The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “We’re going to open our restaurant here.”

  “Ah yes? And you think they’ll be lining up to eat at the undertaker’s daughter’s? What are you planning on serving? Cold meat?”

  Zucker was possessed by the demon of sarcasm, an evil that could not be exorcised.

  There’s nothing like the terrifying thunk of earth hitting an oak casket to bring man’s insignificance into focus. Louis was buried the day after the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Irene shut herself away in the Lamontagne family home, never going out more than once a week and getting by on the widow’s pension the US Army sent her until she fell into an alcohol-induced coma and died in March 1985. She would never speak to her daughter, or to Solange, again.

  Madeleine was beginning to emerge from her torpor. Zucker’s words came back to her like warnings issued from a high Manhattan window. She tried to work out the mathematics behind the rumor, tried to come up with an equation. The problem was as follows: in a town there is always X number of people who know and Y number of people who don’t. By virtue of the Law of Forgetting, the latter always end up outnumbering the former. The opposite is never true. In June 1919, for instance, every man and his dog knew the precise circumstances surrounding Louis Lamontagne’s birth; witnesses to the event carried the story around inside them. But, as the years went by, the number of people who didn’t know exactly how Louis had come into the world began to grow. An influx of newcomers, a jump in the birth rate . . . In short, those who didn’t know were eventually in the majority—around April 1964, by Madeleine’s calculations. The matter at hand was now the speed with which the population of Rivière-du-Loup would forget the origins of the child Madeleine would be bringing into the world a few months from then. The most conservative estimate she came up with was June 1990. Twenty-one years for the rumor to fade by half. The calculations were complex. Many factors had to be taken into consideration, namely the fact that she was a Lamontagne, which in itself lowered the forgetfulness coefficient by a few points. Also to be factored into the mix was the drivel people were spouting about her brother Marc, the frightening number of women Louis had loved in his lifetime, and the alarming rate at which news traveled up and down the town. Plus, the way storekeepers were already staring at her belly with eyes like sharp bayonets didn’t leave much hope for a miracle. People knew, and they would know for a long time to come. “O land of fragile light, how poorly dost thou love thy children,” Madeleine thought to herself. Another calculation, this time of a more practical nature, brought her back to Tosca’s Diner. How many breakfasts would make her rich? That was much easier to work out.

  “What does rich even mean?” Solange asked, trying to bring an end to her calculations.

  “Rich enough to say we have money.”

  “You’re going around in circles, Madeleine.”

  “We could do what Donatella Donatello did.”

  “You won’t be able to all by yourself, Madeleine.”

  “I know. Come with me.”

  They left that January, not long after Solange managed to sell her Triumph. Sister Mary of the Eucharist was the only one to see them off at the bus station.

  “Old Ma Madeleine made you raisin cookies,” she sobbed.

  They didn’t look back. Madeleine would never set foot in her hometown again. Solange would go back fifteen years later to open a restaurant, then five years after that to bury her mother. By the time they turned up at Zucker’s on Rue Saint-Hubert, Madeleine’s belly was already beginning to show.

  “I knew you’d come. I’ll show you the kitchen.”

  The place at the corner of Saint-Hubert and Beaubien wasn’t much to look at. It had belonged to a Polish family who’d left to make their fortune in Toronto. They’d run a lunch joint, which went by the uninspired name of Polska Deli Counter, that they’d been trying to get rid of for five years. Any would-be buyers who hadn’t been overcome by the stench of grease continued their visit only to discover the place was coming down with mice. The rusty, faded sign creaking in the wind was the last straw for even the keenest prospects. Zucker had bought the place for a song, complete with an apartment above that cried “Paint me!” and a parking space behind, where rats and bums could be found sleeping helter-skelter in the morning. Despite Solange’s skepticism, Madeleine was determined to make her restaurant a miniature version of Tosca’s Diner. They spent that first winter in the apartment upstairs, heads buried in The New England Cookbook inherited from Madeleine the American. Among other things, they found the recipe for the pancakes—light and fluffy as clouds—that the other Madeleine had been renowned for in 1918. Though the pages on seafood were of no use to them, the sections that dealt with breakfasts were an invaluable source of inspiration.

  “Look at those huge windows! Have you seen how many people walk by this place? Imagine each of them paying two bucks for something to eat. What do you serve them to turn a profit? Better yet: what do you serve them so they come back next week and give you another two bucks? And bring their aunts? Their cousins?”

  And so Solange’s vocation began. From that moment on, with Madeleine high on pregnancy hormones, she officially became Madeleine’s assistant. Zucker looked on at his handiwork and rarely interfered. His benevolence stopped where Madeleine’s zeal began. He was even surprised when, two days before Mado’s opened in May 1969, the girls offered to buy back the restaurant from him.

  “But you don’t have the money.”

  “How much is it?”

  “No, it’s not for sale. You work. I pay you a salary. Everybody’s happy.”

  “How much?”

  Zucker didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused by Madeleine’s stubborn tone. Truth was, he didn’t need the restaurant. Blessed with an extraordinary nose for business, the Austrian could have sold sugar to Fidel Castro. His food distribution business was thriving; the restaurant would bring him no more than the satisfaction of knowing he’d lifted Louis Lamontagne’s daughter out of a life of poverty and degradation. If he was reluctant to sell them the restaurant, it was largely because he feared their ruin in a city where they didn’t know a soul. Where would they have gotten the down payment anyway? When Louis died, he’d left behind nothing more than the family home where Irene was steeping in her gin.

  “Papa Louis had an insurance policy.”

  Insurance? In Zucker’s eyes, the idea of Louis Lamontagne taking out an insurance policy seemed unlikely. It must have been Irene’s idea. She was the only one in the family who had a head for figures. Irene and her daughter, by the looks of things.

  “You’re too young and it’s too much.”

  “How much?”

  Madeleine’s determination amused him. Solange, standing behind her, stared at him as though begging him to comply. He almost laughed.

  “Ach! Mädels!”

  “I’ll give you three thousand.”

  The Austrian burst out laughing.

  “But I paid much more than that!”

  Madeleine didn’t turn a hair.

  “Three thousand now and we’ll owe you the rest.”

  Zucker thought it over. Barely eighteen and already a nose for business? He felt like having a little fun with them, even if just to see how Solange, a woman in man’s clothing, would be transformed into a smiling, gracious hostess. What did he have to lose? Worst case, the restaurant would fall back into his hands. He spared a thought for his mother, a girl the Austrian countryside had catapulted off to Linz at age nineteen, pregnant by her own brother. She’d been taken on by an innkeeper, Ferdinand Zucker, the man she’d married. The Eastern Front had widowed her in 1943, only twenty years old and in charge of a forty-bed Gasthaus, with a rambunctious child running around her feet. Zum Hirsch was the name of the inn that had miraculously survived the Allied bombing. He’d grown up there on Schnitzel and Strudel, on Knödel and Linzertorten. He wiped a tear from his eye.

  “I think we should see a notary.”

  Madeleine leaped into his arms,
shed a few pregnant woman’s tears, and went back to her rags and broom. On May 2, 1969, the first Mado’s restaurant opened its doors. A monster was born. The restaurant, which had no more than thirty seats at the opening, six of them at the counter, was a surprise success from the get-go. Madeleine, whom everyone presumed to be Zucker’s daughter, amused the customers, most of them storekeepers on Rue Saint-Hubert. They looked on in astonishment as the pregnant girl flipped pancakes and fried bacon at dawn. Solange learned to smile. Mado’s became their life, their raison d’être, their one and only thought, right up to the morning of June 15, when Madeleine had to shut up shop. Her child had stopped kicking two days earlier.

  Madeleine had imagined she’d bring her child into the world in the apartment she shared with Solange above the restaurant. But Zucker was having none of it: too dangerous. Instead, he left her in the hands of the nurses at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, even though the place was crawling with nuns. Every last one of them refused to give the hysterical Madeleine anything to relieve the pain. In the hallways that echoed with her cries for help, Solange tore her hair out by the fistful. The shouts were heard all the way to Alberta. Solange was not allowed into the delivery room.

  “Are you the father?” a nurse inquired sarcastically.

  The hospital agreed, following a generous donation from Zucker, not to press charges for assault. The doctor had decided not to intervene and let the nun deal with that Amazon woman from the Lower St. Lawrence. He was much more concerned with the position the baby was in and the sounds his stethoscope was sending him.

  “Get out of the way, you stupid cow.”

  The nun opted to stand down. While the doctor went looking for help, Madeleine begged Solange to look in her bag.

  “Take out Dr. Beck’s vial.”

  “Are you sure, Madeleine?”

  “Do what I say or I’ll bite your nose off!”

  The doctor returned to find Madeleine calm and dangerously dilated.

  “You have a bass clef on your inner thigh. Your baby’ll be a musician!” he joked.

  Madeleine let out a morphinated laugh. Solange smiled grimly. The child, an enormous creature, was breech, as though intent on killing its mother. As it slipped out into the world, the city of Montreal was rent asunder by a cry for the ages. It was almost too much for Madeleine, just as it had been for The American. It was the doctor who helped her survive Gabriel’s birth—and for a long, long time Gabriel remained the biggest baby ever seen at the hospital. When Madeleine expelled him from her body with one last push, the doctor picked him up and began to laugh.

  “You sure don’t do things by halves! But it’s not over yet, Madeleine. There’s another on its way.”

  Madeleine began to sing a hymn from her convent days.

  “What do you mean, another one?” Solange yelped.

  “Do you mean to say your friend didn’t go to a doctor during the whole pregnancy?”

  “Uh . . . no, I don’t think so. At the start, yes. Dr. Panneton.”

  “Panneton? And where is his office?”

  “Rivière-du-Loup.”

  “I clearly heard two hearts. Twins in separate sacs.”

  “Sacs?”

  “They won’t look like each other. The other might even be a girl.”

  The nun had taken the baby away as soon as Madeleine pushed it out and the umbilical cord had been cut. She mustn’t become attached to it, the doctor said. Solange had seen the huge bloodied child—it was almost blue—pass from the doctor’s hands to the nun, who stared daggers at her every now and again. She left Madeleine’s side for a moment as her friend was swept up in a voluptuous bout of delirium featuring teal-eyed angels. She walked over to the child while the nun washed him. Solange smiled. She’d never seen anything so beautiful. A miniature Louis Lamontagne, his eyes still closed.

  “He looks like Papa Louis, Madeleine!”

  “Henceforth all generations shall call me blessed . . .”

  Madeleine had moved on to the Magnificat. Gabriel had cleared the way so well that she almost didn’t notice when she gave birth to Michel a half hour later. The nun, who still hadn’t gotten over Solange’s violent entrance, was now ready to take a bite out of her to defend herself.

  “Don’t look at them. You mustn’t grow attached. It’s better for you, and for your sister.”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “What are you doing here then?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  They would have come to blows again, had it not been for little Michel, who began to charm everyone around him from the moment he came into the world. The boys were laid side by side in the same bassinet.

  “The second’s smaller than the first, much smaller! You have to keep them, eh, Madeleine? You can’t give them up! I’ll help you! At least keep the first one, Madeleine!”

  Madeleine fainted. Gabriel waved an arm in Solange’s direction. Fascinated by how perfect his little fingers were, she slid her index finger into Gabriel’s hand. He held it surprisingly tightly, even for a newborn. He was definitely The Horse’s grandson, Solange thought. She was under his spell, always would be. Nothing else mattered. And that was the day, she’d later say, when she herself came into this world, after eighteen years of futile, aimless existence. God had sent her this gift to make up for all the rest, and she never dared admit to anyone that she was convinced she’d come out of the deal better off than before.

  “Madeleine, you have to call him Gabriel, like the archangel! You’ve made two little angels!”

  The nun clenched her teeth, spluttering with rage, and envy. In a move that was pure Lamontagne, Madeleine was back on her feet three days later. She gathered her things together and demanded to go home.

  Zucker had tried to talk them out of keeping the babies. What’s going to happen to the restaurant? What about their father? Who’ll be their father? Solange smiled at the question. Crazy. She and Madeleine were both absolutely crazy. Zucker considered alerting the authorities, then, in true Austrian fashion, decided to mind his own business and let events run their course. They would have their fun. He would keep an eye on things, and when they were at their wits’ end, the children would be handed over to the state. At least they’ll have tried, he thought.

  It was late June in Montreal. The streets of La Petite-Patrie were fragrant with the scent of roses; schoolchildren singing odes to freedom. A wind blew across town, rolling up skirts and ruffling men’s hair. Hair was getting longer; churches were emptying. The two newborns were settled in a room in the four-room apartment Solange and Madeleine lived in above the restaurant, the same apartment they’d point at only a few years later, saying: “There it is. That was your first home.” To help her survive her role as a new mother, Madeleine had decided Solange would take care of one of the boys. And so it was that in June 1969, Madeleine pushed Gabriel into the arms of her friend, paving the way, although she had no way of knowing it at the time, to years of pointless suffering.

  “He reminds me too much of Papa Louis. You can take him.”

  She kept little Michel for herself. He was more fragile, his body always a year behind his brother’s. Madeleine was clear: the boys could never know. Ever. She would tell them how they came to be when the time came. There was to be no talk of Rivière-du-Loup, the nuns, Irene, or of those other people who, at any rate, had wanted nothing to do with them. Zucker was instructed to be discreet and never to mention Louis Lamontagne, him drinking himself to death, or anything else that might make him tangible in the boys’ minds. They would be Montrealers. Irene’s resentment had made it so. Of their village on the shores of the St. Lawrence, the girls would keep their accent, its shortened vowels, its guttural r’s, and an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness and hard work. Their heritage also included a few holy pictures, notably a particularly poignant portrait of St. Cecilia, along with a belief in God and regular attendance at mass, just like they’d promised Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who, no more than any of the ot
her nuns, ever attempted to contact them.

  Call Her Venise

  MADO’S BECAME THE neighborhood’s most popular breakfast joint. People would come to watch the two young women bustling about the hotplates. Madeleine did the cooking, while Solange served the customers. Both wore baby-blue uniforms, their hair done up in buns. Mado’s embroidered in teal-blue handwritten lettering above the left breast. No one, not even Madeleine, had an inkling that this simple outfit was about to become the daily uniform of so many hundreds of young Quebec women. A waitress was hired, then another. Two neighborhood girls barely older than Madeleine and Solange.

  Perhaps things might have turned out differently for the twins and their “moms” if Venise Van Veen had decided to eat elsewhere or to skip breakfast altogether that morning. Until that very moment, the girls’ future remained uncertain. Before their fate was to become a story worth telling, they were still lacking the aura lent by celebrity. In short, besides that one small triumph over adversity, they needed something to happen that would propel them even further forward, an event that would cause the media spotlight that swept wildly across the world to stop directly over them and the archangel twins. Years later, Solange must have thought back to the summer of 1969 as the time when she was still in total and absolute control of everything. And if she were asked to freeze a single frame of her life for all eternity, she would choose those summer days in the sunlit diner on Rue Saint-Hubert, with Madeleine busy cooking, her customers sitting in their little red leatherette booths, a Michèle Richard song playing on the radio, and the till respectably full. The twins sleeping in the apartment upstairs, sometimes needing to be brought down to the restaurant when they cried. Solange sought to recall the particular moment when that perfect balance snapped. She looked back on the journalist coming into their lives the way Americans remember Pearl Harbor. Hard to say what might or might not have been if Venise Van Veen hadn’t decided that morning in June 1969 that she wanted to start her day with a pancake. And so it was that a few days before the Saint-Jean-Baptiste holiday, fate once again intervened in Madeleine Lamontagne’s life, this time taking the form of a well-known Radio-Canada presenter. It was Solange who spotted her first.