My fingers stumble as I finish this report and sadness holds me in its grip. Am I sad because reading the manuscript has brought back the memory of days long gone that could have been happier for all of us? Writing about Paul and his narrative has been like looking into a mirror as I typed. A trick mirror, maybe, like the kind found in carnivals and amusement parks. The tricky mirror of memory—making it difficult to separate the real from the unreal.
I believe what I have written is the truth, however. I am convinced that I have sifted fact from fantasy, fiction from reality. Thus, what Paul has written in the manuscript is fiction. Without any doubt or conjecture. To believe otherwise is to believe in the impossible.
My grandfather, Detective Jules Roget, does not look like a detective, and he does not look like a grandfather, either. I think of detectives as tough-talking private eyes in the movies and I think of grandfathers as kindly old men with potbellies, silver hair, and spectacles perched on red noses. My grandfather Roget is not like either of those. His voice is soft, almost a murmur. He has only touches of gray in his iron-black hair. He is tall and slim, without the slightest hint of a paunch.
He also does not resemble the person who wrote the report on the manuscript. That is, obviously, the side of him I have never seen—the police detective whom suspects face under questioning. Yet I was grateful for that relentless logic, that impersonal parade of evidence he marched past my eyes in the report.
Paul's narrative of life in Frenchtown fifty years ago had enchanted me. I delighted in the autobiographical overtones simply because I have devoured every piece of material about him and here was new, exciting stuff. The people in the story—from his parents to his uncle Victor to his best friend, Pete, and even the brief appearance of my grandfather—held me in thrall. I never for a moment considered that the narrative was more than just that—the fragment of a novel, fiction. In fact, as I read the manuscript I realized that Paul had been reaching into new territory, the realm of fantasy. I grieved for all the lost possibilities because this probably was the last thing he had written.
However, confronted by Meredith's reaction to the story, her doubts, her veiled hints, her troubled countenance, I had allowed myself to regard the manuscript as possibly, just possibly, autobiographical. What if… Paul Roget's own question coming back to haunt me.
Having finished my grandfather's report, I slumped with relief on the sofa. The fade, of course, had to be fiction. To think otherwise was to confront the impossible, as Gramps, that most rational of men, had pointed out. That way madness lies— Shakespeare, whom Professor Waronski quotes incessantly.
“Finished?” Meredith asked a few moments later, peeking around the corner of the bedroom doorway. She had sequestered herself with a Broome manuscript while I read the report.
Hugging the report to my chest, I nodded.
“Impressed?” she asked as she sat beside me on the sofa.
“Very,” I said. “It was like a dash of cold water, Meredith. Just what I needed.”
“I agree,” Meredith said. “When I first read it, I clutched it just as you're doing. Like holding on to a lifesaver.”
When I first read it … Shit—would the doubts begin once more?
She evidently saw my face change—did color drain from my cheeks again or did I just register surprise? She said: “Please bear with me, Susan, okay? Let me play the devil's advocate for a little while. …”
Again I nodded, not trusting my voice this time.
“You see, Susan, what your grandfather writes in his report isn't entirely contrary to my interpretation of the manuscript if we put the fade aside for a moment.” This was the first time she had mentioned the word. “Can we?”
“Let's,” I said, still stingy with words.
“Okay, then, invisibility aside, I am certain that Paul was writing the truth. About his family, his aunt Rosanna, his friend Pete, the whole bit. You see, your grandfather continually betrays himself in that report. For instance, he saw his aunt Rosanna one way, Paul saw her another way. But he does not deny her existence. In fact, he doesn't deny the existence of any of the people in the manuscript. He only denies the way Paul portrayed them. And who can say whether your grandfather is right and Paul is wrong? The point is that the characters in the manuscript were clearly recognizable to him. And this is not true of Paul's other work, except for the father and son in Bruises and even then the resemblances to Paul and his father were superficial. In none of his other novels or stories were the characters recognized as real people. But in this manuscript, everybody is. The first names are real names.”
I got up and went to the window and looked out at the night, the lights winking distantly across the river, the water pebbled like a certain kind of black leather. Lights flashed in the air as a helicopter whirled its way through the sky. I sensed that Meredith was waiting for me to say something.
“But where does all this lead us, Meredith?” I asked, turning back to her.
“It leads us to the fact that Paul Roget has written his most realistic, autobiographical novel yet. And if he wrote it that way, then he wanted us to believe what happened in the novel. And we must believe all of it or none of it.”
“I have a theory,” I said, not certain whether I did have a theory at all. “Maybe Paul had to create a real world so that the reader would be forced to believe the fantasy. But that doesn't mean the fantasy was real.” A dart of pain appeared above my left eye, like an old enemy, asserting itself when I've pulled an all-nighter before a big exam or have written long past the arrival of fatigue.
Meredith joined me at the window, our shoulders brushing. “I never tire of this view,” she said. “It's always changing, never the same.”
The intimacy of the night and the moment gave me courage. “Why are you so adamant, Meredith?” I asked. “Why do you insist that Paul was writing the truth?” Plunging on, I said: “Do you realize what the truth would mean? That the fade was real? That Paul had the ability to render himself invisible? That he killed a man fifty years ago in Monument?” I almost shuddered saying these words.
“I know, I know,” she murmured wearily, regretfully, leaning her forehead against the windowpane, her eyes closed. “It's crazy, but …”
I waited, hoping she would say: You're right, your grandfather is right, let's call it a day, let's put out the lights and go to sleep. Weariness enveloped my own body and that vulnerable spot above my eye pulsed with a brighter pain.
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 manage
d 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….”