The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  Sanschagrin nearly fainted with pleasure at the news. He threw both arms up in the air, like the patient owl perched on a treetop stretches out its broad wings at the sight of a delicious little field mouse scurrying across the forest humus. This would make a welcome change from the millennium bug and Y2K celebrations. The more quickly a rumor spread, the more likely it was to be true. This was Sanschagrin’s guiding principle. Madeleine Lamontagne’s being unwell appeared about as probable to him as a Martian invasion, but the mere fact that an ambulance had been dispatched to Lamontagne Tower was newsworthy in itself, fit for the front page, or at least the second. At any rate, the information would certainly be of value if gleaned quickly enough. Just to be on the safe side, Sanschagrin let Venise Van Veen in on the news, not wanting to be attacked as a “sad little boor” or a “nasty piece of work” the next time he bumped into her in the softly lit corridors of Radio-Canada or over a steak tartare in a fashionable bistro.

  He found her at home.

  The news hit Venise hard. Recently retired, she’d kept up only a daily newspaper column, a weekly radio show, the odd TV appearance on current affairs shows, and an occasional panel participation “just to keep her mind active.” Since the very beginning of her career, Venise had learned to tick all the right boxes on the questionnaire of public opinion: for abortion, against the death penalty, for secular schools, against sharia law, for the legalization of marijuana, against immigration quotas, for same-sex marriage, against the force-feeding of geese, for outlawing smoking in public places, against the Gulf War, for lacy underwear, against English being taught from the first year of elementary school, for stores opening on Sundays, against compulsory vaccination, for an independent Quebec, against the return of school uniforms, for a more polite society, against GMOs, for an overhaul of the school calendar, against plastic bags, for sanctions on Cuba being lifted, against burkas, for a return to all-boys schools, against uranium enrichment, for new metro lines, against a new gasoline tax, for affordable daycare, against Michael Jackson.

  She didn’t put a foot wrong.

  Five minutes later, without so much as pausing to touch up her makeup, Venise Van Veen sped out of the parking lot beneath her apartment on Peel, heading for Lamontagne Tower. Meanwhile, the ambulance driver who had been dispatched to Madeleine’s aid was taking his time. He stopped at red lights, respected the speed limit, and even let a young woman in a fur hat cross the street in front of him (she opened her mouth and let out a cloud of steam by way of thanks). There was no way he was going to hurry to help the woman an editorialist (a sworn enemy of Venise Van Veen’s) had just dismissed as “Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher.” The driver’s colleague, unaccustomed as he was to such displays of nonchalance, politely pointed out that it was an emergency call, all the same—and a serious, legitimate one at that—to which the driver replied, though only after spitting out the window a toothpick he’d been gnawing on for the last half hour:

  “Do you really want that Lamontagne woman to make our lives a misery in the twenty-first century too?”

  “I really want to not get the sack,” the worried paramedic replied to his colleague.

  Those on the sixty-first floor eagerly awaited the arrival of the emergency crew. A particularly efficient secretary had already begun cancelling Madeleine Lamontagne’s appointments. She’d given the energy minister, the archbishop of Montreal, and the manager of communications at National Bank more or less the same message: Madame Lamontagne regretfully informs you that she will be unable to attend her meeting with you at Lamontagne Tower this afternoon. Please contact her secretary a week from now to schedule a new appointment. Madeleine Lamontagne is deeply sorry for the inconvenience and hopes you will accept her sincerest apologies. Nobody on this final afternoon of the year was sad to see their improbably scheduled appointment canceled, apart perhaps from the archbishop’s representatives, who had hoped to make the most of the holiday cheer to broach the delicate matter of a new roof for the cathedral. But that, along with the end of the world, would now have to wait until the next millennium.

  The ambulance drivers immediately noticed something out of the ordinary about the skyscraper. First off, everything was impeccably clean. Every surface, especially the glass and metal, gleamed like it had just left the factory. The pale wooden floors appeared to have been sanded and varnished that very morning. The air smelled vaguely like an infirmary: a blend of ether and calla lily. The elevator door opened out onto a spacious room on the top floor. There, lined up as though in a sci-fi movie, were twenty identical wooden desks, ten to the left and ten to the right. A handful of computer screens displayed table after table of complex calculations. And, in the center, a desk slightly bigger than the others, with a sign: Solange Bérubé, Vice President. The room filled the entire floor, with the skyscraper’s huge windows taking the place of office walls and bathing everything in intense sunlight. Aside from the surprisingly spotless surroundings, it was first and foremost the sight of so many people at work on December 31, 1999, that surprised the paramedics. Both just stood there for a moment, long enough for the elevator doors to close on them. The driver pushed the button to open them again and walked straight into what he would later describe to his psychotherapist, a cigarette in his trembling hand, as “a huge dissecting table hanging in the air.”

  Beside the vice president’s desk, they noted a poster resting on an easel, by all appearances a Mado Group Inc. ad campaign. In various shades of metallic blue, the island of Manhattan with its office towers and skyscrapers. In the foreground, the Statue of Liberty with the face and hair of Madeleine Lamontagne; the result being that anyone taking just a quick glance might think that Mireille Mathieu had dressed up as the Statue of Liberty for Mardi Gras. The picture showed Madeleine Lamontagne wearing a maternal, protective smile, holding a breakfast tray, a cornucopia made up of maple syrup pancakes, fried eggs, bacon, orange juice, a steaming cup of coffee, a fresh fruit salad, buttered toast, jam, cretons, beans, ham, ketchup, and sausages. The tray, disproportionately large compared to the tiny woman carrying it, gave the impression that Madeleine Lamontagne had superhuman strength. To the right, in sober, elegant writing:

  Mado’s

  Breakfast from Canada

  Opening January 1, 2000

  Times Square

  At that very moment the two ambulance drivers began to understand the complexity of the situation fate had just thrust upon them. Along with everyone else, they knew Madeleine Lamontagne as the founding president of the Mado’s restaurant chain, with meals served on every continent and its logo (a white egg held up by three roses) plastered across hundreds of buildings around the globe. “An empire upon which the sun never sets,” “The jewel of Canada’s food industry,” “Quebec’s embassy abroad,” and “Nostra cosa”—just a sampling of the platitudes used to describe Madeleine Lamontagne’s worldwide business success. In some US business circles, Madeleine was even known as the Queen of Breakfast, a nod to the fact that the market for every meal ingested before noon across North and South America belonged entirely to her. The two dawdlers realized a little too late that by taking their time in coming to Madeleine Lamontagne’s aid, they had rendered themselves reprehensible in the eyes of Mado Group Inc., a corporate entity in which God himself seemed to hold shares—which wasn’t entirely untrue in a strictly theological sense.

  The skyscraper known to all of Montreal as “Lamontagne Tower” was the personal property of Madeleine Lamontagne, who rented out the first sixty floors to various businesses and ministries. Floor 22, for example, was home to the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Brazilian Consulate in Montreal. Dubbed “a lean, mean breakfast machine” by a journalist for Maclean’s magazine, Mado Group Inc. was known for its pragmatic, efficient business model. And so the company occupied no more than a single floor of the tower with the sixty-foot fiberglass egg on top. At night, Madeleine’s illuminated egg changed colors and could be seen from as far away as the suburbs on the
south shore of the St. Lawrence River. The fact that Montreal had been dominated by a giant egg since September 1995 was less down to sheer chance than to Madeleine Lamontagne’s determination to prevail over Quebec’s largest city. True to form, she had patiently waited for the day 1000 De La Gauchetière opened its doors to unveil, to much fanfare, the plans for her own tower, much to the displeasure of her rivals, whose glory was short-lived.

  This was the beast the two ambulance drivers had thumbed their nose at by taking their own sweet time.

  Inside the office, Madeleine Lamontagne still lay unconscious on a black leather sofa, surrounded by her all-female entourage. It was this scene—an Entombment of Mary fit for this freezing end to the century—that the ambulance drivers discovered as they arrived on the scene. Solange Bérubé was irritated to see that neither man seemed in a hurry and that neither had worked up the slightest sign of a sweat. On the pedestal table to the left of the oak door, Madeleine’s cup of tea released its final puff of steam. Solange stared daggers at the men, prodding them into action.

  With a few virile and professional movements, they quickly secured Madeleine’s little body to the stretcher they’d pushed over to the staircase connecting the mezzanine level to the main room. With the employees looking on, they then headed back to the elevator, closely followed by Solange Bérubé, who’d just given precise instructions as to how the rest of the day was to unfold and grabbed from a drawer in Madeleine’s desk a battered, dog-eared book that she stuffed into her bag. Solange motioned to the elevator. By this stage, it was clear to the paramedics that they didn’t have a shred of authority in this aseptic women’s world. In monastic silence, the ambulance drivers, Solange Bérubé, and Madeleine descended the sixty-one floors of Lamontagne Tower. Solange Bérubé had entered a secret code that meant the elevator wouldn’t stop at the other floors, which were empty in any case, as it was a public holiday. They bundled the stretcher into the ambulance in the deserted underground parking lot. Solange sat beside her president and friend. As he was getting ready to start the vehicle, the driver felt Solange Bérubé’s bony hand grab him by the shoulder. He jumped. Solange carefully enunciated each of her syllables:

  “If anything should happen to our president, I shall personally destroy you and everyone around you.”

  The driver acknowledged the threat without reply. His colleague swallowed hard. The ambulance sped out of the parking lot and back into the thick of the celebrations, the number of revelers having seemingly doubled within the space of a few minutes.

  “We’re taking you to Saint-Luc,” the ambulance driver said, trying his best to sound reassuring.

  “No, to the Jewish General,” barked Solange Bérubé.

  “But, Ma’am. We’re right beside Saint-Luc. It’ll take us an hour to get to Côte-des-Neiges in this traffic!”

  “To the Jewish General, and stop contradicting me. Use your siren!”

  The ambulance driver turned on his flashing lights and siren, and the vehicle took off like a rocket, Mount Royal in its sights. He was too taken aback to argue, and resigned himself to following the madwoman’s orders. At 12:31 p.m., the siren’s wail could be heard at the corner of Beaver Hall and René-Lévesque, where Venise Van Veen’s Volkswagen was heading east.

  As the ambulance transporting Madeleine Lamontagne sped by in the other direction, Venise Van Veen thanked God (but under her breath, since she was officially an atheist). The ambulance’s siren had brought part of the downtown traffic to a standstill. Without considering the legality of the maneuver for even a second, Venise did a U-turn and sped after the ambulance as it turned right onto Guy. She followed it at top speed all the way along Côte-des-Neiges until it reached its destination.

  While the sirens wailed their way up Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Madeleine emerged fleetingly from her torpor only to fall back into the depths as though submerged by a wave of tiredness. Solange tried to keep her conscious by reciting Hail Marys to her, which Madeleine would haltingly finish off with “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” She foundered after the third prayer. Solange went on praying alone.

  The ambulance was only yards away from the ER when Madeleine was seized by a series of mild convulsions, as though a malevolent spirit were trying to violently extract itself from her body in response to Solange’s prayers.

  “New York, New York . . . it’s New York, Solange. Or Rome,” she muttered faintly.

  To which Solange replied: “You’re in Montreal, Madeleine. Forget about New York. You won’t be going. I’ll open the restaurant for you. You won’t have to go back there, Madeleine. Would you like me to call Michel and Gabriel?”

  Madeleine rolled an unwell eye. She no longer seemed to be of this world. When she heard the names Michel and Gabriel, she turned her head, apparently in acute pain.

  “My little angels,” she sobbed.

  Then she returned to her delirium while the ambulance men opened the rear door to remove the stretcher. The driver offered his hand to help Solange down, but she pushed it away and glared at him for the tenth time that hour.

  “Don’t touch me, you moron. And you’d better pray our president survives this!” she hissed.

  The driver bowed his head, visibly wounded. Madeleine rambled on, without the other passengers paying the slightest heed.

  “Berlin is so far . . . We’ll never make it. We’ll have to stop at Elbing . . . The Russians will leave . . . It’s artillery fire . . . The Russians will come back . . . Tante Clara, I’ve lost Hans. He must be on the lower decks . . .”

  Now they were in the parking lot beside the Fannie and David Aberman Atrium, itself a neighbor to the Harriet and Abe Gold Department of Medicine. The ambulance drivers rolled the stretcher into what looked like an aquarium with sliding doors, where an old woman was lying on a gurney. The people in the ER waiting room saw Madeleine’s contorted face pass by out of the corner of their eye, followed by the vice president, who now had the look of someone who’d just given up smoking. The hospital staff asked the usual questions. How did it happen? Did she hit her head when she fell? Any relevant medical history? Was she on any medication? Any history of heart disease? Epilepsy? Narcotics?

  “Of course not!” Solange protested, tightening her hold on the little brown vial she’d slipped into her pocket.

  The president opened and closed her eyes on the stretcher, occasionally went into convulsions, and called weakly for her companion.

  “Where is she from?” a doctor asked. He’d something of a poetic bent, and liked to lend an ear to the delirious rambling of his patients.

  “Madame Lamontagne is a major donor to your hospital,” Solange snapped. “You know very well where’s she’s from!”

  This cast a chill over the room where a battery of nurses, orderlies, and doctors were flitting from patient to patient, coming and going through a set of doors that led goodness knew where, just like in a Feydeau play, where the lover tries to run from the closet he’s hiding in and escape out the window, only to end up passing through the kitchen and every other room in the house. The doctor replied in a tone that was nothing short of apocalyptic:

  “She’s speaking German. ‘Die Kinder, die Kinder sind alle tod,’ she just said.”

  “Madeleine doesn’t speak German. She has a son who lives in Germany, but she hasn’t spoken to him in years.”

  “Well, it sure sounds like German. Or maybe Yiddish.”

  “You must have misunderstood. Does it really matter? Can’t you just help her instead of worrying about that?”

  Solange couldn’t see why the emergency room doctor was so preoccupied by what Madeleine was saying. She was delirious, end of story. You don’t try to understand delirium; you try to avoid it, to get rid of it. That’s how you cure it, not by dwelling on the irrational. Half of what Madeleine was muttering was incomprehensible. It was a stretch to claim it was German. The doctor, a man by the name of David Hirsch, was no crank, however. What he’d heard was too close to Yi
ddish for him to be mistaken, but if the woman in front of him insisted on denying the obvious, there wasn’t much he could do. Madeleine Lamontagne must have heard the words in an opera, he thought to himself. Or some song on the radio. They’d stuck in her memory and chosen to come out at that precise moment. What opera might it be, he wondered. Perhaps Wagner or Strauss. Certainly not Mozart.

  A heart attack had already been ruled out, as had an aneurism, and fainting brought about by diabetes. Dr. Hirsch decided to place the patient under observation and wait for her to come around before continuing his examination. For the time being, he suspected low blood pressure or some form of poisoning. Madeleine was moved to a bland little room. It was full of objects whose shape or function made it impossible to forget you were in a hospital. Solange sat down on a chair beside her friend. Once they had the room to themselves, she took out of her bag the little dog-eared book she’d slipped into it earlier and opened it up at a page marked with a bookmark, also dog-eared. The book seemed to be well traveled. Madeleine continued to rave.

  “It’s the Empire State Building. There it is. It’s very high. Right at the top . . . My name is Madeleine, I’m here for Dr. Beck. I want to see the doctor.”