Rowing in Eden (31 page)

In the early morning—it had to have been after four-thirty because she remembered looking at the clock at four-thirty—she finally fell asleep, sitting up in bed, surrounded by a blizzard of rough drafts and one fair copy of her poem.

When she awoke at eight, it was to the sounds of her father shouting in the upstairs hall. From what Franny could gather, Martie's photograph had appeared in that morning's
Des Moines Register.
Franny's grandmother had telephoned to let Brick know, and now Peg and Brick were trying without success to reach Martie at her dormitory.

Franny made her way down to the landing. In the kitchen, Peg—looking as blanched as Brick looked boiled—stood with newspaper in hand. Brick was on the telephone with the housemother at Martie's dormitory.

“We're ruined,” Peg whispered to Franny. Her eyes drooped as if the eyeballs themselves had grown heavy with blood. “Martie was in some protest yesterday and they got her on film.”

While Franny took the paper from Peg, Brick put his hand over the telephone and asked, “So what do you have to say for your sister now?”

Sure enough, there was Martie in a sea of anonymous faces.

Could Ryan Marvell have been in that crowd? Suppose Ryan Marvell had gone to Iowa City to see a university friend and been caught up in that crowd and unable to make it home for his date with Franny?

“Well?” Peg said.

Franny shook her head. “Is she in some kind of trouble because of this? Did she get arrested?”

“I'd say you're in trouble if your picture's plastered all over the front page of the state newspaper!” Brick barked. “And your poor grandmother's footing the bill for this nonsense!”

After that, Franny carried a cup of coffee to the window in the back hall. A black car passed by the house slowly. Suppose it were him. Suppose that was the car she had seen last night, and he had been in that car with a group of friends, and, because he was late, imagined that
she
had gone home?

“Mom?” Franny stepped into the kitchen. Peg sat at the table, one hand covering her mouth so firmly it appeared she stifled a scream.

“Mom.”

Peg did not lower her hand, but she flicked her eyes toward Franny as Franny said that maybe she could have lunch with her grandmother that afternoon. Wouldn't that be a good thing for Franny to do? Before she went to the library to work on her history project?

(A history project sounded perfect, didn't it? And, no doubt, there was some history project that she should have been doing, and, if she could find Ryan Marvell and things turned out all right, from then on, she would do everything perfectly, all her school-work, everything, perfectly.)

“That'd be fine,” Peg said, then she stood and crossed to the planter that hung on the kitchen wall. With a tug, she uprooted the planter's half-dead ivy plant and proceeded to carry the mess over her cupped hand to the trash basket.

Franny hardly knew how to make plans with her grandmother—she had never done such a thing before—but she did it that day. For Ryan Marvell. For Ryan Marvell, she put on the burgundy plaid Bermudas and knee socks and tennis sweater she had bought with such care for the back-to-school life promoted in the fall's issues of
Glamour
and
Seventeen.
For Ryan Marvell, she brushed her teeth twice and flossed and used mouthwash and set her hair and sat underneath the hair dryer.

“Don't you look cute!” her grandmother said when she came to open the door to Franny and Brick.

“Well, Mother”—Brick rubbed his cold hands together as he stood on Charlotte Wahl's front steps—“I'm sure you'll be gratified to learn I'm on my way to the office.”

“On Saturday?” Charlotte held the door open so that Franny might pass inside.

“That's right. Death and taxes await me!”

Charlotte nodded, then she and Franny told Brick goodbye and they made their way through the muted-green interiors of the house to the big old-fashioned kitchen at the back.

“I ran out earlier and filled the feeders,” Charlotte said as they sat down to eat. She pointed out her bay window to the crowd of birds now taking off and landing. “I thought you'd enjoy them over lunch.”

Franny smiled and nodded. She had already calculated that she ought to stay at her grandmother's for an hour and a half. If she stayed two hours, she would have only two and a half hours in which to try to find Ryan Marvell before Peg picked her up at the library—

“You don't like the sandwich, Franny?”

“It's delicious! It's just—rich.”

Her grandmother laughed. “That was what your grandpa and I used to say when we didn't like something. ‘Delicious, but very rich.'”

“Your sandwiches really are delicious, though.” Franny was sorry she could not pay more attention to her grandmother—she had been saying something about a train trip she meant to take with a friend—but Franny felt she could somehow help herself reach Ryan Marvell more quickly if she mentally
polished
the route to him, and so she imagined, again and again, opening her grandmother's front door, making her way down the walk in the direction of the library—

“You know, Franny”—Charlotte Wahl shook a playful finger at the girl—“I never can tell whether you're being polite or what. With my own children, I knew. They were always charming to me, but rarely meant a word they said!” She laughed—almost as if she had taken herself by surprise—and then Franny laughed, too, though it felt strange to have her grandmother comment upon the character of her father and her aunt and Franny herself. Really, it had never occurred to her that her grandmother had an opinion of her, one way or the other.

“And what about this business with your sister being in the newspaper?” Charlotte asked. “What do you think of that?”

When Franny hesitated, Charlotte raised a finger in the air. “Hold that thought,” she said, and took a pair of binoculars from
the lazy susan in the middle of her table in order to look out the window. “No. Nothing.” She lowered the binoculars. “I see a finch or sparrow in a different light sometimes and think it's a new bird. But, say, has your sister turned political, or is this a boy thing, or what?”

Franny murmured that she had read that the college years were a time for trying out different ideas, and she didn't think Martie was committed to any one way of looking at things.

Charlotte nodded grimly. “Your father was like that. Always taking up some new thing. He couldn't be a lawyer because he had to be a writer. No, he was going to be an architect. No, a pilot.”

“And a piano player,” Franny said.

“Oh, yes. He was going to play piano and Sally Vayless was going to sing. Look out, Manhattan!” Charlotte raised her hands to her doughnut of hair and—an old habit—without quite touching the doughnut, made her way around its circumference, checking for loose ends. “Poor Sally,” she murmured.

“Why poor Sally?”

Charlotte raised the binoculars. “Don't you kick my bird seed around like that!” she said, and then, “Sally was a dear girl, Franny, and she died.”

“Was she the one in the accident?”

Charlotte set the binoculars back on the lazy susan. Gave the lazy susan a little spin. “Yes. An awful thing. I prayed your dad would quit drinking after that—but to no avail.”

“But I thought he started drinking—
hard—
because of the accident. Because people thought he'd been driving, when really he only said he was driving to—” She broke off, doing her best not to flinch as her grandmother reached forward to tuck her hair behind her ears.

“That's better,” Charlotte murmured.

“But, was he the driver?”

“Oh.” Charlotte stood and began to clear the dishes. “He always said he was the driver. It's just—he gave the impression he
wasn't
.”

Franny stood then, too, automatically shaking the placemats in
preparation for wiping the table. “So what do you think, Grandma?”

“I figured out a long time ago that what
I
think about it doesn't matter.”

How irritating Franny found this response! How coy. The clock in the hall began to chime.
She should get going,
she said.
Of course, she'd help pick up first
—

“No, no, you run along, but I'm afraid I've upset you. Your cheeks are bright pink.”

“I'm fine. I just—do you have any aspirin?”

“I'm sure we do.
I
do. I'm always saying that:
we
. Run up to my bathroom. Left side of the vanity.”

Left. Right. Franny hesitated before her grandmother's vanity. That odd conversation and the climb up the stairs after so little sleep had left her feeling woozy. When she pulled open the left-hand drawer, it tipped forward, and dented tubes of Ben-Gay and Preparation H and tins of Doan's pills fell toward the front, along with a new bottle of aspirin.

The bottle was made of that same grass-green glass as the empty bottle of aspirin that the caramel-corn girl had handed Franny at the house of Richie Craft. Franny took two aspirin from the bottle and returned it to the drawer. Then—the artery in her neck pulsing—she took the bottle out of the drawer again, and stuck it in the pocket of her Bermudas. In the mirror, she adjusted the hem of her tennis sweater to cover the lump before returning downstairs.

Her hope: He would see her while she walked to the library. Which meant she took her time once she left her grandmother's house. Which was all that she really felt capable of, anyway. She—dawdled. She stopped and picked up pretty leaves. All the same, she must have moved too quickly, for soon she stood in front of St. Mark's Episcopal, with the library only half a block away.

She stepped inside St. Mark's, which sat empty and dark except for the light that came from the small bulb above the altar and the crimson candle that burned in the corner. The Perpetual Candle.
Just last May, with the church full of people and light, she had been confirmed up at the altar rail. She had longed to feel something more than pleased at the chance to wear the white dress Martie had worn for the Sweetheart's Dance, but when the bishop lay his hands on her head: nothing. The longing with which she had approached the rail was the same longing with which she left.

The Perpetual Candle: Had she made up that name?

She removed the bottle of aspirin from the pocket of her Bermudas and stuck it inside her purse. The modest beauty of the church was a comfort: the dark wood, the stained-glass windows that looked the way stained-glass windows should—dark, mellow, full of depth, like something medieval, not daisy-bright and new.

In a pew close by the door, she knelt down. The kneeling provided some solace.
Please make Ryan love me
, she prayed, over and over. She stared at the Perpetual Candle and hoped it might focus and direct her prayers, keep them ascending even after she left. But, then, it occurred to her that there ought to be a back-up candle for the Perpetual Candle, and it, too, should be called the Perpetual Candle. Then, if the first candle went out, you could say that it did not matter.

Though two candles might not do the trick. Three. Four. No. There was no end to the number of candles you could worry over. So perhaps it was better not to call the candle the Perpetual Candle. Perhaps it was better not to have the candle at all.

Like a bolt, she rose from the kneeler. Suppose, right then, Ryan Marvell drove by the church.

Down the aisle, and out the door, she rushed into the sunshine.

“Franny!”

A large hand rose from a station wagon in the alley between St. Mark's and the neighboring congregational church, and she walked toward it, slowly. The station wagon belonged to Mr. Estep, father of her old Sunday School pal Kimmy, but, might, by some mysterious process, Mr. Estep's car be found to contain Ryan Marvell?

“Saw your big sis in the paper this morning!” Mr. Estep called as Franny drew closer. Also in the car: Kimmy and Mrs. Estep, who
worked as a secretary in the St. Mark's office. Kimmy wanted to know whether Franny would be coming back to Sunday school soon. Franny did not know how to explain that her parents were uninterested in going to church lately, and she found it hard to focus on what the Esteps said—they were talking back and forth with one another and she was unclear whether Mr. Estep meant what he said about Vietnam, that the soldiers should not be in Vietnam—still, she stayed beside the station wagon, nodding, as this allowed her to remain on the street, in view, and she half-regretted it when Mr. Estep finally said, “Well, we better get going.”

She was still waving after the station wagon—its back bumper layered with faded stickers from the Corn Palace, Wall Drug, Dinosaur Monument—when the brown and white Ford came to a stop at the curb.

“Get in!” Ryan Marvell called, and leaned across the seat to throw open the passenger-side door. “I can explain! There was an emergency and I had to help out!”

She got in. He chafed her hands as if he knew how cold she had been the night before. He spoke as if he were a little out of breath; as if he were, in fact, still caught up in the emergency. “The crew guy for The Craft screwed up and left the amp cords in Pynch and I had to drive them down to the gig in Cedar Falls!”

“Oh,” she said, thankful he cared enough to offer her an excuse, even if it were an excuse so stupid that it could be accepted by only the most hopeless of lovers. Really, it was such a bad excuse, it might even be true. Worse: Somehow he knew that if he behaved as if the excuse were reasonable, she would have to accept it.

That was who he was. Who she was. Who they were together.

Eyes soft, voice tender, he asked, “You're not mad at me, are you, Franny?”

Unfortunately, it had not occurred to her to be mad at him.

“I even called your house, but you didn't answer!”

“Ryan—”