The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “I don’t tell you everything.”

  Louis wouldn’t calm down. There was no way he was going to let his daughter peel vegetables in some cheap restaurant in the city’s lower town. Why doesn’t she open a restaurant here? She could start by working at the Saint-Louis or the Granville if she was so determined to wait hand and foot on every Tom, Dick, and Harry!

  “Two young girls from the Lower St. Lawrence all alone in town? They’ve a good chance of coming back pregnant!”

  Irene sighed. Bit her bottom lip as she spread a lump of margarine on a slice of toast.

  “Solange Bérubé? Pregnant?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Why not? She’s a good-looking girl! The boys’ll be around her like flies.”

  “You think she’s attractive, do you?”

  “Of course, she is. In her own way. A strong girl. With Solange, you always know where you stand! She’s solid. I like a girl like that!”

  “That’s the thing, Louis. Solange will keep an eye on Madeleine. Like you say, you always know where you stand with her.”

  Exasperated by such womanly secrets, Louis cursed and got up from the table. Irene raised her eyes to heaven, muttering something about the unfathomable depths of male stupidity. Had handsome Louis lived in New York, he’d doubtless have gone to Tosca’s Diner every morning for breakfast. But since he couldn’t afford such a treat, he went instead down to the Ophir, as he did almost every morning, and pulled up a seat. The cold weather embittered him. All that snow reminded him of Germany and the poor guy he’d found buried in it. What was his name again? Rose? No, Rosen. Yeah, that was it. Rosen was his name. The beer cloaked all his memories of Bavaria with a sepia veil. The Ophir regulars, all men, arrived one by one, and greeted Louis, a slap on the shoulder and a grunt by way of hello. Already drunk by two o’clock, Louis went from one table to the next, singing his daughter’s praises, crying over his dead sons. He’d become a kind of talking ruin, a piece of shared history the place just wouldn’t be the same without, tolerated like a senile professor on the cusp of retirement.

  “My . . . my daughter’s gonna be a cook at the Château Frontenac!” he stammered, drawing looks of pity from those around him.

  A voice from the bar cried out:

  “Is that a fact? I wouldn’t be so sure!”

  The drinkers fell silent. Who had dared? No one spoke to Louis Lamontagne like that, no more than you’d think of slapping an orangutan. The ignoramus was a man they barely knew. Marcoux was his name. Sure, there’d been that thing between Louis and his wife, an affair that left the poor cuckold wearing the horns, a common-enough look in the town, mind you. Louis smiled at the thought of the pair of horns on the calf that day in Gouverneur. Drunkenness beat at his temples like the axles on a German locomotive. What a day! Apart from the gin he could still indulge in, no one, not a thing, seemed to be on his side.

  And the three hundred American dollars that were missing from the money he had set aside? It couldn’t have been Madeleine who’d found his stash! She was a hard worker, his little girl. Just like her mother. He turned his attention to Marcoux.

  “Somethin’ you wanna say, Marcoux?”

  Marcoux went quiet. To lighten the mood, the bartender turned on the television that normally only showed hockey games. A variety show. A lanky French singer was swinging his hips, gyrating in a manner that propriety forbade in the New World.

  “Remind you of your son, Louis? What was his name? Marc, wasn’t it?”

  The room held its breath. For naught. It would take more than that to get a strongman to rise to the bait. The bartender turned off the television. The witnesses who were interrogated the following day had a hard time saying whether Louis Lamontagne had fully grasped what Marcoux was getting at. Louis was, they all agreed, drunker than usual that evening. Marcoux, on the other hand, had stuck to ginger ale and couldn’t use drunkenness as an excuse. His words had whipped up the Ophir’s smoke-filled air, chafing at eardrums, tormenting the men’s consciences. Did he really have to go around shouting every bit of gossip that the rumor mill had washed up on his filthy doorstep?

  “No, he looks more like the other one, the painting priest. They were together so often, you ended up confusing them, I suppose. That type of thing’s legal now, or so they say.”

  His forehead resting on his hand, Louis gazed into space, oblivious to Marcoux’s barbs. He was off somewhere else, a place alcohol sometimes brought him: the shores of Lake Starnberg. A German moon lit up the Alpine landscape.

  Marcoux left the bar somewhat defeated, leaving a putrid stench in his wake. No one was vulgar enough to mention the incident or uncaring enough to try to offer Louis any idiotic words of comfort.

  But Marcoux’s vomit had spattered Louis’s face all the same. It felt like a slap, and he soon left for home himself. He thought of Podgórski, of the blue trailer. His inebriated state took him back to the voluptuous memories of a Bavarian Fräulein, a sturdy blonde with an easy laugh. Maria. Pretty she was, too. Humongous breasts . . . She’d given herself to him and he’d given her his chocolate ration in return. It was Saint-Pierre who helped Louis into his jacket. Before he left the Ophir, he’d grinned over at the bartender again.

  “You’re not going after him, are you, Louis? He’s an asshole.” The bartender almost begged him.

  “After who? I’m going home to eat, dammit!” Louis reassured the bartender. Perhaps that explains why later no one understood why Louis, instead of heading back up home, had crossed Rue Lafontaine and headed toward the train station. The snow swirled as it fell thick and fast, reminding Louis of the Jewish man he had found covered in the stuff. The men at the bar lost sight of him after a few seconds. Louis stopped to let out a sigh, humming the opening notes of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring before continuing on his way.

  “By train, they took ’em by train,” he muttered to himself. My God, the shriek of tortured metal must have been unbearable, he thought. When you think where the trains were headed. A haunting image lodged in his mind: frozen bodies piled one atop the other in car after car. But with the help of Bach, he managed to chase it away. He thought he could hear the wheels of German trains screeching along the track. A sound you don’t forget. A sound that could be heard throughout Germany. “Bahnhof, that’s what they called it. Zug!” Yeah, that was it. Trains! Don’t get on the train! Whatever the destination! Don’t ever take another train again! Stay home. Don’t move. Don’t budge from our beautiful land of snow, in the orange-rose light of the setting sun. Louis was slowly sobering up. He looked around. He wasn’t on Saint-François-Xavier, or anywhere even close to home. He had drifted someplace else. Always the wanderer, he thought. Why were there rails on either side of his feet? And that white light he could just about make out through the snow? Why so much light? What was that in aid of?

  Donatella Donatello had been telling the truth: Dr. David Beck’s office was in the same neighborhood as Tosca’s Diner. Solange was doubly proud of herself: first for asking the choir the way, then for following their directions. Dr. Beck, she thought to herself, might even go to Tosca’s Diner for breakfast. How long did it take them, walking along 10th Avenue, to get to the doctor’s? Twenty-three minutes precisely. Just like Donatella had said.

  Solange had pictured a clinic that looked either like the hospital in Rivière-du-Loup or Dr. Panneton’s office on Rue Lafontaine. Imagine her surprise when she realized Dr. Beck worked above a laundry. His name was engraved on a barely visible gold plate: Doctor David Beck. Physician. They walked up a long wooden staircase and out into a dimly lit hallway. There was an open door at the end. Not much in the way of furnishings. A few armchairs, and a counter behind which a young woman was working. She smiled and greeted Solange and Madeleine in French. Her name was Rachel Beck, she said; she was the doctor’s daughter and assistant. She wanted to know if Solange and Madeleine had had a good trip. They didn’t reply. Where had this girl—she was around their age—learned French? Rachel had long curly hair, ti
ed back with a green elastic band. The rest of her exuded calm and sobriety. A child no one had ever raised a hand to, thought Solange. She explained that her father, a European, had insisted she learn French, and that she was getting ready to enroll at Columbia University, though in what exactly she wasn’t sure yet. Rachel showed great concern for them. Her every gesture was a soothing contrast to Donatella Donatello; probably without realizing it, the Italian woman had made the girls feel quite frantic. No one ever walked out of Tosca’s Diner feeling calm and at peace with themselves.

  Rachel disappeared for a moment down a hallway they couldn’t see from the waiting room. She came back with her father, David Beck. A thin man, his face hidden behind a carefully trimmed beard, Beck plucked a pair of glasses from his doctor’s coat. He, too, spoke some French.

  His appearance was a brutal reminder of the reason the two girls had just traveled over a thousand miles by bus. Solange clasped Madeleine’s hand.

  “Is she your sister?” Beck inquired.

  “No, my neighbor.”

  Beck smiled. He motioned for Madeleine to follow him. The two girls glanced at each other. Madeleine followed the doctor to the end of the hallway. A white door closed behind them. Solange stayed behind with Rachel in the waiting room and immediately went about decimating her fingernails with her incisors. A telephone rang. Rachel excused herself. Solange decided to pray. What else was to be done? Once the call was over, Rachel was back to her friendly self. She was visibly delighted to be able to practice her French with a girl her age.

  “My teachers are all so old!”

  “Are they French?” Solange asked.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you talk like you’re from France.”

  “That’s because my teachers are from France. They came here to the United States after the war.”

  The compliment—at least that’s what she took it to be—had left Rachel blushing and given her some encouragement.

  “Do you like jokes?” she asked, a sudden glint in her eye.

  “I suppose so, yes. Like everyone,” Solange replied, finding her remark to be out of place. A joke? Was this really the time?

  “Papa always tells me a joke to get me to laugh. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Why not?”

  “So it’s the story of an old lady who used to go to the park every day to read. One day, she sits down on her favorite bench in Central Park to read the newspaper. A pigeon arrives and begins to talk to her. The two quickly become friends, and the old lady invites the pigeon over for coffee the following day at four o’clock in the afternoon. The pigeon is pleased and says yes.”

  “That’s funny,” Solange lied.

  “It gets better! At four o’clock the following day, the lady waits for the pigeon to arrive. But it doesn’t come. At half past four, it still hasn’t showed up. The old lady is very sad. The pigeon rings the bell at a quarter to five. The lady rushes to open the door.

  “‘You’re late! I’ve been waiting for you. Where were you?’ she asks.

  “And the pigeon replies, ‘I’m very sorry, ma’am, it was such a nice day I decided to walk.’ Hahaha! Isn’t that funny?”

  Solange smiled. No. She didn’t find it at all funny. She didn’t understand why the crazy old woman would waste her time reading in the park. People in Rivière-du-Loup had better things to do than go around reading on park benches and talking to birds. Besides, aside from July and August, it was too cold to do that. But she wanted to be polite.

  “Your French is really good.”

  And she was being honest. Sure, Rachel had an American accent you could cut with a knife, but she spoke excellent French for a New York City girl.

  Beyond Dr. Beck’s office was an exam room. Madeleine, from the other side of the half-open door, could make out oxygen bottles, a stretcher, and a tray covered in surgical instruments: specula, forceps. A pair of latex gloves lay slumped on a second stainless-steel tray. That was all Madeleine could see. Beck asked her to take off her winter coat, hat, and white scarf. Later she told Solange that he’d been very kind. His accent, difficult to understand at first, reminded her of Mr. Zucker’s, Irene’s traveling salesman. He asked Madeleine to sit on a little sofa.

  A simple floor lamp lit the windowless room. It must have been eighteen degrees at most. Madeleine shivered. Beck chatted to her.

  “You’re a very young lady. You have plenty of time ahead of you, no?”

  Madeleine nodded, embarrassed.

  “You should see a doctor in two months, just to make sure everything is okay.”

  Madeleine didn’t speak.

  “Did you bring the payment?”

  Madeleine took the envelope out of her bag. The doctor opened it in front of her. He counted the bills, looked approvingly at Madeleine, and put the envelope in the drawer of his big wooden desk. As he did so, he switched on the table light, which illuminated the items on the desk. Papers, pens, a photo of Rachel when she was small. No photos of Mrs. Beck. A smattering of books in the upper right-hand corner. A calendar. A china saucer in which something golden shone intensely. Beck disappeared off into the examining room and came back with a hospital smock.

  “Time to get undressed. I’ll be back in five minutes. Please take everything off.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes, everything. When you’re done, lie down on the table over there.”

  Beck left the office. Madeleine slowly took off all her clothes and put on the smock. It seemed freezing cold to her touch. As she walked past the doctor’s desk, she was struck by the golden light shining up at her from the china saucer. A dozen tiny gold crosses glinted beneath the table lamp’s sixty watts. Some of them were initialled, like Madeleine’s. Others were anonymous. The rays they projected seemed to illuminate the whole room and bathe everything in their golden light. Madeleine remembered that Dr. Beck had insisted she take off everything and so she removed her little cross. Frightened she might lose it, she set it down beside the china saucer, beneath the green table lamp, and walked slowly into the examining room, like the Greeks approaching Mount Olympus.

  Beck was true to his word and came back after a few minutes, this time with his stethoscope. He stopped by the desk for a moment. Madeleine heard a metallic clink. Then he was in the examining room. A few tears fell onto the table as Beck’s cold stethoscope moved across her belly. Madeleine’s gaze stopped on a row of three little brown vials. Fine writing on them, indecipherable to her eyes.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Morphium.”

  “What for?”

  The doctor fumbled for the words.

  “It’s for . . . uh. When one has . . . Schmerzen? Pain?”

  “I see.”

  La peine, that’s what she’d understood. Avoir de la peine. To be sad. The vials were for when people were sad. The doctor asked her a few more questions, then asked her to raise her knees. Madeleine felt his cold fingers on her kneecaps, then inside her thighs. That’s where he was looking now. He stopped suddenly and took a step back, as though Madeleine had whispered the third secret of Fatima to him from between her legs.

  “What is this?” he exclaimed.

  “A birthmark. I got it from my father.”

  “It’s a bass clef?”

  “Yes. My little brother Luc had the same thing, but he’s dead now.”

  The doctor was looking at his patient differently now, a mixture of amazement and incredulity. Suddenly there came a terrified hammering on the door. Then came Rachel’s voice, nervous and shrill. “Papa, Papa, come!” Steps in the hallway. Voices could be heard through the half-open door. Someone was crying, saying “No!” At least, that’s what it seemed like to Madeleine. Then, as Madeleine was to tell Solange later, a long shiver ran through her, air rushed into the examining room. The wind had picked up outside.

  It was impossible, she’d later say, to explain the sequence of events. Everything was hazy. Pneumonia, that’s what she�
�d catch, lying on the table in the cold like that, practically naked. She could only think of one thing: the warmth of her clothes. She got dressed as fast as she could, like she did on the mornings Irene forgot to wake her for school. But she took the time all the same, watching herself in the mirror on the wall, to adjust the dried rose from Maria Callas, which she had taken out. She liked how she looked with a red rose in her hair. The cross was no longer where Madeleine had left it. Beck must have thought it was one of his and put it in the saucer where all the others glistened. The golden light, almost palpable in the dark room, seemed to radiate heat. It was impossible to look away; Madeleine was completely enraptured by the gold.

  “Take me,” the little gold crosses seemed to whisper to her. Madeleine thought back to her hoard of treasures squirreled away behind the baseboard in her room in Rivière-du-Loup. That’s where the crosses were asking to be taken, northward. Should she take them all? They jingled as they tumbled into her pocket. And now the envelope! Madeleine wasn’t going to leave the doctor three hundred dollars for something he hadn’t done! The drawer wasn’t even locked. Now get out of here! That’s what the little voice inside her had been screaming ever since they’d arrived in the city. Scram. Run like a thief and take Solange with her.

  Madeleine laced her ankle boots in a rush, grabbed her bag and coat, and sprinted to the waiting room, without dwelling on the strange opera that was unfolding there. Rachel was sitting behind the counter, arguing with a man in a grey suit, a heavy-set man with a moustache who was clearly unhappy about something. He was brandishing a notebook, stabbing at it with his fingers as he shouted a flurry of words ending in -ing. Dr. Beck was trying to mollify him. Everybody had lost their temper and Madeleine knew enough about human nature to know that they would soon come to blows.

  She tugged on her friend’s hand.

  “We’re leaving. Let’s go, Solange!”

  They raced down the stairs five at a time, spilling out onto 10th Avenue. A mad dash forward, through shouts and blaring car horns, to the other side of the street. Dr. Beck emerged soon afterward and looked around for his patient, closely followed by Rachel, hugging herself against the cold.