Fade (14 page)

As I assembled the pages he asked, carelessly: “Goin’ anywhere special?” As if the answer did not matter.

“No,” I said. The bleak streets of Frenchtown suddenly had no appeal for me, all those forlorn three-deckers and the shops.

“Come on,” he said, walking ahead, glancing over his shoulder. I followed him. After all, he was carrying three of my books.

The house he lived in towered above the others in that North Side neighborhood, a white turreted house like those I had seen only in the movies. Birds splashed in a birdbath in the center of the lawn. In the driveway, a man in a black uniform lovingly polished a gleaming maroon sports car. As we approached, he looked up at Emerson Winslow and said: “Afternoon, sir.” I had never heard someone my age called
sir
before. The man was old enough to be Emerson's grandfather, with graying hair and mild blue eyes.

“Hello, Riley,” Emerson said. “This is my friend, Paul Moreaux….”

“That's a beautiful car,” I said.

“It's a pleasure to care for,” Riley said. He didn't miss a stroke as we chatted.

Inside the house, books in glass cases and chandeliers, fireplaces and stately furniture polished to high gloss, a baby grand piano, floor-to-ceiling windows, like none I had ever seen in Frenchtown. Nothing in this house at all like French-town. I was overcome with the realization of my ignorance. I did not know the name of anything in this house. For instance, a magnificent desk of gleaming dark wood that I knew must be more than just a desk. That it must have not only a name, but a history. And the sofa of rich upholstery, yellow. No, not yellow, gold. And the carpet of exotic design beneath my feet. Almost in a panic, I thought: I don't know anything.

We ascended a curving stairway to the second floor, the railing shining so brightly that I dared not touch it and leave a fingerprint. In the second-floor hallway, the walls were the color of whipped cream. One of the doors opened and a girl stepped out. I blinked, looked away, the way actors do in movies, then looked at her again, a double take.

It was like seeing another version of Emerson Winslow but a feminine, more dazzling version, blond hair like a helmet of curls, green eyes dancing with amusement at some private joke.

“My twin sister,” Emerson said. “Imagine going round a corner, Paul, and meeting yourself coming toward you. Only it's a girl.”

He touched her shoulder lightly, just short of a caress.

“Page, this is Paul Moreaux …”

“Hi, Paul,” she said, tossing my name in the air as if it were a bright balloon.

Page? Did he actually call her Page? Was
Page
a name?

I felt stupid again. Could not speak. Could not move. Felt the need to swallow but did not dare swallow because I knew it would make a terrible sound in the hallway and send me into disgrace.

“Page is the noble one of the family,” Emerson said. “She's going off to boarding school. Fairfield Academy …”

“I'm only going so you won't have to go,” she said ruefully. “Daddy says one of us has to be prepared to meet the world.”

She spoke the way Emerson did, carelessly, casually, as if what she was saying wasn't really important.

“I don't have to go because I don't have any talent,” Emerson said teasingly. “I'm not a whiz at anything. See what you get for being a whiz, Page?”

“A whiz,” she said, dismissing the description with contempt and looking at Emerson fondly, as if she thought
he
was the whiz. How I wished she would look at me that way.

As if she could read my thoughts, she turned to me and said: “You must be something, a whiz yourself, if Emerson brought you home.”

Was she teasing me? Although she was not at all like my aunt Rosanna, she had the same Rosanna quality of making me feel hot and cold at the same time, made me squirm and swallow, but all of these sensations pleasant. “Are you something, Paul?”

“Everybody's something,” Emerson said, rescuing me. “Paul is a writer.” He turned to me. “Page is a dancer. Ballet …”

Page rolled her eyes at the ceiling, looked at me, and crossed her eyes clownishly. And looked beautiful doing it.

“If she weren't my sister and I didn't love her, I would hate her,” Emerson said. “She's so goddamned good at what she does. And she does everything. …”

“Not everything,” Page Winslow said, and did an unexpected and beautiful thing. She stuck out her tongue. At him. Childish and yet perfect for that moment, just as crossing her eyes had been perfect when Emerson offered her praise. We laughed, the three of us, and our laughter floated through the hallway and I marveled that I had been called a writer by Emerson Winslow, standing with him and his sister, Page, in this magnificent house.

“Be right back,” Emerson said over his shoulder as he headed down the hallway and disappeared into one of the rooms, closing the door behind him.

I was alone with Page Winslow.

I didn't know what to say. Or do.

“What do you write?” she asked.

“Stories, poems,” I said, trying to control my voice, hoping it would not change keys on me.

“About what?” she asked, giving me her full attention, as if my answer mattered very much to her.

“Life,” I said. “What I feel, what I see. About Frenchtown where I live.” I paused, wondering if I had disclosed too much, remembering Miss Walker, wondering if I was deceiving Page Winslow. Was I really a writer or only a pretender?

She wore a white pleated skirt and a V-neck sweater of such soft pastel colors they could barely be seen: lavender, blue, pink, colors of a gentle rainbow. Her hair was more than blond, almost white, and there was a touch of blushing in her cheeks. Her breasts caused gentle roundnesses in her sweater. I didn't know where to look. Was I being a traitor to my aunt Rosanna?

I tried desperately to find something more to say while Page Winslow stood there perfectly at ease, as if waiting for the world—or me—to entertain her.

“You're still home,” I said. “Does Fairfield Academy start up later?”
Start up?
I felt like a fool, a Frenchtown fool, mute, inarticulate, dumb.

“I'm leaving day after tomorrow. Emerson and I were away for a year—on the
continent,
” pronouncing the last word as if quoting somebody else. “Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?” she asked wryly. “All that happened is that we fell behind in school—here I am going off to Fairfield almost fifteen—and I broke my dumb leg in Italy.” She sighed and lifted her hands in resignation. “Now I'm supposed to be all fit and ready to go …”

“Don't you want to go?”

“I suppose I do,” she said. “I'm not sure. Emerson's one of the lucky ones. He knows what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“Nothing,” she said.

The sun blazed through the window, dazzling my eyes. I had never encountered people like this before, people who threw words away like toys they had tired of playing with. In Frenchtown, people spoke only to say what they meant.

“What do
you
want?” I asked.

“That's the problem,” she said. “I don't know what I want. At least Emerson knows what he doesn't want. What do you want?”

“Everything,” I said. “I want to write. I want to see the world. I want …” And dared not say it. Love. Fame. Fortune. To live in great cities and sail across oceans. To have my books in libraries.

“I envy you,” she said. And again I looked for mockery in her voice. Envied me? Shy and gangling and tormented by my ignorance in this house, here in a place I did not belong, among people who were like beings from another planet, not only from the other side of town.

Emerson returned, having changed into gray slacks, sharply creased, and a crisp white shirt. At home, I changed into worn overalls and an old faded shirt after school. I knew my few moments with Page Winslow were over, done with, as she headed for the stairs. She was leaving Monument the day after tomorrow. Would I ever see her again?

“Toodle-oo,” she called, pausing at the top step.

The unlikely words were perfect, the way sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes had been perfect.

Both Emerson and I echoed, “Toodle-oo,” laughing as she went on her way, sailing down the stairs, her feet barely touching the carpet.

“Did'ja ever hear of Bunny Berigan?” Emerson asked, in the emptiness of the hallway following Page's departure.

I shook my head.

“You haven't lived yet,” he said.

I followed him down the hallway into his bedroom. He closed the door behind us and I was struck by the sudden sense of privacy. His own room, his own bed and bureau. A Harvard pennant, maroon with white letters, hung on the wall above his desk. (“My father's alma mater,” Emerson said, shrugging.) Framed pictures on the walls, showing Emerson and Page in various stages of growing up. In bathing suits at the beach. In formal suits and dresses. At the foot of his bed, a phonograph, records stacked neatly on a shelf below. There was a record on the turntable.

A moment later, I heard for the first time the tortured beauty of Bunny Berigan's trumpet, golden notes bruised with sadness, rising and falling, and then his thin, reedy voice:

I've flown around the world in a plane,
I've settled revolutions in Spain
…

Spellbound, I listened while Emerson went to the window and looked out. I bent my head to the speaker, letting the music fill my ears and my being, closing my eyes, isolating myself. Bunny Berigan swung into his solo after the vocal, the trumpet like a cry from the depths, wild and melancholy, more powerful than words, more telling than a voice. The trumpet spilled notes on the air almost haphazardly, yet I sensed that it was moving toward a climax, as if the trumpeter were building an invisible and impossible structure in the air, rising, rising, toward a pinnacle that was both triumphant and blazing with eternal loss and sadness. The trumpet staggered ever upward, reaching, reaching, and I thought of the poem by Robert Browning:
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?
and then the high note was attained, an unbelievably impossible note that was like a breath held a moment before death comes. Then silence and the scratching of the needle on the record.

I could not speak, held by the music and wanting to hear it again, immediately, the way I wanted to call Page Winslow back again but could not, could not.

Later, we talked about books and movies and the stage plays he saw with his family in Boston.
Winterset
and
Ah, Wilderness!
” My father and mother love the theater.” He exaggerated
theater,
drawing it out to several syllables, pronounced it
thee-ah-tah,
rolling his eyes.

“What does your father do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. Then, sighing, “Well, something, I suppose. Having to do with banks and stocks and bonds. He's off to Boston a lot. My mother does things with charities. What she calls busy-busy….”

He did not ask me what my father did and I didn't volunteer the information. He turned up the volume on the record and we listened in silence. Why did I feel that keeping silent about my father's work was like another sin I needed to confess?

When the record ended, I told him that I had to leave. The bedroom was shadowed, the afternoon sun feeble as it spilled into the window. Later, I had to deliver my brother Bernard's newspaper to Mr. LeFarge.

“You'll have to come again sometime,” Emerson said as we walked down the stairway and across the hallway to the front door. “I'll have Riley run you home.”

“No,” I said, alarmed. Arrive in Frenchtown in that gleaming sports car with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel? Impossible.

He walked me down the steps to the macadam driveway.

We didn't encounter Page Winslow.

“Toodle-oo” he called, laughing, as I ran across the circular driveway and waved without looking back.

“Toodle-oo,” I said, but knew he didn't hear me.

No, I won't do it.

Why not?

Because.

Because why?

Because I don't want to fade. I don't want the pause and the flash of pain and the cold.

Don
V
you want to see her again? Enter her house, stand next to her, go to her bedroom, watch her sleeping, maybe see her undressing?

No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do any of those things.

Yes, you do. Of course you do.

The voice was sly and insistent, the voice that had come with my knowledge of the fade, almost as if the fade had a voice of its own. Which was impossible, of course. But wasn't the fade impossible too?

C'mon Paul. Let's go. It's getting dark. You can be there, at her house, in a few minutes.

No …

She's leaving tomorrow. You may never see her again. Or she might not remember you next time $e sees you. Might look at you blankly and say: Who's that?

Ah, but it wasn't only Page Winslow who beckoned me. It was that house, as alien as a distant planet, the style and essence of that house, the names of furnishings in that house I did not know, like visiting a museum and being ignorant of the artists who created such works of splendor. And the people in that house I had not yet seen, the father who spent his days in Boston with his stocks and bonds and the mother doing charity things while my father stalked the picket line and my mother scrubbed floors and cooked over a hot stove at home.

I knew that I did not belong in that house.

Yet, I wanted to be there.

In the darkness of evening, the house was like a giant ship tied up at a dock, shimmering even as it stood still, its windows blazing with lights. Evening dew sparkled like broken bits of glass on the lawn. Music drifted through the windows, not Bunny Berigan but symphonic music, majestic and classical, swirling violins and bursts of brass.

As I drifted across the lawn, the cold of the fade raced through my body but I ignored it, feeling light and airy, as if I could leap to the highest point of the house and stand on the topmost turret.