The Forgotten Daughter

by Joanna Goodman

He shoves Véronique aside and flees the kitchen. She follows him. Lisette is standing in the middle of the room, stunned. Her hand is over her mouth. She looks like she might fall over. She never knew. “What did you say, Léo?”

  “I said it wasn’t me,” he repeats, raising his voice. “I wasn’t even there!”

  “What do you mean? You weren’t even where?”

  “I wasn’t at the house when they killed him. I was out delivering the last communiqué.”

  A soft gasp from Lisette. The color is completely gone from her face.

  “The plan was in motion,” Léo explains. “We had already decided to go through with it. Someone had to deliver the communiqué, and I wanted to speak to you, Lisette. I knew it was ending. I knew I’d be going to jail.”

  “Tabarnak, Léo!”

  “I needed to hear your voice, Lise! And . . . I couldn’t . . . I didn’t have the balls to kill the guy. I was too weak. I was so ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “I was their leader!” he cries, wiping tears from his eyes. “I was the instigator from the beginning. They looked up to me. But when it came down to it, when the shit really hit the fan and we had to act, I couldn’t even stand by and watch.”

  Véronique has a million questions, but nothing comes out of her mouth. She watches silently as her father cries with regret over not having killed a man.

  “None of the guys judged me or resented me for not being there,” he continues. “They understood. I was the only one with a wife and a kid. When I got back, Laporte’s body was already in the trunk.”

  “You made everything else up?” Lisette whispers, her tone pure disbelief. She’s still standing in the middle of the room—all three of them are—looking shell-shocked.

  “They told me what happened,” Léo says. “All the details.”

  “So you chose to go to jail for my entire childhood, even though you weren’t guilty?” Véronique clarifies, the reality of her father’s confession beginning to crystallize.

  Léo doesn’t answer. He’s looking down at his feet, sobbing quietly.

  “I’m trying to understand,” Véronique says. “You were so ashamed of not being able to murder Laporte that you actually pretended you were a murderer to save face? You abandoned me and Mom because you were embarrassed?”

  “I was a coward!” he cries. “After everything I’d done for the cause, what was I going to do? Admit I hadn’t been there? Turn on my friends? Testify against them? That’s not who I am.”

  “You chose them over your own family.”

  “I was as guilty as they were, Véro. Don’t you see? I was always guilty. I may as well have been there.”

  “But you weren’t! And if you had spoken up, you could have been home with us all along. You didn’t need to go to prison. You let yourself get sentenced to life. You chose being some kind of FLQ hero over me. Over fatherhood.”

  “I chose my honor and my beliefs,” he says, punching his heart with his fist. “Those boys did what I had set in motion. I was just as guilty as if I’d choked Laporte myself. I never had a choice but to go down with them.”

  “The court wouldn’t have seen it that way.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. The lawyers would have forced me to turn on them. The story had to be that we had all done it together, that we were all guilty. And I don’t regret it. I only regret that I left them to do the dirty work, that I wasn’t there for them when it counted.”

  “Weren’t there for them?” Lisette says.

  “Lise—”

  “No more,” she says, and leaves the room. They hear her bedroom door close and then faint sobs through the thin walls.

  “What you thought was cowardice, normal people would have seen as humanity,” Véronique tells him.

  “You’ll never understand,” Léo says, collapsing into his recliner. He lights another smoke and closes his eyes.

  Véronique is standing over him. He looks pathetic to her all of a sudden, slumped over in his chair, tired and defeated. “You don’t give me enough credit,” she tells him. “I understand more than you think.”

  She takes the metro to Sherbrooke station with no real plan other than a desire to be back in her old neighborhood. It’s a short walk to Ste. Famille, to the apartment she shared with James, but she avoids going anywhere near it. Last thing she wants is to run into him again, lurking outside his place. Instead, she strolls aimlessly up St. Laurent for a while, eventually stopping at the Parc du Portugal on the corner of Marie-Anne. She remembers when the city fixed up the park—refurbished the shabby gazebo, added the mosaic tiles to make it look more Portuguese. She was living up the street on St. Urbain at the time. She always thought it looked more like a Chinese pagoda.

  She sits down on the steps of the gazebo. She can hardly believe how much has happened in the last twenty-four hours. She hasn’t slept since yesterday. Was it only last night that she almost blew up the Canadian News Agency? Since then, she has left Louis for good and discovered that her father didn’t actually kill Pierre Laporte. What she thought she knew about herself, her family, her entire world, has been annihilated. Now what?

  Part IV

  1999–2001

  41

  MARCH 1999

  “Turn on the radio!” Elodie calls from the kitchen. “Radio-Canada!” She hangs up the phone on Huguette and rushes out to where Nancy is fiddling with Elodie’s stereo. “Hurry!” she barks.

  “What’s going on?” Nancy asks her. She’s staying with Elodie until she finds a job and can afford her own place.

  “Bouchard made a surprise announcement in the National Assembly today,” Elodie says. “Apparently he apologized and made some offer to compensate us.”

  “How much?”

  “I have no idea, we weren’t even consulted about this.” She nervously lights a cigarette. “It’s on the news now. Turn it up.”

  “We can’t undo the past,” Premier Bouchard is saying in a clip. “But we can apologize to the Duplessis orphans and do our best to ease their lot in life.”

  “Premier Bouchard did make clear that the government has no legal responsibility for what happened to the orphans,” the reporter says. “He doesn’t blame the nuns who ran the psychiatric institutions either. He says they took on a burden that no one else wanted.”

  “We have to put what happened to these orphans in context,” Bouchard says. “Back then, illegitimate children were regarded as deviants of society. We will be setting aside a three million dollar fund to help the orphans reintegrate into society, but there will be no public inquiry and no charges laid against the church.”

  Elodie jumps up and turns off the radio. “Three million dollars for three thousand of us?”

  “That’s a thousand dollars each.”

  “A thousand dollars each? A thousand dollars for everything they did to us?”

  The phone starts ringing. It’ll be Huguette, or Francine, or Bruno. She picks up.

  “A thousand dollars!” Huguette cries. “A thousand dollars to compensate for all our suffering!”

  “It’s humiliating.”

  “I don’t want my goddamn birth certificate!” Huguette goes on. “I want money! I want an apology from the church!”

  “Their offer is meaningless,” Elodie says. “Bruno won’t accept it.”

  “So it’s over.”

  “It’s not over.”

  “How can you say that? You heard Bouchard. We were a burden no one else wanted. ‘Deviants of society.’ There won’t be a public inquiry. It’s over.”

  “This is still progress, Huguette. Think where we started in ’92. We’re not where we want to be yet, but we’re making inroads.”

  She’s not sure she believes her own words. She feels as discouraged as her friend, but someone has to keep the spark lit.

  As soon as she hangs up, the phone rings again. All of them will call at some point, ranting, venting. Another moment of shared disappointment. She ignores it.


  “You’re not going to answer?”

  “No.”

  Nancy quietly unplugs the phone. “At least Bouchard apologized,” she says. “That’s something.”

  Elodie glares at her. “Please don’t tell me I should be happy about this.”

  “You just said yourself it’s progress.”

  “I said that for Huguette’s sake.”

  “Maybe it’s time to give up, M’ma,” Nancy says delicately. “How much more disappointment can you stand? It’s been almost seven years.”

  “A lot more. I’m tougher than I thought I was.”

  “I miss my mother.”

  “You have your mother,” Elodie says. “I’m right here.”

  “Are you?”

  “This means more to me than I can explain, Nance.”

  “But it’s taken over your life, your identity—”

  “I may still identify as an orphan, but I don’t equate that with being a victim anymore. I equate it with being a survivor. I made that doctor write me an apology letter. I went back to St. Nazarius with my mother. I’ve protested and will keep protesting until I get justice and am properly compensated. Until then, I will not stop.”

  They started picketing at the Quebec College of Physicians on René Lévesque Boulevard in the morning, marched over to Bouchard’s office to publicly reject his offer, and then on to the Notre Dame Basilica, where they’re now gathered outside the Archbishop of Montreal’s office. Cardinal Turcotte was quoted in the papers this week saying, “The Duplessis orphans do not deserve an apology. We don’t have time to waste on that. To apologize is to recognize one’s guilt. The whole thing has been sensationalized.”

  There are a couple hundred orphans huddled in the rain, carrying their signs, chanting in unison as they’ve done on so many different occasions. Francine, Huguette, and a few others are wearing straitjackets; some of them have blue duct tape over their mouths. Elodie’s sign says, WHERE IS YOUR COMPASSION, CARDINAL TURCOTTE?

  In spite of the rain, in spite of this most recent setback with Bouchard, Elodie and her friends are in good spirits. There’s a buoyancy among them today, a renewed sense of enthusiasm, mostly due to all the support they’re getting from the public. People driving by have been honking and waving; passersby have been giving them the thumbs-up, telling them not to give up. In today’s paper, a poll shows that 71 percent of Quebeckers think the church owes them an apology. One reporter even referred to them as “Bouchard’s orphans.”

  They’ve also got the Quebec ombudsman on their side. Ever since Premier Bouchard’s surprise announcement, the ombudsman has been speaking out all over the news, condemning the offer as unfair and degrading. In one interview, he said he was shocked by Cardinal Turcotte’s lack of compassion, charity, and justice, especially since Turcotte himself worked at Mont Providence in 1954, the year it was converted into a mental hospital. It’s the most validated Elodie has felt since Dr. Duceppe wrote her the apology letter.

  Today, Francine is passing around a flask that she’s been keeping under her straitjacket. “We may as well have some fun out here in the rain.”

  There’s such an easy camaraderie between them all. They’ve become like family over the years. They laugh together as much as they cry, which is a miracle, considering what binds them.

  A loud honk from a car on Notre Dame gets their attention. “Courage!” a woman yells from the open window of the passenger seat. “Justice for the Duplessis orphans!”

  “Merci!” Francine yells back. She’s already a little drunk. She may be in too good of a mood. “I never told anyone this,” she says, “but I still sleep on my back with my arms folded across my chest. I got so used to sleeping in a straitjacket at Mont Providence.”

  The Radio-Canada van pulls up in front of the church, and a TV reporter Elodie recognizes gets out. Huguette gently nudges her forward. Elodie has become their unlikely media spokesperson.

  “What’s the reason for today’s protest?” the reporter asks her, thrusting the microphone under her chin.

  “We’re here because we want an apology from the church,” Elodie says. “Their refusal to apologize to us is outrageous. Everywhere else in Canada, institutional abuse against children has been repaired. Quebec has always wanted to be a distinct society? Well, now it is. A distinct society of injustice!”

  “A spokesperson for Cardinal Turcotte is arguing that a blanket accusation against the entire Catholic Church is not founded,” the reporter says. “They claim there are only a few isolated incidents. What do you say to that?”

  Elodie gestures behind her, where at least two hundred orphans are marching up and down the sidewalk. “Does this look like a few isolated incidents to you? Even the government acknowledges there are at least three thousand of us, and we’re just the ones who survived.”

  “The church is doing damage control!” one of the guys shouts from behind her, waving a sign that says TORTURE RAPE STRAITJACKETS.

  “Cardinal Turcotte maintains that the orphans were not exploited or abused,” the reporter says, “and that you would have been homeless if the nuns hadn’t taken you in.”

  “You know, the pope has apologized for the Inquisition and the Crusades,” Elodie responds, “but the Archbishop of Montreal won’t even apologize to us for something that happened just a few decades ago in his own province. It’s a national scandal.”

  “Why the tape and straitjackets?”

  “Because we’re still being muzzled. Because we want a public inquiry.”

  “What’s next for the Duplessis orphans?”

  “You see this rain falling?” Elodie says. “This rain represents all our tears. We’ve shed a lot of tears in our lives, and I vow to you, we’re not going to stop protesting until we get what we’re asking for from the government and the church.”

  When Elodie gets home, she’s still in a good mood. She’s enjoying having the public on her side for a change, and it feels as though her voice is being heard more than ever before. Best of all, there was laughter.

  Nancy is on the couch, watching her favorite game show, Piment Fort. Elodie goes straight to the kitchen without speaking to her. She’s not mad, but there’s still some tension between them. She grabs a box of Kraft Dinner from the pantry and a beer from the fridge. Fills a pot with water and turns on the stove.

  “Did you see this?” Nancy says, startling her.

  Elodie turns from the stove. Nancy hands her the Journal de Montreal.

  “More bad news?”

  “There’s an article about two researchers who say the Quebec government and the Catholic Church made a huge profit by falsely certifying the orphans as mentally ill in the fifties.”

  “We already knew that. Why is this news?”

  “I mean they get specific,” Nancy says. “They make a conservative estimate that by today’s standards, the church got about seventy million dollars in subsidies.”

  “Seventy million?”

  “And the government saved thirty-seven million dollars per orphanage,” Nancy says. “How many were converted into mental hospitals?”

  “All of the Catholic ones, I believe.” Elodie leans against the counter. “I knew they made money, but I had no idea it was that much.”

  “And Bouchard had the nerve to offer you a thousand bucks each. It’s disgusting.”

  Elodie reads the article, livid. Seeing that number in print somehow makes it more horrific, more malevolent. “At least now I know what my life was worth,” she says.

  What a stroke of genius it was, that decision to profit off society’s most defenseless citizens. An order given from on high, a few thousand records doctored, a little harmless collusion, and the money began rolling in. Millions and millions of dollars, no strings attached, no foreseeable consequences other than the sacrifice of a few thousand illegitimate children. “Of course the nuns are arguing it’s all made up,” Elodie says, crumpling the newspaper and dumping the box of macaroni into the boiling water. “Wh
y the hell else would they have turned us into mental patients if not for the money?”

  “The point is, it’s in the news,” Nancy says. “You guys have been in the news every day. It’s becoming a movement. People are outraged.”

  A movement. Elodie likes the sound of that. “It is a movement, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And you’re leading it, M’ma. This article is a good thing,” Nancy assures her. “It’s going to add fuel to the fire. Even more people will be on your side.”

  Elodie considers this. Maybe the surfacing of all these damning details will bolster their position, give them some leverage.

  The phone rings. Nancy hands it to her.

  “I saw you on TV today,” Maggie says. “You looked good, Elo. Your cheeks were rosy. You were so confident and well-spoken. I’m proud of you.”

  “Do you think we might be making some progress?” she asks her mother. “I was so discouraged after Bouchard’s shitty offer.”

  “There’s momentum, for sure. You’re getting a lot of media attention.”

  “It’s about time. We’ve been at it long enough.”

  “Keep it up, cocotte.”

  When she hangs up, she removes the noodles from the stove, drains the water in the sink, and adds the orange powdered cheese, not bothering with milk or margarine. She uses a wooden spoon to stir it, and then eats a mouthful straight from the spoon. She loves macaroni and cheese.

  Nancy grabs two bowls from the cupboard, and Elodie fills them both. They eat standing up.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said to me the other day,” Nancy says.

  “You have?”

  “Your past makes me uncomfortable,” she admits. “It makes me feel helpless. Like, I wish I was enough to make you happy.”

  “But you do make me happy. You don’t even know how much. My work with the Duplessis orphans doesn’t undermine the joy you bring to my life. But it does give me a sense of power I’ve never felt before.”

  “I want to be a good daughter to you, M’ma. But I don’t always know how.”

  “I only ever wanted you to be free and untroubled and happy. And you are those things. You are!”