UNCLE BOBBY
“I wanna die!”
Sixteen-year-old Franny Wylde halted mid-step, clutching a bulky magazine. She paused, flamingo-like, on oatmeal-colored linoleum patterned like showroom carpeting. What Franny knew was required to feel good about a low-income rental.
Her twelve-year-old sister was seriously flipped out.
“My hair! It’s…it’s ruined!” Lorna bawled.
Franny headed for the couch. Last day of a shitty year in a shitty school in a shitty city, she thought. ’65. New year. Bring it on.
Franny hated Hartford. Over the past seven months, her aversion to the city had grown like mold over bathroom tiles. She’d made no new school friends. In three years at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, she’d counted only a handful of girlfriends among an all-girl student population. Smart was one thing. Hanging with a gang of smart girls was lame. Most guys were dicks. She’d preferred to chill with the boys who weren’t on the make in the Jacob Riis Houses, where they’d lived until last summer.
“There goes another crappy year,” her father said, hopping off a squat vinyl hassock.
William Wylde regarded his handiwork. Polyester snow blanketed the base of an artificial tree meticulously adorned. Miniature colored lights spiraled down from the top in precise rows. Will clasped a beer can to his shoulder like a good luck charm. The gilt-trimmed bisque angel fitted into his free hand was always the last ornament to rise and the first to come down.
Franny gazed at the object of her father’s attention.
“Everyone has an angel,” he said. “Even you, Franny.”
Ignoring Lorna’s spazzed-out keening, Franny nestled her thumb into the quilted floral depression of an egg-shaped, candy-apple-red ornament. Old-fashioned Christmas ornaments intrigued her. She stroked a paint-chipped wooden Santa, admiring its newly applied cotton-ball beard, her father’s magic touch. His shop back in Manhattan had been a treasure trove of customers’ antiques awaiting renewal. He’d lovingly restore any object whose history moved him.
Franny cupped a weighty, silver tennis-ball-sized globe. Delicately engraved numbers feathered its surface. New Year’s Eve 1947.
“Where’s this one from?” she asked. “Is this when you and Mommy met?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said.
“Dad. Seriously. Nana Wylde said something once. Was I a surprise?”
Will gave the decorated tree the once-over, reminded of Anna’s message that morning on her way out. “Tell your father he’d better take that down,” Anna had said. “Today, Franny.”
Empty Shiny Brite cartons, stacked like tiny cardboard coffins encircled him. He’d have to hurry. Get the rest of the ornaments packed up and out of sight. Forgotten in a corner, a lone strand of tinsel risked his wife’s incandescent rage.
“Daddy?” Franny pressed. “And don’t say—.”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said.
Will coiled a string of inert Christmas lights, rewinding the movie of his life. Prematurely bald like the worn brown corduroys on his slender frame, he wore a tan-and-brown, diamond-patterned mohair sweater, pilled from wear, buttoned over the familiar undershirt.
Anna was right. He’d left it late. Bad luck after today. He drained the can of Rheingold, raising it to his face like an oxygen mask. First, he needed another beer.
“Da-a-a-d-e-e-e!” Lorna shrieked.
William hollered from the kitchen. “Peanut! Get in here.”
Lorna was tiny for her age, a fragile onlooker in their inherited combat zone. Her face, haloed in purplish hair curlers, looked as if she’d been ink-bombed by a prankster squid. Her weedy arms flapped at her stained T-shirt like cartoon wings.
“Jesus H. Christ.” William jerked his hand across his mouth, shifting his gaze from the rivulets of dye scarring his daughter’s cheeks. Cigarette poised between his gnawed thumb and index finger, he flicked ash from a plastic avocado-colored placemat ringed with daisies.
“She wanted a perm!” Franny shouted. “It’s those cheap hair rollers.”
Christopher, the family parakeet, bobbed and claw-danced across Will’s shoulder. “Jeeze-hay-cripe! Jeeze-hay-cripe! Rats!”
“Wonderful,” Lorna bawled. “Thanks. A bunch!”
“Yeah, that’s me. Mister Wonderful,” Will said. He lit another Camel, scowling at the pack. Warnings were for pantywaists. He would not be denied his cancer sticks.
Lorna reeled from her father, nearly colliding with Franny. Her mouth blossomed and shrank like an indecisive rosebud. “I h-h-hate you Franny. I hate. Hate. Hate you!”
From the couch, Franny eyed Lorna’s escape to their shared bedroom. Out of her father’s sight, she slid a spiral-bound notebook from inside the magazine and pushed it under a seat cushion. Reading and writing in bed, even with a flashlight under covers, was out of the question. Only a small night table separated the girls’ twin beds. Lorna was a twitchy sleeper, wary of the monster in the closet.
Later, Franny would rise quietly. Treading light-footed past her parents’ closed door, she’d remove the notebook from under the couch cushion before heading to the kitchen. Arranging the book, flashlight, and a glass of milk on the Formica tabletop, Franny would take care not to wake the caged bird under its cover.
A lithe, dark-haired teenage model sheathed in grass-colored sequins stared back at Franny from the magazine cover. Franny sneered at the headline. “Adorable in her still trendy bangs.”
Like an electric mermaid, Franny thought. My hair should be purple. It was wasted on small fry like Lorna.
Franny picked up the magazine. Their neighbor across the hall had passed along her old issues of Seventeen magazine. The just-married twenty-year-old was a petite, bottle-blonde mirror warmer. She had a killer cheerleader attitude behind a white-picket-fence grin that bugged Franny.
“Not my thing, that magazine,” Franny had said.
“She’d love to have them,” Anna had said, aiming a don’t-contradict-me stare at Franny. “Especially if there’s articles on good manners.”
“They grow up so fast,” the neighbor had replied.
Not fast enough, Franny thought.
Franny was a reader. She preferred real books. Having already read the latest blockbuster, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, she’d wanted more. The book’s dedication to Simone de Beauvoir had inspired Franny to read The Second Sex. She’d raised an eyebrow at the checkout desk at the Hartford Public Library. A good sign, Franny thought. French writer. Another good sign, best kept from her mother.
To Franny, Friedan had seemed to live a comfortable-class life. She’d graduated with honors from a school Franny could only dream of attending. Lived in the suburbs. Big house probably. Generously-sized garden. College-educated friends. Nothing like the mothers Franny knew in the projects. Most men, unlike her father, made the decisions and kept the wives in line. Her mother had always worked.
Anna had given the Friedan book only a cursory glance. “Are you a feminist now?” she’d said. No yelling. No threats. No put-downs. No back of her hand imprinted on Franny’s cheek.
Emboldened, Franny had asked, “Didn’t you ever want to be something? Like the first woman in space or something?”
“You are just like your father, still tilting at windmills,” Anna had said, turning away abruptly. “And I am something.”
Franny was, as her dad used to say, the kid who was all revved up with nowhere to go. She’d tell you whatever was on her mind the moment she thought it. “She’s a sharer, all right,” her mother had said. “Whether you want it or not.”
Franny had once discovered that her given name on her birth certificate was spelled F-r-a-n-c-i-s, though no one called her that.
“Why is it spelled like a man’s name?” she’d asked.
“Because your mother’s got a chip on her shoulder you can see from space,” Will had said. “She made a mistake and will never admit it. Them’s the breaks, Franny.”
“It’s not all about you,” Anna had responded. “Calm down, Franny, or you’re asking for it.”
Franny had never asked for it. Appeals to her father were met with, “Your mother’s got the upper hand, Franny.”
Anna’s verbal outbursts—the alarmingly rapid-fire swings from emotional blackout to bitter fireworks—had paralyzed Franny. She’d watched through eyes narrowed by habit when her mother’s accusations predicted an escalation. Negligible infractions on Franny’s part stuck in her mother’s head like a pebble that irritated itself into a bomb on her brain.
Franny’s expression crunched when she followed Anna, fitfully tearing through their room, wreak havoc in dresser drawers. When her mother could not find what she was looking for, the strap came off the doorknob. Unless she’d unearthed the big gun—their Fly-Back game.
Once Anna had routed it from its hiding place, she’d tear the red rubber ball from its wooden paddle. Younger Franny was hauled over her mother’s lap. In her teens, Franny faced the wall, holding her breath, and took the blows. Lorna was spared, but remained witness to Franny’s punishment.
If Will was around, he’d decamp to the kitchen, seeking the bird’s company at the first sign of a flare-up.
Around her fifteenth birthday, Franny “lost” the paddle. Another was offered, gift-wrapped. Anna let her unwrap it. Franny hurled it from her, shrieking as if she’d been burned. Anna raised her open palm, ready to strike. Franny smacked it away. The beatings stopped.
Since the move to Hartford, Franny noticed that her mother’s once-slender figure had thickened, making her appear even shorter than she was. Her clothes had become ill-fitting and joyless. Shapeless cardigans and pantsuits replaced gaily printed, belted dresses that flounced when she walked. Under a lackluster brown pageboy, her mother’s sleepy-eyed expression was unsettling.
It wasn’t that Anna was calmer. Just further away.
Franny’s overstepping back talk was no longer met with a threat that hovered like Hitchcock’s angry birds just behind her mother’s eyes. Now it was, “Why do you always have to be different, Franny?” Offered coldly, almost wistfully.
Franny flipped through the magazine in her lap. The Boy’s Point of View column was all about the new heartthrobs on the scene, a pop band from England with the stupid name “The Beatles.” Mostly, the male writer of the article hated them. Franny was oblivious. She loves you, yeah, yeah, nope. Barry McGuire. Eve of Destruction. You’re old enough to kill, but not for voting. Bob Dylan. Blowin’ in the Wind. That’s who she was listening to.
She flicked the bangs pressed neatly across her forehead. Fine, light-brown hair brushed her shoulders. Before class, she’d roll the waistband of her skirt to bring the hem dangerously above the forbidden knee. Until some uptight teacher got bent out of shape. “We’re not the Big Apple, Miss Wylde. Let it down or go to the office.”
Franny smoothed her blue-and-orange ‘63 World’s Fair T-shirt over roomy sweatpants. Her dress code: casual-insolent.
Picking at cigarette-burns scabbing a plastic arm protector, she considered her options in light of Lorna’s hair debacle. Franny and her father nearly always saw the humor, as if they were joined at the funny bone. Along with a striking familial resemblance, laughter exploded from them like bats from a dark cave at sunset. She was safe with him. Her mother’s reaction was the sticking point.
School was out until after the Christmas break. Hartford, up their end, shut down early. Anna was still downtown, working at the insurance company in the two-sided glass structure they called the Boat Building.
Franny’s after-school job had, literally, disappeared on the Wednesday before Christmas. She’d been forewarned by the sight of a disparate clutch of telephone sales workers herding confusedly before a padlocked door in West Hartford Center. Franny was somewhat bothered that she’d been complicit in luring clueless housewives and bored retirees into multiple magazine subscriptions. Just when she’d perfected an accent purring with neutral upper-class: “Hi. I’m Ann Howard. Are you in the mood for surprises?” Extra money, dead in the water now.
Her only friend was a forty-something Native Zuni guy. She’d met Ralph at the call center in July, a few weeks before her sixteenth birthday. A slight man, not unlike her father, but stronger. Intense—not angry—with shoulder-blade-length raven hair sometimes worn in a single braid.
She’d had a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with her on her first day. Ralph had introduced himself and asked her what she thought about the book.
“I’ve just started and it’s pretty bleak,” she said.
“Mother Earth is wounded,” he said. “This book is a good thing.”
Franny had noticed his ring. Hand-cut geometric turquoise tiles floating in a silver band.
“Zuni,” he said, extending his hand. “My great-grandfather made it.”
After that first conversation, she bolted from the call center at the end of the shift, composing questions while she waited impatiently for Ralph.
They walked from West Hartford Center along Farmington Avenue. An unconventional couple juggling topics in a record-breaking heat wave in July. Reclaiming her New York voice, she hammered him with earnestness. He compartmentalized her onslaught effortlessly.
President Kennedy was not just the guy who beat her dad’s hero. Martin Luther King was not “…that goddamn Communist.”
Franny had revealed that her father was a Barry Goldwater Republican. Ardently patriotic. Consumed with the American Dream, he was as much fueled by hatred of the wackos on the Left.
“I kind of went along with my dad’s take,” she said.
Until the thousand-word photos began appearing on the news: A Buddhist monk, set alight by his own hand. Franny read the word dharma for the first time. Negro teens protesting, brought down by snarling white cops and teeth-baring police dogs in Alabama. Then, the ghostly white horses, pulling a black carriage with the flag-draped body of their president, John F. Kennedy. Behind the carriage, the riderless black stallion—called Blackjack—shattered the resolve of even the most hardened observer.
They traded flashbacks of an unforgettably grim November day in ‘63.
She wondered if that war in Viet Nam had something to do with his assassination. Or if he’d pissed off the wrong people, wrangling Martin Luther King out of jail. Her father had groused then that it was a gimmick. She wanted to talk to Ralph about King’s speech in Washington, D.C. the previous summer.
Unlike her father, Ralph encouraged her to explore what the speech meant to her.
“Nothing like I ever felt before,” she said.
“Tell me one thing,” he urged.
“I wished I had a dream,” she said.
She regretted her stupidity, but had hardly thought about racism. Until shocking front-page news just weeks after his speech. A church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. Windows were blown out, along with the lives of four little colored girls.
She’d met Ralph not long after newspapers reported three young men had traveled down to Mississippi to register Negro voters. They were members of something called Congress of Racial Equality. Abducted and killed by the Ku Klux Klan. Two of the men killed were white.
Born and raised in a housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Franny had grown up with colored kids. She’d been friendly with some of the colored girls in her classes. She’d known white guys who dated colored girls and the other way round.
Franny had never once thought about what it meant to be white. Until she arrived at Hartford High.
“What can I say? Ralph, I mean, what do I call them?” she moaned.
“James Baldwin embraces Negro,” he said.
Colored students in Hartford were bused to her new school from who knows where. Sides may have been taken, if Franny thought about it. She’d rather boil her eyeballs than go out with a crewcut, madras-wearing white guy in chinos. Having less than nothing in common with the white girls who pretty much shunned her, she gravitated to other students in her classes. A couple of those girls—initially wary of the white outsider who’d breached their senior year—were intimidated by her, until they were brought around with Franny’s New York tales. But when she asked about the phrase African American or questioned why they didn’t go to schools closer to where they lived, shades were drawn.
“I’ve been warned off certain blocks,” she told Ralph.
“Why?” he asked. “Which neighborhoods, which blocks?”
“Negro…colored neighborhoods, like the North End,” Franny said. “Can I still say that? Colored?”
The last time they met he’d given her a copy of James Baldwin’s, The Fire Next Time.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what to think,” she moaned.
“You will,” Ralph said. “And then you won’t. And then you will again.”
Franny had no way to contact him. No phone number. No address. Last names had not been exchanged. She knew only that he took care of his mother and that he still had some distance to walk after leaving Franny at Laurel Street.
Skip supper, she thought. Turn in early. Pretend to be asleep. No big loss if it forestalled the Anna shitshow. If I go down for this, Franny thought, it will be the last nice thing I ever do for that ankle-biter.
She heard the fridge door open. The predictable pop-and-hiss of a beer can. Franny shuddered at the chill palm of memory pressed to her neck.
Everything had changed.
They’d lived in a one-bedroom apartment back home, on the ground floor of the solidly built housing project. Where her mother’s furious bark had rumbled over the stoop outside their windows and across the courtyard. Where unpaid utility bills, long overdue, had darkened those windows like indiscreet billboards, sealing Franny’s humiliation.
Now home was Laurel Street. A quiet block of roomy, multi-story wooden homes depreciating atop sloping unkempt lawns. They were the first tenants to move into a two-story cement box. Their apartment was at the end of a long, narrow hallway. On the ground floor, at the back of the building. Off the main drag. Small favors.
Scanning the living room, Franny looked for clues—those dead giveaways that brought harsh reality to life. Uninspiring off-white walls, the lackluster skin of the room. An uncluttered coffee table ringed with watermarks, anchored by an oversized glass ashtray in the shape of a leaf, courtesy of a fistful of booklets stiffened with S & H Green stamps. Beneath the table an oval rag rug the color of mop water. Against the far wall, a television stand with sliding doors, where Readers Digests went to die. Bronze-colored aluminum TV tray tables propped in a corner, unfolded when an oatmeal supper hadn’t rated the kitchen table or a game was scheduled on television.
Rescued from Will’s shop, white ceramic lamps sat on nondescript end tables like shiny Chinese pagodas topped with unremarkable lampshades. Above the couch, a Sunray wall clock. Its triangular metal rays formed an unhinged family crest that suited theirs. A sleek black panther, missing an ear, still crouched for attack on top of the television. Across the room, a wall hanging of brassy geese headed for the one small window in the kitchen.
The latest item in the room was a second-hand armchair her mother had insisted was Danish Modern. “Suits the day-core,” she’d said.
Her father had dubbed it “goddamn uncomfortable.” Anna had affectations. “Up the wazoo,” he’d crack.
The wall phone rang, startling Franny.
“Yeah. How late’ll you be?” Will waited, gripping the handset. “Yeah, I’ma…me and Franny, we’re on it.”
“It’s your mother,” Will yelled.
“Get extra noodles,” he told Anna. “They never give you enough of the goddamn things.”
“She’s leaving work, Franny. Grabbing Chinese on the way.”
Will’s gnarled fingers writhed like netted crayfish, wrestling haplessly with the handset cord. “Goddamn pain in the ass, this thing.”
Franny grumbled in return. “How did we ever get to this shitty place?”
“What?” Will shouted.
“Nothing,” she said.
They’d gotten there, she knew, on an early morning train in mid-June that same year.
A frangible truce had braced the sisters’ journey from Pennsylvania Station in New York City to Union Station in Hartford, Connecticut.
Like chicks fearing abandonment, Franny and Lorna had pressed close in the maze-like station, fixed on their mother’s rapidly receding back. Franny had only the vaguest memory of the old station that her father still mourned. She searched for remaining clues as they squeezed through building construction, past roughly sandpapered workmen who smelled of cigarettes, sweat, and labor. Men in hard hats, cradling clip boards, staring intently. The girls hurried behind Anna around detours, closed shops, and disorienting renovation before they found the platform and stepped up to a car bound for Hartford. Staring silently at the passing scenery, they avoided their mother’s blank slate. The void that rattled them.
The girls’ tenuous expectations had been dealt a blow when their fears resounded through a cavernous waiting room. When they noticed immediately what air they were breathing was not New York City air. They averted their eyes from used-up men wrapped in coats out of season, splayed lifeless along scarred wooden benches like desiccated cocoons that would never take wing.
Heading for a bus stop behind the station, the girls had scurried closer to Anna striding past mean, rank-smelling bars and shady hotels.
Franny shuddered. One of those hotels was where her father, who had gone ahead by months, had stayed before he found their apartment on Laurel Street.
“I’ve got a room—pretty cheap,” the postcard read. “Good thing it’s right by the train station. I’ll meet you when you come up. Promise.”
William would open a new shop. The girls had been promised their own bedroom. Lorna and Franny would make new friends. Or, as Anna had said, “Any friends, Franny. Make an effort this time.”
Franny had made an effort. A futile one, as it turned out. She had no idea where to reach Ralph.
Her mother was on the way. Franny scanned the underdressed tree. Ornaments lay like spent shells at its base. Christmas lights coiled limply like ineffective traps. She’ll go ape when she sees this, Franny thought.
She hopped off the couch. Skirting around her father at the kitchen table, she grabbed a glass and filled it at the sink.
Their afterthought of a kitchen was a dark shade of yellow, like dried mustard on a paper plate left out in the sun. Hung above the stovetop, practically inaccessible, the ludicrous spice rack. Blue-and-white patterned ceramic bottles embellished with fancy Gothic script. Unused.
Her father blew smoke signals above an overworked ashtray. Perched on Will’s shoulder, like a green-feathered priest wearing a golden skullcap, Christopher chattered head-bobbing absolution.
Will spread the Hartford Courant before him, searching for the galling news item that required a practiced reach.
“Grab me another,” he said, handing Franny an empty.
“Look at this.” He slapped the front-page headline: Bright ’65 Forecast for Area Business. “Bright, my ass.”
“You’re welcome,” Franny said, extending a cold can. “And we missed the blackout back home, in case you forgot.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered.
Franny dropped to the couch, shoving the magazine from where she’d left it. Her father’s smell. That’s what had changed. The nose-clearing essence of turpentine. Varnish, lacquer, glue. Aged wood furniture smell that had been as much a part of him as his sense of humor. Gold leaf embedded in his ravaged cuticles. Gone.
Back in Manhattan, on days she wasn’t working after school at the candy store on Avenue A, she’d sometimes head uptown. She’d stride over to Second Avenue from her high school, to her father’s shop on 34th Street in Murray Hill, pounding five flights in a stoic brick tenement to his workshop at the top, two steps at a time on a staircase shuddering beneath her.
In a roomful of heirloom relics, north light hovered in gilt-flecked planes revealing the eccentric narratives of their owners. Under an old bed sheet, an enormous carved-oak mirror had been breathlessly layered with gold leaf, reflecting a darker fairy tale. A hand-decorated antique rocker, listing from a broken rail. The cracked lip of a Chinese vase big enough to fit the naughty child. A Victorian table—corkscrew legs and eagle talons for feet—another orphan. He’d made it his desk. She wished it had moved with them. On the wall behind a methodically organized workbench, his prized poster of Barbra Streisand. Below it, a faded bumper sticker: America. Love It or Leave It.
Will and his dwindling clientele could be found at happy hour, bellied up to the bar in a neighborhood pub fitted snugly between a church and a movie theater. They sometimes treated him to drinks. In lieu of payment as it turned out. Quick to praise and slow to pay for his labor.
Roland, a svelte interior decorator calling for a round of show tunes by the second martini was Will’s excuse for lateness when he reeked of umbrella cocktails and English Leather.
“We hadda go over particulars,” Will said, fetchingly. “Queen Touchy-feely when Roland’s hadda few.” He affected a limp wristed shrug. “They’re like that, you know. Dingdong. Avon calling.”
There was Ken, a bewigged B-actor cashing his unemployment checks behind the bar.
Mincing above the babble, the well-oiled lisp of a writer they called Tru.
At her preferred seat by the window, Gracie. The slight, platinum-haired principal dresser with the seamstress hump had been comping Will and Franny for Broadway musicals since Franny was eleven or twelve. Stop the World—I Want To Get Off. Carnival. Man of La Mancha. The last show they’d seen was Funny Girl. Box seats, Gracie’s parting gift. Father and daughter had mouthed the words to every song. Light-hearted and magical wasn’t their thing. Both preferred the darker tales and the songs that made them weep.
“I will have my usual sidecar,” Gracie would say. “Richard, please put Mr. Wylde’s drink on my tab.”
“Gimme a scotch and soda, Rich, and whatever my buddy Will over there is having.”
“Great job on my grandmother’s old tea caddy, pal. What’ll you have? Tell Richie. What’s your poison, Willy?”
“Lemme have a cold one Richie,” Will would say. Then, sizing up his benefactor, he’d add, “And gimme a rye chaser while yer at it.”
Franny remembered Tiffany lamps, antique pub signs, a herd of gaily-painted rocking horses hanging from the ceiling. All restored by her father. She’d gaze with curiosity at the crazy checkerboard of candid photographs crowding the walls. She missed the outsized burgers and hand-cut fries the gregarious owner had sometimes set before her on a red-and-white checkered tablecloth.
“On me, Franny. Will and I go back a long way,” he’d say, looking her over. “You’re the spitting-image of your dad.”
The last time she’d visited the workshop, she trudged the steps slowly and breathlessly, stifling sobs that would come much later.
Franny had just returned from lunchroom chatter abuzz with the shooting of the president an hour earlier. Back in class, the announcement came over the school’s public address system. President John F. Kennedy was dead. Franny dutifully collected her coat. In a crowd of students and teachers, she filed silently downstairs before flying out of school and winging it uptown.
That day, her father closed up shop as soon as she arrived. They walked home, not speaking, through an ungraspable silence among the shell-shocked on Second Avenue. At home, Franny and Will were glued to a black-and-white screen. A few days after the state funeral that jolted them speechless, the family had a half-hearted turkey dinner at the kitchen table.
Will had looked up from his plate just once. “Lotta Democrats’ll be crying in their martinis,” he’d said.
Franny’s muscle memory dragged her back by her neck hairs. The night, a year ago to the day, when her mother had unexpectedly torn open a wound still weeping.
“New year. New start,” she’d announced. “We’re moving.”
Franny looked to her father from a growing personal wreckage. He turned a bleary gaze to his wife.
“Mom! What? Where?” Franny cried, backing into Lorna, who ducked behind her.
Anna told them she’d been recruited. Moving up a notch meant relocating. “Hartford is a nice city. Decent people,” she said. Blocking Franny’s rebuttal, she pressed, “You’ll go where we tell you to go.”
“We?” Franny had turned to her father. “Daddy? We….”
“Yes,” her mother said. “We.”
“Why?” Franny asked, her eyes brimful of tears.
“Insurance capital of the world,” her father mumbled.
“And the shop. Will?” Anna said.
Franny recalled her parents’ recent arguments. The words “rent control” passed between them like blame.
“You lost the shop? Daddy?”
“The rent,” he said. “Arrears….”
“Can’t you make that up?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “It was rent controlled. Commercial rents have gone through the roof.”
“But you can fight it,” Franny said. “It’s your business, Daddy. People fight and win all the time!”
“You have to actually have something before you can actually lose it,” Anna said.
“Franny,” Will responded, “Your mother thinks it’s a fresh start. Us moving.”
“Your father will go ahead,” Anna said. “Find us an apartment. You girls will finish out the school year. We’ll join him and then you’ll start a new school in September.”
“Can’t we just move to another neighborhood here?” Franny bawled. “How will I fit in a strange school?”
“The same way you fit in school now,” her mother said.
Franny had never “fit.” She was smarter than the average bear, cutting classes when she could get away with it. Wandering around Greenwich Village. She studied when she had to. She paid attention when it counted. Franny did better than all right in school.
“You don’t have any friends,” Anna said. “I don’t even know where you go half the time.”
“I have a job after school, remember?” Franny said. “And I go to see Daddy at the sh—.”
“Stacking boxes in a candy store is not a job,” Anna shot back.
“But I won’t graduate!”
“You’ll graduate,” her mother had said. “By the skin of the teeth in your big mouth.”
“With strangers!” Franny had cried.
“Get moving! Your mother will be here any minute.” William, back at the tree, was removing plastic icicles.
“Lorna!” Franny shouted.
“Leave her.” Startled by the doorbell, Will muttered, “Crap.” He flipped a wall switch. Static shot from the intercom. “Must’a forgot her key.”
Will hit it again just as Anna unlocked the door and hurried inside, red-faced and sweating. She clutched a large brown paper bag of Chinese takeout. Her overcoat was unbuttoned in an unusually warm winter.
“That was fast,” Will said. “You skate down?”
“Some guys hanging around outside. I ran down the hall,” Anna said, breathless. Her coat sleeves smelled sweetly of pineapple, burnt meat, and deep-frying. Stultifying air trailed her like an omen.
“Probably visiting someone,” Will said.
Anna stared at the closed door. “They were in uniform.”
Will returned to the kitchen. “Girls, eh?” He slipped the bird onto his shoulder. “Who’s a good boy, Chrissy? Who’s Daddy’s boy?” he said. The bird raised an agreeable claw.
“Feet off the couch, Franny. We’re not animals,” Anna said on her way to the kitchen. “Where’s your sister?”
“In the back.” I’m in for it now, Franny thought.
Rapping at the door, like warning shots, startled Franny. She leapt from the couch. Franny eyeballed the peephole. She saw two men planted a few feet from the door. Their khaki uniforms were Army, but different from the ones she’d recognized on the boys back home. The men wore black armbands, white metal helmets stamped MP—and more ominously—holstered guns.
“Dad!” Franny cried. “C’mere. It’s soldiers.”
Will looked through the peephole. “Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered, opening the door.
“Are you William Wylde?”
Will nodded, his face a blank slate.
“We’re looking for Robert Alphonse Kelly, Mr. Wylde. Your wife’s brother?”
It took Franny a moment to realize they were talking about her uncle. She’d never known his middle name and no one ever called him Robert.
“Anna, it’s about your goddamn brother,” Will shouted.
Anna reappeared, still in her coat. “What, Will? I’m trying to….”
Will sidled up beside his daughter, behind Anna.
“Ma’am, we are here about your brother.”
“Is he…?”
Before she could fully get out her question, he apologized.
“Sorry, Ma’am. He’s okay. We think. But he’s AWOL. Absent without—.”
“I know,” she said. "Well, that’s okay if he comes back?”
“It’s desertion,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“So, do you know….” he started.
“No, I haven’t seen my brother in quite some time. Certainly not since June. That’s when we left New York.”
Had they been to see her mother in New York? They had.
“Any other relatives?” he inquired.
“My sister in Buffalo,” she offered. “I think. She’s moved a lot.”
Prompted by their respectful manner, she apologized. “I don’t think I can be of any more help.” She said good night, promising to alert them if her brother made contact.
“Well, I’ll be,” Anna sighed in the kitchen. She tore open the brown paper bag.
Her father managed, “I’ll just say, I told you—.” before her mother cautioned, “Don’t start.”
“Who’s Johnny got on tonight?” he asked.
“No Carson, Dad,” Franny said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Then I think Selma Diamond next.”
Will grimaced.
“Dad,” Franny said, “How come female comics don’t make you laugh?”
“This will have to keep,” Anna said, throwing a kitchen towel over the bag. “We can reheat. I’d better see what’s going on with Lorna.”
Eyeing his wife’s retreat, Will cracked, “Because women aren’t funny.”
Franny had braced for the fallout, but the expected face-off went unchallenged. The Wyldes were a ludicrous bunch of nose-holding, holier-than-thou born-again liars and hypocrites, Anna would scream. Will’s ineffectual rebuttal: The Kellys were drunks and thieves who dumped their own children.
Franny and Lorna were the result of an unfortunate post-war coupling. Her dad’s bunch were Bible-thumping hypocrites. Her maternal grandmother had given up two of her children. Anna’s siblings, Bobby and Barbara Jean, were dropped into the custodial arms of the state when they were little kids. Franny’s mother, Anna, was the eldest. She’d married the first sailor who’d made her laugh.
Interminable journeys with Anna had required multiple transfers from subways to buses to a Catholic Protectory somewhere in the Bronx, to visit what Will called the “goddamn orphanage.” Six-year-old Franny had no idea what to say to someone her own age who was also her aunt. Barbara Jean always looked mildly panicked, as if the visits were an audition she had to get right. Depending on Anna’s mood, she might treat them to banana splits at a nearby ice cream parlor while she nursed a black coffee. Sometimes, Franny thought, the visits felt like a warning.
Franny could not recall ever having seen Bobby at the home, probably because of some trouble he’d caused. She’d seen her uncle on his ninth birthday, a couple of weeks before he was shipped up to the Bronx with Barbara Jean. Bobby was already street-wise, with a wide, bad-boy grin. His hair, startled in all directions, framed the abstract face of a scrapper, the result of battling life with his head.
“Bad news, that kid,” her father had said.
Anna had been at work when Bobby showed up at their old apartment. Twitching on his arm, a peaky redhead, well past jailbait. While Bobby scoped out the apartment, she wobbled in place in outlandish platform boots that reached nearly to the hem of her mini skirt, complaining about the people where they had been staying. “They have a very scuzzy dog,” she whined. “Won’t leave me alone. It gets embarrassin’.”
Will made some excuse, hustling them to the door. Later that day, Bobby called with a proposition. Would Will be interested in buying a car from him for fifty bucks? The car was shot. But he assured Will he could easily get more than fifty for the engine. He’d have to retrieve it, though, from a side road off the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
“I don’t drive,” Will had said, and hung up.
The last time Franny had seen her uncle was in Nana Kelly’s cramped, overheated kitchen, which always smelled of boiled cabbage and her second husband, Harold. Bobby, dressed by the army, his head cleanly shaved.
“Maybe the military will straighten him out,” Anna had said.
“The Army is bullshit,” Will had responded. “Any bum can be drafted.
Lorna’s cries echoed from the bathroom. “Ow! Mommy! You’re pulling my hair!”
“Enough is enough,” Anna barked. “It’s just the dye from the hair rollers. It’ll wash out eventually.”
“It was Franny’s idea,” Lorna whined.
“That will teach you,” Anna said.
Franny thumbed the magazine, keeping half an eye on the television. My Favorite Martian. Her father was absorbed in Uncle Martin’s hysteria over the disappearance of his spaceship.
There was light but insistent tapping at the door. Franny looked up.
“Hear that?” she said.
She leapt back to the door. Through the peephole she saw the top of a red, ball-like shape.
“Who’s there?” she called.
“It’s me. Bobby. Uncle Bobby. Franny, lemme in!”
Franny opened the door. Uncle Bobby had appeared shorter and shorter as she’d grown, but he looked even smaller in a filthy yellow satin clown suit. White greasepaint caked his face like a drought-ridden playa. His unruly hair struggled to escape from under a fake bald piece. Around his neck, a lifeless blue bow tie. The red bulb on his nose had begun to separate from his face. More red paint clung to his mouth like a wound. His runty fingers were caked in filth.
“Franny! Long time no see!” Bobby beckoned his niece, arms spread wide. “C’mere. Give your favorite uncle a hug.” Peering around the room, swiveling his head like a scope, he turned from her. “I gotta hi—uh…hang…hey Willy! How’s my favorite brother-in-law?”
She caught sight of fatigues through the split at the back of his costume. Franny wouldn’t look at her father. If she could not distract herself, she’d be helpless with laughter. They both would.
“How’s my least favorite brother-out-law?” Will snapped, returning to the kitchen.
Anna stood in the hallway, toweling her hands. “What the—?”
With the swagger of the beaten, Bobby tried punting the expected interrogation. “Sorry. I don’t mean to annoy you all,” he said.
“Annoy me?” Will muttered, unheard. “Jesus Christ, he should meet himself.”
“Why are you here?” Anna asked. “Why are you dressed like that?”
As always, Bobby constructed lies for protection that eventually collapsed under their weight. The bigger the problem, the more complicated the lie. He started in with a fantastical tale of secret undercover stuff, life threatening assignments. He stopped mid-sentence, lost.
He’s not even trying, Franny thought.
“They wanna get their hands on me,” he cried.
“Who wants to get their hands on you?” Will said, returning from the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Will. I know you’re a Navy guy,” Bobby said.
“Coast Guard,” Will sighed.
“I thought it couldn’t be worse than living with Harold.” He hung his head, arms to his side. “And I had nowhere to go.”
He turned to his sister, “The Army wants their hands on me, Sissy. That’s who,” Bobby said, unravelling. “I’m not undercover,” he cried. “They’re after me. No foolin’ around. It’s a living hell.”
That’s a sad clown, Franny thought.
“I can’t take it anymore, Sissy.”
“They were here,” Anna said.
Bobby’s expression dropped basement-level. “Looking for me?” he said.
“Yes, of course they were looking for you,” Anna said.
“When?”
“Maybe an hour or so?”
He lowered his head. His shoulders drooped to pleading. “So, Sissy. I’m kinda in a jam here, ya see?”
“Oka-a-ay. Here we go,” Will said.
“Hey man!” Bobby said, extending a swollen hand. “Still got the bird I see. Gimme some skin, yeah?”
“He means shake hands,” Franny said.
“Smart kiddo,” Bobby said. “She could run rings around Saturn. Takes after me.”
“I know what it means,” Will said.
“Tree looks nice,” Bobby said. “Kinda late though, man. Sissy always said there’d be bad luck if it wasn’t cleared away by the end of the year.”
Bobby sniffed the air, like a man starving for luck. “Smells like Chinese,” he said. “Chow mein?”
“Spareribs and fried rice. Soup. Egg rolls,” Anna said. “You can stay and eat with us. I’ll reheat.”
“Hands off the egg rolls. There aren’t enough,” Will said.
Catching Will’s eye, Bobby quipped, “She’s still no genius in the kitchen, eh?”
Will shot back, “Check the silverware drawer, Franny.”
“Why so uptight, man?” Bobby asked cautiously.
“We don’t have any silverware,” Franny said.
“Nuthin’ gets past these two,” Bobby said, relieved at the joke. “You should be on Carson. Double act.”
Lingering at the couch, Bobby reached down, running his hand under the cushions. “So, can I crash here for a bit?”
“It’s busted. Doesn’t pull out,” Will said.
“I don’t mind. You know me. I can sleep anywhere. Sissy?”
“No,” Will insisted. “It’s an old couch, the springs are gone.”
“Don’t sit down in that…costume,” Anna said.
Franny could tell he’d found her notebook.
“Uncle Bobby can have my bed,” she said. “I’ll sleep out here on the couch.”
“Out of the question,” her mother barked. “It’s not really appropriate, him and Lorna in the same room,” she said, less harshly. “What will the neighbors think?”
Franny and Will fell apart. Laughter, like rolling surf, ripped between them. Bobby grinned, hesitant and confused. Anna joined in, liberating herself to helpless laughter.
Lorna stood apart, yawning mutely, keenly watchful. “Who’s he?” she said sleepily.
“Hey Shrimp! Did we wake ya? How’s my Goldilocks? What’s with the towel?” Bobby tugged it from her, revealing crimped purplish locks. Lorna jerked back.
Bobby knelt before her. “It’s me Kitten, Uncle Bobby. Look at you! Like a little flower child.”
“Why are you dressed like a clown?” Lorna asked, relieved.
“Because it’s New Year’s Eve!” Franny declared, still laughing.
“Did the ball drop yet?” Lorna said, twirling a ringlet on her finger.
“Not yet, Peanut. We have a little more than an hour,” her father said.
“An hour and a half,” Anna said.
Bobby gestured to the tree. “Guys,” he said. “We can do this. Get it all cleared away in no time. Whaddya say? Beat that bad luck!”
After a few moments contemplating knee-jerk dismissal, Will came around. “I’ll get the storage carton from the basement,” he said.
Franny began unhooking ornaments. “Lorna, come help me box up this stuff.”
“I’ll get some supper together,” Anna said. “Bobby, take those boots off. You’ll want to get out of that, um, costume. Maybe wash up?”
“Yeah. He’s startin’ to percolate,” Will sniggered.
“Leave it on, Uncle Bobby!” Lorna cried. “For good luck!”
At eleven-forty-five, Franny began unfolding the TV tables. Bobby, showered, was dressed in Will’s clothes despite Will’s grumble. Her dad and her uncle hugged opposite ends of the couch, marking their territory. Lorna was slumped against Bobby, obstinately awake, waiting for the ball to drop.
“Sissy! How about a beer?” Bobby yelled. “Grab one for yourself. I’m buying,” he laughed.
“She can’t. Won’t have one,” Will said, downing his beer. “She’s not drinking.”
Bobby leaned in, like a co-conspirator who’d been locked out of the last meeting. “Whoa! What did I miss? Knocked up? You sly devil. Way to go, man.”
“Little pitchers,” Franny said, eying Lorna. “Daddy. Is he kidding?”
“Yes, he’s kidding,” Will said, frowning at his brother-in-law. “She’s taking some pills.”
“For the fits?” Bobby asked. “She still get those?”
Will avoided Franny’s stare. “No. For headaches or something.”
Anna, in the kitchen, frisked a drawer for forks and knives. The chopsticks Franny had insisted on sat on the coffee table beside holiday paper napkins.
Franny pulled the unused hassock to the uncomfortable chair near the television. “I’m glad this year is over,” she sighed. She caught a clip of a Times Square movie marquee on the screen. “It is definitely a mad, mad, mad world.”
Her mother dealt Melamine plates like a poker hand onto the coffee table.
“You think too much, Franny,” she said above the clatter. “A year is just a year. You go from one year to the next. Rinse and repeat.”
“Ten. Nine. Eight.”
Anticipation rustled the Times Square crowd like a magnet drawn over iron filings.
Bobby bummed a cancer stick in exchange for an eye roll from Will. Her father and her uncle raised their beers to the television screen. Franny had never done that. Drunk a beer, or smoked a cigarette. Or been to Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
“Seven. Six.”
Ding!
“Toaster oven. It’s the egg rolls,” Anna said, starting for the kitchen.
“Five. Four. Three.”
Anna paused without turning. “I’ll get them then.”
“Two.”
Franny followed Anna to the kitchen. This was new, this pill thing, Franny thought. She hadn’t noticed anything in the medicine cabinet. Fits? What did that mean?
Lawrence Welk was on the screen, like a returning character in a recurring dream that never changes. In the background, orchestral music that seemed to make everything stand still for a while.
“Made any resolutions, Franny?” Anna asked, arranging reheated Chinese takeout on a plastic tray.
Franny rolled her eyes, scanning the ceiling.
“Uh oh, she’s thinking,” her mother said, arms folded. “Drum roll, please.”
Franny had thought about resolving to get her birth certificate fixed. But Francis Wylde didn’t need to get a girl’s spelling. If she was ever asked about it, Franny would say: “Oh, that’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“I did. But then changed my mind,” Franny said.
“How about friends? Got any yet? You never talk about anyone,” Anna said.
Franny had never mentioned Ralph. Not for a reason she could put her finger on. Her parents had no interest in the things she and Ralph had turned over. They weren’t even onlookers. Franny was genuinely distressed about losing touch with him. That surprised her.
Resolution decided, she smiled to herself. She would find Ralph. The call center was probably long gone. But, for a start, if she walked some blocks in either direction at their usual time, or hung out at the library, or the bookstore he’d told her about, she might run into him.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Anna said. Turning to the caged bird, she cooed, “No offense, Christopher.”
“I have a resolution!” Franny said.
“She has a resolution!” Anna exclaimed. “Okay. Let’s have it. What’s this resolution, Franny?”
Somebody must have turned off the television. The quiet had come upon Franny unawares, like a blanket being drawn over her shoulders. She wondered if her dad had put Lorna to bed.
“I’m waiting,” Anna said quietly. Tired and expressionless, she stared at Franny. “What is it?”
What did it matter what she said now? She’d made a resolution. Her first.
“That’s for me to know, Mom,” Franny said, “And you to find out.”
UNCLE BOBBY is an original story by Linda Danz.
STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©December 2020.
