Stephen O'Connor

Powers and Principalities

"Superman was trapped. He was like, stuck, and he couldn’t move.”
“How could that happen if there was no green Kryptonite?”
Doug and Darin were sitting on the asphalt, leaning against the cement steps of St. Patrick’s School. The grammar school cacophony of shouts, threats, howls, challenges, screams and cackles skirled through the sunlit air, while a few nuns stood like dark silent sentinels amid the throng. One of them, Sister Boniface, held in the folds of her black sleeve the brass bell with its long slim handle, which, when rung, cast a magical and death- like silence over the school yard. The students would freeze, reminding Doug of The Twilight Zone episode in which the man pushed down the button on his time-freezing stopwatch. The second ringing of the bell would bring the students back to life, and they would form lines by class in silence, the nuns indicating with rigid outstretched arms where each one should begin.
“You know what hydraulic power is Doug?”
“Uhm, it’s wicked powerful, right?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly how it works, but I think it’s like when you put anything in a garbage truck and it just crunches it up…”
“But you couldn’t crunch up Superman,” Doug said with quiet assurance.
“No, he’s invulnerable,” Darin allowed. “But.…”
“But what? He’d smash right out of a garbage truck.”
“Let me finish, for cryin’ out loud. He wasn’t in a garbage truck. Lex Luther got him like scrunched up, an’ he was trapped inside this humungous thick steel ball.…” Darin had Doug’s full attention. He was imagining a ball of steel around the man of steel. He was skeptical. “And…there were these wicked huge hydraulic power pistons pushing in on every part of the circle around Superman, and he was in a tiny ball, squeezed like.”
“Hmmm.” Doug was thinking. He pushed the dark hair away from his forehead, narrowing his eyes. “What was the other end of the pistons connected to?” he asked.
“Ah, I don’t know. That was outside the little square.”
“I can’t believe he was really trapped. So what’d he do? Hurry up before bony face rings the bell.”
“O.K. Superman was stuck there and he was in a little ball, and he was pushing, but nothing happened. He tried to like vibrate at a high speed to shatter the steel ball with vibrations but…”
“He had no room?”
“Right. So he couldn’t really vibrate, so he was stuck, and then he started to think. And he thought and thought and he thought, really concentrating, an’ he said, ‘I’ve never really had to use all my super power - never really all.…’”
“Because he never needed it all.…”
“Yeah, right, not even half—so he said, he got a mental block against using it all, because it would just be too much, and he got a mental block.”
“Yeah?”
“So he concentrated wicked hard, and he said, ‘I’ve got to use it all now, all my power, and forget just using some of it, and really release it, and he started to push again and he was pushing and stretching out and the steel ball started to shake, and then crack, and the pistons started to crack.…”
A thin smile of vindication was spreading across Doug’s face as the solemn bell rang out through the tumult and then echoed across a suddenly silent schoolyard. And as they stood, Darin whispered, “And everything exploded apart.”
“Lex Luther musta crapped his pants.”
They joined the fourth grade line, and marched back into the classroom in silence under the austere gaze of the dark robed women.
Sister Bernard St. John glanced at the clock and said, “Someone remind me when it’s one o’clock.” Darin made a mental note of it. The class sat at rigid attention, hands folded on the desk. The students sat not in the center of their chairs, but slightly to one side, because Sister Bernard had instructed the students on the first day to leave some room for their Guardian Angels, and all of her instructions were enforced with yardstick or ruler. It soon became automatic for the students, as was bowing their heads in unison whenever the sister mentioned the Holy Name of Jesus, and she mentioned the Holy Name of Jesus a lot.
“I was thinking during recess, class, that as we discussed the Act of Contrition this morning, and we talked about the line, ‘Because I dread the loss of heaven and the pain of hell,’ that we spent a lot of time talking about the pain of hell, which is horrible of course.…” Darin remembered the open and veiled threats of the morning, that the part of the body with which one had sinned in life would be singled out for torture by the filthy fiends of hell, and they would know all, seeing into the depths of the sinner’s black soul. He swallowed and inhaled deeply at the thought.
Sister Bernard stood by the windows, gazing out over the brick housing projects and the expanse of the North Common beyond. “Yes,” she said, “the pain of hell is horrible, and to be feared…. ”
Darin began to pick at a band-aid on his index finger as the sister recalled again the pains of hell. He had been terribly concerned about hell and had had a dream that Jesus Christ rode right down out of the sky on a donkey and landed in the narrow driveway between his house and the Poirier’s. Peace and purity bathed Him in yellow light, and he held the sacred palm, but his words were ominous: “Be good, Darin, or you’ll go to hell.” And as he watched, stupefied, in his dream, Christ rose again until he was a speck in the blue sky and disappeared. Darin fretted over the dream. He wondered if he could accidentally do something that at his death would send his soul sinking through earth to fire, never to see his father and mother again, while the souls of the evil barked and howled in his ears.
All that had ended when he received a simpler gospel according to his earthly father. “Dad, what do you have to do to go to hell?“ he had asked him as his father sat back in the stuffed rocker looking at the Sunday Sun. Without taking his eyes off the paper, he’d responded, “Oh, you have to rob a bank or kill somebody.” Relief flowed like cascades of holy water over his trembling soul. His father didn’t lie. He was a good Catholic, and everyone knew that. He sang in Charlie McGrail’s church choir, and got down on his knees every night and every morning to pray. So it was safe to stop worrying, because Darin knew that he would never rob a bank or kill anyone.
Through the open windows of the classroom drifted the voice of a woman calling to a child somewhere in the maze of the brick projects. A name—he couldn’t make it out, and words. Strange words—must be a Greek lady because the stream of sounds reminded him of the Greek guys at Nick’s Barber Shop. Darin noticed that the nun was looking at the class expectantly, and he realized that she must have put a question to them. He assumed a look of concentration, as if he were searching his memory for an answer, praying that she would not call on him. Sister Bernard surveyed the class.
“Dolores, stop picking your nose. Michael, do you know what is the worst torment of hell?” Sister Bernard asked hopefully.
“Is it that the souls in hell are denied the Beatific Vision, sister?”
She smiled. “You are absolutely correct, Michael. That’s it. It is the loss of heaven, and not the pain of hell, that we should dread.” Darin watched as Sister Bernard began to talk excitedly of God and God’s love for us. She said that He was a loving God who wanted the best for his children in the same way that our parents wanted the best for us, and worried about us. Darin pictured his mother in all her deep-hearted concern, and his father coming home from work covered in paint and joint cement, working for the family. And she said that God would give you anything you wanted, all you had to do was ask and have faith. “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Ask and you shall receive. That is the word of the Lord.” She was getting so excited that Darin could see that she had forgotten the time completely, and as the minute hand moved over the twelve, he raised his hand, certain that he would be rewarded for having remembered.
“Yes, Darin?”
“Sister, it’s one o’clock sister.”
He watched her bright face melt into dark anger. Sensing the approaching storm, Darin’s heart beat faster, and he began to explain. “Sister, you said to remind you.…”
The ruler was already in her hand, and she slammed it on her desk, shouting, “I didn’t tell you to interrupt me in the middle of my talk, you rude boy!”
There was a sudden rustle of fabric. Her crucifix swayed and knocked against the long beaded chain, and she strode past the desks to stand before him, in manifold darkness. The phrase “rude boy” stung Darin. He wanted to say that he was not a rude boy, and that she was mean and a liar because she had asked him to remind her, but he was silent. She was a force of nature, a sea that had suddenly erupted in storm, and only Christ could calm a stormy sea, not a boy. His greatest fear now was that she would make him bend over the desk, adding humiliation to pain, and he was somehow relieved when she clutched at his hand, pulling him up from his seat. His desk was knocked forward to the floor. The lid swung open and thudded on the floor as his books spilled out over it.
She pulled his hand out from his body and forced it open, palm up. From the corner of his eye, he saw Helen Toohey watching him with big eyes, as if she were about to cry, and he girded himself for the sister’s fury, knowing that he must not let Helen see tears, and for courage he searched his heroes, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and then his mind cast out to The Three Hundred Spartans, the movie he’d seen the weekend before at the Strand with Doug and Dan Monahan. The ruler cracked down on his palm four times before her anger was spent, and Darin, his hand throbbing and stinging, blinked a mist away, thinking for all his life now of the Greek captain of those Spartans. The Persian messenger had said, “Surrender, or we’ll blot out the sun with our arrows.” And the Greek captain with his bold jaw replied calmly, “Then we’ll fight in the shade.” Darin tried to set his jaw in that way, and let his eyes assume the blank stare of quiet defiance, though his knees were shaking. A Spartan captain. You are a Spartan captain.
“Sit down, rude boy,” Sister Bernard said, and stalked away, and as he sat and thrust his hand between his knees, he sensed a growing power in him. His hand stung, but he had not cried out in pain or burst into tears. She blotted out the sun with her anger and her ruler. But the Spartan captain was defiant. The Green Lantern was recharging his ring, and if he looked at Helen, he knew that she would be watching him with new respect, with sympathy, maybe with love, because he had shown that he was strong. The furious power of the sister had not broken him. What she did was wrong; he knew it was wrong, and Jesus knew it was wrong, and he didn’t fear her anymore. In his mind, he saw himself laughing at her little ruler the way Superman would laugh at a rifle, and bend its barrel backward like a piece of black licorice.
Darin saw Helen’s mother waiting for her in the light blue Buick Wildcat. That was a cool car. There was a little silver wildcat on the side. When they emerged from the school, Helen spoke to him, “Darin, did it hurt?”
“Yeah, a little,” he admitted.
“I hate her,” Helen whispered, and she smiled at him with her dark eyes. Her braided ponytail swung in the air as she turned and ran to her mother’s car.
Doug and Darin walked up Broadway, stopping at Domiseck’s Drug Store to look at the comic books, but the new issues weren’t in yet. Well, the Marvel comics were in, but they only read DC comics.
The boys dropped their green book bags and hopped onto stools at the counter. Harry Domiseck peered over his glasses at them. “Can I get you fellas somethin’?” They ordered root beers, and pooled their change, pushing fifty cents across the marble countertop toward the thin, stooped man. He thanked them and went back to his prescriptions.
They were thirsty, and they drank for a moment in silence. Doug asked Darin if he would tell his parents what happened with Sister Bernard. He gazed at his hands and said, “Ah, I don’t think so.”
“All you did was remind her of the time like she asked.”
“But I still got in trouble, and they’ll think I musta done something. Besides, it’s embarrassing.”
“She can be mean sometimes.”
“Real mean. She wanted me to cry, but I didn’t.”
“Yeah, that was good.”
Doug cast a glance at the pharmacist and leaned closer to Darin. “I was thinking about what Sister Bernard said, before that. I was thinking a lot.”
“You mean about hell?”
“No, that the Bible says that if you ask and you have faith, you will receive.”
“You think that’s true?”
“The Bible says it’s true. But I don’t think it means like a new bike.” Doug’s eyes narrowed, and he whispered to Darin, “It’s got to be something that is good, an’ that helps people, an’ you have to really believe, an’ then God will give it to you.”
“Yeah,” said Darin. “That sounds right.” His straw made a rumbling sound as he sucked the last bit of root beer from among the ice cubes at the bottom of the glass. Bells jingled as a couple of sixth graders stormed in, shouting at Harry for two packs of Tops baseball cards. “Hold ya horses, hold ya horses,” the pharmacist growled. Darin and Doug slid off their seats, slung their book bags over their shoulder, and yelled goodbye to Harry.
Doug was thinking hard, and he continued to repeat that the sister had said ask and you shall receive, and that that was the sacred word of God and that God did not break his word. The boys left Broadway at the Francis Gate House, where the rushing water passed under the bridge, and ambled under the trees along the Pawtucket Canal. Doug explained his plan. “Ask and you shall receive, Darin. You know what that means?”
“O.K., yeah,” the other boy replied, unsure. “You wanna ask God for somethin’?”
“Yeah, but first you gotta swear. You gotta give me your word, an later we both gotta swear on the Bible that it’s just between you an’ me.”
“O.K.”
“I mean really swear on the Bible. Put your hand on it, an’ if you swear - an’ you break it.…”
“I’m not gonna break it. That’d be real serious.”
They saw a group of girls with cones coming from Burbeck’s Ice Cream. They could tell they were public school girls because they had no uniforms. They were a little older than the boys, who pretended not to notice them. One of the girls stopped and leaned over, her dark hair like a curtain before her face, her slim body shaking with laughter as another whispered in her ear.
“Hey, blondie!” The whisperer and her teasing eyes faced Darin. “She likes you!”
Darin felt confused, and a little excited, but in the most casual voice he could summon, he said, “Hey, I think I hear ya mother callin’ ya!”
Doug laughed and said, “Yeah, listen! ‘Hey retard! Come home retard!’”
“You don’t have mothers!” one of the girls yelled. “You were hatched!”
“You’re so funny I forgot to laugh!” shouted Darin as the boys moved on toward the mouth of the canal and the Merrimack River. “And chickens have mothers too, dopey!” Doug added the parting insult. One of the girls yelled something back, but the boys couldn’t make out the words, only their fading laughter.
When the girls were out of earshot, Darin asked Doug what he had to swear about, but Doug said they had to go sit down first by the river. They crossed the street and sat on the stone embankment of the Merrimack, looking out past the boats riding at anchor to where the broad flat sweep of the river spilled over the dam onto the rocks below—the Pawtucket Falls.
Doug grew serious. His face, under the thick black hair, was intent, as if he were about to dive off the high board at the YMCA. Doug was a good diver, and a good swimmer too. He’d always been on a Y team and had trophies in his room. “Well, it’s simple, Darin. Ask and you shall receive. We’re gonna ask God for super powers.”
Darin was puzzled and uncertain. “You think you can ask God for that? I mean He never gave super powers to anyone, I mean other than Jesus.”
“What about Moses?”
“Oh, yeah. I guess he had super powers alright.”
“And St. Patrick? You remember sister read us the thing about St. Patrick and he had a contest against the druids?”
“Oh, yeah.…”
“An’ he walked in the fire, an’ everything. The druids had super powers too, but St. Patrick’s powers were stronger.”
“That’s true,” Darin said.
“And how about when St. Paul was in prison, and he was between all the guards, and his chains fell off him and he escaped right past all the guards. That was super powers—it was like he was invisible, ‘cause they never saw him.”
“Well,” Darin said, “God sent an angel, right?”
“However he did it—if you can call an angel to help you then you still have super power. And if you become a priest you are granted the special power-like a super power- to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.”
Doug was convincing. And he had the word of God on his side: Ask and you shall receive. He always came back to that, with the warning that you had to believe it would happen or it wouldn’t happen. You had to have faith in God. He was sure about that, and Darin began to think that he was probably right, and that God might give them super powers, and he would have to think of what powers to ask for, and design a uniform, and choose a name. And he and Doug began to discuss names, but they agreed that they didn’t want to rush into that. That is something you would have to really think about, but a crowd of heroic names flashed across his mind, to be considered or rejected, Thunder Man, Blue Sword, The Hurricane…and he saw a figure roar along a foot above the river, a jet-like pass and a roiling wake, a blur of yellow and blue that vanished in a sonic boom as the people at Burbeck’s Ice Cream shouted, “Did you see that? It must be an emergency! The Hurricane just took off! Right over the river! If you weren’t looking, you missed it!”
Before heading home, Darin stopped at Doug’s house. Doug’s mongrel, Ginger, followed Darin to the base of a spreading maple tree behind the garage, where a stepladder leaned against the back wall. He unfolded the ladder beside the tree, and when he had climbed to the top step, balancing himself with one hand against the trunk, he grasped a branch, hauled himself up, and began to climb. Soon he was standing in the tree house, which was really just a six foot square platform hammered onto two parallel four by eights. There were double railings on two sides to lean against, while the other two were open, and afforded a view of the neighborhood. Lila’s house, and Mickey’s, Duggan’s yard, a stretch of the railroad tracks, and the top of Marginal Street—from the tree house their world ran on while they watched like winged angels from a cloud of leaves.
Darin heard the back door slam, and looked down to see Ginger far below wagging her short tail while Doug mounted the ladder. He was carrying his book bag, the strap across his breast like a Mexican’s bandoleer. When Doug had pulled himself up to the edge of the platform, he tossed the green bag at Darin’s feet. “Open it,” he said, and clambered into the tree house.
“It’s heavy,” Darin said. He drew the bunched mouth of the bag apart, and hauled out a heavy black book bound in leather, and embossed with a golden cross.
“That’s the family Bible. Has the births and deaths of the Sidewicks recorded inside the cover.” He indicated a florid script, Daniel Sidewick. “That’s my grandfather. 1892-1948. He died after my father got home from the war. And see? Here’s me. Douglas Sidewick 1955.”
“That’s wicked cool,” Darin said. “My grandparents were all born in Ireland. One of ‘em is still alive, but he’s kinda sick. Sometimes when he coughs, it doesn’t sound good.” Darin thought of Papa, his grandfather. He still managed to live alone on Wiggins Street, with his racing magazines and old books. He liked to recite poems like “Bengan on the Rhine” and sometimes sing. His favorite song was “Pal of Mine.” He liked to feed the pigeons, too, and smoke his pipe at the North Common. Darin walked over to visit him a lot, especially after Nana died. She was nice too, but she couldn’t remember things, only when she was a girl in a place called Sligo. Papa used to train boxers when he was younger, and Finny Boyle was his man. He closed the book and looked at the gilded cross on the cover. “You want us to swear on that Bible? About the super powers?”
“We have to, ‘cause it has to be serious or we just won’t bother.”
“Yeah.”
“Now remember, when you swear on the Bible it’s an oath like in court, and the oath is like written down in heaven too. So we can’t break it.”
“Let me hear the oath before I get into a deal with heaven,” Darin said, a little nervous, but intrigued.
“You put your hand on the Bible and say, ‘I promise to, ah, I promise to dedicate myself in prayer and good actions to receive super powers from God, to use the powers always for good, and never to tell other people what we’re doing here, or how we got our powers.”
“Would we wear masks and have alter egos?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll just swear what I said first. Unless you don‘t want to?”
Darin looked at the gold twist-o-flex watchband on Doug’s wrist. He always wore it with the crystal on the back of his wrist. That was cool. And his big silver garrison belt buckle was cool too. You could take it off and use it like brass knuckles if you were ever attacked.
“What time is it Doug?”
He glanced at the back of his wrist. “I forgot to wind my watch. It’s half past a freckle.”
All was silent in the little tree house. “Well, O.K. let’s swear and see if God will do it, and I have to get home.” Doug repeated the words, and they swore on the massive Bible, one at a time, and Darin imagined a wizard-bearded St. Peter making a copy of the oath in another great book in heaven, far above the gray edged clouds.
“God will do it,” Doug said. “That‘s the thing. You have to have faith.”
Along with prayers to God, the boys prayed to the Virgin Mary, because the sisters at school always said that she had the power to intercede for us, and just as Christ had performed his first miracle at Canaan for her, they felt that He would perform for her the miracle they requested. Darin also copied down a prayer in The Treasury of Saint Anthony, the one that his mother had always read to her father when he was dying. “Saint Anthony is a powerful saint for your intentions,” his enfeebled grandfather had told him.
School was winding down for the year. Helen told Darin that she would be going out to her family’s camp at Little Island Pond for most of the summer, and a burning jealousy stirred in his heart against the boys at the lake who would swim with her, and frolic in the water, and sit with her by campfires at night, or lounge on a wooden float set on empty drums, and anchored to the sandy bottom. He imagined all this from what he’d heard of summer camps. His favorite fantasy was that God would grant him super powers, and that he would be able to save Helen, darting from the sky to pluck her from a sinking vessel, or from among thugs bent on harming her. He would tear off through ether, holding her, silent and proud, while she sobbed gratefully, clutching his neck.
He always grew sad and thought of Helen when he heard The Happenings on the radio singing:
Have a good time, but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you—to a summer love?
The mission on which he had embarked with Doug distracted him from these troubling thoughts. He and Doug lit candles in the cool stillness of the downstairs church in the afternoon, and mumbled vivid prayers before the mystical intelligence of the tabernacle. Darin imagined the prayers rising; those that were half hearted or said without complete faith and attention broke apart and fell like spent fireworks earthward, while the true prayers rose all the way to heaven as fiery messengers bearing their request to God in the company of the glorious saints along with the words Ask and ye shall receive.
Often, the boys tested themselves, to see whether some trace of super power was penetrating their bodies. They jumped into the air, straining skyward, hoping to feel a sudden surge of power that would break the chains of gravity and allow them to hover, glide, or even levitate for an instant. And they could almost begin to imagine how it would be; they could almost feel it.
Doug’s mother made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and they brought them up to the tree house in the book bag with two Moxies and the transistor radio. Donovan sang: Superman and Green Lantern ain’t got nothing’ on me, and the boys smiled, feeling that Donovan was singing that song for them. Sunshine Superman.
Cause I’ve made my mind up,
You’re going to be mine,
I’ll tell you right now
Any trick in the book now baby
Well that I can find
Darin thought of Helen out at the pond in golden sun, never suspecting the trouble portent in her future or how she would be saved by the boy that wouldn’t cry for Sister Bernard, though she would not recognize him at first, or maybe even for a long time. I know a beach now baby, where it never ends.…
“I saw Donovan on the Merv Griffin show,” Darin said.
“Yeah, you told me,” Doug responded. He looked up from his Justice League of America comic. “Who do you think would win a race,” he asked, “between Superman and The Flash.”
“I think it would be The Flash, because that’s his specialty. That’s his only power.”
“But if Superman was flying, and The Flash was running, Superman would win—obviously.”
Darin was thinking how Superman was invulnerable and protected from the intense heat generated by super speeds, but The Flash was protected by the special material in his suit, which is why it had to cover his head too. Superman’s suit was special too, because it was made from the material in which he had arrived from Krypton, a baby swaddled in blankets inside the tiny rocket—fired toward earth by his desperate parents who were unable to escape with him from their erupting, crumbling planet. But if the material was impervious to blade or flame, how had it been cut and sewn on earth to make the Superman suit? Well, those heroes weren’t real, but it should be logical, because it was all possible, and if he and Doug were granted super powers by God, they would have to find someone to make some special suits. When they had finished their sandwiches, Doug pulled two pieces of Bazooka from his pocket and tossed one over to Doug. The government probably had scientists who could do it because they would see that he and Doug could help America, and they would - only since their powers came from God they couldn’t kill anyone, not even for America. Superman wouldn’t either -that was his code of honor.
They passed the day in idle speculation and earnest fantasy. They painted a sign in Doug’s garage for the tree house that read, “The Tree Fortress Keep Out,” and nailed it up in the shade of maple boughs. Before Darin went home later in the afternoon, Doug said that they had to pray harder, and also they should give up candy as a sacrifice. He looked at Darin out of his dark eyes and confided, “It will be soon, if we believe, Darin.”
The earth was only that small globe in the hand of Christ in the chapel, and it turned with all its people, and the summer moved along in the drone of cicadas and sometimes in the late afternoon the sky held its breath and the world grew dark, as they said it did after Christ was crucified, and then thunder cracked the sky and rolled along the Merrimack Valley, and they took refuge in Doug‘s garage, and Doug always said, “God is bowling.” Sometimes Darin had to mow his lawn, or vacuum the stairs—scattered chores that provided the small, irregular allowance that came in loose change and the odd dollar from his father’s pocket. With it he bought comic books and Black Raspberry cones at Burbeck’s Ice Cream—the simple but delicious necessities of a ten-year-old boy—but as July wound out Doug said that they would have to give up ice cream too, and even say rosaries in the tree house. In the succeeding days, Darin pulled the smooth black beads between his fingers, while he and Doug recited the sorrowful mysteries and the joyful mysteries and the glorious mysteries and still nothing happened, and Darin was beginning to suspect, to believe in one corner of his heart or mind that nothing ever would happen, that God would not give them super powers.
Sitting on the porch with his grandfather, Doug asked him if he’d read about superheroes when he was a boy. He chuckled and leaned forward on the bumpy black cane he carried and said, “My heroes were Robert Emmet, Wolf Tone, Thomas Davis. Did you read the book I gave you?”
“Some of it,” Darin said.
“If you don’t read, boy, you don’t know,” he said gravely, tapping the knob of his cane lightly on Darin’s head. “This Superman you young people are wild about is no hero at all though, that I can tell you.”
“What do you mean? He’s the greatest hero ever!”
“That’s a lot of codology, Darin, and I’ll tell you why. He can’t be killed and he can’t even really be hurt. That means he can’t be brave, because you don’t need courage when you’re safe, do you?” Darin looked into his blue, sunken eyes and heard his raspy voice. “Read the book I gave you.”
The old man looked up into the trees around the porch and said:
We’ve heard your haughty summons and this is our reply
We are United Irishmen—we’ll fight until we die.
And they did, Darin, they did. Heroes risk death, like your own father did in the last war. And Doug Sidewick’s father was on the beach at a place called Iwo Jima—look it up if you want to know about heroes. A lot of those young men, some who came around here when they were your age—they never came back from France and Holland, or the Pacific. They died there, Darin. Not when they were old like me, but when they were young and had life before them. They stood in the gap with their poor mortal bodies, see. And now they’re sending the boys off to Indochina.”
His grandfather’s voice was sad and serious, and the words sunk into his soul, as he imagined the young boys and their poor mortal bodies tossed on stretchers and thrown in graves so far from Lowell. A bird landed on the railing. They always came when Papa was out because he fed them every day. “A robin,” Darin said.
“A robin you say? I’d call that a thrush.” Darin listened to the way he said that word: therrush. They watched the bird for a moment hopping along the railing, cocking its head at them, but Papa started to cough, and the bird flew.
Later, in the stillness of his room, Doug lay on his bed rereading an old Batman until his mother came in to kiss him good night, and he threw the comic book on the floor and turned the light off. He was surprised at the speed with which his doubts had grown to conviction. And then Papa had even made him wonder if a superhero could be a hero at all. There really wasn’t much room between a small doubt and complete disbelief. The phosphorescent statue of the Virgin Mary on his bureau glowed in silent tenderness, but he did not pray to Mary to intercede with his request, only to help him to make Doug see that it was no use, and that he should stop begging God to do what He would not do. God performed miracles in the old days, but not much anymore, and not this kind of miracle.
The night was humid, and Darin drifted off along the hum of the window fan, which seemed in his sleep to become the roaring flight of a dozen superheroes charging in a blur of color above him. But a light from above shattered the sky like glass and a voice that was the voice of all power filled the heavens. “There can be only God!” Darin stood in some high place, watching the heroes, Superman, Hawk Man, Wonder Woman and all the Justice League, tumbling toward the trembling earth, their power broken, their faces drawn in comic book frames, terror stricken, mouths gaping -screaming in the shock of an encounter with a power so far beyond all theirs combined. And he saw them crash around him, dead and crumpled, their bodies charred and smoking. When he awoke he saw the luminous statue of Mary, a pale dot in the darkness, and he buried his head in the pillow.

Ginger whined a greeting as Darin ambled into Doug’s back yard. “Up here,” his friend called from The Tree Fortress. Darin hopped on the wobbly ladder and pulled himself into the tree, ascending through its branches to the green sanctuary.
“Where were you, Darin? It’s almost three o’clock.”
“My parents brought us all over to my cousin’s house. They got a new baby, and everyone had to say how cute he is an’ all that.” He noticed Doug’s book bag on the floor, and the massy Bible on top of it.
“Listen, Darin. I gotta show you something.” He picked up the Bible, put it on his knees, and began to search through it. “I asked God for a sign, an’ I said ‘I’m going to open up to any page at random, and give me a sign on that page,’ and look, ah shoot, I marked it off somewhere…anyway, it said, the page I turned to said The spirit of the Lord shall come upon thee, something, and thou shalt be turned into another man. And also I found in John’s Gospel….”
Doug said, “Darin I don’t know if you’re supposed to be usin’ the Bible that way…I don’t know….”
“What do you mean? I’m only reading what it says. It’s supposed to talk to you about your intentions and God’s will.”
“But—I don’t know.” He had to say it, but he didn’t know how to say it to Doug. “I don’t think—I don’t know—I wonder if it’s gonna be God’s will, really, to turn us into superheroes. I’ve been thinking. I don’t really believe it anymore.”
Doug put the Bible down carefully and stood up. He turned away from Darin and looked out over the neighborhood. A pulsating clatter gathered in the distance. A B&M train was approaching along the tracks below, heading west. “More powerful than a locomotive,” Darin thought to himself. Doug was quiet, and Darin hoped that he too would admit that he had doubted the power of their prayers or the willingness of God, and they could go back to the way they had been before all this, and enter fifth grade with it all behind them, and get Sister Francis St. Michael for a teacher because everyone said she was nice, and maybe Helen would like him anyway if he was strong and good, even if he weren’t a hero.
But when Doug turned to Darin his face was not calm and accepting, but red and twisted. “You promised to pray with faith,” he said. “You swore on the Bible! And now you say….”
“I’m sorry, Doug, really. I just don’t think it will happen, and… I’m tired of it.”
“You don’t think so? You doubt - you think God made up this stuff He said? Why would the Bible say that if it’s not true? Only people have no faith, that’s the only reason miracles don‘t happen. That’s the only reason. But I have faith.”
“I’m sorry Doug. I just don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
“Then quit. You’re gonna be sorry. It’ll be too late for you!” Darin was shocked at the violence of Doug’s manner. He was getting scared because Doug was almost in tears, and he had never seen him cry before.
“What would you do,” Doug cried, “if I leaped out of this tree house right now, and I flew?”
“Doug, that won’t happen. Don’t even think about that.”
“That’s why we never got the super powers, because you need to show you have faith, and then you shall be another man. That’s why—that’s why they say a leap of faith! You have to prove you have faith!” Doug turned and stood at the edge of the platform, where there was no railing. The train rumbling by behind the fence shook the tree itself, and Darin’s voice was almost lost in its iron clanging as he shouted, “Doug! No! It’s not true!”
He saw Doug’s body in a diver’s crouch, and lunged at him with outstretched arms as Doug launched himself into the air. Darin’s hand touched the back of his shirt, but there was nothing to grip, and Doug flew out into the air and for an instant Darin thought he might really fly as his body shot straight out from the tree house, and then he disappeared. He didn’t know whether Doug screamed, nor did he ever hear the heavy thud of his landing because it was all lost amid the clamor of the train and his own screaming cry.
“Mr. Liston is a Lieutenant in the police, and he has to write a report on this terrible incident. Can‘t you tell him something?” his father asked, his mouth set in that way that made his jaw look square; his blue eyes looked into his own.
“Let me talk to him a minute,” said Lieutenant Liston. He was a big gray haired man. He had known his father from when they were kids. They played together as he and Doug had done. “Look, son. We know you two were real close, and this is very hard for you. You didn’t do anything wrong. We don’t think that. We just need you to tell us what you saw, or what the young man said, just to see if we can throw any light on the…the accident. That’s all.”
Darin was quiet. He seemed almost to be holding his breath, and his father clasped one of his hands in his and said, “Darin, answer Mr. Liston if you can.”
“Just out of curiosity,” the Lieutenant continued, “why did he have the Bible up there? Was he reading the Bible?”
“He showed me the names of his grandparents and everything—it’s in the front of the book. It‘s old writing.” Darin wondered if Doug’s parents would fill in the date beside Doug’s name now. Douglas Sidewick 1955-1966.
“Oh, I see. Because we had a case about five years ago where some boys made a pact, and they swore on the Bible to keep it secret. You didn‘t do anything like that?”
“No. I don’t know what happened. He just tried to jump to a higher branch I think. I wasn’t looking, and there was a train. And then I looked and he was gone. That’s all I know. I‘m sorry.” He had sworn and he could never tell-never, never, never. And even if he could, what adult would understand? Tears rolled over his burning cheeks and he buried his head in his hands. His father and the Lieutenant walked to the door and spoke for a while there in low tones, and then his father called, “You can go to bed, Darin. Don’t forget to say your prayers, and I‘ll be up to tuck you in.”
His mother had baked some cookies and brought them over to Doug’s parents’ house, with a mass card. Doug was dead and his mother had plates of cookies and mass cards with crosses and angels. Darin thought about Doug’s parents standing there with a plate of cookies and Doug gone, and a new date in the book beside his name, and his eyes burned with tears. He heard his father’s steps on the stairs and a shaft of wan light cut across the room as he opened the door. He sat down on the edge of the bed, drawing his hand over his jaw, thinking, and said, “It’s rough, Darin. You lost your best friend. But he’s in heaven. Oh, Doug is all right, believe me. He’s all right. He’s in a better place. For us, though, it’s hard. It’s a test of our faith, Darin.” His father kissed him and said, “Goodnight, son.”
Darin choked out a good night and lay in the dark, shaking. God was always testing us, they said. Why? Couldn’t God look into our souls and see what we were made of? Didn’t He make us? Suddenly he threw back the covers and stumbled across his room. He took the luminescent Mary from his bureau and shook it, crying. He opened his drawer, stuffed the bright figure under some sweaters, and closed the drawer again. He looked toward the ceiling, and trembling with rage, he whispered, “Doug tested your word! He tested you! He tested you, and you failed! You failed! You failed!”

When the cook heard the American tanks and motor cars rumbling up the muddy road from the west, she ran out of the kitchen, through the courtyard, and past the barn, waving her apron, surrendering in delight.
This is what Béatrice tells us. In this moment that she tells us, we fear revealing any pride—those Americans, those Americans not unlike us, except separated by fifty-some years.
We think, Americans saved this house, St. Urbain, a mansion really. Tall ceilings, long hallways of rooms, a stone veranda with dancing cherubs atop its posts. A stretch of lawn that tumbles down to a pond and woods beyond. An estate. We think, the Americans—yes, the Americans!—saved the grandmother, the cook, and the maid, who stayed throughout the German occupation, la grand-mère who refused to leave the house, even when arrangements were made for all the children—Béatrice was nine at the time—to stay in Nancy. And the cook, forced to make meals for those stinking Germans—except the Austrian officer, always polite, always respectful of la famille—the cook now gloriously freed from her servitude to men who didn’t even understand wine, who ate coq au vin as though they were animals thrown raw meat, with no appreciation for subtlety of sauce, the impeccable timing that renders the flesh tender.
We hesitate to smile at this. We do anyway—we know it’s not us, we didn’t personally save St. Urbain from the Germans, but Béatrice speaks as though those American soldiers, marching up the road, tired, hungry, scared, were our kin.
Béatrice says, The cook ran into the road, waving her apron at the American soldiers. See, Maman knew the Germans were gone. It had been a full night and into the next morning with no sounds of boots stomping overhead or voices shouting down the cellar stairs—those Germans voices that provoked shudders and tears in the maid as she and Maman huddled in the cellar. The silence was all they needed to know. The Germans had evacuated. Something else was coming.
When the cook ran out into the road waving her makeshift flag of surrender, the Americans shot at her.
This is what we feared—even if only in that smallest part of our consciousness that says, don’t get carried away, chauvinistic pride is always easily deflated.
Béatrice laughs at this point in her story.
We laugh, too, but a different kind of laughter, the kind that expresses embarrassment, horror, shame at our own sense—however hesitant—of national pride. The Americans shot at the cook!
Then Béatrice is abruptly interrupted in her story by one of the cousin bridesmaids reminding her of something urgent, something we can’t quite make out, but something to do with the banquet arrangements, musicians who need something, and Béatrice is whisked away, leaving us to absorb this shocking change in events—the saviors, the Americans, who shot at the cook.
Was she hurt? we wonder.
We look around us, at the cousins and uncles and aunts running around, preparing for the wedding, the reason everyone has gathered for the weekend, for Claudine and Max’s nuptials. And we consider—in our despair about a story cut short—should we stop one of the other aunts rushing by? Who’s she? Isn’t that Claudine’s cousin Bette? Would she know what happened to the cook?
We have to know what happened to the cook, and not just out of curiosity, not just to know the ending. It’s a matter of national pride; we say this jokingly, of course.
Well, there is the grandmother, Béatrice’s maman, Claudine’s grand-mère, who is alive, who is here at the wedding, the matriarch of St. Urbain. She didn’t die, wasn’t shot by Americans. There is that. We must console ourselves with this thought for now, at least until Béatrice returns or we find someone else to finish the story for us.
Everyone looks busy now. Bette is arranging the flowers on the tables outside one of the parlors where there will be dancing after dinner. The other parlor, across the marble entranceway, is where Grand-mère entertained les américains for coffee earlier that afternoon. She asked us polite questions. Where were we from? Did we like the goat cheese made in the local region? We sat on the edge of beautiful chairs, not elaborate, a bit worn actually, but nonetheless expressing a certain aristocratic class. We sipped the strong coffee as inconspicuously as possible. We smiled and wrapped our loose lips around pointed French words, inwardly grimacing at the sounds that emerged from our mouths.
The night before, Claudine’s father, Jean-Paul, showed us the original Diderot encyclopedia owned by the family. Excitedly we watched as he took down a large volume from the bookcase in the parlor. Shouldn’t it be kept in a temperature-regulated room? we thought, frowning, but not daring to say it aloud, remembering that we had to hide our gauche American ways, our obsession with the right way to do things, much like our obsessions with refrigeration, statistics, and showering.
Jean-Paul opened the encyclopedia and we flinched at the sound of the spine cracking. But we brushed this aside and oohed and aahed over the simplistic maps of Africa and America, the vast sweeps of earth Europeans thought of as savage lands, unpeopled, unsettled. We admired the columns of careful French cursive, the compiling of knowledge as though a thing of fragile beauty, vulnerable to thieves and natural disasters. We wanted to caress the pages with our hands, though we repressed this urge, and merely nodded in agreement to everything Jean-Paul said, even when we didn’t understand.
We took all that knowledge to bed with us that night, tucked in with us in the narrow, sagging mattress, our room an old servant’s chambre above the barn. It looked as though the room hadn’t been occupied since World War Two, but that’s okay, we tell each other, it was nice of Claudine’s family to arrange accommodations. Maybe this is where the cook slept! Over the barn, planning the meals for German officers, grimacing at the thought of wasting precious hens and pigs and goats on the swine. Béatrice had said that the cook, though she could speak German—indeed, her father was German, refused to speak their language to the occupiers, forcing them to rely on the shaky French of one young assistant to the Commandant. But she understood everything they said, as she stirred soup in the kitchen, spitting and stirring, adding cod liver oil and rotting tomatoes. The next morning she watched from the dining room window, while she laid out bread and butter. The officers ran to the pine bushes lining the driveway. She cackled. She didn’t care. Let them kill her, after they shit out their bowels. She’d be happy to die for poisoning Germans.
But the Germans didn’t kill her. The Americans shot at the cook!
We wander toward the hallway, watch through the window as the caterer’s helpers set up chairs and tables in the barn, where the reception will be held. There’s a makeshift stage and flowers strewn along the tables. There are candles and white tablecloths. Earlier that morning we helped sweep the barn and the courtyard, move furniture and wash the windows—what they really needed was a new coat of paint. We did our part. We joined in and made ourselves useful. Now we feel a bit in the way, without a task, without purpose. Except to hear the end of the story. We head towards the stairway, hesitate a moment, hoping for a glance of Béatrice through the open kitchen door. We see an army of people chopping and stirring food, but no Béatrice.
Under the stairway is the door to Grand-mère’s rooms. She is resting now, we’ve been told, saving her energy for the church ceremony. We climb the stairs, curving up and around to the second floor, a wide hallway with windows to one side, looking down on the courtyard, and rooms on the other side. We hear the murmur of activity behind the bride’s door. We wish we could be there, to be one of the “chosen” to spend the few hours before the ceremony with the bride and groom, helping to pin dresses and rouge cheeks, to keep track of corsages and run the myriad last minute errands that always need doing.
But we are guests, we are les américains. We’ve been told to relax, to enjoy ourselves, to take advantage of the countryside and the early summer air. Instead, we turn at the top of the stairs and navigate the narrow hallway filled with bookcases and bric-a-brac and cross the wooden planks to our room. We decide to take a nap. We lie down, face-to-face, nose-to-nose, on the narrow mattress, huddling for warmth—it’s chilly in the servants’ quarters!—and smile, knowing we won’t sleep, impossible to sleep with all the activity around us, knowing that a dozen people are working below us, and with the mattress so sagged, so bowed, that in minutes we are fidgety, our backs ache.
We are too soft, too accustomed to the comforts of the New World, too coddled. We laugh at our own fragility. How do the French do it? How do they stay so focused on what matters—love, life, ideas—when their mattresses sag and their rooms are dusty? We are clearly weaker, inflexible, unable to adapt. We don’t admit it, but we could die right now for wall-to-wall carpeting and big, fluffy pillows.
What did this room look like when the cook lived here? We imagine a small dresser with a shrine to the Virgin, the cook waking early before sunrise, lighting a candle and saying a short prayer. She would have worn solid, leather boots, the kind that laced up, and she probably only had two changes of clothes. She would have used the kitchen sink to wash her face and then brew coffee. She’d have to feed the animals on her own, take care of all the barnyard chores since the stable hands had left to join the Resistance.
Yes, the Resistance! The cook longed to join the Resistance, but she knew that she must stay to help the family. In a way, she was a part of the Resistance, she would think to herself. She prepared le petit déjeuner for Madame and her maid, first. She knocked on the cellar door before clomping down the narrow stairs. She recounted to Madame what the Germans had been saying. They sound worried, she said. They say die Amerikaner often. They seemed to always be studying maps, rolling them up quickly when she entered the parlor with bread and coffee (just a little dirt added).
We think of the grandmother, so petite and frail now, her delicate ways. But to think she refused to leave the house while the Germans were here. She was brave! She was young and so brave! What would we have done? And with seven children, finally taken to Nancy, arranged by the Austrian officer, the one who was very proper and correct with the children, the cook almost regretted having poisoned his soup too. But what could she do?
We are restless. We need to know what happened to the cook. And where is the maid now?
Though it’s still a couple hours until the ceremony, we decide to dress. We’ve laid out our things, a dress, a pair of stockings, a once-pressed pair of pants, now a bit wrinkled from travel, a clean shirt. We dress, slowly, carefully, savoring the feel of clean, fancy clothes, the act of dressing, as though the entire day depended on it. We continue the story, reminding ourselves of what Béatrice has already said, trying to find a clue somewhere of what happened next.
The French had occupied the house before the Germans came. They were proper, very proper, with la famille. Most of the French officers camped in tents on the lawn, waking early to the sound of cows baying, udders engorged. The family confined themselves to the upper rooms and the kitchen, while the officers used the parlors for their headquarters. The family made a game of it, telling the youngest children that they were safe because the soldiers were with them.
When evacuation orders came, the commanding officer told Béatrice’s father to leave, to get to Paris, to Nancy even. The Germans were coming. The father pleaded with Maman—now Grand-mère, but she refused. It was her family’s house after all, and she could not abandon it. She thought of the banquets and balls her parents had hosted, when she was just a little girl before the First World War. She thought of her own coming out on the eve of that war, the shells that fell in the garden, the east wing conservatory one morning imploded by a German bomber. The family didn’t leave then. They slept in the cellar then, the family and the servants who stayed. How could she leave now?
And so the family waited. The French had left, clearing camp as carefully as possible, leaving behind only holes from their tent pegs in the lawn. The family waited. They went about their usual business. Then one day there was a peculiar silence in the countryside. The children were sent to the cellar where they huddled with Father. Maman sat in her parlor, very still, very patient, and waited. The cook got down on her knees and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Again. She wanted to have this to do, she couldn’t bear the waiting. The maid wept in her room above the barn.
Maman sat, listening to the sound of the brush’s bristles against the stone floor, and beyond that, silence. With dusk came the first growl of engines.
We stand in the narrow passage between our room and the main hall, telling ourselves this story. On the bookshelf is a hodge-podge of things—board games, tools, broken ceramic, and a helmet. We are shocked. We’ve passed by this bookshelf already a dozen times at least since the morning. Why hadn’t we seen it before? It is heavy, smaller than we imagined a helmet to be—more like a cap. Its greenness reminds us of algae, of another war, of swamps. Inside in thick black ink: Johnson. An American name. We imagine a black American soldier, on his first tour of duty, his first time out of the U.S.—heck! his first time out of Georgia. A hero.
Except, we must remember, the Americans shot at the cook.
Someone is coming up the stairs. We hear footsteps and then gradually a head of short, black and gray hair appears. We can’t believe our luck! It’s Béatrice.
As she reaches the second floor, she sees us standing in the passageway with the helmet. We sort of gesture at her with it, a kind of wave with the helmet. We are saying, Look, here is proof, here is what war leaves behind, what stories leave behind.
Béatrice nods and smiles, showing us what she has in her hands, a bridesmaid’s dress made of light green organza. She is delivering it to the room where the bride is sequestered. But Béatrice’s nod promises us she will return.
We are delirious with anticipation. We turn the helmet over and over. We try it on, its heaviness pressing down on the skull like memory. Like history. We laugh at our own profundity. We are Americans after all. We are supposed to scoff at the shackles of history. We can slough off history like a snake sheds its skin, leave it behind for others to worry about.
And yet, here it is in our hands, solid, weighty, and green.
Béatrice gently takes the helmet from our hands, turns it over and says aloud, Johnson. We loved the American soldiers, she says. It meant coming back home with Father. It meant chocolate and chewing gum. We’d never had chewing gum before.
We think about chewing gum as though it were a brand new idea. We remember chewing it as children, swallowing countless lumps of gum hardened by endless chewing, and the fear that we would never digest it.
Yes, yes, we say, but what about the cook? What happened to her?
Béatrice flaps her hand and laughs. Oh, nothing. When the Americans were coming, they were scared and they shot at everything that moved. But once they got closer and saw it was just a lady with an apron, they stopped shooting.
We are certainly relieved—those scared American soldiers!—they didn’t hurt the cook. But there is a small part of us that feels disappointed, the drama turned to comedy, to farce. Is it better that the Americans were scared, rather than fierce?
Why did this helmet get left behind?
That, I do not know, Béatrice says and turns, heads down the stairs.
We hastily replace the helmet and follow her, not wanting her to leave us once again in mid-story.
What happened to the maid and Grand-mère? Did they stay with the Americans?
Oh, yes. And the children, we all came back with Father. The American soldiers taught us baseball. I think, actually, they were quite bored.
And with that Béatrice scurries into the kitchen, leaving us at the bottom of the stairs. We consider the kitchen, but now that we’ve dressed we don’t want to risk spills and stains. We turn the other way and walk towards the veranda. The sunlight dapples the marble hallway and children burst suddenly from doors and around corners, chased by older cousins or frazzled mothers. We smile in our distraction, hoping we will be stopped and spoken to, but no one approaches and we pass through the hall and the doors to the veranda.
The veranda stretches across the front of the house. At its center, where we stand now, stairs lead to a gravel driveway and then to the lawn. Stone cherubs twist and frolic along the veranda railing, frozen in movement. We touch their faces, chipped and pockmarked by weather and wear, their stone skin warmed under the sun.
It’s a beautiful day for a wedding, we say to each other and skip down the stairs, holding hands, feeling ourselves young again, like children, escaped from adult concerns and tasks. We run across the driveway, gravel flying out behind our shoes, and across the lawn, down down down to the edge of the pond.
Out of breath, we stop and turn around, look back at the mansion, now spread out against the sky like a patient etherized…yes, yes, we could be in an earlier era, when people drank champagne out of shoes and Americans flocked to Europe. If you squint your right eye, we say, to erase the car parked at the side of the house, it could be just as it was then. We could imagine buggies and horse-drawn carriages coming through the gates and across the driveway, stopping at the veranda stairs, discharging their well-heeled passengers for tea, for dinner, for a ball.
From where we stand on the lawn, hands, like a military salute, shielding our eyes from the sun, we see a flutter of movement behind a second-story window. The bride and her bridesmaids. The groom and his groomsmen. The preparations continue, time continues. We can look back, squinting into the sun, but what can we see, blinded, the story half-known, our desire, like children, fierce and fickle?
After the ceremony, we are driven back by a kind cousin and his wife. Scrunched in the back seat of the car, we listen to them exclaim about the wedding and we contribute what we can. Claudine was magnificent, so beautiful and serene. Max—Max in a tuxedo! What a laugh! Who would have guessed we’d ever see the day? And Grand-mère, in the front pew of the church—the huge, austere church with its stone arches reaching so far above us that voices got lost and never returned from that spacious heaven. Grand-mère so tiny and in her element. And the grandchildren—in costumes! they made their own costumes!—when they were called to the altar, they came marching like a parade of jesters and merry pranksters. Such formal elegance, such irreverent fun at the same time.
As we offer these observations and listen to the cousin and his wife, the car turns into the long private road, shaded by poplars, leading to St. Urbain. Up ahead we can see the stone gates, but not the house, so thick are the woods and so long is the road. It’s as though we were approaching again for the first time. When we pass through the gates and St. Urbain appears close and large, we feel the coolness of the poplars’ shade, and a surge in the stomach that can only be described as love. Everyone is silent in the car, only the crunch of rubber tires on gravel, and then, slowly, the faint, ethereal sound of a piano playing somewhere in the house.
Everyone gathers on the veranda stairs, with champagne flutes and snippets of food—bruschetta and stuffed mushrooms. We stand and chew, murmur things like, What a day! How beautiful they were! Do you remember when... ? We wait for the newly nuptialed to arrive, and after about an hour, as the sun starts to move further west, cutting a sharp line of shadow across the driveway, we hear the sounds of laughter and wheels coming through the gates.
They arrive in a horse-drawn carriage, and we exclaim at how it is exactly as we had imagined it in another era. Small children, children of cousins, are lifted up and into the carriage with the couple. Everyone wants a turn. Everyone wants to be like the bride and groom, at the center, at the focus of attention, or at least to be in the viewing range of such royalty.
Someone hands the bride and groom glasses of champagne while they are still in the carriage. The best man presents a toast. He is in a wheelchair that has to be lifted up and down the stone steps. He will tell us later that he was in a car accident, paralyzed from the waist down.
The toast said, we raise our glasses and sip our wine. From behind us there comes a sound like a wave crashing onto a rocky shore, and then fluttering whiteness bursts around our heads. First there are shrieks, and then laughter and murmurings, as the doves fly above us, bank and turn as a group, and then circle around the house out of sight.
The champagne tingles now inside our heads, and after the releasing of the doves, we are ready to witness anything. What’s next? Will there be elephants and tap dancers? Acrobatics? Fire-eaters? We would be very impressed by sword swallowers, we agree. Yes, anything that involved ingesting fire or weaponry. Wouldn’t it be great if more weddings were like circuses? Bride and groom would undergo intense trapeze training before declaring I do in the air. Now that would be devotion, not merely spectacle.
We follow the other guests as they follow the couple up the veranda stairs and through the house to the courtyard. We are going in for dinner. There will be more wine. There will be a long buffet table of food, deli meats displayed in the form of a peacock—yes, a peacock!—and cheeses and salads and, of course, long batons of bread, hard crusty baguettes that we will devour as though we have never eaten before. There are speeches and skits, singing, jokes, more speeches, voices slurred. And then, as we are imbibing another glass of wine—no use counting anymore, we lost count a while ago—we hear the strains of familiar music and a warm prickly sensation creeps up our backs, the body’s knowledge, before the brain, that we are being watched. The music’s familiarity wakes us from our gluttony before we consciously recognize the tune, and when we look up everyone is grinning at us. They are playing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Flushed with embarrassment, we grin back and then affect little waves, like Miss America on her float, acknowledging the loyalty of the masses.
It’s not spankled banner. Spangled banner.
The couple next to us argues in English tinged with French vowels. And with that distraction comes relief. The music fades and everyone is invited back to the buffet table for fruit and more cheese and chocolate.
Outside the barn, it’s now dark. We’ve been eating and drinking for hours. We feel properly medieval in our dedication to feasting. Guests are speaking and laughing louder, as they meander through the courtyard. Someone has started playing music in the house and candles are lit all along the walkway and into the house. But the air feels marvelously fresh and we linger outside, wobbling around the side of the barn.
We walk up to the road behind the barn, where the cook ran, waving her white apron. There is a tree just there, across the road, magnificently fat, its leaves rustling like a Victorian lady’s underskirts. We turn toward the west. Fireflies blink across the dark. We can barely make out the reach of the road, we strain to see its horizon. The cook would have seen the soldiers coming, an indistinguishable mass of men, and then, here—we point to the tree, she would have fallen flat at the crack of gunfire. Would she have yelled? Would she have called out, Nous sommes les français! Or would she have lain still, just waiting, her heart pounding, until the soldiers came so close that she could smell their sweat and hear their breathing? She would have heard the harsh nasal of an American soldier ordering her to stand up. And then once on her feet, her apron flung forgotten on the ground, she would have smiled and kissed the first soldier she saw. In her machine-gun French, she would have scolded them for shooting at her and taking so long to save them. The soldiers would relax, pull out cigarettes and slump into the grass beside the road, thankful for a moment’s rest. A lieutenant who studied French in high school would be pushed forward to speak with the cook, and studiously she would listen to his questions, his confusion of words, his youthful fear as he asks, Where are we? Only, to the cook’s amusement, he is asking her, Qui sommes-nous? Who are we?
The cook would clap him on the shoulder and laugh, saying, Mais, bien sûr, vous êtes les américains!
There is a sharp whistling sound and then a crack. We turn pale—what is that? A moment of non-sound, as though the air were sucked away, and then a fountain-spray of colorful light beyond the house. We head back across the road and through the courtyard. Everyone else is moving towards the house. More fireworks shoot off, one twirling and twisting like a snake, and then crack crack crack as they explode above the house.
Guests crowd on the veranda, the bride and groom, too, standing in the middle of the group like queen bees surrounded by worker bees. We are all looking up, our necks stretched up to the sky, its infinite backdrop. Our eyes reflect in miniature the streams and bouquets and twinklings of fireworks. We are hushed, we are awestruck, we are humbled by this god’s display of power.
It is like July 4th, is it not? Béatrice says. She is next to us, looking up into the sky.
It is, we agree, but we don’t want it to be. We want it instead to be like this, like a wedding, like champagne and chocolate, deli meats shaped into peacocks, cooks who refuse to speak German, mamans braving occupation, and the faces of each other in the light of sky.
Béatrice beckons us over to the far end of the veranda. She puts her hand on a stone cherub’s head, her thumb tracing a concavity.
She speaks and we push closer, tilting our heads to hear her better.
Vous voyez? You see these missing pieces? The American soldiers were so bored, she says. They had nothing to do all day but wait and wait.
We are stunned. We are speechless. Then there is a rush of popping and whistling, and the fireworks burst in a grand finale of noise and color. We look up and up and ooh and aah.
When we look down again, the guests are moving back into the house. There will be music and dancing well into the dawn, the bride and groom will slip quietly away to sleep, also the grand-mère and her memories. Only the drunken few who deny the end of things will linger, clinging to each other, smiling wearily, picking at the ravaged buffet.
We won’t want to give up either. And so we will stroll along the gravel driveway in the misty sunrise. Beside us, the bullet-ridden cheeks and arms and legs of the cherubs will stay frozen in their postures of flight, enduring beyond even this.

People, complete strangers as well as friends, often make a point to ask me why am I sad. I tell them that I’m not. Then why are you frowning, they ask. Frowning? I didn’t know that I was. For a long time I didn’t believe I walked around looking like that, but so many people have asked why was I sad or about what was I mad that I began to have doubts. I spent a full fifteen minutes one morning examining my normal expression in the mirror. Studying it so, I realized that I wasn’t frowning, I was just not smiling. It’s not the same thing.
Down the underground tunnel of the metro, I spot the approaching lights of the train and push forward toward the edge of the platform. The Parisians around me edge forward, too. The train slides to a stop, and I hurry on. The watch on my neighbor’s wrist reads five past one. I was supposed to meet Nico Questel and his son Benoît at one o’clock. But, fortunately, I’m only ten minutes away. The train moves from lit station through dark tunnel to a stop at another lit station further on....Notre Dame de Lorette...Trinité...Saint Lazare....
My mind wanders. It’s true, I think: I don’t go around smiling all the time because I’m leery of those people who do and I don’t want to give off the same impression. In fact, the thing that attracted me so much to Paris when I arrived here, about three years ago, was the demeanor of the place. Parisians don’t beam gratuitous smiles, just as they don’t walk around being loud and carrying on. They’re more discreet. There’s a sort of grace in their reserve.
When I leave the metro, the April sky is covered gray, promising rain. I finally arrive at their building, a white stone, six-floor walk-up like so many here. As I pass, I give a cursory greeting to the concierge, a round woman who is mopping the entrance hallway, and I bound up the wooden stairs to the third floor and ring. The door opens almost immediately to Nico’s receding back, tucking a black T-shirt into his black jeans and walking towards a back room.
“I’m running late,” he says in French. “Benoît is getting ready.”
Although Nico speaks English fluently, our conversations are often in French. I speak it pretty well, and I especially like to speak it with my French friends, whether they speak English or not. “Pas de problème,” I say.
I close the door and sit on the couch. Eva, Nico’s wife, works, and Nico, who is a musician, has an appointment at a studio to stand in on keyboards during the recording of a video. In France, children don’t have school on Wednesday afternoons, and since Benoît, who usually spends that time with his father, isn’t old enough to take care of himself, Nico and Eva have asked me to take care of him for a few hours today. My schedule is flexible, I’m a journalist, so I told them that, of course, it isn’t a problem.
All around me Nico’s voice echoes to an electric African beat.
Tout le monde est toujours après moi...
Le préfet est toujours après moi....
Their entire apartment resembles a mini-recording studio. Electronic machinery everywhere; stacks of recorders, panels with dials; a guitar leaning in a corner, a saxophone resting in its stand. Nico records his own songs here, sometimes makes videos with his cam-corder. Some of the music is serious which he presents to producers, but much is for fun: for his wife and his son and himself.
He emerges from the back room. I can only hope my smile, when I choose to use it, is half as resplendent as his is now, glowing in a face that’s purple like the midnight ocean in moonlight. He says, “Excuse my earlier rudeness,” and he extends his hand. Shaking hands here is a formality that’s strictly observed. “How are you?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say. “Today’s your big day.”
His laughter erupts outward, his head rolling back on his neck. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll see.”
Nico has all the makings of a pop star except the actual pop star status. Nico, who’s from Cameroon, is handsome, not in a pretty way but rather like an ebony figurine; his charm is magnetic; and he has the look. His body tight like twisted oak, Nico dresses like a rapper: hip-hop caps on a shaved head; baggy trousers, heavy high tops he drags around—but he wears these black, plastic-framed athletic glasses with the strap that betray his humor. Nothing about Nico ever seems serious and sometimes I think that the only reason he’s not a star is because he’s too sincere. He sings rap to an African beat, usually in French but sometimes in English heavy with an accent that makes him sound like Yul Brynner.
“Benoît, are you ready?” he calls toward the back of their apartment.
“Oui, Papa,” returns.
Then out comes Benoît, wearing a raincoat, his neck wrapped in a scarf. He offers me his hand. “Bonjour, Monsieur Max,” he says, very seriously. His grip is soft, his hand seemingly boneless.
“Bonjour,” I say, “Monsieur Benoît,” but he does not smile. “You know, if we’re going to spend the whole afternoon together, we’d better drop the formalities and just call one another by our first names.”
“Okay,” he says, still unsmiling, and lets go my hand.
“Shall we?” says Nico, offering the door. On the way down the stairwell, whisking Benoît in front of him, he continues, “Eva will be home early, at five-thirty or six.”
“We’re still meeting later, right?” I ask as we pass the concierge—Nico and I nod in cursory salutation, but Benoît stops to shake her hand.
“Of course,” Nico says, stopping to pull Benoît along by the shoulders. “Say, at seven at the restaurant.”
“Bisous for Papa,” he says to Benoît, bending over, and they kiss cheeks, once on each. “And thanks again,” he says to me, shaking my hand tersely. Then he dashes down the street.
Benoît and I watch him go.
I turn to Benoît. “So, what would you like to do today?”
A woman holding a young boy’s hand walks by. Benoît watches mother and child, then says, “I don’t know. Whatever you would like.”
“I’d like anything you’d like.”
“I’d like to ride the carrousel,” he says without smiling.
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“That won’t take too terribly long.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
“How about we go see a movie first?”
“Then go to the carrousel?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
Turning toward the metro, I look to take Benoît’s hand, but he looks straight ahead and walks very independently beside me. He’s dressed smartly, like so many French kids, sporting the latest fashions, but in sizes humorously small. In his tan trenchcoat and scarf, corduroy slacks and brown leather docksiders with tassels, he looks more like a miniature lawyer on his way to court than an eight-year-old in search of a carrousel. Thick like a tree stump and wearing worn denim from the collar down, I almost feel deficient beside him.
At the white-striped crosswalk, he puts his hand in mine, but as soon as we reach the curb Benoît returns it to his pocket. We go down the stairs into the metro and, on the platform, pass two gendarmes who, working their way down its length, are checking identification papers, mostly of Arab and African men. Two more are doing the same thing on the platform opposite. These two don’t stop us, though, and I don’t volunteer for their sweep but rather stroll to the far end and stand next to another black person, a sister who looks like she might be an American tourist. Benoît, hands in his coat pockets, stands beside me. The three of us standing so close together could pass for a family. Not that I’m illegal or anything. I just try to avoid run-ins with the police whenever possible. Being dark like an African and young, I’m often a target, subject to their scrutinizing gazes and patronizing questions until I can free my passport from my pocket and they leave me alone.
On the other platform, a clochard, this disheveled figure with a raspy afro and what look like all his possessions in a frayed backpack, stands looking directly at me which for Paris is, of course, an oddity. As I notice him, he asks across the tracks in a French voice soft like clouds, “Do you know Jesus?”
I find eccentricity amusing. “No,” I say. “Not personally, that is.” But neither he nor Benoît nor this woman smiles.
The clochard turns toward her—she has acknowledged neither his presence nor mine. “Do you know Jesus?” he insists.
Being directly addressed, her stone defenses fall and she fidgets. “No, me neither,” she says in perfect French, but her gaze drops just as quickly then away from us down the tunnel. I’d taken her for African-American, but her unexpected diffidence tell me she’s West Indian or African métisse, her cultural identity more closely tied to the French.
“I am Jesus,” continues the clochard, stretching his arms out over the tracks toward us. And more strongly, “I...AM...JESUS.”
I glance from this woman to the advancing police and back. “That may be,” I say, “but then our friend Jesus there is in a world of trouble again, because my money says he doesn’t have I.D. papers to attest to his holiness.”
Like a French person, she’s again surprised to be addressed by a stranger: she looks at me, and she smiles a smile like Benoît might, which I return before glancing down at my own shoes, somehow surprised myself by our exchange, even though I initiated it. But then her glance slips from me to Benoît and just as quickly away from us, as though, having noted Benoît’s skin tone, which is the color of wheat, she’d unintentionally peeked in on something it wasn’t her business to see.
The train zips into the station at just that moment, separating us from Jesus opposite. We three board by the same door, but she sits in a row with her back to us.
“Do you want to sit down?” I ask Benoît.
He looks up into my face. “If you want to,” he says, almost as if it were a question.
“No. I’d rather stand,” I say, “but we’d better hold on.”
Benoît stares at my hand, holding the handrail, and places his own a good foot beneath it as the train rolls out of the station. We ride in silence. I don’t know what to say to Benoît, who is purposely looking at the ads posted in the train, at the backs of strangers’ heads, away from me. Periodically, the woman from the platform glances at us by our reflection in the glass, but when she sees me looking, she turns away. Benoît and I get off at Montparnasse station, and I’m happy to leave her.
When we arrive out on the street, the clouds have thickened and it’s started to sprinkle, a bad omen for later carrousel riding. The dark Tour de Maine stretches heavily upwards out of the surrounding gray buildings but offers no shelter. So I pick up the pace and reach back for Benoît’s hand, but he keeps both deep in his pockets, looking straight ahead, and hustles along awkwardly fast in order to keep up.
There’s a movie theater on the Boulevard de Montparnasse that regularly plays children’s films. Today two cartoons are offered, advertised in larger-than-life Technicolor. “Which would you prefer to see?” I ask.
“I don’t mind either,” he says. “Which would you prefer?”
I look at the marquis. One features two birds in pilot’s gear and seems alive with action and adventure. The other seems more of a lovey-dovey story: a prince and princess holding hands at the top of a long staircase. I scratch my chin. “I guess I’d rather see this one,” pointing to the two birds.
“Oh,” says Benoît. “Okay.” His eyes engage mine, his expression trying so hard to appear impartial that it almost looks sad. And in the tone of his voice I hear disappointment at my choice, which surprises me of an eight-year-old boy.
“But then again,” I say, scratching my chin some more in deep reflection. “I’d really rather see this one.”
And he smiles.
We get into the line, which is rather long. The rain increases, so I turn up my collar and dig my hands deeper into my pockets. Benoît glances over and, very independently, mirrors my actions, his expression so serious, and for some reason this reminds me that I need to make I.D. photos at one of those fifteen franc photo-booths that are everywhere, to send with my application to renew my press card which expires in a month. I make a mental note, but fearing I’ll forget anyway, I take my four-color pen out of my pocket and make a big red X on the back of my hand.
Benoît looks stunned.
“I write on my hand sometimes,” I say, trying to redress my childish act committed in front of a child, “even though I know I shouldn’t....”
“Your Bic,” he says, mouth agape. “Do all the colors work?”
“Sure,” I say and offer it to him.
He presses the green first and, his fingers fumbling to master the bulky Bic, starts to write in the palm of his hand.
“Whoa, whoa. Don’t write on yourself,” I say, feeling hypocritical. I pull out a scrap bank statement from my back pocket and, with the hand I didn’t write on, pass it to him. “Here.”
He writes his name in meticulous script in all four colors, one below the next. He studies it and smiles. “Ah,” he says, “you’re rich,” returning the Bic and still smiling, and I think that at the end of the day I must make a gift of it to him.
The line inches forward as the rain increases. My jean jacket is getting soaked. I look down at Benoît and notice that his coat is made of rainproof material, so I don’t worry. I say, rather to myself, “I should have worn my imperméable, too.”
“What’s an imperméable?” Benoît asks.
We move forward two places. “Material that’s impermeable,” I say, “doesn’t allow water to soak through. Like your jacket. That way, you stay dry in the rain.”
“Oh,” he says. “Okay.” Then he looks down at his pants. Jerks his hands from his pockets and feels inside them. Squats and feels inside his shoes. “Me, I’m rich, too,” he says. “I have a coat that is impermeable, pants that are impermeable, and shoes that are impermeable!”
“Yes,” I say. “You are rich.”
At the ticket window, I pay and we go inside. In French cinemas, there are about ten or fifteen minutes of commercials that precede each film. We enter in the middle of one for Evian mineral water that features a lily-white family picnicking in a golden carpet of some grain, snow-capped mountains as a backdrop, and that’s the sum total of what I see of the cartoon I’ve chosen. Zip. Nada. I feel suddenly sleepy, once I’m comfortably settled in these so comfortable cinema seats, I yawn and close my eyes an instant, and when Benoît nudges me awake some few instants later, the music is blaring, the final credits rolling across the screen, and people are filing out through the illuminated exits.
“It’s finished,” Benoît says, unsmiling.
“Was I....” I clear my throat. “Was I sleeping?”
I only hope I didn’t snore. Poor kid.
Outside, the rain has stopped, but clouds still crowd the skies from horizon to horizon. I try to amend for my sleeping sickness. “I know this great carrousel at the Jardin des Tuilleries.”
“With horses?” he asks. “When I go with Maman and Papa, we always go on carrousels with horses.”
“I think so,” I say, thinking, God, I hope so.
We take the metro. When we arrive, the sun is now peeking through cracks in the cloud cover. That, at least, is a relief. There’s a small fair: a ferris wheel, bumper cars and several carrousels. But not one with horses.
“I don’t see the horses,” he says.
“Me neither,” I say. “There’s another carrousel I know of at...” but his eyes alight looking off in one direction. There, a merry carrousel runs a rolling course over miniature hills with many-colored race cars and...
“Motorcycles!” he says.
“Would you like to ride the motorcycles?”
“Oh, yes,” he says up to me.
And we run to the carrousel, laughing. He climbs onto a purple cycle behind a blond girl in a green racer. I pay at the ticket counter and give the token to the attendant. Benoît looks from me down to the purple cycle and back to me again. He kicks on the foot-pegs, twists the hand grips, impatient for the cycle to go. He looks back to me, uncertain, then the carrousel jerks into motion and his smile returns.
The sun is full out now, the clouds dissipating, and Benoît goes around and around. The blond girl in the green car waves at her parents as she rounds the turn towards us. Benoît watches her, then he waves, too. So I wave back. He leans forward to pick up speed on the downhill side and into the curves. The blond girl slaps the center of her steering wheel, a horn honks and Benoît jumps, startled. He stands up on the foot pegs to see over her shoulder. Noting the green knob in the middle of her steering wheel, he then notices the green one in the middle of his handle bars. He pushes it down and his horn honks. He laughs. At every return to my side of the carrousel, he smiles and honks and waves. I wave back. Then he leans into the curve, trying to overtake the blond in the green racer.
He rides the motorcycle three times.
After the third ride, I say, “It’s getting late. Maybe we should go now.”
“Okay,” he says, and continues smiling anyway.
An older American couple is pointing toward us. I act as if I don’t see them, but as they approach, I hear her say, “Oh, he’s cute as a bug’s ear, Gerald.” She’s pointing to Benoît.
I turn to him and say, “Let’s go.”
“Par-lez vous an-glais?” the woman says to me in discordant French.
I turn back toward her and answer, “Fluently.”
“Oh, wonderful,” she says to her husband Gerald, not realizing I’m American, though I don’t understand how she can’t. She speaks to me slowly, distinctly pronouncing each syllable. “I would like to pho-to-graph your child,” pointing from her camera to Benoît. And smiling.
I don’t know how to say no without calling even more attention to this situation. I turn to Benoît, my eyes fixed rather on his shoes, explain to him, “These-uh...people would like to-uh....” But before I can finish Benoît walks away from us like a Cameroonian prince to a spot where the sun rains golden light on his golden skin and he poses, his hands on his hips. He says, “I should have the sun in my face.”
I have to smile. “Whenever you’re ready,” I translate for them.
They take the picture,, then thank us one thousand fold as I walk to Benoît and we leave. “No problem,” I’m saying over my shoulder. Benoît never even looks back.
It’s already past six somehow. I must get Benoît home before Eva starts to worry. Walking up the Jardin towards Place de la Concorde, the nearest metro station, we pass the round pool where the monstrous gold fish surface and descend like dirty orange submarines. Bands of children push toy wooden sailboats with thin reeds out and across to the other side. In this quiet, I feel a small soft warmth reaching into my hand. I look down and Benoît is smiling up at me, our hands holding.
“Max,” he says, “why are you sad?”
“Sad,” I say. “I’m not sad.”
“You look sad.”
“Oh, no. I’m not sad. Inside I’m very happy.”
“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”
With the sun and this child, I walk past the metro station at Concorde several blocks up to the one at Madeleine, despite the hour. We board the train there. The car is crowded, stuffy, and Benoît, pushed close to the standing handrail, has his soft hand on my hand, holding on. I notice that, with his thumb, he’s rubbing a fleshy spot between my thumb and forefinger. He has been, in fact, to varying degrees of gentleness, since he began holding my hand. The exact same spot. Smiling, looking off elsewhere, but constantly rubbing. It’s like he might kiss it. This makes me uncomfortable, but I try not to show it. Then it makes me think of Margot, the woman I saw for three years before leaving. After we had made love and were lying together, talking, I almost always rubbed with a thumb the puffy pink flesh of one nipple or the other. Gently, but constantly. I wouldn’t have noticed that I was doing it had she not one day snapped at me to stop. I remember something inside sulking down. The funny thing, though, was that I’d never even noticed before that I was doing it, much less that it annoyed her. Margot was white, we didn’t last. Benoît, I hope, will be my friend for a long time. I understand that his rubbing thumb is merely staking a claim, planting a flag in territory he wants to conquer. I refuse to humiliate his innocence. I smile at his smile, and we stand quietly as the crowded train runs on. At their stop, we get off and walk towards his home, holding hands and in the silence of dusk.
We climb the three flights of stairs to their apartment and ring. Eva answers the doorbell after a brief interval. “Hello, you two,” she says, and scoops Benoît up into her arms. She puts him down, and we kiss cheeks—the female equivalent of the Frenchman’s handshake. Only with women, I never know how many pecks any particular one expects—it varies for people from different regions—and nobody likes to be left standing, lips puckered into empty space, feeling like a stooge. I’ve known Eva as long as I’ve known Nico, and I know that she and I always kiss four times, in the tradition of Africans which she has gotten from him. Still, I ask her, “Three times?”
“No,” she says, “four,” knowing full-well that I know and that I’m only trying to be funny. Eva is Swedish and she looks it—blond hair, fair skin, square jaw. Her voice is like gravel and sometimes I think I hear the disciplined intonation of the germanic in her speech, but it’s only illusion. Eva has just enough hold to be the mast for Nico’s sail, but she dances on her own winds, too. She asks, “Did you two have a good afternoon?”
“Oh yes, Maman,” Benoît says, tearing his trenchcoat off his back. “Max has a Bic with four colors. Black, and red, and blue, and... Green!” he finally remembers.
“Okay,” Eva says, “don’t just throw your coat on the floor. Hang it up.”
“Can I show her, Max?”
“Of course,” I say and reach into my pocket.
Eva directs us out of the entrance and into the living room—“Come in! Come in!”—as I hand Benoît my Bic. “Can I get you something?” Eva asks. “Coffee, a beer?”
“No, no. Thanks, but I’m late for my rendezvous with Nico.”
“Look, Maman.” Benoît shows her the paper where he’s just written his name in four colors.
Eva studies it, then says, “What a wonderful pen.”
“Oh yes,” says Benoît. He extends it toward me.
“You go ahead and keep it. I have another one just like it at home.”
“Can I?” he asks and looks to his mom.
“Of course,” I say.
“What do you say?” says Eva.
“Thank you, Max.”
Eva says, “Now go put it with your things and wash up.”
Benoît disappears into the back room, and I use the flurry of his exit as a way to make my own. “I’ve got to go,” I say. I am turning to leave, but Eva turns me back around and gives me a long and very warm hug.
“Thank you very much, Max.”
“Yes,” I say, “of course.”
When we separate, I hustle out the door, calling over my shoulder, “Ciao, Benoît. See you next time.”
I hear the scrambling of little feet, then, “See you, Max,” called down the stairwell.
I run to the metro and am lucky to have a train pull up as I step onto the platform. The metro is the fastest mode of transportation available, yet still not fast enough to keep me punctual: it’s five past seven already—five minutes past my meeting time with Nico. The warning buzzer buzzes and the doors slide shut. I hold onto the rail and await our arrival.
The train slips into Arts et Métiers station. Next come Temple, Rambuteau, Hôtel de Ville.... The air around me feels charged, but I want to think about nothing now, so I think about the drivers of these trains. I think about how horrible it would be to be stuck at the controls of one of these things: staring dead straight ahead at dark tunnel walls that lead toward a growing spot of light and into a lit station, staying there only a moment before starting back into more dark tunnel and again to another lit station beyond, and so on. At the endpoint of the line, walking the length of the train to an identical control booth at the opposite end but pointing in the opposite direction. Then resuming the run, hitting all the same stations, only in the reverse order. What a life, I think. A sort of circular Hell on a linear track; only making the predetermined stops, but always making them.
Then I think about Nico. Nico is thirty-three, his life has a rhythm and is solid, but nothing about it seems fixed or predetermined. Rather, like his music, it all seems spontaneous, improvised. And I envy him his life, his child and his wife. Not that I believe that I, in his situation, would be half so fine. But he, in his situation, is beauty in harmony. Sometimes, when I think of Eva, I feel attracted to her. Then I make myself see that it’s not Eva that is attractive to me, but rather what she is to Nico. And he to her. That thought keeps me mentally wholesome.
The train arrives at Châtelet station, and I get off. I’m meeting Nico at the California Plate, the American restaurant where he cooks from five a.m. to noon, five days a week. At the green and red neon entrance, the hostess recognizes me as a friend of his and smiles. She’s dressed to look American—pink diner-waitress’s dress, hair pulled into a pony-tail, lips painted fire-engine red—but the French way she carries herself is more pronounced and so she looks rather like an anomaly, the beauty of her charm disfigured. But, in a way, she’s a pretty accurate representation of this restaurant. French decorum is way too elegant for a place like this, serving Haut Medoc with chili dogs. Back home or here, it doesn’t matter: a rib shack is a rib shack is a rib shack. How can there be an in-between?
The hostess tells me that Nico’s at the bar, and I head that way. His smile greets me first. Then I notice the music that’s playing: a Nico rap from one of his self-styled tapes. “Catchy tune,” I say.
“Isn’t it, though.”
The restaurant is a convenient place to meet, but Nico doesn’t like hanging around here too much when he’s not working, which I appreciate. So we leave. We cross the Passerelle des Arts, a wooden pedestrian bridge over the Seine, and walk to a little French hang-out, Chez Georges.
Chez Georges is homey and small and always smoke-filled. It’s run by an older, very-French couple who try to maintain a Parisian feeling bar in a quarter that’s gone to the tourists. French students usually crowd the wooden benches, as do their American counterparts who, for their junior year abroad, convert to Parisian life—what they imagine it to be—as to religion. They buy Bohemian clothes and wear unkempt hair and take up cigarette smoking, only to abandon it all a few weeks before the end of the school year and their imminent returns to the U.S. Neighborhood winos get their drinks here, too. And with the occasional tourists who wander in, the whole makes for an eclectic mix. Tonight the place is nearly empty and that’s fine, too. Nico and I sit in a back corner of the tight square room.
Nico gets us beers at the bar. A woman, standing by herself there, watches his return and stares at our table. This is the first I’ve ever seen her here, but she acts at ease at the bar, like a regular, only the others there, the real regulars—the habitués—don’t acknowledge her presence. She’s not unattractive, but something about her looks discordant. She’s older, or appears to be, has long hair, light but not blond and thin like tissue. Her face seems vacuous, like a wino’s, and her clothes—a khaki pantsuit—are nice but rumpled, like she’d spent all day sitting in the streets: a strange appearance for a woman, an older white woman, one who’s obviously American and probably a tourist. There’s little barroom noise, and she’s listening to our conversation without the least unease.
“So, how is your novel coming?” Nico asks in his Yul Brynner English.
“It’s coming along fine.” I respond purposely in French.
But Nico persists in English. “Are you finished?”
So I shift to English, too. “A few chapters are.”
“Not more?”
“I write what I can, Nico.”
“Ah, Max,” he sighs, then laughs.
Sometimes Nico doesn’t understand me, our worlds are so different. He often accuses me of not acting on my dreams. “It takes a lot to write a novel and get a contract,” I say. “And you have to know the right people. Plus, the journalism takes so much time.” Nico thinks I’m in France because I want to be a writer.
I glance toward the bar, my glance falling on the woman there. She responds by coming to our table and sitting on the wooden bench beside us. Or rather, beside me. Shit, I think. But Nico greets her with a smile. Everything’s a joke to him.
She asks us where we’re from in an English slow like syrup and sticky with an accent I can’t pinpoint. Nico laughs at her question and says that, of course, he is from, “Pah-ree!” But she is apparently more interested in my response.
Her stare is unnerving. I look off towards the door, say that I’m from Florida.
“Florider,” she says. Then she asks what we’re doing here.
Nico, still smiling, reiterates that he is French and therefore lives here.
“French, hunh?” she says, not really as a question but like a stone-faced judge looking down from the bench. She asks me if I’m a writer, although she already knows the answer, and when I say that I am, she levels her judgmental “Hunh?” on me. And she just stares.
This woman’s shining for me, and it’s embarrassing, strange, but also familiar—vaguely inviting—so I just want her to take her rumpled pantsuit and nasty accent back to the bar and away from us. I turn to where she’d been standing there: the barman, Georges, is looking on and smiles sympathetically.
Her voice drags and whines: she’s telling us about teaching, that she’s a teacher, and Nico makes a joke of pretending to be interested. “Where do you teach?” he asks, and she says she teaches in New York City now (and I finally place the ugly accent: all those r’s tacked on uselessly to the ends of words). And she’s staring straight at me as she continues, saying that she taught for awhile in “Florider.” “To those mindless people there,” she says.
“Florida,” I say, “you know Florida?”
“I know Florider. Miami, Key Biscayne,” she says. “Just like I know New York. I teach in ghetto schools in New York. Reading, writing. Teach little colored kids how to cross the street, how to keep straight between the white lines so they don’t get hurt. And they love me,” she says.
Nico’s response is to laugh, his laughter egging her on, keeping her here, and that rubs as much as her insistent presence.
“And you,” I hear her say to me, “so you’re here looking for love like every other dumb shmuck American in Paris?”
“Looking for love? I never said that.”
“You’re a writer,” she says. “What else do writers do?”
“I’m a journalist,” I say.
“A journalist, hunh? You don’t look like a journalist.”
I just want her to stop now. “I work for a financial quarterly,” I say to shut her up, “for American businesses abroad. I report on currency trends in Europe....”
“Eurodollars,” she says. “Why would anyone want to write about Eurodollars?”
“Eurodollars...?” I turn toward Nico. “‘Eurodollars’ don’t even exist. I write about....”
“How old’re you anyway? You can’t be older than twenty-five.”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“Why would anyone bring some twenty-six year old black kid from Florider to France to write about Eurodollars?”
“Look...”
“What, you like this one or something,” she’s pointing at Nico, “trying to plant roots?” And she laughs. “Real faux Frenchmen.”
“Look...” is all I can say. I turn toward Nico, whose face is fighting a smile. Toward the bar: Georges isn’t even looking anymore. “Look,” I say, “maybe they want me around because I’m good, because I have a lot of experience on newspapers....”
“At twenty-six?”
“Maybe I’ve been working on newspapers for nearly ten years. At college,” I say. “And at the Miami Herald!...”
“Florider,” she says. “Mindless people.”
I don’t know what to say. She’s turned toward Nico (“And what about you?” “Yes, what about me?”) and I don’t know what to say. Sitting there, sad and pathetic, a drunk, probably sixty (“You must be a musician or something.” “Now what makes you say that?”) her features disjointed like a Picasso portrait (“Oh, I know all about you.”) and trying to make me out to be something I refuse to be (“You know nothing about me.”).
A rib shack is a rib shack, I guess. There is no in-between.
“You find Paris a waste,” Nico, his entire face a Sambo smile, is saying. “How long have you been here?”
My own face is hot. I make myself not look at her. I’m looking at the barman Georges, who is washing glasses, at the regulars at the bar, at Nico.…
“One month,” I hear her say. “I got an open ticket, I’m going back soon.”
“How old are you anyway?”
“How old?” She looks into her glass. “I’m fifty-three.”
“Hunh,” he says, still smiling. “Same age as my mother.”
A sudden silence bursts over the room. She looks suddenly small, sitting there slumped over her wine. She takes a long drink, emptying her glass, her eyes fixed on its base. “Yeah,” she says after a pause, not in agreement

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