Autumn Street

by Lois Lowry

  "Charles can."

  "Elizabeth! You haven't..."

  I caught my error quickly. "Oh, no. I haven't seen him do it. But I meant that I suppose all boys can."

  But I was lying. I had seen Charles do it, often, behind the lilacs. He aimed at ants.

  I held Gordon, drowsy and powdered, on my lap, and played with his hands in the firelight. The flames licked the dry logs and snapped; sparks drifted up the chimney; a log shifted and fell.

  "Do the magic, Grandfather. Do the magic for Gordon."

  So Grandfather leaned forward, took a handful of his magic sand from its box, and sprinkled it onto the fire. For a few moments the flames turned blue, green, purple—for a few moments I saw in the fire all the colors of my paintings, my skies and mountains and hills, moving, alive, flickering and dancing against each other. Blending, the way I had blended my landscapes. There was sky in the fireplace. There was the Pacific, the horizon, the war, the past: the pale blue of places I had dreamed of; and the dark, awesome greens of places to which I was frightened to go.

  The magic was over so quickly. It always was. The baby shifted in my lap and whimpered.

  "Grandfather, do you want to hold Gordon?"

  But Grandfather was standing, as startled as if the magic were new to him, as puzzled as if he had seen none of us before, as if the firelight were frightening and strange. His face was a face I had never seen.

  "I am not well," he said slowly. He turned and left the room.

  From the hallway, as the clock on the stairs struck, we heard the sound as he fell.

  Stroke.

  Stroke.

  When I was told, the next day, after the hushed voices, the confusion, the fear were over, that Grandfather had had a stroke, I associated it with the clock. He had had a stroke of eight.

  I avoided the clock as much as I could. Its strokes, which had always signaled news time, bedtime, now were connected with the evil, the fear I felt when I heard Grandfather fall. The clock measured out dying, I knew, although Grandfather was not dead; the clock waited, and one day it would strike—STROKE—again.

  The painted face of the moon at the top of the tall clock continued to smile.

  The fire had faded untended, and I had not thrown my pine cone in. And the magic, Grandfather's magic, was sealed in the small box still. I opened it secretly, alone in the parlor while Grandfather was in the hospital, and looked inside; there was only gray sand, no colors, none of the bright blues and greens. It took a magic Grandfather to make the fire colors happen; and Grandfather had crumpled on the hall rug. His powers were gone.

  I watched new powers come to Grandmother, who had never had a child. Now, when Grandfather came home and the big house was newly equipped with hospital bed, with wheelchair, and all the chrome trappings of illness, Grandmother became a mother for the first time.

  "Try this, dear," she said, in a soft, mother's voice that I had never heard her use before, as she held a spoonful of applesauce to his lopsided mouth. She wiped his chin with a cloth napkin. She looked at him with the fond look that Mama gave to Gordon, and Grandfather's eyes were as unfocused and trusting as the baby's, looking back at her.

  There was a covered enamel pail, tall and white, in Grandfather's bedroom, and I could not bring myself, even when he was on the porch in his wheelchair and the room was empty, to look inside the pail. I knew there were diapers there.

  So it was not death to be feared as much as this other. The going backward. No one spoke of it. And I thought again of my cousin David, whom I remembered still as tanned and playful in summer, laughing as he chased me to torture me with tickles. After two years of war, David was still in the hospital. No one had spoken of him, either, for a long time.

  Finally I asked, "Did David have a stroke, too?"

  Mama looked at me, puzzled. "David? Do you remember David?"

  As if I could have forgotten that green, sweet summer when I was three. "He used to tickle me and call me Dizzy Lizzie," I reminded her. "Did he have a stroke, like Grandfather?" I didn't remember David's face, any more than I remembered Daddy's; but I could remember the hugs and the sunlight that summer. If, in his hospital, David was diapered now, and someone was wiping spit from his chin, I wanted to know.

  But Mama said no. "David was shell-shocked," she said.

  I didn't let her see that the words terrified me more than the word stroke. In Great-aunt Caroline's bedroom there was a pink translucent shell on a dresser; once she had held it to my ear and told me that I could hear the ocean.

  "Can I hear the Pacific?" I had asked, turning my head against the curved surface to find the sound.

  "Yes," Great-aunt Caroline had said. "The sound of the waves."

  I wasn't sure, because I had never heard waves. I heard a hollow pink sound like the sound of far away, like the sound of dreams.

  Now David was there, shocked, in the hollow void, and it was worse than Grandfather, whose cane stood unused in the hallway closet, and whose mouth formed no words but opened wetly again and again. David's fate had to do with the war; and the shell made it the war in the Pacific, so I had new fears for Daddy. Everyone I loved was threatened by things I didn't understand. Everyone but Tatie. I wandered down the stairs and into the kitchen; Tatie was there, as she always was, and she was making a pie. Apple pie was so familiar, so comforting, that I forgot the sickroom upstairs, forgot David, the shell, the Pacific, and Daddy, settled myself on a kitchen chair and popped a fingerful of raw dough into my mouth.

  "Grandmother says that if you eat raw dough your insides will stick together. Do you believe that, Tatie?"

  "Nope. I been eating it myself since I was as big as you."

  "How are your insides?"

  "Too fat is how they are. And yours is too skinny."

  "Grandmother says that if I want to grow properly I should take cod-liver oil and learn the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church."

  "Ha."

  "That's what I say. Ha."

  "Lick your finger, Liz, and hold it out."

  I did, dutifully, and Tatie sprinkled my fingertip with cinnamon. I sucked it while she sprinkled the sliced apples; it tasted like Fall, and made my nose itch.

  "Tatie, if I ask you something will you promise to say yes?"

  "Nope."

  "Please?"

  "Ask me."

  "Can I take the can of cinnamon, just for a few minutes?"

  "Where you want to take it to?"

  I kicked my dangling feet together, and finally told her. "Grandfather's in his wheelchair on the upstairs porch. I want to put cinnamon on his finger."

  "Your grandma's with him, and she won't like that."

  "If I ask her first, and she says yes, can I?"

  Tatie sighed and handed me the small tin can.

  But Grandmother was asleep, nodding in her wicker chair, a book open on her lap and her glasses pushed up on top of her gray hair. I tiptoed to where Grandfather sat staring in his wheelchair, a blanket across his legs despite the end-of-summer heat, his eyes alive but uncomprehending, his hands useless in his covered lap.

  "Lick your finger and hold it out," I whispered to him.

  His head bobbed but his hands didn't move. His mouth fell open and made shapes but no sounds came. He looked at me. I remembered him walking, in his crisp white suit, carrying his cane, on Autumn Street, and was sad.

  "I'll do it for you," I whispered, and took his hand gently. I put his forefinger into my own mouth, and tasted his clean, aged skin. Carefully I sprinkled cinnamon on his damp fingertip and lifted it to the wet black shape that had once been his fine proud mouth. It touched his tongue, and with his mouth he shaped what I understood to be a smile. I dried his finger with the hem of my dress, put his hand back into his lap, and crept away. Grandmother never knew.

  12

  LILLIAN CHESTNUT HAD boyfriends who were soldiers. Sometimes Jess and I watched when she came down from her over-the-garage bedroom in the early evenings, dressed in full gathe
red skirts and off-the-shoulder blouses, and went out the back door to be met at the corner by soldiers who arrived in a rattletrap car.

  When I called Daddy a soldier once, Mama corrected me.

  "Your father's an officer," she said.

  "But he's in the army. People in the army are soldiers. And people in the navy are sailors." I had learned that much, I thought, from Life magazine.

  "Some of them are. But there are also officers, and your father is an officer."

  "What's the difference?"

  Mama sighed. "Oh, Liz, it's very complicated."

  That meant that she wasn't going to explain it to me.

  Even with my memory of Daddy vague and distant, I could tell that Lillian's boyfriends were different. They came from the army base just outside of town, and were young and noisy, with cigarettes attached to the corners of their mouths. Lillian always looked nervously over her shoulder toward the house as she went out to their car; we could hear her say, "Will you guys hush?" with suppressed laughter in her voice before they drove away.

  By early evening Grandmother was always upstairs, on the other side of the house, spooning soup into Grandfather, or reading Dickens aloud. Mama would be in her own room, preparing the baby for bed and listening to the evening news on a small radio. The evenings of Chinese Checkers and firelight were over.

  "That Lillian," Tatie said to Jess and me after we had watched one evening's leave-taking from the back porch, "she gonna get in trouble, goin' with soldiers."

  Getting into trouble was old hat with me. "Maybe," I acknowledged enviously. "But she's old enough. She can't get punished."

  "Ha. Her kind of trouble carry its own punishment."

  From the time I had deliberately rubbed poison ivy on myself, I knew that there were kinds of behavior that carried their own punishments, but it was hard to relate that experience to Lillian driving off every evening with loud-voiced soldiers.

  "Well," I said, affecting worldliness, "at least she won't get all swollen up and feeling horrible."

  "Ha," said Tatie, putting the last of the dinner dishes away.

  ***

  One evening Charles was there. He and I sat on the back steps before bedtime, counting the fireflies in the yard, slapping at the mosquitoes, planning what we would do in the morning. Lillian appeared with her hair freshly curled and her waist cinched in by a wide red belt. She lit a cigarette and sat with us on the steps, watching the road for the car full of soldiers.

  "Lillian," I asked her, "what happened to that one soldier who used to come, the one with red hair who called you 'Roasted Chestnut'?"

  Lillian laughed and took a long drag on her cigarette. The smoke appeared in two streams from her nose, like a horse breathing in winter.

  "Red? He's gone. He's fighting the damn Germans."

  "I thought the war was against the Japanese. My father's fighting the Japanese."

  Charles groaned. "Elizabeth Jane, you so stupid."

  Lillian aimed a smoke ring at me so that I could poke my finger through it. Then she did one for Charles.

  "It's against the Japanese and the Germans. Some of the guys go one place, some go another."

  "Which is worse?"

  Lillian lifted her shoulders slightly. "I don't know. The Japs chop heads off. But the Germans put people in ovens."

  Her words came out into the still evening and the fireflies continued to blink; but my own eyes were wide open and my stomach was seized with cramps.

  "Is that really true, Lillian?"

  "Yeah. You can see it in the newsreels. Oh, I forgot. You're not allowed to go to movies, are you?"

  "No." No wonder. I had been taken to Snow White. I had thought all movies were like Snow White.

  "Charles, did you know that, about the ovens and the chopping heads off?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Charles lied. His eyes were as wide in the early darkness as mine.

  "Lillian, Hugo Hoffman was a German," I told her, making my voice as meaningful as Grandmother's.

  "Who's Hugo Hoffman?" She lit another cigarette, putting the stub of the first into her purse so that Grandmother wouldn't find it in the yard.

  "Next door. Remember when the little boy next door died? His father was German."

  "Yeah?"

  "At the beginning of the war he disappeared."

  "No kidding. Where'd he disappear to?"

  "Nobody knows. When the war started he just went off in the night and nobody ever saw him again."

  Lillian was interested. "And then the kid died. What'd he die of?"

  My stomach cramped again. "Pneumonia, the doctor said."

  "The doctor said. I wonder about that, let me tell you. There's all sorts of strange stuff goes on. I bet anything that guy is a spy for the Germans."

  Suddenly we were talking in whispers, in secret voices. Even Charles.

  "Spies is over there, where the war is. They ain't in a little ole town like this," he whispered.

  Lillian blew smoke out again and looked impatiently down the street for her ride. Then she said in a hushed, ominous voice, "Don't you kid yourself. Spies are all over, and the walls have ears. There are German radio operators right in this town, let me tell you. Out in California there are thousands of Japs with radios, signaling subs. There isn't a safe place left. And the only thing you can do about it"—she rose, as the sound of the noisy car came—"is go out and have fun. Right?"

  "Right," said Charles.

  "Right," I echoed. We both waved toward the car as she left, but it was dark now; the only things we could see were the small glowing circles of cigarettes, redder than fireflies. From the kitchen Tatie called to us to come in.

  ***

  "Charles," I whispered to him in the morning, as we stood in the backyard, "do you believe what Lillian said about spies?"

  "Yeah."

  "What're spies?"

  He hesitated. "People who fight for the other side."

  "How can they fight for the Germans, here in this town? What did she mean about radios? Everybody has radios. We have a radio."

  "It's a special kind of spy radio they have. They talk to Hitler."

  I knew about Hitler, vaguely. Hitler was an enemy.

  "Do you think Hugo Hoffman talks to Hitler?"

  Charles sat on the grass and thought. "You know what, Elizabeth? That Hoffman house, she's got a big attic. Look at all them windows."

  I looked up. All of the houses on Autumn Street were very large. They all had attics.

  "So what?"

  "I bet that Hugo Hoffman, he been up in that attic all the time, talking to Hitler."

  I knew that it couldn't be true. If Hugo Hoffman had been in the attic the day that Noah cried and called out, the day that Nathaniel and I had held the duck race, Hugo Hoffman would have come down, spy or no spy. But I didn't want to tell Charles about that.

  "He couldn't be. He'd starve."

  "Elizabeth Jane, you so..."

  "I am not stupid, Charles. Nobody can live in an attic and not eat. And how would he go to the bathroom? There aren't any bathrooms in attics."

  Charles explained it to me patiently, the way my Sunday School teacher went through things again and again, making me feel unbearably ignorant.

  "He creeps down at night, after everybody asleep, and eats and pees. His wife, she probably knows he's there. Spies, they can tell their wife, but nobody else."

  I looked again, nervously, at the Hoffmans' attic windows, wondering if Nathaniel's father could possibly be there, chatting with Hitler. The Autumn Street attics were very hot in summer, and there was a wasp's nest in Grandfather's.

  "Charles," I said slowly, terrified by my own daring, "Mrs. Hoffman took Nathaniel to Harrisburg this morning, to buy clothes for school. And she always leaves the back door unlocked."

  Charles grinned. He was always looking for something exciting to do, and I still refused to go with him to the woods. "You wanna go in?"

  "What if he heard us?"

  "We gotta ma
ke a plan. We go in in our bare feet so we don't make no noise. Then we creeps up the stairs without no noise, and we creeps all the way up to the attic door and we listen."

  "What do we do if we hear him?"

  Charles thought. "We call the army and tell them."

  "Charles, what if he knows that Mrs. Hoffman and Nathaniel are gone, and he comes down in the house and sees us?"

  "Elizabeth Jane, you don't know yet that spies is serious stuff. He staying in that attic all the time because if he comes out except when it be real dark, somebody might see him through the windows. No, he gonna stay right in that attic in daytime, tapping at his radio to Hitler."

  "What will the army do to him?"

  "Kill him. They always kills spies. First they torture them some."

  "I don't want anybody to be killed."

  "Long as he sits there talking to Hitler, people getting put into them ovens. You like that better?"

  I remembered Red, with his quick, cocky voice, calling softly to Lillian as she got into the car, "Hey there, Roasted Chestnut!" I didn't want Red to be in an oven, trussed like a turkey, with juices oozing pink from the prick-marks in the browning skin. It was the vision of Red in a baking pan, a cigarette still propped in his grin, that made me agree to go into Hoffman's house.

  We slipped through the opening in the hedge, glancing back to be sure that Tatie wasn't watching, that Grandmother had not appeared on the porch to check the roses, or that Mama was not bringing the baby to the yard for some sun. But the house was silent, closed, and uncaring.

  The Hoffmans' back door was, as I knew it would be, unlocked. The kitchen was sunny and neat, the breakfast dishes washed and draining in the sink, a bowl of bananas on the table next to a bottle of vitamins. Nathaniel's treasured stack of Captain Marvel comics was on a shelf beside the telephone; I saw Charles eye them greedily, and I nudged him forward through the kitchen. The floor was cool and clean, recently scrubbed, against our bare feet. The only sounds were the loud ticking of an ornate clock in the dining room and the stealthy brush of our feet on the rug as we passed through on our way to the stairs.

  But even empty rooms are populated with the presence of those recently there. I thought that I could smell the thin flowery scent of the cologne Mrs. Hoffman sometimes wore; and I could almost hear the soft laughter of Nathaniel as he played. I grabbed for Charles' hand and held it tight; he turned to me and formed some words with his mouth.