Heroes (4 page)

As the big argument resumes about cops and
firemen, I slip out of the bar unnoticed, into the March dampness of Third Street. I make my way through the throng of shoppers and the schoolkids leaving St. Jude’s school, my identity protected by the scarf and the bandage. My head is light from the beer because I haven’t eaten since my breakfast, when I forced myself to drink the coffee and eat the oatmeal.

I am on my way, of course, to the Wreck Center.

T
he Wreck Center is boarded up and abandoned now, the words
FRENCHTOWN REC. CENTER
faded and barely visible above the front door. The door’s red paint has turned a faint sickly pink. My caves begin to run and my scarf is damp and, after a moment, I realize that it’s not the moisture from my caves that has dampened my scarf.

It’s a bad-luck place, people had said.

A place of doom, others added.

In the old days it had been known as Grenier’s Hall, and the children of Frenchtown, myself among them, often heard its tragic story.

Not a tragic story at the beginning, however. The hall had been a place of happy events—gala dances and fancy balls to mark occasions like New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July. It became a traditional place for wedding receptions, the bridal party marching the length of Third Street to the hall after the wedding mass at St. Jude’s.

Until the wedding of Marie-Blanche Touraine.

Marie-Blanche married a handsome Irisher by the name of Dennis O’Brien from the plains of North Monument after breaking off her engagement to Hervey Rochelle, the shipping room foreman at the Monument Comb Shop. At the reception, during a pause between the dinner and the dancing, as Marie-Blanche and Dennis cut the wedding cake, Hervey burst into the hall, a gun blazing in his hands. A moment later, Marie-Blanche lay bloody and dying in her wedding gown. A bullet entered Dennis O’Brien’s spine, leaving him paralyzed for the rest of his life. Hervey hung himself that evening in the toolshed behind the comb shop.

That was the end of Grenier’s Hall as a festive gathering place. The doors were sealed and the windows shuttered. Children shivered as they listened
to the story of that day of doom, and always hurried by the abandoned building. Some claimed that on windy nights when the moon was full, the sounds of moaning and weeping could be heard if you pressed your ear against the front door. It became a Frenchtown tradition for children to listen at the door at midnight on the night of a full moon as a rite of passage. Before my turn arrived, however, Grenier’s Hall was given a reprieve and began a new existence.

I was in the seventh grade, the year that Nicole Renard came into my life, when the hall’s transformation began. People rushed to the site one Saturday morning as word spread through the streets that carpenters and painters were attacking the building in a frenzy of activity. I rushed to the scene and watched in amazement as trucks and vans, emblazoned with the words
CITY OF MONUMENT
, disgorged teams of workmen who, we learned, had been hired under a new municipal program. In the next few days the men worked frantically, scraping and painting, replacing doors and windows, tarring the roof. But the work was haphazard. Workers dropped hammers, spilled paint, stumbled over each other and occasionally pulled brown paper bags from their pockets and took quick gulps from hidden bottles.

“It’s like watching a Marx Brothers movie,” said
Eugene Rouleau, the barber whose tongue was as sharp as his razor.

When the workers finally completed the job, the building still looked unfinished. The white paint didn’t completely cover the dark patches of mildew on the clapboards and the shutters sagged next to the windows.

“Look,” someone called.

As we watched, the sign that read
FRENCHTOWN REC. CENTER
slid from its place above the front entrance until it hung at a drunken angle above the door.

“It’s still a bad-luck place,” Albert Laurier of Laurier’s Drug Store said.

People nodded in agreement, remembering the wedding reception of Marie-Blanche Touraine.

That night, someone crossed out the words on the sign and replaced them with
WRECK CENTER
in bright red paint. Although the sign was restored to its original wording, the place was known ever since as the Wreck Center to the people of Frenchtown.

The center opened its doors the day after St. Jude’s Parochial School closed for summer vacation. I stood with the other kids at nine o’clock on that June morning in front of the building. A tall slim man stepped into view, a lock of blond hair tumbling over his forehead, his smile revealing dazzling movie-star teeth.

“Good morning,” he said. “My name is Larry LaSalle.”

“Is that his real name?” Joey LeBlanc asked in a whisper that carried over the crowd. He was often punished by the nuns for talking out of turn.

“That’s right—it’s real,” Larry LaSalle said. And for some reason, the crowd applauded.

Larry LaSalle had the broad shoulders of an athlete and the narrow hips of a dancer. He was both. He swung the bat with authority as he hit home runs in games at the sandlot next door and later led us through vigorous exercises and calisthenics. He was also a dancer, with a touch of Fred Astaire in his walk, his feet barely touching the floor. He could tap-dance with machine-gun speed and make daring leaps across the stage. But he was most of all a teacher, leading classes in dancing, arts and crafts, organizing a choral group, directing musical shows.

The Wreck Center became my headquarters in the seventh and eighth grades, a place away from the sidewalks and empty lots of Frenchtown. I had never been a hero in such places, too short and uncoordinated for baseball and too timid to join the gangs that hung around the street corners.

I had no best friend, although Joey LeBlanc, who lived on the first floor of my three-decker, often went with me to the Plymouth on Saturday afternoons.
He kept up a steady commentary during the movie, like a radio announcer describing the action. He didn’t like to read and I loved roaming the stacks of the Monument Public Library, where I discovered Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack London and rushed home with an armful of books.

Home was the tenement where I lived with my uncle Louis, my father’s brother, a silent giant of a man who was a yardman at the Monument Comb Shop. He took me in after my father died, cooked our meals and cleaned the apartment. He drank three bottles of beer every night while listening to the radio, volume turned low, until his bedtime at eleven o’clock. He seldom spoke but I never doubted his affection. He patted me on the head, passing by as I read my books at the kitchen table, and listened solemnly as I told him of my day at school, a duty he required every night at supper. “You’re a good boy, Francis,” he’d tell me as he handed over my fifty-cent allowance every Friday night.

The loneliness of the tenement drove me to the Wreck Center after school and on weekends. Without talent for singing or dancing or arts and crafts, I finally joined calisthenics after Larry LaSalle made a speech urging everyone to participate in at least one activity. I picked a spot in the back row to avoid
calling attention to myself, and Larry LaSalle didn’t embarrass me by calling me to the front row where the shorter kids belonged.

Larry LaSalle was everywhere in the center, showing how strips of leather could be made into key chains, old wine jugs into lamps, lumps of clay into ashtrays. He tamed the notorious schoolyard bully, Butch Bartoneau, convincing him that he could sing, coaching him patiently day after day, until Butch’s version of “The Dying Cowboy” brought tears to the eyes of everyone in the Wreck Center’s first musical production,
Autumn Leaves
.

“But he still beats up kids in the schoolyard,” Joey LeBlanc observed.

Under Larry LaSalle’s guidance, Edna Beauchene, tall and gawky and shy, became the hit of the show, dressed like a bum and dancing an intricate routine with ash cans, winning applause like a Broadway star.

“You are all stars,” Larry LaSalle always told us.

Rumors told us that Larry LaSalle had also been a star, performing in nightclubs in New York and Chicago. Someone brought in a faded newspaper clipping showing him in a tuxedo, standing beside a nightclub placard that read
STARRING LARRY LASALLE
. We knew little about him, however, and he discouraged questions. We knew that he
was born in Frenchtown and his family had left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Larry had taken dance lessons at Madame Toussaint’s studio downtown as a boy and had won first prize in an amateur contest at Monument City Hall when he was nine or ten.

Why did he turn his back on show business and return to Frenchtown?

No one dared to ask him, although there were dark hints that he had “gotten into trouble” in New York City, a rumor Joey LeBlanc delighted in repeating with raised eyebrows and a knowing look.

Dazzled by his talent and his energy, most of us didn’t dwell on the rumors. In fact, the air of mystery that surrounded him added to his glamour. He was our champion, and we were happy to be in his presence.

Nicole Renard began coming to the center that first winter and joined the dancing group. She had taken lessons in Albany and instantly caught the attention of Larry LaSalle. I’d watch her glide across the floor, catching flashes of her white thighs as she twisted and turned. She seemed to exist in a world of her own, like a rare specimen, birdlike and graceful as she danced, separate from the rest of the dancers. She didn’t join any of the classes or do exercises or crafts and would simply leave when the dance classes were over.

One day as she headed for the exit, drops of perspiration on her forehead like raindrops on white porcelain, she said:

“Hello, Francis.”

That same strange teasing in her voice that I’d heard when she’d warned me about falling off the banister. I gulped, coughed, managed to utter “Hello” but was unable to bring her name to my lips.

She paused, as if to say more, our eyes meeting in the same connection I had felt in Sister Mathilde’s classroom. A moment later, she was gone, leaving behind a sweet fragrance mixed with the musky smell of her perspiration, and the after-image of her body leaping through the air. She didn’t remind me of St. Thérèse anymore but of the girls in certain magazines at Laurier’s Drug Store who set my heart racing and made my knees liquid.

Nicole Renard’s visits to the Wreck Center made my life there complete.

That’s why Joey LeBlanc angered me when he said he could feel that old doom hanging over the place.

“You talk too much,” I said, slamming the door behind me as we left the center one afternoon.

“Doom,” he pronounced. “Wait and see.”

• • •

Shivering now as the rain begins to fall, I turn away from the Wreck Center, knowing that poor Joey LeBlanc, who died on a beach on Iwo Jima in the South Pacific, had been right, after all.

I
have been in Frenchtown almost a month now, and March has turned into April but the clouds are still thick and low, and rain falls almost every day. I walk the streets and people begin to nod at me or greet me with a smile because I have become a familiar figure. My army fatigue jacket tells them I am a veteran and this is a season when all the veterans are welcome everywhere.

Lingering in front of stores, standing on the front steps of St. Jude’s Church at the corner of Third and Mechanic, I watch for Larry LaSalle, for that Fred Astaire strut and that movie-star smile. I think of the gun in my duffel bag and I’m impatient for him to come back.

I sometimes stand in front of the convent and wonder whether the mystery of what has happened to Nicole is hidden within those walls.

The veterans in the St. Jude Club always greet me with big hellos and slaps on the back and make room for me at the bar or in the crowd watching a close game of pool. They respect my silence and my anonymity. The talk now is of the new Chevies and Fords coming from the Detroit factories and the freedom of walking down Third Street without saluting an officer and wearing civvies instead of the uniform.

Arthur and Armand and Joe are always there, fixtures in the club until they become cops or firemen or go to college or back to the shops but this is the pause between one life and another and they drink beer and wine, and shoot pool and talk, always the talk, reminiscing about the days before the war, the nuns at St. Jude’s, the long sermons of Father Balthazar, the ball games in Cartier’s Field and the mystery of the stranger visiting Frenchtown one summer years ago who hit a home run in almost
every game and who many thought was a major-league player in disguise. Babe Ruth, maybe. Or Lou Gehrig.

I let my glass of beer grow stale and flat on the bar because I want to remain sharp and alert at all times in case Larry LaSalle should walk in or someone might mention his name.

The Old Strangler lets me nurse my beer and doesn’t mind if I don’t order another. He is the bartender, the sweeper and the settler of arguments. Arthur says he used to wrestle in the carnivals that came to Frenchtown, taking on the traveling champion who challenged local wrestlers. He was famous for his stranglehold, which paralyzed his opponents. His voice is hoarse from the time, Arthur says, that he was hit in the Adam’s apple by a carnival champ who was losing the match. His hair is sparse and gray but his eyes are clear and watchful and his muscles bulge under the white shirt, his bow tie moving when he talks.

There always comes a moment when a sudden quiet falls in the club, as if everyone has become weary and yet it’s too early to go home. The jukebox, too, is silent. I watch and see things. I see the twitching in the corner of Arthur’s mouth, the way his lips seem tugged by invisible fingers. Armand stares off into space, looking at something nobody
else can see, and there’s a sudden flash of … what?—terror? bad dreams?—in his eyes. As I turn away, I see George Richelieu tugging at his pinned-up sleeve, which should hold his arm but his arm is buried somewhere in the South Pacific or probably tossed aside into jungle growth, as Arthur muttered one day. In the deepening silence I hear my own voice, loud in my ears, as I break the mood with the question that has been burning inside me since my arrival in Frenchtown: