Rowing in Eden (21 page)

“What on earth was all that?”

The girls turned. In the doorway to the back hall stood Peg. The mask of cosmetic clay that she sometimes put on her skin had dried and cracked around her mouth. To Franny, the clay always made Peg look a little frightening, but Martie laughed at the effect and went to Peg and put an arm around her.

“Good news, Mom,” she said. “Franny doesn't like that Prohaski anymore,” and, with a thumb, she directed Peg to the small rectangular window in the front door.

Peg peered out. “Well, say, he's halfway down the road already, girls. Would that be too soon to celebrate?”

I
N HER BEDROOM, ON THE FAINTLY BLUE-LINED NOTEBOOK
paper she had recently purchased for fall, Franny drew a log cabin with a stone path up to its door and
K
's of curtain at the windows. A home as rustically functional and removed from the real as the Boxcar Children's boxcar, the Swiss Family Robinson's tree hut, the Flintstones' pile of rocks. She set a little mailbox at the end of the path, and wrote upon it R
YAN
M
ARVELL
.

In the next room, Deedee Pierce and Martie applied Peg's clay mask to each other's faces in preparation for that evening's dance at the country club, and listened to the records that Martie always played when feeling lovelorn—just then, Brenda Lee's “All Alone Am I.”

Did something inside the brain carry a code for that downward spiral of violin notes—falling, falling, like leaves—that the brain read as “sad”? Franny was thinking about how poems created such effects when the telephone began to ring. She ran for the upstairs extension, but it was only Rosamund, calling to say that she and Turner Haskin were back from Des Moines with Mike Zanios's car, and did Peg want anything at the store?

“Are you on the line, Franny?” Peg asked from the kitchen telephone. “Come downstairs and set the table. One extra place.”

While she gathered silverware in the kitchen, Franny decided the dinner guest must be the owner of that rectangle of flattop she could make out over the back of an easy chair in the den.

Daiquiris. The smell of rum and limeade filled the kitchen and Franny could see her mother in the den, the empty blender pitcher in her hand. “Oh, Brick!” Peg sounded displeased with something Franny's father had said, and Franny edged toward the doorway to listen.

“Think about my cousin Grace,” her father was saying, “but, hey, here's Fran now!”

She started. She had not realized she was in his line of sight.

“Come on in! I want you to meet an old friend of mine!”

Franny lay down the silverware and entered the den. She could see, now, that her father already had drunk quite a bit. Even if she had not heard the liquor in his voice, she would have known from the way he leaned back in his chair, hips toward the edge of the cushion, long legs shooting out into the room. Still, it was Franny to whom Peg gave a dirty look as she left the den with the empty pitcher. What was that about?

The guest turned out to be an old law school buddy by the name of Hank Ayles, a trim and friendly man with a disconcerting amount of gray fuzz on his arms and forming his owlish tufts of eyebrows. “Your father's feeding me daiquiris,” Mr. Ayles said.

Brick nodded at Franny. “We were just discussing a phone call I received this afternoon.” He winked at Mr. Ayles, and Ayles winked back. “This man from the miniature golf—Mother Goose?—he's got a problem. Johanson? You know that name?”

Skin prickling—could they see?—she shook her head.

“Well, he seemed like a nice fellow, but he's all upset. Apparently, he's twenty-eight years old with a wife and kids and, this afternoon, someone called him and threatened to beat him up. Under the impression you were his girlfriend!”

While regaining her breath, Franny did her best to arrange a reassuringly juvenile expression on her face (wide eyes, gaping mouth). The idea that someone could be beaten up because of her made her knees go wobbly with distress. Still, her voice sounded quite normal to her ears when she said, “I don't even
know
of anybody named Johanson, Dad.”

Brick nodded. “That's about what I figured, honey, but I told him I'd ask you about it. He was pretty shook.”

“I guess.” She made an effort to meet her father's eyes. “What do you bet—what do you bet that Bob Prohaski got some crazy idea in his head?”

That Bob Prohaski.
Thus evoked, it seemed to Franny that Bob Prohaski stood across a field, a banished figure that she and her father could contemplate together. The sight of Bob, there, left her a little lonely, a little frightened, but Brick was massaging the bridge of his nose, laughing. “This Prohaski's a bruiser,” he told Mr. Ayles, then turned back to Franny. “Better call him off, dear. He's got Mr. Johanson quaking in his boots.”

Franny was quaking, herself, but no one seemed to notice. Mr. Ayles sat forward in his chair and waited that perfect deferential second to see if Brick were done talking; then, tilting his head to one side, Mr. Ayles asked what Franny had done over the summer, and she told him the sort of things she could: a bus trip with the Y-Teens to Minneapolis to shop at Southdale and view
The Sound of Music
, sailing with Susan Thomas—

“Playing miniature golf,” Peg muttered as she came into the room to refill the men's glasses.

“You know what's funny?” Franny said—though almost as she spoke she sensed the foolishness of flashing a minor truth around in an area where serious lies could be exposed—“I haven't even played miniature golf since early June.”

“Best years of your life, right, Brick?” Mr. Ayles said.

Brick rumbled a laughing assent. “Hell to grow old,” he said and briskly rubbed his hands over his face and neck as if trying to wash away the signs of his age.

As soon as possible, Franny headed up the stairs to her parents' bedroom, and located the Prohaski family's telephone number in the local directory.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Prohaski, “he don't want to talk to
you
.”

Three Hobarts lived in Pynch, but one of them was a doctor, and one showed a rural farm delivery address, and Franny felt certain
Bob Prohaski's chubby pal Roy was the son of neither a doctor nor a farmer, and so she tried number three.

“You,” Roy Hobart said. “What do you want besides a fat lip?”

“A Mr. Johanson called my dad and said somebody claiming to be my boyfriend threatened to beat him up. I don't even know this Mr. Johanson, Roy! Will you tell Bob that? And, please, not to hurt him?”

Roy Hobart laughed. “So who's the guy we should hurt?”

When she did not answer, Roy Hobart said a low “Fuck you” and hung up.

Dear God
—knives and spoons on the right of the plate, fork on the left—
please let things work out all right. Please don't let Bob hurt Ryan or that other man.
So ran the prayer Franny was praying as Turner Haskin and Rosamund arrived at the house in Mike Zanios's car.

“Fran, we have to talk,” Rosamund whispered the moment she and Turner Haskin entered the front hall.

Something else? “What is it, Roz?”

“I hope we're not mistaken,” Martie called down the stairs. “We thought we heard the blender going. Could somebody be serving daiquiris?”

“What
is
it, Roz?” Franny whispered again.

“Follow me.” Rosamund stepped into the living room and, apparently as some sort of cover, she and Turner Haskin began to rifle through the albums leaned up against the stereo cabinet. “We ran into Timmy downtown,” she murmured. “He told us about that business with the yearbook. He felt bad, I guess—about you being upset—so he told Ryan and now Ryan's coming
here.
To meet Mom and Dad. So they'll let you go out with him! Timmy told him it was crazy—”

“He's coming here?” The information went down like a piece of candy, accidentally swallowed: an experience of sweetness, then that lurch of fear and loss of breath and the sweetness gone out of reach. Still, it seemed to Franny that the odds had changed. The
odds that a person as wonderful as Ryan Marvell would want to be with her were surely more unlikely than the odds that her parents might decide to let her see such a person.

“Maybe it will work, Roz,” she pleaded.

“Franny! It will
not
work, and Daddy and Mom will kill me!” Rosamund pulled the album in Turner Haskin's hands away from him, and plunked the record inside onto the stereo turntable. “We're going to treat this whole thing as—a funny misunderstanding. You talked to Ryan for a few minutes the other night, and he thought you were cute, and asked you to dance, but had no idea you were so young—”

“I have to see him, though, Roz!”

“Hey!” Brick shouted from the den. “Someone's knocking. Can't one of you get that?”

“I've got it!” Rosamund called, then hissed at Franny as they rushed toward the front door, “Let me handle this!”

No one stood at the front door, but
Ay-yay-yay
said Rosamund, and pointed toward a funny old brown and white car in the drive. “That's his car.” She stuck her head out the door and looked around. “Where is he?”

“I hear knocking,” Franny murmured.

“Hey!” Brick again. “Who's getting that door?”

“Where is he?” Rosamund started toward the back hall, Franny following close behind, but then they heard Peg, using her voice for guests:

“Just a minute. Hold on, there. It's stuck.”

In the back hall, left over from the days of the camp or, perhaps, even the hunting lodge, there stood a door that no one ever used, but that Ryan Marvell had apparently taken for the entrance allotted friends who came to call. Franny and Rosamund and, then, Martie, too, arrived at this door just in time to hear Ryan Marvell introduce himself to Peg.

“Actually, you've met my folks at the Paulsons', Mrs. Wahl. My dad's Ben Marvell.”

Peg nodded pleasantly. “Oh, yes, he owns the theaters.”

Something in Ryan Marvell's smile let Franny know that he had seen her though he did not look her way. “I was wondering if Franny was home, Mrs. Wahl. If I might speak to her.”

Peg started at the cluster of daughters she found behind her when she turned, but she smiled. “You have a visitor,” she said to Franny.

Maybe Peg saw in Ryan Marvell a polite improvement over Bob Prohaski, and missed his age. Maybe—Franny's thoughts swam, dipped—maybe by some miracle, he had actually become younger. Maybe people had been mistaken about his age—

“I don't believe this,” Martie muttered, then marched after the departing Peg and Rosamund for a moment, leaving Franny and Ryan Marvell alone in the dim hall. She did not hesitate to step into his open arms. They were blessed. They were the candle that flickered at the end of
This Is the Life.
They were the couple in “So Much in Love.” But then came the sound of hard soles on wood and Franny and Ryan Marvell drew away from each other just as Brick and Martie and Deedee Pierce poured into the narrow back hall. Brick was swearing and Martie was saying “statutory rape” and Deedee Pierce was laughing,
Oh, boy, old Franny's got herself a mess now.

“Scum,” Brick called Ryan Marvell. Mr. Ayles and Turner Haskin and Peg and Rosamund had moved into the kitchen by then, too.
Dog. Slime. Yellow-bellied sapsucker
, Brick said. Colorful, childish insults that steered so close to obscenity they would have been funny if Brick had not bawled them out like a power saw, his eyes red and bulging with the effort and emotion.

“Dad,” Franny protested, “stop!”

But he went on. He was a fire, a spectacle.

Had anybody ever spoken to Ryan Marvell the way Brick spoke now? When Brick finally paused for breath, Ryan Marvell leaned forward a bit—“Well, you see, sir,” he began, but Brick did not mean to listen to a word. He yelled, he grew redder in the face, and finally Rosamund said what Franny could not bring herself to say:

“You better go, Ryan.”

Ryan Marvell pushed his fists deep into the pockets of his pressed chinos. “Well, I don't know,” he said, and looked out the back door toward the swamp, the meadows.

“What does he mean, he doesn't know?” Brick demanded.

Ryan Marvell turned toward Franny. “We'll talk later?”

“The hell you will!” Brick shouted, and it became necessary for Mr. Ayles and Turner Haskin to restrain Brick then, Mr. Ayles taking hold of Brick's belt from behind and Turner Haskin pressing against him from in front while Ryan Marvell exited through that never used door.

“You stop your crying this instant,” Brick shouted at Franny. “I'll be damned if I'll have shenanigans like this under my roof!”

“And don't you give me a dirty look, Roz,” Martie said. The scene had left her looking hot and sweaty in her party clothes. She might as well have already been to the party and come home after a long night of being sick in the ladies' room. “And Franny”—Martie tried to wrap her arms around Franny, but Franny wanted nothing to do with Martie, and she moved across the room to stand beside Rosamund.

“Martie.” Rosamund pursed her lips. “I don't know what you think you accomplished here, but I'm sure we could have found a more graceful means of handling a boy's coming by to say hello.”

“Huh!” Martie thrust out her chin at Rosamund. “You might think so. After all, you're the one who introduced them.”

“No,” Franny said, “it wasn't Roz,” but Brick burst in, “At that party? Is that right, Roz?” Turner Haskin and Mr. Ayles had let him go now, but he looked as if he wanted to run in circles, the way Suzie-Q had used to do when people set off fireworks on the Fourth of July.

“It was all quite harmless, Daddy,” Rosamund said, and rubbed her hand up and down Franny's back. “I don't know why Martie caused all this trouble.”

“
I'm
the one who told them how old he was, Roz,” Deedee Pierce said.

Rosamund nodded. “I could have expected that. Ryan's handsome and cool”—she shrugged—“no doubt you envied Franny.”

Deedee Pierce laughed. “Don't get snotty, Roz. You know the other night wasn't so innocent as you make it out to be.”

“That's right!” Martie said.

“What in heaven's name?” Brick looked about to cry. “Shall we drag out our dirty laundry for all the world to see?”