Delaney said nothing. He continued along Sherbrooke, making good progress with the clear roads and the light traffic. The route took him past Loyola College, but he didn’t bother to point out to Natalia that this was where he had studied, where he had worked on the university newspaper, where he had been infected with the not-yet-fatal journalism virus two decades earlier.
When they pulled onto St. Joseph Boulevard in what was coming to be known as Old Lachine by the young professional couples now moving in to renovate the old Quebecois houses, they had still exchanged few words. Lachine was a place as full of memories for him as he ever wanted Montreal neighbourhoods to be. He had always considered it the no man’s land between the city’s two solitudes of English and French, and of working class and bourgeoisie. In the west of Lachine, the streets were predominantly for the English-speaking and the middle class. Eastward toward the Montreal city centre they became much more heavily Frenchspeaking and blue collar. About midway through Lachine the two worlds met uneasily, as they always did in Montreal.
The place was as old as Montreal itself. French explorers had mistakenly thought when they sailed up the St. Lawrence River to the rapids that began here that they had reached China through the longsought Northwest Passage. They were wrong but made a settlement nonetheless — an outpost for the fur trade, and, later, when the English had con quered the French and taken the colony away from them, the beginnings of an industrial centre.
For Delaney, there was also family history. The Catholic Irish workers who had flocked to Quebec in the 1800s settled in large numbers around the Lachine Canal. His own Irish ancestors had not ever actually lived in Lachine; they had ended up in another workingman’s suburb nearby called Point Saint-Charles. But he had heard the stories and knew the lore.
He knew, for example, as he and Natalia drove past the rough-hewn stonework of the canal, that English soldiers had fired on some of the Irish workmen who had built it so many years ago, when they rioted for better pay and rations. It had always annoyed him that most French Canadians insisted that English-speaking Montrealers were all descended from the wealthy English or Scot merchants who had dominated the city’s finances until only a couple of decades ago. Delaney, when he bothered to express it, had taken pride in his Irish workingman ancestors, if only because he thought they absolved him of any blame in the bitter standoff between the French and the English that still existed in the city.
Lachine had also been where his ex-wife grew up. She, of course, was from the eastern side, the French side, and he had ventured into that zone to visit her parents first with a young man’s trepidation and then with a growing confidence. His French had been good, as was the case with many Irish Quebecers, and this, along with his Catholic background, made him more or less acceptable to Denise’s family, if a somewhat odd specimen for her to have brought home. His role as a hustling young journalist also made him a bit of a specimen as well, but eventually he was accepted simply as “l’Anglais.”
Denise’s parents, he guessed, had also likely thought that as a social worker she was in the habit of bringing home strays. He hadn’t been to Lachine for years, however, since long before his marriage had suddenly, unceremoniously, ended. He preferred to think that the main reason for that had been that his wife simply tired of playing social worker to himself and the crowd of maladjusted media people he ran with in those days. There were other reasons. But he didn’t want to think of those today.
The Church of the Resurrection of Our Lord, and its convent and school, stood on a giant walled parcel of land granted to the Catholic Church by the French colonial administration in the seventeenth century when land like this was next to worthless. Its venerable hewn-granite buildings showed no signs of having been allowed to decay, and Delaney observed that parts of the green copper roofing glowed with burnished sheets of new metal where they had been recently repaired. The paintwork was gleaming, if uniformly grey. The drives and walkways were all carefully plowed and shovelled. The church, like most French-Canadian Catholic churches of the era, was massive, too large, built in the hope that pious Quebec habitant farm ers would do their duty and produce the hundreds of parishioners required to fill it.
The convent building was equally imposing: four stories of straight grey walls, surrounded on all sides and all levels by high wide balconies. Long lines of heavy wooden rocking chairs, the only recreation of generations of French-Canadian nuns, were marshalled on each balcony to take in the view of St. Joseph Boulevard, the abandoned canal, and the wide stretch of the St. Lawrence River that separated this part of Montreal island from the rich plain of farmland on the south shore.
The heavy bronze gate was not shut, and Delaney drove into the main courtyard. A morethan-life-sized crucified Jesus regarded them balefully from a cross in the centre. His halo and crown of thorns featured an array of small electric light bulbs, now not illuminated. There was no one around. Delaney paused for a moment and then made for a smaller stone house that was almost certainly the priests’ residence. He pulled into the one space marked “Visiteurs,” shut off the engine, and sat for a moment listening to it tick as it cooled. In the deep shade beside the house the air was still winter cold. Natalia, too, sat quietly and made no move to get out.
“Thank-you,” she said for some reason. She seemed distracted, lost in her thoughts.
“Thank-you for what?”
“For agreeing to help me out,” she said. Delaney looked at her closely.
She appeared nervous, uncomfortable. He realized, more clearly than before, just what position she was in: here in the car of a near stranger, about to go into an old church building to question other strangers about matters of which she knew little and of which she might wish to know even less. He realized how major had been her recent loss, that the old man who apparently constituted her entire family was now dead, that she was still grieving for that loss, that she was more than likely intensely lonely and afraid. He saw a sort of desperation about her.
She would not have come to me unless she were desperate for someone to help her along in this, Delaney thought. This sort of thing is the last thing she would normally want to do.
He wondered, as she smiled wanly at him, what she might be thinking about why he was sitting in the car with her in this chilly place, what she saw as she looked and waited for some sign from him that they should go in.
Someone calling himself a journalist, early forties, somewhat disreputable beard and indifferently cut brown hair, wrinkles around the eyes, not from laughing, aviator sunglasses, battered parka. What else? A former patient — client was the politically correct word now — a man who had come to her complaining of unease, inability to sleep, something close to depression. A man who had started to tell her a little about his life, about his own sense of loss, about his newly vivid dreams, and who had then just as quickly retreated, hurried back to his waking life, never, she had probably thought at the time, to be seen again. And now here they were together on some unlikely excursion that was leading, he realized, God knows where.
“Let’s go in. See what we can find out,” he said, the no-nonsense reporter once again.
The door of his old car creaked extravagantly as he opened it and this seemed to end the awkwardness that had descended on them. They walked up the few steps onto a broad porch and Delaney banged loudly on the door with the black lion’shead knocker. They waited a long time before a severe nun, perhaps in her sixties and wearing the full grey habit of the Ursulines, opened the door. She regarded them with suspicion through her convent-issue steel spectacles. The overheated foyer smelled strongly of furniture oil and floor wax. “Oui?” she said, unsmiling, not welcoming.
“We’re here to see Father Bernard Dérôme, please,” Natalia said in French. “We are friends of his friend and we would like to speak to him about something important.”
The nun was taken aback. She started to say something and then did not. He
r expression of surprise turned, Delaney thought, to annoyance. She stood with her hand on the inside door handle, and then said: “Moment.”
She left the door slightly ajar and as they stood on the porch they heard her hard heels snapping at the hard wood of the hallway. She was gone a long time. Delaney and Natalia moved to the edge of the porch and looked silently out over the vast property. An old man in blue overalls and a faded red lumberjack shirt walked slowly up the driveway in the distance, a large shovel hoisted over his shoulder. The buckles on his rubber boots jangled faintly as he walked.
“Puis je vous aider?”
The priest who now stood in the doorway was as severe as his housekeeper, in the oldest of Quebecois clerical styles. He wore robes of intense, slightly iridescent black, as if they had caught him preparing to say a Mass. A large crucifix and chain in what looked liked chrome steel glinted at his chest. He, too, was wearing unfashionable steel eyeglasses and his face was ruddy and chapped from years of shaving too close and living in cold rooms. His very thick old man’s ears were also ruddy red. His lips, however, were pursed thin and bloodless. Delaney knew visiteurs were not at all welcome here.
“Yes, we are friends of Father Bernard and we have been trying to reach him to tell him some important news and we have been unable to do this,” Natalia said, a little breathlessly. “I have called many times and left messages and he does not reply. We would like to speak to him if possible.”
The priest did not give them his name or invite them inside. His irritation appeared to increase. “I’m afraid that will not be possible,” he said.
“Why not?” Delaney asked, then realized this was perhaps not quite the moment for that tone, for journalistic proddings. He sensed that Natalia wished he would stay quiet. The priest looked intently at him. Something about the quality of Delaney’s French made him switch, in the baroque logic of Quebec social relations, to English.
“Monsieur, Father Bernard has unfortunately died,” the priest said.
He had delivered the bad news to the other male in the group, as would have been his practice, but now he turned his gaze to Natalia to gauge her woman’s reaction. She was shaken, and looked it. The priest offered no further information or explanation. He did not ask any more about their connection to the dead man. The death, apparently, was all the news he was willing to give, the end of the story he was willing to tell.
“He’s dead,” Natalia repeated.
“Oui, madame.”
“When did he die?”
“Some time ago, madame.”
“But when exactly?” she insisted, looking over at Delaney with fear in her eyes. Stay cool, Delaney told her wordlessly. Stay on it.
The priest stood silently, angrily, for a few moments before speaking.
“You are friends of Father Bernard?” he asked.
“Well, my uncle was his friend,” Natalia said. “Stanislaw Janovski. And my uncle has died too and I know he would have wanted Father Bernard to come to his funeral and when he did not come I telephoned to find out why.”
“Was Father Bernard your uncle’s confessor?”
“No. A very old friend.”
“He did not come because he was dead, madame,” the priest repeated.
“But when did he die? What happened to him?” Natalia asked again.
“Why does that matter to you? He was an old man. As your uncle was probably an old man. Le bon Dieu called them both and now they are gone,” the priest said.
He looked over their shoulders into the parking lot and then back over his own shoulder into the dark hallway behind him. Delaney thought he could make out the dim form of the Ursuline housekeeper deep in the shadows.
“Look,” Delaney said. “My friend here just wants a little information about what happened to Father Bernard. Her uncle was very close to him and she would like to know a little about the circumstances of his death. Why would that be a problem?”
The priest had clearly decided he did not like this tall anglophone with a beard.
“I did not say it was a problem, monsieur.”
“Then why not just tell us what happened?” It was apparently easier for the priest to give them the information than to tell them why doing so might be a problem.
“Father Bernard met with an unfortunate accident,” he said.
“What kind of accident?” Delaney suspected that the news was not going to be good, that somehow the news would be very, very significant, for Natalia and, by extension now, for himself.
“He drowned, monsieur.”
“Drowned,” Delaney repeated. “He drowned.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“In the wintertime.”
“When? When did he drown?” Natalia seemed very alarmed now. Her eyes had widened and she looked over at Delaney briefly.
“It was in January. About four weeks ago.”
“What date? What date was it, please?” she asked.
“The date? Well, madame, that is hard for me to remember.”
“What week? What week? The second week?”
“Yes. I think that would be correct. Yes, the second week of January.”
“What date? What day?”
The priest looked intently at her and then at Delaney. He could clearly see her distress, but he just as clearly did not want to know why she was distressed. Delaney knew that a priest of this vintage would be unused to being questioned. There would be far too much questioning going on nowadays, in his view. This priest would prefer the days when the Catholic Church in Quebec was above question, when the authority of priests was unquestioned, when two young people, who were not French Canadians and possibly not even Catholics, would not dare to stand on his doorstep and demand information.
He would be wishing for a return to the old days, before the Quiet Revolution when the new Liberal government after Premier Duplessis’s death had changed everything, had taken control of the schools and the hospitals and the charities away from the Church and made it their own. He would not like the changes of the last thirty-five years in Quebec very much at all.
“I believe it was a Friday, madame,” he said at last. “A Thursday or a Friday in the second week in January.
This news alarmed Natalia even further. “Friday is the day I got back from Zurich,” she said to Delaney. “That’s the day I found my uncle. He had been dead for maybe one or two days, the police said.”
At the mention of the word police the old priest moved to conclude their interview.
“I’m afraid I must go,” he said. “I have other duties this morning.”
He made as if to close the door but Delaney stopped him with a hard look and a question.
“How did Father Bernard drown?” Delaney asked. “What happened to him?”
The priest saw this as the line these impertinent visitors should not be allowed to cross.
“That is a private matter, monsieur. I have tried to help you with some information, and now I must go. Bonjour, merci.”
He moved again to close the door but Delaney took a step forward and that stopped him. “No,” Delaney said. “It’s important for us to know how he died. You must tell us. How did he drown?”
“Yes, how did he drown? Did he drown in the bath?” Natalia asked. Her voice was higher, insistent now. She looked over at Delaney to see if he thought she was making the situation worse.
The priest’s anger, displeasure, and frustration were intense. He stood and waited, but then seemed to realize that his unwanted guests might now create a scene on the porch of his retreat. He would want that even less.
“Father Bernard died on the ice, monsieur.He was a fisherman, an ice fisherman, and the ice under his fishing shack gave away.”
“He would fish,” Delaney said.
“Oui. It was his hobby, monsieur. He liked the quiet of it.”
“Oui.”
“Did they find his body?”
“Why do you want to know so much?” the priest asked. “Yes, they found his body. He was able to climb back onto the ice.”
“He climbed out of the water and died on the ice,” Delaney said. “Oui, monsieur.”
“He drowned, but they found him on the ice.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“That’s not possible,” Delaney said.
“How would monsieur know what is possible and what is not?” the priest demanded. “I have tried to help you and that it is all for today. Bonjour. I must go.”
“Look, people do not drown like that,” Delaney insisted. “If he could get back onto the ice he was not drowned. He would have frozen to death maybe, but not drowned.”
“Monsieur, I have told you it was an unfortunate accident. It was very cold. His head must have rolled back into the water and he drowned. This is what the police said. The police have been here and they have said it was like this. And now I go.”
The door slammed shut and Delaney and Natalia were left alone on the silent porch. Natalia stood looking shell-shocked. She said nothing. Delaney said nothing either. An intense feeling began to build, however, in Delaney’s guts, a feeling he had had just a few times in his life before.
It was not fear, though he had felt intense fear many times before. Fear was what you feel when rebels point their AK-47s at you and grin the toothy grin they grin when they are thinking about killing a gringo periodista in the rain. Fear is what you feel when border guards somewhere else take away your passport and throw you in the back of a dank armoured personnel carrier and argue loudly in Spanish about whether you may be a Yankee spy.
The Mazovia Legacy Page 6