Escape Artist

talking to her. I mean, Mary Allibone-world famous. Mary said, ‘Leave me alone.’ At the theater she demanded that Gustave Timm shoo Frana away, but Frana started wailing about being an actress, going onstage at the Lyceum, mind you. Mr. Timm tried to be kind to her but then he got angry and said go away. He almost called the police. He caught me rolling my eyes and shot me a look. Like I was part of her craziness. I got scared but Frana kept pleading. One of the ushers came and led us out. Humiliating, I tell you.” She grumbled. “An actress. Really!”

“She was in A Scrap of Paper.”

“And she read her lines like…like reading the alphabet backwards.” She made a smacking sound with her lips, doubtless enjoying her doughnut. “And you think that her family will allow that. Some sick old drummer dragging her off to New York. Jake, you are so simple. Her uncle will club her to death first. Her brothers will…You should see how he slapped her.”

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