Fade Page 13

  “No,” I cried.

  A small space appeared around my father as men fell away, realizing what had happened. My father halted in his tracks, face bone-white in the morning light, eyes wide with disbelief. He began to fall slowly, by degrees, one part of his body following another, legs buckling beneath him, knees sagging, the upper part of his body pitching forward. He finally crumpled completely to the ground, his hands reaching into emptiness, his head striking the gravel.

  As I began to run toward him, I heard the wail of sirens and the roaring of engines in the distance and then saw crowds arriving, running toward the scene and my father there on the ground, surrounded by a forest of legs. I could see him no longer, my eyes blinded by tears.

  The next few minutes were a blur. Cops arriving in black cruisers, sirens screaming. A stretcher appeared, not a real stretcher but poles and a blanket improvised to serve as a stretcher. My father was carried to a pickup truck, policemen and workers clearing a place for him in the rear, tossing equipment to the ground.

  Where was Armand?

  An arm went around my shoulder and I drew away and looked up into the eyes of Rubberman Robillard. He held a bloody handkerchief to his cheek. His eyes were filled with tears and I knew they were tears for my father and not his own wound.

  Armand appeared at my side, white-faced, in a state of shock. “We've got to tell Ma,” he said. “We've got to tell her.”

  I tore myself away. “You tell her,” I cried, from the depths of my pain and sorrow.

  And I ran.

  Always ran when something bad happened.

  Ran the streets, chased and chasing.

  And now I ran again.

  Behind the garage, I invited the fade. Prayed for it. Do not fail me this time. And I was not failed. I was caught breathless in the pause and then withstood the flash of pain. As the cold swept me, my breath came back, the pain disappeared and I was free. I looked down and did not see my body. Held my hands before me and did not see them.

  I walked around the corner of the garage. Saw the sleek Packard. Squinted through the window. Rudolphe Toubert was inside, holding the black telephone receiver to his ear, the small moustache dainty above his lip. I studied him, watched his lips moving, his eyes darting here and there around his office.

  I walked to the front of the garage. Paused, glanced to my right then my left, shivered with the cold of the fade, but ignored the cold, offered it up for my father, who must have arrived at the hospital by now, who also might be dead by now.

  I opened the door, careful with the knob. Closed it quickly as a wave of cold accompanied me into the room. Rudolphe Toubert glanced up, phone still at his ear, puzzled as he arranged some sheets of paper that the air had disturbed.

  “Wait a minute,” he said into the receiver. He lowered the phone and glanced through me. Said into the mouthpiece again, “Funny, I could swear the door opened and somebody came in. But nothing …”

  I advanced a step or two as he continued speaking: “Two thousand dollars, I don't think that's unreasonable …”

  The office had not changed from the days of my delivery routes. His desk at the center, covered with papers and ledgers. Counters to his left where the newspapers were stacked and arranged in bundles for the delivery boys. The odor of newspaper ink in the air. As I drew closer I smelled Rudolphe Toubert's cologne, sweet and cloying. His long fingers gripped the telephone, the nails polished and buffered. His eyes were slits as he listened.

  “Yes, somebody has to get hurt,” he said into the phone. “Somebody always gets hurt. That's the way the ball bounces. But two thousand is the price. Cash on delivery.”

  What was he delivering? Another wounded person like my father to the hospital?

  He hung up. He patted his moustache, smiling, seemed pleased with himself. His white shirt was crisp, the collars pointed. A red tie spotted with small white flowers. A blue handkerchief spilling out of his lapel pocket. Striped red-and-white shirt and red suspenders.

  He shuffled papers on his desk. Glanced up suspiciously, eyes almost meeting mine. The smile gone now.

  I had become accustomed to how people reacted to the fade and I smiled maliciously.

  Frowning, perplexed, he glanced around the office cautiously, eyes sweeping the place slowly, searching the far corners, peering into the shadows.

  A touch of fear in his eyes?

  He reached for the telephone, lifted the receiver to his ear, spoke into the mouthpiece. “Operator,” he said, “get me 3648-R.”

  Waited, phone to his ear, tapping his finger on the desk, whistling tunelessly, forehead damp with perspiration. He loosened his collar.

  I did not move closer, remained six or seven feet in front of his desk.

  “Herve,” he said into the phone. “I want you to come over.” Listened, shaking his head. “I don't care what time it is.” Listened again. “Tell me, Herve, who's more important —your wife or me?” Smiling without warmth or joy. “The hell with her.” A pause, then: “Get your ass over here.” The words crackling with command.

  With Herve Boissoneau, his right-hand man, on the way, I had to act quickly. Knew what I had to do. But how? I glanced around the office, moved to the counter, saw in my peripheral vision Rudolphe Toubert still at the desk, still whistling a tune that wasn't a song, the way I hummed a small tune of terror whenever I walked by St. Jude's Cemetery.

  Rudolphe Toubert had turned to his right, almost as if he had followed my progress. Perhaps I had been careless. His moustache glistened with moisture and he pulled the gaudy handkerchief from his lapel and dabbed at his forehead.

  I looked at him, hating him.

  I thought of my aunt Rosanna in his bed. The paper routes, Bernard and all the other kids at his mercy. The men beaten up in alleys. The scabs he had brought to French-town, turning workers into fighters, men into monsters. I thought of my father, wounded and bleeding, and maybe dead by now.

  Turning away from him, I searched the counter and among lengths of rope and old newspapers found the weapon I needed, the long knife used to cut the ropes that held the bundles of newspaper together.

  I picked it up.

  When I turned into Sixth Street, I saw the crowd gathered in front of our three-decker, huddled together in that weary attitude of prolonged waiting. They allowed me room to pass among them, looking at me with big eyes, the look people reserve for accident victims. I saw Pete in the crowd, arms folded across his chest. He raised his hand in a salute, a brief gesture of sympathy.

  My uncle Victor stood at the bottom of the outside stairs, his cigar unlit in his mouth, a dab of brown juice dripping from the corner of his lips. Armand sat on the banister, head down, disconsolate.

  “My father,” I said, trying to control my voice.

  “He's at the hospital,” my uncle Victor said. “They're operating. They sent us home. Dr. Goldstein said he'd let us know when it's over.”

  Armand leapt from the banister and confronted me. “Where have you been?”

  I shrugged, could not find words to answer, could not answer even if I found the words.

  My mother called from the piazza upstairs. “Come up, Paul, come up. You must be freezing …”

  I was suddenly aware of the cold, and my teeth began to chatter. Frost covered the terrain and glimmered white on the windows. I had never known the sun to be cold before. Looking closely at Uncle Victor, I saw the weariness in his face, lines raking his cheeks, his eyes dull and lusterless.

  “Did the scabs win, Uncle Victor?” I asked.

  “Nobody wins a fight like that,” he answered.

  “We gave them hell,” Armand said, fierce and fiery, eyes blazing. “The police rode them out of town, put them in their trucks, and sent them on their way. Except for the ones in the hospital. They won't come back, right, Uncle Victor?”

  “Right,” Uncle Victor said, placing his arm around Ar-mand's shoulder. His voice lacked Armand's fire and pride.

  “How about the strike?” I
asked, still shivering, still numbed by what had happened in Rudolphe Toubert's office, and amazed that I should be standing here asking my uncle questions about the strike.

  “It goes on,” Uncle Victor said. “But it will be settled. We'll win a little and lose a little. But what we win will be more important than what we lose. …”

  I ascended the steps to my mother's waiting arms, let myself be folded in them. I shivered with chills. She felt my forehead. “You have a fever, Paul,” she said, and led me into the bedroom. She brought me aspirin and hot cocoa and watched me sip from the cup. Her face looked shattered, her eyes glazed, as if she had been struck blind, was doing everything—walking, talking, tending to my needs—by memory.

  “I hope Pa will be all right,” I whispered as her lips brushed my cheek.

  “We've got to be strong, Paul,” she said. “No matter what happens. Pray, Paul, and be strong …”

  I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, plunging into fathomless depths, into the heart of a bottomless darkness, obliterated, becoming a zero, a cipher.

  I woke to the sound of laughter and merriment and clinking glasses and muffled shouts of gladness. Rubbing my eyes, I crept to the doorway, gazed out at the kitchen, saw my mother radiant at the table, my brothers and sisters at their places, my uncle Victor at the door.

  She saw me standing there.

  “Your father, Paul,” she cried, eyes luminous, cheeks flushed with happiness and joy. “He survived. Dr. Goldstein just left. He's going to be fine….”

  “Good,” I said, my voice hollow.

  I thought of Rudolphe Toubert and the knife and the peculiar sound that passed his lips as the knife penetrated his flesh and found its mark. I turned away so that no one would see me trembling.

  Three weeks later, Bernard died. In his sleep.

  Cold and forever remote when we tried to wake him on the last day of that doomed year.

  et me introduce myself.

  My name is Susan Roget and I am sitting at the typewriter here in Meredith Martin's ninth-floor apartment in Peter Cooper Village, New York, New York, and if I look out the window, I can see the East River where a tugboat is pulling a huge tanker through the choppy waters. Ifs a sparkling day in July—Saturday, July 9, to be exact—and I am haunted by something, by those final words in the manuscript I've just read for, like, the tenth time. Cold and forever remote when we tried to wake him on the last day ofthat doomed year.

  Shit.

  This isn't the way I want to begin. What I want to do is keep things plain and simple and direct. Professor Waronski in Creative Writing 209 says that the best way is to plunge in, make a beginning, any beginning at all, as long as you start. Most of all, he said, be yourself.

  Oh, I'm myself, all right. That's what got me into this predicament. I shouldn't have read the manuscript in the first place, had no business finding it the way I did. Then I wouldn't have known about the boy Paul and the fade and all the rest of it.

  Okay, I guess I have made a beginning.

  Next, I suppose I should explain how I arrived in Manhattan, a thousand miles from Farley, Iowa, by way of Boston University, houseguest of a famous literary agent.

  Pure nerve, that's how, plus a willingness to take risks. Professor Waronski says that a writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad. So I gathered up my nerve (which didn't require much effort because I am not exactly a shrinking violet) and took the risk of sending Meredith Martin a letter.

  In the letter, I explained that:

  1.1 burn with desire to be a writer, have always wanted to be a writer, would rather write than eat or drink, which is only a slight exaggeration.

  2. I will be starting my junior year at B.U. in the fall, majoring in communications, which is actually a major in writing. Then I dropped my bomb:

  3. I am a cousin of one of her most famous clients—the author of Bruises in Paradise and all those other wonderful novels. (Distant cousin, yes, but still related.)

  Then the payoff.

  4. Would it be possible for me to work as a summer intern in her agency? Salary would not be a problem because I did not require any. (My father's guilt since his divorce from my

  mother has been so tremendous that he has overwhelmed me with gifts and affection and promised to subsidize me if I was successful in my pursuit of an internship with Meredith Martin.)

  My final risk: including my telephone number at the dorm, in the event she wanted to call me. Which my roommate, Dorrie Feingold, said was not only nerve but chutzpah.

  Lo and behold, Meredith Martin did call. And, perhaps out of curiosity, invited me to New York. We hit it off. I learned that she is accustomed to Manhattan visitors, constantly entertains her many nieces and nephews from the Midwest— Meredith was once a small-town librarian in Kansas—and has a room in her apartment reserved for vacationing guests. Not only did she hire me—at minimum salary with maximum duties—but she invited me to move into her apartment. She would not even let me thank her.

  “I owe Paul much more than that,” she said.

  What does she owe him?

  I did not ask. I don't have that much nerve.

  So here I am in Manhattan, in Meredith's apartment and in my third week of employment at Broome & Company, opening mail, typing contracts, answering the telephone, and finding it all very exciting, to say nothing of the razzle-dazzle of the city itself in this gorgeous summer of 1988.

  A bit more background before I go on:

  It is one of the tragedies of my life that I never met my famous cousin, the novelist. (I have always referred to him that way—after all, he is famous, and he was my cousin.) He died in 1967 at the age of forty-two. I was not even born then. I am not exaggerating when I say that he has been the most important influence in my life. I have gorged myself on his novels and short stories, can recite long sections of them by heart. Have written countless theme papers about his work during high school and my first two years at B.U. Have tracked down various articles and reviews he wrote for small and obscure magazines.

  The reason why I chose to go to Boston University is its proximity to Monument, where he lived all his life. I have walked the streets he walked, knelt in prayer in St. Jude's Church, lingered in front of the apartment house across from the church where he lived on the top floor, as if I expected his ghost to wander out of the place and greet me with a smile. (I wonder if he ever did smile—my grandfather said he was a serious, sensitive person who always seemed a bit sad and wistful.) My grandfather, of course, is my direct link with my famous relative. They were first cousins, grew up together, graduated in the same class from Monument High School. Whenever I visit Monument, I go directly to my grandfather's office at police headquarters. He answers my questions, patiently, painstakingly, and sometimes drives me around Frenchtown, pointing out sights and scenes that turned up only slightly disguised in the novels and stories.

  Time now for true confessions:

  I must admit I am often haunted by the possibility that I am not truly a writer, that perhaps I have been led astray by the fact that the blood of a famous writer flows through my veins. Does blood guarantee that I am really a writer? When the words don't flow or when they seem flat and stale on the page, I am racked—and wrecked—by doubts. That's my dilemma, the baggage I carry with me all the time.

  One of the reasons—if not the major reason—I sought a position with Meredith Martin was the hope that I might show her some of my work so she could answer that terrible question: Who am I? A writer or only a pretender?

  Another confession. Major. And why I sit here agonizing as I write this: I am a terrible snoop. And I eavesdrop shamelessly. I do not open other people's mail or listen in on extension telephones. But I do poke my nose in other people's business. I aspire to be a writer, after all. I have to find out about people. What they do and why they do what they do. So. I admit that I was snooping the day—exactly a week ago —when I discovered the manuscript in one of Meredith's closets. I
wasn't searching the apartment for dark and dirty secrets. (In fact, I ignored the packets of letters in her mahogany secretary.) I simply wanted to get to know her better. What kind of cologne she prefers. Her choice of personal stationery. Stuff like that.

  Meredith is very neat and organized. (A woman comes in twice a week to tidy up, but there is very little to tidy up.) If there is any clutter in the apartment, it comes in the form of boxes. Royal blue boxes, measuring eight and a half by eleven inches, labeled BROOME& COMPANY, and they can be found everywhere. In stacks, in piles, in columns. They contain, of course, the manuscripts Meredith must read every day of her life, in almost every waking hour.

  In my quest for knowledge about Meredith, I pulled out drawers and opened closets, was impressed by the labels on everything from luggage to dresses—Vuitton, Halston, Laura Ashley. Meredith is crazy about hats. Big hats, wide-brimmed, floppy. (“I was born in the wrong century,” she says.) One closet contains nothing but shelf after shelf of hats.

  It was in this closet that I made the discovery. On the top shelf, tucked away in a corner. A box. The kind of box that usually contains a ream of typewriter paper. Frayed and well worn, buckling at the corners, unlike the official Broome & Company boxes. I stood on tiptoe and carefully took it down. Although Meredith had allowed me as an intern to read some of the manuscripts in the Broome boxes, I hesitated now. Should I open this anonymous box? Shit, why not?

  I removed the cover and stood breathless as I read the brief note on the yellowed first page:

  By the time you read this, dear Meredith, I will be dead, probably for many years. (See what faith I have in you— gambling that you will outlive me by that long a time?) Make of this what you will. My thanks for everything.

  Paul

  Stunned, I sank to the floor. After a while, I began to read, swiftly, with no pauses, from the opening paragraph when the photograph was taken in Canada to those last sad words that told of Bernard's death.