Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  The Queen in the Tower

  AFTER MARGUERITE FLEW AWAY and we left the man’s shop behind, I lost myself. I could not tell you where. If Wolf remembered, he kept it secret. I woke up in the cemetery by the orphanage, leaning against a headstone so old the name had worn away. Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen, I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  Who was I kidding? I had no heart, not anymore. Perhaps I never did.

  I went to see Frankie. All winter, she went to work, she went home, she went to work, she went home, she went to work, she went to the diner, her own little loop. In February, she turned eighteen, expecting to feel like an adult, expecting to belong to herself, but she felt trapped as ever. April came and President Roosevelt died suddenly, but the war rolled on without him as if nothing at all had changed. At night, she’d tried to get comfortable beside her sister on the lumpy old bed, turning over and over, but she’d once woken up when she heard someone—or something—scratching on the bedroom door. Scritch, scritch, scritch. She took to sleeping on the living room couch, with a fork under her pillow, just in case.

  By May, Frankie was going to the diner every morning before work, just to get out of the house first thing. Sometimes she even stopped off for dinner, if she could spare the change. It usually meant that she had to walk home, but that wasn’t so bad.

  “Look, Harvey, there she is, our little party girl. Stay up late again, Frankie?” Nancy said one morning as she poured Frankie a cup of coffee and Harvey popped two slices of toast into the toaster.

  “Sure I stayed up late,” Frankie told Nancy. “But it’s not why you think.”

  Frankie hadn’t been able to sleep; so she’d been in the living room reading a book Loretta had sent, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Dewey had stumbled in, stinking of liquor, and sat on her as if he didn’t know she was there. She kicked him off and he left, but she worried the whole night that he’d come back, that he’d sneak into her room and—

  “Hey, Harvey, she says it’s not what I think! What do I think, Frankie?” Nancy put both elbows on the counter and rubbed her chin. “I think that you got yourself a new boyfriend and the two of you were out dancing.”

  “Ha!” Frankie said. “You could not be more wrong.”

  “Okay,” she said. “The two of you were out necking.”

  Frankie nearly spat out her coffee, and Harvey started to chuckle as he plated up her toast. “Nancy!”

  Frankie looked around and then lowered her voice. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Why not? Pretty girl like you probably has a parade of fellas following you around. Am I right, Harvey, or am I right?” She put the usual plate of toast in front of Frankie.

  Frankie said, “No. No fellas for me.”

  “Aw, go on!”

  “It’s true. I had a fella once, but . . .” She trailed off.

  “But?”

  Frankie peeled the crust away from her bread. “But I don’t think my father would appreciate me hanging out with a lot of fellas.”

  “He’s strict, is he?”

  “He’s old-fashioned,” Frankie said.

  “I know the type, believe me,” Nancy said, picking up a rag and wiping down the counter. “Wants his girl to get married but doesn’t want her to go and meet the fella she’s supposed to marry. It’s a little mixed-up, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t guess. I know, don’t I, Harvey?” Nancy finished wiping down the counter, dropped the rag into the sink, and put her hands on her hips. “You want to know what else I know?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your dance partner is right around the corner,” she said, wagging her finger at Frankie. “You take my word.”

  Frankie left the diner, thinking about Sam, thinking about dance partners, when she noticed that people were already dancing. Lots of them, men and women both. Whooping and shouting and kissing one another. Before Frankie knew what was happening, a girl in a polka-dotted dress ran up to her. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said.

  “Yes!” Frankie said. “What’s wonderful?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said.

  “Know what?”

  The girl jumped up and down like a marionette. “Germany surrendered! The war is over!”

  Frankie walked home through impromptu celebrations—people kissing and laughing, waltzing and hugging—her emotions seesawing between happiness and grief. Happiness that Vito would come home soon, and grief that it was too late for Sam, too late for so many others. Before she opened the door to the apartment behind the shoe store, she wiped all the happy/sad tears from her face, because she didn’t want to have to explain them to Cora or Bernice or Ada or anyone. But she needn’t have bothered. She was lucky to find the apartment empty for once, except for the envelope addressed to her on the kitchen table.

  Dear Frankie,

  I have someone you and your sister need to meet. I will pick you up next Saturday at noon and we’ll all go together. You need to know.

  Don’t tell your father.

  Love,

  Aunt Marion

  Go? Go where? Frankie thought. She hadn’t seen Aunt Marion since that day at the orphanage. And meet who? Know what? Though she couldn’t say exactly why, dread weighed her down, made her steps slow and heavy, welded her jaws shut. All week, the girls at the office chattered about the end of the war, about all the boyfriends and husbands who would come back, about the taste of sugar and real butter and steak, and she could barely bring herself to reply. Nancy served her toast, and she bit into it without tasting it, her mouth so dry that she couldn’t distinguish the bread from her tongue.

  Saturday came, and so did Aunt Marion, sturdy as ever, with her giant pocketbook. Aunt Marion told Ada that she had arrived to take her nieces out to lunch.

  “How . . . nice,” said Ada, her lips tightening into something that might have resembled a smile, if Ada’s mouth and muscles remembered how to smile, if Ada had ever been happy enough or pleased enough or even polite enough. “Well, I’m sure they deserve it.”

  They did not get lunch. Instead, Aunt Marion marched Frankie and Toni onto a streetcar. Silently, they rode west for nearly a half hour through Chicago neighborhoods that Frankie had never seen before. When they reached Narragansett and Montrose, they got off the streetcar and walked. It was only when they reached the huge complex of buildings, buildings that looked to Frankie like something out of medieval times, England or somewhere, a place with courtiers and jousters and queens imprisoned in towers, that Aunt Marion said, “You’re going to have to be strong, girls. Both of you.”

  “Strong about what? What is this place?” Toni wanted to know.

  “It’s a hospital,” said Aunt Marion.

  Toni shook her head, the feathers on her hat twitching. “But who’s sick?”

  Everyone, I whispered, my not-mouth dry, my not-throat tight. Everyone here is sick.

  Even the dead. Especially the dead. The grounds were thick with them, restless and dreadful. A Civil War soldier took a sword to the gut, staggered, and fell. Victims of the Great Chicago Fire crawled on charred forearms, blackened knees. A man strangled a woman, while nine others waited their turn in line behind her. Another man cut off his left hand and declared to everyone, to no one, I think it will grow again. And because he was a ghost, it did.

  Though Frankie couldn’t see the ghosts, in some deep and wordless place she sensed their disembodied pain, their anxious agitation. She stopped walking before they reached the entrance, grabbed Aunt Marion’s elbow. The giant purse swung on Marion’s wrist like a pendulum.

  “I’m not going in until you tell us what’s going on,” Frankie said.

  “Like I said, this is a hospital. The state hospital.”

  “So?”

  “People call this place by another name, Frankie. Dunning.”

  Toni scrunched up her face in confusion. “The asylum? But—”

  “Why are we here?” Frankie’s voice was hig
h and shrill, an alarm.

  Aunt Marion pulled her arm and Frankie’s hand tight to her body, stilled the swinging of the purse. “We’re here to see your mother.”

  What Frankie knew about her mother: Her name was Caterina Costa. She came to America on a boat from Sicily in 1918. She was beautiful, with long, dark curling hair. Big chocolate eyes. Sun-kissed skin. She didn’t know a word of English, but she met Frankie’s father the shoemaker, and she married him. They lived in an apartment behind the shoe shop. She had three children, Vittorio, Francesca, and Antonina. They made her so happy. That was why everyone was shocked when Frankie’s mother took the gun from the drawer in the shoe shop. But she only wanted to see what it felt like to pull the trigger, she would never try to hurt anyone, she would never commit such a sin. Frankie’s father threw out the gun and put the children in an orphanage so their mother could rest. After a while, she was okay again. Everyone came out of the orphanage. She and Frankie’s father tried to have another baby, but Frankie’s mother died, and so did the baby.

  Frankie’s mother died. Frankie’s mother was dead.

  But she wasn’t.

  She wasn’t.

  She—

  “—always had a sadness,” Aunt Marion was saying. “It was hard for her to take care of you. That’s why you were sent to the orphanage the first time. After you got out, she lost a baby, and the sadness got so deep she couldn’t crawl out of it. She found the gun and tried to kill herself. They wrestled for it, and she ended up shooting your father by accident. She didn’t mean to. He wasn’t hurt badly. But she was sent here. And you were sent to the orphanage again. I agreed not to tell you then because you were too young, but now . . . you’re a woman yourself. The both of you are. You have a right to know.”

  How had I not known? How had I not thought to sift through Aunt Marion’s thoughts to see the truth?

  A nurse led them through the women’s wing. Frankie and Toni covered their noses and mouths against the smell, but they couldn’t cover their ears, which were filled with the sounds of huffing and panting, ranting and weeping. The halls and the rooms were so packed with people that it was difficult to tell the cries of the dead from the cries of the living. “I am Jesus Christ returned,” said an emaciated woman shuffling in mismatched house slippers. “Someday my prince will come and you’ll be sorry when he does,” said a naked one dancing atop her bed, “This food is poisoned and I won’t eat it!” screamed another woman, throwing a tray against a wall. “The spirits are after me,” said a girl crouching in the hallway, “and their purpose is doom, doom, doom.”

  “Sorry about the noise!” the nurse said cheerfully. “They’re not normally so riled up.”

  Worse than the angry and unsettled ones were the silent ones drugged into slack-jawed oblivion, heads lolling in their wheelchairs. There were so many more of those—empty eyes, strings of drool dangling. I touched my not-lips with my not-fingers and could have sworn I felt the wetness there, a ghostly string tying me to—

  Frankie’s mother slept in a room with eight beds, though she was the only one there now, sitting in a chair by the small barred window. If she’d been beautiful at one time, if she’d had long dark curling hair and chocolate eyes, she didn’t anymore. Her hair was thin and greasy and grayish brown, her expression blank and dull. She blinked as Aunt Marion pushed Frankie and Toni forward.

  “Hello, Caterina. This is Francesca and Antonina. Remember I said I would bring them?”

  “Happy birthday,” her mother said, low and scratchy, the accent thick.

  “It’s not my birthday,” said Toni.

  “It was,” said her mother. She held out a pack of cigarettes. “Here.”

  Toni held out a wary hand for the cigarettes, confused.

  Frankie nudged her. “Say thank you, Toni.”

  “Thank you?” Toni said.

  “Big,” said her mother, looking at Frankie.

  “What?”

  Her mother held her palm flat over her head. “Big girl.”

  “I’m eighteen,” said Frankie.

  “Eighteen,” her mother repeated. “I was sixteen.”

  Toni clutched the cigarettes, blurted, “Dad said you were dead.”

  Marion sucked a breath through her teeth. “Toni.”

  “Is it because you took the gun?” Toni said. “Is that why he put you here?”

  “Toni!”

  “Gun?” her mother said.

  “Toni!”

  “The gun. You wanted to kill yourself.”

  “Antonina, that’s enough,” said Aunt Marion. But her mother didn’t have a reaction to what they were saying, not one Frankie could see. Frankie didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to do. What do you do when everyone has been lying to you for years? What do you do when your mother has been brought back from the dead, but only part of the way? What do you do when the story you’ve been telling yourself about yourself is a lie? When your heart has been broken so many times and so fast it feels like little chewed bits of it are traveling the length of your body, beating all over?

  I felt like chewed bits. Where had I seen Caterina before?

  “He had the gun,” said Frankie’s mother, after a while.

  “What?”

  “I was too sad for him. He loved someone else. Adele? Adeline?”

  “Ada?” said Frankie.

  Her mother nodded. “Yes. Her. He said he would shoot himself if he couldn’t have her. I tried to take the gun. It went off. Boom.”

  Aunt Marion yanked the handle of the big pocketbook higher on her arm. “Now you know that’s not true, Caterina.”

  Frankie’s mother shrugged, as if it didn’t really matter one way or the other. She reached down and scratched at bare dirty toes.

  It was Sesto’s shoe shop, where my fancy shoes had been made. I could picture them so clearly now, Gaspare and Caterina, her tiny foot resting on his thigh. Both of them so young and beautiful that no one could have recognized them.

  Frankie’s mother said, “Do you remember Esta?”

  “Who’s Esta?”

  “That is her name. It means ‘from the east.’ I came from the east too. At first I was happy. Mostly I was not.”

  “You mean Sicily?” Frankie asked.

  “My mother died. My father said I needed to go across the sea to find a husband.” One corner of her mouth quirked up, as if some small, deep part of her thought this was funny.

  “Vito is across the sea now,” Toni offered. “He’ll be back soon, though.”

  “Vito?”

  “My brother. Our brother.”

  “Your son,” said Aunt Marion.

  “Oh. He’s big?”

  “Yes. Bigger than I am,” said Toni.

  “Antonina.” Frankie’s mother tested the name on her tongue, syllable by syllable. An-to-ni-na. “Just a baby, too.”

  “Yes, she was,” Aunt Marion agreed. “A beautiful baby.”

  “I’m not a baby anymore,” Toni said.

  “Esta was my baby. You didn’t see her?” Frankie’s mother made a cradle with her arms, rocked them. “So tiny.”

  Frankie, Toni, and Aunt Marion watched her rock her empty arms, faces collapsing in pity and confusion and sadness. I watched her, too, and as I watched her, I found myself making the same motion, rocking an invisible baby in my not-arms. It looked so familiar. It felt so familiar.

  I had seen this before. I had done this. I had slumped in a chair with my head lolling and rocked my empty arms in a place like this.

  In a place like this.

  In this place.

  Right here.

  More than ten years before Caterina was.

  The lights went out, then quickly came back on. My not-fingers tingled and sparked. I wasn’t even trying to do it, and yet I felt myself unstitching, little spirals of silver spitting. My own fraying moon.

  “What was that?” Aunt Marion said.

  “The ghosts are ghostful,” said Frankie’s mother. “Hello, gho
st!”

  It was as if she’d given me permission, permission to see my own truth, the truth I had kept from myself. My vision blurred, doubled, showing me two eras at once, two versions of me. I was dead, witnessing Frankie’s first glimpse of her mother in more than a decade, and at the same time, I was alive, looking down at my own empty arms, my head a murky swamp of Veronal. All around me were other girls, other sick ones who heard voices or had visions, sad ones who had wasted with despair, battered ones with broken wrists and broken ribs, poor ones with nowhere else to go, brown ones whose skin or tongue had damned them. There were girls who had worked too hard or loved God too much, girls who’d been caught with pillows clutched between their thighs, girls who had just been caught—with boys, with girls, with babies, with drink, with ideas, with a temper, with a plan.

  But how had I been caught? I searched my not-brain for any memory, anything real and true. I had had no plan after my brothers took Benno and the nuns took Mercy, but my parents did. Charles Kent agreed to marry me anyway, make a ruined girl respectable, make my father rich. I was still beautiful, and that was precious enough. The world had taught him he was owed a girl, and I was his to do with what he liked. He told me what he liked. I had whored for that boy and now I would whore for a man. He tore the dress from my back, he would take what he wanted and keep taking. I would wear his ring and he would wear me like a puppet. So I hit him with the poker, once, twice. He bled, he cried, I remembered that. I’d told Marguerite.

  But then more memories lurched up like a body long submerged, bloated and blue.

  What he did after.

  He’d staggered to his feet. He picked up the telephone. Four men came. He said, “She broke into the house and attacked me, she’s deranged and hysterical, I have no idea who she is, she’s a stranger to us all.” The men wrapped me in a sheet, drove me out here to Dunning in a stinking, rumbling automobile, held me down while the doctors plunged the first needle in. It took my parents weeks to find me. And by the time they did—

  How had I forgotten this, how had I lied to myself for so long? Time collapsed, the room spun and melted through the middle like film burned in a projector. I reached for Frankie as if she could anchor me, but she was alive and I was not and there were no anchors anywhere. Here I was, in a crowded corridor with the slumped and drooling patients, here I was on the Dunning grounds with the crawling, feverish dead, here I was at the top of a winding staircase, running down and down and down, trying to get back to the earth as if I’d never left it. Sunlight beamed all around and I looked up into a wide sky made of birds and glass. My father’s voice boomed: “With all these crows roosting here, this building is nothing but a rookery.” I was floating on the ceiling of the glass atrium with the birds that had found their way in. They cawed at me and I cooed—