The Lovely Shoes

by Susan Shreve

  Franny turned off the light beside her bed and climbed under the covers. It was early evening and dark, dark enough to go to bed, to fall asleep, to put this day with its growing sadness behind her. But she was a stubborn girl, born stubborn with a strong will, and had no intention of changing her plans, only of falling asleep so Thursday would be over and she could have tomorrow when she woke up.

  In the distance, she listened to the house noises like background music — her mother talking to Eleanor and then to Boots — under the weather Margaret Hall said again and again, to Mr. Hoagland, the principal, to her sister-in-law Gabbie, who was Eleanor’s mother, to Estelle although Estelle already knew the real story, even to Dr. Henry Hall when he called from the hospital to see if there had been any change. Franny was, as she had heard him say to his wife, a difficult child recently given to moods.

  Dr. Hall had an emergency call around nine o’clock. He called to Margaret, already upstairs reading with Zeke, that he was off to the emergency room and it could be a long night.

  In the bedroom next to hers, Zeke was begging his mother not to turn off the light, to stay with him, that he was afraid.

  “Why are you afraid, Zekey?” Margaret Hall asked.

  “Everything is different.”

  “Everything is the same, darling.”

  “It’s not the same,” Zeke said. “Franny won’t come out of her room and she told me I might never get to see her again.”

  Margaret must have whispered some sweetness to Zeke because he stopped talking and then Franny heard her mother’s high heels travel across the hardwood floor and down the corridor to her own room.

  She turned over on her side and squished her pillow around her face, burrowing in it.

  Poor Zeke. Perhaps she ought to tell him that of course they would see each other again. She didn’t know when that would be. But not forever.

  It pleased her to know that she was so important to Zeke that he was afraid to go to sleep at night. She needed to write him a reassuring letter to let him know that in spite of the failure of their parents, he was still her brother — a Dear Ezekiel, You are the best brother in Easterbrook kind of letter.

  Franny had almost fallen asleep, the light still on beside her bed, her writing notebook on her stomach, when she heard her former mother’s footsteps again and the rustle of paper underneath her door. She waited until Margaret had gone back to her own bedroom, then she opened the door so her cat, Pickle, could sleep on the foot of her bed, and closed it, tiptoeing across the floor with the piece of paper her mother had pushed under the door.

  Dear Francine, the letter began.

  I HAVE A PLAN.

  Yr. former mother, Margaret Hall

  Two

  A DIFFERENT TOMORROW

  Franny left her room for the first time eight days after the Valentine’s Dance. It was a Monday morning, early, just after her father had driven Zeke to school on his way to the hospital and her mother had left for the Cleveland airport to pick up Aunt Estelle, who would be spending the last week of February with them.

  Franny was alone in the house. She walked barefoot in her pajamas through the rooms, carrying a discontented Pickle under her arm, checking her parents’ bedroom, her mother’s office, her father’s study piled with books and papers, pictures that he’d never got around to hanging of his children, his wife, his brother as a boy, all leaning against the wall, Zeke’s bedroom, the bed crowded with stuffed animals. Nothing had changed since she had gone into retreat. The house even smelled of toast and coffee as it had every morning of her life.

  She had gone to bed the night before as usual with a hot ball of temper like fever in her head and awakened feeling actually well, as if she were recovering from a bad case of the flu. During the night while she was sleeping, the sickness had lifted and her body turned a corner on its way to health.

  As usual, Margaret Hall had left breakfast on a tray outside her room, which Franny took downstairs and ate at the table in the kitchen. On the tray, her mother had put a note saying she’d be back with Aunt Estelle by eleven and maybe Franny would come downstairs to see her aunt. She put her dishes in the sink and dropped the note in a wastebasket.

  Dear Zeke, she had written the night before. I am not looking forward to the visit of your aunt Estelle tomorrow. Please explain to her that I have divorced the Hall family, except you, of course. Forever and ever, Franny

  Franny liked the sound of the word divorce. Leah Penelton’s parents were divorced and so was Miss Jones who taught second grade, and occasionally her father expressed a wish that his older brother, Eleanor’s father, would divorce Eleanor’s ill-tempered mother, Gabriela.

  It never occurred to her that her parents would divorce, even when they fought. Even when her father stormed out of the house or her mother said in a stage whisper to her father, I could always return to Denmark with the children. They were married and loved each other and that was that.

  But it had occurred to her in the last week that she could divorce her family, simply call herself Franny or Francine, no longer a Hall, but a free-floating, unattached girl who could make such a decision without a transfusion of new blood.

  When it came to family, blood was her father’s favorite word. Blood is thicker than water, he would say about his own family. We have to stick together through thick and thin.

  When Franny was younger, she wondered what he meant by thick and thin and whether blood was really thicker than water. Were these things her father knew because he was a doctor? But she never asked him because his answers would be too long and scientific and she was, besides, a little afraid of him, although her mother had insisted that she was the apple of his eye.

  Since Franny moved into her bedroom, her parents had been fighting about her. She could hear their arguments even with the doors closed. She had never worried about her parents’ marriage the way Eleanor did about her parents’. They loved each other, especially her father loved her mother and thought she was the most beautiful woman in Ohio, maybe anywhere. But they had almost never fought. If Margaret Hall was upset about something, she kept it to herself.

  It pleased Franny, these arguments about her.

  “Oh Henry,” her mother would say. “Poor Franny is brokenhearted.”

  “She is not brokenhearted,” Dr. Hall said loud enough that Franny could imagine Zeke putting a pillow over his head to shut out the sound of Dr. Hall’s voice, worried tears gathering in Ezekiel’s eyes.

  “Franny is difficult on the way to intolerable,” he said. “Stop indulging her.”

  “She’s good, Henry. You’ve always said yourself she’s good as gold.”

  “Get a grip, Margaret,” her father would say with the full resonance of his large voice. “Good is not necessarily good for Franny. She needs to speak up for herself instead of lurking behind her bedroom door feeling sorry for herself.”

  “Get a grip, Franny,” he said as he passed Franny’s door on his way to the hospital that morning.

  And he bounded down the stairs as if he were hammering each step, hoping to make the house collapse on them all.

  All week, she had sat in bed at night after dinner, after Zeke was tucked in and her parents were in their own bedroom with the door ajar, and listened to them fight.

  Poor darling Franny, her mother would say.

  Poor darling Franny, Franny thought to herself, beginning to hate the thought of it, the sound of it, the word poor assigned to her name.

  Over the last weekend in the solitude of her bedroom, she was beginning to feel a kind of internal metamorphosis taking place, as if she were in the process of becoming someone different from the girl she’d been in elementary school, the sweet, accommodating, agreeable girl everybody had loved and taken for granted.

  Poor darling Franny was not the girl she wished to be.

  The night before, very late after the argument between her parents had ended and the house was quiet, Margaret Hall had slipped a letter under the door.

>   Dear Signor Salvatore Ferragamo, the letter dated 22 February 1956 began:

  I was pleased to read in the American magazine called Vogue about your astonishing career and have always admired the beauty of your shoes. But I was surprised and touched to discover that you came by making shoes as a result of an accident that affected your walking.

  I have such a dilemma with my treasured daughter Franny, who was born with crippled feet and therefore cannot be a comfortable part of the merriment and romance that comes of being a young, young woman. She wears heavy orthopedic shoes with a high lift on one shoe and her feet are terribly, painfully crippled. It would be an honor and a privilege if you might consider making a last for Franny’s feet so that she could have your beautiful shoes to go to dances without embarrassment.

  I am Danish, married to an American physician and we live in a very small town in the middle of this vast country. We are certainly not wealthy like the clientele pictured with you in Vogue magazine, but I would do anything in my power for my daughter’s happiness.

  Yours truly, Margaret Groener Hall

  Franny folded the letter and put it in the drawer with the Juicy Fruit chewing gum and Milky Way bars that Zeke had bought with his own allowance money at Grace’s Variety. Then she climbed in bed and closed her eyes but couldn’t sleep. At first it was the light from the top of St. James’s steeple keeping her awake and then the sound of the wind cracking the frozen branches on the trees outside her window. And then streaming through her brain was the letter her mother had written to Ferragamo.

  What if this shoemaker answered her mother’s letter? What if he invited Franny to come to Italy? What if she went?

  As a slow sleep came over her, Franny imagined herself walking into first-period math class the next morning, taking her seat in the front of the class. She would be wearing her plaid skirt, kneesocks, and a crispy white blouse, her hair in a ponytail.

  “Hi, guys,” she’d say as if nothing whatever had happened at the Valentine’s Dance. “I probably should let you know that I’ll be away in Florence, Italy, for a while.”

  Which had at least the possibility of being true.

  Walking down College Street as the late February sun eased its ball of pale, pale light over the Ohio horizon, she felt triumphant to be leaving without her parents’ knowledge, to have missed five days of school without the excuse of an illness, to be in charge of her own life.

  There was nothing at all that anyone could make her do. Not at school and not at home.

  At Scioto Street, Franny turned toward the square in the center of town, stopping at the soda shop for a double-dip chocolate ice-cream cone.

  “Ice cream so early in the morning?” Mr. Litey asked, scooping a ball of chocolate into a wafer cone.

  Franny pushed her quarters across the counter.

  “Aren’t you late for school?” he asked.

  “I am,” she said without explanation.

  She took the cone, wrapped the wafer in a napkin, and walked the three blocks to the high school slowly so she could finish her ice cream.

  She had not planned this day. She had no story formed for facing her classmates at Easterbrook. Or seeing Mikey Houston or Kirk Salt or Eleanor or Boots.

  But in the days she had spent alone in her room, she had come to know that she would never again allow herself to be humiliated. Whatever it took to protect her dignity, she would do.

  Boots, who was sitting at the top of the high school steps, squealed.

  “Fraaaaanny!” she called. “Where have you been?”

  “At home in my bedroom,” Franny said, dropping down beside Boots.

  “In bed?”

  “Nope. Just in my bedroom. Living there,” she said. “What are you doing outside in the cold during math class?”

  “My mom’s picking me up for a dentist appointment.” She flung her arm around Franny’s shoulder. “How come you never called me?”

  Franny shrugged.

  “I just didn’t,” she said, which was the truth.

  “I kept trying to call you. Eleanor and I went over to your house and then your mom said you were really sick.”

  “I wasn’t really sick,” Franny said. “I was OFF school.”

  “OFF school?”

  “I didn’t want to be here.”

  “And now you’re ON school?”

  “Now I’m here by choice,” Franny said. “School is not a requirement as far as I know.”

  “It’s the law.”

  “Maybe in your house because you’re Catholic but not in mine.”

  “I think it’s the United States government law. I’ll ask my mom.”

  “I think I’m right,” Franny said.

  “I hope so,” Boots said. “I’m already sick of high school but my mom would drag me to school by my hair if I tried to stay home.”

  “She couldn’t,” Franny said. “That’s the point. You’re taller and stronger than she is and she couldn’t drag you seventeen blocks by your hair. She’d be arrested.” She finished her cone and pushed her hands in the pockets of her coat. “So what’s been going on?”

  “Nothing much,” Boots said. “The usual. I got in trouble about the dance because I was late and my mom says that’s kaput for dances.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Well, on Tuesday Bobby Mason broke his femur jumping off the roof of our garage and my dad is pretty furious. And also Eleanor’s going steady with Mikey Houston just like that. And something else which I forget.”

  Franny’s heart stopped.

  “Eleanor and Mikey Houston?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone on the phone including you,” Franny said, feeling her blood heat up, her face flush pink.

  “But Eleanor’s your cousin!”

  “I don’t keep track of everything Eleanor does in her life,” Franny said.

  Not that she had loved Mikey Houston anyway, she told herself. He was soft and pinky-skinned with pimples bigger than his dimples, something she hadn’t noticed until she danced with him. Probably his breath was skunky and she hadn’t noticed that either.

  But Eleanor Hall was not to be trusted — not in the way Franny trusted Boots, who would never speak behind her back to other friends or make fun of her walk or betray Franny’s secrets. Eleanor would do all of those things and had even stolen her red sweater with her initials F.H. for Francine Hall and stuffed it between her mattress and box springs. Not that Franny told anyone about the sweater or even confronted Eleanor. She didn’t want to lose her cousin’s friendship, counting on her father’s belief that blood is thicker than water.

  But maybe blood didn’t matter to Eleanor, who at the moment was burning to crispy toast in Franny’s ferocious mind.

  “I’ll see you later,” Franny called when Boots’s mother drove into the school parking lot. She pulled open the heavy door of the high school building, dropped her coat on the floor of her locker, and headed to math class.

  Eleanor was sitting in the back, pink-cheeked from winter cold, her curly hair piled up on the top of her head with a saucy green bow, her round kitten face scrunched up in a smile.

  “Hi, Franny, Franny, Franny,” she said in a stage whisper.

  Franny walked to the front of the class and took her seat next to AJ Waters. In the next desk, Mikey Houston was drawing a cartoon on a page of algebra problems.

  “Hello, Franny.” Mr. Eckard, the algebra teacher, spoke as if he were making an announcement so everyone could hear. “How very nice to have you back with us. Are you feeling better?”

  “I wasn’t sick.” Franny reached in her bag and took out a pencil and notebook. “I was absent.”

  “You were absent for a week as I’ve made note of in my grade book and I had word from your mother that you were sick.”

  “I wasn’t exactly sick,” she said, tearing a piece of lined paper out of her notebook.

  Dear Mikey, she wrote. Sorry I left you abruptly on th
e dance floor. I had to leave in a hurry as you probably know. Yours sincerely, Franny

  She handed the note to AJ to pass to Mikey who wrote on the back of it, handing the paper back to AJ.

  “Well,” Mr. Eckard replied, turning to write formulas on the blackboard. “Maybe your mother thought you were sick.”

  Hi, Franny. Your mom told the school that you were under the weather. Did you get sick at the dance? Mikey

  You know what happened to me at the dance, Franny wrote back. I wasn’t under the weather. I didn’t want to come to school and so I didn’t. Franny

  At least she should say something true.

  “Cool!” Mikey said when the bell for the end of class rang. “So your mom just let you stay at home?”

  “More or less,” Franny said. “She couldn’t exactly make me go to school.”

  “Let’s trade moms,” he said, heading out the door.

  “What did your mom mean by under the weather?” Eleanor asked after class, catching up with Franny who was walking down the corridor to chorus. “She told my mom that you had appendicitis.”

  “Well, it wasn’t appendicitis,” Franny said, wondering what her mother had really said. It was typical of Margaret Hall to be polite and careful and keep things to herself.

  “My mom says there was nothing wrong with you and it was probably because of the toilet paper coming out of your shoe like it did that made you stay at home.”

  Franny pushed through the door to the girls’ room, Eleanor following her to the next cubicle, talking over the wall between them.

  “I mean I would have been humiliated,” Eleanor said.

  “Your mother is incorrect about the toilet paper,” Franny said. “I was annoyed, not humiliated.”

  “So I guess you heard about Mikey Houston.” Eleanor adjusted the green bow in her hair in the mirror over the sink.

  “I heard you’re going steady.”