Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

As for Ruth, she might not have cared so much about having nothing to drive if she could have taken a streetcar, but they’d ripped up the last of the tracks in ’53. And there was no dignity in a bus. So she did what any girl would do, and that summer when she turned eighteen, she told Francis Statler she’d go steady with him as long as he let her drive. He wasn’t the brightest boy, but he had dimples and held open doors and called everyone sir and ma’am . Besides, she’d known him forever. They lived only a few blocks apart in Palmer Woods, and although he went to Kingswood-Cranbrook and she went to Girls Catholic Central, their circles were more or less the same. They saw each other at socials and dances, at Tom Clay’s Saturday night balls at the armory. Francis was always staring at her through the bottom of an empty punch glass. In the summer they’d mingled deck chairs at the pool of the Detroit Golf Club, where their fathers shot rounds together. Her father worked in management at Ford, slowly edging his way up. Francis’s father was at GM, already a big cheese. On the fairway, Ruth’s father said Mr. Statler had a hopeless slice, but that didn’t stop the club from giving him his very own brass plaque at the top of the donor wall.

Francis Statler meant well, but he could never quite keep up, despite his father’s money. He wasn’t unattractive. Besides the dimples, he had deep hazel eyes and the straightest teeth Ruth had ever seen. His face was warm and inviting, but he parted his hair just like his father, and he’d been wearing the same plaid shirts since grade school. Francis was either indifferent to fashions or unaware of them. He always stood out, the one boy clinging to cotton twill slacks in a world that had moved on to blue jeans. In ’58, when every teen in the city was coveting sport coupes, Francis bought a turquoise Edsel. At least it was a convertible. From the front, the car looked like a disgruntled koala bear, but all Francis cared about were the frills: touch-button transmission, glowing cyclops-eye speedometer, power windows and seats. He could afford every option they offered.

Some of her girlfriends expected Ruth to be embarrassed to be seen in something so uncool. “Doesn’t everyone stare?” Donna asked, but Ruth simply shrugged. Anything was better than nothing. And besides, people really didn’t stare at Francis. He somehow managed to get away with being strange. Were anyone to ask him his secret, Francis wouldn’t even have understood the question. Before Ruth took him up, Francis had no close friends. Hours might pass at the pool without anyone speaking a word to him, and yet the dopey dimpled smile never left his face. It was impossible to exclude someone who didn’t notice he was being excluded. Whatever was happening, Francis was always there. He became a sort of mascot, though no one could have said exactly what it was he represented. He rarely spoke, never danced, didn’t drink. And yet by the time he and Ruth made their arrangement, a belief had spread throughout both their high schools that the dullest parties were the ones from which Francis Statler happened to be missing. For every gathering, someone was invariably dispatched to ensure Francis’s arrival, after which Francis would spend the entire evening by himself, examining the host’s parents’ collection of ivory statuettes until it was time for someone to take him home.

For Ruth, the best thing about Francis Statler was that he didn’t mind handing her the keys. When they were together, the Edsel was hers. It was Ruth cruising Belle Isle with the top down, Ruth roaring north to the charred remains of Jefferson Beach. And there was Francis, grinning beside her with the wind in his teeth.

The only exception was Friday night. When they pulled into Ted’s drive-in, it would be Francis behind the wheel. Ruth insisted. As a ritual, Ted’s was sacred: the trays on the windows, Frantic Ernie Durham shouting his strained rhymes through the radio: Ernie’s Record Racks! Whale of a sale! Whale of a sale! Ted’s was a place where, for better or worse, boys had to be boys. Although of course Francis never seemed to notice all the jockeying and revving. He was the only one not craning his neck to watch each tight sweater flouncing by. Ruth supposed he was in love with her.

Everything in Francis was forgiven. It helped that he was rich. But that was another thing he seemed unaware of. She would always remember one night when she was fifteen, entering the dining room at the club to begin an excruciating meal with her family, and there was Francis Statler helping a busboy pick up the shards of a broken plate, the two of them kneeling side by side, searching among feet and legs, their heads thrust under the tablecloth together, like a pair of old-fashioned photographers. Francis’s father was ruddy with embarrassment, tugging at his son’s armpit, trying to pull him up. Unlike his son, who was quiet as a giraffe, Mr. Statler was incapable of speaking in anything less than a shout, and even the dishwashers could probably hear him repeating “That’s enough, son, that’s enough.” But Francis didn’t stop until every last piece had been collected, just as anyone other than his own father would have known to expect. Alfred P. Sloan himself could have been in the room, and even he would have said, “Oh, it’s just Francis Statler.”

But it wasn’t that Francis was a saint. Nor was he a savant. He was more a like a traveler in a foreign land who understood neither the language nor the customs but was quietly, respectfully accepting of everything he saw.

One July weekend, as was the tradition, Francis took Ruth (or rather she took him) to watch the hydroplanes skip like stones across the murky Detroit River. Everyone they knew was there, and while the other boys shouted and clapped one another on the back, Francis sat with his hands folded in his lap, transfixed, as if God himself were presiding over the rumble and the wakes. Legs folded beneath her on the green plaid blanket, Ruth felt certain she saw the other girls, Donna among them, looking at Francis and then at her. She saw in their eyes not jealousy or judgment but a kind of distrust. They didn’t want to date Francis Statler themselves, but they didn’t want anyone else to, either. It wasn’t that he was like a brother to them — he was more like a newborn baby, someone vulnerable and helpless and in need of constant protection.

Maybe these girls didn’t believe Francis could be loved. Maybe Ruth didn’t believe it either. By then they’d been together three months, and he hadn’t made a single move.

One Sunday afternoon they were strolling the glass-domed paths of the Belle Isle conservatory, Ruth pointing out all the most beautiful orchids, when she realized Francis was no longer beside her. She doubled back through the rows of blooms and found him near the entrance, gazing up at the glass. There was a small bird trapped inside, flapping among the rafters, trying to find a way out.

“We should help it,” Francis said.

He started to whistle, as if he and the bird shared a common tongue. A young couple she didn’t know stared at Francis as he offered his finger as a perch. Meanwhile Ruth inched away, lowering herself onto a little iron bench tucked away in a tiny alcove. She would have liked to disappear completely.

With Francis, there was always waiting. He had a child’s sense of wonder, and it was peculiar how often Ruth’s adventures with him produced in her the feeling of returning to childhood things. That day on Belle Isle, after Francis was finally forced to give up on the bird, they went next door to the aquarium, which Ruth hadn’t visited since she was a little girl. She was struck by how small the aquarium felt that day, the single arched gallery seeming to close in on her from all sides. The place was dark and tight, and each recessed tank was framed in stainless steel, as if it were a porthole — the people imprisoned and the fish utterly free, swimming there of their own accord. She felt as though she were leagues under the sea in some sort of Gothic bathysphere. Francis was captivated by the four-foot-long electric eel that slunk across the tank with its jaws a crude rictus of malevolence, its dead eyes fixed on some nonexistent prey. Ruth caught just a glimpse of the horrible creature, and then she had to turn away. But Francis couldn’t seem to get enough. He was still standing there a few minutes later when some sort of food was dropped into the water. The tank was rigged in such a way that when the eel ate, the current it produced surged to a light bulb affixed to the wall. As the light began to glow, Francis’s eyes grew wide, and Ruth couldn’t help wondering what the others would think if they were to see this side of Francis Statler, not the charmingly oblivious young man but the guileless, naked boy.