by Susan Shreve
“So I see.”
“They are for you to decorate. I’m not good at painting.”
He took several pots of paint out of the basket.
“I have a good surprise,” Zeke said, going to the sink, filling a pot with water to clean the brushes. “Aunt Estelle is leaving to go back to New York.”
“That’s very good news,” Franny replied.
“She said she has outstayed her welcome.”
“She’s right about that.”
Zeke climbed on the bed and scrunched in next to Franny.
“Mama and Aunt Estelle were having a fight about you.”
“What about me?” “About Italy.”
He reached into the pocket of his flannel-lined jeans and took out a yellow marshmallow in the shape of a chicken from the package of Easter treats.
“Mama says you need to go to Italy to have a good life and Aunt Estelle says it’s foolish to make you special and a stupidity for a girl your age to have fancy shoes and Mama said that you deserve fancy shoes and Daddy told Mama to calm down and that’s when Estelle said she’d overstayed her welcome.”
Franny was quiet, her back against the headboard, her legs crossed, her heart accelerating with a sudden flush of love for her mother, the way she used to feel about her when Margaret Hall was her best friend in all the world, her mother who had come again to Franny’s defense the way she had always done all of Franny’s life ever since she was born.
“That was extremely nice of Mama,” she said.
“Yes it was, and it’s very nice that Aunt Estelle is leaving for good. And also Daddy left the kitchen and said he had to go to work and Mama said, ‘On Easter Saturday you’re going to work?’ and Daddy said, ‘Kids get sick on Saturday just like every other day.’”
Zeke took the eggs out of the basket and put them on a towel.
“Can you help me paint the eggs now?”
“In a minute, Zekey.”
“You promised me about the eggs.”
“I will do the eggs with you,” she said, and together they painted the Easter eggs and took them downstairs and Franny made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and turned on the television.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at a party today for Boots’s birthday?” her mother asked.
“I said I couldn’t come.”
“Why did you say you couldn’t when you can?”
“I just don’t want to go,” Franny said, her feet on the coffee table, the sandwich in her lap.
Her mother slipped down beside her on the couch, put her feet up next to Franny’s, crossed her arms in that attitude she assumed when she wanted to talk about something important but didn’t know exactly how to begin.
“What’s going on with you, darling? You’ve been so, I don’t know, so negative.”
“I know,” Franny said, going over to the TV to turn up the volume. “I don’t know exactly why.”
That night, after hot dogs and baked beans and Maybe Tomorrow on at eight on NBC, Franny read “Astril” to Zeke who thought it was a little boring and didn’t like the donkey parents and wanted to read the chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh about Eeyore instead.
“ ‘Astril’ is a very good book, Zeke,” she said crossly as he trotted off to bed. “You’re just too young to understand it.”
By the time Astril was fourteen, it was no longer amusing to have donkey parents as it had been when she was younger and her friends had come over to rub the donkeys’ ears. Now Astril was embarrassed by her parents’ donkey ways and heartsick that they had no idea about the true and pure feelings of a fourteen-year-old human girl, so they treated her like a donkey child, kicking her in the buttocks with their back legs, serving up hay and corn for dinner, spitting at her through their donkey teeth when she complained about her life.
She wanted a human boyfriend and ordinary parents to introduce to her friends and a house that didn’t smell of hay and conversations at dinner that made her feel important as if she were the apple of their donkey eyes.
Alas for Astril Noggin, that was her fate and the only way she could escape it was to leave the Noggin house, maybe forever.
Franny finished writing “Astril” late, after her parents had gone upstairs to bed, the lights in the house out, Estelle on the telephone in the room next door speaking in Danish.
She was beginning to feel herself again, but not the old self of elementary school. It was as if she had lost touch with her best friend, and that friend who was herself, Franny/Francine Hall, had finally come home different than she’d been but also the same.
She put the notebook with “Astril” under her bed, took the letter from Signor Ferragamo out of her sweater drawer, wrote SORRY FOR OPENING THIS FIRST in ink across the open envelope, and stuck the letter under the door to her parents’ room.
Three
FLIGHT INTO THE FUTURE
Franny stood with her mother at the United Airlines ticket counter in the Cleveland airport. Beside her, leaning against her hip, Zeke was crying. In a chair on the edge of the seating area, Dr. Henry Hall was reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Franny couldn’t see his face.
“I think you’re maybe going to die,” Zeke said to no one in particular.
“We’ve no plans at all to die, my darling boy,” Margaret Hall said. “We’ll go to Florence for five days and then back to Easterbrook to you, my glorious child.”
“I actually don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go on this plane,” Zeke said. “It could rain.”
Margaret Hall knelt beside him, took his face in her hands, and whispered something in his ear.
“What did she say to you?” Franny asked Zeke later, walking with him to the newspaper store for bubble gum, which she was glad to have since she doubted there was any gum on the plane for the stopped-up ears her mother had warned her about.
“She told me not to make you worried or you wouldn’t go.”
“I’m going. I told all the people at school that I was going so I’m not going to change my mind now.”
On the Tuesday after Easter, Franny had arrived at school early, feeling better than she had since the day when she had tried on the silver shoes.
By second period, nearly everyone at Easterbrook High knew that Franny Hall was going to Florence, Italy, to meet Signor Ferragamo who was a shoemaker and would be making her new shoes.
People came up to her in the cafeteria and on the blacktop and at gym class. Even Mr. Hoagland, the principal, called her into his office to say how thrilling it was that Franny would be the first student at Easterbrook to travel to the continent.
Eleanor met her in front of the school waiting by a lamppost.
“I can’t believe you’re going to Italy and skipping school,” she said.
Eleanor looped her arm through Franny’s as if they were still friends.
“You never even mentioned it at our house on Easter Sunday.”
“The letter came the day before Easter but I didn’t know whether I’d be able to go.”
“And now you’ll get these regular shoes and you’ll just be normal, right? That’s what your mom told my mom.”
“I’ll have new shoes, regular shoes like every other girl in town,” she said.
Franny didn’t know about normal. Certainly Signor Ferragamo, however miraculous he was with shoes, couldn’t make her normal. Even a surgeon accustomed to remaking bones could not do that. But she hadn’t allowed herself to think about meeting Signor Ferragamo, only the trip to Italy, only the chance she now had at Easterbrook High to be noticed because she was skipping school to go on a romantic adventure.
But to imagine normal was too chancy.
They walked to Main Street.
“Want to get a soda?”
“I can’t,” Franny said. “We’ve got too much to do.” “I’ve been meaning to ask, are you still mad at me about Mikey?”
“I wasn’t mad about Mikey,” Franny said, slipping her hands into the pockets of her jeans.
Instead she turned left on Main away from the square and waved good-bye to Eleanor, a cheerful wave that she invented for the occasion.
Maybe someday she would have somebody in her life, a Mikey Houston or better. But she wasn’t going to hold her breath, as her father would say.
Heading home, she almost missed the turn on College Street, so busy picturing the next time she saw her cousin, Eleanor Hall.
It would be a Monday, the day after she got home from Italy with her new shoes like the penny loafers that Eleanor was wearing with knee socks and short corduroy skirts, the uniform of every other girl in high school.
Franny would meet Mikey Houston at the soda shop before school and they’d walk hand in hand up Main Street toward the high school when Eleanor turned the corner, coming from the other direction.
“Hiya.” Franny would wave to Eleanor, without stopping to talk.
And as they passed Eleanor on the street, Franny would kiss Mikey Houston on the lips.
Over and over, she played that scene in her mind, like a television commercial, always exactly the same.
Zeke had been inconsolable, his head down on his knees, sobbing into his woolen pants until the loudspeaker called out their United flight to New York City connecting at Idlewild Airport for Rome, stopping in Gander, Newfoundland, to refuel.
Zeke stood up then, wiped his eyes with his shirt, stuffed his small hands into the pockets of his pants, and said good-bye.
He didn’t even look at Franny when she kissed him and would not kiss his mother good-bye or wait with Dr. Henry Hall to see his family on the plane. He turned and headed in the direction of the parking lot.
“Will Zeke be okay?” Franny asked her mother.
“Of course,” Margaret Hall said. “He’ll be fine.”
But Franny had a sudden, unexpected misgiving as if without her, life in Easterbrook was at risk, especially for Zeke. Even Pickle’s cat life hung in the balance without Franny to watch over him.
In the plane, her seat belt fastened, her eyes fixed on the stewardess as she detailed the safety measures to be taken in the event of an emergency, Franny was suddenly weightless. The plane’s clattering propellers whirled into motion, and the plane sailed them down the runway and up into the gray Ohio sky. Below, the tiny houses and acres of fields spread like a toy village, and they disappeared under the clouds so that all Franny could see was white, white under the plane and over it, as if the life she’d left was really invisible and only she and her mother were real.
Dear Zeke, she wrote on the F-initial stationery she’d bought at Fuller’s just for the trip. I’m in New York City now, actually in the airport where I’ve met a little girl gypsy with her mother. It is the little girl’s job to go up to strangers with her big, sad eyes and beautiful curls and say to them in English (I don’t know what language gypsies speak), “Please can you give money. We have no food.”
Mama said “absolutely no” money for the gypsy girl and gave her a chilly look. But I took out a dollar and the little girl was all over me, stuck like a leech, and then the mother gypsy came and took my parse. The police said they could do nothing and I was wrong to give out money to the gypsies but luckily she only got the purse without my passport or money, which are in my backpack. We’re heading to Italy in about half an hour. I wish Mama would consider adopting this adorable girl so she could have a normal life. Perhaps you could mention it to Dad. I Love you forever and a day, FH
Dear Boots, Franny wrote, sitting on the hard seat in the airport at Gander, Newfoundland, where the plane was held for an undetermined amount of time until the weather cleared. I’m in Newfoundland and we’re stuck here because of storms. It’s strange. There’s nothing here. I feel as if we’ve landed on the moon. I’ll be in Rome tomorrow. Tell Mikey the Pope’s very busy but sends his best wishes to Mikey’s mom. I met someone from Florence on the plane from New York to Newfoundland, but he doesn’t speak English. I like to think he said we may go to the movies when I get to Florence but I’m not at all sure. He could have said anything and I wouldn’t know the difference. Love, Franny
Dear Eleanor,
The trip from Gander to Rome was horrible. The plane felt like a toy tossing and turning, sinking several feet down in a squish so I felt as if I’d left my stomach in the air. A lot of people threw up but I didn’t and nor did my mom. It became a matter of principle. Mama said, “If you throw up, you owe me dinner when we get to Florence.” And I said, “If you throw up, you owe me an Italian sweater.” When we landed in Rome, it was so foggy that we saw nothing until BOOM, we were on the ground with a bang and a shudder. I met one guy when we were in Gander. His name is Mario and he’s Italian and lives in Rome and had been in Cleveland Visiting colleges for next year because his aunt and uncle live in Cleveland. Italian guys our age are much more grown-up than the guys at Easterbrook. Hope you’re having fun with Mikey. See ya, Franny
Dear Zeke, Franny wrote in the train station after they had gone through customs in Rome and taken a taxicab to the train station and were waiting for the train to Florence. I love Rome. It’s very beautiful and big and Italian. I keep thinking about the gypsy girl and wishing we could bring her home. I’m having a wonderful time and missing you too. Love and hugs, F
If she were to write to her father next and tell him the truth about the trip to Florence, the absolute truth without any fabrications, she would have said she was scared almost to death after the wild ride from Gander to Rome and the gypsy girl and the pushing and shoving in the airport in Rome and the fight for the taxi and the Italians screaming in Italian and then more pushing and shoving in the station in Rome, everyone rushing to get somewhere, to knock someone out of line, racing to the train, throwing their luggage through the windows, climbing through the windows themselves, to get there first, to find a seat. It was crazy and Franny wasn’t at all sure she was going to make it back to Easterbrook alive.
She folded her letter to Zeke and put it in an envelope in her bag with the other letters, leaning against the back of the hard bench, waiting for the train to Florence. Margaret Hall was sitting next to her, her legs crossed, her slender hands loosely folded on her lap, her eyes closed, a tiny smile on her lips. She seemed to be sleeping, although when Franny touched her hand, touched the blue protruding vein on her mother’s hand, thinking as she did how vulnerable her mother seemed in the artificial lights of the station, she opened her eyes. “Almost,” she said. “Almost there.”
SIGNOR SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
Franny and her mother had a room that had been arranged by Signor Ferragamo at a pensione next to the Spedale degli Innocenti, which was a hospital for foundlings.
The pensione, built in 1445 around the same time as the foundling hospital, had been a private home but was now residential apartments built around a courtyard.
It was the hospital for foundlings that caught Franny’s attention, the first place she saw when the taxi from the train station dropped them off at the pensione.
“Foundlings?” she asked.
“Orphans,” her mother told her. “Abandoned babies used to be left between the figures of Mary and Joseph. I looked it up in the guidebook.”
“Because they were sick babies?”
“Maybe, or maybe the parents couldn’t afford to take care of them.”
There were round ceramic medallions made by Andrea della Robbia, each with a fat little baby in swaddling clothes against a bright blue background, and somehow these adorable infants were a solace to Franny so far away from home. A place for babies for hundreds of years. Even now she would find a measure of safety here.
Walking across the courtyard next door to the hospital, to check into their room on the second story of the pensione, Margaret slipped her hand in Franny’s, shyly, perhaps ex
pecting Franny to shake loose her hand.
“Are you getting to be glad you came?” she asked.
“Glad at least not to be in Easterbrook.”
“It’s pretty here, don’t you think? Just here in this lovely courtyard.”
“It’s pretty,” Franny agreed.
Their room was a bedroom with a shared bath in an apartment belonging to a young Italian and his wife. The family was called del Santo and according to Signor del Santo who spoke a little English, they had a nephew, Filippo, who lived with them and was an “arteest” and spoke English, and a little girl who was “six.”
“Six?” Margaret Hall asked.
“Seek,” Signor del Santo said, shaking his head.
“I think he means sick,” Franny said to her mother.
But neither the nephew, Filippo, nor the little girl seemed to be at the apartment when the Halls arrived.
Signor del Santo took their luggage to the bedroom, a spare simple room with a large window overlooking the courtyard. He indicated the bathroom across the hall.
“Only one,” he had said, pointing to them and then to himself. “You first.” He smiled.
Signora del Santo was a tall, slender woman, taller than her round sweet-faced husband, quiet, a little grim, but she was curious about Franny’s crippled leg.
“She’s staring at me,” Franny said to her mother as they climbed into bed the first night.
Margaret Hall shrugged.
“Some people are afraid of differences in others and maybe Signora del Santo is one of those people. I wouldn’t worry.”
Somehow she had expected a certain tolerance in Florence that she didn’t find in Easterbrook or Cleveland or Toledo or even New York City.
“I wish people would look at my face instead of my leg,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful face,” her mother said.
“But people’s eyes always wander straight to my leg.”
“That will change,” her mother said.
Franny didn’t disagree. She didn’t believe her mother, didn’t believe she would ever escape the stares of strangers, but sometimes it wasn’t worth it to object to Margaret Hall’s determined hope for things to be different.