River City (83 page)
Carole had to chuckle. She had often repeated the line herself, but she’d never not laughed.
“Yeah, and I didn’t put bad guys away. I only put the worst guys away. How’s that? I needed the money, Anik. And I needed, deep down inside me, I needed to know that I was helping to catch your dad’s killers. Talking about it now, I admit that there was something else.”
“What?” She was tired, and snuggled in closer to her mom. She had not done this in ten years, but she felt like sleeping with her for a night.
“I wanted a life. I didn’t want to just sew and get beat up on picket lines. I wanted a life. Hanging out with your daddy’s old pals, I got to live a little. Even—you’re a big girl now, right?—I even got to love a little. A teensy bit.”
Yeah, she’d sleep next to her that night. Had her mom done anything so different than what she was doing with René? She liked the life, the attractions, the action, the intrigue, the possibilities, even the dinners out and the dinners in. She adored the sex. The company. The conversations. She knew
all along that she wasn’t making a life with him, that it was just exciting and temporary.
They lay together in silence. Carole reached across and turned off the lamp. Her daughter, it seemed, wasn’t going anywhere.
Minutes passed before Anik spoke out of the darkness. “Should I do it, Mom? Do you think?”
Carole sighed, and put her head back. She didn’t like any of this. The unanticipated problems, worries that seemed to leak out of your spleen and contaminate your bloodstream, tremors along your bones on the darkest nights, deceit an unhappy companion who never went home. She was on the verge of attempting an answer. Say no, don’t do it. The public demands are too great. Nobody wants bombs to go off. The personal cost is too high—the loneliness, the feeling that you have no centre, no core, no place within yourself where you can always go and be who you are for a few minutes. Those consequences were too grave. And yet, before Carole had mustered the resources to talk to her, Anik had fallen sound asleep beside her. Poor child. Why awaken her only to say that she might never be happy, that she might never be safe?
Carole edged down under the sheets herself, and although she did not expect that she’d sleep a wink, before long, before she had a chance to formulate too many frets, she nodded off, feeling her body borne upon waves. The sky was moiling and fiery in an epic dream, touching down upon a seashore of grievous confusion.
They slept together, mother, daughter and, at the foot of the bed, dog. Silent awhile. Still.
T
HE FUNERAL TRAIN MOVED SOUTH ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE
of the St. Lawrence, ponderously rattling away from Kamouraska towards Quebec City. The land in that region proved exquisite for farming, flat and fertile, the air moist from the river in summer when the daylight hours were lengthy. At that moment, in November of 1941, upon the commencement of winter in a dreaded time of war, dusk fell early, and in the waning light, the flatlands were already white with snow. Ghostly sculptures of ice haunted the beaches, washed up amid tangles of driftwood.
For Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the day had been a sad one, although not unexpected. He welcomed the final end to the slow agony of dying inflicted upon his true friend, and most important minister, Ernest Lapointe. The man had been his Quebec lieutenant, and without a notable replacement, his own political life might soon suffer. On the journey back to Quebec City, where a second train waited to return him to Ottawa, he mulled over the issue of his friend’s replacement, and consulted his advisors for their best thoughts.
Of these, Arthur Cardin was a political master and a superb campaigner. Undoubtedly, he was Lapointe’s equal, and in many ways his superior, a likely candidate for the very job they discussed. And yet, at the funeral, he had seemed frail to the prime minister, and never had he been well known in English Canada. King had worked long and effectively with him, yet on a personal level they had never clicked. Of these three liabilities, the issue of his health was the most pressing. In a time of war, King required energetic men.
The premier of Quebec, Adélard Godbout, the hero who had defeated Duplessis, also accompanied him on the train. Along with Cardinal Villeneuve, he led the province as a loyal and fierce backer of the Allied cause. Godbout remained adamant that conscription, should it ever be enacted, would be a crime, and yet, in King’s assessment, Godbout was his man. He ought to resign as premier and join King’s wartime cabinet in Ottawa. Even Cardin agreed with the prime minister on this choice, though he added in the same breath, “Why not Louis St. Laurent? In peacetime, I doubt you could pry him loose from his law practice. So many corporations depend on him. But in wartime? Men are willing in this circumstance to perform a public service. He’s sixty, but vigorous, well known, a significant orator, respected in Quebec—I’d consider St. Laurent, Prime Minister.”
“I am not only choosing my Quebec lieutenant. In all likelihood, I am also selecting my successor. If I choose St. Laurent and he leaves public service at war’s end, the party will be left rudderless.”
The choice was worthy of consideration, although King remained certain that Godbout was his man. He found himself, however, gazing across the river that bore the name St. Lawrence—in French, St. Laurent. Could it be that the river was speaking to him, humming the tune of a separate possibility?
Returned to Ottawa, King learned that Godbout had refused him. An October by-election had been held to replace a member of the Quebec Legislative Assembly. Shockingly, Duplessis’s candidate had merged victorious in Saint Jean, a riding
le Chef
‘ had never won, a riding that had voted Liberal since Confederation. “I must remain where I am,” Godbout informed King. “To leave now would be to allow Duplessis to take hold again.”
While Mackenzie King consulted his best advisors and gave weight to their opinions, he also conferred with the dead—in particular, his deceased mom. Always he was attuned to instances of the other world communicating with this one. The name St. Laurent had been suggested to him while he’d been riding alongside the
Fleuve Saint-Laurent.
He had had a sense that the river itself had been speaking. And so, having lost out on Godbout, and having had his mother endorse his second choice, he selected St. Laurent.
Still, what would become of St. Laurent at war’s end? King was aging, and if St. Laurent departed, no one would be prepared to succeed him. Since 1880, the party alternated between English and French leaders, and upon his death or retirement, it would be Quebec’s turn. Without St. Laurent, who was ready?
The French, for all the grief they caused him, provided King with great solace, friendship and counsel. Lapointe, whom he’d buried with full pomp and splendour, had been his closest friend. Upon his deathbed, each man kissed the other’s cheeks and spoke of their undying regard for the other, secure in the knowledge that they would meet again beyond this world. When Cardinal Villeneuve visited, the cagey prelate reminded the prime minister that their souls were linked, that they shared the same system of beliefs. King had to reserve his most intricate political stratagems for dealing with Quebec. This was frustrating and maddening at times, but for him a separate Quebec could be accomplished only by tearing his heart out. And so, he sat dismayed one day, towards the end of the war, and gruffly dismissed his advisors, both those who worked among the living and those who interceded with the dead, to contemplate a sad document that had landed upon his desk.
A letter from the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had arrived. In it, he suggested the dispersal of all French in North America—from Quebec in particular, but also from the northern United States. He proposed that these millions be scattered across both countries to dilute their political and linguistic concentration. In this way, the language and the culture of the French might swiftly vanish from the continent. An end, the president was suggesting, to King’s troubles and payback for Quebecers’ anti-war sentiment. The action at war’s end would conclude the infernal nuisance of the French presence in North America forever.
William Lyon Mackenzie King sat stunned in his chair.
He laboured under an abject duress.
And prayed for guidance.
At the end of an hour of solitary soul-searching, a scant smile indicated the revival of his spirits. Won’t Roosevelt be surprised, he concluded, to learn that he had chosen his replacement as prime minister. His successor would be none other than the man the river had endorsed, Louis St. Laurent.
A Frenchman. A Quebecer.
Try to disperse the French then, Mr. President. Just try to suggest it.
King nodded to himself, satisfied. The French would remain in Quebec. Strong and free. As well, St. Laurent would continue as a politician. If the man had any further thoughts about returning to his lucrative law practice—which he did, for he rarely stopped mentioning it—King would wave Roosevelt’s letter under his nose. That’s all he’d have to do. St. Laurent would have to stay on then. Duty called. He’d have no choice but to become prime minister.
Roosevelt’s letter had backfired on him.
King took a breath.
Thank you, Mr. President.
A giant load off his mind. He took another moment to thank the river for offering up its namesake, as well as to thank his dead mother for confirming the wisdom of the appointment. Then the prime minister returned to the further demands of his day, both fiscal and occult.
Duplessis took oxygen.
Great gulps of enriched pure air.
In 1942, when the world had been at war, Hitler’s move across Europe demoralized the Allies, prompting Cardinal Villeneuve to declare the advent of Armageddon. Even nationalist commentators within Quebec moderated their remarks, knowing how profoundly English-Canadians grieved over each military defeat. Nonetheless, the prodigious movement of Canada towards conscription, imposed finally through a plebiscite, for domestic defence only, fuelled the nationalist engine, and a few orators carried the rhetoric forward. Louis St. Laurent had one man tried for sedition, although he lost that battle in court, and still the aging leader Henri Bourassa had the audacity to unveil his vision for a new world based upon the cornerstones of Marshal Pétain’s fascist regime in fallen France, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and Mussolini’s Italy. To keep himself out of prison, he neglected to mention Hitler’s Germany, but the cluster of dictatorships left the implication obvious. Support for a new party of the right was growing, to Duplessis’s dismay, as he intended to occupy
that political terrain himself. Under the grievous concerns of conscription, strange bedfellows were entangled upon the same mattress.
A youthful twenty-six, yet a sharp, impassioned speaker, a lawyer named Jean Drapeau ran for Parliament in a Montreal by-election. He began his political career by lecturing on the evils of apartment dwelling, warning mothers to lock up their daughters in such a licentious environment. His supporters included everyone from the key anti-Semites—the philosopher Abbé Lionel Groulx and the unionist Michel Chartrand—to a young and impressionable Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The new party called itself the
Bloc populaire canadien,
and over the protestations of Duplessis it chose to enter both federal and provincial politics simultaneously. The old monk, Groulx, advised them to do so. Many in their midst had scores to settle with Duplessis and desired that he be erased from the political canvas. Even those with no personal grievance against the man concurred. The question went forth, “Who wants a drunkard as our leader?” On that basis alone, the new right-wing alliance gained strength.
Embattled, Duplessis entered an oxygen tent. Into his lungs he breathed the name of every man opting for the Bloc. Liberals were his natural enemies—what could be expected from them if not contempt? Yet those who chose the new option committed a greater crime, for they were acting in clear defiance of him. He’d never forget their names. One of many, that of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, although he was only a sprig of a young man, was inhaled by Duplessis down into the depths, and silently, deeply, took root there.
He would never forget.
In his tent, he breathed. Outside the tent, he suffered. Consumption, diabetes and alcoholism had left him physically impoverished, often angry and depressed, yet never dispirited or willing to quit. Such an option had not crossed his mind. The contrary. Inside the oxygen tent, he marshalled his resolve and plotted his grand return. He already knew that he had been given an argument to win the next election.
This is Quebec,
he’d think.
Quebec is gasping for air. Quebec lives in an oxygen tent, as do I. In here, I am Quebec.
Remarkably, his most prominent adversary came to see him. Premier Adélard Godbout sat outside his oxygen tent and spoke cheering words of
encouragement. Duplessis reminded his guest that he still intended to defeat him, that inevitably the leader of the province would become too cozy with the Liberals in Ottawa. Conscription would yet be his undoing. Godbout argued back on the merits of the war, that civilization itself remained at stake, not merely the comfort of their old colonial master.
For Godbout, to see any man turned onto his back like this, confined and debilitated, moved him to great sympathy, yet he was impressed by
le Chef
‘s ongoing tenacity, a will not only to live again but to fight again, and to win.
At the end of a long discussion, Godbout declared to journalists that Duplessis, if ever he were freed from alcoholism, would yet make a significant contribution to Quebec public life. Godbout had turned down King’s offer to be his Quebec advisor, and by doing so had stepped away from the possibility—indeed, the probability—that he would become the next prime minister of Canada. Now Duplessis, ailing and flat on his back in an oxygen tent, had him where he wanted him—in his sights, ready to take him down in the next election. Just as he would remember those who had betrayed him by joining the new political party, so he would remember Godbout’s generosity of spirit and expression. He recognized that he was an outstanding man. All the better. What satisfaction could there be in defeating a nincompoop?
