The Sojourn

The woman who answered his knock was in old-woman black.  Her dress, long-skirted, was covered by a crisp white apron.  She was neat and tiny, a tidy little woman.

He told her his tale of woe, how his car had broken down almost directly in front of her house.  He was grateful that she seemed to trust him, and better still, that she understood his English.

She smiled.  "Venga!  Come!  Venga nel salotto!  Come into the parlour!" she said, beckoning him through the door into her front room.

Immediately upon entering, he felt a strangeness engulf him.  The feeling that he had been here before crept up his spine and settled on his shoulders, like some gargoyle looking at him.

"My English not good," she said.

"No!  No!" he protested.  "It's fine!  I wish I knew Italian so well!"   He heard himself speak these words,  but they were a mere echo to the clamor in his brain that was shouting, "Why?"  Why was this old, old house, on this little dirt road nestled in the hills of Tuscany....why was it so familiar to him....who until three weeks ago, had never so much as set foot outside the United States?

"I learn a little English from the American soldiers."  He was aware of her speaking.  "You know...the occupation...twenty years ago....no...it was more than twenty.  The years go so fast!"   Engrossed in his thoughts, he made no response.

"Could it be that I heard stories about this house," he wondered, "in my family, perhaps?  When I was very young...too young to remember consciously?"  

Oh, but he knew that was not possible.  His ancestors,  on his mother's side, at least,  had been Virginians since the very existence of the State of Virginia itself, and before that, they had been loyal subjects of British monarchs.

"Then why do I have such an intense familiarity with this modest farmhouse in this remote Tuscan village?"

"Scusa?  Pardon me?"  the woman asked, and he realized he had spoken the last thought aloud.

"Oh, nothing, nothing," he said.  "I was just thinking....that is, I am very tired...."

"I get you un' apertivo, an...how you say...apertif?" she asked.  "It is late to repair your automobile tonight.  Perhaps you rest here, then go in the morning.  Yes?  But first you have un' apertivo."

"Thank you," he said.  "That would be very kind of you."

"Si riposa un po'... you rest alittle," she said.  "I return subito...immediately."

He sat on the divan and returned to his thoughts.  His father's lineage was German, Prussian more accurately.  Maybe that was it.  "Nonsense!" he told himself.  "Prussia is a far distance from these hills, and it would be too coincidental to suppose that my paternal ancestors, had they ever ventured this far south at all, which is doubtful, would have come upon this very house, nestled in the rolling hills of the Florentine countryside.  Besides, even if they had, how would their knowledge of this place have jumped into my brain?  It's not something that becomes part of one's genes!...Or is it?"

She returned with a tray and two glasses.  They sat for awhile, sipping their refreshment and groping for conversation.  Finally they arose, and even before he followed her out of the parlour, he knew there would be a buff-colored hallway on the other side, and that from this hallway would be, on the right, the sala da pranzo, the dining room, and that it would be large and bare, save for a round oaken table and twelve massive, rough-hewn chairs, and that its floor would be of earth.  But when they arrived far enough down the hallway for him to glance into the dining room, he saw that he was wrong, for the floor of the sala da pranzo was concrete, and this puzzled him, for in his mind's eye, he had been sure it was a dirt floor.  He looked around then, and saw that all the floors were of concrete, and it disqueted him, because his memory told him it should not be so.

She beckoned him to follow her up the narrow wooden stairs.  "Venga, please.  Come," she said.  "I show you the bedroom.  It belong to my son, but he is now gone.  You will be comfortable here for the night."

Suddenly the wind battered against the window and for an instant, the Spartan bedroom was brightly illuminated.  He and the woman stopped and stood still until a crash

of thunder ceased vibrating throughout the house.   

Under the influence of the nature of the night, he found himself wondering if perhaps the fates had some purpose in store...given the odd circumstance of his rented Fiat's having chosen precisely this house before which to stage its breakdown.  In truth, the very breakdown itself gave him pause--so strange it was that the car had purred merrily along the road one moment, and then had become utterly and completely immobile the next.  He shrugged off the haunting thought, convincing himself that his friends were right when they often told him he was too much the poet.  "A veritable Edgar Allan Poe," a young lady friend had once called him.

He smiled now at the Signora.  "You are most kind," he said.  "Of course, I shall expect to pay..."

She smiled and protested,, and bobbed her head, and protested anew.  Somewhere in the far recesses of memory, he knew this was the deeply embedded etiquette of this particular countryside...that they protested no, no, and expected  the other one to go on insisting, both realizing full well that the outcome would and should, in all civility, be the very thing so much protested at the start.  There flashed in his mind, a scene, he knew not from when or where, of himself, in pantaloons and a rough shirt, seated at the oaken table in the dining room of this very house.  His shoes, under the table, loomed large in his mind's eye, and unexplainably, they were wooden.  He saw a man, in like pantaloons and shirt, standing in the frame of the doorway, smiling, and he saw his parents, but they didn't have the faces of his parents.  Still, he knew these to be his father and mother.  How he knew was a mystery.  At any rate, his parents bade the man enter and share their repast.  The man politely protested that he had just eaten, but they insisted that he join them at dinner.  He said he really could not eat even one more bite, and they persisted, and he persisted, until finally he entered and sat at their table, and an earthenware plate was set before him, afterwhich the man ate with such enthusiasm, that it was clear he had not had a meal for several hours.and he ate with them.

The scene, so vivid, caused his heart to pound within his chest.  He wondered if the Signora heard it.  If she did, she took no notice, and the question of payment seemed to have been bandied back and forth enough to now be settled, for she said, "Twenty-five-thousand lire will be very acceptable.  You are most generous."  She told him she would fill a the wash basin in the room with water from the kitchen, for him to wash with in the morning.

Mention of the kitchen reminded him of a fireplace, a great stone fireplace, and a large pot hanging therein, and of a small, dark woman stirring its contents.  

"Tell me, Signora," he said, "the kitchen...is it....does it have a fireplace?  And on the wall beside it, is there an oven...that is, a door in the stone wall, with a tunnel hollowed out, and is it used as an oven?"

She shrugged, and the gesture was so typical of these parts, that he felt an inexplicable fondness for her.  "You have seen one of these old houses," she said, "and you have seen them all.  Si!  Yes, it has such a fireplace.  It is old, very old, this house.

My great grandfather remembered his great-grandfather telling of this house in his youth.  Very old, this house.  Tomorrow you see.  Now you sleep.  The walk to Lucca will take perhaps more than one hour tomorrow.  There you can telephone.  Reposa bene, Signore.  Rest well, sir.   I go now to bring you water."  She gave a half-courtsey, picked up the wash basin, and was gone.

"That must be the answer," he reasoned, willing himself to believe.  "To see one such house is to see them all."  But he had never, never to his knowledge, seen one before.  His flight from London had set down in Milano only four days ago, and his stops since then, up to this unplanned sojourn, had been in hotels and albergios.  The gargoyle loomed, and he tried to blot it out, for after all, this voyage had been planned so that he could settle his nerves, quiet his anxieties.  His doctor had advised it. 

He lay awake most of the night, sleeping only in snatches, and waking in a sweat of remembering some other facet of the house, some other little scene that had taken place here...an ancient scene, of other times, of another era.

Finally, the chatter of birds outside his window, and a shaft of sunlight across the cold floor heralded the morning.  How did he know the floor was cold, still snug abed as he lay?  He pushed the question from his mind.  The fantasies that the darkness of night had magnified were not be fearful in the lovely light of morning.  In all honesty, though, he could not convince himself that they had been mere fantasies. 

He washed and shaved, using the long, old-fashioned, leather-handled razor hanging at the side of the washstand.  The washstand was not familiar, and for that he was grateful, and felt an affection, an unreasonable relief and love for the impersonability of the washstand, for he knew nothing of its past, and it recalled for him nothing of his.

The old woman, in the courtyard, was calling to her cat.  He saw the courtyard in his mind, although it had been dark when he had arrived last night, and in truth, he had not approached the house from that side.  "Miscia, miscia," he heard her call.

He had never, not to his conscious knowledge, heard the word before, yet he knew she called her cat, and he wondered how he knew.  "Her tone of voice, perhaps," he thought.  "Perhaps 'Here kitty, kitty' and 'Miscia, miscia'  have a universal inflection."

He shivered and dressed hurridly, and descended the stairs, anxious to quit this house, this vicinity, this very country, as soon as possible.  He intended to return to The States immediately, submerge himself in his work, surround himself with his sophisticated friends, and forget such a place as this existed.  "I have to," he told himself.  "My sanity demands it!"

The Signora, having already set breakfast at the oaken table for him, bid him 'buon giorno', and he returned the greeting.  He did not feel up to protesting the amount of work she must have  gone to in preparing his breakfast.  Yet he knew he should, and being of breeding, and knowing she expected it, he did.  The formalities of protestations completed, he pulled out her chair for her, then circled the table to his own place, and prepared to sit down, but the cat chose that precise moment to skitter into the dining room, almost upsetting him as it darted through his legs.  Catching his balance, he remembered clearly another cat, a similar cat, but they had never had cats in his home.  His mother was allergic to them.  He faced it squarely then...the gargoyle.  And strangely, he was no longer afraid.  He even found himself interested to know if perhaps this cat, this very cat....  "Hmm.  Is it also true of animals?" he thought.  "And  if so, were they always animals, or did they once enter life  as other forms?"

He wondered then if he himself had always been human, and would he always be so?  Or would he someday, some century, some eon from now, when the elements were rightly aligned, and the mood pregnant...would he someday get a glimpse of grazing in a grassy field, his snout close to the ground, the smell of grass in his nostrils?  

"Perhaps it isn't only the human mind," he thought, "that is capable of memory.  Perhaps the bovine mind...the feline mind...the mind of an ant...."

The thought was ridiculous, but it was there, and it made him smile.

He sat down to breakfast, and felt akin to the cat, to the woman, to all mankind, indeed to the world, the universe, and far beyond. 

"Well, cat," he said aloud, lifting his breakfast cup in salute, "here's to other times and other places!"

The woman looked at him, not understanding.  He, however, at last understood perfectly, and could hardly wait to get on with this life of his. 

"And the next," he told himself, and the next, and the next." 

I Know Who You Are

          As Ralph drove the Cadillac into the diner's lot, he saw that there were no cars parked there.  He glanced at his heavy gold Rolex watch.  "It's pretty late," he thought,  "but the lights are still on in the place.  I'm going in."

          The waitress behind the counter had her slender back to him.  He noticed how her tiny waist accentuated her shapely hips.   "It's closing time," she said, without turning around.   "Don't people think I'd like to get home at a decent hour like everybody else?"  She faced him then, and he saw that but for the heavy eye make-up and the dark, almost mahogony lipstick, she might have been attractive enough.

          He placed a ten-dollar bill on the counter.  "Just a fast cup of coffee, and then I'll be gone," he said, smiling, in an effort to turn on the charm.  He saw her eye the large diamond on the little finger of his right hand.  Shaking his left arm farther out of his jacket sleeve to expose his Rolex, he placed his left hand on the counter, too.  As he had expected, the watch was well noted.

          "I'm off to find a motel near BWI Airport for tonight," he said.  "I have a very early flight out of here in the morning, and I don't want to risk missing it.  Morning  rush-hour traffic, you know.  I was looking for I-95, but I must have missed it a while back.  Then, to make matters worse, I got off the Beltway, thinking to come onto 95  from another angle, and now I'm really lost.  I thought I might get some black coffee before trying to find my way back to the Beltway.   If you pour me a cup, I promise to drink it right down and be on my way.  You can even keep the change."

          It was her turn to smile.  "Oh, you don't have to hurry all that much," she said.  "I still have some cleaning up to do."  Her voice dripped honey now.   "You drink your coffee, Handsome, and then maybe you can give me a lift home in that big car of yours out there."

          "It's a rental," he said.  "I  flew in for a meeting in The District.  But I'll be happy to give you a lift.  How had you planned to get home otherwise?"

          "Walk," she said.  "My flat's just down the highway a piece.  Sometimes I thumb a ride, but there ain't too many cars on that road after midnight.  It's sort-of off the beaten path, if you catch my drift.  Someday I'll get me enough money for a car of my own.  Maybe one like your Caddy out there, if I get lucky!"  She had already poured coffee and now pushed the mug toward him.

          He lifted the mug in salute.  "Here's to getting lucky!" he said.   "May your ship come in soon!"

          She giggled.

          "What's your name?" he asked, smiling at her.

          "Lucille," she said.  "What's yours?"

          "Pretty name!" he said.  "Mine's Ralph."

          "Hi, Ralphie!"

          "Hi, there, Lucille!"

          She giggled again.                     

          

          He expected to end up in bed with her at her place, and he did.  He stood at the bathroom sink now, combing his hair, and was just about ready to take his leave.  He looked at the sink's rusted spigots, and at the cracked, paint-chipped toilet seat.  "How some people live!" he thought.  "Does Alma have any idea how lucky she is?"  He envisioned her, his wife, asleep at home in their spacious bed.  Thanks to him, they certainly had come a long way, he and Alma, from that podunk little college town where they had met over twenty years ago.

          When he came back into Lucille's bedroom, he put his hand to his back pocket for his wallet, thinking to leave her the few bills that were in it, but the wallet was not there.   He looked over to her as she stood by the dresser.  She had covered her nakedness with a a short pink sleepshirt.  She held his wallet in her hand.

          "I'll take that," he said angrily.

          "Will you really now?" she said, grinning.  "Well you can have it, Ralphie.  You rich guys never carry much money, anyways, just a few bills.  The plastic wouldn't do me no good, either, because you'd just call the old 800 number and cancel them if I took them.  So take your crummy wallet.  But, hey!  It looks maybe my ship has come in after all, just like you said.   See?  I found your business cards and took one.  I also jotted down my name and address and stuck it in behind your license.  Better make sure you take it out before your wife sees it.  You do have a wife, don't you, Ralphie baby?   Sure you do!  You romeos aways have one at home somewheres!  So send me a nice fat check after you get back to Chicago, Ralphie, sweetie pie!  'Else I may have to phone your rich missus and tell her all about our big night.  She wouldn't be too happy about that, do you think?"

          He grabbed the wallet from her hand and smacked her hard across the face.  She reached for the lamp on the nightstand and raised her arm to strike him with it, but stumbled and fought to regain her balance.  He took the lamp from her and brought it down hard on her head.  It all happened in the split of a second, and suddenly he was looking down at her sprawled on the the floor, her sleepshirt twisted under her, a good deal of her body exposed.  She didn't move.

          

          In the car on his way to the airport, his hands trembling so that he had trouble keeping hold of the steering wheel, he could hardly believe that such a vile thing had really happened.  His heart pounded wildly at the memory of his violence.  Re-enacting it in his mind, he felt almost like an onlooker, watching a nightmare happening to a stranger, not to him at all.    He had left her where she lay, and had wiped all the surfaces he could think of  having touched, and just to be sure, even those he knew he had not touched.  He had kept his wits enough to look over the entire room, making sure he left nothing behind to link him to her.   Then he had unlocked and opened the window.  It was at street-level, and anyone could easily have broken in.   "Maybe they'll think it was a rapist," he thought, and shuddered.  

          "It might work," he thought.  "It has to!  Other than at the business meeting, I saw no one at all this trip whom I know, or who knows me.  There was no one else in the diner to see us together, or at her flat, either."   He hoped against hope that he would be lucky and get away with it.

          Alma was glad to see him when he arrived home late that same afternoon.  "Good trip?" she asked.  "How was the flight?"

           "Uneventful," he said.

           "You look awfully tired, Ralph.  Are you okay?"

          "I'm fine," he said.  He couldn't bring himself to look at her face.  He barely brushed her cheek with his lips.  "Did you get the evening paper yet?" he asked.

          "No, dear.  Will you do it, please?   It's probably in the mailbox.   I told the boy to put it there from now on.  Yesterday I found it blowing all over the yard!"

          "That's illegal," he said.  "It supposed to be for mail only.  Oh, what's the difference!  Sure, I'll get the paper."

          When he reached into the box, he didn't find the newspaper, but he did pull out a piece of orange paper, roughly the size of a postcard.   Written on it in large, bold, sloppy letters, were the words, "I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.  I SAW WHAT YOU DID!"

          Later, in bed with Alma asleep beside him, Ralph turned it over and over in his mind.   Who could have put that note in their box?  Who could have known?  Who could have seen?  He thought he would go insane.  "I could wait for the accuser to make himself known," he thought, "and then reason with him to keep silent for a price."  The idea of blackmail chilled him.  Worse yet, what if his accuser should refuse to be bought?   "Maybe I should make a clean breast of it to Alma," he thought at one point during the night, but immediately discounted the idea.  What good would that do?  With a pang, he thought of their two daughters.  What would this whole sordid thing do to them?

          "I think you should get a check-up," Alma said at breakfast.  "You look terrible!   I have to volunteer at the hospital today.  Want me to talk to Dr. Maguire about an appointment for you?"

           "No!" he said.  

          Somehow he went through the motions of getting himself to the office and getting  down to work, hoping to lose himself  in the politics of running the Corporate Office, which had always delighted him up to now.  It was just no use trying to keep his mind on the job.   Before nine-thirty, he buzzed for his secretary.

          "Mrs. Wallace," he said when she entered his office, "call Mr. Broadmore's secretary and tell her I won't be keeping our meeting this morning."  Mr. Broadmore was the CEO.  Corporate rumor had it that he was grooming Ralph to take over for him when he retired next year.

          "But, sir, do you think that's wise?" Mrs. Wallace asked.  "He might be pretty angry."

          "Then he'll just have to be angry!"  Ralph said.  "I'm not feeling well, and I am going home."

          Alma's car was not in the garage when he arrived, and it reminded him that this was her day to volunteer at the hospital.  He knew it was not her favorite thing, but it was something that was more-or-less expected of the wives of important men in the community.  She would not, he knew, be back until almost dinnertime.  All at once he knew what he had to do.  He drove into the garage, and reaching for the remote control box on the dash, pressed the button which brought down the garage door.  He let the engine idle and settled his head back.  He closed his eyes and wondered how long it would take.          

          At a bar in the farthest end of town, Stretch Neal, already slightly drunk, was telling his pals how it was.  "I go around to these classy neighborhoods, see?"  He could hardly tell it for laughing, "All those fat cats have something dark in their past to be guilty about!  So I sneak one of these little notes in their mailboxes.  Then I drive away and let them sweat!"

          His pals all allowed that it was a pretty damn funny joke.

Cousins

"Angela, I'm on one step..." Franky said, and the skin on Angela's back tingled.

"Angela, I'm on the second step..."

   She knew where the tale was going.  He had recited it to her many times.

"Angela, I'm on the third step..."  She shivered in anticipation.

She was five years old, and younger than Franky by as many years.  He thought it was funny to say that they were like Woolworth's Five and Ten.  He didn't have many friends his own age, probably because he was too bright for them, so he spent much of his time with her.  Their families shared a big red house--Franky's family on the first floor, and Angela and her parents on the second floor.  All the kids slept upstairs in the attic, Franky and his big brother Joe in one room, and Franky's two older sisters and Angela in the other.

They were in the attic now as Franky continued, "Angela, I'm on the fourth step...."

"Franky, cut that out now," his brother said.  "You'll scare her to death.  Why do you always tell that stupid story of yours just at bedtime?  She'll have nightmares all night!  Angela, go back to your own room."

"But, Joe, I want to hear how it ends," Angela said.

"You know how it ends.  We all know how it ends.  He tells it a hundred-fifty times a week.  I'll tell you how it ends.  It'll be 'Angela I'm on the fifth step,'  all the way to 'Angela I'm on the thirteenth step.'  Then he'll pounce and grab you by the neck and say 'Angela, I gotcha!', and you'll scream.  Now go to your room.  Mary and Louise are already in bed.  Scoot!"

Joe was in the tenth grade, and bossed all of them, especially Franky, but he was okay.  He was big and handsome and sometimes even played catch with the four of them.

The kids up at the top of the hill on Woodward Avenue were mean to Franky and teased him, especially Johnny Morey.  He was in Franky's class at school, and Franky said he made straight F's.

"Sissy, sissy!" Johnny said to Franky one day, "always with his little baby cousin!  What do you two play, paper dolls?"

"You go home, Johnny Morey!" Angela said.  "Get off of our property, or I'll..."

She punched him on the arm.

"Or you'll what?"  Johnny said.  "You'll what, huh?...huh?"

"That's okay, Angie," Franky said.

"Get out of our yard!" Angela said again.

"So make me!"  Johnny said, and grabbed her precious Shirley Temple pin, pulling it right from her sweater.  It had come with the Shirley Temple Doll Santa had brought last Christmas, and Angela wore it almost every day.

"Give me that!" she said, but Johnny just laughed.

"Give it back," Franky said.  His voice was quiet and shaking.

Just then Joe came out the back door and took the porch steps two at a time.  "Give her her pin, Morey," was all Joe said.  Johnny threw the pin on the ground and turned and left.

Franky looked ashamed, or maybe Angela just imagined it.  "That's okay, Franky," she whispered, and put her hand on his arm, but he shrugged it off.

"Are you mad at me, Franky?" she asked.

He shook his head.  "No.  Mad at me."

"That Johnny Morey!" Angela said.  "I hate him!"

"No you don't," Franky said.

He was right.  She didn't hate him.  It was just that she loved Franky.  They were best friends.  He had already taught her to read and do sums.  He said he wanted her to be the smartest kid in the First Grade next year.  It was his goal, not hers, but for his sake, she would try.

The times Angela liked best were when Franky would invent scenerios for the two of them to play.  Other kids played cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or Buck Rodgers, but Franky thought up much better games than those.  Sometimes the terrace that sloped gently in front of their house became instead the Alaskan terrain they had to climb to reach their igloo, lest they die in a blizzard that blew icy blasts of snow in their faces.  It was great fun, and she loved it.

"Mush, you huskies!" Franky would shout.

"Do we call them huskies because they are fat, Franky?" she asked.

"No, dummy!  That's the kind of dogs they are!  Like our Sheppie.  The kind of dog he is is German shepherd."

     "Oh," she said, realizing for the first time in her life why that was their dog's name...Sheppie...she had wondered about that.  She had thought Horsie would have been a good name for him, because he was big enough for her to ride when Joe held her on the dog's back.   She didn't say anything to Franky that she had just then figured out how Sheppie got his name.  Franky  would have said "dummy" again  and been disappointed in her.

Once, when Joe overheard how exacting Franky was with her, he told him not to be so tough on her.  "She's only five-years-old, for heaven sake, Franky!" he said.

"I want her to be perfect," Franky said.

"Well, nobody's perfect," Joe said.  

Still, for Franky's sake, she tried to be.

When the front terrace was not for them a frozen tundra, it was other times a desert over which she and Franky rode their camels in search of water.  Just in the nick of time, when they were about to expire from thirst, they would come upon an oasis.  Franky explained to her about oases.

Sometimes, especially in summer, the terrace, shaded as it was by the big chestnut tree in front, and soft with pachysandra that covered it, was where they sat and just talked.

"I'm going to be rich when I grow up,"  Franky said.

"Are you, Franky?  What are you going to be?" she asked.

""A priest."

"But priests don't make a lot of money," she said.

"Oh yeah?  Didn't you ever see how much money is in the collection basket?  Who do you think gets it all?"

"You're right!" she said.

"He's wrong!" her mother said when she told her.  "They give most of it to the poor.  That Franky's a nice boy, but don't believe everything he tells you."

"You dummy!"  Franky said when she went back to him with her mother's words.  "You tell your mother everything!  Just keep quiet some time!"

   "But, Franky..." she said

"But Franky nothing!" he said.  "Do you think your mother tells you everything?"

"No."

"So, see?" he said.

"But we're not supposed to lie," she said.

"Who said anything about lying?  You don't have to lie to them.   Just answer their questions and no more.  Grown-ups have their world and we have ours.  Don't talk so much to them, okay?"

"Okay," she said, but she knew she would continue to talk too much.  She couldn't seem to help it.  Besides, she didn't want her mother and father to have a world apart from hers.  Sometimes, with Franky, she just kept to herself opinions that differed from his.  She didn't want him to feel hurt.

Sometimes, on a Saturday, Franky's mother would shop at the Diamond Street Market downtown, and would take the two children on the trolley with her and drop them off at the old Art Cinema movie house while she shopped.  In those days the Art Cinema showed horror movies, not pornographic ones as it did in later years.

"Don't dare tell her what movie we're going to see!" Franky would say.

She never did.

"What kind of movies are they?" her aunt had once asked, and Franky had hurried to answer for both of them.  "Good ones, Ma," he told her.

"That's nice," she had said.

One such Saturday, her aunt finished shopping earlier than usual and wanted to get home.  She convinced the theater manager to allow her to come in to get her two young charges while the movie was still in progress.  She walked down the aisle of the darkened theater to find her niece hunched over almost double in fright, her hands over her eyes, and Franky mesmerized by what Count Dracula was doing on the screen.  That was the end, then and there, of their Saturday afternoons at the old Art Cinema.

Once she was grown, she credited Franky and his tales and the chills of the horror movies and all the wonderful magic games of childhood he had invented for them, for whatever ambition and imagination she had managed to carry into adulthood.  She missed him terribly.  He was still around, but he really wasn't Franky anymore.

He returned from serving in the Second World War to finish his last year at Carnegie Tech.  Then, after teaching himself German, he took a post-graduate year of studies at the University of Zurich.  He was, among many other things, an accomplished pianist.  Back from Zurich, he enrolled at Pitt in a masters-degree-in-education program.  Relatives began to whisper among themselves that he was afraid to make it in the real world, and chose to stay in the university community.  He did eventually try his hand at teaching school, but it was not for him.  He entered the seminary in Latrobe to study for the priesthood, and left a year later, unordained.   

In a rare moment, reminiscent of their childhood friendship, he confided to her that his life was becoming ever more confusing and that making decisions agonized him.  Finally he could not make them at all.  Stuttering became an affliction, and he spoke less and less.  He withdrew into his own thoughts.  Financially, he became totally dependent on his parents, and at their death, they left him with enough money to live in an institution where things could be decided for him.

Now she wonders if  he realizes how much she looked up to him in those days, how much she idolized him, how much she owes him.    Does he know how hard she used to try to be as good as he wanted her to be?  And if he does, does it matter to him anymore?