Anne Cimon Memoir: from "In My Grandmother's House": Prologue

Prologue

I like to remember my grandmother’s house in Outremont because it was not only a beautiful and spacious house but also because it was where I believe I became the writer I am today.

As a child, I found refuge in this house where my grandmother and her four sisters, my great-aunts, lived together for more than twenty years. The house was built in the 1920s on Stuart Avenue, a wide avenue lined with maple trees and old oaks on the slopes of Mount Royal. It was nestled among mansions, its size more modest, yet a solid attractive brick house with a front porch. My mother and I were there every Sunday, and in the summer, when I wasn’t in school, we visited during the week.

I remember being excited each time I stood on the wooden porch beside my mother as she rang the doorbell. The heavy door was made of oak that looked as though it were polished with golden honey. As I grew taller, I could stand on my toes and peek into the small casement window that gave a view into the living room. Usually it was Tante Jeanne, the eldest sister, who would open the door and welcome us in with a warm greeting and smile.

The shutters of the house were painted creamy beige complementing the brown bricks. What gave the house its arts-and-crafts style were the leaded windows. This house had been a gift to my great-grandmother Delvina Gervais Rivet from “Tante Helmina” as she was called in the family. In fact, Helmina was her sister-in-law as she had married my great-grandmother’s brother Louis-Joseph Rivet. Helmina was not only generous but a remarkable woman in her time, the daughter of Treffle Berthiaume, a printer who had established the Montreal French language newspaper, La Presse. With her brothers and sisters, Helmina had inherited La Presse after their father’s death in 1915. Wealthy in her own right, she rescued my great-grandmother from the shock of sudden poverty when my great-grandfather, Docteur Napoléon Rivet, died. He had left more than a bereft family but one deep in debt. Up until his death, my great-grandmother had lived in comfort, assisted in her homemaking by several servants, as she raised her four daughters, my grandmother Lucile, and my great-aunts Jeanne, Berthe, Gabrielle and Marcelle. I never knew their brother Paul who had died tragically in his thirties.

By the time I was born in 1952, Tante Helmina was eighty-two years old and lived in Rome with Oncle Joseph. A devout Roman Catholic couple, they had moved to the eternal city to better serve the Church then led by Pope Pius XII. Until his death, Oncle Joseph was a chamberlain of the Pope. Tante Helmina chose to stay in her Italian home on Via Aurelia and returned to Montreal only a few times to visit the family. There is a photograph of her in the living room of the house on Stuart Avenue dated 1957. She sits straight and alert in Tante Marcelle’s chair. Her thick glasses distort her faded beauty.

Around that time, a picture was taken of a five-year-old girl sitting alone in the same living room, in the same chair. She sits at a little table, a pen in her hand, a sheet of paper before her. She is wearing a velveteen jumper with a fabric poodle sewn on the front, and white socks and black patent leather shoes. There is a look of concentration on her face, as light and shadow mingle in the room, and she writes something down.