“I w-want to go back up!” he said.
“But we didn’t even see anything yet! We hardly even went inside. Come on. Let’s go find the place where the coal comes in down the chute.”
I took his hand. It was wet and I wiped it against the front of his polo shirt. I began to lead him down the passageway again. There were words written on the walls, proof of other real and harmless people who had been there before us. They had written “H.L. & M.W.” inside a heart, “Jerry was here,” and “Max & Faye forever!” We came to a door that was painted bright red and marked DANGER, and we ran quickly past it. Suddenly a humming noise began and we both stood very still and listened.
“W-what’s that?” Theodore whispered.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it must be something that makes things go inside the house. Like the water or the lights or something.” We had passed large mysterious wall switches and fat dusty pipes, so my explanation seemed to make sense, even to me. Now we moved past more doors that were bolted with heavy locks and for one terrible moment all the lights flickered. Theodore made a small moaning sound in his throat.
“A little more,” I coaxed. “A little more and then we’ll go upstairs.” I was feeling pretty worried and nervous myself, and I started thinking about scary things like zombies and werewolves. But somehow I felt this cure wouldn’t work unless we completed a tour of the whole basement. We made a sharp turn then and the humming noise stopped suddenly. This was more frightening than when it had started. It was so quiet. We couldn’t hear anything at all. I wondered if we had come too far, if the flickering lights had been a warning to leave.
“All right,” I said. “All right, we’ll go back now if you want to.”
“If you want to,” Theodore said.
We turned around and followed the curve of the walls. When we reached the storage bins again, we hesitated. We peered into the one marked 3H. That was Mrs. Golub’s apartment number. Carton upon carton upon carton in a tall shaky tower. We poked at them through the bars, and curls of dust floated down.
“It’s probably junk,” I said. “Nothing but stupid junk.”
We walked to the next bin and behind us there was a slight shifting noise and some rattling, as if someone was following us. Theodore screamed and banged his head against my stomach. Then, with a thunderous explosion, the cartons in Mrs. Golub’s bin came down. Tumbling, crashing, sliding, they emptied their contents as they fell. China cups and saucers, dolls, movie magazines and photos, shoes and umbrellas fell in a crazy pile all over the bin.
We ran. I passed Theodore and then he passed me. We ran and we ran and we didn’t turn around once. I came to the heavy door first and I used both hands to push it open, but Theodore raced past me and he was out first. We took giant steps up the steep ramp and stood outside again in the sunshine, panting and trembling.
“I-it’s all your f-fault,” he said. “Y-you made me go!”
I had to fight back the tears. “Nothing happened to you. Nothing happened to you, anyway. Nobody even saw us.”
Theodore looked at me. “I’m going to tell,” he said.
“You wouldn’t.”
He looked back at me without blinking. “I’m going to tell,” he said again.
“Don’t!” I shouted. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare tell!”
Theodore walked to the curb and sat down. He began to tie the lace of one of his shoes, using two loops just the way I had taught him. He didn’t look up again until he was finished. “What will you give me?” he asked, without a trace of his old stutter.
That was the beginning, I guess. I knew that if he didn’t tell Mother and Daddy about what we had done, I probably would myself. Something like that could give you an awfully guilty conscience. But I didn’t like him as much any more. That was the beginning. At last, Theodore was on his own.
Twenty
Welcome Home!
THE WAR IN EUROPE was over now and we were waiting for the same news from the Pacific, where many of our men were still fighting. Buddy Bloom was coming home finally, and Mitzi and Theodore and I made big signs for all of the windows.
WELCOME HOME, BUDDY
OUR HERO
BENSONHURST WELCOMES BUDDY BLOOM
Mrs. Bloom was so nervous the day Buddy was to arrive that she kept laughing and crying and dropping everything she picked up. Mr. Bloom whistled one song after another and cut himself in four places when he shaved. At eleven o’clock Mitzi left with her parents for the pier in Manhattan where the troop transport was going to dock, bringing home thousands of men who had been prisoners of war.
Theodore and I waited on Mitzi’s street with a crowd of neighbors. We all had small American flags and bags of confetti. We were planning to wave the flags and throw the confetti as soon as we saw Buddy. The Blooms were going to bring him home from the city in a taxi. Other neighbors leaned out their windows and looked up and down the street, waiting for the big moment.
When the soldiers in Buddy’s prison camp were liberated, they were sent to Paris, France, to a hospital, where they were all examined. Wounded men and soldiers who were ill were going to be kept there until they were well. Buddy wrote from the hospital that he was all right and that the doctors were going to let him come home. He was just a little thinner, he wrote, but he was sure his mother could take care of that. Mrs. Bloom began cooking as soon as they received that letter. Great steaming pots of soup bubbled on her stove. Cakes and breads rose in her oven and the whole apartment was filled with the good smells of her cooking.
Now, every time Theodore saw something turn the corner, he shouted, “It’s them! It’s them!” and some of the neighbors began to wave their little flags and reach into their bags of confetti. But it would only be a car or a delivery truck and not the taxi at all. Then, when I turned my head the other way for a moment, Theodore shouted again, “It’s them! It’s them!” I was going to say something to him about the boy who cried wolf, when I looked up and saw that it was a taxi, a big yellow taxi coming down the street toward us. Suddenly I remembered the red rose Buddy had mentioned in his letter. I wasn’t wearing one in my hair. Would he be able to recognize me after all this time?
Other people had taken up Theodore’s cry. “It’s them! It’s them!” At the last minute, one of the men lifted Theodore up onto his shoulders, so his flag was higher than anyone else’s.
When the taxi door opened and Buddy Bloom stepped out, Theodore’s confetti seemed to fall from the skies like beautiful colored snow. As for me, I forgot all about the flag and the confetti, all about the wonderful speech I planned to make. I saw that tall, thin soldier look around him and that familiar smile grow on his face when he knew that he was really there, home again in Brooklyn.
I saw him open his arms wide and I heard him yell, “Peewee, I’m home!” I rushed at him, the tears in my eyes blurring everything, and I threw my arms around him. The confetti fell on my head too, and all around us neighbors called, from windows and fire escapes, “Buddy! Welcome home, boy! Hello, Buddy! Welcome home!”
Twenty-one
Moving Day
“YOU GIRLS VOTE ON a color and Daddy will buy the paint,” Mother said. She dumped a carton of Velma’s books on my bed.
It was moving day at our apartment, but only Velma and Theodore were moving. He was going to have Velma’s little bedroom for himself and Velma and I were going to share the bigger room.
It seemed strange already without Theodore’s toys all over the floor, without his trucks and cars and the little ship inside the bottle. Velma carried in some more of her things and I looked at them as if I had never seen them before. Everything did look different when you put it in a new place. We had pushed the beds and night tables around all morning until we decided where to put them.
“Blue!” Velma and I said together, when Mother asked us to vote on a color for the walls. At least we both had the same favorite color. Daddy pushed Velma’s dressing table against the wall and Velma carried in the
stool that went with it. I sat down on the stool and looked into the heart-shaped mirror while Velma arranged bottles of cologne and dusting powder on a flowered china tray. When she left the room again, I picked up one bottle after another, reading the names of the scents. White Shoulders, Evening in Paris, Tabu. The names were pretty stupid, but I picked up an atomizer and squeezed it and then my left arm smelled wonderful.
Everything was going to be different, I thought. For one thing, I was going to have to try to be neater or Velma and I would have some terrible fights. She had warned me that morning that she couldn’t possibly sleep in a pigsty. She always liked her room to look like a picture in a magazine. Theodore never cared about things like that. When Mother made him clean things up, he would always push everything under his bed: socks, toys, empty cookie boxes. I have to admit that I never cared much either, but now with new paint and new curtains...
Then I wondered what would happen at night if I wanted to read and Velma wanted the lights out so she could sleep, or if she wanted to listen to her radio when I wanted to sleep. Theodore had always been able to sleep with the lights on and the radio playing, and he never said anything to me about touching his belongings or cleaning up the room.
I went down the hallway to the little bedroom that was going to be his now. Theodore was throwing a pair of his pajamas into a drawer. They were all rolled up in a ball.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I folded them neatly for him, the way Velma folded hers. Then I helped him tack his picture of Lucky the dog actor over his bed. “You’re really going to like this room,” I told him. “It will be nice and private and special. You can decorate it any way you want to. It may be a small room, but it’s nice and cozy.” Secretly I believed he was going to miss me and be very lonely.
I opened another drawer and began to fold his underwear and his socks too. Then I went to the closet and opened it. Junk started falling out all over the place. “For heaven’s sake, Theodore,” I said. “You’re a big boy now. You don’t want to live in a pigsty, do you? Look at all this junk. Why don’t you just throw some of this stuff out if you don’t need it?” I hung his shirts on hangers and lined his shoes and sneakers up in a neat row under them. Then I looked around the room again, with my hands on my hips. “Don’t you want to move your bed next to the window? Don’t you want to be able to look outside in the morning without getting up?”
“No,” Theodore said. “I like it over here.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “That’s the worst place. Look, your closet door is going to hit the back of the bed every time you open it. And look at those books! Theodore, you can’t have books lying all over the place. Wait a minute. I’m going to let you have my nice collie-dog book ends, because I can share Velma’s now. I’ll be right back.”
I went back to my room and began to look for the book ends. Velma was standing on her bed knocking a nail into the wall for her picture of two white kittens in a basket of wool. Mother and Daddy were measuring the windows for the new curtains. It was really going to look lovely, I thought. Mother had said we could get new bedspreads to match the curtains. We were going to the store that week to pick them out.
I looked among the cartons and books and games on the beds until I found the collie-dog book ends. I marched down the hallway again to Theodore’s new room. His door was shut. I was going to knock when I saw there was a crayoned sign tacked up.
PRIVIT PROPPITY
T. BRAVERMAN
KEEP OUT
THIS MEENS YOU!
Well! I said to myself. If that’s the way he wants it. What do I care? I would have helped him fix up a perfectly nice room, something he could have been proud of. But if he wanted to live in a pigsty, I decided, that was his problem. I turned around and brought the book ends back to my room.
That night, after Velma and I climbed into our beds, I thought how quiet it was and how strange it seemed to look across the room and not see Theodore, a little round lump huddled under the covers.
Velma said, “Do you want to read?”
I shook my head. “I’m too tired. Do you?”
“No. Let’s talk instead.”
Talk? Velma and I hardly ever talked to each other. What in the world would we talk about? “Okay,” I said, a little worried that she would want to make a list of rules and regulations for keeping our room neat.
“If you want to, Shirley,” Velma said, “you can use my cologne sometimes. Evening in Paris is my favorite.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And you can borrow some of my other things too,” she said. “If you ask me first.”
“All right.” I remembered the mystery of Velma’s dresser drawer, where the lipstick and nail polish had appeared from under a pile of underwear.
“And,” Velma continued, “you can ask me things, if you want to.”
“What things?”
“Oh, you know, like about problems you have. And about the birds and the bees and stuff like that.”
I lay there for a while, thinking about that. There wasn’t anything I wanted to ask Velma. Not yet, anyway. But I felt strangely happy. Velma was offering to be my friend. “Okay,” I said, “and you can borrow some of my things too. If you ask me first,” I added.
Later, when the lights were out all over the apartment, I turned around in my bed and looked across the room. In the moonlight I could see Velma, looking a little like a ghost because of some white lotion she put on her face every night to fight pimples. Her head was covered with shiny pink curlers and she hugged her pillow with both arms. My sister.
Twenty-two
Peace
ON THE MORNING OF August 15, we woke up and found that the war had ended. Through the open windows we could hear people calling to one another all over the neighborhood. “The war is over! Peace!”
I looked out and saw that men and women were standing in the street in their pajamas and bathrobes. Children blew on toy horns and music blasted from someone’s phonograph.
Daddy came to the table for breakfast wearing his striped pajamas and his air-raid warden’s hat. “Oh, Morris” my mother said, bursting into laughter. Then my father took the helmet off. He went to the sink, where Mother had a jelly glass filled with yellow roses from a neighbor’s garden. He took the flowers, water and all, and put them into his upside-down helmet. He walked over to Mother, who was frying eggs in a pan, and bowed deeply. “In honor of world peace,” he said to her. “Oh, Morris,” Mother said again, but she smiled and took the helmet and put it on the windowsill in the sunlight.
Later in the day a committee of neighbors came over and asked my parents to help prepare for a block party to celebrate the wonderful news. Some of them made banners and strung them from the fire escapes. Others made sandwiches and punch and cake. Later that afternoon a police car arrived and two policemen put up wooden saw-horses to keep cars off our block. Then all the families brought out chairs and tables and put them right in the middle of the street! Three men with musical instruments began to tune up under our windows. Flags appeared on poles and homemade signs were hung, welcoming peace and the soldiers and sailors who were coming home.
Mitzi came over in the afternoon to help. “Knock knock,” she said at the door.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Lemmy.”
“Lemmy who?”
“Lemmy in!” she said, and I opened the door. She was the same old Mitzi again.
Theodore and Velma and Mitzi and I went up and down the stairs a hundred times that day carrying folding chairs and paper tablecloths and noisemakers and platters of cake.
The band began to play and people started dancing in the street as if it were a dance floor in a nightclub. Stray dogs ran in and out between our feet looking for scraps of food, and up in the sky an airplane was spelling out V FOR VICTORY in little clouds of smoke.
Some of the old women danced together with party hats tilted on their heads. I saw Mrs. Golub dancing with the superintendent of our b
uilding. Her eyes were closed and I wondered if she was pretending that he was Clark Gable. Old Mr. Katz whirled Mrs. Katz around and around, until, laughing, she said she was dizzy and made him stop.
The party went on and on until the whole street was littered with junk, and little kids fell asleep in their mothers’ arms. The musicians took a break and then they began to play again. Fathers and mothers danced their sleeping children right into the lobby of the building and upstairs, where they put them to bed. My mother and father danced, holding each other very close, and my mother had her head on my father’s shoulder. The sun went down and all at once the street lights went on. The band played a song called “When the Lights Go on Again All over the World” and everyone applauded and whistled. I was so sleepy. It had been the happiest day of my life and I wished that I could stay up forever.
But finally I climbed the stairs to our apartment. Theodore was fast asleep in his room with all his clothes on. I went to the window and looked out. In the distance I could hear firecrackers going off and music from other streets mixing with the music from ours. There was only one couple still dancing. Some of the other people were starting to fold tables and chairs and a man was sweeping the street with a big push broom.
I went to the hall closet and looked and looked until I found the red notebook that Miss Cohen had given me the day I lost the spelling bee. I took a pencil from a drawer in the kitchen and I sat down near the window so I could hear all the last wonderful noises of the party. I opened the book to the first page and in my best handwriting I wrote: “I am twelve years old and I live in Brooklyn, New York. Today the war ended.”
A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer
Introducing Shirley Braverman Page 9