Jane’s bluff had been called. Could she really envision life without Sweet Elizabeth? She was silent. Her friend said, “Come on. We’ll go get her right now.”
Elizabeth met them at the door, sitting up as usual to have her ears scratched. “Oh, she’s cute,” said the friend, but so perfunctorily that Jane knew she had missed the point of Elizabeth. “Never mind,” Jane whispered into Elizabeth’s soft fur, “it’ll be all right. She’ll come to love you, just as I did, and you’ll be happy in the country.” Elizabeth shook her head slowly. Was there reproach in her eyes? Jane gave one last kiss to that foolish ear.
Robert was restless that evening, going often out on the terrace. “Oh, Robbie,” Jane told him, “I’m so sorry. She was your friend, too, and I didn’t think of that.” As Jane hugged him, the old emptiness returned, the emptiness of the time before Sweet Elizabeth when Jane used to imagine that everyone else’s phone was ringing, that everyone else had friends to be with and places to go. A little white rabbit who gave Jane the courage to reach out had made a surprising difference in her life.
It was weeks before she slammed the refrigerator door without a second thought, stopped expecting an innocent white face to come peeking around the terrace door, gave up listening for the thump of those heavy back feet. For a long time she didn’t trust herself even to inquire about Elizabeth. Then one day she was driving to Boston and, on impulse, decided to stop off in Connecticut to see her. No one was home, but the garage door was open. It was some time before Jane’s eyes got accustomed to the dark and she could distinguish the white blur that was Elizabeth. The little rabbit was huddled in a corner of her cottage, shaking with cold. The straw on the floor was soaking wet. The draft from the open door was bitter. Her food and water bowls were empty. Jane spoke her name and Elizabeth crept into her arms. Wrapping her in a sweater, Jane canceled her trip to Boston and headed back home.
She called her college friend the next day and told her she’d missed Elizabeth so much that she’d kidnapped her. That was all right, her friend said; what with the basketball season and all, her son hadn’t had much time for the rabbit. That left Jane with just one other phone call to make—the one canceling the order for a new rug. Then she settled back to watch Elizabeth and Robert rolling across the floor together.
Frankie Buck
On a narrow road twisting along beside a mountain stream lay a deer, struck and killed by a car.
A motorist happening along the infrequently traveled road swerved to avoid the deer’s body. As the driver swung out, he noticed a slight movement and stopped. There, huddled beside the dead doe, was a fawn, a baby who must have been born as its mother died, for the umbilical cord was still attached. “I don’t suppose you have a chance,” the motorist told the tiny creature as he tied off the cord, “but at least I can take you where it’s warm.”
The nearest place was the power plant of a state geriatric institution on a wooded mountaintop overlooking the town of Glen Gardner, New Jersey. Maintenance men there quickly gathered rags to make a bed for the fawn behind the boiler. When the fawn tried to suck the fingers reaching out to pet it, the men realized it was hungry and took a rubber glove, pricked pinholes in one finger, diluted some of the evaporated milk they used for their coffee and offered it to the fawn, who drank eagerly.
The talk soon turned to what to name the deer. Jean Gares, a small, spare man who was the electrician at the institution, had a suggestion. “If it’s a female, we can call her Jane Doe,” he proposed. “If it’s a male, Frank Buck.” The others laughed and agreed.
With the maintenance men taking turns feeding it around the clock, the little deer’s wobbly legs—and its curiosity—soon grew strong enough to bring it out from behind the boiler. The men on their coffee breaks petted and played with the creature, and as soon as they were certain that Frank Buck was the name that fit, they shortened it to Frankie and taught him to answer to it. The only one who didn’t call him Frankie, oddly enough, was Jean Gares. He, his voice rough with affection, addressed him as “you little dumb donkey,” as in “Come on and eat this oatmeal, you little dumb donkey. I cooked it specially for you.”
When Jean came to work at six each morning, always in his right-hand pocket was a special treat, an apple or a carrot, even sometimes a bit of chocolate, which Frankie quickly learned to nuzzle for. On nice days the two of them stepped outside, and Jean rested his hand on Frankie’s head and stroked his fur as they enjoyed the morning air together.
At the far end of the field in front of the power plant, deer often came out of the woods to graze in the meadow. When Frankie caught their scent, his head came up and his nose twitched. “We’d better tie him up or we’re going to lose him,” one of the men commented. Jean shook his head. “He’ll know when it’s time to go,” he said. “And when it is time, that’s the right thing for him to do.”
The first morning Frankie ventured away from the power plant, it wasn’t to join the deer in the meadow but to follow Jean. The two-story white stucco buildings at Glen Gardner were originally built at the turn of the century as a tuberculosis sanitarium and are scattered at various levels about the mountaintop. Cement walks and flights of steps connect them, and Jean was crossing on his rounds from one building to another one morning when he heard the tapping of small hooves behind him. “Go on home, you dumb donkey,” he told Frankie sternly. “You’ll fall and hurt yourself.” But Frankie quickly got the hang of the steps, and from then on the slight, white-haired man in a plaid flannel shirt followed by a delicate golden fawn was a familiar early morning sight.
One day, one of the residents, noticing Frankie waiting by the door of a building for Jean to reappear, opened the door and invited him in. Glen Gardner houses vulnerable old people who have been in state mental hospitals and need special care. When Frankie was discovered inside, the staff rushed to banish him. But then they saw how eagerly one resident after another reached out to touch him.
“They were contact-hungry,” says staff member Ruby Durant. “We were supplying marvelous care, but people need to touch and be touched as well.” When the deer came by, heads lifted, smiles spread and old people who seldom spoke asked the deer’s name. “The whole wing lit up,” remembers Ruby. “When we saw that and realized how gentle Frankie was, we welcomed him.”
His coming each day was something for the residents to look forward to. When they heard the quick tap-tap of Frankie’s hooves in the corridor, they reached for the crust, the bit of lettuce or the piece of apple they had saved from their own meals to give him. “He bowed to you when you gave him something,” says one of the residents. “That would be,” she qualifies solemnly, “if he was in the mood.” She goes on to describe how she offered Frankie a banana one day, and after she had peeled it for him, “I expected him to swallow the whole thing, but he started at the top and took little nibbles of it to the bottom, just like you or me.”
As accustomed as the staff became to Frankie’s presence, nevertheless, when a nurse ran for the elevator one day and found it already occupied by Frankie and a bent, very old lady whom she knew to have a severe heart condition, she was startled. “Pauline,” she said nervously, “aren’t you afraid Frankie will be frightened and jump around when the elevator moves?”
“He wants to go to the first floor,” Pauline said firmly.
“How do you know?”
“I know. Push the button.”
The nurse pushed the button. The elevator started down. Frankie turned and faced front. When the doors opened, he strolled out.
“See?” said Pauline triumphantly.
Discovering a line of employees in front of the bursar’s window one day, Frankie companionably joined the people waiting to be paid. When his turn at the window came, the clerk peered out at him. “Well,