Free Frenchtown Summer by Robert Cormier

That summer in Frenchtown
in the days
when I knew my name
but did not know who I was,
we lived on the second floor
of the three-decker on Fourth Street.
From the piazza late in the afternoon
I watched for my father,
waiting for him to come home
from the Monument Comb Shop.
No matter how tired he was,
his step was quick.
He'd always look up, expecting to see me,
and that's why I was there,
not wanting to disappoint him
or myself.
    That was the summer of my first paper route,
and I walked the tenement canyons
of Frenchtown
delivering
The Monument Times
,
dodging bullies and dogs,
wondering what I was doing
here on the planet Earth,
not knowing yet that the deep emptiness
inside me
was
loneliness.
    I felt like a ghost
on Mechanic Street,
transparent as rain,
until the growling of Mr. Mellier's dog
restored my flesh and blood
and hurried me on my way.
I was always glad to arrive home,
where my mother,
who looked like a movie star,
welcomed me with a kiss and a hug.
My mother filled the tenement with smells,
cakes in the oven,
hot donuts in bubbling oil,
and hamburg laced with onions sizzling
in the black pan she called the Spider.
She loved books, lilac cologne,
and me.
    My mother was vibrant,
a wind chime,
but my father was a silhouette,
as if obscured
by a light shining behind him.
He was closer to me waving from the street
than nearby in the tenement
or walking beside me.
On summer Saturdays,
the men gathered
at the Happy Times bar
or in Rouleau's Barber Shop
and talked about the Boston Red Sox
and the prospects of a layoff
at the Monument Comb Shop
while my brother, Raymond,
swapped baseball cards
in Pee Alley
with his best friend, Alyre Tournier.
I stood beside my father
as he listened
to what the men were saying,
smoking his Chesterfields,
and I wished I could be like him,
mysterious,
silent.
    I was not famous in the schoolyard, or on the street corners, content to cheer for Raymond,
who was a star at everything,
baseball at Carder's Field,
Buck Buck How Many Fingers Up?

in the schoolyard,
while I read
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

or
A Study in Scarlet

on the piazza,
avoiding the possibility
of dropping a fly ball in center field.
    My paper route took me
from the green three-decker
next to the Boston & Maine railroad tracks
where downtown Monument
met Frenchtown,
along Mechanic
and all the numbered streets
from First to Twelfth.
My last customer was Mr. Lottier
at the end of Mechanic Street
next to the sewer beds.
    I held my nose
as I tossed the paper to his piazza.
He always smiled
when he paid me on Friday,
as if his nose didn't work.
    That summer, Frenchtown was a place of Sahara afternoons, shadows in doorways, lingering evenings, full of unanswered questions and mysteries.
    It was also the summer of my twelfth birthday, the summer of Sister Angela and Marielle LeMoyne (even though she was dead) And my brother, Raymond, and all the others,
but especially my uncle Med
and my father.
    And finally
it was the summer
of the airplane.

How many times I have heard
the men at the Happy Times
talking about the famous dancer
in a London dressing room
who decided,
on a whim,
to cut off her tumbling locks
of auburn hair,
plunging Frenchtown
into a depression
a year later because
women all over the world
adopted her bobbed hairstyle
and did not require anymore
the fancy combs
and barrettes,
glittering with rhinestones,
dancing with sequins,
that paraded from the assembly lines
of the Frenchtown comb shops.
My father didn't work for a year.
Just a child then,
too young to understand
what was happening,
I only knew that my mother
did not smile anymore,
her voice like one long sad note
struck on a piano
when she read me stories,
while my father seemed to have gone away
even though I could see him clearly
in his kitchen chair by the window,
the silence in the tenement
a terrible noise
in my heart.

Moosock Brook
kept disappearing
as it flowed
through downtown Monument
and later Frenchtown,
red, purple or green,
depending on the