The American Fiancée

Far from Rivière-du-Loup, in St. Lawrence County, New York, Floria Ironstone waited and waited to hear back from The Horse, until she finally came to the realization that he would not be writing. The letter had been delivered to the wrong stallion. At least she’d tried.

“He was French Canadian, your daddy,” she would later tell her daughter.

She’d christened her Penelope, the perfect name for a little girl who would wait her whole life to hear from her father. Floria had been a singer before becoming an acrobat, but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize that her future was on the trapeze. Penelope must have heard the story a dozen times, “He was French Canadian, your daddy . . .” and so would begin the story of the time her mom met her dad in 1939, a frightfully odd-numbered year. What makes the story so tragic is that Madeleine would never get to hear it, Madeleine who so loved Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne’s stories. She had, of course, heard snatches of it from the Horse’s mouth before, but not all the details, not those that Floria Ironstone would share with her teal-eyed daughter, Penelope Ironstone. It happened at the county fair.

The St. Lawrence County Fair was, until the invention of the television, both the most predictable and the most surprising fair in all of New York State. The 1939 edition was no exception, so much so that for a long time afterward many believed that the devil himself had marked the date on his calendar. Floria Ironstone wouldn’t have missed the St. Lawrence County Fair for the world. She had checked with Old Whitman no fewer than eight times: he had promised to come by to pick her and her sister Beth up in his truck on the first Saturday in August at 7 a.m. sharp. When there was no sign of the truck at the time they had agreed on, Beth sighed.

“We’ll go next year. There’ll still be music next year, Floria.”

Floria was in tears on the porch. She hadn’t missed a single St. Lawrence County Fair since she’d turned eighteen. She’d always found a way to get there, in Old Whitman’s truck or by bus, and writing it off altogether was out of the question. Now where had Old Whitman gotten to?

Just as all seemed lost, the Ironstone sisters heard the truck’s engine rev and splutter.

“Sorry I’m late, ladies. Little Adolf here wasn’t too keen. He’s a bit of a nervous nelly, but if you ask me that’s a sign of character.”

“Why, Mr. Whitman! He’s absolutely enormous! You won’t be coming home empty-handed this year, I’m sure of it! Now what do you think of my skirt? Mamma made it.”

“Not bad at all. But why so red? You’ll be seen for miles around!”

“Let’s just say I don’t plan to go unnoticed.”

The truck had pulled up in front of the two young women, both dressed in their Sunday best, now radiant in the morning sun. Behind the slats a curious black eye looked out at them. It belonged to Adolf, an oversized calf that had been lovingly fattened on a steady diet of grain. Whitman’s every hope rested on the calf that Saturday in August 1939. An ardent admirer of Nazi Germany from the very beginning, Old Whitman had named his calf after the Führer, the same Führer whose photograph he had pinned above the calf’s paddock and stall in the hopes that the dictator’s unwavering stare, which had saved Germany from destitution and famine, would work the same magic on the animal. His hopes were realized beyond even his wildest dreams. The animal thrived and grew, valiantly turning into muscle all the grain and hay that could be found for him. Its coat took on the sheen of a ribbon winner and the animal, through some inexplicable phenomenon of transubstantiation, developed the same gaze as the man whose first name it bore: it was as though the calf could peer right into the depths of your soul, a certain jaded affection in its eyes, with a je ne sais quoi of Alpine ingenuousness that had convinced Whitman that glory was lying in wait, that he would be returning home that very evening brandishing the three-colored ribbon of the St. Lawrence County Fair. Where there is discipline and self-sacrifice there is hope, as would soon be proven to the state of New York.

“He’s as clear-sighted as the Führer!” Whitman thundered as he slammed the door of his Ford.

No, Whitman would not be returning home empty-handed. He looked the two sisters up and down. It all depends how you look at it, he thought to himself: in the eyes of the young men of St. Lawrence County, the girls, so eager to whirl their skirts at the county fair, could pass for two fine ladies; but to the ladies of the Temperance League, they’d be denounced as a couple of shameless hussies.

“Dressed like that, you might not be coming home at all!”

Old Whitman was fond of the girls, even if they were a bit odd. They had been raised by a crotchety Hungarian widow who’d lived in an old wooden home on the outskirts of Potsdam since 1933. Born a Nowak in Vienna and later married to an Eisenstein from Budapest, the Hungarian lady had become an Ironstone in America. The name, it seemed to him, brought to mind her strong character and robust constitution. The two girls, born in Budapest to different fathers who happened to be sworn enemies, had come to America before they had time to form a single memory of the Old World. First came Floria, the eldest, named after the heroine of Tosca, an opera that Mrs. Eisenstein—now Ironstone—had seen several times in Vienna and that had shaken her to the core, particularly the scene in Act II in which the heroine, Floria Tosca, stabs to death the frightful Scarpia, head of the police in Rome, before removing from his still-warm clutches the safe conduct that will allow her to flee the city with her lover. Floria Ironstone’s sister Beth, born two months before the family left for America, was named after Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Every summer, Whitman would take the Ironstone sisters to the St. Lawrence County Fair out of Christian charity. “If I don’t, who will?” would say the old cattle breeder who, in 1939, after a series of lean years brought about by lean cattle, was about to present handsome Adolf, the biggest, the fattest, the strongest, and the most mouth-watering calf ever seen south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi.

At the behest of Old Whitman, who wanted to get his calf in the right frame of mind for the fair, the Ironstone sisters sang as they made their way along the road to Gouverneur; then the old cattle man gave them a lesson on hard-working Germany and its great Führer, explaining among other things that the German chancellor had managed to accomplish in four years what no American president would ever achieve in a lifetime: give every citizen a motor car.

“They all have Volkswagens. The people’s car! And just look at our jalopies, still dragged along by horses. America the beautiful indeed!”

Flooring his poor old Ford pickup, Whitman overtook a buggy drawn by an emaciated grey mare, and as he passed it he bellowed out a “Heil Hitler!” loud enough to be heard on the other side of the Adirondacks. The poor countryfolk, who could see nothing but the head of the hulking brown calf staring out at them from the back of the truck, thought for a moment they were under attack as the driver struggled to prevent the startled horse from dragging the carriage and its occupants into the ditch.

Whitman and the girls arrived at the fairground around eight o’clock, agreed to meet that afternoon at the paddock where the ribbons and awards were to be handed out, then joined the crowds of fairgoers. Floria and Beth spent the first hour walking arm in arm between the shooting galleries, canvas tents, and enclosures where terrifically fat peony-pink piglets sniffed and snorted. Beyond the stands that had been erected for the occasion and beneath a sky alive with swooping swallows, there stood columns of cages filled with farmyard birds and their comical-looking feathers: spherical guinea-fowl speckled with white, immaculate Cochin China chickens, Rhode Island Reds with their scarlet combs, geese that stuck out their necks to nip at Floria’s and Beth’s stockinged legs, quails that clucked tenderly, a handful of domesticated partridges, and ruling proudly over the rest of the farmyard, having left its cage to parade before the people of New York State, a large, magnificent peacock whose beauty instantly turned the Ironstone sisters into pillars of salt.

“Look, Floria! A peacock!”

“How handsome he is. He’s the handsomest of all the birds.”

“Do you think he’ll fan his tail?”

“We’ll have to find him a peahen.”

“No peahen . . . Poor little peacock.”

“Don’t you worry about him, Beth. When you’re that handsome, being unhappy isn’t even an option.”

As though to show the Ironstone sisters he could read their minds, and for their own pure wonderment, the peacock half displayed its feathers’ color. Fairgoers bunched around the crates to admire the huge, vain bird that was visibly aware of the commotion it was causing. Then the miracle happened: the peacock fanned its tail wide, to the applause of the crowd. The bird seemed more surprised than anyone at how big its body had become, as though this morning pavane was the very first time it had ever unfurled its feathers. The bird haughtily studied the people who were so fascinated by its colors. One idiot thought it a good idea to throw the bird a piece of bread as a reward. The peacock took it as a provocation, stood stock-still, looked out at the crowd, and drawled: Leooona! Leooona! Floria and Beth Ironstone clapped in delight. The audience, charmed by the display, looked on at the young girl in the red skirt who was filled with wonder at such a simple spectacle.

“His bride-to-be is called Leona! Ha! Ha!”

At noon, after the first horse and buggy races were over, the Ironstone sisters ate the hunk of dark bread and the apples they had brought with them from Potsdam and bought lemonade. Sitting on the grass beneath a maple tree, they discussed handsome Adolf’s chances of winning the three-colored ribbon. What they had seen in the enclosures had worried them. Other animals from Utica, Watertown, Canton, and even Canada might just as easily take home the honors. Beth was pensive.

“Do you think Adolf realizes he’s being watched and judged? He’s only a calf, after all!”

“Of course he does. The peacock knew we were watching, didn’t it? Why wouldn’t the calf?”

“You’re right. Handsome Adolf is probably polishing his hoofs as we speak.”

On the main stage, the Ogdensburg brass band had just given way to a square-dancing performance that was boring Floria and Beth silly. They redid their hair, shook off the dust and straw that clung to their skirts, and decided to explore the parts of the exhibition they had never visited before, on the other side of the horse-racing track.

A large tent of coarse canvas loomed before them, set a little back from the fairground. From it emanated occasional deep manly cheers, rounds of applause, dull thuds, and, now and then, for no more than a second or two at a time, absolute silence. Whatever was happening there appeared to be taking the audience’s breath away. Each silence was followed by a spontaneous explosion of shouting, whistling, and exclamations of astonishment and amazement. Floria and Beth approached the entrance to the tent, which had been tied closed with rope. Consumed by curiosity, they called out four or five times before a portly gentleman with a moustache came to untie one of the cords that was keeping the mysterious performance hidden away from curious eyes.

“And what can I do for you ladies?”

“We want to see what’s in here,” replied Floria.

“It’s a show for gentlemen.”

“What do you mean, gentlemen?” asked Floria, more curious than ever.

“Strongmen. It’s no show for ladies.”

“Well then, today we’re no ladies,” Floria retorted, shoving the huge man aside.

The man watched the sisters walk inside, his gaze lingering on Floria’s red skirt, and thought to himself: “Not today, and not tomorrow either.”

The older sister took the younger by the hand and now they were pushing their way through a crowd of men, all of whom were taller, bigger, and sturdier than they were. An indefinable perfume of leather, sweat, and testosterone hung in the air. Floria noticed right away that the doorman had lied: they weren’t the only women in the crowd. A few old biddies were sitting in the lowest tiers, one of them shaking her fist and shouting something in a Slavic language. As her eyes took in the stage, Floria realized that the contestants were lifting off the dirt floor a black weight on which “300 lb.” had been painted in white. A tall blond man with blue eyes stood to let the newcomers take his place in the stands. “Please, ladies . . .” How many people were looking on from the V-shaped stands? Three hundred? Four hundred? One thousand, by the sounds of it. A master of ceremonies—black suit, bow tie, slicked-back hair, shiny shoes, gold watch, eyes puffy from the heat in the tent—announced the upcoming contest.

“And now, ladies, girls—he peered over at the two young sisters, their white stockings sticking out like a sore thumb in the sea of men—and gentlemen, now that our contenders have warmed up, we can get down to business. Bring in the heavy loads for the real men!”

The tall blond man who had given up his seat explained to the newcomers that they had missed the first event, a jaw-dropping bent press that a Canadian had won handily. A man known to all as The Warsaw Giant and a certain Idaho Bill had finished second and third.

A pair of scrawny men set up two wooden sawhorses three yards apart and laid a thick oak door on top. It left just enough room for a man to squat down between the door and the ground. The master of ceremonies called down from the stands the stoutest men he could find. Soon, seven strapping men were sitting on the wooden door. A murmur rippled through the audience. Beth’s neighbor guessed out loud that the seven giants must weigh at least fourteen hundred pounds, all told. In the voice of a tormented tenor, the master of ceremonies tried to calm the din rising from the stands.

“The next event consists of squat-lifting the wooden door, including passengers, for ten seconds. Competitors shall be allowed to touch the door with their hands and rest it against their upper back. We ask our distinguished volunteers to please hold still and show nothing but the utmost calm throughout this extremely dangerous maneuver. We do not wish to see a repeat here in Gouverneur of the unfortunate incident that left one poor fellow in Buffalo with a broken tooth! And I am counting on my distinguished audience to help me with the countdown! Now, without further ado, please welcome Michigan’s very own Samson: The Great Brouyette!”

A short, stocky man strode into the tent through an opening in the side. The striped costume that left his shoulders bare threatened to come apart at the seams. Floria and Beth burst out laughing at the sight of the little moustachioed man intent on lifting over a ton. Brouyette crouched beneath the door, and the tent fell silent. Then, after a few deep breaths, the unthinkable happened: the door and its seven passengers were lifted a few inches up into the air. Floria let out an admiring whistle.

“My word. Did you see that, Beth?”

Beth had indeed seen it, too, and there was more to come. Three strongmen followed, one after the other. Each managed to lift the seven men, their faces lighting up with incredulity every time they felt the wood they were sitting on shift beneath them. After The Great Brouyette came Idaho Bill, The Warsaw Giant, and Alexander Podgórski, a Pole whose name meant “of the mountain.” Podgórski, a strapping curly-haired fellow who wore a black costume and must have been six foot four, was cross-eyed, which brought a smile to the faces of the Ironstone sisters. Remarkably, his squint disappeared the very moment he lifted the door, as though the effort had realigned his eyes.

“Look, Beth. He looks a little like Adolf, Old Whitman’s calf!”

Beth pinched herself so hard she drew blood as she tried to stifle a laugh.

A triumphant Podgórski thanked the cheering crowd. After The Warsaw Giant, it was he who had lifted the weight the longest and the fastest, so easily in fact that he had not even been heard to moan or groan like the men before him, especially Idaho Bill, who had let out a pained whinny as he struggled to hoist the load. The crowd had counted down—“ten, nine, eight, seven, six . . .”—while Idaho Bill collapsed under the weight of the men. A stricter master of ceremonies would have disqualified him for giving way too quickly.

To announce the fifth and final contender, the emcee took on a deeper tone.

“And finally, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, for the first time in the state of New York, the iron man of Canada, Louis ‘The Horse’ Lamontagne!”

As he said the word “ladies,” the master of ceremonies had again looked straight at Floria, as though to stress that the man he had just announced was a sight for sore female eyes. Floria felt the crowd turn to look at her as one. To keep her composure, she adjusted the little cloth flower above her right ear while she pursed her lips and did her best to look dignified.

And so appeared Louis Lamontagne. For the crowd at the St. Lawrence County Fair, Louis would go down in history as “The Horse.” That’s how the master of ceremonies had introduced him, and that’s how he would remain in the minds of the Americans. The applause lasted longer than for the other contestants who, behind the canvas, must have been wondering what the audience saw in the Canadian, a greenhorn not yet turned twenty-one whom it was virtually impossible to hold a conversation with because, as his name suggested, he was French Canadian. While Louis Lamontagne’s rivals refused to ponder aloud what made the Canadian so special in the crowd’s eyes, it was certainly no mystery to the Ironstone sisters. Least of all to Floria who, until the day of her sudden death while watching the NBC newsreader announcing John F. Kennedy’s election on November 9, 1960, used to describe Louis Lamontagne as the handsomest man in America. It was that simple. Between that Saturday in August of 1939 and John F. Kennedy’s election as US President, Floria Ironstone must have proclaimed at least thirty times to a great many people, including her own daughter, Penelope Ironstone, that Louis Lamontagne had swept her off her feet. If she happened to be there, too, her sister Beth would nod as if to confirm what her sister said was true, and that she had seen it with her own eyes.

The emcee stepped back to reveal the beast. Louis Lamontagne must have been over six foot six, his hair dark and wavy, the hair of the Roman emperors in American black and white movies. Unlike his rivals, all of whom seemed to have been molded from a barrel, Louis Lamontagne was nothing but muscle and bone. But what bone! When he flexed his right arm, a bicep as big as a cantaloupe sprang up, and an appreciative murmur rippled through the tent. Clad in a skin-tight navy-blue leotard, Louis Lamontagne did not appear to believe in the virtues of humility and prudishness cherished by a certain segment of society. But no one in the audience seemed the least concerned about that. His body was offered up for their admiration just like that of Adolf the calf, who was at that very same moment, only a few hundred yards away, being observed, assessed, judged, and graded in every respect. Acutely aware of the effect he was having on his audience, Louis Lamontagne advanced, feet slightly apart to display his shapely thighs and improbably round calf muscles. “Legs like a horse,” muttered the old men in the third row. And what can be said of the hands of this colossus, other than that they would have surely made him, in another time, in another place, an Olympic swimming champion? Chiseled from marble, the body of Louis Lamontagne was almost entirely hairless, with the exception of one or two little tufts on his broad chest. The boy grinned the grin of one too good-looking to hold a grudge. And like the peacock that had strutted for the Ironstone sisters that morning, Louis Lamontagne spread his arms wide before the hypnotized audience. Their admiration for this body was stealing the show, and the poor devils sitting on the wooden door were quickly forgotten as they waited patiently to be hoisted by the Canadian. Louis Lamontagne appeared more concerned with the admiring looks taking in his body from head to toe than by the feat of strength he would have to win if he wished to remain in the competition.

It would be unfair to the memory of the Ironstone sisters not to mention Louis Lamontagne’s face. Because while it might have been his perfectly defined muscles that won over the men at the fair, it was his grin that forever transformed him into an object of desire in the minds of the few ladies present. To picture him in your own mind’s eye, it is sufficient to imagine a slightly gentler side to Clark Gable, whose fine and elegant whiskers Louis Lamontagne also shared. And the eyes. Teal. Achingly beautiful. Eyes of a color so rare that one day a woman would cry, “If you walk out that door, don’t bother coming back!” and another, “I exist only for you . . .” and another still, just before she took her own life, would write as her last words, “I loved you, Louis. With all my heart.”

Floria ovulated.

Not knowing the term, she could never have put it quite like that, but that’s what happened. She felt it down below, a sensation that brought a smile to her lips, perhaps at the precise moment when Louis Lamontagne’s gaze met hers. Fate’s fatal error. It was the beginning of the end for Floria Ironstone, as a wink smacked her full in the face. To an audience well used to seeing strongmen from all over the world on parade, Louis’s appearance was as pleasing as it was astonishing: as handsome as Charles Atlas—from whom the French Canadian must have learned the basics of Dynamic Tension by mail order—and built like Eugen Sandow, the Königsberg-born father of body building, Louis had a face with all the innocence of the angels who escorted the Virgin Mary. Without the slightest hesitation, anyone would have confided their wildest dreams in Louis in the hopes that he might find a way to make them come true, because to have developed a body such as his in the 1930s was really something. Who but a countryman’s son would ever have gotten his hands on enough animal protein to go about putting so much meat on his bones?

“He’s the new Louis Cyr!”

Hogwash. Louis Cyr might have been the world’s strongest man, but never its most handsome. Louis Cyr had never caused the young ladies of the state of New York to spontaneously ovulate. Louis Cyr did not have Louis Lamontagne’s angelic smile. Cyr had been a brute force straight out of the Old Testament; the Canadian colossus now crouching down under the wooden door looked more like an attempt by God to seek forgiveness for the flood and the regrettable excesses of Deuteronomy.

“But he’s too tall to be Louis Cyr’s boy!”

Indeed he was. Unless, of course, Cyr had married a giant, which hadn’t been the case at all. Louis Cyr’s wife was tiny, as anyone who followed strongmen knew. “So where did he come from?” the regulars wondered. The need to find an answer to the question lost all significance as soon as Louis shouldered the door and its seven passengers into the air. He looked up mischievously, smiled at Floria Ironstone, gave her another wink, then gently set down the load after more than twenty seconds had elapsed, without any of the passengers so much as feeling the door settle back down on the sawhorses. The audience went wild, jumping to their feet as they shouted and applauded, boisterously signaling that the rarest of events had just taken place. The Ironstone sisters rose along with the crowd and found themselves clapping until their wrists threatened to give way, shouting loud enough to be heard all the way to Buffalo: “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!”

The remaining feats of strength were to be held outside that very same afternoon. The Ironstone sisters’ hearts were well and truly aflutter. They had followed the enthusiastic crowd outside, behind the squadron of strongmen and the master of ceremonies. Come! Come, one and all! Who will be the quickest to pull a car one hundred yards? Which of these five giants will manage to hoist a horse to the top of a telephone pole? There were four events in all: the bent press, the squat lift—both of which had just been won by Louis Lamontagne inside the tent—then the car pull and the horse hoist. First place would earn the winner three points; second place, two points; and third place, one point. The man who completed all four events with the most points would be taking home two hundred American dollars. After the first two events, Louis was top of the leaderboard. The Warsaw Giant, who had twice finished second, was hot on his heels, with Idaho Bill and cross-eyed Alexander Podgórski sharing third place.