The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

The Mother Superior raised her eyes heavenward, not out of exasperation, but to indicate the source of all earthly authority.

  “So do I, Mrs. Lamontagne, so do I. Sister Saint Alphonse assures me it won’t happen again.”

  “I should hope not! Just imagine! Making money off people’s backs like that! We’re talking fifteen cents, all the same,” replied Irene, testily.

  The Mother Superior’s face froze in a perplexed expression. “Fifteen cents? What exactly are you talking about?”

  “Well you’re the school principal, are you not? The Chinese babies have always cost ten cents. And now, all of a sudden, they’re up to twenty-five cents a head! What on earth has happened in China to warrant such a price hike? It’s too expensive, if you ask me, Mother. I know you all think that Louis is made of money, but he has overheads too. If his three children have to start buying Chinese babies at twenty-five cents instead of ten cents each, he’s going to have to raise his prices or find more dead people to bury! The poor man is having a hard enough time of things as it is! We’re barely managing to make ends meet.”

  Over the course of two seconds, Mother Mary of the Great Power’s face went from perplexed to astonished to flabbergasted, without even landing on amazed. So that was it: the price of Chinese babies had gone up.

  “Keep a hold of yourself,” she thought.

  “But Irene, we don’t set the price of Chinese babies. It’s out of our hands . . .”

  Irene wouldn’t let it go, though, as insistent as a fly in October.

  “You don’t understand,” she interrupted. “If you want to sell Chinese babies, you’re going about it the wrong way, if you ask me. Unless you intend to start selling products that no one can do without, like milk or butter, you really need to keep your prices under control. ’Cause no one is in desperate need of a Chinese baby! We don’t buy them because we’re hungry. They’re the ones that are hungry! If they want to sell them, it needs to be at the right price! Now, take—” (Irene stared at the ceiling, as though performing a difficult feat of mental arithmetic.) “Yes, that’s it. Let’s say I give you seventeen cents per head. Do we have a deal?”

  At that very moment, haggling over the price of Chinese babies for the Holy Childhood seemed to make about as much sense to Mother Mary of the Great Power as the question of whether marsupials were fond of Ravel. She looked around for a means of attracting someone’s attention, wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t simply cry for help. What a day! What could she say to the poor lunatic in front of her as she continued to go on and on?

  “No? What if we bought five for the price of four? Still no deal?”

  The nun’s jaw fell down onto the floor. Irene picked it up and gave it back to her.

  “You drive a hard bargain, Mother,” she went on. “That’s a lot of money for us ordinary folk. But I’m sure we can reach an agreement. Hah! I’ve got it! What if the girls were to team up to buy the Chinese babies . . .”

  “Team up?” the nun asked, curious to see where this woman’s warped mind would lead them.

  “Yes! In teams! If my Madeleine teamed up with the Bérubé girl, for instance. Just the other day I saw them hiding in the shed to say their prayers. By the way, what a great idea that was, the end of the world! It sure calmed them all down! But don’t play that card too often or they’ll stop believing you. Anyway, let’s just say that my Madeleine buys a little Chinese boy, or girl—they cost the same, don’t they?—at ten cents, like before, and sells it to Solange for fifteen. Madeleine then gives you the fifteen cents that Solange gives her and you have your twenty-five cents! Not only will you meet your price, but Solange and Madeleine will pay less than the others! Although that would remain between the two of us . . . If they’re the only two to do it, your sales won’t dip too much.”

  Mother Mary of the Great Power found herself listening to Irene’s sales patter the way some might catch themselves listening to the dialogue in a porn movie: with much shame and no small amount of interest. She mused to herself. Barely ten minutes ago, when Irene’s untimely arrival had been announced, she had thanked the heavens for not sending her The Horse. Truth be told, she’d been expecting to have to explain away Sister Saint Alphonse’s overzealousness with the cane, having already reprimanded the nun in no uncertain terms. “Hit someone else if you have to! Not our Louis’s little girl!” she’d shouted at Sister Fatty. She could already picture Louis tearing the convent to shreds with his bare hands.

  She’d also expected Irene to go on and on about the story the nuns had come up with about the end of the world, a story they had trotted out at least two or three times in ten years. Nothing calms the nerves of a class of schoolgirls better than bringing the world to an abrupt end, as every nun knows.

  In short, she had no use for the arguments she’d prepared, since Irene’s mind was entirely taken up with the price of Chinese babies. “I’m getting off cheaply,” Mother Mary of the Great Power thought to herself, smiling at her play on words. After all, poor Irene was deserving of her pity; hadn’t God sent her a simpleton of a child, little Luc, to test her, a child who would never learn a thing?

  “I accept, Irene. Your last offer seems reasonable. It is not entirely to our advantage, as we will sell slightly fewer Chinese babies. But Madeleine and Solange will learn the virtues of saving and the nobleness of working together, like all of us here in the convent!” she smiled, pinching one of her ample buttocks hard to stop herself laughing.

  Irene beamed with pleasure. Mother Mary of the Great Power had accepted her deal! What joy! The two women shook hands and the Mother Superior blessed Irene before she left her office. As she closed the door, the Caron woman, determined to have the last word, delivered this heartfelt message to the nun:

  “Oh, Mother, do you think you could you ask Sister Saint Alphonse to beat Madeleine over the back of the hand? Otherwise she can’t peel the potatoes and mop the floor properly. She says it stings too much. I’d be eternally grateful, Mother.”

  The door closed. The Mother Superior didn’t move for a full three minutes. She watched the snow come down, imagining Louis Lamontagne driving into Heaven behind the wheel of an American convertible. Alone. Completely and utterly alone.

  “Not every Hell is deserved,” she said to herself, before yawning profusely.

  Irene, meanwhile, went home with a spring and no little pride in her step, her head held high. On Mother Mary of the Great Power’s desk, the mustachioed picture of Pope Pius XII no longer seemed so pressing. No one cared about it anymore.

  When they heard that their sister had been invited to the Lamontagnes’ for supper, the Bérubé boys observed a minute of silence. It was as though they had just learned she was going to die, which wasn’t far from the truth, if death can be considered a new departure. The incredulity that followed Mr. Bérubé’s announcement gave way to a joke or two about what she should wear for the occasion. Black, what else?

  The jokes washed off Solange like water off a duck’s back. They were jealous, that’s all. And it was admiration mixed with envy she saw in their faces as they watched Papa Louis lift his weights on summer days out in the yard. Not one of those braggarts could claim that the hearse and convertible parked outside the Lamontagne house left him indifferent. On Friday night, Solange bellowed her catechism from her bedroom to be sure she would be heard all over the house.

  “Envy is the sadness at the sight of another’s goods, and the immoderate desire to have them for oneself.”

  To which one of her brothers, between coughing fits, shouted out in reply:

  “Pride is too high an opinion of one’s self, attended with an inordinate desire of being above others!”

  Still annoyed with her husband for having overruled her, Mrs. Bérubé listened in silence to the children bombard each other with descriptions of the capital sins. She had managed to convince her daughter to wear a brown skirt with a white blouse to supper at the neighbors’, then explained that certain topics were off limits at the ta
ble: her brothers’ illnesses, the man her big sister Antonine was engaged to (who now spent all his time at the neighborhood bar), and not a word either about how many days her father worked a week. That was nobody’s business.

  “I’d also tell you not to discuss money at the table either. It’s not polite. But since you’re going for supper at that Caron woman’s . . .”

  And around six o’clock on Saturday, November 12, Solange walked across the snow and through the willow hedge, armed with a bouquet of white carnations as an offering. Louis had pulled out all the stops to make the neighbors’ girl feel welcome. Irene, surprised not to have been consulted, unenthusiastically accepted the presence of this intruder in her daily routine. She had begun by protesting that they were in no position to feed the whole street (which wasn’t true: back then, Louis could still have had the whole parish ’round for supper without dipping into his savings), that the Bérubés hadn’t said a word to them in ten years (another lie: Mr. Bérubé often had a beer with Louis in the bars along Rue Lafontaine, as Irene well knew), and that the boys had nothing to wear (also not true: Louis had just had them dressed entirely respectably at the local tailor at an unbeatable price). Finally, Irene pointed out that Old Mrs. Lévesque was to lie in repose Saturday in the living room, that a guest at the Lamontagnes’ might upset the family in mourning, and that—fiddlesticks!—the Bérubé girl, unaccustomed as she was to funeral vigils, might be traumatized by the gloomy atmosphere.

  “Gloomy? What’s so gloomy about wanting to bury the dead? Anyway, Old Mrs. Lévesque will be in the parlor, far from the dining room. No one will be bothering anyone.”

  Louis won the day. Solange was welcomed like a queen. Music played in the living room beside the funeral parlor. It was Louis’s favorite: Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. A musical choice that might lead one to believe that Papa Louis was a keen follower of baroque music. Not a bit of it. It was, in fact, the one and only baroque record he owned. And how did Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring become Louis’s favorite piece of music? Germany, natürlich. The country from where you could bring back the very best, providing you survived.

  While Solange sat on the green sofa in the living room, Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne told her how he’d come across the little painting he’d given Old Ma Madeleine when he came back from the war. When she moved into Louis’s house, the old woman had naturally hung the painting in the room where the bodies were laid out. There was something about the picture of a dead Virgin Mary, lying on her tomb with Jesus and the apostles looking on, that brought comfort to families in mourning. “In death, no one is alone,” the painting seemed to say. It was a way of underscoring the importance Louis Lamontagne gave to burials and funeral rites. Solange, overcome with happiness, listened to The Horse tell his story, her eyes as wide as saucers.

  It was the day after they’d found David Rosen, the death march survivor who’d been saved by the morning snow in the mountains. Papa Louis had wanted to leave him at a hastily constructed Allied Forces camp by Lake Starnberg. The camp had been built to welcome deportees from Eastern Europe awaiting emigration to more hospitable lands. It was built on the site of what had once been an elite school for the Hitler Youth and left a real impression on Louis: thousands of haggard faces, stunned at the fact that they were alive. Skeletal hands reaching out to him, brushing against his GI uniform, the women who had narrowly escaped the flames of Auschwitz speaking incomprehensible languages and throwing him warm-hearted looks.

  “And the dead. Everywhere. They were everywhere, Madeleine . . .” he told his daughter years later, after a night’s heavy drinking, just before collapsing into sleep.

  At the Feldafing refugee camp—Feldafing was the name of the Bavarian village—he was told there was no room for his David Rosen. He would have to bring him to a grand Bavarian villa built on top of a hill closer to the village. Louis left Rosen up there, in a villa that looked like a cuckoo clock from a distance: wooden balconies, an onion dome, frescoes on its whitewashed walls. A postcard for a dying man.

  Louis drove the military vehicle right up to the door of the villa, set in a magnificent garden overlooking the lake. The wind whistled in the branches of majestic hemlock trees. Rosen, who had just been given a cup of clear broth, was clutching his stomach, his intestines unused to digesting the slightest morsel.

  “I feel heavy,” he said.

  Louis hoisted him over his right shoulder, as you might carry a drunken companion on New Year’s Eve. In the villa, he was told there was no room for Rosen: the house was already full of sick people, other deportees from camps to the east. He would have to try elsewhere. That was when Louis lost patience. On top of what he considered to be lies was the trouble he was having making himself understood by the locals. While his English had improved since the St. Lawrence County Fair, he still had to articulate every single word to get the people at the villa to understand him. They weren’t German; they were there to manage these warehouses for the living dead, and that was, in fact, the first thing they said to Louis:

  “Calm down. We’re not German.”

  Louis finally got permission to set Rosen down on the floor, in a huge bourgeois dining room that had been emptied of all its furniture. He took the time to make him up a makeshift bed of hemlock branches and blankets, then hid some chocolate rations, sugar, American chewing gum, and a handful of cigarettes in Rosen’s clothing, and whispered into his ear that he wasn’t to eat too fast, that it might kill him if he gobbled everything up at once, because his stomach had shrunk at Dachau.

  “Just a little in the morning. To see you through the day, David.”

  Rosen, half conscious, smiled up at the giant who had saved his life.

  “Are you French?” he asked.

  “Canadian.”

  “You sound like you’re French.”

  Louis briefly explained where he came from, leaving out any mention of his German roots. He stayed with David Rosen for a little while, to make sure that the people in this house full of refugees understood the man he’d taken under his wing was important. Rosen’s breathing slowed. He knew he could trust Louis, and he fell asleep.

  On the villa’s ground floor, in a dark, windowless room, a portly woman was crouching down to light a fire in a huge earthenware stove, the likes of which Louis had never seen. The woman stood up and looked the soldier in the eye without saying a word. She was blond, maybe twenty-five. But the war had left her looking forty. Her build was at odds with the emaciated bodies lying all over the villa. She seemed to be the only German there. Louis realized she must be the housekeeper or perhaps the caretaker. Life in these hilly parts had given her a shapely pair of legs, which The Horse had been quick to notice. Charmed by the sight of him, she introduced herself. Maria. She led him down to the cellar, where she lived in a tiny, dank room. It was in that dingy room reeking of mold that they got to know each other better. Needless to say, Louis skipped over this part of the story in front of Solange and Madeleine. The villa’s huge basement had been used to store away the paintings and furniture that had once adorned the upper floors. Louis inspected the pictures leaning against the wall. Almost all of them were wrapped in brown timeworn canvas. The only one actually visible was the small fifteen-by-eight-inch painting. Maria noticed Louis’s interest in the picture. As she bundled her heavy bosom back into her blouse, she pointed at the picture and said, “Die Grablegung der Maria,” the name by which the piece was known in German, which is to say The Entombment of Mary. Louis thought that Maria meant the picture belonged to her. He couldn’t take his eyes off the painting of Mary, an image that brought him back to his native land. Around the body, Christ and his apostles. For the first time in his life, he felt the urge to be nearer to them. He grabbed the painting with his huge hands and asked if he could buy it.

  “Me buy the Maria?”

  Which Maria took to mean: “Good-bye, Maria.” She was well used to American soldiers leaving as soon as their business was done. But she found
this one so handsome she wanted to give him a parting gift. She produced some canvas, wrapped up the painting, and handed it to Louis, who thought, perfectly reasonably, that the picture must belong to her. It took him a week to realize the misunderstanding, but he was far away by then and the painting was en route to America. To Solange, he explained that he’d exchanged the painting for a pack of cigarettes. Which wasn’t entirely untrue since he’d given Maria a Marlboro when they went back up into the kitchen. The painting under his arm, he left the villa without incident. The US Army then had it shipped to New York City, where he picked it up on his return. It never occurred to him that he might have stolen something, any more than Maria realized she’d embezzled part of her masters’ fortune. She asked Louis to write down his name on a scrap of paper, along with his address in Kanada.

  On that freezing-cold morning, Louis told his fellow infantrymen that he wanted to walk, to get his head straight. He walked along the road to Feldafing until he reached an old church. He stepped inside just as the organist was attacking the first notes of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. And he stayed, with the rest of the faithful, to listen to that music from Bach that seemed to make up for all the aberrations he’d seen since Dachau. When mass was over, the people stared at him, contemplating him in all his Americanness. He went up to the organist, a young woman paralyzed by this strapping man with teal-colored eyes who spoke pidgin English. Who wrote the music? Did I? Is that why this brute is pointing at me? Are you poking fun? But what can I tell the poor man other than one word:

  “Bach!”

  Out of fear that he might fly into a rage, they’d given him the sheet music. He’d mailed it along with the painting the very next morning, once again at the US Army’s expense. It was Mother Mary of the Great Power who played it for him on the organ in the church of Saint-François-Xavier, two weeks after his return to the land of his desiring.

  “Why, don’t cry, Louis. It’s such joyous music!”

  Louis didn’t say a word to the Mother Superior about David Rosen, the church in Feldafing, or the big house with the wooden balconies filled to bursting with concentration camp survivors. Moved by how the music seemed to swell her Big Louis’s heart, Mother Mary of the Great Power instructed the church organist to play the piece regularly. And so from that day on, it could be heard during Advent, on Louis’s birthday on December 25, at the end of Lent (the priest had refused to allow it to be played on days of abstinence), and, of course, at Easter.