Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  Instead, Frankie jostled with the other girls at the sink, trying to get a little room to splash water on her face. She toweled off, wondering what her father was going to say this afternoon. He had something important to tell Frankie and her brother and sister, the nuns had informed her. Something that could change their lives. Frankie doubted it. Along with his flair for meatballs, Frankie’s father had a flair for drama. He’d once announced a move to a new apartment as if he were taking up residence in a French castle.

  (What he had not needed to announce: that the new apartment had had no room for his children. That they shouldn’t ask if it did.)

  Frankie didn’t expect much from her father; in her experience, fathers weren’t particularly reliable. All Frankie could hope was that her father wouldn’t bring what’s-her-name with him again. Visiting Sundays weren’t the same when she came along. When she showed up, her father never had shoes, he never had chocolate. She made him cheap. She turned him into a whole different man.

  Frankie brushed her teeth hard enough to hurt. Who wanted to think about her? Nobody. Not even her own kids probably, who were here at the orphanage too, somewhere in the other cottages. Frankie didn’t know their names, she didn’t know what they looked like, and she hoped she never would.

  “Snickers,” hissed the girls in the hall. And then, all through the cottage, the girls passed it down the line: “Snickers, snickers, snickers.” Nuns coming back, shut it, move it.

  Frankie pulled on her Sunday dress and her coat just in time for Sister George to wave them out the door. The cottage wasn’t really a cottage, just a big room that opened out onto a bigger corridor. The girls from other cottages marched in line down the hall, their footsteps echoing so loudly that it was almost like there were more girls marching on the ceiling above. There were boys at the orphanage too, but their cottages were in another building. They’d see one another across the aisle in church. Shorn as a sheep, Frankie would have been happier not to see any boys, unless it was her older brother, Vito. She barely saw him as it was. Even brothers and sisters were separate at the orphanage.

  Up at the front of the line, Sister George opened the door to the outside. The girls kept their heads down and their traps shut as they stepped outside and trudged toward the church. It was sleeting hard, and the girls tried to cover their hair. For a minute, Frankie was happy she didn’t have any. And then she saw the boys walking toward the church too, a few of them laughing and pointing at her, and was sorry again. Frankie was fourteen in October of 1941, which might sound young to some, but wasn’t, not for a nation on the cusp of another war, not for an orphan, not for Frankie. She was just three years younger than I was. Am. Was. A—

  Anyway, it was no fun having boys laugh at you for something you couldn’t help, laugh at you for something that had been done to you. Especially if none of the boys were your brother and some of the boys were filled out just enough to be called handsome.

  They reached the church and filed inside, sitting in their regular pews. The whole orphanage wasn’t there yet, only the cottages with Sunday confession day. One at a time, they marched into the confessional. Most of the orphans were out almost as fast as they went in, mumbling Hail Marys and Our Fathers to repent for whatever sins of deed or thought. A few kids took longer.

  Poor Father, Frankie thought. She hoped he’d had his coffee this morning.

  Frankie and the other girls hadn’t had anything. They wouldn’t have breakfast till after morning mass, and that meant another hour and a half at least. Frankie clamped a hand over her rumbling stomach as she walked to the confessional. She sat in the booth and pulled the curtain closed behind her.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been a week since my last confession.”

  She couldn’t see him very well through the mesh, but she could hear the rustling of the pages in his Bible. Father Paul said, “How blessed is anyone who rejects the advice of the wicked and does not take a stand in the path that sinners tread, nor a seat in company with cynics.” Frankie didn’t know what a cynic was, but it didn’t sound so bad in Father’s Irish accent.

  He said, “Do you have something to confess?”

  Frankie’s tongue was salty with hunger. She wanted to turn the question around—“Do you have anything to confess, Father?” But she was too obedient for that, and also too jaded. She thought about telling him about taking the Lord’s name in vain or thinking vicious things about her younger sister. Things he expected to hear. Instead she said, “Sister George has a face like the Mummy. Only not as cute.”

  From my perch on the ceiling, I smiled. Frankie winced. First because she thought it was a childish thing, a sinful thing to say out loud. Second because she’d probably get about a thousand Hail Marys.

  But Father Paul didn’t say anything about any Hail Marys. He started laughing, a barking laugh that sounded a lot like a cough.

  Frankie leaned closer to the screen. “Are you okay, Father?”

  “Just a tickle in my throat. You were saying?”

  “She dumped me out of my bed this morning. She’s always dumping me out of my bed.” Frankie tugged at her hair and then stopped when she realized she was doing it.

  “Was it time to get up?” asked Father.

  “Well,” Frankie said.

  “There you go. Do you think you’re showing Christlike respect for Sister George by calling her, uh, what was it?”

  “The Mummy. Only not as—”

  “Cute,” he said. “I think I’ve got it now.” More coughing. “And are you truly sorry?”

  Frankie didn’t know if she was. Maybe she was. Maybe if she didn’t say bad things about Sister, Sister wouldn’t do bad things to her. It wasn’t true, but who could blame her for thinking this way? She had no idea that Sister George disliked Father simply because he was from Ireland. Frankie had no idea that too many people believed you could be from a right place or a wrong one.

  The orphanage was German Catholic, and Sister George was more German than German. In Frankie’s language class, they’d learned that the German word for “squirrel” could be literally translated as “oak croissant.”

  That was what Sister’s face looked like. A croissant.

  “Yes,” Frankie was saying, “I’m truly sorry.”

  “Well, then. Anything else?”

  “I’ve been thinking mean thoughts about her, too.”

  “Her?” said Father Paul. “Who’s her?”

  Frankie blushed and was glad for the screen. “My father’s . . . his . . . friend.”

  Frankie didn’t have to explain. There might be nine hundred orphans at Guardian Angels, but Father Paul seemed to know the lives of every single one of them. “What kinds of thoughts?”

  “I want her to move to the North Pole. Or the South Pole. Whichever’s colder. And where there are bears. Starving ones. With big teeth.”

  Father cleared his throat. “She might be your stepmother one day. Some young ladies would be grateful to have a stepmother who cares about them.”

  “She hates me worse than Sister George.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said. “From what I hear, she and your dad visit all the time.”

  Frankie said nothing.

  “And bring you all sorts of nice things. Things the other girls never get. You must learn to appreciate the gifts that God has given you. A father who loves you. A new mother.”

  Sharp now, like the sting of a strap: “My mother is dead.”

  “Your mother is with God. In a better place.”

  I hoped Frankie’s mother was with God. I really did. I hoped she and God were sharing a coffee cake. Once I’d confessed to my own mother that I thought God was a woman, because who but a woman would care so much about the oceans and the plants and the animals, who but a woman could build a whole world in seven days? My mother slapped me so hard my ears rang like church bells for hours after.

  More things Frankie wasn’t thinking about: coffee cake, because she’d
never had it, which should have been some kind of sin but wasn’t. Church bells, or the time it took to conjure all those mountains and trees, sharks and whales, bears and wolves. No, Frankie was too busy imagining how lonely her mother must have been when she stepped off that boat from Sicily, about what made her mother get on that boat in the first place, the kind of courage it took to sail across the ocean all by yourself. What had her mother hated so much about her home, and what had she missed once she’d left?

  Frankie put her hand to her middle again. I remembered doing that, remembered when the feelings were so strong they turned your insides to a frothing stew. Frankie’s mother had been just sixteen when she came to America to build her own new world, and had died for it.

  But Frankie only smoothed the fabric of her dress. “Do you think there are meatball sandwiches in heaven, Father?”

  Coffee cake, I said, still floating against the ceiling. With lots of brown sugar.

  Father said, “I always imagined there’d be corned beef. But I suppose there could be meatballs too. Ten Hail Marys. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.”

  “For His mercy endures forever,” Frankie said.

  When Frankie finally threw herself back on the pew next to Stella, Stella said, “What took you so long?”

  Frankie said, “I was telling him about all your impure ways.”

  “What?”

  Sister George gave them one of her don’t-make-me-come-over-there looks. Frankie slapped her hands together and prayed, but she was praying that Sister wouldn’t drag them out of church by their necks. It had happened before.

  Sister must have been too tired from kicking over mattresses to drag people out of church, because confession ended without anyone losing any more hair. The rest of the boys and girls filled the church pews all around them, going silent as dolls when the nuns gave them what Frankie called the stink eye. Frankie tried to focus on Father Paul. Father was always different during mass than he was in confession, facing away from the congregation, droning on and on in Latin about hell and fire and brimstone, infernos and abysses and sinners. His lilting, musical accent made the Latin words sound less frightening, but it wasn’t supposed to. Everyone in the whole place was certain they were going to burn for something. There was no need to keep bringing it up.

  Frankie believed there was nothing that any father could say that would surprise her.

  She was wrong.

  In my best Irish accent, I bellowed, Hill! Fyre! Breemston! right in Frankie’s ear. She didn’t even turn her head.

  I got bored with the sermon, so I drifted back out of the church and into the courtyard, standing in the curtain of sleet that couldn’t touch me, couldn’t chill or soak me. Across the courtyard, on the upper floors of the dormitories, a shadow darted from window to window. That shadow traveled from left to right until the ghost girl with the broken face burst through a pane without shattering the glass. She plummeted to the ground, screaming, No, please, wait! the whole way down.

  See?

  Hell is never what you think it’s going to be.

  Angels of Blood and Stone

  I LEFT EVERYONE TO THEIR various hells and went to visit the angel in the middle of the courtyard. Carved from white marble, with her huge wings reaching into the air, she stood on top of three tiers of stone like the decoration on a wedding cake. The angel held the hand of a little girl, while a boy sat beside her, reading a book. The nuns told the orphans that she was there to watch over them, keep them safe. In good weather, the children gathered around her, perching on the edge of the stone like so many birds flocking. But with the orphans in church and the sleet falling in a silvery curtain, I had her all to myself.

  I sat on the stone at her feet, and I told her what I had seen that morning, from the hungry babies to Frankie kicked out of bed to the girl with the shattered face. The angel was my confessor; even if I could have, I wouldn’t have told Father Paul anything. I had seen Father Paul in his striped pajamas, curled up in his bed like a child. Once you’ve seen someone in their striped pajamas curled up like a child, eyes shifting under thin lids, it’s hard to think of him as a person you should trust with your deepest secrets, your greatest sins, a person who could offer you absolution. But perhaps it was a sin to judge a priest’s pajamas, so I confessed these things as well. And then I told the angel what I always did, that I loved her wings, that I wanted to know how to get my own.

  How do you become an angel? I asked her. How do you leave this place? Why am I here? Haven’t I paid enough? I would wait for her to answer, as foolish and impossible as that was. But then the whole world seemed foolish and impossible to me; how much more impossible would it be for the angel to offer a little advice? I didn’t think it was too much to ask. That’s your problem, you never think anything is too much to ask, a voice said. Not the angel’s. That voice was in my head; my mother’s voice, yammering on as if both of us were still alive. You never think of anyone but yourself, you never think. I ignored the voice and told the angel about meatball sandwiches and corned beef and coffee cake in heaven. More impossible things. The angel didn’t judge.

  After the angel had tired of me and I of her, when her beatific smile started to look more like a smirk, I left the courtyard. When I was a little girl, I’d heard about ghosts, or rather, the places they haunted—old houses, cemeteries, dark roads at night. The girls in Frankie’s cottage still whispered about Resurrection Mary, a beautiful girl in white who was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking home from the Willowbrook Ballroom in the suburbs of Chicago. Apparently she walks northeast on Archer Avenue until some unsuspecting young man picks her up in his car. She’s quiet during the ride, and when the driver nears Resurrection Cemetery, she disappears.

  And yet, unlike so many others, I didn’t skulk around graveyards. All right, I didn’t only skulk around graveyards. I’d boated down the Chicago River, I’d ridden the train all around the Loop downtown, I’d motored through every inch of the city and beyond, I’d gone wherever and whenever I wanted to go. But I had my favorite haunts, so to speak. So while I did walk through the St. Henry Cemetery—Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen, I said to the gravestones—I kept going, moving through the wrought-iron fence and out onto the street. I passed the orphanage greenhouse and the Angel Flower Shop, where the orphan boys grew the blooms, cut and arranged and delivered them. And then there was the butcher shop, the hardware store on the corner. Because it was Sunday, the streets were filled with people wearing their coats over their best church clothes, clutching their collars and hats and wincing at the sleet. They ignored two men, faces creased with wrinkles and grime, sharing a bottle on a stoop, laughing through broken teeth. A big-domed car rumbled by, splashing a well-dressed man as he hustled down the sidewalk. The man shook his fist, but the car didn’t slow, not for the man shaking his fist, nor for the woman lying battered in the middle of the street, limbs shattered into a dozen extra joints. I wondered how many times she’d died. Two? Two hundred? After a few moments, the woman peeled herself off the pavement and crabbed past me, fast, a giant pink spider scuttling across the sidewalk.

  I left the spider woman to her spinning and continued on my way, sometimes walking, sometimes floating, the streets a blur of shops and apartment buildings and bars locked up tight. I skirted along sidewalks and swam down streets till I reached the shores of Lake Michigan, one of my very favorite places. The lake was so beautiful, especially when shrouded in a glistening veil of sleet—the water, even the air, full of mysteries. I sat in the sand and watched for the slap of mermaid tails in the gentle surf. My mother’s voice intruded again: There is no such thing as mermaids! Stop with this fairy-story nonsense. But I put my fingers in my ears and sang to myself the way I imagined mermaids would sing, a wordless hum that vibrated in the chest, powerful enough to stir the currents. And though I could not feel the sand under me, nor the vibrations, I imagined my mermaid song luring unsuspecting boys into the water, desperate boys chasing their happily-ever-af
ters, their delicious dooms.

  That’s it, I’m putting these obscene books in the fire. You will marry Charles Kent and you will be grateful, do you hear me? Are you listening? Listen—

  You listen, I said to the sleet, to the sand, to the water.

  Listen.

  Listen.

  Listen.

  By the time I returned to the orphanage, mass was over and Frankie and the rest of the girls were at the slop house, though the nuns called it the dining room. The girls each got a cup of Postum and a slice of bread with lard. As hungry as she was, Frankie still had a hard time eating that bread, that lard. The bread was chewy, the lard thick and sticky. And the other girls wouldn’t stop talking about the new girl who had thrown herself—or was chased? But who would have chased her?—from one of the second-story windows and come to a bad end in the courtyard the week before. (None of the girls knew that that same poor soul was now standing right next to the table, tearing at her bloody hair.) Frankie gave her bread to another girl, a strange one named Loretta who’d eat anything. Loretta wrapped it in a napkin and slipped it into her pocket. Later, in the yard, she would pull it out and nibble at it when the nuns weren’t looking.

  And that was what Loretta was doing, gnawing on that sticky, lardy piece of bread, when the other girls tried to get Frankie to play ball outside. Frankie could throw straight and far and she was faster than a cat on fire, but she wasn’t in the mood to play, even though it had finally stopped sleeting. Instead, she climbed to the top of the slide to get a look over the fence. The yard was split in two, boys on one side, girls on the other. Besides visiting days and maybe church, the only time Frankie saw her brother was when she sat at the top of that slide. And even though she’d see him later this afternoon, she wanted to get a look at him now. He was growing so fast and changing so much that sometimes, when he first walked into the visiting room, she didn’t recognize him. It scared her in a way she couldn’t even explain to herself.

  But there he was, huddled in a pack of boys, all of them scratching like dogs at their woollies, the itchy pants they wore. If Vito saw Frankie, he knew better than to wave. One of the other boys didn’t. As soon as he lifted his hand, a nun was on him, giving him such a smack Frankie was surprised his eyeballs didn’t pop out onto the blacktop. She didn’t want other boys waving at her, not until her hair grew back, and she didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble. She turned to climb down, but someone was standing on the ladder. Toni.