Escape Artist
Page 15
Despite the discovery, Frana Lempke’s murder still remained a mystery.
Suddenly I thought of Jake Smuddie. High school footballers lingered after school in the auditorium, running in the hallways, up and down the stairs. We all did. I sat on those very steps leading up to August Schmidt’s storeroom when I worked on my part in A Scrap of Paper. Students often drifted up there for paintbrushes, for brooms, for…I stopped. Anyone could have spotted that panel, that latched door. But most would pay it no mind. There was no reason to. No one would think it a convenient hiding place. Again, my mind flashed to Jake Smuddie, an image of the brawny, tough boy with his amazing hands around Frana’s neck. God no! I recoiled. Who else? What former student, now grown into a man, inheritor of that secret knowledge of that panel, came back to use it to lure the hapless Frana? Or…a present student. Or…who?
Even before I turned onto North Street, I heard my father’s rich laughter. He was sitting with Gustave Timm who was telling him some anecdote, his hands flapping like wild birds. My father leaned in, enjoying it. I was happy. So many afternoons I dropped back home to check on my father, only to find Gustave Timm and Jacob Ferber sitting next to each other in the parlor or on the porch, the two men huddled together, Gustave puffing on a Golden Night cigarette. He’d met my father last spring when I brought my family to the theater, my desperate attempt to connect him to something. How deeply he’d once loved the theater! But he sat stiffly throughout the evening. Unable to view the actors onstage, baffled by the laughter from the audience, he got rattled. We left at intermission, and Gustave Timm, standing in front of his theater, had offered to escort my father home. The afternoon visits began, the two men yammering on and on about politics and Appleton and even, as I once overheard, the outlandish price of coffee. Gustave confided his dislike—his nagging fear—of Cyrus P. Powell, who owned the Lyceum and was thus his boss. Once I’d heard him say, “I was brought up to respect authority, especially one’s employer, but the man always seems to find fault with me. He’s always checking on me. I turn around and he’s there.” He sounded like a whiny child, freshly reprimanded. “I fear Homer speaks against me.”
Gustave Tim spotted me. “Your reportorial daughter has returned home.” He waved a welcome.
“Hey, Bill.”
“Hey, Pete.”
I drew up a chair and told them about Houdini at the high school, filling the account with enough drama to impress Gustave as well as entertain my father.
Listening, my father shook his head. “The sad tale continues.”
Gustave joined in. “Tragic. She was just a child, such a misguided young girl.”
“You knew her?” I asked.
Gustave shook his head. “No. But she wandered into the theater some afternoons with one of her friends, another girl. I thought that they were sisters but…”
“Kathe Schmidt?”
“I don’t remember her name, the other one. She fidgeted, but kept her mouth shut. Frana did all the talking. She’d show up during rehearsals after school was dismissed and announce that she wanted to be an actress. She plagued the visiting artists till they ran from her or complained to me. She’d ask for an autograph, then beg to be in the show.” He shrugged. “Over and over, the same pleading, yet grandly, like she was already on the stage.” His smile was wistful. “It was sad.”
“Why?”
“She thought prettiness made you an actress.”
Sharply, from me, “It certainly helps.”
Gustave disagreed. “Only in vaudeville revues. One time I asked her what she knew about being an actress, and she had nothing to say. It was the idea of fame and money, the allure of Broadway, that propelled her. She wanted to hear stories about Broadway. I told her I’d never been there. She found that strange. Like, how can you manage a theater and not have been to New York? Lord, when she went on and on, her friend rolled her eyes and grimaced. She thought it was funny.”
“What did you tell her?” my father asked.
Gustave considered. “She wanted to act at the Lyceum. I told her that we mount shows with traveling companies of professional players who bring their shows to us. We don’t put on local shows. I’m not a director—I’m a theater manager. I know the business, not the plays. We get Joseph Jefferson and Lillian Russell and the Weber Brothers, popular acts that people want to see.”
“How did she take that?”
“Not well. The last time she was there, just before a dress rehearsal—the two of them, that is—I told her to stop pestering us. Quit loitering outside, approaching the actors, bothering them. She followed William McCreary, and he was not happy. He told me she trailed him to the Sherman House, went on about joining his company when they went to New York. He wanted to call the police on her, and he expressed his concern to Cyrus P. Powell, who spoke to me about it. Harshly, I might add, warning me to shoo such pests away. I gather Powell wrote a letter to Frana’s father, but I heard that from Homer. What good did it do? She drove Mary Allibone crazy, and I was ready to call the police. But in the lobby I put my foot down. She got angry. What did I know about theater, she yelled. I was a mediocre backwater manager. She’d leave and come back to Appleton a star, she said. It was a little tiresome, but she was young, naïve and, well…”
“Pretty?” I suggested.
He looked at me, squinted his eyes. “I was going to say…sad.”
“That, too.” My father turned toward me. Disapproving.
“But then I said the wrong thing. I said she could be hired, summers, as an usherette. We use three or four young people each summer. Ryan High school girls. Most like it, but…”
“The wrong thing?”
“She burst into tears. It was a little scary, frankly, and her friend had to take her by the arm. ‘I’m not an usherette,’ she yelled. ‘I’m an actress. Look at me. I’m beautiful.’”
In the quiet, my father said, “Was she beautiful?”
Both Gustave and I looked at the blind man. A rasp thickened Gustave’s voice. “Yes, she was pretty. There are thousands like her. But she didn’t have that…well, spark. A Lillian Russell steps on stage, beautiful, but there’s something else. A Mary Allibone. A Sophie Toomer. An electric charge that shoots over the orchestra and audience.”
My father spoke. “She was a little girl. Maybe she’d acquire it.”
Gustave weighed his words carefully. “I think no. You need to be born with it. The sad little girl was pretty. That’s all. That’s not enough.” His eyes darkened. “Her friend kept saying ‘Let’s leave’ in a snippy voice. Frana babbled about a friend who had a place in New York, across the street from a theater—but that made no sense. Luckily, Mildred stopped in with her mother, and the two women calmed her down, even drove the girls home in their carriage. Mildred has little patience with such nonsense. An iron will, Mildred has. Comes from being in charge of so many books, I guess.” He beamed.
“Miss Dunne knew Frana from the high school.”
“She never liked her, she told me. I guess she talked in the library.” He flashed that winning smile. “A crime against nature. Mildred complained that Frana would step into the library, her laughter already covering the room. Frana needed to be…seen. Admired. Mildred thought her desperately lonely but, well, Mildred has little patience with lost souls.” He smiled. ”She believes you set your sights on a future and that’s where you’ll end up.”
I interrupted. “Well, so did Frana. She had a dream of a future.”
Gustave clicked his tongue. “The difference is that Mildred is a disciplined woman—strong—and Frana seemed to me an idle dreamer. Let me just say that I was happy that Mildred and her mother were at the theater that day. Mary Allibone looked at me as if to say—what kind of place do you have here?”
I rolled my tongue into my cheek. “Did you tell this to Chief Stone?”
“Of course. For what it’s worth.”
“A place in New York, across from the theater,” I echoed.
Gustave
Timm shrugged and made ready to leave, saying he had to meet his brother Homer for supper at the Sherman House. “It’s an obligation I have a couple times a week.” He made it sound onerous. “Mildred thinks Homer demands too much of my time. She thinks he controls me—that I’m too passive.”
I was curious. “You know, Mr. Timm, when you arrived a couple years back, no one thought you were brothers. You don’t look alike…”
“Of course we do. He’s older by a decade, yes. And a tad heavier, and darker complexioned, but we both take after our mother—prominent chin, big eyes, and”—he laughed—“the floppy ears we cover up with wild hair.”
My father said what I was thinking. “Perhaps it’s the personality. Your brother is very serious, while you…”
“It’s the nature of the profession. He deals with schoolchildren, day in, day out, and over the years he’s developed a severe exterior. Sometimes I think he’s forgotten how to laugh at things. When you run a theater where half of your shows are rollicking, roustabout comedy revues, and when actors miss performances, or when snowy nights keep Appleton home in front of the fireplace, well, you learn to laugh a lot.”
I remembered my conclusion that the brothers disliked each other. “You don’t live together?”
I sensed my father’s disapproval again. Edna, the inquisitor.
Gustave kept his smile but it thinned considerably. “It’s the same old story. Proximity breeds contempt. As boys, with a ten-year age difference, we fought tooth and nail. You know, we do love each other—he’s the one who recommended the job at the theater two years back—but we know better than to spend too much time together.”
Like Fannie and me, I thought: blood-curdling battles royal. Over the hem of a dress. Over the dropping of a saucepan. Over an innocent sarcastic barb from one sister to another.
“I keep expecting your brother to leave for the East to join his wife or for her and the children to return here.” I stopped, sensing a violation. My father was frowning.
A long silence. “Sophie may not be returning to Appleton. Homer begs her to, as she’s no longer in a sanitarium, of course, and he misses his boys. But she delays. She seems to enjoy a marriage of…distance. Each year Homer plans to tender his resignation, head East, and reunite. But each year Sophie…suggests he’d best stay here…” He stood. “I’m airing family laundry on the Ferber porch. Mildred says I talk too much.” His ready smile. “She says silence is a virtue. Spoken like a true librarian.” And he was off, tipping his hat and walking away.
After a while my father said, “They don’t like each other.”
“I know that.”
“But you have a way of intruding into people’s lives, Pete.”
“I’m curious, Bill.”
“You can’t stop asking questions.”
“I know.”
“Family business is private. There are secrets in every home.” A sloppy grin. “Remember that, Edna, when you write your books someday.”
A smile of my own. “I have to get back to the office.” I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
***
When I returned home that evening, Kathe Schmidt was in the backyard walloping the stairwell runner with a beater. From the kitchen I could hear her creaky, off-key voice:
Casey would dance with the strawberry blonde
And the band played on
He’d dance ‘cross the floor…
She didn’t know how the stanza ended because she repeated those same three lines and paused, mid-line, and then began again, as though she were a wind-up toy that malfunctioned. I thought I’d go mad. I wanted to scream: with the girl he adored. It was not singing but some labored keening, mindless and mechanical. Her thoughts were elsewhere, perhaps in a dark place.
Fannie, kneading dough for strudel, her hands and elbows coated with flour, simply raised her eyebrows when I pointed to the backyard. “Fannie,” I began, but my sister held up a powdery arm.
“No, stop. Leave her be.”
I wandered into the parlor where my father slumped in a chair, his head nodding as though to a song in his head. He roused as I walked in, said hello, though he did not to want to talk. I didn’t linger.
Heading up the stairs to rest before supper, I saw my mother enter the parlor and speak sharply to him, a low, cutting remark. “How can you sit in the same chair all day?”
I froze. I hated it when my mother carped at the helpless man. Herself a driven woman whose energy demanded movement, she had little patience with a husband whose blindness was only the last in a series of failures—from business and money to, well, marriage. Lamentably, she had seen him as ineffectual long before the blindness struck. She had little tolerance with his placid movement through life, his desire that the world be painted in soft rainbow pastels, with muted chamber music underscoring his inactive days. She balked at that. Cut from a different cloth, steel-ribbed, taut, indomitable, she wanted her daughters to be molded similarly. Jacob Ferber was willow, she was oak.
She’d had a bad day at My Store. I could always tell because she assailed her sitting, immobile husband. She couldn’t help herself.
“The bank manager stopped in today.” A cold voice. “Again. Money due.” A bitter laugh. “And I can’t even discuss it with you.” I saw her punch a pillow on the settee and shift an end table so it was just out of his reach. She mumbled as she disappeared into the kitchen, “Chicago.” I cringed. It was, I knew, a prayer. It seemed to be the word that let her survive these bleak moments. Salvation in Chicago, sheltered among her family. A number of times I’d heard my mother and Fannie whispering about the ultimate move to Chicago. I always filled in the missing words: when father dies. The store would be sold, the house and furniture sold…and Fannie would marry the shopkeeper there she’d flirted with for years, an earnest fellow everyone loved, though I thought him lackluster.
Where would I be? I often wondered as I eavesdropped. Would I be the unmarried sister tending to sniveling brats through windy Chicago winters?
Something had shifted in the Ferber household these past few months. My mother’s outbursts—her attacks—had long been volcanic. Her anger went on and on, thunderous, until the rafters shook. Fannie had inherited that anger and largely directed it at me. But lately my mother had become…quiet. Coldness replaced fury when she talked to my father. She had stepped backward and realized she didn’t have to care anymore.
Upstairs I lay on my bed, burying my face in a pillow. Outside Kathe Schmidt was singing those same three lines. There was no escape, I thought. None whatsoever. Madness creeps into this home from the very corners.
Later, I found myself alone in the kitchen with Kathe. Last time we’d fought, and I regretted that. This time I vowed to be silent and decent, two qualities I had trouble executing.
“How are you, Kathe?” I asked, quietly.
Kathe looked up from the potted chicken she was spicing. She looked ready to cry.
“What’s the matter?”
Kathe made a smacking noise with her lips, sighed. “Nothing.”
“Something’s the matter.”
“It’s mein vater.” In a sloppy blend of German and English, she described her suffering father. She sobbed like a sickly child. It was like watching a dumb farm animal caught in a trapper’s cruel leg iron, squirming and flailing—helpless before the randomness of life. Kathe cried that life at home was horrible; her father sat all the day long on a chair in the kitchen and faced an empty table, while her mother, a maddened hen, clucked around him. August Schmidt, I learned piecemeal, had lost the will to live: a desire never to return to his lowly job as janitor, surely; but more so, a nagging belief that there would be a sudden rapping on the front door and he’d be led away in irons—to be hanged by the state. August Schmidt would start to whimper and slip from his chair to the floor, slumped like an old dog, afraid of noise and sudden movement. Her mother moved like a ghost through the halls, whispering that the family would flee back to Germany.
“Kathe, your father did not kill Frana. You know that.”
“Do I?” That answer made me furious. I wanted to slap the stupid girl. “Yeah, I know that. But everyone thinks he’s guilty.”
“Not so, Kathe.” I kept the fury out of my voice. “Reasonable people don’t believe it…”
Kathe cut me off. “People look at me on the street. Like…like…” She trailed off. “People don’t talk to me.”
I understood something. “Like Jake Smuddie?”
Kathe pouted. “Yeah.”
“Well, Kathe, you accused Jake Smuddie of murder.”
“I did not,” Kathe was no longer sobbing.
“Sort of. You were angry with him.”
Hands on hips, she swung around. “Well, he left me, you know. Frana always came first. And ever since that day in the park he won’t see me.”
“But he didn’t kill Frana either.”
“Then who did?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Help me, Edna,” Kathe pleaded.
“Me? What can I do?”
Kathe’s tough façade disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “You know people. In town. Talk to them.” Her lips trembled. “I just want things to go back to where they were before. You know. Back then.”
“Kathe, for God’s sake, things can’t go back to where they were. Frana is dead.” I thought of Jake Smuddie, hidden in that park gazebo, searching for an escape from his father’s regimented world. “And you have to accept that Jake is gone from your world.”
Kathe flared up, drawing her cheeks in, a sudden gesture that reminded me of a squirrel gnawing on an acorn out back. “We’ll see.”
My Lord. For a simple girl she could run the gamut of emotions from weepiness to sullenness to anger to pouting…to desperation. And then optimism. Each level, I considered, having the depth of oilcloth.
“I don’t mean to offend you, Kathe. I’m just trying to make you see…”
“Oh, yes, you did,” she snarled. She threw back her head so that her fair hair caught the light “Of course you did.”