“I’m in love with her,” James says. “The last thing that would ever be an issue for me is our politics. We’re able to disagree.”
“Well, good then,” Maggie says, and he’s annoyed with her.
“I’m in love with her,” he repeats.
“I know you are, my love. And you have my blessing and I support you, always. I just can’t pretend I don’t have concerns about your future together.”
“Your father had reservations about Dad, and you guys worked out.”
“You’re right. Which is why my mind is open.”
9
MARCH 1993
Elodie parks in the lot of the Beaudry Community Center, staying in her car a few extra minutes. The building looks like a small institution—a rectangular, light-colored brick box with multiple rows of dormer windows—made all the more grim by the gray sky, dirty snowbanks, and puddles of slush. She wonders about the people inside, the Duplessis orphans. She isn’t sure how many of them will be there, but even a handful will be something. Maybe she’ll recognize someone from St. Nazarius. It’s been twenty-five years, but she could never forget those haunted faces. How strange it is to sit here now, about to have everything she’s fought so hard to forget thrust back into the forefront of her life. This time, though, it’s by choice.
She draws a breath and gets out of the car, feeling extremely nervous. The meeting is in the basement, and she follows the hand-written signs that say DUPLESSIS ORPHANS COMMITTEE MEETING. When she gets to the room, the meeting is already underway.
She stands by the door, taking it all in. There are about fifty men and women in the room, seated on folding chairs, which are lined up in rows. At the front, there’s a long banquet-style table where one man—the leader, presumably—is facing the audience. There are pitchers of water on the table, with Styrofoam cups and ashtrays. A large banner hangs behind him: DUPLESSIS ORPHANS COMMITTEE—SOUTHEAST REGION.
Elodie immediately starts scanning the women, row by row, searching for familiar faces. She doesn’t recognize anyone from St. Nazarius, and yet she recognizes something in all of them—a shared sadness. There are the obvious signs of physical abuse—one man is missing an eye, another has a scar traversing his skull like a river on a map, several have canes, most have facial scars and missing teeth. But what she sees in all of them is the evidence of an upbringing barren of love, nurturing, and hope; the dead stare of a wasted life, the ossification of grief. She quickly realizes she has fared much better than they have.
A woman on one of the aisle seats notices Elodie hovering by the door and beckons her over to the empty seat beside her. Elodie quietly takes the seat. The woman’s name tag says HUGUETTE.
Huguette smiles warmly. She looks about forty-five.
“Here is what you all have in common,” the man up at the front is saying. “You all came from orphanages. You were never adopted, you were all institutionalized.”
The man’s name tag says BRUNO. He’s heavyset with a round face and a full, silver-flecked beard. He wears glasses and a snug tweed jacket over his sweater. When he speaks, a respectful hush falls over the room.
“You were deprived of an education,” he continues. “You were sexually abused, physically abused, et cetera, et cetera. And you were financially exploited, forced to work every day of your lives for nothing!”
The crowd comes to life, yelling, “Yes! Yes!”
“But there’s more, my friends. There’s more,” roars Bruno, riling them up. “Let’s continue with this portrait of the Duplessis orphan—”
“Oui! Oui!”
“Marginalized from society. Poverty. Mental disorders—and not ones that you were born with, but which were the result of everything you suffered in those institutions! To conclude, you’ve had extremely hard lives, to say the least. Lives that were absolutely destroyed by Premier Duplessis.”
Bruno’s speech is met with whistles and wild applause. He talks like an educated man. He can’t possibly be one of them. Even Elodie is clapping, her eyes filled with tears. Yes! she thinks. Yes. That’s me.
The woman beside her, Huguette, suddenly reaches for her hand and squeezes. Elodie squeezes back.
“You learned not to dream,” Bruno goes on. “You learned not to speak up, or have desires. You gave up your illusions and your hopes, until, finally, they turned you into zombies.”
He pauses and looks around the room, acknowledging as many of them as he can. Elodie also looks around the room again. Bodies ravaged by hard lives, addiction, and poverty. Minds destroyed by medication, operations. Elodie has to remind herself that, like her, they’re still only in their forties. She understands now just how fortunate she was to have been rescued by her parents at twenty-four, when she was still young enough for their care to make a difference in her life. Their love restored her while it was still possible for at least part of her to be restored. They gave her a chance. They gave her the practical things—dentists, doctors, healthy food, siblings, Christmas presents, decent clothes. They taught her to read and do simple math. They loved her and loved her and loved her until she began to love herself, even just a little bit. She was only twenty-four.
“What now?” Bruno asks them.
“Now we fight!” someone cries out.
“Now we fight,” Bruno repeats. “Now we have each other. We’re stronger together. They can’t put us in straitjackets and throw us in locked cells anymore! We will continue to meet, and to protest, and to hold press conferences, and to tell our stories to whoever will listen. Call the media. They love a good story. We have a lawyer now, and we’re going to file a class action lawsuit!”
“Against who?”
“Against the College of Physicians for their misdiagnoses, the religious orders for their crimes against humanity—”
Elodie cheers along with the others, feeling as hopeful and excited as she’s ever felt in her life.
“Please, friends,” Bruno says. “Please, stand up one by one and say your name and the institution where you were confined.”
One by one, they stand.
“Gilles Galipeau, Hôtel de Dieu.”
“Hubert Tremblay, St. Julien.”
“Honoré Lagasse, Mont Providence.”
“Huguette Lalonde, Mont Providence.”
“Francine Dion, Mont Providence.”
“Elodie Phénix, St. Nazarius.”
After the meeting, Huguette invites Elodie to join her and her friend Francine for a coffee at a diner down the street. They sit at a booth, with Elodie facing the two women. She orders her usual. Coffee and French fries.
“Is Bruno a Duplessis orphan?” she asks them.
“Sort of,” Huguette says. “He was at one of the psychiatric hospitals—I can’t remember which—but one of the nuns there took him under her wing. She protected him and took care of him, gave him lessons. She recognized he was smart. She managed to get him out and placed with a foster family when he was still young.”
“He missed out on a lot of the abuse,” Francine explains.
“He’s the only one I know of who got a college education,” Huguette says. “That’s why we asked him to be our spokesperson. We needed someone like him. The rest of us, we’re helpless.”
“He’s the reason we have a lawyer now,” Francine says.
“And we’re allowed to sue the church and the doctors?”
Both women shrug. “Who knows?” Huguette says. “It’s worth a try. I don’t think Bruno would let us down.”
“It’s not up to him,” Francine mutters. She has heavy lids and speaks very slowly, like someone who is still medicated.
“Were you both at Mont Providence together?” Elodie asks them.
“We were,” Francine says. “Same ward. We were released at the same time, too. We lived together until Huguette got married.”
“Remember that club we started at Mont Providence?” Huguette says. “We called it the Club for Not Crazies.” Le Club des Pas Folles.
Francine l
aughs, a melancholic sound.
“We used to say over and over to each other, ‘We’re not crazy, we’re not crazy.’ And then one of us would say, ‘Are you sure? Maybe we are?’ And then someone else had to reassure the rest, ‘We’re not crazy. They’re crazy.’ That was our club.”
“I wish I’d had a club like that,” Elodie says.
“Usually we were in the common room,” Francine says. “There was nothing else to do.”
“Sundays were the worst,” Huguette reminisces. “We’d sit and vegetate all day on those goddamn chairs, staring at the walls, listening to the real crazies scream all day. Nothing to do. I used to prefer working.”
Elodie nods, remembering. It was the same at St. Nazarius. They called it the Big Room. Time crawled; your mind played tricks on you. Those times, she thought she really was going crazy.
“Did you ever have the shock treatment?” Francine asks her.
“No. Did you?”
They both nod. “We were lucky we didn’t get lobotomized. She had a mouth on her, this one,” Huguette says of Francine. “She was always in trouble.”
“They kept me tranquilized the last four years I was there.”
“She was basically in a coma.”
“I’m not much better now. I never really got back to normal.”
“Normal,” Huguette scoffs. “Imagine?”
“I didn’t think it was possible that there could be another place as bad as St. Nazarius,” Elodie says.
“You heard it in that meeting. They were all bad.”
“We’re lucky we’re alive,” Huguette says. “Not like the ones who were killed and tossed down the incinerator, or out in the fields behind the hospitals. Apparently there’s a whole cemetery of dead orphans behind St. Nazarius.”
Huguette has used that word twice now. Lucky. Lucky by the lowest possible standard.
“I found my real parents when I was twenty-four,” Elodie says. “I really do feel fortunate compared to everyone else.”
“That’s a miracle,” Francine says. “How did you find them?”
Elodie tells them her story, including the part about Sister Ignatia keeping them apart, and when she’s finished, both Francine and Huguette are dabbing their eyes with a napkin. “You should write a book,” Francine says. “Can you write?”
“Not well, but my mother does. We wrote a first draft a long time ago, but she thinks there might be more interest now.”
“What a story,” Huguette says. “Not many of us got a happy ending.”
It’s such a relief to talk to these women, to be regarded as the one with the happy ending. Never in the real world has Elodie ever been the “fortunate” one or the least damaged one. She’s always had to pretend. Here, she can be completely herself.
Thinking back on it, that was the most challenging part of integrating into the world when she first got out of St. Nazarius—having to act her way into normalcy. She was always self-conscious, always doubting herself. There wasn’t a moment in public when she wasn’t studying how to behave like a normal person, carefully observing people and emulating them. She could never be herself. For years she faked it—not just for Nancy, but for everyone, everywhere. She always worried people could tell that something wasn’t quite right with her. Maybe they know, she would think. Maybe I am crazy and I’m not fooling them.
And although it became easier over time and with a great deal of practice, especially with Nancy, there’s still a certain amount of pretending that has to happen. She’s so used to it now, it hardly takes any effort to play her role. These days, she’s mostly able to let go in public and not monitor herself so carefully, but she’s never completely rid of that voice.
Being with other Duplessis orphans for the first time in decades has emphasized the chasm between where she came from and who she is today. It’s a good reminder that while she’s healed a great deal, it’s actually a relief to be able to let that wounded little orphan be herself for a while. You can come out now. You can speak your truth with these women. You can be you here. It’s safe. What a revelation.
“You mentioned Sister Ignatia,” Huguette says, turning to Francine. “Didn’t Lucille from St. Nazarius used to talk about a Sister Ignatia?”
Elodie’s blood goes cold.
“I wouldn’t remember,” Francine says.
“She did,” Huguette says. “I remember. She said she was as terrifying as her ugly name.”
10
OCTOBER 1993
It’s his turn to meet Véronique’s parents. He’s had to wait almost a year for the privilege. He’s been patient with her, understands her reservations. It would be hard to introduce any boyfriend to your convicted-murderer father, let alone a reporter for the Canadian News Association.
So he hasn’t pushed. He knows it’s a big move for her, and big relationship moves are not her strong suit. But here’s the thing about her timing. The federal election just happened on Monday, and now, Friday, he’s on his way to meet her parents. He can’t help but think she was motivated by Quebec’s recent political victory—small but significant—to give her father some leverage. She’s denied any ulterior motives, simply stating, “I’m just ready.”
“You mean I’ve passed the test?”
“Meeting them will be the test.”
He’s sworn an oath not to interrogate Léo about the October Crisis or his time in prison. The name Pierre Laporte is never to be uttered. She’s given him permission to state his opinions about separatism and the constitutional debacle and the Bloc Québécois, but all conversation must stay in the present. The Past—capital P—is off-limits.
“It’s just a normal family dinner,” she said.
“With a terrorist who was at the center of the infamous October Crisis,” he quipped. “One of the most violent periods in Quebec history. Yes, a normal family dinner.”
At least they’ve been together long enough to be able to have that sort of dialogue. In the beginning, such conversations were a landmine; a joke like that would have set her off in a rage and ended in a terrible fight. Not that they don’t still fight. They do, just less frequently.
“You got the beer?” he asks her.
“Shit.”
She gets out of the car and runs back up to her apartment, returning five minutes later with a case of Labatt Ice. James would have opted for wine or at least craft beer, but Véronique said the Labatt Ice would impress them more.
The ride to Verdun is quiet. He can only imagine what’s going through Véronique’s head, but he assumes she wants everything to go smoothly, wants her parents to approve of him, wants him to like them and maybe even come away from tonight a little less judgmental about her father’s past. At the moment, James has nothing but contempt for Léo Fortin. What can the man possibly do over dinner to sway his opinion?
He loves Véronique. Wants to spend the rest of his life with her, except for that one nagging fear that she will turn out to be just like her father. He worries that the writing may already be on the wall. She is a professional criminal who shows no sign of contrition, nor any outward desire to change. She’s young, sure, and he hopes she’ll find her calling and leave the criminal life behind, but whether she absorbed the trade through osmosis or simply because she wants to please her father, this is what she chooses to be right now.
Lisette has made beef stew and potatoes. She’s tall and statuesque, with the same dark auburn hair as her daughter, and as she ladles out the stew, it’s easy to see where Véronique gets her looks. Léo has been polite and restrained so far, and is less gregarious than James was expecting. He finds himself wishing he didn’t know about Léo’s past; otherwise he could actually like the man, who seems intelligent and thoughtful, clearly adores his wife and daughter. He looks at them fawningly and is easy with his praise and affection.
The awkwardness is unavoidable as they sit across from each other at the kitchen table. They’ve covered a lot of the usual small talk—the warm fall weather they’ve
been having, the shitty economy, his mother’s seed store and how impressive it is that she runs her own business, the still fresh Stanley Cup victory and the upcoming hockey season.
“Patrick Roy better earn that sixteen million dollar contract he signed,” Léo says, dousing his stew with salt and pepper. “Grab me another beer while you’re up, Lise.”
Lisette brings him a beer, asks James if he needs another. No, he’s still working on his first.
“I don’t know if the city can handle another Stanley Cup win,” James says, referring to the riot that erupted on Ste. Catherine Street after the final game.
“Never mind the city,” Léo says. “What about my heart? Ten straight overtime victories. I can’t go through that again.”
James nods in agreement.
“Did you vote?” Léo asks him, switching gears.
“I did,” he says. Here we go.
“The best thing for us was the resounding failure of those goddamn constitutional talks,” Léo says. “Support for separation has never been higher.”
At last, they’ve come around to the conversation James thought they’d be having as soon as he got through the front door.
“You can feel the tide changing again in our favor,” Léo effuses.
“You think Canada is going to take care of Quebec after a separation?” James asks him.
“We don’t need Canada,” Léo responds. “That’s the whole point. We’ve been exploited by the English for long enough, threatened with assimilation every step of the way. This has been the source of all our problems. Now it’s time for total independence.”
Véronique is watching James, waiting to see what he does next.
“I understand you’re not a separatist,” Léo says magnanimously. “And even though you work for the enemy, you’re still French.”
“I am,” James acknowledges, not sure if Léo is teasing him. “And proud of it.”
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