"What?" I whispered.
"Shhh." He formed the words again, adding a little breath to them so that I could understand. "Look for clues."
Clues? I didn't know what he meant. Surely there would be no evidence of Hugo Hoffman's presence here in the empty first floor. Then I stiffened and pulled Charles back into the dining room. I pointed to the large carved wooden clock on the buffet.
Charles looked at me, puzzled, and I remembered that he couldn't read.
"Made in Germany," I whispered, pointing to the words.
He raised his eyebrows, praising me with the look. It was a clue.
At the foot of the stairs, Charles whispered to me. "We should've brung the knife."
I shook my head. I wanted no part of the knife. I had even, when Charles wasn't there, rearranged the leaves and stones over its burial place so that we couldn't find the spot again.
Still clutching his hand, I tiptoed beside Charles up the staircase to the second floor. I had never been upstairs in the house before, but the rooms seemed familiar. There was a guest room; I knew the tidy, unused look of a guest room from Grandfather's house, which had five such impersonal spaces, their closets empty but for a few wire hangers.
Nathaniel's room was messy, bright-colored, haphazard and happy, strewn with little-boy toys. Lincoln logs and a half-constructed, green-roofed cabin lay on the rug, waiting for his return, for his cheerful concentration. I felt the guilt of gladness once again, that Noah was dead, that Nathaniel's playthings were safe, and that Nathaniel smiled so much now. I dropped Charles' hand, knelt on the rug, and added a green slat to the roof of the little house.
Nathaniel's pajamas, printed with clowns and jugglers, were discarded in a corner of the room, dropped in a wrinkled heap where they were outlined by a rectangle of sunlight from the window.
The door to what had been Noah's room was closed. I could hear again his high-pitched wail as it had come through the opened window of that room in June, and once again my half-meant prayer of apology to a god disguised as my father, and to the Hoffmans, crept through my consciousness like a bewildered kitten. When Charles made a motion with his hand toward the doorknob of that room, I stopped him decisively, shaking my head no.
Mrs. Hoffman's bedroom, at the front of the house, was prettily decorated with blue flowered fabrics; a quilted satin comforter was folded into a scrupulous triangle at the foot of the double bed. On the bureau, in a gold filigreed frame, a tinted photograph of the twins, dressed in Eton suits, smiled eerily at me. I nudged Charles and pointed to the other photograph, to the grave face of a wavy-haired man who I knew must be Hugo Hoffman. Charles studied it and nodded, apparently designating it a further clue.
As I glanced at some papers on Mrs. Hoffman's bedside table, Charles ventured across the room. Turning, I almost giggled aloud. He was balancing in a pair of high-heeled shoes with ankle straps and gaudy red bows; his bare, brown ankles converged as he tried tentatively to walk across the rug. He grinned, acknowledging his own foolishness in gleeful silence, and returned the shoes carefully to the floor of the open closet. We went into the hall to find the attic stairs.
It surprised us both that the stairs were open; there was no furtively closed door to which we could press our ears against a keyhole and listen for the spy speaking in low-voiced German. There were no sounds at all from the attic, and the stairs were piled with dusty cardboard boxes, one marked "Christmas tree ornaments" and another "Patterns—size 6—Twins." A mop stood upended in a bucket; and farther up, I saw, with a twinge of pain, a folded, mildewed yellow slicker and a small pair of red rubber boots that I recognized as Noah's.
I was no longer frightened or excited. I was simply sad and ashamed, anxious to get away from the Hoffmans' house and from their lives. I was angry at Charles for having suggested the adventure and angry with myself that the suggestion could have enticed me into a place whose woeful secrets were so small, so despairing, and so private.
"Come on," I said aloud. "Let's go."
Charles was still caught up in the intrigue. "Shhh," he whispered, alarmed by my voice.
"Come on." I pulled away from him, hurried down the stairs and toward the back door. He followed me, and our two sets of bare feet thumped through the empty house, made slapping sounds on the kitchen linoleum, and finally felt the safety of the yard, the hedge opening, and the familiar soft-shorn grass of our own territory.
"You was dumb to make all that noise," Charles scolded me. "He could still be in the basement. We didn't listen at the basement door."
"He isn't there at all."
"You don't know. Spies has all sorts of ways to keep themselves secret."
"He isn't there. On the table by Mrs. Hoffman's bed there was a letter."
"What'd it say?"
"It was in an envelope. I didn't take it out. But on the envelope it said that it was from Hugo Hoffman, Denver, Colorado."
"Where's that?"
"I don't know, but it isn't Pennsylvania."
"Well, he's probably bein' a spy there, wherever it is. Lillian said there was spies everywhere."
"Old dumb Lillian. I wish they'd put her in an oven."
"Yeah, then she really be a Roasted Chestnut!"
I pulled up a handful of Grandfather's grass and threw it impulsively at Charles. "Good-for-nothing old Charles!" I said, and giggled.
He spat the green shreds from his mouth, tore a handful from the lawn to throw back at me, and cried, "No-account ole Elizabeth!"
We lay side by side on Grandfather's lawn, helpless with laughter and freckled with fragments of grass. When you love someone, I thought, you can be bad together sometimes. How I loved Charles then.
13
"WELL, WHY can't Charles go to my school?"
"Hold still, Liz. I can't braid your hair when you're wiggling that way." Mama criss-crossed the strands of blond hair deftly and decorated the ends with new blue hair ribbons to match my dress. "Charles lives in a different part of town, that's why. He'll go to a school near his house, and you're going to the Jefferson School near this house."
"But I won't know anybody if Charles isn't there. I don't want to go."
"Don't be silly, Elizabeth. You know Jessica. You know Anne, and Nathaniel Hoffman. All the children from Autumn Street will be at Jefferson School."
"They're all older than me. Charles is the only first-grade person I know."
"Well, you'll meet other children at school. You'll make new friends."
"Why can't Charles live here, in Tatie's room, and then he can go to my school?"
"Elizabeth. Hold still. There; your dress is buttoned. Can you tie your shoes yourself?"
"Yes," I pouted, "but I don't want to. I don't want to go to school. Not unless Charles does."
Mama turned the hairbrush to its flat silver side and swatted my behind. "Stop it, Elizabeth. You are going to school, and that's that. Jess is waiting for you downstairs. Don't forget to get your lunch from Tatie. You're going to be late if you don't go right now."
I tied my shoes and stomped off, glowering. Then I turned in the doorway, went back, and hugged Mama.
"I' m sorry."
"It's all right, sweetheart. You're just scared. Now go on, and have a good day."
I plodded down the stairs and muttered, out of Mama's hearing, "I am not scared."
It was a lie, of course, but if I said it to myself often enough, I could make myself believe it.
***
The Jefferson School was brick, tall, and Gothic, rising incongruously from an entire block of flat asphalt. Jessica walked with me and tried dutifully to explain the rules of going to school, but she interrupted herself again and again to wave to friends. Jess had finished third grade at Jefferson the previous year. She had friends. She knew all the rules. And Jess never questioned rules, as I did, even now, trudging dispiritedly beside her on the first day of school.
"That's the playground," Jessica said, waving her arm to indicate the expanse of gray asphalt a
s we approached. Then her wave shifted when she saw a dark-haired girl across the street. "Hi, Ruth Ann!"
"How can you play when there's no grass or trees?" I muttered.
"There's recess in the morning and again in the afternoon. That side over there is the girls' side, and this side is the boys' side. Now don't ever go onto the boys' side, Liz, or you'll get into trouble."
"You mean you can't play with boys at recess?"
"Of course not. You have to stay on the girls' side. You can draw hopscotches on the playground, but you have to bring your own chalk from home. You're not allowed to take the school chalk outside. Hi, Betsy!" She waved again to a girl in a plaid dress.
I sighed. I was no good at all at hopscotch, which Jess and her friends had played all summer on Autumn Street. I couldn't balance well on one leg; I stepped on the lines. They only let me play if there was no one else.
"Walk with us, Jess!"
"I can't. I have to take my sister in. Tomorrow I'll walk with you." She was calling across the street, to strangers.
"Jess, do you mean you won't walk with me tomorrow?"
"Elizabeth, you're a first grader. I can't walk to school with a first grader every day. You'll find somebody your own age to walk with. Now, look. This is the door we go in. I go upstairs, to fourth grade, but the first grade room is right here. Over there are the bathrooms—that's the boys', and this is the girls'. But if you have to go to the bathroom, you have to ask the teacher first."
I clung to her arm and could tell that she was anxious to leave me. "Jess," I whispered, "do you mean I have to tell the teacher if I have to go to the bathroom?"
"Yes. Let go of me."
"I can't tell the teacher that."
"Be a camel, then. Now let go. I can't be late."
She pried me loose and pushed me into the first grade room.
A tall young woman in a flowered dress knelt beside me so that her face was level with mine, and she was smiling. "Good morning," she said in a voice as warm and soft as bedroom slippers. "Did you come all alone on the very first day?"
I dispensed with Jessica in a nod. "Yes," I said.
"My goodness, you're very brave. Most children need to have their mothers bring them, and even then"—she lowered her voice to a whisper—"some of them cry. I'm so glad to have a big girl like you in my class. What's your name?"
"Elizabeth Jane Lorimer."
"Mine's Miss MacDonald. Look, Elizabeth. Right here on this desk is your name. I've made special nametags for all my first graders. Would you like to sit here in your desk and look at some books while I greet the other children?"
I nodded. First grade didn't seem so bad after all. The shelves around the room were filled with books, books with pictures on the covers, more intriguing than the leather-bound volumes at Grandfather's house. Miss MacDonald brought me some.
At the desk next to mine, a dark-haired girl sat leafing through a large book of bright illustrations. I read the nametag on her desk: LOUISE. She glanced over and grinned impishly at me.
"These are baby books," she whispered. "Look-there aren't even any words."
"Can you read?" I asked.
"Yeah. I can already read pretty good."
"Me too. But probably the other kids can't. That's why they have to have baby books."
"Yeah. Because of the other kids." She grinned again.
The other kids. I liked the phrase when it came from Louise. I had a friend already.
After school, we traded sweaters and walked together. She wore the blue sweater that Great-aunt Florence had knitted for me, and I wore her yellow one buttoned up over my blue and white striped dress. We exchanged telephone numbers, agreed to bring our jump ropes to school the next day and to approach Miss MacDonald together and ask for books with words. On the sidewalk ahead of us, I saw Jessica, walking and laughing with two other girls, their arms intertwined.
"That's my sister," I told Louise. "The pretty one with the curly hair."
"Hi, Jess!" I called.
Jessica looked back, smiled, and waved to me. Then 128 she turned back to her friends; I took Louise's hand in mine and we kicked the few leaves that had begun to fall, with our first-day-of-school shoes, giggling. The air smelled like apple cider, sweet and fresh.
***
I saw Ferdie Gossett for the first time, at school, and forgot my intention to smile shyly at him. It terrified me that he was there, almost every recess, standing by the edge of the playground. His eyes seemed hooded, like a reptile's, and his sloping chin disappeared into a neck that was wrapped in layers of clothes as stained and repulsive as old bandages. But the other children were unafraid of his presence. They said he had always been there. They pronounced his name Ferdiegossett, the way we all slurred phrases like peanutbutter and bestfriend. Sometimes they pelted him with pebbles, the tiny weapons as casually cruel as the small insults that we inflicted on each other at play.
It frightened me that his inaudibly moving mouth and his vacant eyes made me think of my grandfather.
He became part of my mind's landscape of school, as omnipresent as asphalt, as reliable as chalk. Like snapshots glued to pages of an album, my images of school were objects and people: Ticonderoga pencils in an orderly yellow row; a daub of mint-scented paste on a square of construction paper; Miss MacDonald in a flowered dress, bending to whisper; furry erasers thick with chalk dust; Dick and Jane and Baby Sally skipping through the pages of a book; Ferdie Gossett, reptilian sentinel of the playground; and Louise Donohue, bold and mischievous, who moved into the spot that Charles had occupied alone, and became my other best friend.
"Charles," I said to him tentatively one weekend when he came to visit Tatie, "I can't play with you all day, only part. Because I have to visit my friend Louise."
"I don't care," said Charles. But his eyes were hurt.
"You probably have new friends at your school," I said warily, not certain whether I wanted him to or not.
"Yeah. Clarence E. Cartwright. He's my friend at school."
"And if I came to visit you at your house, probably you would have to go play with Clarence E. Cartwright some of the time."
"You never come visit me at my house," Charles pointed out, as if the idea startled him.
"Well. If I did. If I was allowed to."
"Yeah. Probly I wouldn't even play with you at all, if you did."
"I wouldn't care," I lied.
"Me neither. Clarence E. Cartwright and me, we don't like girls any."
"Oh. I like you still, Charles."
We looked at each other anxiously. Finally he reached into his pocket. "I brung you something," he said. "Jest my ole printing paper."
I looked at his neat printing, the rows of uppercase As and Bs, and at the star pasted on the top of the perfect paper. His penciled letters were as carefully formed as my own. It seemed a link between our different schools, our different lives.
"Thank you," was all that I could think of to say.
***
Louise's house was very different from Grandfather's. Instead of the austere silence punctuated by the hollow striking of the hall clock, there was noise at the Donohues' house: radios played in adjacent rooms, tuned to different stations, combinations of gospel music, syncopated Rinso White! Rinso Bright! commercials, and the portentous conversations of Helen Trent and her many lovers.
Instead of the gleaming, well-polished antiques, each placed in the spot, at the angle, at which it would stand forever, there was clutter at Louise's house, and the surprise of things moved, rearranged, discarded, or changed.
One week there was a canary in a cage in the Donohues' kitchen; he hopped and twittered and sang and spewed seed on the stained linoleum floor. He had several names. Louise called him Goldie. Her mother had named him Rudy Vallee, after a singer, and she called him Rudy for short. Cousins who came and went referred to the canary as Yellowbird and Tweety; the same cousins called Louise things like Weezie, and Lulubelle, and Babydoll.
One a
fternoon the door to the canary's cage was left open by mistake, and the little bird emerged, looked around, flew across the kitchen, sang briefly by an open window, and disappeared. The Donohues waited a day or two, hoping he might return, decided cheerfully that he would not, filled the cage with artificial flowers, and hung it in another room.
The casual, amiable impermanence of everything delighted me.
There were babies at Louise's, but they were not like my own baby brother, who slept according to a schedule and was brought out for display only occasionally, always in clean clothes and with his sparse blond hair brushed into a temporary curl. Louise's baby brothers were one and two years old; they sat most of the time together in a playpen with their hands full of soggy graham crackers that they fed alternately to themselves and to each other. Their diapers were always wet, and each baby had a pink rash at the back of his neck. Louise's mother called it "heat rash" and sprinkled it from time to time with cornstarch from the kitchen cupboard. Their nostrils were always crusty, but they smiled a lot when they weren't biting each other, and they reached their sticky, smeared hands up to me when I came to the house. I liked the babies.
"Hi, Ralph. Hi, Frank," I always said to them shyly, avoiding their gluey grasps and refusing their offers of wet cookies.
Louise's room was a collection of her entire six years of life. She still had her own baby clothes, now on an assortment of eyeless, stuffing-leaky dolls that were piled in a corner.
"Was that yours, really? Did you wear that?" I asked her, fascinated, when she showed me an embroidered white dress, stiff now with dirt, on her favorite, largest doll.
"Yeah. In the album there's a picture of me wearing that. 'Louise Marie, at Aunt Monica's, age six months,' it says under the picture. My mom writes everything in white ink, in the album, because the pages are black."
My mother, too, wrote with white ink in our photograph albums, dipping the pen again and again. There were pictures of me, too, at six months, wearing white embroidered dresses. But where had those dresses gone? Our baby had new clothes, and my dolls were dressed in my mother's carefully stitched doll clothes. What had happened to the things I remembered from New York? My special glass with the red dots painted on the sides, from which I had drunk orange juice in the mornings? At Grandfather's house, orange juice was served in stemmed crystal, and I had not thought of my red-dotted glass until I met Louise and was introduced to lives that paid no attention to style but still cherished tattered and derelict memories. Maybe my special glass had been broken. Certainly the fragile crystal ones were more elegant.