by Ed Ifkovic
The chief had been talking to the principal down in front and glanced up at me. “Newsworthy?” A trace of sardonic smile. Once or twice as I passed by him on College Avenue, he’d greeted me with similar wry amusement. Even this-this situation, whatever it was-seemed to bring his sarcasm.
“So,” he began, “we have a young lady who stepped out of class and into thin air.”
Esther and I slipped into seats at the back of the auditorium.
I heard grunting. Frana’s uncle, Christ Lempke, was sitting apart, not in an auditorium chair but on a bench, his back against the wall, hunched over.
“Is time I went home.” He attempted to stand.
“Not yet.” Caleb Stone eyed him. From the way he spoke, I sensed he’d been using those words over and over with the impatient man.
“I need get home.” A thick German accent, almost impossible.
Chief Stone ignored him.
Scratching the back of his neck, Amos Moss glanced at Lempke, using one of his two practiced stares: accusation and vacuity.
Caleb Stone cleared his throat. “I asked to meet now to review some facts. I know some of you teachers had arrived home and had to travel back here. I’m sorry to inconvenience you. Now we’ve been hearing around town that Frana was seen getting on the 3:01 with”-he looked down at his notes-“a chubby drummer, but I ain’t got no idea where that rumor started.”
Kathe Schmidt, that’s where, I was certain of it. The spiteful Kathe bustling over town with accounts of Frana eloping to New York and to Broadway footlights. Odds are, Kathe created that rumor. But why? Frana and Kathe, two sparring friends, often together but often at war with each other. Kathe was the problem here. She had to be connected to this ugly scene. If Frana did run off, perhaps Kathe was part of the story.
Caleb Stone was going on. “Far as I’m concerned, frankly, the last time Frana was seen was in the hallways of this school.” Suddenly, peering over the heads of the faculty, he addressed Esther and me. “I gather you two were friends of the young lady?” He waited.
Well, I never liked her, fatuous beauty that she was, but…“Yes.” I sounded lame. “Somewhat.”
“Somewhat?”
“From our high-school days, last year,” Esther offered in a hurry. “Sometimes she would visit with me and, well, Kathe Schmidt…and…and sometimes Edna here.”
Caleb Stone raised his eyebrows. Edna here. Frana, the local beauty; Kathe, the pretty; Esther, the stunning Semite. Edna-here. Girl reporter. Here.
“So what do you two know?”
Once begun, Esther chattered about the rumor she’d heard of Frana seeing an older man-“I heard really older, I mean, twenty-five or even thirty”-to which one of the younger male teachers twittered, then gulped, apologetic. Esther talked of Frana’s family’s horrid wardenship, her being locked up in her room at night, and she glanced nervously at the scowling Christ Lempke. Dramatically, she ended with an account of Frana’s desire to be an actress in New York and marriage and…
Caleb Stone cut her off. “I suspect it’s Kathe telling the stories of the train departure. You ain’t the first to tell me that.” Nearby Amos grunted, and I fully expected and welcomed the sight of Kathe being led away in leg irons.
“You don’t believe she left with a drummer?” I asked him, surprising myself.
“Well, anything’s possible. Ain’t saying yes, ain’t saying no.” He scratched his chin. “You know the name of this older fellow?”
Esther and I shook our heads. He turned away, through with us.
“What kind school is this?” Christ Lempke struggled to his feet in a spurt of hot anger. “Hands young girl over to lecher. Hopping train ride to hell.” He shook his fist in the air.
The room got silent. Caleb Stone deliberated, nodding his head. Esther giggled, nervous. “Hopping train ride to hell,” she whispered. Caleb Stone kept his eyes squinted at Christ Lempke, who finally dropped back into his seat.
Amos Moss gurgled with the wad of tobacco in his cheek.
“Way I see it,” Caleb Stone began, “Mr. Lempke here arrived his usual time to retrieve his niece, only to learn she’d left the building an hour earlier.”
Miss Hepplewhyte, the guardian secretary, was livid. “She had a note. There was a note.” The last word screeched, hysterical.
Caleb Stone was, in fact, holding the note.
“Is fake,” muttered Christ Lempke.
Chief Stone looked as if he had no idea what to do. He watched the redoubtable Miss Hepplewhyte bristle. Skinny as a twig, wrenlike, Miss Holly Hepplewhyte claimed she’d been working in education back to the days of Reconstruction. That was probably true. Nothing got by her, and she prided herself on vigilance. Which, sad to say, she now considered under attack.
Miss Hepplewhyte worked in a small anteroom just off the front entrance, at angles to the first floor main corridor, and thus had a bird’s eye view of the universe. The past four days, she insisted shrilly, glaring at Christ Lempke, Frana’s uncle walked Frana to the front entrance and stood there “like Cotton Mather,” never saying a word except for something muttered to Frana in German, and then he’d be off. Miss Hepplewhyte had been told via the principal that Frana’s father, who worked at the Appleton Paper and Pulp Works and was gone early morning to late night, had given orders that Frana be discharged to her uncle each afternoon. She was only seventeen.
Miss Hepplewhyte gathered-here she smacked her lips, judgmental-there was a dire problem with the girl’s behavior, some frivolous conduct, some disobedience at home. Frankly, she wasn’t surprised, given Frana’s brazen flirtations in the hallways, which she herself had admonished more than once. Glancing again to the gaunt, bitter man on the bench, Miss Hepplewhyte insisted her one attempt to greet Christ Lempke civilly was met with an icy, unresponsive stare. Each afternoon he was there like clockwork, dragging home the young girl.
“Is time I leave. Foolish, this,” Lempke muttered.
Caleb Stone ignored him. “And today?”
“Nothing different,” the secretary said. “I only glimpsed him in the doorway this morning. I was about to say something but I was called away for a few minutes”-she turned to Vice-Principal Timm-“as Mr. Timm had a question about one student’s tardiness, Markham Tellin, who’s always late. But then I prepared my tea and biscuit.” She breathed in. “I was next door, an eye on the hallway. When I got back to my desk, the note was there in an envelope, staring right up at me. I assumed Mr. Lempke had planted it on my desk, not wanting to speak to a human being…”
“I no leave note.” Furious.
She didn’t look at him. “I know that now, sir.” She spoke to the wall behind him. “I thought it odd, but…” Another shrug, suggesting she expected odd things from the likes of Christ Lempke. “The outside read, simply, ‘School,’ one word, and inside a penciled, scribbled note, saying…”
Here Caleb Stone opened the note and read it aloud: “‘To school. Her uncle comes for Frana Lempke at two this afternoon. Is family trouble.’” He paused. “Trouble is spelled truble.” I wondered why he shared that last bit, but no matter. Oddly, it did sound like Christ Lempke talking, but perhaps it was the chief’s voice, the addition of a slight thick-voweled accent to his words.
“I no write such thing.” The fist in the air.
“So,” Miss Hepplewhyte continued, clearing her throat, “I duly informed Mr. Timm, who let Miss Hosley, Frana’s teacher, know.” A dramatic pause. “We do have policies about early leave-taking, you know. But”-now her voice got strange-“Frana never left the building at two, nor of course did I see her before that. I thought it curious, but then I assumed plans had shifted, and he’d be arriving at the end of day. I paid it no mind.”
Christ Lempke grunted. He struggled to his feet. “I go now.”
Caleb Stone motioned for him to sit down.
It turned out that Frana had made a point of telling Miss Hosley that she had to meet her uncle at two, and, according to Miss Hosley, Frana use
d the same words-“family trouble.” Family trouble. Frana’s concoction, clearly. Some ruse to flee-to meet that mysterious lover.
Miss Hosley swallowed and spoke in an uncertain tone. I could tell she didn’t like this public spectacle. Her eyes darted from Caleb Stone to, of all people, Amos Moss, who was off in his own world, dreaming, chewing his tobacco like a cow with its cud. Miss Hosley looked as if she were on a witness stand, deliberating slowly before each calculated response. She’d taught me Latin IV with fierce assaults on Cicero and ablative cases, rapping the front of her desk with a pointer as each student misfired when declining a noun on the chalkboard.
Yes, Miss Hosley said, at two o’clock she excused Frana from class, admonishing her to complete a homework assignment and, truth to tell, Frana seemed giddy-“Yes, that’s the word, giddy”-as she left. But, Miss Hosley concluded, drawing in her breath and touching her iron-gray curls and then fingering the cameo brooch stuck on her bosom like a postage stamp, Frana was always happy to leave class. “She is not friends with Cicero.” Amos, rousing himself briefly from his stupor, sputtered and mouthed a word: What? Miss Hosley glared at him, and he turned scarlet.
“And so the mystery begins,” Caleb Stone said, more to himself than anyone else. He outlined the layout of the long hallway, which everyone in that room already knew. Frana’s classroom, five more classrooms to the end of the corridor, a quick turn and you were facing Miss Hepplewhyte’s anteroom, and beyond that, the front door. Frana never made it that far.
“But that’s impossible,” Miss Hosley exclaimed, and then seemed to regret her outburst. “I mean-she left my classroom. She had to walk that way.” Because there was no other way out of the corridor.
Mr. McCaslin had the classroom next door to Miss Hosley’s. He was a youngish man, a dandy; spitfire shiny in a Milwaukee-cut suit with glinting watch fob, his goatee so manicured students whispered it was a fake paste-on, stolen from a passing circus act. Not only was he the drama coach-he directed me in A Scrap of Paper-but he taught English grammar and literature, and, while his students gaped in wonder, he would wax eloquent, bellowing out the climactic lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe, then masking his sobbing behind a gigantic floral-patterned handkerchief. The football team called him Cassie Mac, which meant nothing to me, though I’d attempted to analyze it. When I thought of him, the one image that came to mind was his voracious gobbling of apple strudel at the Elm Tree Bakery, crumbs speckling his careful goatee.
Speaking in his best Milwaukee voice, he added one more bit of information. He’d been standing near the doorway when he noticed one of his students waving at someone in the hallway. Through the window of the closed door, he spotted Frana, who was notorious for her flirtations. She waved back, a grin on her face. He turned to admonish the waver, and when he looked back, Frana was gone.
That left four more classrooms. Chief Stone had learned from Principal Jones that two were empty at that hour. The other two teachers had not been gazing into the hallways, so they had no idea if Frana passed by or not. Frana could have skirted by. Yet, Caleb Stone concluded, she never made it to the end of the corridor where, Miss Hepplewhyte petulantly declared, “I was sitting faithfully. Faithfully.”
“That leaves two empty classrooms.”
“Which should have been locked,” Principal Jones added.
“One wasn’t,” Homer Timm admitted. “By mistake.”
“A mistake,” Mr. Jones echoed.
Sitting across the aisle from me, Mildred Dunne grunted, then thought better of it. She sat apart from Miss Hepplewhyte, and Miss Hepplewhyte frowned when Miss Dunne grunted. Also glaring at the secretary was Mr. McCaslin, who drew his lips into a censorious line. Quite a cast of characters, this bunch!
So much had changed since I left high school last year. Back then the town-and my prying eyes-yawned over the familiar sight of our principal, Mr. Hippolyte Jones, arm in arm with his chatty and equally rotund wife Muriel, the two sitting at a baked-bean supper at the Masonic Hall, gabbing with the same three close friends: Miss Holly Hepplewhyte, fearsome school secretary and hall sentry; Miss Mildred Dunne, librarian and Sunday-school moralist; and Mr. Philip McCaslin, English teacher and drama coach, a bachelor who bore an uncanny (and unfortunate) resemblance to Ichabod Crane. The fivesome made cookie-cutter appearances at every civic function. My mother said Mr. Jones, a favorite of hers, was a model of Christian charity for putting up with the imperious Miss Dunne, the strident Miss Hepplewhyte, and the squeaky Mr. McCaslin-and even, lamentably, Mrs. Jones, a woman who never paused to take a breath or to forgive a seeming transgression.
But the picture changed, suddenly, woefully. Muriel Jones died from a heart attack at the end of last summer; and Mr. Jones seemed ready to follow her to the graveyard. Worse, Mildred Dunne, discovered shopping at Pettibone’s by new-to-town Gustave Timm, became his companion and then his betrothed, the two sitting alone at the Masonic Hall dinners and laughing foolishly over nonsense. Miss Dunne seemed transformed from the dour martinet in the library into a fluttering schoolgirl asked to a picnic for a lemon phosphate. She told some folks that her life was ready to start now. Everything up till then-her shopping sprees, her unhappy time as guardian of schoolbooks-was preamble to what she’d always dreamed of…a husband. The extra dollop of happiness came from Gustave’s being so…handsome. My mother, hearing the gossip, remarked, “She’ll learn that marriage is one more hallway without an exit.”
With Mildred Dunne gone from the group, Miss Hepplewhyte and Mr. McCaslin now discovered they didn’t like each other. So by the Christmas dance and supper, Mr. Jones sat with Miss Hepplewhyte and Mr. McCaslin, but no one spoke. My mother said speaking to the principal made her uncomfortable because his loneliness oozed out like sour sap from an aged tree. When the winter carnival supper was held in February, their table was there, but occupied by Mildred Dunne and Gustave Timm, laughing uproariously over a private joke. Gustave’s brother Homer, strolling past with friends, mumbled something to his brother, but Gustave merely laughed louder.
Miss Hepplewhyte, abandoned by her spinster friend Mildred, chose to stay home and, according to some, devote herself to missionary work, though I couldn’t imagine how you can save savage souls by sitting in a small drawing room cluttered with embroidered antimacassars and porcelain Chinese dogs. Worse, she stopped talking to her friend, believing that Mildred Dunne’s betrothal to Gustave was a betrayal. Rather than be happy for her friend, she chose bitterness, fury, silence. They passed each other in the school hallways like women who’d never been introduced. Mildred reached out to her-invitations to the homestead she shared with her parents, invitations to go to Milwaukee for shopping, a proposal to be in her wedding party, but Miss Hepplewhyte refused to reply.
That much had changed in one year at Ryan High School. It was better, I observed to Esther, than the melodramatic histrionics in a Bertha M. Clay romance.
I also watched the interplay of principal and vice-principal. Mr. Jones, a favorite of mine, had been a genial, spirited man whose overflowing girth matched the expansiveness of his personality. Now he seemed to be lost in melancholy. How different he was from Homer Timm, who stood next to him now, a man severe and dark, the moustache on his upper lip twitching, always a little untrimmed; a man comfortable in his broadloom suit but, oddly, uncomfortable among people. You could be telling a story of great sadness and there’d be that smile stuck to his face.
“But,” Mr. Timm went on now, his voice raising, “the door to that classroom was closed. Frana would have had to try it to see whether it was unlatched. She wouldn’t have known.”
“Unless she knew,” Caleb Stone said.
Mr. Timm snapped. “And how would she have known that?”
“I’m only suggesting.”
“But she could have hid in the room until school closed,” said Mr. McCaslin.
“Impossible.” From Miss Hepplewhyte.
“And why is that?” Caleb asked.
Yes, why was that?
Miss Hepplewhyte harrumphed, a very Dickensian sound. “Until when? Classes were over? Sir, Mr. Lempke”-again the furtive glance to the unhappy man against the wall-“showed up before the last bell and was standing on the top step, hat in hand. I thought to myself-well, someone’s plans have indeed changed and no one had the courtesy to inform me. So be it. And I watched as students streamed down that corridor toward the door, as I always do-I feel it my duty to remind a few of after-school obligations-and Frana was not among that crowd. As Mr. Lempke can testify.”
Christ Lempke was nodding furiously.
Miss Hepplewhyte added, “I was surprised, in fact, because Mr. Lempke was actually early today.”
Christ Lempke stormed, “I am not a clock.”
“Perhaps she climbed out the window,” Amos Moss said, and everyone looked at him.
Principal Jones was shaking his head. “No, Zeke Puttman was pruning the bushes at the front of the school, was there all afternoon. I already talked to him. I think he’d have mentioned the sight of a young girl climbing out of the window, don’t you think? It was the first thing I thought of when I found the unlocked classroom.”
Caleb Stone actually yawned. I could read his mind. This was a lot of pettifogging about a wanton, hell-bent youngster who’d obviously schemed her way out of the school to rendezvous with some surreptitious lover. Doubtless she’d be back home by nightfall, punished by her stern father and whipped by the unrelenting Christ Lempke. At this point, the chief was going through the motions of being the marshal in town. It was either this curiously anemic incident or a walk to Lawe Road to warn Farmer Burnett-for the umpteenth time-to keep his sheep from bothering the grazing cattle of the widow Peters, who inhabited the hell-to-ruin cabin by the river.
“Well,” he drawled out the word, “she ain’t disappeared into thin air.”
So we’d come full circle: Frana, the ghost in the sky.
Mr. Timm decided to speak. “I might add that I was in that corridor at half-past the hour, more or less; and I did glance at my pocket watch”-he extracted the elaborate gold timepiece and flashed it to the onlookers-“and all was quiet. The empty classroom door was closed. Of course.”