Fade (8 page)

Carefully, I slit open the envelope with my scout knife, although I had never been a Boy Scout, and unfolded the sheet of lined paper inside. Blue lines, a few blots of ink.

Dear Paul,

By the time you read this, I will be gone. I don't like goodbyes. Keep up with your writting. Stay as sweet as you are, like the song says. Forget me not.

Love,
  Aunt Rosanna

I was surprised at the childish scrawl, as if a third-grader had laboriously written the words with a scratchy pen. The two
f
s in writing. The inky smudges. I would keep this letter forever, read it faithfully every day even when I was old and gray.

ou opened the door of the Rub Room at the comb shop and a blast like purgatory struck your face. The workers sat on stools, huddled like gnomes over the whirling wheels, holding the combs against the wheels to smooth away the rough spots. The room roared with the sound of machinery while the foul smell of the mud soiled the air. The mud was a mixture of ashes and water in which the wheels splashed so that they would not overheat at point of contact with the combs. Because the Rub Room was located in the cellar of the shop where there were no windows, the workers toiled in the naked glare of ceiling lights that intensified everything in the room: the noise, the smells, the heat, and the cursing of the men. On the coldest day of the year, the temperature in the Rub Room was oppressive; in the summer, unbearable. The workers there were exiles from the rest of the shop: newcomers from Canada and Italy eager for any job at all, troublemakers who needed their spirits broken, and workers who had lost favor with the superintendent, Hector Monard.

Hector Monard had greeted me at the shop's entrance that morning. My father had forgotten to take his lunch to work and my mother had dispatched me to bring it to him. I felt myself shrink as Hector Monard hovered over me. He was tall. And thin. But a lethal thinness, like a knife's. And as dangerous as a knife, the workers said.

Gulping, I held up the paper bag. “I have my father's lunch.”

He inspected me as if I were a piece of lint that had defiled his Sunday suit.

“What father?”

“Louis Moreaux.” Finding it difficult to swallow.

“The Rub Room,” he said, jerking his hand over his shoulder.

My father in the Rub Room? Impossible.

“What?”

“Are you deaf, boy?” he said, scowling. “The Rub Room.” And turning away: “Take it to him there. We don't run errands here.”

I walked tentatively down the hallway leading to the shop's interior, conscious of entering foreign territory. I had always been curious about the shop that for so long had dominated our lives, the subject of so many conversations at the supper table and on the piazzas as men gathered in the evenings to smoke and drink beer. It was on our piazza that I had learned about the Rub Room and the other departments, the threat of fires, the lack of safety measures, and the actions of Hector Monard. My uncle Victor made a big speech about him one evening—Uncle Victor was always making speeches—as he sat on the banister. “He's worse than the owners,” he said. “They're Yankee—what can you expect from Yankees? But Hector Monard is a Canuck, like us. You'd think a Canuck would help his own kind. But not Hector Monard.”

I made my way through the departments, the wooden planks trembling under my feet as machines vibrated somewhere in the building. The sweet acid odor of celluloid stung my eyes. A thousand fingers moved insect-like at the benches while the workers did their jobs.

Moving through the shop, I saw the combs and brushes in all stages of production: cutters slicing into sheets of celluloid; small stoves heating the stock so that it could be bent into the desired shapes; punchers driving holes into combs for rhinestones and other fancy stones to be inserted; bristles pouring down on brushes. An eye-dazzling array of operations that made my head spin. But more than the machinery, the workers. Men and women, boys and girls. Concentrating on their work, glancing up sometimes as I passed. Did I see resentment in their eyes? Did they feel I was not only an outsider but an enemy entering their private territory, violating the camaraderie of their departments?

My sense of alienation grew when I received a gruff reply from a boy almost my own age after I asked directions to the Rub Room. “Down there,” he pointed, turning away abruptly, the corners of his mouth pulled down in contempt.

As I descended the wooden steps to the cellar, the roar of machinery increased, the stairs vibrating beneath my feet. I knocked on a closed door, expecting it to buckle and crash open from the pounding of the machinery behind it. I knocked again, louder, then pounded with a closed fist. I finally jerked the door open—and that was when I saw the Rub Room for the first time, felt the blast of heat and smells, and, horrified, saw my father in his black rubber apron, his hair mussed and his face streaked with the mud, bent over the wheel like a slave in a horror film, as if he had been beaten and whipped.

Rubberman Robillard loomed above me instantly, blocking my view, a giant of a man, covered with mud, a wide grin displaying broken teeth. I had heard of the Rubberman during those evening talks on the piazza. He was the opposite of Hector Monard. The Rubberman was a Canuck who helped his countrymen, a man who respected the job, a foreman who worked right along with his men at the machines.

He saw the lunch bag in my hand.

“For who?” I couldn't hear his voice above the noise but managed to read his lips. Not waiting for my answer, he stepped out of the Rub Room and slammed the door behind him. The sound of the motors receded, although the floor continued to vibrate under my feet.

“Are you Lou Moreaux's boy?” he asked, squinting at me, wiping his face with a mud-streaked hand.

I nodded, speechless, still dumbfounded by the sight of my father at the wheel.

“That bastard Monard,” the Rubberman said. “He sent you down here, right?”

Again I nodded. My father had always avoided trouble at the shop, which had often made my uncle Victor unhappy. Why had he been demoted, then?

“It's not bad enough he put your father down here, he wanted you to see him at the wheel,” the Rubberman said. He exploded into French, the old words of the province that men used for swearing.

“Why?” I managed to utter. “Why is my father down here?”

“These are bad times, kid,” he said. “A lot of bad stuff going on. Union stuff. They're making an example of your father. But he's a tough one and stubborn. He knows how it is in a shop. You take the good times with the bad.” He coughed mightily, cleared his throat, spit a huge gray blob onto the floor. “Your father will be okay,” he said, pronouncing the word the way so many Canucks did:
Hokay.

Stumbling up the stairs, pushing open a side door that led to the outdoors, I burst into the world of fresh air, the sounds of the factory muted behind me, the gathering heat of the summer morning benevolent after the heat of the shop. Standing across the street, I studied the building where my father and so many others spent a third of their lives and where my brother, Armand, wanted to work. The shop was four stories high, dirty gray like the mud in the Rub Room, clapboards charred by fires and never replaced. I thought of how my father and the other workers resembled the place where they made their living, their skin pale from all the hours spent indoors, the smell of celluloid in their pores, their flesh scarred from burns and injuries suffered during the long years.

I thought of my brother Armand, now attending vocational school to learn the printing trade but neglecting his classes because he wanted to work in the shop.

Handsome Armand, swift on the bases, never afraid of the dark, swinging through his days and nights with never a doubt, bold and dauntless.

I wondered if he would someday become like the shop— blemished and battered. And I wondered, too, if long ago my father had been a boy like Armand. My father, my brother, and the shop.

or the first time that summer, it rained. Bursting from the skies in the middle of the night but gentle and tender by the time morning arrived. The rain brought such fresh breezes that people threw up their windows and kids ran in the streets, barefoot, hooting with glee.

By the middle of the morning I was ready to write. The chores were done and the family had dispersed, charged with energy by the fresh air the rain had brought. My mother took the girls on a shopping trip downtown after spending a half hour looking for hats to wear as protection from the rain. Armand went off to a Boy Scout meeting in the school hall and Bernard was scheduled for altar boy practice at the church.

Pad before me on the kitchen table, pencil in my hand, I prepared to put down the emotions churning within me, feeling as though I would explode if I could not express them. A face swam before me, my aunt Rosanna's. More than her face. The breast I had held in my hand for that fleeting moment. Could I capture that moment on paper?

And what of my father and the sight of him bent over the wheel in the Rub Room like a stranger I did not recognize? I pondered the paradox of trying to remember every facet of that moment with my aunt Rosanna and trying to forget the terrible sight of my father at the wheel, yet finding the reverse happening: haunted by my father, unable to wipe away the memory of my glimpse of him, and finding the memory of that time with my aunt fragmented, dissolving, even as I tried to capture it again.

Finally, I began to write. But not a poem. Until this moment I had always fashioned poems out of my emotions. This time, however, I wrote a story, letting the words flow easily and smoothly, not having to search for words whose most important function was to rhyme. I wrote about a boy and his father, the visit to the Rub Room, getting the words down quickly, not worrying about where the story was heading but trying to capture on paper that visit to the shop. Maybe, I thought, if I can rid myself of this anguish on paper, then I will be free to write about my aunt Rosanna.

I wrote until my arm and shoulder sang with pain.

And the words dried up.

I felt exhausted, as if I had run long distances. I counted the words I had written. Two thousand three hundred and three.

I stepped onto the piazza and held my face to the cool breeze the rain had brought. Leaning over the banister, I called out, “Pete … Pete …” No answer came from below, my voice echoing faintly in the quiet neighborhood. The rain fell steadily, mistily, splashing softly like small fountains in the yard below, running off into rivulets toward the gutters.

Footsteps crossed the first-floor piazza downstairs and paused at the bottom of the steps.

“Pete?” I called again.

Still no answer, but someone was climbing the stairs.

The rain was a whisper in my ears and the footsteps grew closer.

“Come on, Pete,” I said.

But Pete did not come into view. Instead, my uncle Ade-lard appeared, wearing a dusty soft hat spotted with raindrops pulled down low on his forehead so that his eyes were hidden in the shadow of the brim.

“There's nobody home, Uncle Adelard,” I said. “Only me.

He drew up the chair my father always sat in after work in the summertime while waiting for supper, removed his hat and placed it on the floor. He wore a blue bandanna around his neck, the kind that cowboys wore in movies. Or hoboes. Or bums, as my uncle Victor would say.

“That's all right,” he said. “I came to talk to you, anyway.”

“Me?” I asked incredulously, but thrilled at this attention.

“Yes, Paul,” he said, settling back in the chair, gazing at the rain.

I thought of the story I had begun to write and wondered whether I had the nerve to show it to him, whether he would understand what I had tried to put down on paper.

Hitching myself up onto the banister, I perched gingerly on the soaked wood. We sat in silence for a while. The wetness of the banister penetrated my pants. The neighborhood was so still, except for the whispering of the rain, that it seemed like a movie sound track that had been shut off.

What did he want to talk to me about?

I had always found it hard to endure silences with people and I began to swing my legs, sitting precariously on the banister, flirting with the possibility of losing my balance.