Читать книгу Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes - Jan David Blais - Страница 5

“YOU WERE TELLING ME about yourself – the early years, Berkeley.”

The rain has stopped but the deck is still soaked, and with the wind leaves are everywhere. Have to get Joseph to do some picking up. “I’ll keep this short,” I say. “I was the first, then came nine more. It wasn’t for nothing our name was Flynn, if you follow me. Stevie was killed in France, he was Ma’s favorite, only nineteen, she took it very hard. Two others and I, we made it through.”

“Quite a record. Didn’t you feel lost in such a big family?”

“Being the oldest helped.” That little machine of his is on the whole time. “Why do you need that thing?” I say.

“The recorder? What’s wrong with it?”

“Just another damned gadget. I’m for cultivating the memory – otherwise where is it when you need it? There are even exercises you can do.”

“I’ll take that into consideration. If I remember, that is.”

“Now where was I?” I say. “Oh, yes, in Berkeley I had a mountain, too. Tamalpais, it was called, in Marin across the Bay. Those days I was a night person but being eighty-four now, I celebrate the dawn. Coming back here I see as a completion of the course, maybe a preview of the next act. I have a bet with myself there is a next act. Nobody knows, of course, but every year goes by I am more interested in the question, I’ll tell you. For me faith always was the problem, but my desire to believe never wavered, in fact these days it’s stronger than ever, as if bit by bit hope moved in and took over the place faith once was, or was supposed to be.”

“Tell me more about California.”

“We bought the house in forty-nine, a rambling one-story, eucalyptus everywhere, fragrant but a very dirty tree. Looking forward, we were, we had such plans. There was a stand of redwoods, new growth. I’ve thought about this a lot – wouldn’t you know those trees growing up and the students coming through, they turned out to be our family, our only family. Nowadays, all this technology, miracles in biology. Not so, then. Ah well, timing is everything. My friends said I lost it when Akiko passed and they were right. I was damned low, miserable – nobody you’d want to be around.”

“I take it Paul was a special person for you.”

“For both of us.” I have to pause to collect myself. “Well, enough of this.”

“Keep going. This is good!”

I put my hand up. “No, though I do appreciate the attention. Closest I’ll ever come to a four-part article. After all, what do you say about a teacher? A teacher’s glory is of the reflected variety – the doing’s more interesting than the telling.”

* * * * * * *

I’M NOT TELLING YOU ANYTHING NEW, GUS, but the war was all anybody ever talked about. The doorbell was an instrument of torture. That next ring could be the one telling you a brother, a son, a father wasn’t coming back. My Uncle Antoine’s oldest son Maurice didn’t come home. I knew him from the pictures in the place of honor on the mantle above our fireplace, and from the stories. The photo on the left has Maurice in the cockpit of his RCAF Spitfire during the Battle of Britain. In the other he leans against the wing of his P-38, his cap at a jaunty angle, a big grin on his face. It was in the P-38 he made those screaming low passes over our house before zooming straight up into the sky and away. My mother told me she asked him if that wouldn’t that get him in trouble. Maurice just shrugged. “Hell, what more can they do to me?” The next week he left for North Africa to fight the Nazis. Six months later he was dead.

Others from the family were also away in France and Germany and the Pacific, but Maurice was the family hero, the legend. Maurice also had a square named after him, another gold-lettered thank-you on a phone pole, this one near their home off Manton Avenue going toward North Providence. I thought about these things a lot.

Late afternoons I listened for the thud on our front step, pouncing on the smooth roll of the Evening Bulletin with its front-page maps and lines and arrows showing the Allies advancing across Europe, daggers aimed at the black heart of the Axis. The Pacific War was more complicated, vast areas with dots for islands, but the outcome would be the same, for bullies and murderers dumb enough to tangle with our country.

The war had theaters but nobody could tell me why they were called that. What did my sister making like she was a Christmas angel have to do with the war? Nor was the war anything like the clippings my mother kept in the folder with the green ribbon in her top drawer that she pulled out when she was feeling sad. She’d show us her original name, Fiona Kelley, under the picture of a pretty woman in some pose with men in suits smoking cigarettes. At such times she’d go on it seemed like hours, reciting from memory some play or other she’d been in before she quit to get married and have us. So, you see, to call the war a theater made no sense at all.

My real love were the comic strips. On darkearly winter afternoons, I would unfurl the Bulletin and sprawl over it, digging my elbows into the living room carpet. With Terry and the Pirates I flew the Hump, matching wits with the mysterious Dragon Lady and her band of wily, pinch-faced Orientals. I was Buzz Sawyer’s wingman on a carrier in mid-Pacific, our Wildcats tangling with the nimble Jap Zero. After supper, it was scrapbook time. My scrapbook was big to start with, eight strips to a page, and by now it bulged impressively. On close inspection you could see some of the ack-ack pounding Buzz or Terry were dried glue spots, but never mind, I lived for my heroes’ exploits against the little yellow people halfway across the world – strange, unfathomable creatures, more ominous even than the German or Italian prisoners you’d see pictures of. After all, that kind of person lived in our own neighborhood, the American kind, of course, not the enemy.

There were five of us. My father and mother, my brother Jim, four years older than me, and Catherine. Two years older, she possessed my mother’s fair skin and freckles, a wide mouth and a nose turned up at the end. Her red hair was a copy of my mother’s, only longer. My mother spent hours brushing it, this far-off look coming over her. “Caitlin, Caitlin,” she’d go on in a sing-song voice, “my little Caitlin,” putting it up one way, say in braids, then brushing it out and starting over again. To me this seemed a great waste of time, though Catherine loved it.

Most days after work my father played ball with Jim and me in our backyard. Summer was baseball, pitching and catching after supper on the long, still evenings. In the fall it was dark when he came home but we threw the football around, slipping and sliding on the leaves my mother would always say how about you people raking for a change. My father could really hum a football, he and Jim outdoing each other until somebody’d catch one wrong and jam a finger. He always took something off it for me because my hands were small but Jim would fire it so hard I had to turn sideways so when it slipped through my hands it wouldn’t raise a welt on my chest. When Jim was off with his friends, it was just Dad and me. Sometimes he’d return to his shop after dinner so I went looking for Omer or Angelo and we’d end up in the lot near the turnaround where there was more room and not as many windows.

“The shop” is what everybody called my father’s work, a big factory building down Manton Avenue beyond St. Teresa’s, almost to Olneyville. Julien Bernard, that was his name, he and my Uncle Antoine started the business, making tools and parts they sold to the mills. One New Year’s I remember them talking about how good business was during the war but Uncle Antoine’s face told me it was Maurice he was really thinking of.

We lived in this nice house and I, ti-Paul, had my own room. Most of my friends lived in tenements and shared a room with their brothers, or in the case of one person who I better not mention, a sister. The stairwells smelled of cooking, a stew of stale aromas, mostly cabbage. Some of them had linoleum floors and not just in the kitchen either, but living rooms and bedrooms too. The long hallways were great for sliding on those little rugs they don’t tack down. I didn’t think about my room and house and yard were better than my friends’. They were, well, different. If they happened to be better, that’s just the way things were. No big deal.

I can’t remember a time I didn’t love books. I remember trailing behind my mother to the library, a squat red-brick building quite far from our house, poring through the children’s books while she looked at the kind with no pictures. At night she often read to me. My father didn’t read much, not that he couldn’t, but he read the Bulletin and the French paper, also Life that came every Thursday, but he had no patience for anything else. In fact, sometimes he’d find me reading and would snatch the book away. “Paul,” he’d say, turning the book over and frowning, “such a waste of time, your nose always in a book. In life there are many useful things and none of them will you find in a book.”

The exception was Le Petit Prince, which he brought home to even the score with my mother who had given it to me in English. This was the one book he read to me, in French, of course, and as a joke between the two of us he called the hero “ti-Prince.” One day he showed me the author’s picture in the paper, an aviator who died like Maurice. The round face and snub nose, he looked just like me! Was this my future? When I grew up is that what I would look like?

I owned other books, mostly birthday or Christmas presents, which were a lot better than the handkerchiefs Tante Héloise always gave us. You didn’t have to unwrap her long flat gift to know what was it was. At this time my particular favorite was a small book you could read the regular way if you wanted, but with your thumb you could fold the pages back then riffle them forward and watch Commander Don Winslow of the U.S. Navy sink a U-Boat, the explosion and all!

Catherine’s Bobbsey Twins and Little Maidas books had small print and she always had them lined up super neat on her shelf. She brought home tests with “excellent” or “100,” and gold stars my mother would ooh and ah at. Not so Jim, who my mother called a project and once in a while had to see the nuns about. Between talking back and getting into fights Jim didn’t have much time left for studying. Jacques was his real name and everyone said he was big for his age. He was nearly as tall as my father and weighed a hundred pounds. One time my father bought him a set of weights which he spent a lot of time lifting in our garage. Jim made St. Teresa’s baseball and basketball teams the first time he tried out. He also had to repeat fourth grade.

At night I overheard my mother and father arguing about some scrape Jim had gotten himself into. I hope we survive until he’s old enough for La Salle, she would say, I can’t wait to hand him over to the Brothers. They know how to handle boys even if you don’t. When she talked like that my father would get mad but before long he’d break out laughing. He always took Jim’s side. When my mother was giving Jim a hard time about this or that, my father would put his arm around him and wink, which drove my mother wild.

“Wait til you’re on the football team at La Salle, Jacques!” he’d say. “Then they’ll see what a Bernard’s made of.”

My brother just sat there grinning, lapping it up. Then my father would turn to me. “As for you, ti-Paul, you’re never any trouble, are you?” Again he’d laugh, but it wasn’t the same, not the same at all.

Sometimes after one of their arguments my mother would storm out, crying, and head for her mother’s the next street over, on the bottom floor of a three-decker, she lived. I’d wait in my room, alert for her step, worried she might never come back. But she always did.

Jim was my father’s prize, though his temper was actually more like my mother’s when she “got her Irish up,” as my father called it. As a girl, Catherine belonged more to my mother. So where did this leave me? My mother said she saw in me the finer qualities, whatever that meant. “You’re destined for great things, Paul,” she would say, but later I came to see I was her foil to get back at my father’s coarse and grimy trade, at his roughhouse Canadian clan who cut and banged and shaped metal for a living, those that weren’t still on the farms up north, that is, or working in the mills.

If Jim was hearty and big for his age, I was just the opposite – undersized and, for the most part, compliant and unobtrusive. Even my face was a compromise, an average of my father’s swarthy round face and my mother’s sharp features, though my slender frame was clearly the Kelley side of the family. Each morning in the mirror I observed those large dark eyes staring back as I fought with my cowlicks, the only unruly part of me. At least I wasn’t frail or sickly, though once a year I’d come down with something and be forced to bed, staring out the window through coldsodden eyes. Later, though, when I was in school and this happened, after the fever wore off I enjoyed pleasant days reading and listening to the radio. I was a sociable boy with many friends, but also enjoyed being alone. Winter afternoons, stretched out on the smooth hardwood floor of my bedroom, meant Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Captain Midnight’s secret messages which when they were longest and most crucial, you knew the call for supper was sure to interrupt your decoding. Before bedtime it was the Green Hornet and the Shadow. As darkness fell I listened, entranced and terrified, compacting myself into the space between my bureau and the closet door, hoping somehow to escape the forces of evil.

It was on this floor I heard a solemn voice announce that a great man, FDR, had died, and some time later, heard the crowds cheering the end of the war. What a night that was! My parents took me downtown to see the jubilant throngs. Parades welcomed our men back, but wonderful as this was, I was troubled. What would become of Buzz and Terry? The war won, what would they do now? Fortunately, events would overtake my fears, as I awaited my own first great adventure – school.