Victoria Frankenstein, III: Part 10

 

Eight

            When the fog cleared, I saw we were on I-90 in western New York State, cruising along at the legal speed limit. Very little time had passed, and I’d given up asking Mr. Leon how we were managing to do all this in a clown car.

And it was only then that I noticed that Aunt Claire was no longer with us. I asked, “What happened to Aunt Claire?”

No one said anything—and John looked at me as if I were crazy. “Aunt Claire?” he asked. “Have you been dreaming or something?”

I decided to play along—until I figured out what was going on.

***

Soon, we were seeing road signs for Buffalo—and for the Falls. And sharp emotions were piercing me. I did not want to see the Falls again—to hear them—to think about Gil again, of his death. The image of poor Gil had never left my mind—my heart—and here we were, nearing the very place where I lost one of the dearest friends I’d ever had.

We pulled into a motel a few miles away from the Falls, where Mr. Leon acquired three rooms—one for each of us.

“We all need some rest,” said Mr. Leon as he came back to the car. He handed us our room keys. “Let’s go find some quiet place to eat,” he said, “a place where we can talk a little about how to proceed.”

***

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he drove around on some sad, neglected streets and pulled into the lot of a small café that looked as if had been there since, oh, 1818, and has had only three customers since then. So we just doubled their business.

Inside, though, it looked comfortable and clean. But very old. Nothing really modern at all inside. No apparent refrigeration. The only heat came from a wood fireplace at the end of the room. Candles instead of electric lights. No jukebox or music coming through speakers in the ceiling. There were no speakers in the ceiling. On the counter was an old mechanical cash register—a solid chunk of metal that looked as though it had appeared in a barroom scene in an old Western movie.

Silence reigned.

No one else was there. No one seemed to be working there. The room was empty.

We agreed on one of the empty tables, sat down. And in a minute the doors from the kitchen swung open, and out came the waiter in an apron.

It was Father.

***

I leapt up from the table, cried “Father!—and raced over to him.

At first I didn’t think he had even heard me—he didn’t respond at all. But then he looked at me, and I could tell in a broken heartbeat that he didn’t know who I was.

He looked around to see if someone was behind him, someone I’d been speaking to. But there was no one.

Father looked back at me, pure puzzlement forming his face.

“Do I know you?” he said in a fractured voice. Oh, it was Father’s voice all right—but damaged. I recognized it the way you know a broken toy from childhood. A toy you’d loved.

I don’t know—even to this day—how I managed to respond. But I did. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I confused you with … someone else.”

“With your father?” he asked.

“You look a lot like him,” I said.

Father smiled—and I nearly broke out weeping right there. (Oh, did I know that smile!) Then he said, “Too bad for your father, looking like me!”

And I tried to make a noise that sounded something like a laugh.

By then, the others had come over to join us. Mr. Leon ignored Father, gently took me by the elbow as if to steer me back to our table.

But John, unable to control himself, stared at Father. John knew what he looked like—had seen him around with me, I later learned.

I stopped, turned to him, said, “Come on, John, let’s go sit down.”

That seemed to shake him out of his trance, and he joined us.

And soon we were all sitting at the table, and Father the Waiter was now standing before us with his order pad. I’d never seen his eyes look so dull, so blank.

We all ordered some sandwiches and soft drinks—it took time to explain to him what we were really asking for—and when Father left to take our order to the kitchen, words flew around our table like startled birds.

I spoke sharply to Mr. Leon. “How long have you known Father was here!” There was no question mark at the end of my sentence.

Mr. Leon reacted mildly. “Oh, about a minute or two,” he said.

I looked next to me—and, somehow, Aunt Claire had appeared again and was sitting there as if she’d been with us the entire time. No one else showed any surprise whatsoever.

“And you!” I barked at Aunt Claire.

“Yes?” she replied mildly.

“How long have you known?’

Aunt Claire said nothing. Just looked at me blankly. I stared right back at her.

Finally, she sighed and said, “I’ve known for about 200 years.”

***

I didn’t even know how to reply to something so outrageous. Two hundred years! I’d always known Aunt Claire was weird—but now I was pretty certain she was crazy. Certifiable. Pure, lock-her-up crazy.

Or maybe I was? Was I the only one who was seeing her? Hearing her?

So I said nothing.

We settled back into our seats and, in low voices, began to talk about what to do. I’m not sure why we were using low voices. After all, no one else was in the café.

I began. “So what do we do now?”

John said, “Can’t we just leave—and take your father with us?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mr. Leon said. We waited. “He doesn’t seem to know who we are. He probably wouldn’t just quit his job, walk outside, and get into a car with people he clearly thinks are strangers.” He paused. “And besides,” he said, “I’m not even sure he is your father. Or knows what a car even is!”

Before I could reply to that, Father returned with our orders. I wondered—in a place that seemed to have no electricity—how the kitchen even cooked our food. But it was then that I noticed the smell of smoke, the smoke emerging from the open kitchen door. A wood stove. How else?

We ate and drank silently and quickly. We needed to get back to our rooms—needed a place where we could think and talk and figure out what to do about all of this.

While we were preparing to leave, Mr. Leon went up to the counter to pay the bill. And a new face was there—the owner, I assumed. Something about him looked very familiar. But I couldn’t figure it out—not right away.

I did hear him ask about the money Mr. Leon had given him. He’d never seen bills like those, but Mr. Leon quietly convinced him that they were, indeed, legal tender.

And then I did recognize him—not because I’d ever seen him before. I hadn’t. But I knew him from portraits I’d seen when I was doing all my reading about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. The owner of that café was William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father. He had died in 1836.