“What do you want, Edna?”
“I’m concerned.”
“Why?”
“You running away?”
“My father’s presence covers that house like a layer of…of, I don’t know, stone. I can’t breathe there.”
“What happened, Jake?”
“What happened, Miss Reporter”-it was actually said gently-“is that my father has condemned me and said some awful remarks about Frana. She’s dead and doesn’t deserve it.”
“Well, he’s afraid for you.”
“No. He fooled you. He fools everyone. He’s afraid for himself. His name in Appleton, at the university. His place in the center of the universe. His image as part of that group of fanatical lunatics. You know, Edna, I have to speak German at home. English is for visitors. If I lapse into English, which I do rarely since I never have friends visit there, I’m banished to my room. Me, a college freshman. A right tackle on the football team. I’m still a child.”
“But is this the answer?” I waved my hand around the dim park.
He looked at me, coldness in his voice that reminded me of Herr Professor. “You don’t understand the…the fierceness of my father. Unyielding, a rock.”
“He’s afraid what Frana’s murder will do to your future.”
“Maybe, but I’ve had my eyes opened. I’m looking at myself…”
“And?”
“I don’t like what I see. I’m a son who kowtows to a cruel man, a boy trapped in a man’s body. I’m a man who refuses to build his own character, drifting in his family’s shadow, and, you know, a man who left undefended a girl who died.”
“Frana’s death…” I had to know.
He looked at me. “Do you think I killed her?” His voice was brusque.
The question stunned me. “Of course not.”
“My father does.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He insinuated as much. In one conversation. My own father.”
“But the heat of the moment…passion…”
He let out a fake laugh. “My father has never indulged any passion.” A baffled look spread across his face. “Maybe I did hurt her. There were times when she infuriated me, her flirtations, her lies about running off with other men, her…”
“She left you, Jake.”
“But lately she’d see me and we’d talk.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
A long silence. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember much, I’ve been in a fog…”
“You’d remember that!” I felt chilled now.
Another long silence. “I suppose so. Who knows? There are times, this past week, I can’t remember what I’ve said or done.”
What was there about him that so captivated me? The handsome face, so much the matinee idol, so striking, like one of the young actors in the stage melodramas. A young fair-complexioned Edwin Booth with those mesmerizing eyes, the square jaw, the authority of movement. But with Jake there was an unexpected softness, almost a feminine pliancy, gentleness…and gentility.
We sat there as darkness fell. I found my heart beating wildly; Jake had charms that alarmed me. Not good, this.
He was intelligent and aware, not the common boy I’d sometimes thought. A smart boy. A contemplator. I liked smart boys. Crazily, I thought of my father as a young man, the dreamy poet who fled one land and lost his way in another.
“There’s something you’re going to hear whispered in town,” I began.
Jake’s lips trembled. “Now what?”
I hesitated, trying to find words I’d never used before. “Frana…was carrying…a child.”
Jake seemed not to have heard me. “What?” Then, the recognition sinking in. “My God. I…”
My heart stopped. “You knew it, Jake?” I watched his face but I didn’t know what I expected to see.
He shook his head rapidly. “No, God no. But something about the way Frana spoke the last time I saw her on the street. She acted like…like she wanted to tell me something scary. Just the way she talked I felt…” His voice trailed off.
“I’m sorry, Jake.”
Jake surprised me. All of a sudden he lowered his eyes and a choked rasp escaped his throat. He sobbed out of control.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“Frana.” He said the name so softly it came out a whisper, reverential.
“I didn’t want you to hear it from the men of town, the gossips…”
Jake reached out and touched my wrist. “Thank you, Edna.”
For a long time we sat in silence.
“What will you do now?” My voice shook.
He stood and walked around, aimless, arms wrapped around his chest; and for a moment he disappeared into the darkness, a shadowy figure that moved in and out of the overgrown bushes. He returned and sat down, his voice clear and resolute. “I’m going away.”
“Where, Jake?” I did not like this.
“Edna, I’ve been thinking about this. I’m leaving Appleton. I’m either going East to join the navy-I’ve always wanted to see the ocean ever since I read Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast-or I’m headed West to California.” He smiled sweetly. “I’ve also read a lot of Bret Harte.”
I whispered. “Jake, I…I’ve read a lot of O. Henry. I’d like a better ending than this.”
“No, I have to do this. Leave Appleton. If I stay here, I’ll be the whipping boy of my father and the good Methodists. I’ll stay at the university and be pitied. I’ll be touched by the Frana murder. People will wonder if I was the…one…the baby. Or even killed her. I’ll never be able to escape that, and the town will look at me and think of it. When the house is on fire, you gotta escape by whatever way you can.”
“But you didn’t kill her!”
He lifted the collar of his jacket, pulled it tight around his neck, and stood. “I have to walk now. I visit football friends. They feed me like I’m a beggar.” He smiled. “Alms for the orphan boy.”
He walked away. I stayed in the gazebo, tired, a wave of melancholia suffocating me. How wrong this was, how sad. A leave-taking, an escape, abandoning what you know and cherish and hope for…
The loneliness of such departures.
Suddenly, out of the blue, I had the image of the strapping young man standing on sunlit California beaches, his eyes staring out over the shimmering blue Pacific. There was rightness about it, salvation for him, a beginning. Yes, Jake Smuddie had to go West-or East, though I thought romantic souls naturally inclined to the West and prosaic types headed East…to find the path of his life, though he’d carry the ghost of Frana with him. It exhilarated me, this reflection. As I walked home, I felt happy for him.
But as I stepped into the dark yard fronting the Ferber household on North Street, I panicked. Suddenly I was scared.
Chapter Fifteen
On Monday morning Sam Ryan was in a tizzy. Matthias Boon was out with la grippe, so he asked me to stop at Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house to pick up some copy Boon had written and taken home with him on Friday.
“Now,” he stressed. “The man is sick in bed, and I gotta newspaper to get out.”
Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house on Fisk Street in the Second Ward was a respectable home. I knew that because Mrs. Zeller announced the fact over and over. A weekly shopper at My Store, she’d linger over a simple cast-iron pot, according to my mother, as though she were “contemplating the brush strokes on the Mona Lisa.” Worse, she chattered incessantly in a high, needle-thin voice, words rushing over one another as though trying to escape that annoying mouth. You saw an old woman, in her eighties perhaps, dumpy as a sack of winter apples, always dressed in misshapen kitchen dresses with one or more stays loose or threatening to give way. When her husband of a half-century died-one of the Appleton pioneers, she’d tell you, read about it in the papers, if you didn’t believe her, her family was real history-and the last of her eight children either died or left town and didn’t look back, she converted her twelve-room monstrosity of a home into a boarding house.