Franky Furbo. William Wharton

the war and had been hurt deeply. I guess I felt sorry for you. But more than that, I wanted to be involved in your life, the life you told me you were going to lead. It’s possible I could have believed you with a part of my mind, an important part, the part related to my heart. Don’t you understand – I wanted to believe so much I maybe actually did believe. I never felt I was lying to you.’

      She pulls the plug to let the water out of the sink. I dry the frying pan and hang it on the wall. I’m feeling empty inside, cold, lost, the way I used to feel in the hospital when no one would believe me and they’d ask the same questions over and over. Now, my own wife and youngest child don’t believe in me.

      ‘I’m not trying to blame you, Caroline. I understand. It’s just during all these years, I thought you believed. It helped me hold on to what I thought was the only sanity I had left. Except for the army psychiatrists, I never talked to anyone about it. Then I started telling the children stories, some of them actual stories Franky told me, some I made up over the years to amuse them. But even those made-up stories were somehow true, true in that I believed them myself.

      ‘You know how the doctors in the hospital put the whole Franky business down to a fantasy I’d constructed as compensation for a complete amnesia due to extreme trauma. They insisted I was only supporting a sustained delusion. That’s why they gave me the Section Eight. That’s why I still receive the fifty-percent disability pension – not for anything physical. I’m considered fifty percent mentally incompetent. I’m a certified half-wit. You know that.

      ‘But, damn it, I was convinced you believed me. I was sure you understood about Franky and believed with me; it gave our lives some sense. Probably I should never have invented some of those stories for the kids. Maybe it was there when you stopped believing in me. But I wanted to share the magic. I wanted them to know something about why their father is the way he is, lives the way he lives, has tried to design a personal kind of life for all of us.

      ‘Of course, some of those stories I told weren’t true, didn’t necessarily happen; there weren’t that many stories Franky told me. But I wanted to tell those stories, and I didn’t think it would hurt. Also, in an unbelievable, almost mystical way, I didn’t make them up. It was almost as if Franky were speaking through me. Even some of the children’s stories I’ve published came into my mind that way, like magic writing. I don’t quite understand it myself.

      ‘But, the important thing is, this doesn’t mean Franky Furbo isn’t real, and many of the stories I told them were true – true stories Franky told me, especially stories about how he discovered he was different from other foxes, that somehow he was a magic fox.’

      I dry my hands on the dish towel and go over to the rocker in front of the fire. There are only two chairs in our home, other than those in the schoolroom and my workroom. There’s the rocker I’m sitting in and another rocker on the other side of the fireplace. Mostly we all just stretch out on our gigantic bed. Each of us has a reading light, and it’s there, in the bed, where we spend a good part of our evenings: reading, talking, discussing what we’re reading, playing word games – having wonderful times.

      My sitting in the rocker is another bad sign, like the whistling. I hardly ever sit in it.

      I see the fire needs more wood. I push myself up and throw two more logs into the hearth. We have all the wood cut for winter. It doesn’t get very cold here, but some evenings can be bitter. We have enough for at least two winters. A good part of our wood is olive, which we get when we trim the trees. It’s hard to start but then burns long and hot.

      Caroline comes over behind me. She puts her hands on my neck and shoulders and starts massaging. I don’t respond. In fact, it annoys me. I don’t feel she even knows me, and I’d always thought of her as my closest friend as well as my wife. I’m feeling very alone, and I don’t know what to do. I’m wishing I’d just let it all go and left everything the way it was.

      Caroline is very sensitive and I know she feels what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling. This somehow makes it worse. There are double-barreled guilts floating around in all directions. I sense how easy it would be for me to drift off into a deep depression, the way I would in the hospital when I felt so isolated. When I’m like that, it’s almost as if I’m in a nonexistent state; I have a hard time even remembering to eat or sleep.

      Caroline stops massaging and comes around in front of me. I look up at her and she doesn’t smile. She just stares at me.

      ‘Look William, what does it matter if I believe in Franky Furbo or not? It just doesn’t matter. I believe in you; that’s what counts. Why should something that happened more than forty years ago be so important? Don’t make a big thing out of this. Please don’t ask me to lie to you.’

      ‘Honest, Caroline. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. If you don’t believe, after all these years living with me, living the way we’ve lived, the way Franky taught me to live, then how can mere talking help?

      ‘Don’t you realize that if it weren’t for Franky Furbo, I wouldn’t be alive? And even if I were alive, I wouldn’t be anything like the person I am. In a strange way, belief in Franky Furbo has been my religion. The experience I had with him made me an artist, a writer, gave me a feeling of uniqueness, of value, such as I’d never known. He gave meaning to my life. Can’t you understand that?

      ‘Without Franky I’d definitely be dead, not just physically dead but mentally dead, psychically dead, psychologically dead – a zombie. I’d lost confidence in the importance of living, the value of being alive, and Franky gave it back to me, helped explain some of what life is about. As a child, an orphan in an asylum, there had never been much joy or meaning in my life, and then there was the insanity of war. It all seemed so meaningless, so awful. Franky gave me a reason for living.’

      I look up at Caroline; tears are rolling down her face. She just stands there in front of me. What can I do?

      ‘Caroline, please, will you listen to me one more time? I want to tell you everything I can remember. You don’t have to believe if you can’t, but it could be good for me to go over it all once more, to remind myself of what did happen, what didn’t happen. If I can separate those things, perhaps, now so much time has passed, I can see the whole experience for what the doctors said it was – only some kind of complicated delusion.

      ‘I think I made up many things to explain aspects of Franky I didn’t understand myself. I wanted the children to believe with me. Even this morning’s story, I know now, although I told it as truth, was not a story Franky told me. In a certain way, Billy was right when he said I made it up, that it wasn’t true. But it seemed true to me, and I wanted him to feel this truth with me. I couldn’t change the ending just because he wanted me to. That would be lying, untruth.

      ‘I hate to think those army doctors were right and there really is something wrong inside me, that my head doesn’t work right, that I can’t separate reality from fantasy. But I do accept the possibility there is something different in me. I often have the peculiar feeling I’m not even myself. That’s got to be crazy, doesn’t it?

      ‘If Franky Furbo isn’t real and I can learn to believe it, I can live with it now, I think. I have you, the children, our wonderful life – that should be enough. It’s been a long time, much has happened, we are so close. You’re right, I shouldn’t ask too much of you. It isn’t right.

      ‘But would you sit down there, dear, in our other rocking chair, and let me go over the entire experience one more time with you, and please, please, try to listen. Listen to me, knowing I’m not purposely trying to make any of this up, that I’m not lying to you. Listen as if it’s all happening to you, and believe what you can believe. I need someone to hear this with me.’

      3

      Fox Hole

      As you know, dearest, I was only twenty when we hit the beaches near Palermo in Sicily. I was with the Thirty-fourth Infantry Division, and