Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes. Jan David Blais
bet you don’t even know how it started!” She was right, I had no clue.
“Steve made a joke about Tante Geneviève’s moustache, and Pierre...”
“Her what?”
“Her moustache, fool! You mean you never noticed it?”
Sure, there was a little dark fuzz there... actually if you thought about it, it did look odd, but it wasn’t a moustache. Women didn’t have moustaches. I didn’t know what it was.
“Pièrre told Steve to take it back, but he wouldn’t, that’s what started it! See!”
Well, I didn’t blame Pièrre. If somebody made fun of my mother, I’d fight him, too.
“And who ever heard of people coming to visit and not telling you ahead,” Catherine was going on. “Of course Ma wouldn’t play the piano! How could he even ask? Good thing they left, if you ask me! Good riddance!”
First up next morning, I did my usual house patrol. My parents’ door was closed but this early that was normal. What wasn’t, finding my father on the couch in a blanket, his legs over the arm like Uncle Albert’s the night before, but this morning no lamp on the floor, no lamp at all. Chin in hand I sat on the stairs, pondering the remains of my perfect day
5. A Nine-Year-Old Summer
JONATHAN LOOKS UP, PUZZLED. “I’m surprised how important religion was to Paul,” he says. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“Those days, that was par for the course. The parishes, the parochial schools, they were immensely powerful. Totally different now, with Vatican II and the unraveling of the American Church. But I give old Pope John credit. He ran a risk, but sometimes overreaction is better than no reaction. The jury’s still out – it will be for centuries.”
“Politics was my family’s religion. My mother was a red diaper baby. She and my father met at Columbia in the Sixties.”
“Ah, Columbia – we watched you from afar. But as for religion, there’s no guarantee that conformist pressure will work. The individual determines the outcome surely as a glass shapes the water it holds. And if it’s all genes and wiring, what’s the point, anyway? I will say this, though, dissent has its price. And when what’s at stake is eternity, every inch you stray from the path magnifies the guilt and fear.”
“Not exactly how I see it.”
“Nor I, not since I figured out which end was up. Some people take it on themselves to redefine the game so nothing means the same. They call that growing in the Faith, but to me that’s simply dishonest. You’re in or you’re out. I’m out, though hope springs eternal, and incidentally, it’s a lot less demanding than the other two. All right,” I say, sliding a pile of folders toward Jonathan. “Today we start with one of Paul’s infrequent letters. After 9-11 we talked by phone but he had no time for correspondence.”
Everyman TeleVision Network
419 West 13th Street
New York City, NY 10014
October 1, 2001
Gus,
I found a couple of spare hours so here’s your next installment. You really need to get down here and go through the rest yourself.
Next week I’m in Paris. The French will be key to whatever Washington does about bin Laden, at least they should be. I need to know more about their thinking.
As I pulled this together it occurred to me, these reminiscences are similar to your young religious experiences, or as you called them, impositions. As for me, one thing is clear, everything was foreshadowed. The acorn does indeed possess the oak.
We need to talk about where this business of yours is going.
All the best,
Paul
* * * * * * *
ON COMPLETING FOURTH GRADE, a few weeks before my ninth birthday we acquired a dog. We always had cats – strays who saw a life commitment in a dish of milk, but dogs didn’t fit my mother’s concept of a home, particularly carpets and furniture. I grew up loathing carpets and furniture nearly as much as cats. My nose was always in a book and my father thought a rowdy animal might straighten me out. Girls read and had cats, boys were about roughhousing and dogs. True to form, though, after his announcement I headed for the library and checked out as many dog books as I could carry. Dogs, Breeds of. Dogs, Care and Feeding of. Dogs, Diseases. Dog, History of. That Sunday afternoon we headed for the country, the newspaper clipping in my pocket:
BEAGLES for sale. Pups, six weeks, 3 males 2 females, variety colors, markings. Shots and wormed. AKC regis. Irresistible. $35. Lincolnwood Kennels. Lincoln 2828B.
Thirty-five dollars was a fortune, an indication of the peril my father thought I was in. I loved Lassie, but my mother wouldn’t abide the hair. But a kid two streets over owned a beagle, a compact, friendly animal with acceptable hair. And so it came to be.
King was a wiggly black and brown fur ball who mostly slept and ate and messed. I fixed a box with a blanket and put it beside the kitchen stove so the pilot would warm him at night. The first night he whined so miserably my father put a hot water bottle and a clock in to settle him down.
A beagle named King? I settled on the name before my mother nixed the collie idea. Here was a creature with no name until I pronounced one over him. Now it was on his tag and he was beginning to answer to it. Disconcerting, such power over another creature. I knew how Adam felt setting up all those animals with names. One of the men in my father’s shop built a doghouse I painted white with red trim and ninety-three, our house number, on the front. We set it under the spruce trees behind the basketball hoop. King was an outside dog, though I could have him in the house as long as I dealt with the inevitable.
Every summer we piled into the car and visited some relative’s house. To qualify as a vacation it had to be a somewhat distant relative, about fifty miles at least. North was the preferred destination. As a driver, my father was fou, everybody said, never stopping except for gas. We always had to get there in one day, which meant an exhausting ordeal usually ending at Bic where he grew up. By the second time I went, Mémère had died. My father and mother went to the funeral but we didn’t because of school.
This summer was extremely rainy and our lot a sea of muck, so Omer and I spent hours on his porch working jigsaw puzzles and playing picture cards. King mostly slept, though sometimes he’d yawn and pull a card in for a chew. One morning on my way to Omer’s an airplane flew right down my street, so low I could read the number on the wing. Circling under the clouds, all of a sudden it dropped behind the trees. I held my breath, waiting... but it never came back up! I yelled at Omer to come on. It took him several blocks to catch us, King and I were running so fast. But nothing! No plane on the golf course, no plane up a tree. No police cars, no fire trucks, no sirens. How disappointing! Later I wondered if what I was really chasing was excitement, disaster. A sign of things to come? That night for the first time I had a dream which visits me to this day. In it I spread my arms and soar, swooping, turning, racing my shadow over the ground. Whenever that dream appears, the next morning I wake exhilarated, ready for anything.
RAINY DAYS MEANT BASEBALL ON THE RADIO. I was still a year away from getting on the school team but I hung around their practice and helped with the bats and equipment. I hoped to make it my first try. When it rained here it rained in Boston, so the Braves or Red Sox, whoever was home, were rained out and I’d listen to telegraphic recreations of games from other cities. For some reason it always seemed to be the Cubs and Cardinals. Or Cincinnati. Maybe it didn’t rain as much in that part of the country. The telegraph clacked as Jim Britt described somebody thousands of miles away stealing second or dumping a Texas Leaguer into short right. I always wondered how much of it he made up.
I