All the Way Home (7 page)

L
oretta’s kitchen was a mess, Brick thought, a great mess. Magazines were piled everywhere, one opened on the countertop. There were other things, too: flowers in jelly glasses, ivy in cups, and knitting needles stuck in a ball of wool the color of apples on Claude’s trees.

And over the table Brick saw pictures of his own family: Mom in her nursing uniform, her head tilted. He knew that picture. Mom loved it because her freckles didn’t show. There was another of her, too, with Pop, and even one of himself as a baby.

It was the strangest thing to sit there under those pictures, eating melted cheese sandwiches with thick slices of tomato for supper. His mother had never made them … warm yellow cheese running onto the plate,
buttery toast. They were as messy looking as the rest of the kitchen, but they were terrific even though the crusts were burned.

Across from him was Mom’s friend, Loretta. He should be angry at her. After all, she was the one who had figured out who he was. Ambrose had walked him back to the station house after the picnic, sat him down with a pile of food, and she had tapped in with her platform shoes and a face full of worry.

He could have run then; the station house door was open and Ambrose was looking down at Loretta, smiling at her as if she were that movie star, Hedy Lamarr.

He could have run, but there was the promise he had made. A week. And he knew Mom was right about Loretta. He liked her. And there was the girl. He bit at the inside of his cheek. He had nearly cried this morning at the picnic, came so close to it, seeing all those kids looking at him, the teacher standing there, the cop. He’d felt as if he’d burst with it when he saw the girl raise her hand. It was almost as if she knew what he was feeling.

All afternoon he’d thought about the girl waving. She must be a quiet girl; she hadn’t said a word, hadn’t moved away from the picnic table.

And here in the house he had seen her peeking out of an upstairs door at him. It almost made him smile when he and Loretta had gone into the kitchen, Loretta rolling her eyes. “Where did Mariel get herself to?” He wanted to see her, wanted to hear her say something.

And then she was there in back of him, sliding onto
the chair at the table so fast it was hard to believe something was wrong with her legs. But he knew it, of course. She had been sick with what everyone in the world was afraid of, the sickness that killed people in just a day, or paralyzed them so that sometimes they couldn’t walk again, or even move their arms.

Polio.

Brick looked across at her, glad to see her. He felt a little shy, though, wondering what to say to her.

She didn’t even look at him.

He waited for a moment, but she fiddled with her knife and fork, staring down at them.

Maybe he had made a mistake. He had gotten through the afternoon because of her wave, but maybe she hadn’t waved at him after all. Maybe she hadn’t even been paying attention to him.

His plate was in front of him, a blue plate with brown horses runing around after each other, little chips on the edges. He tried not to think about yellow movie dishes, or Mom in the kitchen, or Pop grinning at him in the orchard.
“Our own trees, and we’ll stay here forever.”
He tried not to think about Claude and Julia.

“This is Mimi’s son from Windy Hill,” Loretta said.

The girl looked up, not at him but at Loretta. “Windy Hill?” Her voice had a nice sound, high and a little breathy. “The place where—” She broke off, her mouth closed. And now she did glance at him, the quickest peek, but still he saw it before she went back to moving her knife and fork around.

Loretta nodded. “Good Samaritan, honey, and outside of that, there are orchards and a little town.” Loretta began to talk about Mimi and about St. Catherine’s Hospital right there in Brooklyn, where they had met at nursing school. She talked about Windy Hill, where they had gone to take care of kids with polio. “I was a little girl when I first learned about polio,” she said. “It was 1916. Nine thousand kids in New York had polio that summer. Everyone was afraid; no one knew how it started.” She sighed. “No one knows now.” She shook her head and smiled at Mariel. “I found you right there in an iron lung twice your size and knew you were going to be my family.”

Then Loretta began to talk about baseball. “We’ll go to the game on Saturday and see the Dodgers take on the Giants.” Her head was to one side, and she tapped his shoulder. “Your mom wrote that you like the way Pete Reiser plays.” She shook her head. “That kid throws himself into everything, walls, balls, bats.”

Brick took another look at the girl across from him. Her head was bent over her cheese sandwich now, so that all he could see was her fine hair. It was the color of sand, and the part in the middle was slightly crooked.

He had watched the girl in between playing boxball and wolfing down a couple of brownies. He had stared out the gate, too: not a field, not a dirt path, not even a tree in sight, just a row of brown houses on the other side of the street.

“You should have seen the Dodgers play the Giants,” Loretta said. “Right, Mariel? Wonderful.”

He could see she wanted Mariel to talk, but the girl wasn’t having any of it. She pushed her cheese sandwich around her plate, her fingers fluttering a little, her eyes on the radio on the counter as if she were listening, except that the radio wasn’t on.

He had to get out of there, he told himself for the hundredth time. He took a huge bite of his sandwich, wondering about his promise to Ambrose the cop. A week. And would Ambrose be there at the end of that time, watching him, making sure he didn’t run?

Loretta went on. “The next couple of days will make all the difference. We’ve got three games with the Giants coming up next weekend. Our enemies. And then the Dodgers will be on the road. Wouldn’t it be something if they won enough to get the pennant? The first one in twenty years.”

Before he could stop himself, he blurted out, “How far is it from Brooklyn to Windy Hill?”

Loretta stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Oh, Brick. It must seem so far away,” she said.

Across the table the girl’s head came up. “Brick?”

He knew what she was thinking. The teacher had called him Billy Nightingale a hundred times.
“Everyone, this is Billy Nightingale. Want some more lemonade, Billy? Cupcakes, Billy Nightingale?”

He cleared his throat.

“Brick,” said Loretta. “His nickname.”

Mariel looked at him for just a moment more. An angry look? A look as if she thought he was crazy? Then she bent her head over her plate again.

And even though Loretta talked for the rest of the meal, and over her shoulder while she did the dishes, Brick didn’t hear one word she was saying.

11

T
he rest of the week was terrible. Loretta had taken time off, and every morning she stuffed cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches and cookies into brown paper bags for them to take to Breezy Point or Coney Island. The trips should have been wonderful, but Mariel lagged behind, not saying a word to Brick.

On Saturday, before Brick came down for breakfast, Loretta showed Mariel the tickets for the game at Ebbets Field. Then she put them down on the table. There were spots of color in her cheeks. “What’s the matter with you anyway, Mariel? Good grief!” Ordinarily Mariel might have laughed. It was funny to see Loretta angry about a spot on her nursing cap, or a pot that burned, or rain on a day for a picnic. But Loretta was never angry at her.

“Why aren’t you friends with Brick?” Loretta said. “I thought this would be such a wonderful year for you.”

Mariel put her hand up to her head. “I just have to get my hair clip.” And before Loretta could say another word, she was on her way to her bedroom to find the barrette she hadn’t worn in a year.

She stopped in front of the mirror to take a look at her legs. Candles that had been left too close to the stove, curved instead of tall and straight. And Loretta thought he’d want to be friends. She felt a burning in her throat, and a quick feeling of
wouldn’t it be nice to be Brick’s friend
, as she found the barrette in the back of her dresser drawer and ran it through her hair, feeling scratchiness as she clipped it in.

She decided she wasn’t going to bother about Brick Tiernan today. She was going to wear the new overalls with crisscross straps and red buttons that Loretta had bought for her on sale at Loeser’s department store. Brick Tiernan wouldn’t see her legs and neither would anyone else.

They left early. “I’ve got a bag of plums because we’ll be thirsty,” Loretta told them, “and enough money from the penny jar to treat to ice cream.”

The seats were wonderful, so close to the first-base line that Mariel could lean on the iron bar in front of her and watch Dolph Camilli at first, and Curt Davis, the pitcher, as he scuffed up the soft dirt around the pitcher’s mound.

It was an easy first inning, a boring inning with the
Giants’ pitcher, Fiddler McGee, putting the Dodgers out, one two three. Curt Davis did the same to the Giants.

Mariel could see Brick out of the corner of her eye. He leaned forward, too, telling Loretta over his shoulder, “My father always wanted to see a game, and my friend Claude, too.”

And even though she had promised herself she wouldn’t think about it ever again, Mariel remembered the picnic on Tuesday, remembered that they had looked at each other… had they really looked at each other?… and she had thought they might be friends.

And then it was the second inning, the Dodgers were up, and Camilli walloped a pitch far above the scorecard clock all the way onto Bedford Avenue. By the end of the inning Lew Riggs had come home, too. Everyone was standing and cheering. And Brick, forgetting it was Mariel, pounded her on the shoulder.

But that wasn’t the most exciting inning of the game. Not even watching Pete Reiser slide home when they knew the Dodgers were going to win, really win against the Giants’ one unearned homer, was the most exciting. It was toward the end of the game she’d never forget. And it was Pete Reiser who would do it for her.

She had a mouthful of plums, she and Brick had even grinned at each other when Dixie Walker had a screaming fight with the umpire, a quick grin, and they both leaned forward watching as Pete Reiser came to the plate again.

He took powerful swings in the air as the pitcher wound up. Pete was batting wild, the first ball out of play on the first-base line, coming close to the stands, and then the second even closer, bouncing off the wall with a
pock
that rang in Mariel’s ears. But it was the next wallop that made the difference. It popped up high, still far wide of first, and Mariel could see it coming, round and white, spiraling through the air toward her, with everyone in the stands, heads stretched, necks stretched, arms stretched, trying to see where it would go.

All of them wanted to make the catch, Mariel most of all, even though she could feel herself losing her balance, knowing she had to reach out and grab the iron bar in front to hold herself up, instead of reaching for the ball.