Escape Artist Page 6

  Jake finally raised his voice. “That ain’t right.”

  Kathe launched into a new assault on him. “I saw you talking to her last week, you know. Outside the post office. You didn’t know I saw but…”

  Silence. Then, “I bump into folks, Kathe.”

  The door to the bakery opened suddenly. Solomon Smuddie was standing there, a massive man dressed in what townsfolk called his automobile gear: grotesque goggles resting on a funny corduroy cap, a severe-cut muddy brown waist coat, and knee-high black Prussian war boots.

  I hadn’t heard an automobile pull up, which surprised me. There were so few vehicles in town, and the drivers, propelling them like winged chariots, sailed through, leaning on horns, stomping on brakes, careening around corners. He may have been an erudite professor at Lawrence—I’d once heard him deliver a somnolent lecture on Aramaic pottery—but on the dusty though macadamized roads of Appleton he was Ben Hur distancing himself from an invisible Masala.

  “Jacob!” he roared. “You are late!”

  Jake jumped, knocked over a cup, the little boy reprimanded. “Father, I…”

  “I told you the steps of the Tyler House.” He pointed outside, aiming a finger one block up the street. “Does this look like the Tyler House?” It obviously didn’t, though Jake, stymied, glanced around the room, as if to make sure. He muttered an apology and rustled past a glowering Kathe, past his rigid father, and out the door. With a glacial stare, the professor acknowledged the girl. I watched the exchange between the two. Kathe, hardly the winsome shrinking violet, fixed him in a contemptuous glare, daring; very unseemly for a high school girl with so venerable a professor. What fascinated me was his utter dismissal of Kathe, a gaze that suggested her unworthiness for his son, a look that suggested she was some brazen siren seducing the ivory-pure boy into gaslight abandon. His polar look suggested the very same thing that Christ Lempke had said to Frana: whore.

  Good Lord! And I had to go back to the office and type up my notes about the Brown Betty Festival at the Order of Venus Lodge.

  Chapter Six

  The following afternoon, anxious, I hurried home from the city room because my father was expecting a doctor’s visit, some specialist newly relocated to Milwaukee from back East. Dr. Alex Cooper was One Last Hope, capitalized. But they all were, these doctors who were often itinerant physicians making monthly circuits to towns across the state. My mother had orchestrated this new visit, as she had innumerable others over the past few years, from charlatan quacks dispensing miracle cure-alls of Indian tonic and soothing balms and restorative salts—to university men with degrees, oculists and physicians and visiting surgeons and…It didn’t matter. A chance notice in the Appleton Crescent or Post or the Milwaukee Journal or even in the Appleton Volksfreund, the German language paper my mother read and where she’d once located the insane homeopathic doctor visiting from Bavaria—and Julia Ferber would dash off a note, a plea. My husband Jacob Ferber has a shrinking optic nerve so please…

  They came, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes filled with false bravado, usually extending their sweaty palms for crisp dollar bills; but even the charlatans, dressed like dapper Dans with phony Yale class pins, even these slick, officious men were sometimes shaken by the sight and acquaintance with the gentle, handsome man. Jacob Ferber, resigned to a fate his wife and daughters refused, was a man sublime in his silences, his serenity curiously infectious.

  Each visit left him weaker and sometimes more irascible, difficult. We talked quietly of the Pain, the fifth boarder in the house, the one that sat with us in the still rooms. One Last Hope. Again. Dr. Cooper, transported from Boston, a renowned specialist. But of what? I asked. Of what? The man was attending a meeting in nearby Neenah and agreed to visit the stoic, guarded Jacob Ferber.

  One Last Hope.

  My mother would pull on the man’s shirtsleeves, imploring.

  “Edna, don’t bother coming home. I’ll be there,” she’d told me that morning.

  No, I had to be there.

  I crossed lanes, skirted by City Park, rushed up North Street, but already my father sat next to an old man, white-whiskered and heavy as a satiated field mouse, bursting out of a Prince Albert coat, a homburg on his lap, leaning in toward my father, chatting like an old friend. But my father stared straight ahead, and as I neared, out of breath, I heard him say, over the mumbled conversation of the monumental doctor, “Is that you, Pete?”

  The doctor stopped, looked at me strangely, as though expecting the household son to appear. Smiling, I answered, “Yes, Bill.” I pulled up a chair. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  The doctor had a squeaky voice, out of sync with his tremendous girth and his ancient sequoia face. “I was very early, my dear.” His voice reminded me of a winter sleigh ride, crisp and thin on a cold icy night.

  The Pain. The awful Pain. Tell us how to stop the Pain. The blindness, well, that was fact now. But the Pain, excruciating, crippling, numbing.

  At that moment my mother and Fannie, breathless, rushed up the steps. We three Ferber women stood there in a line, a hesitant link of blood, frozen before a dying father. Silence. We waited. The doctor made a rumbling noise, swallowed, and said that there was nothing he could do because the shrinkage of the optic nerve created the Pain. Perhaps an elixir, a tonic. But there was nothing that he…

  My mother fluttered around the porch like a sun-mad fly, out of character. Usually she was matter-of-fact and logical; severe, humorless. And Fannie, her eyes following our mother’s swooping, helpless movements, was on the verge of weeping. How much more futile optimism could we allow? It made me furious. I hated the doctor, that rotting mound of flesh, the buttons of his silk vest ready to pop.

  I stared into my father’s passive, resigned face, realizing that he didn’t care any more. These were gratuitous moments for his wife, his daughters. He sat there staring, but that was the wrong word: staring. You can only stare if you have sight, I thought, horribly. No. Suddenly I had no word, no vocabulary for the scene. Helpless, I panicked: these were the limits of lexicography. There was something beyond language that mattered more.

  I wanted to cry.

  ***

  Later, the doctor gone after being given a thick slice of poppy seed kuchen and a glass of root beer, as well as his generous, if unwarranted, fee, I sat alone outside with my father, quiet. Inside my mother banged the cupboards. I understood the signs. It would be a long night. After each lame visit from a doctor my mother acted like a maddened caged animal. Sometimes she struck out at her husband, as though his blindness and his Pain were a personal quirkiness he could control, conditions he created to get at her, ruin her life, destroy her days. Those nights Julia Ferber sat in the kitchen playing solitaire on the oak table, game after game, the sound of cards being slapped down enough to drive me mad. There were times she was unable to speak to my father for hours afterwards, as though for her to utter a kind word would betray the resentment she harbored. My father, who understood, hid in the corners of the house.

  We never talked about it because I didn’t want to acknowledge that my mother, whom I loved, could blame a hapless man for being…hapless.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” I whispered into the silence.

  He reached out and found my hand, held it.

  “Tell me about your day.” A lazy grin. “Mr. Ryan must be overjoyed with your Houdini piece, no?”

  I thought of Matthias Boon’s coldness all day long. The intimidating Mac had left the back room and wordlessly dropped a sheet on my desk, my printed Houdini piece, his grimy thumbprint on the corner. He’d never done such a thing before, and I had no idea what it was all about. Now and then he’d step into the front room and address some concern with Sam, but rarely to Matthias Boon. This morning he’d given me a preview of my article, which would appear in the afternoon paper. When I started to thank him, he was already leaving, his hulking back to me.

  I withdrew the galley sheet from my pocket and read my own words to my father. I
wanted him to hear my interview before it appeared that afternoon. He leaned in, intent. I read well, dramatic, with flair, the product of Ryan High School’s rigorous elocution regimen. When I got to the end, my father was smiling.

  “Well?”

  “You have a news nose.”

  I glowed. “You think so? So you like it, Father?”

  “All Jews are escape artists.”

  “What does that mean?” I was startled.

  “You know the history of our people. Think about it, Pete. Escape from shackles, bondage, struggles to survive. To escape endless persecution.” He was now grinning. “Houdini is simply the first to make a spectacle out of it…to make others pay for the privilege of watching. The immigrant who broke free.”

  “But that’s not the point.”

  “Of course, it is.”

  I’d always considered my mother the shrewd, intelligent force in the family: domineering, pessimistic, logical. A rigid woman, horribly unhappy. I’d inherited my mother’s acumen, her perceptiveness. My father—well, I’d long ago labeled the handsome, dreamy man as the vagabond poet, the helpless businessman, the sad wanderer out of Budapest into America, the man who’d played, feebly, a few strains of Mozart on the violin that now rested in the dining room hutch. Listening to his careful words, I feared I didn’t know my own father.

  A voice from inside broke the quiet conversation. “Ed, did you see Kathe Schmidt today? I hope she remembers to come tomorrow morning to help Fannie with the dress patterns.”

  I called back. “No, I haven’t seen her since yesterday.” At the Elm Tree Bakery, wooing (and abusing) Jake Smuddie, fluttering those eyelids and spewing venom toward Frana Lempke, who still held a place in the footballer’s heart. “Don’t worry. She’ll be here.”

  “How do you know?” My mother loomed in the doorway. “God, I wish these people had a telephone like civilized people.” She didn’t look at my father.

  “Her mother wants her money. I’ve met the woman. She’s greedy.”

  “That’s cruel,” my father whispered to me.

  “No, it’s true. You know that Kathe doesn’t like coming here. She’s made that clear. She’d rather run around town but she has no choice.”

  “Still and all…” I could hear displeasure in his tone.

  “I don’t mean anything bad.”

  My father tapped my wrist. “Of course you do.”

  Esther was running down the street, cutting across a lawn, even stepping over a bed of iris. Her long dress got caught on a protruding root of an old oak tree, and she grabbed at the fabric to rip it free. “Edna, Edna.”

  My father answered. “Esther, what is it?”

  Esther caught her breath on the lower steps, so winded she couldn’t speak, her face flushed and sweaty. I rushed to her. “News.” Esther threw her hands up into the air. “I have news.”

  Esther, the town crier with the innocent face. I was the notorious town reporter, the town snoop, yet Esther, popular and garrulous, with a multitude of casual friends, always joining this clique or that, a social bumblebee, really reported the scintillating gossip or puerile revelations. People readily shared confidences with Esther, things they’d never reveal to me. She knew about secret engagements, hasty weddings, abandonments, even hush-hush pregnancies long before such news became commonplace; in her quiet, demure way, she often informed me of sub rosa life in quaint Appleton. Errant girls squired out of town in disgrace, drunken remarks spilled at a beer tavern, the dangerous behavior of the blacksmith’s youngest daughter; even, shockingly, the lewd suggestions made to her and other girls by Seymour Weiser as they walked by him after Friday night services. She had no need of a printing press. I—for three dollars a week—was the ho-hum chronicler of social teas and church bazaars and honeymoon couples catching the 7:52 morning train to Milwaukee on their way to Niagara Falls.

  Fannie and my mother joined us, and Esther, finally making it to the top step with my arm on her elbow, blurted out, “Frana Lempke. Gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “We think—Milwaukee.” She swallowed. “Chicago. New York.”

  I was irritated. “All of them?”

  Esther shot me a look before mumbling, “Gone.”

  My mother settled into a chair and sighed. “Esther dear, just what are you talking about?”

  “Frana has run off with a man.” One word, almost: “Franahasrunoffwithaman.” She slowed down, breathed in, repeated the line. “Frana has run off with a man.”

  “Good God.” My mother glanced at Fannie. “What is this all about?”

  Fannie was puzzled. “Are you sure? I thought she was still seeing that football player, you know, the good looking…”

  “What did you hear?” I broke in.

  Esther took a couple of deep breaths. “Well, everyone knew she was secretly seeing an older man. I mean, her friends talked. There were rumors it was some drummer staying at the Sherman House. She was seen spending time around there…”

  “But who?” From Fannie, interrupting.

  “When did this happen?” I touched Esther on the sleeve.

  “I bet it’s that Calvin Steiner,” my mother said. “Forty-odd years old, a drinker, that one, and always his eyes on the young girls. He comes into My Store, huffing and puffing, and if a farm girl is sifting through the pottery, he loses his train of thought and sputters like an old fool. Trying to sell me those mousetraps that wouldn’t so much as catch an elephant passing by…”

  “Was it him?” I demanded.

  “No one knows. But I heard that the afternoon train leaving for Milwaukee had the usual bunch of drummers, and one man was accompanied by a young girl who hid her face.” Esther let the drama settle on the porch.

  “So how do you know it was Frana?” I wondered.

  “Well, she’s disappeared. When her uncle went to get her at the high school this afternoon, she was gone. She’d left early. She snuck out, it seems. She wasn’t there.”

  “But that’s impossible.” I knew how severely the high school was run. If Frana’s uncle was scheduled to collect her at school’s end, there was no way Principal Jones or Vice-Principal Timm would allow her to simply stroll out, especially not with Miss Hepplewhyte, that authoritarian sentry, guarding the doors. It was not done.

  “She lied, I guess.”

  “How did you learn this?”

  “I was with my father at Pettibone’s just now, and Mollie heard it from Kathe Schmidt, who said Chief Stone had been called to the high school. He was out of town but is just back and…”

  “What’s happening now?” Impatient, my words rushed.

  “Well, everyone is rushing there. To the high school. The chief even called the teachers back for a meeting. Right now. Frana’s uncle’s raising Cain, it seems. He’s at the school yelling and cursing. He refused to leave the building. And…”

  We all started to talk at once, speculating, guessing, my mother tsking and talking about wayward girls, too pretty for their own good. She glared at the baffled Fannie, who, meeting our mother’s iron gaze, was stupefied, homebody that she certainly was. Julia Ferber, daughter of fatalistic East European sensibility, always expected disaster, rainy days on her already-dark parade, flooding her beleaguered soul. Me, the younger daughter, already had defied her, becoming the subject of wagging town tongues. Fannie, pretty as a daisy, a fluttering girl, susceptible to flattery, well, that girl needed watching. My mother was a worried mother hen.

  Esther then joined the noisy chorus and our four voices were at counterpoint: “Imagine…her poor family…didn’t you just…I knew something like this would happen…just too pretty…traveling salesmen, you know how…not trusted…roving eyes…a girl too man crazy…an actress, you say?…glory be to God…because she had a part in some high school production? . . too pretty…I always say a young girl…not safe any more…You’d think…I think…I think…I really think…think…”

  In the swelling babble of squawking, overlapping voices my
father spoke, and, like a factory siren blast, there was sudden silence on the porch. We turned to him.

  “What?” My mother was peevish. I realized it was the first word she’d spoken to him since the afternoon visit from Dr. Cooper.

  “She’s just a little girl.” His voice was filled with sadness.

  Chapter Seven

  Esther and I wanted to rush downtown. Ignoring my mother (“Ed, this is not your business”), we headed toward the high school where we spotted Amos Moss, the deputy chief, huffing along in huge strides, headed up the stairs. We caught up with him as he opened the front door.

  Amos Moss was the number-two man in a town that sustained two full-time law officers and a receptionist, an old widow named Tessa Monger. Three part-time constables filled the ranks. Occasionally, I stopped at the police station, though Byron Beveridge regularly covered that beat. I never cared for such visits. No one there took me seriously. Tessa was the least offensive, a shaky, twitchy woman always on the verge of crying, though she wore a constant smile. She thanked everyone for stopping in, as if it were a church social, but she rarely provided information. Deputy Amos Moss was an hour away from being the town idiot—a tobacco-chomping bungler in his forties, overflowing in a stained shirt and pants, his badge always lopsided. He spent his days going in the wrong direction.

  Chief of Police Caleb Stone, however, was a different cut of cloth, a man as stringy as a long bean, with a prominent jaw, a volatile temper, and a persistent belief in fair play. I considered him an enigma, largely because he was so notoriously close-mouthed. He might be a clever man, this taciturn sheriff, but with his stony reserve he was hard to read. An elder in the First Congregational Church, he was respectability itself.