The Main

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 bright gray reflecting the boiling sky. The eyes are invisible. “And Yo-Yo Dery had red hair too.”

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

“You went with Yo-Yo?”

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