The cook always gave Rose cigarettes. The cook liked to have company when he smoked. She would smoke while perched on the counter with her legs crossed, listening to the cook rattle on about his brother-in-law.
When Sister Elo?se caught her, she made Rose stand in front of everyone and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. All the children watched her smoking. She did it so elegantly. Rose blew a smoke ring and the children applauded. They had no idea how she was able to playact at being an adult so well.
“It’s very hard being a dragon,” Rose said, “no matter what they tell you. Every time I turn around, it just so happens that there is a knight standing there, poking me in the behind. Excuse me, but do I show up at your house and poke you in the behind? No, I do not.”
As always, laughter erupted around her, the way water leaps up around a statue in a fountain. Pierrot laughed the hardest. He thought Rose was marvelous. He thought she was a rebel. He was intimidated by her.
Rose felt as if she could smoke every cigarette in the whole damn city. Later that day, Rose found herself over a bucket, puking.
When she caught Rose with her arms around the bear again one evening, Elo?se decided she had had enough.
Ordinarily, Elo?se’s thoughts were like pieces of well-crafted china delicately placed on the shelf of a locked glass display case. When Rose came into the room, each of her words was like a mortar shell, and the shelves began to shake and the ideas began to fall off and smash to the ground. Elo?se’s anger was irrational, and it was also impossible to stand.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want the little ones to be afraid of the dark. I want them to know that the creatures of night are sweet.”
“There’s nothing in the darkness. They just have to trust in God and everything will be all right. God is all around them in the dark.”
“But sometimes we like to imagine talking bears. I am inviting them to come out and to sit with us and have a cup of tea.”
“You’re summoning the devil.”
“No I’m not. It’s only a game.”
“How dare you talk back to me?”
Rose found herself sitting in the cupboard for the better part of three days. When she was finally released, Pierrot noticed her in the corridor, squinting because the light was blinding, her arms stretched out in front of her.
At the orphanage, those caught masturbating had their hands whipped with a ruler fifty times. And then they would stand on a chair in the common room wearing red gloves so everyone would know what they had done. There was a different little boy standing up on the chair every few weeks. And then one day there was the lovely Rose. Nobody could believe it. But perhaps most shocking was the look on her face. She stood with her chin up in the air, a look close to pride on her face.
Pierrot sometimes told people that was the moment he fell in love with Rose.
6
PORTRAIT OF BOY WITH UMBRELLA
Pierrot had his eyes scrunched up as he masturbated one night when he was eleven. His lips were screwed over to the left, and his toes poked out from under the blanket and were stretched out wide. He opened his eyes and was startled to see Sister Elo?se standing at the foot of his bed. He was horrified. His penis was making the blanket stand up like a tent.
He was certain he was going to be severely punished. Instead she gently took his hand while putting her finger up to her puckered mouth, indicating that he should be quiet. Making it seem as though she were somehow complicit in his crime. She tiptoed prettily in front of him and he followed. She took him into the bathroom with her. He thought that she was perhaps taking him away so that she might beat him without waking up the other children. She was probably going to make him climb into a bathtub filled with cold water, a not uncommon punishment at the orphanage.
At the sight of the bathtub filled with water, Pierrot began to tremble and shake. Children in Montreal had an absolute terror of the cold. You might assume they had built up a resistance to it, given the long winters, but the opposite was true. The cold had persecuted and tormented them to such an extent that they were more wary and frightened of it than children anywhere else. In the same way that children who are bitten by dogs are horrified by the creatures their whole lives.
“Take off your clothes and get into the bath,” she said.
Pierrot’s teeth chattered as he pulled his nightgown up over his head. His whole body trembled as though a train were passing by the window. Sister Elo?se looked down at his penis. Although it had lost its erection, it was still larger than the penises of other boys his age. When he noticed her looking, he put his hands over it, embarrassed once again. He stepped into the bath, forgetting the cold for a moment, as if it could hide him.