Escape Artist

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.

A “respectable place,” for as a “Christian lady of the German Lutheran persuasion,” she’d abide no dalliance or misbehavior in her blessed walls. A fussy, opinionated woman, she mothered the men she harbored, those bachelors and widowers who came to Appleton to work. Hers was a household of men and three women-herself, a housemaid, and a cook. “Ladies do too much laundry and want to go into my kitchen,” she said. So the men came and went and most were harmless souls. You had news types like Matthias Boon, transplanted from Milwaukee; Homer Timm, seeking shelter after his wife took ill; railroad men, laborers from the paper mills; wandering disaffected war veterans, always on the move. But despite her loud announcement that she screened and interviewed, there’d been late night knocks on the door by the chief of police. Deadbeat wanderers shuffled out of the back window, one step ahead of the law.

Mrs. Zeller, of course, romanticized all the gentlemen as models of civil conduct and charitable spirit-her “boys.” The likes of Matthias Boon and Homer Timm…more like troglodytes than feckless lads, surely.

I introduced myself to Mrs. Zeller’s housekeeper, a sullen looking Bohemian girl with braided hair and a boil on her neck the size of a harvest apple, a girl flustered at seeing a woman at the door. She rushed off to find Mrs. Zeller, who was haranguing the cook in the back of the house. The old woman came rushing into the front parlor, wiping her hands on an apron, and eyed me suspiciously.

“I’ve come for Mr. Boon’s-ah, copy.” I spoke slowly. Mrs. Zeller, I’d been told, was also hard of hearing.

“A fraulein? The telephone said they would send a reporter.”

“I am a reporter.”

“You’re not.” Flat out.

“Indeed, I am.” I wasn’t going to argue with this old crone. “Mr. Ryan sent me. If I might speak to Mr. Boon, please.”

Hands to the cheeks, eyes suspicious. “No.”

“Is Mr. Boon able to come to the parlor?” I knew that no women were allowed onto the upper floors or into the back rooms, male provinces unsullied by cloying perfume and tatters of lace.

“Is very sick, is throw up much. Such fine figures of mens, he is, ja. Crushed like a boy with la grippe.”

Good God. I entertained an image of Matthias Boon heaving into a chamber pot. The stumpy Boon, blustery as March wind, confined to a sick bed, fed nourishing, though lardy, soups and biscuits by a smothering Mrs. Zeller.

In the hallway the telephone rang and Mrs. Zeller actually jumped. She shook her head. “Is work of devil, but the mens they need it, is businessmens and professions, they are.” She pronounced the words- beezynezmenz and profezzunz, and at first I didn’t have a clue. Mrs. Zeller hurried out of the room, answered the phone, hung up, and looked back in. “I go to knock on his door.” I then heard her heavy footfall on the stairs. I relaxed. Boon was probably listening to her approach with dread.

I waited. The upright piano in a far corner was covered with old-country daguerreotypes in gold-gilt frames, perhaps twenty of them in various sizes. I saw resemblances to the withered Mrs. Zeller in some of the old photographs, ancient relatives in starched Sunday-best dress, severe German women with rigid, fierce faces, staring as though at war with the newfangled camera.

Voices drifted from a back room, raised voices, an argument. Bits and pieces of conversation filtered through the wall, and I recognized the pitched voice of Homer Timm, his words sharp and furious. He was countered by another voice, lower in pitch, but oddly familiar. Gustave Timm’s voice, the younger brother sounding defensive and apologetic. I could make out only random snatches of talk, though there was mostly silence, eerie patches of space between the spat-out words. I glanced toward the open archway that led to the hallway and expected Mrs. Zeller to