Cherry Ames Boxed Set 5-8

by Helen Wells

  “I’m going to Long Island!” Vivian cried. “Good! It’s quiet and pretty out there.”

  “Chinatown,” read Mai Lee. “I knew it, I knew it!”

  “Where’s Bathgate Avenue?” Josie Franklin asked.

  “Mine says Chelsea Street, wherever that is,” Gwen puzzled.

  Cherry looked blankly at her slip of paper and then at Bertha Larsen’s. The addresses meant nothing at all to them. But Bertha, Josie, Gwen, and Cherry were all assigned to the same center!

  “I knew I was lugging this thing around for some reason,” Gwen muttered. She pulled forth a paper-backed guide book, and unfurled a map.

  With the five-o’clock crowds swirling around them, the girls looked up their district streets. They found two Chelsea Streets, one Chelsea Square, and three Bathgate Avenues—all in widely separated parts of the five-island, five-borough city. “Not to mention all the little islands,” Josie said helpfully. They decided simply to go home.

  Home meant just one thing to Cherry. She had a sudden image of newspapers with large headlines: VANDAL NURSES PAINT, EVICTED, FINED, IMPRISONED.

  “Maybe we can finish the painting, if we hurry,” Mai Lee said eagerly.

  “Our blue room! It’s going to look well. What’s the matter, Cherry? Don’t you want to paint?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Cherry. “I’d adore to paint. But next time Ames has an idea, please ignore it.”

  CHAPTER IV

  Ann to the Rescue

  A DOUBTFUL MOOD HIT THE SPENCER CLUB OVER THE following week end. Inspiration and new work were fine but, to their disappointment, they had not been permitted to work wonders immediately. First they had to sit through more training lectures. Then had come the dampening news that they would not report to their centers until Monday.

  Besides, there was still the ferocious janitor to deal with. Although this problem was labeled “Cherry’s responsibility,” the Spencer Club was completing the painting with diminished blitheness. Every time they passed the trap door, even though it was firmly nailed down, they looked apprehensive. When the doorbell rang this rainy Saturday morning, they jumped.

  “You go, Cherry.”

  “You’re nearer the door, Bertha. You go.”

  “Gwen is nearer than I am.” Gwen made a face at Bertha and did not budge.

  The doorbell shrilled again. Josie timidly went over and opened it a crack. A lady in draperies and a man with a harp stood there. The girls stared, goggle-eyed. In fine, ringing diction, the woman enunciated:

  “Is this by any chance the Garibaldi Music and Debating Society?”

  “No’m, by no chance,” Josie stuttered and closed the door by falling on it.

  They all let out sighs of relief.

  “I think,” said Cherry, winding one black curl around her finger, “that we ought to get out of here today. Go sight-seeing or something. Anything to dodge the janitor a while longer.”

  “Sight-seeing in the rain?” Bertha said sensibly.

  “We won’t melt. Honestly, if that doorbell rings again, I’ll have nervous prostration.”

  “We’ll all collapse with you,” Gwen sympathized.

  The doorbell rang again. The four girls sat frozen. In a whisper Gwen said:

  “There’s no law that says we have to answer the doorbell.”

  Cherry hissed back, “I’ll die of curiosity if we don’t.”

  Like a man going to his doom, Cherry plodded to the door and opened it. It was not the janitor. It was a pleasant, well-dressed woman who smiled and said:

  “I’m your neighbor, Mrs. Jenkins. My husband and I live directly above you. I just stopped in to say that if you ever need help, Mr. Jenkins and I are within call.”

  “How kind of you!” Cherry exclaimed. “That’s good to know. Won’t you come in, Mrs. Jenkins?”

  Their neighbor shook her head. “I’m too busy just now, thanks. But I thought you all looked rather homesick. Would this help?” She held out a basket of steaming hot gingerbread.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” the girls exclaimed. As the neighbor smiled and vanished up the stairs, they decided New Yorkers were not so bad, after all.

  When the doorbell rang a third time, Cherry paled. Not one of the girls stirred. Cherry whispered, “Our luck couldn’t hold out three times in a row!” They waited, without moving a muscle, while the doorbell rang furiously again and then they heard footsteps clumping away. A second later, outside their windows, they saw the top of the janitor’s head.

  “There, I told you!” Cherry gasped. “He knows we’re home and he’s on our trail. We absolutely must get out of here!”

  The girls ruefully agreed. They decided to wake Vivian and Mai Lee, who were busy sleeping till noon. At least, they were asleep until a kitchen shelf collapsed, raining pots and pans. A second later, the usual three fire engines went shrieking past their windows. The sleepers awoke with shouts of protest.

  The telephone rang. Cherry seized it. “Oh frabjous day!”

  “Hello, what’s the matter?” said Ann Evans’s calm, amused voice.

  “Ann! Oh, how wonderful to talk to you! When are you coming down to see us?”

  “Soon, if you’ll have me. How are you all?” Ann’s voice was so cool, so close, that Cherry could almost see her friend’s steady, dark-blue eyes and feel her poised presence. But Gwen took the phone away. All the girls insisted on taking turns talking with Ann.

  “Ann wants us to call her back later and make a date,” Vivian said, as she hung up. “What’s this mad talk about doing New York in the rain?”

  Josie wailed. She had just discovered she was wearing Mai Lee’s slip by mistake. “And besides, Cherry, where’ll we go? We haven’t much to spend.”

  “Yes, that’s right!”

  Cherry bit her lip. “Uh—ah—we’ll go to”—she said the first thing that popped into her head—“the Statue of Liberty.”

  They looked interested despite themselves. But then Vivian and Mai Lee wanted to stay home and sleep.

  “And face the janitor all by yourselves?” Cherry warned.

  They glared at Cherry with her flushed cheeks and bobbing black curls.

  “Doggone you, Cherry Ames,” Gwen said, slowly getting out of her chair, “why do you have to be a self-starter?” The others rose too.

  The trek to the Statue of Liberty was not an unqualified success, but it kept them out of the janitor’s clutches. To get to the Battery, they fumbled around in roaring subways and emerged, thoroughly bewildered, at the foot of Wall Street skyscrapers. Here they found a tremendous stretch of grass, Bowling Green, and New York harbor. Gray ships steamed out of sight on a gray ocean.

  Almost no one was out in the rain this Saturday except the six girls, pigeons, and a peanut vendor under a huge, dripping umbrella. They bought bags of peanuts and caught the ridiculous little boat going over to Bedloe Island, on which the statue stood. The boat’s other passengers were a group of visiting Texans, shivering but conscientious, and a knot of young sailors going sailing for a holiday, and—Cherry was informed by three small boys who shared her peanuts—the Wild Eagle Boy Scout Troop.

  “It’s better than the janitor, anyhow,” Cherry thought.

  They sailed out in the rain and the statue loomed up gray and enormous. Dashing from the boat up to the statue’s base, they felt like pygmies. Then they were inside the hollow, metal statue. It was electrically lighted and winding straight up it were spiral stairs, iron and exceedingly steep and narrow.

  They started climbing and in no time at all they were puffing. Cherry began to feel muscles pulling in her legs that she had forgotten she possessed. Bertha Larsen’s hat tipped to one side of her head. Up and round, up and round they climbed. “You thought this up!” the girls hissed at Cherry. “You thought up painting the furniture, too!” But when they reached the top, the Spencer Club voted it worth the effort.

  They were standing in the statue’s forehead. Under the rays of her crown were windows. The girls could see
all of New York harbor and its skyline, and the Atlantic stretching away to the Old World. Cherry hung out one of the windows and, by painfully twisting her neck, contrived to look up. Above her soared the statue’s smooth, mammoth arm, upraised, the hand grasping the torch of freedom. Cherry’s neck was stiff for an hour afterward, but she would never forget the solemn thrill that went through her at that moment.

  “The statue needs a paint job,” Bertha commented.

  They all turned on her. “Will you shush!”

  The descent down the steep spiral was even more dizzying than the climb up. “At least the janitor won’t look for us here,” Gwen cheered them on. No one tripped, however, and they ended up lunching belatedly at the hot dog concession outside in the rain.

  “Let’s go shopping,” Vivian suggested. “Mm, pretty clothes!” Her soft eyes sparkled.

  They plodded up to midtown via boat, subway, and Fifth Avenue bus. They were six dripping and bedraggled nurses who entered the gleaming doors of Saks Fifth Avenue.

  In spite of the rain, the store was crowded. Cherry was so taken by the beautiful things on display that she almost forgot her “responsibility.” What dazzled her even more were these women shoppers, beautifully dressed, perfectly groomed.

  “They look like they’re going to a party!” Bertha Larsen marveled. “Will you look at their hair-dos!”

  “Look!” squeaked Josie. “Not one of them’s wearing rubbers!”

  “Their furs, oh, their luscious hats,” moaned Vivian. “And their jewelry!”

  Gwen was at a counter, happily burrowing into a heap of bright silk scarfs. As the other five came up to drag her forth, they caught sight of themselves in a large mirror. Simultaneously they halted. Against a background of fashion-plate women stood five soaking, smudge-faced girls, with wisps of hair sticking every which way, and horrified eyes.

  “Oh, shame, is that us?”

  “I distinctly see that saleswoman sniffing at us!”

  “Let’s get out of here!”

  All six of them turned tail and fled. They rode home under the beaten title of The Ragpickers.

  At their apartment, they felt reasonably safe, for it was late. Late enough for the janitor not to bother them any more today. Mail was waiting for them.

  The girls turned on lights and scattered, curling up in various rooms to read their letters. Cherry had just picked up hers when the doorbell rang. Without thinking, she answered it.

  It was the janitor.

  “So ye been dodgin’ me all day!” he growled at Cherry. “Lemme in!”

  The other girls came running and stared, crestfallen, at the gnarled little man.

  “No, no, you can’t come in!” Cherry stuttered. “You can’t!”

  “I got a perfect right to come in. Got to see that trap door, I ain’t satisfied with it. Now lemme in!”

  The girls crowded to the door in an unconscious surge, barring his way.

  “Lemme in!” he roared. “Want me to report ye to the landlord?”

  Cherry visibly shook. The janitor pushed his way into their living room. All eyes turned to Cherry, mutely signaling, “This is your responsibility, remember?” Cherry swallowed a large lump in her throat.

  “Mr.—uh—Mr.—couldn’t you come back next week?”

  “Naw, I couldn’t. The name is Sam. Out o’ my way.”

  He strode down the hall, hammer and screw drivers clanking. The trap door was back there. Only a little farther on was the back parlor with its freshly painted furniture. The door was open, the lights were on. If the janitor did not happen to see the blue furniture, the smell of paint would surely lead him in there.

  “Oh, why was I born?” Cherry moaned.

  Fingers pressed into her sides and back. “Follow him!” the girls hissed. “Do something!”

  “Yes, talk him out of it!”

  The girls forcibly pushed Cherry forward.

  “Remember, you thought this up,” Bertha intoned.

  At that moment the janitor turned around. They all held their breaths.

  “And furthermore!” he growled. “About the garbage!”

  Cherry’s voice trembled. “What about the garbage?”

  “Ye can’t just throw ’er out. Oh, no! It hasta be wrapped just so. In newspaper. Tied. The landlord says so. He’s very partic’lar. Very.”

  Gwen said tartly, “Is the landlord as bad as you?” Instantly the other girls made motions of distress and faces meaning: “Be quiet! What are you trying to do?”

  The janitor glared. “Look, Miss Smarty. If ye really want to know, I have a key to your place and I could come in any time I want to. But I’ve been polite about it, see? I ain’t a tyrant because I like it. I got my orders. The landlord is a hard man. If ye think I’m tough, ye should meet up with him sometime. I only wish it to ye.”

  Cherry abruptly sat down. “This is just dandy,” she murmured. But the other girls lifted her to her feet and shoved her forward again.

  “Paint!” The janitor let out a yelp. “Do I smell paint? Hey! What’s goin’ on here?”

  He looked to Cherry like a knotted, evil gnome as he stamped into the back parlor. Surveying the furniture, his back stiffened and he let out another yell.

  “Now ye’ve done it! Ye’ll have to buy a new dining-room set for sure! Ye’ll be lucky if the landlord don’t evict ye, besides!”

  Hands pushed Cherry down the hall. She turned around once to mumble and implore, but it did no good.

  “Sam—” she quavered. “Sam, listen—”

  “Didn’t I tell ye not to paint without permission of me? Didn’t I warn ye? Just wait till the landlord finds out! Oh, I pity ye, ye poor idiots! I wouldn’t want to face the landlord in your shoes! When he sees how ye broke the rules and defaced his property—”

  “We’ll pay,” Cherry choked out, “we’ll make it good—”

  “Ye got paint on the floor, besides! Not only ruinin’ the furniture, ye injured the building! Vandals!”

  “Sam, please, don’t tell the landlord yet—”

  “Ye might as well pack up. Ever see eviction papers? Or court orders for a big, fat bill? Ye’ll see ’em now!”

  The janitor knelt beside the trap door and started hammering with a vengeance. Each furious blow might have been meant for these undesirable tenants. Over the noise Cherry pleaded in vain. Sam shook his head and finally stalked out.

  “Ye’ll be hearin’ from the landlord,” he threw over his shoulder.

  In the terrible silence that followed, Josie spoke up:

  “Well. Guess I’ll read my letters now. Cherry promised to get us out of this, and I guess she will, all right.”

  The other girls, with black looks, retired amid mutters of “Eviction!” “Two or three hundred dollars for new furniture for the landlord!”

  Cherry took a sharp hold on her emotions and, with a wrench of will power, calmed down. She paced around the apartment, thinking. That awful janitor was not joking. The possibility of having to pay for the furniture, or even of being asked to move, was very real.

  Suddenly she stood still and exclaimed: “Now why didn’t I think of that before!”

  “Are you still thinking up things?” Gwen asked wearily. Her freckled face changed to alarm as Cherry snatched up her coat. “What are you up to now?”

  “Just a slight errand. Be right back.” She wanted to keep this secret, in case the answer was no.

  Cherry hastened out the front door and onto the street. The rain had ceased, the moon shone down on city chimneys, and she heard singing and the rumble of the subway underground. She felt relieved already.

  In a drugstore phone booth, she dialed Ann.

  “Ann, it’s me. You’ve been living in New York long enough to know the worst about janitors and landlords, haven’t you?—Well, Jack has, hasn’t he?—Maybe the two of you can help, because—”

  Ann’s chuckles punctuated Cherry’s earnest narrative.

  “All right,” Ann replied. “I’ll be down t
omorrow afternoon. In the meantime, give me your landlord’s name and address—what? Spell it.—All right, Jack and I will see what we can do. ’Bye.”

  Cherry almost skipped home. Ann and Jack might not be able to do anything except advise her. Still, even that would be a help. She could wait for tomorrow and Ann with an easier mind.

  Now Cherry pounced on her letters and settled down to read them. She opened the one from her mother first. Even the familiar handwriting and Hilton postmark were enough to chase away worries.

  “It’s unusually and wonderfully peaceful around our house now,” Mrs. Ames wrote. “With you away and Charles off to the university and Midge back in high school (thank goodness), I am at last getting the fall house cleaning accomplished. Velva—remember her?—is helping me. Dad complains that he gets chased from room to room. But the house will look nice when you come home for visits. I am sending you some more stockings, a chocolate mahogany cake, and Dad insists on putting this in, too.” “This” was a check. “He says it’s for a treat for the Spencer Club. Much love from us both—Mother.”

  Cherry ran around the apartment waving the check. “Hey! My dad is treating us!”

  “How very nice of him!”

  “Wonderful. To what?”

  “To anything we want, I guess,” Cherry said.

  “Curtains!” they chorused. Mai Lee said, “We feel like we’re residing in a goldfish bowl.”

  Cherry, much cheered by her letter from home, galloped back to read the rest of her letters. There was a note from Midge reporting that she was really looking out for her father, and Dr. Joe was looking better as a result. Charlie wrote that he was terrifically busy with his engineering courses, liked them fine, and had found many old friends on campus.

  “Best for the last,” Cherry murmured, and turned to the letter from Wade Cooper. The tall, brown-eyed, brown-skinned flier had been her pilot when Cherry was a flight nurse, serving overseas. Now he was back in Tucson, his home town, grounded with an auto repair business.

  “If I don’t see you soon, Cherry,” Wade wrote, “I am going to burst. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? Think I’ll come to New York and pay you a visit. That is, as soon as this danged business will pay my fare.”