The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “What’s going on, Madeleine? Have you lost your mind?”

  “We have to get out of here before they see us. Come on! Run!”

  And run they did. Very awkwardly, too. If they’d simply dashed into the first store, Beck would never have found them. But how could you miss two girls running and shouting down the icy 10th Avenue sidewalk, one of them wearing a red rose in her hair and the other an orange coat? They fled with all the subtlety of a Soviet tank. Youth, yes, youth, the curse that until that day had been Madeleine’s greatest handicap, would this time save her.

  “They’re right behind us!”

  The girls zigzagged between pedestrians, bumped into grandmothers.

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Beck was shouting now. His voice seemed to be gaining on them, Rachel’s too.

  “Come back!”

  Right? Left? It was up to chance.

  “Don’t look back!” Solange gasped.

  The wind suddenly picked up. Beck was no more than twenty yards behind them. Madeleine looked around for a way out, felt her legs go weak. Huge snowflakes then began to fall all around, as though an angel had shattered into a billion tiny frozen tears. No strangers to snowstorms, the Canadian girls kept on running, while Beck and his daughter slowed, swearing and shielding their eyes from the sudden, ill-timed blizzard.

  The tops of the skyscrapers could no longer be seen, so thick was the snow. Madeleine, still holding Solange’s hand, felt like they were moving through a cloud. They turned left again and went off in an unfamiliar direction. They were young all right, but sooner or later the heart can’t keep up. They didn’t speak. Just trudged through the snow. They’d lost them. West Side passersby, surprised by the storm—despite the forecast—could have described the two crazy young girls who, helpless with laughter, began throwing snowballs at each other. French girls. Very annoying, very loud French girls. They walked through the snow, got a little lost, as much as you can get lost in Manhattan.

  “We need to go back to the station, Madeleine. If you’ve made up your mind you’re leaving, I’ll follow you.”

  “Ma will kill me.”

  “You can come live with us.”

  “And what about your mom?”

  “Mom? She had nine! One more’s not going to make any difference. You did the right thing, Madeleine. We’ll just have to deal with the rest.”

  It only took Solange a few moments to work out where they were. The walk back to the Port Authority Bus Terminal seemed to take forever. They were cold now. They fell quiet, trying to save their energy. A thin layer of snow had formed on Tosca’s dried rose.

  Madeleine got a bad feeling the minute they arrived at the terminal. Sure enough, as soon as they set foot inside, they spotted Dr. Beck and his daughter Rachel waiting for them. How could they have been so stupid? Everyone knew that the French girls who came down to Manhattan to take care of a certain something left from the same hole they’d emerged out of: the Port Authority. For them, there was only one way into New York City. And now Beck was scanning the hall, like a cat outside a mousehole, on the lookout for an orange coat.

  Solange and Madeleine hid behind a pillar. There was no way they could board without being seen. Beck knew what he was doing.

  “They’re here! Dammit, Madeleine, what are we going to do now? And what’s their problem anyway?”

  “I don’t know, Solange. I took back the envelope he’d put in the drawer. Maybe that’s what he’s after.”

  “Still, they have a nerve coming here to get their money back.”

  There are times in life when you have to decide if you’re Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne’s daughter or not. The plan was simple: walk in like nothing was the matter and make a beeline for the escalators that led to the boarding gates. Success would depend on their being able to make their way unnoticed through the stream of passengers—and on the bus driver being on time. After the escalator, one last sprint to the boarding gate where, if God really did exist, they would be the last to get on the bus. Solange still wasn’t keen on setting foot inside the building, convinced they’d be flushed out within seconds.

  “We’re taking a big risk, Madeleine.”

  “I know, but we can’t spend the night just wandering the streets. We need to go home.”

  “Well, we could walk around for a while and take the bus home tonight at eleven. He and his daughter aren’t going to stick around for another eleven hours!”

  “Have you seen the snow? Where are we going to walk to? The bus leaves in five minutes. Come on!”

  They slipped in with a group of students their age. You’re never more invisible than when you look like those around you, a basic rule of camouflage that the Sisters of the Child Jesus had understood years before. The tactic paid off: Beck and his daughter didn’t look in their direction, clearly on the lookout for two girls traveling alone.

  Around Madeleine, the nasal voices of the New York students, words they didn’t understand: “Really, I think a woman should be able to decide.” She made a show of looking at them to make it look as though they were part of the group. “I agree with you. It’s really up to a woman and her doctor.” The hallway just wouldn’t end. “This isn’t Texas, after all.” And then, there it was: the escalator was in sight!

  They were through the danger zone, but strangers as they were to the city and to how crowds moved in general, they hadn’t expected the group of girls covering them to move off so suddenly. With fifty yards to go to the escalators, Madeleine and Solange suddenly found themselves exposed. It didn’t take more than three seconds for Rachel’s voice to ring out: “Dad! Look! Quick!”

  They were running again, across a floor now damp from the snow coming down off the passengers’ clothing in little clumps. The same snow had moistened Tosca’s dried rose, and it was now almost back to looking its best. Swollen and made heavy by the wet snow, Callas’s flower was hanging onto Madeleine’s hair by no more than the grace of God, who had grown weary of bearing the extra weight. Just as Beck was about to put his hand on Solange’s shoulder—with the intrigued passengers looking on—the flower fell limply beneath the doctor’s left shoe—a rubber-soled derby made from the finest quality leather, complete with cushioned insole—which skidded clumsily, sending its owner sprawling to the floor. A sprained ankle, a broken kneecap. Beck also hurt his wrist as he tried not to hit the floor with his chin. The Port Authority Bus Terminal erupted into a howl of pain that the girls didn’t even hear as they raced away. Three ladies riding the escalator were shoved out of the way. At Gate 32, Archibald Jackson, a man as black as the night, glanced at his watch one final time before closing the departure gate. He didn’t see Solange and Madeleine bearing down on him until the last second, breathless, their shoulders still covered in snow, their faces panicked, their hands brandishing return tickets.

  The Greyhound left the parking lot at noon on the dot. Solange looked back at the city one more time, or at least at what the storm allowed her to see of it, and told herself she’d be back one day. Maybe with the child Madeleine would be bringing into the world, the child she’d tell: “This is where you were born. You’re a child of New York City, a New York City boy.” Because it was a boy, she just knew. Before she fell asleep with exhaustion, she imagined the teal-colored eyes he would have.

  Madeleine fell asleep too, fingering through the leather of her bag the three vials of morphine she’d stolen from Dr. Beck. She felt across her chest for her little golden cross, but couldn’t find it.

  When she woke up, she had to wait for Solange to fall back to sleep again before she could look for her cross among the ones she’d taken. It wasn’t there. A lump formed in her throat. The cross had her grandmother’s initials on it, which is to say her own initials: ML. She could remember leaving it beside the saucer while she got undressed. Could she have left it behind on Dr. Beck’s desk? Madeleine couldn’t believe how stupid she’d been. Too late to go back now. So she’d left her cross there. Losing that cr
oss would haunt her bouts of insomnia for years to come, until the day she stopped thinking about it.

  She picked through the little crosses she’d stolen until she found the one that looked most like the one she’d lost. It was initialled LB. Who might that be? Lisette Bernier? Louise Breault? Who was that woman? But, most important of all, how would she ever get her own cross back? The one her grandfather had given Madeleine the American in 1918? As she fastened the chain behind her neck, Madeleine was wracked by sobs that roused Solange from her sleep.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I left something behind in New York,” Madeleine sobbed.

  “Not your cross! Sister Mary of the Eucharist made me promise you’d never be parted from it!”

  Madeleine didn’t know what to say. Losing the cross was unspeakable. She thought for a moment, looked around in vain for a hankie to dry her tears, then brought a hand up to her neck to where the white scarf should have been. Her face lit up.

  “The white scarf Deborah gave me! That’s what I lost!”

  “I think you’re tired, Madeleine. It’s just a silk scarf. We’ll get you another one. Now sleep. We’ve a long way to go.”

  The trip went on and on, punctuated by Madeleine’s bouts of nausea, scheduled stops, unplanned stops forced on them by the terrible weather, the long wait in Montreal, the string of little towns and villages, Rivière-Ouelle, Saint-Pascal, Notre-Dame-du-Portage, and at the end of the white hell, the bus dropped the two girls off in Rivière-du-Loup, where they’d boarded the bus two days earlier but twenty years younger.

  They found their town buried in snow, as restless as they’d ever seen it. Since they weren’t expected before nightfall, there was no one waiting to pick them up. Half crazy with exhaustion, nauseous, and furious at having gone through what they would henceforth call their trip to hell and back, Solange and Madeleine walked up Rue Lafontaine, heads held high, ready to confront Irene, to spit in her face if need be.

  Solange had already pictured a particularly violent scene in which she would make her pay for the humiliation she’d been subjected to two days before. People stared at them in the street. Folks who knew them didn’t say hello, not even the ones they’d been to school with.

  “Can you please tell me why everyone’s looking at us like we’re aliens from another planet?”

  “Probably because I’m so green. Oh no. Hang on a minute. I think I’m gonna be . . . Oh sweet Jesus . . .”

  Madeleine could no longer control her nausea and had been throwing up every hour since early morning. As they neared the parish of Saint-François-Xavier, the looks became more insistent. Women came out onto their balconies, shawls thrown hastily around their shoulders. “Go home, Madeleine. Your mother’s waiting.” Apocalyptic faces. Two police cars were parked outside the Lamontagne home. As the girls walked into the living room, a dozen red-rimmed eyes turned to look at them. After enduring Marcoux’s pointless sarcasm, Louis Lamontagne had left the Ophir just as winter was about to set in. “Slightly more worse for wear than usual,” the bartender admitted. Then Louis, without anyone knowing why, had crossed Rue Lafontaine instead of heading home and found himself on the railway tracks. There it was presumed he walked on for a while longer before being struck head-on by a Canadian National locomotive.

  “He must have died on the spot.”

  The words brought little comfort to Madeleine, who was in shock. Louis had been missing for several hours. They had presumed he was in some mistress’s bed until the railroad workers found him that morning, a bump in the snow a few yards away from the tracks. There he was, under close to a foot of snow that had fallen during the night. The gossips, magnificent in their role as professional mourners, came up with no end of imbecilic reasons to explain how he’d met his end: driven to suicide by slander.

  They couldn’t find a casket big enough to hold him. The one ordered specially from Quebec City didn’t arrive until an hour after Solange and Madeleine came back, which meant that when they walked in Louis’s body was still lying on a door supported by two sawhorses. Irene had switched the heating off so the body wouldn’t putrefy too quickly. Louis’s face was blue from the snow. He looked at peace, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Like a king,” a trembling Solange would tell her mother a few hours later.

  It was feared the news might prove too much for Sister Mary of the Eucharist, so an able emissary was sent to inform the nuns. Father Rossignol flitted from branch to telegraph wire all the way to Rue Saint-Henri, wondering what to say to Mother Mary of the Great Power since she’d have to be told first.

  She was superb and steady, her reaction worthy of the man who had been her protégé.

  “You can tell Irene the nuns will take care of the funeral. She can rest and pray for Louis’s soul.”

  In the convent’s great hall, reduced to a palace of tears, all the nuns gathered; all that is, except Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who couldn’t be found. She arrived at last, her boots covered in snow after a stroll through the fir trees that surrounded the provincial house. She wiped her feet conscientiously, took off her coat, and turned to face, without a modicum of surprise, the sixty or so nuns, Mother Superior, and Father Rossignol, who were all staring at her. Sister Saint Alphonse’s double chin was still trembling, two enormous tears running down her cheeks like polar pearls. Outside in the forest, the black-capped chickadees had gone quiet. Sister Mary of the Eucharist knew already, just as she had known for her twin sister in Nagasaki. She looked at them, full of pride, almost haughtily, and proclaimed, loud and clear, so that all would remember:

  “Louis, joy of man’s desiring!”

  The question on every tongue was as follows: who among them would have the courage to throw the first clod of earth down onto Louis Lamontagne’s casket?

  “Have the courage? What do you mean courage? Surely you mean, ‘Who would have the honor of throwing the first clod of earth onto Louis Lamontagne’s casket?’ Well let me tell you something, sisters! I want it to be me! Because it was I who brought him into the world, who pulled him back from the clutches of death, who presented him like an offering to his speechless grandmother on Christmas night, God’s way of making up for taking his mother, a poor, adorable woman come to die in a foreign land!”

  Sister Mary of the Eucharist delivered her speech in theatrical tones that in other circumstances would have earned her some sort of award, trophy, or scholarship. None of the parishioners in the packed church opposed her wish, nor did any of the latecomers who had to stand through the funeral outside the church, its door left open despite it being the middle of December. Six or seven heads deep, the human tide that accompanied Louis Lamontagne to his final resting place must have been a quarter of a mile long. It took an excavator, borrowed from a building site in Témiscouata, to dig down through the dirt that was already frozen almost two feet deep.

  “There’s no way we’re leaving him to freeze over at the charnel house. We’ll bury him now.”

  The nun was categorical. Louis wouldn’t be freezing among the living until spring put in an appearance. In the church where the Bach melody so dear to the dearly departed rang out, the remaining members of the Lamontagne family themselves looked as though they’d just been dug up that morning. Overcome with sorrow, the Lamontagnes, those Atridae of the New World, didn’t say a word for days, no longer certain they spoke a tongue that God understood. Old Ma Madeleine fought back tears at the end of the family pew. Irene sat between her and Napoleon, demolished. Off to the side, because it was now out of the question that they sit next to Irene, Madeleine and Solange. The former struggling her way through a bout of nausea, the latter engulfed by unfathomable despair. Madeleine had been staying at the Bérubés’ since they came back from the States. Next to them Siegfried Zucker, the traveling salesman who had everything you could possibly need at an unbeatable price. Before Louis was even in the ground Zucker had already organized Madeleine’s escape. As they made their way to the cemetery,
his voice covered by the sobbing of the women of Rivière-du-Loup, he reached out to the young Lamontagne girl, offering a chance to avoid the dark, deep disgrace the town’s gossips intended to cast her into, bound hand and foot. Holding the two friends by the elbow, Zucker spoke in a whisper, making his Germanic accent even more of a hiss, even more mysterious. Only Solange could summon the strength to reply. That morning, Madeleine had opened the first vial of morphine she’d stolen from Dr. Beck and put a little drop beneath her tongue. He’d been right: it did make her less sad. A wave of nausea had washed over her; the colors around her had changed. Another drop before the funeral. She’d floated above the altar, heard Louis Lamontagne’s laugh, watched the teal-colored December sky. She developed a taste for morphine like others develop a taste for power and absinthe.

  “Here you cannot stay.”

  “Here is our home, Mr. Zucker.”

  “The city. The city is what you need.”

  “We’re just back from the city. We’d rather stay here.”

  Zucker became serious.

  “You do not understand. Mrs. Irene told me . . . about . . . I mean . . . about your brother Marc . . .”

  “Marc’s dead.”

  “Exactly. Madeleine, do you want someone to throw that death in your child’s face one day?”

  “Mr. Zucker. Your business on one side, ours on the other. It’s better that way. Okay?”

  “Na! Listen to me! You can’t put your child through that! Du hast keine Ahnung, wie dies ist, Solange. I know. My mother, too . . . I . . . She . . . As well, I mean . . . Her brother . . .”

  “Mr. Zucker, you’re speaking out of turn. (Solange’s tone was beginning to darken.) And Madeleine isn’t going to keep it. She’s going to give it up. The child will never know his father or mother.”

  “As you wish. I leave for Quebec City tomorrow, and for Montreal in a week. I’ve bought a building there, on Rue Saint-Hubert. There’s a kitchen. You’re both hard workers, no? There’s an apartment upstairs. You can stay there a while. Think about it. Nobody knows anyone in the city. I don’t mind if people think I’m the father.”