Maggie brings the car to a stop in front of the Hôpital Mentale Saint-Sulpice, and sits there for several minutes, trying to collect herself. Its redbrick facade and inviting front yard make Maggie think it was probably quite a charming home once. If not for the bars on the dormer windows, it still could be.
A quick phone call to the foundling home in Cowansville revealed that a three-week-old baby girl had arrived there in April of 1950 and was transferred a month later to Saint-Sulpice, as her father had guessed. In 1954, its name—and, with it, its vocation—was officially changed to the Hôpital Mentale Saint-Sulpice.
Maggie gets out of the car and stands at the front door for a long time, imagining her infant daughter being brought here all those years ago in the arms of a stranger. She takes a breath and bangs the knocker. Almost immediately, someone opens the door.
“Can I help you?”
Maggie is surprised to find herself facing a middle-aged man with an Elvis pompadour. She’d been expecting a nun.
“Is there someone in charge I can speak to?” she asks him. “One of the sisters?”
“I’m the caretaker.”
“I’d like some information about my daughter.”
The man frowns. He has tired eyes, a hard expression. He must get women like Maggie showing up all the time looking for their long-lost children, especially since the commissions of inquiry are just being made public. “We don’t give out information,” he says. “It’s against the law.”
She steps toward him and presses a fifty-dollar bill into his hand. “Please accept this donation,” she says nervously. “Anything you can tell me would be appreciated.”
He hesitates a moment and then quickly pockets the money. “Come with me,” he says.
Maggie follows him inside, noting the grim interior—dim lighting, neglected furniture, a strong odor of mildew—as they make their way to an office at the back. He tugs on a cord, and a bare bulb illuminates a narrow room lined with wooden filing cabinets. Maggie scans the cabinets, envisioning their sanctified contents—babies’ names, birth parents’ names, adoptive families’ names, dates of birth, places of birth, hospital records, birth certificates; all of it off-limits to the very people who most want access.
“Name?” the man says.
“Maggie Larsson.”
“The girl’s name,” he says impatiently. “Did she have one?”
“Elodie.”
“Date of birth?”
“March 6th, 1950.”
He kneels down in front of the cabinet marked 1948–1950 and flips through the manila file folders until he finds what he’s looking for. Maggie holds her breath.
“Here,” he says, handing her the file. He leans back up against the cabinets and lights a cigarette. “Hurry up before Sister Tata and the others get back. Most of them are still at the morning service.”
Exactly what she was hoping. Maggie opens the file with shaking hands. There are two documents inside. The first is a copy of the birth certificate. Name, Elodie. Date of birth, March 6th, 1950. Place of birth, Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital. Cowansville, Quebec. Mother: unknown. Father: unknown.
The other paper in the folder is a Record of Transfer. “What is this?” Maggie asks. “It’s dated October 1957.”
“A lot of children were transferred to the mental hospitals in Montreal,” he says. “After the conversion.”
“Does that mean she wasn’t adopted?”
“Not if there’s a Record of Transfer.”
“But why would she have been transferred?”
“To make room for more patients,” he responds. “After ’55, they started sending real mental patients here. They had to start shipping orphans to the asylums in the city to make space. We weren’t equipped to handle them all.”
“Were you here then?” she asks him. “Do you think you might remember her?”
“I’ve only been here two years,” he tells her. “I was working at an orphanage in Valleyfield before that, but I remember the day the nuns there told the children.”
He stubs out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray and opens his pack for another. He hands her one and lights it. It feels good in her lungs. It’s the first deep breath she’s taken in hours.
“I remember one of the nuns going from classroom to classroom that morning, announcing to the children that they were all going to be declared mentally deficient. Imagine? The nuns were upset, they knew they were doing something wrong.”
He shakes his head at the memory. “One day they were all sitting in class, getting an education,” he says. “The next, just like that, no more school. They were treated like retards from then on. Bars went up on the windows, as you can see. Gates around the property. It wasn’t long after that when they started sending them to asylums in Montreal, cramming them into wards already overcrowded with real mental patients.”
The small room is cloudy with their cigarette smoke. “Why?” she asks, knowing the answer. Hating it.
“Why is the easy part,” he says. “The province paid the nuns a pittance to care for orphans, and more than three times as much to care for mental patients. That’s why Mount Providence turned itself into a mental institution, and why so many orphanages in Quebec followed suit. It’s always about money, isn’t it?”
“That can’t have been legal?”
He lets out a hard laugh. “Legal?” he says. “Who do you think benefited most from the whole thing? The moment those kids’ records were changed to classify them as mentally deficient, the church and Duplessis started to line their pockets. The province got giant subsidies from the federal government to build hospitals, so it could certainly afford to pay the church more than triple for taking care of mental patients than it used to pay for orphans.”
“Where was she taken?” Maggie asks him. “Why doesn’t it say on this Record of Transfer?”
“They wouldn’t have included that information. Nothing that might lead someone like you to your child was ever kept.”
“Where are the rest of the documents?” Maggie wants to know. “Shouldn’t there be more?”
“A lot of the records were destroyed after the orphanages were converted. It’s possible hers were transferred to the asylum with her, but as you can see, if there was a Record of Transfer left here, it would be quite vague.”
Maggie closes the file and hands it back to him. She feels as hollow as she did the day Elodie was taken from her eleven years ago. “Do you have any idea where she might have been sent?” she asks him. “Any idea at all?”
“Maybe Saint-Nazarius or Mercy. Those were the two where most of our orphans were transferred. I doubt you’ll find her, though. They’re all fortresses, those places. Besides, most of the records on that end are all lies anyway. I’ve seen files describing normal, healthy kids as severely retarded, a danger to themselves and others. All made up. Real records were expunged. A lot of those orphans were given new names when they got to the hospitals—starting with A for the babies born in January, B for February, and so on.”
Maggie’s spirits plummet. How will she ever find Elodie if Elodie was given a new name? If her records—her identity—were wiped clean?
“The church has to keep covering this up,” the caretaker says. “You won’t be able to pay them off the way you did me.”
“What can I do?”
“You could write to Quebec City.”
“Where will that get me?” she sniffs. “Since when does the government get involved with helping orphans?”
“Since Duplessis died,” he says. “A commission of psychiatrists has been investigating some of the province’s mental hospitals. At Mount Providence they’ve already concluded that most of the five hundred children they examined are perfectly normal. Big surprise, heh?”
“What are they doing about it?”
“I’m not sure. I think the plan is to put the younger ones into foster care. Let the older ones fend for themselves.” He shrugs, his expression cynical. “The new government has only just revealed these kids don’t belong in mental institutions. There are still hundreds of hospitals to investigate.”
“My God. So I may be able to get her back,” Maggie says.
“If you manage to find her,” he says. “But believe me, the nuns will do everything in their power to stop you.”
Outside, Maggie takes several deep breaths before jumping in her car and driving home, where she immediately starts firing off letters to the provincial government, demanding to see her daughter’s files and to learn where she was transferred in 1957.