Written Saturday, February 21, 2009
It's windy, snowy, and cold. The lawns are turning white. Louisville drivers are slipping and sliding all over the road as well as any environs within 30 yards of the pavement. Franny loved winter. This weather would have made her smile. She'd wrap herself in a comforter, slip an old movie into the DVD player, and act as though she were appearing in a Swiss Miss cocoa commercial.
I, on the other hand, despise winter worse than all the other ills that have plagued humankind since the dawn of recorded history. I'd tell Franny that I dream of moving to California so I won't have to put up with snow and ice and the hour and half of daylight of a typical January day. I'd tell her I crave spring and summer.
"Oh no," Franny would say. "You can't really enjoy spring unless you've experienced winter." Which, to me, is like saying I can't wait to serve a 10-year prison sentence because I'll be elated the day I'm released.
Franny took her pleasures wherever and whenever she could. She came from that generation of women who were, well, screwed by society and the times. She was born in 1938 and attended St. Giles elementary school and Notre Dame high school for girls. She was the kind of schoolgirl the nuns loved to hate. Sassy, rebellious, free with her opinions, she listened as more than a few nuns predicted a dire future for her. The women of the habit were certain she was on a one-way ride to cigarette-smoking, hot-rod-riding, liquor-guzzling, girl-gang membership, and, for all I know, membership in the communist party.
Funny thing was, they weren't so far off the mark. She was among the first of her peers to light up, go drag racing down North Avenue near Skip's Fiesta Drive-In, and drink alcohol. She didn't join a girl gang only because she couldn't find any. As for the communist party, she didn't care one way or the other.
Despite her teenaged moral turpitude, Franny got married when she was 20 to a nice boy named Bob. All Bob wanted was a comfortable home and the company of scads of children. By the time Franny was 24, she and Bob had four of them. They added another four years later.
With enough progeny to field a basketball team, Franny entered the 1970s harried, exhausted, and feeling a profound sense of emptiness. She was smart and ambitious enough to have gone to college and made a career for herself. But that option was as anathema to her neighborhood and the nuns who schooled her as if she'd become the Premier of the Soviet Union. Maybe worse.
Franny yearned to be well-read. She began to admire Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, women who spoke up and did things. She found herself disgusted by the Vietnam War and racism. Only she was too busy wiping snotty noses to do anything about them.
When bright, accomplished women who were five and ten years younger appeared on TV, women who were able to take advantage of all the new freedoms of the era, Franny would sigh audibly. She wanted so much more than what she had.
Eventually, that longing morphed into a desire for change of any kind, no matter the repercussions. And believe me, there were repercussions when she took a part-time job as a bartender at The Foxy Lady on Madison Street to help pay the mortgage on a new home. The bar was in Chicago's all-black West Side. One night, a man named Julian walked into the joint as Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" played on the jukebox. Franny fell for him instantly.
Oh yeah, repercussions. Her affair with Julian cost her a husband, much of her childhood family, most of her friends, her neighborhood, and quite nearly her life. Soon after Julian had moved in with Franny on Marmora Avenue just off Grand Avenue, her home was shot up with high-powered rifles. It's 50/50 whether the shooters were local racists turned rabid by the presence of a black man on the block or the kin of the wife Julian had left behind in Cabrini-Green.
Franny and Julian got married across the street from City Hall in 1978 by a preacher wearing a white suit, white shoes, and a wide brimmed white hat with an enormous red feather in it. His "chapel," a cramped, dusty office in a building slated to be demolished, was wall-papered with aluminum foil and had immense pictures of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the front wall. A hidden tape deck played Marvin Gaye in the background. I was the best man.
Julian was gone by 1981. In the weirdest of ironies, he excelled in every vice that Franny's appalled, petrified family and friends had told her black men were known for. Franny never let on that he was a drunk, a philanderer, couldn't hold a job, and that he punched her like Sugar Ray Leonard when she displeased him. She never wanted them to think that they'd been right. She even hid it all from me.
She somehow rid herself of Julian even after he'd held her hostage at knifepoint one harrowing night. After that, Franny swore she was finished with men. She devoted the rest of her life to her kids and grandkids. She baked pies, cakes, and cookies enough to feed armies. She worked for days to prepare seafood gumbo, fried calamari, shrimp scampi, caponata, homemade bread and more on Christmas Eve and lasagna, ham, and lamb on Easter. She spent every dime she had on presents. Anybody who wanted could stay overnight. She was atoning.
When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer six years ago, she began to wonder if there's a heaven. If there is, I hope it's windy, snowy, and cold for her.
