Escape Artist efm-2

by Ed Ifkovic

  A housemaid dressed in gingham and a French Chantilly cap answered the door and said in German, “Folgen Sie mir, bitte.” She had me wait in an anteroom on a plush burgundy side chair that matched the fabric of the draperies and the window-box seats. An oil painting of a European gentleman hung on the wall, framed in an oversized dark-stained black-walnut frame. The shellacked Kaiser Wilhelm moustache made me nervous.

  Odette Smuddie walked in, smiling, but nervous; her hands kept grazing her face as though she wanted to stop herself from saying something. She extended her hand.

  I apologized for the intrusion and identified myself. “I’m a close friend of Jake-Jacob-and I had to be on campus, and he’d said to say hello if I’m in the neighborhood and…”

  Odette Smuddie actually made a yelping sound. “I’m afraid Jacob is not here right now, Miss Ferber…”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I stood.

  Mrs. Smuddie went on, “No, please stay a bit. For tea. Please. He never has guests, and I’m worried about him…” She stopped. “Please, have tea.”

  In the parlor, settled into an overstuffed armchair, I gazed at the shelves of cut-glass vases, the table with the cushy vellum photograph album, the fireplace with the veined marble mantel, the wrought-brass and copper chandelier, the dark mahogany paneling, and the ceiling with the elaborate plaster rosettes. The housemaid served me a cup of tepid tea and a piece of apricot torte. Not bad, I thought. It needed a little more cinnamon and orange rind, but…

  “I’m worried about Jake, too.” I swallowed.

  I got no further. Herr Professor rumbled in, a bull of a man, thick-chested and bursting out of a Prince Albert coat as crisp and pristine as Switzerland. On his expanding vest I spotted the obligatory watch fob and a pin that identified him as part of some German Unity lodge. The man had more gold plate on him than a self-aggrandizing Prussian general.

  “And you might be?” he demanded, not warmly.

  Odette jumped up, flustered, banged her elbow against the back of the chair, and fell back down, slumping like a rag doll.

  “I’m Edna Ferber.” I rose and half-bowed. I made my excuses for intruding, but Herr Professor regarded me with forbidding gray-black eyes, the color of an approaching storm. I looked away because the man frightened me. Around Appleton the epithet most commonly used with him was: gebildeter. A cultured man. To me, he was a harsh schoolmaster with a hickory switch.

  I almost faltered. “I’m a friend of your son, and I wanted to say hello. I know it’s unseemly but…”

  “But young women do not pay visits to young men,” he grunted.

  “I came…”

  “You are a reporter. I know you. You’re the one who thinks we Methodists are prone to vice.” I blushed. In my account of President Plantz’s afternoon tea, I’d mentioned that cards were played, a throwaway line added to my innocuous account. Card playing was forbidden on campus. Apologies were proffered (Sam Ryan wasn’t happy with me), but obviously Herr Professor remembered my indiscretion. I needed to stop imaginative jottings in my notebook.

  “I am his friend. That’s why I’m here.”

  “He has no friends.” He scratched his bushy moustache. “He’s always been a soft, yielding boy. I thought football and whippings would turn him into a man, but Jacob would rather gaze at the moon than tackle the world out there.” He actually pointed through the window at the twilight sky. As though ordered-Herr Professor, Odette and I-turned to see the complex, unmanageable world outside, ignored by the absent Jake Smuddie who was probably sitting out there now, most likely in that gazebo.

  “Jake is a smart young man.”

  Herr Professor was ready to end the conversation. “He’s lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “To us.” He pointed to his wife.

  Dressed in a too-elegant dress to be an at-home gown-a red serge evening dress with strands of black piping (I made a mental note to discuss it with Fannie)-Odette was obviously one of the ornate possessions on show in the cluttered drawing room, a figurine among the porcelain bric-a-brac, the morning glory phonograph, the heavy tiger oak table, the brocade chairs, the feathered pillows. Was she a household pet that would jump at the slightest noise and bolt meowing from the room to hide behind the woodpile at the hearth? I thought of Frana’s sad mother, Gertrud Lempke, herself the invisible member of the family. Two women from different worlds, but so alike.

  “I know Jake’s been through a great deal of…” I paused. “The murder of Frana.” There, out there: blunt, purposeful, smack up against his hermetically sealed academic tower.

  Herr Professor thundered. “Jacob is not here.”

  “Miss Ferber.” His wife stopped as her husband glowered at her.

  I was not through. “It’s important that he not be connected with her death…”

  Herr Professor, cold, cold. “I do not blame my son, though perhaps you assume I do. A weak boy, coddled by a silly woman. An only child, hiding in the corners of this house. There are such women in the world as this Frana, a wayward…”

  He searched for a word, and I interrupted. “She was a young girl.”

  A raised voice, thick and coarse. “She was a seducer-a sinner, Jezebel, temptress. I constantly pulled him away from her hold. He told me that she’d found a man to make her happy, an older man, hardly a surprise. But when she hurled him away, he…he lost his focus.”

  “This older man…”

  “A myth, let me tell you. Because even after that…that abandonment I saw them together. She was toying with him. We are Methodists and we’re not into such shenanigans, young woman.”

  “Her family was going to send her to Germany. To a nunnery.”

  “Catholics!” he erupted, venom in his tone. “Germany has no place for her. She was what America does to young people. Germany is a distant memory.”

  I remembered an interview Herr Professor had given Byron Beveridge for the Crescent: He was a noted orator and writer on the topic of “Honor the German Language,” part of a Wisconsin-based group of Social Democrats whose essays in the Deutsch-Amerikanische Buchrucker-Zeitung protested the loss of the German language as detrimental to their culture in America. The war cry was “German at home!” Deutsch in Amerika. Herr Professor had made it his cause and often dropped his leaflets at the Crescent office. One leaflet oddly blamed a recent diphtheria epidemic on the moral decline of America. He’d also protested the Oneida Indians casting votes during municipal elections, claiming they were all drunkards and fools. Jake had never mentioned his father’s zealotry, and once, when someone brought it up as we sat with sarsaparillas in the drug store, he walked away.

  Herr Professor went on. “I thought her death would solve our family problem.”

  That was a horrendous sentence, cruel. “Frana Lempke didn’t deserve to die…”

  Herr Professor was walking toward the door and I followed. “Sometimes one death can redeem other lives. Sacrifice.”

  “You think she had to die?”

  “Her behavior made it her destiny.”

  “I think…”

  He held up his hand, signaling an end. “But she seems to have taken our son with her.” He actually stomped his foot on the floor. “As you can see, he’s not here. Thank you for your visit, Miss Ferber. I trust we will not find ourselves quoted on the front page of the Crescent.”

  The housemaid was holding the front door open, and I walked out.

  Wrapped in a woolen jacket, Jake Smuddie sat in the gazebo in the gathering twilight. “What?” he said as I approached.

  “I stopped in to see you at your home.”

  “That must have thrown the house into a panic.” He barely managed a wan smile.

  “Sort of.”

  “We only entertain Methodists.”

  “They told me you weren’t there.”

  “I only go home late at night…to sleep.”

  “Your father allows this?”

  “He doesn’t know. My mother sneaks me in.” He shrug
ged those football shoulders. “Where else can I go?”

  “This isn’t an answer.”

  “It is for now.”

  “You left your classes at Lawrence?” I slipped onto the bench, inches from him. In the fuzzy fading light I saw a tired face, the sharp, handsome features washed out, pale.

  “What do you want, Edna?”

  “I’m concerned.”

  “Why?”

  “You running away?”

  “My father’s presence covers that house like a layer of…of, I don’t know, stone. I can’t breathe there.”

  “What happened, Jake?”

  “What happened, Miss Reporter”-it was actually said gently-“is that my father has condemned me and said some awful remarks about Frana. She’s dead and doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Well, he’s afraid for you.”

  “No. He fooled you. He fools everyone. He’s afraid for himself. His name in Appleton, at the university. His place in the center of the universe. His image as part of that group of fanatical lunatics. You know, Edna, I have to speak German at home. English is for visitors. If I lapse into English, which I do rarely since I never have friends visit there, I’m banished to my room. Me, a college freshman. A right tackle on the football team. I’m still a child.”

  “But is this the answer?” I waved my hand around the dim park.

  He looked at me, coldness in his voice that reminded me of Herr Professor. “You don’t understand the…the fierceness of my father. Unyielding, a rock.”

  “He’s afraid what Frana’s murder will do to your future.”

  “Maybe, but I’ve had my eyes opened. I’m looking at myself…”

  “And?”

  “I don’t like what I see. I’m a son who kowtows to a cruel man, a boy trapped in a man’s body. I’m a man who refuses to build his own character, drifting in his family’s shadow, and, you know, a man who left undefended a girl who died.”

  “Frana’s death…” I had to know.

  He looked at me. “Do you think I killed her?” His voice was brusque.

  The question stunned me. “Of course not.”

  “My father does.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “He insinuated as much. In one conversation. My own father.”

  “But the heat of the moment…passion…”

  He let out a fake laugh. “My father has never indulged any passion.” A baffled look spread across his face. “Maybe I did hurt her. There were times when she infuriated me, her flirtations, her lies about running off with other men, her…”

  “She left you, Jake.”

  “But lately she’d see me and we’d talk.”

  “You didn’t kill her.”

  A long silence. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember much, I’ve been in a fog…”

  “You’d remember that!” I felt chilled now.

  Another long silence. “I suppose so. Who knows? There are times, this past week, I can’t remember what I’ve said or done.”

  What was there about him that so captivated me? The handsome face, so much the matinee idol, so striking, like one of the young actors in the stage melodramas. A young fair-complexioned Edwin Booth with those mesmerizing eyes, the square jaw, the authority of movement. But with Jake there was an unexpected softness, almost a feminine pliancy, gentleness…and gentility.

  We sat there as darkness fell. I found my heart beating wildly; Jake had charms that alarmed me. Not good, this.

  He was intelligent and aware, not the common boy I’d sometimes thought. A smart boy. A contemplator. I liked smart boys. Crazily, I thought of my father as a young man, the dreamy poet who fled one land and lost his way in another.

  “There’s something you’re going to hear whispered in town,” I began.

  Jake’s lips trembled. “Now what?”

  I hesitated, trying to find words I’d never used before. “Frana…was carrying…a child.”

  Jake seemed not to have heard me. “What?” Then, the recognition sinking in. “My God. I…”

  My heart stopped. “You knew it, Jake?” I watched his face but I didn’t know what I expected to see.

  He shook his head rapidly. “No, God no. But something about the way Frana spoke the last time I saw her on the street. She acted like…like she wanted to tell me something scary. Just the way she talked I felt…” His voice trailed off.

  “I’m sorry, Jake.”

  Jake surprised me. All of a sudden he lowered his eyes and a choked rasp escaped his throat. He sobbed out of control.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “Frana.” He said the name so softly it came out a whisper, reverential.

  “I didn’t want you to hear it from the men of town, the gossips…”

  Jake reached out and touched my wrist. “Thank you, Edna.”

  For a long time we sat in silence.

  “What will you do now?” My voice shook.

  He stood and walked around, aimless, arms wrapped around his chest; and for a moment he disappeared into the darkness, a shadowy figure that moved in and out of the overgrown bushes. He returned and sat down, his voice clear and resolute. “I’m going away.”

  “Where, Jake?” I did not like this.

  “Edna, I’ve been thinking about this. I’m leaving Appleton. I’m either going East to join the navy-I’ve always wanted to see the ocean ever since I read Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast-or I’m headed West to California.” He smiled sweetly. “I’ve also read a lot of Bret Harte.”

  I whispered. “Jake, I…I’ve read a lot of O. Henry. I’d like a better ending than this.”

  “No, I have to do this. Leave Appleton. If I stay here, I’ll be the whipping boy of my father and the good Methodists. I’ll stay at the university and be pitied. I’ll be touched by the Frana murder. People will wonder if I was the…one…the baby. Or even killed her. I’ll never be able to escape that, and the town will look at me and think of it. When the house is on fire, you gotta escape by whatever way you can.”

  “But you didn’t kill her!”

  He lifted the collar of his jacket, pulled it tight around his neck, and stood. “I have to walk now. I visit football friends. They feed me like I’m a beggar.” He smiled. “Alms for the orphan boy.”

  He walked away. I stayed in the gazebo, tired, a wave of melancholia suffocating me. How wrong this was, how sad. A leave-taking, an escape, abandoning what you know and cherish and hope for…

  The loneliness of such departures.

  Suddenly, out of the blue, I had the image of the strapping young man standing on sunlit California beaches, his eyes staring out over the shimmering blue Pacific. There was rightness about it, salvation for him, a beginning. Yes, Jake Smuddie had to go West-or East, though I thought romantic souls naturally inclined to the West and prosaic types headed East…to find the path of his life, though he’d carry the ghost of Frana with him. It exhilarated me, this reflection. As I walked home, I felt happy for him.

  But as I stepped into the dark yard fronting the Ferber household on North Street, I panicked. Suddenly I was scared.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On Monday morning Sam Ryan was in a tizzy. Matthias Boon was out with la grippe, so he asked me to stop at Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house to pick up some copy Boon had written and taken home with him on Friday.

  “Now,” he stressed. “The man is sick in bed, and I gotta newspaper to get out.”

  Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house on Fisk Street in the Second Ward was a respectable home. I knew that because Mrs. Zeller announced the fact over and over. A weekly shopper at My Store, she’d linger over a simple cast-iron pot, according to my mother, as though she were “contemplating the brush strokes on the Mona Lisa.” Worse, she chattered incessantly in a high, needle-thin voice, words rushing over one another as though trying to escape that annoying mouth. You saw an old woman, in her eighties perhaps, dumpy as a sack of winter apples, always dressed in misshapen kitchen dresses with one
or more stays loose or threatening to give way. When her husband of a half-century died-one of the Appleton pioneers, she’d tell you, read about it in the papers, if you didn’t believe her, her family was real history-and the last of her eight children either died or left town and didn’t look back, she converted her twelve-room monstrosity of a home into a boarding house.

  A “respectable place,” for as a “Christian lady of the German Lutheran persuasion,” she’d abide no dalliance or misbehavior in her blessed walls. A fussy, opinionated woman, she mothered the men she harbored, those bachelors and widowers who came to Appleton to work. Hers was a household of men and three women-herself, a housemaid, and a cook. “Ladies do too much laundry and want to go into my kitchen,” she said. So the men came and went and most were harmless souls. You had news types like Matthias Boon, transplanted from Milwaukee; Homer Timm, seeking shelter after his wife took ill; railroad men, laborers from the paper mills; wandering disaffected war veterans, always on the move. But despite her loud announcement that she screened and interviewed, there’d been late night knocks on the door by the chief of police. Deadbeat wanderers shuffled out of the back window, one step ahead of the law.

  Mrs. Zeller, of course, romanticized all the gentlemen as models of civil conduct and charitable spirit-her “boys.” The likes of Matthias Boon and Homer Timm…more like troglodytes than feckless lads, surely.

  I introduced myself to Mrs. Zeller’s housekeeper, a sullen looking Bohemian girl with braided hair and a boil on her neck the size of a harvest apple, a girl flustered at seeing a woman at the door. She rushed off to find Mrs. Zeller, who was haranguing the cook in the back of the house. The old woman came rushing into the front parlor, wiping her hands on an apron, and eyed me suspiciously.

  “I’ve come for Mr. Boon’s-ah, copy.” I spoke slowly. Mrs. Zeller, I’d been told, was also hard of hearing.