Before I married for the first time, my fiancée, Isabelle, took me to visit Mademoiselle Smith, a 101-year-old spinster who lived alone in a white clapboard house in Val-Brillant. Val-Brillant was where Isabelle had grown up, a barren, windswept village in Northern Québec, a dot in the middle of the Gaspé Peninsula, 400 miles northeast of Montréal. The trees around Val-Brillant were too stunted for logging, and the pulp and paper factory had failed long ago. Children who had fled to cities returned with grandchildren during the brief summer, but there wasn’t much to do. The lake was too cold for swimming, and those who tried were rumored to get rashes or diarrhea. I had never lived in a place like that, where everyone was old and poor, and knew everyone else and their business. I assumed there was nothing for me to learn there, but looking back, I see that I was wrong.
Isabelle and I walked along the dusty road through town on a cool July day, as old couples in rocking chairs on their front porches nodded to each other, whispering “There they go, that’s the English doctor she’s marrying.” There were only a few houses, crowded up against the road because no one wanted to shovel extra snow through the infinite winter. I felt scrutinized and ill-at-ease, like I was running a gantlet. “Don’t be paranoid,” I told myself. I thought that everyone must consider it an honor that a village girl was marrying a doctor, even one who hadn’t finished his training yet. Isabelle later told me this wasn’t true; in fact, whether she should marry me was a question on which the villagers were split and had debated endlessly.
“Smith is pronounced ‘Smeet’” Isabelle explained, as we approached our destination. She had already told me that Mademoiselle had lived in that house her whole life, and hadn’t left the village in fifty years. Long ago her eight siblings had moved away one by one, and then her parents had died, one after the other. She endured. So different from my life, I marveled. To this day I am still not sure why we were visiting her. I had asked Isabelle, and she had said it was the right thing to do.
We climbed the two steps to her veranda and I reached for the door knocker. I hesitated when I saw its design, a bronze Medusa head with snakes for hair. I recoiled. Medusa in Val-Brillant was so incongruous that my thoughts took flight. Would looking at Mademoiselle turn me to stone? In retrospect, perhaps the gods were telling me to look in a mirror instead, to understand myself. I wish I had heeded them.
A teenage girl opened the door and invited us in. She was using her finger to mark her place in a book she had been reading either to her mistress or to herself.
“Bonjour, docteur!” Mademoiselle’s voice boomed through the darkened sitting room. She occupied a big, dilapidated chair, like a throne, with the red velvet covering worn away. She seemed like a mythical creature, large, with a wrinkled face, thick glasses that magnified her blue eyes, and coils of white hair piled on her head. She wore a long-sleeved white dress to her mid-calf and old sneakers. She had not turned me to stone, but I was tongue-tied. She was an escapee from an old foreign-language film, I thought, not a real person.
Isabelle ignored me and launched into a rapid-fire conversation with Mademoiselle Smith in joual, the regional French dialect. She was speaking faster and more gutturally than she did when speaking to me, and I had trouble following, so I scanned the room. It looked like an antique warehouse, ghostly and confusing. Along one wall stood three grandfather clocks, each a different height and shade of wood, each ticking crazily toward a different hour. On another wall was a mahogany breakfront bookcase, stuffed with long-neglected tomes. I was behind the scenes of an unknown play. Nothing seemed amiss to Isabelle. She fit in here, but I did not.
How did I get here? I thought back to one afternoon six months previously, lying beneath Isabelle on her narrow bed in the room beneath the eaves, the fluff from her turtleneck sweater tickling my nose, waiting for the rain to stop, listening to its staccato on the tin roof above us. Her chest was a birdcage, and I could feel the wings inside fluttering frantically. Hesitantly, she explained that her landlord had offered her a long-term lease at a reduced rate, and she wondered if she should take it. Or were we going to get married. I watched a drop of water fall from a wet spot near the corner of the ceiling.
That was unexpected. I was almost 30 years old, an intern, working 90 hours per week, on-call in the hospital every other night, brushing up against nurses who flaunted their availability. I didn’t want to marry one of them. My mother was a nurse. Isabelle was different, exotic; she barely spoke English, I barely spoke French. It was perfect, I thought. Maybe I loved her. Did I want to miss out, doomed to spend the rest of my years sorting through the dustbin of as-yet-unmarried women?
“Sure,” I said, after an embarrassingly long pause, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.
The women were waiting and watching me, and I realized that I had spaced out and missed a question. I apologized in my schoolboy French, and complimented Mademoiselle on her antiques. She beamed, and spoke slowly for my benefit.
“I have just met you, Doctor, but I have watched your fiancée grow up, from when she was a little girl playing street hockey with the boys in the depths of winter, to a teenager playing tennis on the courts behind the church in summer.” She paused to shift course. I hadn’t known that Isabelle played street hockey or tennis. It was dawning on me that I didn’t know much at all.
“I am old now, and must face the possibility that someday I will no longer be here.” She smiled, as if she were not convinced that death could befall her. “I would like to bequeath to you an escritoire that I obtained from a former mayor’s estate. I believe it was shipped here from France in the 19th century.”
With help from the girl who had opened the door for us, Mademoiselle rose, and leaning on her cane, led us to the next room where the escritoire stood. To my untrained eye it was flawless, with thin, elegantly curved legs, a leather inlayed writing surface, a rounded back and sides, two small shelves, and intricate brass handles. It was not the sort of thing I had aspired to, but I instantly loved it. I imagined myself sitting at it, dressed elegantly, writing with an expensive pen, a future gift from Isabelle. Mademoiselle Smith had recognized my discerning taste and promising future, and I loved her for it.
I stammered a thank you that didn’t do justice to my gratitude. Isabelle elaborated, and added that she hoped Mademoiselle would live a much longer and happy life. We returned to the sitting room, and presently the girl served us tea and cookies. Soon after, Mademoiselle stifled a yawn and we took that as our signal to depart.
Clouds had rolled in, and a cool wind was blowing off the lake. The rocking chairs were empty now but moved with stronger gusts, as if by an invisible hand. We hurried along.
“That writing desk is beautiful,” I bubbled. “She was so kind to us!”
“Don’t be naïf, cheri,” Isabelle laughed.
“What? Why?” I did not understand, but knew I was about to be deflated.
“She has been promising her furniture to villagers for 40 years. My mother covets a grandfather clock, and has brought Mademoiselle vegetables from her garden for years to curry favor. Claudette, the girl who reads to her every day for hours, is unpaid, but her family hopes to inherit the house.” None of this had occurred to me. I had assumed the old woman thought of me as someone special, but now I realized I was another target for her deception. It had not yet occurred to me that I might also be misled in other aspects of my life.
“She gets whatever she wants. She’s treated like royalty. I’m surprised someone hasn’t poisoned her after all these years.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m partly joking. Villagers spend the long winter talking about who’s going to get what.” I began to worry that one day she would promise our escritoire to someone local with more influence.
Of course we never got the escritoire. Looking back, I should have realized that I didn’t need it, that it was a bauble, a distraction. Maybe I should have seen that I didn’t need Isabelle either. She was a clear-eyed realist who wasn’t going to indulge my fantasies. Her plan was to marry a doctor, and she would learn that I was not the doctor she expected.
It was still cold and windy two days later, our wedding date. We could see our breath before our eyes as we walked the two blocks to the church, a Gothic monster, its stones blackened and pitted by time.
“Seems way out of proportion to the size of the village,” I mused to Isabelle.
“Built to glorify God,” she replied. “Costs a fortune to heat in winter. A complete folly.”
So there we were. Our small wedding party filled one chapel off the nave. In a few minutes we were married. The reception was at her parents’ house. During dinner my sister mentioned that Isabelle resembled our mother, same eyes, same face, same mannerisms, just a French version. What must have been obvious to everyone had escaped my notice. I was seeing what I wanted to see, not reality.
Isabelle and I left Val-Brillant that evening and drove through the humid night air, the top down on my candy-apple-red ‘65 Mustang, following Route 132 as it snaked through villages. A red neon “Le Bar” sign lit up a dirt parking lot with silver motorcycles, where a long-legged girl in a black leather miniskirt held a long-necked beer, then sipped, to the frenetic pulse of Robert Charlebois’ “J’T’Aime Comme un Fou” blasting through outdoor speakers. I love you like crazy, I automatically translated, but I wasn’t even sure I loved Isabelle, whatever love meant, and it certainly wasn’t like crazy. I did love my old Mustang, but that was different.
I searched for a better image. I thought each light in each town represented a family, a couple tied to children and parents and grandparents, a web stretching backward and forward in time; and now I was no longer floating free, but with Isabelle was linked into all that. I no longer felt alone and vulnerable. But what had I traded for this connection? What would become of us?
I wanted to explain this to Isabelle, but she was asleep, her black hair floating and twisting behind her. I could smell a trace of her perfume, and newly mown hay in the dark fields, and diesel smoke from trucks lumbering along beneath the stars. The 2-lane highway became the 4-lane autoroute. The moon set in front of us, and the promise of a sunrise glowed behind us as we reached Montréal, where we boarded our flight to Paris.
We had departed Val-Brillant but we had not escaped it. I came to realize that a large piece of Isabelle would always be lodged there. And that sticky little village taught me to figure out who I was, and what I needed, and it wasn’t the escritoire.
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