The blizzard brought an early twilight to the Gagnons’ front room, which the fire’s glow could only partially dispel. Behind us the snow rasped against the windowpane. I nestled back into Yves’s embracing arm and sipped the warming tea. He gently ran his hand along my shoulder, down my arm and back up again. I waited for his next move, unsure how vigorously I would reciprocate. But when Yves placed his fingers on my cheek, I managed to shove aside my thoughts of Eric and turned my face towards his.
Yet no pressing kiss came. Only a brush of his lips, then he stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, I must make a phone call,” he said and left the room, leaving me feeling like a fool. While I was thinking romantic thoughts, he had been thinking of business.
I jumped up and paced the room. Perhaps it was time for me to leave, but a glance outside told me that driving home through this obliterating snow would be no easy journey.
On one of the walls hung a Victorian painting of a rather sour-looking man whose almond-shaped brown eyes, although scowling, reminded me of Yves. And the portrait of the stern looking woman beside him with the blunt middle-part in her brown hair could only be a great-grandmother of Soeur Yvonne.
My curiosity sparked by this old Québécois family, I walked over to the collection of photos that lined the mantle. It took me a second to identify the young airman with the carefree smile so at odds with the angry scowl of today. With his pencil-thin mustache and full head of hair, the young Papa Gagnon cut quite the dashing figure. I even detected the je ne sais quoi bearing I saw in his son.
And in another photo, Papa Gagnon looked downright happy, but since it was his wedding photo, he could be excused. Still, I did wonder what had so soured him in later life. Yvette could almost be the twin of the young woman standing beside him in her wedding finery. With her shy doe eyes, she looked as if she wasn’t quite sure she warranted the honour of a photograph.
In a later photo, both arms of this reticent woman were occupied with a baby dressed in a long white christening gown. Yves and Yvonne. It was impossible to tell them apart. Although fraternal twins, in this photo they appeared identical. However, by the time they were three—or so I judged them to be in another photo—it was easier to discern the differences. Yvonne’s more somber demeanour was evident in the unsmiling child with the sausage-like ringlets and the smocked dress, whereas Yves with his boy’s haircut and crisplyironed short pants beamed with a mischievous glint to his eye, like any little boy.
There were more photographs of the twins in their early years with their smiling parents, and one of just the two of them standing proudly in their confirmation finery. And a photo of a teenage Yvonne clad in a school uniform, without her twin brother.
The photos of Yvette were fewer, almost as if the proud parents had run out of enthusiasm, except I shouldn’t say parents. Shortly after she entered the family, there was only one, Papa Gagnon. Where the sad, doe-eyed young woman had sat in the twins’ baptismal photo, an unsmiling Papa Gagnon sat with the baby Yvette held stiffly in his arms.
As I contemplated the possible reason for this, Yves returned to the room, and taking the photo from my hands said, “A sad photo, non? La pet’te with no maman.”
“What happened to her?”
“Yvette killed her,” he replied succinctly.
“Surely you don’t mean that?”
“But it is true. Maman died giving birth. If it wasn’t for Yvette, she would be alive today.”
“What a terrible thing to say. It sounds as if you wished your sister hadn’t been born.”
He shrugged. “Oui, tu as raison. It does sound like that, doesn’t it? And to some extent it is true. Maman was so gentle and good. Her room was a sanctuary against Papa’s severity. I was ten years old when it happened in our family’s former home near Quebec. I will never forget the cries of my mother, my father pleading with the priest to let the doctor save my mother, and the priest insisting that it was the will of God, that a woman’s duty was to produce children, even if it meant she died.
“I remember very clearly Maman’s last words. She screamed her hatred of God, then she was silent. Next, I heard the cry of a new baby. I ran into the room to see the priest, his face red with anger, anointing my beautiful, but dead Maman, while Papa shouted at him that he would answer for what he has done.”
He stood rigid, his eyes wide-eyed with remembered fright and pain. I reached out to comfort him, and he fell into my arms as if he were still that ten-year-old boy. For several long minutes his body trembled with his grief.
As he regained control, he pushed me away, saying “Please, I apologize. I do not know what came over me. Forgive my momentary weakness.”
“There is nothing to apologize for. You loved your mother very much. Her memory is still very real, so is her death. It must have been difficult for you and your sisters to grow up without her.”
He straightened his jacket and brushed his hair off his forehead. “Papa loved us, I know, but he loved our Maman more. It was many years before he could turn his attention to us. In the meantime, we had my father’s sister, Tante Marthe. She moved into our house and brought us up.”
He reached over to a photo that had been wedged behind another one. The Gagnon family posed in its completeness; that is except for the gentle, doe-eyed mother. In her stead stood a tall, rigid woman who reminded me of Soeur Yvonne. I could almost hear the brusque scolding words she would’ve used with these motherless children.
“Not like your mother, was she?”
He gave a brittle laugh. “Yvonne and I were lucky. Tante Marthe sent us away to school, Yvonne to the Ursulines, me to the Jesuits. It was Yvette who bore the brunt of our aunt’s harsh hand. She never knew Maman’s tender touch.
“In some respects, our aunt can be forgiven, for she was trying to make up for the sins of Papa. When my mother died, Papa was so angry that he struck the priest and vowed never to attend mass again. As a result he was excommunicated. Fearing for our souls, my aunt tried to make up for this and instilled in us a fear and a reverence for God.”
“Is that why Yvonne became a nun?” I asked. “And why Yvette’s bedroom is like a nun’s cell?”
He looked at me curiously. “Perhaps, I never looked at it that way.”
“And what about you? Did you reject God like your father, or did your aunt make you a good Catholic too?”
Yves stuck his hands into his jacket pockets and turned to face the window. “I was young. I didn’t know any better. I listened to my aunt and the priest. But then…” Yves’s body went rigid, “something so dreadful happened that I knew God could not exist.”
I waited a few seconds, thinking he would continue, then I asked the question that begged to be asked. “What happened?”
He stared out the window with sightless eyes at the flying snow. The fire cracked and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. The chimes of a clock in the hall echoed four o’clock.
I could feel despair seeping from his heart. I reached out to fold him in my arms. He jumped at my touch and pushed my arms aside so forcefully that my right hand cracked against the hard wood of a nearby chair.
“Don’t ever ask me that again,” he shouted. But, the instant he said those words, he seemed to regret them, for he immediately said, “Je m’excuse. Please, excuse me.”
Then he turned towards me. “Rien. Nothing. We leave our old family home and go to the house of Tante Marthe on Île d’Orleans.” he said. “And we live happy ever after. C’est tout.”
He embraced me, or more like clutched me with the force of a drowning man. Although I tried to project the strength I sensed he was seeking, I felt myself backing off, trying to understand and accept the inner turmoil that was this man. He kept his arms locked around me for what seemed an eternity. Then as suddenly as the embrace had begun, it ended.
“Come, let us have a real drink,” he said. Then with a shrug, as if nothing had happened, he retreated to the kitchen, leaving me to rub my bruised hand. The pain and its cause opened the floodgate on the memories of my ex-husband’s abuse, memories that I’d managed to dam these past couple of years. No way, I thought, no way I would go through that hell again. Time to leave.
I was just entering the kitchen when the back door was flung open, and Papa Gagnon emerged from the blizzard’s fury. He grunted when he saw me, and nodding in my direction, growled something to his son in French, which I took to mean, “What is she doing here?”
Without waiting for his son to answer, he shook the snow from his encrusted tuque and hung it on a wall hook next to my jacket. He removed his wet boots and placed them beside the wood stove. Then he struggled out of his snowmobile outfit and hung it to drip on the linoleum floor.
He did all this in an angry silence. Yves said nothing. He remained standing next to the kitchen counter, but I felt him stiffen as an animal would when facing a known threat.
With a final grunt, Papa Gagnon slumped down into an old captain’s chair beside the stove. He glared at his son and spat out, “Take off those damn clothes.”
At least that’s what I thought he’d said, given my limited understanding of joual. When Yves ripped off his cashmere sports jacket and flung it at his father, I figured I wasn’t far wrong.
At that point, I grabbed my jacket and boots. Far easier to face the storm outside than the one that was building in there. So with hasty thanks and a goodbye, I left.