Rowing in Eden (34 page)

“You want a ride home?” Mrs. Thomas asked. “As soon as I run this box next door, we're going out to the cottage to pick up a few things.”

Franny nodded. She did want to go home. To get in bed and rest her cheek on a cool pillow. Gratefully, she sat down in the back of the Corvair with Susan to wait for Mrs. Thomas's return. Susan told Franny all about the weimaraner pup she had selected—the owner had given her a sweet Polaroid of the litter and exhausted mother, and Susan had made a ballpoint
X
beneath her dog.

When Mrs. Thomas got back in the car and they started out of town, Susan asked if Franny had received the brochure from Bell Academy.

“What? Oh, yeah.” Though happy to see Susan, Franny found it hard to concentrate on what her friend was saying: Would her parents let her go to Bell next fall? Susan's literature class was reading
The Canterbury Tales
and Susan just knew Franny would love them, too—

“You know, Franny”—Mrs. Thomas interrupted Susan as they approached the Poddigbattes Camp sign—“you should be in bed. You look like you feel miserable, and that cough—”

“I'm okay, really. Would you drop me here so I can get the mail?”

Franny squeezed Susan's hand before she got out. “I miss you,” she said, then patted Mrs. Thomas's shoulder, and added, “You, too.”

“We miss you, Franny,” Mrs. Thomas said, and Susan said, “Yeah. Write me. You should be getting a letter from me, like, tomorrow. And keep bugging your parents about Bell.”

There was not much in the mail, but at the back of the little orchard, the small red peppers that clung to Mrs. Neary's dead plants were as bright as Christmas lights. Everything was bright. The shaggy grass along the camp's old baseball diamond burned. One of the Wahl garage doors stood open, a velvety, black rectangle.

She looked up the road at the sound of a car pulling to a stop, its tires biting into the grit from the shoulders. A dark car. Not the brown and white Ford, but this car came on as if she were its goal, and when it rolled to a stop alongside her, she screwed up the courage to look at the car's passengers.

There was something wrong with their faces, something deformed. The car was filled with deformed people. Embarrassed at having seen, she looked away.

So stupid. As soon as they were out of the car and upon her, she knew they were just girls with nylon stockings pulled over their heads.

It was Ginny Weston who found her and drove her to Dr. Hanson's office.

“I made trips like this before with both my ex and Billy,” Ginny said. “You don't have to tell me
what
you been up to, but don't try to tell me you ain't been up to nothing.”

Franny did not try to tell Ginny Weston anything.

Dr. Hanson's pretty nurse, Jane Wiener, winced as she cleaned the sand and dirt from the cuts and scrapes on Franny's face and hands and legs. “I'm sorry, sweetie,” she said, her voice lovely and low, “but we have to get you cleaned up so Doctor can evaluate what we've got here.”

“Looks to me like her hand's broke,” Ginny Weston said from a
plastic chair in the corner of the examination room. “I'd like to find the monsters that did it, I can tell you.”

Jane Wiener nodded as she made her way around the table. Polio had left her with a severe limp, and after practically every visit that Peg made to the doctor's office, she commented,
Poor Jane
, because the nurse's fiancé had broken their engagement when she contracted polio, and no one had ever asked for her hand again.

“You've got a fever, too, haven't you, Franny?” Jane Wiener pulled the thermometer from its holder and stuck it—ripe with alcohol—under the girl's tongue.

“One-o-three,” she reported when Peg arrived at the office. “She's a sick puppy, Mrs. Wahl, as well as a mighty sore one.”

Ginny Weston offered Peg her chair, but Peg waved the offer away. “She didn't tell me she was sick,” she said. She squeezed Franny's hand, but her eyes were on the face of the nurse. “I just knew she had a little cough.”

Dr. Hanson opened the door the way he always did, with a knock that allowed no time for a response. Peg and Jane Wiener stepped back from the examining table. “She's got pneumonia,” the doctor said shortly into the examination, but he didn't think her hand was broken.
Where else are you sore, Fran?
She pointed to her head—someone had kicked her there. Her ribs.
Other than the cut, the mouth looks okay. Probably want to take a couple stitches on that cheek, though.
The doctor spun around on his examining chair to speak to Peg. “We'll have her x-rayed—she may need tape on her ribs—but she ought to do fine at home once we get her on some antibiotics.”

“But, Dick—” Peg tilted her head toward the door.

Jane Wiener went back to work with her tweezers and gauze while the doctor and Peg left the room. From the corner, Ginny Weston said, “Somebody ought to call the police.”

“Maybe that's what they're doing,” Jane Wiener said.

The door opened. Peg, smiling now, stepped into the room alone. “The doctor decided it would be good for you to spend a few days in the hospital. Until your cough is better,” Peg said. She
turned her smile toward Jane Wiener and Ginny Weston. “And he agreed with me that nobody else needs to know about the other business.”

Peg expanded upon “the other business” when she and Franny were alone in the car, driving to the hospital. “This isn't the sort of thing you tell your friends. Those girls—don't give them the satisfaction of spreading the news!”

Lying in the backseat, dopey, bandaged and bound with tape, Franny stared at the bars in the Wildcat ceiling where the canvas folded over upon itself as it lowered into the boot. She considered her various pains. The ones under her eye and by her mouth glowed like branding irons. Her ribs ached. At least no one hit or kicked her anymore. She remained grateful that the hitting and kicking had stopped.

“Oh, honey,” her father said when he approached the bed in her hospital room. Though it was dark by then—Peg had not been able to locate him for a time—he shielded his eyes with a hand, like a person trying to observe a distant object on a bright day. “Oh, Christ.”

Franny was glad of the pain pills they had given her; otherwise she knew she would begin to weep. With shame that she was in such a predicament, and pain at the pain in her father's eyes, and self-pity. There was no denying that.

He took her hand. He looked pale. But then a nurse sashayed into the room to check Franny's temperature, and he laughed and said, very merry, “How come you've got so many sick people around here?”

The nurse's smile was thin—maybe she smelled the alcohol on his breath—and, after that, Brick sat quietly until she left the room.

“So, what's this all about, Fran?”

“I don't even know who they were, Dad.”

“I find that awfully hard to believe,” her mother murmured, but continued in her normal voice, “Dick says he can keep her a week or so. She should look a little better by then.” For a moment, Peg
leaned over the bed and stared into Franny's eyes—implying she could see deep inside her? Put a spell on her?

Franny felt better after they left.

She liked life at the hospital: calm, quiet, accommodating. A Catholic order owned the hospital and certain of the nurses were nuns whose long, white habits swished as they moved up and down the hall. Also, the idea that Ryan Marvell could not possibly know she was there lessened her pain at not seeing him. If he did not know where to find her, she need not suffer over not hearing from him; and maybe, she thought, she could take instruction from this. Maybe the thing to do was to place yourself in unexpected locations. Then you would not need to feel bad if no one ever reached you.

Her mother brought a letter from Susan Thomas to the hospital when she came the next day. The envelope's puffed and stiffened look suggested it had been steamed open and glued shut, and Franny was thankful that she once had warned Susan that she must write only the tamest news in her letters.

“Aren't you going to read it?” Peg asked when Franny put the letter on the bedside table.

Franny was coughing. Little stars sparked in front of her eyes as she shook her head. “Later.”

Peg took a seat between the window and the bed. “I called Mrs. Deever about your piano lesson. Christy and that boy—McCartney—they called. Christy wondered why you weren't in school. I told her you were sick. I don't think she knew anything. About the other, I mean.”

The sunshine that streamed in the window hit Peg's face. She looked as pretty as always, but tired. The skin under her chin was starting to go a little soft, a little wrinkled, like a peach that had sat too long. As if she knew Franny noticed this, Peg raised the back of her hand to her jaw in the way that people beyond middle age so often did in studio photographs. Probably, she had not slept much the night before. Franny was sorry. It was too bad she was not the sort of a daughter who could please her sort of mother. But there
you had it. She certainly did not intend to try to make herself over to please Peg.

Well! With a smack of her hands against her thighs, Peg stood. She was going to run down to the machines and bring back a cup of coffee! Did Franny want a cup of coffee?

No. No thanks.

No sooner had Peg left the room, than the telephone began to ring. Was it magic? Had Ryan Marvell, somehow, heard what had happened to Franny, and did he now want to come to the hospital to tell her he loved her?

She stared at the telephone as it rang a second time. You always had to let it ring twice, no matter how much you wanted to answer, and suppose it were those girls, calling to say they were not finished with Franny yet.

The receiver felt greasy in her hand, as if the last person to use it had been smeared with ointment, but Franny managed to say hello, not drop the thing.

“Franny.” It was Martie. Crying as she explained that Peg had called that morning to tell her Franny was in the hospital.

Did Franny want Martie to come home? Just say the word. Milton could bring her—

Then, suddenly, Martie was not crying but laughing. “I can't believe you haven't even met Milton yet! Hey, maybe this would be as good a time as any for me to break the news to Mom and Dad, you know?”

Franny waved to Peg, now entering the room. “Mom's back with her coffee, Martie,” she said by way of warning. “Anyway, I'll be home really soon. It wouldn't make sense for you to come, so—I'm going to let you say hi to Mom now.”

“I just talked to her this morning,” Peg said, but she came to the bed and took the receiver, and Franny turned onto her side so she could look out the window and try not to think about her various pains or the coughs that pushed against her lungs.

“Miss Wahl?”

One of the nuns—a smiling old lady—stepped into the room.
She carried a vase of pink flowers. “These seem to be for you,” she said and set them on the bedside table.

Pink baby roses and carnations. Peg leaned close as Franny pulled the small green envelope from the flowers. “Who're they from?” she asked, one hand over the receiver.

The card's border of violets was visible even before Franny pulled the card from the envelope, and if the card bore the name Ryan Marvell—well, just then, Franny did not care if Peg saw. If the flowers came from Ryan Marvell, and he wanted her to, Franny would run off with him tomorrow.

The unfamiliar handwriting on the small card seemed to break up and form again, but surely that was an
R
—

Go away
, she wanted to say to her mother,
go away
, but then Peg was telling Martie, “Roz sent Franny a lovely bouquet of carnations and roses,” and she was right. The unfamiliar handwriting was the handwriting of the florist, that was all. G
ET WELL SOON,
read the card. L
OVE
, R
OZ
.

The day before she was to leave the hospital, the newspaper carried an account of how a Baltimore man had poured kerosene over his body and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon. The man's wife told reporters that her husband had become increasingly despondent over the war in Vietnam, but the story was complicated by the fact that the man had brought his small child with him. A number of bystanders said they had been forced to plead with the man in order to make him release the child before he set himself aflame. Others said the man had shooed the child away on his own.

No photographs accompanied the article, but Franny remembered the photographs of a Vietnamese monk who had set fire to himself a few years before. Eyes closed, the monk had looked perfectly calm, as if the flames surrounding him could do no harm. Franny's father had called the monk's actions “show-off stuff.” Franny had not known what to think, but for the man at the Pentagon to hurt himself like that in front of his child—he had to have been sick in the head, didn't he?

She tried to write a letter to Susan Thomas about the cigarette burns on the arms of her friends.
Do you honestly think a boy would like a girl better for burning herself that way?
she asked, but then tore up the letter and lay back against the hospital's stiff pillows and stared at the cross on the wall.

She had seen Catholic crosses before, with their bodies of Jesus, crucified and nailed to the cross. Some people considered Jesus's gesture the grandest gesture of all. There were people who seemed to love Jesus because he died—for them, supposedly. To save them.

It seemed to Franny that she would risk her life to save Ryan Marvell if he were in danger, but she knew that such a gesture would not win his love. Ryan Marvell either loved her or he didn't. And that was all there was to say about that.

A
FTER
F
RANNY RETURNED FROM THE HOSPITAL, HER PARENTS
spoke much more softly when they were upstairs. The noise of their conversations distracted Franny little more than the chirps of the birds outside her window or the whistle of the wind. If she sensed one or both of her parents might come to her room, she often closed her eyes and lay back against the pillow and pretended to sleep until they went away.

Both of them were nicer to her than usual. Brick had brought her peach ice cream from the dairy her first night home and, the next night, he came up to her room and seated himself at the foot of her bunk bed. He gave her toes a pat through the blankets and said he'd been thinking about their getting another dog.
What kind of dog did she think she'd like?

Peg came up to the bedroom to cheerfully deliver messages from Christy Strawberry and others who telephoned (
Roz says I should tell you she'll be bringing home your birthday present at Thanksgiving
). Franny thanked her, and said she would like it if Peg continued taking her calls—just until Franny was feeling better—and Peg seemed to consider this a good idea.

“You want to fully recuperate before you try going back to school,” she said, widening her eyes in what Franny understood as her mother's way of trying to politely convey the message that Franny still looked like a girl who had received a beating.

“A smart girl like you—what do they teach you at school anyway?” Peg asked. In return, Franny smiled. If it were up to Franny,
she would never go back to school. She found, in fact, that she did not even care to get up to brush her teeth.

When Peg came to Franny's room, she never stayed long. The bedroom was cold enough that, even during the day, you often could see your breath, but Franny preferred to spend her days there. Each morning, she built an immense collar of blankets around herself and, within it—writing, reading—she became an Antarctic explorer in her tent, a Buddha, an American Indian looking out from the edge of the continent, a Chinese scholar got up in elaborate robes and a black silk hat with a tassel on top.

Most of the time, in that chilly world, she did not think about the fact that Martie was pregnant. Sometimes, when she did think about it, she decided it might not be true. Maybe Martie had been mistaken. Or—made it up. Or maybe, by now, Martie had told Rosamund, and Rosamund had helped her get an abortion through some friend or other in Florida.

Most of the time, Franny thought about Ryan Marvell. One afternoon, after Peg drove into town to the Hobby Shack, Franny made a careful copy of one of her poems to send to him:

She put the poem in an envelope and addressed it and carried it downstairs, startling Ginny Weston as she brushed out her pin curls in the front hall.

“You about scared me to death!” Ginny said.

“Sorry.” Franny patted Ginny's arm through her heavy coat. “But would you, please, put this in the mailbox for me?”

With one hand, Ginny Weston fluffed her old-fashioned curls across the collar of her coat; with the other, she stuck the envelope in her coat pocket. “I ain't even looking at the name on it. That way, I ain't involved.”

Franny laughed as if she were her old self, and did not let on that she had to hold on to the hall bureau to keep from falling down.

That night, while her father drunkenly banged Cole Porter songs on the piano, she knelt beside her window, face and bandaged fingers pressed against the screen.
Nyar.
The waves conspired with her call.
Nyar. Nyar.
Her patience grew gorgeous: purple and green and blue iridescence, as eyed as peacock feathers.

It was true, she thought, though a miracle, that Ryan Marvell had said, “You're my girl, right? Forever and ever?”

Though maybe not a miracle. Maybe something like Doublespeak. Maybe the kindred soul she had recognized in him was like the kindred soul Winston Smith had recognized in O'Brien. Maybe at some time Ryan Marvell would have been the perfect love, but they had gotten to him and ruined him long ago.

In her bed, she wrote. She recited poems. She memorized Keats' “Ode to Beauty” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It seemed like a life that could go on and on. However, when Charlotte Wahl telephoned Peg about the upcoming Thanksgiving, and learned that Franny remained at home, she drove straight to the house.

“Frances,” she called before she even reached the doorway to the girl's room, “I know about the beating and that you've been sick, but it's time to face the world again.”

Peg had followed Charlotte up the stairs, and she and Franny exchanged a glance around Charlotte's grand fox fur collar: How did Charlotte know about the beating?

“I usually manage to find out most things in this town, whether people want me to or not,” Charlotte said in answer to the unasked question.

Franny studied her grandmother's face as she pulled the chair from the dresser over to the bed. What if Ryan Marvell had told someone about Martie and her grandmother now knew about Martie, too?

But Charlotte Wahl said only, “At seventy, I don't have anything more important to do with my time than see that my granddaughter returns to the world,” and with that she sat down and took a book from her bag—some fat history by William Manchester—and she raised her reading glasses from their chain around her neck and opened the book to chapter one.

After four days of such visits—which always included a period in which Charlotte washed Franny's face and combed her hair—Franny felt so besieged that she got out of bed and dressed and went downstairs to eat breakfast at the table before her grandmother could leave her own house in town.

The following Monday, she returned to school.

At first bell, when all of the students pushed toward their homerooms, she found she needed to step back to wait in the dead space under the stairs leading to second floor. Certain kids skittered
past with heads down. Others used elbows and knees and hard parts to ram and gouge those in their path. Two boys in identical striped shirts grinned at one another, then picked up a smaller boy by his ears and started him down the hall.

“Stop that!” Franny shouted.

To her surprise, the three boys ran off together, as if she were the enemy.

In algebra, she had missed two quizzes, one exam, and the explanation of factoring. In the lunchroom, Christy Strawberry waved to Franny—
over here
—and as Franny took a seat beside the cafeteria's big windows, she noticed: no leaves in the small trees staked with tough wire and sections of green garden hose in front of the school. No leaves in the yards of the pink and yellow and blue tract houses that sat across from the junior high.

“God, you're skinny!” Joan Harvett said. “I wish I'd get pneumonia for a while.”

“But, hey”—Lola Damon took a bite of her sandwich, then chewed while the others waited for her to finish her sentence—“Claudia and Janeen asked if you still liked Ryan Marvell 'cause they saw him at a party with some girl.”

“God, Lola, she doesn't want to talk about that!” Christy Strawberry said, and Franny shrugged as if she had been too ill these last weeks to have given a thought to Ryan Marvell. She could do this because she was down deep, like a diver who hears the speedboats overhead and knows she must stay submerged for as long as possible if she does not want the top of her head ripped off.

“Claudia and Janeen,” she said. “Who are Claudia and Janeen?”

“Our Y-Teen leaders,” Christy said softly. “They go to SFF, Fran.”

“Oh.” Franny nodded. Big girls with blue eye shadow and hair dyed the color of corn silk.

“But, hey, Franny”—Christy smiled—“what do you think of Barry Monahan?”

Franny appreciated the change in conversation. She batted her eyelashes at Christy. Pretended to bite a lengthy cigarette holder,
tap a little ash. “Rahly, dahlink”—Natasha the Russian spy from
Rocky and Bullwinkle
—“I don't know zis Barry. Vy don't you introduce me sometime?”

“Ho, ho,” said Lola Damon. “Nobody gets to talk to Barry but Christy.”

Christy dipped her head closer. “He's cool but he's kind of fast. He wants me to do some stuff, you know?”

Franny nodded. Smiled. The smile stunk. She stunk. She was a mildewed cadaver her old pal now inspected for bad news and clues? Was that it?

“I think I'd go all the way before I'd—you know, let him finger me,” Christy whispered. “Wouldn't you?”

Terrible not to trust Christy. Last fall, Franny and Christy had sung all of the songs from
The Wizard of Oz
together. Last winter they had bought matching stadium coats with wooden toggles, and the night Christy learned her dad was moving out, Franny had rocked Christy in her arms. But she did not quite trust Christy now, and she said, maybe a little more Germanic, less Russian, “Ah, ah, ah! But ze finger does not contain ze spermatozoa.” She lifted her index finger, made the top digit bow. “Ze finger iz your little friend.”

Christy giggled behind her hand. “You're awful.”

“Undt have you never heard ze visdom of sages who tell us ze penis is like ze loaded gun, safe till it shoots?”

Christy repeated this tidbit to Joan Harvett and Lola Damon who said, “Ick!” and “Ho, ho!” and, then, “But that's really true, isn't it?”

Billions of sperm swam in a single ejaculation. Six or seven “good ejaculations” contained enough sperm to repopulate the entire earth. That afternoon, she read all about it at the Pynch Lake Public Library. Why had it never occurred to her that the library owned books and magazines that contained such facts? And pictures? A Swedish photographer had shot beautiful opalescent photographs of sperm swimming in cervical mucus; pink fallopian tube folds as delicate and lovely as the petals of a peony.

At just six weeks, while still so small it could fit on a thumbnail, the human embryo showed minuscule rag doll hands, a fog of fingers. By eleven weeks, the embryo weighed no more than a letter sent with a single stamp—three quarters of an ounce—yet it now looked like a human baby. Little legs and toes and arms and even the beginnings of a nose in that spooky miniature head.

She glanced up from the book's slick pages and out the window at the library's front lawn. Resemblances everywhere. The trunks of the pale-barked sycamores reminded her of the long legs on the three Holsteins the Nearys kept for milking. The tears that rose in her eyes surprised her. If Ryan Marvell were to walk into the library, now, and see her, sitting here, looking out the window, and he could tell what she was thinking, would he fall in love with her again? No denying she had hoped she might see him here, today. Absurd. Yet she had imagined him in the reference room, yawning, loafers propped on one of the big tables. In the stacks:
Well, if it isn't Ryan Marvell!
Said oh, so lightly. The trick would be to make it possible for him to be not too embarrassed at seeing her. To make it possible for him to move toward her, if he liked.

Better: to make it impossible for him to move away from her. But that would be magic again. Miracles. Potions.

When she finally thought to check the clock that afternoon, she found it was already after five, and she hurried down to the alcove to call her father's office. A man in a yellow rain slicker was using the telephone, barking happily into the receiver, “Yes, yes, exactly! That's exactly the way I remember it, too.”

She went to stand a few paces off, to wait.

“Hold it!” A young woman stepping out from under the alcove's stairs grabbed the collar of the parka of the toddler who moved one step ahead of her. The woman knelt. Wrenched the parka hood onto the child's head. Tugged the strings that pulled the hood into a pucker around the tiny face.

“You drive me crazy all day long, don't you?” the woman muttered.

Franny smiled at the tiny, squashed face that stared her way
while the mother took miniature mittens from her own coat pockets and worked them onto the child's hands. A woman not much older than Martie. Her hair looked rough and her skin was grainy.
Ill-used
, Franny thought, not sure where she had seen the phrase.

A terrible mother? A tired mother?