The Metropolis by Matthew Gallaway Read Free Book Online

would never forget a horrible day the year before when he had been sitting in the corner of the school yard during morning recess, quietly singing to himself, and a group of his classmates had jumped out from behind a tree with the intent to pin him to the ground and deliver a ferocious series of kicks and punches. Lucien had managed to escape and fight back, and during the ensuing scuffle—because he was lanky and strong—he had succeeded in bloodying the nose ofone of the attackers, which led his teacher to accuse him of instigating the altercation.
    “How?” Lucien asked, still defiant as he rubbed the dirt from his elbows and knees and glared at the others, who corroborated the teacher’s misunderstanding of the event.
    “Did you play the game with everyone else as I instructed?”
    “No,” Lucien admitted.
    “What were you doing?”
    “If you have to know,” Lucien said as he twisted a lock of black hair around one of his fingers, “I was singing.”
    Guillaume was called in to discuss the matter with the flustered teacher and the headmaster. Because such meetings were practically annual events, he was adept at making the case for why Lucien should be permitted to continue in a small academy populated by similarly situated children of professors and government officials, none of whom shared such a distracting desire for the stage. “I understand that—at least for now—he is very much his mother’s son,” he offered before explaining their loss—in case anyone present was not familiar with the course of events, and even if they were—which never failed to make Lucien’s attachment to her more poignant and forgivable. That Guillaume spoke softly and seriously, with a slight accent—he had been raised in Greece—made his words appear somehow more earnest and reasonable than they would have coming from a native speaker, while his striking eyes, which possessed the diffuse quality of celadon—and which Lucien had inherited—also worked to give his audience the impression that his mind was still in the laboratory, uncovering important secrets of the earth, while his heart remained forever buried with his wife.
    G UILLAUME’S DISCUSSIONS AT home with Lucien on the subject were another story. Though he professed no expectation that his sonwould follow him into the sciences, he made clear that at a minimum Lucien was expected to complete lycée.
    “That’s eight more years!” Lucien objected as his first summer on the Île waned and he confessed to his father his desire to leave school altogether.
    “I went to school for more than twenty years,” Guillaume responded. “I’m sure you can manage half of that.”
    “But you were good at it.”
    “I know you’re as smart as any of them—and I’m sure your life would be that much easier if you applied yourself.”
    “I apply myself to music.”
    “You’ll have plenty of time for that after you turn seventeen,” Guillaume reasoned, “if that’s what you still want to do.”
    “But school is so boring,” Lucien complained.
    Guillaume laughed and Lucien sighed, knowing he had little choice but to follow his father’s directive. He allowed himself to be distracted by the reddish hue of his forearm, which he held up against his father’s swarthier skin.
    Guillaume, however, was not quite ready to abandon the topic. “You know, Lucien, your mother would have told you the same thing about school,” he said and ran his fingers up to his son’s neck, making him laugh. “As much as she loved the theater, it wasn’t all she was interested in—that’s why she married me.”
    L UCIEN OFTEN DREAMED about his mother, and she was always singing, but he could never remember what she looked or sounded like once he resurfaced from the depths of his sleep. During the day, he sometimes became convinced that she—or her spirit—was nearby.
    “Can’t you feel her?” he cried to his father one afternoon that summer, when they were again in the