The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Read online

  Also by Norman G. Gautreau

  Sea Room

  Island of First Light

  The Sea Around Them

  Iniquity

  Blank Slate Press | Saint Louis, MO 63110

  Copyright © 2019 Norman G. Gautreau

  All rights reserved.

  Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC

  For information, contact [email protected]

  Amphorae Publishing Group | 4168 Hartford Street | Saint Louis, MO 63116

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters, organizations, and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  Cover and Interior Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Cover Photography: Wikimedia Commons and Shutterstock

  Set in Adobe Caslon Pro, Neuzit Grotesk, and Escrow Banner

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935300

  ISBN: 9781943075614

  To my granddaughters

  Francesca Grace Gautreau

  &

  Calliope Rose (Callie) Gautreau

  whose names I have borrowed for two of my nicer characters

  and

  to my father

  Norman J. Gautreau

  who did his part in WW II

  and

  to refugee children of every age,

  everywhere,

  and in every time

  CONTENTS

  Part 1

  MOONRISE

  Chapter 1—An Ancient Moonlight

  Chapter 2—Night of Nights

  Chapter 3—Soon You Too Will be at Peace

  Chapter 4—Nine Day’s Fall from Heaven

  Chapter 5—Moon Jelly

  Chapter 6—The Pleasure of Love

  Chapter 7—The Grief of Love

  Chapter 8—Chamber of the Bulls

  Chapter 9—A Second Escape

  PART 2

  MARS IN RETROGRADE

  Chapter 10—The Carrots Are Cooked

  Chapter 11—The Sheep and the Rose

  Chapter 12—Roasted Chestnuts

  Chapter 13—Adrien

  Chapter 14—You Must Make It Sing!

  PART 3

  A MOMENT IN PARADISE

  Chapter 15—If Prayer Were Made of Sound

  Chapter 16—And the Gold of their Bodies

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Élodie is pronounced AY-low-DEE in French and AY-low-dee in English

  The French Jewish organization that helped save many Jewish children, the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, or OSE is pronounced “Ozay.”

  PART 1

  MOONRISE

  When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  I summon up remembrance of things past,

  I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought

  And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.

  —William Shakespeare

  Chapter 1

  An Ancient Moonlight

  Letting a hurt chafe for years without doing something to soothe it, letting grief linger for decades without confronting it will bring a person to the brink, and that’s where I am after seventy years. At the brink. It’s been that long since I lost Élodie and only now, after a life lived, am I ready to do what I should have done a long time ago: face the grief squarely, ennoble it, dignify it. Embrace it. That is the purpose of this journal, this memoir-in-progress. I hope the process of writing about what happened will help me recover more complete, more electric memories of the woman I loved, memories I’ve denied myself all these years.

  And to do this, I will return to France before it’s time to make my final bow.

  From my balcony overlooking Boston Harbor, I listen to the thrum of ferries and ships, the slap of halyards against metal masts, the distant clang of a bell buoy, faint as a memory. The soft euphony of wind chimes from a floor below, reminds me of Élodie’s laughter and I almost hear her voice again.

  Across the harbor, the sinking sun flares in the windows of the office buildings in the city’s financial district and butters the clock at the top of the Custom House Tower. The moon, full and fat, rises low over Logan Airport. I watch an airliner lift into the sky across the face of the moon like a great Pyrenean eagle, its red beacon flashing, its white, wingtip strobe lights slashing the dark, and a thrill runs through me at the thought I will soon fly to France again. Only, this time I will step from the plane trailing carry-on luggage, and smiling at the flight attendant, rather than leaping from an open bay door into a barrage of flak.

  In less than two months, I will attend the 70th observance of D-Day, then retrace my long-ago journey with Élodie to see if being in the fields and the barns and the caves and the houses where we had been, inhaling the lavender air of the South of France we shared, hearing the rush of meltwater in the Ariège River where we bathed each other’s bodies, and seeing the snow-capped Pyrénées in whose shadows we lived and whose breezes raised goosebumps on our flesh—to see if all these things will help me recover more charged memories of her.

  I’ve already made the reservations.

  And I will lay a red rose on her grave—if I can find her grave. And if I’m not too crippled to make the journey. Or too weak to face the grief.

  When I speak Élodie’s name, it flows melodious from my tongue, whether pronounced the English way, a dactylic AY-low-dee, or the French way, a cretic AY-low-DEE. A three-note song. A melody.

  Élodie.

  Sometimes when I lie awake and say her name, my little dog stirs in his sleep and gives a soft huff and crawls under the blankets and I feel the wet of his nose on my hip and I am stirred to remember Élodie’s lips. But the memory quickly fades. For, no matter how hard I concentrate, I can never tease out memories of her beyond a half-lidded blur, scumbled images, murky as if seen through a film of cracked varnish. I have nothing like Proust’s madeleines to fire my memories with scent and flavor.

  If I’m not too crippled to make the journey.

  Sometimes, I swear I can feel the synovial fluid seeping from my 92-year-old joints. My engine losing oil as elbows, knees, neck, hip, knuckles choke with thirst. My right knee cracks. For years, I’ve promised myself I would do anything to avoid arthritis. I swallow chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine pills, I consult a dietitian about anti-inflammatory foods, and I have adopted a Mediterranean diet of fish, vegetables, olive oil, soybeans, cherries and other foods thought to prevent arthritis. I even started choking down broccoli! I go to the gym to lift weights while younger people stare at me with incipient smiles and some pretty woman in spandex tights compliments me on being “over ninety years young” and I feel like clobbering her with my cane because I hate that goddamned, condescending euphemism.

  I am determined to avoid a wheelchair because I dread living with my eldest daughter and her husband. Natalie would insist she clean for me and make me coffee in the morning and button my shirts or buckle my belt or tie my shoelaces. The first time that nightmare occurred to me, I bought walking loafers, two sizes too large, so I could avoid bending over to tie shoelaces and, instead, could wiggle my feet into them while bracing against a doorframe. As it is, I catch myself at the supermarket welcoming the support of a grocery cart even if I have only one or two items on my list. I also hired a maid servic
e, so my condo is always neat when Natalie visits. I won’t allow her even the tiniest opening to become my caretaker. If that ever happens, I know it wouldn’t be long before she admitted it was too much for her (she never stays with things) and I’d have a fight on my hands to avoid a nursing home. I’d rather die than stand unsteadily in a walk-in tub while some grouchy, punctilious aide washes my butt and my balls and asks, for the umpteenth time, about the old, red disfigurement of my war wound, which I would say is a cicatrix just to baffle her nosy self.

  Arlequin appears at my feet, clenching his leash between his teeth. I close my notebook and rise. As I pass through my study, I stop at my desk and lift the aging black-and-white photo taken at a barn near the Normandy beaches during the height of the invasion. I remember the red sheen of the apple Élodie held in her hand, the wavering reflection of a candle flame on its skin, the crunch of her teeth as she bit into it. I can even see the remaining flecks of bright red polish on her fingernails. With a shiver, I recall the weep of juice at the corners of her lips. And I remember how Jean-Baptiste came along and snatched Élodie’s apple from her hand and took a bite of it, leaving a moist cream-white crater, and how Élodie and Jean-Baptiste exchanged those hate-filled glances that were my first inkling of the trouble that was to come.

  The photo shakes in my hand as I stare at it, trying to remember her face as it was when alive, animated, impassioned, not calcified by the microsecond trip of a lens shutter. But it seems fruitless. The juice at the corners of her mouth is as fossilized as amber. All I can summon of those days, beyond the dry reportorial minutia of where, what, when and why, is a sense of the moonlight that dominated our time together. It weighed heavily on us. It seemed everything we did, we did in a wash of moonlight. On that first night, I saw my buddy’s face, drained of blood, bleached white by moonlight. Moonlight reflected in the terror-stricken eyes of the children and in bombed out cities and burnt out villages and in savaged fields until it seemed the entire miserable world was inundated by a density of moonlight.

  And then there were the nights we made love in the moonlight.

  I place the photograph on the desk next to the brochure titled “Normandy Celebrates Liberty, 1944 – 2014” detailing the events in France for the 70th observance.

  When I finally emerge onto the sidewalk holding Arlequin’s leash in one hand and a cane in the other, I am greeted by a neighbor, a young woman who jogs frequently along the roads and wharfs of the Navy Yard, her alluring ponytail swaying side to side in cadence with the swing of her hips.

  “Good evening, Mister Budge,” she says.

  I switch Arlequin’s leash to my cane hand, doff my herringbone newsboy cap, and give a shallow bow, stopping at the first twinge of pain. “Good evening to you Maddie. Have you had a good run?”

  “Enough to work up an appetite. Ted and I are gonna order pizza later. Would you like to join us?” She bends down to pat Arlequin.

  “I’ve already eaten, thank you. And Maddie, you forgot your promise.”

  “What promise?”

  “To call me Henry.”

  “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. It’s hard to get used to.”

  I smile. “Because it’s hard to think of me as a contemporary?”

  “No, that’s not it. I just—”

  “That is it, but I forgive you. It must be hard to think of a ninety-two-year-old man as one of the gang. But I plan to be sharing this earth with folks your age for some time to come, so you might as well get used to it and call me Henry.”

  Maddie laughs. “Henry, it is, then. And let’s make a date for pizza tomorrow night. You can tell us about your book.”

  “You’ll eat pizza two nights in a row?”

  “We could eat pizza every night of the week.”

  This makes me laugh, and I silently curse the broccoli I force-feed myself. “I guess it’s a good thing you two run all the time.”

  “So, you’ll come?”

  Again, I try a slight bow. “How can I refuse a date with a beautiful lady, even if her husband will be present?”

  “Great! Come by at seven. And, of course, you must bring Arlequin.” She bends and scratches Arlequin behind his huge ears, and he wags his tail as she stands and disappears through the revolving doors into the condo building.

  I take a deep breath. “Oh, to be young again!”

  Arlequin gives a little bark, and we begin our stroll along the boardwalk that edges Dry Dock 2. Soon three women pass us from the direction of the Pier 6 Restaurant and one pauses and exclaims, “Oh look! How cute! Can I pet your dog?”

  “How can I refuse?” I say with a smile.

  She squats to give Arlequin a pat. “What’s her name?” She looks up at me.

  “His name is Arlequin.”

  “How lovely. What does it mean?”

  I explain the name comes from a zany stock character in commedia dell’arte. When she raises an inquisitive eyebrow, I say, “Think of it as Italian vaudeville from three hundred years ago.”

  “So, is Arlequin zany?”

  “All the time. A regular comedian.”

  “What breed is he?”

  “Papillon. Means butterfly in French.”

  “He’s adorable. How old is he?”

  But before I can flash my most endearing smile and say, “Not as old as I am,” the woman’s companions, who have continued along, call out to her. “Sorry. Gotta go.” She gives Arlequin a final pat, stands, and hurries to catch up with her friends.

  She walks away gracefully, blue jacket, matching pencil skirt, sunglasses propped on her head. I look down at Arlequin. “Everyone thinks I got you because I was lonely after Anna died. But you and I know it’s because you’re so good at attracting the ladies.” I laugh and draw a glance from a man waking in the opposite direction. “Did you notice her perfume, Arlequin?” He looks up at me. “Vol de Nuit1. It’s what Anna wore. The two women I’ve loved each wore distinctive scents associated with moonlit nights. Vol de Nuit for Anna and Nuit de Longchamp2 for Élodie. I’ll bet you experience something similar. Do you detect the scent of a lady friend at that fire hydrant over there, and another one at that light pole? We are a pair of sniffers, you and I. Like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.”

  We come to the end of Dry Dock 2 at First Avenue and turn left. Moments later, the woman who’d stopped to pet Arlequin dashes past us in the opposite direction. “Forgot my phone at the restaurant,” she says, breathlessly, and is past us before I can think of a clever reply. I shrug, and we continue walking along Constitution Road until we come to the Marriott Hotel where we turn and head back in the lessening light. By the time we arrive back at Old Ironsides, the sky is drained of daylight, and the street lamps create a path of alternating light puddles and dark patches. I stop to admire the full moon through the rigging of the frigate, an old sight a sailor strolling the docks might have seen two centuries ago. The ancient smell of tar on the rigging, like the smell of Latakia pipe tobacco, ferries me back in time. Scent has the power to do that. That’s why, a few years ago, I bought a vial of Nuit de Longchamp to remind me of Élodie. Foolishly, I kept it on the corner of my writing desk, which gets a lot of sunlight, and the heat oxidized the fragrance, and it lost its potency. I’ll replace it soon and put it some place safer.

  In the dimming light, I nearly trip and plant my cane hard to arrest a stumble. Arlequin scuttles out of the way and looks up at me with concern.

  “My boy,” I tell him, “I should go about in a red shirt with a big yellow cross on it and have a sweater made for you out of the signal flag for the letter ‘U’. You would look quite handsome sporting the four alternating red and white squares, and together, we would signal ‘R-U, Romeo-Uniform.’ That’s what ships in trouble hoist to say, ‘Keep clear of me. I am maneuvering with difficulty!’”

  I chuckle at my own joke and then stop abruptly as a cry of alarm cuts through the cool evening air. A woman’s voice. I turn to see two figures disappear into the darkness behind a dumpster
near the locked entrance gate to Old Ironsides.

  Another cry. “No!” More like a shriek. Then another, slightly muffled. “Stop! Get off me!”

  “Christ!” I mutter. I hobble as fast as I can toward the dumpster, planting my cane hard on the pavement with each step. Arlequin follows at my heels. As soon as I round the dumpster, I see a man prone over the blue-jacketed woman. The waist of the man’s pants sits just under his buttocks, which shine in the moonlight as the woman struggles beneath him.

  I saw this brutal violation play out seventy years earlier in France, and the anger I felt then rushes back, cascading onto and reinforcing the anger I feel now. I raise my cane over my head and, with all the might I can summon from my ancient body, bring it crashing down on the would-be rapist’s head. The man cries out and looks over his shoulder, his penetrating eyes shining up at me, and I bring the cane down again with a sharp crack, and then again, and again, and my senses are so aroused, I can hear the cane whistling in the air and feel the spittle flying from my lips. The man raises an arm to shield his head and some of my spit lands on his face, and I hit him a again so hard, the damned cane breaks in two and the lower end pinwheels through the moonlight before clattering along the pavement and the man staggers to his feet and tugs at his pants, and I, gasping for breath and wiping the slobber from my mouth, turn to the woman who has raised herself to a sitting position, and ask, “Are you—?”

  “Watch out!” she screams.

  I turn and see a flash as something slams into my chest and it’s like being hit with a baseball bat in the sternum and I crumble to the ground and bash my head against the corner of the dumpster as I fall.

  And there is only blackness.

  When I regain consciousness, the piercing whine of police and ambulance sirens fill the air and white, red and blue flashing lights strobe wildly in the moonlit night, anachronistically streaking across the 18th century rigging of the frigate and across my face, blinding me every few seconds. Suddenly, I am aware of being on a gurney without remembering being lifted. I am being loaded into the back of an ambulance when I catch the eyes of the woman and they are wide with fear and I hear her ask, “Will he be alright?”