Catch 26

by Carol Prisant

  He’d been imperfect, of course, as she had. Only Satan was perfect, of course. Although she knew some of her strengths now. But he’d lacked self-knowledge, too. He’d lacked backbone and selflessness, while Frannie, somehow, over the years, had acquired both. Qualities he didn’t have? Self-discipline, for one. Constancy. Self-confidence. Frannie owned them all, although that last one came from Berger’s.

  And so, she reflected, laying the letter’s crumpled pages in the nightstand’s small drawer and shakily smoothing them flat, maybe she could convince herself it wasn’t an altogether terrible thing that her prince had disappeared.

  Maybe not.

  Supporting herself on tabletops and chair backs once again, she made an awkward progress into the living room, where she eased herself down on the sofa and, exhausted, picked up each leg by the thigh and hauled it up.

  No more crying now. She was finished with that. Because more than anything else, more than hurt, more than disappointment, more than her terror at losing her soul, she was sick to death of being manipulated.

  For a year now (or fifteen or, to be truthful, forty-four) she’d been controlled. By Stanley. By Randi. And now and then, by herself. What’s more, she couldn’t be sure if Satan – chess-mistress supreme – was intending to have her die two days from today, when the pact would actually expire, or perhaps, condemning her to live for years in geriatric Hell? Blind, arthritic, senile, surely, and sick. On a walker or in a wheelchair. Drooling. Wetting herself. Suffering from endless, intractable pain, and yet, unable to die. Her soul irretrievably pledged.

  Yet none of us ever knows the endgame, she thought. It’s not just me. The only difference – and a major difference right this minute – was that Frannie knew her cursed life would end when Satan wanted it to.

  But surely she still had free will? She’d had it once, even if she’d never taken advantage of it.

  She might still have it now.

  So, did the Devil have the power to keep her from dying?

  For example – Frannie sat bolt upright, unmindful of the agony in her back.

  Right now, for example. If she were to kill herself right now, could Satan prevent that? Would she try? She’d hinted at letting Frannie live till she was ninety, or a hundred and twenty, or was it two hundred and ten? Live like this?

  Well, I don’t think so, said Fernanda Turner. And Frannie Turner agreed.

  Struggling to her feet once more, she felt something filling her chest where once her sense of self had been. A blade of rage, keen and carmine- red like Liz’s dress, like Randi’s hair. It felt alien, yet familiar.

  Fury.

  As swiftly as she was able, Frannie limped to the living-room window and, little by little, despite her weakened arms, she heaved the bottom up.

  Only two days were left, yes. But tonight, Frannie owned herself.

  Leaning out into darkness, she saw, on the street, far below, all dotted with traffic and colorful lights and mobile human specks, there was life and cheer and choice. Leaning further out now, she tried to put her knee up on the sill. It was hard, too hard. She picked her leg by the thigh, but couldn’t stay balanced on the other foot, so her knee came nowhere near the sill. She looked for a chair or a stool, and then stopped.

  She still had two full days.

  So she could wait then. Spend those days saying goodbye.

  Oh, not goodbye to anyone she’d known. She’d known no one, really. And certainly no one knew her. They’d known Fernanda. The successful, favored Fernanda.

  She’d say her goodbyes instead to everything she’d loved.

  She returned to the window where the night was pouring into her elegant living room and, with a monumental effort, she slammed it shut.

  Successful Frannie.

  But what had happened to Courtney and Marcia, she wondered all of a sudden? She hadn’t given a thought to them since … Since.

  Frannie started again for the cell phone and stopped.

  Because tomorrow or the next day, she’d visit Berger’s. Find out about Courtney. Spend time in that life for a bit. Revisit her favorites at the Met, Not bitterly or angrily, though. Or not too angrily, anyway. She had the upper hand now. This wasn’t over yet.

  Oh yes, Satan and her minion – who won and won and “rarely” lost – should get ready to suffer one small, unexpected defeat.

  So Frannie was excited all of a sudden.

  She needed a plan, however. How to leave her apartment, for instance. How to slip by the doormen (they’d be puzzled by an unknown biddy in a too-large coat. How did she get into the building?) But if she could slip out unnoticed … Get over to Berger’s. Certainly to the Met.

  Before she tried the climb into bed she set up her old phone to charge and, tired now, felt she’d made a good beginning to her plans for the end of the movie: The End. Before she shut her eyes she thought she might check in on Marcia, too, and as sleep overcame her, she was thinking she might even run … no, walk slowly … to the park.

  CHAPTER 27

  But she didn’t.

  Because Frannie awoke, the next day, to such shocking grief, such an unendurable sense of loss, such an ache, that she thought there’d be no need of suicide. This, all alone, would kill her.

  And did she even have the courage to kill herself?

  She crept from the messy bed, stiff from her hair to her toes, and made her way to the kitchen, where, she opened a lonely V-8 that she found in the fridge. It was fifteen years old, but she didn’t remember that until she was choking on its thick, metallic, sting. When she’d recovered after a bit, she made herself a cup of tea instead. Teabags didn’t go bad, she was pretty sure. But she’d swallowed barely half a mug when, lurching and gagging, she heaved it all up. Her insides were curdled, she thought, cleaning up. And avoiding the bathroom mirror, she rinsed her sour mouth thoroughly, smoothed what hair she had left with her frail, spotted hands and steeled herself for the effort of getting dressed.

  Her clothes would be enormous, that she knew: her pretty dresses, her jackets, her pants, her shoes. But she would just make do, beginning with the brown-flecked sweater from her profile picture, which she gradually worked over her head and down her sides. It looked huge, and bittersweet. And then, almost tongue-in-cheek, she put on the same, now grown-softer, but falling-down jeans. It took her a while to figure out how to tie up the jeans with her bathrobe belt and roll their bottoms up, so that, in the end, they looked like her jeans did when she was twelve. It seemed to take her forever, too, to pull on the three pairs of socks that she needed to make Fernanda’s sneakers fit, but eventually she tugged her navy coat over it all, buttoned it up to her chin, went out into the hall and pressed the elevator button. It took unusually long to arrive, but today was Sunday, which meant that, luckily for Frannie, there’d be no one inside to have to talk to: no weather or babies or pets. No one to wonder about this strange old crone in an ill-fitting coat. The crone herself was wondering: after fifteen years, was there anyone here she would know?

  In the lobby, the pair of new doormen were busy with taxis and missed little Frannie slipping out.

  Safely on the sidewalk, she inhaled, which provoked another, racking, cough. The taste of the spoiled juice filled her throat and she spat into a tissue. Never mind, she consoled herself. Never mind. She was out here on the street and all in all, this day was starting well. There was no one she needed to fear anymore, and that was certainly something. Nothing she’d have to walk on eggshells for. No accommodations to make at all, because she and Fernanda were strong. They had no illusions nor debts nor human ties. Frannie smiled a tiny, old-lady smile as she hobbled down the street and wondered what her fellow pedestrians would think if they only knew. If they knew that this elderly person picking her way down this Sunday-morning sidewalk, this person fumbling with her pockets and buttons and purse, had skirmished with the devil and won. Or was going to win.

  Awesome, she thought.

  But how to start this penultimate day?

/>   Well, she didn’t need the park, she decided. It would remind her of Randi, so she couldn’t begin there. She’d go antiquing, instead, she thought. A perennial source of joy in her lives, an obsession, but blessing her whole life long.

  “Blessing.” Frannie thought. Now there was a long-lost word.

  But she wouldn’t take a cab today, as Fernanda so often had. She wasn’t sure about her money and was afraid to spend on a cab. Did she even have any, actually, besides this timely $400? And where might it be if she did? What had happened to her money after all these years? This morning she’d seen that her credit cards had expired. Of course they had, although none of that mattered anymore, really. And yet because of it, she had two good reasons to take the bus to the neighborhood where her favorite thrift shops were. The other was a real plus, she thought wryly. As a senior, she’d only have to pay half fare. On her way to the nearest bus stop, she bought a tin of mints at a stationery store and broke one of her hundred-dollar bills.

  She didn’t notice until after she’d left the bus (carefully, very carefully) that only one of the stores she’d expected to visit today was still there. A dying business, antiques, she mused. Like her. Which meant this shop would have to suffice for her today, because maybe none of her other favorites were even still around, and besides, she didn’t know how long she could be on her feet. As she’d so often told the Stanley in her head, she’d never been this old before.

  She always felt energized by browsing through planters and teapots, nevertheless. She’d never known why and she no longer cared. On this day she was here to lose herself, to be distracted. From thoughts of André. Of Randi. Of The End.

  Frannie paused before the thrift shop’s professionally decorated window. An extremely romantic vignette: a rocking chair, a bookcase, a comfy dog bed next to the chair, a pair of wire-framed glasses on a Victorian walnut table like her old one in St. Louis. Some window dresser’s fantasy of a Dickensian old-age.

  Frannie winced, expending every last ounce of her strength to push open the door. Its buzzer alerted two volunteers. She nodded a pleasant hello to them both, then stood for a moment or two to scan the spacious, familiar main room. There was a back room as well, she had forgotten that, and plenty of art. The more attractive and salable things, the oils and watercolors, were on the walls for the most part, and as usual, she’d save these for last. Instead, she’d start small with the boxes and boxes of “art” that had been shoved unceremoniously underneath all the spindly maple chairs or propped up against nicked table legs. They’d be full of hopeless prints, she knew, and it wasn’t as if the volunteers might actually have overlooked something good – she was beyond caring about that now anyway – but because she considered these the “hors d’oeuvres.” And also, of course, because she had nothing to spend.

  Bending over (she could no longer kneel), Frannie was pleased to discover she was still able to flip fairly easily through the old, stitched homilies, the photographs of prints, charcoal sketches and chromos, all of them dreadful, all of them somehow comforting today. She was beginning to feel so at home here, doing this thing that she loved, and a kind of small happiness blossomed inside her to smoothe some of yesterday’s pain. When her back gave out at last and left her unable to bend, she selected three fat art books from a pile, clutched them to her chest and, ratcheting her body up, carried them to a small, tattered bench where she lost herself yet again, turning page after shiny page of the old and familiar: gorgeous Monets, Renoirs, Rembrandts, Picassos, Raphaels, Homers, Miros … Botticelli’s “Primavera.”

  She slammed the book shut and got up.

  Way over there, she thought she could see a glass counter containing promising tangles of … jewelry and silver, it looked like. Leaving the book on the seat, she made her slow way to another part of the store.

  And those small things kept her busy for a surprising amount of time, as did (it seemed like hours later), the many tables and bookshelves crammed with mostly awful bric-a-brac. And while that book had made her unhappy, she kind of thought she felt better now, although she still wasn’t ready to leave. She looked around for more to not-buy. Not the old clothes, though. Not only was she repelled by rack after rack of that tangy, unwashed funk, she knew these were dead people’s clothes. Dead people’s scarves and shoes and shirts. Dead people’s ill-fitting navy coats.

  That inevitable moment came, however, when the walls were all that remained, and so, wearied and about A4 on the pain scale achy, she began her circuit of the room. On those pegboards high and low, she found nothing even remotely of interest, until way over there in the dimly lit back room, she spotted a brown-varnished painting in a lavish gilt frame and headed toward it. Most likely, she was wrong, but still … Oh my God, that hopeful old thump of her heart! It took her by surprise. There was life in the old girl yet! And as usual – clichés. Frannie grinned at herself and gave Fernanda a poke as the crone and the erstwhile expert gingerly picked her way through all the sprung sofas and homemade quilts. When she arrived at last in the chilly back room, she maneuvered with difficulty close enough to determine, almost immediately that even through age-dimmed eyes, it was certainly a copy of a copy of a canal scene: something foisted on a gullible tourist by a bad Venetian forger.

  But oh, Frannie felt sorry for its former owners all of a sudden. They’d been taken in. And perhaps their heirs had been counting on the value of this picture: had taken it to Berger’s – as she herself had done – had heard Fernanda’s disappointing opinion (yes, it might have been Fernanda in that tiny room), and had wound up, after a heated family argument, bringing it here. Although … good God, what if it was real and she’d missed it? What if it actually was a “find”? She got right up close to peer at the painting – her nose nearly touching the canvas – and sincerely wished she had glasses in her purse. But Fernanda didn’t need glasses, of course. And Fernanda wouldn’t be wrong. And besides, Frannie thought, what would she even do with a “find” today? Drop it off at Marcia’s building, perhaps? Maybe with a windfall, she could scare up Mr. Nice.

  All of a sudden, she felt incredibly weary. She needed to sit. Have some tea. She was just coming out of the dingy back room when her eye was caught by a really striking picture. A picture she’d somehow missed.

  She moved nearer.

  It was wonderful, in fact. Fifth Avenue on a winter’s day, big flurries of fat snow almost obscuring sidewalks filled with pedestrians, all of them hunched against the wind. Above all this, above the vintage cars and the crowds and the buses lining the street, brilliant flags snapped and waved in icy, wintry skies.

  And that’s when she saw the hotel: the hotel where they’d bought her lovely ring. She looked at the ring on her hand. Dizziness overcame her then and, stepping reflexively back, Frannie felt her hip hit the sharp corner of a low chest behind her. She groaned aloud, causing the volunteers to hurry toward her, concerned.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” the younger woman asked. “Do you need an ambulance?”

  An ambulance? For a bruise? It was a bruise, that was all.

  They thought she was old.

  “No, no. I think I’m fine. Just a stitch in my side. If I can sit for a second, I’ll be fine.”

  “There’s a comfortable seat over there.” The volunteer pointed out a nearby loveseat.

  “If you don’t mind,” Frannie replied, hiding genuine pain, “I’ll go sit in the front room.”

  Away from the picture.

  Solicitously, each of them holding an elbow, the women helped her to the front of the store and settled her in a giant wing chair. The fabric on its arms had latticed, like a runner in a nylon stocking. Nylons, she thought. Is nylon still made?

  “Are you sure you don’t want us to dial 911? You’re looking awfully pale, dear.”

  Dear. Oh, she wasn’t anyone’s “dear.” And an ambulance? They just didn’t want to be responsible for this “dear” old person dying on them. And Frannie supposed that they couldn’t be blamed.
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  “Please don’t,” she replied. “Don’t bother yourselves. I’m feeling better already,”

  But she wasn’t, really, and as soon as she could stand, she would leave. She was suddenly hating this shop.

  A not-worth-thinking-about little set-back, Frannie reassured herself as she closed the thrift-shop door and stepped into a late-winter dusk that wound itself around her uncovered head and the scant Sunday traffic and down the so-unfamiliar streets. It should be almost Spring, she thought, but the world was still raw. And melancholy. So she needed something else she loved to do. Right now.

  A movie?

  An inspired idea!

  And really, she hadn’t been to a movie in so long. How she relished that community of darkness; the roundness of the two-hour tale; those poreless, perfect faces on the huge all-devouring screen. Oh, how she’d been missing that!

  So that’s just what she would do. Take herself down to one of those with-it places in the Village, some seedy little theater showing odd, old films. Anonymous and safe in the silvery dark, she could eat popcorn for dinner. Have an espresso, maybe. An oatmeal-raisin cookie for dessert. And stay through two whole showings, too. The way she’d done when she was small. She might even meet a man there.

  In the middle of the darkening street, that thought stopped Frannie cold.

  She was instantly bumped from behind by a woman on a phone.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” She plucked anxiously at Frannie’s sleeve, as Frannie, fighting for breath, tried to nod and gasp.

  “Oh, good. Listen, I’m really sorry. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Mutely, she nodded and summoned her brightest, politest smile. All yellow teeth, maybe, but enough of a smile, it seemed, that in dismissive relief, the woman and her phone strode on.

  But she’d been staggered by her mad, compulsive mind.

  Unbelievable! Here she was, getting ready to kill herself tomorrow, and she was still, STILL thinking of meeting a man! She wanted to sit on this sidewalk and weep. Or laugh.