When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins

Author:Eden Robins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Papa’s face was pale and clammy as gefilte fish, a cuff on his arm, a tube in his nose, machines everywhere. It was all wrong. He was supposed to be cracking wise, watching television, fixing people’s plumbing.

Leon paced the floor, back and forth, running his fingers through his hair until it was a black rain cloud. He didn’t like hospitals, having, at the insistence of the head doctor at the VA Hospital, spent a single day and night in psychiatric care there in July of 1945. Papa had rescued him, carried his skin-and-bones body over the threshold of 504, and Franny’s strongest memory of that day was Papa’s silent, vibrating fury, which she had never seen before or since. No one in the family talked about it, not even once. It wasn’t until Franny saw the raw fear in Leon’s eyes that she remembered the episode at all.

Mama hugged her tight, and Franny cried about everything.

“We were eating dinner—just sitting there like any evening,” Mama said, staring at the empty air as though it were their dining table. “Papa was sitting in his seat here, and I had just walked in with the half of a roast chicken I had made. Since it was just the two of us eating alone. Again.”

Leon stopped pacing. “I told you, I was on my way—”

Mama shooed his excuse away. “You kids have busy lives, hiding in garbage cans, phony dates with Michael Berman. Anyway, your papa goes deathly pale, and I think, nu, he’s choking on a chicken bone, so I go to the other side of the table, ready to slap it out of him—”

Modern medicine, what a marvel.

“You were going to slap it out of him?” Franny said instead.

“But your papa clutches his chest and topples backward out of the chair, and then he’s just lying there on the floor like a corpse, and it all came back to me, my training at the Red Cross. I pinched your father’s nose and opened his mouth and leaned in to breathe into his lungs, when his eyes popped open and he said, ‘I always knew you would do me in, but I didn’t know it would be like this.’” Tears were streaming down Mama’s cheeks, and she blotted them with an already-soaked handkerchief. “I knew then that he’d be all right.”

“He doesn’t look all right,” Leon said.

“The human body can handle a lot,” Mama said. She jutted her chin proudly. “And your papa’s can handle more than most.”

Staring at Papa’s sleeping body, Franny felt uneasy. She shouldn’t be seeing him like this—his collarbone exposed in the hospital gown, the swell of his belly under the sheet, his fingernails stained with grease below the plastic hospital bracelet. Franny patted her own collarbone, tucked safely away beneath her Peter Pan collar.

Seeing Papa so fragile brought to mind an image of him as a young boy, as a teenager with fuzz on his lip, a too-big military cap with the czar’s emblem covering his eyes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.