Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  Dedication

  For the original Frankie,

  FRANCES PONZO METRO

  1927–2018

  Epigraph

  “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

  —George Eliot, Janet’s Repentance

  “Sweet Dreams Though the Guns Are Booming.”

  —Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Spring, 1946 — The Sleep of the Dead

  1941 — The Guardians

  Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow

  Angels of Blood and Stone

  On the Coast of the Moon

  Haunts of the Haunt

  Drowning

  The Crow Prince

  1942 — Fairy Tales

  Weak Hearts

  Mermaids of Chicago

  What Didn’t Burn in the Fire

  Fairy Tales

  What Frankie Didn’t Confess

  Golden Arm

  No and Yes

  1943 — Wolves

  The Song of Solomon

  The Three Spindles

  Light, More Light

  Little Red Riding Hood

  What Are You Doing, What Have You Done?

  Three Letters

  1944 — Jezebels

  The Boys of War

  Bambi

  Bombardment

  For I Have Sinned

  The Jezebel

  The Churning Furnace

  The Dragon King

  The Magic Words

  Tooth and Claw

  1945 — Doorways

  The Queen in the Tower

  Hunger

  Bless Me

  Mercy

  No Memories but One

  Witness

  Doorways

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Laura Ruby

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Spring, 1946

  The Sleep of the Dead

  LISTEN:

  The first time they took Frankie to the orphanage, she couldn’t speak English. Only Italian. “Voglio mio padre! Voglio mio padre!” That’s what she said, over and over and over.

  At least, that’s what the nuns told her she said. She couldn’t remember any of it.

  The second time they took her to the orphanage, the last time, she didn’t say anything at all. Not one word. For months.

  She didn’t remember that either.

  What she did remember: her father’s shoe shop on Irving Park Road. The scent of calfskin and polish. The cramped apartment behind the shop. The metal tub sitting in the middle of the kitchen. Cold bathwater wrinkling her little toes. The rough scrape of Aunt Marion’s brush on her back.

  And then the shot from her parents’ bedroom—so sharp, so loud, so wrong. The thud of Aunt Marion’s footsteps as she ran from the kitchen. The screams. So much screaming.

  Frankie remembered climbing from the tub, falling to the floor, hitting her elbow so hard the bones sang all the way up to her skull. Crawling, hot tears on her face. Pushing at the bedroom door to see the body slumped on the bed, smoke and copper in the air. Crossing the threshold from one world to another.

  Most of all, she remembered the door itself. The rusted hinges. The gouges and nicks. The pencil smell of the wood, and then all the other smells that had seeped into it—leather, garlic, salt, blood. How Aunt Marion turned, scooped her up, and slammed that door behind them.

  Frankie wouldn’t always let herself remember these things. Most of the time, she didn’t think about them at all. Yet she had her quiet days, her pensive ones, those days when she dug through her memories, trying to find the truth at the bottom of them. As if the truth were a jewel you could unearth and hold in your hand, as if the truth wasn’t more like something you’d find under a rock, gray and faceless and squirming away from the light.

  But Frankie hadn’t done any kind of digging on this particular night in the spring of 1946, unless you counted picking through a garbage pail to find a dime tip she’d accidentally tossed away with a customer’s half-eaten sandwich. After working a double shift, she’d gotten home at midnight and collapsed fully clothed onto her bed, not even bothering to take off a mustard-stained apron that stank of onions. And though the air wafting through the cracked window held the sweet promise of spring, though all her wars were over, though she should have felt safe, finally safe, after all this time, Frankie woke up hours later in a prickling sweat, tangled and feverish, certain her mother had been whispering in her ear.

  She sat up, clutching at her throat. “Mama?” she said. But her room was still and silent, the moon cutting a wide silver swath out of the dark. Her mother wasn’t there. Would never be there. It was impossible. Frankie remembered that now, just when she didn’t want to.

  Then she called again. Not to her mother, but to someone else. Someone she’d only glimpsed once, another person she wouldn’t allow herself to think about.

  “Hello? Is that . . . you?”

  No answer.

  Frankie smiled a grim little smile at her own foolishness, rubbed her eyes to get the sting out. With the moonlight slicing through the room, she could see everything inside it, though there wasn’t much to see. A chair with a pile of dresses draped over the back, a bureau with a hot plate and a dusty trumpet, two twin beds and a nightstand between, a seashell the size and shape of a child’s ear resting in an ashtray on top. Frankie’s younger sister, Toni, was a motionless lump in the other bed; Toni hadn’t heard Frankie come in or cry out, which wasn’t surprising. The nuns used to say that she and Toni both slept like the dead. Once, Frankie had believed that only people whose hearts were true could sleep so soundly, but that was a long time ago.

  The wind stiffened outside, whistling through the leaky window, blasting Frankie out of bed. She stood just long enough to strip off her apron and uniform. She was being silly and sappy and she couldn’t afford it. Didn’t she have more than sixteen dollars to add to the wad tucked under her mattress? Hadn’t she made the rent for seven months straight, all on her own? She was just nineteen, but she’d weathered worse nights, far more pained and feverish than this. The silver swath of moonlight was beautiful, beautiful, she told herself, as she yanked a nightgown over her head. The whole damned room was beautiful because it was her room, hers and her sister’s. That was something she could hold on to, even when so much else had been lost.

  The moonlight caught in the cup of abalone on the nightstand, winking pink and blue, drawing her attention. Frankie traced the pearlescent edge of the shell with her finger. This delicate shell had come so far, had come through so much, and still wasn’t broken.

  Neither was she.

  Frankie punched the pillow as if her restlessness were all its fault and fell back onto the bed, fell asleep. The shadows lengthened, shifted, creeping over the floors, the furniture. Mice scratched in the walls. A fox cried in the distance, or maybe it was a wolf. In and out, the sisters breathed in unison, agreeing for once. And yet the papery whispers wafted through Frankie’s dreams. Sono qui. Io sono qui per te, Francesca. I am here. I am here for you.

  Of course, it wasn’t her mother’s voice she heard. It was mine. Because the dead never sleep, you see.

  We have so many other things to do.

  1941

  The Guardians

  Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow

  A WASH OF SLEET FE
LL on the buildings of the Guardian Angels Orphanage, blurring their outlines, making the place look hazy and gaslit, like the cover of some cheap gothic novel: A Dram of Poison. Secrets Can’t Be Kept. I passed by the larger building that housed the older children and went right for the baby house, the way I always did. In the baby house, the cribs were lined up in tidy rows, like gravestones. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to them, little cradles of life. The babies—chubby baby faces peeking out from the blankets, new baby eyes screwed up tight—slept like kittens, all shivers and fits. They cycled their legs and gnawed on their fists as if their hands had been smeared in honey. I visited each crib in turn. Hello, you baby, I said. Good morning, cupcake! Like everyone else, sometimes they heard me, sometimes they didn’t. When they heard me, their tiny bud lips opened and closed and opened again, as if to tell me how hungry they were. And though I didn’t get hungry in the way they did, I knew hunger. I knew how it hurt. Soon, I told them. Soon the nuns will come, and they will feed you, and you won’t be hungry anymore.

  Perhaps it was mean to lie. But they were only babies. They would discover the churning furnace of this world soon enough.

  After I made the rounds of the baby house, I moved on to the other cottages, which was what the sisters called the dormitories where the children slept. They kept the boys and girls separate, so I visited the girls. The six-year-olds, sweaty hair pasted to sticky foreheads, the ten-year-olds, knotted up in their sheets like third-rate Houdinis, then the girls in their teens, heads studded with rag curlers, faces slack with dreams. I talked to them too, I told them that their hair was going to look lovely once they’d brushed it out, that one day, sooner than they could ever believe possible, someone would run their fingers through that hair and they’d wish it would never stop, never stop, don’t stop. As with the babies, sometimes they heard me, but mostly they didn’t. Every once in a while, a girl would wake up and stare right at me and I would think just for a second that she saw me, that I was there, solid and real as anyone. Then the girl’s eyes would flutter, she would frown in confusion. Maybe she’d rub her temples or laugh at herself. Later, she would tell the other girls that she heard somebody muttering during the night in a voice that hissed and clicked like a radiator.

  I was thrilled when they heard me. I would talk to that same girl the next night, and the next. I would pluck at her sheets, run a chill finger down her arm, poke at her feet. The nuns would want to know why she kept kicking off her covers, it was cold, did she want to get sick? And the girl would swear she wasn’t kicking anything anywhere, that somebody wouldn’t stop mumbling and poking, that the place was haunted. The nuns would cluck their tongues and proclaim that there were no ghosts but the Holy Ghost, only stories made up to scare harebrained children.

  If anyone in the orphanage had woken up right then and seen what was huddled in the corner of the cottage, they’d have offered up a whole different sort of prayer, a back-of-the-hand-pressed-to-the-lips sort—Sweet Mary, Mother of . . .

  It was a girl, like me, one I hadn’t seen before, slumped against the wall, rocking and moaning, hair ropy with blood. Who knew where she came from? Maybe she’d wandered in from the streets outside. Maybe she’d wandered up from the catacombs beneath the orphanage, a place even I was scared to go. I would have asked her, but most of us were stuck in our last horrible moments, unable to communicate anything but our pain or our fear, and even the ones who could speak gave vague, cryptic answers that satisfied no one, themselves least of all. This one keened at nobody in particular, left cheek and eye socket shattered, jaw unhinged and hanging at a disconcerting angle, making it seem as if she were about to swallow something very large and awkward. Like a car.

  I’d seen worse.

  I turned my attention back to the living, who were starting to climb from their beds one by one. None of them heard the moaning from the corner, none of them noticed the rocking or unhinging. Certainly not Frankie, who was still fast asleep—not the sleep of the dead as much as the sleep of the half starved, half loved. As the sky outside brightened, as the other girls yawned and stretched, I stood at the end of Frankie’s bed, the sixth one in the row by the door, and waited.

  The door creaked open, and Sister George stalked in. Sister wouldn’t wait a minute past five, Sister never did. She kicked over the mattress, taking Frankie right with it.

  Frankie sat there in a puddle of blankets, sleepy gaze sharpening to a glare.

  That was new. That glare.

  Sister took two steps toward Frankie, her black habit making her look like a vampire out of a horror picture. One of the other sisters would have made a joke: “Oh, Frankie! Did I wake you?” Or “So nice of you to join us this beautiful morning!” Or “Jesus says rise and shine!” But not Sister George. Sister George never joked, Sister George never smiled.

  The order of nuns that ran the orphanage was called the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, but some sisters served Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, and others simply caused perpetual sorrow for everyone else.

  Sister growled, “Did you have something you wanted to say, Francesca?”

  Frankie’s eyes spoke for her—the glare hot, so hot. But Frankie shook her head.

  “I thought not.” Sister George marched away, looking for the next sleeping girl to dump from her bed. Sister would never admit it, not even in confession, but kicking over mattresses before Sunday mass was the most fun she’d ever had.

  Frankie shoved the mattress back onto its frame, the fire in her gaze cooling a bit. At least Sister was in one of her good moods. Her bad ones were rather spectacular. Frankie tugged at her hair, a knuckle’s worth of fuzz around her head.

  “Pulling at it ain’t gonna make it grow back any faster,” Stella Zaffaro said from the next bed over.

  Frankie didn’t even glance at Stella. “Shut it, chooch.”

  “Shut it, chooch,” Stella mimicked. Stella flipped her own hair, shiny and blond as any movie star’s. Stella never let the other girls forget that hair, never let them forget that her name meant “star” in Italian. Frankie liked her own dark hair just fine—at least, when she’d had some—and didn’t care what Stella’s name meant in Italian. Stella wouldn’t know a meatball from a baseball.

  As soon as Frankie thought the word “meatball,” her mouth started to water. Meatballs were what Sundays were for. Visiting Sundays, anyway. You might think that the orphans at Guardian Angels had no parents, no family at all, but that wasn’t always true. More than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929, too many people were still reeling—out of work, homeless. Rather than watching their children go hungry, they gave the kids over to the care of the nuns. A few beatings and a whole lot of church seemed a small price to pay for food and shelter—at least, that was what the parents told themselves. Some of these parents would visit their “half orphans” every other Sunday. Frankie’s father never missed one. And the things he brought made Frankie feel rich, feel like a daughter, at least for a few hours. Meatball sandwiches, with thick red tomato sauce soaking the bread. Spaghetti slippery with butter, just as good cold as it was hot. Shiny, crunchy apples. Sometimes he brought presents, like a pair of shoes he’d just made, the leather so clean and new that it didn’t seem right to wrap your feet in it—too special to touch the ground. And sometimes her father filled his pockets with rock candy or even a few wrapped chocolates. He would hide them behind his back so that Frankie, her sister, Toni, and her older brother, Vito, would fight over them, but only Toni was young enough for that. Frankie could almost taste the chocolate melting on her tongue.

  I could almost taste it.

  “What are you grinning about?” Stella said to Frankie.

  “Are you still here? I thought you would have run off to Hollywood by now.” Frankie elbowed past her and followed the other girls to the washroom.

  The washroom was a whole lot of room to wash, with six flush toilets, eight sinks, showers, a tub no one used, and cubbies for their “private belongings.” Funny,
because none of them had many belongings and nothing was private. But they should have been grateful to have the bathrooms because there were still people with outdoor privies. Frankie liked the indoor plumbing, but she didn’t like having to clean it. Her knees were always sore where the little bits of dirt cut into the skin when they scrubbed the floor, and her hands were raw and cracked because of the strong brown soap they used.

  Once Frankie had begged her father to bring some hand cream on visiting day and he had, the fancy sort that smelled like roses and came in a heavy jar. The whole cottage teased her, said she was putting on airs, acting as if she was one of the swells. “Aw, look at Frankie,” they said. “Where are your silk stockings, Frankie? Where’s your gown?” Stella had the most to say. So Frankie sneaked the hand cream to supper and put a fat white ball of it on top of some cake. Told Stella that her father had brought it to her. Stella was so hungry that she ate two huge bites before she realized what Frankie had done.

  I’d been coming to the orphanage for as long as I could remember, but when I saw Frankie scoop that hand cream on top of that cake and offer it to Stella, I started watching Frankie, really watching her. I liked to think that what she did, that trick—not humiliating enough to be truly cruel, but just cruel enough to be funny—was something that I would have done when I was still real enough to fight, a little harmless rebellion.

  But, as my mother had often reminded me, I only looked harmless. That’s the problem with girls, she said. They trick you every time.

  At that moment, Frankie was harmless. She wasn’t concerned about Stella’s name or her blond hair. She wasn’t thinking about her own hair, either, or the fact that her tan skin made some of the nuns mutter about her mother’s blood, or why nobody warned her to stay out of the sun the way they did Stella. She wasn’t even thinking about the orphanage, about how so many people thought it was so sad and so terrible to live here, while Frankie understood that though things could be better, they could also be worse.