The Birds Began To Sing
Summer had gone by. Michel, still unpredictable, was now a taller (not really bigger) baby, sleeping through the night and down to four meals a day. Christine was no longer a baby: she was a little girl who trotted lightly about. In a month's time she would be two years old. Danielle was in high gear with complete control of the household. I had finished reading Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles and browsed through other of his writings till the school year brought Father Paul Thomas back to Fribourg.
Mid-September. Danielle's period began. So we thought. So it seemed. Yet there was something unusual about it. The blood ran clear and bright. It reminded us the miscarriage three year ago in Manitoba. We fretted. It was early morning, Sunday. Danielle called the maternity ward, where one of Dr Nordman's midwives was sure to be on hand. Sister Rose instantly ordered Danielle over for a check-up. As soon as she saw what was happening, she called the doctor. He was there at 8 a.m.
"You are probably pregnant," he said. "I'll run a test."
It was positive.
"You shall stay here in bed, if you wish to keep the baby. We will give you some shots that will help him to stay put."
Danielle phoned me at home where I was with the kids. We both agreed that she must stay at the hospital. I would take care of family and home, and visit her when Christine and Michel were sleeping. We were delighted to know that Jean or Johanne was there, but feared for his (her) life. If only we could simply be happy that he could pull through or get used to the idea that he was going away. The uncertainty racked us.
After three days in hospital, all seemed to be in order. Danielle came home... and had hardly begun going about on two feet that the bleeding resumed. Doctor called. Back to hospital. Three days later, the doctor told Danielle that she could leave for home but — if she was to keep her baby — she had to stay in bed for another three weeks.
I panicked. Classes were about to begin. I had courses to follow and, even if a renewed attempt at my thesis were pushed back, I had must get the lectures into my timetable. Summer holidays were over. So Danielle did the only thing we could, she asked for help. Instantly Gotti agreed to take Christine again: in fact, she made us feel we were doing her the favour instead of her doing it to us. She had been won over by our daughter. Next, Aunt Christiane, from Bern, drove over the afternoon we called and took Michel even though this meant quite an upheaval in her apartment where she regularly did haute couture.
Danielle and I were once more alone. I made all the meals, washed our clothing and bed sheets, took care of the floors, went to the grocery store, kept Danielle company, hoped and feared with her, and resumed classes as they began. I told Father Paul Thomas that he would see little of me these coming weeks for reasons of health: our child's life. He was most understanding.
Danielle's bleeding seemed to have stopped for good. Yet, each time she went to the bathroom, she checked fearfully for those droplets of blood that would colour the toilet water red. There were none.
After three weeks, Danielle could slowly take things over.
Michel was the first to return. He had been well cared for and Aunt Christiane had become extremely fond of him. She was a bit sad to have him go, and we rejoiced to have him back. But Michel had made up his mind that his mother had neglected him. As soon as he was in her arms, he began to cry. I took him. He stopped. I had to mother him a few days till he got used to the idea that Danielle could be trusted again.
Christine celebrated her second birthday with Gotti. On that day, we felt her far, far away. We were bereft and lonely. But, a week later, upon her return, we got a great surprise. The bell rang. We rushed to the door. Christine stretched out her arms towards Danielle and said: "Maman!"
She had learnt her first word. And Gotti had taught her: "Mother". Danielle was delighted, and I was proud of our daughter. She may have been a late starter in speech, but we had never noticed it. And she quickly overcame this handicap, if it was indeed such. She would soon become a flowing source of happy conversation, just like her mother.
Christine's ties with Gotti were now so affectionate that she was allowed a week's holiday at Gotti's every two months. And Gotti said she would prefer two months' holidays every second week.
Well, here we were: a family of five — one of us invisible, but all there, and apparently quite steady, according to Dr Nordman.
* * *
I went back to Father Paul Thomas and the despairing matter of a lingering Ph. D. thesis. He said explicitly what I was unwillingly realising: this thesis would never be finished by the end of my stay in Fribourg. He suggested that this was altogether normal as I was trying to swallow a huge bite that must first be cut to size little by little. The best might be, he said, that I write a short essay on a political subject in line with the general outlook of my thesis and which would yet be finished though not academically recognised by the end of my school year. He added that the nature of the citizen would be a worthwhile subject, as it is regularly bypassed in favour of more descriptive and global analyses of social structure and power. "A short two hundred page book would do the thing." I understood that he would help me along as, once again, I would hand him over the text of my book chapter by chapter.
Well, I did write these 203 pages on The Citizen — A Curious Animal. In summary, I tore apart the rationalistic vision of a citizen, part and whole of a so-called "will of the people" that laid down the law of the land in a totalitarian manner, depriving the ordinary man of his right to be in charge of his private life, his family responsibilities, his professional activities, and his municipal options, etc. I suggested that citizenship was a responsibility meant to protect particular abilities and social complementarity with an eye to general prosperity. This was drawn up within a global vision of the world that would free men rather than enslave them. The basic quotation came from G.K. Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity : "I observe that the social prophets are still offering a supernormal superiority to people who are not allowed to be normal… I read of the great conception of men like Gods, and I wonder when men will be allowed to be like men."
With all its shortcomings, this manuscript would, one year later, allow a student of mine, hooked upon totalitarian Marxism, to see through to the inhumanity of its ideology. He would still be too emotionally involved in the vision of a proletarian world-wide revolution to instantly kick that drug. But his mind would be freed then on, so that his heart could be some time later. He would still cheer the Revolution on for a while, but his faith would be broken and he would gradually evolve out of his fanaticism.
After handing over my concluding chapter to Father Paul Thomas, I belatedly discovered the extent of my naiveté. His non-direction of this work was identical to his non-direction of my "thesis".
He simply said: "Fine. Now get it printed."
And he suggested a friend of his who might publish it. As publishers do not simply print anything that happens to drift by, the manuscript was politely declined.
By then, our stay in Fribourg was nearing its end. What I might have noticed from the start would be revealed to me by one of Father Paul Thomas' best students: "Father Paul Thomas is a very brilliant man. But he is completely incapable of giving a student practical direction."
It cost me two years to find this out.
However, while I was working on my thesis On the Governments of God and Man, a Vietnamese student was trying to write one On Creation, which is a related subject to mine. His director was also Father Paul Thomas. Many times our paths had crossed. Then, I asked this student: "How is your thesis coming along?"
"Very well," he answered.
"Not mine," I said.
As my frustration grew, his answer jabbed more and more into me. I told Danielle quite grimly:
"This fellow is coming along fine and I am not."
Well I needn't have cared. In the end, he also would not finish his thesis. Instead, he got depressed and had to seek psychiatric help to get back on his two feet. I could then tell Danielle:
"I may not have finished my thesis, but I stayed out of depression."
Notwithstanding this slight contretemps in my academic career, my second year with Father Paul Thomas did give me an intellectual liberation for which I shall ever be grateful to him. He may have had shortcomings in pedagogy but he was a brilliant philosopher.
* * *
One day, Father Paul Thomas offered me a bit of consolation. He remarked: "In a way, you will be going home with two brand new theses."
He meant Michel and the baby. On this point he was proven right. Since a thesis is usually something shelved while lives are for eternity, we certainly had the better theses.
Now, after Danielle had got up from her month in bed, she found herself very weak. She struggled to take over her responsibilities, but they were simply too much for her. A neighbour then told us of a government-sponsored agency which offered help in the home. State-subsidised, that agency required payment in accordance with the financial abilities of families. Thus Marie-Juliette came over two or three days a week for the following six weeks. She would return on occasion as the pregnancy began to weigh heavily upon Danielle in the later months.
Unfortunately, we never found this kind of social help on our side of the Atlantic. There, the accent was on day-care centres, on dismemberment of the home rather than on its consolidation.
Marie-Juliette was a liberator in a time of need. Somehow, she was proving that there appears to be a God who looks after fools, sending help when it was most needed.
This was proven as Baby neared. Marie-Thér se was gone. Marie-Juliette, because of the nature of her job, could not be expected to be a permanent help in the weeks following birth. Yet Michel was now there in addition to Christine. Both had to be cared for during Danielle's ten-day stay at the maternity ward and the three weeks following it when she would be the baby's full-time servant. I figured that I should still have some intellectual work to finish off that would prevent me from being a full-time father/mother. That is when Marie-Jeanne told my parents that she would willingly come all the way from Manitoba to Fribourg to help us.
Marie-Jeanne was the cousin of mine who had baked those delicious doughnuts that had fattened Danielle a bit just before we left Manitoba for Québec and then Switzerland.
We told my parents that the idea was wonderful but that we simply could not afford it. The answer came back: Marie-Jeanne offered to pay her own trip and requested no fee. It was a fantastic generosity, practically too good to be true. Yet it was true. My father objected on only one point: he insisted he would pay Marie-Jeanne's fare. So we accepted. Marie-Jeanne would come in May when the baby was due.
Ronald MacDonald and his wife would be the baby's godparents. Ronald was a friend all the way back to philosophy at Laval University. He was a good friend with a streak of unconscious originality. For example, the day he had arrived at the students' residence at Laval, he had visited the shower-room wearing suit and tie. He was simply reconnoitring and did not unwittingly turn on the water, as may be expected in classical comedy. He read the instructions.
They said one had to pull the knob for the water to flow, and turn it left or right to get the desired temperature. He understood this quite clearly. But he was an unbeliever. It just couldn't work that way. Then, to prove his point, he deliberately pulled the knob. He was proven wrong and went to his room to change clothes. I took notice of his originality the day I absent-mindedly saw him come out of an exam I had already finished. I was chatting with another fellow. Ronald rushed towards the door, heading for a bus the other side of the street. Then there was a loud bang. Ronald had smacked into the glass door. I exclaimed: "It's Ronald!"
"Do you know him?", my companion asked.
"Yes, he is in my class."
"Oh! That explains it: a Philosopher!"
Above all Ronald was a good friend. And we were glad that he and his wife accepted the responsibility of our child's future, should any ill-luck happen to us.
* * *
My thesis had gone down the drain (postponed was the official expression). The book was to be shelved. The baby was coming. And we had to think about next year, a school year. I had hoped to go back to the Québec college where I had taught part-time during my last year at Laval. But Ronald, who also taught there, told me there would probably be no new teacher required in philosophy that autumn. So I sent in my application to the Québec system of privately-owned colleges. Nothing came of this. I also picked up the map of Québec and the list of Québec's public junior colleges. I noticed there was a college at La Pocati re, some eighty miles East of Québec City, near the St. Lawrence River. That seemed an appropriate distance to live in harmony with my in-laws. Danielle's parents would be near enough for us all to take pleasure in visits yet far enough not to seek our pleasure in departures. I wrote to that college. I got an answer. The dean of studies would be coming on a business trip to Europe. Would I meet him in Geneva? I certainly would and did. We signed a contract. The following week, Ronald wrote saying that his college was offering me a job if I was still interested. "Sorry, too late", I answered. Next term we would be in the City of La Pocati re with its five thousand inhabitants.
We then asked Danielle's parents whether they could find us an apartment in La Pocati re. They did better. They bought us a semi-detached house and has it furnished, lending us the needed sum to be paid in return when we could. The house was brand new. We should be its first occupants. They also had the lawn sown and the backyard fenced for our children to play outside safely. This we greatly appreciated as our children's immediate playground in Fribourg was the parking lot at the door of our apartment-building.
* * *
May check-up. Baby should be arriving in a week's time, maybe sooner. I was on the phone with Matthew when Danielle returned.
Matthew? A young American studying for the priesthood at Fribourg's seminary. I met him and Peter in January at a conference given on the Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, by the world-renowned theologian, Cardinal Charles Journet who resided at Fribourg seminary. And Peter? An Englishman who had come from the Church of England to the Church of Rome, which he felt to be the Church of Christ. Peter was also studying for priestly orders.
Our meeting instantly became friendship at first sight. In Matthew, we found the North American lacking in Fribourg; in Peter, the wit and good humour of Chesterton's countrymen. They would come to our apartment at least once a week to feast on Danielle's cooking. One evening, we overdid it. One serving of pork "cordon bleu" was quite enough for an ordinary adult. But our tradition would have it that everyone must be allowed two servings, and "cordon bleu" simply could not be cut in half. So we offered two servings, expecting that in fact all would take but one, and we should have left-overs for another time. As the potatoes and vegetables could not be outdone by the meat, we found ourselves before "a huge pile of mashed potatoes" (Matthew's expression) and abundance of vegetables. As it happened, Matthew and Peter had brought over an immense St. Honoré cream cake. The atmosphere around the table was so lively and joyous that everything went down the hatch. After which we dropped ourselves into the living room. Peter sat in a silent "agony" while Matthew, Danielle and I struck up a conversation in moderato. Matthew's next meal was taken only the following evening. Rumour has it that Pope John XXIII was once asked when is overeating considered a sin.
He answered: "When one dies of it."
We survived.
Peter and Matthew made me realise that, for all my professed admiration of the priesthood, in fact I had unconsciously considered it as an old man's career. No young man could seriously entertain it as a proper goal in life. And here these two chaps, so full of healthy common sense, energy, and fun, were proving to me that priesthood ought definitely to be on the choosing list for a young man's commitment.
As I was saying, I was on the phone.
"Danielle has just come in", I told Matthew.
"Is the baby coming soon?", he asked.
I queried. Danielle answered matter-of-factly: "He'll be coming next month."
I repeated this to Matthew and suddenly realised: "WHAT!", said I to Danielle.
She explained that somehow there must have been some miscalculation, because Dr Nordman had said the baby was not yet ready.
All we had to do was adjust. We hurriedly wrote to Marie-Jeanne to postpone her trip for a few weeks. Yet some good came from the delay: Baby fitted her trip so that she could return with us in July.
* * *
Michel was now a strong boy who adored his sister as she loved him. But he was more introvert, whereas she was extrovert. This, added to the age difference, made her the absolute boss over their games. So Christine invented the "boom" game. Michel was now able to stand up by himself without any need of the wall. But he still couldn't walk as, whenever he stood up, Christine would push him down.
"Boom," she said laughing.
Michel also laughed, but he dared not get up again for a while. When he tried again — "boom".
As soon as Gotti took Christine to her home, Michel who was now fifteen months old, instantly got up and began walking about the apartment as a liberated man.
At the beginning of June, Marie-Jeanne arrived. Baby was weighing heavily inside Danielle. Marie-Jeanne's good humour and competence were greatly appreciated. She was the eldest of five children and had begun baking bread at ten years of age. She was brisk and efficient and dove straight into house and child care.
One o'clock Saturday morning, June 5. As Danielle was dreaming she was giving birth to our baby, she was awakened by a contraction.
"This is it," she said, and shoved me.
I got up, nervously ripped open my pyjama blouse, sending buttons all over the place, got dressed in a jiffy while Danielle was calmly getting ready. I opened our bedroom door and whispered loudly to Marie-Jeanne, who slept on the living-room sofa, that we were going to the hospital. She wished us good luck. I called a taxi and off we went.
Because the doctor had wondered whether the baby was late in coming, the mid-wife ruptured Danielle's amniotic sac to help the baby along. The amniotic liquid was greenish, which was a sign of possible trouble. Then the mid-wife noticed that the baby's heart-beat was slowing down. She gave Danielle a shot of stimulant to help her contractions. Christine and Michel has already paved the way. Expulsion was a piece of cake. At three in the morning, the baby was out. Johanne greeted the world with a clear cry.
By all counts, Johanne seemed a beautiful and healthy baby girl. She weighed 8 lbs, 5 ounces, and measured 20 1/2 inches. We waited for the doctor to arrive to make the suture. Outside, nature was awakening. Birds began to sing. Danielle and I spoke softly, happily. Christine and Michel now had a sister. We figured that Michel would greatly benefit to have someone to boss and care for instead of being solely repressed by his big sister.
Dr Nordman assured us that Johanne was perfectly healthy. So was the mother. So, also, was the father, now a veteran of two births, who no longer felt anxiety in the face of spilled blood and masses of useless flesh.
At three o'clock that afternoon, in Danielle's private room, Peter — a deacon of Holy Mother Church — baptised our baby girl. Matthew stood in for her godparents. Twelve hours after her birth, she was born again in Christ. Her parents were proud. And God was assuredly on our side because it was only the next day that the new diocesan policy was put up on the hospital bill-board: baptisms would no longer be allowed in the hospital, save when the child's life was presumed to be in some danger. From then on, all children would have to wait till they could leave hospital for the parish church. But, the Lord had slipped us through in time. Christine, five days; Michel, three; Johanne, twelve hours.
* * *
Ten days later, Danielle and Johanne came home. Christine was jubilant and Michel curious at this new thing. Marie-Jeanne cuddled the baby. And when all the excitement subsided, Marie-Jeanne made her confession to Danielle. She had doubted Danielle's pedagogical abilities.
She had noticed how Michel would suddenly get into fits of screaming for no apparent reason. She had pitied the incompetent mother of that poor child and had decided to take matters into her own hands while Danielle was in hospital. Well, she now admitted, she had failed. Like Danielle and me, she had tried every possible trick: the stick and the carrot, ignoring, cuddling, scolding, keeping him company when he was happy, indifferent, or miserable, letting him be, everything and anything. None of it had worked. So she had come to the same conclusion as we had — live with it.
Johanne proved to be an easier child, more like Christine had been, maybe even gentler. Danielle breast-fed her and completed the feeding with milk in the bottle. This time, Danielle tried another kind of baby milk that seemed to be perfect.
* * *
In Mid-July we were to leave Switzerland. By this time, Danielle would have regained her strength and we would be adapted to Johanne. Christine would easily adapt to the change. We feared Michel's reaction.
During those last weeks we sold all of our furniture to people who agreed to a last minute delivery. On the evening before our departure, Charles and Ghislaine took us in. The next day, we should board the train for Zurich where Swissair took us on its wings off to Montreal.
What had been the results of our Swisscapade?
Two new beautiful children, a blossomed Christine, strong friends, a rich acquaintanceship with Danielle's relatives, the experience of counting upon others and the assurance that help was there when needed, a better knowledge of each other by living the Swiss way of life, and much more.
But what about academics? Well, Father Paul Thomas aloofness towards any production of mine certainly shattered any hope of academic success in my two years in Fribourg. Yet I had attended his courses constantly, participated diligently in the seminars he directed, and read his writings attentively. Something had to come out of this: and it did. The second year, I began to see a method in his madness, an image in his puzzle. This new insight enriched my grasp of reality, though I no longer had the naive assurance with which I had previously proclaimed "eternal wisdom". There was finally more to Father Thomas' originality than originality itself.
Part of the problem lay in the fact that we had looked at the same world from different points of view. Should one see a town from the East and another from the North-West, the town will always be the same, but the two descriptions of it will be hard to reconcile. Is the school on the far end or the near end of town? Must one turn left or right to reach the drug store? Thus, the philosophy taught at Laval University was largely founded upon perspectives induced by the sciences of matter: physics and bio-chemistry. Father Paul Thomas expressed the same common world, but from the point of view of human experience, largely that of artistic experience. I am told that at Louvain University, in Belgium, the same world is described mainly from challenges founded upon social and psychological sciences.
But there was more to it than that. Laval University, as I saw it, was interested in the town as a permanent fixture whereas Father Paul Thomas saw it as the home of men who lived a particular story. In other words, philosophy is preoccupied, by its method, in the common patterns of being. For example, there are patterns common to all children, of which Christine, Michel and Johanne would only be instances. Each comes from a man and a woman; each is in need of personal attention. Now, it is natural for a philosopher to think of his profession as the essential part of life, as any man may do of his own profession, be it golf, poetry, politics, or baking.
But Father Paul Thomas had the insight to go beyond the pattern-seeking of his profession and realise that we are made to love people and not their patterns. He managed a pattern by which each man is expected to tear himself away from patterns, from abstracts, and go out towards someone that lives and dies and survives in life eternal, concretely.
This insight outdid the narrow professionalism which would have lured a man into a life of abstract thought instead of actively loving his neighbour and his historically incarnate Lord. Father Paul Thomas was not one to abandon the prize for its shadow. His philosophy got us out of the shadowland of philosophy and became a handmaiden better to serve Christine, Michel, Johanne and the Lord. I knew that before. Now, I knew that I knew it. I owe it to Father Paul Thomas. Academics be damned. He had breathed a truer life into my mind that fit the one in my heart.
* * *
Our Swissair flight took off. Marie-Jeanne cared for Michel, I for Christine, Danielle for Johanne. As there were few passengers aboard, we were allowed to occupy one row of three seats each so that every child slept on two seats beside his care-taker.
