The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  To fully comprehend the visceral hatred that Mrs. Bérubé—and many other women in Rivière-du-Loup—harbored for Irene Caron, we need to go back to that very same Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in 1948 when Louis Lamontagne made his triumphant return home.

  He arrived via Route 2, down below by the river, without letting anyone know in advance. News of his arrival began to wind its way up through the streets of the town. It started at the corner of the church of Saint-Patrice, then spread from store to garage, from gossipmonger to fishmonger, from fishmonger to fishwife, all the way up to the top of the town, climbing Rue Lafontaine like a salmon leaping its way through the rapids of the river where it was born to spawn and die.

  “The Horse is back in town!”

  “That can’t be! Handsome young Louis, the American’s son?”

  The whole town was already in the mood for a party, as it geared up to watch the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade on Rue Lafontaine, but all talk turned to Louis. The crowd was divided into clearly defined groups. First, those who knew Louis and had even been there for his birth on December 25, 1918, in the church of Saint-François-Xavier: his immediate family, people who went to school with him, the Sisters of the Child Jesus (including Sister Mary of the Eucharist, positively squirming with happiness at the wonderful news); then those who had rubbed shoulders with him without really ever getting to know him: neighbors, a great many distant relatives, the town’s businessfolk, his very first adversaries at the county strongman contests, a handful of priests who knew of him through legend, and countless perpetual gossips, ever hungry for more. Lastly, the biggest group of all was made up of families who had made Rivière-du-Loup their home after the Great Depression, a majority who knew of Louis Lamontagne only through the fantastic tales they had heard. Strangely enough, it was this group that was most overjoyed by his return. Those who knew him were of course proud to welcome home a son they had no reason to be ashamed of, but they were apprehensive nevertheless. Had Louis changed? They would find out soon enough.

  But anyone who imagined that Louis Lamontagne just happened to turn up in Rivière-du-Loup right in the middle of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade was naive indeed. They were obviously unaware of the man’s theatrical flair. Even more naive were those who thought it was modesty that had compelled him to parade on foot, wearing his US Army uniform for the very last time. The floats, the Lacordaire procession, the luxury motor cars, even poor little St. John the Baptist (an altogether adorable child), all had their thunder stolen by the prodigal son’s return. The American Army had robbed him of a little of his naïveté; that’s the first thing the Sisters of the Child Jesus noticed. When Sister Mary of the Eucharist saw Louis walk past Moisan’s florist shop, she ran toward him, unable to hold back any longer. He was surprised to see the woman who had brought him into the world. She was as ugly as ever. With a smile that was enough to frighten anyone, Sister Mary of the Eucharist shouted to the crowd, imploring them to applaud the lost son. And the clamor grew; perhaps louder still than at the victory parade when Canada’s soldiers returned from Europe. Louis had been fighting for the real winner. Make no mistake about it! Maybe Hollywood had been too kind to the US Army, but in the eyes of the locals it was Louis Lamontagne who had strangled the fascist snake with his bare hands. Move over, Stalin! Unlike his fellow citizens, Louis had served in a real army, an army that anyone could see for themselves on the big screen! A beaming Louis paraded before the eyes of the whole town, an ecstatic nun hanging from one arm, because the poor woman had worked herself up into quite a tizzy. She thought of the boy as almost her own. For the first and last time in her life, Sister Mary of the Eucharist shed a tear. A single tear, furtive and happy, that evaporated before it hit the ground. Louis was moved, too, and broke away from the jubilant crowd to join Old Ma Madeleine, who never missed a parade.

  “It tires me out and it’s so noisy, but I enjoy it.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Irene Caron also came out to every parade.

  “It’s fun and it doesn’t cost a cent!”

  Irene Caron. She hailed from the parish of Saint-Ludger, already cause for suspicion in the eyes of honest folk. The Carons had never been the type to lose count of anything. They were people who could always be asked flat out how much they had in their bank account. Because they knew. Just like they knew with terrifying precision how much was in the savings accounts of a fair number of people living in Rivière-du-Loup. The Carons knew how many houses there were in town, how many plots of land, how many addresses. They knew where every car was parked, they knew how much it had cost, and they could put a price on every piece of farm machinery currently being paraded down Rue Lafontaine on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. The Carons were in the know. All in all, they had seventeen children. Thirteen girls and four boys. Their piety was beyond reproach, and their stinginess virtually unimaginable. It was not uncommon to see a Caron wearing clothes stripped off some housewife’s scarecrow. Nothing all that unusual when times were hard, but enough to set tongues wagging in 1948.

  Another story about the Carons bears telling, not just because it speaks volumes about the family, but because it is backed up by documents that Solange was able to read for herself. Irene Caron, the youngest child in a family that went on and on, had a brother who was one year older. He was a nice boy, sound in mind and body, whose humble origins destined him for the clergy, military service, or hard labor. The boy had taken a while to babble his first words, much longer than the others. Whenever you spoke to him, he would look up at you with those big brown eyes of his, smile, and then his attention would fall on a bird or butterfly and he would laugh. Sitting at the frosted windows of the boys’ bedroom on winter mornings, Armand would trace the snowflakes’ winding trajectory with his finger and smile blissfully. At school, he learned to read in no time at all, but, alas, showed no interest in numbers. His father, an old man who had already turned bald and lost his teeth and hearing, was in no condition to step in. His sisters Irene and Martha tried to get him caught up in math, but it was no use. Soon arithmetic had the boy tormented. But his mother was not for turning. “Knowing how to count is all that counts.” He was no idiot. He mastered the basics, even a multiplication table or two, but couldn’t manage to apply what he’d learned to everyday life. One day, sitting at the table, Mrs. Caron lost patience. She nodded at the plate of roast rabbit she had just set down on the table and put young Armand to the test.

  “Armand, how many feet are on the plate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try.”

  The boy counted slowly. “Seven!”

  “What do you mean, seven?”

  “There are seven feet.”

  “What do you mean there are seven feet when I can count four heads. If there are four heads, then there must be . . .”

  Silence.

  “Well? Go on!”

  “I . . . uh . . . six feet?”

  Somewhere other than at the Carons’, in a loving, indulgent family, the answer would have been met with a gentle cascade of laughter, perhaps a comforting pat on the dunce’s head or a kiss on the forehead. Not at the Carons’. Mrs. Caron stood up, grabbed Armand by the ear, and sent him to stand in the corner for two hours without supper. And that wasn’t the end of it. As the boy grew, it became clear that he would never master the subtleties of arithmetic. And so he was thrashed by his brothers, and by his sisters, too. He became a punching bag to the family of math whizzes. In addition to his lack of aptitude for numbers he had scant regard for frugality. One day, his sister Irene caught him throwing away the peel of a large onion that their mother had just finished dicing. The little girl told on him right away and he was severely punished. Nothing too alarming: just a few strokes of the wooden spoon and two heartfelt smacks.

  “Onion peel is for blowing your nose with! What a waste, throwing it away like that!”

  He wasn’t allowed any of that night’s stew either. And since he was crying, Mrs. Caron let him wipe his nose on the onion peel he�
��d been silly enough to throw away.

  Realizing his abnormality and limited intellectual capacity, poor Armand began looking for ways to get on his family’s good side. He discovered a knack for telling funny stories, cracking jokes, and coming up with skits that featured all the Rivière-du-Loup bigwigs. One night when he was sixteen and Irene was fifteen, he decided to tell a story at the dinner table, a neatly turned anecdote that was sure to draw a laugh, inspired by an incident he had witnessed in the parish of Saint-Patrice. He told his family what he had heard Old Ma Madeleine, still as illiterate as ever, dictating to the postmaster to put in a short letter to her grandson Louis Lamontagne, now in the US Army and stationed somewhere in the old country. He repeated every word the old woman had said, mimicked her old-fashioned way of talking, and even managed to pull off a passable impression of the postmaster’s mannerisms. When he finished, he realized his family had barely been paying attention.

  Irene looked up from her plate of stew.

  “How much did the stamp cost her?”

  “Um . . .”

  He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember because this particular piece of information had seemed insignificant, of little interest to him at the time. His intention had been to re-enact a scene that he alone had witnessed because his father had sent him off to mail a letter. He had thought he might amuse them, transport them beyond the walls of their living room via the magic of storytelling. Nothing had escaped his attention: the worry on the old woman’s face, her imploring tone (“tell him his grandmother’s waiting for him and looking for a good little wife for him”), the postmaster’s vain attempts to hide the beginnings of a smile. But nothing had stirred his brothers and sisters from their torpor, or for that matter, their mother, who hadn’t even been listening. Irene brought an end to the ordeal.

  “Anyhow, those Lamontagnes have time to waste and money to spend, that’s for sure!”

  At the age of seventeen, since he’d been born much too late to sign up for the Papal Zouaves and much too soon to go off to hide at a city college, Armand was only too eager, willing, and overjoyed to join the Canadian Army, which promised a chance to get away from the whole lot, two months before Mackenzie King’s government introduced conscription. He wrote a series of short letters from Holland, in which he sought to put his mother’s mind to rest about his health and the advance of the Canadian troops.

  After the war, instead of returning home, and without anyone knowing exactly why, Armand boarded a merchant ship at Halifax, destination unknown, and wasn’t heard from again until a letter reached Irene Caron in 1950. Armand went far. He explained in his letter that he had worked out Rivière-du-Loup’s “antipode,” a calculation that had brought him to southwestern Australia where, he said, he had married and started a family. He was never seen again. He gave no address. Irene read the letter several times over without understanding a word. She was already pregnant with Madeleine at the time, and asked Louis to explain it to her.

  “What’s an antipode? I just don’t get it.”

  “Well, it’s like he said. It’s as far as you can get away from here.”

  “Right, but why did he go so far instead of coming back here?”

  “Because he wanted to travel!”

  “And how do you even get there?”

  “If you take him at his word, all you need to do is start digging a tunnel and after a while you’ll end up at your brother Armand’s.”

  “At his house? I thought if you did that, you ended up in China.”

  “That’s not what he says.”

  “Who’s going to go to the trouble of all that digging for nothing? What good does traveling do you anyway?”

  Armand’s letter survived long enough for Madeleine to inherit it once Irene died. She too read the letter from her enigmatic uncle several times over without being able to grasp its meaning. Armand became a captain on a whaling boat and, in 1976, unbeknownst to his family in Canada, died at sea not far from Rivière-du-Loup’s antipode. He was survived by his wife, an Australian of legendary loveliness, and four children, none of whom, Solange was quite sure, had become accountants or bankers.

  It was true, however, that Old Ma Madeleine was on the lookout for a nice little wife for her grandson Louis Lamontagne during his long absence. Because, in her mind, it was obvious that the reason Louis had left Rivière-du-Loup in 1936, after winning every strongman contest in the region, was to find a Madeleine of his own. And so she’d started to keep an eye out, in case he came home empty-handed. She’d inspected every nubile Madeleine in the county. None was suitable. Too thin, too bony, too much of a dreamer, too devout; every last one of the weddable Madeleines of 1948 fell short in at least one regard, in the old woman’s eyes. But she didn’t despair. Proof that the double coincidence of wants really does exist, Irene Caron, who had turned twenty in 1948, was actively looking for a husband after her mother served her an ultimatum:

  “Marry this fall or it’s off to the convent with you.”

  Louis’s arrival in the middle of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade had not been lost on Irene. When someone mentioned to her that the woman who had brought him into the world was none other than her own aunt, Sister Mary of the Eucharist, Irene turned an interested eye to Louis—and to the nun. Needless to say, she first approached Old Ma Madeleine to get the lay of the land. Having limited dealings with the dead and no inkling of what might irritate or antagonize them, Irene went with Sister Mary of the Eucharist to officially submit her candidacy to Old Ma Madeleine. Louis was already someplace else, off with schoolfriends.

  Old Ma Madeleine received Sister Mary of the Eucharist politely, while making it clear that her Louis was spoiled for choice. But the old woman was rather fond of the hideous nun and felt something of a communion of the soul with her.

  “But your Irene, she’s . . . well, she’s not called Madeleine, is she?”

  “No, but she could bring a Madeleine into this world.”

  Old Ma Madeleine pulled a face. Bring a child into this world? Now that was putting the cart before the Horse. And that’s exactly what happened at that particular Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade in Rivière-du-Loup in 1948. Handsome Louis was marching up Rue Lafontaine to applause from the crowd when the cart carrying little St. John the Baptist, sitting on a bale of hay, came to a standstill. The two horses yoked to the cart, usually staid and dependable, were suddenly spooked, as though they had just seen the devil in person. The halter, buckled by a man in too much of a rush, came undone and the cart and its holy occupant began rolling back down the hill and picking up speed. Louis let go of Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s arm for a second to grab the back of the runaway cart with both hands. He leaned forward and, acting as a counterbalance and smiling all the while, pushed the load up to the top of Rue Lafontaine. A photograph of the exploit still exists to this very day in the archives of the Rivière-du-Loup Historical Society. It shows little St. John the Baptist clinging to his lamb, the hulking figure of a uniformed Louis Lamontagne grinning as he pushes the cart, and dozens of people, laughing, pointing, and generally having a grand old time. In the upper left-hand corner of the photo, Sister Mary of the Eucharist is holding a hand to her mouth in astonishment, clutching her wooden cross in her right hand, no doubt imploring divine intervention at such a difficult time. You don’t see photos like that anymore.

  It was all in a day’s work for Louis Lamontagne. The feat of strength reminded anyone who might not have recognized him, perhaps thrown off by the Clark Gable moustache, exactly who he was and why others hadn’t forgotten him. Irene Caron had seen the whole thing. The chatter around her was music to her ears: the handsome young fellow has come home a rich man; they say he plans to buy a house in the parish of Saint-François-Xavier. Apparently he made his money at county fairs in the United States, lifting barrels full of water and pulling Oldsmobiles across fields.

  Irene waited for the parade to end before she introduced herself to Louis, and it was outside the church of Saint-Franç
ois that Irene Caron first looked her future husband in the eye. He sized her up, seeking the flaw that would make her desirable. It was hard going: needless to say—and difficult to say, though it is—Irene Caron was a very attractive young woman. Years of deprivation and an education built on frugality had made her an unusually svelte woman in this land of plenty. Thrifty to be sure, but not to the point of leaving the house dressed in any old thing, on this particular Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day Irene was wearing a pretty floral dress her mother had made for her out of a length of fabric exchanged for a crate of radishes. Blond, her teeth straight and numerous, she could have posed for a catalogue or stood in for a mannequin in one of the stores on Rue Lafontaine. Louis kept looking for any charming imperfection, a stutter that would make him desire her, a squint that would win him over. Nothing. Irene behaved like a well-mannered young lady and spoke of the number of people she estimated had watched the parade, and of the money it would have cost to replace the cart if Louis hadn’t been there. No woman is perfect, the handsome young man said to himself. Her imperfection was surely her ability to hide her imperfections, there you had it. Irene asked how much an American soldier earned. “Enough to want to do something else with his life,” Louis said with a smile. Then he thought to himself that he wasn’t going to treat this lovely girl differently to all the rest, all the same, and before going back to find Old Ma Madeleine on Rue Fraserville, he arranged to see Irene again at Sunday mass.

  “There’s nothing I like more than the sight of a woman wearing a hat,” he was careful to explain, by way of an invitation.

  The following Sunday, Irene ignored her suitor’s wishes and showed up at church in a blue silk headscarf. Sitting beside Old Ma Madeleine, Louis chuckled at poor Irene’s attempts to resist him. Outside the church, Irene went out of her way to ignore Louis, going so far as to turn her back on him as she pretended to wave to someone in the distance. Louis and Old Ma Madeleine approached the young lady, who turned to them with a harried look. Louis smiled; Old Ma Madeleine pursed her lips.