Heroes (8 page)

We played table tennis without keeping score, hitting the ball back and forth, trying for and sometimes making impossible shots, Larry rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, removing the medals and ribbons
that he called scrambled eggs. We played game after game while Nicole changed the records and jitterbugged with Marie LaCroix.

The evening wore down and Joey LeBlanc and Louis Arabelle said good night and later Marie and the others wandered off until finally there were only Larry and Nicole and me. He embraced us both. “My favorite champion and my favorite dancer,” he said.

“Find ‘Dancing in the Dark’ ” he told Nicole.

As she went off to search among the records, Larry placed his arm around my shoulder. “Time to go home, Francis,” he said. “You look tired … it’s been a long day.”

The day had not been long enough for me.

“I don’t mind staying,” I said.

“Nicole and I are going to have one last dance,” he said. “Just her and me alone. It’s important, Francis.”

I wondered if he had a big announcement for her. That he had found a way to make her a star. Entertaining the troops, maybe. Nothing was impossible with Larry LaSalle. His face was flushed and his eyes shone with excitement. “So, you’d better go, okay?”

Nicole placed the record on the spindle and turned toward us, an expectant look on her face, glancing at Larry.

“I’ve got to go,” I told her. “You and Larry stay. One last dance …” The words sounded false as I said them and I realized they were Larry’s words, not mine.

Nicole frowned. “Stay and watch,” she said, and I was puzzled by the expression on her face. Was she only being polite, asking me to stay? Did she want to be alone with Larry?

He went to her, placed his arm around her, drawing her to him gently. “He’s tired,” Larry said. “He wants to go …”

We always did what Larry LaSalle told us to do. Always carried out his slightest wish. And now I seemed actually to be tired, as Larry had suggested, the events of the day and all the excitement catching up to me. I saw Larry raising his eyebrows at me, the way he looked at me when I made a stupid move at table tennis.
Get going
 …

“I’d better go,” I said, keeping my eyes away from Nicole, a pang of regret gnawing at me even as I spoke, because I really wanted to stay, wanted to be a part of them.

As I turned away I heard the plop the record made, dropping onto the turntable. A patter of feet, then a hand touched my shoulder.

“Don’t go,” Nicole whispered into my ear.

But Larry LaSalle had told me to go.

“No, I’d better leave,” I said. “I think he wants to tell you something.”

The first notes of “Dancing in the Dark” filled the air, and the singer sang:

Suddenly, he was there, sweeping her into his arms, and as he did so, he reached out and flicked the switch, plunging the hall into darkness. I made my way toward the front door but drew back, didn’t leave, stationed myself in the small foyer, in a slant of moonlight, as the music filled the place, miserable in my aloneness, wanting to be dancing with her, the way Larry LaSalle was dancing with her, holding her close.

In the shadows of the hallway, I stood in agony and waited for the song to end, and then I would tell Nicole that I had not left, that I had stayed, would never desert her, that she had told me not to go and I hadn’t, that she was more important to me than Larry LaSalle.

The song ended and the scratching of the needle on the record did not stop and I heard a sigh and a sound that could have been a moan and a rustle of clothing.

How long did I stand there listening? Hearing the small sounds, then a sudden gasp, and the needle
scratching as the record went round and round, and I couldn’t breathe, my body rigid, my lungs burning, and at the moment of panic, heart thudding, my breath returned, and I listened and heard nothing now. What were they doing? But I knew what they were doing—the thought streaked through my mind so fast that it could hardly be acknowledged.

Then, a whimpering, like a small animal caught and trapped, moaning distinct now. The scratching of the needle stopped. Footsteps approaching, coming close, closer, and suddenly she stumbled into the hallway, her face caught in the slash of moonlight.

She saw me the moment I saw her. Saw her face, her eyes. Her hair disheveled, mouth flung open, lips swollen. Cheeks moist with tears. Her white blouse torn and one hand clutching the front of her blouse to hold it together.

I drew out of the darkness toward her and she raised a hand to stop me, gasping now, her breath like a moan escaping her body.

In the spill of moonlight, her eyes flashed black with anger as she looked at me. More than anger. But what? What? I brought my hand up to my face, not to brush away my own tears but to hide from her terrible gaze. But I couldn’t cover my eyes, had to look at her. And I recognized in her eyes now
what I could not deny: betrayal. My betrayal of her in her eyes.

For another long moment she stared at me, mouth still agape, then shook her head as if in disbelief and fled toward the door, fumbling with the doorknob. She pulled the door open, stepped through, slamming the door behind her while I stood there helplessly.

Numb, I stepped out of the moonlight’s rays, wanting to hide in the dark.

Larry’s voice called from inside the hall.

“Anybody there?”

I stood hushed, pressed to the wall, heard my own breathing so harsh that I was afraid he could hear it. His footsteps grew louder as he approached. He passed through the flash of moonlight, a ghostly silhouette, and I closed my eyes, not wanting to see him. Then, no footsteps. Had he seen me? My eyes flew open. He was at the door, a shadow now, turning the knob, whistling a tune … “Dancing in the Dark” … whistling softly as he stepped through the doorway, closing the door gently behind him, and went off into the night.

I stood there thinking of what I had seen in Nicole’s eyes.

It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

A
heat wave gripped Frenchtown, the heat almost visible in the air. People moved as if in a slow-motion movie, gathering on front lawns and piazzas in the evening after the shops closed, hoping for a breeze to cool them off. Men walked slowly as they went off to work in the shops as weary looking in the morning as they were late in the day after their shifts were over.

For three days, I haunted Sixth Street at all hours, standing across the street and looking up at the second floor of Nicole’s house, venturing sometimes into the yard, hoping that I might catch a glimpse of her coming or going or at a window. Despite the heat, the piazza on Nicole’s second-floor tenement remained vacant. The windows were open to allow cooler air to enter the tenement but no one came or went.

Nicole’s father left the tenement to go to the shop just before seven o’clock in the morning and returned shortly after five in the afternoon and I avoided him, kept away from the street during those times.

A small boy in the house across the street from Nicole’s rode his bicycle endlessly on the sidewalk and gazed at me occasionally as I waited. Finally, squinting against the sun, he asked: “Why are you here all the time?”

I shrugged. “Waiting.”

“Are you the boogeyman?” he asked, scratching his chin.

Yes, I wanted to say. A kind of boogeyman who does terrible things like letting his girl get hurt and attacked, purposely avoiding even in my mind that terrible word: what had actually happened to her.

The boy waited a moment for my reply, then pedaled back into his yard, silent as he gazed at me
over his shoulder. He went into the house and did not come out again.

• • •

In Laurier’s Drug Store, rumors were rampant about Larry LaSalle’s sudden departure from Frenchtown so soon after his arrival. Someone said his furlough had been canceled, that his outfit had been recalled to duty for a big push in Europe against the Nazis. There was talk of a Western Union messenger bicycling down Mechanic Street in the middle of the night, bringing a telegram to the tenement Larry LaSalle rented on Spruce Street.

“That wasn’t a messenger,” Mr. Laurier scoffed. “That was Crazy Joe Touraine trying to cool off from the heat of the day …”

I could not sleep at night. Lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, glad for the heat that was so relentless, as if it were part of the hell that I had earned.

• • •

Finally, on the fourth day, I saw her emerging from the hallway to the piazza on the first floor.

She did not move away as I came into the yard.

“Nicole,” I called.

She saw me, frowned, drew back a step, then paused, as if waiting for me to approach.

“Nicole.” My voice breaking, not like the days
of my shyness with her but because my heart was so full it destroyed her name as I spoke it.

Her eyes met mine. She didn’t say anything for a long moment and when she finally spoke, her voice was harsh.

“You were there all the time,” she said.

I couldn’t reply, could find no words to utter in my defense. Because I had no defense.

“You didn’t do anything.”

The accusation in her voice was worse than the harshness.

“I know.” I wasn’t sure whether I spoke those words or only thought them.

“You knew what he was doing, didn’t you?”

My head so heavy, pounding with blood, that I could barely nod in agreement.

Leaning against the banister, she asked: “Why didn’t you do something? Tell him to stop. Run for help. Anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how pitiful those words must sound to her.

She shook her head, turning away, and I couldn’t afford to let her go.

“Are you …,” I began to ask, but hesitated as she turned back and looked at me again. What word could I use? Are you hurt? Torn apart?

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No, I’m not all right,” she answered, anger flashing in her eyes. “I hurt. I hurt all over.”

I could only stand there mute, as if all my sins had been revealed and there was no forgiveness for them.

Finally, I asked: “What can I do?”

“Poor Francis,” she said at last. But no pity in her voice. Contempt, maybe, as her eyes swept me. She flung her hand in the air, a gesture of dismissal. “Go away, Francis,” she said. “Just go away.”

And she herself went away, pulled away from the banister, stepped into the hallway, one moment there, the next moment gone.

I waited for her to appear again.

I waited through long empty minutes.

Somewhere a door slammed. Later, a dog barked, a car roared by.

I finally went away.

• • •

Later that week, I went to church after supper and slipped into Father Balthazar’s confessional, waiting there until Mr. Boudreau, the janitor, closed the doors for the night. Finally I stepped out into the old smell of burning wax and incense and walked through the shadows to the back of the church. I climbed the stairs to the choir loft and opened the door that led to the exterior of the tallest
steeple. Father Balthazar had shown me the door during my altar boy days.

I started climbing in the darkness, up the steep steps that workers climbed to repair portions of the steeple. The heat intensified and the stairs narrowed as I ascended, my heart beating heavily, my breath coming in gasps, the sound like cloth ripping.

Pausing to gather strength and wait for my heart and lungs to calm down a bit, I looked for the stone door that could be swiveled aside to allow access to the outer surface of the steeple. My fingers found it. Grunting, gasping, I managed to move it aside on its rusty hinges. I looked out at Frenchtown below me, the dark shapes of the three-deckers, the shadowed streets, the stars closer than I’d ever seen them as if I could reach out and pluck one of them from the sky.

Despite the calmness of the summer night, a gust of wind caught me by surprise, cooling the perspiration on my face and forehead. I rested there, bathing in the sudden coolness. Then peered out again, craning my neck to look down at the cement sidewalk below. How long would it take to plunge toward the sidewalk? Still staring down, I began to mumble a prayer, in French, the old
Notre Père
, the way the nuns had taught us, then stopped, horrified
at what I was doing. Saying a prayer before committing the worst sin of all: despair. I thought of St. Jude’s Cemetery and the pitiful graves set apart from the rest, the ones who had taken their own lives and could not be buried in consecrated ground. I thought of my mother and father—could I disgrace their name this way?
Did you hear what Lefty’s son did last night, jumped to his death from the steeple of St. Jude’s
?

I could not die that way. Soldiers were dying with honor on battlefields all over the world. Noble deaths. The deaths of heroes. How could I die by leaping from a steeple?

The next afternoon I boarded the bus to Fort Delta, in my pocket the birth certificate I had altered to change my age, and became a soldier in the United States Army.

I
always thought I would spot Larry LaSalle on Third Street, would see him striding along like Fred Astaire, bestowing that movie-star smile on people he met. I would shadow him through the streets and follow him home, note his address, and then return late with the gun in my pocket, ready to do my job.

Instead, I learn of his return from, of all people,
Mrs. Belander, as I come back from another round of searching the Frenchtown streets.

I overhear her talking to a neighbor as they stand on the back porch. Mrs. Belander is folding clothes she has drawn off the clothesline that links her house with the three-decker next door. The neighbor is Mrs. Agneaux, a big woman with flushed cheeks and bulging eyes. They are talking in French and I linger nearby, listening like a spy. They don’t realize that I understand most of what they are saying as they talk of the weather and then of old Mr. Tardier, who likes to pinch women on the
derrière
when they pass.