Fleabrain Loves Franny Read online

  To my dear friend Arlene Moscovitch, kindred spirit and book sharer since third grade

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rocklin, Joanne.

  Fleabrain loves Franny / by Joanne Rocklin.

  pages cm

  Summary: “This middle-grade novel takes place in Pittsburgh in 1952–53. The protagonist is Franny, a young girl of imagination, curiosity, and stubbornness. While recovering from polio, she begins a correspondence with a flea named Fleabrain”—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-1068-1 (hardback)

  [1. Poliomyelitis—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction. 3. Family life—Pennsylvania—Fiction. 4. Fleas—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Jews—United States—Fiction. 7. Pittsburgh (Pa.)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R59Fle 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014006380

  Text copyright © 2014 Joanne Rocklin

  Book design by Kate Fitch

  Published in 2014 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  www.abramsbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  I SUMMER 1952: QUESTIONS

  What Franny Knew

  II AUTUMN 1952: CORRESPONDENCE

  The Note from Nowhere

  What Fleabrain Knew

  Franny’s Answer

  Waiting

  Other Things Fleabrain Knew

  Believing

  By the Light of the Moon

  The Bookcase

  The Vista from Alf’s Left Ear

  Revenge, Then Disaster

  Last Words

  Nothing, Then Something

  Sparky’s Finest

  “Nee-cheh”

  III WINTER 1952–53: ADVENTURES

  The Bath

  The Meeting

  A Ride in the Night

  FB Saliva #1

  What the Professor Knew

  Blisters

  Holiday Headlines

  Truths of the Universe

  How Did Our Cars Travel Without Us?

  FB Saliva #2

  Miniaturized

  Poster Child

  Proud Pittsburgh

  Dr. Engel, Who Thought He Knew Everything

  Horsey! Horsey!

  Happy Birthday to Franny

  FB Saliva #1-X

  A Wondrous Travel Journal

  What Lightning Knew

  Who Is the Gateway Angel?

  IV SPRING 1953: HOPE

  What the World Knew, Finally

  FB Saliva #2-X

  The Good News and the Bad

  Reading

  Professor Doctor Gutman and the Pack

  Rereading

  Rereading

  The Buckeye Amendments

  Happy for Her

  What Fleabrain Knew but Wished He Didn’t

  An Envelope Like Many Others

  No Wheelchair

  Three Little Words

  Zadie’s TOTU

  A Statement

  Author’s Note

  Bibliography

  Other Resources

  Songs

  Acknowledgments

  I

  SUMMER 1952: QUESTIONS

  What Franny Knew

  One thing Franny knew. Angels did not exist in real life.

  But there they were, floating all around her. Some leaned close, almost touching Franny’s nose. Others waved at her from an impossible distance, whizzing about a cathedral ceiling. Their long white robes rustled. Their tiaras sparkled. They hummed and smiled and moved their lips without saying anything, or sometimes they murmured words Franny didn’t understand, such as “pachay” and “fee-lee-ah.”

  Then, one day—

  “WOOF!”

  —one of the angels barked, sounding remarkably like Franny’s dog, Alf.

  And Franny awoke from her feverish dreams. She’d only imagined Alf. Pets weren’t allowed to visit patients at Children’s Hospital, and that’s where Franny was, wearing a plastic wristband with FRANCINE KATZENBACK printed on it. She’d imagined those angels, too, who were actually nurses in white uniforms and peaked caps.

  Franny’s parents had also been angels in the dreams. They’d stood in the doorway of her hospital room, wearing white masks and worried looks. They couldn’t come near her bed because Franny was infectious.

  She had polio, everyone told her.

  Franny already knew about polio because of her wide and fast reading habits, wider and faster than those of most ten-year-olds. She knew that polio was short for poliomyelitis. She knew that even though “po-lee-oh” sounded jolly, like “roly-poly,” it wasn’t.

  Franny knew that polio was a disease from a tiny, invisible virus that entered your mouth, stowed away in your intestines, then sometimes burrowed into the nervous system, chomping on nerves so that your limbs became paralyzed. And she knew that the poliovirus could attack your lungs so they couldn’t work on their own. When that happened, you needed to lie inside a big, wheezy, green iron tube called an iron lung. The iron lung squeezed your lungs to help you breathe.

  But even if Franny hadn’t been a wide reader and a fast reader, even if she read only superhero comics like her friend Walter Walter, she’d still know about polio. In her Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, that summer of 1952, the poliovirus had been practically the only topic of conversation. Polio spread faster during the hot summers. That’s what their neighbor Professor Doctor Gutman had told her parents. He was a university professor as well as a researcher, with a long string of letters after his name on the business card he gave Franny’s parents. He worked in a lab with the famous polio researcher Dr. Jonas Salk. Everyone knew that Salk and his family also lived in Squirrel Hill, but no one was exactly sure where.

  With all that wonderful brainpower in her neighborhood, Franny had felt safe, as if superheroes were ready to protect her from terrible things. How babyish she’d been! Now she knew that nobody, nobody, nobody, not even the brainiest people in the world, knew how to prevent and cure polio. Or why some people got it and the rest didn’t.

  Lying in her big iron lung, she had a lot of time to think.

  Did she get polio by watching The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men three whole times at the Manor Theater? Franny and her friends loved that movie. They’d even taken to spelling “merry” the old-fashioned way and threatening to give each other “drubbings” as they swashbuckled around Frick Park. Many people said the evil virus often lurked in crowded movie theaters, but none of the kids believed that.

  Or maybe she got it from eating that cherry Popsicle at Sol’s Ye Olde Candy Shoppe. Popsicles were absolutely forbidden by all parents because there was a possibility they could be made from contaminated water. So how come other
kids in her neighborhood didn’t get polio? Teresa Goodly ate more Popsicles than anyone, but she always confessed about it to the priest at her grandmother’s church. Maybe that had helped. Jewish kids like Franny didn’t go to confession, although Franny was sure it could have been arranged.

  The evil virus lurked in pools and lakes, people said, so hardly anyone went swimming anymore, even when the air felt like a hot, wet towel. Franny hadn’t swum once that summer.

  Walter Walter had said the virus would never get him, because he had a strong constitution. Of course, when your parents give you a first name the same as your last name, and everyone calls you Walter Walter because it’s funny, and you feel you have no choice but to go along with the joke, well, that makes you as tough as a tiger, as tough as nails, as tough as raw meat. Double-dose courage and pizzazz. That’s what Walter Walter liked to tell everyone.

  So how come her own constitution was so weak?

  By the time autumn arrived, none of Franny’s summer questions had been answered. When she turned her head toward the hospital window, she could see the leaves falling from a scrawny elm tree, disappearing like all the days she’d missed as she lay in her iron lung. An entire Pittsburgh Pirates baseball season, come and gone. Poof! The Pirates had stunk—the worst team of the bunch, people told her. Cellar dwellers! But now she knew that worse things could happen.

  Other kids lay in other iron lungs, just their heads sticking out, all together in one big room with Franny, as if they were in a bunch of lifeboats bobbing about in the same rolling ocean. Sometimes the children talked to one another, but most of the time they didn’t.

  There was a lot of time to think.

  There was also a lot of time to cry.

  The only good part of Franny’s day was when the tutors came, a group of nuns who brought them schoolbooks and storybooks. Franny’s tutor was Sister Ed, short for Sister Mary Edberga.

  Sister Ed was the first nun Franny had ever known personally. Franny loved her. She was positive Sister Ed was an angel in disguise, even though she smelled a bit like onions, had bushy eyebrows that wriggled like mustaches, and wore a long, dark robe. Franny was sure there were angel wings squashed underneath Sister Ed’s habit.

  Sister Ed read books out loud like nobody’s business. Franny had always imagined that nuns spoke with European accents, like the actress Ingrid Bergman in the movie The Bells of St. Mary’s. But Sister Ed talked like everyone else in Pittsburgh, except when she was acting out all the parts in the books, using funny voices.

  One day Sister Ed arrived, hugging a brand-new book to her chest. “This book is hot off the presses. Just published! You’re going to love it! As soon as I read it, I knew it was written for an imaginative kid like you.”

  The book was about a girl named Fern, who lived on a farm. Fern had a little scared pig named Wilbur. Wilbur’s best friend was a kindly spider named Charlotte, who protected him and wrote compliments inside her web. For example, SOME PIG. Everyone on the farm was just knocked out and flabbergasted by Charlotte’s talents! Other amazing things happened at that farm, with Charlotte’s help.

  Miracles.

  “Read it again,” Franny said when Sister Ed came to the last page.

  And Sister Ed did, as many times as Franny wanted, or a favorite chapter or two on request. When Franny wanted to sleep, she asked Sister Ed to sing the lullaby Charlotte sang to Wilbur. Sister Ed sang different tunes at different times, but the words were always the same.

  Sleep, sleep, my love, my only,

  Deep, deep, in the dung and the dark …

  Sometimes Franny pretended she was Fern, living on a country farm with all those barnyard animals, instead of in busy, car-honking Pittsburgh. But she marveled that they both lived in Pennsylvania, she and Fern. Sometimes she pretended she was Wilbur the pig, who had a miraculous friend like Charlotte.

  Soon the doctors decided it was time Franny practiced breathing on her own. But outside of the iron lung, like a fish thrashing on a riverbank, Franny couldn’t get her lungs to work. She was suffocating! She decided it wasn’t a bad thing to live forever inside an iron tube, waiting for Sister Ed to read stories to her.

  One afternoon Sister Ed said, in her big jolly voice, “Hey, kid, take a look at this!”

  She was pointing to a spiderweb on the wall. Who did Sister Ed think she was kidding? Even from the iron lung Franny could see that it was just a pencil drawing of a spiderweb. Inside the web, in tall, black script, somebody (Franny’s guess: Sister Ed) had written

  SOME GIRL

  “Imagine this spiderweb is the real deal,” said Sister Ed. “Please, Franny. Imagine.”

  Each day the nurses and orderlies pulled Franny from the iron lung so she could practice her breathing, and each day Sister Ed pointed to that web.

  “Imagine! Imagine!” boomed Sister Ed.

  And each day Franny could breathe a few more minutes on her own. Sister Ed said she wasn’t surprised. She said she had faith all along that Franny could do it. So Franny tried to have faith, too, and after a while she didn’t need the iron lung at all. The doctors said it was time for Franny to go home to her family. Franny had been hoping to go home all along, deep down in her heart of hearts.

  “Charlotte helped me like she helped Wilbur,” Franny said. She was going home in a wheelchair because she couldn’t walk yet. But she was out of that green iron lung, and she could breathe.

  Sister Ed wriggled her eyebrows and kissed her good-bye. “The story isn’t over,” she said. Then she gave Franny the book, Charlotte’s Web, for keeps.

  Franny prayed that one day she would witness a miracle as real and fine as that spider, Charlotte.

  And she did.

  II

  AUTUMN 1952: CORRESPONDENCE

  The Note from Nowhere

  Franny had been home from the hospital ten days before she found the note.

  It was on her bed, which was strewn with schoolbooks, library books, Get Well cards, and that week’s assignments delivered on Monday afternoons by her teacher, Mrs. Nelson. The note was half-hidden by a ball of dust and dog hair, underneath one of her books. In the Katzenback household, if there were any dust balls to be found, they were usually under beds, not on top of them. So, first Franny was surprised to notice the dust ball, and then she was even more surprised to see the scrap of paper folded inside it. The ink was a rich chocolatey-brown, the unfamiliar handwriting tiny yet elegant. Some letters leaned forward as if in a hurry to have their say; others stretched their long legs athletically. Every now and then the words themselves leaped about the page.

  Franny held up the note to the window, squinting to read it.

  Greetings, Franny,

  Bonjour! Now that you’ve found my note, you can stop seeking messages

  in spiderwebs. Only one bug we know

  composed that way, and she’s

  unique.

  And need I remind you, also

  fictional?

  Besides which, her output was meager

  and pedestrian and sentimental,

  although

  that’s probably beside the

  point …

  I, Fleabrain, have much more to offer!

  I offer you an invitation

  to connect.

  So,

  répondez s’il vous plaît, which I know I don’t have to translate for

  you, Franny.

  Cordially,

  Fleabrain

  Franny flopped down onto her pillow. Resting at the foot of her bed, Alf opened an eye, saw that Franny was OK, then went back to sleep.

  How humiliating! Franny thought. Her private wishes revealed!

  Yes, she’d been searching for spiderwebs lately, because of that book. That wonderful, wonderful book! Unfortunately, to her knowledge, there weren’t any webs to be found inside the house, especially because an invalid lived there now and everything had to be kept extra scrupulously clean. And there were absolutely no bugs, either. Fly spray and ant hot
els and Alf’s flea powder took care of that.

  Still, Min had guessed! Of course it was Min who had cleverly disguised her handwriting and put the dust ball and its note on her bed. Just to torment her.

  Min must have guessed that time she’d been pushing Franny in her wheelchair down the block, when Franny had leaned way, way to the side to get a good look at the spiderweb draped on Mrs. Kramer’s shrub rose. Franny had been absolutely positive she’d seen a Capital T for Terrific in that web.

  “Franny!” Min had hollered. “What the huckleberry are you doing?”

  Now Franny stared at the ceiling, thinking how much she hated her older sister. She really, really did. Sometimes it felt so good to hate her, like picking at a knee scab. When she used to have knee scabs.

  “Huckleberry, my foot, Min,” said Franny. “You think you’re so great, you can’t even say HECK!”

  And it felt so good to say HECK.

  Alf sat up. “Hey, it’s OK, Alf,” said Franny. The dog gave his neck a good scratch with his hind leg, then lay down again.

  Heck wasn’t nearly as bad as that horrible word in the note. PEDESTRIAN. How mean of Min to bring up a certain topic in a sneaky way, while pretending to talk about spiders!

  Pedestrian.

  A person who walks.

  I’ll show her, thought Franny. She popped the tiny note into her mouth, chewed hard, then swallowed. I never even saw your note, Min! So there.

  The note left an odd but familiar taste in her mouth.

  What Fleabrain Knew

  Fleabrain was composing a small poem in his microscopic head. He was usually inspired to do so when he thought about the catastrophe. Poetry helped soothe his terrible loneliness, not to mention the terrible guilt.

  A tragedy of epic size.

  Oh, their cries!

  Each and every one, a ghastly demise.

  Seventy-two thousand and ten

  Women, children, men,

  The eggs, as well (but one),

  Pearly and translucent

  And, oh! So innocent!

  He supposed it was a miracle he alone had survived the deadly flea powder. Not to mention the miracle of his lofty intelligence quotient! There was so much to know! So many wonderful books to read in this one house alone.