by Eric Dupont
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to what Sister Saint Alphonse called “the battle,” a duel between two girls standing face to face. Their subject? The times tables. The stakes? A Chinese baby boy. The nun got them started.
“Six times eight!”
The fastest answer earned a point. The girls had to win three of five to advance to the next round. Madeleine had invariably come out on top since September. Woe betide any girl whom fate put before her. In French, geography, and catechism, she barely managed to keep her head above water, and was even considered something of a dunce, in spelling especially, but she always emerged victorious from these mathematical jousts. With first place out of reach, the rest of the girls would aim for a place in the final alongside Madeleine Lamontagne, the perpetual champion of these predictable contests that the pupils, surprisingly, never tired of: the girl’s neurons were as much a source of fascination as her father’s muscles. That day when the world had been supposed to end proved no exception: Madeleine crushed all before her. But for the first time—and much to Sister Saint Alphonse’s dismay—Solange Bérubé managed to take second place, finding herself up against Madeleine in the final. Madeleine was tempted for a moment to let her friend and neighbor win, until she remembered her father’s words:
“Pity is for the weak.”
Solange and Madeleine walked home together, not caring what admonitions it might earn them from Mrs. Bérubé. Solange’s heart was a carnival of contradictory emotions: happiness at seeing the end of the world averted, the thought of spending the rest of the school year in a classroom with a raving lunatic of a nun, and then this closeness with Madeleine, a girl who, with all their shared prayers in the shed, had become so friendly, so approachable, that Solange had, albeit somewhat reluctantly, been forced to set aside her inertia and shyness. Nothing is so foreign to the heart of the tormented lover than seeing the pain of absence disappear, as though her heart had been fuelled by this angst ever since she first laid eyes on Madeleine from behind the willow hedge. Now she would have to work on getting the ban lifted on visiting the Lamontagne house. The two girls threw snowballs at each other and slid along Rue Fraserville’s steep sidewalks, breaking into a song for the cold of heart as they revelled in winter’s arrival right down to the very last snowflake:
It’s not the end of the world
Oh no, no, no, no!
The nuns’ heads are full of lice
Na, na, na, na, na!”
Madeleine grabbed Solange by the shoulders.
“I’ll tell my dad to invite you over for supper on Saturday.”
“My parents will kill me.”
“No, it’s my mom they hate, not my dad. Everyone loves Dad. Everyone loves Louis ‘The Horse’ Lamontagne!”
“I know, but if you invite me for supper, my dad will beat me again!”
“I’ll take care of it!”
And their happiness lasted all the way to Rue Saint-François-Xavier where, worried by the November storm, Mrs. Bérubé was waiting in her glassed-in veranda for her daughter to come home from school. Her heart skipped a beat at the sight of her daughter frolicking with the Lamontagne girl. Would she really have to beat the stubborn little girl again? She’d almost put her shoulder out the last time.
“Solange Bérubé, come inside this instant. You’re soaking wet. What on earth were you doing throwing snow at each other? You’ll get sick! Do you want to end up in a box at the Lamontagnes’? Madeleine, you get on home, you’ll catch your death!”
She was hopping mad, was Mrs. Bérubé.
“Catch my death? I’ll be sure to tell Grandma Madeleine. That’s a good one!”
“Just you do that, you insolent child. And leave my Solange alone.”
Solange ran to her mother, clutching the holy picture that second place in the math contest had earned her, hoping the reward might spare her a lash or two of the belt. Her mother was unimpressed.
“Multiplications? Go multiply me some peeled potatoes, you little devil! And stop walking like your brothers! You’re a girl, Solange!”
That night, the Bérubés were treated to a side of Solange they’d never seen before. Her words came out with newfound aplomb; she sounded like her dad when he was twenty. The defiance of youth. She followed the rules and didn’t speak at the table, but she made up for it as she did the dishes. She recounted her day in the tone a witness to an air disaster might use to describe what they saw; Solange even broke a glass as she attempted to mimic Sister Mary of the Eucharist gulping down the first snowflakes of winter.
“And word has it Sister Fatty shit her pants!”
“Solange Bérubé, you watch your mouth,” Mrs. Bérubé roared, brandishing a wooden spoon covered in soapsuds.
Just steps away, the atmosphere was very different in the Lamontagne household. Madeleine had told her family before supper how her prayers had saved the world. She also told them about the first snow, the math battle she’d won again, and how the price of Chinese babies was up fifteen cents.
“To twenty-five cents?” Irene Caron gasped.
“Well, Sister Saint Alphonse says the price went up because christenings are becoming more expensive.”
“Is that so?”
Irene was working herself into a tizzy. Madeleine could feel her chances of inviting Solange over for supper on Saturday night slipping away. She would have to find a way to make herself seem adorable, pitiful even. She nonchalantly revealed her hands, still red from the caning that morning. Irene’s eyes grew wide.
“My God, Madeleine! What’s wrong with your hands?”
“It was Sister Saint Alphonse. She caned me.”
Madeleine held up both hands while offering a passable imitation of Saint Blandina’s face as the lions surrounded her. Irene didn’t seem much moved, but Madeleine was used to that.
“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?”
“No, no, I . . .”
“Why did she hit you?”
Madeleine froze. Now she’d have to own up to what she’d done, admit how her hands, driven by an outside force, had grabbed the felt-tip pen and drawn a little mustache on Pope Pius XII, and she’d have to describe how the tiny black line had infuriated the nuns.
“It’s all because of Pius XII.”
“What do you mean, Pius XII? Pius XII is dead!”
Madeleine decided that sobbing was the best course of action. She had come to the realization that sobs expressed the emotion that generated the greatest respect from others. In her mathematically inclined mind, Madeleine had categorized possible behaviors according to the feelings and emotions they were likely to arouse. “Looking like Saint Blandina” was at the very top of the list, almost as effective as kneeling by the radio during the family rosary, although needless to say the latter tactic worked much more effectively on Irene Caron than on Papa Louis. But generosity, thought Madeleine, a condition essential to her undertaking’s success, was a quality more readily associated with Louis Lamontagne.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Your father has gone down to pick up a body in town. The old Lévesque woman died this morning. Your father’s happy. He was practically praying for someone to be killed on the roads.”
So the old Lévesque woman, found as stiff as a poker on the morning of November 10, 1960, had been the end of the world’s only victim. Madeleine decided to wait for Louis to come back in his hearse. He wasn’t long coming. From the kitchen window, she saw her dad and brother Marc carrying the old woman into the basement, a place no one was allowed to go while Louis got the mortal remains ready before laying them out in his funeral parlor. Madeleine thought to herself that a new corpse arriving in their home couldn’t hurt her plan to invite Solange over for supper that Saturday. She bided her time. Louis would be back up soon enough. Irene, meanwhile, had gone out, explaining to her daughter that she had an errand to run before supper.
“Peel a dozen potatoes and set the table, Madeleine. Keep an eye on the soup, while you’re
at it.”
Irene had gone out without even buttoning up her coat. Whatever it was couldn’t wait, by the looks of things. Louis found his daughter spreading a tablecloth. Madeleine ran the numbers, looked for Louis’s Achilles’ heel, how best to get what she wanted out of him. Asking straight out “Can Solange Bérubé come over for supper this Saturday?” would never work. “How come? Don’t the Bérubés’ have anything to eat?” That’s what he’d say. No, she’d have to do better than that. Louis washed his hands.
“Where’s your mom?”
“At the store.”
“So . . . how was the end of the world?” Louis grinned.
“It was just some snow. The nuns said it was down to our prayers.”
“That’s probably it.”
Louis was still grinning. Things were looking good.
“I made a new friend.”
“Oh yeah? Anyone we know?”
“Solange Bérubé.”
Louis suppressed a laugh. Back when he was a child, he had known Mrs. Bérubé, though she was a Cormier back then. He’d flirted with her when she was twelve, back in 1930. Too shy. Too tough. He’d turned his attentions elsewhere.
“Oh, you mean our neighbor!”
“Uh-huh. She’s always talking about you,” Madeleine lied.
“What do you mean, she’s always talking about me?”
“Her mom told her you’re always telling stories, and she loves a good story.”
“Well, you’ll have to invite her over sometime, if she likes stories.”
Madeleine flicked the black eye out of a potato, unsettled by her own power. “Be quiet now,” she said to herself. “Let things take their course.”
Louis wiped his hands and bent down to his daughter’s height. His teal-colored eyes looked into hers.
“Look here, Madeleine. Don’t tell a soul. This Saturday I’m working on a big surprise for the whole family. If you want, I’ll talk to Mrs. Bérubé and have Solange over too. What do you think?”
Madeleine was stunned: she’d played him like a fiddle. She gave her father an astonished look, which he took to be barely contained joy. Ten minutes later, Louis rang the Bérubés’ doorbell. Well aware of Mrs. Bérubé’s feelings about his wife, he insisted on speaking privately to Mr. Bérubé in the living room. In the kitchen, where the family was eating, Solange held her breath. She could hear both men laughing. She heard the words “Saturday,” then “Whatever makes you happy, my dear Louis.” Her heart was pounding. After five minutes, The Horse left again. Mr. Bérubé sat back down at the table.
“Solange is having supper at the Lamontagnes’ Saturday,” he announced.
Mrs. Bérubé twisted her apron nervously.
“Oh no, I don’t think so! I don’t think so!”
“Annette, Solange is eating at Louis Lamontagne’s on Saturday and that’s that. Do I make myself clear?”
A heavy silence fell over the Bérubé kitchen. Solange wondered if the world actually had ended without them noticing. She thought that the Lord, in all his goodness, might have reserved a death so quick for his creation that no one had noticed. “We’re all up in heaven and I’m off to Madeleine’s for supper on Saturday,” she thought as she peeled a turnip. Her mind was a Chagall painting, her times tables spinning by with orange rabbits and flying nuns above Madeleine Lamontagne’s sweet face.
Just as these intense negotiations were taking place on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, Irene Caron was braving the elements to settle a matter that couldn’t wait. She crossed Rue Fraserville without looking right or left, continued on to the convent and went up the steps to the parlor. After wiping her boots and shaking her coat, she waited for someone to come out to meet her. It was her lucky day: her aunt, Sister Mary of the Eucharist, came to greet her. Irene pulled every string she could to get what she wanted, which was for the Mother Superior, Mother Mary of the Great Power, to see her right there and then.
“Really, Irene! You need to make an appointment to speak with the Mother Superior!”
“Tell her Louis sent me,” Irene replied.
With only her husband’s name to guarantee her safe passage, Irene Caron was admitted to Mother Mary of the Great Power’s antechamber at four thirty in the afternoon. A teenage girl sat on a chair. Her eyes were red and she was biting her nails. With her free hand, she kept putting on and taking off a shoe that was too big for her. Indistinct words could be heard from the Mother Superior’s office. “I expect you to change . . .” then, nothing. The door opened and out came a woman in her fifties, visibly the nail-biting student’s mother. Mother and daughter left the antechamber without a word, disappearing down the hallway, from where there came the sound of a slap followed by a yelp.
“Hello, Mrs. Lamontagne.”
Irene stood. While she had been waiting in the antechamber, the snow that had clung to her boots had melted and formed a puddle of water just in front of the chair she’d been sitting on. Mother Mary of the Great Power eyed the mess and pursed her lips. Irene stepped into the principal’s office.
The door was closed by an invisible hand. The nun with the bellicose chin smiled from behind a large desk. What to say of this upstanding woman other than that she couldn’t abide laziness, that she had been to a papal mass in Rome in 1953 (a story she wheeled out every chance she got), and that she never ate in the presence of her colleagues? Instead, she would have her lunch brought into her office on the stroke of noon and chew each mouthful in the strictest privacy. The eucharist was the only food she would take into her mouth with people looking on. And even that couldn’t be considered “eating” in the strictest sense. The Mother Superior would no doubt have preferred the term “nourishment.” Not a soul had ever seen her nibble on a filet of sole or sip a tomato juice.
If she was smiling, it certainly wasn’t with delight. She was showing her teeth for an altogether different reason. Irene had been well used to the convent since childhood. She would go there with her father two or three times a year to visit with his half-sisters in the parlor. Mother Mary of the Great Power was often on the receiving end of Louis Lamontagne’s generosity, as he provided the convent with donations, transportation, and other sundry services. In theory, Irene and the Mother Superior should have gotten along just fine, but there was something about the waif from the parish of Saint-Ludger that profoundly irritated Mother Mary of the Great Power. Was it the feverish fervor with which Irene had thrown herself at Louis upon his release from the army? In the nun’s eyes, social mobility was no sin, provided you went about it the right way, a basic rule that seemed to have escaped Irene Caron. And it wasn’t the first time today that she had been reminded of the Lamontagnes.
Shortly after lunch, Sister Saint Alphonse—yes, now she was quite sure, she’d put on weight again—had come to confess having committed a “regrettable” act against little Madeleine, without, of course, the Mother Superior inquiring as to the precise nature of the act. A few too many strokes of the cane, Mother Mary of the Great Power assumed. But the portly nun had insisted on the details, even shedding a few tears in the process. Now that the cat was out of the bag, it was holding a defiled picture of Pope Pius XII in its mouth. There it was on Mother Mary of the Great Power’s desk, stirring in her an outrage that defied description. She’d found the whole story so far-fetched that she’d been about to send for Louis Lamontagne when she’d been told that Irene had just arrived. So she was here to discuss the Hitler mustache. Imagine her surprise when she realized the real motive for her visit.
“What can I do for you, my dear Irene? And how is our Louis?”
“Very well, Mother. I . . .”
“You realize that the Sisters of the Child Jesus consider him to be something of the son we never had. I hope you’re taking good care of him. Hasn’t he put on a little weight?”
The implication behind this last remark raised Irene’s hackles. She struggled to hide her irritation. Take good care of him? What did she mean by that? What was the meddling old c
row sticking her beak into? Throughout their short meeting, Irene thrice declined Mother Mary of the Great Power’s invitation to sit. She stood there, straight as Lady Justice herself come down off her pedestal.
“He’s doing very well, Mother. I don’t want to bother you for too long. I came to talk to you about quite a delicate matter.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been informed of what went on today in the classroom. I find the whole affair most regrettable, but there are two sides to every story. Madeleine has probably given you her version of the facts. Perhaps you’d like to hear ours?”
“You mean that Madeleine would have lied to me?”
“Not at all. But children, you know, often feel they are punished unfairly. They tend to recount events to their advantage.”
“I suspect that’s what’s going on here. I don’t think that Madeleine, or her family, deserve what happened at school today.”
“I couldn’t agree more. I spoke with Sister Saint Alphonse. She told me about the whole thing, in tears . . . Just imagine! Breaking down in front of me like that! But please sit down, Irene . . .”
“I’ll stand. So it moved her to tears, did it?”
Irene quivered. A few drops of water tumbled from her coat.
“But it’s not worth getting all worked up about, Mrs. Lamontagne. I’m sure that Sister Saint Alphonse had her reasons. This isn’t her first year teaching! Please, sit down.”
“No, I won’t stay long. I find it hard to take at any rate.”
