She tries not to think too much about the path she did not take—the path of Gabriel and motherhood. She’s had a long time to make peace with her decision. It was not the romantic choice; it was more practical than that. She glimpsed her future as a poor farmer’s wife, a sixteen-year-old mother stuck at home in that shack, turning fat and bitter, just like her mother. She glimpsed an existence without her beloved seed store or her father, and it was no existence at all.
Maman is right; life isn’t a romance magazine.
“Tabarnac, I forgot the horseradish,” Maman says just as a gush of warm liquid between Maggie’s legs soaks through her maternity dress. Maggie stands. Everyone is watching her.
“What’s happening?” Maggie asks.
“It’s fine, cocotte. The baby’s early, that’s all.”
Deda and Maman help her upstairs, supporting her on either side. In the bedroom she’s occupied since the day she came to live with her aunt and uncle, Maman quickly throws some of Maggie’s things into a small suitcase. “Get me some towels,” she tells Deda.
Deda waddles out of the room. Maggie hears the linen closet door open and close, the water running in the bathroom, Deda’s heavy footsteps creaking on the hall floor. Maggie tries hard to focus on the ordinary minutiae of what’s going on around her; otherwise she’ll faint. That’s when the first pain slices through her, so sharp and abrupt she reels backwards.
Maman looks over at the clock on the dresser. “Tell me when the next one starts.”
“The next what?” Maggie asks.
“Contraction.”
Maggie sits down on the bed and waits. Deda stands over her, watching, while Maman continues to pack. Deda pats Maggie’s dress with the towel. It’s about ten minutes later when another pain shoots through her. Maggie screams and leaps off the bed.
“Nine minutes,” Maman says.
Maggie has to walk it off. She can’t stay seated. The pains start to get more intense and last longer. Every time another one seizes, she cries out, “It huuuuuuurts!”
Deda reaches for her hand and tries to hold it, but Maggie flings it away and grasps her fleshy forearms. When the next contraction comes, she squeezes, and this time, Deda is the one who cries out.
The trip to the hospital is a blur. Maggie writhes in the back seat of the Packard, sandwiched between her mother and Deda. Her father speeds all the way to the Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital in Cowansville. She’s wheeled to a private room. As soon as she lies down on the bed, there’s a sudden excruciating pressure in her lower back, the memory of which she will never forget. She can feel the baby in her groin.
Dr. Cullen appears next to her. He peers down between her legs, studying the situation the way she’s seen her father study his seeds and bugs beneath a magnifying glass. “She’s already fully dilated. It’s crowning,” he announces, grabbing her ankles and resting her feet on his solid hips. “Push hard,” he instructs. “Press your feet into me and push.”
Maggie does as she’s told. She pushes until the pain becomes unbearable, and then she unleashes a scream that makes everybody jump back a few feet.
“Push, Maggie.”
“I can’t!” she cries, collapsing. “I can’t do it!”
“You’re doing fine,” Dr. Cullen says. “I see the baby’s head. A couple more pushes, that’s all. It’s there.”
She pushes, grunts, and jams her feet into Dr. Cullen’s immovable fortress of a body. She squeezes her aunt’s hand until it goes limp in her own. She can feel it. It. The baby. It’s coming. Push, collapse, push, collapse. “One more,” Dr. Cullen encourages. “Don’t give up now, Maggie. You’re close.”
And just when she thinks she can’t stand another second of the torture, the baby is there. After all that heaving and panting, it just slips out and there’s an explosion of relief that it’s over. She can’t see it, but she can feel it—slimy and squirming, like a reptile sliding out of a swamp. Then she sinks into the mattress, feeling suddenly weightless. She hears the baby crying from across the room, and it sounds like two wildcats fighting outside her window. Her body feels strangely empty.
Dr. Cullen takes the baby over to the basin. Deda and Maman leave Maggie’s bedside. Maggie hoists herself up on her elbows to get a better look at what’s happening. Dr. Cullen is holding the baby in the palm of his hands, a tiny bluish creature covered in blood. “The umbilical cord tore,” he explains, holding it up for her to see. It looks like boudin, the blood sausage Maman cooks for supper on Thursdays.
Blood is everywhere. Her mother is gazing at the baby. “It’s a girl,” she says, her voice emotionless.
The baby is still crying when Dr. Cullen hands it—her—to the nurse. Maggie wonders if everything is all right. The nurse washes her methodically, without affection or fondness. Maggie can only glimpse the baby’s flailing fists. She flops back against the pillow. A girl. She thinks about Gabriel and tears slide down her cheeks. She has no one to blame but herself. A name comes to her then, the name she would have given her daughter. Elodie. A type of lily whose buds open to reveal layer upon layer of lush candy-pink petals: a flower she’s always loved whose name she can now give to the daughter she will never know.
“She’s got jaundice,” Dr. Cullen tells Maggie’s mother.
“What’s jaundice?” Maggie cries.
The doctor and her mother exchange conspiratorial looks, and Dr. Cullen comes over to her, needle in hand.
“What’s that?” Maggie asks.
“Just the twilight to help you sleep.”
“Her name is Elodie,” Maggie tells them as the syringe penetrates her flesh. “Will you tell Daddy? Will you make sure he knows?”
No one responds.
“Elodie,” she repeats, trailing off. “Tell Daddy.”
Maggie wakes to total silence. The hospital is eerily still; the only sound is the echo of the baby’s crying inside her head. “Where is she?” Maggie asks.
Deda gets up out of the chair and shuffles over to her. No one else is around, but then her mother suddenly appears in the doorway.
“One of you could have kept her,” Maggie sobs, looking from her mother to her aunt. “It’s not too late!”
“It would ruin your family name,” Deda says gently. “Your mother may not be Catholic anymore, but she still cares what people think of her. And your father has a reputation in town.”
“I want to see her then.”
“Drink this,” Deda says, handing Maggie a glass of water. There’s whiskey in it, which makes her gag. “It will help with the pain.”
Maggie finishes the water and whiskey. She’s exhausted and sore. “Can I at least see her before they take her away?” she repeats.
“It’s too late,” Maman says, her tone softening. “She’s already gone. She’s not yours, Maggie. She never was.”
And then she turns and leaves the room without another word.
“Was she pretty?” Maggie asks her aunt.
“She was very small. Born too early. They’re all ugly when they’re that premature.”
“What’s jaundice?”
“It’s nothing. Don’t worry.”
“Where did they take her?”
“To the foundling home in Cowansville.”
“Why couldn’t I hold her?”
Deda sits heavily on the edge of the bed. It squeaks and sags beneath her weight. “It makes it too hard,” she explains. “This is what people do in these situations, Maggie.”
“I wanted to say good-bye.”
Deda touches Maggie’s forehead, her fat paw grazing her hairline. “Your uncle would like to see you.”
Maggie turns her face away, swelling with anger. “I don’t feel well,” she mutters.
Deda brushes her lips on top of Maggie’s head, smooths her damp hair, and leaves. The door closes and Maggie is alone. She feels completely hollow, as though her insides have been scooped out and dumped in that enamel basin.
Feelings come in waves. Grief, relief, s
hame, guilt. She could have kept the baby. She’s not blameless. Instead, her infant daughter is about to be hurled into the world all alone. She will grow up untethered, incomplete. They both will.
Maggie begins to drift off, lulled by the rain battering the windows. In that place between sleep and alertness, the name comes back to her. She whispers it into the night. Elodie.
I will find you, she thinks, slowly succumbing to sleep. It’s a promise as much to herself as to her newborn daughter. I will get you back and make it right.
Part II
Transplanting out of Season
1954–1961
When for some reason it is necessary to transplant at a time of year that is really too cold, puddle the plants in using hot water instead of cold. This, surprisingly, really does not damage the roots.
—Old Wives’ Lore for Gardeners
Chapter 12
Elodie
Tata’s outstretched arms are what she sees first when she opens her eyes. Instinctively, she raises her own arms, and in one swift movement, Sister Tata lifts her from her crib and deposits her upright on the floor.
“Cold!” Elodie cries, dancing in place to keep her feet off the ice-cold wood. Tata laughs. Elodie loves the sound of her laugh.
Tata picks her up again and sets her down on one of the empty cots. “Soon,” Tata says, taking a pair of wool socks from the drawer and slipping them on Elodie’s tiny feet, “Elodie will be ready to move to a big-girl cot.”
Tata lifts Elodie back onto the floor and takes her by the hand. Together, they go downstairs for breakfast. Elodie can almost manage the stairs by herself, but not quite.
Elodie is four years old. She knows this because she hears the nuns say it to the visitors all day long. She hears them say other things, too: “She’s very bright. She’s already talking. She’ll be a beauty when she fills out.”
People come to look at the girls to decide if they want to take them home. On those days, Elodie wears a pretty dress for the visitors. She has only one. She prefers to wear the ugly dress so she can play and get dirty, but it’s very important to make a good impression on the visitors if she’s ever going to get adopted. Tata says this is the object of the orphanage—to see to it that all the little girls are “placed” with good families.
Elodie is an orphan, which, Tata has explained, means she does not have a mother or a father. When Elodie once asked her why not, she was told quite plainly, “You live in a home for unwanted girls because you were born in sin and your mother could not keep you.”
Which means Elodie did have a mother, at one time, and now she does not. She wonders sometimes about this person, this mother who gave her away. Where is she now? Why did she go? What does it mean to be born in sin? And why is it called a home for unwanted girls? If they all live here, she reasons, surely the nuns must want them.
The nuns don’t answer those kinds of questions. They merely instruct her to behave and make a favorable impression on the visitors, reminding her again and again that nothing is more important than being chosen by a nice couple so that she can grow up in a proper family, instead of at an orphanage.
Occasionally, the visitors have other children with them and Elodie observes them with curiosity—the way they hold their parents’ hands, and cling to them, and look at Elodie with pity.
The nuns say to the visitors about her: “She’s small and thin, yes, but she’s perfectly normal.”
The visitors seem to like the fat, round kids with rosy cheeks and fat legs. Tata always tells her, “Eat, Elo. Eat. You have to get fat so a nice family will take you home.”
The nuns are always telling her: “You’re too small. You’re too pale. The visitors want a healthy child.”
But Elodie is happy here. She doesn’t know any other kind of life. Besides, there’s green grass for running around outside and toys to play with. And there’s Tata, who makes her feel safe.
Chapter 13
Maggie
“Isn’t that Angèle Phénix?” Peter says as they turn on to Ontario Street with their bags of fresh fruit and vegetables from the market.
Maggie has been living in Montreal with her brother for several months. It’s been a challenging transition from country life; she’s had to catch on quick. She used to think the hostility between French and English was fairly palpable back home, but here in Montreal it’s a perpetually simmering, volatile thing. There are no written signs telling you what language should be spoken where; you have to read between the lines and listen carefully. You have to simply know so as not to offend anyone.
“Angèle!” Maggie exclaims, genuinely happy to see her. She sets her bags down on the sidewalk and hugs her old friend.
“What are you doing in Montreal?” Angèle asks her.
“Working at Simpson’s. I live with Peter.” Peter waves hello, looking uninterested. “We live over on La Fontaine,” Maggie says. “How’s nursing school?”
“Oh, I love it,” Angèle says. “It was the right choice for me. I wouldn’t have made a very good nun. You look gorgeous, Maggie.”
Maggie thanks her.
“I love your skirt,” Angèle goes on, admiring the felt flowers Maggie’s glued onto the fabric. She sets down her groceries to touch the flowers, and Maggie notices the front page of La Presse poking out of the paper bag. The word “orphanages” catches her eye. She reads the headline from where she’s standing.
Quebec orphanages to be converted into mental institutions.
Maggie came to Montreal to escape the past. Yet here it is, taunting her from the front page of the newspaper. How quickly she can be wrenched back to that shameful place. Confronted all over again with the secrets and scandals she’s worked so hard to forget.
“Horrible, isn’t it?” Angèle says, noticing Maggie staring at her paper. “I was reading about it on the streetcar from work.”
Maggie reaches for the paper and quickly skims the article. “Every orphanage in the province is going to be turned into a mental hospital?”
“It’ll take some time, but yes, that’s what they’re doing.”
“It’s so they don’t have to educate the children,” Peter says.
“You’ve heard about it?”
“It’s all over the news.”
“They’re starting with the Sisters of Charity of Providence next year,” Angèle says.
“But where will all the orphans go?”
“Duplessis doesn’t give a shit,” Peter answers.
“Why are they doing this?”
“Duplessis is a monster, that’s why,” Peter responds. “Obviously the federal government gives more money for the nuns to take care of sick people than it does for orphans.”
“It’s barbaric,” Angèle says, clicking her tongue.
A swell of dread settles in Maggie’s chest. She thinks about that helpless baby in the palm of Dr. Cullen’s hand and wonders if her daughter could wind up in an asylum. Whenever Maggie has allowed herself to think about Elodie, she’s imagined her with a gentle, nurturing mother and a father who is present and attentive and doting. For the first time since she gave her up, Maggie considers that her daughter may not have been adopted.
She can feel Peter’s eyes on her, and she knows he knows what she’s thinking. Like everyone else in her family, he has cooperated in the surreptitious cover-up of her pregnancy.
“How’s Gabriel?” Peter asks Angèle, changing the subject, and Maggie’s cheeks heat up at the mention of his name. She tries to keep her expression neutral.
“He moved to Montreal a couple of years ago,” Angèle says. “He had a falling-out with Clémentine over how to run the farm, and he hasn’t been back to visit since. He’s a foreman at Canadair.”
He’s here, Maggie thinks. She knew he would be, but the confirmation is like a jolt of electricity in her body.
“He’s married,” Angèle adds, not looking at Maggie when she says it.
Everything goes silent—the street noises, the shrieking c
hildren in the alley, her breathing. It takes Maggie a moment to recover. “That happened fast . . .” she manages.
“He’s happy,” Angèle says.
“What’s his wife’s name?”
“Annie.”
Annie. A punch in the stomach. She has no one to blame but herself. “We should go,” Maggie says, hugging Angèle numbly and hurrying away with her grocery bags.
“Put it behind you,” Peter says, catching up to her.
Maggie looks at him, startled. “Put what behind me?”
“Gabriel, the pregnancy. Mum and Dad did a good job covering it up. You’re here for a fresh start.”
They finish walking home in silence. By the time they turn onto La Fontaine, a pretty East End street lined with trees and wrought iron fire escapes, Maggie is fighting back tears as she climbs the narrow stairs.
They live on the second floor of a triplex, with tenants above and below, whose noises she hears at all hours, whose odors she smells the moment she wakes up. She’s getting used to it, learning to walk in socks or slippers, never shoes, so Mme. Choquette from downstairs doesn’t bang her broom into the ceiling. Their apartment is bright at least, with hardwood floors and lots of windows. The kitchen linoleum is coming up in places, but the appliances are almost new. Maggie’s room is practically bare, except for two cast-iron nuns’ beds and a Salvation Army dresser. When she complained there were no curtains, Peter said, “You’ll live.”
She left her mason jars of planted seeds and lemon tree shoots behind in Dunham, knowing her mother would get rid of them.
She drops her bags and goes straight out to the balcony. She lights a cigarette and blows smoke at the city’s unwavering skyline. Clothes hang on the lines that run from the balconies to the telephone poles, zigzagging across the sky so that pairs of long underwear and work pants connect the entire block.
The Home for Unwanted Girls Page 8
