Enchanted Islands Page 5

  “You have to tell your mother. You have to,” I said. She stared at me, her eyes narrowing in incredulity. I understood. Her mother knew. Her mother had arranged it.

  *

  I left before her parents came home. I didn’t know what else to do. I wandered around by the port. Though it was spring, the wind was icy off the lake. I turned up the collar of my thin coat for warmth.

  How could I have been so stupid, not seen what was happening? How else could Rosalie’s family have afforded that grand house? What did it feel like, I wondered, having the camera on her, his eyes. Knowing that other people looked at photographs of her naked, vulnerable. I couldn’t even imagine putting something inside of me there (I knew so little of my own anatomy). I touched my cheek where his rough hand had lain.

  But Rosalie hadn’t even protested. She was used to it. And perhaps that was what broke my heart most. It had become banal for her to be violated.

  Reading this with modern eyes, you may wonder why I didn’t go to the police. But it was a different time, a different place. People would have blamed Rosalie. She would be damaged goods. No one would marry her. She’d be disgraced.

  How could her parents have sold her like that? Though mine were overly strict and old-fashioned, I knew my mother would have died before she let anything like that happen to me. She would have protected me with her own body, would avenge anyone who hurt me. And yet the people who were supposed to protect Rosalie were the ones who hurt her, who allowed that animal to hurt her over and over again.

  I decided then that we should run away together. Rosalie’s plan, though far-fetched, could be hatched. I was already working. I could be a secretary anywhere and support us.

  Should I tell my parents I was going to leave? They’d try to convince me to stay, surely. Out of love or necessity? If they would just let me finish school, I could make something of myself and send money home. If I stayed, our situation would never get any better. They would marry me off to whomever the yenta chose, like we were still in the old country. Might they be relieved, I wondered, if there was one less person in the cramped apartment? One less set of clothes to wash, meals to prepare, turns to wait for the communal lavatory? Possibly. They would keep me home out of fear of the unknown, the immigrant’s clinging to old-fashioned ways, conservative ideals. But this was America! We’d come for opportunity, and now they wanted to waste it by being timid, afraid. I wasn’t afraid.

  By the time I got home I had decided. And our little apartment, three floors up with the makeshift kitchen, the crammed rooms, the laundry hanging like dour bunting on lines strung across the room, draped on every chair and table, made my decision seem right. I would tell my mother that they were late with payroll this week, and we could be gone before the first of the month, before the rent was due.

  *

  I marched over to Rosalie’s house the following weekend. I had been preparing my speech all week and had honed it to what I considered a supreme example of rhetoric and accusation, whose ultimate purpose was to…I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had righteous indignation I had to get off my chest.

  When her mother answered the door, however, her blond hair swept back and her apron tied primly around her waist, I completely deviated from the script.

  “How could you?” I demanded. “How could you let that man take pictures of Rosalie?”

  “Excuse me?” she said. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about, Frances? Your face is all red.”

  “You let O’Rourke take pictures of Rosalie, dirty pictures.”

  “Dirty pictures?” She laughed. “Hardly. He has a line of women’s fans and Rosalie models them for the catalog.”

  I was struck dumb. Was it possible that she didn’t know? I knew her to be a kind person, a cultured person, an intelligent person. She must have understood. Rosalie must have told her what the pictures really were. The look Rosalie had given me in the bathroom confirmed it.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not what it’s like. The pictures…they’re…” I didn’t have the vocabulary to say what those photos were.

  “Look, Frances, are you coming inside? I don’t know what Rosalie has said, you know her and her stories. That one is ready for the stage.”

  “But, have you seen—”

  “Rosalie, Frances is here.” She swept me inside, our conversation over.

  Rosalie grabbed my arm, pulling me into her room and closing the door. “I heard you. With my mother. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Someone has to confront her,” I said. “This can’t go on. How can she pretend not to know?”

  “Oh, she knows,” Rosalie said, her hands bunching at her sides. “But she doesn’t know.”

  My face must have shown my confusion.

  “She knows what’s going on, but she can pretend she doesn’t know. And then she can convince herself that it’s all innocent so that it’s not her fault.”

  “But why don’t you just tell her you’re not going to do it anymore?”

  “We’ll lose our home,” Rosalie said. “We’ll be out on the street! I’ll be ruined. I can’t believe you told her. You’ve destroyed me.”

  Surely she was being a bit grandiose. “You were so upset.”

  “I’m always like that right afterward and then it passes. For God’s sake, Fanny, you’re like gully-fluff. Just leave,” she said. “I can’t look at you right now.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the word gully-fluff, but I certainly understood its context.

  *

  I went to Rosalie’s house the next afternoon, ready to apologize. She was right. It was not my place to tell or not tell. I was planning to beg her forgiveness. I had even brought her a sticky bun, which I knew she liked. I knocked on the door, and when no one answered I pounded on it. Finally Rosalie opened it. I could sense rather than see her mother behind her.

  “I can’t see you anymore,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I said, we can’t be friends anymore.”

  “Because…”

  “Because we can’t.” She was cold, all business, pale.

  I opened my mouth but no sound came out. I was too stunned even to feel hurt.

  “Goodbye, Frances.” She closed the door in my face.

  *

  Each day before work I went by Rosalie’s house. It was early, and her household wasn’t yet stirring. But I made a little pyramid of stones where she would surely see them from her window when she looked out in the morning to judge the weather. By the next morning they were gone, whether by Rosalie’s hand or by someone else’s I didn’t know.

  After a week, I stood outside the window and waited for Rosalie’s face to appear. When it did, she didn’t seem surprised to see me there. She looked paler than before and thinner. She had rouged her cheeks in a way that made her look exaggerated, like an acrobat in the circus. I waved. She dropped the curtain back into place.

  After waiting for her for three days, during which her curtain never moved, I stopped going to Rosalie’s house. I wasn’t sure what her silence meant, but it cut me, to stand there in the dawn looking vainly as if for a lover. I began to plan my own solo escape. When I had $100, I told myself, I would catch a train east. I decided on Hartford, a city enough like Duluth. I would be sixteen by then, and I could easily pass for eighteen and take a room in a boardinghouse somewhere. I could get a job in the evenings washing dishes or caring for children or even taking in laundry. And then I could enroll in high school. Hopefully I wouldn’t be too far behind; I’d been keeping up with my studies through Rosalie until recently. I could pretend to be an orphan. The fantasy was romantic enough to sustain me as I added two dollars, now three, to my savings, walking with my head down looking for fallen pennies, buying no books or sweets, just saving for the day when I’d catch the train.

  Each day I ate lunch on the bench where we once shared sticky buns, hoping Rosalie would come and see me. It was late May now, and the weather wasn’t too cool. I ate m
y sandwich while scanning the crowd for Rosalie’s form among the fishmongers, the roasted-nut salesgirls, the inevitable port girls for rent.

  If I wasn’t allowed to see her, how could I convince Rosalie that running away was not only her only option but my only option too? In imagining our life together, I began to find my own situation completely untenable, crying at work on a regular basis when the boss criticized me, whereas before his criticism fell around me as though I had a protective umbrella. My file grew thick with demerits. I knew that I would soon be fired.

  At home I so exasperated my mother that she hit my arm with the laundry brush, the first time she’d ever taken her hand to me. She was more upset than I was, begging my forgiveness and kissing the spot repeatedly, her tears wetting the skin. I forgave her. I wanted to hit someone too, to kick and lash out.

  I told her they had reduced my hours at work and docked my pay accordingly. I began to save the extra money instead of putting it in the jar above the icebox. I kept it in a small pouch I’d sewn one night and which I pinned into the waistband of my skirt every day. My money was always with me then. It would be too risky to hide it in the small apartment, where there were many hands that might discover it. I felt bad about the deception, but justified it as a penalty for the slap. I told my mother that with my free afternoons, I was looking for work downtown.

  Then, on the last day of May, there Rosalie was, carrying a large carpetbag. I’d nearly forgotten that’s why I sat there every day. Yet it was so natural to see her finally approach me, as if we’d been meeting there for years. She threw her arms around me, and I let myself lean into the hug. I wanted to tell her everything, and then I understood how lonely I’d been without her.

  She held me at arm’s length and then we hugged again.

  “Oh Fanny, I’ve missed you so!” she said.

  “Me too. Awfully. Please say you can be my friend again.”

  “I’m going away.” Rosalie stared over my head out onto Lake Superior. The large barges were just arriving from Canada to discharge their loads of coal and fish and textiles.

  “What? When?” I sputtered. “I’m going away too. I have thirty dollars saved. We’ll go together. As soon as I have a hundred.”

  “You can’t come with me. I’m ruined.” She spoke so softly, her voice was almost too small to hear.

  “No, Rosie.”

  Rosalie continued to look out on the water. A breeze came up and the harbor grew frothy. “It’s true, I’m damaged, worthless.”

  “It’s just pictures. It’s not—”

  “I’ve done other things too,” she said. “Not everything, but most of it. And once I bled, so I don’t think I’m…intact.” She turned to me. Her face was eerily blank, the bruising around her eye a mauve that blended in to her ashen skin.

  I slumped, examining the worn sleeves of my coat. Rosalie’s life was worse than I could ever have imagined. And I had been feeling so sorry for myself for having to quit school to work. Rosalie in pictures, with boys, with objects, doing things…it was too horrible.

  “We’ll start over, somewhere else,” I said. “It doesn’t have to count.”

  Rosalie noticed I was crying. “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” She stood up. “Goodbye, Fanny. You’ve been a true friend. My best friend. I love you. Try to forget what you saw. Try to forget me.”

  “Please,” I begged. “Please let me come with you. We can go to Hartford, I have it all planned out.”

  “Hartford?” Rosalie asked. “Why on earth would we go there? Chicago. It’s closer.”

  I heard her say “we.” I didn’t care where we went.

  “I’m going today,” Rosalie said. “If you want to come with me it has to be today.” She pointed to the carpetbag, which I could see now was stuffed with clothing. I began to protest. I couldn’t leave today. I didn’t have my things. I needed to write a letter to my family, give notice to my job…Rosalie just sat in front of me saying nothing and I saw how feeble my excuses were, how they were just fears.

  Finally I said, “Yes, all right, today.”

  “You get paid today, right? It’s Friday. Then ask for an advance on next week’s pay.”

  “They’ll never do that.”

  “Try. Tell them your mother has to see the doctor, or your baby sister needs medicine. Meet me at the station at five fifteen and we’ll catch the five thirty. It’ll be busy at the train station then; no one will notice us.”

  “But my clothes—” I began. Rosalie gave me a stern look. It was one of the things she teased me about, the horrible state of the hand-me-down rags I wore. My mother made them out of discarded fabric or forgotten washing. Surely I would not need any of this for my new life.

  And then I said the easiest word in the world, the word I was to say so many times without thinking through the consequences. I said, “Yes.”

  *

  I waited nervously for four forty-five, when they handed out pay for the week. When the senior secretary called my name, I garbled the sentence I’d been planning. “That’s highly irregular,” she said. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Narrins.”

  I knocked softly on his door and waited for him to say, “Come in.”

  “Hello, sir. I was wondering if I could have an advance on my pay, just a week. You see my sister, she’s a baby, and she needs to go to the doctor.”

  Mr. Narrins took his pipe from his mouth. “The doctor. What are her symptoms?”

  “She’s been listless, feverish. She can’t keep anything down.”

  “It sounds like the flu,” Mr. Narrins said. “In which case the doctor will do you no good, and you’ll be wise to keep your money.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “My brother had it before, and the doctor gave him some very good medicine that cured him quickly.”

  “Come on, Miss Frankowski, tell me what it’s really for.”

  “What?” I asked, acutely aware that he was staring at me.

  “What is the true purpose of the money you’d like to be advanced?”

  “The doctor, sir, as I said.”

  “I have to say, Miss Frankowski, you lie about as well as you type.”

  I nearly protested that I typed very well. I searched my mind for a plausible reason I needed the money. “School fees, sir. For correspondence courses.”

  “Right,” he said. “I have a feeling, Miss Frankowski, that we won’t be seeing you anymore.”

  “No sir.” I shook my head. “I’ll continue on, the same way I’ve been. I like my job. I value it.”

  “Here.” He wrote something on a piece of paper. “Tell Mrs. Peck to advance you half a week’s pay. And Miss Frankowski”—he paused before he handed me the paper—“please do something worthwhile with yourself.”

  “Have a good weekend, Mr. Narrins. I’ll see you on Monday.”

  “Have a good weekend, Frances,” he responded, chuckling.

  I danced my way back to Mrs. Peck’s desk.

  “Well, that is very irregular,” she said again, reluctantly counting out the bills. I wanted to leave her with some parting words: Mrs. Peck, you are a cream-faced loon (apologies to Shakespeare); or, Mrs. Peck, you are a goopy goldbricking grousing gasbag (apologies to the English language). But I held my tongue. It would only have given me a moment’s satisfaction, and I would regret it later, if I knew myself at all.

  *

  As I rode the tram, packed with people going home from work, I began to worry. What if Rosalie wasn’t really going to meet me? What if she changed her mind? What if it was a trap set by her mother to see if I really was the bad influence she claimed? I tried to brush the thoughts from my mind. Rosalie would be there and we would run away together to the life we were meant to live. After all, my parents left Poland for the unknown. Now my New World would be Chicago.

  I arrived at the train station with fifteen minutes to spare and waited as directed under the large clock. The minutes were long, and I searched every hurrying person for Rosalie’s face. But that one
was old, that one a man, this one fair. Each moment made me doubt myself and our journey more. Surely this was a fool’s errand, some fancy of youth that we would greatly regret. Maybe Rosalie had already come to that conclusion and decided not to meet me. Maybe her mother had locked her up.

  From there my mind began to spiral as it does when anxiety takes hold. Rosalie didn’t love me. No one would ever love me. My life would be a barren wasteland of loneliness, witness to the love and companionship of others, a joy that would be denied to me. I was thinking in that vein when Rosalie’s face appeared, red from hurry. Late, as always. She didn’t even pause but grabbed me by the hand, and we took off running for the train.

  We hopped aboard as the whistle blew and went from car to car searching for our compartment. I was breathless from running, from excitement. Rosalie consulted our tickets and then purposefully marched through the cars, until we found Cabin F, places 2 and 3. She grabbed the door handle and pulled, then pulled again. Behind us, the conductor unlatched the door and it slid easily. Rosalie flashed him a smile, and he took her bag and put it in the overhead rack.

  She slumped into her seat and began to fan herself with the tickets. I sat next to her and tried to calm my beating heart by examining our fellow passengers. One was a young man, perhaps a bit older than we were. He was dressed very smartly in a suit too warm for summer. He’d taken off his hat and his hair stood up in all directions, a multitude of colors from brown to blond. He had a friendly face but was absorbed in his book, either to give us time to compose ourselves or because he really was not interested. I saw the title, a religious treatise on the nature of sin, and imagined that Rosalie and I were temptation. Also in our cabin were two older women, already at their knitting, with a basket of food that smelled strongly of sausages. They were chatting in a Scandinavian language. There was no one in the last place, and after a bit Rosalie set her handbag on the empty seat.

  The train groaned out of the station and the tension left Rosalie. I wondered if she was worried her parents had followed her to the train. As we sat, my excitement began to leak like gas from a balloon, and I filled up with nervousness. I looked at my hands and found little half moons of white where my nails dug in. Rosalie and I dared not speak to each other. I know I would have burst into terrified tears had she said a word or even looked at me.