Roy passed by or cut through the old graveyard every day on his way to and from grammar school. There were two graves side by side that he stopped at frequently, pausing to read the names of the interred and the epitaphs inscribed on their tombstones. Tendresse and Pierre Raffolet were buried in Chicago in 1913. Tendresse had been born in 1895, Pierre in 1894, both in Paris, France. Their epitaphs were: for Pierre, “La mort passe, mais il reste”; and for Tendresse, “La mort passe, mais elle reste.” The second time he noticed these graves, Roy copied the epitaphs into his school notebook.
His mother had taken French in high school and kept a French-English dictionary on a bookshelf in the living room of their apartment. Roy looked up the words and translated them as “Death passes by, but he remains” and “Death passes by, but she remains.” When his mother came home from work that afternoon Roy showed her the epitaphs and his renderings and asked her if the translations were correct.
“I’m pretty rusty with my French now, Roy,” she said, “but I think you’ve got it right.”
“I looked up the meanings of their names, too. Raffolet means ‘to be passionately fond.’ ”
“Crazy about,” said his mother.
“And Tendresse means ‘tenderness.’ ”
“Or ‘caresses.’ ”
“Pierre means ‘stone.’ ”
“Roy, you’ve really done a great job!”
“They were both from France and died very young, Pierre at nineteen and Tendresse at eighteen. I’d like to know why they came to Chicago and how come they died so young.”
“They may have been in an accident, in a car or on a train. I don’t know, Roy, unless of course they wanted to get married and their parents wouldn’t let them. It’s possible that they committed suicide together. What puzzles me is their names. Were those their real names or were they given to each other. It’s a mystery. They must have been madly in love.”
“Maybe their ghosts rise from their graves after dark so they can be together again, curling around each other like Casper the Friendly Ghost does with other ghosts sometimes.”
The idea of the couple’s double suicide bothered Roy, he really couldn’t understand it. If their families forbade them from marrying, they could have run away to another city, or even back to France. Roy also wondered what France was like, what people did there that was different from life in America. They spoke French, of course, used words Roy could not pronounce properly. Why didn’t everyone in the world speak the same language? Once his mother was watching a French movie on TV and Roy watched a few minutes of it. A beautiful girl wearing only a white slip was sitting on a chair in front of a mirror brushing her hair while she was smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone. Nothing else happened while Roy watched, the camera never moved and the girl did not remove the cigarette from her mouth. Her lips were like two fat snails crawling so slowly atop one another that even though she was speaking it seemed that they did not move, either. Her hair was light-colored, probably blonde, and fell almost to her shoulders. Did Tendresse have blonde hair?
The old graveyard, Roy decided, was a foreign country, too.