“Only money,” I answered, with the famous nonchalance no one knew I was famous for.
After picking up the pieces and restoring order, I finally got him to the door.
“Sam,” I said.
He regarded me wearily, as if I were about to hand him a bill.
“Sam, before a girl can come back, she has to go away first. Know what I mean?”
He looked at me for a long time and then lifted his shoulders and did something with his elbows and smiled and frowned and coughed, all at the same time. I vowed to avoid future encounters with adolescents. The final wave of departing guests engulfed us in the hall and Sam was carried along with them. I had been unable to say what I’d needed to say: “This is a bad time in her life for either one of us—lover or father.” But he might have flung his arms out and broken another lamp, anyway.
I could hear Jane outside, shouting goodbye to people, distributing her farewells. “Goodbye, Sam,” she called.
Silently, I amended that statement to Sam: “A daughter has to go away for a while before she can come back.” I wished I could have said it aloud to make it sound more convincing.
In the kitchen, Ellen started the garbage disposal and, as usual, every pipe in the house began to rattle. I stood for a moment looking at the broken lamp and the other remnants of the party. After mixing myself another drink, I went upstairs to see if there were any Indians riding to attack, although I knew that they were gone forever.
Protestants Cry, Too
INTRODUCTION
I am assuming that the reader has read “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” before embarking on these remarks because there is such a distinct relationship between that story and “Protestants Cry, Too.” The stories are very much alike and yet distinctly different. Let me explain.
The setting of both stories is Frenchtown, the French Canadian section of a small New England city, the time is the 1930s Depression, and the cast of characters is almost identical. The narrator of both stories is a boy named Jerry; Armand, a high school student, is his older brother; Roger Lussier is Jerry’s best friend; Sister Angela presides in the classroom; the Globe Theater is their palace of celluloid dreams; Jerry’s father works in the comb shop. An important part of both stories is the fact that Armand is in love with a girl from the other, more affluent, side of town.
Thus, the similarities. The differences? Subtle, perhaps, but so unmistakable that it seems to me that “Protestants Cry, Too” hardly fits into the Depression era stories in this collection. It has a certain aura, a sense that it belongs to a time far removed from the Depression. The family, although American (the father is proud of his citizenship and is a partisan of Franklin Roosevelt), is more Canadian in spirit, more recently arrived from Canada, more alien to the American way of life. Would the father in “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” be as upset by the Protestant girl friend of his son as is the father in “Protestants Cry, Too?” I don’t think so, or, at least, the tone of the story suggests he wouldn’t be.
Tone is probably the operative word here. I sought to give the story a more ethnic feeling than the other story, made Frenchtown a more self-enclosed area with invisible but powerful walls separating it from the rest of the city. But focus and emphasis also play their roles.
In “Protestants Cry, Too” the emphasis is on Armand’s love for a girl from the North Side. The love affair and the reaction of Armand’s father allowed me to explore prejudice and the possibility of love—or compassion—overcoming it.
In “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” Armand is again in love with a girl from the other side of town, but this time the focus is on Jerry, the narrator, who discovers something in himself he had not recognized before.
In one story, Jerry is simply the narrator, the device through which the story is told. In the other, Jerry, still the narrator, is the crucial character to whom things happen. But Armand’s involvement with a girl alien to Frenchtown is the wheel that turns both stories.
Thus, we have the same ingredients in both stories, the same basic situation and the same cast of characters, but the two stories are altogether different in tone and theme and plot.
Protestants Cry, Too
To begin with, my brother Armand fell in love eleven times between Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving Day of 1938, and so it was no surprise, to me at least, when he announced at supper one night three years later that he wanted my parents’ permission to marry.
After all, marriage seemed to be the inevitable destination of love, and I marvelled that he had not married long before.
My father took the news without expression, his doorway-wide shoulders hunched over the table as he chewed the blood sausage slowly and deliberately, but my mother flushed deeply, paled, looked at my father in horror and back at Armand in disbelief. My other brothers and sisters immediately set up a chorus of hoots and whistles, like a fleet of ships docking at Boston Harbor.
“But you’re only nineteen,” my mother protested, automatically passing the bowl of mashed potatoes to Esther. Her appetite shamed my mother but was a thing of pride to my father, who believed that an enormous quantity of food was as important to children as an enormous quantity of beer was to men.
“Well, if I’m old enough to work, I’m old enough to get married,” Armand answered, addressing my mother defiantly while his eyes were sliding apprehensively to my father. Armand seldom looked uncertain. Hundreds of times I had seen him spear a line drive with finesse and send it arrowing to first base. He held the record for home runs with the Frenchtown Tigers and had broken more windows by his feats with the bat than any other boy in the neighborhood. In high school, Armand had been—of all things—the star of the Debating Team (Resolved: That the government should assume control of the nation’s railroads) and he had also played basketball. And somehow he always found time for love.
“That’s what makes the world go round, Jerry-boy,” he’d tell me as I watched him combing his hair prior to a date.
I was much younger than Armand and had my private thoughts about love: foolish and unnecessarily troublesome, involving going to terrible dances and wearing Sunday clothes on, say, a Wednesday night and taking baths two or three times a week. Yet, I had to admit that if Armand pursued love so faithfully, certainly there must be some good in it.
At the supper table that night, however, I did not envy him and I suddenly realized that he had gradually changed in the past few months. He had been vague about the nature of his dates and he had been alternately happy and morose. Sometimes, he sat on the piazza steps in the evening, staring at nothing in particular and would dismiss me with a curt shake of his head when I asked him if he wanted to toss the baseball around for a while or bat me a few balls.
“How much are you making at the shop?” my father asked, reaching for another slice of bread.
“Fifty cents an hour and I’m due for a raise next month,” Armand answered.
“How much have you saved?”
“Two hundred and ten dollars. And she’s got almost as much. She’s a secretary uptown and says she doesn’t mind working to help us get settled.”
“She … she,” my mother said, exasperated. “Who is this she?”
“Yes, which one?” Esther asked. Her appetite apparently had been dealt a fatal blow by the announcement, because she had put down her fork although her plate was still half full. “Is it Yolande or Theresa or Marie-Rose or Jeanne?”
My mother silenced her with a look.
“I thought you said there was safety in numbers, Ma,” Paul offered. Paul was the smart one, a high honor student with a memory so acute that he got on your nerves.
“Enough,” my father commanded like an umpire calling strike three. He turned to Armand. “My son, you’re no longer a boy. You’ve been working more than a year since your graduation from high school. You’ve found out what it means to earn a living. And I admit that a man needs love and marriage and children.”
My mother snorted
with disgust. She always claimed that my father was incurably romantic, and she dreaded wedding receptions and anniversary parties at St. Jean’s Hall, because he always got sentimental and maudlin and drank too much beer and insisted on proposing innumerable toasts to the glories of love or singing old Canadian ballads about people dying of broken hearts.
“Would it be too much to tell us the name of this girl who is coming into the family?” my mother asked.
Armand scratched his head and tugged at his ear: a bad sign.
“Jessica Stone,” he said.
“Jessica?” Esther asked. “What kind of name is that?”
“Stone … Stone,” my mother mused.
“A Protestant,” Paul exclaimed, his voice like a door slamming shut.
My mother made the sign of the cross, and in the awesome silence that followed we turned our eyes to my father. His head was bowed and his huge shoulders sagged in defeat. His knuckles were white where his hands gripped the table. I too clutched the table, tensing myself for the explosion to come. But when my father raised his head at last, there was no violence in his manner, although his voice filled me with fear because it was terrible in its quietness.
“All right,” he said wearily. “You don’t want a good Canadian girl, fine. Maybe you don’t like pea soup. And an Irisher, fine, maybe you don’t like corn beef and cabbage. And an Eye-talian, that, too, is all right if you don’t like spaghetti.” Fury gathered in his eyes. “But a Protestant? Are you crazy, my boy? Is that what we sent you to the good Catholic schools for? Is this what you were an altar boy for? To marry a Protestant?”
“I love her,” Armand said, leaping to his feet. “This isn’t Canada, Pa. This is the United States of America, 1941 …”
“Armand, Armand,” my mother whispered, a pleading in her voice.
“Hey, Armand,” Paul said, bright and interested. “What kind of Protestant?”
“What do you mean—what kind?” my father roared.
“Congregational,” Armand said. “She sings in the choir at the Congregational Church. She’s a good girl. She believes in God …”
Excitement danced in my veins. I had never known a Protestant. My family had come late from Canada and we had settled in a neighborhood far removed from the world of Protestants and Yankees. Although my father had become a fierce patriot, a staunch supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a loyal Democrat, he seldom ventured outside of Frenchtown. As a result, I knew little of Protestants. They were people who lived on the other side of town, people who did not have to go to church on Sunday morning if they felt like staying in bed and whose churches closed up in the summer for vacations. Sister Angela assured us that Protestants could get to heaven, but she implied that this was allowed by the Catholic Church out of the goodness of its heart. Suddenly, my excitement fled by a sudden sense that the world was crumbling at my feet. My loyalty moved toward my father and mother, although I still ached for Armand, who stood at the table like some lonely hero who finds his deeds stricken from the rolls of honor.
My father suddenly relaxed. He shrugged and smiled. “Well, why should we get excited?” he asked my mother. “This week a Protestant and next week maybe a … a Hindu. And the week after that …”
“Next week and next year and forever, it will still be Jessica,” Armand cried. “This isn’t puppy love, Pa. I’ve been going out with her for seven months.”
For Armand, of course, this was some sort of record.
“Seven months?” my father asked, astounded. “You’ve been going around with a Protestant for seven months behind my back?”
“Not behind your back,” Armand said. “Have I ever brought any girl home here? No. Because I wanted to wait until I met the right one. And Jessica’s the right one …”
“Well, don’t plan on bringing her here,” my father said. “I don’t want her name mentioned again under this roof.” He banged his fist on the table and a dish fell to the floor. My mother jumped up in alarm, and Armand turned on his heel and left the house, slamming the door behind him.
So began what my brother Paul described as the Six-month War of the Renault family, and the war usually was fought at the supper table. My father was not a man for stiff rules, but he had always insisted that the entire family be home for supper, to break bread together at least once a day. Even Armand in his rebellion dared not break that law. Otherwise, however, he became a silent and brooding figure, spending little time at home. He worked all day in the comb shop and went off to meet his Jessica every evening. He didn’t whistle off-key anymore as he dressed for his dates, and he acted as though we had all become invisible to him.
I had been pressed into service as a pitcher for the Tigers because Roger Lussier broke his arm, and I lost three games in a row. Armand agreed to give me some pointers, but he was not much help because he seemed like someone split in half, part of him murmuring to me, “Fine, fine,” even when I threw a bad pitch, and another part of him far away, deep in thought. Paul said that a kind of doom hung over our house. He was melodramatic and often used words like doom and holocaust (Edgar Allan Poe was his favorite writer), and yet I had to admit that Armand’s troubles had cast a shadow over us all.
Supper time became exercises in agony.
“I see in the paper where a fellow who left his religion got killed in a car crash in Boston,” my father would offer to no one in particular.
“I’m not leaving my religion,” Armand would reply, addressing the picture of the St. Lawrence River on the wall. “She’s willing to take religious instruction, to go halfway …”
“Pass the gravy,” my father would say.
And my mother would pass the gravy to my father while she looked with stricken eyes at Armand.
Or, my father would announce:
“I understand that the Blanchemaisons are going to lose their house. To the bank. A big-shot Protestant there is signing the papers tomorrow.”
“Mister Blanchemaison has been drunk for six months and his family’s on relief. It’s the city that’s making the bank take the house,” Armand explained, looking at me as if I had brought up the question.
“And who’s the mayor of the city? A Protestant, that’s who,” my father announced triumphantly to Esther, who looked at him in perplexity.
Or, with a quiet air of victory, he would ask my mother, “You know Theophile LeBlanc, the caterer? Well, he was putting on a feed at a fancy Protestant wedding last Saturday. He said that it was disgusting. Nobody sang any songs, nobody danced and nobody even got drunk. They stood around and ate sandwiches made with crackers. People who don’t sing and dance at a wedding: they don’t have hearts …”
One day I burst into the house after finally winning a ball game (although I almost spoiled the victory by giving up four home runs in the ninth inning) and found the rooms unusually quiet, all the kids gone off somewhere, and my father at work. I heard voices in the parlor and was about to enter when I halted in my tracks, held back by the intimate quality of the voices.
“I know, I know, Armand,” my mother was saying. “I agree that she’s a nice girl. Polite and charming. But going behind your father’s back to meet her is one thing—inviting her here, without warning him, is another …”
“But don’t you see, Ma,” Armand said, “that he thinks all Protestants are some kind of monsters because he’s never really known one? I’ll bet he’s never spoken more than five minutes with a Protestant. You met Jessica. You say she’s a fine girl. I think Pa will, too, if he has a chance to meet her …”
“I still get the shivers wondering what he’ll say when he learns that I’ve met her, that we sat in a drugstore together and had a college ice …”
“Please, Ma,” Armand pleaded. “His bark is worse than his bite. You always said he’s a sentimental man.”
“I don’t know, Armand, I don’t know,” she said, her voice tender and troubled.
I drew back in horror, appalled at the conspiracy, my mother’s treachery, her dislo
yalty to my father. I ran up the street to meet him; and as I saw him stalking home from work, I became aware for the first time of my father as a person, not simply a big man who either roared with anger or boomed with laughter, who consumed incredible amounts of beer and whose word was law. Knowing that he could be betrayed gave him a sudden, human countenance. I studied the deep lines on his face, the network of wrinkles near his eyes that had always fascinated me because of their resemblance to spider webs, and I realized that they were the result of long hard days at work and the problems of bringing up a family. And instead of bursting out my information, I remained silent and carried his empty lunchpail, shy with him suddenly and warm and itchy all over my body.
The following Sunday afternoon, I cried out in astonishment as I glanced out the parlor window and saw Armand coming along the sidewalk with a girl. He held her elbow tenderly, as if she were fragile and precious beyond price. He didn’t look where he was going but gazed at her raptly. I had to admit that I did not blame him for staring at her: she was slender and blond and lovely, dressed in something pink and white, and the colors blended with the soft tones of her delicate face. The autumn wind rose suddenly and she lifted her hand to hold a tiny pink hat, the gesture filled with grace. I myself would have gladly run a mile to chase that hat for her if the wind chanced to blow it off.
My mother stood beside me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide with concern. She looked like the guilty party who is unmasked in the last chapter of the serials at the Globe Theater on Saturday afternoons.
“God help us,” she whispered breathlessly. Straightening her shoulders and sighing, she called to my father: “Louis, company’s coming up the street …”
My father, who was in the kitchen listening to the Red Sox baseball game on the radio, groaned loudly. “Company? Who comes to disturb a man after dinner on Sunday?” My father pretended that he wanted only privacy on weekends or in the evenings, but when company did arrive he played the role of the perfect host to the hilt, keeping the beer flowing and my mother busy serving food. People usually found it hard to leave because my father always insisted on one more drink, one more joke, one more argument.