“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay.” That was the moment it occurred to her to wonder if perhaps all of this wasn’t complicated for him, too, and in ways she couldn’t imagine.
When they got back to the car, the others were poised for celebration. Good old Francis had finally done it. Even the other girls looked upon Ruth with respectful warmth, as if she’d now proven she would not hurt this gentle boy no one else wanted.
At Ruth’s insistence, Francis Statler took the wheel, and the others marked his triumph by making him lead the way to the Totem Pole, grandmaster of their small parade. Ruth squeezed next to Francis on the bench seat, their bodies combined into one shadow, but down in her lap, where no one else could see, Francis’s hand had gone limp.
At the Totem Pole, Francis ordered a burger, but he seemed distracted, and Ruth had to be the one to remind the waitress to bring his customary extra pickles. As the other boys squeezed his shoulders and mussed his hair and called him Casanova, Francis contorted his bendy straw into unrecognizable shapes. Stuffed beside him in the overcrowded booth, Ruth quietly sucked on a cherry-flavored ginger ale, a drink she loathed but had ordered anyway, feeling somehow it was what she deserved. With every sip, her tongue became more sharply preserved in the cloying, medicinal sweetness. And when the glass was empty, she realized she’d inadvertently erased every trace of Francis Statler’s kiss from her lips.
For the rest of the night, she clung to his side, smiling whenever he looked her way, but there were no more kisses. At eleven, Francis pulled up to the curb in front of Ruth’s house, the Edsel still running. With lowered eyes he wished her goodnight. Francis lived on Balmoral too, the biggest house in the neighborhood, an eight-bedroom colonial with presidential-looking columns and an English garden in the back. Ruth’s father passed the Statler mansion every morning on his way to work, never tiring of the view.
Ruth’s house had a circular drive, but Francis never used it. He seemed to prefer having a buffer of yard between him and her front door, as if he were afraid of falling within her father’s reach. She could have told him there was nothing to fear, that Ruth’s father worshipped the Statlers, that Francis himself could do no wrong. But that was something Francis could never know. Ruth let her fingers linger on the door handle, giving Francis one more chance to take the cherry from her lips, but his gaze would not budge from his lap.
The summer faded into fall, and fall quickly dissolved into winter. All at once, it seemed, the excursions to the club to swim and play tennis were replaced with parades downtown and skating at the pond at Palmer Park. A week before Christmas, Ruth and Donna took a bus downtown to buy presents for Francis and for Richard, Donna’s new boyfriend. The city had painted the bus in white and red stripes, like a candy cane, and the driver wore a matching vest. Ruth knew she was too old for such things, and she made a point of rolling her eyes at Donna as they boarded, but secretly the one time she loved to ride the bus was at Christmas, high above the snow and slush, watching the tinkling lights and laurels strung from all the buildings. Nothing made her more sentimental than Christmas, and Christmas at Hudson’s Department Store most of all.
Every year after Thanksgiving when she was a child, Ruth had gone with her mother to Hudson’s to do the Christmas shopping. At any other time, she would beg and plead to stay home, dreading the boredom and exhaustion, dragging bags up and down twenty-something stuffy floors. But at Christmas everything changed. Hudson’s became a place of infinite possibilities and endless riches magically transformed: a life-size diorama of carolers floating from the ceiling amid a dusting of snow; a frosty Cinderella descending an icy path to a twinkling carriage; holly wreaths and floating angels and chandeliers done up like ornaments. Ruth could remember being eight years old and sitting in her very own chair beside her mother in the Christmas card shop on the ninth floor, flipping through the catalogs, imagining the day when all this would be hers. And now it was. Ruth and Donna were women now. For the very first time, they were here to shop for men.
They got off the elevator on the second floor and strolled the disorienting racks of suits and ties and French-cuffed shirts. Ruth felt the salesmen watching her, preparing to come forward and offer assistance, and it made her feel powerful to have their attention. A tall, angular man with a jutting chin was the first to step into their path, and with a distracted, harried air borrowed from her mother, Ruth raised her nose in his direction and said, “Where might I find the Levi’s?”
With the help of Donna and the salesman and an embarrassed stock boy roughly Francis’s size, Ruth picked out a pair that looked as if they might fit, admiring each heavy seam, every shiny rivet. Afterward, the handle of the bag tingling in her fingers, she followed Donna down to the salon on the fourth floor.
Donna left the salon with a new compact, and together they went up to the thirteenth floor. At a table overlooking the river, they ordered Maurice salads and Coca-Cola, and while they ate, they talked of nothing. Nothing, at least, that Ruth would later be able to recall. She would have liked to think of the two of them, there on the cusp of adulthood, discussing what the future held, a world full of possibilities. Their last year of high school was nearly halfway finished, and what then? There was college and marriage. They must have discussed Richard, whether he would propose, and would he like the pebble-grain wallet Donna had chosen for him? In fact, in little more than a year, Donna would become Mrs. Richard Galt, and the two of them would buy a new brick rancher in Royal Oak.
But what about Ruth? Did Donna ask what might happen between her and Francis? If she did, how did Ruth respond? The relationship would end, of course. Everyone knew it would have to end. But Ruth herself could not yet see the end. She was too young to be able to see the end of anything. At eighteen she was less like a young version of her adult self than like some primitive ancestor. There would be many crude steps along the evolutionary path before she became what she was now. And it bewildered her still to look back at this young girl, so lacking in ambition, teenage years spent wanting nothing more than to be her own driver. And having achieved that simple goal with the help of Francis Statler, she found herself tapped out of ideas. There would be college, one wasted year of it in Ann Arbor. And there would be a marriage, almost two decades’ worth of unhappiness and frustration.
But then again, if she had then already possessed the notion to make something of herself, things might not have turned out half as well as they did. At eighteen, the best she could have hoped for was to be taught to type, and no one then wanted to employ a girl who thought she deserved better. Of course, no one did fifteen years later, either, when Ruth’s aspirations finally surfaced. But by then the two daughters she had loved and coddled had taught her patience, and her husband had taught her how to humor men less intelligent than herself.
But such change would not come to Ruth alone. Nor would it always come so slowly.
On July 23, 1967, when the children were four and six years old, the only city Ruth had ever really known would suddenly be set alight. Of course, there would be nothing sudden about it, except that neither Ruth nor anyone else she knew had seen it coming. But that didn’t mean the tinder hadn’t been sparking for years.
Even four decades later, she would remember the day vividly. It was early Sunday morning when the riot broke out. They heard murmurs on the radio of something happening miles away on Twelfth Street. Hours before dawn, police had raided an unlicensed bar, arresting eighty-something patrons, all of them black. In the hours since then, black people across the city had been expressing their anger with fire and bricks.
Having witnessed a few similar flare-ups years before, Ruth and Tom assumed that this one, too, would pass. They were living then not far from Palmer Woods, and at nine-thirty they left for church, their route taking them down Woodward, where they were alarmed to find the street already trashed, all those precious cars overturned like stones. Everything was on fire.
Later that day came reports of a fireman shot
dead by a rooftop sniper. The National Guard took up positions—terrified boys who had never seen anything like this. And then, at last, came the tanks and the infantry troops fresh from Vietnam. It took five days for the streets to clear.
And once the streets were cleared, they never really filled again.
Forty-three people died, most of them black. More than a thousand people were injured. The blacks called it a rebellion, claiming they were fighting back against police brutality and discrimination and all kinds of other iniquities, but it would be years before Ruth could understand what that meant, before she could feel anything other than anger. Only then would she come to see them as something more than a mob hell-bent on destruction.
Within a year, all of Ruth’s closest friends (the ones who had not gone already) left the city for the suburbs. For a while, the people she had known were replaced with others she didn’t. Black doctors and lawyers and executives moved into neighborhoods that had always been completely white. Ruth was ashamed sometimes to remember how much she and Tom fretted for their safety, for their prosperity, how they watched moving trucks through curtained windows, wondering where it all would lead. It didn’t take long to find out. At the time, they felt lucky to have gotten out when they did, when it was still possible to sell a house for something. There were only so many black doctors and lawyers and executives to go around. The city emptied faster than it could be filled. First one house at a time went empty, and then entire streets, and then entire blocks, and then entire neighborhoods, and eventually entire zip codes. And nothing would ever be the same again.
§
All that had happened long ago, to someone else, to someone that Ruth, at sixty-eight, truly felt she barely knew. As she looked out now over the river from the third floor of the HSI Building, it occurred to her that the eighteen-year-old girl who had left Francis Statler to stand alone by herself at the Belle Isle fountain would have been staring then at the very spot where she currently sat. Of course, the tower hadn’t been built then. That was a different city in 1958, the sort of city that could still afford to maintain a conservatory and an aquarium and a lavish fountain that shot water forty feet into the air.
Ruth had gone back to Belle Isle for the last time the previous fall, wanting to share the aquarium with her granddaughter before it was permanently closed. Her younger daughter had brought her family in from Connecticut for the weekend. Ruth and little Hannah found the island dead, the casino and the children’s zoo already shuttered. The shoreline roads she’d cruised as a girl were empty, the bushes overgrown, the sidewalks disintegrated. The parking lot in front of the fountain was barricaded, the water shut off. It was fall and overcast, and the leaves were off the trees, and on all the battered grass there wasn’t a single dog or child to be seen. Ruth felt as if she were the last cold war spy, sent to some vast, desolate place for an exchange of top secret microfilm. Even her favorite orchids in the conservatory weren’t enough to mask how far the place had fallen. The bark of the palm trees had been carved up with initials. Squares of plywood covered the broken panes of greenhouse glass.
Hannah kept saying, “Grandma, I think we should go.”
“It didn’t used to be like this,” Ruth tried to explain. But eyes can’t be talked out of what they see.
On all of Belle Isle, only the yacht club had been kept up. It didn’t belong to the city. In its latest manifestation, the building was a Spanish Colonial stucco anomaly with it own private wooden bridge. Ruth couldn’t help suspecting the club had chosen this least logical of architectural styles precisely in order to signal its detachment from the rest of the city. Her second husband was a member, as was virtually everyone else in their circle, as were all the other HSI executives. It was the only reason any of them came onto the island anymore, the place to go when one wanted to feel as though one were somewhere else.
Everything was gone. Hudson’s, where she’d spent almost as many hours as she had at school, had been imploded years before, 2,800 pounds of explosives turning the twenty-eight stories—more than two million square feet—into 330,000 tons of rubble.
The Gratiot Drive-In, where Francis Statler had finally kissed her, was a strip mall now. It was hard to say if that was better or worse than remaining an abandoned hulk, a freestanding waterfall run dry.
And the cars, which had been all anyone cared about then—the city largely imported them now. They were someone else’s pride and joy.
There were more than ten thousand empty houses in the city. Her childhood home in Palmer Woods was one of them. The last time she drove by—for no reason other than curiosity—the roof wore an immense blue tarp, and the glass was gone from the windows, even in the small dormers in her brothers’ old bedrooms. She couldn’t bring herself to stop. A few other houses in the neighborhood looked just as bad, but as a whole Palmer Woods was still one of the best neighborhoods in the city. On the way back out to Woodward, she passed Francis Statler’s house. It, at least, was as presidential as ever, the lawn still perfectly manicured. Someone else owned it now.
For weeks after that drive through Palmer Woods, Ruth had debated buying her old house on Balmoral Drive. She’d gone as far as to have a contractor acquaintance of her husband’s go through it to see what it might take to restore the place. Nearly half a million dollars was his estimate, all for a house that in her lifetime would never be worth even a fraction of that. David, her second husband, would never agree to live there. She knew better than to ask.
For David, there was no city. As far as he was concerned, the whole place had been bulldozed decades ago, leaving nothing but an immense blank he sometimes needed to pass through to visit friends in Grosse Pointe. That Ruth consented to come here every day to work was for him just another mark of her eccentric character. Her colleagues would have been mystified to learn that at home she was in this regard the hopeless romantic, and that David, despite his full-time devotion to leisure and exotic produce, was the practical one.
Ruth was not ashamed to admit that part of her lived in the past. David was content to live in the eternal present. Nothing was permitted to remain in his life longer than a couple of years. Periodically he would cast away every last piece of furniture, and she would come home to find last year’s Asian transformed into this year’s rustic modern. He’d never worn down the heel of a shoe or the tread of a tire. Things came and went. It was a wonder he hadn’t yet grown tired of her, although without her he could never have afforded such profligacy.
She rarely complained.
At thirty-three, Ruth Freeman had decided to remake her life. And unlike the city, she had succeeded. And that was why she sat here now, in a walnut-lined boardroom surrounded by a phalanx of balding men in boxy suits impatiently waiting for her to sign off on the proposal before her, to add her rubber stamp to theirs.
The presentations were over, their case laid out. All they needed, all they had wanted for the last hour, was her okay. She could not blame them for their irritation. For decades she had been training them to imagine they had her agreement, her consent. Without that, she never would have made it to where she was, the only woman among their ranks.
But it was impossible for her not to think back on her old life. And on the other lives she might have lived. If not with her first husband, whose vision of her was only as large as the kitchen and the bedroom, then with Francis Statler, that strange, gentle boy. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever found a world in which he fit. His family had moved away while Francis was in college back east, and Ruth lost track of him after that. He never resurfaced for reunions, never appeared in any corporate profile. She could have found out, of course, if she had wished, but in truth she liked it better this way. She wanted to leave the past as it was, as it remained in her memory, with Francis showing up at her door unexpectedly at the end of August 1958, the week before he was to leave for college, and announcing it was over.
“We’ve had a lot of fun,” he said, reaching out for her hand. “But it’s t
ime to move on.”
And as he strolled back down her walkway, she wept, quietly at first so he wouldn’t hear. But as soon as he was gone, she let it all go, burying her face in her pillow, glad for once of the din of her brothers in the room next door. That letting go was the first of many, and it was important to her that it be preserved.
She let go of the house on Balmoral, too. Some things were beyond saving. By now it was probably gone for good, scooped into Dumpsters, another blight erased. As if somehow emptiness could hide what had been there before. And now the neighbors who remained tossed grass seed onto the filled-in foundation and tasked their children with keeping the lot mowed. They did not want to think about the contagion, that with every passing year their own homes were worth less and less.
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