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 fres
h 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.
A way to break the silence occurred to me. Did I have the nerve to bring up the subject?
Astonishingly, he brought it up himself.
“You know the picture, Paul? The one they took up in Canada before we came to the States?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“I have to talk to you about that picture,” he said, looking at me with those penetrating eyes. “That's the reason I came home this time.”
“I've looked at it a thousand times,” I said, studying his face, the lines of weariness enclosing his mouth, the dark pouches like bruises under his eyes. “I've always wondered about it.”
“Tell me what you've wondered about, Paul.”
“Well, you're supposed to be in the picture. Mémère and Pépère are. And my father. And all the uncles and aunts. Everybody except you …”
“Yes,” he said. “All except me.” His voice sad, wistful.
Gathering my courage, I said: “It's a big mystery, Uncle Adelard. Everybody wonders about you and the picture. I mean, were you there or not? Or were you just playing a prank?”
“It was a prank, Paul,” he said.
“Oh.”
“What's the matter?” he asked. “You look disappointed.”
“It's crazy, Uncle Adelard,” I said. “But I always hoped that you hadn't played a trick, that you hadn't just ducked out of the picture, that you …” My words dribbled away, sounding foolish suddenly.
“That I'd disappeared?” he asked. “Into thin air?”
I nodded, my cheeks flushed, feeling ridiculous.
“But I did,” he said.
Blinking, I asked: “Did what?”
“Disappeared.”
“But you said it was a prank.”
Or was he still playing a prank at this moment but this time on me alone?
“It was a prank, Paul. I had found out only a day or two before the picture that …” Now it was his turn to give up on words, to frown and look again at the rain slanting down.
“What had you found out, Uncle Adelard?”
My voice echoed strangely on the piazza. Did I already know?
The rain began to fall harder, hissing as it struck the ground. I looked away from him, at the steeples of St. Jude's shrouded in mists, barely visible above the three-deckers. I listened for other sounds in the rain—a car horn, a dog's bark, bird's cry, footsteps, voices, anything—but there was nothing. My uncle and I were alone in a world of our own.
“Paul,” he called.
I continued looking at the steeples as they wavered in the wet gray sky.
“Paul,” he called again.
Reluctantly, I turned to him.
He was not there.
I stared at the chair in which he had been sitting. It was vacant. His hat was still on the floor beside the chair. The piazza was empty but I had not heard his departure, had not heard his footsteps going across the floor and down the stairs. Yet I didn't feel as if I were alone on the piazza. I felt his presence there, as if he were hiding, just out of sight, a small distance away. Felt also that his eyes were upon me, studying me, watching me.
I blinked and he was there again.
Sitting in the chair, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap, the bandanna around his neck.
In the moment before he appeared, the air in the vicinity of the chair shimmered, as if a thousand stars had congregated, clashed, and dissolved in a burst of brilliance. Out of the brilliance, my uncle Adelard emerged.
He was looking at me with the saddest eyes I had ever seen.
he strike at the Monument Comb Shop began during the dog days of August, in weather so hot and humid that we were warned by our parents to avoid dogs, which might go on a rampage, mad with the heat, and attack not only complete strangers but people they knew, especially children.
We learned about the strike when my father came home an hour la
te from work and announced, after he had washed his face and hands at the kitchen sink: “We walk out tomorrow. If they don't meet our demands.”
My mother looked up sharply.
“No, I didn't vote to strike,” he said as we gathered at the table. “But you have to go with the majority. We agreed to that. I don't think this is the right time to strike but I'll do what the others voted. We have to show we're united.”
This was the longest speech my father ever made about the troubles at the shop, unlike my Uncle Victor, who never stopped talking about it.
I wanted to say to my father: At least you won't have to work in the Rub Room during the strike.
Excitement crackled in the air when the men gathered in the streets and marched to the shop in the first days of the strike. Everyone was good-natured, shouting and joking, and there was a lot of clowning around—Mr. Landry, who called the quadrilles at the Saturday night dances at St. Jean's Hall, led the parade with a baton like the kind used by drum majors. But the atmosphere changed as the heat intensified in the next few days and men began to realize that there would be no paychecks at the end of the week. The sun was merciless during the daytime when the men picketed the shop, and nightime brought little relief, as if the three-deckers and the pavement had stored up heat all day long and released it after dark.
The absence of paychecks gradually showed its effects, particularly in the Frenchtown stores. Mr. Dondier told me that my services were no longer needed, that he would do without extra help sweeping the floors and delivering orders and packing potatoes into peck bags. He touched my arm, his face long with regret. Miss Fortier, who operated the Lau-rentian Gift Shoppe next door to Lakier's, would close her doors “temporarily” at the end of October and never open them again. Someone said she went back to Canada.
When my uncle Victor dropped in to visit, the strike was the big topic.
“We'll never make up what we're losing,” my father insisted. “Depression is no time for a strike.”