Whenever Lorean Saint-Pierre gives her history, the first thing she always says is how, when she was five, she made a list of the things she wanted to be. One: journalist. Une journaliste. Two: television correspondent. Une présentatrice à la télé. Three: historian. Une historienne. She didn’t know these jobs were similar any more than she knew une dentiste was another type of doctor. The world had so many words—she assumed each must mean something unique. Little Lorean wanted to be a writer, but she never considered writing books or movies. She liked them, but even as a girl, she didn’t trust people who made things up. Making things up was what her parents did; for instance, they had been pretending to be happy for years.
“How did you know they were pretending?” Keating asks.
Since he is an actor, Lorean explains it in terms he can understand. “How does the audience know something the characters don’t? Les enfants are on the outside looking in.”
“Les enfants,” repeats Keating. He writes it down.
This is in their early days—she’s more than just his tutor, but they have yet to fall in love. As they talk, she peppers her speech with Québécois. Lorean likes that Keating is tall and has a movie star’s looks, but his most attractive feature is his effort to speak in her native tongue. There’s a difference between Parisian French and Québécois; most of her students want one and not the other. But Keating wants to speak like she used to back home. He says her name like her father or, for that matter, the boy who is waiting for her back home. Not Lor-e-an, each letter pronounced. Lor-ee-unh. That silent en, the end of the word trailing into space.
“Everyone in that town was hiding something,” she goes on. “Geneviève. Une village Québécois. They had clear ideas about what should and should not be said out loud. But I wanted everything to be said out loud. I didn’t like all the acting.”
“I hope your opinions have changed,” says Keating.
“You aren’t going to fool me,” Lorean says. “I’m on the outside looking in at you too.”
It’s late summer in the last years of the twentieth century, and they’re walking through the city on the hottest day of the year. Keating has just broken up with his girlfriend, but Lorean is still with Denis Beaufort, the boy she left back home. Back in that village Quebecois. Denis believes they will marry, and Lorean has the promise ring to prove it. She doesn’t like the ring; she finds it ugly and embarrassing, like a sin exposed. She often hides her hand.
“So, what sort of things were people lying about?” Keating asks as they turn down another street. He has mastered the aimless stroll; born and raised in the city, he isn’t scared to get lost. Lorean, on the other hand, still carries a map wherever she goes. “Give me all the gossip,” Keating continues. “Was the priest an alcoholic? Did the shopkeeper have a pile of dirty books?”
“The other way around. After Père Rochelle died, they found his library of French Canadian erotica. Les livres érotiques. The churchwoman burned them, but her son saved one and for years it went around l’école. We knew it was real because Père Rochelle’s writing was inside. He had taken notes.”
“Érotique,” says Keating. He can write as he walks. Another of his impressive skills. Lorean keeps telling herself things are innocent with him. She’s in her last year of school and about to emerge with a useless degree. English. What good will that be when she goes home? Keating can relate. His degree is useless too; in the acting world, no one cares where you went to school. College, Lorean thinks, is a racket in which people get rich off your hopes and dreams. A large debt-inducing hoop. She had to jump through—but what was on the other side?
“The sex wasn’t even the scandalous part,” she says. “The scandalous part was that it was written en Anglais.“
“What’s wrong with it being en Anglais?”
“In Geneviève, there was no greater crime.”
Les Québécois, she explains, have long seen themselves as a distinct culture. The battle with the rest of Canada dominated the early years of her life. There had been referendums and political fights that left lasting wounds. “Everyone in Geneviève dreamed of separation. They resisted any culture that wasn’t theirs. Most people didn’t speak English—it was a point of pride. Learning it was an act of rebellion. I had to teach myself from the radio and TV.”
“So, this Rochelle guy….”
“….was a French Catholic priest dreaming of sex in English. Tortured on multiple fronts.”
“A town of secrets. And you wanted to expose them all.”
“I wanted to set the record straight.”
“How did that work out for you?”
Lorean’s mouth folds over itself. One day, she will be a journalist and, even on this day with Keating, she has the seed of a reporter’s soul. She likes telling other people’s stories but isn’t interested in her own. Keating knows she has a boyfriend named Denis Beaufort, but he doesn’t know it’s serious. She hasn’t explained the meaning of the humiliation on her hand.
“Geneviève didn’t have a movie theatre,” she explains. “To watch movies, we had to go to the next town.”
“How is that a secret?”
“Let me get there,” she says “A good writer always builds the scene.”
And build it she does, first as they walk and later when they are nested in the back of a pub. Geneviève and its sister town—une ville jumelée—on the east end of a river that looked like a thread on the map. Three hours northwest of Montreal, it was a quarantine in winter and a glory anytime else. When the snow came, the roads closed except for the one that connected Geneviève and Notre-Dame-Sur-Rivière. Both were wonderlands of white-capped shops and colonial homes. There was one school between them and six churches because, when it comes to God, one is never enough. The tree-lined streets had been named for les rues of Paris back when the town was young. NDR—everyone shortened the name—even had its own Avenue Foch. It was here that the movie theatre stood and here that Roch Saint-Pierre took his daughter on Saturday afternoons. Alouette days, he called them, because that was his name for her. His little lark.
The Alouette days—les jours d’Alouette—started when she was nine, and Lorean blushes as she tells Keating of her pigtails and hand-me-down clothes. Back then, her father was a meaty man with black hair who worked at the cigarette factory. He didn’t smoke but his car smelled like he did, and today Lorean associates tobacco with weekends and road trips and her father singing Francophone pop. The movie theatre in NDR had once been a music hall and the decor was still as it had been during the Second World War. Roch always bought his daughter popcorn and soda before leading her up to the balcony. It was closed for matinees, but he had his connections. How many fathers give their daughters a balcony of their own? It was a reason to love him—but she wouldn’t love him for long. One afternoon, within minutes of the theatre growing dark, someone entered the balcony and took a seat in the last row. Roch left Lorean and joined the newcomer. When Lorean turned, her father was sitting with a woman’s silhouette.
“Alouette days were a farce,” Lorean tells Keating. “They were les jours de Maryse et Alouette.“
“Maryse?”
“A secretary at the factory. This was how they met. Her brother ran the movie theatre.”
“Why didn’t they go somewhere else?”
“Spoken like a man who grew up in the city. In une village Quebecois, even the trees have eyes.”
The towns didn’t know the secret, but young Lorean had only to glance back and watch the silhouettes move in the dark. Often, she sank into her seat and begged the movie to swallow her whole. The theatre had only one screen and it played the same films in repertoire, especially in the winter when it was hardest to get new reels. In the winter of 1986, when Lorean was ten and les jours de Maryse et Alouette had been going on for a year, the movie she watched time and again was La guerre des tuques.
“That means ‘The War of the Winter Hats’,” she translates. She tells him this isn’t the title en Anglais, but she refuses to tell him the English title. The English title, she says, spoils the movie’s end. “It was about a small town like mine. A grand snowball fight breaks out among the children, and they’re caught in the thrill of war. Until they’re not.”
“A tragic end? No. Don’t tell me. If it’s your favorite, I want to see it for myself.”
She’s delighted as he writes down the title. Keating is left-handed, like her, and the side of his palm is stained blue from the ink. The southpaw’s tattoo, her mother calls it. Le tattoo de gaucher.
The factory didn’t pay well and Roch made extra money as a taxi driver—the town had no official service and several men often made use of their cars. In the winter, it was common for Roch to shepherd people between Geneviève and NDR and, for this reason, there was nothing unusual about the sight of Maryse in his car. Everyone knew her brother lived in NDR, and it was well-known that Roch took Lorean with him on the weekend.
“The perfect ruse,” says Keating.
“Sometimes we picked her up on the way to the movies,” says Lorean. “And we didn’t always drive her home. The trick was to make it common enough to be uninteresting but never so common that it becomes extraordinary.”
Maryse lived in a secluded cottage tucked behind a copse of trees. There was more privacy here, and Roch often took the chance of walking her to the door. He always pulled the car in backward—he wanted Lorean to face away from the house. Lorean couldn’t see anything unless she turned around and knew it was better not to. But she couldn’t stop herself. She wanted the story; she was une journaliste even then. Sometimes she saw them kissing, and sometimes she saw Maryse lead him inside. In the winter, Roch left the keys in the ignition so the heater could run. Lorean dreamed of starting the car; she liked to think of her father finding the car, his daughter, and his pretensions were gone.
Lorean’s own house was in a small enclave of homes with Quebec flags and signs demanding independence. Je suis séparatiste. Each time they returned, Roch pulled into the driveway and turned to his daughter as the engine died. Remember, Alouette, not a word to Maman. Maryse and I are just friends, but you know how your mother gets… Then came the smile of conspiracy as he extended an offer. In 1986, the going rate for silence was a ten-dollar bill.
“He did this every week?” asks Keating.
“He thought he was bribing me. But it was all part of my plan.”
“Your plan to do what?”
“To set the record straight. I decided I would tell my mother what was going on.”
Roch Saint-Pierre was a man of the community. He sat on the town council, sang in the church choir, and didn’t charge people when his car became an ambulance (the closest hospital was an hour away). The respect for him bled into the homelife where Madame Clarabelle Saint-Pierre was as smitten as she had been on her wedding day twelve years before. Lorean’s mother idolized her husband. If Lorean was ever going to set the record straight, she couldn’t just make allegations. She needed evidence to back them up. For months, Lorean didn’t know what this might be. But a man can’t bring his daughter to the movies without it having some effect.
“You got your idea from the movies?” says Keating.
“A movie was the idea,” says Lorean. “I was saving Papa’s money to buy a video camera. The JVC GR-C1. I wanted to give my mother proof she couldn’t deny.”
Clarabelle Saint-Pierre, née Villeneuve, was the daughter of a dairy farmer in the next town—not NDR, but the next next town, a town even smaller and much further north. Bell-shaped with wide hips, she always had flour on her apron and a prayer on her lips. In the bedroom was a crucifix and a monument to Lorean’s brother, who had died in infancy and whose death had left a millstone that hung around Clarabelle’s neck.
“Maman was different before Jean-Jean,” Lorean tells Keating. “But by the time Maryse came along, we were living with a different person. She lived on a ship fifty kilometers from shore. I could see her but she was never quite there. I hated what Papa was doing to her. I wanted him to bring her to land. But he was pushing her away.”
The only other person who knew the truth about les jours d’Alouette was Denis Beaufort. One day, he would give Lorean a promise ring but, when she was ten, he was just the hardware store owner’s son. They had been early friends, and he had grown into a king of mischief with a mouth of straight teeth that he flashed whenever he wanted to charm. He was the one who kept her from slipping too far into dolls and skirts. Every Sunday, after church, Denis pulled her aside and confirmed that her father had given the same amount as the week before. The hardware store was also the electronics store; if they wanted a JVC GR-C1, Monsieur Beaufort would have to order it by mail. Denis knew the price and had already agreed to pay half. His plans went beyond exposing Roch Saint-Pierre; he had a filmmaker’s brain and dreamed of making epics about Nazi-occupied France.
Near the end of that winter in 1986, Lorean announced that she had finally saved enough. Denis told his father, and three weeks later the magnificent machine arrived along with extra cords and spare VHS-C cassettes. They spent the rest of the winter learning to work the camera by making amateur movies where they attacked imaginary enemies before dying with glee. It was fun for Lorean, but Denis was an auteur-in-training. He knew he would never be a filmmaker if he stayed in Geneviève. He’d have to go to Montreal, that mecca where success lurked behind every depanneur. He had no dreams of Hollywood. His parents had instilled in him a duty to contribute to Quebec culture; the English world could not be trusted.
“That’s separatist talk,” Lorean told Denis.
“And what’s wrong with that? We should be separate.” They were preparing to stage a science fiction scene and were gathering his collection of laser guns and spaceship paraphernalia. “You’re only against separatism because your Papa likes it. You need to think for yourself.”
Then Lorean surprised him. When he turned on the camera, she recited lines from Star Wars—the version en Anglais. Her accent was heavy and her inflection was wrong because she had learned it phonetically. May the force be with you. She had no idea what the words meant. But they were there. English. The forbidden tongue.
“Your father won’t approve,” said Denis.
“Good,” said Lorean in English.
“I don’t approve either,” said Denis in French. “What are you going to do? Take your English and leave?”
“Never,” said Lorean, switching back. “I might see the world. But I’ll always come home.”
“Promise?”
“Promise!”
“He loved me even then,” she says to Keating years later. “He even kissed me that day. A ten-year-old’s peck, but for us, that was everything. Remember that? When a peck was the world?”
“Is he still in Geneviève, or did he go to Montreal?” asks Keating.
“Montreal. He’s doing what he said he would. The industry in Quebec is incestueux. Insular. He is making a living there and never has to speak English at all.”
“And you’re going back to help him? You’re going to keep your promise?”
Lorean toys with the humiliation on her hand. It’s been stuck for a while but now, as if by miracle, it slides free. She moves it towards the knuckle, revealing a white line as if the promise of the ring has become a stain in the skin.
“Que sera sera,” she says. “Whoever knows?”
Keating brightens. “All right, then. Don’t leave a man hanging. What’s the second act?”
Mon Dieu, how he likes to listen. And how he looks at her! It’s the same look that Denis wore in the basement all those years ago. Boys age and men grow old but, if you’re lucky, they never lose that look. How long might Keating be like this? Men are April when they woo, said Shakespeare, but December when they wed. Denis had once been April but had been all too close to winter in recent months. The chill could be felt across the phone. She wonders if there is a secret to keeping a man forever in April; she wonders what Keating will be like when a month like October rolls around.
◆
The second act began just like the first: in the movie theatre of NDR while Lorean watched La guerre des tuques. From the back row came the steady hum of whispers and kisses. Lorean clutched her backpack, and the JVC GR-C1 seemed to quiver inside. Would this be one of those Saturdays when Roch didn’t drive Maryse back to Geneviève? No. When they left, they walked together to the car and soon they were en route. It was a bright day—Denis would have approved of the light. Fate. Un destin. Lorean kept her eyes front as she unzipped the knapsack. The camera had been pre-positioned so the lens peered into the outside world, and she only had to feel for the record button through the cloth. The red light blinked, and she shifted to mask it with her hand.
Roch glanced back. “Ça va, Alouette?”
“Ça va, Papa.” She tried to act sullen and bored. The camera’s microphone was buried in the bag. The sound would be bad; she hoped the visuals would be enough.
At last, the cab turned into Maryse’s cottage, reversing as always as it pulled into the drive. “Au revoir!” said Maryse and Roch followed her out. As soon as they left, Lorean turned and pointed the camcorder through the back window. Un destin struck again. The shot was perfect and caught Roch as he drew Maryse into his arms. Propelled by his passion, Maryse pulled him into the wall, driving them behind the slats of the latticework. That was nothing to Lorean, who by now had experience with the zoom. Close-up on a father and the other woman. Et voilà, as Denis would say. Le coup de grâce.
By the time Roch returned to the car, everything was where it should be. Lorean played the bored little girl. Acting—there would always be a degree of it in setting the record straight. Her heart was a hummingbird. The next step would be to bring the recording to Denis. Since he had one of the few VCRs in town, he’d be responsible for transferring the recording to a videocassette. Then there would be copies—a crucial step with any coup de grâce. Lorean watched the dark hairs on the back of her father’s neck. They seemed coarser now. Grayer too. She had bested him and, in the process, he had lost his shine.
At home, her father turned as always and gave his conspiracy grin. This time, though, when he stretched his hand, he was offering a twenty-dollar bill. The biggest prize yet. A reward, he said. For always being such a good girl. My quiet bird, he said. Mon oiseau tranquille. Lorean pocketed the money and climbed from the car, keeping the knapsack close. But when she turned to the house, her father blocked her path. His kind expression had been replaced by a ferocity she had never seen. In one swift motion, he snatched the knapsack away.
Roch didn’t need instructions on how to use the camera, and those meaty hands were nimble as they yanked out the viewfinder and switched the camera into playback mode. He hit rewind and waited. The only sound between them was the gears as the tape rewound.
“Papa…”
He held up his hand.
The tape stopped. Roch touched the play button and, through the viewfinder, the video sprang to life. There was Lorean, play-acting with laser gun in hand. Roch touched the fast-forward button. The action sped up but the scene never changed. Lorean died. Denis died. Kids being kids; the young moviemakers at work.
“It’s Denis’s camera,” she said. “He’s letting me play with it.”
She reached for the knapsack, but her father shoved her against the car. He covered her mouth with one hand while the other ran across her body, frisking the pockets of her shirt, her pants, her coat until, at last, he felt the second VHS-C tape in the back pocket of her jeans. He spun her around and held her like a TV cop making an arrest. After pulling the second tape free, he sprang away.
Roch moved to the back of the car and leaned against the hood while he replaced one tape with the other. Lorean shuddered. It had been Denis’s idea that she switch tapes as soon as filming was done. A smart plan, but no one was smarter than Roch Saint-Pierre. She had never been a step ahead. The lost shine was her own. Run, she thought. Run inside and lock the door. But she didn’t move. It was a short circuit in the mind, a failure of the electricity to move from thought to deed. By the time she found her courage, her father was closing in.
He returned the camera to the knapsack. Trapping her between himself and the car, he looked down at her with his cool silver eyes before, in a flash of motion, he struck her with the heavy bag, hitting her sideways so the weight knocked her against the car. She lost her balance and fell. He hit her again. The hammer fell. Inside, the camera cracked.
You little bird, he said. You alouette. You will never be ahawk. Le faucon, c’est moi.
◆
“Were you hurt?” Keating asks.
“Bruised. The camera was wrecked. Denis was miserable for weeks.”
“Your father destroyed the tape.”
“Never saw it again. I searched his room once, just in case. But no. It was gone.”
“Au revoir à ton coup de grâçe.” It was his first effort at a French phrase. “I don’t imagine you ever had another chance.”
“Les jours d’Alouette were done. Papa told Maman he had to start driving to other towns, but they were so far that it would be boring for me. Maman took this as some great sacrifice. The man of the house, working hard for the sake of the family back home.”
“And she never learned the truth.”
“I never said that.”
“You still set the record straight?”
“I tried,” says Lorean. “You can tell people the truth. Whether they listen is always up to them.”
She tells Keating how, when her mother saw the bruises, she thought it was from a bad fall. While Lorean trembled in her room, Clarabelle Saint-Pierre arrived with hot cocoa and lotion and bandages to nurse her daughter’s cuts. “I’m clumsy too,” she whispered. “You got that from me.” Then she kissed the wounds and tended to her little girl. Doing her duty. Duty to husband and daughter and the memory of Jean-Jean, who never reached a year. Lorean ached. She couldn’t bear to give up the plan; she needed her mother to know how badly she was being wronged.
“I’m not clumsy, Maman. Papa knocked me down.”
The ministering angel glanced up from the palm she had been swabbing clean. “Your Papa has his temper. He doesn’t mean anything by it. Has it happened before?”
“No, but—”
“—then voilà. A moment in time. To be forgotten.” She returned her medical kit, finding the right bandage she could wrap around the wound. “Alouette, you’re shaking. Is it a fever? Are you ill?”
Her hand went to Lorean’s forehead, but Lorean took it and held it against her chest. “We weren’t at the movies, Maman. We weren’t just at the movies. There’s a woman from the factory. He sees her on the weekends and then he drives her home.”
Clarabelle Saint-Pierre took back her hand as if she’d been burned. She began to pack up the supplies, leaving Lorean wet with salve and a half-bandaged palm. There was flour on the bed and the smell of pie in the air. Apple and pear. Lorean pictured her mother making the lattice, strip by strip, as Roch kissed Maryse behind a lattice of their own.
“He kisses her, Maman. I saw it. He kisses her on the porch, it’s been happening since—”
But for the second time that night Lorean was struck. The aim was off, or maybe Clarabelle Saint-Pierre’s heart wasn’t into it. The slap was a brush. Too soft to hurt yet it hurt just the same. Lorean hadn’t cried in front of her father, but now she burst into tears. Her mother didn’t pull her into her arms. She denied her duty; she collected her things and stood to leave.
“I know you’re angry at him, Lorean. But it’s no reason to make up lies.”
◆
Years later, at the bar with Keating, Lorean can’t stop building the scene; she can’t stop summoning the smell of those pies or the sting of her mother’s almost-slap. “She didn’t even entertain the idea. She had a faith in him like she had for God. And she died believing him to be something he never was.”
“She’s gone?”
“Two years later. Papa married Maryse.”
The drinks are done and the pub has gone quiet around them. It’s late now and the room is almost empty. Easy to pretend they’re the only two people in the world.
“For a time, I wondered if I was wrong. You can think something happened, but if everyone around you says otherwise, what does it mean? Is it a moment in time to be forgotten, or is it something that never was? Just a dream in time. It’s the worst thing you can do to someone, I think. Make them doubt what they believe. Papa never took me to the movies again, but he also never mentioned what happened. Maman certainly never brought it up. There was no video. Denis even managed to get the camera repaired. Once my bruises were fixed, it was like it had never happened.”
“Healed,” says Keating. “Bruises aren’t fixed. They’re healed.“
“No,” says Lorean. “They aren’t.”
On the table, his hand is close to hers. But he’s being careful, always so careful, as if the lords of propriety are watching from afar. Lorean has seen his lingering looks for weeks, but he didn’t even invite her out until he and his girlfriend were done. Her father juggled two women, and Père Rochelle balanced erotica and God, but there will be none of that for Keating. This is chivalry, circa today. Her chevalier moderne. She sees no reason to doubt this conviction. Like most of us, Lorean is only clever when she’s on the outside looking in. She doesn’t think she is the story; she thinks she learned her lesson and is now too smart to ever be fooled. She believes in Keating as much as her mother believed in Roch Saint-Pierre, but who knows? Maybe this time, the faith will be deserved. She takes off the promise ring and tucks it away. Her naked hand takes his and offers a new promise. She doesn’t yet know what it is.