Free Frenchtown Summer by Robert Cormier Page B

which
diamonds were displayed
in the windows of Brunelie's Jewelry Store.
Delicate as lace,
she was not like my sturdy aunts,
who stomped off to the comb shops
in the mornings,
or the vigorous aunts,
who stayed home with the babies,
scrubbing, ironing,
pummeling carpets on clotheslines.
Their hands swooped like trapezes
as they talked,
to help my mother understand
their Canuck words,
while my mother's hands
performed ballets.
Somehow they came to understand
each other
in a haphazard litany of language.
    From magazines,
my mother scissored scenes
of country lanes,
farmhouses with smoke corkscrewing
from chimneys,
while her kitchen window
framed three-deckers,
streetlights and sidewalks,
and the comb shop roofs.
If her smile was sometimes wistful,
her laughter often ran silver
in the tenement.
She sighed at Raymond's roguish ways
as she caressed his cheek
and looked tenderly at me
in all my confusion.
Her eyes always lingered
on my father,
in what seemed to me
depths of love.
    At those moments,
I looked at my father,
trying to read his eyes,
to find out
what was in his heart.
But he was as unknowable
as a foreign language.

In the massive heat
of a July afternoon,
delivering the
Times

on Seventh Street,
I glanced up to see Mrs. Cartin
on her third-floor piazza,
hanging clothes on the line
that stretched like a limp rosary
from her three-decker
to the LeBlanc house next door.
Letting a blue shirt flutter
like a wounded bird
to the ground below,
she leaned forward,
her hands gripping the railing,
and rose as if on tiptoe,
lifting herself,
rising, rising,
higher and higher,
precariously poised,
like a bird before flight
—
but people can't fly
—
the throbbing in my throat
preventing me from calling:
“Don't jump, don't jump!”
    She fell back from the railing,
like a balloon deflated.
As she turned away,
arms hugging her chest,
I saw tears on her cheeks
but told myself that
at that distance
they were tricks of summer sunlight
or my imagination.
    That Sunday,
at the nine o'clock Mass,
she knelt in the third pew
alongside Mr. Cartin
and their two little girls.
She received Holy Communion,
eyes lowered
as she returned from the rail,
looking like a saint
in my prayer book.
    I thought of how she had almost
followed that blue shirt
in its flight
to the yard below,
and placed the memory
in that dark place
where I kept all the secrets
of Frenchtown.

Long ago,
before I was born,
the broken body
of Marielle LeMoync
was found in the woods
at the bottom of Twelfth Street,
a wild place
of gnarled bushes
and stunted trees,
with a tortured path carving a shortcut
to the Acme Button Company
where Marielle worked
as a packer.
A yellow necktie
with black stripes
coiled like a snake
around her neck.
    Children were warned
to stay away from those woods
but we often explored
that forbidden territory,
shivering with delicious fear,
trying to determine the exact spot
where she was murdered.
    Her killer was never found
although a hobo was spied
leaping aboard a boxcar
headed west
the morning her body was discovered.
Marielle was buried
in St. Jude's Cemetery,
a marble angel
placed on her grave
by her father and mother,
who returned to Canada
the following summer
unable to withstand
the onslaught of memories
Frenchtown held for them.
    Sometimes at night,
awaking suddenly,
hearing the chuffing of an engine
in the Boston & Maine freight yards,
I'd ponder the possibility
that the tramp had been
innocent after all,
remembering the rumors
that Marielle LeMoyne
had been three months pregnant
when she was slain.
Was it possible
that a murderer still stalked
the streets of Frenchtown,
kneeling in St. Jude's Church on Sundays,
buying hamburg steak
at Fournier's Meat Market,
drinking beer with the men,
my father among them,
at the Happy Times,
and, maybe,
maybe looking right into my eyes
as he passed me unidentified
on Third Street?
    Or had he died?
Or simply moved away?
    Those last thoughts
were like rosary beads of comfort
as I lay sleepless,
waiting for