Excerpt from
Woonsocket:

the Lourdes of New England

Notes: 

About excommunication: For a French Canadian, excommunication was a far worse sentence than merely being forbidden to take communion. Everyone would avoid you, literally cross the street if they saw you, as if you had the plague. It would mean total ostracism. Without an official Church pardon, it was a social death from which you would never recover.

About the power of the Church in Québec: In Catholic Québec in 1928, every novel, play, poem, history, every book had to carry the Church censor’s Nihil Obstat, his No Objection stamp of approval before the work could ever get published. The Monseigneur from Montréal, Mgr. Carol Prince is one of the Québec Catholic Church’s appointed book censors.

This excerpt from my novel Woonsocket: the Lourdes of New England is a scene between the main character, Gabrielle d’Avignon, and her father Edouard and their rivalry over the Monseigneur’s favor. Mgr. Carol Prince is a titular bishop, one who has the title of bishop but does not preside over a diocese. He’s a literary man who writes essays, books of literary criticism. He’s the most important literary critic in Québec, where he’s extremely influential. He’s also one of the Church’s book censors. 

——————-

Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 1928

When the Monseigneur Carol Prince came to town, it had been snowing for weeks. So much snow that, overnight, trains were canceled and roads became impassible, trapping Monseigneur Prince, along with a dozen travelers, for days. For the local newspaper, La Tribune, the drama was irresistible: it unleashed the paper’s pent-up lust for alarm with headlines like “The Siege of the Century.” For the city engineer, however, calling it a siege was no exaggeration. In private conclave with the mayor, he would confide his worries that the spring thaw would trigger a titanic flood that would destroy the mills along the river in lower town and drown the workers who lived in the nearby tenements. 

For these workers, though, the snow blockade was more than a major inconvenience or even a potential threat. It was a sign from God. For these devout French Canadian Catholics, the snow was the living symbol of the deadlock between their own Irish American Bishop, His Excellency Evan Conroy who presided over their diocese of Providence, and the French Canadian rebels he was threatening to excommunicate. 

  Early one morning, several days into the snow blockade, the leader of these rebels, Edouard d’Avignon, was at work in his study. A journalist of some renown among French Canadians, he lived in moderate ease with his wife Yvette and their grown daughter Gabrielle, in the hillside parish of Précieux Sang. He was poring over yet another chapter of his ever-growing tome (Les limites du pouvoir diocésain sur la paroisse: The Limits of Diocesan Power Over The Parish), which, at four hundred and seventy six pages, made the exhaustive case against Bishop Conroy. 

This was not the first clash between French Canadian and Irish American Catholics in New England. It was an old feud. And in his voluminous apologia, Edouard dissected in excruciating detail every one of the precedents going back to the beginning; the beginning, that is, in the 1840’s, of the massive exodus of French Canadians from the poverty of backwoods Québec down to the mills of New England. And from that beginning, the conflict between French Canadians and their Irish American clergy had always been over the same thing: Who controlled the parish?

A sudden whoosh of snow slid off the roof and landed in a muffled thump outside Edouard’s window, distracting him from his work. He gazed out at the snow-globe flakes swirling in all directions. He worried that his brief might not appeal to the eminent guest he was expecting for tea later that day. His guest was none other than Monseigneur Carol Prince, the Monseigneur who had been made a hostage by the snow. Monseigneur Prince was touring French-speaking towns in New England to promote his latest book of essays. He was, among his many roles, the best-known literary critic in Québec where his influence was immense. Edouard was hoping Prince would reassure him that the pope was on their side, that his Holiness would protect them against their rapacious, bigoted Bishop Conroy. 

Upstairs in her bedroom, Edouard’s daughter Gabrielle was going over her opus, her first novel, entitled Volte-Face, also in anticipation of Monseigneur’s visit.  Because of his great renown as a critic, she had mailed him, several months ago already, her original manuscript. The draft she was reading now was a carbon copy of the original typed pages. In the bluish light from her lamp, she sat at her small desk parsing an early scene, struggling to find in her written words the reassurance that the Monseigneur’s silence so far was not proof of a negative verdict on her effort.  She had only last night learned that Monseigneur Prince was coming that very afternoon, presumably, she hoped, bringing her original draft bearing his copious, and flattering remarks. 

She had read Carol Prince’s essays and literary criticism and tried to anticipate what he might object to in her novel. But being young and idealistic, she had little inkling what he would demand that she erase from it. And because she naively assumed that getting Prince’s permission to publish was a mere formality, she saw herself going back to her old newspaper job at Le Devoir in Montréal, the job she had agreed to leave, for a time, to come down here to Woonsocket to help her father at his weekly, Le Combat. Her novel, she believed, was her ticket out of Woonsocket. She drained the last sip of her cold coffee, and leaned back in her creaky chair to look out her window at the grey morning. 

An hour later, Gabrielle stood at the door of her father’s study. Her excuse for disturbing him was to ask for an envelope for her carbon copy.  As she knocked first inaudibly and then loudly on the door, she became aware of another intention, one that made her feel agitated with expectation. She couldn’t help wanting her father’s favor, his approval, the mood that so often came over her when she entered his territory. She heard him say Entrez and opened the door; and as she did so she assumed an air of confidence, of competence, the one her father expected of her, the role she had played for so long that to her, it felt mostly like who she actually was.  

As usual, Edouard’s eyes didn’t stray from the words he was writing. Beyond his desk, the dim light barely reached the corners of the room where stacks of documents teetered in the shadows. Casually, Gabrielle mentioned the envelope on her way to the file cabinet where he kept such things. Edouard said nothing, as her request didn’t require a response. She noticed he was wearing the paisley ascot she had given him. It was his habit to always wear his daughter’s gifts. And it was her habit to interpret this as proof of his affection for her. 

Gabrielle thanked him for the envelope she had found in the drawer.  

Looking up suddenly from his page, Edouard frowned. “Carol Prince is coming to see me about our cause,” he said, “whatever interest he shows you, it’s only because you’re my daughter. So don’t take up my precious time with him.”  

Gabrielle stiffened. He wasn’t usually this mean and she hadn’t expected the jab. She could feel her red cheeks betraying her embarrassment.

“You know the situation is critical,” Edouard went on, justifying himself. “I need his endorsement.  No airy-fairy discussions about literature,” he insisted, waving his hand dismissively. “I have a war to win.”  He bent back to his work. He knew he’d been harsh, but so be it. So much was riding on this visit from Mgr. Carol Prince. 

Gabrielle was still reeling from her father’s barb. Of course she knew all about his war with Bishop Conroy: she was, after all, his staunchest political supporter.  Everyone knew that. In fact, it had always been this way. Gabrielle agreed with him on politics, religion, on so many things. The only exception was her understanding, contrary to his, that assimilation was inevitable. In all other ways, it didn’t feel that she was obeying him so much as being naturally in accord with his views. Like Athena, she liked to think, born fully armed from the head of Zeus, her father. 

She was searching for something to say; she swallowed to loosen her tight throat. It didn’t occur to her that her father felt in competition with her for the great man’s attention. Her dismay had blinded her to his latent motives.  She hadn’t seen, and he would never admit, that he had felt threatened by Mgr. Prince’s interest in her novel, a work that could be good enough to appeal to the literary critic more than Edouard’s endless treatise on parish rights. He had lashed out at her to protect his privileged position with the Monseigneur. 

Gabrielle put down the envelope on his desk and picked up the pewter eagle she had found in an antique shop in Montréal. Its fierce expression had reminded her of her father’s. 

 “No of course, of course,” she said, feeling, as she spoke, her body relaxing into her familiar supporting role. “I expect he’ll just give me back my draft with his notes.  It’ll only take a minute.” 

Edouard was watching Gabrielle as she held the pewter statuette and was reminded that it was one of his favorite gifts from her. He smiled at her.

She recognized his smile.  It meant that everything was understood between them. That their understanding was so complete that nothing further need be said and all would be well. She too wanted to believe that all would be well and the hope obscured for her the other motive driving Edouard, fear. The fear that he barely admitted to himself that he had made a bad bargain in abandoning Ottawa where he’d been a well respected journalist covering Parliament Hill, for this unknown backwater to run an obscure weekly Broadsheet. Thus he could never entertain even the possibility that his campaign could fail; or consider that the assimilation of French Canadians into American culture was as predictable, as inevitable, as that of all other immigrant groups to this country, without admitting that he had sacrificed so much, too much, for a lost cause.