Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (26 page)

At first I slumped low in my seat while Frankie sang the words to Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” As he crooned off-key, I couldn’t help but compare him to Ted in my mind. For some reason I did this a lot growing up. If they fought, I rooted for Frankie, although Ted usually won. As we grew older, I favored Ted and felt guilty about it later, because Ted was handsomer, wittier, smarter, and more athletic. As for singing, Ted could do a perfect tongue-in-cheek imitation of the Moody Blues
.
Frankie, with his crooked teeth, his lips curled in song, had no voice. Then there was the matter of guile.

Everyone still teased Frankie about his handling of Mom’s stew, the “witch hazel” that she simmered in her “cauldron.” While Liz and I had connived to hide the meat in dozens of ways—inside an extension of the table, or (Liz’s favorite) rolled and stuffed into a bottle of A.1.—Frankie would not waste food because of the starving kids on the UNICEF box that Mom strategically placed at the center of our kitchen table. An hour after dinner, we would be lying on our stomachs side by side with our eyes locked onto
The Patty Duke Show
. I’d glance over at him to find that he still had meat stored in his jaw. “Spit it out,” I’d say, and he’d look away, embarrassed.

Now, in the Beetle, I shot up from my slouch, excited. I was leaving town. My hair whipped against my face as I joined Frankie in song.

That night I sat in front of the television, folding laundry for my trip. There were windows on two sides of the party room downstairs, one facing the path up to the pool, and the other, my side, facing an isolated patio rimmed by a stone wall. This patio wasn’t connected to anything else in the yard, which made it my favorite thing about the house. Frank came down and handed me a long-necked Hudepohl. I sipped the beer, thin and sour. “Why do you drink this stuff?” I asked.

He didn’t exactly abide my slights; he simply never registered them. Instead, he brought up his plans for the coming week with Sarah Jane. When would I be back? Did I still want to have a pool party before Mom and Dad came home? As usual, he stared at the television screen while we talked, only this time a smile crept over his lips.

“You like Sarah Jane a lot, don’t you?” I said.

He pushed his lips out to hide his giddiness.

Sarah Jane was a lucky girl. “You gonna marry her, Frankie?”

“Maybe.” He took a sip of his beer and looked me in the eye, his almond eyes crinkling, then moved them back to the screen. He puckered his lips to stifle a proud grin. Frank’s life plans were clear and simple: he would graduate from Xavier University in a year and stay in Dad’s service department, where even the most irate customers were soothed by Frankie’s sincere desire to be helpful. I’d spent one summer answering the phone there and fell asleep between calls, but Frankie whistled his way to a perch on the service desk.

He might have already proposed to Sarah Jane. Or maybe he would do it on this next meeting. That grin implied that he was at least close, although trying to “breast” his cards, as Grandpa used to say, so I didn’t press him.

“Good,” I said, folding the last T-shirt. The clothes were warm and smelled of clean cotton. I smoothed a hand over the stack, the way Mom would when she finished folding laundry.

As for David, Frank was kind to him but he thought I’d do better to choose a guy from the old neighborhood, someone Catholic. Other than Michael and Bridget, few of us siblings practiced Catholicism in our young adult years to the degree our parents expected. Many of us lied to our mother about going to church, except Frankie. He attended Mass every week. “You gonna marry David?” Frankie blurted out, his voice cracking on David’s name.

For me, it wasn’t the way he said “David” but the word “marry” that touched a nerve. David had one married friend in medical school, and that couple looked miserable. Marriage was a possibility for us, but not for a few years.

“Well?” said Frank.

“I guess so. Someday.” I sipped my beer.

Then Frank asked me in a coy voice if I wanted to get fixed up with one of his friends. The young man in question was a beefy guy called Bubba Punch. “He likes you,” said Frank.

I sighed.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I tried to sound gracious. “Really?”

“Well,” said Frank, “I’m just saying ...” When he chose to, Frankie could read my body language. “I mean, if you ever break up with David ...”

That hardly seemed likely. I couldn’t wait to see David. Ten weeks earlier, while David packed up to leave for the summer, I cried so hard I was slobbering. He handed me a key to his apartment and said, “Come here whenever you want. That’ll make us both feel better about being apart.” At first, I didn’t think I would last a week without him. I came by his place often, sometimes with a studious friend who was taking a summer class. Back at my parents’ home, because of Frank and Ted, my evenings were turning out to be fun.

The trip to Buffalo made it even better. Over the following days, David took me to an outdoor performance of Shakespeare, a nightclub with magicians in training, a beach house on the Canadian side of the lake, and more jazz clubs. His mother welcomed me warmly into their home. Still, members of both families were showing reservations about this relationship.

Since my parents weren’t due home for a few more days, I figured I could get away with a day or two alone with David before anyone would expect me home. His apartment smelled of decay when we entered. Over the last month I hadn’t made it there at all. His ferns had rained brown leaves everywhere. We were so tired that we collapsed onto the bed sideways. My legs were hanging over the edge, and I kept meaning to do something about that. Instead, I rattled off the highlights of my summer: fireworks on the river, Frank’s friends hanging out at our house, and a canoe trip with my girlfriends.

We held hands, and I told the story of Frankie’s scheme to fix me up with Bubba Punch. David laughed in the midst of a yawn. He wasn’t offended by Frank’s attempt to thwart our relationship. In fact, he’d negotiated any resistance from my family with finesse. “Punch what?” he said. “With that name, the guy could pitch for the Reds.”

“Or go on
Big Time Wrestl
ing
.”

“That Frankie,” said David.

I sighed. Falling asleep felt as safe as it had with Frankie back in our old room while he endlessly calculated RBIs, like revisiting a time before I even knew what worry meant: before Trent on the playground, or Mom’s downward spiral. How freeing it felt to break clean of those dismal memories.

We awakened to a pristine September morning, which was cool but warming up. After we went out to breakfast, we bought groceries and stopped by the sorority house to pick up mail. Gretchen wasn’t awake yet, but a girl there said she’d tell her I’d stopped by to see her. I jumped in David’s car out front. “Let’s scram,” I said, afraid that somehow word would get back to my family that I was in town.

We were unloading the groceries in David’s kitchen when the phone rang. “Should I answer?” he asked.

“Your parents probably want to know that you got home.”

He grabbed the receiver from the wall and took it into the dining room. “Hello ... Oh, hey, Gretch.”

“It’s Gretchen?” I asked, ready to take the call.

David didn’t answer me. His face hardened. I’d never seen that look on him. I stopped unpacking. “What is it?”

“Okay. I got it. Thanks.” He hung up and briefly the stunned face lingered.

“What?” My heart raced. “Am I in trouble?”

“I don’t know. Gretchen just told me to get you home right now. Come on.” He grabbed his keys.

“Gretchen said what? I have to put these away first.”

“Forget it.”

The head of lettuce, fresh and crisp in my hands, dropped to the counter. David took my hand and rushed me to the car. Along the way I worried. My family must have called the sorority house, where someone must have told them I was in town. This meant that my family would know I was sleeping with David, and while I was pretty sure that I wasn’t the first sibling to have premarital sex, it seemed that I would be the first one to be caught. Already I was crafting my defense.

The radio came on briefly in the car and David stuffed a tape into the deck before starting the engine. “Watch it. You’re gonna break your new tape deck,” I said, just before the underbelly of his car brushed the lip of the curb. “Ouch!” I was eager to get this over with, too, but David seemed to be taking this so hard. “What can they do?” I said.

David was silent. Some ominous piece by Mozart played. I kept thinking, this is ridiculous, being so nervous about spending a weekend together. I remembered the first time he’d driven to my parents’ house.

“We could just tell them it was too late to drive home so I slept on your sofa.”

“Sure,” he said, distracted.

What would David say to my family? Should I even bring him into the house?

Finally we turned onto my street. As we neared the house, I saw cars lining the curb out front, which was odd because people usually parked in the lane, but as we made the turn into the lane we found more cars. “What is it?” I said, releasing my seatbelt. “It has to be Katie.” My heart sped up even faster. Grandpa had died about six years before. Maybe it was Katie’s turn, but ninety is a good many years, I thought. And then I remembered my parents. When were they due back? I opened the car door before David could stop.

“Wait!” He slammed on the brakes.

I jumped out and he called after me. Maybe he said he would park the car, or he asked me to wait for him. My attention was fixed on the screen door into the kitchen. Mom had to be on the other side of it. She could punish me or slap my face, I would still hug her. It was an old door, and I couldn’t see into the house through the warped screen. Voices were there on the other side, and the door inside was open. Still, I found myself knocking as if this were someone else’s house.

Michael’s wife came to the door. Her hair was wet and she wore tennis shorts, as if she’d been playing with her kids in the pool. Maybe this was a party? Except that she had this harsh expression on her face. Her blue eyes drilled into mine, the lines on her jaw tight. “Come inside,” she said.

“Is it Katie?” I asked, almost crying.

“Come in the house,” she said, softer.

“Oh, God. It’s Mom and Dad?” I started shaking uncontrollably.

“Please,” she said sternly. “Eileen. Eileen!”

“No!” I snapped, pointing at her. “You tell me right here.”

“It’s Frankie,” she said. Her eyes, swelling with tears, told me that he was dead.

I heard a long scream, and it wasn’t until my head started pounding that I realized it was coming from me. My knee wobbling to the brink of collapse, I took off in the direction I’d last seen David driving. At a tree down the lane, I stopped to beat my forehead against the trunk. Something tugged me back. It was David. He was telling me he had me.

We were there in the neighbor’s yard, David soothing me, when I heard whimpering from someone other than myself. Out in the lane, I saw Ted, his arms folded over his face, sobbing. It was like hearing the news all over again.

On the day of the funeral, Dad called us all into the living room: Mom, the priest, children, and grandchildren—in total more than twenty people. As we held hands, he delivered a heartening talk before we faced the service. Despite his normally terse style, there were times when my father spoke and it seemed as if he’d been born for that moment alone, his words so stirring that we were prepared to face a battle. We didn’t know that Dad had been sedated in Las Vegas and required a wheelchair to get on the plane, that inside he felt he’d just faced his last defeat. We had expected Mom to fall apart, but she was holding her own. Already she said she’d had a visit from Frankie in the form of a dove. This seemed to relax her enough to get through the days ahead.

A wake was held. I don’t remember a single image or conversation from it, except that there was a closed casket. Frank had been killed in a car accident while his friend drove home after they had been drinking. Gretchen had heard the story on the news that morning, and called us. Everyone insisted that Frankie was sound asleep on impact, never felt a thing, but for months afterward I imagined him waking up at the last second to face that telephone pole. At the very moment he died, I might have been talking about Frankie to David, just before I fell asleep.

I have only a fleeting memory of the funeral service. The mass took place at Saint Vivian because it was bigger than the church in our new neighborhood and because Frankie belonged to that world. I couldn’t have made it down the aisle to the front pew without David holding my hand. I see the jammed church and the candles in their brass chandeliers lit on a cloudy morning. I recall bursting into tears during the gathering back at our house when I came upon a group of Frank’s friends, among them Chief Taylor, Stilts, and Bubba Punch.

Otherwise, I remember only two images from the limousine immediately after the service. First, I glanced out the window and saw the friend who was driving when Frank died. He was standing away from the church, scratches on his cheek, petrified, waiting as if he expected the crowd to come out and sentence him. The second is an image I must have dreamed, in which David sits beside me on my left and on my right sits Frank’s fiancée, Sarah Jane. I picture her in a window seat wearing an off-white dress, the driver of the crashed vehicle outside in the distance. I see her freckled cheeks and the cut of the dress, which couldn’t have been white, I think, but that’s what I see when I picture all of us there in the limousine.

S
ome days I awakened to the realization that I would never again see Frankie. I could only roll over and go back to sleep. David kept as close as anyone could be to someone encased in a protective shell. I rarely left my room in the sorority house. Frank’s death was changing me in fundamental ways. I understood none of them. When I think of that year, I see the bottom side of the upper bunk, where a girl named Kitty slept. She slipped out gently every morning and spent most of her time in the library. Across the hall from us were Gretchen and Pam. On a good day, I joined them for
General Hospital
or a game of hearts. More often I stayed in the lower bunk with the blinds drawn and the lights off, just staring.