American Stranger Read online

  High banks of snow had been plowed up around the train station to form a snowscape with cars, among which Nancy stopped.

  Yvon remained sitting next to her.

  “You’re sure you won’t let me take you to your parish?”

  Reaching for the door handle, he said, “I am,” but, his arm bent at an odd angle, again he became still.

  He didn’t want her to go with him, and he didn’t, she realized, want to go alone.

  He said, “I was thinking of spending the break in my room in Boston, but then thought I couldn’t, really—”

  “Because of your mother?”

  He drew in his breath.

  “Listen,” Nancy said, “I’m going to give you a set of keys to my apartment, so that whenever you want to get away you can go there.” She took the set from the glove compartment, and he held out his hand for it, then, as before, sat still beside her.

  She thought, he doesn’t want to leave me, and this thought filled her with a tender desire to take him with her, take him wherever she went. A small urge came to her just to drive off with him now. She felt that he wouldn’t object, and that for her to drive off with him was what he was waiting for.

  He pressed the door handle down and opened the door, but, instead of turning to go, he turned more toward her and put his arms around her, and then he lurched sideways away from her, getting out of the car quickly.

  As she pulled away, she saw him in her rearview mirror standing near a snowbank, his valise at his side, and she stopped, turned the ignition off, but remained where she was in the car, looking at Yvon in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t moved, as if he had no choice but to stay where he was. On impulse, somewhere beyond making a choice, she opened the car door and, shaking her head so her hair flew out, she strode to him and said, “I’m taking you to your parish. Get in the car.”

  Which he did, talking only to direct her up a hill along an avenue of tenements, and into a side street of clapboard bungalows, all heavy with snow. The side street was icy, and when he said, “You can stop here,” the car skidded a little. Nancy parked the car at a deep snowbank, and beyond the bank was a small gray clapboard bungalow with a narrow porch supported by pillars, icicles hanging from the edge of the porch’s roof gutter. Yvon did not move.

  Nancy said, “Come on.”

  He did everything she said, as if coming here had all been up to her, not him, and he followed her through a path in the snowdrift and up the stairs to the porch, but she stood aside when he rang a bell by the storm door.

  Nancy was apprehensive. The ice around the storm door cracked and the door slowly opened, and she felt a flash of fear. The door opened to a thin, taut woman in a housedress and a heavy cardigan that was too big for her, and, as if she couldn’t quite see, she frowned when she recognized her son, then frowned again when Yvon stepped aside for his mother to see Nancy.

  “I’m Nancy.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Yvon told me,” his mother said, and, as if she had expected Nancy, she led the way into the living room of large, overstuffed armchairs and sofa and a cedar chest in the middle, all in the dim snow light, and the room was winter cold.

  Nancy noted that the short, graying hair of Yvon’s mother looked as if it had been cut with large shears, maybe by herself. Silent, Mrs. Gendreau went ahead of Nancy and Yvon and opened a door into the kitchen, then shut the door to keep the kitchen warm. The floor was covered with worn linoleum patterned with the heads of clowns and merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels. The room was crowded, with a large range and an old refrigerator and a high-backed rocking chair and a table with chairs around it, and what might have been a seventeenth-century cabinet with the marks of an adze on its thick wood sides. Yvon’s mother gestured to Nancy to take off her coat, and hung the coat in a closet in which Nancy saw a broom, a snow shovel, and what looked like a sheep’s pelt hanging among other coats. Yvon threw his parka onto a chair, as though to show he and Nancy would not stay long.

  Nancy felt that she had never been in a place as strange as this, had never met a woman as strange as Yvon’s mother, who put a kettle to boil on the range.

  As if daring herself, Nancy said, “Yvon told you about me?”

  But instead of answering her, Yvon’s mother spoke to him in French. She spoke with what had to be a Franco accent, a rough accent new to Nancy, which Yvon had clearly taught himself not to reflect in English. Nancy couldn’t understand any of the French of mother and son, but then Yvon told his mother to speak English, and she said nothing, and didn’t look at Nancy.

  No, Nancy thought, there was nothing for her here in this strangeness, and nothing here would reveal to her something about Yvon she had wanted to know. She wanted to leave; she wanted to leave Yvon behind and go on to New York.

  With an old key, Yvon’s mother opened the old cabinet for mugs, a box of tea bags, a bowl of sugar, and spoons and little plates and a narrow box of cookies, all of which she placed silently on the wooden table with a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. She appeared to act as though she were alone.

  Yvon said to Nancy, “There’s a lot of history in that cabinet.”

  He was pointing out to her the antique cabinet, the only evidence in the house of something to be proud of, the only claim he had to any value in his long history, a long history, Nancy suddenly felt, without value to her.

  Hanging above the cabinet was a framed oleograph of Christ holding open his red robe to reveal a bloody heart and looking up with an expression of suffering endured because he had no choice but to suffer, and this image appeared stark to Nancy, the image of a stark religion, the stark religion of Yvon’s mother, of Yvon, of the parish.

  And the single impression Nancy had of Yvon’s mother was of hard starkness. She has, Nancy thought, the small black eyes of an Indian.

  And Yvon’s eyes were blue.

  Yvon stared at Nancy as though with the nervous anticipation of her reaction with at least some interest in the old cabinet, and Nancy smiled at him, as if to let him know she understood, with a little echo of pity for him here in this house, here with his mother.

  His mother indicated a chair for Nancy to sit at the wooden table, and when Yvon and his mother sat his mother poured boiling water into mugs with tea bags in them and slowly opened the box of cookies.

  She again spoke briefly to Yvon in French, and again Yvon insisted on English, but, suddenly, instead of speaking, she rapped her knuckles against the edge of the table.

  Yvon looked at Nancy, worried by what she would make of this, but in his look was a plea to her not to worry.

  His mother rapped the edge of the table with her knuckles more and more violently, and Nancy worried about what this meant. She stood and said to Yvon, “I’d better go now.”

  He didn’t speak, but his mother turned to Nancy, the palms of her hands held out as if as an offering of herself, and she said, “I’m sorry,” and Nancy saw how tense her gaunt face was.

  And though she had no idea what Yvon’s mother was apologizing for, and not knowing what else to say, Nancy said, “Oh, don’t be sorry.”

  “All I want,” Mrs. Gendreau said, “is for my son to be happy. I can’t make him happy. You do that, you make him happy.”

  “Ma,” Yvon said, and then he spoke to his mother in French, which, his expression conveyed, was meant to stop her from talking. Leaving the cups of tea and the cookies on the table, Yvon quickly took Nancy’s coat from the closet, helped her put it on, and, without his parka, showed her to a back door that opened into the outside cold, and he walked with her to where her car was parked at the front of the house. Nancy understood that Yvon had brought her into the house by the front door because that was the visitors’ door to enter and out the back door because she was no longer a visitor.

  At the car, she reached out and held him closely to her, and
he let her hold him.

  She said, “Your poor mother.”

  He said, “My mother.”

  She rubbed his arms through his shirtsleeves to warm him a little before he left her to get into her car.

  As Nancy drove, her concentration on the highway seemed to converge on a point always ahead of her. How could she ever understand Yvon in his world, and the world he lived in with his mother? If she saw Yvon’s mother as helpless, so, too, must Yvon be, for when his mother, as if praying, said that all she wanted for her son was his happiness, Nancy knew that the mother’s prayer wouldn’t be answered, that both mother and son could never be happy in the world they lived in, a cold, dark, snowbound world, their native world, a world so unknown to Nancy that she would never understand why she was as attracted to Yvon as she was.

  The green interstate sign for New York appeared to emerge from the green light of the highway lamps, and then to pass into space behind her.

  She knew her parents were expecting her, and she wanted to be with them.

  In Manhattan, she drove through slush, swerving in it when she braked at red lights. Outside, people appeared black and remote against the lit stores.

  She parked her car in a side street off Fifth Avenue. A doorman she didn’t know opened the door to the apartment building for her, and she had to explain she was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Green.

  They were waiting to have dinner with her.

  Nancy’s father, as always, did most of the talking, and, as always, Nancy didn’t know for certain if her mother listened or not, but whenever her father stopped talking her mother asked, “What were you saying?”

  Wondering about Yvon with his mother, Nancy listened and didn’t listen to her father. She thought: I’m not interested in Yvon, let him take care of his crazy mother.

  During dinner she hardly spoke, and, because she always had a lot to recount whenever she came back from Boston, her father asked, “Are you all right?” and when she said, “I’m all right,” her mother, after another silence, asked her, “Are you all right?” and again she said, “Like I said, yes.” She knew that her parents worried about her because of her moods, but she had learned to assure them that she no longer gave in to her moods, and she didn’t, because she no longer had those moods. After dinner, her mother asked her if she was going to go out, and she said she hadn’t thought about it. “You mean,” her father asked, laughing, “you’re going to stay in?” She tried to laugh, answering, “I only said I hadn’t thought about it.” She didn’t want to telephone anyone, though to telephone someone was always the first thought she had in the past when she returned to New York from Boston. She didn’t really want to see anyone, not even Vinnie.

  She went to her room and lay on her bed, the lights off.

  But her mother came in and, moving slowly in the dark, switched on a light by Nancy’s bed.

  Nancy sat up. “You want to talk to me?”

  “Just to ask how you are in Boston.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “How’s Manos?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “You don’t spend too much time in Boston lying on your bed in a darkened room?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I have a lot of studying to do.”

  ‘How is that going?”

  “Interesting.”

  “You know how much we want you to be happy.”

  “I know, I know. But maybe you want that too much for me.”

  “Too much?”

  “As if you’re a little scared that I’m getting into one of my moods.”

  “We do think about that.”

  “And you both feel that’s happening?”

  “I suppose Dr. Quinn alerted us to any signs, not that that’s for anyone to say but you.”

  “I like to think Dr. Quinn is way in the past. I’m over Dr. Quinn, who was long enough ago that I can deal with a mood when I feel it coming on. Just now, I was a little tired, so I thought I’d rest, that’s all.”

  “Then I’ll let you rest,” her mother said, but as she reached out to switch off the lamp, Nancy said, “Leave it on, I’ll do some reading.”

  Her mother leaned over and kissed her on the forehead before going out.

  But Nancy didn’t have the concentration to read, though, lying still, she kept the lamp lit.

  Out on a solitary morning walk around the reservoir in Central Park, she thought of Aaron Cohen, thought of him as someone whom she, at the very back of her mind, was sometimes still thinking about. She could not imagine where he was, if he was anywhere in the world, and maybe it was just because she could not imagine him anywhere in this world that he remained a shadow within the shadows of another world at the back of her mind. For a moment, she considered going to the house where he had lived to ask someone where he was, but then she felt she didn’t want to know. She told herself he was not so important that she should know.

  On Christmas day, the Greens went to visit a cousin named Gil and his wife Maria and their withdrawn son, Adam, whose long hair was rolled into dreadlocks; he kept to himself. Looking at the tree, lit up with candles in old-fashioned candleholders, Maria, who had converted from Catholicism to Judaism although Gil was not a practicing Jew, said, “I call it a Hanukkah bush,” and Nancy said, the words separate and hard, “Please spare me.”

  When she returned to her apartment in Boston, she found, across the back of a chair near the bed, one of Yvon’s shirts. It had not been there when she left. She thought he might have moved in and was living there, and, out now, would be back at any moment. She waited for him, going from time to time to the window. Snowbanks were higher than ever along the curbs.

  Because Yvon had a key to the apartment, when the bell rang downstairs on Sunday evening Nancy wondered who was there. Yvon always came in the afternoon, and she thought that maybe he had stayed in his parish with his mother. But then she thought he was too polite to come in on her without letting her know beforehand. She hurried down the stairs. He stood in the light of the hissing gas lamp with his old army valise, and, the door open to the street, she hugged him as if she had worried that she might never see him again. She asked, “Are you all right?”

  He said, “I am now that I’m with you.”

  Upstairs, even before he took off his parka, she, unable to help herself, pulled at him, hugged him and kissed him, and they fell onto the bed.

  In the after-midnight silence, Nancy woke, and, about to switch off the lamp by the bed, she saw Yvon raise his head, his eyes closed, and reach out for her. She lowered herself so his hand grasped her shoulder. Asleep, he kissed her shoulder, the side of her neck, her cheek and temple, and as he slowly kissed her he curled a hand into a loose fist and pressed it between her breasts.

  After Yvon left her in the morning to return for the week to his room in the student apartment house near BU, Nancy, putting a little order in the disorder of her apartment, found one of his socks by the bed. He kept a drawer of socks and underclothes in her apartment. Partly because she wanted him to be with her so she could make sure he was all right, and also because she wanted him to share her bed night after night—maybe she wanted him to share her bed with her night after night to make sure he was all right—she wished he would move in with her. When he next came, she hinted at this, telling him she was going to get rid of a lot of clothes and that would leave space in her closet, but, not quite certain what she meant, he smiled. He was not good at picking up hints.

  She said, “I’m asking you to live with me.”

  “I think I’d offend my Irish roommate if I left him.”

  “Are you real friends?”

  “I try to be to him, but I don’t think he is to me.”

  “Well,” Nancy said, “if you want to come and live here we can move your things in my car.”

  His eyes large, with the expression of a boy committ
ing himself to something he must show her he was capable of committing himself to, he said, “Only if I pay half the rent.”

  She tapped his cheek and said, “Never mind that.”

  “Only if I do,” he said.

  He couldn’t, she was sure, pay half the rent; he hardly had enough money from his brother Cyriac and his job in a university cafeteria, and, too, he had a university loan to pay for tuition and his room and board, but he insisted. She said, “All right.” But she would pay and not tell him, and she would accept if he forgot, because he couldn’t pay.

  Seeing his shirt hanging over the back of a chair, his loose change on the top of the bureau in the bedroom, his razor on the shelf under the mirror of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, she felt a little better about him.

  And she very much liked being in bed together for the night, when the sheets, the blankets, the pillows seemed to be part of their warm intimacy, and it also seemed to her that the intimacy deepened as, awake just enough to talk, they would slowly fall asleep.

  The light of the street streetlamp through the many-paned window cast the shadows of the frames on the bed where they lay, Nancy’s head on Yvon’s chest, her long hair spread out.

  He was talking to her about his course in French literature, which, he said, made him consider the long history of the French he was brought up with. He said, “My mother speaks what she calls the French French she was taught by nuns in the parish school, and I was, too, taught by nuns to speak the French French. My mother isn’t as dumb as she seems to be. She can talk in a way that would surprise you, even a lively way, sometimes.”

  “She didn’t speak the French French when I was there with her.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “She hardly spoke to me.”

  “She’s very shy, and you were strange to her.”

  “She asked me to make you happy.”

  “You make me happy.”

  Nancy kissed Yvon’s chest and, because she liked to hear his voice as she fell into sleep, she said, “Tell me more.”