A Saint Patrick’s Day Queen
Memory takes its own pictures
No one will ever be able to see the green in the black-and-white photographs of the Montréal Saint Patrick’s Day Parade of 1959. Whatever the shade of green, it’s lost to history, along with most of the images from that day. Among them, the five beautiful Irish girls, identically dressed in green gowns, riding on a Shamrock-shaped float: the Parade Queen and Her Court.
My mother was one of the girls on the float.
The Montréal Parade still has a queen, but I believe it is now a leadership/public speaking award. Back then it was a beauty/popularity contest. Mom told me there was the pre-Parade party where guests voted for the Saint Patrick’s Queen with their applause. The girl with the most applause was selected, and four runners-up were her Court.
I am not sure what inspired my mother to enter this contest. Maybe a boy had dared her? Maybe my grandmother, who was so proud of her pretty daughter, had asked her?
When I was growing up, when there was nothing to do, I liked to look at my mother’s scrapbooks. I remember the photos clearly. She and the other girls sat aloft on the float, regal in their green gowns and green velvet fur-trimmed capes, waving to the crowd in the street.
In my kid’s opinion, the Saint Patrick’s Queen that year was certainly not as pretty as my own mother. It always bothered me, but Mom insisted the Queen was beautiful, with the type of evanescent Irish beauty not readily captured in pictures. That was the message for me, growing up.
In later years, she told me that the Queen also had an especially large and rowdy family who generated deafening applause on selection night.
Parade marchers were Irish clubs, teams, marching bands, parish churches, and representatives from Irish communities in Québec’s disappearing English-speaking rural towns. Some carried the green, white, and orange flags of the Republic of Ireland, and some the Québec fleur de lis. And at the very end of the parade, its pièce de résistance, the Shamrock-shaped float bedecked with crêpe paper, carrying the Queen and Her Court.
They wore those little fur-trimmed capes high on their shoulders, almost at their ears: it was March in Canada, after all.
The parade passed a reviewing stand at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel. Montréal Mayor Sarto Fournier had his picture taken with the Queen and Her Court. He shook hands with each girl.
When he got to Mom, he whispered in her ear: “You are the most beautiful one.”
She later wondered if he had said that to each of them.
Toward the end of her life, Mom thought of returning to Montreal and walking in the Parade again, as one of the Court alumnae. Then she thought, what’s the point? She had asked that question of most of her possessions, too, by then. You can’t take any of it with you.
When we emptied her apartment after she died, I went looking for her scrapbooks and photo albums. I was devastated to discover that she’d thrown out all her photos and news clippings of that day. She’d probably decided they wouldn’t be of interest to anyone after she was gone. They were barely of any interest to her then.
What was the point of hanging onto a few black and white photos of herself from sixty years ago, sitting on a parade float with a bunch of people she didn’t know?
When I was a kid, I’d asked her about the Parade whenever we looked at her albums, but it never came up in the decades that followed. At the very end of her life, we somehow got on the topic of the Parade, and she shared a detail I’d never heard before. My grandmother was a French Québécoise who had married an Irishman and raised her family in an Irish neighborhood, speaking English.
Mom told me that my grandmother had gone to the Parade by herself that day, and waited all morning in the cold to see her daughter go by on a float. In fact, my grandmother followed the entire parade route, staying ahead of the float, swimming against the human tide of onlookers, repeatedly stopping to turn around and wave.
And as the float made its way down Sherbrooke Street, every time Mom looked into the crowd, everywhere she looked, there was her mother, bobbing up in the crowd, beaming and waving.
That’s a memory more precious than any photo or news clipping. One to take into eternity.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
