by Susan Shreve
“I mean we have sodas together at the soda shop most every afternoon.”
“Nice.”
“You don’t mind, do you?”
Eleanor followed Franny through the door to the music room, crossing in front of the piano just as Miss Bloom was playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
“Mind what?”
“Mind that I’m with Mikey since he was the one you were dancing with and who knows?”
“I’m not in love with Mikey Houston if that’s what you’re asking.”
She climbed the steps of the small auditorium.
“He has pimples, the oozy kind,” she said.
“Franny Hall.” Miss Bloom stopped playing as Franny sat down next to Pixie Cooper, blonde, blue-eyed, perfect Pixie, the size of a small doll.
“We missed you,” Miss Bloom went on. “I’m hoping you’ll do a solo for the March concert.”
“I may be away,” Franny said.
“You can’t be away,” Miss Bloom said, moving her tiny little hands like a fan. “Where will you be? Everyone in town comes to the spring concert.”
“I may have to be in Florence,” Franny said.
“Ohio?” Miss Bloom sat down on the piano bench. “My aunt Ruby lives in Florence, Ohio.”
“Florence, Italy,” Franny said with a sudden rush of feeling.
Just to say I may have to be in Florence transformed the moment to possibility. Not that she would be there but that she could be. She could go to Florence and leave them all behind in the little town of Easterbrook, an ink dot on the map of Ohio, as her father would say.
Everyone in chorus turned around to look at Franny. Florence, Italy, they said, astonished as if it were as remote from Easterbrook as the planet Saturn or the moon.
“I am not happy about this, Franny,” Miss Bloom said in her little voice. “I was counting on you to sing with Kirk Salt and Sally Ann Fergusen. I’ve set up the program and am depending on you to sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ just like Judy Garland. Yours will be the only solo.” She shook her head, playing a chord on the piano for silence. “Okay, everyone …”
And she played the opening of “America the Beautiful.”
“One, two, three …” Miss Bloom called out.
“You upset her,” AJ whispered in Franny’s ear.
“How do you go to Italy?” Pixie asked.
“On a boat from New York.”
“How come you’re going?” Pixie asked.
“For fun,” Franny said as if it were perfectly normal to go to Florence, Italy, in the middle of the school year, to leave Easterbrook, Ohio, where nearly everyone who lived there, like Franny, had been born there and stayed until they died.
“What about school?” Pixie asked.
“I’ll just miss school,” Franny said.
She leaned back on the bench. Eleanor, sitting in the next row, was whispering to Belinda Rae. Kirk Salt came in late.
“Honest to God, you’re allowed to miss school to go to Italy?” Pixie asked.
“It’s sort of a business trip,” Franny said, a certain lightness flooding her body. “It hasn’t happened yet but I may be invited to go.”
“Ready,” Miss Bloom said, her small hands perched over the piano keys like so many birds. “O beautiful for spacious skies / For amber waves of grain / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain! / America! America! / God shed His grace on thee / And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea!”
“What’s going on with you?” Eleanor asked, following her cousin down the steps after the final bell at three o’clock. “Why did you say that about Mikey? It’s like you went to bed sweet and woke up in the morning mean.”
“Maybe you just don’t know me very well.”
“Of course I know you. We’re cousins!”
At South Street, Franny headed toward home.
“I thought you were coming to the soda shop with me?” Eleanor said.
“My aunt Estelle is here,” Franny said. “I can’t.”
Mean was good, Franny thought, walking up the steps to her house.
Don’t let friends like Eleanor walk all over you, her mother had said to her just a few weeks ago.
Margaret Hall kept notes for self-improvement stuck in the mirror over her dressing table. No cookies, she’d write. Read one book a week. Say NO to Henry at least once a day. And a big red circle with the new message Don’t buy more shoes.
Walking up the front steps to her porch, Franny thought of two notes to stick on her own bulletin board:
No presents for friendship.
Say what you think.
Estelle was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, her feet up on one of the chairs while Margaret made tea. They were speaking Danish. Franny loved it when they spoke Danish together although she didn’t understand what was said. But the strange and guttural sound of Danish in Easterbrook made her feel exotic by association.
“Hello, darling,” her mother said, making no mention of the fact that Franny was out of her bedroom and had gone to school, acting as if nothing whatever had happened in the last week, as though it was perfectly normal to see Franny come in the back door and kiss her aunt Estelle. “How was school?”
“Great,” Franny said, sitting across from Estelle wondering how it could be that her aunt was related by blood to Margaret Hall. She was dumpy and blonde with a reddish face almost exactly square and green eyes and no style whatsoever. It was as if she’d just arrived in her work clothes to clean the house.
“I thought you were spending the year in your room,” Estelle said. “A pity, I’d thought, a waste of opportunity. And here you are!”
“I had a good time in my room,” Franny said casually.
“What did you do all day?” Estelle asked, taking a sand cookie, passing the plate to Franny.
“I started to write a mystery called The Terror of the Missing Silver Shoes. It’s autobiographical except for a murder.”
Estelle shrugged.
“I like murder,” she said, “but I don’t like mysteries so don’t count on me to read it.”
Margaret put a teapot on the table and poured Franny a glass of milk.
“Estelle and I were just talking about my letter to Signor Ferragamo, the one you read this morning,” Margaret said, changing the subject.
“Totally nuts for your mother to think that Signor Ferragamo is going to make shoes for you, but it’s a cute idea and a good letter.”
“An okay letter,” Franny said.
“Margaret hasn’t even thought how you’ll get to Italy in the middle of the winter or how much it will cost. A fortune, I assume,” Estelle said. “Does Henry have a fortune, Margaret?”
“We’re actually pretty poor,” Franny said, slipping out of her boots, tucking her feet under her. “In the letter Margaret wrote to Signor Ferragamo, she says that we’re short on money.”
“I said not wealthy,” Margaret said. “I didn’t say poor.”
“I was telling your mother that I doubted Signor Ferragamo reads English.”
“Maybe he doesn’t read English, Estelle,” Margaret said. “But he did live in Hollywood for a long time before he moved back to Italy and they speak English in Hollywood.”
She slipped a cigarette out of the pack and pushed it across the table for her sister.
“I was hoping you’d know of a translator from English to Italian in New York so at least we can send Ferragamo the letter in Italian.”
“Perhaps I can find someone,” Estelle said, lighting the cigarette. “I actually know an Italian professor who teaches at Columbia University.”
“Perfect,” Margaret said. “I want to give us every chance.”
“I may not be able to go to Italy,” Franny said. “I’ve been asked to sing a solo in the spring concert.”
“You may not be invited to go to Italy, so it doesn’t matter what you may or may not do when you have nothing to decide,” Estelle said.
“We can go after spring vacation if you’ve got a solo, darling,” Margaret was saying when the telephone rang.
Aunt Gabbie, pronounced Ont not Ant, as Franny had been instructed to say, had called about Franny.
“Hello,” Margaret said. “Yes, of course, Gabbie. I’m here in the kitchen, not working. Yes.” Margaret nodded, rolling her eyes, as she listened to Gabriela speaking in her high soprano whine that everyone could hear across the room.
“Franny did have pain in the area of her appendix, Gabbie,” she said, pausing to listen. “Of course I’m not lying. Why would I lie to you? Why would I lie at all? The pain just wasn’t acute enough to warrant going to the hospital.” Margaret pulled the phone cord and sat back down at the kitchen table. “Excuse me, Gabriela, but my sister, Estelle, is here from New York City so I need to ring off and call you back later.”
“Dreadful woman,” Estelle said. “In Denmark we execute women like that.”
But Gabbie was still talking.
“No, no, no,” Margaret interrupted. “That’s not the case. The toilet paper incident was just an incident. Not a crushing psychological blow, Gabriela, honestly.” She took a deep breath. “I must ring off now.”
And she replaced the receiver on the hook.
“Why did you say I had appendicitis in the first place?” Franny asked. “Were you protecting me by lying?”
“A white lie,” Margaret said. “I suppose I didn’t want Gabbie to think you were fragile.”
“I’m not fragile,” Franny said crossly. “I stayed home from school because I wanted to stay home.”
“I didn’t want a fuss made about the toilet paper, darling, and Gabriela is such a busybody.”
“Well, there is a fuss,” Franny said, glad for a reason to storm out the kitchen door in front of Estelle, forgetting her coat, crossing the garden around to the front of the house to look out for Zeke, who would be coming home after tutoring in arithmetic.
She headed past the church to South Street where Zeke would be walking, suddenly desperate to see her little brother, just as he rounded the corner walking in her direction.
“Frannnnny,” he called out and ran to her, flinging his arms around her waist. “You’re out of your room. You’re finally out of your room and I can see you again just like you used to be. Even your hair hasn’t gotten any longer.”
She lifted him in her arms, his skinny legs wrapped around her waist, his head resting in the V of her shoulder, tears gathering behind her eyes. Franny swallowed, determined not to cry, not now, not here in front of Zeke who would misunderstand her tears and think they were for sadness when they were tears of gratitude for the little boy, her brother, who had sat by her door day after day like a puppy, her very own puppy, loyal and true.
“You are my best friend in the world, Ezekiel S. Hall,” Franny said, tickling him under the arms.
The sisters were poring over the letter to Signor Ferragamo when Franny returned with Zeke, Estelle on the telephone reading the sentences slowly one at a time.
“She’s speaking to the Italian professor,” Margaret said, bubbling with her familiar excitement. “Oh, Franny, this could be so fun — he’s translating the letter for us.”
Franny took milk out of the fridge and cookies for Zeke.
“What is going to be fun?” Zeke asked, settling down at the table next to Estelle.
“Maybe Franny and I will go to Italy where Salvatore Ferragamo makes shoes for famous people, and maybe he will be making your sister a pair of lovely shoes.”
“And then she’ll be famous?” Zeke asked, breaking his peanut butter cookies into so many little pieces.
“Not exactly,” Franny said. “Then I’ll have new shoes.”
She grabbed a handful of cookies and headed up the stairs to her safe house where she sat on the bed with the lights out in her room, eating cookies in the early winter dark.
PLANS IN THE MAIL
Spring vacation was late that year, which was just as well since the weather for March was blustery and cold with more snow on the ground than there had been all winter. Sometimes the Halls went to Chicago for Easter to avoid the crowds at St. James Episcopal Church, staying at a hotel, ordering room service on Easter morning as a special treat. But this year Dr. Hall was too busy to leave. Terrance Flan, a boy in Zeke’s class, was in the hospital with leukemia, and Mikey Houston’s sister had been in an automobile accident on the way to Cleveland, breaking both of her legs.
“I can’t possibly leave with so many children in the hospital,” Dr. Hall told the family at dinner the week before Easter. “So Easter will be at our house with dyed eggs and rabbits and roasted lamb.”
“I want to go to Chicago and have room service and television,” Zeke said.
“Sorry, Zeke,” Dr. Hall said. “I take care of my flock.
That’s the deal.”
“What flock?” Zeke asked.
“The children of Easterbrook are my flock.”
Later, after the dishes were done, the lights out in the kitchen, the family upstairs getting ready for bed, Zeke brought his copy of Winnie-the-Pooh into Franny’s bedroom for her to read to him.
“Daddy’s important in our town, isn’t he?” Zeke asked.
“I think he is,” Franny said, opening the first volume of Pooh to read again as she did almost every night. “A doctor is an important job.”
“That’s what I plan to be,” Zeke said. “And when I get to be a doctor, I’ll fix your foot and leg and stuff.” He scrunched under the covers and leaned against Franny’s arm.
“Thanks, Zeke, and then I won’t have to worry about the stupid high school dances.”
“I wonder why Daddy can’t fix you up.”
“I doubt I can be fixed or else he would have done it.”
“He would have,” Zeke said. “I know he would have fixed you ‘cause he’s our dad.”
Franny had never thought about her father as a real person the way she thought about her mother. He was her father who loved her, mostly loved her, and he was strict and strong and a kind of hero in Easterbrook because he took care of children. But she had never wondered about him, the way she did about her mother, imagining Margaret Hall as a little girl. She’d never studied pictures of her father when he was young, as she did of her mother, thinking what she might have been like growing up as a teenager in Denmark.
Until very recently, her father had not been interesting to Franny, not as a person beyond his role as her father. When she moved into her bedroom after the Valentine’s Dance, it had been the first time ever that her father had been angry at her. She could still hear him registering his displeasure, imagine him with narrowed eyes, his arms folded across his chest.
Once when she was younger, she had asked her mother What do you love about Daddy? since as far as Franny was concerned at the time, her mother was more exciting and beautiful to look at and warmhearted and interested in Franny than her father was.
“I love that he says what he thinks,” Margaret Hall had said. “And does what he believes in.”
“I guess that’s true,” Franny replied. “Sometimes I wish he’d keep what he thinks to himself.”
“But someone who tells you what he thinks is a person you can trust,” Margaret Hall had said.
“I suppose,” Franny had said, misunderstanding her father because he was often impatient and strict and severe. But lately, especially in the week she’d been alone in her room, she was beginning to understand the problems that come of being the person other people want you to be, as though it’s their decision, as though they have control, as Franny had done in elementary school. And as Margaret Hall sometimes did with her white lies.
Of all the people Franny knew, only her father never cared what other people thought of him.
After she finished reading the chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Zeke slipped off her bed, holding up his too-big pajama bottoms with one hand, the other wrapped around Pooh.
“Do you like Mama
and Daddy better than you did when you moved into your bedroom and locked the door?” he asked.
“Maybe and maybe not. I’ll tell you in the morning, Ezekiel, but tonight, I’m too tired for a serious conversation.”
But it wasn’t tiredness she felt. Something stranger, more unfamiliar in herself. Sometimes for no reason at all she was angry. It just came over her as if she were boiling water. And then the gas under the pot of water turned off and the anger was gone.
She stretched out on her bed on top of the covers in the dark, wondering why out of nowhere she got suddenly angry not just at her parents or at her cousin Eleanor Hall, but at most of the freshman class at Easterbrook.
It was as if a dark and furious creature, a restless stranger had slipped under her old familiar skin.
“You’re growing claws, Francine,” Aunt Estelle had said to her at breakfast that day.
And Estelle was right. Franny was at war.
She’d arrive at school in the morning, her body arched for combat, hoping for trouble, ready for a fight as if every conversation with her friends or former friends was an attack she needed to defend against.
Most days she trolled through the list of the people she didn’t like as if she were memorizing Latin verbs. Certainly she didn’t like Estelle or Aunt Gabbie or Gabbie’s husband, Uncle Tom Hall, or even their dog, Heather, who was a yappy cocker spaniel.
The only safe person in her life was Zeke and he wasn’t even a full person. She thought of him as her devoted follower, the personal stuffed bear she hauled around under her arm.
Lying in the dark listening to the night sounds of the house, the traffic outside her window, choir practice letting out at the Episcopal church next door, she heard her mother’s high heels clicking down the hall from Zeke’s room to her room. There was a knock on the door and her mother opened it without an invitation.
The light from the hall spread over the covers of Franny’s bed and she flung her arm across her eyes to keep it out.
“Franny?”
“I’m trying to sleep.”
“What have you been saying to Zeke about us?” she asked.
“I don’t remember every single thing I say to Zeke,” Franny said. “Nothing terrible.”