Frenchtown Summer (2 page)

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
Frenchtown held for them.

Sometimes at night,
awaking suddenly,
hearing the chuffing of an engine
in the Boston & Maine freight yards,
I'd ponder the possibility
that the tramp had been
innocent after all,
remembering the rumors
that Marielle LeMoyne
had been three months pregnant
when she was slain.
Was it possible
that a murderer still stalked
the streets of Frenchtown,
kneeling in St. Jude's Church on Sundays,
buying hamburg steak
at Fournier's Meat Market,
drinking beer with the men,
my father among them,
at the Happy Times,
and, maybe,
maybe looking right into my eyes
as he passed me unidentified
on Third Street?

Or had he died?
Or simply moved away?

Those last thoughts
were like rosary beads of comfort
as I lay sleepless,
waiting for daylight
to arrive.

My uncles and aunts
came and went in my life
like gaudy ghosts,
playing bid whist at kitchen tables,
dancing the quadrille at weddings,
singing old songs on
le Jour de l'An
at my pépère's house,
sitting on the evening piazzas,
the uncles gruff in their talk
and raucous with sudden laughter,
the women murmuring delights
of gossip,
gasping sometimes
at a surprising bit of news.
My uncle Philippe passed the collection basket
at the ten o'clock High Mass
Sundays at St. Jude's Church.
Uncle Albert was a clerk
at Fournier's Meat Market
and washed his hands all day long.
Raymond and I counted with delight
his many trips to the kitchen sink
as he listened to the Red Sox games
with my father,
the hanging towel near the sink
limp and damp
at the end of the afternoon.
My poor aunt Olivine
visited St. Jude's Church
every afternoon at four o'clock,
lighting a candle
for the soul of her child, Theo,
who spent only twelve minutes
in this world.
Years after he died,
she still dampened handkerchiefs
with her tears
and they waved
like small flags of distress
on her clothesline,
nobody able to come
to her rescue.
My uncle Eldore,
who laughed at everything,
claimed that her tears
came from a “sinus condition”
but we all still mourned
for poor Aunt Olivine.

The children in the family,
Raymond and me
and all my cousins,
made birthday visits
to my aunts and uncles,
passing our hats
like church collection baskets,
receiving nickels and dimes,
always a quarter from Uncle Med
and three shiny pennies
from Aunt Julienne,
who never married
and sewed and mended
for Frenchtown women
in Pépère's sitting room.

My uncles patted me on the head
as they walked by,
my aunts bestowed wet kisses
on my cheeks.
They called me Eugene
but most of them seldom
looked into my eyes
and I wondered
if they really knew
who I was.