“Here,” she said, shoving the sled at Stan and locking the door behind him. “Have fun,” she yelled.
The house was quiet, save for the furnace wheezing through the floor vents. Too quiet. Ellie slipped on Mom’s coverall apron and clicked on the kitchen radio. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” blasted into the room. Getting out the vegetable peeler, she whacked at the carrots in time to the music. But even the Andrews Sisters didn’t cheer her up.
The snow fell thicker and faster. Across the alley, she could barely see the Gandecks’ garage. She hoped that at least her sled was having a good time.
“And now, news from the war front,” a voice boomed from the radio.
“Oh no you don’t.” Ellie snapped it off. The only news she wanted to hear was that the war was over.
Putting the vegetables on to boil, she went upstairs. She decided to change clothes, knit Jimmy’s Christmas scarf, and maybe do some homework. But Jimmy’s closed door was like a blow to the head. Jimmy had never closed his door.
Without thinking, she put her hand on the doorknob to Toots’s…no – Jimmy’s – room. Just this once. She wanted to see his things. Pretend he was home.
Ellie pushed open the door.
The iron bedstead and chenille spread, the maple dresser and battered desk were still there. White walls, patched window shades, and the leaky spot on the ceiling that looked like the Liberty Bell. All the same.
But where were the model airplanes? Jimmy’s baseball glove, his Pirates pennant? Ellie knew he had taken his Lana picture with him, but where was the clay ashtray she made for him in first grade? He kept it on his dresser to hold pocket change. Toots better not have thrown it out!
A wilderness of boxes and bottles had replaced Lana and the ashtray on the dresser. Evening in Paris perfume. Tussy deodorant. Wave-set. Bobby pins scattered here and there. Hair crimpers with cruel-looking teeth.
The room even smelled different. Jimmy’s room had smelled like Vitalis and dirty socks. Now it reeked of Evening in Paris and the smoky-factory smell of Toots’s overalls flung across the bed.
Ellie jerked open a dresser drawer, looking for the ashtray. There, in a tangle of undies and bobby socks, was a letter addressed to Miss Agnes Guilfoyle. Agnes? Oh, right. Toots’s real name. From a Private Max Johnson, Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Jimmy’s friend. The envelope was neatly slit down the side.
Something hard and ugly rose in Ellie’s chest.
She wanted to read this letter from Max Johnson.
Only a real creep would read another person’s mail. But Toots deserves it! Ellie thought. She’s acting like she belongs here!
Ellie’s hand shook as she prised open the tissue-thin envelope and…
Keys jingled in a lock, and the front door banged open.
“Helloooo,” Aunt Toots carolled from downstairs.
Ellie dropped the envelope back in the drawer, as if she’d been scorched.
“Anybody home? Ellie? Sal?”
Ellie quickly shut the dresser drawer and scurried from the room, silently closing the door behind her. She met Aunt Toots on the stair landing.
“The vegetables are boiling,” Ellie said in a guilty rush.
“Swell!” Toots boomed, hefting a butcher’s parcel. “Beef stew tonight! It ain’t filet mignon, but it ain’t horsemeat, neither. These days…”
“…folks take what they can get,” Ellie and Aunt Toots finished together. “Owe you a nickel,” they both said, laughing.
Ellie’s heart warmed for a minute, as her aunt disappeared downstairs. Maybe Jimmy was right about Toots – she was a good egg after all.
Ellie could hear Toots singing “Pistol Packin’ Mama”, slamming cupboard doors and rattling pots and pans. “I tell you, kiddo,” she said as Ellie came to the kitchen door, “I thought I’d be lonesome here, but you know what? I ain’t homesick a bit.”
Ellie remembered what Jimmy had written in his letter about missing snow. She knew that he was homesick, and the warmth in Ellie’s heart vanished as fast as it had kindled.
“Yes, ma’am, I am fittin’ in just fine!” said Toots, chopping up the stew beef.
So Toots thought she was fitting in fine, did she? Ellie watched the knife flash through the meat and she knew one thing for dead sure. The next time she was in the house alone, she would read that letter from Private Max Johnson.
CHAPTER NINE
At supper one night, a week before Thanksgiving, Ellie’s mother dropped the bombshell.
“What do you mean we aren’t having Thanksgiving this year?” Ellie stared at her mother. “Are you kidding?”
“Ellie, please don’t talk with your mouth full. More turnips, anyone?” Mom passed the bowl to Pop as if she had said something ordinary, like “Today is Tuesday”.
“The plants are staying open on Thanksgiving,” Pop said, scraping the last of the mashed turnips onto his plate. “A holiday meal is just too much to ask of your mother, now that she’s working.”
“Not only that,” Mom added, “but I checked on the price of turkey at Hales’ the other day. Do you know they want fifty-nine cents a pound for a turkey? We can’t afford to pay that kind of money for a Thanksgiving turkey, then turn around and do it again in a couple of weeks for Christmas as well.”
Ellie played with her mashed turnips, hiding them under the stringy stewed chicken she also wasn’t going to eat. “We can help, me and Sal can.” But even as she said it, she knew Pop was right.
“Huh!” snorted Sal. “You know how to cook a turkey? Or are you planning to serve salmon pea wiggle?”
“No, tomato aspic,” Ellie shot back.
“Girls! Enough!” said Pop, thumping his knife handle on the table.
“We’ll do better for Christmas,” Mom promised. “We’ll save up our rations and have a feast. The plant is paying overtime to work Christmas, but Toots and I have already decided to take the day off. I’ll have time to cook. It will be like old times.”
And Jimmy will be home.
What’s so great about Thanksgiving? Ellie said to herself over and over. When she saw the handprint turkeys in the kindergarten room windows. When they sang “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” in assembly. After all, it was just a big dinner where everybody ate too much and the grown-ups told boring stories about the Good Old Days. Besides, who wanted to celebrate without Jimmy?
Ellie sat at her school desk the day before the holiday, struggling with her arithmetic homework. Homework! On Thanksgiving!
“You may have this last hour to do your homework or read,” Miss Granberry had said with a rare, tiny smile. Easy enough for her to smile, Ellie thought as she erased problem four for the fifth time. Miss Granberry has the answers in the back of her book!
Laughter floated up the hall. All around Room Seven, other classes were having parties. Miss Granberry crossed the room and closed the door.
Ellie’s pencil lead snapped. Good! An excuse to get up.
As she ground the sharpener handle round and round, Ellie studied the photographs on the bulletin board. Pictures of men and women, all in uniform. Some were Miss Granberry’s former students. Some were relatives of sixth graders. A sort of Honour Wall of service men and women. It was the first time Ellie had looked at them. Really looked at them.
Closest to her, all four Gandeck boys grinned in a colour snapshot taken on their front porch, caps cocked, arms slung across each other’s shoulders. Ellie could almost hear them saying, “Lemme at that lousy Hitler. I’ll punch his lights out! Tojo and Mussolini, too!”
Next to the Gandecks, a photo-booth picture. The face under the Army cap looked familiar. She leaned in for a better look. Big ears, funny round chin, firm mouth. Of course! That was Jellyneck’s oldest brother, Orrie, who had been their paperboy.
“If there’s one good thing about the war,” Pop said, “it’s that my paper finally lands on the porch. Hope that Jelinek kid aims better with a rifle than he did with my Post-Gazette.”
All kinds of pic
tures covered the wall. Newspaper clippings, black-and-white snapshots, even a few formal portraits in uniform, with the colour tinted in. Sailors, soldiers and nurses. WAVES and WACs and SPARs. Army and Navy and Marines. Army Air Force. Even some Coast Guard and Merchant Marine uniforms. Some of the faces smiled, their eyes holding a secret joke. “Can you believe I’m in a war?” they seemed to say. Other faces were solemn, eyes serious, as if seeing a terrible future. Their eyes said “Can you believe I’m in a war?” too, but not in a joking way.
Some pictures had tiny gold stars in the lower right hand corners. Down near the chalk rail, Bill Schmidt with a gold star. Ellie squinted at Miss Granberry’s old-fashioned, spidery script, inked across the margin. Bill Schmidt. Lost at sea, USS Juneau, November 1942.
Above Bill, a stocky boy in an Army uniform with a wide smile, two beagles at his feet. Sy Hart. Missing, presumed dead, Winter 1943. Somewhere in the Pacific. Gold star.
Next to Sy, another sailor leaned against a car, foot on the running board, holding a girl in a tight sweater close to his side. Otis Bennett. Lost at sea, Battle of Savo Island, August 1942. Gold star.
Beneath him, Sean O’Toole. Missing, somewhere over France. Presumed dead. Spring 1942. Sean O’Toole, who had sat in her desk…how many years ago? As Ellie stared at the picture, the dashing young man with the Clark Gable moustache and leather flying jacket dissolved. In his place, a kid. A kid with freckles and a snaggly toothed smile, in a jersey and corduroys. He probably had marbles in his pocket, like Stan. Maybe a peashooter, too.
“Eleanor, your pencil is sufficiently sharpened.” Miss Granberry’s voice crackled in her ear. “Take your seat, please.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ellie. The classroom floor seemed to slant upwards and her head buzzed. Somewhere between the pencil sharpener and her desk, the war became real for Ellie. The names she heard on the radio each night – Midway, Savo Island, Guadalcanal – were now real places. Places where Bill, Sy, Otis and Sean had disappeared or died.
Ellie hadn’t brought in a picture of Jimmy. He hadn’t sent her one of him in uniform. Maybe the war would be over before he did.
Until then, he was safe in South Carolina, and not in a Pacific jungle like Buddy Gandeck or on a ship in the North Atlantic or a plane “somewhere over France”.
As she wobbled back to her seat, Ellie knew how you could have Thanksgiving without turkey and pie.
It was as simple as knowing your brother was safe.
And that the star on your family’s service flag was blue.
Not gold.
CHAPTER TEN
Ellie couldn’t wait for school to start after the Thanksgiving-That-Wasn’t. The calendar said November, but it couldn’t fool Ellie. The Monday after Thanksgiving meant the beginning of the Christmas season.
The Macken Street storekeepers wrote “Merry Christmas” and “Season’s Greetings” on their windows with white shoe polish. Maybe to disguise the bare displays, Ellie decided. Sugar and gas weren’t the only things being rationed. So were rubber and metal of all kinds – and most toys were made of rubber or metal. I’m really too old for toys, Ellie reminded herself.
The Christmas season also meant that Mr. Corsiglia hung a loudspeaker outside the grocery so he could share his collection of Bing Crosby Christmas songs with the neighbourhood. Whether they wanted to share them or not.
“If I hear Bing Crosby sing ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ one more time, I’ll go wacky,” said Ellie. She and Stan leaned against the wide window sills of Room Seven, watching new snow fall on the old snow, which had fallen on the slushy first snow.
“What’s the matter?” Stan unwrapped his egg-salad sandwich. “You don’t like Bing? Bub-bub-ba-boo,” he sang, imitating Bing Crosby’s familiar song phrase.
Ellie didn’t know how to explain that the song held both promise and disappointment for her holiday. So she didn’t try.
“Nah, it’s not Bing,” Ellie said, looking at her own sandwich with distaste. “It’s my lunch. Soy loaf. Sal made meat loaf without any meat, and a load of that soy extender junk.”
“Soy loaf? You always have peanut butter.”
“Sal did the marketing.” Ellie took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. “And she forgot to buy peanut butter.”
“Fire it my way,” said Stan. “Gotta get big and strong to fight the Germans.”
Ellie started to say, “Like there’ll still be a war when you’re eighteen.” But what if there was still a war when Stan was eighteen? Or, worse, what if the war was over and the United States lost?
“Bub-bub-ba-boo,” Stan crooned in Ellie’s ear. “Gimme your sandwich, bub-bub-ba-boo.”
Ellie smiled at his Bing imitation and passed him the sandwich.
Victoria swished up to the window, oozing importance from every pore. “Guess what?” she said.
“School is closed for the duration?” Stan guessed.
“I’m serious!” Victoria socked Stan’s arm. “Come on, guess.”
“Eleanor Roosevelt is coming to assembly tomorrow?” said Ellie.
Victoria missed the sarcasm. “She is?”
“What do you think?” Ellie shrugged. Victoria didn’t blink. “Oh, all right. What’s the big surprise?” Ellie’s hand itched to smack her.
“My brother Frankie isn’t coming home for Christmas,” Victoria announced.
“Big deal,” snorted Stan, and took Ellie’s sandwich back to his seat.
“It is too a big deal,” said Victoria. “It means that he’s going overseas real soon.”
“Really? How do you know?” A tiny tongue of fear flickered inside Ellie.
“Because he went right from boot camp to California, instead of coming home on leave like my other brothers. Frankie says they’ve cancelled all the home leaves, so I’ll just bet he’s shipping out from there.”
Ellie’s stomach did the Dips-swoop.
“Well, my brother is coming home for Christmas,” said Ellie. “He said so, and he is!” At least, that’s what Ellie thought Jimmy had told her. She waited for Victoria to say something. She didn’t.
Victoria stared out into the schoolyard. “I wish things were the way they used to be,” she whispered.
I know what you mean, Ellie wanted to say.
But before she could, Victoria began a loud, off-key rendition of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.
Ellie wanted to smack her all over again.
Chocolate! Ellie smelled it the minute she opened the front door after school that day. The aroma drew her into the kitchen, where racks of fresh-baked cookies covered the countertops.
“Smelled my world-famous cookies, didja?” Aunt Toots pulled a cookie sheet from the oven. In her work overalls and apron, she looked like a cross between Rosie the Riveter and Betty Crocker. But there was something else about her outfit that bugged Ellie. What is it? she wondered.
“Hey, snap out of your dream world, kiddo,” said Toots. “Help me finish these cookies so I can send this box to the post office when your pop goes to work in the morning.”
“What box?”
Toots spooned more brown lumps onto a cookie sheet. The lumps looked like what badly behaved dogs left on the sidewalk.
“Jimmy’s Christmas box. It has to be in the mail by December 1st, for somebody stateside.” Toots squinted at a magazine recipe. “These don’t look like the ones in this picture.”
Ellie’s heart gave a hard thump. She didn’t know they were sending Jimmy a Christmas box.
“Have you finished knitting that scarf?” Toots asked, still studying the recipe. “We can send it with the rest of the stuff.”
“Why? He’ll be home for Christmas.”
Toots looked up. “That’s news to me, Shorty.”
“He said…he said…” Ellie thought hard. “Something about keeping the Christmas tree up.”
Toots rapidly loaded the contents of the cooling rack into a shoebox lined with wax paper. “Who knows? Christmas is a time of miracles, they say.”
She handed one of the baked lumps to Ellie. “Try this.”
Ellie chewed and swallowed. “Kind of dry. Do you have any chocolate chips left?”
“I’m saving the rest of the chocolate and sugar for us,” said Toots. “I’ve got an idea for Christmas I’ll tell you about later.” She pulled the pinafore apron off over her head, and suddenly Ellie knew what had been bugging her.
“Say, isn’t that Jimmy’s shirt?” she asked.
Toots examined the long sleeves of her green shirt, pretending great surprise. “Why, I’ll be doggoned if it ain’t.”
Ellie frowned, but before she could speak, Toots hastily added, “Jimmy told me I could borrow anything in his closet I needed. He figures he’ll gain some weight in the Army and those shirts and such won’t fit him when he comes back. Now, I’ve got to finish packing his box. Why don’t you run along and get that scarf for me, Shorty.”
“It’s not finished,” Ellie lied, and went upstairs to change clothes. She wanted to watch Jimmy open it himself Christmas morning.
Toots must have turned on the radio because “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” wafted up the stairs.
Jimmy better come home for Christmas, Ellie thought. Before Toots wears out all his shirts.
“This house is like Union Station.” Pop rattled his Sunday Post-Gazette in disgust. “People coming and going at all hours. Whatever happened to peace and quiet?”
“If you didn’t work all those double shifts, you’d know that peace around here is a thing of the past,” Mom said as she brought the teapot in from the kitchen.
“Peace?” cracked Sal as she finished setting the lunch table. “Don’t you know there’s a war on, Pop?”
“So I’ve heard,” said Pop, heaving himself out of his Morris chair. “Peace of any kind is mighty hard to find these days. Church is about the only peaceful place I can think of. If them Nazis and Japs spent more time on their knees, world wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in.”
“Oh, they’re all heathens,” said Sal with a flip of her hair.
“Who’s a heathen?” yawned Toots, staggering downstairs. “You mean me, for sleeping in? Skipping that gasbag Schuyler ever’ now and then don’t make me a heathen.” Ellie bit back a smile. Sometimes she couldn’t help liking Aunt Toots.
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