Fade (20 page)

So much for the photograph. I admit that it remains an enigma and that its existence, with or without explanation, was enough to inspire someone with Paul's sense of drama to make an imaginative leap from the impossible to the possible. After all, his trade has always been the writing of fiction. He once told me that his entire literary career was the answer to a very simple question: “What if?”

Let me now turn to the characters and the setting of the narrative. It is obvious that Paul again is demonstrating his talent for taking real people in a real place and transforming them into fictional characters in an artificial setting. He seizes the truth and molds it to the design he has in mind. His characters, particularly those in this fragment, appear to be real when seen from a distance but they are much different when viewed close up.

Aunt Rosanna, for instance.

Aunt Rosanna was not the person in real life that Paul created on the page. I have a vivid picture of her and I also heard my parents discussing her at length through the years. If he loved her—and this, of course, is possible—I saw no inkling of his passion, no hints at all. I don't wish to disparage her looks or her character but she was not exactly the beauty or the sweet victim that Paul made her out to be. She was pretty,
yes,
but in the common everyday manner of any healthy young woman. She was plump, if anything, and liked garish clothing—her favorite color seemed to be orange—and always wore high heels, as Paul indicated. Her hair was her best feature (I remember my mother saying) and she had a flair for hairdressing. Other people's hair, that is. Her own hair always looked frowsy and windblown. She was a person of good nature, however, an easy mark for a loan and would not hurt a fly, my mother said. But she had bad luck with men.

As far as her relationship with Rudolphe Toubert is concerned, there was no doubt among members of the family that he was the father of her child. (It was not the well-kept secret Paul made it out to be.) But I don't think anyone believed that Rudolphe seduced an innocent girl. There is no reason to suppose that Rosanna was even a virgin when she took up with him.

Rosanna was one of the few students actually expelled from St. Jude's Parochial School. In the seventh grade when she was thirteen years old, she was caught by Mr. LeFarge in the boys’ basement (the nuns’ name for toilet) doing a striptease while six or seven boys cheered her on, tossing coins at her feet. Mr. LeFarge, who believed in live and let live—probably because he spent most of his time at the cemetery among the dead—did not report the incident to the nuns or the priests (the boys themselves spread the word), but Rosanna was discovered later that year by Mother Superior in one of the broom closets off the second-floor corridor. She was with two boys, performing an act that Mother Superior could not bring herself to describe, although she let it be known that it was certainly a mortal sin worthy of damnation to hell.

It's entirely possible that Paul had a crush on his aunt and that she excited him physically. Rosanna could have easily become the object of an adolescent's fantasy. My own memories of her cease at an early age. Despite her talent for hairdressing, I do not recall that she ever opened a shop of her own, in either Canada or the United States. She seldom returned to Frenchtown and I have no distinct memories of her visits. She was never a topic in my parents’ house. No one in the family knows whether she is dead or alive.

I have been frank in my remarks about Rosanna and I hope it does not seem as if I have spoken ill of her. I think it is important, however, to show how Paul idealized his aunt in the narrative and I make mention of this to support my belief that his narrative is fiction and that he was making use of his standard approach to his writing; that is, taking actual people and places and coloring them with his own brushstrokes, rendering them finally as figures of his imagination.

Regarding Rudolphe Toubert:

While hardly a paragon of virtue—as our police records indicate—he was not the vicious person Paul depicts in the narrative. He was less than heroic and often strayed beyond the law. He cheated on his wife, which Paul reports, and carried on affairs with women only a stone's throw from his home. Yet, his wife, who deserves sympathy because of the illness that confined her to a wheelchair, was not the most likable person in French-town and not the easiest woman to live with. (Her illness today would probably be considered psychosomatic.) She was sharp-tongued and never had a kind word for anyone even before she became a prisoner of her wheelchair. This does not excuse Rudolphe Toubert's extramarital affairs, of course, but it does help explain his promiscuous ways.

It is true that Rudolphe Toubert served the people—however, illegally—of Frenchtown in the Depression era. It must be remembered that French Canadians were still considered poor immigrants in those days and were not highly regarded by bankers and business leaders. Rudolphe gave people hope through his various lotteries.
(Sold
them hope is a more accurate way of putting it, as Paul's father said in the narrative.) But Rudolphe Toubert never welshed, always paid off the winners, and regularly lent large amounts of money to the people of Frenchtown without collateral, asking people to simply pay off the debt at interest rates that, while high, were not prohibitive.

In the matter of Rudolphe Toubert's cruelty, it is a fact that he arranged for the man Paul called Jean Paul Rodier to be taught a lesson for refusing to pay his debt. Without punishment, his entire system would break down. However, Rudolphe Toubert ordered his goons to merely shake Jean Paul up a bit, give him a slap or two. But the goons got carried away with their assignment. Jean Paul was among the most disliked persons in French-town, had a big mouth, was known to beat up his wife, who weighed no more than ninety pounds, and did not pay his debts. Few people mourned the assault on Jean Paul Rodier.

I realized that all of this makes me sound as if I'm apologizing for Rudolphe Toubert just as I realize that I have painted an unflattering portrait of our Aunt Rosanna. But my purposes are different from PauPs. He was writing fiction and I am trying to devote myself to fact. I also believe that I am in a better position than Paul was to know the facts and to recognize them as such.

I once had a conversation with Paul—after the publication of his second novel,
Come Home, Come Home
— in which we talked about the old family celebrations, particularly New Year's Day, which the French Canadians call the
Jour de l’An,
The family always gathered at my grandfather's house, and there was much food and drink and singing of old songs. It was, in a way, a bigger celebration than Christmas.

At any rate, Paul and I began to reminisce about the celebrations of our childhood and
ont Jour de l’An
in particular, during which he and I stole away in the barn to smoke some forbidden cigarettes and accidentally set fire to the hay. We had to scramble to extinguish the flames and were fortunate to do so before they spread. I will never forget the panicky whinnying of my grandfather's old horse, Richard. The horse sounded almost human in its terror of the smoke and flames.

Paul fell into silence after we had discussed the incident. “That really happened, didn't it?” he finally asked.

“Of course it happened,” I replied. “Why? Don't you remember?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “But you know, Jules, I have fictionalized so much of what happened in those days that sometimes, rereading my books and thinking of the past, I'm not sure what's real and what isn't.”

That's one of the reasons why we cannot trust Paul to write factually. His imagination, which was one of his great gifts, not only ran wild but enabled him to take the ordinary events and people of his life and make them larger than life. The father in
Bruises in Paradise
was a memorable character whom critics compared to the fisherman in Hemingway's
Old Man and the Sea,
while my uncle, Paul's father, on whom the character was based, was an ordinary man, a good man, but hardly the tragic figure Paul created out of his art and craft.

I was once told by the chief of police here that I had little or no imagination. I took the remark as criticism until he told me that he was, in fact, giving me high praise. He said that my strength as a detective was my ability to see the facts as simply facts, to be always logical in my investigations. He said I was seldom thrown off the track or went off on a wild-goose chase because I was able to separate clues from false leads or red herrings. I think these same qualities allow me to judge Paul's manuscript accurately. I am also justified in making the observations about Frenchtown and the events Paul writes about not only because I have been a lifelong resident but because of my position as a police officer. A great amount of information comes in and out of police headquarters in a small city, information that concerns the past as well as the present. We have a complete file, for instance, on Rudolphe Toubert, including the fact that he received citations from the city for his activities on behalf of the youth of Frenchtown. Paul takes a dim view of Rudolphe Toubert's monopoly of the newspaper routes in the story. While Rudolphe Toubert may have enjoyed his power over the youngsters, he also gave hundreds of Frenchtown boys their first opportunity to earn money during the hard days of the Depression. He provided them with protection (the paper boys in the other sections of town were often beaten up or intimidated by older boys and a timid one like Bernard, for instance, would not have survived the rough-and-tumble world of downtown Monument). Paul also fails to note the annual Christmas parties Rudolphe Toubert held for the boys and the gifts each of them received. I believe that for dramatic purposes in his novel Paul needed a villain and Rudolphe Toubert served ideally in that role.

That leads us to Rudolphe Toubert's death. We still carry his death here in our files as an unsolved murder.

His body was found in his office on December 19, 1938, with a number of stab wounds. That same night, one of Rudolphe Toubert's employees, Herve Boisseneau, left town (was observed by a reliable witness boarding the B&M train for Boston). Rudolphe Toubert's safe had been rifled (Boisseneau knew the combination). Herve Boisseneau was never seen again and the murder weapon was never found. Rudolphe Toubert and Herve Boisseneau had been engaged in a fierce argument the day before the killing. Boisseneau was a huge man, capable of overpowering Rudolphe Toubert and inflicting the fatal wounds.

It is important to note that in the narrative Paul does not actually describe Rudolphe Toubert's murder. Why this omission when he did not hesitate to describe so many other scenes in detail?

The events of that tragic night are matters of fact. Paul's father was wounded in the skirmish and rushed to the Monument Hospital. Although he lost a great amount of blood, his wound was not considered critical and he made a complete recovery. At no time was his life in danger, according to police reports still available here in the files. Paul obviously exaggerated his father's injury to provide a climax for the events of that night. It is also tragic that his brother Bernard died three weeks later, suddenly and without apparent cause, according to Paul's narrative. In reality, an autopsy was performed and revealed his brother suffered from a congenital heart defect of which his family was unaware. As so often happened in those days, Paul's brother was considered “delicate” and this was given as the reason for his lack of vigorous appetite and low energy level.

As to the sudden death of our uncle Vincent years before— which Paul attempts to link with the fade and Bernard's death— I am using the resources of my own memory as well as my interrogation of Uncle Edgar to corroborate the fact that Vincent was besieged by illness from the day of his birth, seldom went out of doors to play, and was a grade behind other children his age because he missed so much school. His death, which naturally plunged the family into sadness, was not entirely unexpected.

It amazes me that Paul took so many disparate events and forged them into a narrative that smacks of reality until one inspects each incident and character separately and sees how Paul distorted them for fictional purposes.

One further note on the now famous strike at the Monument Comb Shop. Paul describes the strike in very simple terms without going into any details of a complex situation. An important omission is the complete absence of Howard Haynes, owner of the comb shop. Howard Haynes dealt directly with the strikers and his office at the factory was the scene of the negotiations. He passed through the picket lines every day and was booed soundly on occasion. He was never the object of violence, because Howard Haynes had always been a fair employer. The time of the unions had arrived, however, and industry was in an era of change. Men like Howard Haynes soon parted from the scene.

Why did Paul not mention Howard Haynes at all or deal with the strike issues? I believe there is a simple answer. He ignored Howard Haynes because he wanted to focus on Rudolphe Toubert as the villain of his manuscript. This is only my theory, of course, but I am convinced that there is merit in it.

I must deal now with my own relationship with my cousin Paul, although I have only a minor role in this narrative. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find that my character was
so
bitter about Silas B. Thornton Junior High School when I remember my one year there and my subsequent years at Monument High School as among the happiest of my life. It is true, of course, that I was apprehensive about Silas B. Most of the students who arrived there in the ninth grade from parochial schools were latecomers—the public school system in those days operated on a three-year junior high system (7th, 8th, and 9th grades)—and we all felt lost and abandoned in our first contacts with public school teachers and students. Most of us adjusted quickly. It is possible, however, that I warned Paul about his writing and my fear that his work would not be accepted because he was a Canuck. This rings true. However (and again I emphasize), I do not remember making the statement. Isn't this what Paul has always done—made use of a real emotion for fictional purposes?