The Temptations of St. Frank

by Anthony Bruno

  Holy fuck, Frank thought.

  “Annette,” her father said. He didn’t yell, but he didn’t have to it was so quiet. Frank couldn’t read his voice. He could be furious or just his average mad. “Come in,” he said. It was an order, but Frank wasn’t sure if it was for her or for him.

  “Daddy.” Suddenly she could walk. She stood on her own and pulled away from Frank, heading toward the house. Frank wasn’t sure if he should follow her, but he had her purse and shoes, so he did.

  She walked up to the front steps but didn’t climb them. Frank came up behind her.

  Her father frowned down at her. “Go in, I said.”

  “Dad-dy” she whined.

  “I said, go in.”

  “I have to say goodnight to Frank. Can we have a little privacy, please?”

  A goodnight kiss? Frank thought. Was that still a possibility? The little dog in his pants perked up.

  “Go to bed,” her father said. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  She scowled at her father, then turned to Frank. “Good night, Frank. I had a good time.” But she didn’t sound like she’d had a good time. She sounded mad at her father. She leaned toward Frank and gave him a peck on the cheek from a safe distance. What else could she do with her father standing there?

  “I had a good time, too,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as half-hearted as he felt.

  She started up the steps.

  “Hurry up,” her father said.

  “I’m going!” she snapped.

  “Wait!” Frank said. He still had her purse and shoes. He held them out to her.

  She reached down from the top step and took her things from him, a deep frown on her face. She stumbled a bit crossing the threshold and disappeared into the gloomy light inside. Frank felt very uncomfortable being alone with Mr. Trombetta. There were so many things he shouldn’t know about Frank, and his shrinking boner and the condom in his wallet were the least of it.

  Frank forced a smile. “Well, so long,” he said as he started to go.

  “Hang on.” Mr. Trombetta came down the steps, his hand in his pocket.

  Jesus! What the fuck’s he gonna do, shoot me?

  But it wasn’t a gun he pulled out. It was a wad of cash in a gold money clip. His cold, hard eyes never left Frank as he peeled off a bill. He folded it lengthwise and held it up between his fingers. It was a hundred-dollar bill.

  “I don’t want you to call her anymore. You understand?” He held the $100 in front of Frank’s face.

  “I– Why–?”

  Trombetta cut him off. “Stop talking. I don’t wanna hear anything you have to say. You did your prom thing, and now it’s over.”

  “But—“

  “Shut up, I said. Take the money and get the fuck out of here. And make sure I never see your face ever again.”

  Does that mean I don’t have to mow your fucking grass anymore? Frank thought.

  “Here. Take it and go. Buy yourself a new guitar.”

  Frank still had the hundred-dollar bill Mr. Nunziato had given him. With $200, he could trade in his Vox and buy a Fender. But the sight of Trombetta’s money made him sad and angry. It was an insult.

  “It’s okay,” Frank said. “I don’t need it.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t need it? Everybody needs money. Or is it my money you don’t want?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “But it’s what you’re thinking. You’re a pretty snotty kid, you know that?”

  Frank looked at him, then looked at the ground. He didn’t want to get into it, not now and now here.

  Trombetta put the $100 back in his pocket. “All right, have it your way. But I still don’t want to see you with my daughter ever again. I’m serious about that.”

  Frank kept his head down and nodded.

  “I know what young guys are like. All you think about is getting pussy. That’s all that’s on your mind.”

  Frank didn’t respond. The man had a point.

  “Annette can be a little bit wild sometimes. I know that. Whatever happened with you two, happened. But it ain’t gonna happen no more. Unless you got her fuckin’ pregnant.”

  Frank shook his head. “No.”

  “Good. I hope you’re right. You’d better be right.”

  They stood there in silence, bugs flying into the floodlights over the garage, the air-conditioning unit at the side of the house humming.

  “So whatta ya hanging around for?” Trombetta said. “Go.”

  Frank felt like he’d been cut open, throat to groin, his bloody organs lying on the ground. He started to walk back to his car. Trombetta watched him go, like a border guard making sure he went back to his own country.

  Frank stopped and turned around. He looked Trombetta in the eye. “One thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just for the record, I treated her like my sister.”

  He turned around and walked to his father’s Cadillac without looking back. By the time he got behind the wheel, Mr. Trombetta was gone and the front door was closed.

  Chapter 26

  Chest-high stacks of cardboard boxes crammed the Summit office. More boxes sat on the couch and the desktop. There was barely enough room for Frank to move. The new yearbooks had come. The printer had delivered them the day before. As usual, Monsignor Fitzgerald would not allow them to be distributed until he and Mr. Whalley had a chance to examine their copies. A couple of years ago the photo editor sneaked a tiny picture of a Playboy bunny—a clothed Playboy bunny—into the background of a group shot of the entire sophomore class. Fitzgerald blew a gasket and demanded that all the students return their copies so that the yearbook editors could black out the bunny. Every year after that, the Summit was embargoed until Fitzgerald gave the okay.

  But this year the thing that would definitely piss off Fitzgerald couldn’t be fixed so easily. Frank had done it. A full-page photo of the Unholy Trinity was in the humor section of the yearbook, and Frank didn’t give a shit if Fitzgerald blew a gasket. He really didn’t give a shit about anything because his life had turned to shit. He leaned on the desk and stared down at the back page of his spiral notebook, which was open on a stack of boxes. The page with the doodles of the endless interlocking boxes where he’d written his list of senior-year goals in miniscule print. The list made him sad and angry and disappointed.

  1. Col.

  2. Band

  3. G.L.

  Going away to college. That seemed pretty iffy now. The acceptance letter from B.U. was in the front flap of the notebook with the registration forms, but his father was still crying poverty, telling Frank they couldn’t afford B.U., pushing him to go to Rutgers or Montclair State, then in the next breath telling him college was a total waste of time and money and he shouldn’t go at all. Whenever Frank brought up taking out a college loan, his father exploded, screaming that he wasn’t gonna sign for “no goddamn student loans.” But even the state schools charged tuition, so he’d have to take a student loan anyway if he went to Rutgers or Montclair State. But his father refused to talk about it. He’d have a shit fit if Frank just mentioned the word college. His mother had tried to plead Frank’s case, but his father shut her down, too. Thanks to his father, Frank had no idea what the hell he’d be doing next September.

  As for playing in a band, well, Frank knew that wasn’t gonna happen. He had heard that Dom and Johnny Trombetta had found a guy from Johnny’s school who had a Farfisa organ, and now they were looking hard for a drummer. Frank was obviously not invited, and he didn’t know any other guys who played well enough to form a group. The band thing was a pipe dream. Maybe someday he’d have a band, but not any time soon.

  And then there was G.L.—get laid. Didn’t look like that was gonna happen ei
ther. He’d come close with Annette, but she was long gone from his life. He’d tried to “run into” her outside Our Lady of Mercy one afternoon the week after the prom, but she just gave him the cold shoulder. Barely friendly and in a hurry to get somewhere. Her father had no doubt given her the same warning he’d given Frank. Still, he couldn’t help feeling that now that she’d been to the prom, she was done with him. Like a well-chewed gob of Juicy Fruit that had lost its flavor.

  Strike one, strike two, strike three—you’re out. Out of the game. Out forever.

  “Shit…” he mumbled.

  “Don’t shit here. It attracts flies.”

  Frank looked across the stacked boxes. Tina was at the door, holding it halfway open. “I saw the light,” she said, pointing at the dirty transom. “You haven’t been up here in a while.”

  Frank shrugged. “No… guess not.”

  “Worried about Mr. Whalley?”

  “It’s the last week of school. What’s he gonna do? Give me jug for the rest of my life?”

  “He could ban you from graduation. That’s the threat they use at my school.” She stepped into the office and shut the door. “You don’t have any coffee, do you?”

  He shook his head. She had that flirty cat look on her face. Cute and flirty the way she used to be. Except things had changed. They weren’t the way they used to be.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said. “Personal.”

  Her flirty-cat grin drooped. “What?”

  “You and Monsignor Fitzgerald. Are you two…? I don’t know how to put it.”

  She threw her books on top of one of the stacks. “Do you hate me?” Her face was red.

  “Why should I hate you? You’re one of the only girls I know who talks to me.”

  “You think I’m—I don’t know—a slut, an idiot, something. Because you saw me with him.”

  “All I saw was you in his room, sitting on the bed.”

  “At night.”

  “Yeah, at night.” She was right. He did think a little bit less of her, but he didn’t want to. He liked her.

  “He’s been tutoring me, that’s all. His degree is in medieval history. He’s been helping me with my independent study paper. I told you.”

  “What’s it on again?”

  “Aethelflaed, Queen of the Mercians.” Tina volleyed the answer back at him as if she were expecting it. “She ruled by herself in the Tenth Century. She took over from her husband, Aethlered. It was unprecedented.”

  He just looked at her.

  “What?” she said. “Say it.”

  “I don’t think you want me to.”

  “See. You do hate me.”

  He shook his head. “I hate him.”

  She looked shocked. “Why?”

  “Because he’s a priest and he’s messing around with a high-school girl.”

  “What do you mean, ‘messing around’?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You think I’ve been having sex with him?”

  Frank’s heart beat harder. He didn’t think she’d come right out and say it. Why did she do that? To throw him off? To say it as if it was totally ridiculous when in fact it was true?

  “I don’t know what you’ve been doing with him,” he said.

  “Working on my Aethelflaed paper,” Tina raising her voice. “I just told you.”

  “Okay, fine. I believe you.”

  “No, you don’t! You think I’ve been fucking him!”

  “Hey, keep it down,” he whispered.

  “Why? I thought you didn’t care if Whalley caught you.” Tears brimmed in her eyes. Her face was very red.

  “Hey, calm down. I believe you.”

  “No, you don’t. You think I’m a whore or something.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to!” She was crying for real now, the tears flowing. But there were mad tears as she glared death rays at him.

  He glanced down at his list and focused on G.L. He’d once considered her a possibility. She was level-headed, he’d thought. She was easy to talk to. She was cool. Jesus, was he wrong about her. Peel off the outer shell and you’ve got a nut case inside. A shit-storm of emotions like a bag full of fighting mongooses.

  She stood there, glaring at him, her eyes raw, her face wet. He didn’t know what to do or say. Fitzgerald must have done something awful to her or she wouldn’t be acting like this. But she didn’t want any consoling from him. That was pretty clear.

  “Tina, I…” He started to open his arms. He’d hug her, give her a shoulder to cry on, if she’d let him. “I’m not condemning you—“

  “YES, YOU ARE!” she screamed.

  Fuck! he thought. The whole damn school was gonna be up here if she kept yelling like that.

  A light knock on the door before it opened. Yolanda poked her head in. “Tina? Are you all right?” She looked at her friend crying, then looked at Frank and scowled.

  I didn’t make her cry, Frank wanted to say, but he held his tongue, afraid that anything he might say would set Tina off. And give Yolanda the wrong idea. This wasn’t about him and Tina. It was about the Monsignor and Tina.

  “Tina, what’s wrong?” Yolanda’s sweet high voice was stern. She looked at Frank as if he were a bum in the gutter. “Tina, tell me.”

  “NOTHING’S WRONG!” Tina fumed. She snatched up her books and stormed out of the office, brushing past Yolanda so fast, Yolanda’s hair picked up the breeze.

  Yolanda gave Frank her own version of the death-ray glare.

  “We were just talking,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, right.” She put her nose in the air, turned on her heel, and marched out like one of the girl-cats in the Pepe Le Pew cartoons who wants nothing to do with the poor horny skunk.

  The sight of the empty doorway made Frank sigh. One girl was Crazy Cat; the other was Drop-Dead-I-Don’t-Want-Anything-to-Do-With-You Cat.

  My life is a fucking cartoon, he thought.

  He dropped his chin to his chest, and his eye went right to his list. G.L. Strike Three. Yer out!

  Mr. Dalton took a drag off his little cigar and blew smoke into the breeze. Frank sat next to him on a bench in the quadrangle behind Mulvaney Hall, his half-eaten tuna fish on a Kaiser roll on the seat by his side. He didn’t have much of an appetite.

  “This is pretty distressing, Grimaldi,” Mr. Dalton said. “Do you think it would help if I talked to your father?”

  “No.”

  That would actually be a very bad idea. His father didn’t think much of Mr. Dalton because he “put ideas” into Frank’s head. Whatever that meant.

  The English teacher looked up at the fluffy clouds passing by as if he were searching for a solution to Frank’s college problem. “It would be a damn shame if you didn’t get to go to college. You’re a bright guy, Grimaldi. And you’re a good writer. You have some real talent.”

  Frank smiled weakly. He didn’t really believe that he had talent, but he did like to write, and the way he was feeling today, he could use a compliment.

  Mr. Dalton crossed his arms and clenched the plastic tip of the little cigar in his teeth. “And he won’t even consider your taking a student loan?”

  Frank shook his head. “Nope.”

  The smell of fresh-mown grass was in the air. Frank gazed off into the distance toward the football field where one of the maintenance men was circling a goal post on a rider mower. The sun was hot, and it felt like summer, and that combined with the grass scent depressed Frank. That was going to be his summer—mowing lawns for his father. Then what? Raking leaves in the fall? Shoveling snow in the winter? Then back to mowing in the spring? He’d rather die, he thought. But what was the alternative? Frank glanced down at Mr. Dalton’s copy of the New York Times,
which was on top of his briefcase on the bench. More bad Vietnam news. The war was dragging on, and peace negotiations were going nowhere. Maybe he should just run away to Canada to avoid the draft because he wasn’t going to have a student deferment. But what would he do when he got there? Mow lawns? When you got right down to it, that was the only think he knew how to do. Wanting to be a writer wasn’t enough to get a job writing for a living, and he had no idea where to start with that, especially in a country he’d never even visited.

  “What’s your father’s biggest objection to B.U.? The cost? That it’s far away? Or does he just object to a college education in general?”

  “All of the above.”

  “Seriously?”

  “He’s a moving target,” Frank said. “One day it’s one thing, the next day it’s something else. I think he just doesn’t want me to go to college.”

  “Well, what does he want for your future?”

  “’And Son’ on the truck.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “He wants to be able to paint ‘and Son’ after his name on his truck. He wants me to go into the landscaping business with him the way he did with my grandfather.”

  “Oh…” Dalton nodded. “I see. Kind of an old-fashioned guy, I guess.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.” Frank listened to the hum of the distant rider mower and wondered if his father’s cuckoo attitude about college had something to do with him not pursuing his violin career. If he couldn’t take the leap himself, maybe he didn’t want his son to either.

  Mr. Dalton went back to searching the sky for an answer, puffing on his cigar. Frank picked up the can of root beer next to his sandwich, and as he brought it to his lips, he looked across the quadrangle and saw the back door of Mulvaney Hall opening. Monsignor Fitzgerald stepped out into the sunlight. His black cassock shushed around him as he walked across the asphalt, a vampire out in the sun. The sight of him made Frank boil inside. He couldn’t forget Tina’s face red with tears. The cocksucker should burn in hell for whatever he did to her. Then Frank realized that the bastard was walking right toward them. And he had a copy of the yearbook in his hand.