Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  “You have to lean on it,” Mr. Gilhooly said.

  She didn’t want to lean on it, she didn’t want to close it, why did he need her to close it? She pushed harder, but the door still wouldn’t shut. Her mouth felt like a desert, her heart banged in her chest.

  “No, you have to really lean on it. The wood swells in this heat.”

  She pressed her body up against the door and pushed as hard as she could. With her nose right up on the wood, she could smell its door smell, like pencils and something else too. Smoke, the pine-scented cleaner they used on the windows, the salt and sweat of a thousand hands. Her head swam with memories: sitting in the bath while Aunt Marion scrubbed her back, the sound of a gunshot echoing through a tiny Chicago apartment, then crawling to the bedroom door, kissing Sam in the greenhouse thinking they were safe enough to do it, praying that Chicago would be hit by bombs just so that Sister George couldn’t beat her anymore. Every closed door was a test, every open one was a trap. And now she was going to shut this door and no one would be able to hear her scream over the sound of the typewriters.

  A sob caught in her throat.

  “Did you shut it? Do you need me to do it?”

  Nothing’s going to happen, everything is all right, he’s fine, he just wants a letter, just a letter, she told herself. Her body didn’t believe it, though. It banged and shuddered and watered and itched. She turned her face toward the door so that he wouldn’t see the tears that suddenly spilled all over her cheeks.

  “Hey, what’s wrong? Are you okay over there?” In that moment he sounded kind, and that was all it took. She put her head in her hands and wept like a baby.

  Mr. Gilhooly called Wanda and she took Frankie to the ladies’ room and got her a glass of water. Wanda said that Mr. Gilhooly thought Frankie was having “woman problems” and that she’d scared him so bad that Frankie would never have to take dictation again, ever, if she didn’t want to.

  Wanda let Frankie go home early, but when Frankie thought about “home”—the cramped collection of rooms, her there-but-not-there father, creepy Dewey, broad-faced Bernice and slinky Cora—she decided to duck into a coffee shop instead.

  She took a seat at the counter and the waitress came over to pour her some coffee.

  “If you don’t mind my saying,” said the waitress, smiling, “you don’t look so hot.”

  “Thanks,” Frankie said.

  “Don’t mention it.” She plunked down a little pitcher of cream. “Bad day?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She didn’t explain.

  The waitress didn’t care. “No sugar. Ran out yesterday.”

  “That’s all right, I don’t need it. I’d like some toast, please. With oleo.”

  “Coming up.”

  She walked over to the window and told the cook, who glanced in Frankie’s direction and then popped some slices into the toaster.

  She sipped the coffee. She liked the smells in here, all the food smells . . . the gravy and the meat and the cream and the pie. Even though it was hot outside, she liked the warmth of the coffee shop. She liked how people seemed content and happy munching on their sandwiches. Nobody clacking on a clackety typewriter, no one asking you to take a letter and then trying to trap you behind a closed door.

  The waitress slid the plate of toast in front of her. “Eat it while it’s hot.” She was white with curly red hair, friendly sort of hair, and big gray eyes round as quarters.

  “Do you like your job?” Frankie asked her.

  “Why? You looking?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I like it fine. Harvey over there gives me lunch.” She tilted her head at the cook. “I like lunch.”

  Frankie smiled. “So do I.” Frankie looked down at the waitress’s hands, but she wore no ring. “Are you married?”

  “Say, you are curious. Harvey, this little girl wants to know if I’m married.”

  Harvey chuckled, wiping his hands on his white shirt.

  The waitress, whose name tag said Nancy, said, “I live by myself. I have a room over the hardware store next door.”

  “A room?”

  “Yeah, a room. You know, with a bed and a dresser. Have to share a bathroom, but that’s all right. It’s cheap.”

  A room. “But it’s your own room?”

  The waitress laughed. “Well, who else’s would it be? Winston Churchill’s?”

  “Winston Churchill,” Harvey repeated, chuckling again.

  All the way home that afternoon, Frankie thought about Nancy’s room. A room she had all on her own, and all to herself. Why couldn’t she have something like that? She didn’t like the job, and she didn’t want to take dictation again, ever, but she worked hard, she made money. And the apartment was too small for all of them anyway.

  But she couldn’t leave Toni. She wanted a room of her own so badly she could taste it, but she wouldn’t leave Toni in the same house with Bernice and Cora, in the same house with Dewey.

  She found her father in the shoe shop, putting new heels on some old boots. He smiled at her in his there-but-not-there way and went back to his boots. He used a small hammer to pound tiny nails into the wood.

  “Dad,” Frankie said. “What do you think of me and Toni getting a room?”

  He pulled the nails from between his teeth. “Eh? What are you saying? What kind of room?”

  His expression said she should stop talking, but she didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop. “Well, it’s pretty crowded here. I thought that maybe I could take some of the money I’m making and rent a room for Toni and me. To make more space for the rest of you. I know that Ada doesn’t—”

  “Ada makes beautiful home, beautiful home,” he said. “What are you saying? Are you crazy?”

  “I was just thinking that—”

  He pounded on the work bench. “No. No girls of mine get rooms.”

  “Dad, if you just think about it—”

  He picked up the boot and shook it at her, his face red. “Don’t you think about it, okay? Don’t you talk about it. I send you back. To orphanage.”

  He wasn’t making any sense. He’d left them at the orphanage for years. And he didn’t take them back until he’d been forced to. “They threw us out of there. You can’t send us back. They won’t take us.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do!” he yelled. “Maybe I call different place, I don’t know. Maybe I call the police. You’re not all grown up. You can’t do things you please.” He shook his head. “You stay here, you work. Or I find somewhere else to send you, yes?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. He put the tiny nails back between his teeth, nodding yes, yes, yes, like a man reassuring himself of his own power, like a mad and fickle king.

  The Magic Words

  PERHAPS I GOT RECKLESS. Perhaps I went a little mad myself. I flipped the hats off strangers in the street, I tickled babies in their cribs, I turned the lights on and off and on again. I sat with Stella as she slept and told her the story of the girl with the golden arm. She woke up rubbing her own left arm and starting at every little noise. When I visited her in the shower, when I knocked the soap from her hands again and again, she screamed. Sister Bert hauled her wet and gave her extra lessons for making such a spectacle.

  Mad Maureen had forbidden me to knock any more bottles off the shelf, but I could drink as much bourbon as I wanted, though I didn’t really want it. I was sitting there, at the bar, trying to figure out a way around Mad Maureen’s rules, a way to entertain myself, when Marguerite appeared next to me. Wolf licked her not-hand with his not-tongue, and she patted his not-head, scratched his not-ears.

  Where have you been? I asked her.

  Praying, she said.

  I missed you.

  I missed you too, she said. But her not-eyes had a faraway look, as if she were already redrawing the lines of herself, ungathering.

  Are you ready now? I asked her.

  She dragged her eyes back to me, her attention. She said, No one is ever ready for something like this. You
don’t do it because you’re ready. You do it because you’re weary. And I am weary. I have been weary for too long.

  So we went back to the antiques shop, Marguerite, Wolf, and I. When the little black cat saw us, she gave a soft chirp of recognition. She leaped from a chair to a table to the top of the highest cabinet, as if she knew what was coming, as if she was choosing what to witness, and this was the best spot from which to watch.

  Do you think he’ll see you again? I asked. Really see you?

  She thought about this for a moment. Yes, she said. Because he still wants to.

  At the front of the shop, Marguerite hesitated, as if waiting for him the way she always had. But then she closed her eyes and put her palms together, praying for something only she understood. Her yellow dress billowed, the soft curls on the back of her neck stirred. The lines of her blurred, as if I was seeing her through a wash of tears. Marguerite lifted her feet from the floor, floated wafted glided to the desk in the back of the shop. The man sat behind the desk, holding something in his hand. He glanced up. Froze.

  “You,” he breathed. “You’re here.”

  I am, she said. The spirit was spiraling off her in sparks and ash, golden and bright.

  “You’re beautiful. More beautiful than . . .”

  Than when I was alive? Than when you let me die?

  At the sound of these words, a tear streaked his skin. He got up from the desk, using one hand to brace himself as he made his way around it. He willed himself forward, dropped to his knees in front of her.

  “I’ve waited for you.”

  She said nothing.

  “It’s all right. I want you to do it.”

  Her fire only burned brighter. Do what? she asked.

  “Do what you came to do. Punish me. That’s what I deserve.”

  Is it? she said. Tell me why.

  “I love you,” he said. “I always have. I never stopped. It’s tortured me.”

  Marguerite closed her eyes, her chest rising and falling, as if she were breathing still. How? she asked him. How have you been tortured? How have you hurt? How have you suffered?

  “I thought about you all the time. You haunted—” He cut himself off. “I dreamed about you. I dreamed that I confronted her about what she did, that I turned her in for it. I dreamed I kept my promises to you and to myself.”

  You dreamed you were a better man, Marguerite said.

  “I . . . I . . .” But he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t say yes.

  Marguerite’s face smoldered, the sparks around her lengthening and deepening into ribbons of burnt umber. So, she said, those were only dreams.

  “After . . . after she died, her father caught me with this.” He held up a pocket watch, open so that Marguerite could see the picture of herself tucked inside it. “I’d never replaced it. He took the children. They haven’t spoken to me since. I’ve had no life at all, not really. And I’m done with what’s left of it. So please. I beg you. Do what you came to do.”

  He bowed his head. He no longer looked beautiful to me, like a man carved from marble. He looked like a mewling, selfish, broken thing.

  To Marguerite, I said, Do it. He wants you to.

  The man didn’t seem to hear me. He kept his eyes on the shining sun that was Marguerite unwinding.

  No, she said.

  No? I said.

  “But isn’t that why you’ve come?” he asked.

  From the surface of the desk, a book floated into the air, beating its leaves like wings. Another book did the same, and another, and another until the books twirled and flocked like birds.

  No, Marguerite said. I didn’t come to punish you.

  Yes, you did, I said. I swept all the papers off a table. I tipped over a chair. The man looked frightened, and relieved.

  Marguerite said to me, to both of us, Don’t.

  “Don’t what?” said the man.

  This isn’t the way, she said.

  “What isn’t?”

  The way to forgiveness.

  “Do you forgive me?” he said.

  No, she said. Her fine brows furrowed, then smoothed out again. The ribbons of umber brightened again, bronzed and brassed.

  “What?”

  She smiled, a smile so sudden that it cast its own beam of light. No, I don’t forgive you.

  He blinked, confused.

  Once upon a time, she said, a girl fell in love with a man so small and weak and easily led, she died for it. She kept asking for forgiveness from the earth and stars, from God and from ghosts, but though forgiveness was offered, she never felt it, it could not touch her, it could not free her. Until she forgave herself.

  Marguerite laughed, the sound like a choir. The book birds whirled in a frenzy.

  She said, I do not forgive you.

  Then she said: This is not where I need to be.

  All the books dropped to the floor.

  She turned and flew out the door of the shop, leaving the man on his knees behind her. Wolf and I ran rushed flew after her, the houses and the shops and the buildings a blur all around us. I couldn’t understand where she was going, where she was taking us, until we reached a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, bustling with music and with the friendly chatter of people on porches and stoops, toasting a fine evening with finer company.

  She stopped at a tidy brick house, the windows aglow with soft light. She pressed through the wall and I did too, Wolf alongside me. In the house, a family gathered around a dinner table. In the skin and in the bones of the faces of these men and these women, these children, I could see Marguerite’s skin and bones, her history and her future. A regal woman sat at the head of the table, salt and pepper hair piled high on her head. She glanced up from her food, inhaled, shivered. She laid her fork and knife carefully on the edge of her plate.

  “Baby?” she said.

  “What is it, Mama?” said the mustachioed man next to her. “Can I get you something?”

  “Margie,” the woman said.

  The other people around the table stopped eating, forks and knives hovering. The man took his mother’s hand. “What about Margie, Mama?”

  The woman didn’t smile exactly, but the corners of her mouth curved gently upward, sinking into her brown skin, into the faint lines anticipating it. “She’s here.”

  The man exchanged glances with a woman across the table, who scooped up a small boy and hugged him hard, though the boy wriggled like a puppy.

  “What was that, Mama? Who’s here?”

  “I can’t see her, but she’s here. Aren’t you, baby?”

  Yes, Mama, Marguerite said.

  The others in the room didn’t seem to see or hear Marguerite, but the regal woman said, “I smelled the sweetness in the air. Like perfume, the way your hair used to smell when you were just a little one. And look at you. Shining like your own sun.” The woman put a fist to her heart.

  Tears spilled down Marguerite’s golden cheeks. Yes, Mama. I wasn’t sure you’d still be in the same house after all this time.

  “I’ve been waiting for you. It took you long enough.”

  I know, Mama. I’m so sorry. I had . . . I had things to do. Things to work out. I’m so sorry. There are so many things I should have told you. There are so many things I should have done. Please forgive me.

  “My beautiful girl, I loved you all your life, and I’ve loved you all this time.” The woman got up from her chair and went to a small desk in the corner of the room. She pulled out a leather-bound book. When she saw the book, Marguerite’s body shook as with tears, sobs.

  “I kept your stories. I read them to the children.” She gestured to the table full of people, who were staring in incomprehension and concern. “There’s nothing for me to forgive,” Marguerite’s mother said. “God has forgiven you long ago. You have to forgive yourself. Can you do that? Will you?”

  Yes, Marguerite said. Yes, I think I can do that now.

  “You have somewhere to go, don’t you?”

  I don�
��t want to leave you. I never want to leave you again.

  “You will always be with me, but you know what you have to do. Your daddy’s there. I won’t be long.”

  I love you, Mama. I love you.

  “I love you too, baby. Carry it with you.”

  Marguerite’s skin shone with tears, shone with blazing golden light. She threw back her head and cried out, not in pain, but in sheer joy, the way a bird cries midflight. Wings so black and so bright they shorted out my vision sprouted from her back, wide as the room, wide as the city. The house fell away and there was only Marguerite, burning in her own lovely fire, her lips moving, silently telling herself the story of herself, the magic words, unwinding, then raveling into a whole new form. I dropped to my knees like that man at the bookshop, just another sinner, just another supplicant. Don’t go, I shouted, take me with you, but she couldn’t, I was her friend but I was not of her people, she couldn’t teach me the words and I didn’t have the power to learn them. Her history wasn’t mine, her story wasn’t mine. One last glance, one last beatific smile; she rose up into the air. She flew higher and higher into the plush and generous darkness, the long forgiving night, until she slipped through a star, a doorway, and heaven welcomed her in.

  Tooth and Claw

  I DID NOT HAVE WINGS, so I could not fly away. I would have to run. Or claw.

  I went back to the antiques shop with Wolf. We wrecked the place. Knocked over shelves, tore up books, smashed the pretty lamps, overturned the tables. We left the photograph of the redhead, unassuming as milk, in the middle of the room, untouched.

  The man couldn’t see us, but he could see what we were doing, what we did, the effect we had on his world. But I didn’t kill him. He was too weak, too pathetic, and Marguerite wouldn’t have wanted me to; she wanted him to live with it. And live with it he would. As he sat in the ruin of his shop, the ruins of his life, weeping, the little black cat curled on his lap, I bent and whispered in his ear:

  Even the cat deserves better.

  1945

  Doorways