The Main

14

From horizon to horizon the sky is streaming southward over the city. The membrane of layer-inversion has ruptured, and the pig weather is rushing through the gap, wisps and flags of torn cloud scudding beneath the higher roiling mass, all swept before a persistent north wind down off the Laurentians. Children look up at the tide of yeasty froth and have the giddying sensation that the sky is still, and the earth is rushing north.

The wind has held through the night, and by evening there will be snow. Tomorrow, taut skies of ardent blue will scintillate over snow drifts in the parks. At last it is over, this pig weather.

LaPointe stands at the window of his office, watching the sky flee south. The door opens behind him and Guttmann’s head appears. “I got it, sir.”

“Good. Come in. What are you carrying there?”

“Sir? Oh, just a cup of coffee.”

“For me?”

“Ah… yes?”

“Good. Pass it over. Aren’t you having any?”

“I guess not, sir. I’ve been drinking too much coffee lately.”

“Hm-m. What did you find out?”

“I did what you told me; I checked with McGill and found that Mlle. Montjean attended on a full scholarship.”

“I see.” This is only part of the answer LaPointe is looking for. As he walked through back streets of the Main toward his apartment last night, he was pestered with the question of how a girl from the streets, a chippy’s daughter, managed to get the schooling that transformed her into a sophisticated, if bent and tormented, young woman. If she had been Jewish or Chinese, he would understand, but the French Canadian culture does not contain this instinctive awe for education. “How did she come by the scholarship?”

“Well, she was an intelligent student. Did well in entrance tests. Super IQ. And to a certain degree, the scholarship was a foregone conclusion.”

“How come?”

“She attended Ste. Catherine’s Academy. I remember the Ste. Kate girls from when I was in college. They’re prepped specifically for the entrance exams. Most of them get scholarships. Not that that’s any saving of money for their parents. It costs more to send a girl to Ste. Kate’s than to any university in the world.”

“I see.”

“You want me to check out Ste. Catherine’s?”

“No, I’ll do it.” LaPointe wads up the coffee cup and misses the wastebasket with it.

Guttmann pulls his old bentwood chair from the wall and sits on it backwards, his chin on his arms. “How did it go last night? Did it turn out to be true that she never met the American, MacHenry?”

“No. She met him.” LaPointe involuntarily lays his hand over the five-year diary he has been scanning with a feeling of reluctance, invasion.

“Then why did she deny it?”

“He gave her a phony name. She probably read about his death in the papers without knowing who it was.”

“How about that? She’s quite a… quite a woman, isn’t she?”

“In what way?”

“Well, you know. The way she’s got it all together. Her business, her life. All under control. I admire that. And the way she talks about sex—frank, healthy, not coy, not embarrassed. She’s got it all put together.”

“You’d make a great social worker, son; the way you can size people up at a glance.”

“We’ll have a chance to find out about that.” Guttmann rubs the tip of his nose with his thumb knuckle. “I’ve… ah… sent in my resignation, effective in two months.” He glances up to see what effect this news has on the Lieutenant None.

“Jeanne and I talked it over all last night. We’ve decided that I’m not cut out to be a cop.”

“Does that mean you’ve got too much of something? Or too little?”

“Both, I guess. If I’m going to help people, me, I want to do it from their side of the fence.”

LaPointe smiles at the “me, I” construction. His French was better when they met… but more bogus. “From the way you talk it sounds like you and your Jeanne are getting married.”

“You know, that’s a funny thing, sir. We’ve never actually talked about marriage. We’ve talked about how children should be brought up. We’ve talked about how when you design a house you should put the bathroom above the kitchen to save on plumbing. But never actually about marriage. And now it’s sort of too late to propose to her. We’ve sort of passed that moment and gone on to bigger things.” Guttmann smiles comfortably and shakes his head over the way their romance is going. People in love always imagine they’re interesting. He rises from his chair. “Well, sir. I’ve got to get going. I report this afternoon out at St. Jean de Dieu. I’ll be doing my last two months on the east side.”

“Be careful. It can be rough for a Roundhead out there.”

Guttmann tucks down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. “After being around you, maybe I can pass.” If the chair weren’t in the way, he might shake hands with the Lieutenant.

But the chair is in the way.

“Well, see you around, sir.”

LaPointe nods. “Yes, see you around.”

A few minutes after Guttmann leaves, it occurs to LaPointe that he never learned the kid’s first name.

“Lieutenant LaPointe?” Sister Marie-Thérèse enters the waiting room with a crisp rustle of her blue habit. She shakes hands firmly, realizing that uncertain pressures are vulnerable to interpretation. “You surprise me, Lieutenant. I expected an army officer.” She smiles at him interrogatively, with the poise that is the signature of Ste. Catherine girls.

“I’m police, Sister.”

“Ah.” Meaning nothing.

As LaPointe explains that he is interested in one of their ex-students, Sister Marie-Thérèse listens politely, her face a mask of bland benevolence framed by a wide-winged wimple of perfect whiteness.

“I see,” she says when he has finished. “Well, of course Ste. Catherine’s is always eager to be a good citizen of Montreal, but I am afraid. Lieutenant, that our rules forbid any disclosure of our students’ affairs. I am sure you understand.” Her manner is gentle, her intention adamant.

“It isn’t the young lady we’re interested in. Not directly.”

“Nevertheless…” She shows her palms, revealing herself to be helpless in the face of absolute rules.

“I considered getting a warrant, Sister. But since there were no criminal charges against the young lady, I thought it might be better to avoid what the newspapers might consider a nasty business.”

The smile does not desert the nun’s lips, but she lowers her eyes and blinks once. There are no wrinkles in her dry, almost powdery forehead. The face shows no signs of age, and none of youth.

“Still,” LaPointe says, taking up his overcoat, “I understand your position. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

She lifts a hand toward his arm, but she does not touch him. “You say that Mlle. Montjean is not implicated in anything… unpleasant?”

“I said that she was not facing criminal charges.”

“I see. Well, perhaps Ste. Catherine’s could serve her best by cooperating with you. Will you follow me, please, Lieutenant?”

As they pass along a dark-paneled hall, he walks through air set in motion by the nun’s habit, and he picks up a faint scent of soap and bread. He wonders if there is a Glory Hole here, and little girls working off punishment tranches by holding out their arms until their shoulders throb. He supposes not. Punishment at Ste. Catherine’s would be a subtler matter, modern, kindly, and epulotic. Theirs would be a beautifully appointed little chapel, and their Virgin would not have a chip out of her cheek, would not be cross-eyed.

Two teen-aged girls dash around a corner, but arrest their run with comic abruptness when they see Sister Marie-Thérèse, and assume a sedate walk, side by side in their identical blue uniforms with SCA embroidered on bibs that bulge slightly with developing, unexplained breasts. In passing, they mutter, “Good morning, Sister.” The nun nods her head, her expression neutral. But as the girls pass LaPointe they make identical tight-jawed grimaces and suck air in through their lower teeth. They’ll get it later for running in the halls. Young ladies do not run. Not at Ste. Catherine’s.

The Sister opens a tall oak door and stands aside to allow LaPointe to enter her office first. She does not close the door after them. As principal, she often has to meet male parents without the company of another nun, but never in rooms with closed doors.

The whole atmosphere of Ste. Catherine’s Academy vibrates with sex unperformed.

With a businesslike rustle of her long skirts, she passes behind her desk and opens a middle file drawer. “You say Mlle. Montjean came to us twenty years ago?”

“About that. I don’t know the exact date.”

“That would be before I held my present position.” She looks up from leafing through the files. “Although it certainly would not be before I came here.” A careful denial that she is claiming youth. “In fact, Lieutenant, I am a Ste. Catherine girl myself.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Except for my girlhood and my years at university, I have lived all my life here. I was a teacher long before they made me principal.” A slight accent on “made.” An elevation to which she had not aspired, and for which she was unworthy. “It’s odd that I don’t remember a Mlle. Montjean.”

Of course. He had forgot. “Her name was Dery when she was here.”

“Dery? Claire Dery?” The tone suggests it is impossible that Claire Dery could be in trouble with the police.

“Her first name may have been Claire.”

Sister Marie-Thérèse’s fingers stop moving through the file folders. “You don’t know her first name, Lieutenant?”

“No.”

“I see.” She does not see. She lifts out a file but does not offer it. “Now, what exactly is the information you require?”

“General background.”

Her knuckles whiten as she grips the file more tightly. She has a right to know, after all. A duty to know. It’s her responsibility to the school. Personally, she has no curiosity about scandal.

LaPointe settles his melancholy eyes on her face.

She compresses her lips.

He starts to rise.

“Perhaps you would like to read through the file yourself.” She thrusts it toward him. “But it cannot leave the school, you understand.”

The folder is bound with brown cord, and it opens automatically to the page of greatest interest to Ste. Catherine’s. The information LaPointe seeks is there, in the record of fees and payments.

“…I was sure you saw me last night in Carré St. Louis.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you stopped suddenly and turned around, as though you had seen me.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. I just had one of those feelings that someone was watching me.”

“But she saw me. When she was crossing the park, I am sure she saw me.”

“She mentioned that she saw someone. But she didn’t recognize you.”

“How could she? We have never met.”

They sit diagonally opposite one another in comfortably dilapidated chairs in the bow window niche of a second-floor apartment in a brick row house on Rue de Bullion, two streets off the Main. Below them, the street is filled with a greenish gloaming, the last light of day captured and held close to the surface of the ground, causing objects in the street to be clearer than are rooftops and chimney pots. As they talk, the light leaks away; the gray clouds tumbling swiftly over the city darken and disappear; and the room behind them gradually recedes into gloom.

LaPointe has never been in the apartment before, but he has the impression that it is tidy, and characterless. They don’t look at one another; their eyes wander over the scene beyond the window, where, across the street to the left, a billboard featuring a mindless smiling girl in a short tartan skirt enjoins people to smoke EXPRESS “A.” Directly beneath them is a vacant lot strewn with broken bricks from houses being torn down to make way for a factory. There is a painted message of protest on the naked brick wall: 17 people lived here. The protest will do no good; history is against the people.

In the vacant lot, half a dozen children play a game involving running and falling down, playing dead. An older girl stands against the denuded side of the next house to be demolished, watching the kids play. Her posture is grave. She is too old to run and fall down dead; she is still too young to go with men to the bars. She watches the kids, half wanting to be one of them again, half ready to be something else, to go somewhere else.

“Will you take something, Claude? A glass of schnapps maybe?”

“Please.”

Moishe rises from the chair and goes into the gloom of the living room. “I’ve been waiting for you here all day. Once you traced your way to Claire…” He lifts a glass in each hand, a gesture expressive of inevitability. “I suppose you went to Ste. Catherine’s Academy?”

“Yes.”

“And of course you found my name in the records of payment.”

“Yes.”

Moishe gives a glass to LaPointe and sits down before lifting his drink. “Peace, Claude.”

“Peace.”

They sip their schnapps in silence. One of the kids down in the vacant lot has turned his ankle on a broken brick and is down on the hard-packed dirt. The others gather around him. The girl still stands apart.

“I’m crazy, of course,” Moishe says at last.

LaPointe shrugs his shoulders.

“Oh, yes. Crazy. Crazy is not a medical term, Claude; it’s a social term. I am not insane, but I am crazy. Society has systems and rules that it relies on for protection, for comfort… for camouflage. If somebody acts against the rules, society admits of only two possibilities. Either the outsider has acted for gain, or he has not acted for gain. If he has acted for gain, he is a criminal. If he has broken their rules with no thought of gain, he is crazy. The criminal they understand; his motives are their motives, even if his tactics are a little more… brusque. The crazy man they do not understand. Him they fear. Him they lock up, seal off. Whether they are locking him in, or locking themselves out—that’s a matter of point of view.” Moishe draws a long sigh, then he chuckles. “David would shake his head, eh? Even now, even at the end, Moishe the luftmensh looks for philosophy where there is only narrative. Poor David! What will he do without the pinochle games?”

LaPointe doesn’t respond.

“I’ve caused you a lot of trouble, haven’t I, Claude? I’m sorry. I tried to confess twice; I tried to save you the trouble. I went to your apartment Sunday for that purpose, but that young girl was there, and I could hardly… Then again after the game, when we were in the Russian café. I wanted to tell you; I wanted to explain; but it’s so complicated. I only got as far as mentioning my sister. You remember?”

“I remember.”

“She was very pretty, my sister.” Moishe’s voice is hushed and husky. “Delicate. Almost painfully shy. She would blush at anything. Once I asked her why she was so shy in company. She said she was embarrassed. Embarrassed at what, I asked. At my blushing, she said. Claude, that is shy. To be shy about being shy, that’s shy. She… they put her into a special barracks in the camp. It was… this barracks was for the use of…”

“You don’t have to tell me all this, Moishe.”

“I know. But some things I want to tell you. Some things I want to explain… to say out loud for once. In classic drama, when a man has stepped on the inevitable treadmill of fate, he has no right to escape, to avoid punishment. But he does have a right to explain, to complain. Oedipus does not have the right to make a deal with the gods, but he has a right to bitch.” Moishe sips his schnapps. “When the word reached me through the camp grapevine that my sister was in the special barracks, do you know what my first reaction was? It was: oh, no! Not her! She’s too shy!”

LaPointe closes his eyes. He is tired to the marrow.

After a pause, Moishe continues. “She had red hair, my sister. Did you know that redheaded people blush more than others? They do. They do.”

LaPointe looks over at his friend. The finger-stained round glasses are circles of bright gray reflecting the boiling sky. The eyes are invisible. “And Yo-Yo Dery had red hair too.”

“Yes. Exactly. What a policeman you would have made.”

“You went with Yo-Yo?”

“Only once. In all my life, that was my only experience with a woman. Think of that, Claude. I am sixty-two years old, and I have had only one physical experience with a woman. Of course, in my youth I was studious… very religious. Then in early manhood other things absorbed my attention. Politics. Philosophy. Oh, there were one or two girls who attracted me. And a couple of times one thing led to another and I was very close to it. But something always went wrong. A stranger happening along the path. No place to go. Once, in a field, a sudden rainstorm…

“Then there were the years in the camp. And after that, I was here, trying to start up my little business. Oh, I don’t know. Something happens to you in the camps. First you lose your self-respect, then your appetites, eventually your mind. By clever forensics and selective forgetfulness, one can regain his self-respect. But when the appetites are gone…? And the mind…?

“So, with one thing and another, I end up a sixty-two-year-old man with only one experience of love. And it really was an experience of love, Claude. Not on her part, of course. But on mine.”

“But you couldn’t have been Claire Montjean’s father. You weren’t even in Canada—”

“No, no. By the time I met Françoise, she was experienced enough to avoid having children.”

“Françoise was Yo-Yo’s real name?”

Moishe nods, his light-filled glasses blinking. “I hated that nickname. Naturally.”

“And you only made love once?”

“Once only. And that by accident, really. I used to see her pass the shop. With men usually. Always laughing. I knew all about her; the whole street knew. But there was the red hair… and something about her eyes. She reminded me of my sister. That seems funny, doesn’t it? Someone like Françoise—hearty, loud, always having fun—reminding me of a girl so shy she blushed because she blushed? Sounds ridiculous. But not really. There was something very fragile in Françoise. Something inside her was broken. The noise she chose to make when it hurt was… laughter. But the pain was there, for those who would see it. I suppose that’s why she killed herself at last.

“And the men, Claude! The men who used her like a public toilet! The men for whom she was nothing but friction and heat and a little lubrication! None of them bothered to see her pain. One after the other, they used her. They queued up. As though she were… in a special barracks. They sinned against love, these men. Society has no laws concerning crimes against love. Justice cries out against it, but the Law is silent on the matter.”

“Are you talking about the mother now, or about the daughter?”

“What? What? Both, I guess. Yes… both.”

“You said you made love to… Françoise by accident?”

“Not by intent, anyway. I used to see her walking by the shopwindow—that was back when David was only my employee, before we became partners—and she was always so pert and energetic, always a smile for everybody. You remember, don’t you? You went with her yourself, I believe.”

“Yes, I did. But—”

“Please. I’m not accusing. You were not like the others. There is a gentleness in you. Pain and gentleness. I’m not accusing. I’m only saying that you had a chance to know how full of life she was, how kind.”

“Yes.”

“So, well. One summer evening I was standing in front of the shop, taking the air. There was not so much work as there is now. We had not been ‘discovered’ by the interior decorators. I was standing there, and she came by. Alone for once. Somehow, I could tell she was feeling blue… had the cafard. I said, Good evening. She stopped. We talked about this and that… about nothing. It was one of those long, soft evenings that make you feel good, but a little melancholy, like sometimes wine does. Somehow I got the courage to ask her to take supper with me at a restaurant. I said it in a joking way, to make it easy for her to say no. But she accepted, just like that. So we had supper together. We talked, and we drank a bottle of wine. She told me about being a child on the Main. About men taking her to bed when she was only fifteen. She joked about it, of course, but she wasn’t joking. And after supper, I walked her home. A warm evening, couples strolling. And all this time, I wasn’t thinking about going to bed with her. I couldn’t think of that. After all, she reminded me of my sister.

“When we got to her place, she invited me up. I didn’t want to go home early on such an evening, to sit here alone and look out this window, so I accepted. And when we got into her apartment, she kissed her little girl good night, and she went into her bedroom and started undressing. Just like that. She undressed with the door open, and all the time she continued to chat with me about this and that. She had been sad that night, she had needed to talk; and now she was offering me what she had in return for giving her dinner and listening to her stories. How could I reject her?

“No! No!” Moishe’s hands grip the arms of his chair. “This is no time for lying to myself. Maybe not wanting to reject her had something to do with it, but not much. She was undressed and I was looking at her body… her red hair. And I wanted her. She had told me stories about sleeping with men to get enough money for food, and now she was willing to sleep with me for giving her a dinner. I wanted to prove to her that I was not like those other men! I wanted to leave her alone! As a gesture of love. But she was nude, and it had been a gentle evening with wine, and… I wanted her…

“And… one week later… she committed suicide.”

“But, Moishe…”

“Oh, I know! I know, Claude! It had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t that important in her life. A coincidence; I know that. But I felt I had to do something. I had failed to show that I was not like the other men. And now I had to do something, to show that I had affection. Then I thought of the daughter.”

“So you arranged to have the girl taken into Ste. Catherine’s. How did you find the money?”

“That’s when I began to sell out the business to David. Bit by bit, as she needed money for school, for clothes, for vacations, I arranged for a summer in Europe, and later for a loan to start her language school.”

“And all this time you never talked to the girl? Never let her know what you were doing for her?”

“That wouldn’t have been right. I wanted to do something. A gesture of love. If I had accepted the daughter’s gratitude, even affection maybe, then it would not have been a pure gesture of love. It would have been payment for value received. It was a sort of game—staying in the background, looking after her, taking pride in her accomplishments. And she has turned out to be a wonderful woman. Hasn’t she, Claude?”

LaPointe’s voice has become fogged over. He clears his throat. “Yes.”

“When you think of it, it’s ironic that you have met her, while I have not But I know what a wonderful woman she has become. Look what she is doing for others! A school to teach people how to communicate. What could be more important? And she is a loving person. A little too loving, I’m afraid. Men take advantage of her. Oh, I know that she has had many lovers. I know. I have kept an eye on her. In my day, or yours, to have lovers would have been the mark of a bad girl. But it’s different now. Young people aren’t afraid to express their love. Still… still… there are some men who take a girl’s body without loving her. These people sin. They defile.

“I used to go to Carré St. Louis often at night and keep an eye on her. I came to recognize the men. When I could, I checked up on the ones who visited often. That was a game too, checking up on them. It’s amazing how much you can find out by asking a little question here, a little question there. Especially if you look like me—mild, unassuming. Most of the men were all right. Not good enough for her, maybe. But that’s how a father always thinks. But some of them… some of them were sinning against her. Taking her love. Taking advantage of her gentleness, of her need for love. The first one was that university professor. A teacher! A teacher taking advantage of an innocent student fresh from convent school! Think of that. And a married man! Would you believe it, Claude, I saw him come to her school again and again for more than a year before it occurred to me that he was taking her love… her body. Inexperienced as I am, I thought he was interested in her school!

“Then there was that American. He had a wife in the United States. And from the first day, he was lying to her. Did you know that he used a false name with her?”

“Yes, I learned that.”

“And finally there was this Antonio Verdini. When I found out about his reputation on the Main…”

“He was a bad one.”

“An animal! Worse! Animals don’t pretend. Animals don’t rape. That’s what it is, you know, when a man takes the body of a woman without feeling gentleness or love for her. Rape. Those three men raped her!”

The room is quite dark now; a ghost of gloaming still haunts the vacant lot where children play at falling down dead, and the lone girl watches soberly.

On the billboard, the woman in a short tartan skirt smiles provocatively. She’ll give you everything she has, if you will smoke EXPRESS “A.”

While Moishe sits unmoving, calming his fury, LaPointe’s mind is flooded with scraps and fragments. He recalls Moishe’s wonderful skill with a knife when cutting fabric. David once said what a surgeon he would have made, and Father Martin made a weak joke about appendices being made of damask. LaPointe remembers the long discussions about sin and crime, and about sins against love. Moishe was trying to explain. Then a terribly unkind image leaks into LaPointe’s mind. He wonders if, when he made love to Yo-Yo, Moishe grunted.

“Tell me about her,” Moishe says quietly.

It takes LaPointe a second to find the track. “About Mlle. Montjean?”

“Yes. One of my daydreams has always been that I meet her somehow and we spend a few hours talking about this and that… not revealing anything to her, of course, but finding out how she thinks, what values she holds, her plans, hopes, outlook, Weltanschauung.” Moishe smiles wanly. “It doesn’t look as though that will happen now. So why don’t you tell me about her. She’s an intelligent girl, eh?”

“Yes, she seems to be. She speaks Latin.”

“And did you find her sensitive… open to people?”

“Yes.”

“I knew she would be! I knew she would take that quality from her mother. And happy? Is she happy?”

LaPointe realizes what trash it would make of all that Moishe has done, if the girl is not happy.

“Yes,” LaPointe says. “She’s happy. Why shouldn’t she be? She has everything she could want. Education. Success. You’ve given her everything.”

“That’s good. That’s good.” The sky is dark and is no longer reflected in Moishe’s glasses. His eyes soften. “She is happy.” For a time he warms himself with that thought. Then he sighs and lifts his head, as though waking. “Don’t worry about it, Claude.”

“About what?”

“This business, it must be awkward for you. Painful. After all, we are friends. But you won’t have to arrest me. I will handle everything. A thousand times when I was in the camp, I cursed myself for letting them take me. I regretted that I hadn’t killed my body before they could degrade and soil my mind. So, after I got out, I managed to purchase some… medicine. You would be surprised how many people who have survived the camps have—hidden somewhere—such medicine. Not that they intend to use it. No, they hope and expect that they will never have to use it. But it is a great comfort to know it is there. To know that you will never again have to surrender yourself to indignities.

“I shall take this medicine soon. You won’t have the embarrassment of having to arrest me.”

After a silence, LaPointe asks, “Do you want me to stay with you?”

Moishe is tempted. It would be a comfort. But: “No, Claude. You just go do your rounds of the Main. Put the street to bed like a good beat cop. I’ll sit here awhile. Maybe have another glass of schnapps. There’s only a little left. Why should it go to waste?”

LaPointe sets down his empty glass and rises. He doesn’t dare follow his impulse to touch Moishe. Moishe has it under control now. Sentiment might hurt him. LaPointe presses his fists deep into his overcoat pockets, grinding his knuckles against his revolver.

“What will become of her?” Moishe asks.

LaPointe follows his glance down to the adolescent girl standing alone with her back against the scabby brick wall. “What becomes of them, Claude?”

LaPointe leaves the room, softly closing the door behind him.

It is snowing on the Main, and the shops are closing; metal grids clatter down over display windows, doors are locked, one or two lights are left on in the back as deterrents to theft.

The sidewalks are thick with people, pressing, tangling, fluxing, their necks pulled into collars, their eyes squinting against the snow. At street corners and narrow places there are blockages in the pedestrian swarm, and they are pressed unwillingly against one another, threading or shouldering their way through the nuisance of these faceless and unimportant others, the wad.

Plump snowflakes the size of communion wafers slant through the garish neon of nosh bars, fish shops, saloons, cafés. People try to protect their packages from being soaked through; women put newspaper tents over their hair; those wearing glasses tilt their heads down so they can see over the top. Friends meet at bus stops and grumble: the goddamned snow; won’t be able to get to work tomorrow. It was too good to last, the pig weather.

Snow crosshatches through the headlights of trucks grinding past the deserted park of Carré Vallières, at the top of the rise that separates the lower Main from the Italian Main. LaPointe sits on a bench, alone in the barren triangle of sooty dirt and stunted trees he has always associated with his retirement. Huddled in his great shapeless coat, the dark and the snow insulating and protecting him, the Lieutenant weeps.

The scar tissue over his emotions has ruptured, and his grief is pouring out. He does not sob; the tears simply flow from his eyes, and his face is wet with them.

LaPointe is grieving. For his grandfather, for Lucille, for Moishe. But principally… for himself. For himself.

For himself he grieves that his grandfather left him without support and comfort. For himself he grieves that Lucille died and took his ability to love with her. For himself he grieves the loss of Moishe, his last friend. At last, he pities the poor old bastard that he is, with this bubble in his chest that is going to take him away from a life he never quite got around to living. He is sorry for the poor old bastard who never had the courage to grieve his losses, and to survive them.

He slumps in the soporific pleasure of it. It feels so good to let the pressure leak away, to surrender finally. He knows, of course, that his life and force are draining out with the grief. His strength has always come from his bitterness, his reserve, his indifference. When the weeping is finished, he will be empty… and old.

But it feels so good to let go. Just… to let it all go.

At first the snow melts as it touches the sidewalk outside Chez Pete’s Place, but as the slush builds up, it begins to insulate, and the large flakes remain longer before they decompose.

Inside, a dejected group of bommes sit around the center table, drinking their wine slowly so they won’t have to buy another bottle before the proprietor makes them go out into the weather. Dirtyshirt Red glowers with disgust at two men sitting at a back table. He sneers to the ragged man sitting beside him, drinking a double red from a beer mug.

“Wouldn’t ya know it? The only guy who’ll drink with that potlickin’ blowhard son of a bitch is a nut case!”

His mate glances over at the table and growls agreement with any slander against the Vet, that stuck-up shit-licker with his cozy kip off somewhere.

At the back table, a bottle of muscatel between them, sit the Vet and the Knife Grinder. They are together because they had enough money between them to buy the bottle. They have seen one another on the Main, of course, but they have never talked before.

“It’s beginning,” the Knife Grinder says, staring at the floor. “The snow. I warned everyone that it was coming, but no one would listen.”

“Can you believe it?” the Vet answers. “They just caved it in! These goddamned kids come when I wasn’t there, and they caved it in. Just for the hell of it.”

“People fall in the snow, you know,” the Knife Grinder responds. “They slip off roofs! Happens alla time, but nobody cares!”

The Vet nods. “They come and dragged off the roof. Then they caved in the sides. No reason. Just for the hell of it”

The Knife Grinder squints hard and tries to remember. “There was somebody… somebody important. And he told me there wouldn’t be any snow this year. But he was lying!”

“What can you do?” the Vet asks. “I’ll never find another one. They just… caved it in, you know? Just for fun.”

They are both staring at the same spot on the floor. A kind of sharing.

In close to buildings, where pedestrian feet have not ground it to slush, the snow has built up to a depth of three inches. The wind is still strong, and it blows flakes almost horizontally across the window of Le Shalom Restaurant and Coffee Shop. Inside, where damp coats steam and puddles of melt-water make the tiles dangerous, the Chinese waitress barks orders to the long-suffering Greek cook, and tells customers to hold their water; has she got more than two hands?

Two girls sit in a booth near the counter. They are giggling and excited because a romance is beginning. One girl pushes the other with her elbow and says, “Ask him.” The other presses her hand over her mouth and shakes her head, her eyes sparkling. “Not me. You ask him!” She dares a quick look at the two grinning Hungarian boys in the next booth. “Go on!” the first girl insists, stifling her giggle. “No, you ask him!”

The Chinese waitress has found time to grab a cigarette. She mutters to herself, “For Christ’s sake, somebody ask him!”

Four young women from the garment factory walk briskly down St. Laurent, laughing and kidding one another about boyfriends. One tries to catch a snowflake on her tongue; another starts a bawdy folk song about a lute player who will fix your spinet for you like it’s never been fixed before, if you have a fresh new écu to give him for the lesson. They link arms and walk four abreast with long energetic strides as they sing at the top of their voices. They overtake an old Chasidic Jew with peyiss, his shtreimel level on his head, his long black overcoat collecting snowflakes. Playfully, they split, two on each side, and link arms with the startled man who is pulled along at a pace alien to his dignified step. “Buy us a drink, father! What do you say?” one of them shouts, and the others laugh. The old man stops, and the girls continue on, linking up four abreast again, their butts tweaking merrily along. He shakes his head, confused but not displeased. Youth. Youth. He looks up to check the street sign, as he always does before turning down toward the house he has lived in for twenty-two years.

Snow slants against the darkened window of a fish shop in which there is a glass tank, its sides green with algae. A lone carp glides back and forth in narcotized despair.

The long wooden stoop of LaPointe’s apartment building is blanketed with six inches of untrodden snow. He holds the rail and half pulls himself up each step, tired, empty. Because his head is down, he sees first her feet, then her battered shopping bag.

“Hello,” she says.

He passes her without a word and opens the front door. She follows him into the vestibule, lit only by a fifteen-watt bulb. He leans against the banister and looks at her, his eyes hooded.

She shrugs, her lips compressed in a flat half grin. The expression says, Well, here I am. That’s the way it goes.

LaPointe rubs his whiskered cheek. What’s the use of this? He doesn’t need this. He is empty at last, and at peace. He wants to finish it off easily, cocooned in his routine, his chair by the window, his coffee, his Zola. It’s not as though she would stay. The first time she finds a handsome Greek boy to buy her ouzo and dance with her, she’ll be gone again. And probably she’ll come sniffing back when he gets tired of her. What is she after all? A stupid twit the age of his daughters, the age of his wife. And worst of all, he would have to tell her about this thing in his chest. It wouldn’t be fair to let her wake up some morning and reach over to touch him. And find him…

No, it’s better not to want anything, need anything. There’s no point in opening yourself up to hurt. It’s stupid. Stupid.

“How about a cup of coffee?” he asked.