by Laura Ruby
All of the Guardians girls started talking at once, about brothers and fathers and cousins and the boys at the Guardians, and what would happen to them, and what did it mean for the rest. Sister Bert put up her hands. “We’re not going to solve all the world’s problems now,” she said. “We’ve all had a bit of a shock, but I’m sure President Roosevelt is taking the actions that need to be taken and we’ll hear about them soon enough.” She stood up. “How about you girls do your darning?”
“I don’t have any darning,” said Stella.
“Stella, a person always has darning.”
“But—”
Sister held up a hand. “We must trust that God has a plan for this country, and for us. The best thing we can do is have faith and continue to do our work.”
The girls made a show of getting out their torn socks and stockings, but no one was able to concentrate on anything except for the broadcast. They talked in whispers about what it all meant, but no one knew. Soon, though, they half forgot about it, and ended up talking about the things they always did: food they wished they had to eat, the way they’d wear their hair if they could. That’s the amazing thing, that you could half forget a war. But you could. Especially when that war is fought far away across the ocean, when your brother’s eyesight is too terrible for him to go and your mother is so grateful that she bakes a cake herself instead of telling the cook to do it, when there’s a black-haired boy with a sparkling hollow at his throat standing at your door and you can’t speak for the wave of want that swamps you and threatens to drag you under.
Benno, Benno, Benno, Benno. B—
But the bad news must have stayed in the back of their minds the way bad news always does, because the girls were too jittery to sleep. Sister Bert turned out all the lights but one and told them a story that her mother used to tell her back when she was a little girl in Bavaria.
“Once upon a time,” Sister said, “a man fell asleep while napping under a tree. A crow with a painfully crooked wing flapped down from the tree and pecked the man awake. The man was very angry until the crow told him that he’d been asleep for five years! The man looked down at himself and knew it was true; his thick beard reached all the way to the ground. He asked the crow how he could thank him. The crow plucked one of his own shiny black feathers and gave it to the man. ‘Offer this feather to your daughters. Whoever accepts it will have her wishes come true, and mine as well.’
“The man went home and offered his daughters the feather, one by one. The eldest laughed. The middle sister scoffed. But the youngest slipped the feather into her pocket.
“Since the man had been away for five long years, his family had suffered. They had no food and nothing left to sell to buy some. The older girls were angry at their father, but the youngest said she would find work. Her sisters laughed. ‘What do you know how to do?’ they said.
“The youngest went to the city and got a job as a cook. But, as her sisters said, she didn’t know how to cook. All her dishes were either raw or burned. The head of the kitchen beat her and told her that if she didn’t do better at breakfast, she would be sent home hungry. While the girl was searching for a handkerchief to dry her tears, she found the crow’s feather. Using the feather as a quill, she wrote down what she wished would happen. ‘I wish that the breakfast table was filled with delicious food.’
“The next day, her wish came true. The table was heaped with one wonderful dish after another. The girl was amazed. When the head housekeeper asked her to sew some dresses for the lady of the manor, the girl wrote down the names of beautiful garments. Again, her wish came true—a half dozen beautiful gowns appeared in the lady’s closet.
“Soon her reputation preceded her all around the city. She was so accomplished and so lovely that many men wanted her to be theirs. A carpenter sneaked into her room at night. She told him to leave, but he refused. She said, ‘Shut the door, then.’ While he was shutting the door, she quickly wrote, ‘I hope he spends all night shutting the door and opening it again.’ Her wish came true. At daybreak, the carpenter slunk away.
“The next night, a hunter came to the girl’s room. He bent to take his boots off. With the crow’s feather, she wrote, ‘I hope he spends all night taking off his boots and putting them back on.’ Her wish came true. At daybreak, the hunter left, exhausted.
“The third night, a crow with a crooked wing flapped into her room. Since he was just a bird, and an injured one at that, she fed it crumbs from her supper and took pity on its crooked wing. She wrote, ‘I hope this crow becomes whole again.’
“With that last wish, she had broken a spell. Suddenly the crow changed into a beautiful young man clad in black velvet.
“The beautiful young man took the feather from her hand and wrote, ‘I hope this girl’s fondest wish comes true.’ And it did.”
Sister nodded, her tale finished.
“Wait, what happened?” said Huckle.
“They got married, right?” said Stella. “This girl and the crow prince?”
Sister Bert slapped both hands on her knees and stood. “Maybe. Depends on what her fondest wish was.”
“What else could it be?” Stella demanded.
Sister sighed. “A piece of decent chocolate? World peace?”
“Chocolate! What kind of story is that?” Stella said.
“The kind of story that makes you think about what you’d wish for,” said Sister Bert, turning out the last light. “Now, get some sleep.”
In the dark, the girls thought about what they’d wish for if a beautiful crow man came through the window. Not all of them wished for world peace.
After a while, someone whispered, “Where’s Bavaria anyway?”
Another voice said, “Somewhere in Ohio, I think.”
1942
Fairy Tales
Weak Hearts
THE MONTHS PASSED IN A haze of falling snow and Christmas lights and bloody battles in faraway towns with names that caught in the throat. I talked to the babies in the baby house and watched Frankie as she turned fifteen. When I wasn’t at the orphanage, I wandered the streets of the city with people lumbering like bears under the weight of their coats. Or I attended the picture show where the 4-F boys went to forget their shame, too sickly or disabled for war.
One morning, as a deeper chill wrung tears from the ragged souls waiting on line at the soup kitchens, I got hungry for a different kind of story. I walked the streets, not bothering with the sidewalks. The cars drove right through me as if I were nothing, but I caught their thoughts like butterflies in a net:
What if Herbert can’t find another job?
That no-good man drank his last paycheck.
Daisy, oh, Daisy, I love you but . . .
We’ll have to move in with his mother.
America can’t afford to be dragged into another—
But I’m starving, Mommy.
Who do you think we are, the Rockefellers?
Damn Roosevelt is useless.
The hell you say.
Finally I reached the library. I slipped through the glass doors and greeted the pretty new librarian at the desk the way I always did—Hello, Miss Books, love the sweater!—though she couldn’t hear me. The old librarian, an iron-haired woman with green spectacles, hadn’t been able to hear me either. Until the day she could. By then I wasn’t saying Hello, Miss Books, those are some snazzy spectacles, I was saying other things, such as Better to flee from death than feel its grip, or All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream, or Most women do not creep by daylight. All to entertain myself. I was as surprised as she was when I simply whispered the word boo and the stack of catalog cards she was holding flew up in the air in a shower of oversized confetti.
She retired, which was probably for the best. Weak heart.
After I greeted the pretty new librarian, I floated into the reading room. The colder it got outside, the more crowded it got inside, but the crowd didn’t bother me. More people reading, more for me to read ove
r their shoulders. Newspapers mostly, though I didn’t care for the news. The spasms of the world meant little to me—who was fighting the war, who was prepping for war, who was avoiding the war, which war, that war, or that other one—but the people here and everywhere were consumed by it, convinced that each war was different, that it wasn’t one long war with the briefest of pauses between battles.
Even now, a doughy woman pored over Reader’s Digest, lips moving as she read an old article by Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator-turned-crank. “We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race. . . . It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor. . . .” Her eyes flew from face to face, looking, I supposed, for Mongols and Persians and Moors.
I made the rounds of the reading room, searching for the man with the blond hair and crooked teeth. Well, not him exactly, but the book he’d been reading for the past few months, a couple of pages at a time. I had not been much of a reader when I was young, but I wondered if that was because I was never allowed to read anything worth reading. My favorite book of fairy tales was given away when I turned twelve, because my parents said it was time to turn from childish things. Later, my mother would confiscate the mystery magazines and love stories lent to me by my friend Harriet, saying such rubbish would melt my brain to porridge and lay my morals to waste.
Whatever brains or morals I still possessed, she’d added. She’d been horrified when she caught me and Harriet practicing our kissing instead of doing needlework as we had promised.
I found the man with the blond hair and the crooked teeth in the corner by the window. The book he’d been reading was called The Hobbit. Like the fairy tales I’d loved as a child, this book had monsters and goblins and riddles, but here was a grown man reading the book out in the open, as if he wasn’t the least bit worried about his brains melting or his morals wasting. How nice to be a man, to be free to read a monster book in public without anyone worried that you would turn into a monster yourself. Or that you picked the book because you were a monster. He’d just begun chapter five, “Riddles in the Dark.” I floated over his shoulder, imagining Bilbo Baggins, a tiny creature with hairy feet, stumbling upon a ring, slipping it onto his finger, becoming invisible. Magic.
Across the room, someone coughed. I looked up. Facing me, hovering over the shoulder of another man, was a girl about my age. Where I was small and fair with silvery curls—a devil in disguise, my mother said—here was a tall black girl with warm brown skin and the thickest ebony hair I’d ever seen piled high on her head. Unlike the boxy dress I wore, hers was a gold dress that nipped in at her tiny waist, skimmed her hips, and fell nearly to her ankles, making her a perfect hourglass. Despite the dress, and the hairstyle that hadn’t been fashionable for nearly a decade, she was so lovely that for a moment I thought she was alive. Until she reached out and tried to turn the page of the newspaper and her hand went right through the man instead. She frowned and tried again.
I hated watching ghosts act out their last moments, hated their fruitless, frantic agitation. I wouldn’t have said anything to her, but I was trying to read, and she was distracting.
That won’t work, I said.
She did not reply. Of course she didn’t. Her hand flicked.
You’re moving too fast, I said.
Frown, flick.
Are you new? You can’t be new. That dress is more than ten years out of date. I know, I’ve kept up. Have you seen these ads?
Frown, flick. Frown, flick.
You’re trying too hard. Relax.
Flick, flick, flick.
I stamped my foot as if it could get her attention. Or anyone’s. As if my own movements, my own words, weren’t just as fruitless.
I said, Just read over his shoulder. It takes less energy anyway. We don’t have much to begin with, you know. If you keep doing that, you’ll wear yourself out.
The girl wasn’t listening, wasn’t looking. Frown, flick.
If you wear yourself out, you’ll lose time, do you hear me? You’ll lose yourself. You’ll find yourself weeks from now months from now years from now, wandering in Indiana somewhere, or floating on a boat on Lake Michigan, or perched on the top of the Chicago Board of Trade or flapping around the Rookery building like all the other birds wondering how you got there. Is that what you want?
Frown, flick, frown, flick.
There was no reaching her, lost as she was in her own death. But what was lethal about a newspaper? Maybe a paper cut did her in. Maybe my mother was right and mere words could turn a brain to porridge. Or maybe this girl had a weak heart too.
She should have stayed away from newspapers, then. All that war talk could be shocking. And the heart was always the first thing to go.
Then I felt the girl’s eyes on me, her glare hot, so hot. She didn’t have to say anything for me to hear what she was thinking:
Who are you calling weak?
I took a step back. I didn’t mean—
Her fingers flicked, and this time she jerked that newspaper right out of that man’s hand. It swooped around the room like a hawk an owl an eagle spreading its wings before crashing to the table in a heap.
The patrons blinked at one another.
“Must have been the wind,” said a man.
“What wind?” said a woman.
Some wind, I said.
The girl quirked a sharp brow, a hook piercing the skin.
How did you—? I began.
She put her finger to her lips. Shhh.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been a week since my last confession.”
“Go on.”
“I thought bad things about my little sister, Toni. She’s telling everyone she’s going to marry a duke. We don’t even have dukes in America.”
Father coughed. “Perhaps one day she plans to move to England.”
“Like that will help.”
Father coughed again but said nothing. Frankie wished she could see him better through the mesh. His face was friendly when he wasn’t pounding the pulpit and going on about hell.
Frankie said, “There’s something funny about Toni. But I’m not sure it’s a sin to think so, because everyone says that about her.”
“Everyone better confess it, then,” he said. “Are you truly sorry?”
No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.
“What else?”
“I almost took the Lord’s name in vain. Twice.”
“Almost?”
“Choppy threw a potato at me before I could get the whole name out. The second time I almost did it, she whacked me with a flipper. Choppy doesn’t like it when people take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“A girl after my own heart,” Father said, his accent making it sound like “a giurl after me own hayrt.”
Frankie half wanted to be a girl after Father’s own heart, but she probably wasn’t. Sometimes, when the sisters weren’t looking, Frankie grabbed a raw egg and sucked it out. Other times, she scooped out huge handfuls of Jell-O and slurped them down while shivering in the icebox. Was it a sin to eat when you were hungry? If Father was hungry, would he dig his hands into a vat of Jell-O? Did Father Paul actually get hungry, or was he too full of God’s light? Frankie didn’t know about his striped pajamas or how often he dreamed of his grandmother, who thought it was bad luck to put shoes on a table, to tell a mother her baby was pretty, to knit after dark unless you were certain the sheep were sleeping. His grandmother believed that since Paul had been born at night, he would be able to see both the spirits and the fairies, whom she called “the good people.” Every night, she told him to leave a saucer of cream in the corner, just in case a brownie might want a sip. His mother said that this was a bunch of English nonsense, that they were Irish, for pity’s sake, but his grandmother claimed the brownies helped everyone with their darning, especially the Irish. Once, Father
woke up in the middle of the night to see a tiny wizened creature sipping at the bowl.
Father Paul loved God more than anything. But sometimes he missed the fairies.
To Frankie, Father said, “Is there something else?”
“I’ve been thinking about the word ‘yet.’”
“What about the word ‘yet’?”
“I’m thinking about doing something but I haven’t done it yet.”
Father said, “Ah,” as if he knew exactly what Frankie was talking about. She tugged at her hair, which had finally grown a little. Not that there were many boys left to look at her hair or any other girl’s. Except for the ones who weren’t old enough, and some with thick glasses or a limp, the boys had been leaving the orphanage left and right for the service. Some had even snuck out in the middle of the night.
Frankie was sad to see them go. One of the jobs of the kitchen girls was to wash the dishes in the senior boys’ dining rooms. At first, Frankie didn’t think that was fair at all. The boys were the ones who dirtied the dishes. But after a while, she didn’t mind so much. There she was, scrubbing plates and steamers and whatnot, and this or that boy would walk by, and maybe talk to her for a while, if there was no nun around. And maybe they would tell her that she was pretty and help her stack some of the dishes or carry the heavier pots. Frankie hadn’t had much to do with boys, how could she? Except for Vito. And then, when she tried to picture what Vito looked like out there in Colorado, and what he could be doing, she couldn’t. It was getting so much harder to see him in her mind, as if skinny Vito was getting skinnier and skinnier until he faded away to nothing, like a shadow, or the faint scribbles on the letters he sent.
But those other boys. Some smelled like the ink from the print shop, others had the bitter smell of green leaves they got from working in the orphanage flower shop, some like plain old dirt. One by one, they untied her apron, flicked bubbles at her, sang stupid songs, hid the soap, and one by one, they left for the service. Sometimes they’d tell her about it. “Fran-ces-ca,” they said—they always called her Fran-ces-ca because that’s what they heard Choppy called her—“it’s time to ship out!”