Free The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams Page A

twelve his father disappeared. Much later his mother told him the story—not an uncommon one in its basic details. Somehow, it seemed, Harold’s father and his stepdaughter had been left alone in the apartment on a Sunday afternoon. Yvonne was sixteen, a sulky, rather stupid, buxom girl who had already left school. Harold’s mother came back long before she was expected to find them naked on the conjugal bed. Tante Louise came in then, too, and they both got a good look at the pale-skinned, wrinkle-necked man atop the spread-eagled sixteen-year-old. The two women just stood there for a moment. Allard clearly saw Harold’s mother staring at the naked buttocks of the man she’d slept with for twenty years, seeing them, white and hairy, driving with their goatish jerks that other thing into her own daughter. What licks of shame and hellfire must have singed her pious soul in those few seconds! And legally this was incest, statutory rape and what-all. Tante Louise had the presence of mind to grab an iron bridge lamp and bring it down across the man’s bare back. “
Monstre! Animal! Va-t’en
!” She got him a few more good ones before he made his escape. Yvonne, though scared, gave the two women a superior, languorous shrug and began to put on her panties and bra with the sang-froid of a whore. They gave her a few good lumps, a black eye and a split lip, but she never gave them back a sniffle or a tear.
    But when did Harold’s mother, whose life was composed of work and prayer and the avoidance of candor in such matters, tell Harold at least some of these details? Later, much later, when Harold was out of the army. They were both adults then, and he found that she had not, for instance, slept with the man every night for twenty years out of sheer duty. It was Harold who was shocked by her rueful humor concerning those ancient events.
    Of course Harold didn’t tell the story quite like this toAllard. There would be little crudeness, and not even a hint of the chill of irony. Allard was the first friend Harold had ever considered close enough, trustworthy enough, to reveal any of it to, and he spoke of these things as if he used an unfamiliar language.
    Harold and his sisters were told that their father had gotten a job in Manchester. Yvonne stuck around for nearly a year, though her mother would not speak a word to her and didn’t care whether she came or went. Harold thought she got married, but he wasn’t sure. He was surprised to find out later that his three sisters had known all about Yvonne, and that her bad reputation had commenced to grow when she was at least as young as seven.
    The store was barely profitable but Tante Louise and Oncle Hebert let them live in the building for very little rent. Harold’s mother worked nights as a waitress, as well as in the store. She was a saint, Harold said, always trying to raise her children up in the world, while she herself went to church more and more often. He remembered an encyclopedia she bought for them—later repossessed, but this was because of fine print in the contract and a smooth salesman. She fed them, she washed, she sewed, she prayed upon her rosary. Harold was good in school, perhaps because he had no friends—no
real
friends, he said, meaning real like Allard—and with his mother’s devout and nearly frantic aid he entered the seminary at seventeen. lie was not quite sure when, or why, it became obvious to him and to his teachers that he had no vocation as a priest. In 1943, to his mother’s sorrow and despair, he left the seminary and was drafted into the army.
    Though still devout—his doubts were of his own character, never of the Church—he had thought to make a complete break with the things of the seminary, but after basic training he was assigned as an assistant to the Catholic chaplain of the 3rd Infantry Replacement Training Command, where he spent the rest of the war. In 1946 he was discharged as a technician third-class.
    One fine spring