Frenchtown Summer Read Free Page A

plunging
into agonies of longing.
Dumb with desire,
I stumbled through my days and evenings
just as my fingers stumbled
as I struggled to play
“The Song of the Rose.”
Delirious with her closeness
beside me on the bench,
the scent
of strong soap her perfume.
Her long fingers
were so lovely in their paleness
I longed to crush them
to my mouth
and kiss the palms of her hands,
not daring to dream
of touching her lips
with mine.
Mute in her presence,
tripping on the carpet's edge,
I was a pathetic lover.
By the time I had learned
to play “The Song of the Rose”
without tripping fingers
she had vanished,
gone to some unknown convent,
her sudden departure,
like her arrival,
unexplained,
a mystery,
just as so much of life
behind the shuttered windows
of the convent
was a mystery.
    My anguish tore
my life into shreds
and I never played
the piano
again.

“So you're going.”
My mother's voice
an off-key violin string,
while my father,
not answering,
tightened the knot
in his Sunday tie,
blue with cardinals flying
on the silk.
    His white shirt glistened
in the bedroom mirror.
I watched him toss her question away
with the tilting of his chin.
He often didn't answer my mother
but his silences
could contain lightning,
at other times,
tenderness.
He shrugged into his Best Suit,
dark blue with faint stripes,
his suit for weddings and funerals
or special times
like the day he watched
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
waving from the final car
as the train slowed down
but did not stop
at the Monument depot.
“Spiffy,” my mother always said
when my father put on his Best Suit.
    But today, she said only:
“Go then.”
Her voice
a violin string
snapping.
    I followed him like a spy
through the thrumming Saturday crowds
on Third Street,
women clutching grocery bags,
the men lounging outside the Happy Times,
basking in the cellar smell of whiskey.
    Mechanic Street led us downtown
while I dodged
from doorway to telephone pole
behind him.
He never turned around,
head down,
as if the sidewalk held a map
charting his way.
Through Monument Park
past the wartime statues,
and the Civil War cannon
aimed at the five-and-ten
across the street.
The North Side lay ahead,
big white houses
with wide verandas
and birdbaths on carpet lawns.
My father's steps faltered
and he stopped at a telephone pole.
Would he turn back?
He lit a Chesterfield,
then began to walk again,
more briskly now
as we passed Merryweather Lane
and Holly and Cranberry Avenues.
Frenchtown had streets,
not lanes or avenues,
piazzas, not verandas.
My father finally paused
at the two marble columns
guarding the entrance
to the Estate,
the home of Lanyard C. Royce,
owner of the Monument Comb Shop.
“Benefactor and Philanthropist,”
according to the
Times
,
reporting his death that week at age eighty-nine
in big black headlines on the front page.
“Inventor of machines that produced combs
eight hours a day without stopping.”
I had seen his signature
scrawled on my father's Friday paychecks.
The
Times
did not report
what the men called Lanyard C. Royce
at the Happy Times:
Skinflint.
Strikebreaker.
A hard man, my father said at home,
striking a kitchen match
on the sole of his shoe.
I watched him enter the Estate,
diminishing in size
as he walked up the half-moon driveway,
past men gathered
near Mack limousines,
puffing at long cigars,
and he disappeared
into veils of smoke.
    Waiting, I thought of the times
he dressed in that Best Suit
to visit Cardeaux's Funeral Home.
“Have to pay my respects,” he'd say
and my mother never said,
“So you're going.”
I lurked on the sidewalk,
keeping out of sight,
which was easy to do,
because the men with cigars
took no notice
of my presence
or my existence.
    At home, after my mother
hung his Best Suit in the closet,
having enclosed it first
in cellophane,
they sat in the kitchen,
my father in his rocking chair,
my mother at the kitchen table,
smoothing invisible wrinkles
from the blue tablecloth.
I stared at the pages
of
Tom Sawyer.

My mother