Within minutes, walking briskly, I approached the gazebo from the side and startled Jake Smuddie, sitting on a bench, dressed in his football jersey. He was leaning over a thick tome, concentrating, his face inches from the book. He turned, expecting someone. “I’m not Kathe.”
He smiled and stood. The book toppled to the ground. I noticed the title: Elements of Moral Philosophy, and I thought, cruelly, a little too late, no?
“I can see that.” A pause. “Hello, Edna.”
My heart fluttered as I looked at the handsome boy.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m not hiding. We-Kathe and me-we always come here.” Then he swallowed. “Yeah, I guess I’m hiding. From my father. He thinks I’m at the college library, studying.” He pointed at the book, which now rested on his boot. “But I couldn’t stay at home. He’s not happy with me these days.” He gave me a wispy smile. “He says I’ve brought shame to the family.”
“Well, have you?”
He looked hurt, and I regretted my sharpness. I stared into his wide, milk-fed boy’s face on that rough-and-tumble physique. I’d never thought him capable of anything untoward, though I gave him considerable license because he was so handsome. Attractive souls, I’d learned long ago, had a freedom in life that mere mortals-the bland, the dull, and the otherwise-didn’t possess. Plain girls learned that lesson early.
Unlike the other boasting boys, Jake Smuddie was always a decent sort, with a quiet manner. Boys like Jake never noticed me, but, peculiarly, Jake had. He laughed at my stories and sometimes talked to me. The afternoon following my performance in A Scrap of Paper, he stopped me on College Avenue and told me how much fun he’d had. “You make me laugh out loud, Edna.” That surprised me, and I blushed. Jake reached into a cloth satchel slung over his shoulder and took out a thin volume, thrusting it out toward me.
“What?” I stared into his handsome face.
“I want you to have this.”
A beautiful edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I held the slender leatherbound volume in my hand, an awful weight, as he mumbled something I didn’t catch, turned, and walked away.
That night, showing off the book at the dinner table, perhaps saying the name “Jake” a little too much, Fannie boiled over. I’d been watching her simmer. She, the pretty girl, had a not-so-secret crush on the footballer, and, unlike me, had notoriously (and unsuccessfully) flirted with him at school dances and even in broad daylight on College Avenue. Jake had ignored her. Now, eyeing the Shakespeare in my hand, she sniped, “He probably stole it from his father’s library.”
“I think it’s a touching gift.”
Fannie drew in her cheeks, narrowed her eyes. “He probably knows the only companion you’ll ever have is a book.”
“Fannie!” my father thundered.
“Well, I’m not sorry.”
Jake’s only fault was his lap-dog devotion to the beautiful young blond girls of town. Which must be some sort of punishable crime in the universe I created in my mind.
“I’ve been foolish.” Jake picked up the dropped book.
“Chief Stone giving you a hard time?”
He blushed. “I should have told him right away about my stupid visit to Frana’s home.”
“When was that?”
“The night before she, you know, died.” His voice cracked.
“Good God.”
“I know, I know.”
“Why did you go there? You’re courting Kathe Schmidt, no?” I waited, but he didn’t answer. His eyes were watery and he rubbed them with the back of his hand. “Who you’ll be meeting here shortly, right? After she pounds the Ferber carpets into perdition.”
A genuine smile, warm. “Kathe’s a little slip of a girl, Edna, but she packs a mean wallop with a stick.” He considered his words. “No, no, I don’t mean anything bad, you know. I’m trying to make a…” He stopped.
“Why did you go there?”
“My father says I shouldn’t be with a high school girl now that I’m at Lawrence. But we’re just a year apart, really. And what he really means is that I shouldn’t be courting any girl. He’s made that clear.”
“You and Kathe?”
He looked away for a second. “I was thinking of Frana. I used to be with her all the time, Edna. Last year at Ryan. You know that. You saw us together. She was a grade behind me, but that didn’t matter. She liked me. Then out of the blue she left me last fall. Just told me to go away.” He hesitated to say what was on his mind. “She had trouble at home,” he whispered. “It made her, I think, afraid of people.”
“I don’t understand.”
He licked his lip. “It was a secret she let slip out. She was crying one night and…”
“Tell me.”
“One of her brothers…bothered her a lot. He, you know, tried to…but …” He stopped. “She was scared, Edna.”
My mind swam. Violent, horrible images floated before my eyes. I recalled a mysterious remark from Esther. Frana doesn’t like to go home sometimes. Why? I’d asked. Esther just shook her head.
Secrets, I thought. The real lives of Appleton, lived behind closed doors. When I started out at the Crescent, that plump girl whose visions of life came from Dickens and Thackeray, I’d been woefully innocent, and Sam Ryan purposely kept me from the dark underbelly. It wasn’t possible. Now, a year later, I understood that darkness loomed on too many lost souls’ horizons. The first time I saw a drunken man slap his wife as I joined a noisy celebratory crowd outside a beer hall, I was stunned and couldn’t sleep that night. Yet last week when I was sent by Sam Ryan to interview a doctor who was hawking some new, improved health elixir, the august doctor, a slobbering man in his seventies, was startled that a nineteen-year-old girl was doing the interview. All of a sudden he reached into a drawer and thrust before me some photographs-the kind of risque French postcards I’d seen high-school boys tittering over. The doctor watched me closely, expecting-what? — screams, horror…fainting. But I’d been on the streets of Appleton for a year now. “Interesting,” I stated. And stood up to leave.
Now, beside a sad Jake, I questioned, “Did you ask her about it?”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“So she just left you?”
“Just told me to go away. It drove me crazy. I’d see her around town, and she’d stay away from me. But then we met by chance a month ago or so back, bumped into each other on College, and we talked a while. I guess I…went a little crazy.”
“But you are seeing Kathe.” A fact, stated bluntly.
He nodded. “I started seeing her right after Frana told me goodbye.” The last word hung in the air, awful and loaded. “I guess Kathe had been around me a lot and I didn’t notice. When Frana said goodbye, suddenly Kathe was there, and, well…” He waved his hand in the air.
I knew all of this. I’d watched parts of the curious evolution and heard the rest of it through Esther, who’d blathered about all the ups and downs of Jake Smuddie’s infatuation with Frana, as well as Kathe’s shameless pursuit of the jilted boy. Kathe had been telling friends she and Jake were “close” long before they appeared at a barn dance at the Masonic Hall this past February. “I know, I know,” I told him now.
Jake looked away for a second. “I never lost my feelings for Frana, and I was angry that she told me goodbye. When I talked to her last month, she said she had a way out. That surprised me. She was always talking about New York. You know, I said to her-Frana, you’ve never even been to New York, much less Broadway. She got mad at me. She really wanted a different life…away from her home. But I don’t think she knew how to get away clean. I suspected there was somebody wooing her, whispering something in her ear.”
“No idea who?”
“Somebody not in high school, that’s all I knew.”
“Why?”