Escape Artist

Casey would dance with the strawberry blonde

And the band played on

He’d dance ‘cross the floor…

She didn’t know how the stanza ended because she repeated those same three lines and paused, mid-line, and then began again, as though she were a wind-up toy that malfunctioned. I thought I’d go mad. I wanted to scream: with the girl he adored. It was not singing but some labored keening, mindless and mechanical. Her thoughts were elsewhere, perhaps in a dark place.

Fannie, kneading dough for strudel, her hands and elbows coated with flour, simply raised her eyebrows when I pointed to the backyard. “Fannie,” I began, but my sister held up a powdery arm.

“No, stop. Leave her be.”

I wandered into the parlor where my father slumped in a chair, his head nodding as though to a song in his head. He roused as I walked in, said hello, though he did not to want to talk. I didn’t linger.

Heading up the stairs to rest before supper, I saw my mother enter the parlor and speak sharply to him, a low, cutting remark. “How can you sit in the same chair all day?”

I froze. I hated it when my mother carped at the helpless man. Herself a driven woman whose energy demanded movement, she had little patience with a husband whose blindness was only the last in a series of failures-from business and money to, well, marriage. Lamentably, she had seen him as ineffectual long before the blindness struck. She had little tolerance with his placid movement through life, his desire that the world be painted in soft rainbow pastels, with muted chamber music underscoring his inactive days. She balked at that. Cut from a different cloth, steel-ribbed, taut, indomitable, she wanted her daughters to be molded similarly. Jacob Ferber was willow, she was oak.

She’d had a bad day at My Store. I could always tell because she assailed her sitting, immobile husband. She couldn’t help herself.

“The bank manager stopped in today.” A cold voice. “Again. Money due.” A bitter laugh. “And I can’t even discuss it with you.” I saw her punch a pillow on the settee and shift an end table so it was just out of his reach. She mumbled as she disappeared into the kitchen, “Chicago.” I cringed. It was, I knew, a prayer. It seemed to be the word that let her survive these bleak moments. Salvation in Chicago, sheltered among her family. A number of times I’d heard my mother and Fannie whispering about the ultimate move to Chicago. I always filled in the missing words: when father dies. The store would be sold, the house and furniture sold…and Fannie would marry the shopkeeper there she’d flirted with for years, an earnest fellow everyone loved, though I thought him lackluster.

Where would I be? I often wondered as I eavesdropped. Would I be the unmarried sister tending to sniveling brats through windy Chicago winters?

Something had shifted in the Ferber household these past few months. My mother’s outbursts-her attacks- had long been volcanic. Her anger went on and on, thunderous, until the rafters shook. Fannie had inherited that anger and largely directed it at me. But lately my mother had become…quiet. Coldness replaced fury when she talked to my father. She had stepped backward and realized she didn’t have to care anymore.

Upstairs I lay on my bed, burying my face in a pillow. Outside Kathe Schmidt was singing those same three lines. There was no escape, I thought. None whatsoever. Madness creeps into this home from the very corners.

Later, I found myself alone in the kitchen with Kathe. Last time we’d fought, and I regretted that. This time I vowed to be silent and decent, two qualities I had trouble executing.

“How are you, Kathe?” I asked, quietly.

Kathe looked up from the potted chicken she was spicing. She looked ready to cry.

“What’s the matter?”

Kathe made a smacking noise with her lips, sighed. “Nothing.”

“Something’s the matter.”

“It’s mein vater.” In a sloppy blend of German and English, she described her suffering father. She sobbed like a sickly child. It was like watching a dumb farm animal caught in a trapper’s cruel leg iron, squirming and flailing-helpless before the randomness of life. Kathe cried that life at home was horrible; her father sat all the day long on a chair in the kitchen and faced an empty table, while her mother, a maddened hen, clucked around him. August Schmidt, I learned piecemeal, had lost the will to live: a desire never to return to his lowly job as janitor, surely; but more so, a nagging belief that there would be a sudden rapping on the front door and he’d be led away in irons-to be hanged by the state. August Schmidt would start to whimper and slip from his chair to the floor, slumped like an old dog, afraid of noise and sudden movement. Her mother moved like a ghost through the halls, whispering that the family would flee back to Germany.

Kathe gasped. “I can’t live in that place no more. It’s a house of…of dead people.”

“Kathe, your father did not kill Frana. You know that.”

“Do I?” That answer made me furious. I wanted to slap the stupid girl. “Yeah, I know that. But everyone thinks he’s guilty.”

“Not so, Kathe.” I kept the fury out of my voice. “Reasonable people don’t believe it…”

Kathe cut me off. “People look at me on the street. Like…like…” She trailed off. “People don’t talk to me.”

I understood something. “Like Jake Smuddie?”

Kathe pouted. “Yeah.”

“Well, Kathe, you accused Jake Smuddie of murder.”

“I did not,” Kathe was no longer sobbing.

“Sort of. You were angry with him.”

Hands on hips, she swung around. “Well, he left me, you know. Frana always came first. And ever since that day in the park he won’t see me.”

“But he didn’t kill Frana either.”

“Then who did?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Help me, Edna,” Kathe pleaded.

“Me? What can I do?”

Kathe’s tough facade disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “You know people. In town. Talk to them.” Her lips trembled. “I just want things to go back to where they were before. You know. Back then.”

“Kathe, for God’s sake, things can’t go back to where they were. Frana is dead.” I thought of Jake Smuddie, hidden in that park gazebo, searching for an escape from his father’s regimented world. “And you have to accept that Jake is gone from your world.”

Kathe flared up, drawing her cheeks in, a sudden gesture that reminded me of a squirrel gnawing on an acorn out back. “We’ll see.”

My Lord. For a simple girl she could run the gamut of emotions from weepiness to sullenness to anger to pouting…to desperation. And then optimism. Each level, I considered, having the depth of oilcloth.

“I don’t mean to offend you, Kathe. I’m just trying to make you see…”

“Oh, yes, you did,” she snarled. She threw back her head so that her fair hair caught the light “Of course you did.”

“Kathe, I’ve been wondering about something. That afternoon Frana disappeared, you seemed to know so much about it-I mean, the story of the older man, the rumor of Frana on that train. You said she told you what she intended to do, her plan to sneak out of school. You knew about that note. You must have asked her who the older man was, no? She told you everything…” I stopped. Kathe’s face tightened. “What?”

“I did ask her.”

“And?”

“She’d just smile. A secret. She’d write me from New York.”

“So you helped her?”

“Well, you know that. She was afraid Miss Hepplewhyte might spot her near the office and she’d have to explain. So she had me drop the note off when Miss Hepplewhyte stepped out. Frana slipped it to me. I put it on her desk. So what? I ain’t committed a crime, you know.” A hard look, challenging.

“Did you know what it said?”