The Lovely Shoes Read online

  The

  Lovely Shoes

  SUSAN SHREVE

  To

  new little wonders

  Isaak and Henry and Aden and Padget

  and to Aaron Jacobs

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  One

  KISS THE GIMP

  WISHFUL THINKING

  SILVER SHOES

  THE 1956 EASTERBROOK HIGH VALENTINE’S DANCE

  ISOLATION WARD

  Two

  A DIFFERENT TOMORROW

  PLANS IN THE MAIL

  BECOMING

  Three

  FLIGHT INTO THE FUTURE

  SIGNOR SALVATORE FERRAGAMO

  POSSIBILITIES

  LINE DRAWING

  Four

  AN ORDINARY DAY

  THE LOVELY SHOES

  WHAT IS TRUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  KISS THE GIMP

  It was the night of the last dance at Easterbrook High, dusk, late June, and Franny Hall was looking out her bedroom window to check if choir practice had let out at St. James Episcopal Church next door.

  No one was on the street except Mr. Goodly, walking his elderly basset hound in the front garden of the church.

  Franny hurried down the stairs, checking herself in the mirror in the front hall, something she had been doing recently as if expecting a stranger reflected in the glass. That’s how she sometimes felt, a stranger to her own self, and was almost surprised to see the same straight black hair in a ponytail, the same freckles and wide-set eyes she recognized as Francine Hall of Easterbrook, Ohio, U.S.A.

  She opened the front door, calling to tell her mother that she was leaving.

  “I’ll be back by ten-thirty,” she said.

  An upstairs window flew open and Margaret Hall leaned out.

  “Phone us to pick you up,” her mother said. “I don’t want you to walk home alone in the dark.”

  As if anything ever happened in Easterbrook, even in the dark.

  “Things happen,” her mother had said at dinner that night. “Especially at the high school dances.”

  By the time Franny reached the sidewalk, choir practice had let out and so she walked quickly, as quickly as she could under the circumstances, hoping to escape the choir boys in her class who had a habit of making fun of her.

  Turning right at the end of her driveway, she headed in the direction of her cousin Eleanor’s house, but too late. Already the boys had spilled onto the sidewalk — Andy Freeze and Tommy Wade loping by her, brushing against her shoulder as they passed, their hands in the pockets of their jeans.

  “Franny Banany,” Tommy said. “Heading to the dance?”

  “I am. With Eleanor and Boots,” Franny said, her stomach tightening, thinking she should have said nothing at all.

  Don’t give those silly boys the time of day, her mother would have told her.

  “Can you dance, Franny?” Andy asked, laughter in his voice.

  “I can dance,” she said, anticipating remarks like that, especially from the boys. Not that they didn’t like her — they liked her high spirits and giggly laugh. They even thought of her as funny and pretty, pretty above the waist, Randy Burns once said to her in his thoughtless way, as if to pretend he was giving her a compliment.

  Randy Burns crashed into the group and the boys bumped up against one another like puppies, their arms flailing, bending over in uncontrollable hyena cries.

  “Have fun, Franny Banany, and watch out for the senior boys.”

  The choir boys rushed ahead, turning off College Street, and Franny walked on alone, the street silent except for the low roar of cars in the distance, the only sound that of her left shoe hitting the sidewalk with a thump from the heavy lift she wore to even the length of her crippled left leg with her right one.

  At the square she turned right on Scioto Street where her cousin Eleanor lived, passing the Sweet Shoppe on the corner lit up and crowded mostly with high school students already in their formal dresses and gathered outside, leaning against the glass. Several members of the Adorables, the eighth-grade girls club to which a lot of girls including Franny had not been invited to belong, were licking the tops of their double-dip ice-cream cones.

  “Are you going tonight?” Belinda Rae asked as Franny passed by, not wishing to stop for conversation.

  “I am,” she said.

  She didn’t even ask if the Adorables were going to the dance. Of course they were.

  “With your cousin?” “Yes and also Boots.”

  “Cool,” Belinda said. “Has anybody told you about the kissing contest?”

  “I’ve heard about it,” Franny said.

  “We’re planning to keep out of the way of that,” Belinda Rae said, and the rest of the Adorables agreed.

  “Me too,” Franny said, although it had never occurred to her to worry.

  Every year most of the girls in the eighth grade and a few of the boys went to the senior prom, not to the dance because they weren’t invited, but to stand outside the Knights of Columbus Hall, peering in the windows, watching to see what would be in store for them when they went to high school. They carried cookies and thermoses of lemonade, and after they got bored watching the dancing inside the hall, they sat on the ground and whispered back and forth about the hot boys or the creepy ones, or danced on the lawn in front of the Knights of Columbus Hall to the music that wafted through the open windows onto the street. Some of the older boys broke the rules and brought liquor and drank it in the boys’ room, and a few staggered out of the dance hall leaning against the building, falling over their own feet drunk as skunks, as her father described their behavior.

  In the shadows of the building, couples wrapped around each other, and by ten o’clock most of the girls in the eighth grade had been picked up by their parents on Mission Avenue and driven home.

  Stories traveled from one eighth-grade class to the next about the “kissing contest” during which one of the older boys was chosen to slip out the back door of the Knights of Columbus Hall, grab an eighth-grade girl, kiss her on the lips really hard as Eleanor had said, and run so quickly that no one would have a chance to see him well enough to identify in daylight. The kissing contest was a ritual repeated every year since anyone could remember, even when Franny’s father, Dr. Henry Hall, had gone to Easterbrook High. According to stories, the kissing boy had never been caught and the girl chosen for kissing was immediately famous even before she started ninth grade.

  It was a rite of passage that every girl in Easterbrook half wished and half feared would happen to her, including Franny Hall, who knew that she would never be the one chosen.

  At the end of the square, just before Scioto Street branched off into Eleanor’s neighborhood, Franny went into Grace’s Variety to get presents for Eleanor and Boots, little nothings she called them, buying dollar packets of trading cards with the pictures of Hollywood actresses on the front. Franny was known for the presents she gave — bags of cookies or lollipops, costume jewelry from Grace’s — to mark occasions like this one, the last year in elementary school, the first high school dance. She dropped the trading cards in her bag and headed down the street to the second block of Scioto, turning into the driveway of her cousin’s house, where her best friend and sometime enemy Eleanor Hall was sitting on the front steps with Boots, Franny’s other best friend.

  Boots was wearing a little girl pale pink dress her mother had made for her to wear to the Catholic church on Sundays, and Eleanor had on a new lavender jumper with penny loafers and a puffed-sleeved blouse. From the pocket of her jumper, she rescued a tube of lipstick she had taken from her mothe
r’s dressing table and handed it to Franny.

  “Apple red,” she said.

  “Great,” Franny said. “I love everything red.” She dumped her bag and gave them their trading cards.

  “Franny Claus,” Boots said. “You give the best presents.”

  “June Allyson!” Eleanor exclaimed, flipping through the actress trading cards. “I don’t have a June Allyson or an Ava Gardner or even Sophia Loren. This is so great, Franny.”

  “Don’t give so many presents, darling,” her mother had said too many times. “It worries me that you feel you need to buy presents.”

  “I don’t need to buy presents,” Franny had said. “I want to buy them.”

  And that was true. She did want to buy things for her friends. But deep down she also believed she needed to buy presents. Not that her friends didn’t like her, but she couldn’t escape a lingering fear she’d had since she could remember that she must work especially hard to keep their friendship.

  “I thought you might change your mind and stay home,” Eleanor said as Franny sat down on the steps. “How come?”

  “I just thought you might decide you didn’t really like dances,” Eleanor said.

  “Well, I’m here,” Franny said.

  “So do I look okay?” Eleanor asked.

  “You look like you always do, which is perfect,” Franny said, easy with compliments.

  “You too,” Eleanor said.

  “Not exactly perfect,” Franny said cheerfully.

  No one — certainly not Eleanor or Boots, who knew her better than anyone except her mother — would have guessed that Franny Hall had a moment of sadness, because she kept her real feelings to herself. Even from her mother and father and little brother, Ezekiel, called Zeke.

  That was the kind of girl she was.

  Crippled was how Franny’s father, Dr. Henry Hall — who as the pediatrician for all the children in Easterbrook did not mince words — described Franny’s condition. Even Margaret Hall, her amazing mother who seemed to be able to fix anything that went wrong, couldn’t fix a leg and two feet that had been squished and twisted in Margaret Hall’s belly before Franny was born, resulting in a birth defect, as her parents described the skinny little stick of flesh and bone that was her left leg, her damaged feet.

  Margaret Hall was Franny’s true best friend. In Easterbrook, they were a famous pair, mother and daughter flying on their bikes through the sleepy town as if they owned the streets. Margaret — tall, willowy, with black curly hair and a kind of daring surprising in the 1950s in a small Midwestern town — would ride her Schwinn around the square, where the shops were located, wearing short shorts and bare feet in the summer, long skirts and boots in the winter, with Zeke strapped into a seat on the back of the bike. Behind her, on a child’s Schwinn, Franny, dressed like her mother in short shorts in summer and long skirts in winter, and always, winter and summer, heavy brown oxfords with a three-inch lift on the shoe of her skinny left leg.

  Above the waist, Franny looked like a miniature version of her mother, long black hair but no curls, high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, kissable lips, her mother had told her.

  “What does that mean?” Franny had asked.

  “Just full, pretty lips,” her mother had laughed. “Especially fetching on such a good, pure girl.”

  Goodness was what distinguished Franny.

  “Good as gold,” her father, who gave few compliments, said of her.

  “Too good, darling,” her mother had told her. “Too agreeable.”

  “I have to be agreeable,” Franny said.

  She knew that about herself but she believed she had no choice. It was her role to make people happy, to listen to their troubles as if she had no troubles herself, to give presents for the pleasure of it, to smile as if it made no difference when girls in the class whispered behind her back. Agreeable had worked for Franny so far, at least in elementary school.

  Eleanor, leading the way to the Knights of Columbus Hall on the other side of the square, was walking just ahead of Boots and Franny, swinging her hips.

  “I hope I’m not the girl kissed by one of the senior boys,” she said, her head bobbing to the music already in the air on Main Street.

  “It won’t be me,” Boots said. “My mother would kill me dead if any boy kissed me before I’m married.”

  Franny walked with Boots, her arm though hers, a light wind blowing her hair across her face, a little breathless, trying to keep up.

  “What about you, Franny?”

  “I’ve never thought about kissing,” she said.

  Which wasn’t exactly true.

  She had thought about kissing, sometimes at night when the lights in her room were out and the stars were bright over the steeple of St. James Episcopal Church and a sense of floating came over her, as if she belonged to a magical kingdom and the church was her palace and everywhere in the village, the young men desired her company.

  But the actual fact of lips on her lips, of breath mixed with her breath, of that much closeness filled her with longing and dread.

  The Adorables were already at the Knights of Columbus Hall when Franny arrived, standing on tiptoe, peering in the windows of the hall lit up with blinking lights.

  “This is so fun,” Eleanor said, standing with the Adorables. “I honestly can’t wait for high school.” She threw her arm around Franny’s shoulder. “Can you?”

  “Me neither,” Franny agreed, although she actually hated change, hated the idea of leaving the warm cocoon of elementary school where she knew everyone and everyone knew her, where the teachers said she was the best-natured student in the class and very smart.

  High school seemed like a war zone in which a girl like Franny could be in particular danger.

  In the hot gym, they were fast dancing, the rock and roll and the jitterbug, which Franny had never tried, only watched on Friday nights when Eleanor and some of the girls in the eighth grade danced in her recreation room. She realized that she would never be able to fast dance. But after the lights dimmed and the music slowed to melody and the bodies swayed together like sails in a calm, that kind of dancing was possible for Franny, and she watched the couples, thinking of herself as one of them.

  It was getting late, almost ten, and some of the older boys had wandered outside, large, thick boys, strangers, with spiked hair and low voices that rose to a kind of crescendo in the still spring air.

  Franny was standing on the edge of the circle of eighth-grade girls who were dancing on the lawn, Eleanor dancing with Boots, the Adorables dancing with one another.

  Randy Burns in a button-down dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up was standing by the front door, Randy’s elbow resting on Tommy’s shoulders. But most of the eighth-grade boys had stayed away, not up to the risk of embarrassing themselves in front of the older boys.

  Tommy moved closer to Franny.

  “I don’t think I’m going to like high school,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “Stuff like the kissing contest. So dumb! It hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

  “I don’t think so.” Franny was tentative.

  The music inside was picking up, rising to the tempo of the next fast dance. The doors opened and several more boys came outside, shouting over one another’s voices, the girls still dancing on the lawn.

  Leaning against the building in the shadows next to the front door, Franny noticed a boy she had seen before, maybe at the Sweet Shoppe or coming from church, a tall, skinny boy with a Brylly wave of black hair plastered high on his forehead. He stood on the top step of the Knights of Columbus Hall, surveying the dancing on the lawn, one hand in his pocket. Something in the expression on his face, the way he looked at the girls dancing, a certain curling of his lips as if he were chuckling to himself alarmed Franny. She stepped back, away from the light that spread across the lawn from the double doors, away from Tommy Wade, and before she even had a chance to catch herself in the dark, she had fallen backward.
r />   The boy must have seen her fall and taken a leap from the top step to the ground, rushing into the center of the eighth-grade girls, grabbing one of the Adorables, grabbing her around the waist, kissing her hard on the lips, and as he headed on his escape route around the building, passing Franny who was struggling up from the ground where she had fallen, he leaned over, mumbling under his breath, “Kiss the gimp!”

  And then he disappeared into the darkness.

  Franny scrambled to her feet, brushed the dirt off, her breath caught in her throat.

  “So, was it fun?” Margaret asked after she had dropped Eleanor and Boots at their own houses and she and Franny were in the car alone.

  “It was fun,” Franny said. “Fun enough.”

  “And did you dance?”

  “I danced with the girls on the lawn outside, with Boots and Eleanor. But slow dancing. I can’t do fast.”

  “You’ll learn. We’ll practice together.” Her mother turned into the driveway, pulled up the brake, turned off the engine.

  “And can you imagine what it will be like next year at the high school dances? Can you imagine yourself in a new formal gown, your hair swept up, maybe with flowers?”

  “Of course, I can imagine it,” Franny said, glad it was dark in the car, that her mother couldn’t see her face or hear the thumping of her beating heart.

  What she couldn’t imagine was telling her mother about the boy who whispered gimp in her ear. That would break her mother’s heart.

  “High school will be great,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

  WISHFUL THINKING

  Franny stood in front of the full-length mirror on the door to her mother’s closet, examining her feet. In spite of a cold winter wind blowing through the cracks of the Halls’ old Victorian house, she was wearing very little — her Carter’s cotton underwear, a black strapless bra borrowed from Eleanor, and her mother’s blue satin high-heeled shoes, one of sixty-seven pairs of shoes stacked on the shelves of the closet, some of them with the price tag still stuck to the bottom.