*
“Here the girls are asking their father for his blessing,” the Movietone newsreel narrator said, as though announcing the bombing of London. “Like obedient children. It’s a ritual still practiced in the hinterlands of Quebec.”
He pronounced it Kwee-bek, and his voice was hushed, documenting a rare species caught in its natural habitat.
Gamache sat forward. The girls were now eight or nine years of age. They weren’t in their fairy-tale cottage. This was back at the family farmhouse. Through the windows he could see it was winter.
Their coats and hats and skates were neatly hung on pegs by the door. Hockey sticks formed a teepee in the corner. He recognized the woodstove and braided rag rug and furnishings from the very first film, when the girls had been born. Almost nothing had changed. Like a museum.
The girls were kneeling, hands clasped in front of them, heads bowed, wearing identical dresses, identical shoes, identical bows. He wondered how anyone could tell them apart, and he wondered if they even bothered. As long as there were five of them, the details didn’t seem to matter.
Marie-Harriette knelt behind her daughters.
It was the first time the newsreels had captured the Quints’ mother. Gamache put his elbows on his knees and leaned further forward, trying to get a good look at this epic mother.
With surprise, Gamache realized this wasn’t, in fact, the first time he’d seen her. It had been Marie-Harriette who’d pushed her daughters out that door. Then closed it on them.
Over and over. Until they got it right.
He’d presumed it was some NFB producer, or even a nurse or teacher. But it was their own mother.
Isidore Ouellet stood at the front of the room facing his family, his arms straight out in front of him. His eyes were closed. His face was in repose, like a zombie seeking enlightenment.
Gamache recognized the ritual. It was the New Year’s Day blessing of the children by their father. It was a solemn and meaningful prayer, though one rarely practiced in Québec anymore. He’d never considered doing it and Reine-Marie, Annie and Daniel would have howled with laughter had he tried. He had a brief thought that the holidays were approaching and the whole family would be together in Paris. Perhaps on New Year’s Day, with his children and grandchildren, he could suggest it. Just to see the looks on their faces. It would almost be worth it. Though Reine-Marie’s mother had remembered, as a child, kneeling with her siblings for the blessing.
And here it was, being played out for the insatiable newsreel audience, sitting in dark theaters around the world in the mid-forties, the Quints’ lives a prelude to the latest Clark Gable or Katharine Hepburn film.
There was a definite odor of the gaslights about what they were seeing on this grainy black and white film. A staged event, played for effect. Like the native drumming and dances performed for paying tourists.
Genuine, absolutely. But here more mercantile than spiritual.
The girls were supposedly praying for the paternal blessing. Gamache wondered what their father was praying for.
“The charming little ceremony over, the girls prepare to go outside to play,” said the voice-over, as though announcing the tragic raid on Dieppe.
What followed were scenes of the Quints putting on their snowsuits, good-naturedly teasing each other, looking into the camera and laughing. Their father helped lace up their skates and handed them hockey sticks.
Marie-Harriette appeared, putting knitted tuques on their heads. Each hat, Gamache noticed, had a different pattern. Snowflakes, trees. She had one too many and threw the extra off camera. Not a casual toss. She whipped it, as though it had bitten her.
The gesture was revealing. It showed a woman at the end of her tether, where something as trivial as too many hats could spark anger. She was exasperated, exhausted. Worn down.
She turned to the camera and, in a look that chilled the Chief Inspector, she smiled.
It was one of those moments a homicide investigator looked for. The tiny conflict. Between what was said and what was done. Between the tone and the words.
Between Marie-Harriette’s expression and her actions. The smile, and the thrown hat.
Here was a woman divided, perhaps even falling apart. It was through such a crack an investigator crawled to get to the heart of the matter.
Gamache watched the screen and wondered how the woman who’d struggled up the steps of Saint Joseph’s Oratory on her knees, praying for children, came to this.
The Chief suspected her annoyance had been directed at the ubiquitous Dr. Bernard, trying to keep him out of the frame. To, just once, leave them alone with their children.
It had worked. Whoever she’d gestured to had backed off.
But Gamache could tell it was a rearguard action. No one that tired would prevail for long.
Long dead and buried in another town, Gamache remembered Ruth’s seminal poem, my mother hasn’t finished with me yet.
In just over five years, Marie-Harriette would be dead. And in just over fifteen years Virginie would possibly take her own life. And what had Myrna said? They would no longer be Quints. They would be a quartet, then triplets, twins. Then just one. An only child.