by Wally Lamb
On the morning after the Rheingold girls’ surprise appearance in Three Rivers, Frances more or less appointed herself Dulcet’s precinct captain and made me her deputy. We traipsed down to Melady’s Package Store and, since we could not step inside without a parent, Frances called Mr. Melady out onto the sidewalk. She used her powers of persuasion to get him to agree to our borrowing of the Miss R ballot box so that we might ring doorbells, canvass the neighborhood, and secure as many votes as possible for the hometown favorite.
“Would you like to vote for Miss Rheingold?” she would ask, pushing the box at whoever answered a door or emerged from a car.
“I’m kind of busy.”
“It will only take two seconds of your time. This one comes from Three Rivers. She used to be our babysitter. If you don’t want to think about it, just vote for her.”
“Well, all right.”
“Care to vote for Miss Rheingold?”
“Sure. Now let’s see. I guess I like this blond one—Flo-Ann Cobb.”
“Really? She’s never gonna win. What about Dulcet Tone?”
“Hmm. She’s pretty, too. All right. I’ll vote for her.”
We were like secular Jehovah’s Witnesses, armed with paper ballots rather than pamphlets, but energized nonetheless with missionary zeal. And by “we,” I mean my sister.
We usually campaigned until noon. After we ate lunch, we would return the ballot box to Mr. Melady—but not before Frances popped open the back, removed the ballots, and separated them into piles. If Dulcet Tone was not way ahead, she would adjust the returns by filling out several more ballots and instructing me to do the same. “I bet you and me vote more times than anybody else,” I told her.
She nodded. “If she gets Miss Rheingold, she probably has us to thank.”
We canvassed for the next two weeks. One morning, we rang doorbells on Boswell Avenue, the street where the Shishmanians lived. When Mrs. Shishmanian answered the door, she said JoBeth was over at her cousin’s house. Would we like to come in and have some refreshments? Frances and I nodded like bobbleheads, all but speechless in the presence of the woman who had birthed a Rheingold girl.
We waited in the parlor while Mrs. Shishmanian went out to the kitchen.
“Psst. Look,” Frances whispered, pointing to a framed picture atop the Shishmanians’ piano. “That’s her.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” The girl in the photo resembled JoBeth, except she was older. I shrugged. “What are you, a moron?” Frances said, tapping her index finger against Dulcet Tone’s face on the ballot box.
I saw not the slightest resemblance. “No sir,” I said.
“Yes sir,” she insisted. “It must be her high school graduation picture.”
I stared in disbelief at this pre-Dulcet Dulcet until Mrs. Shishmanian came back with two glasses of pink lemonade and a plate of Lorna Doones. When she invited us to have a seat, Frances and I sat next to each other on their sofa. Mrs. Shishmanian sat across from us on a cushioned chair. She kept looking at us—at me, mostly—and smiling. “Next time I talk to Shirley on the telephone, I’m going to tell her how a certain adorable little boy in the neighborhood has been working hard to get her elected,” she said.
“And my sister too,” I reminded her.
“And your sister too.”
When we got back outside, Frances started mimicking Mrs. Shishmanian. “A certain adorable little boy.” I braced myself for a zammo punch; she sounded angry enough to deliver a doozy. “And his sister, too, Miss Nobody, who doesn’t even count. Typical. I do all the work and Little Mr. Adorable gets all the credit.” Clutching the ballot box against her chest with one hand, she grabbed me by the arm with the other. “Come on!”
I reminded her that we’d already been to those houses toward which she was pulling me. Didn’t we have to go the other way? She shook her head and said there was something on Division Street I needed to see. Her fingers felt tourniquet-tight against my upper arm as we rushed toward what she wanted to show me, but I knew not to protest when she was in a mood like this.
We came to an abrupt halt when we arrived at an ugly institutional-looking gray building with peeling paint. I asked her what the sign by the front door said and she read it to me. “‘The Esther Clark Spain Children’s Home.’ Follow me.” She led me around to the back where, instead of a yard it had an asphalt . . . what? Was it a parking lot? A playground? Cars were parked there and motor oil stained the paved ground. But there was a swing set, too, with two good swings and two broken ones. Someone had drawn a grid on the ground for a game of hopscotch. On the opposite side of the fence from where we stood, I saw a dirty Raggedy Ann doll, faceup in litter and dead leaves, stabbed in the heart with a broken pencil.
“What is this place?” I asked. “A school?”
“An orphanage,” Frances said. “This is where we got you from when you were a baby. The lady who runs it called us and said your real parents didn’t want you and would we please take you because everyone else she asked said no. Poppy and Mommy felt sorry for you, so they said they would. That’s why you’re in our family. You didn’t believe me before when I said you were adopted. So here’s the proof.”
I shook my head. “Simone said I wasn’t adopted.”
“Because she didn’t want you to feel bad.”
“Yeah, but—” A bell blaring inside the building cut me off. A side door banged open and a bunch of loud, skinny kids came outside, both boys and girls. Some of them started playing and some stared back at Frances and me as we watched them from the other side of the fence.
“They’re like zoo animals,” Frances said. “But not really, because everyone loves zoo animals. Nobody loves these kids, not even their parents.”
From that long-ago day to this, I can picture with near-cinematic clarity the boy who came running toward us from the opposite side of the fence. Up close, I could see that he had two different-colored eyes and a bald patch on the side of his head. He was too skinny for his pants; they were all bunched up under his belt. He didn’t look at Frances, just me. When he smiled, I could see the cavities eating away at his front teeth. “You know what? I smoked a cigar once,” he said.
“Oh,” I go. “You did?”
“Yup. What’s your name?”
“Felix. What’s yours?”
Without answering, he ran over to the swing set. “Hey, boy! Watch this!” he called back to me. Grabbing onto the chain from one of the broken swings, he shimmied up, then climbed onto the crossbar at the top. Hooking the backs of his knees around it, he let go and hung upside down like a monkey. When he waved to me, I waved back.
“Just think, Felix,” Frances said. “Mommy and Poppy and Simone and me could have picked that boy instead of you. See what a lucky duck you are? Come on. We better get the ballot box back to Mr. Melady.”
As we headed toward Franklin Street, I decided that Frances, not Simone, must be the one who was telling me the truth about my origin. Hadn’t she just shown me the place where my real parents had dropped me off when they gave me away?
“Come on. Let’s cross,” Frances said. Halfway across the street, without realizing I was about to do it, I reared back and, hard as I could, punched her in the stomach. She doubled over and cried out in pain, dropping the ballot box. I thought she was about to retaliate, but instead she staggered the rest of the way across the street, crying. Then I was crying, too. Then a car drove by and ran over the Rheingold girls. The box had been squashed flat, popping open the back. A breeze caught the spilled ballots and sent them dancing down the street.
When we returned the ruined box Mr. Melady yelled, “Is this how you two take care of something that doesn’t belong to you?” I looked away from the tire mark across Rita Regan’s and Mitzi O’Neill’s faces. Even if he could get a replacement from the salesman next time he came around, Mr. Melady said, we would not be allowed to borrow it anymore. Maybe the next time someone lent us something, we wouldn’t be so careless w
ith it.
Walking back to our house, Frances offered me a deal: she wouldn’t say anything about my having punched her if I didn’t tell anyone about her having shown me the orphanage where I’d come from. I agreed. “And who cares if he won’t let us borrow that stupid ballot box anymore?” she said. “I don’t even want to, and I hope stupid Shirley Shishmanian loses.” She said she was pretty sure Shirley had heard her that day when they rode by in their white cars but pretended she hadn’t because she was so stuck-up and fake. She told me that now she hoped Flo-Ann Cobb won Miss Rheingold instead of Ugly Face Shishmanian.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
Good god, these memories and movies of my past, these ghosts: it’s all so vivid and so confusing. What does it mean? I get up from my seat, walk to the foot of the stage, and pace. Then, for no particular reason, I climb the side stairs, walk to the center of the stage, and gaze out at the rows and rows of empty seats.
“Felix? What are you doing up there?”
Aha, my mentor from the shaded realm returns. I see her, vaguely, at the back of the auditorium. But as she approaches, I realize it’s not Lois’s ghost who’s just spoken. It’s Jeannie, one of the theater managers.
“Oh, hey. I’m . . .” In a panic, I look over my shoulder to see if that frozen image of Frances and the Rheingold girls is still up on the screen. It’s not. “It’s nothing, really. Occurred to me that, as many years as I’ve been coming to this theater, I’ve never seen the view from up here on the stage. So I . . .”
“Oh, okay,” she says. “Because if you were thinking about breaking into vaudeville, you’re seventy or eighty years too late.”
“Vaudeville? Oh, ha-ha, no. Can’t sing, can’t tap-dance.” I can hear the nervousness in my laughter. But okay, she’s bought the bluff.
Maybe I should just tell her what’s been going on. After all, Steve and Maura have seen ghosts here, too. Still, a sighting is different from a full-scale exchange, with paranormal movies thrown in. And as real as it’s all seemed, I’m still not a hundred percent sure that I’m not cracking up. I mean, recalling things from childhood: sure. Who can’t do that? But watching your past play out on a movie screen? Dropping back into your life back then? If I spilled all this to Jeannie, I’d probably get tranquilized and carried out of here, headed for the psych ward.
I come down off the stage and walk up the aisle toward her. “So what are you doing here on your day off? Can’t stay away from the place, eh?”
She says she’s got some paperwork she needs to catch up on and a grant application to write. “So are you all set up for your movie club tonight?”
“Uh-huh. So I guess I’ll take off now.” I start toward the exit doors.
Oh shit! What about those film canisters up there in the mezzanine? How am I supposed to explain where those came from and why they’ve got my name on them? I’m halfway up the stairs to the mez when I realize she’s watching me. “Just checking something first,” I tell her.
She nods, but there’s a puzzled look on her face. “Are you feeling okay, Felix?”
“Me? Yeah. Never better. Yup. Maybe a little too much coffee today. Makes me jumpy, you know?”
“Yeah, me too. Well, I’d better get to my office and make some headway. Nice to see you, Felix.”
“You too. Later, then. Say hi to Steve for me.”
At the top of the stairs, I’m relieved to see that all those cans of film are gone. But I’m confused as well—and disappointed that they’ve disappeared.
Driving home from the theater, I look at my face in the rearview mirror. “Who are you to dismiss the possibility that ghosts exist?” I ask it. “Or that paranormal experiences are just something you’d see on the Syfy channel? Isn’t it a little grandiose to assume that the dimension we inhabit is the only one that exists?” In other words, maybe I’m not cracking up.
Back home, I flop face-first onto my bed, hoping to grab a nap. My body’s exhausted, but my mind keeps racing with moving images—the ones I watched up there on the screen and the ones that kicked in from memory after the film froze. . . .
It had been a baffling summer, to say the least. Puppets became boys, cardboard women became real ones. Most confusing of all was that my sister Frances could be both protective and cruel—that she could squeeze my hand one day to reassure me that I was safe, and the next day jab at my security like a lance-wielding picador by taking me by the hand and leading me to a broken-down building that housed a bedraggled orphan boy who was far scarier than Lush Magoon.
It’s clear to me now that Frances’s campaign on behalf of Shirley Shishmanian was really a campaign for her own legitimacy. Caterpillars become butterflies, right? Ugly ducklings transform into graceful swans. So maybe a chubby, insecure little girl in a homemade sack dress needed to project herself as some future Cinderella. But then that mean streak of hers had kicked in and, to undermine and frighten me, she’d dragged me to that orphanage. And I had been frightened, too, which was why I’d landed that surprise punch to her gut. And then a car drove by and flattened the ballot box, and Frances’s fantasy along with it. Cinderella’s castle walls came crashing down all around her. What I didn’t know at the time—couldn’t have known—was that Frances’s own insecurity provoked her effort to convince me that I was once unwanted and abandoned, the implication being that I had better watch my step because that braided rug in our living room on Herbert Hoover Avenue could be yanked out from under me at any time and I’d be sent tumbling back to the Esther Clark Spain Children’s Home to live the life of that unclaimed no-name boy and all the other kids nobody wanted. . . .
Tossing and turning rather than falling asleep, I see, once again, that strange boy on the other side of the rusty fence: his ill-fitting pants, his mismatched eyes and rotten teeth. What became of him? Did he fall victim to some disease? Rise up from his bleak beginnings and become someone in the world who mattered? Maybe he had entered the military and become a hero—or a casualty of war.
I hadn’t been adopted. Frances’s lie was disproven several times over. But each of the half dozen or so times I have screened, for my students or myself, that vintage 1938 film Boys Town, in which Spencer Tracy rescues Mickey Rooney from juvenile delinquency, my illogical fear of being an unwanted orphan has been reignited. Recently, I did an Internet search of Nebraska’s actual Boys Town, the basis for that sentimental film of the same name, and was surprised to learn that it’s still in existence—still in the business of saving disturbed and deprived youth, and that it boasts generations of success stories. Among its alumni it counts real estate moguls, college professors, and captains of industry. But then again, Charles Manson had lived there, too.
SEVEN
Hooray for Hollywood! That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood . . .
“Well, well. The prodigal daughter finally calleth. I was wondering when I was going to hear from you.”
“Sorry, Daddy. I was balls-to-the-wall all weekend trying to finish my Miss Rheingold piece.”
Now there’s a curious phenomenon I’ve been noticing lately: testicles seem to have become gender non-specific. The other day on the radio, I heard that radio shrink Dr. Laura advise a caller that she should “grow a pair” and kick her philandering husband to the curb. Later that same day, while reading something in the New York Times, I came across the term “gender fluidity.” By and large, I’m cool with all this, with the exception of having to stand in line now to use restrooms that have gone unisex. Biologically speaking, we who were already equipped with a pair didn’t used to have to do that.
“—and you know, Daddy, you can get with the twenty-first century and text like everyone else in the world does.”
“Honey, I’ve got big hands and sixty-year-old eyes. The couple of times I’ve tried it, it felt like typing through a fog with oven mitts on. And those tiny letters? They’re smaller than the bottom line on the optometrist’s chart.”
“Excuses, excuses. You’re just afraid to try anything t
hat takes you out of your comfort zone.”
“Yeah, I guess I need to grow a pair, huh?”
“Okay, Daddy. That was just plain weird.” Apparently, there’s some nuance involved when invoking the testicular metaphor. “Hey, can Jason and I come up this coming weekend? Jason’s still up for some movie-watching if you are.”
“Sounds good. By a stroke of luck, my social calendar is empty.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Uh-oh. You’re not going to make another pitch for those online dating sites, are you? Can’t I just start texting instead?”
“So you had a couple of bad experiences. That doesn’t mean—”
“Three, actually. The weepy divorcée, the woman whose grammar I kept wanting to correct, and the one who told me, with unnerving delight, that I was the same age as her father. You don’t have any daddy issues, do you?”
“Nah. Mom can drive me nuts sometimes, but you and I are good. You just need to refine your search a little. When I come up this weekend, we can check out some sites that have more mature women.”
“Meaning what? That I’ll be able to hook up with some nonagenarian who’s looking for a young buck like me?”
“Stop speaking PhD, Dr. Funicello. What’s a nonagenarian?”
“A piece of ass in her nineties. Is that un-PhD enough for you?”
“Daddy, don’t be gross.”
“Okay. Change of subject. Did you get your article finished?”
