Underdog

by Marilyn Sachs

  Mrs. Firestone shook her head. “No, and as a matter of fact I haven’t seen her for a while. But Mr. Holland will know who she is. He didn’t like the way the little dog used to—you know what—on his tomatoes.”

  Mrs. Firestone didn’t want me to leave. She offered to show me a whole bunch of umbrellas she had found in the park. She said I could look them all over and even take one if I liked.

  But she understood that I had to go. If anybody understood how much you could love an animal, it was Mrs. Firestone. She showed me the way to go to Mr. Holland’s grocery store and said I should tell him that none of her animals had liked the last pound of butter he had sold her. “Too salty,” she told me. “Next time, tell him, more butter and less salt.”

  The store was empty when I arrived. A large, round, bald man with more chins than I could count slouched over the counter and watched me carefully as I came toward him.

  “Uh, Mrs. Firestone sent me over,” I told him.

  “Mrs. Firestone,” said the grocer, straightening up and narrowing his eyes at me. “Mrs. Firestone now owes me three hundred dollars and seventy-eight cents. I don’t know what she sent you over here for but maybe you’ll be good enough to take a message back to her from me. The message is—no more credit!”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and decided not to deliver Mrs. Firestone’s message to him. “Actually, Mrs. Firestone didn’t send me over here to buy anything. She sent me over here because she said you would be able to answer a question I have.”

  “Which is?” he asked, not very pleasantly.

  So I went through the whole story about Gus and he shook his head when I finished.

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” he said. “I’ve been here for over thirty years and I’ve never known what she’s ever been talking about.”

  “A lady with a little boy ...”

  “Lots of my customers are ladies with little boys.”

  “A small black dog ...”

  “And lots of them have small black dogs.”

  “... named Gus.”

  “I don’t listen to their names.”

  “Mrs. Firestone said he—you know what—on your cans of tomatoes.”

  “Oh that dog!” said Mr. Holland.

  He remembered Gus. “Mrs. Kaplan. That was her name. Her husband was Dr. Kaplan, a young fellow doing an internship in one of the hospitals. Five, six years ago that was, but I remember because she always bought cans of okra. Her little boy was crazy about okra so I had to stock it just for her. You remember things like that when you’re a grocer. I never had a customer before or one after who liked okra.”

  “But Mr. Holland, where is she now?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? Once he finished interning, they moved and I was stuck with over a dozen cans of okra.”

  “Does anybody know where they moved, Mr. Holland?”

  “But I don’t hold it against her. She should have let me know in advance but I guess she didn’t think of it. And she did come in to say good-bye. She was a good customer, so some things you just have to overlook.”

  “Please, Mr. Holland,” I said, “I need to find them. Isn’t there anybody who can tell me where they went?”

  “Maybe,” said Mr. Holland. “Maybe their old landlady, Mrs. Doyle. She rented them the upstairs apartment, She lives downstairs—148 Oleander—but she’s probably not home now. You have to catch her in the mornings. In the afternoons she goes to baby-sit for her daughter.”

  I was aching with impatience but the clock in Mr. Holland’s grocery store said ten to three. It would take me nearly an hour to get home and I didn’t want Gina to grow suspicious. Tomorrow was another day.

  We had crepes stuffed with shrimp and mushrooms and a big spinach and mandarin orange salad for dinner. And little chocolate tarts that my aunt pulled out of the freezer. I watched her working in her kitchen. Everything gleamed and nothing made stains or spots or splashes on the floor. Her beige skirt and off-white silk shirt stayed clean under the spotless white apron. She loved to cook, she told me as her long, slim fingers with their perfect nails quickly stirred, chopped, and cut. Often, on a free evening or Sunday, she said, she might cook or bake up a batch of things to freeze,

  “Do you like to cook, Izzy,” she asked me.

  I hesitated. I thought of Mrs. Evans’s meat loafs and spaghetti sauces and the rows of TV dinners in our freezer. Sandy never cooked much and Karen kept saying she would once she was over being pregnant. Sometimes Mrs. Evans baked—big, lumpy marble cakes and cookies that were either too hard or too soft.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, I like to cook.”

  “Well, maybe you and I can work together tonight if you like. Tomorrow night, I’m expecting some friends over. Some women. We have a women’s reading group and we get together once a month at somebody else’s house. Tomorrow night it’s my turn, so I thought I might bake something tonight. Would you like to help?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I would.”

  “Unless,” she said, “you have too much homework. I wouldn’t want to interfere with your homework.”

  “Oh no,” I told her. “I did it already.”

  They asked me a lot of questions about school at dinner. My aunt really asked me the questions and my uncle pretended to be interested in what I was saying. But I could see his mind was on other things. He was reminding me more and more of my father.

  My aunt’s face had such a serious, worried look as she asked her questions that I made a special effort to look bright and happy as I answered.

  “What’s your teacher’s name?”

  “Uh—Miss Ballard.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “Oh yes. She’s very nice. She’s young and very pretty and the kids all seem to really like her.”

  “And the other children? The kids? Are they ... are they nice?”

  “Oh, just great! Very nice!”

  “Are they ... are they nice to you? I hope nobody said anything mean or ...”

  “Oh no. They went out of their way to help me. One of the girls showed me around the classroom and stayed with me during the day. And she picked me for her kickball team during PE. A great bunch of kids, Aunt Alice.”

  “Because you know, Izzy, if you’re not happy there, I want you to let us know right away.”

  “I love it,” I told her, smiling. “It’s the best school I ever went to.”

  My uncle did the dishes but you could see he was in a big hurry to go off and look at his papers. Aunt Alice and I stayed in the kitchen and she began pulling out shiny baking pans and measuring spoons and gleaming mixing bowls.

  “I thought we’d make a Gateau Genoise for petits fours.”

  “Oh sure,” I said.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever made them before,” she said, looking at me with that worried look.

  “Well no, not exactly,” I admitted, “but I’m a fast learner.”

  Later, she said I was. At first, she made me nervous, the way she worked, so clean and careful. But later, after she had baked a large pan of sweet, lemony-smelling cake and set it down in front of me to cut out shapes with different kinds of cookie cutters, I began to enjoy myself. I cut out squares and circles and diamonds and even some hearts. She gave me jams and creams and chocolate icing and nuts and fruits to fill them with and her face stopped looking so worried.

  They were so beautiful later, when she arranged them on a tray, that I couldn’t bear thinking people were going to eat them up the next night,

  “How about sampling a couple now?” she suggested before sliding the tray into her immaculate refrigerator.

  “Oh no!” I said, and she suddenly burst out laughing when she saw my face.

  Uncle Roger came out of his study into the kitchen, sniffing the air. “Fee, fi, fo, fum,” he said.

  “Out!” my aunt ordered, giggling. “This is for my women’s group. He’s a compulsive taster,” she told me. “We’ll have to post an armed guard here tonight t
o keep him out.”

  “I always give you some of my french fries,” Uncle Roger told her. “I never refused to share my potatoes with you.”

  “I’m afraid, Izzy,” my aunt said, “your uncle has a dreadful secret that you had better be told. He is a nut over french fries.” She shuddered. “Especially late at night. So sometimes if you smell greasy, fattening smells in the wee hours of the morning, you’ll know who’s responsible.”

  “I like french fries too,” I said.

  “There, you see,” my uncle said to my aunt. “It’s a genetic trait—runs in the family. We can’t help ourselves. But it could be worse. Some people become werewolves when the moon is full but Izzy and I—we simply take to the kitchen and immerse ourselves in grease.” He looked at the clock. “Hmm—9:30, a little early, perhaps, but what do you say, Izzy?”

  “I say no,” my aunt replied. “She has to get up for school early tomorrow, so maybe we had better work out some kind of compromise.” She held out the tray of petits fours. “One,” she offered.

  “Two,” he countered, picking a chocolate square rolled in almonds and an apricot-filled heart with icing.

  Aunt Alice took one too and, finally, so did I. We sat in the kitchen eating and talking, nice and easy and relaxed. I could see they both were beginning to feel comfortable with me and it seemed to me that if I could just make them understand that I was a good kid, a happy kid, a kid who wouldn’t bother them, they might not send me away.

  But first, I had to find Gus.

  Chapter 8

  148 Oleander!

  Another old lady, but this time one with a bright red mouth and lots of dark eye makeup around her blue eyes and a pile of blonde hair. Maybe it was a wig but it sat up high and yellow on her head.

  “Yes?”

  “Uh, Mrs. Doyle, I’m looking for the Kaplans. Mr. Holland said I should come and ask you if you know where they are.”

  She stood looking at me for a second or two, her head on one side. Then she asked it. The question I’d been expecting since yesterday.

  “Why aren’t you in school, little girl?”

  “Oh! Well, it’s a holiday and I thought this would be a good time to get in touch with the Kaplans.”

  “Oh—a Jewish holiday?” said Mrs. Doyle, and I smiled and nodded.

  “Are they relatives, dear? Such nice people. Wonderful tenants. Their little boy, Joey, was a real doll. He’s not so little anymore. They sent me a picture of him last Christmas. Hard to believe but he’s eleven years old now. Little Joey!”

  Eleven years old. Just my age. And Mrs. Doyle knows where they are. “No, ma’am, not exactly relatives but I need to get in touch with them.”

  “Come in, come in,” said Mrs. Doyle. “I’ll give you their address and I’ll show you the pictures of Joey and Danny.”

  “Danny?”

  “The younger boy. Of course, I never saw him. He was born after they left San Francisco but he looks just like Joey, and Myra says they’re coming for a visit this summer and she’ll bring them both over to see me.”

  “Where are they, Mrs. Doyle?” I said, feeling scared and almost hearing the roar of oceans between me and Gus.

  “New York now. He teaches, you know. Very smart— you wouldn’t think it to look at him—a skinny little man with a stutter. But he’s been all over—Scotland, France, Chicago, and now New York. She’s tired of traveling, she says, and she wants to settle down. Here—I have their pictures right here in this envelope.”

  Upstairs, a woman began singing and Mrs. Doyle looked up to the ceiling and rolled her eyes. “There she goes again,” she said to me, “She promised she wouldn’t. I never would have rented her the apartment if she didn’t promise. I told her—between one and five I’m gone and you can sing all you like then but not when I’m here.” The singing went on and Mrs. Doyle handed me an envelope and said, “Just sit down and look them over, dear. I’ll be right back.”

  She left me alone in the room and I sat down carefully on a very soft chair. I opened the envelope and pulled out some pictures. The first one was of two boys and the others showed the boys sometimes by themselves and sometimes with a woman or a man and sometimes with both. Dr. and Mrs. Kaplan and their two sons, Joey and Danny. I really felt like a close friend of the family. But in none of the pictures did I see Gus.

  The singing suddenly stopped upstairs and shortly afterward, Mrs. Doyle returned. “She said she forgot,” Mrs. Doyle told me. “So I said to her, ‘Miss Sorenson, this morning at 6:30 you also forgot and the day before yesterday, I believe, you forgot at eleven in the evening.1 She apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again but I don’t think she can help herself. You just can’t trust those music conservatory students.”

  She looked at the pictures in my hands and smiled. “The Kaplans were the best tenants I ever had. I hardly ever saw Dr. Kaplan, and the little boy was in nursery school all day and took long naps whenever he was home. Marvelous people!”

  “What about their dog, Mrs. Doyle?”

  “Their dog?”

  “Yes. Their little black dog, Gus. What about Gus?”

  “Poor thing!” said Mrs. Doyle. “I don’t generally like animals but he was really unusual—such a quiet, gentle dog. I felt so bad for him when they left.”

  “What happened?” I cried. “Didn’t they take him with them?”

  “Why, they couldn’t take him with them. They were going to Edinburgh and they had to leave him. They felt bad too because he was such a sweet little thing. I would have taken him myself if I didn’t have all this good furniture. But a dog is going to chew on things and jump up on furniture and you know what else.”

  Even though Mrs. Doyle was nothing at all like Mrs. Firestone, I knew how to ask the right question this time.

  “Where is Gus now?”

  “Was that his name, dear? I didn’t remember. Well, they left him with Mr. Bailey over in the dry cleaning store on Aster. I don’t think he has him anymore but let me give you the Kaplan’s address and when you write to them be sure to send them my love.”

  Mr. Bailey, said the young woman in the cleaning store, was out making some deliveries and would not return until the afternoon. No, she said, she didn’t know anything about a dog named Gus. She only came in twice a week to do alterations but why didn’t I come back after one o’clock.

  It was 10:45 which meant I had over two hours to get through before returning. What was I going to do for more than two hours? I tried to tell myself that now I really was on the right track but I began feeling worse and worse as I circled around the dry cleaning store and thought about Gus. About how nobody really wanted him. About how every owner had kept him only a little while and then passed him on to somebody else who didn’t want him either.

  I looked at a clock in a barber shop—eleven o’clock. I knew I’d never last for two hours watching the shop and thinking about Gus. I began walking. What could I do to make myself feel better? I could eat something but it was too early, and in any case, I wasn’t hungry. The thought of Gus, little, helpless Gus, being passed from one owner to the next made me angrier and angrier. I wanted to hit somebody. I wanted to scream and yell and say, “What kind of people are you to treat a little dog like this?”

  Then I saw the library and hurried inside. There was a woman at the desk who looked up at me and asked, “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “It’s a Jewish holiday,” I told her.

  “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know.” Then she smiled at me and went back to her work. I found the children’s room and the librarian showed me the section on dogs. For the next couple of hours I read through most of them. I looked at pictures of German shepherds, collies, beagles, and miniature poodles. None of them looked like Gus. Then I read a book on how to take care of dogs.

  Mr. Bailey was in the store when I returned. He shook his head when I asked him about Gus. “That wasn’t his name,” he said, “but it was the dog I got from the Kaplans.”

  “A
little black dog?” I asked.

  “That’s right—a little black dog but his name was Casper.”

  “Where is Gus—I mean Casper now? Do you still have him?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t. It was when the Missis got sick. Casper kept whining and whining. It made me nervous. I guess he knew she was going but I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t say anything to her—to my wife—but I left Casper with my cousin and later, after she passed away, I didn’t want him back. I’m at the store all day so who was going to look after him?”

  “Where is Gus now?”

  “Why, with my cousin,” said Mr. Bailey. “I haven’t seen him for a year or so but he was there when I saw him last.”

  “Is he ... is he happy?” I asked. But I knew the answer before he began speaking.

  “Happy?” said Mr. Bailey. “Well, I don’t know that I ever thought about a dog being happy. Casper was a good dog—good for the Missis because he was so quiet and didn’t bother anybody. Never jumped up on you or made a lot of noise. Until she got sick you hardly even knew he was there.”

  “Please, Mr. Bailey,” I said, “could you tell me your cousin’s name and give me his phone number?”

  Mr. Bailey said no. But after I told him about Gus and me, he explained that he and his cousin had argued last time they met. He didn’t remember what it was all about but he knew his cousin had been wrong. Still and all, he said, it wasn’t right to give people’s telephone numbers to strangers, even the numbers of stubborn, intolerant people like his cousin. But he agreed finally to call and ask if I could come and see Gus—only he said Casper.

  “Leave me your phone number and I’ll call you when I get home. Nobody will be home now at his house.”

  “Why don’t I call you later?” I suggested.

  “I won’t be home until nine or ten.”

  “Then I’d better come back tomorrow.” I knew that my aunt and uncle would grow suspicious if a strange man called me up or if they heard me talking to somebody on the phone.

  I went home and helped Gina vacuum the white rugs in the living room that weren’t dirty, and clean off the spotless bathroom fixtures. She said I was a big help and she told me how she met her boyfriend and what her parents thought of him and vice versa.