The Home for Unwanted Girls

by Joanna Goodman

  As I stare into his sleeping face, I can’t think who I’m sorrier for: you, for not being here to see and hold and love him, or our son, James Gabriel Phénix Hughes, who, it seems, is going to grow up without a father. We’re not completely alone, though—no need to worry. My sisters come over every day and fawn all over him. He’s even managed to melt the ice wall around my mother’s heart. My father hasn’t seen him since the day of his birth, but I’ll save that story for if I ever see you in person.

  Not a day goes by that I don’t think about you, regret how things turned out, or hate myself for messing things up so badly. And yet, I did do one thing right. I had this baby, this perfect, beautiful boy with blond hair like his papa and dark blue eyes. His legs are like white sausages, and his tiny pink feet and hands make me weep. He smells like talcum powder and sour milk.

  I rock him to sleep with his white-clothed bum in the air and his rosy cheek flat against my chest. I hum lullabies in his ear and rub his back. His body is no bigger than a football and fits perfectly between my breasts. When he’s in a deep sleep, he smiles to himself and his mouth twitches, as though he’s having a funny dream or speaking with people from another life. His cries wake me up every hour, all night long, and sound exactly like an angry goat.

  That’s everything I can think of for now. I wish you were here with us. And I’m so sorry.

  Love,

  Maggie

  Part III

  The Families of Flowers

  1961–1971

  Birds have wings; they can travel, mix and standardize their populations . . . On the other hand, flowers are rooted to the earth. They are often separated by broad barriers of unsuitable environment from other “stations” of their own species.

  —A Field Guide to Wildflowers

  Chapter 36

  Maggie answers the phone wearing an oven mitt. It’s her mother, which is not unusual, though they typically speak Sunday nights after dinner. “Why’re you calling so early?” Maggie asks, shoving the chicken back in the oven.

  “He’s sick,” Maman says.

  “Who’s sick?” Maggie asks, her heart quickening.

  “Your father. He has cancer.”

  “Cancer?”

  “He wouldn’t go to Dr. Cullen. You know how he hates doctors. Now it’s spread. He waited too long.”

  Maggie’s father has always been deathly afraid of doctors. She can’t recall a single time he’s ever gone—not for a checkup, nor for an ailment or an illness. His way is to battle it on his own and hope for the best.

  “How long has he been sick?”

  “Last year he noticed a small lump right below his ear,” Maman says. “He lied and told me he went to the doctor and that it was nothing. He said it was just a cyst, so he ignored it until it was the size of a meatball. That’s when I told him he had to get it removed, that it was growing as big as his head. I took him myself and Dr. Cullen sent us straight to the hospital. The damn idiot! He never even told me how bad he was feeling. And now—”

  “Now what?”

  “Now it’s too late. He’s going to die.”

  “Surely something can be done,” Maggie cries. “There’s always something to be done. What kind of cancer is it?”

  “It’s rare,” Maman says. “The doctor called it gardener’s cancer.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “From pesticides probably.”

  How many times has Maggie heard her father defend pesticides to his customers? They are friends of the seed, gentlemen!

  “He’s been having tests at the hospital all week,” her mother says. “He wouldn’t let me tell any of you. Not till we knew how bad it was. They’ve sent him home to die.”

  Maggie puts a hand over her mouth to suppress a sickening gasp. “How long did they give him?”

  “Months. A year at most.”

  “They don’t know Daddy,” Maggie says, her voice breaking. “If anyone can fight something like this, he can. He won’t give up.”

  “Maggie. This isn’t a business problem. It’s cancer.”

  Maggie leans against the oven and cries quietly. She hasn’t spoken to her father since James Gabriel was born. She was planning to wait a lot longer, too, to punish him for what he did with Elodie. She’s been making her mother and sisters visit James at her house rather than going to her parents’ place. Now she’s gutted.

  She knew her father wasn’t right. He hasn’t looked well in months. He’s only seen his grandson once, at the hospital when he came to visit with cigars for anyone who happened to be there. Maggie didn’t say a word to him.

  “Did you hear me?” her mother says.

  “No.”

  “I said he’s asked to see you.”

  Her mother is waiting for her in the kitchen when she arrives, looking old and weary. She’s only in her fifties, but she looks twenty years older. She’s put on more weight and has a double chin now. The first thing she does is take the baby from Maggie. She gazes into his sleeping face and smiles, a smile that lights up her dark eyes and softens the deep lines around her usually frowning mouth. “Bonjour, mon p’tit choux,” she coos.

  Maggie watches her mother cradle James Gabriel in her arms, murmuring baby gibberish and staring at him in adoration, and she wonders if Maman ever held her that way, looked at her with those same besotted eyes, cooed softly in her ear.

  “How’s Daddy?” she asks.

  “He’s in terrible pain. He’s got morphine, but it doesn’t help. The cancer’s already in his liver.”

  Maggie climbs the stairs. The room is pitch-black and ominously quiet. As she approaches the bed, she can make out a slight mound under the chenille bedspread. “Daddy?”

  Her father stirs. “Maggie?”

  She sits down beside him.

  “Turn on the lamp,” he croaks.

  With the light on, she can see how much he’s already deteriorated. She has to fight back tears so as not to alarm him. Whatever anger she’s been holding on to over the past couple of months instantly vanishes. He looks like a sick old man. Skeletal, gray, helpless. Gone is the solid, reliable man. Not a trace remains of his vitality or passion or arrogance.

  “Maggie,” he wheezes. He’s got dark pouches under his eyes and his limbs are like branches. He coughs into a handkerchief and Maggie cringes. “How are you?” he asks, his voice rattling with mucus.

  “I’m fine, Daddy.”

  He attempts a smile. Years of cigar smoking have yellowed his bottom teeth. “You’ve got your son to look after now,” he says.

  Maggie reaches for his hand.

  “If I had a dying wish . . .”

  “Please don’t say it.”

  “The boy needs a father,” he says. “Roland would take you back in a snap. I know he still loves you.”

  Maggie is silent.

  “The store has to go up for sale,” he says.

  “I know. I can help with that.”

  “Just make sure it doesn’t wind up in the hands of a Frenchman, eh? I don’t want Superior Seeds getting a bad reputation after all my hard work building it into something.”

  She laughs. He always did believe himself to be cut from a superior cloth.

  “Unless you take it over,” he adds.

  “Take over the store?”

  “You always had a good mind for business,” he says. “It has to be you. You could run it. Keep it in the family.”

  Maggie’s mind goes off in all directions. Running her father’s seed store was her childhood dream, but she’s got the baby now and she’s come to enjoy translating . . .

  “I need to sleep,” he murmurs. “Think about it, hm?”

  She nods, knowing she won’t be able to think of anything else.

  Maman grabs the pan of spaghetti from the oven and hands it to Vi to set down on the table, and then she drops a couple of sausages into a fry pan. Watching her mother expertly maneuver around the kitchen, Maggie experiences a small surge of fondness. She’s always take
n good care of them. She’s never done it with affection or tenderness, but she’s always tended to their basic needs. They were well fed, smartly dressed, sparkling clean; their home was always spotless, pretty, and comfortable. It’s probably the only way her mother knows how to love anyone.

  “You made his favorite,” Maggie remarks. Baked spaghetti and sausage.

  “After thirty-five years,” Maman says, turning the sausages in the fry pan, “it’s strange not having him at the table.”

  James Gabriel stirs in his basket at Maggie’s feet. Maman drops the sausages on top of the spaghetti casserole and sits down. Maggie, Vi, and Maman eat in silence. It’s just clinking cutlery, Patti Page on the radio.

  “The farmers used to warn him,” Maman says, suddenly breaking the silence. “About those goddamn pesticides. They knew. But he never listened to anybody. He always knew best. He always had to be right.”

  “No one knows for sure it was the pesticides,” Vi says, adjusting her browline glasses on her nose.

  “That ghost up there,” Maman goes on. “That’s not my husband anymore.” She pauses, reflecting. She hasn’t touched her supper. “He used to boast about his fancy diploma, his plans to open his own plant store. He was so full of himself.” She laughs, remembering. “The day I met him he was wearing an Irish tweed vest. He actually made a point of telling me it was Irish. As if I cared about goddamn Irish tweed!”

  She roars with laughter. Maggie leans over and pulls the blanket up over James Gabriel.

  “He made an effort,” Maman concedes. “I’ll give him that. He lived in L’Abord-à-Plouffe, but he’d ride an hour and a half on the streetcar to come see me with a bouquet of fresh-picked flowers. He didn’t seem to mind at all that I lived in Hochelaga.”

  The back door suddenly swings open and Nicole appears in the mudroom, looking flushed and exuberant. Her dark hair is cut very short in that new Jean Seberg pixie style from À Bout de Souffle. She’s as pretty as Maggie, but with more confidence. She grabs a sausage on her way out of the kitchen.

  “She’s a pain in the ass, that one,” Maman complains.

  “It’s no wonder,” Vi says. “You let her get away with murder and she’s not even sixteen yet.”

  “What’s the point of trying?” Maman says. “None of you turned out the way I thought you would. Except for Peter and he’s the one I left alone the most.”

  “Geri’s at university,” Vi reminds her.

  Maman shrugs and gets up to clear away the dishes. She puts on a pot of coffee, lays some homemade icebox cookies on a plate, and brings three mugs to the table. When the coffee’s ready, she stirs Fry’s cocoa and a drop of milk into the bottom of the mugs and then pours the coffee on top.

  “After your father and I were married,” she says, sitting back down at the table, “that’s when he started trying to change me. All of a sudden he couldn’t stand my Frenchness. He was like that. He hated himself for wanting to be with someone like me.”

  “What did you like about him?” Maggie asks her.

  “He had good manners,” she says. “All the other boys I grew up with drank and swore, but your father had some class. I suppose that’s why he liked hanging around in the East End with the French girls.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Vi says.

  “Your father had no confidence,” she tells them. “His father died when he was young and he was raised by his mother. She was a total snob, you know. She didn’t come from money either—she lived in the country, for God’s sake—but she acted like a queen. Talk about putting on airs.”

  Maman rolls her eyes at the memory of her mother-in-law. “Everything your father did was wrong in her eyes,” she says. “She wanted him to go to McGill, not to horticulture school. She wanted him to be a doctor or a banker. She was always making fun of him for becoming a ‘gardener,’ as she put it. He hated that.”

  Maman snaps a cookie in two and pops a piece in her mouth.

  “He didn’t think very highly of himself when I met him,” she resumes. “But in the East End, he was always the best dressed and acted like he was better than all the rest of us. He was a king in the slums. He wore those expensive suits that made the French girls worship him. He loved the attention, but he was afraid of his own kind. His mother planted that in him. Everyone was beneath her. I think he married me to punish her. Or to escape her ridiculous expectations.”

  “He loved you,” Maggie states. “I know you fought a lot, but you loved each other.”

  Her mother waves a dismissive hand in the air, but her cheeks flush a deep pink. “Anyway, his mother disowned him when he married me,” she says, gloating.

  Maggie sips her coffee, bittersweet from the cocoa, and she’s struck by how common a thread it is—the rejection of a parent, a lifetime spent trying to patch up the ensuing feelings of deficiency.

  “He tried to turn me into an English doll,” her mother goes on. “He did the same with you girls, which of course is exactly what his own mother did to him.”

  “Can’t you say something nice about him for once?” Vi says. “Now that he’s dying, for Christ’s sake, can’t you just say you love him?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve never given it any thought,” Maman answers. “We didn’t think about things like that when I was growing up in Hochelaga, and we still don’t. We thought about survival. You girls think about love too much. You always did.”

  “You and daddy must have stayed together for a reason,” Maggie says.

  “We could hear it from your bedroom,” Vi mutters, surprising Maggie. They never talked about it when they were young.

  “That was just sex,” Maman says.

  “Well, that’s more than most.”

  Chapter 37

  Maggie tiptoes across the room and stands over her father, watching him sleep. She spent the night here again last night and doesn’t want to go home to Knowlton yet. She’s worried if she leaves, he’ll die.

  “Maggie,” he rasps, sensing her there. “That you?”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Sit.”

  She sits down on the bed and he attempts to prop himself up. She helps him by raising the pillow behind his back. The effort leaves him spent.

  “Maggie, I just want you to know I’m sorry.” He squeezes her hand and she’s surprised by the strength of his grip.

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  “No. Listen to me. I’m sorry I forbid you to be with Gabriel Phénix. I know you loved him.”

  Maggie wipes her eyes and then strokes her father’s thin, damp hair.

  “And I’m sorry about your baby,” he says. “I didn’t lie to you for any other reason than to spare you unnecessary pain.”

  “I know that.”

  “We made the decision to put her up for adoption to protect your future, Maggie.”

  “I know.”

  “It was the times,” he says. “It’s what families had to do back then. Otherwise your life and your reputation would have been ruined at sixteen.” He pauses then and clasps her hand. “We wanted you to have a chance. Look how Clémentine’s life turned out and she was just a divorcée.”

  Maggie knows he’s right. The moral climate of Duplessis’s Quebec was the integral backstory to what unfolded in their family. Her parents were merely reacting out of fear and panic, doing the only thing they knew to do in order to shield their child from public humiliation and disgrace. How can she stay angry with him? He’s a dying man. She has no desire to punish him on his deathbed or carry a grudge after he’s gone, which would only serve to poison her life.

  “Have you tried to find her?” he asks.

  “I haven’t had a chance to do anything since James was born.”

  “I can’t bear the thought of you hating me,” he says.

  “I could never hate you, Daddy.”

  His eyes flutter shut and his breathing becomes even more strained. His head lolls to the side, his body convulsing with quiet sobs. Te
ars are collecting in his sunken cheeks. “She was so beautiful, Maggie. Just like you.” He starts to cough. “I’m sorry I didn’t save her when I had the chance.”

  “Save her?”

  “Enough,” her mother says, coming into the room. “Let him be, Maggie.”

  “Hortense,” he chokes. “Get me a drink.”

  “Wellington, don’t be an idiot.”

  “Please.”

  Hortense begrudgingly leaves the room, muttering to herself, “Maudit ivrogne.” Goddamn drunk.

  “I gave her that name you liked,” Maggie’s father reveals, once they’re alone.

  “What name?”

  “Elodie.”

  Maggie lets out a small noise and covers her mouth with her hand. “Maman told you?”

  “Deda did.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  He shakes his head helplessly, his eyes clouding. “It was an impulsive decision,” he admits. “I had no intention of doing it, but at the last second I just couldn’t let her go without at least some connection to you. Some way back.”

  Maggie lays her head on his chest. It doesn’t erase what he did, but giving her baby that name was as close to a gift as he could have given her.

  “What if she was never adopted?” Maggie says, lifting her head. “What if she grew up in an asylum?”

  “If only that couple had been more honorable,” he laments. “They should have taken her, sick or not. They’re the ones to blame.”

  “Why did you choose people from New York? Why so far away?”

  “It was hard for Jews to get babies back then,” he explains. “They were desperate and started buying babies in Quebec. I thought it was our best bet to ensure an adoption.”

  “Couldn’t you find another family here in Quebec after they decided not to take her?”

  “That was the plan,” he says. “She was to be transferred to the Saint-Sulpice Orphanage near Farnham. I’m sure they eventually placed her with a family, Maggie. She was perfect.”