I picked up the phone. "Hi, Frannie."
"Bingo! I've been calling all over for you. Johnny Petangles's mother died and we had to go into his house to get her. Guess what I found there? Pauline's notebooks from school."
Veronica asked if she could come with me and I was glad for the company. We got to Crane's View in an hour and drove straight to the police station. There was no time for the Bayer guided tour, but I pointed out some things along the way.
At the station there was only one cop on duty. With a tired wave he directed us to Frannie's office. That big empty room was even gloomier at night with only two lights battling the shadows.
The chief of police was sitting with his feet up on his desk. Club Soda Johnny was facing him and the two of them were laughing. On the bare desk were two white notebooks with SWARTHMORE COLLEGE printed on the covers.
Frannie got up and straightened his tie as soon as he saw Veronica. After I introduced them, he went to get more chairs.
"Hi, Johnny."
"Hello. I don't know you."
"Well, I used to know you. This is my friend Veronica."
"Hello, Veronica. You have hair like the woman in the Clairol ad."
She smiled and moved to shake his hand. His first reaction was to pull back. Then, like a frightened but interested animal, he slowly put his big one out and they shook.
She spoke to him in a gentle voice. "Sam told me you know all the commercials."
Frannie came back in with two chairs. "Johnny's the King of Commercial. That's what we wete doing when you came in – he was doing the old 'Call for Phillllip Mor-ris!' ad. So sit down, join the festivities."
"My mother died. Frannie came to my house."
We nodded and waited for him to go on. "He was nice, but he went into my room and took my books. They're my books, Frannie. They're not yours."
"Take it easy, big guy. I got a friend of mine to come over and talk to Johnny. He's a clinical psychologist over at the state hospital." Frannie sat back in his chair, put his arms over his head and stretched. "Tried every trick he knew, but Johnny isn't so good at remembering. Says Pauline gave him the books."
"Pauline gave me the books and then she died."
"Says he didn't kill her."
"Nope. I never killed anybody. I saw a dead dog once but that's not a person."
I gestured toward the door. Frannie got up and we left the room. Out in the hall I asked if he had found anything else at the Petangles house.
"Yeah, a lotta crucifixes and pictures of Dean Martin. Those houses down on Olive Street are like a fuckin' fifties time capsule, you go inside. It's strange he had the books, Sam, but I don't think he's involved. Maybe Pauline did give them to him for some cockeyed reason."
"Where did you find them?"
"On a bookshelf in his room. He asked me to come in and look at it. Place was as spick-and-span as a Marine barracks. Showed me all his comics and there they were, right up next to Little Lulu and Yosemite Sam."
"Did you look at them yet?"
"There's nothing there. Just scribbles and blah blah. I'll tell you one thing: It's an odd feeling seeing her handwriting all these years later. I'm going to copy them and give the originals to her mother. I'll give you a set too. You haven't talked to her mom yet, have you?"
"No, but this will give me a good excuse."
Back inside, Johnny was standing far across the room, glaring accusingly at Veronica. "She's not nice! I don't like her."
Frannie and I looked at her.
"He wanted to touch my hair. I said no."
"That's not true! You liar! That's not true!"
I wondered if she was telling the truth. Despite the warm, close afternoon we'd spent together and everything we had talked about, I realized I still didn't trust her.
Jitka Ostrova's house was a shrine to her dead daughter. The walls were crammed with framed awards, pictures of the girl at all ages, high school and Swarthmore pennants. Pauline's room, which we were shown almost immediately, was kept exactly as it had been thirty years before. Everything was dusted, all the figurines on the shelves arranged just so. On the wall above the bed was a giant yellowing poster of Gertrude Stein looking like a fire hydrant in a wig.
No shoes tossed left and right, no underwear draped over a chair or flung haphazardly onto the bed. I knew how it should look because I lived with a teenager. Kids and order rarely agree on anything. But no kid lived here, only ghosts and an old woman.
Outside that odd room, the rest of the Ostrova house was a cozy clutter. You liked being there, liked looking around and seeing this sweet woman's life in every nook and cranny. It was almost grandma's house from a fairy tale but that was impossible: Two of the people she loved most who had lived here were dead. They left an emptiness that was palpable, despite all the gemьtlichkeit.
Mrs. Ostrova was a gem. She was one of those people who had come to the United States early in life but had never really left Europe behind. She spoke with an accent, peppered her sentences with what I assumed were Czech words and phrases ("I took my five plums and left"), and rowed her little boat above a sea of bad fortune and pessimism a thousand feet deep. In everything she said, it was clear she loved her surviving daughter, Magda, but adored the dead Pavlina.
Magda was also there that day. She was a tough, attractive, tightly wound woman who looked to be in her early forties. She had the bad habit of watching you with the eyes of a museum guard who's convinced you're going to steal something. Very protective of her mother, she surprised me by speaking as reverently of Pauline as the old woman did. If there was any residual filial jealousy, I didn't see it.
When we handed over the notebooks, Jitka's face took on the expression of someone touching the Holy Grail. Until then very effervescent and chatty, she went silent for minutes while slowly turning the pages and sounding out some of the words her lost daughter had written so long ago.
When she was finished, she gave us a million-dollar smile and said, "Pavlina. A new part of Pavlina is back in our house. Thank you, Frannie."
She wasn't surprised when she heard where they'd been found. Johnny Petangles had told the truth: Throughout her senior year in high school and whenever she came home from college, Pauline had tried to teach him how to read.
"Poor Johnny! He's so simple in the head but he tried so hard for Pavlina. He loved her too. He don't take those lessons so he can learn to read – he wanted to sit next to her all those afternoons!"
Frannie said, "Tell about The Pirates of Penzance."
Jitka stuck out her tongue and gave him a raspberry. "Yeah, that's the story you like just so you can laugh at me every time! Frannie, I wish you the black cheek!
"You see, that was my lesson from Pavlina. She was teaching everyone sometimes. You understand, my terrible English always embarrassed her. She'd put her hands over her ears like this and scream, 'Ma, when are you gonna learn?' So she buys this nice record and makes me listen to it. This is Pirates of Penzance and after a while it is my lesson to try to sing along with it to make my English better. You know it?
I am the very model of a modern major general;
I've information vegetable, animal and mineral;
She sang it so badly, so offkey and with pronunciations so horrendous that it could have made the whole of England shift on its axis. But she also looked so happy and proud remembering it that we all clapped. To my great surprise, Frannie picked it up where she stopped.