Fade (13 page)

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 to 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.”

“Are you ever coming back?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

We were crossing Monument Park, walking by the statues erected to honor the men of Monument who had died in the wars.

“I'll never desert you, Paul.”

He had told me so much but there was still so much that I didn't know.

“I'm afraid,” I said, trying to keep the tremor from my voice. “It's scary …”

“I know.”

“I'm not going to use the fade,” I declared. “I want everything to stay the same, the way it is now.”

“Do you really, Paul?”

“No,” I admitted, shamefaced. I thought of my longings and my desires. The books I would write, the countries I would visit. The fame I hungered for. “But I want to do things on my own.” The fade couldn't write my books for me.

“Don't make any vows, Paul,” my uncle said, his voice grim.

A leap of intuition made me breathless. I almost asked: Did you make a vow because of what happened to Vincent? He had said that Vincent died because of him. I could not bring myself to ask that question, though.

Instead, I asked: “Where are you going?”

“It's a big country out there. So many places I haven't seen yet. And then old friends to see again in places where I've been. They're not family but they're consolations. …”

“Do you really want to go, Uncle Adelard?”

“Life is filled with things you don't want to do but have to do. And you find out in the end that it's not as bad as you thought. You accommodate yourself to the situation. Remember everything I've told you. Write it all down someday. Always be careful. Watch for the next fader. That's your mission, Paul, if there is a mission….”

We didn't speak alone again. He made his rounds of the family, brief visits with lots of laughter and gentle kidding. “Next time we're going to have a good-looking woman waiting for you,” my uncle Victor joked, but he turned away after he said the words, and I saw the doubting in his face.

“I hope the strike will be over soon,” Uncle Adelard said.

Before he left, he hugged us all, kissed the women, shook my hand with a firm grip. I found it hard to look into his eyes. “Pll be back, Paul/’ he said to me as we embraced.

A week or so later, when I drew my notebook of poems from my hiding place, I found my uncle Adelard's blue bandanna, folded neatly, freshly washed and ironed, on the closet shelf.

ith my uncle Adelard gone, the events at Silas B. consumed me completely and the fade became a part of the past summer and its witchery, along with street games and garden raids and the battle of Moccasin Pond. I learned to my delight of something that had been unknown at St. Jude's Parochial School: extracurricular activities. I joined the Eugene O'Neill Drama Club and tried out for the chorus of
The Pirates o/Penzance,
to be presented at Christmastime by the Silas B. Choral Group.

I submitted the story I had written about the boy and his father and the shop to
The Statue,
leaving it on Miss Walker's desk. She was the faculty adviser for the magazine. I had titled the story “Bruises in Paradise,” pleased by the contrast of those two nouns linked uneasily by the plain preposition.

One afternoon Miss Walker detained me in homeroom as the bell rang, and I waited in anticipation as the classroom cleared. When we were finally alone, she looked up at me, smiled, and withdrew my manuscript from her drawer. I recognized it immediately when I saw my handwriting on the title page. I had submitted it before learning that all manuscripts had to be typed.

“This is simply not acceptable, Moreaux,” she said, still smiling.

“I didn't realize it had to be typed,” I said. “I'll be taking typing next semester.”

“Typing doesn't really matter,” she said, her smile widening, as if amused by something she did not care to share with me. “The story itself is not acceptable, Moreaux. The subject matter is not suitable for our school magazine. Neither is the writing.”

Why was she smiling as she was devastating my life?

“I would suggest this,” she said, voice flat and decisive. “Concentrate on your studies this year. The transition from parochial school to public school is difficult enough. You have another transition next year when you leave here and enter high school. I understand that you have tried out for the chorus in
The Pirates of Penzance.
I would suggest that you withdraw from that. Your marks come first….”

The smile was frozen now. And so were those blue eyes. No softness at all in those blue eyes. Blue ice, those eyes.

I tore my eyes away from that smile and looked at the floor. Saw my shoes with the rubber soles my father had attached with liquid cement, scuff marks visible although I had polished them vigorously. I thought of what Jules had said:
You ‘re a Canuck, Paul, and nothing you write will ever be good enough.
Despite Miss Walker's remarks, I refused to believe that Jules was right. I raised my eyes to Miss Walker. She was leafing through the manuscript, nose wrinkled now, as if an odor rose from the pages.

“I want to be a writer,” I said, aware that my voice trembled. “I know I have a lot to learn—”

“Maybe you'll be a writer someday, Moreaux,” she said, looking up, “but you must have other priorities at this time in your life. Your first priority is to study. Later, there will be time to write….”

Stumbling out of the classroom, running through the corridor, trying to hold back the tears that threatened to spill onto my cheeks, I tore around a second-floor corner and bumped resoundingly into someone coming the other way. My books exploded out of my hands and the pages of the manuscript flew through the air and descended like giant, soiled snowflakes to the floor.

“Hey, what's the rush?”

Emerson Winslow stood there, brushing back that blond lock of hair, wearing a green sweater, the same soft material as the beige.

“No rush,” I muttered as I bent down to retrieve the spilled books and pages. He joined me, dropping to one knee. “ ‘Bruises in Paradise,’ “ he read aloud as he picked up the title page. “ ‘By Paul Moreaux …’ “ He glanced at me curiously. “Are you a writer, Paul?”

“I thought I was,” I said. “Until Miss Walker rejected it. It's not good enough for
The Statue.
”

“Do
you
think it's good enough?” he asked.

“I've got a lot to learn,” I said. “Priorities.”

“You didn't answer my question,” he said, smiling that lazy smile.

“Okay, yes, I think it's good enough for
The Statue.
” My voice sounded firm and strong. But was it good enough, after all?

Emerson Winslow shrugged, an elegant movement that reminded me of British fliers in The Great War movies who flew to their deaths with what-the-hell smiles, their white silk scarves flowing in the breeze. “That's all that counts, then,” he said.