Escape Artist efm-2

by Ed Ifkovic

  “And what did you do?”

  A pause. “I laughed as loud as the rest.”

  “Frana was your friend.” I glared at her. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  “I got lots of friends, Edna.” She narrowed her eyes. “Unlike some people I know.”

  I ignored that. “Yet you helped her with that note.”

  She closed up. “Leave me alone, Edna. I mean, could you just leave me alone?”

  After supper my mother decided that the Ferber family should pay a condolence call to Frana Lempke’s family. Frana’s mother Gertrud often did her shopping at My Store. At Christmas she bought religious figurines-the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, camels, sheep, little Bohemian figurines in gaudy blue and red and green. “A small, quiet woman, but a good woman. Not the brash army of women who move like stampeded cattle through my aisles, their ample hips sending goods willy-nilly.”

  Fannie had baked one of her succulent apple pies, dipping into the barrel of winter apples in the cellar. Entering the house, I’d smelled the aromatic confection-the pungent sweep of cinnamon and nutmeg, the savory butter crust, the fleshy winter apples diced and soaked in cider. I was happy to see a second pie on the pie rack, cooling-this one for the family.

  Dressed in funereal black broadloom and corduroy tie and black silk and black taffeta bonnets, the Ferbers left home, Fannie swinging a wicker basket with white linen cloths covering the pie. We walked to the edge of the farm district beyond the fairgrounds in the Sixth Ward. The Lempke farm sat on a little promontory that edged a bank of black hemlocks, a tiny farmhouse with pine-slatted roof and whitewashed clapboards, a house that seemed haphazard, a room tacked on as needed, so that the whole effect was one of chance, mishap, even chaos. Dilapidated, with a sagging lean-to on one side. Broken stone paths wound through untrimmed bramble bushes, thickets of wild rose, and I could see, beyond the sagging honeysuckle-covered picket fence, the meager fields beyond.

  I knew Frana’s father and brothers worked at the Appleton Paper and Pulp Works on the river. The men did the filthiest, smelliest jobs in the acid vat rooms. At home they worked their piddling truck farm of tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, potatoes. A few autumn melons. The mother tended the hencoops and the pigsty out back, while the brothers labored in the barn where the horses, cows, and goats clamored in the dark, tight recesses. An orange-brown mongrel dog barely lifted its head as we stepped onto a creaky porch; nearby a cat squeaked, leapt over the railing, and then climbed into a Rose of Sharon bush.

  Gertrud Lempke seemed surprised that anyone would visit but looked grateful, thanking us too much, apologizing for the disheveled parlor with its hand-hewn chairs and rag rugs. She rushed off to brew coffee. There was one photograph on the wall, a sepia-toned portrait of a mustachioed German military officer with much braid and ribbon; and I thought of the Old Testament God, judgmental and contentious. Mrs. Lempke served us a strawberry strudel, but not the apple pie. From my chair in the parlor, I could see that confection sitting on a rough-board kitchen table among the unwashed supper dishes.

  Gertrud was dressed in a faded Mother Hubbard smock. She had a tiny, pinched face, a small crinkly nose, a little mouth. One more sad hausfrau, I thought, the hidden-away drudge with wrinkled skin and the ill-fitting blue-white false teeth that glistened like piano keys in the flickering gaslight. She had none of her dead daughter’s beauty. She sat, stood, sat down again: nervous. I wondered what folks ever visited this isolated farmhouse. Who talked to this scattered, lonely woman?

  As we sipped coffee in silence, the back door opened and Oskar Lempke and his three husky sons lurched in, stopped dead in their tracks, and looked ready to retreat back to the fields and the barn. One of the boys carried a pail of beer, and it swung back and forth in his grip. Nervous, he sloshed some suds on the pine floor, and the old man mumbled, “Du unverschamter Hund.” The lad narrowed his eyes, fierce. Oskar Lempke, looking at his wife and then at my father, said he appreciated the condolence call, though he didn’t seem to. He and his sons sat down in a rigid line, stiff as tree trunks. I looked at all three boys, Frana’s older brothers, all in their early twenties, perhaps, blunt-muscled and thick and blond-cowlicky, farm boys and mill workers, all with wide cherry-red faces and hands as broad as ham hocks. Plodding oxen, brutal farm animals themselves, dull. No one said a word; each stared straight ahead. I’d met one of them in a harness shop months back, with Frana at his side; and my memory of him was clear. He kept spitting on the floor.

  The brothers seemed inordinately fascinated with Fannie who, conscious of their unblinking stares, fidgeted in her seat. There was rawness in their stares. A barnyard hunger. My mind flashed to Jake’s whispered gossip…Frana’s fear of her brothers, her dread of going home…the brother who bothered her…

  In the awful silence, my mother repeated her sympathies. Frana’s mother swallowed and looked away, but I found Oskar’s reaction alarming. The tough-looking man, all bulk and weathered line, seemed teary-eyed, putting the backs of his palms against his eyes, and trembling.

  Silence.

  Then he spoke, his German accent thick, “Maybe we did wrong thing, locking her up like that.” He pointed upstairs. “She was rebel, that girl, she was, meine Kleine. Fought like wild rabbit. So we nail the bars on the window and we learn you cannot nail in someone who is already living outside the house.”

  His wife whispered, “We was going to send her to family in Germany. To a nunnery. Is stricter there. I make her dresses but she has to have the Amerikanische gown. America is too-too much freedom. The…” She waved her hand in the air. “The…the…open space…”

  One of the brothers grunted, or had he belched? He looked pleased with himself.

  Everyone turned at the sound of heavy clomping. Christ Lempke was dragging himself down the stairs. He nodded to us and fell into a chair, out of breath. I knew he’d once worked at the Eagle Manufacturing Company, building silo feed cutters, making good money, a hard-working man, well-liked; but his war injury kept him home. Staring at us with hooded, distrustful eyes, he sneered, “I hears you talk. Enough. Frana was girl who chose to dishonor…”

  Gertrud made a tsking sound, but Christ went on, “She should have been in nunnery since little girl, no? Too much looking in the mirrors, too much the Amerikanish sass in the mouth, too much with the boys throwing stones at the window at night.” His voice rose louder and louder. I thought it peculiar that in this house of grief, this man could only speak ill of the dead beautiful girl. Oskar Lempke stood, tottered a bit, stared down at his hectoring brother, and then left the room, not saying a word. Christ Lempke stopped talking.

  We hurriedly stood. No one had touched the strudel.

  At the front door Gertrud Lempke touched my sleeve. “She mentioned you. I remember. From school, maybe.”

  “Yes.”

  My mother started to say something, but Gertrud Lempke whispered, “Would you like to see her room?”

  No. No. God no. But I nodded, and Fannie and I followed Mrs. Lempke up the narrow stairs, leaving our parents waiting downstairs. She opened the door to Frana’s bedroom at the back of the house, and in the first flush of gaslight I saw one small window crisscrossed with bars, with nailed wooden panels. Shivering, I felt we were violating the dead girl’s bedroom; but I was surprised by the small space, a crawlspace, really, with sloping ceiling just under the roof, a space that was probably a closet converted into a bedroom. A small wrought-iron bed was covered with an old, faded down-feather quilt embroidered with folk patterns, ripples and cascades of red and green floral patterns. It was torn at the edges, with bursting fabric at the center. A simple homemade bureau with a missing drawer was painted a dull green, a stolid paint intended for a floor; and the wide-planked flooring was covered with an oval rag-weave rug, the threads loose. A shadowy mirror in a dull brown frame was nailed by the back window, most likely to catch the sunlight in the morning. On the dresser stood a water pitcher, some brushes, pins, and inside an unclo
sed wardrobe, I spotted Frana’s dresses, her bonnets, her finery.

  A Wisconsin nun’s cell, cloistered and forgotten among the leftovers of a family. But on the wall just inside the door Frana had pinned pages torn from magazines and newspapers, stories of New York and Broadway and theater, of well-known actresses. A grainy print from a magazine like the Century or Scribner’s-with a black-and-white likeness of Lillian Russell. There were also some glossy chromolithographs from magazines like Demorest’s, with bright, blotchy colors, actresses like Mary Allibone in her celebrated role as Juliet, the wide-eyed, winsome tragedienne staring into space, hands extended, hair askew. It was a popular print, the one used on the poster when Allibone performed at the Lyceum. Unframed, ripped, tacked on, the print stared back at me, haunting; a talisman of color in an otherwise drab lifeless room. It blazed like a noontime sun in its shadows. I could scarcely turn away from it. It was compelling…awful.

  Suddenly I felt faint and wobbled. I’d disliked the vain and fickle Frana with her ribbons and her lace and her fluttery coy manners, her cheap flirtations, her prettiness. We talked now and then, we socialized, we moved in similar circles of young people. In this monastic chamber, illuminated by that midnight sun of an actress in her glossy colors, I saw Frana as a lonely, desperate girl, a lost child in the home of pain, overwhelmed by a new world. I wished, all of a sudden, that I’d paid attention to her. There were things we could have told each other. Maybe.

  But maybe not.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Caleb Stone stopped to say hello as I walked up College Avenue, heading to My Store, and he was uncharacteristically eager to gossip. I was hoping his organ-grinder monkey Amos Moss was elsewhere, but Caleb I liked. I didn’t think him too bright, yet I considered him honorable and fair. We chatted about some ruckus he’d broken up at a beer hall, and he joked, “Not really headline news, I’m afraid, Miss Ferber.” Then the usually laconic chief told me that Jake Smuddie was no longer attending classes at Lawrence University, which surprised me.

  “You probably know that he sits in that gazebo in City Park.” He leaned into me. “I sat with him. He was a little testy with me. Seems to think his father sent me over to bring him back to the college.”

  “And had you spoken to his father?” A little testy myself.

  Caleb Stone nodded. “The father-Herr Professor-did speak to me. He’s worried about his lad, of course, but I said that the boy ain’t doing anything illegal, so far’s I can tell. Not going to your classes at the university ain’t a crime, though it’s a questionable choice of behavior for someone whose father is a high muck-a-muck on the faculty there.”

  “And what was Jake’s attitude when you spoke to him?”

  “Angry.” He reflected a bit. “But more, I think, bewildered. Hurt. This whole thing with Frana Lempke-the way she died-seems to have snapped something in him. That’s all he would talk about.”

  “Just what did he say?”

  “No confession of spontaneous murder from him, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “I don’t believe that he would kill anyone…”

  He scratched his chin absentmindedly. “That’s where you and I differ, Miss Ferber. I believe everyone could kill someone. It’s just the circumstances that trigger a episode.”

  ”I would never…”

  “Of course, you would.” He had a deep rumbling laugh. “I’ve walked by North and Morrison on more than one occasion and heard you and Fannie whooping it up like deranged warriors. One of these days I fully expect to lead one or the other of you off in leg irons.”

  I waved him off with a grin. “It’ll be me doing the killing, frankly. If ever there was a girl born to be strangled, it’s my sister Fannie…” But I stopped, realized the gravity of my words. Strangle her? Images of Frana Lempke swept over me. “I’m sorry.”

  This time Caleb Stone waved his hand in the air. “We’re just talking, the two of us.” He started to walk away. “If you hear anything about young Smuddie, you let me know.”

  “Like what?”

  “I get the feeling he knows something he hasn’t told us. Something his father senses as well. Maybe I’m wrong. Hard to say.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” The chief expected that to happen; I suspected he’d orchestrated our little talk…

  “But don’t let me read about it in the Crescent first. Come see me.”

  “I’m a law-abiding young woman.”

  He tipped his hat and walked away.

  By afternoon in the city room I got increasingly angry, feeling that everyone was in league against me. Miss Ivy was out with a spring cold, so it was a male enclave of pipe- and cigar-smoke, belching, and ribaldry, coupled with the excessive use of bodily functions as metaphor for most of what they talked about. I scooted in and out of the office, interviewing a Ladies Auxiliary woman about a spring flower show. Then I interviewed a local milliner and haberdasher about summer fashions-my notes were filled with cotton cheriot, peau de soie, Bishop’s sleeves, Valenciennes lace, and gros de Londres-all of which made little sense to me though I dutifully jotted everything down. Fannie, I knew, would relish such European vocabulary for the fabric that she cut, basted, sewed, and ultimately wore.

  But something was not being told to me, a story that the men knew I’d want to know. It had to do with Frana, though it would be indecorous to ask the male club what with its privacies and strict definitions of what could and could not be told to any woman. Lord, if these men could read my random jottings in my reporter’s pad-the suspect behavior I observed around Appleton.

  Men shouldn’t have a monopoly on discussing base or foul human behavior, even though they were responsible for so much of it.

  I pricked up my ears, busied myself at my typewriter, silently moved alongside them, left the building and yet lingered in the stairwell, eavesdropped. It wasn’t hard to do once I put my mind to it. These men were frantic gossipers who couldn’t wait to blather their news to one another, Matthias Boon sputtering, Sam Ryan lamenting, Byron Beveridge becoming salacious in his comedy. I even spotted Mac standing in the doorway, nodding at Sam, when I returned from walking my father at mid-afternoon. So he was part of the mystery. Noisy, chattering men; boys with their marbles.

  What I learned, though, stunned me-I pieced it together, fragment by fragment, a scrap of anecdote, a throwaway line, even a licentious or downright lewd remark. Frana was no longer a virgin-or at least that was the scuttlebutt hinted at by the attending physician who served as medical examiner-word of mouth that seeped through the male world, like sewage into already murky waters. Hardly shocking, though such things were rarely discussed, certainly not among the young folks of Ryan High School. Occasionally, a wayward girl or boy was subjected to public censure and quick removal to a distant relative’s home in Tacoma, Washington, or Ecorse, Michigan. Or to a Home for Unwed Mothers on the East Coast, where such homes, I gathered, were commonly needed, and thus plentiful. No, the revelation about Frana stunned but didn’t surprise. As the day went on, the overheard comments were even more alarming, for the indiscreet doctor-Horace Belford, notorious, I knew, for examining you with half-closed eyes and beer-nasty breath-had also suggested that the misguided girl was carrying a bastard child in that young body.

  That news would never appear in any daily paper.

  Chief of Police Stone, according to Sam Ryan who mentioned it to Matthias Boon, had told Herr Professor Smuddie about the-in Sam’s word-“problem.”

  It added a new and fascinating wrinkle to the mystery of her death, and I thought of Jake Smuddie, dazed and disoriented these days, a wanderer in the small city.

  Poor Frana, scared, running, desperate to leave Appleton, still clinging to her dream of Broadway though she carried a child in her body. Who could she turn to for solace? Kathe? Hardly. The lover who betrayed her, touched her…The jilted Jake? Somebody else? Worse, her hideous brothers slouching around that decrepit farmhouse? Little Frana, beautiful and…running scared. My heart ac
hed for her. She didn’t know how to get away.

  By the end of the day the story had more spice. Byron Beveridge, lolling at his desk with his feet up, said in his drawling, Southern sleepy voice to Matthias Boon-just as I was walking back into the room-something salacious about Jake Smuddie and Lovers Lane.

  “So what’s new with the Frana investigation?” I asked the men.

  Silence.

  “I gather…”

  Matthias Boon interrupted me. “Miss Ferber, isn’t your workday over?”

  For a second anger rose in me, the taste of ashes in my mouth. But then a curious thing happened. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter anymore. None of this. Ever since Boon began his campaign against me, I’d bristled and fumed, ready to do battle. Now, sensing another mean-spirited confrontation, I knew to my marrow that the landscape had shifted. Perhaps Frana’s murder had something to do with it. Perhaps Houdini’s rousing praise was part of it. This city room was too small to contain me now. Yes, there was no escaping the resentment I felt at my unfair treatment at the Crescent, but to battle with a pipsqueak like Matthias Boon was a waste of time. I felt calm.

  I made a dismissive sound, which bothered the men not at all, gathered my belongings, glanced around at one more pitiful rung of hell…one of the unimportant ones.

  That evening, skipping supper and dressed in my take-me-very-seriously outfit of brown chiffon taffeta shirtwaist with a tan linen flounce skirt, I walked to the Lawrence University campus. To gather my resolve, I first strolled among the tree-shrouded buildings of the Methodist university, a place I’d always liked because of its somber appearance and its earnest students. I headed to Eldorado Street, an expanse of elegant white-fenced professorial homes with electric lights and vanilla-soda lives. There stood the imposing home of Herr Professor Solomon Smuddie, his wife Odette, and son Jacob, called Jake, erstwhile Ryan High football hero, now disaffected Lawrence University freshman.