Frenchtown Summer Frenchtown Summer
Robert Cormier
That summer,
Frenchtown was a place
of Sahara afternoons,
shadows in doorways,
lingering evenings,
full of unanswered questions
and mysteries.
It was also the summer
of my twelfth birthday,
the summer
of Sister Angela
and Marielle LeMoyne
(even though she was dead)
and my brother, Raymond,
and all the others,
but especially my uncle Med
and my father.
And finally
it was the summer
of the airplane.
Other books
by Robert Cormier
After the First Death
Beyond the Chocolate War
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway
The Chocolate War
Eight Plus One
Fade
Heroes
I Am the Cheese
I Have Words to Spend
In the Middle of the Night
A Little Raw on Monday Mornings
Now and at the Hour
Other Bells for Us to Ring
The Rag and Bone Shop
Take Me Where the Good Times Are
Tenderness
Tunes for Bears to Dance To
We All Fall Down
To Bobbie, Peter, Chris and Renée
With Love, Dad
That summer in Frenchtown
in the days
when I knew my name
but did not know who I was,
we lived on the second floor
of the three-decker on Fourth Street.
From the piazza late in the afternoon
I watched for my father,
waiting for him to come home
from the Monument Comb Shop.
No matter how tired he was,
his step was quick.
He'd always look up, expecting to see me,
and that's why I was there,
not wanting to disappoint him
or myself.
That was the summer of my first paper route,
and I walked the tenement canyons
of Frenchtown
delivering The Monument Times,
dodging bullies and dogs,
wondering what I was doing
here on the planet Earth,
not knowing yet that the deep emptiness
inside me
was
loneliness.
I felt like a ghost
on Mechanic Street,
transparent as rain,
until the growling of Mr. Mellier's dog
restored my flesh and blood
and hurried me on my way.
I was always glad to arrive home,
where my mother,
who looked like a movie star,
welcomed me with a kiss and a hug.
My mother filled the tenement with smells,
cakes in the oven,
hot donuts in bubbling oil,
and hamburg laced with onions sizzling
in the black pan she called the Spider.
She loved books, lilac cologne,
and me.
My mother was vibrant,
a wind chime,
but my father was a silhouette,
as if obscured
by a light shining behind him.
He was closer to me waving from the street
than nearby in the tenement
or walking beside me.
On summer Saturdays,
the men gathered
at the Happy Times bar
or in Rouleau's Barber Shop
and talked about the Boston Red Sox
and the prospects of a layoff
at the Monument Comb Shop
while my brother, Raymond,
swapped baseball cards
in Pee Alley
with his best friend, Alyre Tournier.
I stood beside my father
as he listened
to what the men were saying,
smoking his Chesterfields,
and I wished I could be like him,
mysterious,
silent.
I was not famous in the schoolyard, or on the street corners, content to cheer for Raymond,
who was a star at everything,
baseball at Carder's Field,
Buck Buck How Many Fingers Up?
in the schoolyard,
while I read
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
or A Study in Scarlet
on the piazza,
avoiding the possibility
of dropping a fly ball in center field.
My paper route took me
from the green three-decker
next to the Boston & Maine railroad tracks
where downtown Monument
met Frenchtown,
along Mechanic
and all the numbered streets
from First to Twelfth.
My last customer was Mr. Lottier
at the end of Mechanic Street
next to the sewer beds.
I held my nose
as I tossed the paper to his piazza.
He always smiled
when he paid me on Friday,
as if his nose didn't work.
That summer, Frenchtown was a place of Sahara afternoons, shadows in doorways, lingering evenings, full of unanswered questions and mysteries.
It was also the summer of my twelfth birthday, the summer of Sister Angela and Marielle LeMoyne (even though she was dead) And my brother, Raymond, and all the others,
but especially my uncle Med
and my father.
And finally
it was the summer
of the airplane.
How many times I have heard
the men at the Happy Times
talking about the famous dancer
in a London dressing room
who decided,
on a whim,
to cut off her tumbling locks
of auburn hair,
plunging Frenchtown
into a depression
a year later because
women all over the world
adopted her bobbed hairstyle
and did not require anymore
the fancy combs
and barrettes,
glittering with rhinestones,
dancing with sequins,
that paraded from the assembly lines
of the Frenchtown comb shops.
My father didn't work for a year.
Just a child then,
too young to understand
what was happening,
I only knew that my mother
did not smile anymore,
her voice like one long sad note
struck on a piano
when she read me stories,
while my father seemed to have gone away
even though I could see him clearly
in his kitchen chair by the window,
the silence in the tenement
a terrible noise
in my heart.
Moosock Brook
kept disappearing
as it flowed
through downtown Monument
and later Frenchtown,
red, purple or green,
depending on the dyes
dumped that day by the comb shops.
The brook slid
under Main Street
and reappeared
on Water Street,
colors hectic in the sunlight,
/>
until it went unseen again
beneath the B&M railroad bridge,
before finally flowing
into the Meadows.
There it created
a sudden pool
into which Frenchtown kids,
Raymond among them,
plunged with glorious abandon,
emerging later,
dripping
red, purple or green
depending on the dyes
dumped that day
by the shops.
I wore my aviator helmet,
the goggles pushed up
on my head
in careless fashion,
striding through the streets
like a World War hero
home after aerial battles
over the trenches in France
until Hector Henault
tore the helmet from my head,
dashed it to the ground
and crushed the goggles
under his boots,
the sound
like my own bones cracking.
He paused to view his damage.
Holding the ruined goggles
in hands that trembled,
I withheld tears
as I screamed at him:
“Die, you dirty rat, die,”
(but silently, of course)
like James Cagney
in the movies.
Three days later,
Hector Henault was crushed
like my goggles
under the wheels of a Mack truck
on Mechanic Street
near Fifth.
They said he died instantly.
I was awestruck
by my power to kill.
On the fourth of July,
Oliver Randeau,
giggling,
lobbed a firecracker my way.
It exploded like a grenade
against my ear,
stunning my skull with pain.
Knowing the power I possessed,
I ignored the mad doorbells
ringing in my head
and looked at him.
Because he was stupid,
still in the sixth grade
at the age of fourteen,
with a left eye that often
went askew,
I decided
not to kill him.
Whenever I met him later,
on the sidewalks or in the empty lots,
I deflected his baleful stare
with a pitying smile.
Frowning, he always looked away.
Did he somehow know
that I held the power
of life and death over him?
I wondered whether I should confess this power of mine to Father Balthazar but instead vowed never to use it again even if absolutely necessary.
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
