by Anne Nesbet
And then some other light came into his eyes, and he actually pounced forward like a wild thing and grabbed a handful of Gusta’s sweater.
“Wait — what did you say your name was, girl?”
“Gusta, come away, quick!” gasped Bess, and she gave Gusta a surprisingly fierce pull, considering how small a person she was. There was a small but awful sound of wool threads tearing, and then Gusta and Bess were falling back through Mr. Kendall’s door, bumping into the entirely shocked figure of his secretary, who must have leaped up from her chair once he started shouting like that, and, most of all, turning to flee for real and serious.
Until they were up the hill from the mill, back as high as the main road, they focused only on running away, fast as fast, and not one bit on figuring out what had just gone wrong inside that office.
“Oh, Gusta!” said Bess finally, holding her hand to her side as if she had a pretty terrible stitch. “What did we just do? Oh, it’s all my fault!”
“Your fault!” said Gusta. “I don’t think so. That man’s horrible! He doesn’t even make any sense! What was he even talking about, some sort of agreement with Aunt Marion and Gramma? Oh!”
She had finally started to add things up.
“Bess,” she said. “Oh, dear. You know who’s fourteen. Oh, Bess: it’s got to be Josie. Miss Marion’s child, he said. He was talking about Josie. He said, ‘the one they say is mine.’ ”
“Yes,” said Bess, and she looked pale from the seriousness of the thought that she was, like Gusta herself, beginning to have. “Oh, but no. What are you saying? It can’t be. And look what that awful, awful man did to your sweater!”
Gusta was down a button and a bunch of threads — and she hadn’t even noticed.
Her mind was filled with this terrible new version of everything she thought she knew about the world, this rewriting of all the family history, this catastrophic, lightning-bolt-out-of-the-sky piece of new information.
Josie, cheerful Josie, the first baby taken into the Hoopes Home, was apparently not actually an orphan after all.
We can’t tell her,” said Bess. “We can’t say anything. Oh, but we can’t not tell her! Gusta, what do we do?”
They couldn’t figure out at all what they should do.
And worse than Josie, even, was Gramma Hoopes. What were they supposed to say to Gramma Hoopes?
Then Gusta kicked at the side of the road.
“Makes me so mad,” she said. “All of it.”
“That horrible man,” said Bess.
Then they wrestled with it some more, and the horribleness of Mr. Kendall, and the stickiness of the dilemma they were trapped in just got worse-feeling and worse-feeling.
“Oh, Gusta, just imagine: that horrible man is her father!” said Bess.
It was an awful thought.
“And then — Aunt Marion,” said Gusta.
The girls stared at each other, full of wild-eyed amazement.
Imagine that! Josie had grown up all these years thinking she had nobody! Thinking she had just been dumped on the porch of the Hoopes Home as a baby, that there was no one in the whole world who cared about her in particular, and all the while . . .
“How could you do that, though?” asked Bess in tender wonder. “How could you live under the same roof as your own daughter, and pretend you weren’t related in the slightest? Never even let her know?”
“Guess they thought they couldn’t let anyone know,” said Gusta. “A baby is an awfully big sort of secret.”
They had gotten back as far as the high school, where there was the faintest sound of singing. One of the choruses must still be rehearsing inside.
Bess shivered. “Gusta, I’m afraid I think I’m going to hide under my bed or something forever,” she said. “I wish I didn’t know any secrets, and I don’t want to have to be telling anyone or not telling anyone. So I’m just going to hide. But what are you going to do?”
And suddenly Gusta knew the answer to that question.
“I’m going in there,” she said, waving in the direction of the high-school door.
“Oh, Gusta, no!” said Bess. “You’re not going to just walk up to Josie and tell her!”
Gusta shook her head. “Nothing like that. I’m going to go talk to Miss Kendall, if I can catch her.”
“You’re not!” said Bess in horror. “You can’t. You can’t say a word about anything to Miss Kendall. That would be — that would be —”
“It’s not about that,” said Gusta. Inside she had become cold, like the rivers of ice Miss Hatch said ran across the far northern parts of the world. “It’s about the French horn.”
Now Bess was horrified in a different way.
“But how can you even think about music at a time like now?” she said, and she wiped her leaky eyes on her sleeve. “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I don’t know what to do.”
“Go on home, Bess,” said Gusta, with the miserable cold rivering its way through her muscles and her veins. “You don’t have to worry about me. I just have to do what I can to make things right.”
And she turned away from Bess and marched up the stairs and through the front door of the high school.
It was obvious what she had to do now, since the universe hadn’t been willing to bend itself in their favor. Mr. Kendall wasn’t going to help Uncle Charlie. Even the union wasn’t going to help Uncle Charlie! So it was up to her.
She hadn’t found a Wish anywhere. She couldn’t stop the wider horror of the war or even call her own papa home, even though every atom of her being longed to be able to reach out and put the tip of an index finger on the back of her papa’s hand again, just to know that he really was actually there.
(And her father used to glance down when she did that. “Testing your papa, little thingling, to see if he’s real?” His voice was soft when he said that, like the smudged lines of his face, a laughing voice that was also sad. She loved that sad-amused voice of his, the one that came out into the world so very rarely and that she thought of as somehow especially hers.)
But here was the thing about Gusta’s papa, who had so suddenly vanished far beyond the reach of her index finger: her papa had taught her that whatever you can do to put things right in the world, you really must do.
And that’s why Gusta was now going in through the high-school doors and trotting down the main hall as quickly and quietly as she could.
Gusta knew the high-school building pretty well by now, knew where the music room was and where the high-school students tended not to go, on their way from the music room to the outside world. So she did a very competent job of sneaking down the long main hall, ducking into a shadowy doorway when the chorus members came out of their practice session in a laughing, chatting bunch. Josie herself was in that crowd, only a few feet away from where Gusta was shrinking into a corner, but Josie never saw her. And then, with the coast cleared, Gusta slipped in through the music room door.
Miss Kendall looked up in surprise. She was tidying a stack of music on her desk.
“Gusta! Have you mixed up your dates, dear? Concert’s not until tomorrow, don’t you remember?”
“Miss Kendall,” Gusta started right in, before her words could get shut down by the rivers of ice in her. “It’s about my French horn, how you said you wanted to buy it, you know. For that hundred dollars.”
“What is this, Gusta?” said Miss Kendall. “Good heavens! You look so worried, dear child. Please do sit down. And explain to me, please, what it is you’re saying.”
“The thing is, my Uncle Charlie needs an operation to fix his hand. And I know you need a horn, not just when I play it for a special concert like the one we’re playing here tomorrow, but for always. So it’s like my mama said in her note, ‘if need arises,’ and I guess it has. Arisen. The need.”
Miss Kendall was silent now, simply flabbergasted, probably.
Gusta had almost never said so many words in a row to a teacher, ever. But she was tryin
g to do one right thing, after all the things that had gone so wrong.
“So I was wondering,” said Gusta. “If I give you the horn tomorrow, after the concert — would you be able to, to give me that money? Could you maybe bring the money along to the concert?”
There was a silent moment, in which Gusta got colder and colder inside, and then Miss Kendall said, sounding a little doubtful, “Why, yes, of course, Gusta. I would be very pleased indeed to buy that horn from you, if that’s what you really want to do. But are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? Because you look —”
“Thank you, Miss Kendall,” said Gusta, already turning to flee. “I’m sorry. I promise I’ll hand the horn over tomorrow. But I’ve got to go now. Good-bye.”
Her horn! Her brass seashell deep singing-voiced horn!
It’s done now, she thought as she fled the school. It’s done. I’ve done one right thing.
And her heart broke and broke and broke.
Gusta had no idea what she was going to say to Gramma Hoopes, though, until she was coming through the door of the Hoopes Home and could hear Aunt Marion frying up potatoes in the kitchen, and Josie getting the boys (minus Thomas, who was down with influenza) organized for supper, and little Delphine singing “ashes, ashes, all fall down.”
Then she realized, all at once, that there was something that she couldn’t do.
She couldn’t simply add all these new secrets to the ones that were already weighing her down. It reminded her of one of her mother’s sayings, about how a camel can carry just about anything, but even for the camel there’s some point where the straws become too heavy, and the poor beast’s back just snaps right in two like a twig. Or, probably, sags slowly toward the ground and makes the camel reluctant to push on through the porch door and into that noisy, wonderful house.
She was going to have to let some of these secrets out into the world.
She started her new career as a reckless truth-teller by fibbing, however: she murmured something to Aunt Marion about how she wasn’t feeling very well and wanted to lie down instead of eating supper. And then she lay on her cot and faced the dim wall and tried not to think too much, until she heard the boys (other than Thomas) trickling back to their rooms and the voices downstairs of Josie and Aunt Marion, busy with the dishes. Gramma Hoopes liked to have a quiet half hour to herself after supper, which she claimed was for mending — so this was Gusta’s best chance.
She sat up on her bed, feeling like someone doomed to having to be brave, which is not the same thing as actually feeling brave. Her feet were a little numb, and she kept wiping her hands on her skirt, but her hands in fact were perfectly dry.
Gusta snuck down the stairs and down the back hall and slipped in through the door of her grandmother’s room. Her grandmother was sitting at her desk; she had her funny reading glasses on and a sheet of paper in her hand.
“Gusta!” said Gramma Hoopes in surprise. “Are you ill, too, girl? If you are, you shouldn’t be floating around the house like this. Come here and let me feel your forehead.”
The forehead made her grandmother frown a little.
“Well! You’re a tad warm, but not exactly burning up, that’s one good thing. Your face is strange, though. You come sit down here.”
She had another chair right by the desk. Sometimes she and Aunt Marion did accounts together in this room.
“I was just reading a letter from your mother,” said Gramma Hoopes. “She’s wondering how you’re getting on. I’d say, pretty well, don’t you think? Wait, now, Augusta, what in heaven’s name is wrong with you, child?”
Whatever Gusta’s inner plan had counted on, for how this conversation might go, it had not included Gusta bursting into tears. But that’s what she did now anyway.
For a minute or so, she just sobbed and sobbed, while her grandmother stroked her arm and made astonishingly kind noises for someone as hard-boiled as Gusta’s grandmother.
“Feeling homesick, are you, after all?” said her grandmother. “I guess that’s the normal way of things.”
That made Gusta pull herself together again, because she felt how easily she could just slip away from the truth toward something more comfortable. And if she did that she would be like the camel, only even worse: a pathetic sort of camel loading straws right onto his own shaky back, and that was not what she was here to do.
“Gramma Hoopes,” she said, with some hiccups. “I’m so sorry. I only wanted to try to help. And now I’ve gone and made Mr. Kendall mad —”
“Mr. Kendall!” said her grandmother in an entirely different tone of voice. “What does he have to with anything?”
“It was against the law, what he did to Bess’s papa,” said Gusta. “I thought, I mean, I thought he should know, that the mill should pay the doctors —”
“We leave the Kendalls alone,” said Gramma Hoopes, firm as firm. “You’re not so new around here you don’t know that, are you, Augusta?”
There was no more comfortable patting of Gusta’s arm, that was for sure.
“I know that,” said Gusta miserably. “I knew that. But you see, I didn’t know why.”
The next ten seconds were silent, and maybe the most uncomfortable ten seconds Gusta had ever spent. Probably there were worse seconds far off in the future waiting for her, but these ten right here were pretty bad.
“And now you will explain,” said Gramma Hoopes finally. Her voice had a layer of ice to it now. “What exactly have you gone and done?”
So Gusta told her.
She left out Bess as much as she could, because she remembered just in time that although Gusta might be sent away back to New York City, at least she had a mother there to take her in, even if that mother would have to leave her rooming house and find some other place for them to live if Gusta showed up in disgrace. But Bess had nowhere else to go. So Gusta told the story, as much as possible, without Bess in it. Of course it was Bess whose father had the mangled hand and the medical bills, but Gusta focused on how it had been her, Gusta’s, idea, to march on down to the Kendall Mills, and to ask to speak to Mr. Kendall, and then to go into his office, just to be yelled at so strangely, with all the threats about deals and bargains, and all the horrible description of what Gusta should tell her grandmother and her Aunt Marion. And of course she also left out the part about agreeing to sell her French horn to Miss Kendall, because that was too hard to be said aloud.
And at the end Gusta said again, “I’m sorry. I meant to help, not ruin things.”
She looked up at her grandmother, and the thing about having been so upset, and having cried some, is that even through glasses the world looks almost as blurry as it used to, back before you had any glasses.
“Augusta!” said her grandmother, and Gusta couldn’t even tell from her voice exactly how mad she was. Plenty angry — and also something else, both at once. “You are a heedless girl. Heedless and thoughtless and reckless. Comes from your father’s side, I guess.”
Gusta felt a tiny thread of resentment leap up in her at that, on her papa’s behalf, but she forced herself to stay quiet, to keep her eyes on the floorboards and simply listen. She deserved all those words, every sharp edge of them.
“What were you thinking? Now Josie will suffer, and she’s a good girl and doesn’t deserve it, and your Aunt Marion will suffer, for having tried to do the right thing, mind you — and yes, you and I will suffer, too, all because you —”
“I’ll go pack,” said Gusta, interrupting. Suddenly she just couldn’t bear it anymore, the slow slipping down this slope that would end up, sure as sure, with her on another bus, all on her own. She’d rather it was all over and done with. She’d rather be already gone. “I can take the bus home tomorrow.”
It became more a hiccup than a sentence, halfway through.
“Gusta, what is this nonsense?” said her grandmother. “The bus has nothing to do with anything. You’ve done something harmful and foolish — yes, you have — even if you didn’t mean to, and now we’ll
have to face the consequences, best we can. That doesn’t mean I put my granddaughter on a bus!”
Those ten seconds were also memorable. Gusta’s ears heard those words. Her brain rolled them around and around, thinking about them. Her heart looked up for a moment, feeling a change in the wind.
“Do you have absolutely no sense in your head at all, girl? Your Aunt Marion did something foolish long ago. Did we put her on a bus on her own back then? No, we did not. We did our best. We worked it out. And our Josie! Did we put that little baby on a bus? Of course not. Think a little, why don’t you! For all that you’re a good scholar, as the teacher tells me, sometimes you are as dense as a potato, Augusta Hoopes Neubronner. Now, you’ve messed up. Yes, you have. But don’t you understand yet? We’ll have to make our way through. Nobody gets put on any bus all by herself. Because you know what, Gusta? We Hoopeses are a family that does not send our own away. And for heaven’s sake, whatever happened to your sweater?”
“When he got mad,” said Gusta. “Mr. Kendall, he — I lost a button.”
Her grandmother actually slapped the desk with her hand.
“That selfish, tiresome, poisonous man!” she said. “He’s been lording it over us long enough. I thought I was doing right by Josie, not to cut her off from that little bit of money he sent over, all anonymous like, but I will tell you honestly, a great part of me will be glad to be done with him. Though you’ve still been a bad and reckless child, Gusta, and don’t you forget it. And listen hard: I won’t have you saying a word to Josie, not right away. Your Aunt Marion and I will have to be the ones who explain things to her. I’m trusting you to be sensible about that, for once.”
Her gramma’s fingers were busy examining the place where the button was missing, and the buttons below.
“That’s a shame, though, the lost button. Your mother did a nice job on this sweater. Well, hand it over, and I’ll see what I can do.”
It was the opposite of packing her bags, obviously. Gusta slipped out of her sweater and put it on her grandmother’s table, while Gramma Hoopes took a wooden box out from a drawer in her desk. Inside was a great jumble of buttons, all kinds of buttons.