A Crossing of Hearts

By Michel Tremblay and Sheila Fischman

A Crossing of Hearts continues Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, a family saga set in Montreal during World War I.

August 1915. Montreal is stifled by a heat wave while war rages in Europe. The three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a whole week of vacation in the mountains, to do nothing but gossip, laugh, drink, and overeat while basking in the sun. Maria had decided to leave her children, Nana and Théo, in Montreal, in the care of a neighbour who gives her a hand when she needs it. Now Maria’s children come roaring into the kitchen, pink with pleasure, begging to come too. “I keep telling you, Momma, we’ll be as quiet as little mice,” Nana assures her. “We’ll hardly take up any room. You won’t even know we’re there.”

Reluctantly, Maria takes her children along on the week-long trip to the Laurentians. As the reader views the journey through young Nana’s eyes, we come to understand the impoverished circumstances they leave behind in Montreal, only to find poverty ever more present in the country. Yet here it is surrounded by mountains, reflected in a lovely lake, and the blue sky gives them a moment of respite. It feels good to get out of town, and Tremblay’s writing remains so vivid that the reader imagines dipping into cool lake water along with the family. Encounters with rural relatives crystallize young Nana’s true feelings for her mother, as confidences and family secrets fuse day into night.

This third novel in Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series bursts with life as Nana, the young city girl, explores the natural world – and the enchanted forest of her inner, maturing self. The novel also further develops the character of Maria so that we understand her motivations more fully, and at the same time recognize nods to the history of Quebec and the dynamics of the family under the strictures of the Catholic church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Aug 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781772010121

Michel Tremblay

A major figure in Québec literature, Michel Tremblay has built an impressive body of work as a playwright, novelist, translator, and screenwriter. To date Tremblay’s complete works include twenty-nine plays, thirty-one novels, six collections of autobiographical stories, a collection of tales, seven screenplays, forty-six translations and adaptations of works by foreign writers, nine plays and twelve stories printed in diverse publications, an opera libretto, a song cycle, a Symphonic Christmas Tale, and two musicals. His work has won numerous awards and accolades; his plays have been published and translated into forty languages and have garnered critical acclaim in Canada, the United States, and more than fifty countries around the world.

Book preview

PART ONE

DARKNESS

AUGUST 1915

Like I keep telling you, Mama, we’ll be as quiet as little wee mice. We won’t take up hardly any room. You won’t even know we’re there.

Yeah sure.

Maria sets down in front of her daughter a plate of little baloney hats, the poor people’s dish Rhéauna is so crazy about. It’s a dish Maria’s own mother used to make when money was tight and she had to come up with something to feed her husband and their four kids. Cheap and filling. It could actually be the memory of that poverty more than the taste of the dish itself that Maria can’t stand. When Rhéauna asked, shortly after her arrival from the Prairies two years earlier, why she never made it, horrible childhood memories came flooding back and she resisted briefly because she knew that just the smell of baloney frying would take her back to Saskatchewan, where she’d been so miserable, and remind her of her mother, so brave and docile she was ridiculous; the constant hunger because the father drank up the miserable amount of money that he earned; all those clichéd images of poverty she had tried to shed when she left her native village on a whim and had never managed to forget. But it’s true that the little baloney hats didn’t cost much and the children loved them.

A few minutes earlier she’d tossed into the big frying pan some slices of the fattiest baloney, the kind with the white spots that Joséphine called pig’s eyes. She cooked them until they swelled in the heat and took the shape of the little hats that had given their name to the dish. Just before the meat began to burn on the edges, she added some cubes of leftover boiled potatoes with a little butter to bind it all together. She stirs the contents of the frying pan as she’d have done if she were making a fricassee while an aroma of overcooked pork fills the kitchen. She thinks she’ll have trouble ridding her clothes and her hair of that smell before she leaves for work. Nana and Théo come racing into the kitchen, pink with pleasure. When they’d asked for it that morning, she’d said it was too heavy for August and hard to digest, that she didn’t want one of them to have a stomach ache when she wasn’t there. They insisted though, and in the end she gave in. They needed consolation in the face of her refusal to give in to Nana’s demand that they go on vacation with her to Duhamel, in the Laurentians, where her sister, Teena, has a cabin. For months the three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a whole week of vacation with nothing to do but gossip and laugh and have a drink and overeat while basking in the sun, and Maria had decided to leave her children in Montreal, in the care of a neighbour, Madame Desbaillets, who helps her out and gives her a hand when she needs it. Of course the prospect of staying in the city while her mother and her aunts go on vacation in the country was bad news for Rhéauna, who’d love to follow them. Though Maria had explained that the house was too small for all of them, Rhéauna, unwilling to give in, put her foot down.

Now she looks up at her mother who refuses to touch the dish she’s cooked for them, instead taking little sips of black tea. All right, now what?

Why aren’t you eating?

You know I can’t stand it.

But it’s so good.

Théo, perched on his high chair and just as happy as his sister, fiddles with his plate and shovels in gobs of food that cover his mouth with a thick layer of grease. He doesn’t bother wiping it off. The floor around his chair is strewn with scraps of meat and potatoes that Nana will clean up later.

Just watching you eat it makes me sick to my stomach.

Then don’t look!

Rhéauna adds a little Heinz ketchup to what’s left on her plate and picks up her fork.

Maria brings her cup of tea to her lips before she speaks. She must not lose her temper. This is not the moment to launch into one of those endless arguments that pit them against one another that have happened nearly every day since the start of summer holidays. On the threshold of adolescence, Rhéauna has her nasty side and Maria has decided not to let her daughter get under her skin, imposing her own way of seeing things whenever she gets a chance. And there’s no lack of opportunities because their ideas on just about everything are different. On the pretext that she takes care of her little brother when Maria leaves for work around eight in the evening, Rhéauna tends to think she’s no longer a child and appears a little too independent for her mother’s liking.

Drink your tea, Nana.

You know I can’t stand it.

She’d spoken in the same tone of voice Maria had just used. She knows that Rhéauna is looking for something, that she’ll jump on the slightest excuse to blow up into specific accusations, and what shocks her most is that for the most part they are well founded. A mother shouldn’t give her children over to the care of a neighbour so she can go on vacation – a nearly irrefutable argument that Rhéauna has been serving up for days. But Maria also has a thirst for independence; she would like a chance to catch her breath for a while, even just a week, to have some fun, to live it up without having to think about them continuously, about their needs, their demands. Not that they are difficult, far from it. Even Théo, now all of two years old, agrees without too much fuss to his mother’s leaving while he’s being given his bath at bedtime. He doesn’t know where she goes, doesn’t know she works nights, but all the same he tolerates her going. No, these are responsibilities that weigh on her and she should be able to forget them for a while. Just one little week. Though she is well aware that she’ll worry if she leaves Rhéauna and Théo in Montreal, and that’s what infuriates her most.

Meanwhile, Rhéauna stands up to her and wolfs down too quickly the fricassee that she shouldn’t have made on such a hot day and is simply a sign of her own guilt.

I told you, Nana, drink that tea. It’ll wipe out the grease in your stomach.

Another legacy from her own mother who always served strong tea with heavy food because she thought or pretended to think that it melted the fat and kept her from putting on weight. The heavier the food, the stronger the tea. Which didn’t stop her from putting on weight and getting bigger over the years.

Rhéauna shrugs.

That isn’t vinegar, it’s tea. And tea makes you have to pee.

She wipes her lips with the rag that serves as a table napkin and lays it down next to her plate.

Mama, did you know that in the days of Louis XIV the queens of France drank quarts and quarts of vinegar to keep from getting fat? Mind you, maybe they didn’t know about tea yet.

Maria slaps the table with the flat of her hand, just once but so hard that Théo stops chewing and starts to shriek.

Nana! Don’t start teaching me the kings of France. This is not the time.

Rhéauna knows when to stop.

I’m sorry, Mama, I wasn’t trying to make you mad.

She gets up from the table and starts to clean her little brother’s face, which needs a good scrub. She plants a kiss on Théo’s forehead, talks softly in his ear until he finally calms down.

She knows it’s pointless to push her mother any further, that irony won’t make her win, especially because Maria, who doesn’t read much, hates it when her daughter displays knowledge that she’s found in books. Especially when Rhéauna assumes the superior manner of a know-it-all teacher and deigns to share her tremendous knowledge with the ignoramus who is her mother. Maria’s not ignorant though, far from it, as Rhéauna is well aware; she knows about life from all sorts of experiences she has lived, not taken from books, her knowledge is first of all practical. She doesn’t have time to plunge into historical novels – The Three Musketeers for instance, which has fascinated Rhéauna for months now, as she searches for detailed descriptions of customs from other places, other times, of what provoked the behaviour of the great historical characters, what they ate, what they thought, how they dressed. Maria has too many problems to deal with here and now that keep her from losing herself in fictions that wouldn’t solve any of them even if they gave her some pleasant moments. Rhéauna was wrong then to talk about a vinegar diet in the court of Louis XIV, to play once again a learned woman, and she can’t see a way out of the fix she’s in. If she wants to spend a week in Duhamel, alienating her mother isn’t the best way to start.

So why not opt for the simple truth? Her mother would react better to that than to one of those endless disputes tinged with bad faith on both sides and far-fetched arguments that had them at daggers drawn ever since the announcement of the vacation in Duhamel from which she and Théo would be excluded because there wasn’t enough room in aunt Teena’s house. Which sounds more like an excuse than a genuine reason.

When she finishes cleaning up the floor around her brother’s high chair, she goes back to her place at the table. Her mother has just poured herself a second cup of tea. She blows on the scalding liquid before every sip.

You didn’t answer, Mama.

After a long moment, Maria speaks.

Of course you’re excused. But you’ve got a knack for aggravating me, I’ve told you a thousand times. We’ll be talking about something and when you don’t know what to say you change the subject and then who knows what to say! I don’t know how to explain it, Nana, there isn’t enough room, the house is too small, Duhamel is a long way from here. It takes half a day to get there and there’s already four of us in Monsieur Lebrun’s car – and he’ll have to sleep in the shed next to the house because there’re just two bedrooms. And there’s three of us women with baggage for a week. I need a holiday, Nana, can you get that into your head once and for all?

Rhéauna finishes her plate, her glass of milk, takes them to the sink. She’ll wash the dishes later, when Théo is in bed and her mother has gone to work. Meanwhile, she rinses all the plates, all the utensils, then sets them on a clean towel that serves as a draining board. She talks while she bustles about, not looking at Maria. What she has to say isn’t easy. She’s afraid of how her mother will react.

Duhamel is in the country, Mama. And I haven’t seen the countryside for two years. I spent five years surrounded by fields and animals and then all of a sudden here I am in the middle of the city where there’s hardly any trees except in the parks with all the noise and the stink. I didn’t ask, Mama, I didn’t ask to leave the countryside at the other end of the country and move here. It was you that made me do it. Aunt Teena says there are lots of mountains in Duhamel, that there are mountains all around her house, and I’ve never seen a mountain! I don’t know them. All I know is Saskatchewan that’s as flat as an empty plate, and what I want to see is mountains. You showed me Mount Royal in the distance but we’ve never gone there because you can never afford the time. I keep telling you, we’ll behave ourselves. Théo and me, if you take us you’ll hardly know we’re there. I’ll take good care of him, I’ll keep an eye on him day and night. I know you need a holiday, I know how hard you work to support the three of us, but we could all be on holiday together, couldn’t we? Are we that much in the way, Théo and me?

She turns away as she asks the last question and what she sees in her mother’s eyes scares her. It’s a different look, veiled, that’s hiding something she can’t explain, a mixture of all kinds of feelings that clash and conflict. There is love in it somewhere, yes, and generosity, but also a kind of resentment. Or a certain kind of regret. For one brief moment she tells herself that it’s most likely true that they are nuisances, finally, she and her brother, that likely there are times when she puts up with them because they are her children: she, Rhéauna, whom she brought from so far away to take care of Théo, and him, the child she possibly hadn’t wanted and who arrived at the beginning of her widowhood. And there, in the middle of the kitchen, dishrag in hand, she understands that there’s nothing to be done, that she won’t go to Duhamel and that her mother, because she needs it, will spend a fantastic week there far away from them, free at last, happy at last. That it’s fair, too, because she deserves it.

And for the first time since she arrived from Saskatchewan, she has a glimpse of the possibility that her mother is unhappy.

A decorative leaf

All that fuss has made me late.

Maria is moving around impatiently in the bathroom, touching up her lipstick, running her hands through her hair, checking out her eyebrows. She is beautiful when she leaves for work, another woman almost, livelier and more elegant, and at this time every night, Rhéauna inhales deeply the wafts of tilleul perfume her mother bathes in. She looked up tilleul in a dictionary at school the year before: it’s a tree that grows in temperate climates, with small white or yellowish blossoms. So Rhéauna decided that her mother smelled more like the tree than the flower. In a story by the tilleul, The Inn of the Guardian Angel, she had seen an illustration depicting two children at the foot of a tilleul and she thought to herself that yes, her mother could very well be that beautiful protective tree that smells so good. Maria gets her perfume and her soap from the United States because she can’t find them in Montreal, not even at the fancy Ogilvy’s store, not even at Dupuis Frères, where she had claimed every time the two of them went there that you can find anything you want. Rhéauna had of course pointed out that you can’t find everything because they didn’t have tilleul perfume or soap and her mother had laughed as she told her that you couldn’t find crocodiles or the King’s underwear either. For Rhéauna, tilleul had become as exotic as crocodiles and as rare as the king of England’s underwear. Meanwhile, though she feels overwhelmed with disappointment, Rhéauna inhales lungfuls of the oh-so-sweet fragrance that will float in the apartment for long minutes after Maria has gone out.

Over supper, they hadn’t talked again about the conflict that pitted them one against the other. Both believed that the matter had been dealt with, that the two children would not be going to the country, and a kind of truce, made up of frustration on one side and relief on the other, has settled between them. Maria had chosen to forget the disagreement as soon as the argument was over, taking refuge in a cock-and-bull story interrupted by little laughs that didn’t hide her nervousness. She often conceals discomfort behind laughter in that way whenever she feels disconcerted. It’s what Rhéauna calls looking elsewhere, one of her mother’s character traits that irritates her most. Right in the middle of a discussion, especially if she feels trapped and can’t come up with anything to say, Maria will start to laugh, sweep aside the problem, and exit the room, humming. She had not done that earlier because the subject was more serious, but as soon as the conversation was over she told a joke, planted a kiss on Théo’s forehead, and stepped out on the balcony for a cigarette – a new bad habit picked up at the nightclub where she works. She talked to her children through the screen door as if nothing had happened, about the gladioli, beautiful in Madame Desbaillet’s yard this year, the green of the trees that has deepened over the past few weeks, about school which will be starting soon, about Rhéauna’s birthday which will be there shortly. Rhéauna who is practically a woman now! Meanwhile, Rhéauna has washed the dishes and put them away before leaving the kitchen, pulling Théo by the hand without a word to her mother who has been holding forth as if they were still there.

After that, Maria took a quick bath to get rid of the smell of fried baloney, even washing her hair. And so she’s behind on her usual schedule, which clearly makes her nervous. She has just called a taxi, something she allows herself very rarely.

In two years I’ve never been late and I’m not starting tonight.

Rhéauna sits on the toilet seat while Théo plays with his yellow ducky, splashing in the lukewarm water his mother has left in the tub. She rests her chin on the edge of the sink.

You always say there’s hardly anybody at the Paradise before ten.

That’s true, but I still have to be there. Even for just two or three customers, somebody has to serve them. Often I’m the only one on the floor till ten o’clock, don’t forget. It’s a big responsibility.

The phone rings in the living room.

Maria heaves an exasperated sigh.

Now what! This isn’t really the time. Go and answer it, Nana. Say I’ve already left.

Rhéauna, who hardly ever has permission to use the phone, races across the apartment to pick it up.

Hello?

Nana? It’s your aunt Teena. Is your mother there?

She’s just leaving for work. I don’t think she has time to talk to you …

Tell her it’s urgent!

Can’t it wait till tomorrow morning?

It can’t wait five minutes.

Maria must have sensed bad news and she’s already next to Rhéauna with her hand held out.

"It’s ma tante Teena. Sounds like it’s important."

Maria grabs the receiver.

I’m late, so make it quick.

Her sister doesn’t bother asking how she is.

Here’s what happened. Monsieur Lebrun can’t come to Duhamel. His car broke down!

A decorative leaf

Rhéauna has known for some time that Théo only understands the last words of the story: "The