Sitting on the steps, we’d talk about everything and nothing. She liked to tell jokes. She’d imitate Sister Mathilde, who had trouble with her digestion and tried to disguise her burps behind her hand, and sometimes rushed out of the classroom, slamming the door behind her. “She lets off her farts in the corridor,” Marie maintained, doing a quick imitation of those corridor farts.
Baseball was a big topic with us. Monument has always been a baseball town, and Frenchtown teams, made up of players from the shops, often won the city championship in the Twilight Industrial League. Marie’s older brother, Vincent, was an all-star shortstop for the Frenchtown Tigers, and my father, whose nickname was Lefty, had been an all-star catcher for the same team years before.
I kept wondering how to bring Nicole Renard into the conversation. She had no brothers and sisters about whom I could inquire. I didn’t know whether she liked to read or who her favorite movie stars might be. Finally, I plunged. We had fallen into a comfortable silence, listening to the men arguing mildly about the Red Sox, and I said: “Nicole Renard seems very nice.” Feeling the color creeping into my cheeks.
Marie turned and fixed her eyes on me.
“Yes,” she said.
I said nothing more. Marie didn’t speak, either. My father’s voice reached us with his old refrain: how selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees had brought a curse upon the team.
“Do you like her?” she asked finally.
My breath came fast. “Who?”
An exasperated sigh escaped her. “Nicole, Nicole Renard.”
“I don’t know,” I said, cheeks incinerating now. I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
“Then why did you ask about her?”
“I don’t know,” I said again, feeling stupid and trapped, knowing I had fallen into Marie LaCroix’s clutches and that she’d probably blackmail me forever.
Finally, I threw myself on her mercy. “Yes,” I said. “I like her.” Astonished at the relief I felt at this admission, I wanted to shout from the rooftops: “I love her with all my heart.”
“Please don’t tell her,” I pleaded.
“Your secret is safe with me,” Marie said.
But was it? Yet deep within me was the knowledge that I wanted her to tell Nicole Renard that I loved her.
Three days later, Marie and Nicole again passed time together on the piazza above mine. I sat reading The Sun Also Rises, realizing that Ernest Hemingway seldom used big three-syllable words, which made me wonder if anyone, including me, could become a writer.
When I heard Nicole making noises of departure, her footsteps crossing the floor as she called “Bye-bye” to Marie, I closed the book and perched on the banister, positioning myself where it would be impossible for her to ignore my presence.
Hearing her footsteps on the stairs, I curled my legs around the rungs of the banister.
She came into view.
I didn’t look away this time.
“Don’t fall off, Francis,” she said as she passed quickly by and went down the stairs.
I was so startled by her voice, by the fact that she had actually spoken to me, that I almost did fall off the banister. Regaining my balance, I realized that she had actually spoken my name. Don’t fall off, Francis. My name had been on her lips! Then I winced in an agony of embarrassment. Why hadn’t I answered her? Did she now think I was stupid, unable to start a conversation? Had she merely been teasing me? Or had she been really afraid that I might fall off the banister? The questions left me dazed with wonder. I never knew that love could be so agonizing. Finally, the big question: Had Marie told Nicole that I liked her?
I never learned the answers to those questions. Marie and I never talked about Nicole again. She was always coming and going in a hurry, and I was too timid to try to corner her. Summer vacation started and everyone fell into different routines. Nicole didn’t visit our three-decker anymore. I caught sight of her sometimes on Third Street going in or coming out of a store, and my breath held. I saw her strolling the convent grounds with Sister Mathilde one hot summer afternoon.
One evening as I hung out in front of Laurier’s Drug Store with Joey LeBlanc and some other kids, I saw her walking across the street, her white dress a blur in the darkening evening. She looked our way and waved.
I waved back, thrilled at her attention.
Joey also waved, calling out: “Hey, Nicole, you’ve got a run in your stocking.” Laughing at what he thought was a witty remark. He couldn’t see her stockings at that distance, of course.
Nicole paused, tilting her head as if puzzled; Joey burst into more laughter, and Nicole walked on, quickening her step.
“You’ve got a big mouth,” I told Joey, turning away in disgust.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
I wondered whether she’d been waving at Joey LeBlanc or me.
I feel like a spy in disguise as I walk the streets of Frenchtown, hidden behind the scarf and the bandage, making my way through the chilled morning, pausing on the corners, watching the people come and go, and then moving on when I feel their eyes on me filled with either pity or curiosity.
I try to avoid eye contact with people I know, like Mr. Molnier, the butcher, who stands in the doorway of his meat market in his bloodstained apron, and Mrs. St. Pierre, who scowls her disapproval at him as she passes.
I have places to visit now that I have returned and one of them is Sixth Street and the gray three-decker where Nicole Renard lived with her mother and father on the second floor at number 212.
I know she doesn’t live there anymore and I have nothing to gain by going there but it’s inevitable that I look at her house again.
I stand across the street for a long time, staring up at the blank windows with their white lace curtains.
After a while, a child’s small face appears at a window on the second floor, like the ghost of the little girl Nicole once was. I smile up at the child and she draws away from the window, disappearing the way Nicole disappeared from Frenchtown. Or was the child a momentary hallucination?
Crossing the street, I climb the steps to the first-floor piazza and look at the nameplates beside the black mailboxes. Langevin, Morrisette, Tourigny. The Morrisette nameplate shines with newness and has taken the place of Renard. I stare at the final proof that Nicole has gone away.
I don’t know where they went, the Renards. They left without warning, in the middle of the night.
That’s what Norman Rocheleau told me in a village outside Rouen one evening. His outfit came through the village we were occupying temporarily, and we recognized each other from across the street. He was older by three years but we had both gone to St. Jude’s Parochial School and we talked about Sister Perpetua in the sixth grade, who was notorious with the ruler. Extend your palm, she’d order for the slightest infraction, and the ruler descended almost mechanically.
Norman and I made a swap, my ration of Chesterfields, which I did not smoke anyway, for his military edition of The Great Gatsby, which I’d heard was a great novel. We continued to talk about the old days in Frenchtown as we drank vin rouge like the heroes in a Hemingway novel, sitting on the steps of a bombed-out farmhouse.
As twilight softened the ragged edges of the broken houses, and the wine began to lower my defenses, I got up the courage to ask him:
“Hear anything about the Renards?” Almost afraid to say her name.
He said it for me: “Nicole!” Then: “Didn’t you go out with her for a while?”
Hearing her name aloud on the evening air in a foreign country, I was unable to find my voice.
“Yes, she was my girl,” I said finally, giving in to a rush of memories: our lips meeting, her hand in mine as we walked down Mechanic Street, the cologne like spring flowers that always clung to her.
Dragging on the cigarette and releasing the smoke through his mouth and nostrils, he told me about the family’s sudden departure from Frenchtown. More than that
:
“All kinds of rumors about her, Francis. She began to stay at home, didn’t come out of the house except for the five-thirty morning mass, the nuns’ mass, which nobody else in his right mind ever goes to. She was like …”
He gestured with the cigarette, trying to find the right word. “… a hermit. Then she was gone. Her and her family. Left Frenchtown without telling anybody.” Gazing at me curiously: “Haven’t you heard from her?”
“No,” I answered.
He squinted at me, curiosity remaining in his eyes. “You’re about fifteen, right? How did you get in the army?”
I told him about forging my birth certificate. He didn’t ask why I joined and I didn’t expect him to. Everyone wanted to go to war in those days to defeat the Japs and the Germans.
After a while, we fell into a tired, end-of-a-long-day silence. Then he left to rejoin his outfit, walking off into the twilight. He turned and we saluted each other in a half-joking way, grinning, because we didn’t think of ourselves as soldiers but only as two Frenchtown boys in uniform.
And I had not yet killed anybody.
• • •
As I turn to go back down the steps at 212 Sixth Street, the front door swings open to reveal a woman in a damp apron, a broom in her hand, looking at me with narrow suspicious eyes.
“You want something?” she asks.
I wonder if she is using the broom as a weapon for protection and don’t blame her. I have to keep reminding myself how I look to other people.
“Do you know where the Renards went?” Not expecting an answer but hoping that the question provides me with respectability.
“What?” she asks, frowning as she clutches the broom in front of her.
The scarf has muffled my voice, of course.
“The Renards,” I say, trying to pronounce the words distinctly. “Where are they?”
“All gone,” she says, her voice doleful. “All gone.”
She begins sweeping the doorstep as if she intends to sweep me away, too.
Her words chase me down the steps and into the street: All gone, all gone.
• • •
Mrs. Belander is waiting when I return from Third Street, two bags of groceries from Henault’s Market in my arms. I have stocked up on cocoa and bread and strawberry jam, and a variety of Campbell’s soups in the red-and-white cans, mostly tomato and bean and pea soup. Everything soft because my gums are tender and it’s hard for me to chew. I have also bought two bottles of pasteurized milk, a pound of butter and a wedge of cheddar cheese, which I will store in the small electric refrigerator on the counter upstairs. I can keep going on a minimum of food because I lost my appetite somewhere in France and eat now only to sustain myself for a while.
Mrs. Belander holds a deep pot in her hands and says: “I will carry it up for you, the black bean soup I made.”
We climb the stairs together.
In the tenement, I place the groceries on the counter and she puts the pot on the stove. “No boil,” she says. “Just heat …”
Then turns to me. “You didn’t say your name.” Not quite an accusation but as if her feelings have been hurt.
Here is the point where my life becomes a lie.
“Raymond,” I tell her, using the name of my dead brother. “Beaumont,” I add. My mother’s name before she married my father.
“Père et mère?” she asks.
I am ready to give those answers. “In Canada.” In my mind, I substitute heaven for Canada. “We lived in Boston before but they went back home to Canada when the war came.” The truth is that my uncle Louis, who never became a citizen, returned to Canada while I was in the army.
I see the question in her eyes and am quick to answer:
“I met a Frenchtown boy in the service. Norman Rocheleau. He told me about Frenchtown. He made it sound like a nice place to live.”
Doubt flashes in her eyes and I make a quick addition to my story.
“My mother and father are waiting for me in Canada. But I have to report to Fort Delta for treatments for a while.”
It scares me, how easy it is to lie.
“Vous parlez français?” she asks.
I shake my head no. I can understand French because of the eight years with the sisters at St. Jude’s but have never been able to speak the language correctly.
She sighs heavily, studies my scarf and bandage for a long moment and murmurs “Poor boy” again as she shuffles toward the door.
• • •
The tenement is heated only by the black stove in the kitchen, fed by a glass oil jug that I will have to fill every day or two from the big metal barrel in the backyard. The stove throws heat only into a small area of the kitchen, and the rest of the tenement is damp with cold even though winter has gone.
I make myself a cup of cocoa, stalling, delaying the moment of going to bed, despite the cold. The clock on the wall, in the shape of a banjo, tells me it is twenty-five minutes after eleven, which means that a long night stretches ahead. I yearn for sleep, my eyes raw and burning, but I know that the dreams will begin when I close my eyes and drift off.
In the bathroom, I apply more Vaseline to my cheeks.
Finally, I slip into bed. Mrs. Belander has provided me with extra blankets and I pull them up to my chin. I double the pillow under my head to prevent the phlegm from running down my throat, causing me to choke and cough.
• • •
I can never trace the moment when I finally fall asleep, that blurred line between wakefulness and oblivion. While waiting, I silently recite the names of the guys in my platoon—Richards and Eisenberg and Chambers and, yes, Smith—and their first names or nicknames—Eddie and Erwin and Blinky and Jack. Then, more last names, Johnson and Orlandi and Reilly and O’Brien and their first names, Henry and Sonny and Spooks and Billy—and then start all over again, arranging them this time in alphabetical order, still waiting for sleep to come.
I don’t want to think about them, those GIs in my platoon. I don’t want to recite their names. I want to forget what happened there in France but every night the recitation begins, like a litany, the names of the GIs like beads on a rosary. I close my eyes and see them advancing in scattered groups through the abandoned village, ruined homes and debris-cluttered streets, our rifles ready, late-afternoon shadows obscuring the windows and doorways and the alley entrances. We are all tense and nervous and scared because the last village seemed peaceful and vacant until sudden gunfire from snipers erupted from those windows and doorways and cut down the advance patrol just ahead of our platoon. Now I can hear Henry Johnson’s ragged breathing and Blinky Chambers whistling between his teeth, the village too still, too quiet. “Jesus,” Sonny Orlandi mutters. Jesus: meaning I’m scared, and so is everybody else, clenched fists holding firearms, quiet curses floating on the air, grunts and hisses and farts, not like the war movies at the Plymouth, nobody displaying heroics or bravado. We are probably taking the final steps of our lives in this village whose name we don’t even know and other villages are waiting ahead of us and Eddie Richards asks of nobody in particular: “What the hell are we doing here, anyway?” And he’s clutching his stomach because he has had diarrhea for three days, carrying the stink with him all that time so that everybody has been avoiding his presence. Now gunfire erupts and at the same time artillery shells—theirs or ours?—boom in the air and explode around us. We run for cover, scrambling and scurrying, hitting the dirt, trying to become part of the buildings themselves but not safe anywhere.
I find myself in a narrow alley, groping through rising dust, and two German soldiers in white uniforms appear like grim ghosts, rifles coming up, but my automatic is too quick and the head of one of the soldiers explodes like a ripe tomato and the other cries Mama as my gunfire cuts him in half, both halves of him tumbling to the ground.
I explode into wakefulness along with the booming artillery and I find myself gasping, instantly wide-eyed, not cold for once in Mrs. Belander’s tenement, the swea
t warm on my flesh, but in a minute the sweat turns icy. In the alley that day I encountered the German soldiers, all right, but my bursts of gunfire killed the soldiers quickly, no exploding head, no body cut in two, although one of them did cry Mama as he fell. When I looked down at them, in one of those eerie pauses that happens in an attack—a sudden silence that’s even more terrible than exploding shells—I saw how young they were, boys with apple cheeks, too young to shave. Like me.
“Hey, Francis, come on,” yells Eddie Richards and I join him in a scramble out of the alley and into the woods, his smell still heavy in the air, and we stumble around in the woods until nighttime, when we run across the remains of our platoon and learn that Jack Smith and Billy O’Brien are dead and Henry Johnson wounded, his chest ripped open by shrapnel, carried off somewhere behind the lines and we never see him again.
The next day, the grenade blows my face away.
• • •
The morning sun slashes my eyelids and I blink at daylight spilling through the window. I have survived another night, endured the dreams and the memories again although I’m not sure anymore which are the dreams and which are the memories.
My limbs are stiff and the raw places of my flesh sting but I grope from the bed, coughing, my throat filled with phlegm.
Ignore it all, I tell myself, and count your blessings.
You’re back in Frenchtown and your body is functioning. You have a nice dry place to stay and a mission to perform.
And maybe this will be the day that Larry LaSalle will appear on the streets of Frenchtown and you will be able to carry out that mission.
I tell myself that I will not visit the Wreck Center, that there is nothing to gain by going there just as the visit to Nicole’s house on Sixth Street brought back only loneliness and regret.
Yet even as I acknowledge the futility of such visits, I am walking in the direction of the Wreck Center at the far end of Third Street, bending against the never-ending March wind.
Then a hand grips my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks, and a voice whispers in my ear: