“I'm not hungry,” he said, his face disappearing from view.
I strolled down Sixth Street, without destination in mind, and came to a halt at an abandoned garage, its doors torn off, next to the Luciers’ house, one of the few bungalows on the street. Melting into the shadows of the garage, I thought of the fade and the pause and the flash of pain. Piano music drifted from the house. Yolande Lucier, who was in my class, was singing “All alone by the telephone,” her voice sweet and plaintive in the evening air.
I, too, was all alone but no telephone at our house. Who would I call on the telephone, anyway? No one I knew had a telephone, either. Call my aunt Rosanna in Montreal? Impossible. No one had heard from her since she left Monument.
If only my aunt Rosanna were here in Frenchtown, still at my grandfather's house … but I turned from the thought. It would be a sacrilege to consider the fade for such a thing, especially so soon after my confession. I thought of her far away in Canada, men waiting outside her shop when she closed for the day. If love was so wonderful that they wrote poems and songs about it, why was I so miserable?
“Are you in there?”
Pete's face was dim and pale as he peeked into the garage. “What the hell are you doing?” Curiosity diluted the anger in his voice, however.
“Nothing,” I said, an answer that was always accepted, even by your parents, although they'd look annoyed.
“Do you want to hear the last chapter of The Ghost Rider?” he asked.
Armand had already told me that the phantom cowboy had turned out to be the storekeeper in town. But I said: “Sure,” responding to his gesture of friendship, glad that we were pals again, even for a short time.
On the cement floor of the garage, our backs to the stuccoed wall, the sounds of Yolande's voice in endless repetition of “All Alone” like a poignant soundtrack, Pete told me, scene by scene, the events of that final chapter.
Then we sat in silence as Yolande began her piano exercises, the notes harsh and discordant.
“School starts next week,” Pete said, disgust in his voice.
He had expressed the thought that was on my mind and the main reason why I had called to him earlier. I knew that our friendship was nearing its end. Although Pete and I were the same age—we were born exactly a month apart—he was two grades behind me in school. School was enemy territory to Pete. He became sullen and brooding, arrogant to teachers, failed tests, started fights in the schoolyard, a sharp contrast to the carefree summer adventurer. And he often looked at me with the eyes of a stranger.
“Junior high for me,” I said. The Silas B. Thornton Junior High School downtown in the center of Monument near City Hall and the public library. A quiver of anticipation— and apprehension—went through me as I thought of the school term that lay ahead and the drastic changes it would bring. My class had graduated from St. Jude's in June, the boys in blue serge jackets and white flannel trousers, the girls in white dresses, wearing delicate crowns to match the dresses. There were tears in Sister Angela's eyes as she looked at us standing at attention. “You will never be this pure again,” she had said, her rosary in her clasped hands.
Her words had been prophetic, at least for me. Turning to Pete, I was seized by an impulse to tell him about the fade and the night I had watched him matching cards with Artie LeGrande and what I had seen in the back room at Dondier's Market. We had shared a thousand secrets—why not this, the greatest secret of them all?
“Pete,” I said.
“Yeah?” Brooding, chin almost touching his chest.
Yet, if I could not tell a priest in the darkness of a confessional, how could I tell Pete Lagniard? I wanted to say: Pete, I can make myself disappear. Become invisible. Like in that movie you saw a while back where the man wrapped himself in bandages.
“Remember that movie you saw, the one I missed because I had a toothache?” I asked.
“What movie?”
You must never tell a living soul, my uncle had warned.
“Never mind,” I said.
Yolande was no longer practicing her exercises and the garage was spooky with silence.
“Will we always be friends?” Pete asked.
“Always,” I said.
But the word sounded hollow and empty in the stillness of that Frenchtown evening.
here were three courses of study available at Silas B. Thornton Junior High School, but Sister Angela had ordered everyone in our eighth-grade graduating class to sign up for the commercial course.
“No one for the classical course/’ she said. “That's for the rich ones on their way to college.”
“How about the general course?” my cousin Jules asked. Jules was never bashful about asking questions.
“The general course is for good-for-nothings,” she said. “If you sign for the general course, you might as well quit school and work in the shop.”
So it had been settled and I found myself with courses in bookkeeping and mechanical drawing and shorthand, all dull and dry and deadly, preparing me for—what?—a job in an office?
But when I arrived at Silas B. Thornton Junior High School on the first day of school, the courses suddenly did not matter. The corridors were filled with activity and excitement. Teachers in suits or dresses, not the black-and-white habits of the nuns, stood at their classroom doors and talked and joked with students as they passed. Bells rang, doors slammed, laughter burst from classrooms, and the sunshine splashing through the windows was brighter than any sun that ever shone through the windows of St. Jude's Parochial School.
My homeroom teacher, Miss Walker, took my breath away. She wore a red dress and lipstick to match. Her high heels clicked rhythmically as she walked to and fro in front of the class, checking off our names.
Every forty-five minutes bells signaled the changing of classes, and this was the most exciting part of the day. Hustling into the corridor, finding my next classroom, I thought of the interminable days in Sister Angela's class, from eight in the morning to three-thirty in the afternoon, monotonous, suffocating, and wondered how I had endured such a terrible routine. Here at Silas B. (already I had learned to call the school by its popular name), we changed classes seven times a day, new teachers, new subjects, and—marvel of all marvels—a daily study period in which to do nothing but read or daydream or glance surreptitiously at the new people I was encountering who, I could tell by their names—Buchanan, Talbot, Weidman, Kelly, Borcelli—were not French but Yankee and Protestant and Jewish and Irish and Italian. My head danced with color and light and laughter and voices and ringing bells as I stumbled down the stairs that afternoon to meet my cousin Jules across the street.
Of all my cousins, he was the closest to me in age and interests. If Pete Lagniard was my summertime conspirator, Jules was my closest friend during the school year. We usually parted company in the summer because he played baseball in the Neighborhood League and was a patrol leader in St. Jude's Scout Troop 17. Pete and I were renegades, with an aversion for organized fun, preferring the Plymouth or roaming the streets and fields, making up our own games, raiding gardens in the evening and distributing the tomatoes and cucumbers to the families of Alphabet Soup and galloping off on our imaginary horses.
When summer ended, my cousins and I were brought together again and I was always drawn to Jules. Jules and I loved to read. On crisp fall nights or wintry afternoons, we journeyed downtown to the Monument Public Library and borrowed books. There was a limit of five books per patron and by going together we doubled our quota and swapped the books back and forth. We read everything and anything from Tom Swift to Penrod and Sam, books on travel, pirates, explorations, books with pictures and without pictures. Pete Lagniard and I gobbled up comic books in the summertime and marveled at Superman and Terry and the Pirates. But Jules and I found literary treasures in the library, and we ran down the street whooping with glee and spilling the books in excitement the day Miss Wheaton, the tiny, whispering librarian, issued our adult cards. Which gave us permission to invade
the stacks containing grown-up books that had always been forbidden to us.
Jules showed no evidence of glee at this moment, however.
“Ï hate that place,” he declared, handsome face suddenly pinched and sour as he tilted his chin at red-brick Silas B., through whose doors hundreds of kids were pouring.
When I didn't reply, he said: “Don't you?”
I merely shrugged, not wanting to betray him.
“We don't belong there,” he said. “We'll never catch up.” By this he meant that we were joining the school in the ninth grade, and would be leaving at the end of the year for Monument High. “These kids have been together since the first grade. My homeroom teacher called Raymond LeBlanc a Canuck. But not in a nice way. Said it like it was a dirty word.”
“My homeroom teacher is beautiful,” I said. “She likes the movies. She saw every chapter of The Ghost Rider. Cripes, Sister Angela thinks going to the movies is a sin, a venial sin on weekdays, a mortal sin on Sunday.”
“I'm sitting behind a Jew,” Jules said. “Her name is Stein. Her father owns the Vanity Shoppe where women buy all their fancy clothes. She looked at me and wrinkled her nose. Like I was a piece of shit….”
“Changing classes is great,” I offered. How could he possibly find fault with that particular phase of Silas B. ? “The day flies by …”
“The cafeteria food is junk,” he said. “I hate vegetable soup. And the sandwich was terrible. Salmon, the bones still in it …”
“They've got a school magazine,” I said. “A literary magazine. Anybody can submit stories and they'll print them if they're good enough.”
Jules stopped walking and turned to me.
“You're a Canuck, Paul. I don't think your stories will ever be good enough for them.”
“Come on, Jules,” I said. “Give the place a chance.”
We walked together in silence. I wanted to tell him that I had met my first Protestant that day, but dared not. A moment after Miss Walker had called the roll, checking attendance, my math book fell to the floor with a dull thud. The foot of the kid behind me tried to kick the book away but a hand shot out, grabbed his ankle and twisted it, causing a soft howl of pain. I looked up to see who had prevented the kick. That was how I met Emerson Winslow. I had never known anyone with two last names before. He smiled at me and winked, a lazy closing and opening of one eye, a wink that said: Take it easy, don't take any of this—the foot, or even life—too seriously. A lock of blond hair fell on his forehead. The sweater he wore was like no other sweater I had seen before. Beige, soft, not like wool at all but as if made of melting butterscotch. I had never seen anyone so at ease with himself, languid, casual. If a bomb exploded, I was sure Emerson Winslow would be unaffected, would simply brush himself off and walk away, untouched, amused by it all.
But I didn't mention Emerson Winslow or anything else about Silas B. to Jules as we walked through downtown Monument, past the park with all the statues, and reached the tracks and the railroad signals that served as an entrance to Frenchtown.
As we approached the corner of Fifth and Water, I spotted my uncle Adelard leaning against a mailbox, his hat tipped over his eyes, the blue bandanna around his neck. He did not wave or beckon or make any sign. But I knew he was waiting for me.
During the last days of that summer and the first days of fall, my uncle Adelard gave me instructions in the fade. Not exactly instructions, of course. He provided me with the basic information that I required, although he spoke reluctantly and I felt he was holding something back. We strolled the streets of Frenchtown and paused now and then while I asked questions or he offered information. Even now, there are places in Frenchtown that are forever connected with memories of Uncle Adelard and the things we talked about.
On the steps of St. Jean's Hall on Fourth Street, while the sound of colliding billiard balls came through the open windows:
“How did you know I was the one, Uncle Adelard?”
“The glowing, Paul. I was told by my uncle Théophile to watch for it, a brightness around the body. He said the nephew with the fade would display the glowing to me. Just as the fader in the next generation will show it to you. One evening when you were just a baby, I was visiting your ma and pa. For a few minutes we were alone—your mother was washing dishes, your father was filling the oil jug for the stove. I looked at you in the crib and saw the skin glowing, as if light was passing through your veins. And, of course, I knew you were the one. Then the waiting began. Between the time the glowing appears and the fade manifests itself, many years may pass. For you it's happening at thirteen. With me, it was sixteen. The next generation, who knows? So you have to watch and wait, Paul.”
“But suppose I don't see the glowing. Suppose I'm not there when the fader is a baby?”
“Then something will call you to the fader. I have no proof it will happen but I believe it will. Something called Théophile to me on the farm in Canada. Something called me to you this year. I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, hitchhiking across the plains, on a dusty road, everything flat, heading north. And it came to me that you were beginning to fade. How did I know? I can't tell you, but I knew. And I walked back to town, boarded a train, and headed east. Used the fade to board and then to avoid the conductors. And I got here just in time.”
“What do you mean—just in time.”
“Because it was beginning to work in you, Paul. Whether you know it or not. Think back now—do you remember times when unexplained things happened to you? Blackouts, maybe? Strange feelings? Fainting spells?”
I thought of the battle of Moccasin Pond and how I had stumbled and fallen while the hooded guard pursued me. The flash of pain, the cold. Most of all, the mystery of why the guard had not seen me as I lay on the beach only a few feet away from him in the bright moonlight. At the time, I had thought that he was too drunk to have noticed me. Now I realized I had faded, maybe for the first time. Later, Omer LaBatt chased me through the alleys of Frenchtown and almost caught me in Mrs. Dolbier's backyard. Mrs. Dolbier had concentrated her attack only on Omer LaBatt. No doubt I had faded from her sight. Now the memories came rapidly —a series of baffling episodes a year before when my father took me to Dr. Goldstein after I had fainted twice, once in the library while I searched for books with my cousin Jules, another time when my father found me lying on the floor in the shed, where I had apparently fallen and bruised my head. Dr. Goldstein found nothing wrong with me but had prescribed certain tonics while my mother fed me cod-liver oil in huge spoonfuls, alternating the foul, fish-tasting stuff with a concoction called Father John's Medicine, which tasted somewhat better but was thick and difficult to swallow.
I did not tell him any of these incidents. As he looked at me with sympathetic eyes, I felt that he knew what I had been going through anyway.
“Poor Paul,” he said.
In the Meadow on a September evening as we sat on the identical bench where my aunt Rosanna had guided my hand to her breast, I asked him:
“What about you, Uncle Adelard?”
“What about me?” he answered, surprised, as if he could not be of the slightest interest to anyone.
“You and the fade. How's it been for you?”
“It's hard to judge by what's happened to me, Paul. In fact, I have avoided talking about my experiences because I want you to learn on your own. We are different people. What happened to me might not happen to you. You have your own life to live.”
His voice held a tone of finality and I sensed that he was being purposely evasive. I pressed on, however. What did I have to lose?
“But there must be something you can tell me,” I said. “How you've used the fade. If it's been good or bad. Something to guide me …” I thought of Mr. Dondier in the back room with Theresa Terrault and how my first adventure with the fade had left me shaken and disillusioned.
“All right,” he said, sighing with resignation. “I only use the fade when it's absolutely necessary. I never use it for my own pleasure. I use it t
o survive. When I'm hungry on the road and have run out of money. Once, a friend of mine was in trouble and I used the fade to help him. Someday maybe I can tell you more. For now, be satisfied with this. I've told you some of the rules. I've told you all that I know about bringing on the fade and sending it away. For the rest, you have to learn by yourself, Paul. Let your instincts guide you. Your instincts are good. Use the fade in a good way. I think that's the most important thing of all.”
We walked by St. Jude's Convent one evening after supper, and watched the nuns in pairs strolling the grounds in their black-and-white habits, their rosary beads in their hands.
“You know, Paul,” my uncle mused, “I sometimes wonder why the fade was given to us, the Moreauxs. Modest people. Peasants in France, farmers in Canada. Me, a drifter. Maybe with you, it will be different. You belong to a generation that will be educated. Maybe you represent a new beginning….”
The sun had dropped behind the church, throwing long shadows across the convent and the nuns in prayer. They seemed to have disappeared into the shadows.
“And I sometimes wonder, Paul,” he said, “what might have happened if the fade had been given to the wrong people. Evil men, unscrupulous. More than that—I often hate to think of the future, what might happen with the next generation after you, if there will be an evil fader who will use it for terrible purposes….”
We fell silent then, contemplating that possibility, the awful prospect of a world dominated by a fader, using the fade to gain riches and power. Hitler in Nazi Germany—the thought of an invisible Hitler in the future was too horrible to contemplate.
“Ah, Paul,” Uncle Adelard said, again sensing my feelings. “I'm sorry you have to carry the burden of the fade.”
“Maybe it won't be a burden, Uncle Adelard,” I said. Although I didn't believe what I was saying.
One afternoon when he waited for me across from the school, he told me that he was leaving Frenchtown and Monument.
“When?”
“In a day or two. I have to say my good-byes to the family first.”