Free The Years of Fire by Yves Beauchemin Page B

1953 graduate from the University of Montreal, married, father of three (now grown and moved away), a taciturn man not normally given to fantastical notions, but dependable, a hard worker, and, all in all, an agreeable person to work for when accepted exactly as he was.
    Beneath his hibernating-bear exterior, Lalancette had three hidden passions. The first was his daughter, Claire, whom by dint of patience andkindness he had succeeded in rescuing from drug addiction when she was sixteen. She was now married and worked in a downtown travel agency; every Thursday evening he had dinner with her in a restaurant.
    His second passion was diseases of the prostate gland, an interest he had had for many years. He and a former medical student, who now worked in the laboratory of a pharmaceutical company, had been conducting “experiments” on the beneficial effects of the dregs of port wine on such diseases, beneficial effects that he himself had experienced.
    And thirdly, he was an inveterate collector of paintings, some of them of dubious quality, hinting perhaps too strongly of the bargain bin. His most precious acquisition was entitled “View from the
Montréal-Matin
Building, Nightfall, Winter’s Day,” painted in 1953 by John Little, which he had bought from a retired journalist. It reigned on the living-room wall above the settee, along with a few other works of lesser interest, and no one but he and he alone was allowed to so much as dust its frame.
    The pharmacist congratulated himself on having hired Charles. He found the boy friendly, resourceful, and conscientious; after two weeks he raised Charles’s salary to two dollars and twenty-five cents, to show how satisfied he was with his work. For his part, Charles quickly learned that, despite Monsieur Lalancette’s dour expression, he was an interesting man with a sensitive heart, a man who could easily be taken advantage of (as his associate in prostate research knew very well). Claire came into the pharmacy one evening and talked for a while with Charles. She, too, found him charming, and said so to her father. Two days later, after closing time, Charles was favoured with a thirty-three-minute lecture on the dregs of port wine; the pharmacist expressed his regret that Charles was still an adolescent and therefore probably had a properly functioning prostate, otherwise he would be able to join his small group of guinea pigs. The following week he invited Charles to his home, to admire his collection of paintings.
    Madame Lalancette, a small, portly, somewhat snobbish woman, was cool towards Charles at first, but was soon won over by his smile and good manners. She offered him a glass of milk and a piece of raspberry pie, cutting a large slice for herself as well, which she ate while telling him aboutthe week-long vacation she and her husband had taken in Cuba at the beginning of the winter.
    Within a month Charles was nicely settled into his new job. True, the atmosphere in the pharmacy was infinitely less entertaining than Chez Robert’s restaurant had been. But the work would nonetheless draw him into a terrible experience.

    Céline was busting out all over. Two impish bulges had appeared under her blouse that very morning, and far from being shy about them she paraded about the house as though to show them off. She kept her eyes lowered demurely, but there was a smile of satisfaction on her lips. Could they have appeared overnight? Hard to believe. And yet one day it had been difficult to see her as anything but a young girl, and all of a sudden she’d been mysteriously transformed into a young woman, easily overtaking both Charles and Henri on the road to maturity.
    The stir she created that morning almost made Charles forget it was the last day of school and they were leaving Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur School – and its tyrannical principal – forever. At the breakfast table the boys teased Céline mercilessly (Charles asked her why she had two little puppies