The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “Play Bach, I’m tellin’ ya!”

  The organist stood, and in a scholarly, didactic tone committed the worst mistake of his existence.

  “I know you’re upset, Mr. Lamontagne, but that piece you’re so fond of is simply not played at funerals. It’s for Christmas or Easter, not for funerals.”

  Everyone held their breath. Was Louis on the verge of taking a man’s life at the very place where his own had begun? His huge frame swayed back and forth, his arm slowly took the impertinent fellow by the throat, and the shouts—

  “You little bespectacled apostle. You’re gonna play what I want or God help me . . .”

  Mother Mary of the Great Power, who had immediately foreseen Louis’s intentions, raced up to the organist to prevent the worst. By the time her hand came down on Louis’s arm, the poor man’s feet had already been thrashing in the air for interminable seconds.

  “Louis, for the love of God,” she murmured.

  The giant’s hand opened and the organist fell to the ground like a sack of corn. Down below, people sighed with relief. Louis went back to his seat only when he realized that Mother Mary of the Great Power was going to play Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring herself. He sat back down beside Irene, who was paralyzed by grief and hadn’t even noticed the commotion. Madeleine was sobbing noisily, accompanied by Marc. The cousin just sat there, stunned. His eyes never left the casket. Truth be told, he was desperately hoping this game of hide-and-seek would be over very soon. It had gone on long enough. As the congregation looked on in horror, he stood up, walked over to the casket that was much too big for a child, and knocked on it three times. There’s no way of knowing just how many people in the church hoped or thought they might see a repeat of Old Ma Madeleine’s miraculous resurrection in 1933. But this particular casket remained unmoved. It was Marc who got up to lead his cousin back by the hand, his eyes lost in a far-off world. The music of Bach cast the scene in an unreal light that was both unlikely and magnificent.

  Little Luc’s death was treated as a tragedy that had befallen the entire community. For the longest time, the Lamontagnes had been the butt of gossip and idle speculation, although they were also admired by their peers. Now they were martyrs, bejewelled with the permanence of tragedy. When mass ended, the casket was carried out by the drama’s survivors: Louis, Marc, and Madeleine on one side; Irene, Solange, and Siegfried Zucker on the other (Zucker had happened to be in Rivière-du-Loup on the day Luc died.). Their gaze was steady and proud, bordering on presumptuousness, betraying no sign of any effort whatsoever, as they carried the casket out of the church, slow and steady, just like Papa Louis had showed them, like American GIs. We are devastated, but we are strong. That was the message the funeral march conveyed to the music of Bach. “Joy of man’s desiring.” That’s what the Sisters of the Child Jesus muttered to themselves under their breath. All had insisted on attending Luc’s funeral, even Sister Saint Alphonse, who was spotted shedding a tear or two as the casket passed by. Outside, fine early-winter snow twirled its way through the air, as though to cover the ground in a white blanket evoking the purity of the soul God had called back. That, at least, is what Father Rossignol maintained once the family had gathered around the grave. One week after the funeral, when the poor boy’s body had scarcely begun to decay in the casket that was too big for it, the very same Father Rossignol paid the Lamontagne family a visit. He insisted on speaking alone with Papa Louis and Irene, then alone with Irene. His intentions were clear, and he didn’t back down at Irene’s incredulous expression. She would have to have another child.

  “But, Father. I’ve just buried one. I mean, how can I put this . . . ?”

  “All the more reason to proceed as quickly as possible. Your family is on the decline. Time to restock!”

  “I’m thirty-five, Father.”

  “So be quick about it, Irene. Plenty of women give birth at your age. Only yesterday we baptized Louisa Desjardins’s eighth child. And she’s the same age as you.”

  “Yes, but I have two already and—”

  “Mrs. Lamontagne,” the parish priest interrupted curtly. “You aren’t standing in the way of the family, are you? Has the television filled your head with such notions? All I can do is express my joy at the prospect of baptizing another Lamontagne next summer, or perhaps he’s already on his way? Little Luc was nine years old, after all . . . I do wonder what you’re waiting for. Think of the consequences.”

  Irene fell silent. The priest left the living room and bade good-bye to Louis one last time, who was busy nursing a gin toddy in the kitchen. Irene no more felt like bringing another child into the world than she did drinking a bottle of bleach. Without a word to her husband, she helped him finish off what remained of the gin. That’s what they’d done best together for the past few months: hit the gin. Papa Louis lit a cigarette and smoked in silence.

  Three months later, when Irene’s belly remained obstinately flat, Father Rossignol made good on his threats. In front of a packed church, he refused Irene communion. She didn’t understand and tried to take the host, thinking it must be some kind of joke as the priest pushed her back. Irene returned to her seat, overcome with shame. A murmur ran up from the nave to the jube and back. The Sunday sermon dwelt on the dangers that new media posed to right-thinking French-Canadian families. Irene was dumfounded. Humiliation slowly worked its way through the rock of her piety like a powerful solvent, leaving behind scars, opening cracks in places once presumed impenetrable. The silence was the final touch to the destruction started by Father Rossignol: Irene could now imagine Sundays without communion. Would she die of hunger? Would she perish, struck by lightning or crushed by a falling block of ice? For the first time, she was tempted to find the answer to such questions. What would be would be. Shame dogged her; people turned their backs on her for months. At last they knew: she was the end of the world. Priests have a knack for making things clear.

  And so there was no little Luc in the photograph of June 1968. Five years after he left this world, he still seemed to be everywhere: in the wrinkles that lined Irene’s face, in Papa Louis’s white whiskers, in his brother Marc’s stunned gaze, and on his sister Madeleine’s tormented forehead.

  Madeleine had just turned eighteen. She and Solange had left the convent two years earlier and were now learning to cook at the local trade school. They dreamed of opening a restaurant together. All of Solange’s brothers and her sister had left home. She lived alone with her mother and could indulge in extravagances like the motorcycle she liked to rev through the streets of Rivière-du-Loup, around the Point, and along the country roads of the Lower St. Lawrence. When she wore her helmet, they called her Atom Ant, a nickname that filled her with pride. Her mother managed to get her to agree not to cut her long black hair. But apart from that, Solange walked like Louis Lamontagne, talked like Louis Lamontagne, and sped like a V2 rocket through peaceful villages where her diabolical vehicle—a canary-yellow Triumph Bonneville T120R—spread terror. All that was missing was an eagle on her back. A sometime passenger on those crazy bike rides, Madeleine Lamontagne was especially fond of driving along the river to Kamouraska.

  There was practically no telling what Solange and Madeleine made of life or the feelings that bound them. In Rivière-du-Loup, Solange and Madeleine were both considered to be nuns in the making. The former had the awkward gait, while the latter had the devotion, or so the gossips said. And so, they were expected to be walking through the convent’s doors from one moment to the next. Their barely concealed fascination for Sister Smiley was, rumor had it, irrefutable proof of this, even after the nun in question left the Dominican Order and gave herself over to unnatural passions.

  As far as people knew, there were no suitors or admirers after Madeleine, who would still do her hair in braids from time to time.

  “It makes things easier when I’m cooking,” she’d explain with a smile.

  Irene tried in vain to introduce Madeleine to handsome young men. But the few candi
dates who managed to overcome their fear of The Horse then came up against Solange, a daunting obstacle standing between them and Madeleine who, for the time being, seemed to have no interest in matters of the heart anyway.

  The biological clocks were about to be reset in June 1968.

  “She’s got plenty of time ahead of her,” said Louis, who’d developed a philosophical bent after the death of little Luc. So much so that he hadn’t lifted a hand to a soul since the incident with the organist. Louis was going soft. Nobody was going to complain, least of all Irene, and it turned out to be in the interests of the taverns along Rue Lafontaine. The old man would buy a drink for whoever would listen. To drink on the cheap, all you had to do was turn up at the Ophir in the afternoon, once The Horse was a little the worse for wear, say hello, exchange a few words with him and make like you were interested in listening to him. He would pay for the round in exchange for a pair of ears. Sometimes, after his gin, The Horse would fall asleep, often halfway through a story, snoring away in the middle of the tavern while the other drinkers looked on in amusement and understanding.

  With Papa Louis no longer around, Solange had charged herself with keeping an eye on Madeleine. As it happens, she was waiting for the Lamontagnes when they emerged from the photographer’s. It is also hard to tell what the Lamontagne family really thought of Solange. Marc found her horribly masculine and wasn’t afraid to say so with that slight lisp of his. He feared, envied, and hated the virago, in equal measures. He was frightened of her the way people are frightened of rivals they know to be stronger than they are, he envied her motorcycle, and he hated the hold she had over his sister Madeleine. Irene considered Solange to be a very nice tomboy who was careful with her money. Solange’s ability to combine motorcycling with that pious lifestyle of hers amused her no end.

  “A nun on a motorcycle! We’ve seen it all now!”

  As for Madeleine’s feelings for Solange back then, no one will ever know. But what everyone did know—she made no secret of it—was how upset she was to see Louis’s decline.

  The Lamontagnes walked home from the photographer’s, escorted by Solange. When they reached the church of Saint-François-Xavier, they were pleased to see the first lilacs in bloom. Their delicate scent wafted across the parish. They stopped for a moment to gaze at the river, its almost unreal shade of green. To their left stood the former Sisters of the Child Jesus convent; the nuns now lived in the huge provincial house that had been consecrated in 1961, a building enormous enough to get lost in. Atop the natural headland, on that balmy spring day in 1968, Solange and the Lamontagnes were about to become front-row witnesses to the event that would remain forever etched in the entire town’s memory, the event that would seal their fate.

  It started with an imperceptible stirring beneath a few tiny waves that washed up against the Point. On its way across the bay, the quiver barely wrinkled the water. Now it had become audible from the shore, a word, then two, then at last a few sentences. “He took the road up from Quebec City, he’s here for the way of the cross.” The sentence, now a rumor, had gone the wrong way along the route usually taken by gossip in Rivière-du-Loup: it had gone up the hill rather than down it. Soon it was hammering away at the doors and windows of the sad little shanties along Rue Saint-Marc, waking the idle from their naps.

  “He’s a painter and a priest. Can you believe it?”

  But the poor had no use for the news, which would gain more traction in the well-to-do neighborhoods of the upper town; they didn’t know how to keep hold of it and, like money, it slipped through their bony fingers. And now it was on its way up Rue Lafontaine. The priest walked past Moisan the florist’s without stopping, and he didn’t stop when he got to the church of Saint-Patrice either. It was clear he was on his way up in the world. He had ambition: the country parishes were of no interest to him. And so he climbed, slowly, pulling a suitcase full of paintbrushes along behind him, a small gold cross on his tweed lapel. He was impeccably dressed—that’s the first thing Papa Louis noticed about him. Even his dog collar looked more fashionable than the ones worn by the colleagues who had funded his stay in Rivière-du-Loup. A burning question: how much would the priest-cum-painter be costing the people of the parish of Saint-François-Xavier? In dollars, the amount was barely enough to raise an eyebrow, nothing to get worked up about, but enough to appeal to the generosity of the town’s businessfolk. Papa Louis was one of the contributors to the new stations of the cross. An extravagance shouted from every shingled rooftop in town that would bring him, or so he hoped, a few more bodies to help get him back on his feet again. Competition was fierce by 1968, and the people of Rivière-du-Loup were increasingly putting off crossing the great divide, starving the Lamontagnes of customers in the process. Business was tough, but by helping to fund the new stations of the cross Louis hoped to kill two birds with one stone. He made sure his name stayed in the hearts of Father Rossignol’s flock, all while teaching his daughter Madeleine a lesson that would serve her well for the rest of her days, and that would become, in a way, her motto: ambition always goes further when disguised as virtue. One day, Papa Louis had, without her knowing why, spoken to his daughter about money.

  “Money’s no good to you in the bank, in a safe, or under a mattress. Money needs to be in circulation, needs to help people do things. You can’t just stand by if your brother’s thirsty. Your glass is full? You give him half. You have a slice of pie left? You cut it in two. Do you see, Madeleine? Mom doesn’t think like that because they were poor when she was growing up. But poverty begins in the mind. You’re not poor.”

  Madeleine hadn’t understood much of his sales patter, only that her father had funded part of the parish’s stations of the cross and that that was a good thing. Misfortune had fallen upon Papa Louis’s business slowly, like cancer eating away at the elderly. Louis’s funeral parlor might still have been one of the most popular places in town at the end of the 1950s, but by 1968 it was frequented only by the odd drunk who’d drowned in his gin. Only Madeleine had made the connection between the drop in her father’s clientele and a few key events.

  The way she told it, Old Ma Madeleine’s departure in 1960 had marked the beginning of the end. Indeed, the number of customers had declined shortly thereafter, despite a significant overhaul of the pricing structure. The reassuring presence of a dead woman in Louis’s parlor had appealed to a clientele that was frightened by what lay beyond the grave. Added to this loss, The Horse wasn’t what he had once been. There was no doubt that had the archbishop seen him in 1965, greying and potbellied, he wouldn’t have bothered having his photograph taken with him and would have turned elsewhere for masturbatory inspiration. His fading physique was not without consequence for customers of the female persuasion either, who began to look elsewhere for the hands that would touch them once they were dead. Little Luc’s accidental death didn’t help matters. No one wanted to wind up, even dead, in a room where such a terrible drama had unfolded. “Negligence” was a word that was still on too many lips.

  All of which meant that in 1968 Papa Louis was lucky if he buried one body a month. The family’s savings dwindled. Irene had to go back to cleaning at the Saint-Louis Hotel, and the aura of success and glory that had always clung to The Horse gave way to the slightly nauseating smell of alcohol. Madeleine had learned an important lesson from the family’s fall, however: customers need to be well looked after, alive or dead.

  It is of absolutely no interest to speculate how much that damned stations of the cross cost in Canadian dollars or francs or sesterces, for that matter. After leaving Rivière-du-Loup, the priest-cum-painter left behind a liability for which Madeleine Lamontagne, in spite of all she would eventually amass through sheer grit and determination, would never manage to pay back more than one-hundredth of the principal.

  And there’s little point dwelling on the actual cost of his visit to Madeleine’s parents, brothers, and, consequently, on all those whose world revolved around Louis Lamontagne, w
hich is to say the Sisters of the Child Jesus, Old Ma Madeleine, Solange Bérubé, and all the other women—and men, it must be said—who had one day found themselves pining for handsome Louis’s teal-colored eyes. Women would stop in their tracks when he walked past. No, not Louis: the priest-cum-painter. They would stop the way Saint Bernadette Soubirous stopped before the Virgin. The rumor continued to gush from both sides of Rue Lafontaine, leaping up the falls like a salmon, oozing across smoke-filled kitchen walls, weaving its way around restaurants, businesses, and kitchens until it reached Saint-Ludger. News of his arrival swept across town like smallpox through the New World in the sixteenth century. No man and—especially—no woman was immune.

  There was no hiding from it, no means of protecting oneself. He turned right onto Saint-Elzéar. He could now be seen making his way up to the church of Saint-François-Xavier. Someone should have taken a photograph of the Lamontagnes at that very moment. It could have been filed away between the photo of Hiroshima in late July 1945 and Christmas 1944 in Dresden—or of any other place whose destruction is imminent.

  “He’s not all that handsome.”

  That’s the first thing Louis thought to himself when he got close enough to have a good look.

  The stranger approached. Within four seconds it would be too late. His gaze would meet Marc’s brown eyes, fall on Madeleine’s teal-colored ones, and stare right into Louis’s.

  “Hello. I’m Father Lecavalier. I’ve just arrived from Quebec City.”

  It was now too late.

  He offered his hand to Marc first; then, after a lingering look into the teenager’s eyes, to his father Louis and to the rest of the family. Solange shook his hand. She recoiled at the touch of his damp skin. He had broken into a sweat climbing the hill. She pursed her lips as though she’d just bitten into a lemon.

  “Are you the painter?” Madeleine inquired, her voice trembling slightly.