Fade (5 page)

Mrs. Dolbier supported herself and her brood of children by taking in washing and doing ironing and sewing. Her backyard was an unending series of sagging lines always filled with clothing of all shapes and sizes and colors, like a small tent city. I crouched down low so that I could scoot beneath the clothes as I made my way toward the front of the house. But I tripped over the wooden crate in which she carried the clothing. When I scrambled to my feet, I found myself mixed up with a long pink nightgown. As I fought to free myself, I heard Omer LaBatt grunting and swearing his way through the slat in the fence. Panicking, grabbing hold of a pair of overalls, I found my face covered with a lumberjack shirt while the nightgown clung to my body.

Omer charged into the hanging clothes with a ferocious scream while I flailed desperately, overcome momentarily by my exertions, trying to catch my breath, my body flashing with pain, fear turning my blood cold. As I tugged at the clothes, a blue shirt draped itself around me as clothespins flew through the air and I fell down. Looking around, I saw Omer LaBatt had blundered into the same trap, desperately fighting the shirts and blouses that entangled him.

“Son of a bitch!” Omer cried.

Suddenly, there was a third presence among the billowing clothes. Mrs. Dolbier's voice, shrill as a factory whistle, tore at the air.

‘Out of here, bum,” she cried, vaulting into the melee, wielding a broom that she swung at Omer with passion. I ducked away on all fours.

“Bum,” she screamed again. “All my hard work …”

I looked up and saw her pummeling Omer LaBatt with the broom. He tried to get away but was trapped in an assortment of shirts and trousers, at the mercy of her blows. In an effort to protect himself, he raised his arms, a movement that brought down an entire line of shirts upon him.

I howled with glee and the widow's head popped out of the confusion of pajamas and nightgowns. She looked in my direction, paused, frowned, and then attacked Omer again with the broom, her voice rising to a dangerous pitch. “Bum … thief … sinner.”

She had looked straight at me, and then had turned back to her assault on Orner LaBatt. Safe from her now, I untangled myself from the clothes, glad to be rid of my disguise, trying to catch my breath, enduring the pain brought on by my fall, still shivering with cold.

Free at last, I ran through the yard, across her front lawn, down the street, streaking to safety. I rested in the shaded doorway next to Dondier's Market and waited for my heart to resume its normal beating, my breathing to become regular.

Trudging homeward, I took solace in acknowledging that Omer LaBatt's pursuit of me that day had served one purpose, at least. For a little while I had not been thinking of my aunt Rosanna, my pain and anguish absent as I ran for my life through the streets and alleys and backyards of French-town.

What I did not know was that I had faded for the second time.

omen never wore high heels in Frenchtown on weekday afternoons. Except my aunt Rosanna. I spotted her one day hurrying along Seventh Street in bright red high-heeled sandals with straps that wrapped around her ankles like thin fingers caressing her flesh.

I ducked behind the big oak tree across from the Lachance Steam Laundry as she passed and, after counting to fifty, began to follow her.

Once or twice she glanced over her shoulder as if suspecting a follower, but I was too quick for her to spot me. I slipped from tree to tree, skittered between houses, hid behind banisters on piazzas, crouched behind bushes in my hot pursuit, feeling clever and resourceful, trying to ignore the small sense of shame that grew within me as I dogged her footsteps. Shame at following her like this, shame at how I had betrayed her in the bedroom.

She approached the corner of Fourth and Spruce, where men and boys on short time at the shops hung around, and I grimaced, knowing the remarks the men would make as she passed. Watching from a piazza across the street, I silently cheered as she held her head high and paid them no attention. But this didn't prevent them from whistling and yelling at her. “Hey, baby, want some company?”

At the intersection of Mechanic and Third where St. Jude's steeples climbed to the sky, she paused. Would she go into the church? Confess herself, maybe? Confess what? But she continued on her way. She went toward Fourth Street again, walking aimlessly, more slowly now, head down, as if deep in thought. She didn't glance behind anymore and her movements were not at all furtive. It was easy to follow her now without much risk of being spotted, but I still took precautions as she turned at Fourth and Mechanic.

She stopped suddenly in front of the three-decker at 111 Fourth, bent over to straighten the seams of her stockings, then patted her hands around her waist as if to make certain her blouse was still tucked into her skirt. She fluffed her hair and the rings on her fingers caught the sunlight. I knew who lived at 111 Fourth and my spirits sank as I crouched behind the bushes across the street.

Make her walk away, I prayed. Make her change her mind.

But my prayer wasn't answered.

She marched into the driveway, her high heels kicking up small pieces of gravel. She passed the steps leading to the back door and headed toward the garage at the rear of the three-decker. A sign on the garage proclaimed:
TOUBERT ENTERPRISES.

Not him, I cried silently as I watched her knock on the door, tilting her head like a child about to ask for candy. Even in my despair, she melted my heart with that tender inclination of her head.

The door opened and she stepped inside and I caught a glimpse of waiting arms.

Of all the people in the world, I thought, why did she have to choose Rudolphe Toubert?

Rudolphe Toubert was the closest thing to a gangster in Frenchtown and yet no one ever spoke that word aloud. He was known as “the man to see.” The man to see if you wanted to place a bet on a horse or a football game. The man to see for a loan when the Household Finance Company downtown rejected your application. The man to see if you needed a favor. It was well known in Frenchtown that if you were faced with trouble of some kind—at the shop, on the streets, even in your family—Rudolphe Toubert was the man to see. Of course, you paid for his services in more ways than one. For instance, people still changed the subject when the name of Jean Paul Rodier came up. Jean Paul was found bruised and bleeding in Pee Alley one morning and it was said he had not paid back a loan he had taken out with Rudolphe Toubert. But there was no proof. And no witnesses.

Rudolphe Toubert was a dashing figure who commanded instant attention. Tall and slender with a movie star moustache on his upper lip, he always wore a suit with a vest and drove a big gray Packard that rolled majestically through the streets of Frenchtown, a pretty girl sometimes at his side. My mother said he was cheap-looking with his slicked-down hair and his pinstripe suits, like someone in a B movie at the Plymouth. My father said it didn't matter whether he looked cheap or not—he was a success at what he did. My father bought a lottery ticket every week from the runner at the shop who worked for Rudolphe Toubert. A twenty-five-cent ticket of hope, my father called it. Old man Francoeur on Ninth Street had once won fifteen hundred dollars on one of Rudolfe Toubert's tickets, and Mr. Francoeur's name was still spoken with awe and wonder by people who remembered his good fortune and had memorized the winning number: 55522. But it never came up again.

Rudolphe Toubert controlled all the newspaper routes in Frenchtown, including the delivery of the Boston newspapers—the
Globe, Post,
and
Daily Record
— as well as the Monument
Times.
He paid the boys a flat fee for each route instead of a commission. As a result, Frenchtown newsboys earned far less than the boys who delivered papers in other sections of town. He arranged the routes to suit his own purposes, giving the best routes to boys he favored. The routes everyone wanted were those that covered a small territory of three-deckers where papers could be delivered quickly and the customers always paid on time and gave big tips.

My younger brother, Bernard, was struggling that summer with the worst of the routes, the longest, least profitable, and spookiest route in Frenchtown, which Rudolphe Toubert always gave to the newest and youngest boy. Although the route consisted of only twelve customers, it stretched more than two miles from the railroad tracks at the edge of downtown Monument along Mechanic Street to the small cottage of Mr. Joseph LeFarge at the gate of St. Jude's Cemetery. Mr. LeFarge was the parish
bedeau,
which meant that he was the church janitor as well as in charge of the cemetery, where he dug the graves and cut the grass. He was a silent, forbidding man with thin lips that never softened into a smile and eyes that seemed to contain secrets. He could have stepped out of a Boris KarlofF movie, although my father claimed he was actually a gentle man who wouldn't harm a fly.

But then my father didn't have to deliver papers to Mr. LeFarge's house day after day, especially during the fall and winter months when darkness had already descended or was threatening by the time you arrived there, the tombstones visible from his front walk. Not only was his house isolated, a quarter mile from the nearest three-decker, but it was located across the street from the city dump, where clouds of smoke from smoldering rubbish rose like pale ghosts against the sky. The worst time of all was Friday, collection day. Instead of flinging the rolled-up newspaper to his piazza and hurrying away, you knocked on the door and waited an eternity for him to respond, while trying not to look toward the cemetery and those lurking tombstones. He never hurried to answer your knock and he never gave a tip.

I sympathized with Bernard when he set
off
each day on the route because I had undergone the same ordeal a few years before.

Bernard was only eight years old. I, at least, had been ten. He wanted to quit after the second day but knew he couldn't. Every penny was important to the family. I worked afternoons packing potatoes and doing errands at Dondier's and Armand did odd jobs at the comb shop.

“I don't mind the long walk and the dogs,” Bernard said as we sat on the piazza steps after supper. He was trying not to cry. “But it's …” And his voice faltered.

“Mr. LeFarge's house, right?” I asked.

“It's summer, for crying out loud,” Armand said. “It's not even dark when you get there.” Armand spoke with the bravery of his 145 pounds, the strength of his muscled arms and legs. He did not believe in ghosts and never woke up at night from bad dreams.

Later, when we were alone, I struck a bargain with Bernard. I told him I would deliver the paper to Mr. LeFarge's house every day after I finished my chores at the market. I bragged that I was the master of shortcuts and assured him I could easily do the delivery and be here in time for supper.

“What about my part of the bargain?” Bernard asked.

There was nothing Bernard could offer me. “I'll think of something,” I said.

His smile was beautiful to see, almost like a girl's. It was no wonder my sisters Yvonne and Yvette envied his good looks and his hair that curled without the touch of a comb or a curling iron.

So, every day that summer, I delivered the Monument
Times
to Mr. LeFarge's house. Bernard left the newspaper at the market and I raced after work to Mechanic Street, cutting through backyards and across empty lots, avoiding houses with dogs in their yards and always on the lookout for Omer LaBatt. Despite my thirteen years and all my experience, I was still uneasy as I approached the
bedeau
‘ s house, averting my eyes from the cemetery and trying not to inhale the fumes of burning rubbish from the dump across the street.

Now I stood across from Rudolphe Toubert's house, thinking of my aunt Rosanna inside the garage with him. I tortured myself with images of his long, tapered fingers caressing her flesh, his lips on hers, their mouths opening to each other the way it happened in the movies.

Scanning the windows of the three-decker, I searched for the figure of his wife lurking behind the curtains. She was confined to a wheelchair and never left her tenement and spent her days, they said, wheeling from one window to another. Sometimes I caught glimpses of her thin pale face as she peered out at the street or watched people in their comings and goings as they did business with Rudolphe Toubert. Women visited him at odd hours as my aunt was doing now, and this flaunting of his love affairs seemed to me the worst thing about him.

Finally, my aunt Rosanna emerged from the garage, closing the door slowly behind her, lingering a moment in the yard. Did she look disheveled? Was her hair a bit mussed and her orange lipstick hastily put on? Or was jealousy feeding my imagination? How could I be certain of anything as I crouched miserably behind a hedge across the street, worried that a dog would find me there and bark me out of my hiding place?

As she left the driveway, tugging at her skirt, she surprised me by turning left instead of right, which meant that she was not going to my grandfather's house. She was heading in the direction of the Meadow down at the end of Spruce Street. The Meadow was a place for family picnics on the shores of the Moosock River, which meandered without design among stands of birches and pines, in the shade of elms and maples, and on through the long, open fields. The Meadow remained unspoiled despite constant rumors that the city's rubbish would be carted to the place once the city dump was filled. The kids of Frenchtown frolicked there on occasion, building bonfires at night, swimming naked in the river, playing games. Boy Scouts often pitched their tents on the grounds and pursued their merit badges in camping and nature studies and such. I often visited the place with pad and paper and tried to write poems as I sat with my back against a tree trunk or dangled my legs on the banks of the river, watching the changing colors—red or green or a murky brown, depending on which dyes had been used that day in the shops.