“Speak,” Galtier urged. “Say what is in your mind.”
“No-what is in my heart,” O’Doull replied. “What I want to tell you is that I love your daughter, and I will do everything I can to take care of her and make her as happy as I can.”
“Well,” Lucien Galtier said, and then again: “Well.” He picked up the bottle of applejack and poured a hefty dollop for Dr. O’Doull and another for himself. He raised his glass in salute. “I look forward to my grandchildren.”
O’Doull’s long face was normally serious almost to somberness. Galtier had not imagined such a wide smile could spread over it as happened when the doctor understood his words. Still smiling that broad smile, Dr. O’Doull reached out and shook his hand. The doctor’s skin was soft, uncallused from manual labor, but not smooth-poisons to kill germs had left it rough and red.
“Thank you, my father-in-law to be,” O’Doull said. “Thank you.”
“Now you make me feel old,” Galtier said in mock severity. He raised his glass. “Let us drink, and then let us tell the rest of the family-if Nicole has not already done as much in the kitchen.”
Only as the brandy slid warmly down his throat did he reflect on how, after the United States had overrun his country, he had been certain-he had been more than certain; he had been resolved-he would hate the invaders forever. And now his daughter was going to marry an American. He had just given permission for his daughter to marry an American. He shook his head. Life proved stranger than anyone could imagine.
When he called, his wife and daughters flew out of the kitchen and his sons came leaping down the stairs like mountain goats. They might not know what he would say, but they knew what he was going to talk about. He got up, walked over to Leonard O’Doull, and set a hand on his shoulder. “We are going to have in our family a new member,” he said simply. “Our friend, monsieur le docteur O’Doull, has asked of me permission to marry Nicole, and I have given to him that permission and my blessing.”
He remembered then that O’Doull had not asked for permission, only his blessing. He wondered what would have happened had he refused it. Would O’Doull have done something foolish? Would Nicole? He had no way of finding out now. Perhaps-no, probably-that was just as well.
And then he forgot about might-have-beens, because Nicole squealed with joy and threw herself into his arms, her three little sisters squealed with excitement and started jumping up and down, Charles and Georges went over to O’Doull and pounded him on the back (that Charles did so rather surprising Lucien), and Marie squeezed between them to kiss the American doctor on the cheek.
“Thank you, Papa. Thank you,” Nicole said over and over.
He patted her on the back. “Do not thank me now, my little one,” he said. “If you thank me ten years from now, if you thank me twenty years from now, if le bon Dieu permits me to remain in this world so that you may thank me thirty years from now, that will be very good.”
“If I want to thank you now, I am going to thank you now,” Nicole said. “So there!” To prove it, she kissed him.
He glanced over to O’Doull, one eyebrow upraised. “See how disobedient she is,” he said. “You should know what you are getting into.”
“I’ll take my chances,” O’Doull said with a laugh.
“And we will at last get our older sister out of the house!” Georges said. If the dance he and Charles danced wasn’t one of delight, it made an excellent counterfeit.
Galtier waited for Nicole to explode into fury. It didn’t happen. She said, “This is the happiest day of my life, and I am not going to let my two foolish brothers ruin it for me.”
The happiest day of my life. When the USA first invaded Quebec, Galtier had never imagined those words in connection with an American. Now Nicole spoke them altogether without self-consciousness. And now he did not explode into fury on hearing them. He poured himself more applejack, to serve as a shield against strangeness.
TheGreatWar: Breakthroughs
“Well, Edna,” Nellie Semphroch said with a groan, “I wish you’d married that Rebel officer and moved away from here, the way you were talking about.”
“So do I, Ma,” her daughter moaned. “Oh, Jesus Christ, so do I.” They were not angry at each other, not for the moment. What sounded like a thunderstorm raged outside.
It was not a thunderstorm. It was worse, much worse. “If you’d gone somewhere far away, you’d be safe now,” Nellie said. “You ain’t safe here. Nobody’s safe in Washington, not any more.”
Two candles lit the cellar under the coffeehouse from which Nellie had made so much during the war. Every few seconds, another U.S. shell would crash down, and the candlesticks would shake and the flames jerk. Every so often-far more often than Nellie’s frazzled nerves could readily bear-a shell would land close by or a round from a big gun would hit a little farther off. Then the candlesticks would jump, and the flames leap and swoop wildly. A couple of times, Nellie had to move like lightning to keep the candlesticks from falling over and the candles from starting a fire.
If a big shell came down on the coffeehouse…If a big shell came down on the coffeehouse, it would pierce the roof and then the ceiling of the first story and then the floor, every one of them as if it weren’t there at all. Those shells, she’d heard, had special hard noses to smash their way even into concrete installations. If one of them exploded in the cellar-well, she and Edna would never know what hit them, and that, she had seen, was in its own way a mercy.
A heavy shell thudded home. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake (or so Nellie imagined; she’d never felt a real earthquake). Edna started to cry. “God, God, Ma,” she wailed. “This here is the capital of the United States. What the hell is the U.S. Army doing, blowing the capital of their own goddamn country to pieces?”
“If the Rebs would have left, if they would have said Washington was an open city and pulled back over the Potomac into Virginia, this never would have happened,” her mother answered. “But they keep going on about how Washington is theirs, and they built all those forts on the high ground north of town-built ’em or took over the ones we made-and so this is what happens on account of it.”
Edna was not inclined to argue politics. She’d wanted to marry Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid for his personal charms, not out of sympathy for the Confederate States of America. Falling in love with him (that was what Edna called it, though to Nellie it had never looked like anything but an itch in the privates) had made her more sympathetic to the CSA, but not all that much more.
One of the candles burned out, making the cellar even gloomier and filling it with the greasy stink of hot tallow. Edna lighted a fresh candle from the one still burning and stuck it in its candlestick. The flickering flames filled her face with shadows, making her look far older than her years. “Ma…?” she began, and then hesitated.
“What is it?” Nellie asked warily. These days, that kind of stuttering led only to trouble.
Sure enough, when Edna resumed, it was to ask, “Ma, why do you suppose that Bill Reach yelled for everybody to get out of the church just when the Yanks-uh, the Army-were gettin’ ready to start shooting at Washington?”
“I don’t know.” Nellie’s voice was tight. “I don’t care. I wish I’d never set eyes on Bill Reach, not a long time ago and not now, either.”
She waited for her daughter to bait her about the strumpet’s life she’d led. But Edna’s mind, for once, turned in a different direction. “How do you suppose he knew, Ma? How could he have known the Army was going to open up on us right then?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Nellie answered. That didn’t mean she didn’t know, as she hoped Edna would think it would. It meant only what it said: that she couldn’t tell.