The Main

by Trevanian

  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-Therese’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 Carre 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 cafe. 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 brigh
t 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 Francoise, she was experienced enough to avoid having children.”

  “Francoise 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 Francoise—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 Francoise. 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… Francoise 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 Carre 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.