by Terri Lee
It’s odd, how in times of crisis and panic that time can seem to stand still. He had witnessed it before during battle. He felt it now, as if everyone else was frozen in place, like actors afraid to move from their mark on the stage, and he alone was moving in and out and around them. People seemed to be shouting, but no sound reached his ears. Ash was swirling about mixed in with the snow that had begun to fall and Frankie wasn’t sure which was which as he looked at the people in the crowd, covered in a soft powder.
Life had come crashing down around his feet and he couldn’t quite comprehend the fact that the Christmas lights in his own apartment building continued to blink as if they hadn’t heard the news.
Frankie barely had the strength to shuffle his feet as he moved across the dark street, back to Frances, who was still sitting on the ground rocking back and forth, struggling to catch her breath between her sobs and the thick smoke that filled the air. Several women were kneeling beside her to offer what comfort they could.
Frances looked up at him, tears weaving dirty tracks down her face. He bent down and in one quick movement scooped her up into his arms. Without any effort at all, he carried her home, wondering all the while who would scoop him up and carry him home?
THIRTY NINE
“It’s been over a week and she’s not getting any better.” Frankie spoke quietly to the doctor as they closed the bedroom door and left Frances lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
“We have to give her more time.” Dr. Tyndall said. A man of few words.
Dr. Tyndall had first come to their apartment the night of the fire, providing Frances with something to help her sleep, but there would be no rest for Frankie. Frances was so tiny, so fragile, and when Frankie had laid her down on the bed, she curled up into a tight little ball, looking like a child herself. The next morning upon waking, Frances had retreated into a mute shell and had yet to return. She was unreachable. Unshakeable.
“How much time?” Frankie asked the impossible question.
“No one knows. She doesn’t know. Just make sure you’re here when she’s ready.”
Dr. Tyndall tried his best to provide a ray of hope as Frankie struggled without a shoulder of his own to lean on. He told Frankie there was good reason to believe that Frances would return to him intact. Her catatonia was the result of her deep state of shock.
“Catatonic.” Frankie repeated the word, slowly. The word sounded strange on his tongue. “I know what it means, but what are we really talking about here? What does it mean for her?”
“Catatonia is a complicated diagnosis. You must remember it’s not like a broken bone. It manifests itself in different ways in different patients. There is so much we do not know about how the mind handles shock. And grief as well, for that matter.”
Frankie stared at the doctor, unwilling to accept his feeble explanations. The doctor seemed to sense Frankie’s coldness.
“I’ve seen it before.” He was saying. “And it is still too early to make a judgment about her recovery. After the war many young men returned with shell shock and we have made great strides in learning how to deal with this condition. There has been much advancement in the intervening years. I’m encouraged that she allows herself to be fed, and bathed. She is not violent. She has simply… withdrawn. These are good signs. Signs that she is not lost completely.” With that, Dr. Tyndall snapped the clasp on his black bag, and left the apartment. Frankie was left alone.
Frankie’s thoughts rummaged back over the last few days, as images came and went in no particular order. He had been left to handle the funeral arrangements by himself. Left to stand alone at the graveside long after the last of the neighbors filed silently home. He had stood staring down at the pint-sized coffin until he lost track of time. Thankfully the coroner had spared him the sight of the remains of his son. But his imagination would dredge up the most horrible thoughts, anyway. Frances had missed it all, missed saying good-bye, and she didn’t even know it. Not one word, one tear, one sigh had escaped her lips since that fateful night.
A Christmas Eve fire and the death of three people was a glaring headline in the newspapers. Surely Frances’s family would hear of this and come to gather her in their arms. That’s what families did, didn’t they? Didn’t they put petty feuds aside in the face of such horror? And Frankie thought for a moment that something good might come of the ugliness. No one came. What he received instead was more silence. He was surrounded by it.
Their once happy home was now a silent tomb. Frankie wandered around the rooms at night like a restless ghost. He would find himself in Robert’s room, toys still left on the floor where his little boy had left them. He buried his nose in the blankets lying in a rumpled heap in the crib and he could still smell his son. He clutched them to his chest, but they were empty.
***
Sophia returned home with the New Year, to the devastation all around her. She returned to her block with its burnt-out shell of a building and her friend, who could not be found in the midst of her grief. Frankie turned his face from the scene as Sophia gathered Frances in her arms and received her limp reply with no recognition in her eyes. So the older woman cried the tears that her young friend could not.
Frankie thought enough of Sophia to sit her down and tell her the story of that horrible night. Even though the retelling would open the wound again and fresh blood would be spilled. He wanted her to know.
She listened wordlessly as he told her about a small boy on a secret mission to find hidden Christmas presents. Serena Callas had laid Robert down for the night when her five-year-old son Tommy crept into the room. The kindling for this fire was a stack of neatly wrapped gifts tucked safely in the back of a dark closet. When a curious child with a box of matches instead of a flashlight came in contact, it would prove to be a deadly combination.
The rest of the story was easy enough to put together. A stray spark left behind the closed closet door had quickly spread. The fire obviously engulfed Robert’s room before Serena awoke to a smoke filled apartment with only enough time to save herself and her two children.
The fire had claimed two other lives that night, an elderly couple, whose apartment had the misfortune to back up to Serena’s apartment. And many people, who had so little to begin with, lost the last few items they could call their own.
Sophia reached out for Frankie, and though he welcomed the warmth of her arms, he held back, holding on tight to the last bit of control he held in his hands. Everything was piled onto his shoulders and he was beginning to bend under the weight.
***
For days on end, Frankie watched the two women. His wife and his dear friend Sophia who tried desperately to squeeze a sign of life from the rag doll in her arms, and he just hung his head.
He was left feeling helpless more often than not these days. From the first night and into the next critical few days there were people hovering over Frances, all with a task to perform. The doctor with his daily examinations and the even the priest seemed to have some specific function as they gathered at her bedside, while Frankie was pushed further and further into the background.
Though Sam had been more than generous in telling Frankie to do what he needed to do, Frankie knew it was time to return to work. He still had plans to give his notice, but he knew they would need a decent interval to find his replacement.
Of course, they had been sympathetic to his plight. The horrific death of a small child could melt even the hardest of hearts and Frankie had been moved to see the tears in Sam’s eyes at the funeral. But business was business. Money was the thing. The only thing. People didn’t matter, alliances didn’t matter, and friendships didn’t matter. Only money.
Frankie accepted Sophia’s offer to step in and watch over Frances at night while he was gone, easing one of his worries. And if the truth be told, he was thankful for a reason to escape. The sound of Frances’s silence was deafening. It reached out to grab him the moment he walked in the door and never let him go. Her stilln
ess was like another death.
***
One week turned to two, and nearly three. The gray mist of January hung in every crevice, the perfect accompaniment to the gray mood of those around Frances. Frankie was growing thinner and paler as Frances went deeper inside herself. And he was left alone to deal with Robert’s shadows. Now the talk of moving Frances to a mental facility was growing more urgent.
Dr. Tyndall seemed surprised that Frances hadn’t recovered by now and today, he showed up with Dr. Chase, a respected psychiatrist to consult on the matter. Frankie watched from the bedroom doorway while his wife was oblivious to the examination taking place, and the strange sounding words being exchanged across her bed.
Dr. Chase made it clear that he was in complete agreement that the move to a mental hospital would be the next logical step. Still, Frankie would hear none of it.
“No. You’re not going to hook her up to machines and experiment on her. You don’t know anything about her. She’ll recover. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever known.”
“The mind is tricky business, Mr. Lee. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. This is not the Middle Ages. We’re talking about the very best that modern medicine has to offer, which just might help your wife. You do want her to get better don’t you?”
Frankie struggled with his decision. They didn’t understand what it was like to be shut out from the world, with no one to believe in you.
“Not yet.” He whispered to the two men. “Not yet.”
Dr. Tyndall looked at Sophia and shook his head, as Frankie balked at any talk of removing Frances. Sophia linked her arm through Frankie’s in a show of quiet solidarity.
“I’ll be back in a few days, then.” Dr. Tyndall said.
When the door closed behind the two men, Frankie sunk down on the sofa and held his head in his hands. “All I ever wanted was a family of my own.” His words were barely a whisper and Sophia wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to himself.
Sophia sat beside him and placed her frail arm around his shoulders. “You still have a family. She’s right in the other room.”
The tears broke through and fell in a torrent down his cheeks. Sophia squeezed his arm and said nothing, but provided him a safe place to let them fall. He had been so strong through it all, but now he was simply exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that moves in once hope begins to waiver. And he let his secret fear be spoken when he told Sophia that Frances might never return if she went behind those closed doors.
After the tears had been spent, he looked over at Sophia. “She’s going to be alright, isn’t she?”
“Of course she is.” Sophia provided the only answer there was to give.
But he knew there wasn’t a shred of evidence to hang his heart on.
***
Frankie watched as Sophia brushed Frances’s hair, speaking softly to her and sometimes singing. She talked to Frances as if Frances could hear and understand everything she was telling her. She brought her Krupnik, comfort food, soup from Sophia’s youth, and she patiently spoon-fed her friend. The doctors had prescribed just that. To carry on as if things were normal. Speak to Frances every day. Stimulate her senses. So Sophia had conversations with her old friend as if they were sitting over a cup of coffee. Frankie almost expected his wife to enter into the conversation at any minute. But she never did.
Frankie spent his days trying to reach her in any way possible and his nights tabulating thousands of dollars generated from bootleg liquor. His two worlds couldn’t have been more different.
Early one evening, he sat beside his wife, as he did every day before leaving for work. She sat in her rocking chair, moving slowly back and forth and staring past him, always past him, as if he weren’t there. Her eyes were empty and it was hard for Frankie to believe that she was still alive inside the protective cocoon she’d woven around herself.
“Please come back to me, Frances. I can’t do this on my own.” He took her hand in his and squeezed her lifeless fingers. He said the same things he said every day, hoping one day there would be a crack in her armor. He knew her silence was her shield, he understood it completely. Most days, he wanted to crawl in there with her.
He hoped that she was not lost forever, but only that she had lost her way. And in her silence, she was conserving her energy to find a clearing in the darkness. Perhaps she was so still on the outside because she was busy taking up the repairs she needed on the inside. He could only hope that she was healing and rebuilding while her protective shell kept the world at bay.
FORTY
The nights were getting longer at work as Frankie had less and less to give. He dreaded walking into Lou’s place every night, the place he secretly blamed for his situation. If he had not been at the stupid Christmas party, Robert would still be alive and Frances would be smiling and laughing. He hated this place, and he hated everyone in it. Mostly, he hated himself.
Because he knew if he had just given his notice when he thought about it instead talking himself into waiting until after Christmas, his world wouldn’t have spun out of control. Everything was his fault. How he wanted to go back in time and change that one decision. Not a day went by that he didn’t mutter to himself, “Why didn’t I…” But he and Frances would have to live with the ripples that emanated from that one pebble in the pond, watching helplessly as they radiated, out and out.
He was sitting there, buried beneath a stack of papers, when Sam walked in and took a seat, swinging his leg over the arm of the chair. Frankie looked over at him and he noticed that Sam seemed a little taken aback, probably by his appearance. He knew he looked like hell. But so what?
“We’re going to be making some changes with the bookkeeping.” Sam said.
“What kind of changes?”
Sam scooted his chair closer to the large wooden desk and laid out the plans that had been cooked up by Lou and others while sitting around the table at Lou’s favorite booth.
Frankie was aghast. “So now I’m supposed to cook the books?”
Sam just shrugged.
“Basically, what you’re telling me is I’m supposed to figure out how to roll all the money from gambling and alcohol into the books, making it look legit?” The dim light from the desk lamp cast a dark shadow across Frankie’s taut face.
“Basically,” Sam sat back and picked at his fingernails.
“Why now? Why would Lou want to take the money that’s been rolling under the table all this time and suddenly document it and pay taxes on it? That makes no sense.”
“Because Lou wants to invest it. But in order to invest that kind of money, he’s going to have to show that it’s real money. The only way to make it look like real money is to launder it through the business. If he can’t invest, then it’s just sitting there not working for him. He’s looking down the road, way past the end of prohibition. Eventually, he wants to be a legitimate business man. You know, like your father-in-law.”
Frankie looked skeptically at Sam, but Sam remained stone-faced.
“So, can you make that work?” Sam asked as if he were simply asking Frankie to make a minor adjustment to an entry in the books.
“No.” Frankie closed the ledger he had been working on.
“No?” Sam echoed.
“No.”
Frankie had just reached his limit. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been meaning to give you my notice. My wife is not getting any better and I need to be home to take care of her.” He had been right to assume that there would always be something else, it would never be enough.
Lou’s number two was not used to being refused. “Lou won’t be happy.”
“Well then that makes two of us.” Frankie stared across the desk, and Sam’s face said that he knew enough about human nature to never push a man who had nothing left to lose.
As Frankie went home in the early morning light, he felt lighter than he had felt in some time. Perhaps this decision would be the beginning of turning this ghost ship around. It
certainly couldn’t hurt. He should have done it sooner. He didn’t know why he’d been hiding at work. It was cowardly of him to look for an escape, when Frances had nowhere to run.
As he neared his apartment house, he saw the empty hole next door to his own building. An ugly scar that refused to heal. Try as he might, he couldn’t avert his eyes. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but every day he scanned the pile of charred rubble, hoping against hope that something, someone would rise from the ashes. For weeks, the smell of ash would assault him. It lingered in his nostrils and the stale taste it left in his mouth was the taste of losing everything. He was grateful that Frances, in her current state, was at least spared this much.
“I quit my job today.” He told Frances when he got home. For a split second he thought he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, a moment of lucidity before she fell back to her safety. Perhaps he had imagined it, but he needed to believe it. It was enough to give him hope. Hope that she was still in there, fighting and clawing her back from the darkness.
“I won’t give up on you.” He whispered.
FORTY ONE
Frankie’s hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his winter coat, his chin tucked to his chest to avoid the sharp blast of air whipping down the sidewalk. Another dead end to a rumor about a job. He was used to it.
He’d been wandering around Greenwich Village for awhile. No need to hurry home, no one would notice his coming or going. Looking up to get his bearings, he noticed he was in front of St. Anthony’s and it stopped him in his tracks. There it was rising up like a stone calling card at the corner of Sullivan and Houston. He shook his head, as he began to move past the entrance, but his feet seemed intent on leading him through the door. The last time he’d been here was for Robert’s funeral only a few weeks ago. But that day was lost in a jumble of black memories.
His legs had a mind of their own and they propelled him into the warmth of the church. He followed their lead, all the while muttering under his breath, that he didn’t know what in the world he was doing here.
