“Well . . .”
“We won’t stay for the whole thing,” she told him. “We’ll just sneak in and watch until eight-thirty, a little Eyes and Ears of the World News, and . . .” She tried to remember the newest movie at the Cross Bay. She had seen two minutes of it the other day before the matron had caught her and marched her outside, blinking, into the sunshine.
“How much does it cost?” he asked.
“Not a cent. I told you, we’re sneaking in.” She could see he looked worried. “Unless you’re afraid.”
“I am not afraid of anything.”
“Well, then.” Action in the North Atlantic was the name of the movie. It was about the troop ships crossing the ocean, and German submarines following along . . .
She shivered a little, thinking about those ships. Mrs. Sherman had just pinned up another poster over a pile of raisin rings. SOMEONE TALKED, it said in big red letters on top, and underneath was a ship sinking so you saw only the bow, and sailors trying to swim away in waves that were high as mountains.
Lily tried not to think about it. Instead, she walked down the street in front of Albert. They turned in at the alley on one side of the Cross Bay Theatre. The alley was filled with itchy weeds that smelled. She could see Albert lifting his skinny legs as high as he could, but she just rushed right through the weeds and around to the back.
“It’s hot as a poker in the balcony,” she told him. “They always leave the door open up there.”
Albert stopped when he saw the fire escape stairs they’d have to climb.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, knowing what he was thinking. “Don’t look down.”
“It must be two stories,” he said. “You can fall right through those steps, and it looks as if the steps will pull off the side of the wall.”
“Three stories,” she said, daring him.
“I am not afraid,” he said. “I am just telling you.”
She started to climb without answering. She had done this every summer since she was six, up those stairs a thousand times. The stairs were rickety, she had to admit. And the screws holding them to the wall looked rusty as anything. Wouldn’t you think the guy who owned the movie would polish things up once in a while?
She looked back over her shoulder at Albert. He was holding on to the railing for dear life, as Gram would say, stopping each second to close his eyes and take a breath.
“Race you to the top,” she said.
He opened his eyes. “Sure.”
She grinned. He was a tough kid, that Albert.
The balcony door was opened just wide enough for them to crawl through. She sank down on the top step next to the door to watch, with Albert sliding in next to her, breathless. “That was so simple,” he said.
She leaned over. “We made it just in time for Bugs Bunny.”
He grinned back. “What’s up, Doc?” he said.
She started to laugh.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s your voice. It sounds so . . . so . . .”
“Hungarian,” he said. “It is a Hungarian Bugs Bunny.”
She liked the way he laughed, the way he talked. She kept smiling to herself as they leaned back against the steps to watch Bugs Bunny chomping on a carrot, falling off a cliff. They had a perfect spot. In fact, they had the whole balcony to themselves. Not one person was up there.
If they had paid, if Poppy had been with her, she would have been able to go downstairs to the candy stand and buy a cup of popcorn, or some peanut chews. If she tried it now—that is, if she’d still had her tan purse with money—the matron with her flashlight would be right there to pounce on her.
And then it was time for the picture. Words . . . music . . . a destroyer being blown up in the water. The noise of it was deafening. Explosions were going on all over the place.
Lily sat there for a while. She watched one of the ships sink and the sailors trying to hold on to little pieces of wood, or to swim away, just like the poster in Mrs. Sherman’s bakery.
And she thought of Poppy. They had heard from him again, but only a postcard. She had missed the mailman that day, and the card had slid into the slot in the door, and it had been there all morning until Gram had spotted it. Never so tired. Never worked so hard, to be ready to go overseas. Thinking of you both in Rockaway makes me happy . . . makes it all worthwhile. Love, Poppy.
Lily watched one of the sailors, arms raised, go under the water, and then she didn’t watch anymore.
Albert wasn’t watching either.
“Don’t you like the movie?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“We could leave—” she began, and broke off. She could see the balcony stairs, and the beam from the matron’s flashlight bouncing up toward them.
“I was on a ship like that,” Albert said.
She blinked. Of course. How else had he gotten here? She had never thought of that. The matron was halfway up the stairs now, looking at them, a frown on her face.
“Albert,” Lily began.
“Are you here again?” the matron asked. “I told you last time it’s dangerous to climb those steps, and you can’t keep coming in here when you don’t pay. It was one thing when you were six years old, but . . .”
Lily circled around her, with Albert following, and went down the balcony steps to the first floor. They passed the candy counter and the glass stand with the popcorn piled up to the top, and went out the door.
Behind them was the sound of bombs, and depth charges exploding, and in the marquee’s light she could see Albert’s face, his blue eyes swimming in tears.
She stood there for a moment, wanting to ask him, wanting to know about the ship, wanting to know what had made him cry. Then she heard the church chimes.
“It’s nine o’clock,” she said. “Gram is going to have a fit”
They started to run, crossing the street diagonally, just missing an old Chevy with its headlights blackened, its horn blaring at them. They raced past Mrs. Sherman’s. “Same cookies,” Albert said, breathless, and then around the corner of the As Good As New Shoppe with the dusty hat and coat, the flute and the violin.
By the time they reached the back road Lily had a pain in her chest and a stitch in her side, and Albert wasn’t crying anymore. They were both laughing, and he grabbed her hand and pulled her along until they reached her back door.
“Tomorrow,” Lily called after him. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he said, going down toward the Orbans’.
She went into the house, thinking about tomorrow, thinking about asking him all the things she wanted to know.
Gram was in the kitchen making iced tea, and she poured some for Lily. “I was just getting a little worried,” she said.
“I was with Albert,” Lily said.
Gram nodded at her. “Good. I’m glad.”
Lily went into her bedroom with a glass of lukewarm iced tea and a sprig of mint from Mrs. Colgan’s Victory garden. She bent over to run her fingers across her mother’s stars pasted in a neat row, still thinking about tomorrow.
Chapter 13
“
You can’t wear those things,” Lily told him after they had fed the cat and were walking along the road. “I’m not going to march along the beach with someone who—”
“You said you wanted to go out on the rocks,” Albert said.
“Not with a baby who has beach slippers on his feet,” she told him, grinning.
He grinned back, looking down at his feet. “My aunt said I would come back with cuts from the bar-nackles . . .”
“Barnacles,” she said. “Not bar-nackles.”
“Same thing.” He reached down to pull off Mr. Orban’s slippers and tossed them into the marshes.
She nodded. “Don’t worry, they’ll still be there when we get back. Nobody in the world is going to want them.”
She led him down the path, across the sand, toward the jetty, and began to hop along the rocks. “See,” she said,
looking back. “Nothing to it.”
He followed her slowly, one foot at a time, wincing.
“Didn’t you ever walk around barefoot in Hungary?” she asked.
“Certainly not,” he said. “Do you think we were poor, that we had no shoes?”
She was laughing again, thinking about her feet, tough as leather, and Albert, his first summer going barefoot. She settled herself on the gray triangular rock, way out, with Albert next to her, the sun on her face, and the sound of the water lapping against the rocks.
“I want to tell you something,” she said after a while. “I have stars on my bedroom ceiling. My mother pasted them all up for me when I was a baby. She told my father she was making a world for me. She said she wanted to give me the whole world.”
Albert wasn’t looking at her, his head was turned, but he was sitting there so still, so unmoving, she knew how hard he was listening.
“I bring one with me to Rockaway every year,” she said. “I counted. There are dozens of them left on my ceiling. I’ll be thirty or forty before they’re all used up.”
He nodded a little.
“I never told anyone,” she said. “Not even Poppy. I make them presents to me from my mother, every year on my birthday, in July.” She took a breath. It was so nice to tell someone about the stars. It was so nice to talk about her mother as if she, Lily, were like everyone else, like everyone who had a mother.
“I know your mother is dead,” he said, looking at her now, reaching out for the tiniest second to touch her shoulder. “My aunt told me.”
Lily squinted a little, looking out at a curl of smoke from a freighter far out. She waited for him to say something more about them, but when he didn’t she began again. “My mother had something wrong with her heart. It was too big. She died right in Poppy’s bedroom on a sunny day.” She took a breath. “I think that’s an all right way to die, but it’s not all right that I don’t remember her.”
“A picture?” he asked. “You have a picture?”
“Poppy has a book with her pictures, but they’re blurry, and I don’t know what her voice was like. You know?”
She could see his teeth chewing on his lower lip. She opened the paper bag from Gram: two sandwiches, Spam, apples, Social Tea cookies.
“I hate this,” she said, handing one of the sandwiches to him. “Gram does too. After the war we’re never going to have one can of Spam again. And Poppy says if we have any left in the kitchen cabinet, he’s going to throw them right in the ocean.”
Albert had a mouthful of it. “I like this,” he said. “I like everything. My grandmother, Nagymamma, loved to cook for me. She said I was her best . . .” He closed his eyes, trying to think.
“Customer,” Lily said, watching him nod, as she tried to get her mouth around the word. “Nahj . . .”
“It means big mother, grandmother. The Nagy part just means big.”
Lily took a tiny piece of Spam and tossed it into the water. “For the fish,” she said. “They probably don’t like it either.”
“You know my mother is dead too, and my father,” he said.
Both, she thought. She couldn’t picture what it would be like with Poppy dead. So terrible . . .
“They are dead because they had a newspaper. They wrote bad things about Hitler and the Nazis. And their friends would give out the papers. They were caught one day. The Nazis came to the house . . .”
Lily let out her breath. She didn’t want to look in his eyes, but she couldn’t help it, she glanced at him quickly, but he didn’t look as if he would cry. He was squinting at the water, his eyes dry. “Nagymamma came for me, for Ruth and me, just before they came to our house. And there was no time, not one minute. We did not say goodbye, my mother was running into the kitchen, trying to burn small pieces of paper at the stove, and she looked over her shoulder and told us, ‘Szeretlek,’ and then she looked back because the stove was hot and she was almost burning her fingers.”
Lily was biting her own lip, chewing on her lip, watching a small fish tear a piece of the Spam, and then another . . .
“It means ‘I love you,’ ” he said before she could ask. “But if they loved us, they would not have done that, they would not have bothered with newspapers. And we do not even know what happened to them. Nagymamma just got a postcard from the police that they were dead.”
“Oh, Albert,” Lily said, thinking how angry he looked, thinking she was angry too. Poppy should have stayed home.
“And we went to Austria, Ruth and me, in the back of Mr. Kovacs’s car, and then across to Switzerland. Mr. Kovacs promised he was going to sneak us all the way across Europe. In Switzerland Ruth was sick with”—he touched is face—“marks.”
“Chicken pox?”
He shook his head.
“Measles.”
“Yes, and we had been traveling for so long, and Ruth had a fever, a big fever, I knew it. I could not tell anyone.” He shook his head, and Lily could see him making fists of his hands.
“We still had to cross the mountains into France,” he said. “Mr. Kovacs was pretending we were his children, and the Nazis were there, right there.” He was almost breathless, telling her. “We had to get to the ship that would take us to America.” He stopped for a moment. “I was afraid they would not let Ruth go.”
Lily couldn’t look at him. She tore off another piece of Spam for the fish, and the crust of her bread.
“In France she was so thirsty. Her face was red, and she was burning.” Albert stood up, balancing himself on the rock, watching the ship, a little closer now. He pointed to the end of the jetty, across the water. “Ruth is in France, and so are the Nazis.”
“But how . . .”
Albert sighed. “We were waiting for the ship to take us to America, and this lady who was helping us, this lady with a long gray dress that went to the ground and a cross . . .” He raised his hands to his head. “She was wearing a white . . .” He stopped and frowned.
“Something on her head?” Lily asked. “Was it a nun?”
“Yes. And she said, ‘This girl is sick. She belongs in a hospital and not on a ship. She will give the sickness to everyone else.’ ”
“Measles.”
“Yes, but I said it was not measles. I said she could not go to a hospital, but later I fell asleep, and they took her, and I did not even say goodbye.”
Lily swallowed.
“Now Ruth is in France until the war is over. The war may last forever, and Ruth is in a convent, with the lady in the gray dress, and the Nazis are right there, and suppose they find out about our newspaper in Hungary?”
“Wait, Albert,” Lily began. “Isn’t Hungary far away from France? How would they know?”
Albert didn’t stop. “Nagymamma said to stay together, no matter what. She said as long as we did, we’d have a family.”
He looked around and picked up the bag with the apples.
Chapter 14
It was late on Monday night. Still in shorts and a shirt, Lily lay under her red quilt looking up at the sky. She could see Orion’s Belt, and the W of Cassiopeia. They were sharp and clear among the other stars in the dark sky. It was a beautiful night, and finally she and Albert were going to watch for convoys.
She thought about it a little uneasily. They hadn’t talked about Lily’s going to Europe since that day at the beach. Maybe he had forgotten, she told herself, or maybe he had thought it over by now and knew she had been lying.
She turned in the bed, trying to put it out of her mind. Everything was ready for tonight, on the floor. A sweater, two towels, her sneakers tucked in one side of her beach bag, and two bottles of soda jammed into the other side.
If only Gram would go to sleep. Vaguely she heard Gram’s radio, the end of Lux Radio Theatre, and then music. “Would you like to swing on a star?” She couldn’t keep her eyes open.
Then suddenly she was awake, wide awake. It seemed very late, midnight, maybe one o’clock. Gram’s radio was off, and all the l
ights. Lily reached for the screen and pushed it up and out.
She dropped into the rowboat and pushed herself along under the porches. In the light that spilled out from the les of Mrs. Colgan’s blackout shades, she could see a mess of sand crabs hanging on to the pilings.
And at the Orbans’, just silence. She sat there as wide awake as if it were the middle of the morning, so angry at herself for sleeping, so disappointed Albert was asleep, she could have cried.
“Too much crying,” she said aloud.
“Too much talking to yourself,” a voice said, so close she jumped.
Albert dropped into the boat. He was clumsy and splashed water in over the side. “Because of the cat,” he said.
She leaned over until she could see the cat’s face, its eyes peering out from the front of his open jacket. “Cats hate the water.”
“This one does not. I thought you would not come.”
She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but raised one shoulder instead. “I fell asleep.”
Albert nodded. “It is hard to stay awake sometimes.”
Lily pushed the boat out from under the porches. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll cut across the bay. That way we can stay away from the surf.”
“But it is closer the other way.”
“Yes, but it’s harder to fight the surf than the bay. If you’re going far you want to save your arms.”
He nodded, watching her pull on the oars.
“Will you teach me to swim?” he asked after a while.
She blinked. She had been thinking again about Poppy . . . Poppy on a troop ship watching her swim toward him. It was a wonderful dream. “Swim?” she repeated. “Yes. But why can’t you swim?”
“I did not have an ocean,” he said. Like Margaret in Detroit, she thought.
“I had a river, the Danube.” He leaned forward. “It runs between Buda and Pest, but the river is not blue like the waltz. It is gray, and sometimes silver.”
Lily didn’t say anything. She had never heard of Budapest split up that way in two halves. She’d heard of “The Blue Danube,” though. It was one of the songs in her music book for the piano.
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