Escape Artist

A pause. “No, it was sealed.”

“But you did it.”

“Of course. It was part of Frana’s plan to leave Appleton with that…that man. She said she’d be on that train.”

“But it didn’t work, Kathe. Frana got murdered, and Jake is gone.”

Kathe trembled. “It ain’t my fault, Edna. You can’t blame me. I was just trying to help a friend. That’s what friends do, you know.”

I deliberated. “Kathe, you were always with her. Did you help her sneak out that afternoon?”

“No.” One word, hard.

“Did you see anything?”

“How could I? I was in the library that period. Last period. I mean, I knew something was gonna happen, but I didn’t know what.” She swallowed a laugh. “The funny thing is, you know…One of the boys-Johnny Marcus, that clown-yelled something to me about Frana the prisoner locked up in the tower like Juliet. Everyone jumped in, buzzing, about her creepy uncle. They looked at me like I knew what was going on. In a loud voice I yelled, ‘Frana ain’t gonna be happy everybody is laughing at her.’ And then everyone laughed and hooted and carried on. Some of the serious students slammed their books shut, mad as hell.”

“And what did you do?”

A pause. “I laughed as loud as the rest.”

“Frana was your friend.” I glared at her. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“I got lots of friends, Edna.” She narrowed her eyes. “Unlike some people I know.”

I ignored that. “Yet you helped her with that note.”

She closed up. “Leave me alone, Edna. I mean, could you just leave me alone?”

After supper my mother decided that the Ferber family should pay a condolence call to Frana Lempke’s family. Frana’s mother Gertrud often did her shopping at My Store. At Christmas she bought religious figurines-the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, camels, sheep, little Bohemian figurines in gaudy blue and red and green. “A small, quiet woman, but a good woman. Not the brash army of women who move like stampeded cattle through my aisles, their ample hips sending goods willy-nilly.”

Fannie had baked one of her succulent apple pies, dipping into the barrel of winter apples in the cellar. Entering the house, I’d smelled the aromatic confection-the pungent sweep of cinnamon and nutmeg, the savory butter crust, the fleshy winter apples diced and soaked in cider. I was happy to see a second pie on the pie rack, cooling-this one for the family.

Dressed in funereal black broadloom and corduroy tie and black silk and black taffeta bonnets, the Ferbers left home, Fannie swinging a wicker basket with white linen cloths covering the pie. We walked to the edge of the farm district beyond the fairgrounds in the Sixth Ward. The Lempke farm sat on a little promontory that edged a bank of black hemlocks, a tiny farmhouse with pine-slatted roof and whitewashed clapboards, a house that seemed haphazard, a room tacked on as needed, so that the whole effect was one of chance, mishap, even chaos. Dilapidated, with a sagging lean-to on one side. Broken stone paths wound through untrimmed bramble bushes, thickets of wild rose, and I could see, beyond the sagging honeysuckle-covered picket fence, the meager fields beyond.

I knew Frana’s father and brothers worked at the Appleton Paper and Pulp Works on the river. The men did the filthiest, smelliest jobs in the acid vat rooms. At home they worked their piddling truck farm of tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, potatoes. A few autumn melons. The mother tended the hencoops and the pigsty out back, while the brothers labored in the barn where the horses, cows, and goats clamored in the dark, tight recesses. An orange-brown mongrel dog barely lifted its head as we stepped onto a creaky porch; nearby a cat squeaked, leapt over the railing, and then climbed into a Rose of Sharon bush.

Gertrud Lempke seemed surprised that anyone would visit but looked grateful, thanking us too much, apologizing for the disheveled parlor with its hand-hewn chairs and rag rugs. She rushed off to brew coffee. There was one photograph on the wall, a sepia-toned portrait of a mustachioed German military officer with much braid and ribbon; and I thought of the Old Testament God, judgmental and contentious. Mrs. Lempke served us a strawberry strudel, but not the apple pie. From my chair in the parlor, I could see that confection sitting on a rough-board kitchen table among the unwashed supper dishes.

Gertrud was dressed in a faded Mother Hubbard smock. She had a tiny, pinched face, a small crinkly nose, a little mouth. One more sad hausfrau, I thought, the hidden-away drudge with wrinkled skin and the ill-fitting blue-white false teeth that glistened like piano keys in the flickering gaslight. She had none of her dead daughter’s beauty. She sat, stood, sat down again: nervous. I wondered what folks ever visited this isolated farmhouse. Who talked to this scattered, lonely woman?

As we sipped coffee in silence, the back door opened and Oskar Lempke and his three husky sons lurched in, stopped dead in their tracks, and looked ready to retreat back to the fields and the barn. One of the boys carried a pail of beer, and it swung back and forth in his grip. Nervous, he sloshed some suds on the pine floor, and the old man mumbled, “Du unverschamter Hund.” The lad narrowed his eyes, fierce. Oskar Lempke, looking at his wife and then at my father, said he appreciated the condolence call, though he didn’t seem to. He and his sons sat down in a rigid line, stiff as tree trunks. I looked at all three boys, Frana’s older brothers, all in their early twenties, perhaps, blunt-muscled and thick and blond-cowlicky, farm boys and mill workers, all with wide cherry-red faces and hands as broad as ham hocks. Plodding oxen, brutal farm animals themselves, dull. No one said a word; each stared straight ahead. I’d met one of them in a harness shop months back, with Frana at his side; and my memory of him was clear. He kept spitting on the floor.

The brothers seemed inordinately fascinated with Fannie who, conscious of their unblinking stares, fidgeted in her seat. There was rawness in their stares. A barnyard hunger. My mind flashed to Jake’s whispered gossip… Frana’s fear of her brothers, her dread of going home…the brother who bothered her…

In the awful silence, my mother repeated her sympathies. Frana’s mother swallowed and looked away, but I found Oskar’s reaction alarming. The tough-looking man, all bulk and weathered line, seemed teary-eyed, putting the backs of his palms against his eyes, and trembling.

Silence.

Then he spoke, his German accent thick, “Maybe we did wrong thing, locking her up like that.” He pointed upstairs. “She was rebel, that girl, she was, meine Kleine. Fought like wild rabbit. So we nail the bars on the window and we learn you cannot nail in someone who is already living outside the house.”

His wife whispered, “We was going to send her to family in Germany. To a nunnery. Is stricter there. I make her dresses but she has to have the Amerikanische gown. America is too-too much freedom. The…” She waved her hand in the air. “The…the…open space…”

One of the brothers grunted, or had he belched? He looked pleased with himself.

Everyone turned at the sound of heavy clomping. Christ Lempke was dragging himself down the stairs. He nodded to us and fell into a chair, out of breath. I knew he’d once worked at the Eagle Manufacturing Company, building silo feed cutters, making good money, a hard-working man, well-liked; but his war injury kept him home. Staring at us with hooded, distrustful eyes, he sneered, “I hears you talk. Enough. Frana was girl who chose to dishonor…”

Gertrud made a tsking sound, but Christ went on, “She should have been in nunnery since little girl, no? Too much looking in the mirrors, too much the Amerikanish sass in the mouth, too much with the boys throwing stones at the window at night.” His voice rose louder and louder. I thought it peculiar that in this house of grief, this man could only speak ill of the dead beautiful girl. Oskar Lempke stood, tottered a bit, stared down at his hectoring brother, and then left the room, not saying a word. Christ Lempke stopped talking.

We hurriedly stood. No one had touched the strudel.

At the front door Gertrud Lempke touched my sleeve. “She mentioned you. I remember. From school, maybe.”

“Yes.”

My mother started to say something, but Gertrud Lempke whispered, “Would you like to see her room?”

No. No. God no. But I nodded, and Fannie and I followed Mrs. Lempke up the narrow stairs, leaving our