Heroes (2 page)

Enrico always had something to say. About anything and everything. I sometimes think that he talked so much to cover up the pain. Even when he laughed, making a sound like a saw going through wood, you could see the pain flashing in his eyes.

“If you want to forget Nicole,” he said one afternoon when we were tired of cards and checkers, “here’s what you do.” He put down the deck of cards he was practicing on, to shuffle with one hand. “You get out of the army and get yourself to a
home for the blind. There must be a good-looking blind girl somewhere just waiting for a nice guy like you.”

I looked to see if he was joking. Even when he was joking, though, it was hard to tell because his voice was always sharp and bitter and the pain never left his eyes.

“You’re a big hero,” he said. “A Silver Star hero. You should have no trouble finding a girl as long as she can’t see your face.” He tried to shake a cigarette from his pack of Luckies and three or four fell to the floor. “A blind girl, now, is right up your alley …”

I am not a hero, of course, and I turned away in disgust but later that night, lying awake, I wondered if I could really find a blind girl to love me. Ridiculous. What made me think that a blind girl would automatically fall in love with just anyone at all?

“Forget it,” I said to Enrico the next day.

“Forget what?” His voice was a gasp from the pain in his legs, which were not there anymore. He kept massaging the air that occupied the space his legs used to fill.

“About the blind girl.”

“What blind girl?”

“Never mind,” I said, closing my eyes against the sight of his hand clawing the air.

“It’s still Nicole, isn’t it?” he said.

I did not have to answer because we both knew it was true.

It would always be Nicole Renard.

And even though I am home from the war, I wonder if I will ever see her again.

I
saw Nicole Renard for the first time in the seventh grade at St. Jude’s Parochial School during arithmetic. Sister Mathilde was standing at the blackboard illustrating a problem in decimals when the piece of chalk in her hands broke and fell to the floor.

I leaped to my feet to retrieve the chalk. We were always eager to keep in the good graces of the
nuns, who could be ruthless with punishments, using the ruler like a weapon, and ruthless, too, with marks on our report cards.

As I knelt on the floor, the door opened and Mother Margaret, the Sister Superior, swept into the classroom, followed by the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

“This is Nicole Renard. She is a new student here, all the way from Albany, New York.”

Nicole Renard was small and slender, with shining black hair that fell to her shoulders. The pale purity of her face reminded me of the statue of St. Thérèse in the niche next to Father Balthazar’s confessional in St. Jude’s Church. As she looked modestly down at the floor, our eyes met and a flash of recognition passed between us, as if we had known each other before. Something else flashed in her eyes, too, a hint of mischief as if she were telling me we were going to have good times together. Then, the flash was gone and she was St. Thérèse once more, and I knelt there like a knight at her feet, her sword having touched my shoulder. I silently pledged her my love and loyalty forever.

Sister Mathilde directed her to a vacant seat in the second row nearest the window. She settled herself in place and didn’t give me another glance for the rest of the day.

After that first meeting of our eyes Nicole Renard
ignored me, although I was always aware of her presence in the classroom or the corridor or the schoolyard. I found it hard to glance at her, both hoping and fearing she’d return my glance and leave me blushing and wordless. She never did. Was the look that passed between us that first day a wish of my imagination?

Luckily, she became friendly with Marie LaCroix, who lived above my family on the third floor of our house on Fifth Street. The girls often walked home from school together—Nicole lived one street over on Sixth—and I trailed after them, happy to be following in Nicole’s footsteps. They giggled and laughed, their schoolbooks pressed against their chests, and I hoped that one of Nicole’s books would fall to the ground so that I could rush forward and pick it up.

Once in a while Nicole visited Marie on the third floor, and I lurked on the piazza below, trying to listen to their conversations, hoping to hear my name. I heard only the murmur of their voices and occasional bursts of laughter.

Standing at the banister in an agony of love and longing, like a sentry on lonely guard duty, I waited for Nicole to come down the stairs so that I could get a glimpse of her and perhaps catch her attention. She’d come into view, my mouth would instantly dry up, and I would look away, afraid that my voice
would emerge as a humiliating squeak if I tried to say hello. A moment later, I’d hear her footsteps fading away and I’d plunge into an agony of regret, vowing to talk to her the next time.

Often, in the evening, when families gathered on the piazzas, the men drinking beer they had brewed in big crocks in the dirt-floored cellars and the women mending socks and knitting as they chatted, I’d seek out Marie and try to get her to mention Nicole Renard. Although we were separated by that chasm of being twelve years old, when boys and girls barely acknowledged each other’s existence, Marie and I spoke to each other once in a while because we lived in the same three-decker.

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?”