HOW THE BÉRUBÉ BOYS REGAINED THEIR ACCENTS
My sixth-grade class—6-305, P.S. 32 Queens—has a Facebook page that describes itself as “dedicated to all the members of that class who endured and survived the 6th grade at the hands of the mercurial Mrs. Policastro.” In 2012, the administrators of that page organized a fortieth anniversary reunion of the class, as odd as that sounds. One of my former classmates, Ken Ballard by name, found my home phone number and left me a voice mail, letting me know about the reunion and the Facebook page; he was, in fact, the only person in that class with whom I got in touch in my college years—and I had called him simply to ask whether his older brother might be interested in selling his drum kit. (As it turned out, he had sold it years before. Ken and I went out for drinks a couple of times and then fell out of touch again.) There was one other classmate who wound up attending Columbia University, as I did, but we didn’t hang out together. I had next to no connection with these people.
My wife, Janet, playing back Ken’s voice mail, was highly amused. “A sixth-grade reunion! That’s amazing. You know you have to do this.”
“I certainly do not have to do this,” I replied. “I didn’t have a friend in that class. I’m pretty sure nobody liked me. Ken might have been one of the few exceptions.” I was a socially awkward child who had difficulty making friends, and P.S. 32 was the first school I attended for more than a year; I arrived in fourth grade and stayed through sixth. Prior to that, my family bounced around a lot, because my father was very good at getting and then losing and then getting jobs.
“Who cares?” Janet said. “We’re talking forty years ago. It might actually be fun.”
I wasn’t on Facebook then—I had been invited by any number of people, many of whom I met in the early days of the blogosphere, but I declined all those invitations. So I checked out the 6-305 page using my younger son Jamie’s password and thought, maybe this would be fun! And besides, I figured, it’s not like a high school or college reunion (events to which I have never gone), because you really don’t know who people are going to be when they’re 11. There might be some surprises.
I joined Facebook on March 1, 2012. I went to the reunion in mid-July. It was a blast, and about half the class showed up—seventeen people! Some of my former classmates are now IRL friends, which is something I absolutely did not have on the bingo card in 1972.
But at some point, scrolling through the page to see posts that predated my joining the group, I learned that four months prior to my arrival, someone had asked the group whether anyone else had seen me on a short-lived NBC newsmagazine called Rock Center the previous night. In November 2011, in one of their first broadcasts, Rock Center interviewed four Penn State professors about the Sandusky child rape scandal. Correspondent Kate Snow, as it happened, had a connection to Penn State: her father, Dean Snow, was a professor of anthropology here. She came out to State College to interview him, me, and two other faculty members; the taping was a group interview, and it ran for over two hours. (At some point, I said to the crew, “you’re airing this throughout prime time without commercial interruption, I take it?”—meaning, as I explained, that I was getting worried that we would have no idea which six or seven minutes of all this material would wind up on the air.) The segment aired on November 21, 2011, and sure enough, only six or seven minutes of that marathon group interview survived editing.
In the Facebook comment thread, another classmate replied that she had seen my name in the Washington Post on the same topic (I was fielding a lot of media inquiries back in those days) and wondered if it was the same Michael Bérubé they knew from school. A discussion then ensued as to whether I had accents on my name back then. Some people were sure that I did not have any accents; some people thought I didn’t but was always vigilant about not being called Berooby, with the emphasis on the second syllable (as Carla Berube and Craig Berube and any number of New England Berubes pronounce their names); the original poster, for her part, was sure that the accents were always there. My parents went by “Behroobee,” with the emphasis on the first syllable, and no accents aigus. But my father didn’t care much whether people called him Berooby. Mo Berube sounds just fine pronounced that way. The only thing he cared about was not being called Maurice.
Well, I was touched and surprised that any of my old classmates would remember any of that. Had I been on Facebook back then, I might even have explained the accents to the 6-305 group, because the thing that induced me to start using them happened right smack in the middle of that school year, 1971-72. It is a story I have told to a couple of people, but I have never tried to write it out until now.
*
On Friday, January 7, 1972, my youth hockey team—technically, the Greater New York City Ice Hockey League (GNYCIHL) All-Stars, or “New York Stars” for short—traveled to Brockville, Ontario, to play in the Fourth Annual Thousand Islands International Atom Tournament that would take place that weekend. (“Atoms” are kids nine and ten years old, in Canadian parlance; in the U.S. we called them “squirts.”) In the immortal locution of Joe Biden, this was a big fucking deal.
If you’re a hockey fan, you know that the epic Summit Series between Team Canada and the Soviet Union didn’t happen until eight months later. Canada rightly regarded itself as the sole proprietor of hockey; in the U.S., only New England, Michigan, and Minnesota took youth hockey seriously. The GNYCIHL itself had been founded only five years earlier, in 1967; it was as if a glacier called “youth hockey” took that long to advance as far south as the New York metropolitan area. It wasn’t until 1968 that any American players were selected in the NHL Entry Draft, and it would be many years before any American players distinguished themselves in the big leagues.
We would be the first youth team from New York to play in a tournament in Canada. There were only three other American teams in the thirty-two-team tournament, one from Rochester, NY, and two from Rhode Island, and some of us suspected that our teams had been invited partly so that the tournament could call itself “international.” (The Canadian teams were all from Ontario and Québec.) Nobody expected us to be able to compete at the Canadians’ level, let alone actually beat a Canadian team.
The teams were divided into two groups, A and AA; according to the tournament program, A teams were from towns with populations under 20,000, AAs from towns over 20,000. We suspected that the real distinction had to do with talent levels, since all the American teams were in the A division, and some future NHL players were on the teams in the AA. And of course, my team came from a metropolitan area with a population of roughly ten million. One of the players in the AA division was a kid named Gretzky something, who was already famous. He played for Brantford, and his stats that year were insane: in eighty-five games he scored 378 goals and notched 139 assists for a total of 517 points. Over six points per game. (I was the leading scorer on my team, with seventy-eight goals and seventy-six assists in seventy-five games. Not quite in Gretzky’s league.) Brantford lost in the AA semifinals to Don Valley, who then beat Kitchener in the final, 3-2.
On eBay, someone is selling a copy of the tournament program under the heading “1972 WAYNE GRETZKY KIDS TOURNAMENT PROGRAM BROCKVILLE CANADA ATOM HOCKEY RARE.” The asking price is $720. The original price for the program was 25 cents.
When we debuted in the tournament on Saturday morning by beating Beaconsfield 4-0, word got around quickly: hey, check out these upstart New York kids! The other three American teams lost their openers as they were expected to, and then two of them lost again in the consolation round; Beaconsfield, for its part, went on to win its next three and take the consolation round prize, which was pretty impressive inasmuch as they had to play all three games on Sunday, at 9 am, 1:30 pm, and 3:45. They beat East Providence, RI, in the consolation final, which means that East Providence was the only other American team to win any games in the tournament, going 2-2. (I am consulting the tournament program as I write. My father saved a copy in the scrapbook he kept for me in those days.) Games consisted of two periods of fifteen minutes each, running time—that is, no stoppages of the clock even during stoppages of play—and a third period of t en minutes with stoppages.
I had scored a late meaningless goal in the Beaconsfield game and had assisted on another. But on Sunday, I had my moment in the sun—and my peak as an athlete. This, I have found, is a pattern with me: I peak early. The pinnacle of my hockey career came when I was ten, and the height of my academic career when I was thirty-five. I have done a lot of downhill skiing since then.
We played Smiths Falls at 10:15. We won 3-1; I scored two goals and assisted on the third, and by “assisted” I mean “I took the shot and a linemate put in the rebound.” (The rap against me at the time was that I would always look to shoot instead of passing. The rap was largely justified.) We thereby earned the right to face Cobourg in the semifinal at 2:30, and we knew that Cobourg was heavily favored; the general consensus among tournament-goers was that Cobourg would face the hometown Brockville squad in the A division final.
And sure enough, Cobourg was clearly the better team. They kept us bottled up in our own zone for about half of the first period, and we barely touched the puck; it looked as if they were on an extended power play—and we looked as if we didn’t belong on the same ice. Then we caught a break: my center, a wispy kid named Wimmie Colgate, intercepted a pass and headed up ice. Wimmie was a great playmaker and passer; my left wing, Steve Boyle, was a brawny guy who could be relied on to win battles for the puck along the boards. I was the scorer. We almost perfectly replicated the New York Rangers’ “GAG (goal a game)” line of Jean Ratelle, Rod Gilbert, and Vic Hadfield, which made perfect sense to me because I idolized Gilbert and attended his summer camp three times.
So I turned on the jets—I was scrawny but very fast—and Wimmie hit me mid-stride at center ice. I had already blown by the far defenseman and needed only to beat the guy immediately in front of me. With a surreal clarity, I knew what I had to do: emulate the move Jim Pappin of the Chicago Black Hawks had used against Guy Lapointe of the Montréal Canadiens in game six of the previous year’s Stanley Cup final, and slip the puck between the defenseman’s legs and pick it up on the other side. I did exactly that … and then suddenly found myself looking at the goaltender’s pads out of the corner of my eye. The goalie, watching this play develop, had decided to come maybe thirty feet out of his net to cut me off; I quickly fired a shot just to his left, then looked up to see the puck fly into the net. The place erupted—not just our parents, but everyone in the arena (except of course Cobourg). It was quite a play, and suddenly, with our very first shot on goal, we were up 1-0.
I don’t remember the rest of the game in that kind of hallucinatory detail (over fifty years later), but I do remember that Cobourg replied with two goals, neither of which was very impressive. On the contrary, they were kind of soft. Cobourg was still the better team, I thought, but now the game was much more even; it was as if that first goal had served them notice that we wouldn’t be pushovers.
And then in the second period, one of our defensemen took a slap shot from the point, their goalie made the save, and I tucked in the rebound. 2-2. Things stayed that way until there were only five minutes left in the game, when I snapped a wrist shot from the top of the right face-off circle into the far lower left corner of the net. My father later described that shot as a “rocket.” 3-2! We were going to win this game and go to the finals. And I had a hat trick. I had basically hauled the team onto my shoulder and carried us to the championship game! I had been responsible for all six goals we scored that day, and now…
And now Cobourg tied it up a minute later, 3-3, on yet another soft goal. It was weird. Our goaltender, Richie Koch, was usually a reliable player. He played stand-up style, as did most goalies in the early 1970s, and he rarely gave up juicy rebounds or was caught out of position. But this afternoon, against the best team we’d faced all year, he simply did not bring his A game.
With under a minute to play, we had a face-off deep in Cobourg’s zone, to the right of their goalie. Steve Boyle was going to take the faceoff instead of Wimmie, but was tossed out of the faceoff circle for jumping the gun before the linesman dropped the puck. I skated into the circle to take the face-off in his stead. Suddenly I felt Steve’s glove on my arm. “Mike,” he said, “you don’t know how to take face-offs.” (Quite true, unfortunately.) He gestured for another teammate, named Joey Byrne, to take the draw. Joey won it cleanly and snapped the puck back to Steve—who took a slap slot from about thirty-five feet that soared over the goalie’s right shoulder, hit the crossbar, and caromed into the net. 4-3. Game over. We had pulled off the upset in ridiculously dramatic fashion.
Now all we had to do was rest up for a few hours before our 7 pm showdown with the home team, who had outscored their three previous opponents 21-1.
Our coach, Bart Grillo (who was also the president of the GNYCIHL), made an executive decision: Richie Koch was worn out. He’d let in three questionable goals and didn’t have anything left in the tank for a third game. His backup, a tiny Puerto Rican kid named Perry Vella, would get the start. We were changing horses mid-stream—something a hockey team almost never does in a playoff or a tournament situation. It was a gamble: Perry had only played a handful of games to that point, and his size was an issue. Perry was just over four feet tall. His body didn’t cover much of the net, and he had to stretch to the fullest extent to make saves that for bigger kids would be routine.
We lost the final game, 1-0, but the score does not tell the story. Brockville outshot us 29 to 9, and none of our nine shots amounted to a real scoring chance. We were never a serious threat. Richie Koch wasn’t the only kid with nothing in the tank; we were all gassed, and we realized that the tournament organizers never imagined that an American team would get to the finals, so they didn’t worry about the remote possibility that we would have to play three games in one day. We played in the Memorial Centre rink, home to Brockville’s Junior A team, with a seating capacity of 5,000. And we were blown out in front of about 1,500 people. It was our first loss of the year after forty games, and it was crushing.
The only reason the score was respectable—hell, more than respectable—was that Perry Vella stood (as the standard locution for goaltenders has it) on his head. His was a performance worthy of a nine-year-old version of Dominik Hašek or Vladislav Tretiak. He made incredible, acrobatic saves all night long, and I remember thinking at some point that it was a privilege and a pleasure to be his teammate. Who knew he had this in him?
The next day, the local paper, the Recorder and Times, had a full-page spread about the tournament, leading with the information that the home team
won the top honors by taking a 1-0 thriller from the New York City Stars for their fourth win of the tourney. The game ranked as one of the best witnessed among the 48 at both local rinks.
This was altogether too kind to us, since, as the article went on to note, accurately, that
Brockville carried much of the play and had countless chances to score during the first two periods which ended 0-0. In the opening 15 minutes “straight time” period, the [Brockville squad] didn’t allow New York a single shot while firing 10 of their own at the Stars’ goalie, Perry Vella.
The game was in no sense a “thriller,” except insofar as Brockville didn’t outscore us 21-1. More generally, there was much praise for the quality of play and the competitiveness of the games:
Many fans commented on the calibre of play and the fact that nine and 10 year-olds made it look so easy, committing few errors. This ran true throughout the two days and was especially evident in the championship games. Although it was the fourth game in two days for all the finalists, they showed no signs of fatigue.
Yes, well, that last bit was simply not true. We showed all the signs of fatigue—except for Perry, who wound up winning the A division goaltending trophy (for one game!) and getting his picture in the Recorder and Times, smiling and holding a trophy half as tall as himself.
A month later, the February 18, 1972 edition of the Recorder and Times announced our return to Brockville:
The New York atoms have an exciting goaltender in their line-up—Perry Vella, who was the top netminder in the “A” final game. He is a fierce competitor and provides the inspiration for the New York club.
We were mightily amused by this. In reality, Perry was a backup goalie who rarely played, but he had clearly made an impression on the Brockville sports press. I so hope that Perry’s family kept copies of those papers, as my father (obviously) did.
*
I should explain our return to Brockville: there was a postscript to the Thousand Islands Atoms tournament. Apparently the locals were sufficiently impressed with us to agree to book us on an “exhibition tour” consisting of five games over what was, for us, the three-day Washington’s Birthday weekend, February 19-21. We would play two more games against Brockville, then head to Kitchener to play two games against their “B” squad, the Komets (who knew they had a “B” squad?) before wrapping things up with a climactic final game against the fearsome A squad, the Bauer Krauts, who had barely lost to Don Valley, the team that beat Gretzky’s team. We were stoked.
To make matters even more interesting, we would play the first two periods of the first Brockville game in the youth arena, and then we would be shuttled onto buses, in full gear, skates and all (with protective rubber skate guards on, of course), to the Memorial Centre, where our third period would be a pregame attraction before Brockville’s late-teen Junior A team played its game. This time, we would be playing in front of a capacity crowd.
When we took the ice for the third period, the announcement came over the public address system that the score after two was Brockville 2-1, and the crowd erupted in cheers, as one would expect. Not that they were surprised, of course. Just pleased. But in that third period, I assisted on two goals (real assists, the kind that involve passing to teammates) and then, with yet another 3-3 tie in the final minute, just as in the Cobourg game, we scored with about forty seconds left. More specifically, I scored. I silenced an arena of five thousand people, and we celebrated deliriously as the final buzzer sounded. We were avenged! We showed Brockville what we could do when we weren’t utterly exhausted. We had beaten one of the best teams in Ontario.
The following morning, we battled Brockville to a 1-1 tie in the youth arena, so our mini-Summit Series ended in a 1-1-1 draw. In Kitchener, we manhandled the B squad, 7-2 and 4-1. And then, in our showdown against the Kitchener A team (which we played just an hour after our second victory against the B squad), a funny thing happened.
We led 3-2 with under five minutes to play. I had gotten two assists—one on a pass from the corner, after which I was crushed to the boards (and therefore didn’t see the goal), and one on a blistering shot their goalie plucked out of the air only to have another New Yorker bat the puck past him in midair (yes, we had ten-year-olds who were that good). Now I was anxiously watching the clock as each second seemed to drag out longer than the last one … and then OMG, there were five extra minutes on the clock! It went from 4 something to 9 something, like the lights on top of the numeral four had been switched on, just like that! I yelled to Coach Grillo. All at once, the whole bench was chattering and gesturing at the scoreboard.
To no avail. Kitchener tied it up in those extra five minutes, but we didn’t protest the game. We simply decided that we would leave politely and not make a fuss, and call it a win among ourselves. We understood that our hosts were not going to let us leave by embarrassing them in their own building. It was their sport, after all—and it remained so until the Soviets showed up in August and stunned Team Canada 7-3 in the Montréal Forum.
When we came home, Bart Grillo was invited to appear on a Rangers telecast between periods. He told the viewing audience about our adventures, mentioning my hat trick against Cobourg and discreetly saying that we’d tied the team that beat Wayne Gretzky’s team. (Not precisely true, but close enough.) He pronounced my name “Berooby.”
None of my sixth-grade classmates saw that interview. There weren’t any diehard hockey fans in class 6-305, not yet.
*
Oh wait, I forgot to explain about the accents. Well, not really. I was withholding a key piece of the narrative. You might have assumed, up to this point, that the experience of playing against and defeating Canadian youth hockey teams made me identify proudly as a French-Canadian kid. You would be partly right. My favorite players on the Rangers were Gilbert and Ratelle, and I believed then—as I believe now—that French-Canadian players tend to play the game the way they did, with style and finesse and no thuggery. In my teen years, I was a big fan of the Buffalo Sabres’s French Connection line (Gilbert Perrault, Rick Martin, René Robert), and after the thoroughly thuggish Philadelphia Flyers beat the Sabres in the Stanley Cup finals in 1975, I was convinced that Montréal’s victory over the Flyers the following year—led mostly by players like Guy Lafleur, Jacques Lemaire, Guy Lapointe, and Yvan Cournoyer—saved the NHL from degenerating into something resembling roller derby. So I already had some feelings on the subject.
But the real reason was this: at the outset of the Atoms tournament, before the start of our game against Beaconsfield, my father whistled me over to the boards (there was no protective glass or chain-link fencing, just boards) and said, “Just remember that they hate you here. And they hate you because you’re French.”
W. T. A. F.
OK, I was too young to think that, but I can assure you that I was utterly gobsmacked. I had never heard my father say anything about being French. He spoke French occasionally at home with my live-in great-aunt, Emerilda Ryan, whom we called “Ryanie,” but he never spoke it to me; when I began taking French in the fourth grade at P.S. 32, I started from scratch. I knew he identified strongly with his French-Canadian roots in Lewiston, Maine, and I knew—even at ten—that he idolized Jack Kerouac, who grew up in a similar mill town, Lowell, Massachusetts. But he had never uttered a word about being hated or ostracized or anything. This came completely out of the blue.
And it was preposterous, of course. I never heard any chirping from any of our English-Canadian opponents, and the family that was hosting me—the players stayed with Brockville families, while the parents, mostly fathers, stayed in a hotel—was cheery and kind. They never remarked on my name; the only thing that mattered to them was my number, since they’d signed up randomly to host number 5 from the New York Stars, and they were briefly disappointed, when we first took the ice, to think that there was no number 5 on that team—until I came out of the locker room dead last, even behind Perry Vella. (I explained to them that this was a little superstition of mine, kind of like Phil Esposito’s belief that he had to wear a black dickey under his Bruins jersey, because he first wore one during a game in which he scored three goals.)
But if my father was trying to light a fire under me for my first Canadian tournament, it obviously worked. And sure enough, every time I heard my name over the public address system—eight times in all, for my six goals and two assists (like my hero Gilbert, I rarely took penalties)—I heard it pronounced correctly in a hockey arena for the first time in my life. Everywhere else we played, even on our home ice in the Abe Stark Sports Center in Coney Island, I was Barooby. Here I was not merely Bayroobay but actually Bayrhoobay, the French “r” uttered with that subtle back-of-the-throat inflection. And I thought to myself, hell yes, that’s my name. I am Michael Bayrhoobay, dammit.
And when I got back home, I started turning in my school assignments as Michael Bérubé.
I didn’t—and don’t—care if other people put the accents on my name. And for a long time, it was a moot point; in high school, for instance, neither the school paper nor the yearbook had the capacity to print letters with diacritical marks. So there is plenty of evidence in my attic storage bins that I remained Michael Berube for many years. (For that matter, I went by “Mike” until my first college girlfriend insisted on “Michael.” Until then, I thought of “Michael” as the name my parents called me by.)
And it wasn’t until 1977 that I heard anything about my father’s upbringing in Lewiston. One night he borrowed some money from me and went out on what may have been his last bender. He gave up drinking that year, and has remained sober ever since, which is why he’s still with us as I write this. (At ninety-three, he has broken every Bérubé record for longevity; his mother Medora died of ovarian cancer at the age of forty-three, her brother Ralph died at fifty-five, her brother Florian died at sixty-nine, and only Ryanie made it into proper old age, dying in 1986 at the age of eighty-four.) He returned a few hours later, knocked on my bedroom door, came in, sat down in my desk chair, and proceeded to tell me the story of his life. If you remember Christopher Walken’s “this watch” speech to a young Butch in Pulp Fiction, it was a little like that—at least in terms of its effect on me.
He started by explaining that he always sent news of his accomplishments to his former hometown papers, the Lewiston Daily Sun and the Evening Journal, because he felt he had to clear the family name. It was bad enough, he said, that he was the child of a single mother in the thirties, born in 1933 at the depth of the Depression; but when she died he was only nine. He bounced around between her siblings for the rest of his childhood. He did not land in happy homes; Emerilda was married to an abusive husband, and Ralph … well, Ralph’s story is not my story to tell, but if you go to the Google News Archive and search for the April 15, 1955 Lewiston Evening Journal, you’ll get some idea of what kind of story it is. Front page, banner headline.
My father spoke also of separate, back entrances to buildings for French Canadians; of intimidation by the KKK and slurs from the Anglo-Americans; of the 1919 law that banned the teaching of French in schools and the need to mask his accent—and drop his accents. “You’re a classic third-generation immigrant,” he told me. “You have the option of putting the accents back on. We had to assimilate in every way possible.”
Until a few years ago, the family narrative was that my paternal grandfather was a Lewiston attorney named George LaRochelle, who had no contact with my father until 1951, when he wrote a letter to my father promising to send him to college and thence to Harvard Law School, to set him up for a career as an attorney. Presumably this was LaRochelle’s attempt to atone for his neglect—or so my father believed. But this plan never came to pass because LaRochelle died shortly thereafter. I think of it as roughly analogous to Dan Cody’s relation to Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby: LaRochelle was the Would-Be Benefactor Who Suddenly Died.
But a few years ago, my sister Jeannie decided to go down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole, and she has become convinced that LaRochelle’s name is on my father’s birth certificate only because he was doing Medora Bérubé a favor by giving her newborn son a legal father. The real father, Jeannie insists, is a man named Janney McLean Yeats, who was apparently living in Frederick, Virginia, in 1932—and was married to a woman named Eugenia Sneed. How in the world he managed to meet Medora is anybody’s guess, though that’s what the DNA seems to say. My father, for his part, has no interest in guessing, and less than no interest in discussing any of this. We will never know whether Medora was seduced and abandoned, or whether she was an extraordinarily bold woman for 1932, had an affair with a married man (be he Janney or George), and always intended to raise little Maurice herself.
*
Both my children, Nick and Jamie (forty and thirty-four, respectively, as I write), sign their names as Bérubé; Jamie has Down syndrome and never attempted cursive writing, but has always taken care to include his accents. He is also quite proud of his Irish heritage; my mother’s people are from County Mayo, and my wife has one Irish grandparent (who always denied that he was Irish), so Jamie is 37.5% Irish and for a while, during his teen years, would sign his name “James Lyon Seamus Bérubé.”
Jamie took French in high school, to the surprise of some of his classmates; his teacher, Madame Eid, decided that his “reasonable accommodation” as a child with a disability would be that he would take French I for two years and French II for two years. This seemed very reasonable indeed, and though I never met Madame Eid I will always be grateful for her kindness. On his trips to France (three so far), Jamie attempts to speak rudimentary French to waiters and cab drivers, which earns him all kinds of good will from Parisians who are otherwise highly skeptical of Americans’ ability to speak their language.
In 2013, Jamie and I were invited by Reach Canada (the disability justice organization, not to be confused with REACH Canada, Render Effective Aid for Children, which works in developing nations) to come to Ottawa and give a talk and a podcast interview. During our visit, we were told that we simply had to visit the Museum of Civilization, now known as the Canadian Museum of History.
The museum was very impressive indeed; because Jamie will always start with an iMax film if he can, we watched L’Incroyable Voyage des Papillons in French, understanding about ten percent of the narration (though we got the big picture). We then walked through the Canadian History Hall, and even though we know perfectly well what “sortie” means, we entered it through the exit and did Canadian history backwards. When we got to the era of Confederation, I asked Jamie to slow down and let me read so that I could see how the Museum handled the creation of the province of Québec and the question of what to do with those crazy French Catholics in general.
“Are these my people?” Jamie asked.
“They certainly are,” I replied. “You have two French-Canadian great-grandparents, so you are one-quarter French Canadian.” (The George LaRochelle – Janney Yates question was still years away.) “And of course your last name is French Canadian. The Bérubés came to North America when Damien Bérubé arrived from Normandy in 1671.”
“Cool,” Jamie said.
The following day, as we checked in for our flight home, we were greeted by a Customs official in the Macdonald-Cartier Airport. The young woman initially hailed us in English, but when Jamie replied with “bonjour,” she seamlessly code-switched to French.
“Pardonnez-nous, madame,” I said. “Nous parlons français quelquefois, mais nous sommes Americains.”
“Oh, I see,” she replied, not missing a beat, “but Bérubé is such a French name.”
“They are my people,” Jamie said, beaming.
“Jamie,” I said, in a slightly broken voice, “je suis très très fier.”
The Customs official smiled at us. And perhaps she smiled at us because we were French.
In Memory of Maurice Berube, May 24, 1933-September 27, 2026