Fade. Part 7

*less me, Father, for I have sinned," I whispered in the darkened confessional, the words hissing against the screen that separated me from Father Gastineau. I had chosen him for my confession because he was the youngest of the three curates at St. Jude's. "It has been June since my last confession. I received absolution and made my penance."

The old formula completed, I hesitated, unsure of myself despite my careful plans. To gain time, I called upon my usual 'start-off' sin, the venial sin to ease my way into the more important transgressions. "I lost my temper, three times."

One of the church's huge doors closed gently, almost with a sigh. Otherwise, all was silence.

I had chosen late afternoon, the final moments of the confessional hours, to make my move, waiting in a distant pew for the penitents to thin out. I had also argued silently with myself, wondering why I was there in the first place. Since Armand and I had been successful in deceiving our mother about confession earlier in the summer, she had not brought up the subject. Yet, as August dwindled, the sudden cool nights hailing the imminent end of summer, I felt a need to confess and had made a total of all my sins. The total was overwhelming. Get rid of them and die in peace if you are struck by lightning, I told myself.

Father Gastineau cleared his throat and I swallowed painfully, bringing my lips within an inch of the screen, and said: "I have touched the breast of a female, Father."

"A female?" the priest asked, his voice m.u.f.fled, as if he were trying to strangle a cough.

I had thought long and hard about how I would confess my sin. I could not say that I had touched a girl's a girl's breast since that would be a lie. Priests had an uncanny way of knowing whether the penitents were young or old. How could I confess that I had touched the breast of a grown woman without opening the door to a lot of questions? Finally, I had settled on breast since that would be a lie. Priests had an uncanny way of knowing whether the penitents were young or old. How could I confess that I had touched the breast of a grown woman without opening the door to a lot of questions? Finally, I had settled on female. female.

"Yes," I said, feeling my Adam's apple jumping. "A female."

"And this female, how many times did you touch her breast?"

It was always "how many times," the inescapable arithmetic of confession. "Once," I said.

"Only once?"

"Yes."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing."

"You did not go-further?"

"No." My lungs burned. I had been holding my breath.

"If you see this female again, do you plan to touch her as you did before?"

"No," I said fervently.

Pause. My fate hanging in that pause, teetering as if on a high wire.

"Anything more?" he finally asked.

My first instinct was to say no and end this torture, but I had come this far after all these agonizing weeks and did not want to turn back.

"Yes." I lowered my head as I said the words I had rehea.r.s.ed countless times: "Father, I must confess a sin that I'm not sure is a sin."

A sigh, almost a moan, came from the darkness on the other side of the screen. Had I made a mistake, waited too late in the day for confession? Was he too tired after hours of being besieged by sins to deal with a complicated question? But what else could I have said? I did not know whether the fade was a sin. In the shed or in the cellar, I had practiced fading, learned to endure the frightening limbo of the pause and the excruciating flash of pain. I had learned to absorb the cold, as well. After a while I was able to slip in and out of the fade easily, staying unseen for longer periods of time, my body becoming accustomed to it, the way eyes become accustomed after a while to the dark. The experience of the fade was always disappointing, however. The fade did not provide the freedom it promised. I had the power to pa.s.s through the streets unnoticed, to spy on people, listen to private conversations, enter stores and homes and public buildings, unseen, undetected. But for what purpose? Steal from Lakier's or the five-and-ten downtown? Sneak into the Plymouth without buying a ticket? These acts were too petty for the fade. I did not want to steal. Anyway, how could I take anything from a store when the thing I took remained in sight? And where would I hide it later? I was not a thief, did not plan to be one.

"Tell me about this sin that you are not sure is a sin," Father Gastineau said.

I tried to gauge his att.i.tude. Did he sound impatient, angry, tired? Or receptive?

"Don't be afraid," he added, more gently.

"Is it a sin to spy on people?" I asked. "To watch them when they don't know you're there?"

"Are you a peeping torn?" His voice cracked, like a piece of wood snapping.

"No," I said. But perhaps I had been. "Yes," I amended. "I spied on people. Saw them ... doing things they should not be doing...."

"Listen, my boy," he said, so close to my face that I felt the breeze of his breath. "I will not ask you what you saw. If you saw a sin being committed, then you have the necessity to remain quiet. If you tell others about it, then you become a part of that sin. The privacy of people is sacred to them. If what they do in private is a sin, then it is up to them to confess. You must do no further spying. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I said. But I did not understand. Was spying a sin or not? It seemed to me that he had avoided the issue, had not given me an answer. I sagged with relief, however, had escaped an explosion of anger, and I dropped my chin to my laced fingers on the small confessional shelf.

"Anything more?" the priest asked, brusque suddenly, stirring in his chair.

"No," I said. Hadn't he heard enough?

"For your penance, you will recite one rosary. For the rest, you will keep away from this female and not touch her again. And you will stop spying. Now, say a good act of contrition...."

Only later, running homeward, face lifted to the cool breeze of a waning summer afternoon, did I realize that I had forgotten to confess my other great sins: the impure thoughts at night and the spasms of ecstasy they brought.

Would the sinning never stop?

"Hey, Pete," I called. "Pete ... are you coming out?"

No answer from inside his tenement.

"Aw, come on, Pete," I cried, listening to my voice echo back at me in the twilight, the neighborhood caught in after-supper stillness.

Again no answer, although I knew Pete was home and so were most of his family.

I kicked at the bottom step and drifted aimlessly toward the street. Twilight was smoothing the harsh edges of things, bringing with it an aching loneliness. I thought of the fade and how it had set me apart from the rest of the world, my world, Frenchtown. From my family. From Pete. He and I had barely communicated in the past two weeks. I had purposely avoided him at first and then he had stayed out of my way. At the beginning, I had been relieved that there were s.p.a.ces between us. I had been dazzled by the fade, had had to find a way to live with it.

"What do you want?" Pete yelled, suddenly appearing at the window.

I shrugged. "Want an ice cream?" I called back. Lakier's still sold two-for-a-nickel cones and I had eight cents in my pocket.

"I'm not hungry," he said, his face disappearing from view.

I strolled down Sixth Street, without destination in mind, and came to a halt at an abandoned garage, its doors torn off, next to the Luciers' house, one of the few bungalows on the street. Melting into the shadows of the garage, I thought of the fade and the pause and the flash of pain. Piano music drifted from the house. Yolande Lucier, who was in my cla.s.s, was singing "All alone by the telephone," her voice sweet and plaintive in the evening air.

I, too, was all alone but no telephone at our house. Who would I call on the telephone, anyway? No one I knew had a telephone, either. Call my aunt Rosanna in Montreal? Impossible. No one had heard from her since she left Monument.

If only my aunt Rosanna were here in Frenchtown, still at my grandfather's house ... but I turned from the thought. It would be a sacrilege to consider the fade for such a thing, especially so soon after my confession. I thought of her far away in Canada, men waiting outside her shop when she closed for the day. If love was so wonderful that they wrote poems and songs about it, why was I so miserable?

"Are you in there?"

Pete's face was dim and pale as he peeked into the garage. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" Curiosity diluted the anger in his voice, however.

"Nothing," I said, an answer that was always accepted, even by your parents, although they'd look annoyed.

"Do you want to hear the last chapter of The Ghost Rider?" The Ghost Rider?" he asked. he asked.

Armand had already told me that the phantom cowboy had turned out to be the storekeeper in town. But I said: "Sure," responding to his gesture of friends.h.i.+p, glad that we were pals again, even for a short time.

On the cement floor of the garage, our backs to the stuccoed wall, the sounds of Yolande's voice in endless repet.i.tion of "All Alone" like a poignant soundtrack, Pete told me, scene by scene, the events of that final chapter.

Then we sat in silence as Yolande began her piano exercises, the notes harsh and discordant.

"School starts next week," Pete said, disgust in his voice.

He had expressed the thought that was on my mind and the main reason why I had called to him earlier. I knew that our friends.h.i.+p was nearing its end. Although Pete and I were the same age-we were born exactly a month apart-he was two grades behind me in school. School was enemy territory to Pete. He became sullen and brooding, arrogant to teachers, failed tests, started fights in the schoolyard, a sharp contrast to the carefree summer adventurer. And he often looked at me with the eyes of a stranger.

"Junior high for me," I said. The Silas B. Thornton Junior High School downtown in the center of Monument near City Hall and the public library. A quiver of antic.i.p.ation- and apprehension-went through me as I thought of the school term that lay ahead and the drastic changes it would bring. My cla.s.s had graduated from St. Jude's in June, the boys in blue serge jackets and white flannel trousers, the girls in white dresses, wearing delicate crowns to match the dresses. There were tears in Sister Angela's eyes as she looked at us standing at attention. "You will never be this pure again," she had said, her rosary in her clasped hands.

Her words had been prophetic, at least for me. Turning to Pete, I was seized by an impulse to tell him about the fade and the night I had watched him matching cards with Artie LeGrande and what I had seen in the back room at Dondier's Market. We had shared a thousand secrets-why not this, the greatest secret of them all?

"Pete," I said.

"Yeah?" Brooding, chin almost touching his chest.

Yet, if I could not tell a priest in the darkness of a confessional, how could I tell Pete Lagniard? I wanted to say: Pete, I can make myself disappear. Become invisible. Like in that movie you saw a while back where the man wrapped himself in bandages.

"Remember that movie you saw, the one I missed because I had a toothache?" I asked.

"What movie?"

You must never tell a living soul, my uncle had warned.

"Never mind," I said.

Yolande was no longer practicing her exercises and the garage was spooky with silence.

"Will we always be friends?" Pete asked.

"Always," I said.

But the word sounded hollow and empty in the stillness of that Frenchtown evening.

*here were three courses of study available at Silas B. Thornton Junior High School, but Sister Angela had ordered everyone in our eighth-grade graduating cla.s.s to sign up for the commercial course.

"No one for the cla.s.sical course/' she said. "That's for the rich ones on their way to college."

"How about the general course?" my cousin Jules asked. Jules was never bashful about asking questions.

"The general course is for good-for-nothings," she said. "If you sign for the general course, you might as well quit school and work in the shop."

So it had been settled and I found myself with courses in bookkeeping and mechanical drawing and shorthand, all dull and dry and deadly, preparing me for-what?-a job in an office?

But when I arrived at Silas B. Thornton Junior High School on the first day of school, the courses suddenly did not matter. The corridors were filled with activity and excitement. Teachers in suits or dresses, not the black-and-white habits of the nuns, stood at their cla.s.sroom doors and talked and joked with students as they pa.s.sed. Bells rang, doors slammed, laughter burst from cla.s.srooms, and the suns.h.i.+ne splas.h.i.+ng through the windows was brighter than any sun that ever shone through the windows of St. Jude's Parochial School.

My homeroom teacher, Miss Walker, took my breath away. She wore a red dress and lipstick to match. Her high heels clicked rhythmically as she walked to and fro in front of the cla.s.s, checking off our names.

Every forty-five minutes bells signaled the changing of cla.s.ses, and this was the most exciting part of the day. Hustling into the corridor, finding my next cla.s.sroom, I thought of the interminable days in Sister Angela's cla.s.s, from eight in the morning to three-thirty in the afternoon, monotonous, suffocating, and wondered how I had endured such a terrible routine. Here at Silas B. (already I had learned to call the school by its popular name), we changed cla.s.ses seven times a day, new teachers, new subjects, and-marvel of all marvels-a daily study period in which to do nothing but read or daydream or glance surrept.i.tiously at the new people I was encountering who, I could tell by their names-Buchanan, Talbot, Weidman, Kelly, Borcelli-were not French but Yankee and Protestant and Jewish and Irish and Italian. My head danced with color and light and laughter and voices and ringing bells as I stumbled down the stairs that afternoon to meet my cousin Jules across the street.

Of all my cousins, he was the closest to me in age and interests. If Pete Lagniard was my summertime conspirator, Jules was my closest friend during the school year. We usually parted company in the summer because he played baseball in the Neighborhood League and was a patrol leader in St. Jude's Scout Troop 17. Pete and I were renegades, with an aversion for organized fun, preferring the Plymouth or roaming the streets and fields, making up our own games, raiding gardens in the evening and distributing the tomatoes and cuc.u.mbers to the families of Alphabet Soup and galloping off on our imaginary horses.

When summer ended, my cousins and I were brought together again and I was always drawn to Jules. Jules and I loved to read. On crisp fall nights or wintry afternoons, we journeyed downtown to the Monument Public Library and borrowed books. There was a limit of five books per patron and by going together we doubled our quota and swapped the books back and forth. We read everything and anything from Tom Swift to Penrod and Sam, books on travel, pirates, explorations, books with pictures and without pictures. Pete Lagniard and I gobbled up comic books in the summertime and marveled at Superman and Terry and the Pirates. But Jules and I found literary treasures in the library, and we ran down the street whooping with glee and spilling the books in excitement the day Miss Wheaton, the tiny, whispering librarian, issued our adult cards. Which gave us permission to invade the stacks containing grown-up books that had always been forbidden to us.

Jules showed no evidence of glee at this moment, however.

"i hate that place," he declared, handsome face suddenly pinched and sour as he tilted his chin at red-brick Silas B., through whose doors hundreds of kids were pouring.

When I didn't reply, he said: "Don't you?"

I merely shrugged, not wanting to betray him.

"We don't belong there," he said. "We'll never catch up." By this he meant that we were joining the school in the ninth grade, and would be leaving at the end of the year for Monument High. "These kids have been together since the first grade. My homeroom teacher called Raymond LeBlanc a Canuck. But not in a nice way. Said it like it was a dirty word."

"My homeroom teacher is beautiful," I said. "She likes the movies. She saw every chapter of The Ghost Rider. The Ghost Rider. Cripes, Sister Angela thinks going to the movies is a sin, a venial sin on weekdays, a mortal sin on Sunday." Cripes, Sister Angela thinks going to the movies is a sin, a venial sin on weekdays, a mortal sin on Sunday."

"I'm sitting behind a Jew," Jules said. "Her name is Stein. Her father owns the Vanity Shoppe where women buy all their fancy clothes. She looked at me and wrinkled her nose. Like I was a piece of s.h.i.+t...."

"Changing cla.s.ses is great," I offered. How could he possibly find fault with that particular phase of Silas B. ? "The day flies by ..."

"The cafeteria food is junk," he said. "I hate vegetable soup. And the sandwich was terrible. Salmon, the bones still in it ..."

"They've got a school magazine," I said. "A literary magazine. Anybody can submit stories and they'll print them if they're good enough."

Jules stopped walking and turned to me.

"You're a Canuck, Paul. I don't think your stories will ever be good enough for them."

"Come on, Jules," I said. "Give the place a chance."

We walked together in silence. I wanted to tell him that I had met my first Protestant that day, but dared not. A moment after Miss Walker had called the roll, checking attendance, my math book fell to the floor with a dull thud. The foot of the kid behind me tried to kick the book away but a hand shot out, grabbed his ankle and twisted it, causing a soft howl of pain. I looked up to see who had prevented the kick. That was how I met Emerson Winslow. I had never known anyone with two last names before. He smiled at me and winked, a lazy closing and opening of one eye, a wink that said: Take it easy, don't take any of this-the foot, or even life-too seriously. A lock of blond hair fell on his forehead. The sweater he wore was like no other sweater I had seen before. Beige, soft, not like wool at all but as if made of melting b.u.t.terscotch. I had never seen anyone so at ease with himself, languid, casual. If a bomb exploded, I was sure Emerson Winslow would be unaffected, would simply brush himself off and walk away, untouched, amused by it all.

But I didn't mention Emerson Winslow or anything else about Silas B. to Jules as we walked through downtown Monument, past the park with all the statues, and reached the tracks and the railroad signals that served as an entrance to Frenchtown.

As we approached the corner of Fifth and Water, I spotted my uncle Adelard leaning against a mailbox, his hat tipped over his eyes, the blue bandanna around his neck. He did not wave or beckon or make any sign. But I knew he was waiting for me.

During the last days of that summer and the first days of fall, my uncle Adelard gave me instructions in the fade. Not exactly instructions, of course. He provided me with the basic information that I required, although he spoke reluctantly and I felt he was holding something back. We strolled the streets of Frenchtown and paused now and then while I asked questions or he offered information. Even now, there are places in Frenchtown that are forever connected with memories of Uncle Adelard and the things we talked about.

On the steps of St. Jean's Hall on Fourth Street, while the sound of colliding billiard b.a.l.l.s came through the open windows: "How did you know I was the one, Uncle Adelard?"

"The glowing, Paul. I was told by my uncle Theophile to watch for it, a brightness around the body. He said the nephew with the fade would display the glowing to me. Just as the fader in the next generation will show it to you. One evening when you were just a baby, I was visiting your ma and pa. For a few minutes we were alone-your mother was was.h.i.+ng dishes, your father was filling the oil jug for the stove. I looked at you in the crib and saw the skin glowing, as if light was pa.s.sing through your veins. And, of course, I knew you were the one. Then the waiting began. Between the time the glowing appears and the fade manifests itself, many years may pa.s.s. For you it's happening at thirteen. With me, it was sixteen. The next generation, who knows? So you have to watch and wait, Paul."

"But suppose I don't see the glowing. Suppose I'm not there when the fader is a baby?"