She sits on the edge of the chair as if being a nun does not allow her to sit comfortably. “We still pray for our men and women in uniform every day and night.”
She asks about my wounds and I tell her as little as possible. She says she will offer up special prayers for me. Finally, a question appears in her eyes.
“Nicole Renard,” I say. “I have been wondering where she is and what she’s doing. Her family left town while I was away. Do you know where they went, Sister?”
“Nicole, yes,” she says, nodding her head. “You were friends, n’est-ce pas?”
I nod in return, my interest quickening.
“Ah, Nicole,” she says, clasping her hands and then unclasping them. “A good girl. Smart. A secretive girl, too. But then, we all have secrets, eh, Francis?”
I shrug, not daring to say anything. A thought strikes me.
“Has she gone away to become a nun?” I ask. The possibility dashes my hopes of ever seeing her again.
“She’s gone away, yes, but not to become a nun,” Sister Mathilde says. “Life is not that simple, Francis, and neither is a calling to God.”
Glad that my face is behind the scarf and the bandage so that she can’t see my relief, I plunge ahead: “Do you know where she is, Sister?”
She picks up the beads of her dangling rosary and begins to draw them through her fingers.
“Her family has returned to Albany. I don’t think Mr. Renard was happy here in his job at the comb shop and went back to his old one …”
“Nicole, was she glad to go back, too?” I ask. Then, conscious that I am pressing: “Do you think it might be all right if I visit her?”
She sighs, her shoulders lifting and falling, the beads clicking together as her fingers move across them.
“I don’t know, Francis. She didn’t seem happy when she came to say goodbye. Was she unhappy because she was leaving Frenchtown? Or was there something else? Did you quarrel, like young people do?”
Now it’s my turn to sigh. If she asks that kind of question then she certainly doesn’t know what happened with Larry LaSalle that night at the Wreck Center.
“Maybe it would be good to have a friend from Frenchtown visit her. It’s hard for a young person like Nicole to move away from her friends …”
“Do you have her address, Sister?”
“She wrote me a letter a few weeks ago. She’s in her senior year now, at St. Anne’s. An academy of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit. I have her address upstairs in my bureau.”
A few minutes later, we stand at the front door, our fingers touching tentatively as we shake hands. I have never touched a nun’s flesh before. She lets go of my hand and touches the bandage on my face.
“I hope your face heals soon, Francis.”
“A doctor I met in the service is going to help me. He’s a specialist. I’ll be as good as new pretty soon.”
I wonder if it’s a special sin to lie to a nun.
A moment later, I leave Sister Mathilde and the convent behind, Nicole Renard’s address in my pocket.
For one lightning moment, I don’t recognize her, fail to see Nicole Renard in the girl who has just entered the room. The long black hair that fell to her shoulders is gone. Now her hair is cut short and combed straight and flat, with wisps touching her ears. Her cheekbones are more prominent and her eyes seem to be bigger. I look at her as if studying a painting in a museum, searching for that glimpse of mischief in her eyes, but see only the question there.
“Francis,” I announce, the way I did with Larry LaSalle and Sister Mathilde. “Francis Cassavant …”
She’s wearing a green cardigan, unbuttoned, a white blouse underneath and a green plaid skirt, the uniform of the school. I saw other students dressed the same way when I entered the academy ground earlier this afternoon.
As she advances toward me, her face is inscrutable, and I wonder if my coming is a mistake, whether I should have written to her first. Instead, I took the train from Monument to Worcester, then to Albany, and a taxi to St. Anne’s Academy. I convinced the nun at a desk in the administration building that I was harmless—a wounded veteran and a school friend of Nicole Renard’s from Monument—and she ushered me, finally, into this parlor of plain furniture, paintings of saints on the paneled walls and an old classroom clock whose hands are frozen at six-thirty.
“I couldn’t imagine who my visitor was,” Nicole says, walking past me to the floor-to-ceiling glass door that looks out over a tennis court and green fields beyond. Maybe it was foolish of me to think that we would hug or even shake hands. “You’ve come a long way,” she says.
“So have you.”
She frowns and her eyes show concern. “How are you, Francis? Your face …”
“This is nothing,” I say, gesturing toward the bandage and the scarf. “It’s not as bad as it looks. My skin is healing. There’s a doctor who took care of me overseas. He’s going to fix my face up—they call it cosmetic surgery—when he gets back from the service.” Still lying, but this time not to a nun.
“I heard about your Silver Star. Jumping on that grenade and saving all those lives. Remember Marie LaCroix? She writes me now and then, sends me news about Frenchtown.”
“How about you, Nicole? How are you doing?” I don’t want to talk about that grenade.
“Fine,” she says, but the softness is gone from her face and her voice is sharp and brittle. “The girls here are very nice. Nuns are nuns, of course, but at least they don’t use rulers for discipline here. So I’m fine.”
You don’t sound fine.
“I’m sorry about one thing,” she says. “What I did to you that day.”
“Did to me?” What day?
“I shouldn’t have said those things to you that day on the piazza. You weren’t to blame for what happened. I realized that later and went to your uncle Louis’ place but found out that you’d enlisted.”
We fall silent and she returns to the window, looking out as if something very interesting is going on out there. I join her and watch two girls in white blouses and shorts playing tennis. The ball when it lands doesn’t have the sharp sound of a Ping-Pong ball on a table. Or a gunshot.
“He’s dead, you know.” It’s easy to say the words because I’m not looking at her.
“I know.”
“He was …”
“Don’t say it, Francis. I know what he was. For a while there he made me feel special. Made us all feel special. Made me think I was a ballerina. Now I’m starting to find out what I am, who I really am …”
“Who are you, Nicole?”
“I told you—I’m just finding out.” As if impatient with the question. Then: “How about you, Francis? How are you? What are you going to do now that you’re back?”
I had prepared my answer while riding on the train. “Go to high school. College later. The GI Bill pays for college for veterans.” The words sound flat and false to my ears.
“Are you going to write? I always thought you’d be a writer.”
“I don’t know.” Which is the truth, for a change.
Silence falls between us, broken only by the swish of the tennis racket and the plopping of the ball outside and the distant laughter of a girl in a corridor somewhere.
“Why did you come here today?” she asks.
The question surprises me. Didn’t she know I’d track her down sooner or later?
“I wanted to see you again. To tell you that I’m sorry, too, for what happened. To see if …”
“If I was all right? To see if I had survived?” That bitter twist back in her voice again.
To see if maybe you could still be my girl. Which could maybe change my mind about the gun in my duffel bag.
“Well, I’m all right.” Lifts her hands, palms upward. “What you see is what you get.” A brave smile on her lips.
For once in my life, I’m not timid with her.
“I don’t think so, Nicole.”
“Don’t think what?”
/> “I don’t think you’re all right.”
She looks at me for a long moment, as still as the stopped clock on the wall.
“Did you ever tell anyone about it, Nicole? Did you ever talk about it?”
My question seems to startle her. “Who was I going to tell? My mother and father? It would have killed them, ruined them forever. Or maybe my father would have killed him, which would have been worse. The police? He was a big war hero. He didn’t beat me up. No visible wounds. So I didn’t tell anybody. All I said to my parents was that I didn’t want to live in Frenchtown anymore. My father was ready to come back here, anyway. This is his hometown. And we came. No questions asked. I think they were afraid to ask questions.”
She backs away, as if she needs to distance herself from me.
“Okay,” she says. “If I’m not exactly all right, then I’m …” She screws up her face, searching for the right word. “I’m adjusting. Getting better at it all the time. When Marie LaCroix started writing to me, that Monument postmark gave me the shivers. I tore up that first letter. But she persisted. Now I read them and even write back.” She sighs as if suddenly out of breath. “It’s almost three years, Francis, and sometimes I can think of Frenchtown without the shivers. And then …” Her voice falters and her eyes lower.
“And then I come walking in.”
She shakes her head. “For a minute there, when you said your name, I almost panicked. And I’m sorry. Because you were part of the good times, Francis. Always so shy, I couldn’t help teasing you. Those movie matinees. Our long talks walking home.” Reminiscence gentles her voice.
So we talk about those days and she confesses that she really didn’t like those cowboy serials and their fake endings every week but pretended to for my sake and I tell her that I was embarrassed that my palm was always wet when we held hands and she says her palm was wet, too. She says that Marie LaCroix was thinking of becoming a nun, which should liven up any convent. She tells me about the routine at St. Anne’s. That she wants to be a teacher, English maybe. She asks me about the war and I keep it light, telling her the harmless things, about the crowded troopship going across and how the quality of sunlight in France is different somehow than in America.
We run out of words. Silence falls between us, magnifying the sounds of the tennis game outside, the plopping of the ball.
Finally, she reaches toward me.
“Your poor face,” she says, moving as if to touch the white scarf, but I step away.
“I don’t want you to see me this way,” I tell her. “When the doctor fixes up my face, I’ll send you a picture.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” I answer, although I know that I will never keep that promise and that she probably doesn’t expect me to.
She looks at me with affection. But affection is not love. I’ve known all the time we’ve been talking that we’re filling up the empty spaces between us with words. I’ve known that I’ve lost her, lost her a long time ago.
“I’ve got to go,” I say. My gift to her.
She nods almost eagerly, glances at her watch. “The bell’s going to ring any minute now. We live by bells around here.”
She comes to me and doesn’t reach for my face this time but takes my hand.
“Still moist,” she says, tenderness in her voice. “My good Francis. My table tennis champion. My Silver Star hero …”
Hero. The word hangs in the air.
“I don’t know what a hero is anymore, Nicole.” I think of Larry LaSalle and his Silver Star. And my own Silver Star, for an act of cowardice.
“Write about it, Francis. Maybe you can find the answer that way.”
“Do you think I can?”
“Of course you can.” A trace of impatience in her voice. Like the Nicole Renard I knew at the Wreck Center just before the table tennis competition, urging me on. Telling me I could win.
She steps away. “Look, I’ve got to go.” Suddenly brisk and hurried.
“Can I come again sometime?” I ask, hating myself for asking because I know the answer. It’s as inevitable as the answer to an arithmetic problem Sister Mathilde wrote on the blackboard.
“Oh, Francis,” she says, the words weighted with sadness. And I see the answer in her eyes.
She reaches up and presses her lips against the damp scarf that covers my own lips. I expect a flash of pain but there is only the pressure of her lips, and I close my eyes, clinging to the moment, wanting it to last forever.
“Have a good life, Francis. Be whatever will make you happy.”
The bell rings, freezing us together for a moment, and when I open my eyes she is gone, the room vacant, her footsteps echoing down the hallway, until there’s only silence left.
In the railroad station, sitting on the hard bench, I watch the people coming and going in the late-afternoon rush, on their way somewhere, with suitcases and briefcases, a freckle-faced girl struggling under a knapsack on her back, two sailors sitting on the marble floor playing cards.
A master sergeant marches across the lobby as if leading an invisible platoon, uniform crisp, an array of ribbons on his chest. A young guy watches him, unshaven, wearing an old battle jacket, soiled and stained. He follows the sergeant with half-closed eyes, then sags against the wall, smiling dreamily. But the smile turns into a grimace and I wonder what he’s thinking of or remembering.
I remember what I said to Nicole about not knowing who the real heroes are and I think of my old platoon. Sonny Orlandi, Spooks Reilly and Blinky Chambers. Eddie Richards and his diarrhea. Erwin Eisenberg. Henry Johnson, hit by shrapnel. And those who died, Jack Smith and Billy O’Brien, and all the others. I think of Enrico, minus his legs, his arm. I think of Arthur Rivier, drunk and mournful that night in the alley. We were only there. Scared kids, not born to fight and kill. Who were not only there but who stayed, did not run away, fought the good war. And never talk about it. And didn’t receive a Silver Star. But heroes, anyway. The real heroes.
Maybe if I’m going to write as Nicole hopes I will, I should write about them.
Maybe I should buy a typewriter and get started.
Maybe I should try to find Dr. Abrams’ telephone number in Kansas City.
Maybe I should track down Enrico, check out those hospitals he told me about.
I should do all those things.
I think of Nicole.
I think of the gun inside the duffel bag at my feet.
I pick up the duffel bag and sling it over my shoulder. The weight is nice and comfortable on my back as I cross the lobby, heading for the exit and the next train to leave the station.
ROBERT CORMIER has been called “the single most important writer in the whole history of young adult literature.” His many acclaimed books include The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, Beyond the Chocolate War, Fade, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, We All Fall Down, Tunes for Bears to Dance To, In the Middle of the Night, Other Bells for Us to Ring, Eight Plus One, Tenderness, Heroes, Frenchtown Summer and The Rag and Bone Shop. His books have won many awards and have been translated into several languages, becoming modern classics. In 1991 he received the Margaret A. Edwards Award, honoring his lifetime contribution to writing for teens.
Robert Cormier, Heroes
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