Frenchtown Summer Read online

  That summer,

  Frenchtown was a place

  of Sahara afternoons,

  shadows in doorways,

  lingering evenings,

  full of unanswered questions

  and mysteries.

  It was also the summer

  of my twelfth birthday,

  the summer

  of Sister Angela

  and Marielle LeMoyne

  (even though she was dead)

  and my brother, Raymond,

  and all the others,

  but especially my uncle Med

  and my father.

  And finally

  it was the summer

  of the airplane.

  Other books

  by Robert Cormier

  After the First Death

  Beyond the Chocolate War

  The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

  The Chocolate War

  Eight Plus One

  Fade

  Heroes

  I Am the Cheese

  I Have Words to Spend

  In the Middle of the Night

  A Little Raw on Monday Mornings

  Now and at the Hour

  Other Bells for Us to Ring

  The Rag and Bone Shop

  Take Me Where the Good Times Are

  Tenderness

  Tunes for Bears to Dance To

  We All Fall Down

  To Bobbie, Peter, Chris and Renée

  With Love, Dad

  That summer in Frenchtown

  in the days

  when I knew my name

  but did not know who I was,

  we lived on the second floor

  of the three-decker on Fourth Street.

  From the piazza late in the afternoon

  I watched for my father,

  waiting for him to come home

  from the Monument Comb Shop.

  No matter how tired he was,

  his step was quick.

  He'd always look up, expecting to see me,

  and that's why I was there,

  not wanting to disappoint him

  or myself.

  That was the summer of my first paper route,

  and I walked the tenement canyons

  of Frenchtown

  delivering The Monument Times,

  dodging bullies and dogs,

  wondering what I was doing

  here on the planet Earth,

  not knowing yet that the deep emptiness

  inside me

  was

  loneliness.

  I felt like a ghost

  on Mechanic Street,

  transparent as rain,

  until the growling of Mr. Mellier's dog

  restored my flesh and blood

  and hurried me on my way.

  I was always glad to arrive home,

  where my mother,

  who looked like a movie star,

  welcomed me with a kiss and a hug.

  My mother filled the tenement with smells,

  cakes in the oven,

  hot donuts in bubbling oil,

  and hamburg laced with onions sizzling

  in the black pan she called the Spider.

  She loved books, lilac cologne,

  and me.

  My mother was vibrant,

  a wind chime,

  but my father was a silhouette,

  as if obscured

  by a light shining behind him.

  He was closer to me waving from the street

  than nearby in the tenement

  or walking beside me.

  On summer Saturdays,

  the men gathered

  at the Happy Times bar

  or in Rouleau's Barber Shop

  and talked about the Boston Red Sox

  and the prospects of a layoff

  at the Monument Comb Shop

  while my brother, Raymond,

  swapped baseball cards

  in Pee Alley

  with his best friend, Alyre Tournier.

  I stood beside my father

  as he listened

  to what the men were saying,

  smoking his Chesterfields,

  and I wished I could be like him,

  mysterious,

  silent.

  I was not famous in the schoolyard, or on the street corners, content to cheer for Raymond,

  who was a star at everything,

  baseball at Carder's Field,

  Buck Buck How Many Fingers Up?

  in the schoolyard,

  while I read

  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  or A Study in Scarlet

  on the piazza,

  avoiding the possibility

  of dropping a fly ball in center field.

  My paper route took me

  from the green three-decker

  next to the Boston & Maine railroad tracks

  where downtown Monument

  met Frenchtown,

  along Mechanic

  and all the numbered streets

  from First to Twelfth.

  My last customer was Mr. Lottier

  at the end of Mechanic Street

  next to the sewer beds.

  I held my nose

  as I tossed the paper to his piazza.

  He always smiled

  when he paid me on Friday,

  as if his nose didn't work.

  That summer, Frenchtown was a place of Sahara afternoons, shadows in doorways, lingering evenings, full of unanswered questions and mysteries.

  It was also the summer of my twelfth birthday, the summer of Sister Angela and Marielle LeMoyne (even though she was dead) And my brother, Raymond, and all the others,

  but especially my uncle Med

  and my father.

  And finally

  it was the summer

  of the airplane.

  How many times I have heard

  the men at the Happy Times

  talking about the famous dancer

  in a London dressing room

  who decided,

  on a whim,

  to cut off her tumbling locks

  of auburn hair,

  plunging Frenchtown

  into a depression

  a year later because

  women all over the world

  adopted her bobbed hairstyle

  and did not require anymore

  the fancy combs

  and barrettes,

  glittering with rhinestones,

  dancing with sequins,

  that paraded from the assembly lines

  of the Frenchtown comb shops.

  My father didn't work for a year.

  Just a child then,

  too young to understand

  what was happening,

  I only knew that my mother

  did not smile anymore,

  her voice like one long sad note

  struck on a piano

  when she read me stories,

  while my father seemed to have gone away

  even though I could see him clearly

  in his kitchen chair by the window,

  the silence in the tenement

  a terrible noise

  in my heart.

  Moosock Brook

  kept disappearing

  as it flowed

  through downtown Monument

  and later Frenchtown,

  red, purple or green,

  depending on the dyes

  dumped that day by the comb shops.

  The brook slid

  under Main Street

  and reappeared

  on Water Street,

  colors hectic in the sunlight,

  until it went unseen again

  bene
ath the B&M railroad bridge,

  before finally flowing

  into the Meadows.

  There it created

  a sudden pool

  into which Frenchtown kids,

  Raymond among them,

  plunged with glorious abandon,

  emerging later,

  dripping

  red, purple or green

  depending on the dyes

  dumped that day

  by the shops.

  I wore my aviator helmet,

  the goggles pushed up

  on my head

  in careless fashion,

  striding through the streets

  like a World War hero

  home after aerial battles

  over the trenches in France

  until Hector Henault

  tore the helmet from my head,

  dashed it to the ground

  and crushed the goggles

  under his boots,

  the sound

  like my own bones cracking.

  He paused to view his damage.

  Holding the ruined goggles

  in hands that trembled,

  I withheld tears

  as I screamed at him:

  “Die, you dirty rat, die,”

  (but silently, of course)

  like James Cagney

  in the movies.

  Three days later,

  Hector Henault was crushed

  like my goggles

  under the wheels of a Mack truck

  on Mechanic Street

  near Fifth.

  They said he died instantly.

  I was awestruck

  by my power to kill.

  On the fourth of July,

  Oliver Randeau,

  giggling,

  lobbed a firecracker my way.

  It exploded like a grenade

  against my ear,

  stunning my skull with pain.

  Knowing the power I possessed,

  I ignored the mad doorbells

  ringing in my head

  and looked at him.

  Because he was stupid,

  still in the sixth grade

  at the age of fourteen,

  with a left eye that often

  went askew,

  I decided

  not to kill him.

  Whenever I met him later,

  on the sidewalks or in the empty lots,

  I deflected his baleful stare

  with a pitying smile.

  Frowning, he always looked away.

  Did he somehow know

  that I held the power

  of life and death over him?

  I wondered whether I should confess this power of mine to Father Balthazar but instead vowed never to use it again even if absolutely necessary.

  My father

  often sat in the shadows

  in the middle of the night,

  The Monument Times

  collapsed in his lap,

  the dial on the Emerson radio

  an orange moon in the dark,

  the volume turned down.

  As I crept by on my way

  to the bathroom,

  having been awakened

  by a dream or a noise,

  he looked up,

  squinting,

  then took his eyes away

  from me.

  I tried to speak, but no words

  my voice drugged with sleep,

  and he continued to stare

  at nothing

  while I glided like a ghost

  to the bedroom,

  my bathroom urge

  forgotten.

  Back in bed,

  smelling the drifting smoke of my father's cigarette, I thought of him sitting up like a sentry in the night, guarding his family.

  Yes but

  why had he looked at me

  as if I were a stranger unknown to him, in the kitchen of the tenement that was home?

  I pretended

  that my tears

  were drops of sweat

  because

  the night was hot.

  The Boston & Maine freight yards

  drew Raymond and Paul Roget and me

  across the iron bands of the tracks

  to the boxcars.

  We'd climb up,

  then race along the roofs,

  leaping from car to car

  in breathtaking swoops,

  pretending railroad bulls

  (that's what they called them

  in the movies at the Plymouth)

  were chasing us,

  blowing their whistles

  and waving their billy clubs.

  We'd take refuge in an empty car,

  inhaling the aroma of faraway places

  … Chicago … Omaha … Santa Fe…

  dangling our feet at the door

  like hoboes

  riding the rails.

  Our parents always reminded us

  of Harold Donay,

  who ran away from home

  to ride the rails

  and, one rainy night,

  outside of Denver, Colorado,

  slipped and fell

  between the boxcars

  and was sliced in half

  by the wheels.

  He was shipped home

  in two parts,

  people said,

  and old Mr. Cardeaux,

  the undertaker,

  stitched him back together again

  for the wake and funeral.

  But we still stole across the tracks

  and climbed the boxcars,

  and outran the bulls …

  although for a long time

  I left the tenement

  whenever my mother

  picked up her needle and thread

  to do her sewing.

  My mother was Irish,

  from a small town in Vermont,

  her eyes the color of bruises,

  her hair black

  as the velvet on which

  diamonds were displayed

  in the windows of Brunelie's Jewelry Store.

  Delicate as lace,

  she was not like my sturdy aunts,

  who stomped off to the comb shops

  in the mornings,

  or the vigorous aunts,

  who stayed home with the babies,

  scrubbing, ironing,

  pummeling carpets on clotheslines.

  Their hands swooped like trapezes

  as they talked,

  to help my mother understand

  their Canuck words,

  while my mother's hands

  performed ballets.

  Somehow they came to understand

  each other

  in a haphazard litany of language.

  From magazines,

  my mother scissored scenes

  of country lanes,

  farmhouses with smoke corkscrewing

  from chimneys,

  while her kitchen window

  framed three-deckers,

  streetlights and sidewalks,

  and the comb shop roofs.

  If her smile was sometimes wistful,

  her laughter often ran silver

  in the tenement.

  She sighed at Raymond's roguish ways

  as she caressed his cheek

  and looked tenderly at me

  in all my confusion.

  Her eyes always lingered

  on my father,

  in what seemed to me

  depths of love.

  At those moments,

  I looked at my father,

  trying to read his eyes,

  to find out

  what was in his heart.

  But he was as unknowable

  as a foreign language.

  In the massive heat

  of a July afternoon,

  delivering the Times

  on Seventh Street,

  I glanced up to see
Mrs. Cartin

  on her third-floor piazza,

  hanging clothes on the line

  that stretched like a limp rosary

  from her three-decker

  to the LeBlanc house next door.

  Letting a blue shirt flutter

  like a wounded bird

  to the ground below,

  she leaned forward,

  her hands gripping the railing,

  and rose as if on tiptoe,

  lifting herself,

  rising, rising,

  higher and higher,

  precariously poised,

  like a bird before flight

  —but people can't fly—

  the throbbing in my throat

  preventing me from calling:

  “Don't jump, don't jump!”

  She fell back from the railing,

  like a balloon deflated.

  As she turned away,

  arms hugging her chest,

  I saw tears on her cheeks

  but told myself that

  at that distance

  they were tricks of summer sunlight

  or my imagination.

  That Sunday,

  at the nine o'clock Mass,

  she knelt in the third pew

  alongside Mr. Cartin

  and their two little girls.

  She received Holy Communion,

  eyes lowered

  as she returned from the rail,

  looking like a saint

  in my prayer book.

  I thought of how she had almost

  followed that blue shirt

  in its flight

  to the yard below,

  and placed the memory

  in that dark place

  where I kept all the secrets

  of Frenchtown.

  Long ago,

  before I was born,

  the broken body

  of Marielle LeMoync

  was found in the woods

  at the bottom of Twelfth Street,

  a wild place

  of gnarled bushes

  and stunted trees,

  with a tortured path carving a shortcut

  to the Acme Button Company

  where Marielle worked

  as a packer.

  A yellow necktie

  with black stripes

  coiled like a snake

  around her neck.

  Children were warned

  to stay away from those woods

  but we often explored

  that forbidden territory,

  shivering with delicious fear,

  trying to determine the exact spot

  where she was murdered.

  Her killer was never found

  although a hobo was spied

  leaping aboard a boxcar

  headed west

  the morning her body was discovered.

  Marielle was buried

  in St. Jude's Cemetery,

  a marble angel

  placed on her grave

  by her father and mother,

  who returned to Canada

  the following summer

  unable to withstand

  the onslaught of memories