When Frances came finally to the bluff, she felt small. The cityscape loomed at her from the other side of the river. In the foreground, along the opposite bank, there were many structures of industry—cranes, cables, electrical towers, black skeletal constructions that were menacing to Frances, even in the daytime.
Frances peered over the bluff and called down to the trails, but her voice was lost in the river, and Jimmy didn’t answer. She suspected he’d taken the lower trails closest to the water where a bridge might be found. She descended steep stone steps and then made her way along the path beside the water. Next she chose a path that took her higher up to the middle ground. There she stopped and looked around her.
The bluffs overhead were built up with limestone walls to support the mill buildings on top. The numerous tunnels that pierced the upper walls, once used for drainage, were cracked and dry. A pair of pigeons fluttered out of one of these cavelike openings, and their racket startled her. She bent her head back to watch them. The sun behind them glared in her eyes so that her vision was shattered a moment with white specks. “Jimmy!” Where was he? She called again, her voice bouncing off the wall. She thought she heard something, but then it was lost. Then she was sure she had heard it. A small faint, “Hey!” He was above somewhere, but she couldn’t see him. She looked higher up to the sound and spotted him. Her stomach jumped when she saw how high he was.
He was balanced against the sky on an old iron girder that stretched out from the mouth of one of the upper caves to the protruding rock of another bluff. The girder looked so narrow that Jimmy appeared to be suspended in air. As she looked at him, the sun blinded her again, and she couldn’t bear it.
There wasn’t time to take the trail back to the steps, so she began to climb the rocks at the foot of the bluff. Her ears were full of her own breathing, and with each breath she would call out to herself, “That’s not a bridge. That’s not a bridge. That’s not a bridge.” The closer she came to Jimmy’s position, the more panicky she became, and her refrain turned to, “This is the bad thing. This is the bad thing.” But then she caught herself and changed it to, “No, it’s not. No, I won’t let it be. No, I won’t let you do it.” She was losing her breath when she finally reached the upper trail. She ran along the upper trail until she was below the cave.
Jimmy was still teetering on the girder. His back was to her, and he was bowed slightly, looking down. She didn’t call to him, afraid to startle him. Now she could see how he’d got there. He’d climbed down instead of up. There was even a sort of rock trail coming down from the high ground. A ledge jutted out from the wall in front of the archway of the cave. It was from this ledge that the girder was suspended.
It was necessary for Frances to climb the wall from below. It wasn’t far up now, but it took time for her to search out the proper footholds. Normally, she would have been frightened of such a climb, but today she was frightened for Jimmy. Today she was sure the bad luck was his. Once, her footing slipped on a rock, but her hand grips were strong enough to hold her.
When she climbed over the ledge, Jimmy was watching her from his perch.
“Hey, good going, Franny. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Frances gave him no reaction. She could see how rusty and decayed the girder was and understood how easily it could fall apart. She looked only briefly at the drop Jimmy was hanging over. He was above a small ravine full of rocks and other rusted beams that had fallen like this one would. Frances wanted to sound calm when she first spoke. She wanted not to be afraid. She thought perhaps she could change the bad luck if she wasn’t afraid.
Her stick still hung from her belt loops. She knew what she should do. “Jimmy, I want you to come back here.” She leaned out over the ravine. “I want you to hold on to this stick and cross back over here.”
“No way, Ray. The idea is to cross this bridge.”
Frances couldn’t keep her voice level. “Jimmy, please.”
He looked back at her, with challenge in his face. “And I say, Franny!” He began to bounce on the girder singing, “Franny, Franny, Franny.” He was teasing. Across the short expanse she could see the dance in his eyes. Then there was a change. A curtain began to close over the dance, and she knew it was starting to happen. Jimmy knew what was happening too. A shred of a second before his eyes went blank, she could see the terrible fear, the kind that she had never, never seen on his face before.
She was on the girder before he began to stumble. When he did begin to lose his balance, she shouted with a deep voice, a voice not her own, “Hold on to the bridge.”
Perhaps her words made him respond, or perhaps his own little body responded independently in that dawning moment before the seizure—that time between control and uncontrol. Something forced him to his knees, kept him from toppling over.
Frances straddled the girder and grabbed his belt. She stuck her stick through the belt and used it for a handle as she inched her way backward on the beam. She waited a little as he shuddered, and when he began to come to, she pulled him off the girder onto the ledge.
Groggy, but conscious now, Jimmy cried like a wounded soldier, all anguish and failure in something he didn’t understand. He cried like it was a new thing to cry.
She laid her body across his and was quiet.
Jimmy said in small chokes, “I wet it, Franny, I wet my uniform.” She felt the dampness too, but she kept herself from crying because she was the older one. She was the one who knew how these things could happen.
She nestled her face next to his and said, “That’s okay, Jimmy, we can change it when we get home.”
THE GATE HOUSE
Long before the sisters moved into the gate house, when I was very small, I would jump up on the car seat when we passed it and shout, “Look at the ship!” My father corrected me several different times with no effect. So finally one day he turned the car into the driveway of the gate house and passed under the archway to show me the cemetery. He took me out of the car, and we walked along the paths between the graves. After our walk he carried me up to the gate house and introduced me to the old caretaker who lived there. When we returned to the car, it seems I was disappointed and would not look out of the window for the remainder of the drive. My father was sorry then that he hadn’t let me carry on with my illusion a little longer.
I remember none of this story except for what my father has told me and the picture of a ship he bought me soon after. It hung on my bedroom wall for several years. This picture was meant to replace my lost idea of a ship. But the truth is it never made me happy. It was a picture of a ship alone in the half-light, rough sea all around it, and no land in sight. Because its beautiful sails strained forward in the wind, I wanted to know that it was going somewhere and would be there soon. Now I can see that ships are dreams, and there is no certainty they will take me where I need to go. There is only the possibility.
I’ve learned that life is not only a course set by choices, but that it is also subject to powers beyond choice. And none of us is exempt from this, as much as we would like to be. This is a disappointment, but it is also the beginning of a deeper life and deeper gifts, not the least being the gift of compassion. How we finally come to accept this is different for everyone, but one day we look back and we realize we do. I know for myself, though I wish I’d been wiser sooner, this acceptance only began when I met Clara and Connie.
Because of them I’ve come to love the gate house again. I can see that it does resemble a tall ship, the starboard side facing the graveyard and the port side facing the road. The archway attached to the house, which my father drove me through that first time, still remains the only entrance. Tall, pockmarked tombstones have settled unevenly into the ground, all leaning like plant life in one particular direction. I didn’t notice this until I returned to our parish school across the street as a teacher. But I find myself studying the cemetery now.
When the sun rises, the gate house falls back into the immediate shade of our church.
Both buildings support crosses. A stout stone cross atop our fatherly German church faces off the tall, mastlike cross attached to the highest point of the gate house. At sunset it is the gate house’s cross that casts the longest shadow.
I remember Clara as having dark, round eyes like a dolphin. Her thick glasses pulled them out and magnified them—the way they might look under water. There was something else, an intangible quality about her whole being, that was like a dolphin’s. She seemed prehistoric, belonging to a species that had survived many ages. Clara’s body was substantial, and the few times circumstances pressed me against her, she felt to me like bread, not doughy, but firm like baked bread.
Connie was as small and fidgety as a squirrel. She would zip from one place to another in a room, usually for no good reason. She packed away odds and ends in her apron pocket, many books of matches, pens, bunches of crumpled Kleenex. It was always hard for her to find the right thing when she needed it, because there was so much clutter for her to sort through. Finding a pen that worked meant first grabbing two others that didn’t. They looked too unalike to be sisters. Perhaps they were old lovers. It didn’t matter. It mattered that they needed to be together.
I first knew them when I was eighteen, the summer between high school and college. I was waitressing as many hours as I could at O’Donnel’s Tavern. It was a rite of passage for me to work at the tavern. An eighteen-year-old was old enough to drink in Wisconsin and so, too, old enough to serve drinks. Rusty O’Donnel, the owner and head barkeep, was a coleader with my father in the Cub Scouts. The autumn of my senior year our church held a Brat-fest in the parish parking lot to raise money for all the scouts. My father pulled O’Donnel over to the corn-roast booth, where I stood wrapped in an oversized, white institutional apron and huge asbestos mittens.
“Here’s my best chef,” he said, tipping my white paper hat over my eyes. “We would like two of your finest cobs.” I kept the hat over my eyes and felt around for a couple of cobs, then held them out blindly in my big mitts. After my father had pulled my cap back up, I smiled at Rusty O’Donnel, who was a handsome man. He liked that I was funny, I could tell that.
“She starts college next year,” my father said.
“Maybe she should work for me at the tavern next summer. She looks like a good worker.”
I blushed and shrugged my shoulders to show them I was pleased. We all discussed the arrangements for a few minutes until it was settled. And that’s how easy it was to get my first job. Everything used to be that easy.
O’Donnel called Clara “the big one” and Connie “the squirt.” He had them on to cook the Friday fish frys, and the weekly job supplemented the little money they were able to make cleaning houses. Half of St. Agnes’s parish and half of our neighborhood packed the frys. These were family dinners, the night when children’s voices and mothers’ voices mixed together with the gruffer voices, the regular voices. The wooden floor that groaned hollowly during the week lost its somberness to running feet on Friday. Families lined up in the bar waiting for a table to open. Mothers and fathers held their beers distractedly as they chatted with other parents. And the smallest children would scoop their hands into unattended mugs, bring the foam to their mouths, taste it, sneeze, laugh.
I learned how to turn my hips like a waitress, around tables, through crowds of people. Backward, I’d bump into the swinging kitchen door. Clara in the kitchen would say “Whoa, girl! You can’t go faster than the food can be ready.” Then she would pile an order on my tray, deliberately taking her time. When I became impatient and started grabbing things for myself, she would slap my wrists and narrow her eyes in mock fierceness. I tried hard to look like a good worker. If I knew Rusty or friends of my family were watching me, I would knit my brow and tap my pen against my tray as though I had a lot to think about. Usually I did. My head was full of the empty ketchup bottles that needed refilling, the highchair I’d forgotten to bring to the Kuzinskis’ table.
Though Clara herself received little recognition, her beer-batter fish became famous around the city. It was a recipe no one else seemed to know, and it gave O’Donnel’s a competitive advantage over the other fish frys in Milwaukee. Clara would soak the fish in baking soda and water to “freshen it up,” and then she would get to work on her beer batter. She was smart enough to keep the recipe a secret, even from me, whom she was good to in every other way. I would try to study her process, but she would confuse me by sending me off to fetch some unneeded ingredient or by blocking my view of the bowl with her big body at some crucial moment. Clara’s secret gave her a little power, if only to hold their jobs a few weeks past the time their drinking took over.
Connie made the coleslaw. It was an exhausting job grating cabbage after cabbage. Her dry, wiry hands were stained from the cabbage, and she complained that the job was “lousy.” But I suspected that she enjoyed the rhythmic work since she only complained before the job and after. When she was at it, she worked frenetically, nonstop. She hooked into each cabbage with a claw grip, pressing all her weight into the head against the grater. She would reduce thirty-six heads to a mountain of slaw on the table, and not until she had grated a dozen onions to mix with the pile would she stop to take her cigarette break. With her hands raw, and onion tears condensed around her eyes, she would lean against the opposite counter, blowing smoke, studying the pile of gratings as though it was some devil she had slaughtered. When I made a point of complimenting her endurance, Clara chimed in over her shoulder as she dipped her fish, “Connie’s a tough one, Connie knows how to hold up. Listen, darlin’, Connie wouldn’t be around if she didn’t know how to hold up.”
I learned about this “holding up” at the end of those Friday nights. At closing time O’Donnel would cajole his straggling customers to leave; then he would lock the doors and count his cash. After cleanup I was allowed one free beer and anything left in the kitchen to eat. I would join the “sisters” in their back booth, filled with their ashtrays, and their waning tumblers of Seagram and Seven. O’Donnel’s wife, Marge, called the booth “Seagram’s confessional.”
Clara hadn’t been married for long. Her husband drove a poultry truck from Occonomowoc to Chicago and back. He had met a woman on his run and made her pregnant; after this he stopped coming back.
She told me that Connie was pregnant once, but she miscarried after her husband pushed her over the coffee table. At the end of the night Connie would lift her glass, “Lord, bless us children every day, especially Friday, and if You still have time, wake me on Saturday.” Her arm was bony and branchlike holding that glass in the air. I couldn’t imagine her pregnant. Did she feel the infant squash in her stomach when she hit the table?
He beat her up after the bars were closed, so she started staying at Clara’s apartment on Friday nights. She called Friday nights his mean nights.
“On his mean nights I would pack my nightie, some crackers, and some beer and go over to Clara’s place above the library. It became so regular that he just started coming over there after the bars were closed. So Clara and I started going to the all-night Laundry-mat about midnight. We’d eat our crackers there and maybe sip some beer. We brought magazines. Sometimes I’d even wash Clara’s hair in the utility sink. He never found us there, but it didn’t matter; he just changed his mean nights around. It didn’t have anything to do with Friday, more to do with just needing to beat me up once a week.”
Connie would drag on her cigarette, thinking of these things as she talked, and with each piece of information revealed, she would blow the smoke far away from her face. She told her stories as though reading about someone else from the newspaper.
One night, however, she seemed upset. She pressed her little dry bangs down on her forehead, then pushed them back until they stood up like devil horns, then smoothed them flat again. “I don’t think about those times anymore.” She placed a new cigarette between her lips and pinched them together so that the unlit tip pointed upward. She fiddled with a match between he
r fingers, then her brow crossed, and her hand, detached as though it were not her own hand, moved to her mouth to take the cigarette away. At that moment I saw how her face could be different. The hardness was dissolved and replaced by a look of startled recognition, as if someone had just told her something she already knew, but that she had been hoping all along wasn’t true.
“I’ve been having that dream again, Clara.” She looked toward Clara, who looked back with expectation. “The one where I’m down at the park under the library in Occonomowoc. This time I’m fishing for minnows in the lagoon. I’m trying to scoop them up in a Dixie cup—you know, the way the kids do. It’s getting dark out, and it seems that I’m supposed to be catching these minnows for dinner. But it’s impossible, because my Dixie cup doesn’t have a bottom. So I try catching them with my hands, but they are so slippery and hard to see in the murky water. When the darkness is almost down and everything around has lost its color, I have that dread again that someone is coming to get me. I can hear his footsteps shaking the ground around me.”
Clara turned her dolphin eyes on Connie. “Am I in the dream?”
“No, you’re not.”
“How does it end?”
“I don’t know. I just hear the footsteps, and I’m looking out over the water.”
We three were quiet for a spell in the booth. Clara’s breaths, close to my face, were slow, heavy, drunken. Connie flicked her cigarette and rubbed her eyes. My elbow had been resting in a small puddle of drink all the time Connie had been talking. I felt if I made any move at all she would stop talking. When she was through, I wiped my sticky arm with a cocktail napkin. It frightened me to hear Connie talk about her life as though it were an ordinary matter of fact. Although her dream didn’t seem any more frightening than one of my own, I think I’d already come to expect that what people dreamed at night could often be scary, but this didn’t mean it was real, that it was something to actually be afraid of.
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