All the Way Home (18 page)

When he saw her, Claude picked up a knife and a chunk of cheese. He sliced off a wedge for her, pushed a bottle of root beer closer, and stuck the tip of the knife
into an apple. “Apples and cheese,” he said. “There’s nothing better in the world.”

“Is that any way to give the child lunch?” Julia scolded, raising her hands and shaking her head at Mariel. “Deafening,” she said. “Everything in the house vibrates because of that radio.”

“Can you hear the noise of the crowd?” Claude asked, ignoring Julia. “Reiser just made a home run.”

Julia rolled her eyes.

“Loretta took me to my first game,” Mariel said. “It was a night game. It was early in the season, and very cold. I was afraid of the noise. Loretta wrapped her sweater around me.” She could still feel the warmth of it, the feel of Loretta’s hug.

Brick stopped flipping through the book. “Found it.” He grinned. “A little dogwood tree, that’s what it is. From Prospect Park.”

Mariel leaned forward to run her finger over the leaf, thinking of the band shell, and Ambrose, and the fountain spraying water into the warm air.

Claude clapped his hand to his head. “I forgot about your letter,” he said. “How could I do that?” He pulled it out of his pocket and slid it across the table to her.

She reached for it, so happy to see the envelope from Loretta. Loretta was writing every day. But when she picked it up, the writing wasn’t Loretta’s writing. The letters were large and even.

“It’s not from Brooklyn,” Claude said, shouting over the radio. “Queens, is it?”

“I don’t know anyone from Queens.” She ran her finger over the purple stamp, then turned the envelope over, tearing open the flap with the return address. “I can’t imagine …,” she told them, looking down at the short note, the signature:
Vincent
.

She didn’t know anyone named Vincent. Not in Brooklyn, not in Queens, not anywhere. She leaned over and read aloud:
“Dear Mariel, I miss walking with you in Brooklyn. Sometimes I walk with Loretta to her hospital. We talk about you and wonder what you’re doing.”

She shook her head. No one walked with her in Brooklyn. And Loretta? Mariel could see her, always late, rushing down the street, no time to walk with anyone.

“Say hello to Billy Nightingale.”

Ambrose? Could it be Ambrose the cop?

“Please come home, Mariel. It would make Loretta happy
.

“Vincent.”

Ambrose had a first name. Ambrose with the blue eyes, and the hat pushed back. She ran her hand over the paper. She missed Ambrose the cop, missed hiding on him, missed the shiny black shoes as he walked her to school. She turned the letter over. There was one last sentence.
“Loretta says to tell you I can cook.”

She smiled. If he could see their kitchen, the burned pots, she thought, and then something else.
If we ever get a husband in here
 … Oh! She reached for a wedge of
cheese, another apple. Loretta and
Ambrose
? Oh, how lovely.

“Mariel likes all this,” Claude said. “Maybe we’ll make a country girl out of her.”

She looked up at him. His head was turned to one side. “A country girl?” she asked.

He watched her almost as if he were waiting for something.

And then she heard the voice of Red Barber, the announcer. “A grand slam,” he said in a soft Southern drawl. But there was nothing soft about the noise of the crowd and Hilda the fan’s cowbell clanging and clanging.

It was there, almost there, the thing she’d been trying to remember. Was it something to do with the radio? The Dodgers game? Loretta wrapping her in her sweater, hugging her?

She never even got to the hospital
, Joseph had said.

Her hands were in front of her on the table, quiet now, no fluttering. But her heart was fluttering so hard she had to open her mouth to breathe. She closed her eyes.

She could see it in her mind: the middle of the night, a black square of window, the whoosh of the machine, all alone. And then her mother, the red sweater thrown over her shoulder, the charm bracelet dangling from one arm, clinking a little.

Her mother had never gotten to the hospital
.

She leaned forward. Julia turned, her mouth open, ready to say something, but Claude warned her away with one large hand.

“You’re going to get out of this iron lung, out of this hospital, I promise you. And then I’m going to take you home. I’ll be your mother if you’ll have me.” She had bent over, so close that Mariel could smell the starch in her cap as it tumbled off her head
.

Loretta, a red sweater over her white uniform. Loretta wearing a bracelet.

Loretta all the time.

“I’ll be your mother. Won’t I do? My child has had such a hard time, Mrs. Ginty. Here, look, knit one, purl one. You can do anything, Mariel. I’d come but you have to do this by yourself. President Roosevelt said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ I love you, Mariel.”

“Please.” Mariel pushed herself away from the table. “I have to go home now.”

32

I
t was a daytime bus, so Mariel could see the farms as they flashed by, and then the small towns turning into larger ones, with lovely gray stone buildings and houses with neat little gardens. Once they passed a redbrick school with a flag flying in front and kids playing jump rope in the yard.

She couldn’t play jump rope. She thought about it, leaning against the window. Loretta would say she could, but she didn’t have to jump rope; she didn’t have to do everything.

They had hugged her at the Windy Hill bus station, all of them telling her she had to come back next summer. Julia had tears in her eyes as Claude put his hands on her shoulders. “We will never forget you,
Mariel,” he said. “You were a brave girl to bring Brick home.”

“And to bring the pickers,” said Julia.

Mariel had reached up to ease the too-tight elastic of the hatband under her chin. “Will you write to me?” she asked Brick.

He nodded. He took one of her hands then, and hugged her at the same time. Then they stepped back, laughing, a little embarrassed.

“I don’t think my fingers will flutter anymore,” she said.

He raised one shoulder. “Even if they do it doesn’t make any difference.” He broke off. “I never had a friend like you.”

“Oh, Billy Nightingale,” she had said. “Me too.”

She thought about it now in the bus. Why had it been so easy to be friends with Brick, and not with Geraldine Ginty?

After a while, they pulled into the Hurley bus station for a rest, and she bent over the water fountain for a cool drink. In back of her someone whispered. She put her head up in time to hear the end. “Poor kid … polio.”

She smiled, the water from the fountain icy against her teeth, remembering the movie she and Loretta had seen, Dumbo the elephant with his large ears.
“And didn’t he do just fine?” Loretta had said
.

Loretta had been talking about her.

From the other side of the station someone yelled, “Hey, the Dodgers just beat Cincinnati. They’re hanging
signs out in Brooklyn. They’re going to win the pennant this time!”

A picture of Geraldine Ginty came into her mind. What would Geraldine say now about the Dodgers?

Mariel climbed back on the bus, thinking about Brooklyn, and Loretta, and Geraldine. She took a breath. Geraldine Ginty was afraid.

Could that be? Afraid of getting polio? Afraid of being like Mariel, hiding behind the stoop instead of playing? Fingers fluttering? Taking the backseat in school?
Razy Cray?

Mariel pressed her nose against the window, seeing the darkness coming and lights going on here and there. But maybe it would be different now that Geraldine knew she had gone all the way upstate and back by herself.

She took a deep breath. She’d never hide behind the stoop again. She was going to start over. Geraldine might make an all-right friend, and so would Frankie McHugh. She’d make sure they really knew about President Roosevelt. And she’d show them she could hit, that maybe she was even a two-sewer hitter.

When the bus turned into the station in Manhattan, it was close to nine o’clock. Loretta stood there, her shiny black hair lifting as the bus slid in next to her.

Mariel sat there for just a moment. Loretta was standing up on tiptoes trying to see into the bus. Mariel could picture her in her starched white uniform, the pointy little cap, the red sweater over her shoulders, and the gold
bracelet jingling, her face close to hers. How could she not have known it was Loretta coming back after her shift, spending all that time with her?

She reached up on the shelf over her head for the bag filled with apples, green leaves still clinging to the stems.
A green lace curtain. When the wind blows … knotted shoelaces, sweet face, a blue kerchief
.

My poor mother
, she thought. She was hit with such a terrible sadness that for a moment she sat back in the seat again.
My mother
. Then she thought of Joseph:
The most important thing, she loved you
.

She took her purse and her hat off the seat next to her and looped them over her arm. She went along the aisle and climbed down the steps, dropping everything, her arms out to Loretta. They rocked back and forth, crying, laughing and talking both at once.

“I had to let you go.”

“The two-dollar bill is gone, I’m sorry.”

“We’ll find another to remind us.”

“I’ll never leave again except for visits.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Oh, Loretta.”

And then, at last, they turned to look at Ambrose the cop, who was gathering up the apples that rolled around their feet.

I
t was September twenty-fifth. That afternoon the Dodgers were in Boston. It was the game that would matter, the one that would decide the pennant at last. In Brooklyn, radios blared from every house. Mrs. Warnicki had brought her own radio and put it on a table so the class could listen. And in Windy Hill, the principal promised to announce the score over the loudspeaker.