Fade (22 page)

Meredith turned to me abruptly, clasping her hands together. “One more thing, Susan.” Voice brisk again. “Please?” Without waiting for a reply, she asked: “Remember Paul's refusal to be photographed and, in the manuscript, Adelard's warning about photographs?”

“Yes,” I said, reluctantly, trying to disguise my impatience.

“I have something to tell you about photographs,” she said, “and then we'll call it quits. I won't even ask you to comment.”

I said nothing, waiting for her to go on, knowing that my protests would be useless. Besides, I was a guest in her apartment and she had been kind to me from the moment we met.

“I told you about the Coover, how Paul refused to come to Manhattan, didn't I? There was an epilogue to that particular episode. Paul was suddenly vaulted into more prominence than ever before. People were curious about this man who sidestepped publicity, whose photo had never appeared anywhere. As might have been expected, there were people who were determined to photograph him. A hotshot photographer with a reputation for tracking down the most elusive of subjects got an assignment from
Lit Times
to shoot Paul Roget.
Lit Times
was a trendy literary magazine that loved gossip, inside news, exclusives. It failed after a few years but it was powerful and influential in its heyday.

“
Lit Times
dispatched the hotshot to Monument. All hush-hush. She was a friend of mine, Virginia Blakely, my roommate at Kansas State, but didn't confide in me, anticipating that I would have tipped off Paul, which I would have done. It took her a week but she managed to track him down and took three quick shots of him, at a distance, as he came out of his apartment building and got into a car—”

“Photographs? Of Paul?” Excitement sent my voice an octave above normal.

She smiled wryly, held up her hands. “Hold off, Susan. Let me finish. Virginia brought them to me after
Lit Times
rejected them. Let me show you why they rejected them….”

She went to the secretary again and opened that same drawer and this time withdrew a manila envelope. I literally held my breath, my heart behaving erratically, the headache almost forgotten. Even an obscure, rejected, out-of-focus photo of Paul Roget would be a discovery of major proportions to the world. And priceless to me.

I left the window as Meredith placed the envelope on the coffee table, and removed three eight-by-ten photographs, black and white, grainy, stark, like newspaper photos. They showed the front end of an automobile, the front steps of a building, a curtained window in the background. The focal point was the blurred figure of a man caught in midstride as he moved toward the car.

But wait.

As my eyes scanned the photographs I saw that the figure in the first photo had grown fainter in the second photograph and was not in the third photo at all, having disappeared into the car when the third picture was snapped.

“Notice anything special?” Meredith asked.

“Of course,” I replied impatiently, disappointed at having come so close to seeing a photo of Paul Roget and then not seeing him. “It's all blurred. That hotshot photographer goofed up.”

“Look again,” Meredith said. “Closely. See how sharp the pictures are? The car, the front steps, that lace curtain? Fine details, remarkable, really, for a high-speed telephoto lens.”

I looked up, wary again, knowing I was being led to places I did not want to go.

“The fact is, Susan, that Virginia didn't goof up. Neither did her camera. Everything in the photos is clear, and sharp, except Paul. The figure of Paul isn't really blurred or out of focus. He's like a ghost image, a figure that was either about to materialize or vanish altogether in the first two pictures. And he's entirely gone in the third photo….”

“He's in the car,” I said, keeping my voice level and reasonable.

“Is he?” Meredith asked. “Or has he faded? Started fading in the first photo and was completely invisible in the last?”

Sleep was elusive that night. Traffic sounds, the swishing of tires on the pavement nine floors below—had it begun to rain?—reached my ears and the grandmother clock in the living room chimed at quarterly intervals and tolled the hours, like notes of doom in the quiet apartment. No dramatics, Susan, I muttered as I tossed and turned on the bed, punching the pillow, tugging at the sheet, and then lying still, unmoving, hoping to invite sleep that way. Thank God my headache was gone.

I must have slept occasionally because I suddenly plunged into dreams, vague and insubstantial, faces swimming in mist and rain. One of the faces was my grandfather's and I emerged from sleep, saw by the digital clock that it was three forty-five. I thought of what my grandfather had told me about Paul and the public library in Monument and why I had not mentioned it to Meredith, but the thought was too much to manage as I drifted off again, this time into a deeper, encompassing sleep. When I woke up, morning light filtered into the room through dripping windows, a foghorn sending its mournful call up from the river.

The digital clock announced nine forty-two—the alarm had not gone off at nine.

Padding down the hallway, I passed Meredith's bedroom, glanced in, saw the bed unoccupied and unmade. Listened for sounds of the shower at the bathroom door. Peeked in, not there. She was not in the kitchen or the living room. At the window, I looked out at a gray morning, the waters of the river like chips of slate, the high-rises shimmering in the rain and mists.

Meredith and I usually went to midmorning mass at St. Pat's on Sunday, busing it back and forth, picking up the
Times
and croissants on the way back. She had evidently gone off without me today. Was she angry? Or merely avoiding me? Had those final words of hers last night suddenly sounded unreal and impossible this morning—to her as they did to me?—and sent her running out of the apartment?

On the coffee table I found a neatly stacked pile of manuscript pages, a note on top of them.

Dearest Susan:

So sorry—I did not play fair with you last night. Haven't played fair since the beginning. Attached is the remainder of Paul's manuscript, which I did not show you or Jules. Maybe it will explain all—maybe nothing. Anyway, forgive me. See you later today.

Meredith

Almost dreamlike, my hand moving in slow motion, I lifted the note and looked down at the first page of the manuscript.

I am writing now of Frenchtown in the late spring of 1963 when I lived in
…

I glanced away, rubbed my eyes, lowered myself on the sofa, drew the stack of pages toward me, and began to read those first words again.

am writing now of Frenchtown in the late spring of 1963 when I lived in a three-room tenement on Mechanic Street, on the top floor of a three-decker across from St. Jude's Church. The tenement was adequate for my needs: a kitchen where I prepared simple meals or heated up my mother's casseroles on the old gas stove; the bedroom where I slept fitfully in the small hours of the night; and the front room where I wrote, directly opposite the huge stained-glass window portraying St. Jude. From the outside, I saw only the leaded outlines of his figure, like a giant paint-by-number portrait.

There was a small porch where I sat sometimes in the evening, aware of Frenchtown all around me. The house is still there and so is the church, and so is Frenchtown, although it isn't French anymore and was never a town to begin with. That first generation of French Canadians who gave the area its name have either died or live out their days in housing projects with terrible names like Sunset Park or Last Horizon. Most of their sons and daughters have left Frenchtown, although some remain in Monument in homes constructed during the boom years after World War II. As the Canucks moved out of Frenchtown, others moved in. First the blacks, who swarmed the streets and quickened the tempo of life, bringing jazz and blues from the ghettos of Boston and New York City and Chicago. The Puerto Ricans came next, mingling with the blacks and sometimes fighting with them, both races finally accommodating each other in a tentative and uneasy peace. Now the Puerto Ricans outnumber the blacks and the Canucks, and fill the air with spicy smells, the acrid odor of celluloid only a dim memory.

The shop whistles no longer blast through the air of Frenchtown. The old button shop ceased operation years ago, the building torn down to make room for a low-income housing development. The shirt factory closed its doors soon after World War II, windows boarded up, clapboards peeling like old skin while the city debated its future in an urban-renewal program that never happened. The Monument Comb Shop has a new identity and is now Monument Plastics, part of a conglomerate with headquarters in New York State. All kinds of toys, combs, flowerpots, footstools, boxes emerge from molding machines that operate twenty-four hours a day. My brother Armand is in charge of personnel and community relations, positions that were unknown during the Depression. He still lives in Frenchtown, in a ranch-style home, with a swimming pool in the backyard, one of the new streets laid out on the site of the old municipal dump. He is married to the former Sheila Orsini, who was employed as a secretary in the office of the shop. At the time of which I write they had three sons: Kevin, who was thirteen, Dennis, eleven, and Michael, nine, and a daughter, Debbie, who was six.

Armand was a comfort to my father in his old age, although they argued constantly.

My father was contemptuous of plastic. “Fake stuff,” he called it.

“But safer than celluloid,” Armand countered.

“Safe but cheap. A celluloid comb, now. We still have some in the house. They never wear out.”

“But they can catch fire,” Armand pointed out.

My father snorted and lapsed into silence.

“What's the matter with us, Paul?” Armand asked me later. “I always get under his skin. Why do we always argue? I try to be a good son. Christ, I followed his footsteps into the shop. …”

“Age, time,” I said. “That's what he's mad about. Not you or me or anybody.”

My father sat on the piazza bundled against the chill, the thin sunlight not warm enough to bake his bones. I sat with him several times a week after my stint at the typewriter. He always rose to embrace me when I arrived, his cheek dry and smooth next to mine, like old paper that might crumble at a touch. His troubles began when he was struck by a car on Spruce Street and thrown into the gutter. His injuries hastened the aging process, the way an early frost kills flowers still in bloom, and he was forced to retire early from the shop. I think he loved his days at the shop despite the hard years.

Although I visited him regularly and lived only a few streets away, he was unhappy because I refused to move in with him and my mother. “A waste of money,” he said, “throwing it away on rent. And food—isn't your mother's cooking good enough for you anymore?”

“I eat more of her food than ever before,” I told him. My mother pressed casseroles and pies and cakes and cookies on me when I visited or brought them to me when she dropped in to see me, which she did every day or so.

“He's a writer,” my mother called in my defense from inside the house. “He needs to be alone when he writes. He doesn't need an old hen like me or an old rooster like you bothering him….”

My sisters the twins, Yvonne and Yvette, were regular visitors to my parents’ home, although Yvette lived in Gardner, a few miles away, and Yvonne in Worcester, a forty-five minute drive. They spent most of their visits in the kitchen with my mother and were affectionate with my father in an ab-sentminded kind of way, maternal toward him, as if they were mothers instead of daughters. It had been my mother's fancy to dress them identically when they were young. Yvette and Yvonne dressed differently when they grew up— Yvette tended toward tailored clothing in subdued colors, Yvonne loved flouncy dresses and bright hues and high heels. Sometimes when the light caught her in a certain way, she reminded me of Rosanna, and my heart ached. When Yvette and Yvonne visited, the house was filled with laughter and small talk. The talk was of babies and recipes and hair styles and sales and it was all jolly and happy and light. They each had three children, two sons and a daughter each as if the pattern of their dual identity remained intact despite the changes the years had brought. Yvonne's children were Brian who was eleven, Donna, ten, and Timothy, who had just turned eight. Yvette's children were Richard, ten, Laura, nine and Bernard, six.