Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  After Father Paul was done with his eulogies, after the sisters and cousins had gone up to the altar to light candles for their brothers, one of the boys got up from his seat and went to stand at the communion railing. He lifted his trumpet to his lips and started to play “Taps,” low and slow, pausing at the end of each phrase so that another bugler in the bell tower could play the exact same part. Except the bugler in the bell tower wasn’t so much a bugler as a bungler, and kept getting the notes all wrong, or sour. Some of the kids in the church smiled and some of them even laughed. Sam, who was a kind boy, the kind who willed flowers to grow, who wanted to coax vegetables from the ground, would have been offended that these brave boys’ funeral was turned into a joke.

  But maybe Clay and the rest weren’t brave at all. Maybe they’d made mistakes and that’s why they were killed. Sam didn’t make mistakes. Frankie knew that about him. She already had a stack of his letters. The air force had sent him to Mississippi for training, and he liked to talk about the food and the weather and the mess-ups of guys who would man the transport planes with him. Yesterday, he wrote,

  during mail call everybody was quiet reading their letters when suddenly somebody cursed in a loud voice and shouted, “Alice got married!” So that’s how Eugene learned he’s out in the cold. I’d feel bad for him if he hadn’t gotten us all latrine duty because he’s a slob who can’t make a bed right. . . .

  We got a night off and went out for gumbo. Do you know what that is? A spicy kind of stew with shrimp in it. I thought I wouldn’t like it, but I did. Reggie didn’t like it, but that’s because he drank enough for ten guys and spent the rest of the night sick as a dog.

  I got your letter, the one with the self-portrait. The fellows all agreed that you were as pretty as I said you were, and a crackerjack artist too! Hank said you looked as good as Hedy Lamarr. (He’s wrong. You look better.) Can you believe he tried to swipe your picture? As if I wouldn’t notice. I nearly broke his fingers. (But I didn’t.)

  He signed all his letters “Love, Sam.”

  Frankie would write to Sam about this service, make him see that everyone messes up and that it was okay, that you had to find something to laugh about, especially during a war. Sam, she’d write,

  it’s a funeral and all, but maybe after all the sadness and flowers and speeches, the boys would hear it up in heaven and they would laugh like we were laughing, and they would understand that there is joy in everything, like Sister Bert said. Remember Sister? She looks like a beautiful tea cozy. Have you seen any nuns over there? I bet you don’t miss them, even the ones who look like beautiful tea cozies. Do you miss me? I miss you. I think about the greenhouse. I think about our garden, the one we’ll have together. We’ll plant those tulips that you said were worth more than gold. The bees will visit us, or maybe we’ll have a hive. The bees will never sting, and if they do it will feel more like a kiss. I’ll make you any kind of cake you want with the honey. Or with sugar, when we can get it. Or that dish your mother made, the funny one with the apples and the cabbage. Gumbo? Gumbo! Ham and beans so green they’ll make your eyes hurt. Fluffy mashed potatoes. Real butter over everything. You can play for me while I cook, you can play for me always. A song as happy as we are, as we will be.

  Toni wasn’t happy. She had never quite forgiven Frankie for screaming at her and her boyfriend back on the day of the Corpus Christi parade. Sitting in their best dresses, waiting for their father’s first visit in two years, they were quiet as clouds. Frankie kept tying and retying the scarf around her neck, thinking about the love bites her scarves always used to hide, feeling like a heel.

  “Not a heel,” Loretta had told her. “A hypocrite.”

  “I’m not,” Frankie muttered, though she felt as terrible as a hypocrite and a heel probably should.

  “What did you say?” Toni said.

  “Nothing.”

  Toni looked at her with her big dark eyes. “You’re going to strangle yourself with that scarf.”

  Frankie let go of the scarf. “I’m just nervous, is all.”

  “Do you think he forgot?”

  “He never forgot visiting Sunday before,” she said. “But I almost did.” She didn’t say that she had gotten used to spending Sundays hanging out with Loretta and the other girls. That now that their father was coming, and probably would be every other Sunday, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed, as if they would be missing everything good. And then she felt guilty. And then mad. Everything was all mixed up.

  “I almost forgot too,” Toni said. “It just feels funny after all this time.”

  “Yeah,” said Frankie.

  Toni smoothed the skirt of her blue dress. “You think he’ll be surprised when he sees us?”

  “Probably,” Frankie said. “You’ve grown about a foot.”

  “A foot wider maybe,” she said. “Still, I’m taller than you.”

  “There are girls in the eight-year-olds’ cottage who are taller than me.”

  Toni smiled just a little bit, and Frankie could see that maybe her sister still hated her, but not as much as she did before. That was all right.

  They had waited just a few minutes more in their quiet, all right way, when their father swept into the waiting room, hat at an angle, like the movie star he always was, like the Italian Clark Gable. “Belle!” he said. “Belle!” and dropped the bags of food onto the floor. Hugging them, he rubbed their faces with his rough, scratchy cheeks, even teared up a little, as if he’d never learned that men don’t cry about anything, that real men were never sad.

  He stepped away from them and held Frankie by the shoulders. “Let me look, eh? So big! So grown up!” He let go and turned to Toni and whistled. “And you! No Toni for you! Mia Antonina, a woman!” He picked up one of the paper bags he had brought, dug around inside, and brought out two carefully wrapped sandwiches. They could smell the meatballs even through the layers of newspaper he’d wrapped them in, and Frankie’s stomach gurgled, though she wasn’t hungry at all.

  “Yes!” said their father. “This will fix you.”

  They took their sandwiches and he shooed them over to a table so that they could eat them. As they unwrapped the packages, he talked about the new apartment and the customers he had at the new shoe shop. He told them about Ada and her kids, how the two older boys got sent off to war, how Dewey would sometimes tap dance on the sidewalk for a few coins, how the girls got jobs in a typing pool somewhere, that they were special because they worked in an office and not a factory.

  “That’s what you do, eh? You type important letters.”

  Though it was probably what Frankie would do, what they both might do, what the orphanage had trained them to do, Frankie shrugged and did her best to eat that sandwich. He was acting like nothing had ever happened at all, that he had never left, that he hadn’t picked Ada and her army of brats over them, that he wasn’t going home to them afterward. There he was, sitting in front of them, talking and talking and talking, and Frankie felt so far away from him, as if she were Sister Bert with her face in a book so much more interesting than the real world.

  And that’s how it went. For weeks after, the missing-him part of Frankie fought with the mad-at-him part, and every time she thought she had it figured out, it turned out that she hadn’t. She loved him, she hated him, she wanted him to visit, she wanted him to stay away. And either way, she thought more about Sam than she did about when her father was coming to visit. Huckle said that all that meant was that Frankie was a red-blooded American gal, but Frankie figured that was just one more reason she was going to burn.

  Join the club, I said.

  I couldn’t find Marguerite anywhere. As soon as the pretty white man had fallen in the atrium, she had fled from the Rookery, taking her golden blazing light with her. The other men and women lifted the man to his feet and he’d shaken them off. He was fine, he told them. He just slipped, that’s all. Nothing life-threatening, he was sure of that. Nothing wrong with his heart.

&nbs
p; Wolf and I had followed him from the Rookery to an antiques shop on the north side of town. Porcelain table lamps. Ornate carved furniture with animal feet. Rare books bound in leather. Sparkling jewelry tucked away in glass cases. If I could have smelled the place, I was sure it would smell of must and lemon oil and money. I could imagine my own father shopping in just such a place, not because he valued old things but because he thought other people did, that a rich man who wanted to be richer should always look the part, even if he had to go into debt to do it. When Charles Kent started coming to call on me, too rich and too important for war—even a Great one—my father had my mother order a dozen new dresses for me, and three pairs of handmade leather shoes. I needed to play my part, too—the beautiful, dutiful daughter, soon to be a richer man’s wife. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet eighteen. I didn’t matter.

  Once upon a time, a banker and a banker arranged a merger, traded a girl for a stake in a corporation, agreed over a handshake and a scotch. And on a chilly afternoon, while my parents were out, Charles Kent tore one of those lovely new gowns off my back because I didn’t want to play. He laughed as I shivered in the sudden cold, he laughed as I gathered myself by the fire.

  He stopped laughing when I hit him with the poker. He cried when I hit him again.

  War is hell.

  But in that musty, dusty shop, there was no fire to warm me, no fire that could. A sleek black cat dashed out of the stacks to greet the beautiful fair man, and still shaken from his encounter, he bent down to scratch her between the ears. The cat’s large jewel eyes, an acid green, regarded Wolf and me placidly, fearlessly. We were no danger to her, and she let us know this with a twitch of her tail, an unhurried saunter as she followed the man to the very back wall of the shop. She jumped up onto the large mahogany desk there, and the man sat down behind it, breathing, breathing, as if the mere fact of breath was a feat in and of itself. On the desk were photographs of him and his family. As he did in the flesh, he looked in the photos like something hewn by Michelangelo, freed from the stone with chisel and hammer. No wonder Marguerite couldn’t refuse him. The redhead posing with him in the pictures couldn’t either, I supposed. A wide-eyed and bow-mouthed little thing, unassuming as milk.

  He was beautiful, but I could see the truth. I knew what he’d done.

  The black cat settled herself on the desktop, closed her acid eyes, shutting us out. After the man had proven to himself that he could breathe just fine, he fished inside his jacket pocket, removed a snowy handkerchief. He took off his glasses and rubbed each lens slowly, methodically, the way you might if you’d seen the ghost of the girl you murdered more than a decade ago and you were trying to convince yourself you hadn’t.

  Bambi

  MOVIE NIGHT AT THE GUARDIANS.

  “Bambi again?” said Frankie.

  “They think we’re all a bunch of babies,” Loretta said in Frankie’s ear.

  “Some of us are,” Frankie told her, looking in Joanie McNally’s direction. She was crying up a storm because Bambi’s mother had died.

  “Did Joanie’s mother die?” Loretta asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe? But my mother is dead and you don’t see me acting like that.”

  “Hmmm,” Loretta said. The last time Loretta’s mom had come to visit, she forgot to put her dress on under her coat again, and sat talking to Loretta in her stained old slip before one of the sisters made her put her coat back on. Later, the girls found out that she’d been sent to Dunning to “rest.” Loretta said that the asylum was the last place anyone should be sent to rest. The last place anyone should be sent, ever.

  Frankie searched for something else to talk about, something safe, but everything seemed loaded these days. Loretta’s mom, Sam, Toni, the war, the sisters all so on edge. Stella sat a few rows down, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a white hankie. Her lipstick was perfect. “Some of us are babies, and some of us are regular old Sarah Bernhardts,” Frankie said, nodding at Stella.

  Loretta scowled and pushed her strawberry-blond hair from her eyes. “She got so much attention by crying at that funeral, now she just cries all the time, as if it’s the same. What was she saying yesterday? ‘I’ve only got two Roberts left?’ I could have slugged her.”

  “I wish you would.”

  Someone must have opened the back door of the theater, because a beam of light cut across the screen, slicing poor Bambi in half. A bunch of the little kids started shouting, and a bunch of the older girls twisted around to see who it was.

  A young man was limping slowly across the auditorium. He wore a uniform and a green coat, and he looked rumpled as a bed, as if he’d been traveling a long time. As he got closer, Frankie saw that he was scanning the audience in the dark, looking for someone. Brown hair fell across his brows, and an ugly scar ran from his ear to his chin. He held a piece of paper or an envelope or something in his hand like it was precious, a will, a treasure map.

  The sisters, napping as usual in their chairs against the back wall, started to poke and nudge one another. Sister Cornelius pushed her glasses up her nose, stood and flapped her wings at the boy running the projector. The movie stopped, and the kids booed. “Be quiet!” boomed Sister Cornelius, and the girls shut up.

  But the soldier with the scar didn’t seem to notice that the movie had stopped and the lights went on. And he didn’t notice Sister Cornelius zooming up behind him like a wasp getting ready to sting. He kept scanning the audience, looking for the one face he wanted. He stopped at Stella’s row and his split face broke out in a smile, though it must have hurt to grin like that.

  “Young man!” barked Sister Cornelius. “Young man! You cannot just come in here! This is private property! There are designated visiting hours!” She yammered on and on, but he didn’t hear it. Stella’s eyebrows flew up almost into her hair as he stood there with that envelope—it was an envelope, I could see it now—smiling like that, his big scar fresh and raw and red.

  “Stella,” he said, sighing her name. Then he looked at the girl on the end of the row and said, very politely, “Excuse me. I need to speak with Stella.”

  “Young man!” shrieked Sister Cornelius.

  The girl stood up, and so did all the girls next to her. The soldier stepped past them, nodding at them as he went thank you, excuse me, thank you, until he reached Stella and Toni. Toni jumped out of her seat, letting the man take it. “Thank you,” he said to her, and turned to Stella.

  “Young man! I will call the police!”

  “Stella,” the soldier said, sliding the envelope into his pocket and taking her hands in his. Frankie could only see her profile, but she wondered what Stella was thinking, looking at that poor handsome boy’s messed-up face. “You’re more beautiful than in your pictures, more beautiful than ever,” he said to her, and he brought her hand up to his lips. Though he hardly had the room, though it seemed to pain him to do it, he got down on one knee. All the girls held their breath. Even me.

  “Stella,” he said. “I promised myself that if I made it home, that the first thing I would do was come and look for you. And here you are, so pretty. Just like I knew you would be. You are my angel.”

  Even Sister Cornelius seemed to realize that something big was going on and stopped yelling for a minute, listening along with the rest. They watched, fascinated, as he let go of Stella’s hands and pulled something else out of his pocket, a box.

  “It’s not much, but after I get a job we’ll get you something as beautiful as you.” He opened the box, as if everyone didn’t already know what was in it. They expected him to say something like, “Will you be my wife?” the way they always say it in movies, but all he said was, “Please.”

  The room was quiet as a church as they waited for Stella’s answer. “Well,” she said. “This is certainly a surprise. A lovely surprise, of course.” She probably realized that she should be paying attention to the ring, and she reached out to touch it, but stopped, her hand hanging there in the air.

 
; Something in his face fell, his smile drooping a little. “I’m sorry it’s so small,” he said. “I just got home and this was all I could find.”

  “Oh, no!” she said. “It’s just beautiful. Really, it is.”

  “You kept me alive, Stella. You did.”

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  “You kept me alive. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. You got me through.”

  “Stop saying that,” she said, her voice tightening as she finally figured out what she’d done. “It’s just that it’s such a big surprise. A shock, even. And so fast, I don’t know what to say.”

  He grabbed her hand again. “Say that you’ll marry me. We love each other, right? That’s all there is to it. What else do we need?”

  “Of course we care for one another, but—”

  “What do you mean, care for one another?” His scar got redder, along with the rest of his face. “I love you and you love me, it’s what you said.”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly what I said . . . dear.”

  “What?” he said. “What?”

  That was when Stella remembered that she had an audience, and looked around at the rest of the orphan girls. Her face was tight and pinched and scared, her eyes huge as Bambi’s. She wanted them to help her, and maybe they even wanted to, at least at that very moment.

  The soldier snapped the box shut. “Say my name.”

  Stella looked back at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Say it, say my name.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you want me to—”

  “My name!” the soldier shouted. “Say it!”

  Sister Cornelius woke up from her trance. “Young man,” she said, now gentle, so gentle. “I’m afraid that visiting Sunday is next weekend.” She walked down the row where the soldier was still kneeling, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him to his feet. “I’ll show you where you can sign up, and you can come back.”