Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  You and Toni are my family.

  You.

  Vito

  So many people were gone now—Sam, Loretta, even her own parents, in a way. Every little decision you made, every person you met could change your life, set it on a different course, or end it. At the diner, Ray of Sunshine told Frankie about the day he’d lined up at the recruitment office. Officers were counting off the boys one, two, three, four, and then circling back to one again. Ray realized that the numbers were for each branch of the military: army, navy, air force, marines. When he counted the boys on his own line for himself, he saw they’d mark him for the navy. He asked the boy in front of him to switch places so he could chat with another boy. “No way I was going to die on a boat, no way I was going to drown,” Ray said.

  “You didn’t die at all,” Frankie said, pouring him a fresh cup of coffee. “And you’re here now.”

  He winked at her over the brimming cup. “So I got lucky twice.”

  I’d gotten lucky too, if that was the word for it. If I hadn’t been watching Frankie at the orphanage, if I hadn’t followed her for so long, maybe I would never have met Marguerite, maybe I never would have remembered myself, come back to myself, rewritten my own story. The door to heaven didn’t open up for me, but not everyone was that kind of angel.

  Some had wings, others had claws.

  Now Frankie held the purse tighter. The old clock on the table ticked off the minutes, a countdown to midnight. The sky through the tiny windows seemed so black, blacker than black, like a great black hole, and she didn’t know how she’d fling herself into it, set herself on a different course, make herself disappear.

  Instead, she fell asleep.

  Soldiers fell asleep with their stomachs rumbling, with the sound of guns booming, why not Frankie on the night of her greatest escape? Toni too had drooped on her lumpy mattress, one hand around the handle of a suitcase, in the other a bouquet of white underthings. I tried to wake her, but Toni had never been one to hear me.

  I’d read all kinds of stories by then, I knew how this would end. Their father would find them draped across their own luggage, he would find the money in Frankie’s purse. He would put on the biggest show he could—cops and sirens, orphanages and asylums, towers and keys. Such things would make him feel real. Such things turned a shoemaker into a movie star, some kind of king.

  He’d keep the money.

  The door to the apartment rattled. “Damn hot,” Dewey said, almost tumbling into one of the armchairs when he tried to take off his jacket. Change dropped out of the pockets and rolled across the floor. He swore again, and dropped to his knees to find it. Feeling along the ground with his hands, he crawled over to the couch.

  I let go of myself, unraveling, spiraling out. Wake up, I said in Frankie’s ear as loud as I could. He’s coming.

  Frankie scrabbled backward, rubbed the side of her face, her arms where my tendrils had chilled her. But she could also smell the whiskey or whatever bootleg swill Dewey drank mixed with his terrible Dewey stink. She fished under the pillow for the fork Loretta had given her so long ago.

  His hand went up her leg. “Hey! Look what I found.” He grabbed the handle of her purse, yanked it.

  She plunged the fork into the meat of his arm. Dewey howled. Wolf howled back.

  “What the hell was that? What the hell?” Dewey said, clutching his bloody forearm.

  Frankie didn’t know if he was talking about his wounded arm or the howling of the wolf—a wolf?—but she didn’t wait to find out. She ran for her sister’s room, slapped Toni awake. She grabbed their bags and hauled Toni back into the living room, slamming right into her father.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “It’s the middle of the night!”

  Ada stepped into the room, Bernice and Cora piling up behind her. Ada’s face blanched when she saw Dewey’s bloody arm. “Oh my lord, what happened!”

  “She stabbed me!” Dewey yelled, pointing at Frankie. “She’s crazy!”

  “You grabbed me!” Frankie shot back.

  “What is this?” Frankie’s father said, snatching Toni’s suitcase out of her hand. “Where you think you go?”

  “Away from here,” said Frankie.

  “You stabbed him,” Ada shrieked. “You stabbed my son!”

  Bernice wrapped a towel around Dewey’s arm. “Maybe she should go to the nuthouse with her mother.”

  For a moment Frankie was so angry she stopped breathing. To the others, it looked as if she was frozen solid, still and unmoving as a statue. But they couldn’t see the sparks coming off her, the tendrils of herself, spiraling out. Not golden like Marguerite’s, not silver like mine, but coppery red, living and pulsing. The ribbons of her spirit entangled with my ribbons, teasing and braiding. I felt a jolt, a blast of heat. Everyone in the room stared—as if I were there, real and solid as anyone.

  “Who the hell is that?” said Bernice. “What the hell is that?”

  “Get out of my house!” Ada shrieked.

  I felt heavy and light at the same time, the air weighing upon my skin that was suddenly, briefly, skin, the breath that filled my lungs, the blood that sped through my veins, the breath that whistled through my teeth. Every nerve that was now a nerve twitched, every cell throbbed in gratitude.

  “Who are you?” Frankie whispered.

  “Sono qui. Io sono qui per te,” I said, my own voice vibrating in my own throat, humming in my own ears. “I am here, I am here for you.”

  I didn’t know which of us did it, or maybe Frankie and I did it together. The couch flipped over. The coffee tables spun and crashed into the wall. Dishes flew from the cabinets in the kitchen, soaring through the apartment like warplanes. Glasses smashed. The bulbs in the lamps whined, illuminating the whole room and the people who cowered there, arms over their heads, in a white-hot light. Then the bulbs burst, plunging the room once again into darkness.

  Then all was quiet.

  The twitching of my nerves faded, my breath leaked away. I cried not-tears as my brief life ebbed. Wolf sniffed at my not-fingers, the ribbons of dimming silvery light.

  “Hello?” Frankie said. She blinked at the space where I had been, blinked at the returning shadows, stunned for just a moment.

  “What is going on?” Dewey moaned.

  Cora pasted herself to the back wall. “Stay away!”

  “I call the police,” said Frankie’s father.

  Frankie remembered them, her not-family, remembered herself. She swiped at her tears, squared her shoulders. She turned toward the door. If she put her nose against it, she would have smelled the pencil smell of the wood, and the other smells that had sunk into it—leather, garlic, salt, blood. All the things she hoped for could be on the other side of it. Vito could be there, walking tall, and Loretta too, her nose in a book, her hand in Beatriz’s. Nancy and Harvey laughing together, maybe even Ray of Sunshine with his twinkly eyes. There could be a room with two beds and two dressers and a window that opened to the street, a hot plate for soup that a person could eat at night, every night, so she never went to bed hungry.

  But pain could be on the other side, too. Failure. Ruin. She couldn’t be sure what was waiting behind it, wing or tooth or claw.

  But she was sure of one thing: she was going to live. She was going to live.

  Frankie grabbed their bags and her sister’s hand. She opened the door. We raced into the night, Frankie, Toni, and me, the fox loping after—all of us wolves, all of us angels.

  Author’s Note

  My late mother-in-law, Frances Ponzo Metro, was many things: a self-taught pianist, a painter, a cook, a waitress, a cardsharp. But like the best poker players, she kept her cards close to the vest. I remember chatting over dinner at one of our early meetings, when she suddenly said something like “At the orphanage, we would sneak into the kitchens when the nuns weren’t looking, steal an egg, and suck out the insides.” I said, “Orphanage? Nuns? Eggs? What?” And she said, “Want another meatball?”

&nb
sp; I had to ask an awful lot of questions to find out about the years she had spent at Angel Guardian, a German Catholic orphanage in Chicago, during the Depression and World War II. The stories emerged out of order, little snippets here and there, about how her father took her and her brother and sister to the orphanage after the death of their mother, about the abuse some of the orphans endured, about the fact that her father soon took her brother and the children of his second wife out of the orphanage but left Fran and her sister there till Fran was seventeen.

  Fran endured my endless questions about her early life with bemused good cheer and characteristic generosity. She didn’t understand why I was so fascinated by her upbringing—“What’s the big deal?” she wanted to know. But when I told her I wished to write a novel based on her teen years, she did the best she could to help me. She didn’t consider her own story to be worth much, but if I wanted to write about it, well, then, that was okay with her. “Ask whatever you want,” she’d say while beating me at rummy.

  Writing a historical novel obviously means tons of research. So I read everything from books about World Wars I and II to transcripts of interviews with young women who worked in the meat-packing districts of Chicago during the ’30s. I pored over family photographs, as well as photos and videos of other children at the Angel Guardian Orphanage available in library archives and on the web. And I combed through numerous folk and fairy tales, including those gathered and/or retold by Zora Neale Hurston, Julius Lester, Virginia Hamilton, John Steptoe, Ashley Bryan, and the Grimms, among many others.

  But because I was primarily interested in the stories that families tell themselves about themselves, my main source of information was always Fran, along with her brother, Vito; sister, Toni; and friend and fellow orphan, Loretta. I relied heavily on their recollections of the meals, jobs, church services, nuns, celebrations, school, family visits, and general day-to-day life at a Catholic orphanage in the 1930s and ’40s, as well as the city of Chicago itself. As you’d expect, some of their recollections conflicted, especially as it concerned Fran’s family, so I did my best to weave these recollections into a coherent narrative. Some personal stories—likely apocryphal—didn’t make it into the book, such as rumors that Fran’s father was being chased by the Italian mob or that Fran’s stepmother and stepsiblings were wanted by the feds (!!!). No one ever implied that the nuns at the orphanage took babies from young mothers and offered them for adoption, but since that has happened elsewhere, I admit I took quite a few liberties (and added a whole battalion of ghosts, something that delighted Fran when I told her that I was going to do it).

  And then I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

  For more than ten years, I worked on this story, but I kept getting it wrong.

  I couldn’t get it right until I realized that the orphanage, though a difficult place to grow up, was also a safe place in many ways. That the most painful betrayals were not those committed by nuns or priests, but rather the family that was supposed to cherish and protect you. That making your way in a world that thinks so little of you takes a particular kind of courage, a kind not always obvious from the outside.

  This is a story about Fran’s teen years. But it is also a story about girls. Girls with ambitions, brains, desires, talents, hungers. It is a story about how the world likes to punish girls for their appetites, even for their love.

  Fran read and approved an earlier version of this novel, and I kept her up-to-date on my progress until her death last year. My only regret is that she never got a chance to hold the book in her hands.

  Every word is fiction. And every word is true.

  I hope it honors her the way the way she deserves.

  Laura Ruby

  2019

  Acknowledgments

  Thirteen Doorways is about many things, the nature of memory among them. Since I first conceived of this story back in 2002, it’s difficult to remember every angel who helped and challenged me along the way. But I owe it to all of them to try.

  Thanks to my brilliant agent, Tina Dubois, and my equally brilliant editor, Jordan Brown, for their continued faith in me, and their endless patience with me. Thanks also to everyone at Balzer + Bray and HarperCollins, including Alessandra Balzer, Donna Bray, Tiara Kittrell, Patty Rosati, Nellie Kurtzman, Bess Braswell, Michael D’Angelo, Olivia Russo, Andrea Pappenheimer, Kerry Moynagh, Kathy Faber, Jen Wygand, Heather Doss, Jenny Sheridan, Allison Brown, Josh Weiss, Mark Rifkin, and Renée Cafiero. And thanks to Alison Donalty, Molly Fehr, and artist Sean Freeman for the moody and mysterious cover art.

  Thanks to my dear friend Gretchen Moran Laskas, who read one of the earliest iterations of the book and, in the kindest and most generous way possible, told me not to show it to anyone else before I figured out what the heck I was doing (and then helped me figure out what the heck I was doing). Thanks also to Gina Frangello, Cecelia Downs, Zoe Zolbrod, and Karen Halvorsen Schreck, who wrestled with various (dreadful) drafts of the novel. Thanks to Miriam Busch, Christine Heppermann, Annika Cioffi, Linda Rasmussen, Tracey George, Esther Hershenhorn, Esmé Raji Codell, Franny Billingsley, Myra Sanderman, Carolyn Crimi, Brenda Ferber, Jenny Meyerhoff, Sarah Aronson, Katie Davis, Tanya Lee Stone, Melissa Ruby, Joan Ruby, Richard and JoAnn Ruby, Melissa Metro, Jessica Metro, Joe Metro, Tony DeYoung, Greg Metro and family, and all the various Ponzos, who patiently listened to me talk and talk and talk about this story over the years (and probably assumed that I would never, ever finish).

  Eternal gratitude to my friends and colleagues at Hamline University’s MFAC program, the fabulous ladies of the LSG, Harpies, and the Shade for their endless support. I love you all. Special thanks to Swati Avasthi, Tessa Gratton, Heidi Heilig, Justina Ireland, Kelly Barnhill, Laurel Snyder, Kate Messner, and Martha Brockenbrough for their thoughtful reads of later drafts. And thanks to Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich and Tracey Baptiste for the discussions and for pointing me in the right direction with regard to folk tales. Thanks to the wonderful people at the Butler Center at Dominican University for letting me spend some lovely days sifting through their special collections, including their folk and fairy tale reference collection, as well as their Effie Lee Morris Collection of African American–focused books. And thanks to Renée Cafiero and Nita Tyndall for translating the German (and to NT for the joke about squirrels=oak croissants), and to Claudio Bertelli and Max Cantarelli for translating the Italian. Any errors of fact or representation are mine.

  Of course, this book would not exist at all if it weren’t for my late mother-in-law, Frances Ponzo Metro, who graciously allowed me to write about her life, particularly her experiences as a teenager growing up in an orphanage during the Depression and World War II. Though many names and dates are changed to suit the narrative or to preserve privacy, the main trajectory of Fran’s early life is reflected in Frankie’s story.

  My friend Claire Rudolf Murphy has said that a single book has several story arcs, including the arc of the book itself, the arc of the author’s life during the writing of the book, and the arc of the world during the writing of that book. When I began this project long ago, I didn’t know I’d be writing through my own bout with cancer, my father’s struggle with dementia and his eventual death, and then Fran’s death. And I never could have imagined that I would be working on this book during a time of rising attacks on immigrants and the poor in our country, as well as a horrifying resurgence of anti-Semitism around the globe. All of this informed my thoughts about memory and legacy, American dreams and American nightmares, whiteness and darkness, war and resistance, justice and love. So I must thank two people who have been with me through all this reckoning: Anne Ursu, for everything she is and everything she does, and Stephen Metro, who inherited his mother’s eyes, her spirit, and her heart.

  About the Author

  Photo by Stephen Metro

  LAURA RUBY is the author of Bone Gap, a Michael L. Printz Award winner and National Book Award finalist. Her other acclaimed novels for children and teens include the ALA
Best Fiction for Young Adults selection York: The Shadow Cipher and its sequel, York: The Clockwork Ghost; the Edgar-nominated mystery Lily’s Ghosts; and the Book Sense Pick Good Girls, among others. She is on the faculty of Hamline University’s MFA in writing for children and young adults program and lives in the Chicago area. You can visit her online at www.lauraruby.com.

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  Books by Laura Ruby

  Good Girls

  Play Me

  Bad Apple

  Bone Gap

  Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

  York: The Shadow Cipher

  York: The Clockwork Ghost

  York: The Map of Stars

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  Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  THIRTEEN DOORWAYS, WOLVES BEHIND THEM ALL. Copyright © 2019 by Laura Ruby. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  COVER ART © 2019 BY SEAN FREEMAN