The Main

2

“…so all the wise men and pilpulniks of Chelm get together to decide which is more important to their village, the sun or the moon. Finally they decide in favor of the moon. And why? Because the moon gives light during the night when, without it, they might fall into ditches and hurt themselves. While the sun, on the other hand, shines only during the day, when already it is light out. So who needs it!” David Mogolevski snorts with laughter at his own story, his thick body quaking, his growling basso filling the cramped little room behind the upholstery shop. His eyes sparkle as he looks from face to face, nodding and saying, “Eh? Eh?” soliciting appreciation.

Father Martin nods and grins. “Yes, that’s a good one, David.” He is eager to show that he likes the joke, but he has never known how to laugh. Whenever he tries out of politeness, he produces a bogus sound that embarrasses him.

David shakes his head and repeats, his eyes tearing with laughter, “The sun shines only during the day! So who needs it!”

Moishe Rappaport smiles over the top of his round glasses and nods support for his partner. He has heard each of David’s jokes a hundred times, but he still enjoys them. Most of all, he enjoys the generous vigor of David’s laughter; but sometimes he is tense when David starts off on one of his longer tales, because he knows the listener has probably already heard it, and may be unkind enough to say so. There is no danger of that with these pinochle friends; they always pretend never to have heard the stories before, although Moishe and David have been playing cards with the priest and the police lieutenant every Thursday and Monday night for thirteen years now.

The back room is cramped by stacks of old furniture, bolts of upholstery, and the loom on which Moishe makes fabrics for special customers. A space is cleared in the center under a naked light bulb, and a card table is set up. At some time during the night there will be a break, and they will eat sandwiches prepared by Moishe and drink the wine LaPointe brought.

Father Martin contributes only his presence and patience—and this last is no small offering, for he is always David’s partner.

Throughout the evening there is conversation. Moishe and Father Martin look forward to these opportunities to examine and debate life and love; justice and the law; the role of Man; the nature of Truth. They are both scholarly men to whom the coincidences of life denied outlets. David injects his jokes and a leavening cynicism, without which the philosophical ramblings of the other two would inflate and leave the earth.

LaPointe’s role is that of the listener.

For all four, these twice-weekly games have become oases in their routines, and they take them for granted. But if the games were to end, the vacuum would be profound.

Each would have to search his memory to recall how they got together in the first place; it seems they have always played cards on Thursdays and Mondays. In fact, Father Martin met David and Moishe while he was canvassing the Main for contributions toward the maintenance of his battered polyglot parish. But how that led to his playing cards with them he could not say. LaPointe entered the circle just as casually. One night on his way home after putting the street to bed, he saw a light in the back of the shop and tapped at the window to see if everything was all right. They were playing three-handed cutthroat. Maybe LaPointe was feeling lonely that night without knowing it In any event, he accepted their invitation to join the game.

They were all in their forties when first they started playing. LaPointe is fifty-three now; and Moishe must be just over sixty.

David rubs his thick hands together and leers at his friends. “Come, deal the cards! The luck has been against me tonight, but now I feel strong. The good Father and I are going to schneider you poor babies. Well? Why doesn’t somebody deal?”

“Because it’s your deal, David,” Moishe reminds him.

“Ah! That explains it. Okay, here we go!” David has a flashy way of dealing which often causes a card to turn over. Each time this occurs he says, “Oops! Sunny side up!” His own cards never happen to turn over. He sweeps in his hand with a grand gesture and begins arranging it, making little sounds of surprised appreciation designed to cow adversaries. “Hello, hello, hel-lo!” he says as he slips a good card into place and taps it home with his finger.

David’s heritage is rural and Slavic; he is a big man, unsubtle of feature and personality; gregarious, gruff, kind. When he is angry, he roars; when he feels done in by man or fate, he complains bitterly and at length; when he is pleased, he beams. The robust, life-embracing shtetl tradition dominates his nature. In business he is a formidable bargainer, but scrupulously honest. A deal is a deal, whichever way it turns. Although it is Moishe’s skill and craftsmanship that make their little enterprise popular with decorators from Westmont, the business would have failed a hundred times over without the vigor and acumen of David. His personality is perfectly reflected in the way he plays cards. He tends to overbid slightly, because he finds the game dull when someone else has named trump. When he is taking a run of sure tricks, he snaps each card down with a triumphant snort. When he goes set, he groans and slaps his forehead. He gets bored when Moishe and Father Martin delay the game with their meandering philosophical talks; but if he thinks of a good story, he will reach across the table and place his hand upon the cards to stop play while he holds forth.

Moishe, too, is revealed in his cardplaying. He collects his hand and arranges it carefully. Behind the round glasses, his eyes take an interior focus as he evaluates the cards. He could be the best player by far, if he were to concentrate on the game. But winning isn’t important to him. The gathering of friends, the talk, these are what matter. Occasionally, just occasionally, he takes a perverse delight in bearing down and applying his acute mind to the job of setting David, particularly if his friend has blustered a little too much that evening.

Slight, self-effacing, Moishe is the very opposite of his business partner. During the days he is to be found in the back room, tacks in his mouth, driving each one precisely into place with three taps of his hammer. Tap… TAP… tap. The first rap setting the point, the second neatly driving the tack home, the third for good measure. Or he will be working at his small loom, his agile fingers flying with precision. If he is in a repeat pattern requiring little attention, his expression seems to fade as his mind ranges elsewhere, on scenes of his youth, on hypothetical ethical problems, on imagined conversations with young people seeking guidance.

As a young man he lived in Germany in the comfortable old ghetto house where his great-grandfather had been born, a home that always smelled of good cooking and beeswax polish. They were a family of craftsmen in wood and fabric, but they admired learning, and the most revered of their relatives were those who had the gifts and devotion for Talmudic scholarship. As a boy he showed a penchant for study and that mental habit of seeing things simultaneously in their narrowest details and their broadest implications that marks the Talmudic scholar—a gift Moishe calls “intellectual peripheral vision.” His mother was proud of him and found frequent opportunities to mention to neighbor ladies that Moishe was up in his room studying again, instead of out playing and wasting his time. She would lift her hands helplessly and say that she didn’t know what she would do with that boy—all the time studying, learning, saying brilliant things. Maybe in the long run it would be better if he were a common ordinary boy, like the neighbors’ sons.

Moishe’s adoring sister used to bring up little things for him to eat when he was studying late. His father also supported his intellectual inclination, but he insisted that Moishe learn the family craft. As he used to say, “It doesn’t hurt a brilliant man to know a little something.”

When the Nazi repression began, the Rappaports did not flee. After all, they were Germans; the father had fought in the 1914 war, the grandfather in the Franco-Prussian; they had German friends and business associates. Germany, after all, was not a nation of animals.

Moishe alone survived. His parents died of malnutrition and disease in the ever-narrowing ghetto; and his sister, delicate, shy, unworldly, died in the camp.

He came to Montreal after two years in the anonymous cauldron of a displaced persons camp. Occasionally, and then only in casual illustration of some point of discussion, Moishe mentioned the concentration camp and the loss of his family. LaPointe never understood the tone of shame and culpability that crept into Moishe’s voice when he spoke of these experiences. He seemed ashamed of having undergone so dehumanizing a process; ashamed to have survived, when so many others did not.

Claude LaPointe sorts his cards into suits, taps the fan closed on the table, then spreads it again by pinching the cards between thumb and forefinger. He re-scans his hand, then closes it in front of him. He will not look at it again until after the bidding is over. He knows what he has, knows its value.

For the third time, Father Martin sorts his cards. The diamonds have a way of getting mixed up with the hearts. He pats the top of his thinning hair with his palm and looks at the cards mournfully; it is the kind of hand he dreads most. He doesn’t mind having terrible cards that no one could play well, and he rather enjoys having so strong a hand that not even he can misplay it. But these cards of middle power! Martin admits to being the worse cardplayer in North America. Should he fail to admit it, David would remind him.

When first he came to the Main, an idealistic young priest, Martin had affection for his church, nestled in a tight row of houses, literally a part of the street, a part of everyone’s life. But now he feels sorry for his church, and ashamed of it. Both sides have been denuded by the tearing down of row houses to make way for industrial expansion. Rubble fields flank it, exposing ugly surfaces never meant to be seen, revealing the outlines of houses that used to depend on the church for structural support, and used to defend it. And the projects he dreamed of never quite worked out; people kept changing before he could really get anything started. Now most of Father Martin’s flock are old Portuguese women who visit the church at all times of day, bent women with black shawls who light candles to prolong their prayers, then creep down the aisle on painful legs, their gnarled fingers gripping pew ends for support. Father Martin can speak only a few words of Portuguese. He can shrive, but he cannot console.

When he was a young man in seminary, he dared to dream of being a scholar, of writing incisive and illuminating apologetics that applied the principles of the faith to modern life and problems. He would sometimes wake up at night with a lucid perception of some knotty issue—a perception that was always just beyond the stretch of his memory the next morning. Although his mind teemed with ideas, he lacked the knack of setting his thoughts down clearly. Prior considerations and subsequent ramifications would invade his thinking and carry him off to the left or right of his main thesis, so he did not shine in seminary and was never considered for that post he so desired in a small college where he could study and write and teach. There was a joke in seminary: publish or parish.

But Father Martin’s mind still runs to ethics, to the nature of sin, to the proper uses of the gift of life; so, while being David’s bungling partner is mortifying, the conversations with Moishe make it worthwhile. And there is something right about that, too. A payment in humiliation for the opportunity to learn and to express oneself.

“Come on! Come on!” David says. “It’s your bid, Claude. Unless, of course, you and Moishe have decided to save face by throwing in your hands.”

“All right,” LaPointe says. “Fifteen.”

“Sixteen.” Father Martin says the word softly, then sucks air in through his teeth in an attempt to express the fact that he has a fair playing hand but no meld to speak of.

“Ah-ha!” David ejaculates.

Father Martin catches his breath. David is going to plunge after the bid, dragging the uncertain priest after him to a harrowingly narrow victory or a crushing defeat.

Moishe studies his cards, his gentle eyes seeming to pass over the number indifferently. He purses his lips and hums a soft ascending note. “Oh-h-h. Seventeen, I suppose.”

“Eighteen!” is David’s rapid reply.

Father Martin winces.

LaPointe taps the top of the face-down stack before him. “All right,” he says, “nineteen, then.”

“Pass,” says Father Martin dolefully.

“Pass,” says Moishe, looking at his partner slyly from behind his round glasses.

“Good!” David says. “Now let’s sort out the men from the sheep. Twenty-two!”

LaPointe shrugs and passes.

“Prepare to suffer, fools,” David says. He declares spades trump, but he has only a nine and a pinochle to meld.

Gingerly, apologetically, Father Martin produces a king and queen of hearts.

David stares at his partner, hurt and disbelief flooding his eyes. “That’s all?” he asks. “This is what you meld? One marriage?”

“I… I was bidding a playing band.”

LaPointe objects. “Why don’t you just show one another your hands and be done with it?”

Moishe sets down his cards and rises. “I’ll start the sandwiches.”

“Wait a minute!” David says. “Where are you going? The hand isn’t over!”

“You are going to play it out?” Moishe asks incredulously.

“Of course! Sit down!”

Moishe looks at LaPointe with operatic surprise. He spreads his arms and lifts his palms toward the ceiling.

Roaring out his aces in an aggressive style that scorns the effeminate trickery of the finesse, David takes the first four tricks. But when he tries to cross to his partner, he is cut off by LaPointe, who manages to finesse a ten from Father Martin, then sends the lead to Moishe, who finishes the assassination.

At one point, Father Martin plays a low club onto a diamond trick.

“What?” cried David. “You’re out of trump?”

“Aren’t clubs trump?”

David slumps over and softly bangs his forehead against the table top. “Why me?” he asks the oilcloth. “Why me?”

Too late, the lead returns to David, who slams down his last five cards, collecting impoverished and inadequate tricks.

He stares heavily at the tabletop for a few seconds, then he speaks in a low and controlled voice. “My dear Father Martin. I ask the following, not in anger, but in a spirit of humble curiosity. Please tell me. Why did you bid when you had nothing in your hand but SHIT!”

Moishe removes his glasses and lightly rubs the red dents on the bridge of his nose. “There was nothing Martin could have done to save you. You overbid your hand and you went set. That’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t tell me that! If he had come out with his ten earlier—”

“You would have won one more trick. Not enough to save you. You had two clubs left; I had the ace, Claude the ten. And if you had returned in diamonds—at that time you still had the queen—Martin would have had to trump it with his jack, and I would have overtrumped with the king.” Moishe continues to rub his nose.

David glares at him in silence before saying, “That’s wonderful. That is just wonderful!” The tension in David’s voice causes Martin to look over at him, his breathing suspended. “Listen to the big scholar, will you? If my jack of hearts has its fly unbuttoned, he remembers! But when it comes to accounts, suddenly he’s a luftmensh, too busy with philosophical problems to worry about business! Oh, yes! Taking care of the business is too commonplace for a man who spends all his time debating does an ant have a pupik! For your information, Moishe, I was talking to the priest! So butt out for once! Just butt out!”

David jumps up, knocking the table with his knees, and slams out of the room.

In the ensuing silence, Father Martin looks from Moishe to LaPointe, upset, confused. LaPointe draws a deep breath and begins desultorily to collect the cards. The moment David began his abuse, Moishe froze in mid-action; and now he replaces his glasses, threading each wire temple over its ear.

“Ah… listen,” he says quietly. “You must forgive David. He is in pain. He is grieving. Yesterday was the anniversary of Hannah’s death. He’s been like a balled-up fist all day.”

The others understand. David and Hannah had been children together, and they had married young. So close, so happy were they that they dared express their affection only through constant light bickering and quarreling, as if it were unlucky to be blatantly happy and in love in a world where others were sad and suffering. After they immigrated to Montreal, Hannah’s world was focused almost totally on her husband. She never learned French or English and shopped only in Jewish markets.

During the pinochle games, David used to talk about Hannah constantly; complaining, of course. Bragging about her in his negative way. Saying that no woman in the world was so fussy about her cooking, such a nuisance about his health. She was driving him crazy! Why did he put up with it?

Then, six years ago, Hannah died of cancer. Sick less than a month, and she died.

For weeks afterward, the card games were quiet and uncomfortable; David was distant, uncharacteristically polite and withdrawn, and no one dared console him. His eyes were hollow, his face scoured with grief. Sometimes they would have to remind him that it was his play, and he would snap out of his reverie and apologize for delaying the game. David apologizing! Then, one evening, he mentioned Hannah in the course of conversation, grumbling that she was a nag and a pest. And moreover she was fat. Zaftig young is fat old! I should have married a skinny woman. They’re cheaper to feed.

That was how he would handle it. He would continue complaining about her. That way, she wouldn’t be gone completely. He could go on loving her, and being exasperated beyond bearing by her. Occasionally the sour void of grief returned to make him desperate and mean for a day or two, but in general he could handle it now.

The complicated double way he thought of his wife was expressed precisely one night when he happened to say, “Should Hannah, alshasholm, suddenly return, cholilleh, she would have a fit!”

“So just pretend nothing happened when he comes back,” Moishe says. “And whatever you do, don’t try to cheer him up. A man must be allowed to grieve once in a while. If he avoids the pain of grieving, the sadness never gets purged. It lumps up inside of him, poisoning his life. Tears are a solvent.”

Father Martin shakes his head. “But a friend should offer consolation.”

“No, Martin. That would be the easy, the comfortable thing to do. But not the kindest thing. Just as David is not grieving for Hannah—people only grieve for themselves, for their loss—so we wouldn’t be consoling him for his own sake. We would be consoling him because his grief is awkward for us.”

LaPointe feels uncomfortable with all this talk of grief and consolation. Men shouldn’t need that sort of thing. And he is about to say so, when David appears in the doorway.

“Hey!” he says gruffly. “I went out to make the sandwiches, and I can’t find anything. What a mess!”

Moishe smiles as he rises. David has never made the sandwiches in his life. “You find some glasses for the wine. I’ll make the sandwiches, for a change.”

As David rummages about grumpily for the glasses, Moishe steps to a narrow table against the wall on which are arranged cold cuts and a loaf of rye bread. He cuts the bread rapidly, one stroke of the knife for each thin, perfect slice.

“It’s amazing how you do that, Moishe,” Father Martin says, eager to get the conversation rolling.

“Agh, that’s nothing,” David pronounces proudly. “Have you ever seen him cut fabric?” He spreads two fingers like scissors and makes a rapid gesture that narrowly misses Father Martin’s ear. “Psh-sh-sht! It’s a marvel to watch!”

Moishe chuckles to himself as he continues slicing. “I would call that a pretty modest accomplishment in life. I can just see my epitaph: ‘Boy! Could he cut cloth!’ “

“Yeah, yeah,” David says, fanning his hand in dismissal of Moishe’s modesty. “Still, think what a surgeon you would have made.”

Father Martin has a funny idea. “Yes, he’d make a great surgeon, if my appendix were made of damask!”

David turns and looks at him with heavy eyes. “What? What’s this about your appendix being damask?”

“No… I was just saying that… well, if Moishe were a surgeon…” Confused, Martin shrugs and drops it.

“I still don’t get it,” David says flatly. He is embarrassed about his recent loss of control, and Father Martin is going to feel the brunt of it.

“Well… it was just a joke,” Martin explains, deflated.

“Father,” David says, “let’s make a deal. You listen to confessions from old ladies too feeble to make interesting sins. I’ll tell the jokes. To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.”

“Look who’s the communist,” Moishe says, trying to attract some of the fire away from Martin.

“Who said anything about being a communist?” David wants to know.

“Forget it. Did you manage to find the glasses?”

“What glasses? Oh. The glasses.”

Moishe puts a plate of sandwiches on the table, while David brings three thick-bottomed water glasses and a handleless coffee mug, which he gives to Father Martin. The wine is poured, and they toast life.

David drains his glass and pours another. “Tell me, Father, do you know the meaning of aroysgevorfeneh verter?”

Father Martin shakes his head.

“That’s Yiddish for ‘advice given to a priest about how to play pinochle.’ But that’s all right. I forgive you. I understand why you overbid.”

“I don’t believe I overbid…”

“The reason you overbid was because you had a marriage of hearts. And who can expect a priest to know the value of a marriage? Eh?”

Father Martin sighs. David always delights in little digs at celibacy.

“Now me!” David gestures broadly with his sandwich. “I know the value of a marriage. My wife Hannah was Ukrainian. Take my advice, Father. Never marry a Ukrainian. Nudzh, nudzh, nudzh! When she was born, she complained about the midwife slapping her on the ass, and she never got out of the habit. There is an old saying about Ukrainian women. It is said that they never die. Their bodies get smaller and smaller through wind erosion until there is nothing left but a complaining voice by the side of the fireplace. Me, I know the value of a marriage. I would have bid nothing!”

LaPointe laughs. “I’d like to see the hand you wouldn’t bid on.”

David laughs too. “Maybe so. Maybe so. Hey, tell me, Claude. How come you never married, eh?”

Father Martin glances uneasily at LaPointe.

When Martin was a young priest on the Main, he had known LaPointe’s wife. He was her confessor; he was with her when she died. And later, after the funeral, he happened upon LaPointe, standing in the empty church. It was after midnight, and the big uniformed cop stood alone in the middle of the center aisle. He was sobbing. Not from grief; from fury. God had taken from him the only thing he loved, and after only a year of marriage. More urbane men might have lost their faith in God; but not LaPointe. He was fresh from downriver, and his Trifluvian belief was too fundamental, too natural. God was a palpable being to him, the flesh-and-blood man on the cross. He still believed in God. And he hated His guts! In his agony he shouted out in the echoing church, “You son of a bitch! Rotten son of a bitch!”

Father Martin didn’t dare approach the young policeman. It chilled him to realize that LaPointe wanted God to appear in the flesh so he could smash His face with his fists.

After that night, LaPointe never came to church again. And over the years that followed, the priest saw him only in passing on the Main, until they happened to come together in the card games with David and Moishe. Because LaPointe never mentioned his wife, Father Martin didn’t dare to.

That was how LaPointe handled it. One great howl of sacrilegious rage; then silence and pain. He did not grieve for Lucille, because to grieve was to accept the fact of her death. There were a muddled, vertiginous few months after the funeral, then work began to absorb his energy, and the Main his ragged affection. Emotional scar tissue built up around the wound, preventing it from hurting. Preventing it, also, from healing.

“How come you never married, Claude?” David asks. “Maybe with all the nafka on the streets you never needed a woman of your own. Right?”

LaPointe shrugs and drinks down his wine.

“Not that there would be many working the street in this pig weather,” David continues. “Have you ever seen the snow hold off so long? Have you ever seen such ugly weather? Jesus Christ! Forgive me, Father, but I always swear in Catholic so if God overhears, He won’t understand what I’m saying. Anyway, what’s so bad about swearing? Is it a crime?”

“No,” Father Martin says quietly. “It’s a sin.”

Moishe glances up. “Yes, Martin. I like that distinction.” He presses his palms together and touches his lips with his forefingers. “I don’t know how many times I have considered this difference between crime and sin. I am sure that sin is worse than crime. But I’ve never been able to put my finger exactly on the difference.”

“Oh boy,” David says, rising and looking under a shelf for the schnapps bottle. “I should have problems that trivial.”

“For instance,” Moishe continues, ignoring David, “to throw an old woman out of her apartment because she cannot pay her rent is not a crime. But surely it is a sin. On the other hand, to steal a loaf of bread from a rich baker to feed your starving family is obviously a crime. But is it a sin?”

David has returned with half a bottle of schnapps and is pouring it around into the empty wine glasses. “Let me pose the central question here,” he insists. “Who cares?”

Father Martin flutters his fingers above his glass. “Just a little, thank you, David. Take this case, Moishe. Let us say your man with the starving family breaks into a grocery store and steals only the mushrooms, the caviar, the expensive delicacies. What do you have? Sin or crime?”

Moishe laughs. “What we have then is a priest with a subtle mind, my friend.”

“Who ever heard of such a thing?” David demands. “Tell me, Claude. You’re the expert on crime here. Who breaks into a grocery store and steals the mushrooms and the caviar only?”

“It happens,” LaPointe says. “Not exactly that, maybe. But things like that.”

“Who does it?” Moishe asks, pouring out more schnapps for himself. “And why?”

“Well…” LaPointe sniffs and rubs his cheek with his palm. He’d really rather be the listener, and this is a hard one to explain. “Well, let’s say a man has gone hungry often. And let’s say it doesn’t look like things are going to change. He’s hungry now, and he’ll be hungry again tomorrow, or next week. That man might break into a grocery and steal the best foods to have a big gorge—even if he doesn’t like the taste of mushrooms. Because… I can’t explain… because it will be something to remember. You know what I mean? Like the way people who can’t keep up with their debts go out and splurge for Christmas. What’s the difference? They’re going to be in debt all their lives. Why not have something to remember?”

Moishe nods reflectively. “I see exactly what you mean, Claude. And such a robbery is a crime.” He turns to Father Martin. “But a sin?”

Father Martin frowns and looks down. He isn’t sure. “Ye-e-s. Yes, I think it’s a sin. It’s perfectly understandable. You could sympathize with the man. But it’s a sin. There is nothing remarkable about a sin being understandable, forgivable.”

David is passing the bottle around again, but Martin puts his hand firmly over his glass. “No, thank you. I’m afraid it’s time for me to go. I suppose the world will have to wait until next Monday for us to sort out the difference between sin and crime.”

“No, wait. Wait.” Moishe prevents him from rising with a gesture. He has drunk his schnapps quickly, and his eyes are shiny. “I think we should pursue this while it’s on our minds. I have a way to approach the problem practically. Let’s each of us say what he considers to be the greatest sin or the greatest crime.”

“That’s easy,” David says. “The greatest crime in the world is for four alter kockers to talk philosophy when they could be playing cards. And the greatest sin is to bid when you have nothing in your hand but a lousy marriage.”

“Come on, now. Be serious.” Moishe takes up the almost empty schnapps bottle and shares it equally around, attempting to anchor his friends to the table with fresh drinks. He turns to the priest. “Martin? What in your view is the greatest sin?”

“Hm-m-m.” Father Martin blinks as he considers this. “Despair, I suppose.”

Moishe nods quickly. He is excited by the intellectual possibilities of the problem. “Despair. Yes. That’s a good one. Clearly a sin, but no kind of crime at all. Despair. A seed sin. A sin that supports other sins. Yes. Very good.”

David gulps down his drink and declares, “I’ll tell you the greatest crime!”

“Are you going to be serious?” Moishe asks. “Your playing the letz nobody needs.”

“But I am serious. Listen. The only crime is theft. Theft! Do you realize that a man spends more time in prison for grand larceny than for manslaughter? And what is murder to us but the theft of a man’s life? We punish it seriously only because it’s a theft that no one can make restitution for. And rape? Nothing but the theft of something a woman can use to make her living with, like prostitutes… and wives. It’s all theft! All we really worry about is our possessions, and all our laws are devoted to protecting our property. When the thief is bold and obvious, we make a law against him and send someone like Claude here to arrest him. But when the thief is more cowardly and subtle—a landlord, maybe, or a used-car salesman—we can’t make laws against him. After all, the men in Ottawa are the landlords and the used-car salesmen! We can’t threaten them with the law, so we tell them that what they are doing is sinful. We say that God is watching and will punish them. The law is a club brandished in the fist. Religion is a club held behind the back. There! Now tell me, is that talking serious or what?”

“It’s talking serious,” Moishe admits. “But it’s also talking shallow. However, for you it’s not a bad try.”

“Forget it, then!” David says, peeved. “What’s the use of all this talk anyway? It helps the world vi a toyten bankes.”

Moishe turns to LaPointe. “Claude?”

LaPointe shakes his head. “Leave me out of this. I don’t know anything about sin.”

“Ah!” David says. “The man who has known no sin! Dull life.”

“Well, crime then,” Moishe pursues. “What’s the greatest crime?”

LaPointe shrugs.

“Murder?” Father Martin suggests.

“No, not murder. Murder is seldom…” LaPointe searches for a word and ends up with a silly-sounding one. “Murder is seldom criminal. I mean… the murderer is not usually a criminal—not a professional. He’s usually a scared kid pulling a holdup with a cheap gun. Or a drunk who comes home and finds his wife in bed with someone. Sometimes a maniac. But not often a real criminal, if you see what I mean. What about you, Moishe?” LaPointe asks, wanting to shunt the questions away from himself. “What do you think is the greatest sin?”

Moishe is feeling the effects of the schnapps. He fixes his eyes on the tabletop, and he speaks of something he very seldom mentions. “I thought a lot about crime, about sin, when I was in the camps. I saw great crimes—crimes so vast they lose all sense of human misery and can be expressed only in statistics. A man who has seen this finds it easy to shrug off a single beating outside a bar, or a theft, or one killing. The heart and the imagination, like the hands, can grow calluses, can become insensitive. That’s what it means to be brutalized. They brutalized us, and by that I don’t mean being beaten or tortured by brutes. No. I mean being beaten until you become a brute. Until, in fact, you become such an animal that you deserve to be beaten.” Moishe looks up and sees expressions of concern and close attention in the faces of his friends. Even David does not offer a flip remark. It always happens, when they drink a little more than usual, that Moishe gets tipsy first. The priest is abstemious, and the other two have thick bodies to absorb the alcohol. He feels foolish. He smiles wanly and shrugs. The shrug says: I’m sorry; let’s forget it.

But Father Martin wants to understand. “So you make the greatest sin the brutalizing of a fellow man? Is that it, Moishe?”

Moishe runs his fingers through his long, thin hair. “No, it is not that simple. Degree of sin is not based upon the act. It’s more complicated than that.” He is not sure he can say it neatly. Often Moishe brings the card talk around to some point he has rehearsed and rephrased again and again during his workday. But this evening it is not like that. When he speaks, he does so hesitantly, with pauses and searches for words. For once he is not sharing with his friends the results of thought; he is sharing the process.

“Yes, I suppose brutalizing could be one of the great sins. You see… how do I put this?… it isn’t the act that determines the degree of sin. And it isn’t the motive. It’s the effect. To my mind, it is much worse to chop down the last tree in the forest than to chop down the first. I think it is much worse to kill a good husband and father than to kill a sex maniac. In both cases the act and the motive could be identical, but the effect would be different.

“So, yes. Brutalizing a man could be a great sin, because a man who has become a brute can never love. And sins against love are the greatest sins, and deserve the greatest punishments. Theft is a crime, often a sin; but it only operates against money or goods. Murder is a crime, often a sin; but the degree of sin depends upon the value of the life, which might not be worth living, or which might have brought pain and misery to others. But love is always good. And sins against love are always the worst, because love is the only… the only especially human thing we have. So, rape is the greatest sin, greater than murder, because it is a sin against love. And I don’t only mean violent rape. In fact, violent rape is perhaps the least sinful kind of rape because the perpetrator is not always responsible for his acts. But the subtler kinds of rape are great sins. The businessman who makes getting a job dependent on having sex with him, he is a rapist. The man who takes a plain girl out for dinner and an expensive evening because he knows she will feel obliged to make love with him, he is a rapist. The young man who finds a girl starving for affection and who talks of love in order to get sex, he is a rapist. All these crimes against love. And without love… my God, without love… !” Moishe looks around helplessly, knowing he is making a fool of himself. He is perfectly motionless for a moment, then he chuckles and shakes his head. “This is too ridiculous, my friends. Four old men sitting in a back room and talking of love!”

“Three men,” David corrects, “and a priest. Come on! One last hand of cards! I feel the luck coming to me.”

LaPointe fetches a cloth and wipes the table.

David deals quickly, then picks up his hand, making little sounds of appreciation as he slips each card into place. “Now, my friends, we shall see who can play pinochle!”

The bidding goes rather high, but David prevails and names trump.

He goes set by four points.

LaPointe, Moishe, and Father Martin are grouped around the door of the shop, buttoning their overcoats against the cold wet wind that moans down the almost empty street. David lives in the apartment above the shop, so did not accompany them to the door. He said good night and began clearing things away for the next day’s business, all the while muttering about how nobody could win a game while schlepping a priest on his back.

As he shakes hands good night, Father Martin is shivering, and his eyes are damp with the cold. Moishe asks why he isn’t wearing a scarf, and he says he lost it somewhere, making a joke of being absent-minded. He says good night again and walks up the street, bending against the wind to protect his chest. LaPointe and Moishe walk together in the other direction, the wind pushing them along. They always walk together the three blocks before Moishe’s turnoff, sometimes chatting, sometimes in silence, depending upon their moods and the mood of the evening. Tonight they walk in silence because the mood of the evening has been uncommonly tense and… personal. It is just after eleven and, although their block is almost deserted, the action on the lower Main will be in full flow. LaPointe will make one last check, putting the street to bed before returning to his apartment. Once a beat cop…

Moishe chuckles to himself. “Agh, too much schnapps. I made a fool of myself, eh?”

LaPointe walks several steps before saying, “No.”

“Maybe it’s the weather,” Moishe jokes. “This pig weather is enough to wear anyone down. You know, it’s amazing how weather affects personalities. It’ll be better when the snow comes.”

LaPointe nods.

They cross the street and start down a block that is lit by saloon neon and animated by the sound of jukeboxes. A girl is walking on the other side of the street. She is young and unnaturally slim, her skinny legs bent as she teeters on ridiculous, fashionably thick clog soles. She wears no coat, and her short skirt reveals a parenthesis between her meager thighs. She is not more than seventeen, and very cold indeed.

“See that girl, Moishe?” LaPointe says. “Do you believe she is committing the greatest sin?”

Moishe glances at the girl as she passes a bar and looks in the window for prospects who don’t seem too drunk. He turns his eyes away and shakes his head. “No, Claude. It’s never the girls I blame. They are the victims. It would be like blaming the man who gets run over by a bus because, if he hadn’t been there, there wouldn’t have been an accident. No, I don’t blame them. I feel sorry for them.”

LaPointe nods. Prostitution is the least violent crime on the Main and, if it doesn’t involve rolling the mark and isn’t controlled by pimps protected by the heavies from the Italian Main, LaPointe habitually overlooks it. He feels particularly sorry for the whores who don’t have the money to work out of apartments or hotels—the young ones fresh in from the country, broke and cold, or the old ones who can only score drunks and who have to take it standing in a back alley, their skirts up, their asses pushed up against a cold brick wall. He feels pity for them, but disgust, too. Other crimes make him feel anger, fear, rage, helplessness; but this kind of scratch prostitution produces in him as much disgust as pity. Maybe that’s what Moishe means by a sin against love.

They stop at the corner and shake hands. “See you Monday,” Moishe says, turning and walking down his street.

LaPointe thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy overcoat and walks down the Main.

As he passes a deep-set doorway, a slight motion catches the tail of his eye. His hand closes down on the butt of his revolver.

“Step out here.”

At first there is no movement. Then a grinning, ferret-thin face appears around the corner. “Just keeping out of the wind, Lieutenant.”

LaPointe relaxes. “Got no kip tonight?” He speaks English because Dirtyshirt Red has no French.

“I’m okay, Lieutenant,” the bomme says, reaching under his collar to adjust the thickness of newspaper stuffed beneath his shirt to keep out the cold. “I sleep here lots of times. Nobody cares. I don’t bother nobody. I won’t get too cold.” Dirtyshirt Red grins slyly and shows LaPointe a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. “It’s half full.”

“What are you going to do when the snow comes, Red? You got something lined up?” There are seven bommes whom LaPointe recognizes as living on the Main and having rights based on long residence. He takes care of them on their level, just as he takes care of the prostitutes on theirs, and the shopkeepers on theirs. There used to be eight recognized tramps, but old Jacob died last year. He was found frozen to death between stacks of granite slabs behind the monument-maker’s shop. He drank too much and crawled in to sleep it off. It snowed heavily that night.

“No, I don’t have anything lined up, Lieutenant. But I ain’t worried. Something will come along. That’s one thing you can say: I’ve always been lucky.”

LaPointe nods and walks on. He doesn’t like Dirtyshirt Red, a sneak thief, bully, and liar. But the bomme has been on the Main for many years, and he has his rights.

It is past midnight, and the street is beginning to dim and grow quiet. Thursday is a slow night on the Main. LaPointe decides to leave St. Laurent and check out the tributary streets to the east. He passes through the darkened Carré St. Louis, with its forgotten statue of the dying Cremazie:

The fountain no longer works, and on the side of the empty basin someone has written in black spray paint: LOVE. Next to that there is a peace sign, dried rivulets of paint dripping down from it, like the blood that used to drip from the swastikas in anti-Nazi posters. And under the peace sign there is: FUCK YO …then the spray can ran out.

That would be young Americans who have come to Montreal to avoid the Vietnam draft. They have a special flair for spray paint. LaPointe is not fond of the young, bearded boys from the States who hang around dimly lit coffee bars filled with eerie music and odd-smelling incense, brandishing their battered guitars, singing in nasal groans, cadging drinks from sympathetic college girls, or practicing their more-tragic-than-thou stares into space. Most of them live off federal dole, cutting into funds already inadequate for the needs of the poor of east Montreal.

But they will pass, and they are no real trouble, aside from the nuisance of marijuana and other kiddie shit. They bring yet another alien accent to the Main, with their hard “r’s” and their odd pronunciation of “out” and “house” and “about,” but LaPointe assumes he will get used to them, as he got used to all the others.

In general, his feelings toward Americans are benevolent, for no better reason than that when he went on his brief honeymoon—now thirty-one years ago—he found the thoughtfulness of road signs in French as far south as Lake George Village; while in his own country, the French signs stopped abruptly at the Ontario border.

At least these young draft avoiders are quiet. Not like the American businessmen from the convention quarters of the Expo site on Ile Ste. Hélène. Those types are a real nuisance. They get drunk in their chrome-and-leatherette hotel bars, and small bands of them come up to the Main, seeking a little action, mistaking poverty for vice. They flash too much money and bargain childishly with the whores. As often as not they get rolled or punched up. Then LaPointe has to respond to complaints lodged with the Quartier Général, has to listen to diatribes about tourism and its value to Montreal’s economy.

Always turning toward the darkest streets, LaPointe picks his way through the tangle of back lanes until he comes out again onto the Main, quiet now and nearly closed up.

As he passes the narrow alley that runs beside the Banque de Nova Scotia, he feels a slight rush of adrenalin in his stomach. Even after all these years, his nerves, quite independent of his conscious mind, take a systemic jolt whenever he passes that alley. It’s become automatic, and he is used to it. It was in that alley that he got hit; it was there that he sat awaiting death, expecting it. And once a man loses his sense of immortality, he never regains it.

He had put the street to bed, like tonight; and he was on his way home. There was a tinkle of glass down the alley. A figure dropped down to the brick pavement from a window at the back of the bank. Three of them, running toward LaPointe. He fired into the air and called to them to stop. Two of them fired at once, two flashes of light, but he had no memory of the sound because a slug took him square in the chest and slammed him against the metal door of a garage. He slid down the door, sitting on one twisted foot, the other leg straight out in front of him. They fired again, and he heard the slug slap into the meat of his thigh. Holding his gun in both hands, he returned fire. One went down. Dead, he later learned. The other two ran.

After the shots, there was no sound in the alley, save for the sigh of wind around the corner of the garage. He sat there, slipping in and out of consciousness, staring at his own foot, and thinking how silly he would look when they found him, one foot under his butt, the other straight out in front of him. A long time passed. A minute, perhaps. A very long time. He opened his eyes and saw a yellow cat crossing before him. Its tail was kinked from an ancient break. It stopped and looked at him, one forepaw poised, not touching the ground. Its eyes were wary, but frigid. It tested the ground with its paw. Then it walked on, indifferent.

The wound in his chest felt cold. He put his hands over it to keep the wind out. His last conscious thought was a stupid, drunken one. Must keep the wind out. Mustn’t catch cold. Catch cold at this time of year, and you don’t get rid of it until spring.

He knew he was going to die. He was absolutely sure. The fact was more sad than terrifying.

He was four and a half weeks in the hospital. The leg wound was superficial, but the slug in his chest had grazed the aorta. The doctors said things about his being lucky to have the constitution of an habitant peasant. After leaving the hospital he had a period of recuperation, lounging around his apartment until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Even though he wasn’t technically back on active service yet, he began making rounds of the Main at night, putting the street to bed. Once a beat cop…

Soon he was back in his office, doing his regular duties. He received his third commendation for bravery and, a year later, his second Police Medal. Down at the Quartier Général, the myth of the indestructible LaPointe was even more firmly established.

Indestructible maybe, but altered. Something subtle but significant had shifted in his perception. He had accepted the fact of his death so totally, had surrendered to it with such calm, that when he did not die, he felt unfinished, open-ended, off balance.

For the first time since he had cauterized his emotions with hate after the death of his wife, he felt lonely, a loneliness expressed in a kind of melancholy gentleness toward the people of his patch, particularly toward the old, the children, the losers.

It was shortly after he was hit in the alley that he met and began to play pinochle with Moishe, David, and Martin—his friends.

Only one rectangle of dingy neon breaks the dark of Rue Lionais, a beer bar that is a hangout for loudmouths and toughs of the quartier. LaPointe mentally runs down a list of its usual clientele and decides to drop in. The barman greets him loudly and with a bogus grin. Knowing the loud greeting is a warning signal for the customers, LaPointe ignores the owner and looks about the dim, fuggy room. One man catches his eye, a dandy dresser with the thin, mobile face of a hustler. The dandy is sitting with a group of middle-aged toughs whose faces record a lot of cheap hooch and some battering. LaPointe stands in the arched entranceway and points at the dandy. When the man raises his eyebrows in a mask of surprise, LaPointe crooks his finger once.

As the dandy rises, one of the toughs, a penny-and-nickle arm known as Lollipop, gets to his feet as if to protect his mate. LaPointe looks at the tough, his eyes calm and infinitely bored; he shake his head slowly. For a face-saving moment, the tough does not move. Then LaPointe points a stabbing finger toward their booth, and the tough sits down, grumbling to himself.

The dandy flashes a broad smile as he approaches LaPointe. “Good to see you, Lieutenant. Now isn’t that coincidence? I was just telling—”

“Cut the shit, Scheer. I ran into the Gimp on the street”

“The Gimp?” Scheer frowns and blinks as he pretends to search his memory. “Gee, I don’t think I know anybody by—”

“What day is this, Scheer?”

“Pardon me? What day?”

“I’m busy.”

“It’s Thursday, Lieutenant.”

“Day of the month.”

“Ah… the ninth?”

“All right, I want you to stay off the street until the ninth of next month. And I don’t want to see any of your girls working.”

“Now look, Lieutenant! You don’t have any right! I’m not under arrest!”

LaPointe’s eyes open with mock surprise. “Did I hear you say I don’t have any right?”

“Well… what I meant was…”

“I’m not interested in what you meant, Scheer. LaPointe is giving you a punishment. One month off the street. And if I see you around before that, I’m going to hurt you.”

“Now, just a minute—”

“Do you understand what I just said to you, asshole?” LaPointe reaches out with his broad stubby hand and pats the dandy’s cheek firmly enough to make his teeth click. “Do you understand?”

The dandy’s eyes shine with repressed fury. “Yes. I understand.”

“How long?”

“A month.”

“And who’s giving you the punishment?”

Scheer’s jaw muscles work before he says bitterly, “Lieutenant LaPointe.”

LaPointe tilts his head toward the door. “Now, get out.”

“I’ll just tell the guys I’m going.”

LaPointe closes his eyes and shakes his head slowly. “Out.”

The dandy starts to say something, then thinks better of it and leaves the bar. LaPointe turns to follow him, but he stops and decides to visit the booth. By standing up aggressively, this Lollipop has challenged his control. That is dangerous, because if LaPointe ever lets these types build up enough courage, they could beat him to a pulp. His image must be kept high in the street because the shadow of his authority covers more ground than his actual presence can. He approaches the booth.

The three toughs pretend not to see him coming. They stare down at their bottles of ale.

“You. Lollipop,” LaPointe says. “Why did you stand up when I called your friend over?”

The big man doesn’t look up. He sets his mouth in determined silence.

“I think you were showing off, Lollipop,” LaPointe says quietly.

The brute shrugs and looks away.

LaPointe picks up the tough’s half-finished bottle of ale and pours it into his lap. “Now you sit there awhile. I wouldn’t want you going out into the street like that. People would think you pissed your pants.”

As LaPointe leaves the bar, he hears two of the toughs laughing while the third growls angrily.

That’s just fine, LaPointe thinks. It’s the kind of story that will get around.

He turns up Avenue Esplanade toward his second-floor apartment in a row of bow-windowed buildings facing Parc Mont Royal. Above the park, a luminous cross stands atop the black bulk of the Mont. The wind gusts and flaps the tails of his overcoat. His legs are heavy as he mounts the long wooden stoop of number 4240.

He closes the door of his apartment and flicks on the slack toggle switch. Two of the four bulbs are burnt out in the red-and-green imitation Tiffany lamp. He tugs off his overcoat and hangs it over the wooden umbrella stand. Then, by habit, he goes into the narrow kitchen and sets water to boil. The stove’s pilot light is blocked with ancient grease and has to be lit with a match. The circle of blue flame pops on and singes his fingers, as always. He snaps his hand back and swears without passion, as usual.

While the water is heating, he goes into the bedroom and sits heavily on the bed. The only light is the upward-lancing beam of a streetlamp below his window, illuminating the ceiling and one wall but leaving the floor and the furniture in darkness. He grunts as he pulls off his shoes and wriggles his toes before stepping into his carpet slippers. He loosens his tie, pulls his shirt out from under his belt and scratches his stomach.

By now the water will be boiling, so back he goes into the unlit kitchen, his slippers slapping against his heels. His coffee-maker is an old-fashioned pressure type, with a handle to force the water through the grounds. His cup is always on the counter, its bottom always wet because he never wipes it, just rinses it out and turns it upside down on the drainboard.

Coffee cup in hand, he pads into the living room, where he settles into his overstuffed armchair by the bow window. Over the years, the springs and stuffing of the chair have shifted and bunched until it fits him perfectly. Holding the saucer under his chin in the way of workingclass men from Trois Rivières, he sips noisily. Four long sips and the cup is empty, save for the thick dregs. He believes that his routine cup of coffee before bed helps him to sleep. He sets the cup aside and turns to look out of the window. Beyond the limp curtain is the park, and above the dark hump of Mont Royal, the sky is a smudged gray-black, dim with cityglow. Within the park’s iron fence, lamp-posts lay vague patterns of light along the footpath. The street is empty; the park is empty.

He scrubs his matted hair with the palm of his hand and sighs, comfortable and half anesthetized by the platitudes of routine that comprise his life in the apartment. Sitting slumped like this, wearing slippers, his shirt over his belly, he does not look like the tough cop who has become something of a folk hero to young French Canadian policemen because of his personal, only coincidentally legal style of handling the Main, and because of his notorious indifference to administrators, regulations, and paper work. Rather, he looks like a middle-aged man whose powerful peasant body is beginning to sag. A man who has come to prefer peace to happiness; silence to music.

He stares out the window, his mind almost empty, his face slack. He no longer really sees the apartment he and Lucille rented a week before their marriage. Since her death only a year later, he has changed nothing. The frumpy furniture in the catalogue styles of the thirties stands now where it ended up after a flurry of arrangement and rearrangement under Lucille’s energetic, but vacillating, inspiration. When at last it was done and things had ended up pretty much where they began, they sat together on the bright flowered sofa, her head on his shoulder, until very late at night. They made love for the first time there on the sofa, the night before their marriage.

Of course, the apartment was to be only temporary. He would work hard and go to night school to learn English better. He would advance on the force, and they would save their money to buy a house, maybe up toward Laval, where there were other young couples from Trois Rivières.

Over the years, the gaudy flowers on the sofa have faded, more on the window end than the other, but it has happened so slowly that LaPointe has not noticed. The cushions are still plump, because no one ever sits on them.

He blinks his eyes, and presses his thumb and forefinger into the sockets. Tired. With a sigh, he pushes himself out of the deep chair and carries his cup back to the kitchen, where he rinses it out and puts it on the drainboard for morning.

Dressed only in his shorts, he shaves over the rust-stained washbasin in the small bathroom. He acquired the habit of shaving before going to bed during his year with Lucille. His thick, blue-black whiskers used to irritate her cheek. It was several months before she told him about it, and even then she made a joke of it. The fact that in the mornings he always appears at the Quartier Général with cheeks blue with eight hours of growth has given rise to another popular myth concerning the Lieutenant: LaPointe owns a magic razor; he always has a one-day growth of beard. Never two days of growth, never clean-shaven.

After scraping the whiskers off his flat cheeks, his straight razor making a dry rasping sound even with the grain, he rinses his mouth with water taken from the tap in cupped hands. He straightens up and leans, his elbows locked, on the basin, looking in the mirror. He finds himself staring at his thick chest with its heavy mat of graying hair. He can see the slight pulse of his heart under the ribs. He watches the little throb with uncertain fascination. It’s in there. Right there.

That’s where he’s going to die. Right there.

The very efficient young Jewish doctor with a cultured voice and a tone of mechanical sincerity had told him that he was lucky, in a way.

Inoperable aneurism.

Something like a balloon, the doctor explained, and too close to the heart, too distended for surgery. It was a miracle that he had survived the bullet that had grazed the artery in the first place. He was lucky, really. That scar tissue had held up pretty-well, it had given him no trouble for twelve years. Looked at that way, he was lucky.

As he sat listening to the young doctor’s quiet, confident voice, LaPointe remembered the yellow cat with the kinked tail and one forepaw off the ground.

The doctor had handled many situations like this; he prided himself on being good at this sort of thing. Keep it factual, keep it upbeat. Once the doctor permits a little hole in the dike of emotion, he can end up twenty minutes—even half an hour—behind in his appointments. “In cases like this, when a man doesn’t have any immediate family, I make it a habit to explain everything as clearly and truthfully as I can. To be frank, with a mature man, I don’t think a doctor has the right to withhold anything that might delay the patient’s attending to his personal affairs. You understand what I mean, M. Dupont?”

LaPointe had given him a false name and had said he was retired from the army, where he had received the wound in combat.

“Now, your first question, quite naturally, is what kind of time do I have? It’s not possible to say, M. Dupont. You see, we doctors really don’t know everything.” He smiled at the admission. “It could come tomorrow. On the other hand, you could have six months. Even eight. Who knows? One thing is sure; it will happen like that.” The doctor snapped his fingers softly. “No pain. No warning. Really just about the best way to go.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh, yes. To be perfectly honest, M. Dupont, it’s the way I would like to go, when my time comes. In that respect, you’re really quite lucky.”

There was a young receptionist with a fussy, cheerful manner and a modish uniform that swished when she moved. She made an appointment for the next week and gave LaPointe a printed reminder card. He never returned. What was the point?

He walked the streets, displaced. It was September, Montreal’s beautiful month. Little girls chanted as they skipped rope; boys played tin-can hockey in the narrow streets, spending most of their energy arguing about who was cheating. He wanted to—expected to—feel something different, dramatic; but he did not, except that he kept getting tangled up in memories of his boyhood, memories so deep that he would look up and find that he had walked a long way without noticing it.

Evening came, and he was back on the Main. Automatically, he chatted with shopkeepers, took coffee in the cafés, reaffirmed his presence in the tougher bars. Night came, and he strolled through back streets, occasionally checking the locks on doors.

The next morning he woke, made coffee, carried down the garbage, and went to his office. Everything felt artificial; not because things were different, but because they were unchanged. He was stunned by the normalcy of it all; a little dazed by a significant absence, as a man going down a flight of stairs in the dark might be jolted by reaching the bottom when he thought there was another step to go.

And yet, he had guessed what was wrong before he went to the doctor. For a couple of months there had been that effervescence in his blood, that constriction in his upper arms and chest, those jagged little pains at the tops and bottoms of breaths.

In the middle of that first morning, there was one outburst of rage. He was pecking away at an overdue report, looking up the spelling of a word, when suddenly he ripped the page from his dictionary and threw the book against the wall. What the fucking use is a fucking dictionary! How can you look up the spelling of a fucking word when you don’t know how to spell the fucking thing?

He sat behind his desk, stiff and silent, his fingers interlaced and the knuckles white with pressure. His eyes stung with the unfairness of it. But he couldn’t push through to feeling sorry for himself. He could not grieve for himself. After all, he had not grieved for Lucille.

He insulated himself from his impending death by accepting it only as a fact. Not a real fact, like the coming of autumn; more like… the number of feet in a mile. You don’t do anything about the number of feet in a mile. You don’t complain about it. It’s just a fact.

With great patience, he mended the torn page in his dictionary with transparent tape.

LaPointe pulls the string of the bathroom ceiling light and goes into the bedroom. The springs creak as he settles down on his back and looks up at the ceiling, glowing dimly from the streetlamp outside.

His breathing deepens and he finds himself vaguely considering the problem of worn-out water hosing. Last Sunday he spent a lazy morning sitting in his chair by the window, reading La Presse. There was a do-it-yourself article describing things you could make around the house with old water hosing. He has a house; a fantasy house in Laval, where he lives with Lucille and the two girls. Whenever he passes shops that have garden tools, he daydreams about working in his garden. Several years ago he put in a flagstone patio from the plans in a special section of the paper devoted to Fifteen Things You Can Do to Improve the Value of Your House. That patio figures often in his reveries just before sleep. He and Lucille are having lemonade under a sun umbrella he once saw in a hardware store window—Clearance!!! Up to 2/3 Off!!! The girls are off somewhere, and they have the house to themselves for a change. Sometimes, in his imaginings, his girls are kids, sometimes teen-agers, and sometimes already married with children of their own. During the first years after Lucille’s death, the number and sex of their children shifted around, but it finally settled on two girls, three years apart. A pretty one, and a smart one. Not that the pretty one is what you would call a dummy, but…

He turns over in bed, ready to sleep now. The springs creak. Even when it was new, the bed had clacked and creaked. At first, the noise made Lucille tense and apprehensive. But later, she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…