Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes. Jan David Blais
brackish, foul-smelling river. Merino, where winters we played hockey, terrorizing the girls, my sister and cousins, as they skated backward and did spins. We helped them spin, all right. Merino, home to St. Teresa’s baseball. I was already obsessed with my tryout. On my knees each night, I pounded my glove and pleaded with God, aware I was testing His patience and power to the limit.
Walking into the reception area I waved at Miss Grenier, a stout older lady who’d been with the business since it started in the Thirties. A distant relative, she’d been in the States a long time. Her gloomy face and dour expression are permanently etched in my memory. She nodded as I opened the door to the corridor where my father and Uncle Antoine had side-by-side offices, black letters on frosted glass.
JULIEN BERNARD – PRESIDENT
ANTOINE BERNARD – VICE PRESIDENT
I peered into Uncle Antoine’s office but he wasn’t in. My father’s door was ajar and I heard voices so I knocked. No answer, so I knocked harder. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me. I brought your lunch.”
“Well, don’t just stand there! Come in!”
My father was seated at his desk. Lorraine, his secretary, was standing by his chair, brushing the front of her dress, kind of pulling it down. Sweeping up some papers she floated past me with a big smile, which reminded me of something my mother said about perfume, that its presence should be felt but not smelled. That didn’t make any sense to me. Isn’t that what perfume’s for, to be smelled? But I have to admit Lorraine’s particular perfume was extremely powerful, in fact, the room reeked of it. If it had been my office I would’ve opened a window, that’s for sure.
My father had two secretaries, Lorraine and Mrs. Lamontagne. Mrs. Lamontagne was another of those other people who’d worked for him forever. His bookkeeper, she knew everything about the business. As well as being my father’s personal secretary, Lorraine helped out in front. The person in her job changed often, younger women who left to get married and have kids. This day I thought how pale Lorraine’s hair was, white, really, which recalled another of my mother’s comments, about women who bleach their hair. Everyone knows what kind of woman does that, she’d say, scowling at my father, and we know what they’re after. Her hair would have made Lorraine look old except she was pretty and not at all fat which you could tell since her dress was very tight. I don’t know, maybe it shrank.
“Ti-Paul!” My father waved me into the chair in front of his desk. As I said before, he rarely called me that, but the shop was one of those times. “I’ve got something to show you, something-you-will-not-believe!”
It had been a dull day, nobody around, and I ended up on my hands and knees clipping grass along the edge of the driveway, a dreary, pointless task. I placed the sack lunch beside my chair. My feet easily reached the floor – I was pushing five feet.
“There!” he said, inserting his gold pen in its holder and blotting a paper. “We’ll give this to Mrs. Lamontagne then we’re off!”
He dropped the bag into a desk drawer. “That can wait,” he said, plucking his hat from the hat rack. I followed him down the corridor through the heavy metal door to the factory side of the shop. I always liked watching the machines, some going up and down, others side to side or in circles, punching holes, slicing, bending, filing. Most of them were quiet which these days wasn’t unusual. We passed the timecard rack which could hold a couple hundred cards but these days had a lot of empty spaces. I often heard my father and mother talking about how bad business was. But today he was in a really good mood.
“Pretty soon, ti-Paul, pret-ty soon! Before long, this place’ll be hopping, just like the old days!” He bent down and put his face close to mine. “I’ll tell you something not even your mother knows. We just landed a contract from one of them big jewelry makers! A ve-ry big contract! First time we’ve ever been able to crack them.” He nodded. “The other news you’ll hear about soon enough.”
“There’s more?” I asked.
He paused. This time his face was serious. “It looks like we’ll be having another war. Them Orientals are up to their old tricks – this time it’s the Koreans. They better watch out or we’ll kick their ass again!”
Wow! This was the first I’d heard about another war.
Our car was in the first parking space, in front of the PRESIDENT signpost, a black Plymouth we’d had a long time. If things pick up, I thought, maybe we’ll get a new one! Soon we were driving through the Olneyville business district down the hill. We turned into a side street and pulled up in front of a store with the sign QUALITY RADIO SALES AND SERVICE – ALL WORK GUARANTEED. The front window was full of radios and victrolas and dead flies and bees on the sill with a lot of crumpled paper. As we opened the door a chime sounded and a man pushed his way through a curtain from the back room.
“Ça va, Julien!” It was my father’s friend, Mr. Lemieux. He ran the Mongenais Club Christmas party every year.
“Ça va, Roland, damn good, in fact.”
Mr. Lemieux was a short, balding man with a lean face and a heavy beard and something that shocked me every time I saw it, something that wasn’t even there, his right arm. It had been shot off during the war, they said, in the Battle of the Bulge. He was another hero of the neighborhood, though seeing this incomplete person, in an odd way it made you feel worse than Cosmo or cousin Maurice who didn’t come back at all. I once asked my father how Mr. Lemieux could repair radios and he said, lucky thing, he was left-handed to start with. When he was working Mr. Lemieux strapped on this fake arm with a metal hook. Unbelievable how he could move things around and pick them up with that hook. Today he didn’t have the arm on and the sleeve of his short-sleeve shirt flapped as he moved. I always wanted to see what it looked like, some kind of stump, I figured, but I never dared ask.
“So, ti-Paul, you ready for the big show?” Mr. Lemieux asked.
No idea what he meant but I nodded anyway.
“Allons-y! Back this way. Just got it in this morning.”
He led us through the curtain to this amazing indoor junkyard, thousands of radios and other stuff in every state of disrepair. Next to the workbench a calendar lady in a red swim suit gazed down on us from August. “Here it is!” he said proudly.
There it was all right, in front of Mr. Lemieux’ workbench, a... I didn’t know what it was. Some sort of cabinet like our living room radio except bigger and with a round window and a bunch of dials. I ran my fingers across the cool glass.
“First one in the city,” Mr. Lemieux said, winking. “The Dumont man’s a friend of mine. Here, let’s start it up.” He turned one knob and fiddled with another that had little numbers around the edge... circumference, that is. This knob clicked when he turned it.
“This is television, ti-Paul!” said my father, looking extremely pleased with himself.
Now the box was hissing and giving off a tone. The window grew lighter and a design appeared, several circles and a star with a black arm, a white arm and two shaded arms, and the words WJAR-TV - Providence - Channel 10. “That there’s the test pattern, they’s nothing on that station til later,” Mr. Lemieux said, reaching for the numbered dial, “but look here!” He turned the dial through several clicks. The test pattern disappeared and what was this? The window was fuzzy but I saw a baseball field, with a pitcher at the top of the window! Near the bottom, a catcher and a batter! I leaned forward.
“It’s Ted Williams!”
“You bet!” Mr. Lemieux said, fiddling with a V-shaped thing on top of the box. As he moved it around, the picture faded, then returned. “This here’s the Boston station. Comes in okay with the rabbit ears. When I hook up the roof antenna we’ll get rid of that snow.”
Ted Williams, my idol, here in this... this box! “Two men out, last of the first, here’s the three-one pitch.” Williams swung and the ball disappeared through the upper