by Laura Ruby
Till I see you again,
Your girl, Frankie
The next morning, Sister Bert found Frankie asleep, fingers stained black.
They let Frankie heal as best she could for a week. Then Toni and Loretta came to visit. “Are you feeling well enough to get out of bed?” Toni asked.
“Why? Do they need me in the kitchens?” Frankie said. “Do I have to scrub floors or toilets for penance? Do they want to cut off my hair?”
Toni bit her lip and looked at Loretta. Loretta sighed and said, “They decided that it’s disruptive to the other girls to let you and Toni stay.”
Disruptive. “What does that mean?”
“You and Toni are leaving.”
At this, Frankie laughed. You had to find reasons to laugh, she thought, especially when nothing was funny. “Are we being sent to a convent in the country?”
“No,” Loretta said. “You’re going back to your family.”
“Family? What family?”
Toni said, “Daddy. We’re being sent back to Daddy.”
For I Have Sinned
FRANKIE’S FATHER, GASPARE MAZZA, sailed to America from Sicily in 1918, when he was twenty years old. After weeks spent crammed belowdecks with hundreds of stinking men, he’d emerged from the bowels of the boat like a moth from a cocoon, warming himself in the sun. From Ellis Island, he took a train to Chicago. He’d apprenticed with a shoemaker in the old country, and he did the same in his new one. In a rundown neighborhood on the South Side, Gaspare pieced leather in the dank basement of a shop owned by an old man from Napoli named Sesto.
Old men from Napoli were notoriously cranky, and Sesto was crankier than most. When he deemed Gaspare’s work less than perfect, Sesto would deliver a sharp slap to the back of Gaspare’s head. More than once, he kicked his apprentice down the stone stairs. When he decided that one of his female customers seemed more interested in the dark and handsome young man bringing the new shoes up from the basement than in the shoes themselves, Sesto waited until the woman left and then punched the boy in the stomach. Foul as he was, however, Sesto wasn’t stupid. During the busy hours of the day, he began having Gaspare come up from the basement and put him to work behind the counter, where Gaspare could smile at the women who brought their shoes in for repair or ordered new ones. And, eventually, to help them try on the shoes.
Gaspare would sit a woman down on the small chair in the corner of the dark shop and kneel before her. He would gently, scandalously, tug the shoe from her foot, and then rest that foot on his own thigh, one hand on her calf as he fished for the new shoe. He would slip those new shoes onto the woman, and watch her shapely calves tense and her hips twitch as she paraded across the floor of the small shop to test his handiwork. He loved every woman who came into the shop—old or young, tall or short, fat or thin, brown or white, sweet or spiky, Italian or not. There was so much beauty in this world, so much beauty in these women, all of them so vulnerable in their stockinged feet.
One day a beautiful girl named Caterina brought in her shoes to be repaired. Gaspare liked the tone of her skin and her long curling hair, the cut of her nose and jawline, and could tell by her accent that she was Sicilian too. The skin of her calf was soft and pliant; she shuddered so prettily at his touch. Gaspare fell in love with her the way he fell in love with every woman: hard, and completely. With Caterina, however, he managed to stay in love, at least for a time. That was his problem, you see, staying in love. When you fall in love as quickly as Gaspare did, when you can be swayed by the merest hint of feeling, the merest hitch in the blood, you can fall out of love just as fast—with places, with jobs, with women. You might even trade in your own children, convinced you can start over, like exchanging a worn pair of shoes for new ones.
Frankie’s father picked her and Toni up on a gray summer day, the air so swollen with rain that just breathing wore out their insides. Frankie waited for him to yell, to drench them in a flood of angry Italian, maybe even give them a smack or two, but it seemed he’d already yelled himself out that first visiting day after the letter from Sister Bert, and he wasn’t going to yell anymore. He hugged them both as usual, and even carried their suitcases onto the streetcar. As they rode away from the orphanage in Rogers Park and toward their new life in West Town, Frankie tried to be hopeful. She closed her eyes and told herself that she was getting the thing that orphans wanted most in the world: a family. But it didn’t feel that way. Vito was somewhere in North Africa. Sam, beautiful Sam, was gone. Toni curled herself into a ball on the seat next to her, and their father sat across the aisle, whistling a tune Frankie couldn’t recognize.
Ada wasn’t lying when she wrote and said that the apartment was small. Her lips were drawn up tight as a buttonhole as she led them from tiny room to tiny room, through one narrow doorway after another, to where they would be sleeping. “You’ll have to share this room with Bernice and Cora. We only had room for one more bed, so you’ll have to share that, too, if you can fit. If not, one of you can sleep on the couch in the living room. You can put your things in the two bottom drawers.” She gave them one long look, like a woman eyeing the rabbits that ate up the carrots in her garden, before she shut the door. Frankie gingerly sat on the bed, her wounds still sore, as Toni unzipped her suitcase and began filling up one of those two drawers.
In her own suitcase, Frankie had the few items of clothing she owned, Sam’s trumpet, her sketchbook and pastels, and her high school diploma. They had given her the diploma a whole year early because she had enough credits, but she wouldn’t be allowed to march in the graduation ceremony later this month. She was the first girl in her family to ever finish high school, the first person, as much good as it did her. Loretta had bought her a nice frame to put the diploma in, which she gave to Frankie the night before they left. Though Frankie couldn’t imagine that her new sisters would let her hang it here.
Frankie felt like someone had unzipped her skin and dumped her out of it, left her more naked than naked. One minute they were at the orphanage wishing someone would come take them away, and then they were here, wishing they could get back in. Their father was a stranger, and Ada . . . who knew what Ada was?
“Don’t you want to unpack?” Toni asked. Frankie just shook her head and watched as Toni dragged her suitcase over and started unpacking for her, putting her clothes in the other drawer, placing her diploma in its frame and leaning it against the wall above the dresser. She took out Sam’s trumpet and stood it next to the diploma. She tucked Frankie’s sketchbook and pastels in the drawer and covered them up with a sweater. Toni did things like that now, little things, kind things, to try to make up for the fact that Frankie had been beaten, that they were here, that Sam was gone. Frankie had gotten one letter after she learned he was dead, like a note from a ghost. It was V-mail, the print shrunk down so tiny it was difficult to read. It was full of blackouts.
I’m writing you from . Yesterday, we went to . I miss your pretty cat eyes.
She’d read it over and over until the paper felt as soft as tissue.
Toni finished unpacking and sat down on the bed they were supposed to share. “What do we do now?”
Frankie shrugged. “I don’t know.”
With her chin, Toni pointed at the door. “She hates us.”
“You’re right.”
The door swung open, and Bernice walked in. She was tall but mousy looking, broad in the cheeks and in the hips. Her brown eyes were as flinty as Ada’s.
“I was wondering when you two would show up,” she said.
Frankie and Toni had never said more than three words to her before in their whole lives, so they didn’t say anything as she pulled off her gloves one finger at a time and threw them on top of the dresser. “At least you managed to get your diploma,” she said, nodding at Frankie. “You’ll be able to earn your keep.”
“Earn my keep?” Frankie said.
“Money don’t grow on trees,” said Bernice. “Doesn’t grow on trees. We already got a
lot of mouths to feed.”
Frankie wondered what in the heck she was talking about, considering that all of them were living with her father right behind her father’s shoe shop. She was about to say something else when Cora sauntered into the room like a saloon girl in a Western picture, loose-jointed and slippery.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she drawled. She was a lot prettier than Bernice, with perfect lips painted apple red, the same color as the dress she wore.
Toni didn’t like the way they looked at Frankie, the way they were acting like they owned the place, because she said, “What are you talking about, cats? There ain’t no cats here. Except maybe you two.”
“Shut up, little girl,” Cora snapped. “Or I’ll shut your mouth for you.”
Toni stood up, but Frankie grabbed her arm. They were in enough trouble without asking for more. If Ada threw them out, then they’d have nowhere to go.
Cora smiled in that way people do when they’d rather kick you but aren’t sure that they can get away with it. “I hear you got an interview on Thursday.”
“What? Where?” Frankie said.
“At Berman’s. Our cousin works there, in the factory. But they need a girl for the typing pool, so Mother arranged it. You can type, can’t you?”
Through clenched teeth Frankie said, “Yes.”
“That’s good.” Her eyes slid down Frankie’s body. “I hope you have some decent dresses with you. That thing looks like it’s been through a war.”
Automatically, Frankie clutched the collar of her dress before she realized that that was what Cora had wanted her to do. To feel ashamed.
Frankie was done with shame. She let go of her collar and snatched up her diploma, rubbed her thumb over a nearly invisible nick in the frame. “I’m just going to hang this over the dresser.” She didn’t wait for permission.
Though I stayed with Frankie and Toni for a time in that cramped apartment, eventually I missed the orphanage too. In the middle of the night, I visited the babies in the baby house and the girls in the cottages. I talked to this girl and to that one, whispering feverishly in their ears while Wolf licked their feet. I stroked their hair and flicked their studded curlers, told them one day someone would run their fingers through that hair and they would wish that it would never stop, never stop, don’t stop. I called for the ghost with the broken face, but she wasn’t taking requests.
Then I sat at the foot of the angel, Wolf in my arms, and said that if I couldn’t become an angel to leave this world, shouldn’t I be able to have an effect on it? Did I burst the light bulbs in the library? Did I knock the photos from the table in the blue house? Could I do it again? Could I help Frankie? Could I help anyone? What use is a ghost who knows she’s a ghost?
Why am I here?
Instead of answering my questions, the angel told me of the world. About the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome that killed hundreds of Italians, including Jews and members of the Italian Resistance. The Slapton Sands tragedy: American soldiers killed in a training exercise in preparation for D-Day. D-Day itself, when thousands of troops landed at Normandy in France, and thousands were massacred so that the Allies could take the beach.
They too asked why, the angel said. But who can comprehend the will of God?
I resolved never to visit the angel again and went instead to my stretch of sand at Lake Michigan, to the library, and to the bar, where Mad Maureen plied me and Wolf with bourbon and her tattooed fish blew us kisses. Not-drunk on the not-bourbon, we sat in the atrium of the Rookery, blearily watching the shadows creep. Wolf pounced on the shadows as if they were burrowing chipmunks and the marble floor was snow.
I’d given up on searching for Marguerite, but I got so mad at the man who had taken her from me, the man who had rooked her, that I went to find him at his antiques shop. Where I should have looked in the first place. Where I should have been looking all along.
Marguerite was sitting at the big wooden desk, nose to nose with the man’s little black cat. The man himself was nowhere to be found, though the photographs on his desk were jumbled, and one was on the floor. The one with the wide-eyed redhead, unassuming as milk.
How long have you been here? I asked her.
Weeks. Months. I don’t know. I followed you that first time. I stayed and read. She waved a hand around. He has an edition by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted.
Are you uplifted?
You’re not as funny as you imagine, she said.
You didn’t know he had this place? How could you not know?
I never looked for him, she said.
You never looked?
It’s not what you think, Marguerite said. He didn’t kill me.
Do you know who did?
He didn’t. He . . . loved me.
Now who’s lying to herself? I said.
What do you know about it? she said, suddenly furious. Those stories I told you? The stories my mother told me, and her mother before her? I wrote them down, I made them my own. He encouraged me to do that. I was going to be a writer, like Frances Harper. You don’t know what that means, what that . . . meant to me.
Once there was a boy, I said.
A boy, she spat.
Listen: once there was a boy. There’s no other word for him, because he wasn’t a man yet. My family didn’t approve. And I—
Did you love him?
I hesitated before answering. He consumed me, I said.
Did he love you?
I thought about the way he said my name, as if he had a pearl tucked under his tongue. I thought about the woods and the lake, his hands and the need in them. Was need love? Was hunger?
I said, I don’t know.
Then it’s not the same! she shouted.
Let me take you somewhere, let me show you something. I tried to take her hand, but of course I couldn’t. Please, I said.
Reluctantly she got up from the desk. We left the bookshop and the fearless little cat behind, and we walked we ran we flew to the blue house in the sea of brick. Wolf beat us there, was already peering inside the back window.
What is this place? Marguerite asked.
I led her to the window where Wolf was propped up on his front paws. Inside, the man with the boxer’s build was sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on his shoes. He wore a pair of trousers with suspenders, a sleeveless white undershirt.
Is that him? Marguerite said. Her eyes scoured his muscled shoulders, his smooth skin. It can’t be, she said. He’s much too young.
I put my not-hand on the glass when the glossy-haired, berry-lipped girl walked into the bedroom. We’re not here for him, I said. We’re here for her.
Why?
Just look.
Marguerite looked. Well, she’s a pretty little thing, like you. Then Marguerite closed her eyes. A little thing like you.
She is, I said. Look again.
Marguerite pressed her face close to the glass, through the glass, dipping into as if it were water. She stepped back from the window, back from me and Wolf. Said, She looks white but . . .
That’s why he wouldn’t tell me his name, his real name, I said. He told me I’d ruin it even if I didn’t want to. He said it would sound ugly coming from me and he didn’t want his name to sound ugly. He didn’t want me to sound ugly.
What are you saying?
He was Chinese. He delivered messages on his bicycle all around the city. I think his parents had a business somewhere in the city. A laundry or a grocery.
You . . . you . . . and this boy? She reached out, tried to take my arm, gripped nothing but air. Her not-hands knotted, worked.
Don’t, I said.
A Chinese boy. A white girl. In 1918? You could have gotten him killed. Oh my lord. Did you? Did you get him killed?
No, he got . . . hurt, I said, remembering Frederick, remembering William. I died instead. I had her and I gave her up and then I got the flu and died instead.
Marguerite put her hand to
her forehead, paced the tiny yard, Wolf at her heels.
I said, I think this is why I’m still here. I’m paying for what I did. Or because I can’t let go. Or something like that. But . . .
She came to a dead stop in front of me, her chest heaving as if she were trying to catch her breath. But?
But even with all of that. Even with—
What?
If I had the chance, I would do it all again.
Her not-hand lashed out to slap me but flew right through me like a wisp of smoke cut by a breeze, the way it did with the newspaper the very first time I’d seen her. She kept at it, slapping with her left hand and her right, as if she truly believed she could touch me. And after a while, I leaned into it, as if I truly believed I could feel her.
Later, we lay in the grass of the grubby yard, watching the clouds take shape overhead—a hawk, a fox, a bear, a wolf.
Marguerite said, My family loved me so much. And I loved them. But I destroyed them anyway, because I loved him too.
How do you know that?
I just know. I could bear my mother’s anger, but I could never—can’t—bear her disappointment. I can’t bear her heartbreak.
But maybe she’s not disappointed in you.
Of course she is! I destroyed myself! I destroyed everything! I never even showed her my stories. Her stories. I should have shown her. Why didn’t I show her? Marguerite wiped not-tears from her not-eyes. I’ve asked for forgiveness so many times. I’ve prayed. But I don’t think God hears the prayers of the dead. And I don’t think he forgives me.