American Stranger

by David Plante

  And here everything became so familiar and so different she was not sure if she was there or not. As she approached the street, down the other side of the Hill, on which she had lived with Yvon and where he might for all she knew still be living, she felt an inward impulse both to draw away and to go to the street door and ring the bell. The brick sidewalk had been shoveled, and there was a bank of snow along the curb in which the posts of the gas streetlights were partly buried. She looked up at the streetlight that had illuminated the room where she and Yvon had made love and talked and slept. Lit all day, the pale greenish flames in the glass lanterns hissed. She climbed the three granite steps to the newly painted black door with a newly polished brass knocker; to the side of the door were brass slots for the names and bells of the occupants. The one where her name had been was empty.

  She rang the bell. She waited. There was no answer. It was early afternoon. If Yvon were teaching at the language school, he would be there, and would return.

  In a telephone booth deep in a bank of snow she telephoned information for the number of the family home of Manos Papas, then telephoned there, and Manos’s mother answered. She remembered Nancy and asked how she was, but said quickly, with an accent Nancy didn’t remember, that Manos was an intern now, with a Greek wife and a baby. She gave Nancy his telephone number. Through the glass sides of the telephone booth, she looked out at people passing along the narrow path through the snowbank on the sidewalk. She was not sure the number she dialed was right. The palms of her hands sweated as she waited for the ringing telephone to be answered, and they sweated more when a woman answered. Nancy explained, tactfully implying she had no other interest in Manos, past or present or future, but to find out something through him, that she was trying to locate an old friend of theirs, Yvon Gendreau. Manos’s wife said, Oh hi, her name was Irini, and Manos had spoken about her and would want to see her.

  “Where are you staying in Boston?” Irini asked.

  Nancy hadn’t thought about where she would stay. She said, because she remembered it was the hotel where students from colleges outside of Boston stayed when they came for proms or football games, “The Kenilworth.”

  “Can you come to dinner tonight?” Irini asked. “It’ll be a nice surprise for Manos when he gets home.”

  “I can,” Nancy answered.

  She walked back toward the Public Garden and the Ritz, where she got a room for the night, and from her room she watched the day go dark and the lights light in the Public Garden and, beyond, on the Common, illuminating the snow-covered landscape where there was no one, and where, no doubt, it was dangerous to go at night.

  Manos and Irini lived in Brookline in a new apartment house. Manos opened the door to Nancy and hugged but didn’t kiss her. Irini, who had blonde hair and blue eyes, stood down the entry hall from Manos.

  Releasing Manos, Nancy immediately said to him, because she couldn’t help herself, “Please tell me about Yvon.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Manos said.

  “Come in,” Irini said to Nancy, “come in.”

  Manos helped Nancy off with her coat.

  She tried to check her compulsion to talk about Yvon during drinks and dinner, which Irini served at a long, shining table with candles in silver candlesticks at either end, and even for a while after dinner, while Irini told Nancy about how she and Manos had met, about their Greek Orthodox wedding, about the baby, asleep, and about Manos wanting to become a heart specialist. Manos smiled while Irini spoke.

  They moved to the living room. Irini stopped talking for a while, then got up and said, “I’ll let you two continue,” and said good night and left.

  Looking around, Nancy noticed that there was nothing Greek about the apartment, not even a rug. With one corner of her lips raised, Nancy said, “You married a Greek.”

  He laughed as if at a joke he had made. “It pleased my parents.”

  And she laughed at the joke.

  Surprising her because she’d never known him to be concerned. Manos said, “This country has changed in the time you’ve been away, Nan. It was always uncontrollable, and that was a great virtue, because the uncontrollable allowed for freedom. But it’s become so uncontrollable I’m frightened for my family. The fear is real. I wonder what’s going to come out of the chaos, and I don’t know and I don’t know anyone who does. What’s strange is that the chaos seems to make people more patriotic than ever.”

  She asked, “Where is Yvon?”

  “I can’t say quite where.”

  “You can’t say to me?”

  “Nan, he was really broken after you left him.”

  “I had to leave him. It was either him or me. And I’m not going to feel guilty that I broke him. He almost broke me.”

  “Then why have you come back to look for him?”

  She lowered her head, then, raising it, said, “Because I want to see him.”

  “In fact, I can’t say because he told me he was leaving Boston, but he didn’t say where he was going.”

  “Back to his parish, I’ll bet.”

  “I hope not. I hope he went somewhere where he started a new life.”

  Nancy asked, “Will you get my coat for me?”

  In her hotel room in the Ritz, she opened the curtains, which the maid had closed, on the view of the Public Garden and Common and went to bed with them open.

  She did not want to go to Providence, and even while she was in her car heading south she kept telling herself to drive past and go on back to New York. But she turned off at the exit.

  In downtown Providence, she got out of her car to walk around to calm herself and then, in the city’s main post office, looked up in the Yellow Pages, under Printing Businesses, the name Gendreau. She asked a policeman sitting in his car near where her car was parked for directions to the address she had written with an eyebrow pencil on the back of an envelope. He took a plan of the city and its suburbs from his glove compartment to look it up.

  “That’s in the French parish,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember how to get there. It seems a long way away.”

  “I’d say, centuries away.”

  She drove up a hill out of the city, past churches, all red brick, that looked the same to her. Unsure of herself, she stopped before a church to ask an old woman walking along the sidewalk with two big sagging bags of grocery shopping if this was the French parish, and the old woman said, no, it was the Polish parish, though, she added, there were not many Poles left to make it a parish. The French parish was at the top of the hill.

  Nancy parked her car in a side street next to the brick church at the top of the hill. She got out and walked along the path on the sidewalk between the snowbank at the curb and the snowbank against the wooden and chain-link fences of the front yards of tenement houses; great icicles hung from their eaves. At the end of a row of shops she came to a snow-covered lot, dry weeds growing up through the snow, and she saw GENDREAU PRINTING across the large window of a shop there. Through the large window, partly frosted over, she saw a man she imagined must be Yvon’s brother Cyriac at the press. Just as she was thinking she shouldn’t have come, he turned and saw her.

  He opened the door, an old-fashioned door with a glass pane in it and a half-drawn blind with a cord and a wooden knob at the end of the cord that hit against the glass, and he rushed out onto the path, but stopped a short distance from her, as if he didn’t know how to greet her. Their breaths steamed in the cold air. He looked like a rough Yvon.

  “You’re cold,” he said.

  She said, “I’m an old friend of Yvon, Nancy Green.”

  “Ah, Nancy,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Come in, come in,” he said, and tightened an arm about her shoulders to bring her inside the printing shop.

  The press was clanking. He shut it off.

 
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “It’s fine. I can come back. I have time.”

  He was standing at the large press, rubbing his hands together to try to get the ink off them.

  “What were you printing?” she asked.

  He hesitated and then said, “Some fliers for the liquor store. They’re having a sale.”

  “In French?”

  “In English. The owner of the liquor store is Irish now.”

  Nancy asked, “Is Yvon here in the parish?”

  Cyriac laughed. “The parish? The parish doesn’t exist anymore.” And before she could say anything more, he asked, “Did you eat?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “We’ll go to my house and eat.”

  They walked along the parish streets, under the huge, snow-heavy maple trees along the curbs, to the clapboard bungalow that Nancy remembered and that had the familiar smell of wood smoke. Its kitchen walls seemed to converge on the large, black-framed oleograph of Christ holding his chest open to a thorn-entangled heart.

  Nancy said, “There used to be an old cabinet in the kitchen. You could see the marks of the adze on the wood.”

  He said, “I sold it.”

  “Yvon was proud of it. It had so much history in it.”

  “So much history, so much,” he said, “and it’s gone.”

  As polite as Yvon, Cyriac helped Nancy off with her coat and hung it, with his, in the closet in which she remembered seeing a sheep’s pelt, and it was still there.

  She followed him into a pantry off the kitchen where, at a sink, Cyriac washed his hands with a paste he scooped out of a can. Ink remained under his nails and in the whorls of the tips of his fingers. From a pantry cabinet he took down a can of food and, holding it out to her, said, “Franco-American spaghetti,” and laughed. “The only sign of anything Franco-American in America, and it isn’t Franco.” He took a loaf of sliced white bread from a tin bread bin. Cyriac, setting the table, put the knives and forks together at one side of the plate, and Nancy recalled Yvon’s doubt about what side the knife was set on and what side the fork, and this recollection seemed for a moment to sum up his world. Nancy and Cyriac ate the spaghetti in a thin tomato sauce from mismatched plates and drank tea from mismatched cups without saucers.

  Nancy said, “Tell me where Yvon is.”

  Cyriac seemed to smile a little. “Well, I believe Yvon is gone.”

  All the tendons of her body became loose, and, as if giving in to something she could no longer hold away, Nancy sat back in her chair. She felt a tingling about her lips.

  Nancy asked, “What do you mean, ‘you believe’?”

  Cyriac said, “I believe,” and paused, and Nancy wondered for a flash if he wouldn’t tell her, but when he spoke he spoke simply, “that he went into the forest and didn’t come out.”

  She winced. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, Yvon usually didn’t tell me where he went, and I didn’t ask. He’d go off for longer and longer times, across the country, maybe without knowing where he was going, maybe just hitching rides. I guess he found jobs, odd jobs, for money enough. But he always came back afterward, sometimes months later, with another piece of rock from where he’d gone. But this time he never returned. And so I think that when the snow was falling heavy, he went into the forest and he found a deep drift, and he laid himself down in the drift, and he fell asleep.”

  Cyriac ceased talking, as if he had no more to say, and Nancy looked around the kitchen. The worn linoleum patterned with merry-go-rounds and clowns still covered the floor.

  “You’re a New Yorker, aren’t you?” Cyriac asked.

  “I am.”

  “I don’t have a problem with New Yorkers. They’re buying houses in the woods in the Yankee southern part of the state. They go for walks in the woods, but the Yankees hunt. I sometimes feel that Yvon went there, but if he was there, he’d of been found.”

  “Did you contact the police?”

  “I did, and once or twice they called me to come identify a body, but it wasn’t Yvon.”

  “And did you go to look, yourself?”

  “I did, I looked, but he’s gone, Nancy, yes, oh yes, he’s gone.”

  “Yes,” Nancy repeated quietly.

  “Eat up,” Cyriac said, and in a state of numbness she did as she was told, with bread.

  When she had finished, Nancy said, as if this were the inevitable reaction to not knowing where Yvon was, “Show me the parish.”

  “I told you, the parish hardly exists anymore.”

  “Show me what’s left.”

  Nothing of what she remembered the parish to have been was the parish in fact—small, clapboard bungalows behind snow-covered privet hedges; then, as they walked in silence towards the brick bell tower of a church, clapboard tenements with sagging porches at every story, some of the porches with clotheslines strung between pillars and hung with clothes frozen in the cold. There were shops that appeared to be shut, but pale light showed through their frosted windows: a grocery, a laundry, a cobbler’s shop. The brick church appeared on a little rise among the tenements and shops. While Nancy waited outside the closed doors of the church, Cyriac went to the rectory for the key to the side door. She felt that she was surrounded by what she could only think of as an inevitability, as though inevitability were a space around her, and in that space was Yvon’s world, and his world now was more vast than she could know. Cyriac returned with the key and led her to a side door, which he held open for her to go in first.

  The church was colder inside than the outside. The altar, behind a wooden rail, looked stark, a lamp suspended by chains, a tiny red light seeming to flicker in it, hanging above the altar.

  She asked, pointing to above the altar where there was what looked like a very small chapel in white and gilt, and she asked, “Is that a tabernacle?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Yvon told me. He told me it’s a bad swearword in your French when you’re angry, and that makes me think that I never heard him use any swearwords because I never saw him angry.”

  “No, not Yvon,” his brother said.

  “So this is where Yvon came to Mass,” Nancy said.

  “This is it.”

  “Tell me, did he believe?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. It don’t matter, not now. Almost no one comes to Mass. And there are no baptisms, so I don’t even know where the baptismal fount is, if it’s anywheres.”

  Sunlight lit the stained-glass windows, and she noted that along the bottom of the windows, were painted, in script, French names—Francoeur, Pelletier, Beauchemin—and Cyriac explained that these were the names of the parishioners who had donated the windows; before she could ask, he added that the Gendreaus were never rich enough to donate. There was a hole in one of the windows, as though a stone had been thrown through.

  Nancy tried to imagine Yvon sitting in a pew in the church, and she could only see him alone, with no one else and no service at the altar. She thought that if there had been a God present in this church, that God would have been for Yvon alone, as strange to the outside as a God to whom prayers were unknown, but known by Yvon, and, perhaps, still known by him.

  “Let’s go,” Nancy said.

  Outside, the sky had clouded over with low gray clouds.

  This was what Nancy felt: she felt, yes, that the world was vast, more vast than she could know, than anyone could know.

  Cyriac said, “We’ll get back into the kitchen, the only room that’s warm in the house.”

  Inside, in the fug of the kitchen, she sat at the table and he put a battered kettle on the hob, mugs and a bottle of milk and a sugar bowl with a spoon on the table, and while they waited for the water to boil she looked at the large, black-framed oleograph of Christ holding his chest open to a thorn-entangled heart, th
e picture high on the wall in the absence of the cabinet.

  All of Cyriac’s attention seemed to be on preparing her a mug of tea: how much milk? how much sugar? She said just tea. He seemed not to know that people drank tea without milk and sugar. His tea was almost half milk and three teaspoons of sugar.

  He said, “You know, Yvon had this idea of finding a new mineral that’d make his collection special, even, well, you’d say unique. He was crazy about his rock collection.”

  “Do you have his rock collection? Can I see it?”

  “I’ll show it to you.”

  “Now.”

  “Drink your tea.”

  She drank some tea.

  Cyriac said, “He had his ideas, Yvon did, and sometimes they were big ideas, like having all the different rocks from all over the world in his collection. I don’t know what it’s like to have ideas like that, but I wanted him, wanted Yvon, to do everything he wanted to do, and to get everything he wanted. It was so much that he wanted. Oh, I don’t mean getting rich, getting famous, having what a Yankee has, no, that wasn’t what Yvon wanted, and I can guess that he didn’t want all of that because he knew he couldn’t have it, but it was like something bigger than anybody can have.”

  Nancy heard herself moan a little. “Oh yes.”

  “You know?”

  “I know.”

  “And you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “He had it in him that he could make people feel there was something more in the world for them than they knew. He could do that, yes, oh yes, sure, he could make people think there was something more in rocks than just rocks, something they never thought was worth looking at, like rocks. Yvon was the only one who could make Ma be calm, the way she’d be calm at Mass with him sitting next to her. And that’s why he came back every weekend to take her to Mass, because she was calm there with him. Just putting his hand on hers when she was hitting her knuckles against the edge of the table, that made her calm. She could be crazy, Ma could, and only Yvon gave her peace, not much, but some. He could do that, Yvon could, he could make her feel that there was something more than just herself, something that would make her let go and be calm, a little, so she’d stop hitting her knuckles on the table and she’d sit back and close her eyes, and he’d sit with her, and maybe he’d close his eyes, too.”