Angels of Detroit (26 page)

One Sunday afternoon they were strolling the glass-domed paths of the Belle Isle conservatory, Ruth pointing out all the most beautiful orchids, when she realized Francis was no longer beside her. She doubled back through the rows of blooms and found him near the entrance, gazing up at the glass. There was a small bird trapped inside, flapping among the rafters, trying to find a way out.

“We should help it,” Francis said.

He started to whistle, as if he and the bird shared a common tongue. A young couple she didn’t know stared at Francis as he offered his finger as a perch. Meanwhile Ruth inched away, lowering herself onto a little iron bench tucked away in a tiny alcove. She would have liked to disappear completely.

With Francis, there was always waiting. He had a child’s sense of wonder, and it was peculiar how often Ruth’s adventures with him produced in her the feeling of returning to childhood things. That day on Belle Isle, after Francis was finally forced to give up on the bird, they went next door to the aquarium, which Ruth hadn’t visited since she was a little girl. She was struck by how small the aquarium
felt that day, the single arched gallery seeming to close in on her from all sides. The place was dark and tight, and each recessed tank was framed in stainless steel, as if it were a porthole—the people imprisoned and the fish utterly free, swimming there of their own accord. She felt as though she were leagues under the sea in some sort of Gothic bathysphere. Francis was captivated by the four-foot-long electric eel that slunk across the tank with its jaws a crude rictus of malevolence, its dead eyes fixed on some nonexistent prey. Ruth caught just a glimpse of the horrible creature, and then she had to turn away. But Francis couldn’t seem to get enough. He was still standing there a few minutes later when some sort of food was dropped into the water. The tank was rigged in such a way that when the eel ate, the current it produced surged to a light bulb affixed to the wall. As the light began to glow, Francis’s eyes grew wide, and Ruth couldn’t help wondering what the others would think if they were to see this side of Francis Statler, not the charmingly oblivious young man but the guileless, naked boy.

Before the eel could finish, Ruth slipped her arm in the crook of Francis’s elbow and pulled him out the front door. His head came last, eyes still locked on the display. She reached into his pocket then and pulled out the keys to the Edsel. He climbed into the passenger seat without a word. Without waiting for him to fully close his door, Ruth squealed out of the parking lot, swerving into the oncoming lane as she entered the road along the southern shore. Francis didn’t ask where they were going, and in fact she didn’t know herself until they got there, to the massive marble fountain about a mile away at the western end of the island. When they arrived, she got out of the car alone and walked briskly toward the fountain. She felt propelled by a great sense of purpose, but what the purpose was, precisely, she couldn’t have said. In defiance of nature, lions and turtles together spouted a froth of water into the already humid air. Ruth stood there in silence, looking past the fountain and out over the river, toward the city. She’d known from the start that her relationship with Francis
Statler was not meant to last, but it had only just occurred to her that perhaps this fact had escaped him. It was a troubling realization, but what could she do about it? All she could think was how the other girls would judge her when that time finally came.

And so they stuck together, Ruth and Francis, even after the thrill of driving had worn off, after Ruth found herself more and more often sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat on their weekend drives to Walled Lake.

The night he finally kissed her, they were at the Gratiot Drive-In. It was August, and they were about to enter their last year of high school. A group of them had caravanned up there together, and they were only a short way through
Gigi
when Francis put his arm around Ruth. Maybe he could sense how bored she was watching Maurice Chevalier do his shuffle in topcoat and tails, thanking heaven for little girls. As Francis leaned in, Ruth was thinking about the irony of watching such silliness in a city that had done so much to destroy the French language, turning Bois Blanc to Bob-Lo and Gratiot into Grash-it, not to mention Detroit itself. And then in a flash, Chevalier’s walking stick was replaced with Francis Statler’s nose, shiny with grease and terror.

She didn’t try to stop him. She was pleased to be done with the horses and carriages and silly parasols. And yet she couldn’t help being aware of the many eyes turned to face her. She and Francis were surrounded on all sides—Donna and Robert to her right, and she didn’t remember who else, but there had been at least five cars. Soon a cheer rose up. That was the moment Ruth pulled back, wiping the damp from her mouth. Taking Francis by the hand, she pulled him out of the car, past the box offices, and a minute later they were alone outside the theater. Alone, but it hardly felt private out there. There was so much light all around them, it felt like midafternoon. The sky pulsed at their backs with every flashing image on the screen. For Ruth, the Gratiot Drive-In wasn’t really about the movie. Especially when the movie was something like
Gigi
. There were plenty of places
closer to home: the Bel-Air, the Eastside, the Ford-Wyoming, the Town. But none of them had what the Gratiot had, the movie screen built onto a one-hundred-fifteen-foot tower, from the top of which, on the highway side, cascaded an actual waterfall—the spray illuminated by a kaleidoscope of colored bulbs. It was both beautiful and absurd, surely the world’s only liquid marquee. It was the spectacle she marveled over, the ambition so peculiarly placed. It was said the construction had cost four hundred thousand dollars. Ridiculous! But could she say the money had been poorly spent? Here she was, after all, gazing up at the red and yellow mist. And as they stood by the railing in front of the pool into which the water fell, Ruth saw that Francis Statler was trembling. At first she thought he’d somehow gotten wet. But that wasn’t it, and it wasn’t just nerves anymore, either. Although it might have flattered her to think so, she understood he wasn’t shaken by an overwhelming passion. He was miserable. Leaning against the rail, she pulled him toward her, and he collapsed onto her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay.” That was the moment it occurred to her to wonder if perhaps all of this wasn’t complicated for him, too, and in ways she couldn’t imagine.

When they got back to the car, the others were poised for celebration. Good old Francis had finally done it. Even the other girls looked upon Ruth with respectful warmth, as if she’d now proven she would not hurt this gentle boy no one else wanted.

At Ruth’s insistence, Francis Statler took the wheel, and the others marked his triumph by making him lead the way to the Totem Pole, grandmaster of their small parade. Ruth squeezed next to Francis on the bench seat, their bodies combined into one shadow, but down in her lap, where no one else could see, Francis’s hand had gone limp.

At the Totem Pole, Francis ordered a burger, but he seemed distracted, and Ruth had to be the one to remind the waitress to bring his customary extra pickles. As the other boys squeezed his shoulders and mussed his hair and called him Casanova, Francis contorted his
bendy straw into unrecognizable shapes. Stuffed beside him in the overcrowded booth, Ruth quietly sucked on a cherry-flavored ginger ale, a drink she loathed but had ordered anyway, feeling somehow it was what she deserved. With every sip, her tongue became more sharply preserved in the cloying, medicinal sweetness. And when the glass was empty, she realized she’d inadvertently erased every trace of Francis Statler’s kiss from her lips.

For the rest of the night, she clung to his side, smiling whenever he looked her way, but there were no more kisses. At eleven, Francis pulled up to the curb in front of Ruth’s house, the Edsel still running. With lowered eyes he wished her goodnight. Francis lived on Balmoral too, the biggest house in the neighborhood, an eight-bedroom colonial with presidential-looking columns and an English garden in the back. Ruth’s father passed the Statler mansion every morning on his way to work, never tiring of the view.

Ruth’s house had a circular drive, but Francis never used it. He seemed to prefer having a buffer of yard between him and her front door, as if he were afraid of falling within her father’s reach. She could have told him there was nothing to fear, that Ruth’s father worshipped the Statlers, that Francis himself could do no wrong. But that was something Francis could never know. Ruth let her fingers linger on the door handle, giving Francis one more chance to take the cherry from her lips, but his gaze would not budge from his lap.

The summer faded into fall, and fall quickly dissolved into winter. All at once, it seemed, the excursions to the club to swim and play tennis were replaced with parades downtown and skating at the pond at Palmer Park. A week before Christmas, Ruth and Donna took a bus downtown to buy presents for Francis and for Richard, Donna’s new boyfriend. The city had painted the bus in white and red stripes, like a candy cane, and the driver wore a matching vest. Ruth knew she was too old for such things, and she made a point of rolling her
eyes at Donna as they boarded, but secretly the one time she loved to ride the bus was at Christmas, high above the snow and slush, watching the tinkling lights and laurels strung from all the buildings. Nothing made her more sentimental than Christmas, and Christmas at Hudson’s Department Store most of all.

Every year after Thanksgiving when she was a child, Ruth had gone with her mother to Hudson’s to do the Christmas shopping. At any other time, she would beg and plead to stay home, dreading the boredom and exhaustion, dragging bags up and down twenty-something stuffy floors. But at Christmas everything changed. Hudson’s became a place of infinite possibilities and endless riches magically transformed: a life-size diorama of carolers floating from the ceiling amid a dusting of snow; a frosty Cinderella descending an icy path to a twinkling carriage; holly wreaths and floating angels and chandeliers done up like ornaments. Ruth could remember being eight years old and sitting in her very own chair beside her mother in the Christmas card shop on the ninth floor, flipping through the catalogs, imagining the day when all this would be hers. And now it was. Ruth and Donna were women now. For the very first time, they were here to shop for men.

They got off the elevator on the second floor and strolled the disorienting racks of suits and ties and French-cuffed shirts. Ruth felt the salesmen watching her, preparing to come forward and offer assistance, and it made her feel powerful to have their attention. A tall, angular man with a jutting chin was the first to step into their path, and with a distracted, harried air borrowed from her mother, Ruth raised her nose in his direction and said, “Where might I find the Levi’s?”

With the help of Donna and the salesman and an embarrassed stock boy roughly Francis’s size, Ruth picked out a pair that looked as if they might fit, admiring each heavy seam, every shiny rivet. Afterward, the handle of the bag tingling in her fingers, she followed Donna down to the salon on the fourth floor.

Donna left the salon with a new compact, and together they went up to the thirteenth floor. At a table overlooking the river, they ordered Maurice salads and Coca-Cola, and while they ate, they talked of nothing. Nothing, at least, that Ruth would later be able to recall. She would have liked to think of the two of them, there on the cusp of adulthood, discussing what the future held, a world full of possibilities. Their last year of high school was nearly halfway finished, and what then? There was college and marriage. They must have discussed Richard, whether he would propose, and would he like the pebble-grain wallet Donna had chosen for him? In fact, in little more than a year, Donna would become Mrs. Richard Galt, and the two of them would buy a new brick rancher in Royal Oak.

But what about Ruth? Did Donna ask what might happen between her and Francis? If she did, how did Ruth respond? The relationship would end, of course. Everyone knew it would have to end. But Ruth herself could not yet see the end. She was too young to be able to see the end of anything. At eighteen she was less like a young version of her adult self than like some primitive ancestor. There would be many crude steps along the evolutionary path before she became what she was now. And it bewildered her still to look back at this young girl, so lacking in ambition, teenage years spent wanting nothing more than to be her own driver. And having achieved that simple goal with the help of Francis Statler, she found herself tapped out of ideas. There would be college, one wasted year of it in Ann Arbor. And there would be a marriage, almost two decades’ worth of unhappiness and frustration.

But then again, if she had then already possessed the notion to make something of herself, things might not have turned out half as well as they did. At eighteen, the best she could have hoped for was to be taught to type, and no one then wanted to employ a girl who thought she deserved better. Of course, no one did fifteen years later, either, when Ruth’s aspirations finally surfaced. But by then the two daughters she had loved and coddled had taught her patience, and
her husband had taught her how to humor men less intelligent than herself.

But such change would not come to Ruth alone. Nor would it always come so slowly.

On July 23, 1967, when the children were four and six years old, the only city Ruth had ever really known would suddenly be set alight. Of course, there would be nothing sudden about it, except that neither Ruth nor anyone else she knew had seen it coming. But that didn’t mean the tinder hadn’t been sparking for years.

Even four decades later, she would remember the day vividly. It was early Sunday morning when the riot broke out. They heard murmurs on the radio of something happening miles away on Twelfth Street. Hours before dawn, police had raided an unlicensed bar, arresting eighty-something patrons, all of them black. In the hours since then, black people across the city had been expressing their anger with fire and bricks.