by Laura Ruby
“Defend your country. Enlist now.”
This last billboard had a picture of Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeve to show a big arm muscle. Frankie looked around and saw a gaggle of sailors walking around in their crazy, wide-legged uniforms, but they all looked too young, younger than Vito even, to have such big muscles as the Uncle Sam in the picture. When they spotted the girls, they started pushing and shoving each other. Stella started to giggle and waved at one of them. The sailors waved back.
Sister Bert herded them into the candy store because a couple of the girls had pennies that their relatives gave them. Frankie didn’t have any pennies, but she loved the smell of the candy store and the pretty colors of the candy. Even with the war on, there were jars of licorice whips, suckers, rock candy, gooey-looking fudge and caramels, though not as many as there used to be. How the candy store could keep making candy with sugar being rationed she didn’t know, but she figured that a candy-store owner probably was allowed to buy more sugar than everyone else.
Loretta was mooning over the candy case with Huckle, so Frankie wandered over to the window display. They had pretty white boxes tied up with bows, but if you looked close, you could see that the boxes and the bows had dust on them, and that there was no candy in them, because it was too hot in the window. Frankie pulled at her collar. She wondered if it was warm in Colorado. In his last letter, Vito hadn’t said.
Dear Frankie,
Thanks for the drawing—I never seen anything so swell. I could almost taste that bowl of fruit! I’m glad that Aunt Marion made good on her promise and went to see you. I didn’t know Dad was sending her money to buy you and Toni a present, but I’m glad to hear that, too. I told you that Dad misses you and Toni a lot. He talks about you all the time. “Belle!” he says. My beautiful girls.
Things are pretty much the same around here. Half the time Ada acts like she can’t understand a word I say, the other half she acts like what I say is the worst thing she ever heard. She’s an awful cook, did I tell you that? (She put ketchup on the spaghetti once. I thought Dad was going to keel over.) The girls are still spoiled rotten, but they complain less because Dad got mad at the younger one and whacked her for mouthing off. I don’t want anyone to get beat, but I can’t say that she didn’t deserve it. The boys are terrible as always. Mostly I stay out of everyone’s way and they stay out of mine. Not a lot of presents here, except for what I buy myself. Not that I’m complaining. It’s good to have a job, good to have a little change in my pocket so that I can do what I like. (Most of the time.) And it sure is nice not to have a nun always following me around, waiting to smack me upside the head just for blinking.
But I miss Chicago. I miss the smell of it. I even miss that stupid orphanage, if you can believe that. The yard with the yellow line down the middle. The sound of the rain on the windows. Denver is nice enough, but it’s like living on some other planet, with all these crazy mountains all around. I’m antsy all the time. I keep up with the papers, so I know this war is going to last awhile. I figured that I’ll be eighteen soon enough, so why not just join up now? Get on with it. I asked Dad, and he said no. Can you believe it? I couldn’t. I said, “Why not?” and he couldn’t come up with a good reason. Finally he just said that it was dangerous. Did you hear that, Frankie? War is dangerous. Call the papers!
Anyway, Ada is calling me for who knows what, so I gotta cut this short. Keep your chin up and your nose clean.
Love,
Vito
Frankie turned away from the window. The other girls were crowded around this display or that, even though they’d been to this candy shop a million times before. There wasn’t anything new, but there was something nice about coming here and seeing the same things you saw the last time. Something safe. You weren’t ever going to follow Sister Bert into the candy shop and find out that the candy man was selling dresses instead. Or furniture. Or cars. And after, they knew that they’d go back to the Guardians and watch a picture. Sometimes it would be a good one, The Philadelphia Story maybe, or Fantasia, with the scary devil rising from the mountain, or something glamorous or scandalous with Greta Garbo or Hedy Lamarr (if Sister Bert was the one picking the film). Sometimes it would be an old or boring one. But it didn’t much matter. You knew what was going on. You knew what would happen next. You weren’t confused or antsy, like Vito.
Frankie turned back around to look out to the street and saw that Stella and one of the other girls had slipped outside the candy store when no one was looking. They were across the street talking to the sailors. As she watched, Stella grabbed the arm of one fellow, a tall boy with red hair, and squeezed with both hands. He didn’t seem to mind. He pulled off his little sailor’s hat and dropped it on her head. Where did Stella learn to be so bold? But then, she was always so full of herself, always telling everyone how pretty she was and how much better she was, why wouldn’t she be bold in front of sailors?
“What are you doing?” Loretta and Huckle crowded around at the window. Frankie pointed to Stella and the sailors.
“Look at her!” Loretta said as Stella rubbed the sailor’s biceps. “Cheap as they come.”
“I don’t know,” said Huckle. “That sailor’s all right. Maybe if he wanted to talk to you, you’d act cheap.”
Loretta blushed again, for reasons that Huckle wouldn’t understand. “No, I wouldn’t.”
Huckle saw the blush and smiled, slow and lazy. “Say, you sure would.”
Outside, Stella threw a glance at the candy store and opened her handbag. Frankie didn’t know if she saw the other girls staring through the window, but Stella took out a scrap of paper and a pencil, and the red-headed sailor wrote something down on it. When he was finished writing, she took the paper back and shoved it into her handbag before running back across the street to the candy store.
She and the other girl slipped back inside and made a big show of looking at all the candy, maybe to make Sister Bert think they’d been there the whole time. But Sister Bert wasn’t paying attention to them anyway, she was standing in the corner reading a book. She was always reading a book—sometimes the Bible, sometimes a prayer book, sometimes other books, like today. Sometimes when she was reading the books, she would laugh, or frown, or nod, or smile in a way that made Frankie think that whatever was going on in those books was more real to Sister Bert than the people around her. That if she could choose, Sister Bert would dive into one of those books and never come back out again.
Today, Sister was buried in a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, a book banned and burned by Joseph Goebbels when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Goebbels thought that the book made German soldiers seem weak.
Sister Bert turned the page in the book. Then she threw her head back and laughed.
“What’s so funny, Sister?” Huckle asked.
“One of the nuns is described as a beautiful tea cozy,” said Sister Bert. “Don’t I look like a beautiful tea cozy?”
Frankie thought Sister did, a little.
Loretta frowned. “But isn’t All Quiet on the Western Front about war? What’s funny about war?”
“Nothing is funny about war,” Sister said. “But one must find reasons to laugh anyway, especially when nothing is funny. Sometimes joy is the only defense you have, and your only weapon. Remember that.”
Frankie looked again at the sailors, who were still on the sidewalk. She remembered how Stella laughed with them. Stella’s joy, it seemed to Frankie, was a different sort of weapon.
“What are you all staring at?” Toni said.
“Nobody,” Frankie said, but Toni had already shoved her out of the way. “Ooh, boy! Look at them!”
“What do you care?” Frankie said. “None of those boys are dukes.”
Frankie figured Toni would just get steamed again, but all she did was smile. “Neither is that fella you were talking to in the yard.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that I wasn’t talking to any fella?”
Toni shrugged
. “At least those fellas are something to look at.”
Frankie almost socked her one right there, but Sister Bert had closed her book. “All right, girls, I think we’ve all had enough of the candy store,” she said. “This infernal rain is making us all edgy.”
They lined up outside to shuffle back to the orphanage, all of them limp and damp as a pile of washrags. Toni stood next to Stella again. She was whispering something to Stella, maybe something about the sailors. Stella opened up her pocketbook and showed Toni some slips of paper. They both laughed like it was the funniest thing ever. And then Toni pulled two lollipops from her pocket and gave Stella one of them.
Frankie gripped Loretta’s arm.
“What?” she said.
“She didn’t have any money for those. She went and took them.”
“What? Who?”
As Frankie glared, she thought of the P.S. at the bottom of Vito’s letter. It had looked like he’d erased it once, changed his mind, and then written it out again:
P.S. I ask Dad all the time when we’ll be able to come and get you and Toni out. He says that he doesn’t know. But I have to tell you, Frankie, there are some days that I think you’re a lot better off where you are, and that’s the God’s honest truth.
And it was. Frankie knew that it was. She didn’t want to be trapped by any mountains. She didn’t want to talk only to have Ada shake her head at everything that came out of her mouth. She didn’t want to live with spoiled girls and terrible boys. They had those at the Guardians, but at least they weren’t strangers. And she really didn’t want to leave Sam before . . . before . . . what? Before she could draw him. Before he was hers. She needed to have something of her own for once.
And then there was the thought that wormed its way up out of the dark recesses of her brain like something out of a fresh grave: Your father doesn’t want you. Why do you think he’d take you in even if you had nowhere else to go?
As she watched Toni and Stella lick those stolen pops, so bold, bolder than anyone, she could see that Toni didn’t much care about being safe, about knowing what came next. That Toni didn’t much care about anything. That Toni could do something to get herself thrown out of the orphanage, just as easy as breathing.
And if they threw her out, they’d throw Frankie out too. Like a shower of dirty handkerchiefs over a fence. Like so much trash.
Golden Arm
MY FATHER KEPT A SMALL collection of books in his study, books I was not allowed to touch. Only British writers would do for my father’s shelves—Charles Dickens. Thackeray. Hardy. A smattering of women, too: Brontë, Austen. My father didn’t read any of the books; he displayed the rows of embossed spines to impress the men who came to discuss business over cognac and cigars. He thought the shelves of books made him appear cultured, a man of many interests, even a man of secret passions.
He wasn’t.
When I was twelve years old, I crept into the study and stole a book. I thought that if the books were so special, then reading at least one of them might make me special too. I took Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the lake and struggled through the prologue. . . .
I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation.
. . . only to learn, years later, that Mary Shelley hadn’t even written that prologue, that her husband had. But back then, I grew frustrated with the book. The lake beckoned the way it always did, and I left the book in the sand. By the time I was done swimming, the water had found poor Frankenstein, tried to drown him. After the book was dry, the pages stuck together as if with glue. When I tried to peel the sheets apart, they tore, leaving fragments of themselves adhered to the other pages. At first my father was angry, but what did he care? The spine still looked handsome enough in the row of unread books.
Sometimes I remembered that waterlogged book when I moved through Chicago, with all the bits and fragments of other eras, other lives, stitched here, there, everywhere—a patched-up monster shambling along. I saw all these people in their uniforms and their smart modern suits, living and breathing, and then I saw all the dead beside them, in and around them, in their raccoon caps and breeches and hoopskirts and bustles, from 1750 and 1800, 1850 and 1880. The two black women dressed in homespun cotton, fleeing Missouri or Kentucky, looking over their shoulders, clutching each other’s hands. The exhausted Civil War soldier riding through the streets on his starving horse. For a while, I even looked for Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black man who arrived around 1780, the first non-Native to settle here, but I never saw him. I never saw the Natives who had passed, either, though I saw the living. The Indian Boundary Lines were meant to keep the Potowatomi, the Fox, the Shawnee and Winnebago, out of the city of Chicago, but there were still some trying to survive here on the land of their ancestors. Yet their dead were invisible, at least to me. Maybe those spirits had moved on, like many of their people.
Or maybe the ancestors of the Natives had better things to do than show themselves to ruined girls who liked to read about monsters.
The library was hushed except for the rasp of turning pages. In The Hobbit, Bilbo and the dwarves were about to enter the forest of Mirkwood, where there seemed to be eyes everywhere. And giant lurking spiders. I could almost hear their stealthy approach, the kaleidoscope click of their feet.
Thunk!
Everyone in the library looked up. The young librarian in her crisp blouse and skirt leaned over the desk to peer into the stacks. A lone book lay on the floor. The librarian sighed, walked around the desk and into the shelves. She picked up the book and slipped it back into place, returned to the front desk. All was quiet until another book slammed to the floor.
That was when I saw her, the girl in the golden dress. She was lying on her stomach on the very top of the bookshelves, cheek resting on her forearm, her other arm dangling loosely over the rows of books like someone trailing her fingers in a stream. The girl watched the librarian retrieve the fallen book, tuck it back on the shelves, and sit once again at the front desk. Then the girl in the golden dress reached down and pulled yet another book off the shelf and tossed it to the floor. The librarian jumped, the patrons started, everyone started mumbling about faulty shelves and incompetent employees and drafty old buildings.
That’s just cruel, I said.
For a moment I thought the girl wasn’t going to answer, but then she said, As if you haven’t done the very same sort of thing.
Not to her.
To someone, she said.
What’s that book? I asked.
Only a book, she replied.
According to my mother, no book is only a book. A book can improve your mind or it can break it, I said.
Your mother must have been an . . . interesting woman.
Still is, I assume.
You don’t know?
I said, I don’t want to know.
Her eyes walked my form head to toe and back, then again to the book on the floor. She said, None of these books are the books I want.
What kind of books do you want?
Good ones.
I like the one he’s reading, I said, pointing to the blond man with The Hobbit.
The girl picked up her head, glanced at the cover of The Hobbit, wrinkled her nose. She said, I’m not interested in little men with hairy feet.
So you know it?
She smiled. I don’t want to know.
I want to know how you pulled all those books off the shelves, I said. I usually can’t move anything that heavy.
You’ve never slammed a door?
I said usually.
So you’ve never slammed a door, she replied. Like a cat, she vaulted off the shelf, righted herself in the air, and landed on her feet. Said, I haven’t met many of us who can converse.
I was
irritated about the books and the doors. I said, Converse?
Talk. Speak. Opine, she said, drawing out the I.
Opine, I said. How is it that you can opine?
Her voice took on a faraway twang as she said, I don’t know. I reckon I’m special.
Converse? Reckon? Not from around here, then?
Where’s here? she asked.
The public library on a beautiful Chicago day, I said.
Or maybe we just believe we’re at the library. Maybe we’re somewhere else entirely.
Like where? I said. Heaven?
My father always said that there would be plenty of books in heaven, but I don’t think that’s where we are. She drifted closer. She was even more beautiful than I’d first realized. Smooth brown skin, large liquid eyes. Full lips. Flawless.
You don’t have a mark on you, I said.
Excuse me?
A mark. A wound.
Not all wounds are visible.
How did you die?
Don’t be rude, she said.
We’re dead, I told her. We don’t need to stand on ceremony.
Besides a good story, I haven’t figured out what I need.
I have a good story, I said.
She drifted even closer to me, the yellow fabric of her dress seeming rich and thick enough to touch. Let me guess, she said. Poor little rich girl wasted away for want of love. What was his name? Percival? Reginald? Was he a banker, or a banker?
I thought we weren’t being rude.
I thought we weren’t standing on ceremony.
A tasteful gold cross winked from the hollow of her throat; jeweled combs sparkled in her dark hair. If anyone knew any bankers, it was this girl.
I wasn’t talking about my story, I said. I have a story.
Please don’t tell me about the hobbits. I don’t want to know about the hobbits.
No, this one is about a crow prince.
What would you know about the crows? she said.
Once upon a time, I began.
She rolled her big dark eyes, but she listened to Sister Bertina’s whole tale. When it was done, she said, That wasn’t particularly terrible. It makes you think about what you might wish for.
