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THE FUNERAL PROCESSION moved slowly down the street. The clowns didn’t care that they were blocking traffic. When the limousines began to move hesitantly through the crowd and down Saint Catherine Street, a woman sitting on the sidewalk pulled on her accordion and started to play Pierrot’s tune, and it made everyone feel wonderful. It brought out their feelings and made them more intense, the way spices do to the flavors of meat. And Pierrot, who had been terrified of the feelings that accordions gave him, seemed to no longer mind. And the people in the crowd felt terrible and full of woe that Pierrot had died, but they also felt grateful that he had been in their lives. He was from Montreal, and he had proved that they all had beauty and art inside them as much as any other person anywhere in the world. They felt happy about exactly where they were in the universe.
All the children in the city put candles in their windows that night. The Milky Way became for one night a tiny island in the Saint Lawrence River.
71
FINAL CHAPTER
It was late in the afternoon and Rose was walking down the street. She wore a long, straight navy blue dress. It had different layers, different rows of lace that had been sewn together—it looked like a multistoried apartment building. She had a giant white pouf attached to the side of her head.
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SHE WAS ON HER WAY from the audition of a new brother-and-sister act for the Rose Theater. The eighteen-year-old boy played the ukulele with such an odd solemnity. The sister sang a letter to a sweetheart who was overseas. She had a squeaky voice, slightly off-key, but confident for no reason. Only an act as awkward as this could dare to convey the tragic events that had occurred overseas, so Rose booked them on the spot.
The pair threw themselves into each other’s arms and wept when Rose offered them a job. In the three years since Rose had returned to Montreal, she had turned her clubs and hotels into vibrant, lucrative businesses. Her most magnificent accomplishment was the cabaret on the corner, the Rose Theater, which she had constructed out of an abandoned ballroom. The building itself was beautiful, but it was the acts that were extraordinary, universally regarded as the best in town. No one ever quite understood where she was able to find them. There were always lineups around the block to get in.
There was also something romantic about the atmosphere. It was the place to go on a first date. People often found themselves proposing to their partners there.
Rose stopped to chat to four young girls sitting on a bench. They weren’t any better looking than other girls. The prettiest thing about them was that they were nineteen. But there’s always something eternally lovely about being a girl. They had fixed their hair in various waves on top of their head with bobby pins. Two of the girls were looking at a magazine together. Another girl, dressed in a beige coat with beige socks, was eating french fries out of a paper bag, looking straight ahead. You might not think that the girls were prostitutes if it wasn’t for the fact that the girl at the end, who was wearing a light blue cotton dress with puffy sleeves, couldn’t seem to keep her eyes open and her head kept jerking up and down.
The city’s nightlife exploded in the 1940s, with all the sailors and army ships docking in Montreal before heading out to Europe. Montreal became world famous for having pretty girls you could fuck for cheap. But Rose refused to ever make a cent off an unfortunate girl. She never operated any brothels or allowed any in her buildings. She never had a back exit at her clubs that led to a brothel across the alley. She never allowed pimps to prey on young girls at her clubs.