Skating with the Statue of Liberty

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  One by one the girls with the patriotic ribbons came onstage. Some giggled and sang weakly, others did pretty well, but none of them sang as well as Elsie, or even Martha, Gustave thought. Then came a bunch of boys and some more girls Gustave didn’t recognize. The audience was thinning out a little as some of the singers and their friends left, although most of them seemed to be staying to hear the others audition.

  Gustave was getting bored. He took out his geography textbook and flipped to the section Mr. Coolidge had assigned. He was reading about crops in East Africa when he heard his name.

  “Gustave Becker?” And then the teacher on the right of the stage repeated his name, sounding irritated and impatient. “Gustave BECKER?”

  He jumped up, confused. The folding seat slipped up behind him, and his book fell to the floor with a loud bang. Someone giggled. Faces turned toward him.

  “I am Gustave,” he called, feeling heat rise to his face.

  “Pay attention! It’s your turn to line up and sing!”

  Sing? His heart throbbed with panic. “Me? No! NO! I did not…I don’t want to audition!” he stammered. A ripple of laughter went through the auditorium.

  “Then why did you waste our time?” the teacher muttered. “Very well. Next?”

  As the boy at the head of the line went up to sing, Gustave sat back down, hearing whispered comments and giggles around him. His face gradually cooled, and his heart slowly went back to its normal rhythm. He must have accidentally put his name on the audition list, he realized. That was why the teacher had been taking names at the door. He felt like an idiot. But at least he hadn’t been forced to sing.

  Suddenly he heard the name he’d been waiting for. “September Rose Walker. ‘America the Beautiful,’ ” Seppie announced, clasping and unclasping her hands in front of her. It was the first time Gustave had ever seen her looking nervous.

  The pianist struck up the first notes. September Rose seemed to wait just a beat too long. You can do it, Seppie! Gustave thought, trying to send her confidence. Sing!

  “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies,” September Rose’s voice started out so quietly he could hardly hear her.

  Louder, Gustave thought. Louder!

  “For amber waves of grain.”

  Her voice expanded, becoming rich and warm as she went on. Now she was singing naturally, singing full throated, the way she did in music class, the way she had in her kitchen, only now she was filling the vast expanse of the auditorium.

  “For purple mountain majesties

  Above the fruited plain!”

  September Rose’s voice soared like an eagle:

  “America! America!

  God shed his grace on thee”

  Everyone was listening now. You couldn’t help it. It was impossible not to follow her voice.

  “And crown thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!”

  In the pause as the last note faded away, the room was hushed. A moment later the whole auditorium erupted into applause. Seppie’s face lit up with joy.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Heine, scribbling something down on her pad. “Next?”

  Four more girls sang, none particularly well, and then the auditions were over.

  In the crowded hallway outside the auditorium, Gustave spotted September Rose and squeezed through the crowd toward her. She was surrounded by girls congratulating her. Elsie had said something to September Rose, smiling, and was just moving away as Gustave got there.

  “You were great!” he said. “You’ll get the solo. I’m sure.”

  September Rose looked at him, still flushed with triumph, smiling slightly. “Elsie was good too,” she said modestly. She lowered her voice slightly, grinning. “Even Martha wasn’t half bad.”

  “They weren’t as good as you,” Gustave said, and he could tell from the excited look on her face that she knew it was true.

  “Well, we’ll see. Mrs. Heine is going to post the results in a few minutes. I’m going to wait. Then I’ll get my stuff and meet you at the statue and we can walk over to the library.”

  She ran through the crowd to the spot where her friend Lisa was waiting on the other side of the hall. Gustave got his things from his locker and came back to see if the results had been posted yet, but the students were still milling around, waiting.

  “She’s coming!” someone near the door called, and a moment later the auditorium door swung open, and Mrs. Heine came out with a list.

  “May I have your attention, please!” she said, clapping her hands. The students quieted immediately. “I’ll read the names of everyone chosen to sing at the rally,” she proclaimed, “and then I’ll announce the soloist.” She began reading a long, alphabetized list of names. Gustave realized that September Rose was going to have to listen in suspense nearly all the way through before Mrs. Heine got to the “Ws.”

  Mrs. Heine was reading the letter “S” now. “Rose Sapienti, Martha Teagan—” Here she was interrupted by many loud shrieks from Martha’s crowd. “Peter Underhill, Larry Upton,” she went on. “And September Rose Walker. Those are all of our singers. And now for the one chosen to sing the solo.” She paused dramatically.

  “You made it!” Gustave wanted to say to September Rose, but she was on the other side of the hallway with a crowd of people in between them. Still, he caught a glimpse of her excited expression, and he knew that, despite what she had said, she was hoping that her name was coming.

  “The soloist for the Joan of Arc Junior High 1942 Victory Rally chorus is…” Mrs. Heine paused dramatically. “Elsie James.”

  31

  September Rose wasn’t at the Joan of Arc statue when Gustave arrived, and she wasn’t there five minutes later or ten minutes later. Had she changed her mind about going to the library? Gustave walked around for a while, looking downhill. The sun was out, and the river glinted between the trees, which were covered now with a faint haze of green. He was dipping his finger in a puddle and drawing the Cross of Lorraine in water all over the base of the statue when he heard feet trudging up the stairs to the park.

  “Hi, Gustave,” said September Rose. “Sorry I’m late. What’s that?” Her eyes were red.

  “It’s the symbol of the French Resistance. It’s Joan of Arc’s symbol too.”

  She traced a finger over the double-barred cross. “I like it.”

  “Mrs. Heine should have picked you,” Gustave said awkwardly. “But at least you’re in the chorus.”

  September Rose stamped in a puddle and stared down at the ripples in the water. “I was better than Elsie, wasn’t I? Or maybe I just wanted to think I was. Maybe you just think so too because you’re my friend.”

  “No! You sang the best. Everybody thought so.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “Elsie sings fine. She’s nice. But your singing is very…I don’t know the English word. It makes you feel the music. It makes you think about the words.”

  Brotherhood, Seppie had sung. Brotherhood from sea to sea. Listening to her voice, Gustave had imagined the oceans shining. And he had thought about how brotherhood was a French value too. Liberty, equality, fraternity. There was something about the way September Rose had sung “America the Beautiful”—with such conviction, her voice bringing the words of the song so vividly to life—that was enough to make anyone hearing her believe in those words, or at least think they did, while they were listening.

  “That’s why everyone clapped for you,” he said. “They didn’t clap like that for Elsie.”

  “Mrs. Heine didn’t want a soloist who looks like me, I guess. After she announced the results, when mostly everyone was gone, I was coming out of the restroom and I overheard her talking with another teacher. She said that Elsie sings like an angel and looks like one too. Elsie is so pretty,” September Rose said wistfully. “I love her hair, don’t you? It’s kind of like a cross between cotton candy and sunshine. I wish I had hair like that.”

  Gustave shrugged. He watched Septemb
er Rose tracing the Cross of Lorraine with her finger over and over. “But her hair isn’t like Josephine Baker’s,” he said finally.

  September Rose looked up. “True.” She rubbed her fingers over her eyes. “I should put on my curls.” She took an eyebrow pencil out of a pocket in her schoolbag. Using her reflection in the puddle of water, she traced a curl onto each cheek. Then she pulled her long necklace out of another pocket, looped it twice around her neck, and lifted her chin defiantly, sniffing. “That’s better, right?”

  “And what Mrs. Heine said about angels…that’s only true if angels have skinny voices.”

  September Rose laughed shakily. “Thin voices, you mean? Well, it’s Mrs. Heine’s loss,” she said, blinking hard. “I get to sing solos at my church all the time. Let’s go. The library’s not that far. It’s at Amsterdam and Eighty-First.”

  She started off, walking quickly and purposefully, not talking. Somewhere in the eighties, they crossed over to Amsterdam Avenue. It was a quiet street, but as they walked down it, an older blond boy suddenly jumped out at them from between two buildings and swung something in their direction. It hit Gustave’s right calf, just below the knee. Sharp pain shot up his leg, and it buckled under him. “Hey!” he shouted angrily, doubling over. The boy sprinted down the street, leering over his shoulder and shouting something before vanishing around the corner. Gustave heard the words “Get out!” and “lover.”

  “Are you all right?” September Rose asked, glaring after the boy.

  Gustave’s pants leg was covered with white dust, and his leg hurt like crazy. He rubbed it, and it started to feel better. “What was he talking about?” Gustave asked.

  “Why can’t people just leave us alone?” September Rose burst out furiously.

  “It was because we were together? What did it mean?” But he knew she wouldn’t say.

  “He’s just some stupid hoodlum! He had one of those stockings filled with bits of chalk. They’re really dangerous. I know a kid who lost an eye when he got hit with one on Halloween. Can you walk all right?”

  Gustave nodded. He limped for a few steps, and then his leg was moving normally again. Farther down the block they saw a white patch on a knocked-over garbage can where the boy had whacked it. They walked most of the rest of the way to the library without talking.

  Lover? Gustave thought. Had that boy been teasing him and September Rose, saying he was her boyfriend? But his shout hadn’t sounded at all like teasing. It had sounded like a threat. It had happened twice now, in two different neighborhoods. This must be the kind of thing September Rose’s brother was worried about. The reason he had told her they shouldn’t be friends.

  32

  As Gustave and September Rose neared the library, they walked past a synagogue. September Rose looked at the Star of David carved into the pale stone wall. “I wanted to ask you something,” she said. “Your friend who’s missing. He’s Jewish too?”

  “Yes.”

  She played with the zipper on her schoolbag. “So he’s in danger, you think? Because the Nazis don’t like Jews?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s our age? Is he all by himself?”

  “He’s with his mother, and maybe an uncle, we’re not sure. His mother couldn’t leave her job when my family left Paris, so they stayed. Now we don’t know where they are.”

  September Rose twisted one of her braids as they waited for another light to change so they could cross the street. “What’s he like?”

  “Marcel?” So many memories rushed through Gustave’s head that it was hard to know what to say. “He’s smart, but not always good in school. He’s good at sports, especially le foot—I mean, soccer. He’s funny. He always plays tricks. On teachers sometime…” English was slipping away from Gustave, and his throat was getting thick, but words were tumbling out of him anyway, faster than he had ever spoken in English before. “He was a Boy Scout with me. One time in Paris we had a race to find things on a list. A search…”

  “A scavenger hunt? Like, find a bottle cap, find a fishhook, find a magnet, that kind of thing?”

  “Yes. But part of it was we couldn’t tell what we are doing. We needed a teacher to write his name—”

  “A teacher’s signature?”

  “Right. So Marcel doesn’t tell about the scavenger hunt. Instead, he says to the teacher that he collects signatures of famous people. The teacher laughs and says, ‘But I am not famous!’ Marcel says, very serious, ‘Oh, monsieur, I think you will be someday.’ ”

  September Rose smiled. “Smart! I bet your team won the scavenger hunt!”

  Gustave shook his head, watching three yellow taxis going by, one right after the other, each one splashing through an enormous puddle and sending up a tall spray of water. “No.” The dream about Marcel that he’d had on the ship rushed back at him. “One thing we never got in time. We never found a yellow feather.” His throat hurt too much to get any more words out.

  “A yellow feather. Hmm. If we wanted a yellow feather, I wonder where we could find one here,” September Rose said. Her face was starting to look cheerful again. “I think Lisa’s aunt has a parakeet. But parakeets are mostly green, not yellow, right? But I think some of their feathers are yellowish. Or, hey! You could dye a feather yellow the same way you color an Easter egg, with onion skins! Do you do that in France? Well, I guess Jews wouldn’t. Here’s the library, Saint Agnes.”

  It was smaller and less intimidating than the main branch, the one he’d visited with Cousin Henri and Jean-Paul back on his first day in New York, but it didn’t have the majestic lions on each side of the door. Gustave and September Rose went up the steps together. Inside it was nearly silent, with high ceilings and furniture made of dark wood. September Rose pointed to the circulation desk. “You go there to get a card,” she whispered. “If you have any trouble, I’ll help you.”

  A friendly-looking woman with short, curly dark hair was behind the desk. When Gustave had explained what he wanted, she pushed some papers toward him.

  “Fill these forms out in triplicate, please.”

  Gustave took them and went to the large wooden table where September Rose was sitting. The top form asked for his name, age, address, school, and parents’ names. That was easy. But something the librarian had said was bewildering. He flipped through the papers looking for an envelope with a sticky flap.

  “What am I supposed to lick?” he whispered to September Rose.

  “What? Nothing!”

  “She said, ‘Lick it.’ ”

  “I don’t see anywhere to lick.” September Rose flipped through the papers. “You just fill out that form three times.”

  “She said, ‘In trip,’ and then, ‘Lick it.’ Is something getting mailed somewhere?”

  September Rose suddenly laughed out loud, and a man at the next table turned around and scowled at her. “Fill this out ‘in triplicate’! Is that what she said? That means fill out the same form three times! I’m going to go find some books on Abraham Lincoln for my report.”

  Gustave filled out his information three times and brought the completed forms back to the desk. As the librarian typed out his library card, September Rose returned and dropped a stack of books on the table with a loud thud.

  “There!” The librarian handed him the small rectangle. “Don’t mark up the books. And return them on time. Is it your first library card?” She smiled at him.

  “My first library card in America,” he said, fingering it.

  “You’re from France, aren’t you? Well, have fun! Read lots of good books. Do you need help finding anything?”

  “For school, I need to find three things about Charles de Gaulle. My teacher said probably newspaper articles, not books.”

  “That’s ambitious! Well, let’s see what we can find.”

  When she was finished helping him, he had several newspapers and two magazines. “And if you need a French-English dictionary you can use this.” She handed him a thick book, much bigger than
their dictionary at home.

  Gustave thanked her, then joined Seppie at the table. Even with the dictionary, the newspaper articles were hard to read, so Gustave was glad they were short. He had to look up lots of words. But an hour later he had taken notes and was starting to write his report. He looked over at September Rose, noticing that she had already written two pages. He worked hard for another hour, and with lots of erasing, checking the dictionary, and rewriting, he had written a short paragraph by the time a bell sounded and the lights flicked on and off three times. “They’re closing!” September Rose slammed a book shut. “I’m almost done memorizing mine. How’s yours going?

  “I wrote it. It’s going to be short. I don’t want a lot to memorize.”

  “Makes sense.” She peeked at his paragraph. “ ‘Charles de Gaulle is a French hero,’ ” she read out loud. “That’s a good way to start. It’ll make people pay attention.”

  When they walked past the circulation desk, the librarian was putting on her own coat.

  “Did you see that?” September Rose whispered as they went out the front door of the library.

  “What?”

  “Her hat. It had a yellow feather in it. Like the one you and your friend Marcel couldn’t find. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe it means that your friend’s all right.”

  Outside, the buildings on the opposite side of the street were silhouetted against a dusky blue sky. Gustave looked behind him. The librarian was coming down the steps, the yellow feather in her hat illuminated by the streetlight overhead. He didn’t think that he believed in signs. “Maybe,” he said.

  September Rose looked unhappy, as if going outside had made her think about the auditions again. “Do you think Elsie James will stand in front for the whole performance at the Victory Rally?” she asked. “Do you think she’s going to wear something special? She has the prettiest dresses. Remember that peach-colored one with the lace collar? She wears it to school sometimes. Maybe she’ll wear that.”

  Gustave shrugged. “I never noticed it. At least Mrs. Heine didn’t pick Martha.”