NOVEMBER 1995
Elodie pulls up in front of the house on Terrace Groulx. There’s a large OUI sign on the front lawn, Christmas lights strewn around the railing. It’s just after four in the afternoon, but the sky is already dusky violet and quickly darkening. Outside, she pulls her hood over her head and looks up at the house. She has no idea what she’s going to do if he’s there. One minute she was home, rereading parts of Bruno’s memoir. Next thing she knew, she was on the Champlain Bridge headed for the Townships.
Standing at the foot of Dr. Duceppe’s front walk now, she can hardly remember what she thought might come of such a confrontation. She approaches the house. She can see there’s a light on inside through the curtains of the picture window. She closes her eyes and presses her finger to the doorbell. Let him not be home. Let him not be home. Her heart is pounding. She can hear muffled voices inside. A woman. Let him not be home.
The door opens. She freezes.
“Can I help you?” he says, without warmth. It’s him.
Forty years later, she is standing in front of the man who blithely sentenced her to life in hell. He must be in his seventies now, but the essence of him is unchanged; he’s still intimidating, with an edge of brusqueness in his tone and cold eyes. His hair is white, with the same Clark Gable moustache trimmed exactly as it was back then, in two perfectly symmetrical spear tips with a clean-shaven Cupid’s bow. He’s wearing bifocals and his teeth have yellowed, but otherwise, he looks remarkably the same.
He’s watching her, obviously not recognizing her. Time stands still. She’s five years old again, trying to find her voice. “My—my name is Elodie.”
He nods impatiently, waiting for more. Her name means nothing to him. She means nothing to him.
“Elodie . . . de Ste. Sulpice,” she stammers.
Recognition slowly lights his eyes. She senses his discomfort. He seems to shrink back from her. “Do I know you?”
“Elodie de Ste. Sulpice,” she says, with more confidence. “I was an orphan at Ste. Sulpice in 1955.”
He shakes his head, dismissing her. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“This is my file,” she says, shoving it at him. “You were the one who diagnosed me mentally retarded.” She opens the file and points to his signature at the bottom of the page. “That’s your name, right there.”
“I saw so many children,” he mutters. “It’s late—”
“I just want a few minutes of your time,” she says. “I just want to ask you some questions. Please? I just need answers.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, attempting to close the door.
She holds up her hand. “Please? Isn’t it the very least you can do? Just talk to me for a few minutes? Help me to understand.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let her in, Guillaume.”
A woman’s voice, behind him. Dr. Duceppe turns, startled.
“Let her in,” Mme. Duceppe repeats.
He hesitates a moment and then holds open the door with an audible sigh. Elodie steps inside the vestibule. The house is already decorated for Christmas—a tree twinkling from the corner of the living room, a garland hanging from the fireplace. The wife collects fancy dolls, which are displayed all over the place—creepy little girls wearing fur stoles and hand muffs. There’s a round table beside the couch, on which a Nativity scene is spread out over a fur-trimmed emerald green velvet tablecloth. A musical snow globe of Santa and Mrs. Claus is playing “Deck the Halls.” Elodie doesn’t know where to look.
“Would you like a cup of coffee? Some sucre-à-crème?”
Dr. Duceppe shoots his wife an irritated look.
“No thank you,” Elodie says.
“Can I take your coat?”
“No.”
“Sit, please,” Mme. Duceppe says.
Elodie removes a needlepoint cushion of a reindeer from one of the press-back chairs facing the couch and sits down. Not knowing what to do with the cushion, she places it on her lap, resting her hands on the reindeer’s face.
“Guillaume, do you want coffee?” his wife asks him.
He shakes his head and she bustles off, but not before giving Elodie an unmistakable look of sympathy.
“I’m not sure how I can help,” Dr. Duceppe says, taking a seat on the couch. “It was a very long time ago.”
“Why did you do it?” Elodie asks him, holding up her file. “Why did you sign this?”
Dr. Duceppe is silent.
“I wasn’t mentally deficient in any way,” she says. “I didn’t know what a wallet was. Or keys. How could I? I’d never seen any before. I was only five! And from that you determined I belonged in an insane asylum?”
“It was much more complicated than that.”
“How could it be?” Elodie says, her file shaking in her hands. “I was a normal little girl. You ruined my life—”
“No,” he interrupts. “Duplessis ruined your life. You have to understand, our hands were tied. Duplessis gave the order. The nuns told us what to do. If it hadn’t been me signing your assessment, it would have been another doctor. You were going to wind up in an institution no matter what. There was nowhere else for all of you to go.”
She can feel tears coming, but she wills them back.
“The orphanages were terribly overcrowded,” he explains. “They were filled well beyond capacity. There simply weren’t enough of them to house all the illegitimate children in the province, let alone enough money. There was nowhere for all of you to go but to the hospitals. I told myself you would all be better off there than on the street. That’s what it came down to.”
“You knew the nuns and the provincial government would get more money for mental patients than for orphans,” she says, unbuttoning her coat. The room is hot; her face feels flushed. “You knew and you just went along.”
“Of course,” he admits. “We all knew. Everyone knew. But what could we do? The order came directly from Premier Duplessis. Quebec was basically a theocracy back then. The church ran just about every institution in the province, and in return, Duplessis helped the church impose its traditions on every aspect of Quebec society. It was quid pro quo, and it was impenetrable. Those of us in the College of Physicians—we were just puppets. We did what we were told. We asked no questions.”
“You turned a blind eye,” Elodie accuses. “You had an obligation to uphold the standards of all the psychiatrists in the province. Your obligation was to protect us!”
“My sin was following orders and staying silent, yes. But what choice did I have back then? I couldn’t disobey the most powerful man in the province. Or the church, for that matter. To whom should I have reported what was happening? Duplessis himself? The police, who were also under his thumb? My priest? There was nowhere to turn with my doubts.”
“You had to know where you were sending us.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I never knew about the mistreatment in the hospitals.”
“That can’t be true,” she says. “If you’d ever set foot on any of those wards—which of course you must have done hundreds of times—you would have seen with your own eyes.”
“Mam’selle Sulpice,” he says, “we had no choice but to transfer all those children to mental hospitals. As a practical reality, there was no alternative. Not only were the orphanages overcrowded, but the hospitals were understaffed and in desperate need of labor.”
“Cheap labor. Which we provided.”
“Yes. In those days the nuns believed they had the right to judge and punish illegitimate children for the sins of their parents. It was the morality of the times. Given your circumstances, you were considered fortunate to be housed and cared for anywhere.”
“Cared for?” Elodie cries, standing up. “We would have been better off in the street!”
“Well. As for what went on behind the walls of those hospitals,” he says, “we knew implicitly not to infringe on any practices or decisions made by hospital management. That was the church’s domain, certainly not within the purview of the doctors.”
“It’s always the same excuse. The doctors blame the church, the church blames the doctors—”
“I only did what the nuns told me to do.”
“Most of the children you misdiagnosed are illiterate, uneducated, and living on welfare now. I did okay for myself. I found my family. But my friend Francine has brain damage from all the drugs she was given. She can’t work. And my best friend from Ste. Sulpice is dead. She overdosed in her twenties.”
Elodie pauses long enough to notice Mme. Duceppe standing in the doorway, looking horrified. Elodie takes a breath and sits back down, this time on the reindeer cushion.
Dr. Duceppe lowers his head.
“Do you remember me at all?” Elodie asks him.
He shakes his head, still looking at the floor. “Truthfully,” he says, “I don’t remember doing any proper exams at all. Not really. It was more like paperwork, bureaucracy.”
“Do you even feel guilty about what you did?”
“I don’t like to think about it,” he says. “At the time, back in the fifties, I thought I was doing the right thing by trying to keep a roof over your heads. But when you all started showing up outside my house, picketing and protesting . . .” He returns his gaze to the floor. “I’ve questioned my actions many times.”
“Questioned?”
“Yes, questioned whether I could have done something different. Something more noble.” He looks up at her again. “And the answer is no. There was nothing else I could have done. Not then. But to answer your question, do I feel remorse now? Yes, I do. I’m a good Catholic. I’d have to be a monster not to feel terrible about what happened to you all, or not to feel guilty about my hand in your suffering.”
“You knew we weren’t at all mentally deficient when you diagnosed us, didn’t you?”
“I do remember the smaller orphanages like Ste. Sulpice,” he admits. “I did think the children seemed normal and well-adjusted, in some cases quite bright. Happy, even.”
“I was happy,” she says. “Until the day you came.”
“Understandably,” he murmurs.
“I’d like you to put that in writing.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I would like you to write a letter saying that you falsely diagnosed me on the orders of the nuns and the Duplessis government, even though you knew I was not mentally deficient.”
“I don’t understand what that will accomplish.”
“Having it in writing will bring me some peace of mind.”
She did not come here with the intention of forcing him to write a confession letter or an apology; the idea did not occur to her until just now. But having asked for it, she will not leave here without it.
“What will you do with it?” he asks nervously. Not a monster, but a coward.
“I don’t know yet. Probably just keep it in the drawer beside my bed, to remind myself every day that I’m not crazy, and I never was.”
“He’ll do it,” Mme. Duceppe intervenes, stepping into the room with a pen and a notepad. She hands it to her husband, glaring at him. Dr. Duceppe takes the pen. Elodie can’t help thinking about the last time they sat across from each other, him with his pen and pad, jotting down notes, barely looking at her; and Elodie, completely naïve and trusting, her fate—unbeknownst to her—about to be sealed by the stroke of his pen.
“What do you want me to say?” he asks her.
“The truth.”
He bows his head over the page and begins to write. A strand of white hair flops over his eye. His brows furrow in concentration, a snowy ledge across his forehead. Elodie watches him write. Anxious about reading it. She isn’t sure what she’ll do with it yet, possibly just leave it in her drawer, read it whenever her self-confidence is waning. Or maybe she’ll present it in court one day—proof of the falsification of her records. She makes a mental note to discuss it with Bruno.
“You said you were five?” he confirms, head still bent.
“Yes.”
“And you go by Elodie de Ste. Sulpice?”
“Elodie Phénix,” she clarifies. “I took back my parents’ name.”
He looks up, smiles. “Well, that’s wonderful.” When he’s finished writing, he rests the pen on the coffee table. “I wish I could do more,” he says, handing her the letter.
“It’s too late for that,” she says, standing up and taking it from him. She reads it right in front of him.
I am writing this letter to acknowledge a grave moral mistake I made in the early years of my career in psychiatry. In 1955, I was tasked with examining a number of children at the Ste. Sulpice Orphanage in Farnham, Quebec, in order to diagnose their mental health. Under direct orders from the Grey Nuns, immediately following Premier Duplessis’s reclassification of the province’s orphanages into psychiatric institutions, I personally diagnosed a number of seemingly healthy children as mentally deficient. My reports were entirely false.
What stood out to me during those interviews at Ste. Sulpice was that the girls—ranging in age from five to fourteen—were generally bright and of sound mind. In other words, they were normal and frankly educable. While the level of their education to that point lagged somewhat behind the provincial standard, this was no doubt the result of having been institutionalized since birth. The orphans I examined were indeed sheltered and unworldly, but not one of them was mentally deficient.
One of those orphans was Elodie Phénix. She showed up on my doorstep this evening with her medical records in hand and asked me why I had signed a false diagnosis of mental deficiency. Mlle. Phénix is a grown woman of forty-five now. She is well-spoken, intelligent, resilient, and courageous. She couldn’t be farther from the diagnosis I gave her forty years ago. To my great shame, the only answer I could offer her was my own cowardice in the face of the Catholic Church and the Duplessis regime.
I eschewed my responsibility as a psychiatrist in favor of towing the line. As such, I was complicit in the crimes against humanity that were committed against these innocent children. I feel deep shame for what I did, and on behalf of all the doctors like myself who were a discredit to the profession, I am deeply sorry. To Mlle. Phénix and all the others like her, I apologize for my part in your suffering.
Sincerely,
Dr. Guillaume Duceppe
She thanks him. She does not forgive him.
“I am sorry,” he says, getting to his feet.
She turns away, not wanting him to see her eyes.
“Good luck,” Mme. Duceppe tells her.
Outside, Elodie quickly lights a cigarette to settle her nerves. She gets inside her car and cranks up the heat. She unfolds the letter and reads it again, and again, and again.
She lowers her head onto the steering wheel and cries for little Claire, who could not count past ten.