by Laura Ruby
—at the babies in their cribs, lined up like gravestones, which was probably why I was drawn to them, little cradles of life. Hello, you baby, I said. Good morning, cupcake. Sometimes they heard me, sometimes—
they
didn’t
Running again, through the halls of the orphanage. Something was chasing me, something had come up from the catacombs beneath the building, lurching and shuffling and moaning. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t breathe, my dead lungs heaved and spasmed. I made for the window. A girl whose hair was ropy with blood unhinged her jaw to gulp me down. But I was already shattered, already gone.
Hunger
I CAME BACK TO MYSELF on the shores of Lake Michigan, the water lunging at my feet. The elegant black man in the pinstriped suit and a knife sticking out of his neck spun a cane this way and that. He said I was the whitest girl he’d ever seen, he asked me the name of my wily red fox, he said we looked like we’d stepped out of a fairy tale, “The Girl and the Wolf.” He wondered if I’d ever eaten anything that lit me up from the inside, set me aflame.
I said: I know hunger. I know how it hurts.
He said: Do tell.
Bless Me
FRANKIE AFLAME: HER GLARE HOT, so hot.
“What are you staring at?” Bernice snapped over her morning oatmeal.
“Yeah,” said Cora. “What are you staring at?”
Frankie’s lids dropped to half-mast, but the heat in her gaze didn’t fade. Did Vito know about their mother? Did Bernice know? Did Cora?
Ada knew. Ada scrubbed pots in the sink, her traitor’s back to Frankie. Ada should leave the pots and scrub herself inside and out, she should reach under her own house dress, she should swallow the steel wool.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bernice said.
“Do you hear that?” Frankie asked.
“Hear what, you loony tune?”
Frankie’s father cobbled shoes in the shop and his hammer said liar, liar, liar. He thought he could lock her mother away, he thought he could pitch his own daughters. He thought they were all his to shut in a tower. Or turn out the door, leave for the animals.
Frankie stood, pulled on her gloves.
Bernice dropped the spoon into her bowl with a thud. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Church,” said Frankie.
At this, Ada turned around. “We just went this morning.”
“Are you telling me I can’t go?”
“There’s washing to do around here. And I thought I told you to wake your sister up. She needs to pull her weight.”
“She needs to lose some weight,” said Bernice.
“So do you,” said Cora.
“Shut your ugly mug,” said Bernice.
“Hey, I know!” said Cora, through a mouthful of oatmeal. “Why don’t Frankie and Toni join a convent! That’s what girls like them do anyway. I mean, what man would want to—”
“Learn some new insults, why don’t you?” Frankie said. “You’re both boring the crap out of me.”
Cora’s mouth dropped open in shock. “What did you just say?”
“Hush,” Ada said to Cora and Bernice. To Frankie, she said, “You can go to mass tomorrow. We have the sheets to do, and the floors. The rugs need beating. Your father’s shop needs to be dusted.”
“I’m going to confession.”
“Oh, what do you have to confess?” Cora said.
“Mother, you can’t let her get out of doing her chores,” Bernice whined.
Frankie ignored them both, kept that hot glare on Ada. “Confession is good for the soul, wouldn’t you say, Stepmother?”
Ada put her hands on her hips, the soapy water from the Brillo soaking into her dress. “I don’t think I like that snotty tone.”
Frankie straightened her hat. “Looks like I have something to confess after all.”
She took the streetcar to the Guardians. She slipped into the church, and then inside the confession booth. She waited for the shadow of Father Paul to appear behind the screen.
When he was settled, she said, “Bless me, Father, for he has sinned.”
Father Paul said, “Don’t you mean that you have sinned?”
“I said what I said.”
“All right, Frankie. I’ll bite. Who are we talking about?”
“He lied to me. He lied for fourteen years. My mother isn’t dead after all. She’s at Dunning. She’s been there the whole time. My whole life.”
Father shifted, the bench beneath him creaking. In that creak, Frankie heard another truth. “You knew?” But of course he did. There were nine hundred orphans at the Guardians, and he seemed to know them all, even the ones who had left. Even the ones who had been thrown away.
Frankie’s nails bit into her palms. “Who else knew? The sisters? The orphans? Everyone but me?”
“Frankie, sometimes the adults in your life keep things from you to spare you, to protect you.”
“You think that he protected me? That he ever has? That he’s doing it now?”
“You feel anger in your heart.”
“I feel anger everywhere,” she said. “I feel it in my toes.”
“Fools give full vent to their rage, the wise bring calm in the end.”
“I’m a fool then,” said Frankie.
“You don’t have to be. You can repent, and God will forgive you.”
“What if I don’t want to be forgiven?”
“Oh, Frankie. I am sorry for you. I am. For everything that’s happened.” He sounded sorry. And that was something. “But,” he said, “anger only lets the devil get a foothold. Anger gets us that much closer to hell.”
“And hell is where you burn.”
“That’s right.”
But it wasn’t true, Frankie understood that now. Hell wasn’t fire and brimstone. Hell didn’t burn. And the only devils to be found were the ones you find on earth, and there were too many of those, and they looked like everybody else.
Hell, though. Hell was empty. Hell was nowhere. A dead silent plain of echoes and dust and empty arms rocking. Of dead boys shot down over vast, cold oceans. Where people didn’t even care enough about you to hate you. Where the people who’d promised to love you forgot your name.
Hell was cold. The coldest place in the universe.
“Frankie?”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said.
Because if she hadn’t yet, she would.
Though I had promised that I would never again sit with the angel in the courtyard, I did, slumping at her feet, Wolf slumped along with me. The angel told me of the ruthless furnace of the world, the endless suffering that was its fuel. She spoke of Hitler’s suicide in his underground bunker, how he tested the cyanide on his favorite dog, Blondi, before he and his wife swallowed the capsules themselves, leaving the Allies with only his minions to punish. She told me of the Russian sharpshooter, a woman with hundreds of kills to her name, who shot three drunk American soldiers because they wouldn’t stop laughing about all the girls that they had raped, their plans to find more. She told me of Anne Frank and her sister, who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just months before it was liberated by British troops. She told me of the most powerful bombs the world had ever seen, the plan to unleash them, the mushroom clouds, the radiation, the unspeakable, unfathomable tragedy of it all.
I had the same questions I always had: Why was I going in circles, what were the magic words, why did the world spasm with such horrific pain, why, why, WHY? She had the same answers. I left in the same fury when Frankie pushed out of the church.
And then Frankie stopped short. Turned, stared up at the window of Sister George’s old office. The ghost with the broken face burst from it, fell to the cobbles. Frankie didn’t see her, couldn’t hear her, but sensed . . . something, someone, writhing on the stones, hair ropy with blood. Frankie bent, squinted, trying to sort the shadows from the light. The ghost peeled herself up from the ground, drifted back from where she came, dispersing th
rough Frankie as she did. Frankie gasped, shuddering with sudden cold.
The ghost floated back to the building, and Frankie followed the trail of her chill, rode along that icy eddy. The ghost slipped through the wall, Frankie sneaked through the door into a silent hallway. No voices, no nuns, no orphans riding a gig. She followed the breeze past door after door until she reached the end of the hallway, the darkened door at the end. The ghost disappeared behind it, but Frankie hesitated. This was the door to the basement, the catacombs, the tunnels beneath the orphanage, where everyone feared to go. The nuns only occasionally locked the door; the stories—and the fear of the strap—kept the children out.
But Frankie was hot, so hot—cracked and raw, determined to turn over every rock, to follow the ghosts of sadness and pain and truth that she had felt at the hospital, that she had felt outside. She gripped the freezing knob, twisted it ever so slowly, pushed it open. It creaked on rusty hinges. Behind the door was a small landing, then a set of stairs that disappeared into the darkness. The ghost girl’s chill still lingered, the smell of ash in a spent hearth. Frankie walked slowly down the steps and into the corridor below.
It was dark but not dead, the air electric, like a struck match before the flame. Goose bumps cascaded along Frankie’s skin from her fingers to her shoulders, her hair prickled.
“Hello?” she said.
The darkness beckoned, gathering itself, luring her deeper. She found a light switch on the wall and could now see there were doorways here, too, on either side of her. She peered into the small rooms as she went. In each one was a narrow bed and a dresser. She counted twelve rooms before she entered the next, laying a palm on the cool surface of the mattress. But the bed was not an ordinary one. It had stirrups at the foot of it, straps at the top. Confused, Frankie fingered the stirrups, stared at a tiny red stain on the fabric of the bed. She didn’t see the ghost in the corner, hair ropy with blood, she didn’t hear her plaintive keening. But she had a vision nonetheless, of a girl in the bed, feet in the stirrups, arms pinned, beseeching the nun who was walking away with her baby, “No, please, wait.”
The pain of it punched her in the chest, and she closed her eyes against it. Maybe some girls were relieved, maybe some girls hoped the babies would be taken in by loving parents, that this was for the best, that they would all have a better life. But the feeling was the same. No matter what you hoped for, hope could break your heart.
She backed out of the room and out into the hallway, instinctively cradling her arms in the pulsing dark just the way her own mother had back at Dunning. Girls were punished so hard for their love, so hard, hard enough to break them.
Frankie tightened her arms, cradling herself.
But maybe, once upon a time, her mother had loved her that hard too.
She didn’t bother with the streetcar. She ran the whole way home, every step a Hail Mary, every breath an Our Father.
Mercy
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” Toni said when Frankie walked in the door. “Why are you so sweaty?”
Frankie took off her hat. “Where is everybody?”
“They worked me like a dog all day, and then they all went out,” Toni said, plopping herself into a kitchen chair. “Dad took Ada to see her mother. Cora and Bernice got all dolled up and went down to the Servicemen’s Center. And Dewey . . . well”—Toni hugged herself, her eyes focused on the scratched surface of the table—“I don’t know where Dewey is and don’t care.”
Frankie sat down next to her. “What about Dewey?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Toni, did something happen? Did he do something?”
Toni rubbed her finger against one of the scratches. “I was washing up in the bathroom and he walked in. He said it was an accident.”
“It wasn’t,” Frankie said. “That piece of trash.” She jumped out of the chair and stalked around the room, her agitation propelling her from the inside.
“He didn’t touch me or anything.”
“Goddamn it,” Frankie said.
Toni tipped her head and considered her sister. “Did something happen to you?”
“No. I’m fine.”
Toni waited for Frankie to say something else. When she didn’t, Toni said, “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. There’s some ham salad in the icebox. It’s terrible, you know Ada can’t cook worth a darn, but it will fill you up.”
Frankie sat back down at the table and pulled off her gloves. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’re never hungry. You’re wasting away to nothing. You’re like a little doll.”
“I ain’t no doll.”
“Oooh! Listen to you, ‘ain’t no doll.’” Toni clapped her hands. “I like it when you talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like a regular gal. One that don’t—excuse me—one that doesn’t work in an office.” She tapped her fingers on the table. “So are you going to tell me what happened to you today, or not?”
Frankie couldn’t. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. Toni had come to Dunning, but she hadn’t had the same reaction, didn’t feel the same outrage. Maybe she’d been too young when their mother left. Maybe she was just a different kind of girl. Either way, Frankie didn’t know how to explain the feeling she had when she visited the orphanage, the feeling she had when she was down in the catacombs—the sense that she hadn’t been alone.
“Nothing happened,” Frankie said.
Toni threw up her hands in surrender. “Fine. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you. I got a job today.”
“Where? Doing what?”
“Checker at the grocery. I start day after next.”
“Wow. What made you do that?”
“Are you kidding? I’m tired of hanging around here, taking orders. Dad bosses me around the shoe store, Ada bosses me around here, her stupid kids boss me around, I hate it.” The smile dropped off her face. “I don’t like it here, Frankie. I thought I would. I thought it would be . . . oh, I don’t know what I was thinking. Dumb stuff.” She curled her hands into fists. “Guy came by to call and Dad wouldn’t even let me see him! He said I’m not old enough. But Dewey . . . if that Dewey gets near me again, breathing on me or trying to touch me, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Stab him with a fork?”
“Now there’s an idea.”
Something burned in Frankie’s head, not the rage she’d felt before, but a thought that made her open her eyes so wide she felt the skin around them twitch. She put her palms on the table. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“Oh, yeah? What is it?”
“I’m gonna get us out of here.”
Every morning for the rest of the summer and into the fall, Frankie got up, she put on a nice dress and shoes, hat and gloves, grabbed her handbag, and walked out the door to catch the streetcar, like she’d been doing since she moved in with her father and Ada. Only she didn’t go to Berman’s. She went to the coffee shop instead. In the ladies’ room, she took off her nice dress and changed into the pink uniform and apron and hustled all day for tips. On weekends, she’d say that she was going out to church or to see Loretta, but instead she’d squeeze in a lunch or dinner shift, when the tips were best. She had to give her father the same amount of money she’d always given him, but now she had money to spare, and she saved every penny. It was her escape money, hers and Toni’s.
At first she was so scared all the time that she could hardly breathe. She kept thinking that someone would find her out, that Cora and Bernice’s cousin would have to go to talk to Mr. Gilhooly about some such thing and that he’d tell her that Frankie had had too many woman troubles and had to quit. But after a month went by, her father counting out the dollar bills and handing them to Ada the way he always had, and Cora and Bernice making fun of her dresses and how she should really go join the convent if she was going to spend that much time in church, she settled down.
“More coffee, sir?” She held up the pot.
“That’s mighty kind of you,” said the skinny young man sitting at the counter. He said “mighty” like some kind of southern boy, but Frankie could tell from his accent that he was Chicago born and bred. She topped off his cup and filled up the milk pitcher.
“Do you need anything else?” she asked him.
“A little dog soup would be nice.” His eyes were green and twinkly.
She got him a glass of water and put it next to the coffee. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he said, holding the glass up before taking a sip. He was just a few years older than Frankie herself. She wondered if he’d been a soldier, if he’d known Sam. That was silly, there were millions of soldiers spread all over the world. Still, she wanted to ask him. She wanted to tell him of a dream she had in which Sam was playing a sad-happy tune on his trumpet, and when she’d asked him in the dream the name of the song, he’d said, “It’s called ‘The Goodbye Song.’ Bye, Frankie. The boys are calling, I’ve got to go.”
But she didn’t say any of this. She said, “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“Nope, you sure haven’t,” he said. He held out his hand. “The name’s Ray. As in ray of sunshine.”
That made Frankie laugh. “Well, hello there, Ray of Sunshine.”
“You can just call me Sunshine, if you want,” he told her. “I’m waiting for you to shake my hand.”
“You’ll be waiting a long time,” she said. She grabbed the coffee pot and made sure all her customers had a full cup. Frankie liked this job. She knew food, she knew hunger. She never had to worry about what to say to this one, or what to say to that one. All she had to say was, “What’ll it be?” All she had to do was hold up the coffeepot.
