by Anne Nesbet
“Jay!” said Gramma Hoopes.
“Oh!” said just about everybody else around that long table.
“It said in the paper, if you qualify to be an Aviation Cadet, you get paid money to study in that program! They’re building up the army, they say, but all the planes are no good unless there are pilots to fly them!”
A sigh from some of the other boarders.
“Then I’ll join up, too!” said Donald.
“Sorry, kid,” said Gusta’s uncle Jay. “Got to be twenty-one years of age and a high-school graduate. You fellows have a long wait ahead — too bad. Glad I scraped through and got my diploma! Not going to spend the whole of my life mucking out barns!”
“This is nonsense,” said Gramma Hoopes, and it was as if thunder had suddenly clapped its enormous hands. Everyone froze. “That’s what this is. Nonsense! Nobody on my watch is going up in the air in a tin can. Not when there’s real work to be done here on the ground.”
“But, Mother,” said Aunt Marion, and already those two words came closer to actually contradicting Gramma Hoopes than any in that house since Gusta had arrived. “That’s a real good career, isn’t it? With the airport here? And a salary even while they train him up? Wouldn’t that be a great opportunity for our Jay?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Gramma Hoopes, slapping the saltshaker down onto the table. “I won’t have a child of mine going up in the air! This is absurd on your part, Jay, and I won’t hear another word about it. Augusta!”
Gusta jumped in her seat.
“We had a surprise visit today while you were off at school.”
Gusta’s heart pounded out a quick, hopeful rhythm, even though her head knew better. Her papa was far, far away from here, and always getting farther. He was not going to show up in something as simple as a surprise visit — no, sorry, no.
“It was that eye doctor man, Mr. Bertmann,” said Gramma Hoopes. “In the company of Miss What’s-her-name, the Jefferson School nurse. Imagine that! He told me quite an interesting story about your eyes, Gusta.”
All up and down that long table, faces were turned toward Gusta. All up and down that long table, breaths were being held.
“Oh,” said Gusta.
“Indeed. He and that nurse came all the way out to the house here today, because they were wondering when we were going to act on the glasses the school says you urgently need. Apparently I should already know about this business? A letter was sent home with you?”
Gusta gulped.
“I didn’t think —” she started. “I mean, I’ve been getting along fine. . . .”
“Well!” said Gramma Hoopes. “Gladys seems to have let things slide on this score, down in the city. The nurse says you really can’t see well enough for school. I’m tempted to take that nice old Mr. Bertmann up on his offer.”
“What offer?” said Gusta.
“It seems that Mr. Bertmann is willing to give you a job,” said Gramma Hoopes. “As a way of your earning yourself a pair of these glasses they are saying you need so much.”
“But Gramma Hoopes, what kind of job?” said Gusta.
“Well, as far as that goes, tidying up his workshop, I imagine,” said Gramma Hoopes, and Gusta could tell from the way she said it, that this decision had already been made. “Making yourself generally useful. That sort of thing.”
The boys made a lot of clamor around the table. Apparently they all knew Mr. Bertmann, at least by sight. And (Gusta noticed) they didn’t seem to find him too terribly frightening. That was a relief.
Larry even went out of his way, after supper, to whisper into Gusta’s ear, “Wish I was you!”
“You do? Why, Larry?”
Because, to be scrupulously honest, even Gusta sometimes found it hard to be herself.
Larry gave her a smile that was just as gentle as you’d expect from a boy who could be trusted with eggs. “That Mr. Bertmann — he keeps pigeons!”
After school the next day, the rowdy band of kids heading back up Elm Street dropped Gusta off at the front stairs of the building on Main Street where Mr. Bertmann, the oculist, kept his shop (and, apparently, pigeons). “Good luck!” said Josie with an encouraging wave, and the boys echoed with their usual motley assortment of good wishes and waving hands.
The sign on the front of the building said OCULIST and FINE LENSES, PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMERAS, EYEGLASSES. Gusta peered at that long list carefully, and sure enough, it didn’t mention any pigeons. Could the boys have been pulling her leg?
She pulled herself together and knocked on the door. To her surprise an older lady with the red face of someone who has just been arguing opened the door and looked at Gusta. Or rather, overlooked her.
“I’m quite serious, Mr. Bertmann,” the woman was saying. “I’ve been checking the rolls, as part of my patriotic duty, you understand, and because my Molly is starting a Real Americans Club at school, and she came home asking how safe we really are, here in Springdale, in these days of doubt and uncertainty on the global stage. So I went and looked through the county records, and it really does seem to be the case that you, a person who has regular contact with schoolchildren around the issue of their eyesight and suchlike, are not just unregistered, but a foreigner and an alien.”
A man’s voice said something, but nothing that Gusta could hear properly.
“Now really, Mr. Bertmann,” said the angry woman. “It’s very serious business, to be an unregistered alien in York County in 1941 — Oh, now then, who are you?” she added, having almost run right over Gusta on the threshold. That lady must not have heard Gusta’s knock at all.
“Oh, sorry,” said Gusta. “I’m just Gusta. I’m here for Mr. Bertmann. My grandmother sent me —”
“Well, I was just leaving, little girl,” said the woman icily. “And I recommend you do the same, unless doing business with aliens doesn’t trouble your conscience. You mark my words, Mr. Bertmann!”
She flung the last phrase behind her the way you might fling an apple core over your shoulder, and then stalked out the front door and down the walk. Gusta stood well to the side, so as not to be accidentally bowled over.
“Hmph!” said another voice from inside. “Oh, and look at this: it’s the little girl with that most intriguing name, the little Neubronner! Come in, little Neubronner! Come in, so we can get acquainted and get to work.”
Gusta went in. It was a very interesting space to be entering — everywhere she looked she saw complicated blurry objects and mechanisms that looked like they would be quite fascinating to look at, closer up, or to explore with your hands. Gusta had very perceptive hands. But she kept them strictly plastered to her sides now, trying to be polite.
“My grandmother tells me you might, um, have something I can do. . . .” she said, and then those words turned out to be a dead end. “Because of the eyeglasses, I mean,” she added. And then she remembered the main thing: “I mean, thank you.”
“Well, now, child, you are most welcome, and I’m very happy to say that I have some equipment here — courtesy of the United States Army, young lady — that will make getting you the proper eyeglasses much less of a chore. Just look at this wonderful mechanism!”
Now that she had been officially invited, she went very close to look. It was an extraordinary thing that he was tapping with such enthusiasm just now: a super-complicated mechanical mask of some kind, suspended by metal arms in the air, with what looked like a dozen moving pieces, round bits of glass and dials of various kinds.
“What kind of a machine is that?” she said. She couldn’t help feeling somewhat suspicious. “What does it do?”
“It will help us diagnose what’s going on with your eyes. They are recruiting Aviation Cadets, and to fly a plane, young lady, you need the sharpest possible eyes.”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think I ever want to fly a plane,” said Gusta. She was trying to be polite about all of this. “And I’m too young to join the army, so why do they care about my eyes?”
&nb
sp; The oculist laughed.
“They do not care! You are entirely right about that. They are just borrowing my space here and my various tools and tables; they will house this machine with me for a while, run the local recruits through their paces, find their new crop of Aviation Cadets, and then move on somewhere else. But meanwhile, we can use this astonishing mechanism to see what kind of lenses your eyes require. Step over here now, Augusta Neubronner. I will have to adjust the height of our machine, but as you can see, it’s designed to be flexible.”
The crazy-looking mechanical mask hung at the end of a metal boom that could be raised or lowered to match the heights of all sorts of people.
Gusta stepped forward, but not without trepidation. It was such a strange device to put one’s face up into the middle of. She tried to match her eyes to the glass holes, and Mr. Bertmann fiddled with the dials and the joints between the halves of the mask until finally she had one eye looking through one tiny glass window and the other eye looking through the other. It was a little like putting glass bandages on, though, because she could actually see nothing.
“So, child, now the fun begins,” said Mr. Bertmann, and he turned a knob of some kind so that the lens in front of Gusta’s right eye went completely black.
He twisted more knobs.
“This is an amazing machine,” he said. “We will start by examining your left eye. Look at the eye chart over there now, and tell me, Augusta, which of these images is clearer, number one . . . or number two?”
“What chart?” said Gusta.
“Ah!” said Mr. Bertmann, fiddling with the dials. “Now this. Try this: number one . . . or number two?”
This time there was a smear of darker gray just visible against that blurred background of nothing in the second version of the little window, so she said, “Number two?”
And it went on that way for a very long time indeed, with Mr. Bertmann fussing with lenses and mechanisms and then making little notes in his notebook, while blurry letters, then not-so-blurry letters, then sometimes letters that looked so definitely themselves that it was like Mr. Bertmann had added a microscope to his machine appeared first in the left-hand eyepiece, and then in the right-hand lens.
“Good job, Miss Augusta Neubronner,” he said finally, moving the machine away.
“It’s quite some machine, Mr. Bertmann,” she said, just to be polite. “What did it tell you about my eyes?”
Mr. Bertmann laughed.
“That they are complicated eyes indeed! But we live in modern times, and so we can order very complicated eyeglasses now, to match them. It is my hope that those complicated eyes of yours will see more clearly then.”
“Oh,” she said. Complicated eyeglasses sounded like expensive eyeglasses. “And Mr. Bertmann, can you tell me something? How much will they cost, the eyeglasses?”
She was determined not to skitter away from the topic of money. Her papa was so scornful of people who skittered away. It was his passion, making everyone see how it all worked, the mechanisms that turned actual human effort into stuff and into money. Sometimes he gave whole speeches at the dinner table about the price of things, the prices you saw, in dollars and cents, and the prices you did not see, the sweat and labor of the people who had worked in the factory that made the plates you ate off, the farmers who had raised the chicken whose drumstick you were maybe about to sink your teeth into, who had sold that chicken for almost nothing to someone else, who eventually brought it to the city and sold it to Gladys Neubronner or to her daughter, Augusta, sent to the butcher with a dollar and a basket. “The shoes on your feet, Augusta! What did you think, that they appear in the world by magic? No! Somewhere someone cut out that leather, stamped that pattern into the sole — and how much do you think he was paid for that work?”
There was no shame in talking about the price of things. And yet now here Gusta was, writhing a little on the inside and trying with all her might not to let the writhing show.
“You see, Mr. Bertmann, the thing about these eyeglasses,” she said, “is that I’ve done pretty much perfectly fine without them so far. It does seem an awful waste of money, buying glasses for someone who has been getting along all right without them, all this time.”
“Well, now, no,” said Mr. Bertmann. “Really, no. I’m afraid there is no question about the spectacles. In your case they are a necessity, an absolute necessity. And I do not speak lightly of necessity. Of course it’s a shame that your prescription is so complex — I will have to order the lenses especially, and that is what makes the eyeglasses in your case more expensive. But you are not to worry: we have a business arrangement, don’t we? See, I am taking this page in my ledger book, and I am making a little document for our records.”
He turned the page in his book and drew a line neatly across the top, using a very sharp pencil and a ruler. Then on the line, he wrote her name: Augusta Hoopes Neubronner. Gusta leaned closer to look. Mr. Bertmann’s handwriting struck her as very strange: more zigzaggy than ordinary writing, somehow. If Gusta had not known those words he was writing must be her own name, she would never have recognized it there.
“Six seventy-five,” said Mr. Bertmann, “which from experience I’m afraid will be the cost of eyeglasses such as these. That comes to twenty-seven hours of labor at twenty-five cents an hour. Is my math correct?”
Gusta moved the numbers around in her head, checking them.
“Yes,” she said. “But —”
And here it was her father’s voice she suddenly found herself channeling, all the stories he had told in all the places they had lived. She tried to stand up straight and look like she knew what she was about.
“It’s just that — shouldn’t that be thirty cents an hour, Mr. Bertmann?”
“However so?” said the oculist. He seemed more than a little taken aback.
“Because there is a minimum wage now in this country,” said Gusta. “I know there is, and I know it used to be twenty-five cents, but they raised it to thirty cents more than a year ago.” Then she thought twice and added, to give him the benefit of the doubt, “But maybe you hadn’t heard yet. About the change.”
She could not read Mr. Bertmann’s face, of course. He wasn’t quite close enough for that. For a moment she was afraid he was about to shout at her, and she planted her feet very firmly on the plank floor of his office, ready to withstand whatever needed to be withstood — because Gusta’s father was adamant about this: that if a worker did not stand up for his rights, he brought down not just himself, but everyone else who had to work to earn his bread — and then Mr. Bertmann surprised her by breaking into a laugh. He laughed so long and so heartily, in fact, that he had to wipe tears from his eyes with his handkerchief.
“What a strange child you are!” he said. “Strange, strange child! A — what did you call it?— minimum wage? For a child who does a few errands for an old oculist! You are spinning stories, but —”
Fortunately he got to the but before Gusta even had time to get properly mad.
“But I have also been a rouser of the rabble in my time, and so I take off my hat to you, Miss Neubronner.” (He did not actually take off his hat, because he wasn’t wearing one.) “I take my hat off to you, and I am willing to raise your salary to this absurdly high amount that a full-grown man doing full-grown work might expect, even though you are an untrained child on behalf of whom I am trying to do a kindness. Thirty cents I will account to you for every hour. In which case, you owe me . . . how many hours? Please do the math.”
Gusta noticed her hands were shaking a little, but she ignored the tremor and moved more numbers around in her head. “Twenty-three hours,” she said, and to show she was reasonable, she added: “I rounded up.”
“From what strange place has this child come?” Mr. Bertmann asked of the room in general, and he shook his head.
He started making a list on the ledger paper.
“So. For this princely sum, you will have the following duties: dusting — th
at is easy and dull, to start with, but you’ll find I don’t care for dust and will see very instantly if you are shirking this task; note-taking, if you have a neat hand; perhaps some help with accounts, if I find your mathematical skills sufficient; and caring for my pigeons.”
“Oh!” said Gusta, because he had mentioned the pigeons!
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “It is my cherished hobby, raising pigeons. Come now, and I’ll introduce you to your charges.”
The pigeons had their own private room upstairs, where they lived in relative luxury, for pigeons. One of the windows had been fitted with a clever swinging board that let them in, but not out.
Their names were Mabel, Bella, Nelly, and Ruth. Mabel and Bella had interesting mottled patterns to their feathers (Bella with splotches of darker brown here and there); Nelly was almost entirely white, like a dove in a church picture; and Ruth had ash-colored feathers and a spark of independence burning in her eye.
“My beauties. My talented ones,” said Mr. Bertmann. “They are very special pigeons.”
“Yes,” said Gusta, who could see right away that they were different from the pigeons she had met before, fluttering raggedly in the streets of, for instance, New York.
“Not merely because they are beautiful,” he added. “They are special because they are highly trained adventurers. Partners in scientific inquiry!”
He showed her how they could carry little metal tubes attached to their legs, bringing messages home from the woods. That was the proper term for them, he said: carrier pigeons.
“Who are the messages from?” asked Gusta.
“Well, in fact,” said Mr. Bertmann, “as of now, they are just messages from me to myself. Disappointing, no? Mostly I don’t even bother to write out the words, because I know them so well in my mind. But it is all a part of their long-term training.”
“Oh,” said Gusta, petting the regal backs of Mabel and Bella. Ruth was still wary of her and kept herself just out of reach.