The Alley (2 page)

Connie loved school—all her studies, all her teachers, and every inch of the school itself. The school was an old one—red brick and five stories high. What a race there was to the gym, between bells, for the gym was higher still, in a sort of turret. It was a famous old school, ancient and with a long history. A poet had gone there once. Now Connie went there, in grade five, and also many of the other children in the Alley, big and little. When the sixth of June came, Connie would be promoted to grade six. She would take up decimals—not easy, not easy at all, they said—and problems—how fast one car would be going if another car was going forty miles an hour and if Mr. Grimes, the driver of the first car, got to the city ten minutes ahead of Mr. Cox, driver of the second. Connie had seen it in Katy's book and often tried to figure it out.

When she started in this school, Connie had been in grade two. Two, three, four, five, and next six. Grade six in this school! That meant that she had been living in the Alley for four years, almost a half of her life. She counted on her fingers to be sure. She always counted on her fingers. "Ts," Mama always said. "Counting on your fingers? Still?" And Papa, a professor, though of English not arithmetic, chimed in. "The way they teach arithmetic—by packs of cards, the numbers on each card having nothing to do with the numbers on the card before! This is why children age ten have to count on their fingers!"

"Yes," said Mama. "They should learn addition ('addition facts' they call them now!) by rote, not by cards. It's fun learning by rote, anyway. One and one are two, two and two are four, and so on. Some of the ways of doing things now don't seem sensible to me at all."

Connie had always loved to swing. Everywhere that she had ever lived—and that had been four places, counting this Alley in Brooklyn—she had always had a swing. Practically everybody in the Alley loved to come into the yard and swing. "Can I come in?" "Can I swing?" The big children and the little ones came to the gate all the time, asking to come in and swing.

"You have a regular playground there," June Arp's mother often said to Mama over the fence.

"I know." Mama laughed. She didn't care. She loved having the children in the yard. But she had had to post rules. Otherwise, there would be too many on the swing at once, and the little ones might get hurt.

Mama printed the rules on a nice thin, square, flat piece of wood, and she put these rules on the trunk of Mrs. Harrington's huge elm tree, the side of the trunk that was in Connie's yard. Next to Billy Maloon's oak tree, this tree was the largest in the Alley, and its branches spread over the jungle gym and most of Connie's garden. A lot of the little boys, like Nicky and Danny, couldn't read; but that did not matter. They knew the rules by heart. The rules were:

1. Always ask permission. Don't just walk into the yard and start swinging.

2. Always close the gate so that Wags (the dog) can't get out in the Alley.

3. No more than two little ones on at a time or three big ones.

4. Little ones under three must have a mother or a big person with them.

5. Don't go too high.

6. Don't jump off.

7. No reserving. (That is, you can't come in and swing and then jump off and say "reserved" while you go home for a cookie or something else. That would be hogging the swing.)

8. Don't stand up and swing.

Everyone knew the rules of Connie's jungle-gym swings and glider, and everyone obeyed them ... at least, in the main they tried to, but some, Nicky especially, just couldn't resist going too high. And one, Katy Starr, often walked right into the yard, not asking first "May I?" and left the gate open, swung a short while, jumped down, and then went out, saying, "Swinging is boring." She did not close the gate after her, either.

"I wonder why she does that," Connie thought. "There are thirty-three children in the Alley, and Katy is the only one who leaves the gate open. Oh well, that is the way Katy is! She just is that way."

It was lucky that there were this many children in the Alley. There was always someone out, someone to play with. Connie didn't have any brothers or sisters herself—oh, how she wished she had one, a brother or a sister—but she didn't. However, this didn't mean that her family was a small one. Far from it. It was quite large and consisted of the following.

First of all, herself, Connie. She had long blond hair, which she sometimes wore in two braids and sometimes simply hanging straight. She had bangs; and very black eyelashes shadowed her frank blue eyes. Her face was serious, thoughtful. But when she smiled, her eyes and face lit up like moonbeams. She loved to read, she loved music, she made up songs, she took piano lessons, though she did not like them; she liked to play, simply play the piano, not to take the lessons. She liked to draw and often wrote a book and drew the pictures for it. She liked to think, just swing and think; and she loved animals. When she thought of animals, lost and out in the cold or in the snow, hungry in the nighttime, she cried softly to herself. She had a good sense of humor. It would be hard to say which of her favorite books her most favorite book was—
Alice in Wonderland, Floating Island, Charlotte's Web,
or
Half Magic.
She loved them all, each one being the best and most favorite while she was reading it.

Then there was her father, a professor of English. "Papa is the most distinguished-looking man on campus," thought Connie. "Next most distinguished-looking man might be Mr. Starr, Katy's father." He was a man with a beard like Van Gogh's, though Mr. Starr was a professor of archaeology, not an artist. Mr. Blackman, dean of the students and an oboe player, was very handsome, too. The Alley had many handsome inhabitants. Connie's father was from South Carolina and stemmed from the Rebels. Connie's mother, who, besides being a mother, was an artist, was from Connecticut; so she stemmed from the Yankees. Mama and Papa first set eyes on each other in a classroom right here at Grandby College. She was studying art, and he was already a professor of English; to be an artist, you must also study English, and he was her teacher. They met each other, for the first time, outside the classroom on a windy day in October at the cannon in Library Park, when she dropped her portfolio and her drawings blew all over the park. It was too windy to run around gathering up her drawings; she had to hang onto the cannon merely to stand up. Papa had run all over the grass picking up her drawings. They were not much torn, and she didn't care, anyway. What were lost drawings in comparison to lunching with Professor Ives? For they had had lunch together that day in the Grandby Drugstore—both had had tuna fish on toast—and then they had had lunch together practically every day thereafter.

Next came Nanny, Connie's grandmother, the mother of Connie's father, and likewise stemming from the Rebels. She loved to cook and was practically always in the kitchen. She always listened to the baseball games on the radio and knew every player on every team, and knew past famous players, too, and who won the pennant when. In her college in the South in her day, she was captain of the women's baseball team. She also loved horses and had been considered a dashing horsewoman, galloping along the country roads, sometimes bareback, or driving a little surrey, trot-trot, clop. "There goes Stacy," all would say; but she would be out of sight before anyone could really see her. That's what Connie's father told Connie. Nanny was in her seventies; but she did not sit in the corner and knit or anything of that sort. She cooked, listened to the news, wrote dozens of letters a week to her dear friends back home. She did not consider Brooklyn her home; she just lived here with Connie's father and mother. She dearly loved Connie, her only grandchild. It would be hard to imagine anything sweeter than her voice saying, "Yes, darling?" when Connie had something to tell. You could always count on Nanny's listening. You could not always count on Papa's listening; he had his mind on other things. He had so much to do—
correct
papers, have conferences with his students,
go to
meetings, read the paper, read books. But when he finally listened, he listened really hard. Mama was quite a good listener; sometimes, however, she had to listen to two people at once—Connie and her father, or even three, Nanny, too, plus Nanny's news report on the radio, with her comments about it—and that was not easy. Nanny did not like for you to let the cat out when she had just gotten her in, or in when she had just gotten her out—having beguiled her with a piece of kidney or a little scrap of something. She spoke crossly to Hugsy Goode and Billy Maloon—Billy was Connie's best friend—if they tracked in one drop of snow. They were both scared of her. It embarrassed Connie, the cross way Nanny spoke to her friends. But that was the only thing wrong with her. Otherwise, she was perfect and she loved Connie so. She loved Connie and she loved South Carolina. She had missed only one Christmas with Connie since Connie was born. That Christmas without Nanny had been awful; and Connie hoped she would never miss another one.

Next came Wags, nicknamed Wagsie. Wags was the six-year-old springer spaniel dog of the Ives family. She was dark brown and white with curly, shaggy fur and long, floppy ears. Ordinarily Wags had a melancholy look, wise and thoughtful; but when she rolled over on her back, she looked as though she was laughing, and she was. If Connie had any troubles, she buried her face in Wagsie's fur and told them to her. "Wagsie," she cried. "Listen." This wonderful dog was given to Connie by the wife of an F.B.I. man when Connie was almost three. Sometimes she was called "the F.B.I. dog." Wags was only eight weeks old then, and her hind legs were so weak, she could not get up on the sofa. Her legs never grew very strong, and sometimes, coming downstairs, she would slide on her stomach the last few steps as though she were a toboggan. Wags was a very timid dog. But she was a noble, wonderful dog and the most beautiful of her kind anyone was apt to see anywhere. That's what Papa said, and he had seen many dogs. Wags stemmed from champions, and Papa owned the family tree. Wags was quite nervous—her weak hind legs made her so—and did not like tiny little children, who scared her with their sudden movements and squeals. She had never bitten anyone, though, mainly because Mama was always on the watch—always.

Next in this family came the two large and fat cats named Mittens and Punk—Mother Mittens and Daughter Punk, to be exact, age two and one.

Mittens was a cat born in the Alley and given to Connie by Billy Maloon, who owned the father. Punk was one of Mittens' first batch of four kittens, her favorite and the one who slept with her mother's front paw around her. Punk was beautiful; but she was not as brilliant as her mother. She had been pampered by her mother, had never had kittens of her own, and still tried to gobble up her mother's food. Her mother let her. The reason Punk had such an odd name was that she was born on the Fourth of July. Connie named the four first kittens of Mittens after Fourth of July things—Punk, Rocket, Sparkler, and Pinwheel. Hugsy Goode owned Rocket now, but his mother had made him change Rocket's name to Smoky because she had just lost a cat named Smoky and she liked to think she had the real Smoky back.

That's all there was to the Ives family, unless you count Red Horsie, Bear, and Patricia. Connie still counted Red Horsie, her rocking horse, as a member of the family and still made him a Christmas card, even though he was up in the attic, being saved for her children when she grew up. Bear was a big teddy bear given to Connie on her fourth Christmas by her uncle Clare, and he still stayed in her room. Patricia had always been her favorite doll, and she still stayed in her room, too; sometimes Connie took her or Bear out to swing with her. So that was the family of Connie Ives, just one family out of the twenty-seven in the Alley.

"The famous swinger." That was Connie's nickname. She was swinging now, and she thought of how practically everyone in this Alley had a special name: Katy Starr, the lawmaker, Arnold, the great R.A. boy—in the Rapid Advancement class, that means, in school—Mrs. Carroll, the rainmaker—so called because she sometimes beat on tin tubs, yow-yowed like an Indian to make rain come—Joe Below, the
boulevardier
(or Bully Vardeer, as it was pronounced)—too many to list them all.

Connie was watching what was going on in the Alley. Because it was Saturday morning, the iron gates were unlocked and the garbage truck would soon be here. The two pretty iron gates to the Alley were always kept locked except on the mornings when the garbage truck came in—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Most of the littlest children were safely locked in their own back yards. They longed to get out to freedom in the big Alley, but they couldn't do this until the truck should come and go and the gates to the outside world be locked again. They waited for this happy moment by playing Superman, with sheets on for capes. One was Superman, another, a little smaller, was Superboy, and George Gwatkin, practically a baby, was Little Super. They flew from yard to yard on their side of the Alley, up one fence and over and so on all the way, shouting "Superman!" with capes fluttering behind them.

The Carrolls lived in the end house next to the iron gate on Connie's side of the Alley. There were four little Carrolls, and since each was born on or around Christmas day, they were all named in honor of Christmas. Their names were Stephen, the oldest, who was six, then Star, four, Nicky, three, and last, the littlest one, Noel—Notesy, her nickname was, and she was practically just a baby still and had to be held on the swings. All the Carrolls wanted to be garbage collectors when they grew up. The most interesting times of the week for them were the mornings when the garbage truck arrived. "Here it comes! Here it comes!" they yelled. They helped the men roll the trash cans down the Alley and were grateful for the privilege.