cars had always amused him, truth be told, but a man’s sleep is a sacred thing.

  When Mrs. Bérubé had forbidden her daughter from hanging around the Lamontagne home, when she slapped her and forbade her from speaking to Madeleine, when she closed the drapes so that her daughter would not even see her house from their living room, it was not so much because of Luc Lamontagne (a loud, obnoxious, vulgar, and violent child), nor because Louis Lamontagne ran a funeral parlor out of his home on Rue Saint-François-Xavier (a funeral parlor that, if you asked her, was all too popular), nor because of Old Ma Madeleine (who first died in 1933 and was still waiting with her grandson to be free at last of her earthly sorrows), nor because of little Madeleine (a quiet little girl who spent the better part of her time in a shed behind her house); no, none of these things, as strange and unusual as they might appear, bothered Mrs. Bérubé in the slightest. What she was so keen to protect her daughter and her long-suffering sons against was Irene Lamontagne, née Caron.