Family Grandstand (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries)

by Carol Ryrie Brink

  “But he’s a hero, Daddy!” cried Susan.

  “Heroes have to pass their examinations,” said Professor Ridgeway, “just the same as other students.”

  “That’s so,” said Dorothy suddenly. She had been eating her dinner with her usual efficiency, but now she joined the conversation. “That Mr. Tokarynski, or whatever his name is, is in my chemistry class, and I can tell you he’s going to flunk.”

  “Why, Dorothy,” cried Susan, “you never even spoke to him today, not even when I introduced you.”

  “There are a hundred and fifty students in that class. He wouldn’t remember me,” Dorothy said.

  “Flunk—plunk,” said Dumpling. “What is flunk, Dorothy?”

  “It means he isn’t smart enough to pass his examinations,” Dorothy said. “It means he’s dumb and he’s going to fail. No wonder he didn’t look cheerful. I expect they’ll take him off the football team.”

  “You mean you have to be extra smart to play football?” asked George.

  “You have to pass your examinations,” Father said. “If a man fails in his college work, it is an indication that he does not have any extra time to spend on football games. Studies come first.”

  “But they couldn’t put him off the team now, could they, Father?” begged Susan.

  “His case is rather peculiar,” said her father. “Last spring he just barely made the grade. This fall he is on trial, as you might say. If his college work goes well he will stay on the team, but if he fails in his mid-term exams, he will be out on his ear—bingo!”

  “Bingo is a game,” said Dumpling seriously.

  Dorothy got up and began to remove the dishes.

  “The worst of it is,” said Professor Ridgeway, “he didn’t register for something easy as he might have done. He signed up for chemistry, and apparently he’s having a fearful time with it.”

  “I’ll say he is,” said Dorothy from the kitchen doorway.

  “H2O is chemistry for water,” said Dumpling. Everybody looked at her, but nobody thought of anything to say. Then Mother kissed her on the back of the neck. “Too bad you’ll never be eligible for football, Dumpling,” she said.

  “But, Father,” said Susan, “how nice that it’s chemistry he’s having trouble with, because Professor Jones lives right next door, and if you just went over and talked to him—I know he thinks we’re noisy and hard on flowers and all that, but he respects you very much. If you would just go over and tell him how important it is for Tommy Tucker to stay on the team—”

  “And do you think Professor Jones would respect me any longer if I did?” asked Father. “No indeed. What Tommy does, he must do himself. If we made it either easier or harder for the football players, it would be completely unfair to the other students. What he needs is a good tutor.”

  “‘A tutor was teaching two tooters to toot,’” remarked George. And he began to play “Tootle—tootle—toot” on an imaginary fife.

  But Susan was quite serious and troubled about all this. She went out to the kitchen to help Dorothy with the dishes.

  “Is chemistry really very hard, Dorothy? I don’t think I’ll try it when I get to college,” Susan said.

  “Of course you will,” said Dorothy, “if you want to. Anybody can do anything if she really wants to. I might be milking cows and slopping pigs, not to mention washing dishes, if I hadn’t decided I would go to college and get an education.”

  “But you’re washing dishes now,” Susan argued.

  “I won’t always be,” said Dorothy. “This is the bottom rung of the ladder. You’ll see. I’ll be famous and rich and everything else before I get through.”

  Susan looked at Dorothy, and she thought, Dorothy would be quite pretty if she didn’t braid her yellow hair so skin-tight and look so determined; she’s got beautiful blue eyes. But she doesn’t seem to know how to have very much fun, or is it fun just to be so very smart, I wonder?

  They continued to do the dishes in silence for a few moments and then Susan said thoughtfully, “Dorothy, would you be able to be a tutor, do you suppose?”

  “I could in some subjects,” Dorothy said, “if I had time. But you don’t mean that football boy with the funny name, do you?”

  “He’s not a boy,” Susan said. “He’s a quarterback, and if he flunks in chemistry Midwest will lose the rest of the football games. Haven’t you any Midwest spirit, Dorothy?”

  “Not much,” said Dorothy, scouring the sink in a way to produce the greatest possible cleanness in the shortest possible time.

  “If you would tutor him in chemistry—” said Susan.

  Dorothy put away the dish mop and folded the dish towels. She put the pots and pans very neatly into the cupboard. When Mother was here alone the pan cupboard was always bulging, and the way Mother started to get a meal was to open the pan cupboard and let all the pans rush out until she found the one she wanted, and then she would shut the doors forcibly upon the rest. Since Dorothy had come the cupboards were neat, and preparations for a meal no longer started with a crash of falling pans.

  When Dorothy had finished she stood up, put her hands on her hips, and looked at Susan. “Well,” she said, “so you want me to tutor him? I suppose you want me to call him up and say, ‘Hello, Mr. Tokarynski. I understand that you are failing in chemistry. Since I’m smarter than you are you’d better let me help you.’”

  “I see what you mean,” Susan said reluctantly. “It would sound kind of strange, but still if you could, Dorothy, thousands of people would be grateful to you, maybe millions.”

  “Humph,” said Dorothy, and without even saying good night she went upstairs to her room two steps at a time.

  Busy Saturday

  Saturday was a beautiful fall day. The sun shone lazily through a faint blue haze. But the Ridgeway children had too much to do to stop and enjoy it.

  Susan helped Mother and Dorothy with dishes and beds, while George cleaned his animal cages and Dumpling took care of the canary.

  The name of the canary was Peter Pan, but he was called Dickie for short. Dumpling cared for Dickie faithfully. She gave him birdseed and water every day, a bath and clean paper in the bottom of his cage every other day, and on Saturday he had a little sand and a fresh piece of cuttlebone. She never shirked her duties, partly because Dickie had been given to her as her own bird, partly because that was how she earned her salary of ten cents a week.

  But in spite of all this Dumpling was not sure that she liked Dickie. He never seemed to remember her from day to day. He fluttered and cheeped and fussed at her when she came near him. But what bothered her most was that he seemed to want to get out of his cage and away. She looked at the wild birds flying past the window and making plans for their trip South, and then she looked at Dickie, and she did not feel happy.

  It was not so with George’s animals. They seemed quite contented in the screened boxes and crates which George had made for them. They either sat and munched things and grew fat, or they chased each other around in a friendly way. They did not keep trying to get out. Most of them had never been out of boxes anyway, for they had been born in boxes over in the biology or the zoology or the psychology laboratories. George was a frequent visitor to these scientific laboratories, and he managed to stay close friends with the student assistants in each place. That was how he happened to have so many guinea pigs, rabbits, and white rats. George was crazy about animals and birds and reptiles. He would have enjoyed owning Dickie, too, but Dickie had been given to Dumpling.

  After the household tasks had been done, Susan and Dumpling hurried into their good clothes. They put the money they had been saving carefully into their purses. Dumpling had fifty cents or the savings of five weeks; and Susan, though she earned twenty-five cents a week as well as the profits from her babysitting, had only managed to save the same amount, because she had a great many expenses.

  “Don’t forget to go downtown after the Child Study Clinic,” called George hopefully as they went out the gate.
“Remember Sunday,” he added. He ran around the house and called it out to them again as they went down the street, for fear they had not heard him the first time.

  “We won’t forget,” they called back.

  As they went along Dumpling held hard to Susan’s hand. “What will they do to me at the Child Study Clinic, Susie?” she said.

  “Oh, it will be easy,” said Susan. “Putting blocks in holes and doing puzzles.”

  “I like that,” said Dumpling.

  “Don’t you remember last year?” asked Susan. “It will be something like that but a little harder, because you’re a year older.”

  “A year is a long time,” said Dumpling, trying to remember what they had asked her last year.

  “It’s not like going to the doctor or the dentist,” Susan reassured her. “They just want to find out what you know at this age, and how smart you are.”

  “I think I’m pretty smart, don’t you, Susan?”

  “Well, of course, I think so, Dumpling,” said Susan, “but then I’m your sister. There’s no telling what they’ll think over there. They study all kinds of children.”

  When they reached the clinic a couple of pleasant but learned-looking young ladies took Dumpling by the hand and led her into a little room by herself. Susan glimpsed a small table which held oddly shaped blocks and cards with pictures on them and other things which she vaguely remembered from her own past, and then the door closed on Dumpling and her questioners. Susan sat on a bench in the hall and waited.

  Susan began to think ahead and plan what she would buy for George’s birthday when they went downtown. “Fifty cents,” she thought. “It’s not enough to buy him a new football. It would buy a box of that delicious kind of chocolate-covered taffy that is my favorite kind. Of course he’d like an animal better than anything else, but he has animals. What kind of an animal could you buy for fifty cents anyway? The chocolate sort of melts off as the taffy gets softer, and then you can chew and chew on it for a long time. I might go to the pet store just to see, but Father thinks we have too many animals anyway. Let’s see, in a fifty-cent box there would be about twenty pieces of the chocolate-covered taffy, and that would make four pieces apiece around the family, or maybe he would only pass it three times and keep the other four for himself because it’s his birthday.”

  After Susan had decided on the box of candy, she went and got a magazine out of a rack and read it from cover to cover. It was a magazine for parents, and Susan was interested for, although she was not a parent, she found that being a babysitter is quite similar to being a parent. When she had finished the magazine, she sat still and waited. The learned young ladies seemed to be taking an awfully long time with Dumpling.

  “Goodness! I hope she isn’t being too dumb!” thought Susan. “I wish they’d hurry, because we’ve got to get home before the football game.”

  She took another magazine and looked all through it. Other children came and went with parents or sisters or brothers holding on to their hands. But still Dumpling didn’t come. Susan began to fidget and fret. Should she knock on the door and say to the young lady, “Tomorrow is George’s birthday, and we’re really in an awful hurry to get home before the football game. Can’t you be a little easy on her just this time? After all, she’s only six.”

  But before Susan screwed up her courage to do this, the door opened and Dumpling came out. Dumpling looked very calm and collected, but the two young ladies seemed to be in something of a flutter. Susan knew that it was no use asking them how Dumpling had got along, because it was against the rules for them to tell. The results of the tests were written down on record sheets and put away in filing cabinets, but no one outside the clinic, not even the child who was tested, was supposed to know whether he was smart or stupid.

  Susan jumped up and took Dumpling’s hand, and, because it was getting so late, they hurried out of the building.

  “How was it?” Susan asked Dumpling.

  “Oh, it was lots of fun,” said Dumpling. “I did more puzzles and games and things than you ever saw, Susie. It was just like a party, only no food.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” cried Susan. “I forgot my purse. Stand right here and wait while I go back.”

  She ran as fast as she could back to the building, and there was her purse, still lying on the seat beside the magazines. As she picked it up, Susan saw that the two young ladies were still standing there talking to each other.

  “It’s the most remarkable thing I ever saw,” one of them was saying, and the other one said, “A prodigy! A child prodigy!”

  All the way downtown on the streetcar, Susan kept turning this over in her mind. She felt sure that they had been talking about Dumpling, and she knew that it was quite exceptional to be a child prodigy, but whether it was good or bad she could not remember. She thought it was good. She looked at Dumpling with new respect.

  “Weren’t the puzzles hard, honey?” she asked.

  “Well, some of them were,” said Dumpling, “but those were the last ones. All the first ones were very easy.”

  Susan felt excited. She didn’t say anything to Dumpling, but she thought to herself, My goodness! If we have a prodigy in the family, it’s almost like having a football hero to mow our lawn! She wondered if George would want to print tickets.

  “Where do you want to go to shop, Dumpling darling?” Susan asked respectfully.

  “I would like to go to the big dime store, Susie,” said Dumpling. “The one that has pickles and canary birds and plants and lamps and sets of dishes and everything.”

  “All right,” Susan said, “but that’s not really a dime store, Dumpling. You know things cost all sorts of prices.”

  “I call it the dime store,” said Dumpling.

  “All right,” Susan repeated. “So if I leave you there at the dime store and come and collect you again, will it be okay, Dumpling? Because I want to go up to that yummy taffy store, and we haven’t much time.”

  “It will be okay,” Dumpling said.

  So Susan left Dumpling at the door of the big Woolworth store with instructions to meet her there in fifteen minutes, and she hurried up the street.

  Susan thought that even if she were blind she would be able to find the taffy and caramel-corn store, because there was a rich, warm, and bubbling smell that came out of the door and billowed up and down the street. It was the best possible advertisement the store could have, better than an electric sign or a sandwich man walking up and down.

  The rich, warm smell reminded Susan that breakfast was long past and that luncheon was still quite far in the future. It would have been very nice to spend part of her money on the beautiful golden-colored caramel-corn for immediate eating, but she kept the thought of George and his birthday resolutely in mind.

  “A fifty-cent box of chocolate-covered taffy please,” she said to the clerk with more firmness than appeared to be necessary.

  When the box was filled, wrapped, and paid for, she put it under her arm and walked out of the store. A block away from the store Susan made a pleasing discovery. The rich, warm, and bubbling smell was still with her, although she had left the store behind. It clung to the box of candy as the fragrance of spring clings to the earliest flowers.

  “Smell, Dumpling!” Susan said, holding out the white-wrapped box. Dumpling was waiting for her outside the dime store.

  “M-m-m!” said Dumpling. “Good!”

  In her hand Dumpling had a little cardboard container with a wire handle. It looked like the kind of container in which one carries pickles or oysters or sauerkraut or ice cream. It might have been any of these things, for the big dime store had practically everything.

  “What did you get, honey?” asked Susan.

  “Susie, it’s a surprise,” said Dumpling.

  “A surprise for George, I know. But don’t you want to tell me, Dumpling?”

  “No, Susie. It’s a surprise.”

  Going home in the streetcar, Dumpling held the container very care
fully. Susan was worried.

  “It isn’t ice cream, is it, Dumpling?” she asked. “Because today is quite a warm day, and I just thought—”

  “No,” said Dumpling, “it isn’t ice cream, Susie.”

  Susan’s package gave off a very delightful odor, but Dumpling’s package had a sound rather than a smell. It had a very, very tiny sound, like something sloshing. “It must be pickles,” Susan thought.

  The farther along they went, the more crowded the streetcar became. People were already going to the football game. Automobiles with pennants flying kept whizzing by them, and there were other streetcars up ahead. The one they were on moved very slowly.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s not ice cream,” said Susan. She stopped worrying about Dumpling’s package and began to wonder how they would be able to get home from the streetcar. The streetcar stopped right by the stadium, and they would be the only two people going against the crowd instead of with it. There was one place where they would have to cross College Avenue, too, and that was bad because a steady stream of cars flowed by on football days.

  “I hope there’s a policeman,” Susan said. “I hope Officer Cahill is there.” Officer Cahill was the college policeman, and the children were good friends of his.

  How to Cross a Street

  On ordinary days College Avenue was quiet and calm under its big elms. The old houses and the new houses seemed to slumber there in the sunshine, and across the street the University campus was quiet and drowsy, too, with students strolling along in pairs or sitting on the steps of the buildings, studying their lessons.

  On football days, however, everything changed. College Avenue suddenly became like the State Fair and the Shrine Circus and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. Almost everybody in town seemed to be on the way to the football game, and those who were not going to the game were there to sell something.

  “Soov’nirs! Soov’nirs!” shouted the boys with boards full of bunches of red and yellow ribbon. Red and yellow were the University colors. Fastened to the red and yellow ribbons were cunning little metal footballs. “Get your soov’nirs, folks!”