“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, disgusted. 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.”