The Forgotten Daughter

by Joanna Goodman

  He beats her twice in a row, much to his relief. They return to their table, and he orders another round. Talking to her is easy, fun.

  “Did you see your father when you were growing up?” he ventures. He’s opened up about his father; now it’s her turn.

  “Of course.”

  “So you went out to the penitentiary?”

  “How else would I have seen him?”

  “And now? He’s in your life?”

  “He’s my dad.”

  “Is he sorry for what he did?”

  “Are you interviewing me?” she asks him, her tone changing.

  “No, I’m just curious. I know you believe in his cause.”

  “It’s not just his cause,” she interrupts. “It’s Quebec’s cause. It’s the French working-class cause. It was and still is so much bigger than the FLQ.”

  “He brainwashed you from jail.”

  “I think for myself.”

  “So you’re okay with what he did?”

  She sighs. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that an innocent man died,” he says. “And you haven’t had a father for most of your life. How can you possibly agree with what they did?”

  “I never said I agreed with it. You can’t stop being a journalist, can you?”

  “I’m inquisitive, yes,” he admits. “But I’m not asking for my job. I genuinely want to know.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she says, her eyes darkening. “But it’s none of your business.”

  “Do you ever lighten up?”

  “You tricked me.”

  “Tricked you? How?”

  “I would never have come here if I thought you were going to interrogate me about my father.”

  “I’m just trying to get to know you,” he scrambles. “I thought we were . . . connecting.”

  “Why? Because your father had a fleur-de-lis tattoo?”

  “You said the exact same thing to me in August,” he reminds her. “You said, ‘You think just because your dad worked at Vickers . . .’ You’ve got some serious trust issues, Miss Fortin.”

  Before he finishes his sentence, she gets up out of her seat, calm and cool, pulls a handful of cash out of her back pocket, and tosses a twenty onto the table. Without uttering a word, she’s out the door, leaving him alone with her abandoned protest sign and her half-full beer.

  Screw her. He doesn’t need this adolescent drama in his life.

  He drives back to Montreal in a bad mood. He pops a Pearl Jam CD in the player and cranks it up, but it only makes him grumpier. Now she’s ruined the band for him. He’ll never listen to them again and not think of her, not see those big brown eyes staring at him or that lovely white back with the fleur-de-lis carved into the hollow between her shoulder blades.

  Was he out of line? Did he ambush her? He couldn’t stop himself from asking her about the infamous Léo Fortin. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want her as much as he wants the story. Now he’s messed up both opportunities.

  3

  It’s late October, a cold night with a sharp wind pushing the tree branches against her building. Elodie keeps the window open because she likes to feel and smell the outdoors at all times, no matter how cold it gets. It reminds her that she is free. She likes the distinct smell of every season, each one with its own sensory memories. She will never forget her first autumn after seventeen years of being locked up; the way the leaves felt beneath her shoes when she walked, the ashy breath of chimneys coming to life, the bite of air in her nostrils and the smell of damp earth decaying. This is October for her.

  Elodie is having her dinner in front of the TV, which she does every night. She doesn’t like to eat alone, and TV is a good companion. She’s watching the news. The results of the referendum on this recent constitutional accord have come in, and it was rejected. Voted down, just like the last one. It doesn’t surprise Elodie. Quebec is not the compromising type, and the rest of the country is sick of it. A young woman on TV is raging at the camera. “This accord was a waste of time and energy,” she says, the microphone right up to her mouth. “Hopefully this is the end of all constitutional talks for a long time. It’s a joke.’”

  This girl should be happy, Elodie thinks. Someone as smart and well-spoken as her, someone so young and beautiful. The world is hers for the taking, and yet she seems so full of rage. When Elodie was her age, she was afraid to breathe, let alone scream into a TV camera about the government.

  When Elodie first got out of the asylum and discovered this tension between the French and English, she was absolutely baffled. How could speaking a different language be enough to make someone an enemy? The real enemies were the doctors and the nuns, the monsters who put you in the mental hospital, the ones who labeled you crazy when you weren’t and abused the hell out of you, the government that profited from it all. Those were formidable enemies. But an English person? A Francophone? For no other reason than the language they spoke? This ongoing animosity between both sides has always annoyed Elodie. There are far more serious matters to get angry about in this province.

  “This country has never shown Quebec the respect it deserves,” the girl on TV is saying. “This referendum result proves that Quebec independence is the only way forward!”

  Quebec throws a referendum like it’s a birthday party. Elodie doesn’t understand it. She remembers the first referendum in 1980—the big one, the one that would decide whether or not Quebec would separate from Canada and become its own country. Her daughter, Nancy, was nine at the time. She came home from school one day, in the midst of all the political propaganda, and she was crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Elodie asked her, pulling the little girl into her arms. She always made a point of being affectionate with Nancy; a hug or a caress was like a salve to a child—she knew that.

  “They called me a stupid frog and a separatist,” Nancy sobbed, her face pressed into Elodie’s sweater.

  “Who did?”

  “The English kids from the English school.”

  “What English school?”

  Nancy went to a French school. She’d only ever spoken French.

  “It was pen pal day,” Nancy explained. “Our English pen pals came to our class for the day, and they started writing NO on the blackboard, and then we started writing OUI, and then they started calling us frogs and peppers and separatists.”

  Nine years old and already the divisiveness had been wholly absorbed by a new generation. It was generally understood that if you were English, you would vote No in the referendum; and if you were French, you would vote Yes. The campaign exploded around those two simple words; they became symbolic, iconic. There were stickers, signs, placards on front lawns. You were either No or Oui; everything was understood about you based on that. Of course it was much more complicated than that. Not all the French wanted to separate. Many were afraid of the financial uncertainty that would follow; others thought it was extreme. But the separatists, as they were known, were longtime French nationalists, mainly blue collar. They were the pure laine and they fiercely wanted their own country. They had for decades.

  In the end, the No side won. Sixty percent of Quebeckers voted against separation. That put the separation question to rest. Until now.

  Elodie wonders if the failure of this new proposed accord will resurrect it. Those nine-year-olds from Nancy’s fourth grade class are twenty-one now, and if their generation is anything like this girl on TV, they’re angry and ready for battle.

  Just as Elodie is about to change the channel, the news anchor says two words that stop her cold.

  Duplessis. Orphans.

  Elodie turns up the volume, barely breathing.

  “In the fifties, the Duplessis government made a shocking decision to convert the province’s orphanages into mental institutions to gain larger subsidies from the federal government. Seemingly overnight, thousands of Quebec orphans were reclassified as mental patients—”

  Reclassified, Elodie thinks, disg
usted. It almost makes it sound humane.

  “The Bédard report of 1962 revealed that about one-third of the province’s twenty thousand mental patients did not belong in the institutions, and it put an end to the monstrous practice. Many of the orphans who had reached adulthood were released from these institutions. Today, they are grown up and they are angry. They call themselves the Duplessis Orphans Committee.”

  Cut to a group of men and women marching in front of Cardinal Turcotte’s office at the Archdiocese of Montreal. “They want justice,” the announcer continues, in voice-over. “Louise Tremblay was sent to Mont Providence Hospital in 1950, when she was just six years old.”

  A woman about fifty, a little older than Elodie, appears on screen. She’s crying as she tells her story to the reporter. “They told me I was mentally challenged. One day I was in school, an orphan. The next day, bars went up on the windows and mental patients were shipped in. That was it. From that day on, the nuns and the doctors spent the next two decades convincing me I was crazy.”

  Elodie closes her eyes, reliving her own experience of Change of Vocation Day. She remembers Mother Superior standing before them in the classroom and announcing that the orphanage was to become a mental hospital. Some of the other nuns were crying as Mother Superior went on to say there would be no more school. “From this day forward,” she told them, “you are all mentally deficient.”

  The orphanage, Ste. Sulpice, was the only home Elodie had ever known. She’d always been happy there, but everything changed quickly after the Change of Vocation. The children now had to take care of real mental patients, who had arrived by bus one day from a mental hospital in the city. Elodie’s job was to bathe them. One of the crazies bit her. Soon, new nuns began arriving—mean ones, always yelling at them. And then, without warning, Elodie was taken away in the middle of the night.

  “I want an apology!” Louise Tremblay cries on TV.

  She’s got those sad eyes, Elodie thinks. That’s what Nancy’s father said to Elodie, lying in bed the only time they were ever together, right before he went off to Vietnam. You have such sad eyes for someone so young.

  “I want compensation,” Louise Tremblay rails. “I’m on welfare, I can’t read or write. I can’t work because of a back injury from all the beatings I endured.”

  On TV, the announcer is wrapping up her story. “The Duplessis orphans are rallying together and speaking up,” she says. “They want to be heard. They won’t be ignored anymore. They want everyone to know what was done to them and why.”

  I am one of them, Elodie thinks. What she lived through has a name. Duplessis orphan.

  She goes to her bedroom and retrieves her notebook and the book proposal her mother wrote not long after they’d found each other. The book no one would touch. Maybe now it’s time to tell her story.

  Maybe now someone is finally willing to hear it.

  The phone rings, right on cue. Her mother.

  “Are you watching the news?” Maggie asks her.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to fight now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  4

  NOVEMBER 1992

  Outside the Verdun metro station, an Arctic wind pummels Véronique’s face, and she has to pull the hood of her parka down over her eyes. She probably thinks the same thing every year, but this feels like the coldest November she can remember. Head down, she passes a parked car and notices a brand-new Le Château bag on the passenger seat. The door is unlocked, and she could easily swipe the bag. Not that she would ever steal from one of her own, but the carelessness of it annoys her. It’s not always a bad thing to think like a criminal.

  She continues walking quickly toward Rue Rielle, where her parents have lived in the same beige-brick duplex with the S-shaped balcony for the past nine years. This afternoon the sky is matte gray, dull, giving the neighborhood a depressed feeling. She opens the door without knocking. “Allo? M’ma? Papa?”

  It’s Sunday dinner, and the foyer smells of cigarette smoke and roast chicken. Her father is in his recliner, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, with a Montreal Canadiens ashtray balancing on the arm of the chair. His shaggy hair is completely gray on the sides, but it’s still a full head. He’s got his own teeth—impressive for a French Canadian pushing fifty—and only a slight beer pooch above his belt buckle. A thick moustache covers most of the lower half of his face. He barely looks up from the TV to greet her, but his voice is warm, fond. “Allo, ma belle fille.”

  “Hi, Pa,” she says, unwinding her scarf. “How was your week?”

  “Same as always,” he complains.

  There’s an undercurrent of disappointment that vibrates around Léo. Even he acknowledges on a regular basis how much jail changed him. “A man gets broken in prison,” he’ll say. “That’s what it’s designed to do: tear you down, destroy your spirit, take away all your passions, one by one. First you forget what music sounds like. Then you forget how to sing, how to laugh, even how to cry. They take away every single thing that’s precious to you. It’s damn hard to get the joie de vivre back.”

  When he first got out, he still had some fire in him. He probably thought he could pick up where he’d left off with his crusade, but he soon realized that the eighties were very different from the sixties. He tried to reestablish himself as a prominent nationalist. He saw himself as a hero, and although he’d always had a cultlike following of admirers and hard-core separatists, his attempts at repurposing a career in the nationalist political milieu went nowhere. His supporters were, and always had been, the marginalized and disparate minority. Léo wrote a few articles for a leftist Quebec magazine that advocated sovereignty and democratic socialism, but when the magazine folded, so did Léo. He talked briefly about running for leadership in the Parti de la Démocratie Socialiste, but his talk had a delusional undertone, as though even he knew he was living in a fantasy world. The separatists had lost their first big referendum in 1980, and people were sick of thinking, hearing, and talking about it.

  After his first few exhilarating months out of jail, the high began to wear off and the promise of everything he would accomplish with his newfound freedom began to fade. He settled back into life on the outside, and Véronique watched as the fight slowly began to seep out of him, replaced by an unhappy resignation. He went back to work, operating a forklift at a plastics factory, and bought the small house on Rue Rielle; Lisette continued to clean houses.

  The only thing that remained stalwart was their marriage. Prison, at least, had not managed to diminish Léo and Lisette’s love for each other. Together, they quietly continued to pit themselves against the unjust world, the Goliath that had always oppressed them. The only difference between now and then—youth and middle age, pre- and post-jail—was that their battle was now waged from the couch or kitchen table, not through bold action or violence.

  “I pulled my back again,” he mutters, still staring at the TV. “Goddamn factory work. Promise me you won’t let this happen to you”—“this” being a regular job, working for the man. “Don’t let my twelve years in the slammer be for nothing.”

  She can see he’s in one of his moods. She leans over and kisses his forehead. He has his usual smell of tobacco and hair gel. “I won’t,” she says, appeasing him.

  It hasn’t always been easy with Léo. Even though she no longer lives at home, his erratic temperament still rattles her.

  When he first got out of jail, he barged into their lives with his big personality and his dark moods, his unrealistic expectations for everyone and everything around him. As his expectations began to topple, he grew even more sullen. Véronique, who was used to Lisette’s steady pragmatism, was unnerved by him. But he tried to be a good father. He genuinely adored her, always wanted to spend time with her. Too much, she sometimes thought. He didn’t discipline her; he left that to Lisette. His domain was imparting life lessons: The French are as e
xploited as they’ve always been. Nothing has changed. The rich are evil. The Anglos are the enemy. The government is corrupt. The system is fixed against us. You have to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what. Lines are made for crossing. True freedom is living outside the law.

  He put great effort into making up for lost time. His generosity was overwrought, slightly smothering. He wanted things from her, too—forgiveness, approval, absolution. Even at twelve, Véronique understood this and knew what was expected of her. It was a lot of pressure, the responsibility for mending his broken spirit and grouting his unfulfilled cracks with her potential.

  Around the age of fourteen, assailed by puberty, she became angry with him. Angry that he’d missed her entire childhood, frustrated with the burden of having to make up for a decade of lost time, of having to carry the torch of all his failed ambitions and dreams. Who the hell did he think he was? He’d homed in on her territory, and all she wanted was some privacy. They began to bump up against each other. They fought often. She used to tell him he wasn’t a real father. She was fond of saying, “You don’t belong here.” About his crime, Léo said very little. This was unspoken in their house; they were all complicit in the shroud of silence. But one day, in the midst of those turbulent teen years, Véronique said, “Are you the one who murdered Pierre Laporte?”

  They were outside washing his car. “It was all of us,” he said, not looking up from the windshield he was scrubbing. “We acted as one.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “So you’d grow up in a better world than I did.”

  He’d said as much to the cameras, too, the night they captured him hiding in the Townships: “I did it for my baby girl!” It was all over the news, her father declaring that a man’s life had been sacrificed for his child’s.

  “Well, I don’t want someone’s murder on my conscience,” she said.