Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  All the poet’s aspirations

  Centre in that prayer for light.

  Gracious Saviour, when life’s day-dreams

  Melt and vanish from the sight,

  May our dim and longing vision

  Then be blessed with light, more light.

  I didn’t tell her about the fairy lights that led the hobbits astray, how they had become lost from one another. I didn’t tell her that maybe the lights were just one more door that we should hesitate to open.

  Instead, I asked, Did you write that song?

  No! That’s a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. She was an abolitionist and suffragist. My mother read that poem to me. My mother always saw me for exactly who I was. She always knew. I couldn’t hide a thing from her.

  The fox sat between us, panting the way he liked to do, even though there was no need for breathing anymore.

  I decided to call him Wolf.

  It was as right a name as any.

  Little Red Riding Hood

  THE GIRLS OF FRANKIE’S COTTAGE were subdued. Not because of Wolf, though the horror of his death occupied them through the summer and fall—Did you see Sister with that shovel did you see the blood did you see did you see did you see?—and some would bring it up for years afterward. But because Huckle insisted that someone kept mumbling and poking her throughout the night, that the cottage was haunted. “There are no ghosts but the Holy Ghost,” Sister Bert said wearily, without much conviction. Sister was tired these days—less tart, less pert. She read All Quiet on the Western Front over and over again. When someone suggested another book, she’d say, “Yes, yes, as soon as I’m done with this one.”

  But Sister Bert seemed energetic enough when she and the other sisters marched every girl and boy who was old enough to the Granville Avenue “L” station and herded them onto the train headed to Jackson Park. The sisters kept shouting for everyone to stay together, and took a head count every few minutes. They didn’t count the girl with the shattered face and the hair ropy with blood who rocked and moaned in the seat by the door. It wasn’t me poking and mumbling, I said to her. Was it you? Did you like it too much when they heard you? Did it thrill you? And then, Where did you come from? What’s your story? But the girl just kept rocking and moaning, unhinging her jaw in that disconcerting manner of hers. Next to me, Wolf yawned—in imitation or in boredom, I couldn’t be sure.

  A cipher, that Wolf.

  “Think you could get a little closer? My face is in your armpit,” Frankie said to Loretta, who was hanging on to one of the bars over their heads for dear life. Even so, Frankie practically broke her neck jumping and looking around the car for Sam. So far, she hadn’t seen him in the crush of orphans on the train. Maybe he hadn’t come.

  Loretta crashed into Frankie as the train lurched. “How long are we going to be on this thing?”

  “At least it’s warm in here,” said Joanie McNally, scratching at her freckled nose. “I don’t know why they always make these trips for days when it’s too hot or too cold. How come they can’t pick a nice day?”

  “’Cause that would make sense,” Loretta said.

  Joanie McNally scrunched up her nose. “Huh?”

  Loretta sighed. “Never mind.”

  Huckle, who had been hunched in one of the seats, sulking because no one believed her story, said, “I’m telling you, it was nibbling on me, like some kind of animal.”

  I nudged Wolf. Nibbling? I said. He licked his not-lips and yawned again, showing me his not-teeth. I told him the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but I had to stop halfway because it was so silly. Who wouldn’t recognize their own grandmother? Who didn’t know a wolf when they saw one?

  They rode to the end of the line, Sixty-Third Street and Stoney Island Avenue, filed out of the trains and onto the street. Frankie supposed it could have been colder, but it was cold enough to make her nose go numb as they walked toward Jackson Park.

  “I hope we’re having lunch in the park,” said Joanie.

  “It’s only about ten o’clock now,” Loretta said, stuffing her hands in her pockets. “We probably won’t be having lunch until we get to the museum. And who knows how long that’s going to take, with all these people. We won’t have hardly any time to see the exhibits.”

  “How much time do you need?” Joanie said. “This isn’t even the good museum.”

  “You mean the one with all the paintings?” Frankie said, thinking about the one time they had taken a bunch of the girls to a place filled with beautiful, colorful pictures painted by all sorts of famous artists.

  “What? Oh, no, not that boring old place,” said Joanie. “I’m talking about the place with all the dinosour bones.”

  “It’s dinosaur, not dinosour,” Loretta said.

  Joanie frowned. “But that’s what I said.”

  They walked the rest of the way to the park as Joanie chattered on about dinosours and their very big bones and foot-long teeth. I couldn’t remember ever being in a dinosaur museum, so I wondered if she was just making it all up.

  Ahead of us, Sister Bert turned and shouted, “Chop, chop, people! We want to make it to the museum in time for lunch.” Sister George just shot them all a glare that said they would regret their whole lives if anyone made her late for lunch.

  Joanie muttered, “She’s worse than the Nazis.”

  A strange but interesting little building loomed up ahead. “What’s that?” Frankie asked Loretta.

  “Is it a bathroom?” Joanie asked. “I hope it is, ’cause I really gotta go.”

  “I don’t think it’s a bathroom,” Loretta said. “Look at how it’s landscaped. With all the little trees and everything. Oh, wait! There’s a plaque.”

  “I don’t want to read about anything but a bathroom,” said Joanie, but they slowed down as Loretta read, “‘The Ho-o-den Pavilion. A replica of the famous Phoenix Hall in Uji, Japan.’” She shook her head. “It was put here a long time before the war.”

  “What about Japan?” said a boy behind them. He wore a gray cap pulled low over his eyes and a blue scarf that looked as if moths had nested in it.

  “Nothing, really,” said Loretta as we started walking again. “That building’s a replica of some building in Japan. This whole place is supposed to look like a Japanese garden.”

  The boy in the gray cap said, “Oh yeah?” He reached out and grabbed a pretty little bush and yanked it clean out of the ground. “I don’t think we need no Japanese anything in Chicago, now do we, fellas?”

  The boys around him nodded, and all at once started pulling out plants, uprooting bushes, and throwing rocks into the little ponds. Wolf whined and pawed at the ground, but no one heard him.

  One of the plants landed at Sister George’s feet, and she whipped around. Frankie was sure she’d start shrieking at them, maybe march back to where they were, grab someone by the ear. But Sister George just looked at the boys, then looked at the plant crumpled at her feet the way a bird looks at a worm it’s just bitten in two. All she said was, “You heard Sister Bert. We have to make it to the museum in time for lunch.” She scooped up the plant, ripped it in half, and stomped on it with such ferocity everyone stopped to watch.

  Frankie waited until Sister George was far away before she said, “Forget the boys. They should send her overseas.”

  Too cold outside, too hot inside.

  “I’m baking in this sweater,” Joanie said, already upset because Sister Bert had made her wait until after lunch to go to the bathroom, and she already had to go again. Plus, she was mad that there were no dinosours, no bones. Sister Bert had herded a group of them right beneath an old airplane hanging from the ceiling and made them crowd around a piece of an old lighthouse instead. They couldn’t have been more bored if they worked at it.

  “Now,” she said, “this lens was recovered from a very old lighthouse on Barnegat Inlet—that’s on the shore of New Jersey.”

  She droned on and on and on while the orphans shifted their coats from one
arm to the other. “It was brought to the museum in 1934. And,” she said, “it cost fifteen thousand dollars.”

  That, we heard. “Fifteen thousand dollars!” said Joanie. “For this old piece of junk?”

  “It’s hardly junk, Miss McNally, and if you’d been paying attention . . . Oh!” All of a sudden Sister Bert gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  At first I thought she was staring back at the airplane itself, but that wasn’t it. She was staring at the boy in the gray cap who’d somehow climbed up into the plane and was waving at them from the cockpit.

  “Daniel Konecky! Get down here!” Sister George yelled. “Now!”

  I didn’t know if Gray Cap didn’t hear her or didn’t care, because he just kept waving as Sister George turned red, and then purple. I was mildly curious if she would have an embolism and have to haunt the museum, forever flapping and shouting at a wayward orphan in an airplane. Sister shoved the orphans aside and ran underneath the plane, back and forth, like Gray Cap might jump out and she would be the one to catch him. The rest of orphans giggled, but then tried to stifle themselves when Sister Bert came over.

  “Goodness,” Sister Bert said in that mild way she had. “We can’t take you hooligans anywhere, can we?” A uniformed museum guard dragged a ladder under the plane. As he was pulled from the plane, Gray Cap gave them the thumbs-up and all the orphans clapped until Sister Bert told them to knock it off.

  “You think it’s funny? It won’t be so funny when that boy has to go up in a plane for real, will it?”

  Frankie remembered some of the letters Stella had read to them. Boys talking about bombs bursting around them, hitting the wings, shrapnel cutting through the metal skin of the plane like it was nothing but tissue paper. Suddenly she was very happy Vito wasn’t flying in any airplanes and had both feet on the ground, as if that were the thing that could keep him safe, as if any one thing could.

  Frankie had a stream of letters that Vito had written, but it didn’t occur to her how little he wrote of the actual war. She knew he was in Italy somewhere, but she didn’t know he was a part of Operation Avalanche, the main invasion of Salerno. She knew they were fighting, but she didn’t hear the crash of the bombs, she couldn’t know what it was like to try to sleep to the sound of men screaming. Vito had talked of listening to a radio that one of the boys had found in town, but she didn’t know that they listened to Axis Sally, who signed on to her show by saying, “Hello, Suckers!” and told them that their wives and fiancées back home were sleeping with any man they could find—you know girls, girls will trick you every time—but that it wouldn’t matter, because they’d all be wiped out anyway when the Germans rolled in. Frankie didn’t know that the boys opened every letter, any letter, as if it were a dispatch from another world, a kinder one, a pleasant dream they’d once had when they were young.

  She didn’t know they weren’t young anymore.

  The next exhibit they were dragged to was better than the lens, and got their minds off the plane, off the vague and nagging fear of war. It was the Santa Fe Railroad exhibit, the biggest model train set any of them had ever seen.

  “Danny’s gonna be sore that he missed this,” said one of Gray Cap’s friends, watching the locomotive pull a line of cars along the track. There was a cement factory and an oil field. Even some of the houses and buildings had working electricity, just like real houses.

  “You ever been to the Grand Canyon?” said someone next to Frankie. Sam.

  She was so surprised to see him that she forgot what he had asked. “What?”

  “The Grand Canyon. Have you ever been?”

  Was he making fun of her? “Um, no, what do you think?”

  “Here,” he said, and grabbed hold of her hand. He led her over to where the museum people had set up a miniature Grand Canyon next to one of the train tracks. “Now you’ve been there. One day, we’ll go for real. All around the country, all the around the world.”

  He meant it, she could see that. He squeezed her hand, she squeezed back.

  Loretta squeezed between them. “Give it a rest.”

  “What?” said Frankie.

  “Sister George is right over there,” said Loretta. “She’s going to see you, and then what will happen?”

  She could be beaten. She could be thrown out of the orphanage for good. But would that be the worst thing? Choppy had left the orphanage last fall, had taken a job at a factory in Forest Park, where she was helping to make torpedoes, living it up in a boardinghouse with a dozen other girls. On Saturday nights, they took the train to the Christian Servicemen’s Center downtown to dance the night away with petty officers and marines. “Anyone can find a man, cut a rug,” Choppy told Frankie on her only visit, her last. “I’m telling ya, Fran-ces-ca, it’s the life. I’m going to join up, Frankie. They have a women’s auxiliary.”

  Frankie had no father, Frankie had no mother. She would have to make a life in any way she could. With Sam, she could manage. She wouldn’t be alone. And Toni would be okay. Toni always was. They wouldn’t punish her for anything Frankie did; Toni was too young. Maybe Toni would even be glad to see Frankie go.

  Luckily for Frankie, Sister George wasn’t watching them. Not then. Her eyes were still on the plane that hung so high above them, swaying slightly with a phantom weight. The ghost girl with the broken face sat in the cockpit, trying desperately to fly away.

  What Are You Doing, What Have You Done?

  MY OLDER BROTHER WILLIAM’S HERO was Theodore Roosevelt—bear-hunting, horse-loving, gun-slinging Teddy Roosevelt. My father said it was Teddy’s fault William was so desperate to go to war. William hated horses—or rather, the horses hated him—he was a terrible shot, and any bear worth its salt would have eaten him and used his bones for toothpicks, but he read Roosevelt’s books the way religious men pored over scripture: The Rough Riders, The Winning of the West, The Conservation of Womanhood and Childhood, America and the World War. After the Germans sank the Lusitania, William couldn’t believe Woodrow Wilson wasn’t leading the whole of America’s military straight to the German border. He believed a man wasn’t much of a man if he didn’t have a gun in his hand, if he wasn’t willing to protect home and country with his very flesh and blood, with the blood of others, no matter how far he had to travel to do it. When the service rejected William for poor eyesight, he took it as a judgment not on his vision, but on his manhood. So many boys did. As if a person’s worth could only be measured in the number of people he was willing to kill. William was willing.

  Not everyone was so eager.

  “Hey,” said Sam, pulling at Frankie’s arms, which were around his neck. “Not so tight. You’re choking me.”

  “Sorry,” she said. Lately, when she was with him, she got a cold, cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. His eighteenth birthday was coming up, and the war wasn’t over yet. But maybe it would be, soon. Maybe the Allies would beat back the Germans and the Japanese. Maybe she’d be listening to the radio tomorrow or next week and hear the announcers interrupt the regular programs to say that Hitler had surrendered and that not one more boy would have to leave.

  “Come on, Frankie. Let go.” Sam stood up and ran his fingers through his hair. His face was wan and drawn, and there were lines around his eyes, like he’d gotten old overnight.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then he shook his head. “I do know. I have to sign up.”

  She knew what he was talking about, but she asked anyway. “Sign up for what?”

  “The service, goof.”

  “Don’t call me a goof,” she said, though she was acting like one, and on purpose. “You don’t have to sign up yet.”

  “I will in a few months.”

  He walked over to the window and looked out. He had a handprint on the back of his dark shirt, hers. She’d been making dough for pie crusts and still had flour all over herself and she went ahead and left it on him. She decided not to tell him, decided to leave him
marked.

  “Everyone has to enlist,” she said after a while.

  “You don’t,” he said, over his shoulder.

  She didn’t know what he wanted her to say to that. “My brother Vito did. And he’s okay.”

  “Not everyone stays okay, Frankie.”

  “I know. But Vito will, and you will.”

  “Just because you want it doesn’t mean it will happen,” he said.

  Anger flared up in her like a struck match, melting the cold spot. “Why are you saying things like that? Why do you want me to worry about my brother? Why do you want me to worry about you?”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and said something to the window that she couldn’t hear.

  “What?” she said.

  He turned his head a little, so she could only see half his face. “I said, I’m scared.”

  Frankie opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Vito had never said he was scared, but maybe he was.

  And then Sam scared her: he started to cry.

  She didn’t know what to do except take his face in her hands and kiss him until the salt dried on her own skin.

  At the bar, Mad Maureen poured me a bourbon. She set a bowl of water for Wolf, showed him the tattoo of a fox she had on her thigh. When she flexed her muscles, her fox seemed to tense, ready to pounce. Wolf jumped up on the stool next to me and lapped at the bourbon. I let him have it.

  I said, Every time there was a knock at the door, I ran to answer it myself, just in case it was him, standing there with a message or a package for my father. He told me that his name was Benno. But that wasn’t his real name. He didn’t want to tell me his real name.

  Mad Maureen wiped down the bar in big sweeping circles, told me exactly what Marguerite had told me: Names have power. He didn’t want to give away what little he had.

  I wanted more, I said. I wanted everything. When I looked at him, I felt . . . strange inside, blurred and watery and indistinct, as strange as I felt when I first found my brother William’s French postcards buried in the back of his closet. As if I’d discovered some secret that everyone else was keeping from me. As if he was the secret. There was an itch under my skin I couldn’t reach, no matter how much I scratched. My mother saw the red marks on my neck at the dinner table. What are you doing to yourself? she asked me. What have you done?