Since it was now an established fact that Mother’s friends would visit several times a week, Father made the effort to put the front parlour into a condition to receive guests. The furniture was removed, the floor swept and washed, the imitation oriental rug unrolled after so many months, and the nesting spiders relocated into oblivion. Finally, the furniture made its return, in a new arrangement supervised by Aline, who swooped down upon this chance to make a mark of her own on the house and revealed a startling capacity for self-assertion. She even suggested a new renovation project, that a door should be knocked out of the rear wall to provide direct access to the kitchen through the pantry and eliminate the need to carry trays up and down the long hallway. There was an idea for Father to ponder.
Mrs. Harrison arrived amidst a cloud of tobacco smoke, frail and bent as driftwood, mumbling her hellos and putting out an arm to steady herself in the hall. She was so small she needed Aline’s help to hang her cloth coat up on the hook. Mrs. Pangloss, who had never been shy of showing her hostility to Grandfather, and who had already had the news of his misfortune, reacted by storming in as if she were home, quoting the Bible. Just as Aline was bringing in the tea, she bellowed, “An eye for an eye, my dears. The Lord gives us what we deserve,” and nodded her head vigorously in agreement with herself. Aline, who only half understood what had been said, was frightened by the remark because it stung her with the memory of her own words to Grandfather.
When Mrs. Harrison ventured that her remark “wasn’t very nice,” Mrs. Pangloss replied that the Lord was not obliged to be nice, on account of his mysterious ways. Mrs. Pangloss never hesitated to identify her own will with that of the Lord because there were always plenty of people—Father Pheley, for instance, or any number of doctors, or many of her fellow callers to phone-in radio shows—who readily agreed with her quick grasp of that clearly defined line between right and wrong. Though truth to tell, it’s possible some of them had simply learned the futility of argument. And speaking of doctors, had Mother yet been to see her own regarding her over-long mourning?
Mother’s eyes rose to meet Mrs. Pangloss’s gaze. Had it been that long? Just how long had it been?
A cigarette quivering in her outstretched hand, Mrs. Harrison said, “Leave her be,” as best she could while trying to retain her ill-fitting dentures. Clacking them into place, she continued, “Everybody’s different. She needs her time.”
“Maybe you should talk to Father Pheley,” insisted Mrs. Pangloss, who, although she knew her friend to be Presbyterian, felt everyone ought to be Catholic and refused to believe those disgraceful rumours about the Church and its servants. “He’ll put you right.”
As if there were something wrong with me, thought Mother. She remembered the rumours all too well—Angus had been fond of referring to them—and the incident in Marie’s childhood.
“He’s Catholic,” objected Mrs. Harrison, puffing.
“You old fool, of course he’s Catholic. He’s a priest.” Mrs. Pangloss’s temper rose with her exasperation. How anyone could tolerate that brainless harridan was beyond her.
“She should burn sandalwood.” By now, the two were speaking as if Mother were absent.
Mrs. Pangloss pulled herself erect with a hand on her hip, tilting her head. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“It’d make her feel better. The smell. It smells good.”
“Fer crying out loud.” Pangloss paused. “You think smelling up the house will make anyone feel good? That’s for witches. That’ll give her a headache.”
“I saw it on TV.”
“Oh, it must have been a horror show.”
“No, it was Mass. From Rome. The Pope. The Pope.”
For once Mrs. Pangloss was silent.
“He’s a priest,” said Mrs. Harrison.
Mrs. Pangloss continued to encourage Mother to see a doctor, because although she still believed that whatever took place was the will of God, she was not a Mormon, and thought that doctors were also the will of God because many of them had told her so. While no one else thought this line of reasoning made any sense, everyone agreed a visit to the doctor—any trip out of the house—would probably do her some good. Mother finally cracked under the pressure and went to her family physician.
Dr. Hyde hadn’t seen her since he’d delivered her of twins, and so happily went about a battery of tests when Mother couldn’t be more specific than to say she felt “under the weather.” He made her undress and weighed and measured her; he took her blood pressure and her temperature. He had her pee into a cup; he examined her urine as closely as he could. He examined her breasts for lumps. He wasn’t sure, so it took a long time. He made her put her feet into the stirrups and bent into her with cold, dry implements. He was thorough. He put on rubber gloves, which he lubricated, and was more thorough. Finally, as she lay with her legs still spread into the air, he simply stood and stared at her for such a long time that she slowly turned completely red; and then, just as slowly, she resumed her natural colour; and then she began to worry. At last he announced he could find nothing wrong with her.
Why then did she feel so out of sorts? Gently, the doctor tried to suggest she was just having trouble accepting her grief, and therefore was, well, mentally unbalanced. Perhaps she simply needed some rest. In any case, he would do for her what he did for everyone when he had no idea what was wrong with them: prescribe tranquillizers.
The small square of paper he handed her at least made Mother feel she hadn’t endured the whole ordeal for nothing. But unbalanced? She was puzzled and tried to decide how that could be. It was a fact that since she was a small girl, she had developed the habit of sleeping on a different side each night. Because Angus had tried to raise her with a sense of regularity, she took to sleeping on her right side on even-numbered nights, and her left on odd-numbered nights. But suddenly she realized that the calendar is mostly made up of odd-numbered days. Whenever the thirty-first came along, she would sleep on her left side. But the next day, the first, was also an odd day. So in fact she had been sleeping more often on one side than the other. She realized that all these years of asymmetrical sleeping must have made her brain slide around in her head, until now it wasn’t sitting straight in her skull. The doctor was right: she was mentally unbalanced.
What to do about it? Well, he’d said rest, and given her tranquillizers. Obviously she needed to correct the imbalance. She would go straight home and start sleeping on her right side, regardless of whether it was an odd or an even day. And she would sleep until she had regained her mental equilibrium.
It took quite some time.
Uncle was introduced to his first dog when he was only a child. Fittingly it was just a puppy itself, and he hated it instantly because it refused to be paper trained. But taking it for a walk was something of a pleasure, if only to get away from a house which even then abutted on the funeral parlour on one side, and a crazy woman’s on the other.
Grandfather’s preferred method of instructing his children was to beat them when they acted contrary to his wishes. So there had been a loud row with Grandmother as Uncle cowered upstairs, listening without his supper. For once, Grandmother had won: instead of being punished for killing the neighbour child’s hamster, Uncle was to be shown the value of life and the responsibility of owning a pet. (In truth, Grandfather was not upset at the slaying itself, but that a child of his took no care to hide the crime. An attitude like that was the privilege only of those beyond the law by reason of birth or wealth or sheer force of personality—a Bronfman, a Van Horne, a Duplessis—but certainly not a Desouche. Regardless, this quibble had no bearing on the argument over an appropriate punishment.)
Next day, Grandmother took him on the streetcar to the SPCA and kept him there until he had chosen a puppy. Understanding that the lesson he was being taught was not one he could acknowledge and then forsake immediately, he whined and protested. The thought of a lifetime of daily caring for and nurturing his sin was as repellent to the child as it would be to any adult. Grandmother, who considered this method of educating him a gift and would never have understood his reluctance even if Uncle had been able to explain his reasoning, was as startled by this reaction as were the clerks at the animal shelter.
“Never seen a young boy didn’t want a puppy,” they exclaimed and remarked, and called in every one of their co-workers to see the petulant and contrary child.
At last Uncle broke down, not under Grandmother’s patience but under their collective gaze of wonderment, and grudgingly chose a listless young animal that seemed to him older—and closer to death—than the others. In fact, it was merely sick and undernourished. Under ordinary circumstances Grandmother wouldn’t have allowed an unhealthy dog into her house, but she was compelled to consider she’d won some sort of victory, and perhaps nursing it back to health would produce exactly the effect on her young son for which she was hoping.
It didn’t. Uncle clearly wanted nothing to do with the creature and there was something about it so indefinably unsavoury that no one else could take any pleasure in its presence. Nevertheless, Grandmother spent more energy ensuring that Uncle looked after it than she would have doing the job herself. Reluctantly he fed and watered and walked it twice a day, even though when he did, the other children in the neighbourhood took care to be absent. It remained a sickly thing, head drooping, eyes watery, rarely a wag of the tail; it remained untrained, and Grandfather bellowed and cursed whenever he set foot in its droppings in his own house. But it remained only as long as it had to, for one day, long, weary dog-years later, it disappeared.
No one knew whether it had got loose and been struck by a car, or struck out on its own for its own mysterious reasons, or even whether Uncle had finally done something about it. But as Uncle grew into adolescence he left it behind with the rest of his infancy, and it simply was no longer a part of his life, like so many childhood sins, until on a summer’s dog day, it seemed to have simply evaporated in the heat.
The black dog followed Uncle home the first year he began working with Grandfather, in fact on his very first job. It was one of only two times they were discovered at work.
Who this witness was they never knew. Whether some groundskeeper or some darkly romantic soul taken with wandering through graveyards in the middle of the night, or simply some homeless unfortunate. It mattered little. But discovery was unacceptable. Discovery was death to them—arrest, shame, unemployment—and so it meant death to their discoverer. While Grandfather kept the man’s attention, Uncle moved behind him and swung the shovel like a baseball bat. Almost, the anonymous head flew out of the park; the blow, at least, was strong enough. But the spine and neck would not let go, and it merely leapt forward first, before the rest of the body came crashing behind it.
“Criss,” said Grandfather.
A discussion ensued. Could they take this one to the doctor’s back door too? That was a tempting plum: two bodies to sell, for the work of just one.
But no, Grandfather reasoned, a medical man could easily spot the difference between a disinterred corpse and a murder victim. And though it might not make any difference to him, it might. It just might. Or then, it could be a fact taken careful note of and stored away for maturation, like a wine or a cheese, only to be resurrected at some future opportunity, to be enjoyed in the fullness of its strength.
Either way, it was simply too great a risk. When Uncle, a greedy neophyte, protested too much caution, Grandfather reminded him of the legendary status attained in their profession by Burke and Hare, and how in that case only the doctor had got off scot-free.
Reluctantly, then, Uncle pushed the fresher of the corpses into the grave, at the foot of which sat the dead man’s dog. It neither howled nor barked, not raising any kind of a protest or even sniffing its master or his new resting place. It merely yawned and watched. And when the two men took up their burden of shovels, lanterns and sacks, it trod along behind them as if it had done so all its life.
It would not be got rid of, and Uncle discovered he felt quite at home with his anger towards it, and the practice of kicking and slapping it. And so he settled into a life with it.
The second time they were caught, they were just lowering a coffin back into the ground. A figure ran screaming out of the night, right into the grave, and lay startled and injured in silence.
Uncle looked in. “It’s a woman,” he said.
Grandfather turned on his flashlight. It was a man in a dress.
Two more figures came running over the hill. Grandfather snapped off his light and began to move away. The fellow in the grave pleaded. “Don’t leave me with them.”
They were cops, from the neighbourhood. They had no pants.
On opposite sides of the open grave, the four men recognized each other. Slowly Uncle turned and gathered up their things. He and Grandfather took up their large, full sack.
“Tabernac,” said the younger cop. He was panting.
The older one said, “Ferme ta gueule.”
“And keep your pants on,” said Grandfather. He and Uncle turned their backs and walked away. They weren’t stopped, and if they heard any noises behind them, they made no comment.
Ville-Marie de l’Incarnation Desouche and her brother Jean-Baptiste were born only an instant apart in those brief seconds between 11:59 P.M. and 12 A.M. either on June 24th, if one wanted it to be St-Jean-Baptiste Day—as Marie wanted, and why couldn’t she have been named for the Fête Nationale?—or on June 25th, if one liked the idea of being the antipode to Christmas—which Jean-Baptiste did, for poetic reasons that he himself couldn’t clearly define (or at least, that’s how he thought of it; but it could simply have been an inherited grasping for symmetry and balance, passed down through Mother from Angus); and perhaps because of that they retained something ineffable about them, as should the day. Or its cognate.
Further, the event took place not at the Royal Victoria but at the Reddy Memorial, a lesser anglo hospital that stood on Atwater Street. The same Atwater that divided (English) Westmount from (French) Montreal, the same Atwater that was so treacherous with black ice on dark winter nights. Born at midnight, on that border, a boy and a girl, of an English mother and a French father.
Could they be anything but doomed?
One chose words and the other actions, but they both believed in exploding complacent notions of the status quo; one revered Artaud, the other Che Guevara, both of whom upheld, at heart, the idea of honesty.
Thus, Marie was furious with Hubert.
No matter how long and hard Hubert tried to explain to Marie that he felt it necessary to act as he had, to deceive her in the greater interest of their cause, it made no difference: she slapped him and spat at him when he tried to take her around the waist, to fondle her bosom, to calm her in their bed. He realized now, of course, that his precautions had been too stringent, that she could be trusted totally. Yet couldn’t he be forgiven for treading lightly on family connections, especially in a mixed family?
Well, that deserved another blow; after which, “I am Desouche,” cried Marie. “I have proven myself in direct action, with dynamite. Have you? You’re a scribbler, like Jean-Baptiste. You do nothing. And you doubt me?”
Her words stung. True, he was their ideologue: he was their only university-educated cell member. True, he’d had the same difficulties with his former professors as he was now having with Marie, that they refused to see he was right, that they stubbornly clung to their bourgeois faith in political, not revolutionary, action. True, further, that his passionate tirades against their complacency, which was tantamount to collaboration with les têtes carrées, netted him only expulsion from the Université du Québec.
But he was no coward. Hadn’t he authorized all the bombings? Hadn’t he planned the bank robberies? Hadn’t he stood in public distributing pamphlets and haranguing Anglos? Wasn’t he always the one urging action, casting the deciding vote in favour of change, not caution?
Hubert had never flinched in a crisis, never hesitated to give orders, to decide. As leader of the cell it had been his role. Some others were smarter, including Marie, and some were better connected; and he was always silent in debates, letting others argue and discuss. But whenever there was a deadlock or doubt, all turned to him to break it. And having listened to all voices, when it was clear the issue wasn’t clear at all, he decided. Always on the side of instant action and today’s goals, always for the good of the cause. Always what he imagined he would someday be rewarded for, when Quebec was its own sovereign nation, by its own head of state. By the very man presently both premier and leader of the Péquistes—the Parti Québécois.
Hubert considered the Péquiste premier to be the future of Quebec: “He is our destiny.” And he considered all his fellow felquistes as the natural, military extension of the Péquiste political party. He knew that someday, when separation had finally been achieved, all felquistes would be lionized and welcomed to places of honour in the new nation.
In fact, Hubert dreamt of receiving a medal from the premier himself, on a platform before a cheering crowd. And that was just the beginning. On occasions when he allowed his fantasy to flow out to its end, he became not just a decorated hero of the revolution, but afterwards a revered public speaker and journalist, and finally a respected and tenured professor of political science at that same large French Montreal university that had turfed him out in his youth. He would be appointed to chair committees on social and cultural issues, his classes would be crowded with silently awed young faces receiving the wisdom not only of his thoughts but of his active experience, and the hallways would be cloudy with the cigarette smoke of the Revolution.
In other words, Hubert’s idea of revolution was not to change at all the way in which Quebec society treated itself, but merely to change who was cracking the whip.
In this respect Hubert’s nationalism was traditional, one might say even orthodox. The French in Canada had not, on the whole, ever been treated very well, even before the British Conquest; but at least in the early days the poor illiterate farmers were spat and shat upon by their own landlords, the Seigneurs, and shat and spat upon by their own curés and confessors. Unlike France, where the Ancien Régime was deposed with a fury that negated the ideals of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Quebec didn’t mind so much an enormous gulf in wealth and privilege—as long as it retained a French face and a French voice.
But it would be a mistake to think Hubert and Marie and all the rest didn’t have legitimate complaints. For too long had the French been excluded, in practice if not in law, from too much in Quebec: from government service, from higher education, from business. While it’s true that the poorer English were too, at least they could read the application forms; at least they could be understood in banks and stores.
And although bigotry abounded among the English, just as it did among the French, it was true (and still is) that anyone, English or French, could succeed at whatever he or she wished, given the right quantities and proportion of three essential qualities (no, not talent, ambition and charm): hypocrisy, money and friends. This was proven by the fact that as many political and business leaders in Canada have been French lawyers as have been English, more or less, but that none of these leaders has ever been a farmer or a labourer.
Nevertheless, Hubert had made the mistake of confusing Quebec with a totalitarian country, of confusing Canada, a Western capitalist state in which he was free to organize whatever political or labour unions he wished, to speak and vote freely, to work as hard as he felt necessary to effect political change, with countries where people were tortured and murdered for these things. In his confusion he adopted the methods and rhetoric of revolutionaries from such countries, because all over the West it was becoming the thing to do. Germany had its Baader-Meinhof, Italy its Red Brigades, Peru its Tupameros. He explained to Marie that “louder votes count for more. Votes that explode are supreme.”
Hubert, Marie and the other felquistes rejected much that was common in Quebec. They rejected foremost the idea of a nation that spread from sea to sea; they rejected the idea that a social conscience and responsibility could cross linguistic lines; they rejected the thought of common goals providing common solutions. They rejected even the feeble Canadian notion of patriotism. But they held dear conceits that every people regards with a sentimental nostalgia: that by birth they were entitled to their land, that blood will out (one way or another), that outsiders were depriving them of their natural rights. They would not allow Ottawa to administer social programs and they would not allow English to sully the French face of Quebec. But because nationalism glorifies blood relations and the extended family of a common religion, they would sell their souls to the Devil to be home at Christmas.
And they couldn’t see the irony in that.
Instead, they celebrated the fact in myth, made it a cultural sacrament taught in their schools and literature, and elevated it to the status of a founding paradigm. Fur traders stranded far from home at Christmas were carried by the devil to their families in a flying canoe. It became a sentimental Christmas display on a downtown Montreal street, a giant inflatable parade float for the Fête Nationale and the illustration on a beer label: Les Maudits. The Damned.
Jean-Baptiste was visiting the shrunken heads at McGill University.
McGill still maintained a small Victorian museum housing the various trophies, plunder and knick-knacks retrieved by the pompous during years of empire building. A great domed central area housed the skeletons of several dinosaurs, surrounded by second- and third-floor galleries displaying insects and geological specimens. Other wings contained stuffed mammals, large and small, set against painted dioramas of the settings they’d been shot in. A sequence of enormous glass cases held a parade of simians from tiny spider monkeys through chimps and apes, each slighter taller and more upright than the last, culminating in a human skeleton displaying a sign that read: Darwin’s Proof.
Jean-Baptiste had been visiting the Redpath Museum since childhood, when Mother and Angus had brought the children to the campus for picnics. When he was old enough, he came by himself. In truth it was a small and unimportant museum scientifically, but it did have its treasures, which lured him back time and again. It was here he’d first seen skeletons of any sort, and here they were in abundance. Tiny rodents, bats, larger predators; serpents, from garden snakes to giant constrictors out of darkest Africa, sabre-toothed tigers, the aforementioned dinosaurs and, yes, even humans. Here was a display of marvels more chilling than any Hollywood movie, because these were real.
They held an eerie fascination for him, these relics, because on the one hand he knew them to be the real remains of once-living creatures, but on the other, the manner in which they were displayed was itself a relic of a once-living era. The mammals, for instance, were stuffed and posed and set against a backdrop painted to look like the wilds of nature—yet so obviously artificial—and had been in place since before the vogue for zoos (that is, for actual living creatures) had supplanted such exhibitions as these. And truth be told, there was something about the cases themselves, with their mahogany trimmings and plate glass, and the sheer age of the mounted and mummified corpses, that bespoke age and dust and decay.
Of course, the Redpath had its own real mummy, a glorious and mysterious object contained in its own room. The brightly decorated coffin stood open for inspection with the rag-and-bone princess summarily exposed for any eye to behold, in total disregard for her noble origins and surely her own and her long-gone family’s desires for her dignity. Still, since immortality had been the goal of her funerary preparations, she could be said to have achieved it, even in this debased and insignificant form. Her hair escaped the crumbling wrappings but still clung to her skull. It was thin, bleached grey not by the expanse of time since her death but by the comparatively brief exposure to the blazing overhead lamp. Her hands had been clasped on her breast while they were still clothed with flesh but now had fallen—both of them, her fingers still entwined—to her right side. The remains of her face had shifted to stare at her hands as if she were mourning the loss of their use. If she were not so obviously dead, she might be sleeping.
All these items radiated an exoticism only magnified by the accompanying explanatory cards and crumbling black-and-white photographs illustrating the remote, dark corners of the world where the brave safari-suited scientist-explorers had risked all to procure them.
For Jean-Baptiste, the most alluring of the oddities in this phantasmagoria were two simple items almost hidden from view in a little-used stairwell, which he’d only discovered while hunting for the washroom. In a modest case, surrounded by poisoned arrowheads, bone needles and a leather pouch spilling powerful magic, were two shrunken human heads.
Balls of chocolate-brown leather misshapen from (some kind of: what?) misuse, topped with tufts of silky black hair like tassels hanging from the handlebars of a child’s bicycle, they were mounted at the ends of sticks smooth and free of bark, whose bottom ends were wrapped in leather (leather?) grips.
As a child these curios had been enough to distract him from the washroom he’d been seeking. He’d stare eye to eye with the tiny people, their eyes sewn shut in an almost sleepy expression, their mouths sewn shut with lips (and here’s how he would ever after understand this phrase) pursed, and wonder: What had they seen? What had they said?
As he’d grown he’d been forced to crouch lower and lower, in order to look them in the face, until finally he now resorted to sitting back on his knees as the only proper way to get a look. It had always seemed wrong to do other than face them, since they were still, after all, human beings. He couldn’t bring himself to weave his head about and around the glass case in order to glance behind or above or beneath them, the way others did, or the way he could with statues or mineral specimens. Even the mummy princess was mostly hidden by her centuries-old roll of cloth so that one knew she was a corpse, although her desiccated ashes and dust retained only the vaguest of human forms.
But these heads weren’t objects; these heads had real, recognizable faces. These were people.
Which always led Jean-Baptiste to wonder at the status and fate of people who lost their lives, or pieces of them. Where were their bodies now, what had become of them? Were those bodies also people? Had they ceased to be human when they lost their heads? And whatever had happened to Uncle’s missing finger? Was it still in some way human, was it still in some way Uncle, or had it instantly, on the point of separation from the rest of him, become something else? A mere thing?
This he’d wondered time and again over the years as a child; today, he also wondered: and what about Grandfather’s eye?
Aline was praying for both Grace and Grandfather at the chapel where she had once been in the habit of going every Sunday with her own father. St. Joseph’s Oratory stood on the slope of the mountain opposite the Royal Vic, which put both the Catholic and Jewish cemeteries between the two and gave it the highest elevation of any church in Montreal. Aline would never have had enough pretension to travel out of her local parish for the sake of worshipping at this grandest of cathedrals, except for the fact of her being present at a particular Christmas Eve’s midnight Mass, when the relic of Frère André’s heart had bled in public.
This rare miracle had marked her and her father in a bond with St. Joseph’s, and they never afterwards resisted the temptation to worship where God had chosen to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. It seemed an unquestionable sign, a direct invitation to these meekest of the flock to remember that after all, since they would eventually inherit the earth, they might want once in a while to gaze at the riches they would then enjoy.
The Lord of the Poor was never one to stint on His own house, and this one, named after His own earthly father, was no exception. It was purposely erected at the top of a hill so steep it required a stairway like those in Hollywood fantasies of the Ascent to heaven itself. And a funicular for those who could pay the penny. The doors were so large it seemed a giant’s castle. The vaulted ceilings were so high the light-bulbs must have been changed by God Himself, and He probably didn’t have to stoop. Where it wasn’t covered in jewelled relics, embroidered tapestries, enormous stained glass windows or painted biblical scenes, it was merely gilded. The enormous volume of space within its walls produced the requisite booming, medieval echo as the numberless white-and gold-robed priests chanted their way across the altar. The pipes of the organ, pointing straight up to God, loomed so large over the congregation they might have been taken for factory chimneys. The nave seated thousands, so that communion became the endless parade of Judgment Day and the beginning of eternity.
In short, it made Aline feel small, poor, nervous and insignificant.
Just as it, and she, were intended to.
But despite this—or maybe, as they say, because—it made her feel closer to God than any local chapel ever could. Especially during that particular midnight Mass.
Frère André—a doorman—had been revered in Montreal and even beyond as a living saint: a tireless worker for his flock, a gentle and generous soul, the very Platonic ideal of a Christian shepherd. He lived a long and selfless life, was much loved and never maligned, and at the last he welcomed the summons of the Lord with a humble contentment.
As a reward for this exemplary life, the faithful tore his heart from his corpse and hung it up in public. What, if any, compensation was granted him by the Lord is not on record; but for what it’s worth, he was beatified by the Pope a decade after he died.
The heart was treated for preservation and mounted on a golden silk pillow, in a case handcrafted of purest silver; it was viewed not through mere glass but through a lead crystal window. It was placed in its own permanent niche in the church, and proved itself a worthy attraction. The devout remained so, the wandering returned to the fold and the curious began to pay a token into the poor box for their visits. Prayers, which had previously been divided fairly evenly between the Lord and St. Joseph, were now just as often addressed to Frère André.
Eventually the heart itself showed the weakness of the flesh, and as it dried and hardened, it darkened in colour until its purple was black. But because it was mounted high enough above the heads of even those who didn’t kneel to gaze at it, no one minded. Or perhaps no one noticed; at least, no one ever remarked on it. In time it became another fixture of the chapel, like the altar, the organ or the cross. It was noticed only as it served a particular purpose.
Even Aline approached it as she did the other artifacts of worship, as if it were not a person or a divine spirit but only signified the proper place to perform the rituals of her religion, simply the object that served to remind her of her devotion.
Until.
Midnight Mass is as much a spectacle in the Catholic Church as it is a religious observance, and as much a social occasion for French-Canadian society as a spectacle. On Christmas Eve, after the enormous traditional dinner and the clamouring for presents that follows, the children are dressed in their finest, no matter how loudly they complain. For once, they want to go to bed. They’re tired, after all, from the excitement of the day and the abundance of material goods afforded by the holiest of Christian observances. But no, the parents all insist, Mass must be observed. They’ve paid to reserve space in the pews; it’s an obligation not only to the Church but to their neighbours, to see and be seen; and to be seen to be devout. So devout as to be able to afford a pew up front.
The Church spares nothing. There is music; there are carols; there are innumerable candles of all sizes everywhere; smoking censers are swung in one hand while the priest reads, chanting, from a psalter. St. Joseph’s is jammed. Every seat is taken and the corridors are full. The multitude patiently wait their turn at the door, stamping their feet in the cold, their breath billowing. The crowds pass in and out of the church for hours. Confession is taken, with penitents lined up waiting their turn like the poor at a soup kitchen; absolution is given in solemn tones; communion is taken with necks bent, silently. The priest mumbles continuously and drops the Host onto outstretched tongues like a machine stamping out parts.
Aline, out of breath from the climb to the Oratory, and her father, yawning despite the frigid, clear air, waited patiently for the line ahead of them to shuffle its way inside. Once they were through the doors, the interior space was bigger than expected, as if the confines themselves increased the volume they enclosed. The temperature was rising with every exhalation of the flock and with each new candle lit for a remembered loved one. It did no good for Aline to open her cloth coat and loosen her knitted scarf. Her father too complained of the heat.
The monotonous droning of the chanting priests and praying crowds … the languid swelling and swirling mass of people … the air thick with incense and the smell of paraffin … the hypnotic twinkling of the candles … the late hour, the heat … by the time they’d shuffled their way up front near the altar, Aline was afraid she’d pass out.
Instead, as they passed in front of the niche displaying Frère André’s heart, she prayed for strength. She crossed herself and stared into her hands, chapped from the cold. She closed her eyes but immediately felt vertiginous. She gave up praying and reached for the rail. Her father steadied her. When she opened her eyes and looked up to the relic, it was bleeding.
Aline silently contemplated the vision before her and tried to determine if it was real or merely induced by the atmosphere. Could she be witness to a miracle? Had no one else seen it? Her father too was staring, but silent, and might just have been in prayer. Surely the Lord would not choose her from among all the faithful to witness His presence? Surely others were more deserving? Her father returned her gaze and she realized he too was seeing the vessel fill with blood. He’d been thinking similar thoughts; and they both now knew their vision was true, and miraculous.
It was left to someone else to cry out in the crowd:
“It’s bleeding. The heart, Frère André’s heart! It’s bleeding!”
A clamouring began. Communion, confession, prayer were all forgotten. At first there were cries of “Silence!” from the priests, in anger that Mass should be violated, and “Ta gueule!” from some outraged but less refined of the faithful.
Aline and her father were no longer looking at Frère André’s heart, but into each other’s joyous eyes; and as the crowd began to press and howl, they retired together from the church, straining against the flow of bodies. They had seen, and had no need to gawk like children; and they had seen first. Aline was bursting with the warmth of a communion she’d never before experienced, and so must her father have been, for the two remained silent even when their eyes met.
The mindless fervour of the crowd could also see nothing but the bleeding heart, and so ignored the overturned votive candles. When the flames took hold and some close to them began to shout the danger, they went unheard in the cacophony of prayer, amazement and denunciation:
“Fraud!”
“A miracle, for Jesus’ birthday!”
“Fire!”
“Praise God Almighty!”
“Don’t push!”
By the time the draperies were aflame, Aline and her father had left the church by a side door and, despite the cold, were slowly making their way down the cathedral steps. So taken were they with the miracle that they never remembered precisely how they’d gotten home; whether they rode the bus as they had come, or hailed a taxi, or even walked the entire way.
There was no newspaper on Christmas, but the following day—Boxing Day—as Aline was pouring her father’s morning coffee, he looked up from the paper and said, “I don’t remember a fire at the Oratory. Do you?”
“Oh, no. No, I don’t.”
“No one seriously hurt.” He read further down the column. “A miracle, they say.”
“Yes, with the crowds.”
And so, from that day on, whenever there seemed some especial reason to speak to God, something out of the usual line of Bless Papa and bless Mama and bless the neighbours too, Aline made the trip to St. Joseph’s and knelt before the relic of Frère André.
For the sake of an eye, for the sake of a bird, she prayed to a shrivelled black heart. “Forgive and heal my husband in your mercy, Lord, and bring Grace back to me.”
On the afternoon Mother went to sleep she’d been thinking about Angus because his death was the cause of her grief and his insistence on regularity was the cause of her malady. And so his was the face that first took shape in her dreams.
Angus had never been in a dream before. He’d had them like anyone else, but this feeling was something different. It was still amorphous, still entirely unpredictable and absurd, still faded at its edges into an insensible void, still finite but unbounded. But it was also definitely not like any dream he could remember because he was inside it, instead of the other way around. Things happened, time passed back and forth, immense objects appeared in his path yet failed to obstruct it. Primal fears took hold instantly without warning or reason, but without incongruity: he was naked before an immense crowd; he’d been climbing a staircase forever; he fell from an immeasurable height; he flew; the car’s brakes failed; he made love to Isabel; he slept; his daughter dreamt he was approaching her.
He asked her, “What the hell happened to me?”
“You died in the war,” she said. “Don’t do it again.”
The peasants were storming the castle and the dance of pitchforks and torches overwhelmed their conversation like surf on the beach. Both tried to speak and failed.
It did no good to turn her as Dr. Hyde had suggested, to prevent bedsores. She simply returned to her side as if she were a boat righting herself. She slept so much they thought she must be sick. Yet she had no fever, never moaned or cried out in delirium, didn’t even toss and turn during her dreams; she always seemed simply and happily asleep. The medication was slowly disappearing, which was a mystery since Mother was never awake to take it.
The more and better she slept, the more fitfully did Father; which eventually brought the solution to the case of the disappearing pills. He tossed and turned, aware of the unnaturally inert form of his wife. He’d gotten used to her immobility, so that when she did move, it woke him instantly. And this time he saw her sit up, open the vial, shake out two pills and swallow them with water before settling back in bed. And he realized she’d done so entirely in her sleep.
After days of sleeping beside her, he could stand no more. It was just too creepy; he couldn’t share the bed with her any longer. Since there were no available empty rooms except the front parlour, that’s where they moved her—and her friends continued to visit her, as if she were in a hospital bed.
She lay semi-fetally as if in prayer, with her hands clasped together and her head nodding towards them, her thin grey hair clinging from neglect.
At first Aline was shocked by what seemed to her Father’s disposal of his wife: how could he not have wanted her in his bed? But as she began to assist in the minimal care Mother seemed to need (an airing of the sheets, an occasional sponge bath, feeding like a baby) she came to understand how uneasy her condition had made him. It was certainly unnatural, and yet nothing seemed the matter with her. In fact, if it were possible to judge by her face and the lack of tension in her body, she seemed now to be content, practically happy. It was almost as if she were simply awaiting something and had stopped bothering to suffer through life in the meantime.
When Mrs. Pangloss arrived the day after they’d installed Mother on a folding cot in the parlour, she began a panicked keening: a screeching wail pitched as high as she could manage without cracking her voice. It was her instinctual and habitual way of entering a wake, beginning high and loud with shock and disbelief, and it usually gave way first to a moaning despair and finally to a quiet sobbing in a corner, with only an occasional outburst designed to refocus the other mourners’ attention on herself. Funerals are, after all, for the living.
Aline didn’t know much about Mrs. Pangloss’s habits but she could tell instantly that she thought Mother was dead. Mrs. Pangloss managed to choke out the usual baffled questions—“What happened? Was it an accident? I didn’t know she was sick! Oh, the poor woman. Was it quick? Did she suffer?”—and as usual didn’t bother to wait for the answers.
Aline attempted to calm her by mustering what little broken English she could, but under the rush of Mrs. Pangloss’s exclamatory grief she was reduced to tugging on the woman’s sleeve and muttering, “Non, madame, non.”
And then, unexpectedly, Mrs. Pangloss did something Aline would otherwise have judged as impossible as anything absurdly imaginable, like walking on the Sun or meeting Elvis; something which shattered totally her view of the woman and cast into doubt her opinions of all Anglos.
Mrs. Pangloss spoke in French.
Aline stepped back under the blow.
Haltingly, as if the words had made no sense to her, she framed her simple reply almost as a question: “Elle dort.” She’s sleeping.
Mrs. Pangloss moaned hugely and all the tension lapsed from her face; she slumped into an overstuffed armchair and buried herself in the cheap cloth coat she was still wearing. She breathed ferociously, holding her heart as if to keep it in place. Aline couldn’t tell if she was relieved or disappointed.
Aline stood nervously, not daring to approach the woman, not knowing what to say or do. Should she take her coat? Should she try to explain Mother’s condition, when it had commenced, why they had moved her to the front parlour? Should she speak in French or English?
At that moment, Dr. Hyde arrived and relieved her of any responsibility. Aline was torn between her resentment of his presumption of authority in what was really her house and not his after all, and her relief at not having to choose a course of action. She hung both their coats and retired to the kitchen to prepare tea.
“Bodies,” said Dr. Hyde, “are fascinating and disgusting.”
He took Mother’s pulse. “They are always with us; they are perhaps the sum of our existence. Yet we always feel as if they were adjunct to ourselves. They are filthy and they produce filth. We may lose parts of them, appendages or even internal organs, and go on living feeling that we are still ourselves. So we speak of them as if they were separate from our existential selves.”
He listened to her heartbeat. “We have mapped them, inside and out; we have charted their histories and divined their workings so that we know what parts belong in which place and how they are supposed to function. We have experimented with them and subjected them to torture, chemicals, extremes of climate, so that we know more or less the conditions necessary to their well-being. We have deduced a Platonic ideal against which we measure ourselves and our patients: this is the practice of medicine.”
He placed the stethoscope on her back and listened to her breathing. “Yet we are forever stumbling across exceptions, aberrations and inexplicable circumstances. Miraculous cures, astonishing survivals, even unaccountable deaths. And this, Madame Desouche’s curious repose.”
Mrs. Pangloss nibbled a crustless devilled ham sandwich and nodded. She firmly believed that when one found oneself in the presence of a professional, educated man, one should take advantage of listening to him in order to better oneself. Especially if he was a doctor. It had always puzzled her that her friends the Desouches should have Dr. Cameron Hyde as their family physician, and it stunned her now to see that not only had they been telling the truth about it, but he would deign to descend from his famous institute on the slopes of Mount Royal and actually pay a house call.
He was, after all, a famous man who had done unbelievable things. An indisputable genius since the days when Time—an American magazine, mind you—had put him on its cover, he was invested with all the unquestioning confidence of the hospital and the university to which he’d brought fame and money by his brilliant experiments into brains, bodies, psyches and souls. So overwhelming was his authority in Montreal that not even those whose heads he’d cut open (whether in an effort to shrink them, or merely to introduce needle-thin electric prods), or those to whom he’d sequestered in sensory deprivation tanks and secretly administered the new, mysterious lysergic acid, or those whom he’d restrained, doused, disoriented or otherwise tortured—not even those poor people (and they were usually poor) had once imagined that their “treatments” were anything but proper. No one had ever thought that Dr. Hyde’s actions might be unorthodox, unethical, illegal … monstrous. Not for years would anyone suspect that they might be actionable, although frequently they were acknowledged, sometimes by Hyde himself, as “experimental.” But then only grudgingly.
And besides, he (or they) would say, just look at the results. More donations to the hospital, more government and private funding of research at both McGill and the Royal Vic, more acclaim within the medical community for both Hyde and hospital.
But damned few cures or recoveries. Never mind; if none of the ex-patients were complaining, there must be good reason. Many of them were dead or vegetative or otherwise, but that only proved the need for further research.
Mother’s case was quite interesting; she simply lay down to sleep and refused to wake up. It certainly wasn’t anything he had told or asked her to do, or thought might do her any good, or even thought of at all. True, he had a ward full of comatose and vegetative cases up the mountain, but they were mostly in reaction to “developmental treatments” or “radical therapies.”
“Why’s she asleep, Doctor?” asked Mrs. Pangloss.
He opened Mother’s left eye and shone a penlight into it as if he were looking for something that had rolled under the bed. “I don’t know. I’ve done nothing to her.”
“Didn’t you give her some pills?”
“Yes, but she’s taken them all and I won’t give her more. Besides, they wouldn’t account for this.”
“She’s simply asleep. It’s a mystery.”
Mrs. Pangloss gulped some tea. “The Lord, then, eh? Mysterious Ways. That’s what Father Pheley says.”
Dr. Hyde put away his tools. “Yes. Well, it would help if His ways were not so mysterious to physicians.”
Mrs. Pangloss was devastated. It was too much. On the one hand, here was the city’s most celebrated man of medicine attending her friend in her very own home, in Mrs. Pangloss’s own presence. On the other, he not only could do nothing for her, he admitted he was baffled. Further, she suspected his remarks bordered on blasphemy. Not only Mysterious Ways, but a clear-cut example of Giveth and Taketh in the same instance.
When Father and Jean-Baptiste entered to hear the diagnosis, the doctor prattled on in the most extravagant of Latin phrases about what exactly he had done and in the least common medical jargon about what exactly he had found. Jean-Baptiste was looking at him quite suspiciously. Father finally pressed the point.
“But what is it?”
Dr. Hyde donned his greatcoat and heaved a sigh. “Brain fever,” he said.
“Brain fever? My God. What can we do, Doctor?”
He put on his hat, took his gloves from his pockets. “Keep the windows open. It’s too hot in here. And wait.”
Father was clearly burdened with this news. Why wasn’t there something to be done? A prescription, a treatment, even an operation? Why couldn’t it simply be over with, and let them all get back to their lives?
When Dr. Hyde had left and Aline was clearing away his untouched plate and cup, Mrs. Pangloss remarked, “He’s not so smart. Great Man. In a pig’s eye.”
“What the hell is brain fever?” asked Father.
“A usually mortal affliction in Victorian novels,” said Jean-Baptiste.
Father’s voice broke. “What!”
“Nothing,” said Jean-Baptiste. “It’s nothing at all.”
Mrs. Pangloss asked, “You mean it’s like psychosomatic? Is that the word?”
“Yes,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Except it’s the doctor imagining the illness, not the patient.”
So Mother slept and life was easier for her; but Grandfather couldn’t. There was, first of all, the pain. Although now it had dulled considerably, it was still constant and likely to stay that way for some time, according to Dr. Hyde. And whenever he closed the other eye, he still tried to close the absent one and received a stabbing reminder that he couldn’t. And then there was the intermittent presence of Grace at the window. She was like Captain Hook’s crocodile, hanging around as if she wasn’t finished with him.
There was also the proposal Dr. Hyde had put to him to consider: transplant or artificial? Though it was now almost too late for a transplant—too much healing would preclude the idea. And there was the problem of a suitable donor. Besides which, the thought of someone else’s eye in his head was not a pleasing one. Would it even fit properly? What would he see with it? Would it match the other? No, better to go without. A simple patch might be best—wait, now we’re back to Captain Hook and that damned bird.
That was it, then. A glass eye.
Just as Grandfather made this decision, he received a visit from Mrs. Pangloss, who came to the hospital despite her dislike of him simply because he presented her with an opportunity to visit someone else’s misery.
He groaned when he saw her, which she chose to accept as a greeting.
“I had to visit Billy Berri anyway,” she said. “He’s just had a prostrate operation. Insisted on showing me his catheter.” And she made a noise something like a giggle, but altogether too much like a cackle. She sat beside Grandfather’s bed, trying to look around and under his bandages to see the wound. When she couldn’t, she surveyed the ward in the same manner.
“You don’t look so good. Coming along? Well. Christ, you want to get out as quick as you can. House of horrors in here. Creepy old place. Not that you’re not used to that sort of thing, that house of yours, next to the funeral parlour. Nurse! Nurse! Open a window. We need some air in here, it’s not a morgue. He he hee.”
There was one thing the two could agree on: the hospital was no place for a sick person. Both were old enough to remember the days when few people ever returned from hospitals, and the association was still strong in them: hospitals were houses of death. What do you expect when you put so many diseased souls together in one place? Whatever germs, microbes, viral infections, diseases and bacteria you were relatively free of before going in would surely be coming out with you—if you survived. If they didn’t kill you, they at least made you a carrier, a host.
Aside from that, there were the surgeons to fear. Mrs. Pangloss suspected the very idea of tampering with God’s work: if He’d put something in there, who were we to take it out? But she was forced to admit their successes and grudgingly bowed to an intelligence greater than hers; which after all was also a gift from above.
Grandfather, however, was on familiar terms with at least one surgeon, his own family doctor, Cameron Hyde. And this certainly did not put him at ease. It wasn’t a question of religion with Grandfather. He’d never been convinced that human life, or any life, was in any way connected to anything supernatural at all. If asked, he’d deny entirely the very existence of the supernatural. No, his doubts were quite firmly based in the physical. He knew a thing or two about bodies and how they fitted together. Surgeons, however, always seemed more interested in getting them apart.
In a word, butchers.
So the idea that he’d been under the knife himself was one he was having trouble accepting, one he was in fact trying to suppress, and the thought that he might have to undergo yet another operation unnerved him.
Bandage; eye patch; glass eye; perhaps even a human eye. But never again his own.
Grace scratched at the frost-covered window, startling Mrs. Pangloss. “Crikey, is that your wife’s buzzard? No wonder you won’t open the window. What’s she doin’ here, trying to get another taste? Hee he hee. Oh, that’s a filthy bird. You must be glad she’s out of the house.”
Strangely, thought Grandfather, another point of agreement between them. Or at least it would be, under ordinary circumstances. But at the moment, since he was not in the house, he would prefer that Grace were. Or at least that she were somewhere away from him. He sat up a little and turned his own single, baleful eye upon her.
With a screech, she flew away.