I saw Frances on my bike before we left home. I yelled at her, but she did not hear me. She is very stuck up and Jackie is not. Jackie's hair is prettier also.
There are more girls than boys on the beach this year. You never see any boys. The girls play cards a lot and put a lot of sun tan oil on each other's back and lay in the sun, but go in the water more than they used to. Virginia Hope and Barbara Geezer had a fight about something and don't sit next to each other on the beach anymore. Lester Brogan was killed in the army where the Japs are. Mrs. Brogan does not come to the beach anymore except on Sundays with Mr. Brogan. Mr. Brogan just sits on the beach with Mrs. Brogan, and he does not go in the water, and you know what a good swimmer he is. I remember when you and Lester took me out to the float once. I go out to the float myself now. Diana Schults married a soldier that was at Sea Girt and she went back to California with him for a week, but he is gone now and she is back. Diana lays on the beach by herself.
Before we left home, Mr. Ollinger died. Brother Teemers went into the store to get Mr. Ollinger to fix his bike and Mr. Ollinger was dead behind the counter. Brother Teemers ran crying all the way to the courthouse and Mr. Teemers was busy talking to the jury and everything. Brother Teemers ran right in anyway and yelled "Daddy! Daddy! Mr. Ollinger is dead!"
I cleaned out your car for you before we left for the shore. There was a lot of maps behind the front seat from your trip to Canada. I put them in your desk. There was also a girls comb. I think it was Frances'. I put it in your desk also. Are you in France?
Love,
MATILDA
P.S.: Can I go to Canada with you next time you go? I won't talk much and I'll light your cigarettes for you without really smoking them.
Sincerely yours,
MATILDA
I miss you. Please come home soon.
Love and kisses,
MATILDA
The boy in the hole carefully put the letter back inside the dirty, worn envelope, and put the envelope back into his shirt pocket.
Then he raised himself slightly in the hole and shouted, "Hey, Eeves! I'm over here!" And across the field Eeves saw him and nodded back.
The boy sank back into the hole and said aloud to nobody, "Please come home soon." Then he fell crumbily, bent-leggedly, asleep.
13. Elaine
ON an exquisite Saturday afternoon in June, an assistant watch repairer named Dennis Cooney temporarily distracted the audience at an indoor flea circus just off Forty-third and Broadway by dropping dead. He was survived by his wife, Evelyn Cooney, and a daughter, Elaine, aged six, who had won two Beautiful Child contests; the first at the age of three, the second at the age of five, being defeated when she was four by a Miss Zelda "Bunny" Krakauer, of Staten Island. Cooney left his wife little insurance: enough for her to import her widowed mother, a Mrs. Hoover, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the aging woman had supported herself by working as a cashier in a cafeteria. The money was enough for the three to live in relative comfort in the Bronx. The superintendent of the apartment house in which Mrs. Cooney and her mother and daughter proceeded to live was a Mr. Freedlander. A few years before, Freedlander had been "super" of the house where they finally “got" Bloomy Bloomberg. Freedlander informed Mrs. Cooney that Bloomy didn't look any deader than Mrs. Cooney, or anybody. Freedlander made it clear to Mrs. Cooney that Bloomy never called Freedlander anything but Mort, and Freedlander never called Bloomy anything but Bloomy.
"I remember readin' all about it," remarked Mrs. Cooney enthusiastically. "I mean I remember readin' all about it."
Freedlander nodded approvingly. "Yeah, it was quite a case." He looked around his tenant's living room. "Where's Mrs. Boyle?" he asked. "I haven't seen her around lately."
"Who?"
"Mrs. - your mother."
"Oh. Mrs. Hoover. My mother's name is Hoover. I oughtta know. It was my name once!"
Mrs. Cooney laughed immoderately. Freedlander laughed with her.
"What'd I call her?" he asked. "Boyle didn't I? We had a Mrs. Boyle in this apartment last. That's why. Hoover. Hoover's her name, eh? I get it."
''She's out," said Mrs. Cooney.
"Oh," said Freedlander.
"It's really awful. I mean she stays out for hours and hours. I keep thinking of her getting run over by a truck or something at her age."
''Yeah," Freedlander commented, sympathetically. ''Cigarette?"
At the age of seven, little Elaine Cooney was sent to Public School 332 in the Bronx, where she was tested in accordance with the newest, most scientific methods, and consequently placed in Class 1-A-4, which included a group of forty-four pupils referred to among the faculty as the "slower" children. Every day Mrs. Cooney or her mother, Mrs. Hoover, brought the child to and from school. Usually it was Mrs. Hoover who made the delivery in the morning, and Mrs. Cooney would pick up her daughter in the afternoon. Mrs. Cooney went to the movies at least four times a week, frequently attending the late evening show, in which case she slept late mornings. Sometimes, owing to some unforeseen emergency, Mrs. Cooney was unable to call for her daughter. Under this not uncommon circumstance, the child was forced to wait as long as an hour by the second exit door from the corner, marked Girls, until her grandmother plodded irritably into view. On the way to and from school, the conversation between Elaine and her grandmother never achieved an exceptionally high degree of camaraderie between generations.
''Don't lose your lunch box again." "What, Grandma?"
"Don't lose your lunch box again." "Do I have peanut butter?"
''Do you have what?"
"Peanut butter."
''I don't know. Your mother fixed your lunch. Pull up your pants."
It was always a conversation both varicose and unloved, like Mrs. Hoover’s legs. The child didn't seem to mind. She seemed to be a happy child. She smiled a great deal. She laughed constantly at things that were not funny. She didn't seem to mind the bilious pastel and tasteless print dresses in which her mother dressed her. She didn't seem to live in the unhappy child's world. But when she was in the fourth grade her teacher, Miss Elmendorf, a tall, fine young woman with very bad legs and ankles, spoke of her to the principal.
"Miss Callahan? I wonder if you can spare a minute."
"Indeed I can!" said Miss Callahan. "Come in, dear!"
Young Miss Elmendorf dosed the door behind her. "That Cooney child I was telling you about-"
"Cooney. Cooney. Yes! That very pretty child," said Miss Callahan, enthusiastically. ''Sit down, dear."
"Thank you... I think we'll have to drop her back a class, Miss Callahan. The work is much too difficult for her. She can't spell, she can't do arithmetic. Her oral reading is positively painful to listen to."
"Well!" said Miss Callahan. "Ding, dong, dell!"
"She's a sweet child," said Miss Elmendorf. "And certainly the most exquisite thing I've ever seen in my life. She looks like Rapunzel."
"Who?" said Miss Callahan sharply.
"Rapunzel," said Miss Elmendorf.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair. Remember the fairy prince who climbed to the castle tower by Rapunzel's hair?"
"Oh, yes," said Miss Callahan shortly. She picked up a pencil with her thin, genderless fingers. Miss Elmendorf was already sorry she had brought up that unfamiliar business about Rapunzel.
"I think," said Miss Elmendorf, "she'd find it less difficult if we dropped her to a lower class."
"Well, then! In a lower class she goes, she goes, she goes!" sang out Miss Callahan, getting up like a man.
Miss Callahan had spoken, but Miss Elmendorf, dining alone at Bickford's Cafeteria that evening, decided that she couldn't just drop this child, this Rapunzel, into a lower class without a word to her or anything. Miss Elmendorf wanted to be disenchanted before she did any dropping. So she kept Elaine in the following, afternoon, hoping to be disenchanted.
"Elaine, dear," she said to her, "I'm going to let you report to 4-A-4 tomorrow instead of your own class. We'll
just try it for a while. I don't think the work will be so hard for us. Do you understand, dear? Stand still."
"I'm in 4-B-4," said Elaine. What was Miss Ellumdorf talking about?
"Yes, dear; I know. But we're going to try 4-A-4 for a while. It won't be quite so hard for us. We'll get a much better foundation, so that when the new term starts 4-B-4 will be ever so much easier for us."
"I'm in 4-B-4," Elaine said. "I'm in 4-B-4."
The child is stupid, thought Miss Elmendorf. She's stupid. She's not bright. She's wearing the most horrid little green dress I ever saw. I look in those tremendous blue eyes, and there's nothing there, absolutely nothing. But this is the Rapunzel in my class. This is the beauty. This is the most glorious, slim-ankled, golden-haired, red-lipped, lovely-nosed, beautiful skinned child I have ever seen in my life.
"We'll just try it for a while, shall we, Elaine?" Miss Elmendorf said, hopelessly. "We'll just see how we like it, shall we? Stand still, dear."
"Yes, Miss Ellumdorf," chanted the child nasally.
It took Elaine nine and a half years to be graduated from the eighth grade. She had entered grammar school when she was seven, and she was graduated when she was sixteen. At her graduation she wore lipstick, as did only one other child: an Italian girl named Theresa Torrini, who was eighteen and the mother of an illegitimate child by a taxi driver named Hugo Munster. At graduation, Phyllis Jackson, aged twelve, delivered the valedictory; Mildred Horgand, also twelve, played Elegie and Somebody Else Is Taking My Place on her violin; Lindsay Feurstein, just turned thirteen, recited Gunga Din and I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud; Thelma Ackerman, thirteen-and-a-half, tap-danced with maximum intricacy, and gave her impressions of Eddie Cantor and Red Skelton. And there were others whose names featured prominently in the mimeographed programs: Piano Selections-Babs Wasserman; Bird Calls Dolores Strovak; What America Means to Me-an original essay, by Mary Frances Leland. None of the latter group was over thirteen, and Dolores Strovak, who knew and could repeat the calls of thirty-six different birds, was only eleven.
These individual accomplishments were followed by a pageant, entitled The Blood of Democracy, which included in its cast the entire graduating class.
Elaine Cooney enacted the part of the Statue of Liberty. Hers was the only non-speaking part in the pageant. She was required simply to stand with her arm raised for nearly fifty minutes, supporting a torch made of solid lead, painted bronze-a piece of property conceived and wrought by Marjorie Briganza’s brother, Felix, a young pill. Elaine never dropped the heavy thing. She never relaxed under the weight of solid lead and, something heavier, unsung responsibility. Neither seemed to weigh heavily upon her. Nor did she once furtively scratch her golden head, which was adorned with a light, tight cardboard crown. It didn't even seem to itch.
Twice during the pageant of The Blood of Democracy, Elaine's left foot, unbelievably small for a girl of her height, was tramped upon with all the ruthlessness of accident by both Estelle Lipschutz and Marjorie Briganza. At neither time did Elaine even wince. She lost a little color, temporarily.
After the graduation exercises Elaine went with her mother, her grandmother, and Mr. Freedlander (the "super"), to see a film her mother had particularly wanted to see all week, at the neighborhood movie. Elaine seemed to find the occasion unbearably festive, the fourth-rate feature picture exceptionally engrossing, happy-making. The Mickey Mouse cartoon made her laugh so hard that her almost-violet, great eyes wept ecstatic tears, and Mrs. Hoover had to slap and half-punch her on her lovely back to shock her out of hysteria, reminding her irritably that it was only a picture, and there wasn't any sense crying about it. During the entire show Mr. Freedlander pressed his leg against Elaine's. She made no attempt to move her leg away from his. She simply was unaware of the imposed intimacy. She was sixteen years old and mature enough physically to like or dislike leg pressure from a man in the dark, but she was totally unqualified to accommodate sex and Mickey Mouse simultaneously. There was room for Mickey; no more.
The summer following her graduation from elementary school Elaine chiefly spent attending the movies with her mother, and listening to afternoon dramatic serials on the little, faulty-toned radio in their living room. She had no girl friends of her own age, and she knew no boys. Boys whistled at her, boys wrote clean or dirty notes to her, boys said "Hiya, beautiful" to her in hallways, in drugstores, on street corners; but she didn't go out with any of them, or even know any of them. If they asked her to go for a walk; or to a movie, she said she couldn't, that her mother wouldn't let her. This was not true. The question had never even come up at home. Elaine was not unwilling to go out with boys, but she was unwilling to be confused by unfamiliar, evadable issues.
So Elaine went through July and August of the summer of her graduation from elementary school, living in a Hollywood - and radio-promoted world peopled pled with star newspaper reporters, crackerjack young city editors, young brain surgeons, intrepid young detectives, all of whom crusaded or operated or detected brilliantly when they were not being sidetracked by their own incorrigible charm. Everybody in Elaine's world combed his hair beautifully, or had it tousled attractively by an expensive makeup man. All of her men spoke in deep, trained voices that sometimes swooped pleasantly through a sixteen-year-old girl's legs. On and on Elaine and her mother drove on foot, from one soap opera to the next, from one movie house to the next. They presented a strange picture, walking together on hot Bronx streets. Mrs. Cooney, and sometimes Mrs. Hoover, ever looking like centuries of literary Nurses, Elaine ever looking like centuries of Juliets and Ophelias and Helens. The troll-like servants and the beautiful mistress. Bound for a rendezvous with Romeo, with Hamlet, with Paris...bound for a rendezvous with the Warner Brothers, with Republic, with M.G.M., with Monogram, with R.K.O....there were thousands of Bronx people who saw them on their way. There was never one to cry out, to wonder, to intercept....
Early in September, shortly before high schools opened, there was an irregularity in the program. One of the ushers at the neighborhood R.K.O. theater, a slight, pale, blond boy who carried a white comb in his hip pocket and was constantly running it through his hair, invited Elaine to the beach over Sunday, and his invitation was accepted. The invitation was made while Elaine's mother, who chronically suffered with head colts, saw fit before seating herself to retire to the ladies' room to administer nose drops. Elaine waited in the front lobby of the theater, examining the release photographs of scenes from next week's film. The usher, whose name was Teddy Schmidt, spoke to her.
"Hey. Your name's Elaine, ain't it?"
"Yeah! How'dja know?" Elaine asked.
"I heard ya mother call ya around a million times," said Schmidt. "Listen. I mean wuddaya doin' Sunday? You wanna go to the beach? This friend of mine, Frank Vitrelli, he has this Pontiac convert. I and he and his girlfriend, were all driving out to the beach, Sunday. You wanna come? I mean you wanna come?"
"I don't know," said the recent graduate of P.S. 332, watching him, liking his wavy, effeminate hair.
"It'll be fun. I mean you'll have a good time. This friend of mine, Frank Vitrelli, is a panic. I mean you'll get a good sunburn and all. How 'bout it?"
"I hafta ask my mother," Elaine said.
"Swell!" said Teddy Schmidt. "Swell! I'll pick ya up at nine, Sunday morning. Where d'ya live?"
''Four fifty-two Sansom," Elaine sing-songed.
"Swell! Be downstairs!"
Mrs. Cooney, snuffing back nose drops, interrupted the conversation. Teddy Schmidt's white, white hands tore her tickets in two, and Elaine followed her mother into the familiar darkness.
When the names of the personnel responsible for the film flashed on the screen, Elaine whispered to her mother, "Mama."
"What?" said Mrs. Cooney, watching the screen.
"Can I go to the beach on Sunday?"
"What beach?"
"The beach. The usher wants me to go. He's going and I can go with him."
"I don't know. We'll see."
A man's figure appeared on the screen, and Elaine gave it her immediate interest biting her fingernails. The film progressed for ten minutes, then suddenly Mrs. Cooney addressed her daughter. "You don't have no bathing suit."
"What?" said Elaine, watching the screen.
"You don't have no bathing suit."
"I can get one, can't I?" Elaine asked.
Mrs. Cooney nodded in the dark, and the subject was closed indefinitely. The screen was becoming involved with a condition which promised the Cooneys a sudden lurch of romance.
The following Saturday night, when Elaine and her mother were walking home from another film at another theater, Mrs. Cooney gave her daughter certain motherly advice.
"Don't let nobody get wise with ya tomorrow."
"What?" Elaine said.
"Don't let nobody get wise with ya tomorrow. In this man's car or anything. Don't let nobody get funny."
Elaine walked with her beautiful mouth slightly open, listening to her mother.
"Just watch your P's and Q's," Mrs. Cooney advised.
"What?" said Elaine.
"Watch your P's and Q's tomorrow," Mrs. Cooney said, and added somewhat more vehemently, "I hope ya grandma's picked up the papers after her in the livin' room. I'm sick an' tired of pickin' up after her. Pickin' up, pickin' up, pickin’ up."
At ten minutes before nine the next morning, Elaine stood in front of the house, with a Kresge dime-store valise containing a cheap royal blue bathing suit, a thin, easily tearable bathing cap, and a face towel. She set down the valise at her small feet, and waited. It was a stunning, bright day, with special little breezes doing justice to Elaine's hair. At least three cars with men in them passed by her slowly, tooting their horns. One man went so far as to draw up to the curb, reach over and open his front door.
"Going my way, kid?"
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 11