Secrets on 26th Street

by Elizabeth McDavid Jones

  But there was no reply.

  Her chest tight with disappointment, Susan rushed out into the alley and nearly tripped over a scrawny dog nosing in a garbage can. She had counted so much on that telegram. Now her mind was a blur. She didn’t know what to do next.

  Then it struck her that maybe she’d gotten no telegram because Mum was already home!

  She raced to 26th Street and the familiar red tenement. Somehow she knew that Mum would be there. Mum would be at the big black stove in the kitchen, humming to herself as she fixed her girls their dinner.

  Susan burst through the kitchen door, her lips already forming words of welcome, but her hopes sank when it was Bea she saw chopping cabbage on top of the washtub cover. Mum was not home.

  Bea was smiling. “I’ve got good news for you, love. I got a telegram today.”

  Susan’s pulse quickened. Could Aunt Blanche’s telegram somehow have been delivered to their flat while Susan was at work?

  “You needn’t worry anymore about your mum,” said Bea. “She wired from Long Island. She’s enjoying her rest so much, she decided to stay on for a few more days.”

  Susan’s first reaction was relief. Mum was safe. But as Bea’s statement sank in, Susan’s heart twisted: Mum, staying out of work simply to enjoy herself? It would never happen. Bea couldn’t be telling the truth.

  Susan opened her mouth to say so, then shut it quickly as she noticed Helen, sitting cross-legged on the floor with Lucy. Helen was wearing the most troubled expression Susan had ever seen on her face. And she was beckoning Susan toward the bedroom.

  Once alone in their bedroom, Helen, in a frightened whisper, told Susan of the telegram’s arrival only a few minutes before Susan got home. “I saw Bea’s face when she opened it, Susie. The way she looked, it wasn’t good news she was reading. She wouldn’t let me see it when I asked to read it. There was bad news in the telegram—I know it.”

  “What are you saying?” A lump of fear was gathering in Susan’s stomach. She knew very well what Helen was getting at.

  Helen’s voice sounded small. “I’m afraid something bad has happened to Mum, and Bea doesn’t want us to know. Susie, I’m scared.”

  Susan pulled her sister close to her chest. She could feel Helen’s heart pounding. “Don’t be, sweetie. We don’t know anything yet. We’ve got to get hold of that telegram and read it. That’s all.”

  Helen pulled away and stared up at Susan. “How? Bea’s got it in the pocket of her apron. We’ll never be able to get it from her.”

  “If something is truly important, there’s usually a way to get it.” Bea’s words sprang from Susan’s mouth as naturally as if they had been her own. Susan’s chest tightened painfully as she realized how Bea had become such a part of her. “Just give me a minute to think,” she said to Helen. She paced over to the window and stared out at the shops across the street. From here she could almost read the labels on the cereal boxes stacked in the front window of Mr. Haggerty’s grocery store. Then her mind jumped to the way Lucy always poured too much milk on her cereal. And then, Susan had an idea.

  She knew exactly how they would get the telegram from Bea.

  At dinner that night, Susan ate slowly, waiting for her cue from Helen. Helen was chattering about the Girl Scout organizational meeting at the Hudson Guild that Mum had promised to take her to tonight. Helen was hinting for Bea to take her, but Bea was only half listening. Her attention seemed focused on the wall calendar next to the icebox. Susan glanced at Bea’s plate; she’d barely touched her food. Bea was preoccupied with something, that was for sure. Susan hoped the telegram would tell them with what.

  Finally Helen plunked down her empty cup on the table. “I’m still thirsty.” She licked milky foam from her upper lip.

  Susan stood up. “I’ll get the milk. I want more, too.”

  Susan filled Helen’s cup to the brim and handed it to her, but the cup slipped from Susan’s hand and clattered to the floor, splattering milk everywhere. Then Susan knocked over the milk bottle. A white river flowed out and cascaded into Bea’s lap. Smaller streams ran across the table and dripped over the side onto Lucy and Helen.

  Bea leaped up, an astonished look on her face. She was soaked. A dark stain was spreading down her blouse, her apron, her skirt. Milk dribbled off her clothes onto the floor.

  “Susie, you made a mess,” said Lucy, eyeing first Bea, then her own flooded plate. Bea was holding her sopping skirt out from her body.

  “Yeah,” said Helen. “You managed to soak everything and everyone, except yourself.” If Susan didn’t know better, she would have thought Helen was really mad.

  Susan hurried to help Bea take off her apron. “You better change, Bea, before you get chilled. I’ll clean up out here.” She began fetching rags from the ragbag under the dry sink.

  “Come on, Lucy,” said Helen. “You and I will have to change, too.” Helen marched Lucy to the bedroom, throwing an angry glance at Susan over her shoulder. Helen would make a wonderful actress, Susan decided.

  Bea looked hesitantly at the sea of milk on the table and the floor. “I suppose I should get into something dry, but I’ll be back to help straightaway.”

  As soon as Bea started down the hall, Susan stuck her hand in the apron pocket to snatch the telegram. Suddenly she heard Bea’s voice. “Susan?”

  Susan jerked her hand from the pocket. “Yes?” Had Bea seen her?

  Bea was standing at the entrance to the kitchen. For a moment she was quiet. Then she said, “Don’t feel bad, love. It wasn’t your fault.” With that, she disappeared into her room.

  Susan felt a rush of guilt. She hated deceiving Bea. Then she hardened herself. Bea had brought it on herself, hadn’t she, by deceiving them first.

  Quickly Susan plunged her hand back in the apron pocket and fished out the telegram. She opened it with trembling hands. It was three short lines:

  SIR GEORGE UNABLE TO SEND REQUESTED FUNDS STOP REMINDS MISS RUTHERFORD OF HER DEFIANCE AT THEIR LAST MEETING.

  It was signed by some official in the British Parliament, a secretary of some kind.

  Susan must have read the lines three or four times before the realization sank in.

  The telegram had nothing to do with Mum.

  It made no sense to Susan at all.

  Susan refolded the telegram and stuffed it back into Bea’s apron pocket. She hung the apron over the towel rack on the dry sink, and with her rags, she sopped up the spilled milk from the table. Then she grabbed the mop to tackle the floor. All the while her mind whirled.

  Why on earth was Bea getting a telegram from the British Parliament?

  Then, from some corner of Susan’s memory, the words came floating back: He was so stern, my grandfather was … He was a member of Parliament … We haven’t spoken in years …

  The telegram was from Bea’s grandfather.

  After dinner, Susan huddled with Helen in their bedroom, and Susan told her everything about the telegram and about Bea’s feud with her grandfather.

  “I’m stumped,” Susan said. “If Bea asked her grandfather for money, she must be desperate. But I don’t understand it—it seems like she has plenty. She spends it right and left. She even paid all our back rent as easy as buying a ticket to the picture show.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” said Helen. “Maybe the money she gave to Lester for our rent was all she had. I noticed her yesterday mending a hole in her stocking. She never used to do any mending. She’d just go out and buy a new pair.”

  “Yeah,” said Susan. “Now that I think of it, those treats on Sunday were the first things she’s splurged on in weeks. Yeah. Maybe Bea is out of money.” She gnawed the inside of her lip, pondering. “But she wouldn’t wire her grandfather for plain old spending money. There’s too much bad blood between them. Bea must need money for something really important.”

  “But what, Susie?” Helen whispered.

  Susan was grim. “I wonder if it has something to do with Mum. All I can guess is t
hat the money Bea needs has something to do with Mum coming home.”

  Helen’s eyes widened. “Do you think Mum’s being held for ransom?”

  Susan shook her head. “Poor people like us don’t get kidnapped for ransom. I’m thinking it’s something else.” Susan felt a sudden burning in her chest as a thought occurred to her. “You know what I think, Helen? I think it has something to do with Bea’s secret.”

  Helen’s mouth dropped open. “Bea’s secret! I forgot all about it. But how could her romance have anything to do with Mum?”

  “I don’t think her secret is a romance. And I don’t think it’s a spy mission either. I don’t know what Bea’s secret is, but I have a feeling it might be wrapped up in all of this—the fight with her grandfather, Mum’s disappearance, the telegram, everything.” Susan stood up and peered down at Helen on the bed. “We’ve got to find that letter with the secret in it, Helen—tonight.”

  “But you can’t just go snooping in her room. That’s … not right.”

  “Is it right for Bea to lie to us about where Mum is?” Susan asked.

  Helen gave a troubled sigh. “No, I guess not.”

  Susan was sorry to put it so bluntly, but she had to make Helen understand. Like it or not, they could no longer trust Bea.

  “You’ll have to get Bea out of the house somehow,” Susan told Helen, “so I can search her room.” The girls decided that Helen would ask Bea to take her to the Girl Scout meeting. Susan would beg off, saying she had too much homework. Bea and Helen would be gone at least an hour, Susan figured. After she got Lucy in bed, Susan should still have plenty of time to scour Bea’s room for the letter.

  Susan waited for ten minutes after Lucy was tucked in to be perfectly sure that Bea and Helen were well on their way to the Hudson Guild. She crept into Bea’s room and carefully stepped over the creaky floorboard in front of the door. From the nightstand, Bea’s clock ticked out a warning to hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry. Susan stood by the nightstand, forcing herself to breathe evenly. Then she reached for the handle of the drawer and gently, gently pulled it out. Inside, Susan found Bea’s reading glasses, a pair of silk gloves, a box of hairpins, and a stack of embroidered handkerchiefs.

  No letter.

  Susan groaned. She should have known Bea wouldn’t leave the letter in the drawer where Susan had seen her place it. Bea probably moved it the first chance she had to a more secure hiding place.

  But where?

  Someplace inaccessible, maybe a jewelry box, something with a lock. Yet, to Susan’s knowledge, Bea had no jewelry box. She kept her brooches on the dresser. The only other jewelry she had was a locket with her mother’s picture, which she wore all the time. Bea’s trunk was full of clothes and hats, and it wasn’t locked anyway. There was really no place to hide anything.

  Where then? Where should she look? The clock seemed to tick more loudly than ever, making Susan aware that minutes were slipping by while she wavered.

  She’d just have to start. Anywhere. The dresser was as good a place as any. Her knees wobbly and her heart hammering, she pulled out the top drawer. Bea’s underclothes. Stockings and chemises and bloomers. She lifted each garment in turn, felt among its folds for the letter, and then replaced it exactly as Bea had had it.

  She checked each drawer in the same careful way, feeling more and more tense as the letter failed to appear. The bottom drawer was the heaviest, and it had always stuck, so Susan yanked hard at it—too hard. The drawer jerked loose from its runners and toppled out.

  Susan stared, not believing what she saw under the dresser where the drawer had been: a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She could guess what was inside that package, for it was wrapped just the way it had been when Bea pulled it out of her trunk on the night she arrived.

  It had to be the Trafalgar Square photograph.

  Susan picked up the package. She loosened the strings and let the brown paper fall to the floor. The frame looked even more richly burnished than it had the first time she’d seen it. Susan pictured Bea polishing the dark wood; she pictured her wrapping the frame and placing it gently under the dresser, then sliding the drawer in on top of it. Bea had obviously gone to great lengths to hide this photograph.

  Why?

  Susan studied every detail in the photograph for a clue. Something was nagging at her brain … something. Then she had it: the girl standing next to Bea looked like a much younger Alice Paul, the stirring speaker at the suffrage rally.

  Susan wanted to be sure, so she slid the photograph out of the frame to have a closer look.

  And then, right into her lap, as if inviting itself to be read, dropped the letter. Bea’s letter.

  The secret letter.

  Tick-tick, tick-tick, went the clock. A horn beeped down in the street. Susan’s pulse beat in her throat. She unfolded the letter and began to read.

  She skimmed over the first couple of paragraphs—about doings of people Susan assumed were friends of Bea’s and the writer’s. When Susan’s eyes fell on the third paragraph, her heart began to pound. The writer was asking Bea to come to America to help with “our cause.”

  Goose bumps rose on her skin as Susan read again the familiar line: “Your work must be kept secret for now.” What? What was the work that Bea was to do?

  Susan’s eyes raced on, searching for the answer. “We want an appearance of strength,” the writer went on, “not division, and there are those among us, even among our leaders, who wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing. There will be time for full disclosure later. When we’ve achieved our goal, no one will question our methods.”

  No one will question our methods. It sounded so grim.

  Then Susan glanced at the signature, and a chill ran down her spine. The letter was signed simply “Alice.” But Susan could supply the last name—Paul.

  The writer of Bea’s letter was Alice Paul.

  And the “cause” Alice Paul mentioned was the suffrage movement.

  So Bea was a suffragist. Well, that did explain some things. Like Bea’s argument with Mum over Kathleen’s stand on suffrage. It also explained Bea’s injuries Saturday night. She got them at the suffrage rally.

  But the letter left even more questions unanswered. What was the work Bea was doing for suffrage that had to be kept secret? And what did it have to do with Mum?

  Susan wracked her brain for any detail that might help her make a connection between Bea’s secret and Mum. She thought back to the night Mum disappeared. She remembered Bea hobbling in, walking past Susan and Helen with scarcely a hello, and she remembered thinking it was strange that Bea didn’t comment on Mum’s absence.

  Then Bea had been so reluctant to let Susan into her room. That heavy sigh, as if Susan was a bother. Her eagerness for Susan to leave. And the way she had turned her photograph away from Susan’s view.

  Why? Susan thought. Why did Bea try to keep me from looking at that photograph?

  She couldn’t have known Susan was at the suffrage rally. Maybe Bea was afraid Susan had seen Alice Paul’s picture in the newspaper and would recognize her as one of Bea’s friends in the photograph.

  Why, though, would Bea want to hide her friendship with Alice Paul? It came back somehow, Susan was sure, to Bea’s letter and her secret work for suffrage. But the more Susan’s thoughts went round and round, the more confused she felt. She didn’t see how Bea’s letter could have anything to do with Mum. Whatever Bea was doing for suffrage, surely Mum would have no part in it. She had seen what had happened to Kathleen.

  Which meant Bea’s secret had led Susan nowhere.

  CHAPTER 10

  TRACKING DOWN MUM

  The black iron railings of the fire escape blocked Susan’s view from her bedroom window. She had to lean out to see the trains that rumbled by on the Grand Central Overpass, and even further out to see the steamers and tugboats that pulled through the dark, restless waters of the Hudson.

  Susan spent most of the night leaning out the
window, watching the life of the city below. She couldn’t sleep. She felt dark and restless like the Hudson—and lonely She wondered if Mum was somewhere out there in the ever wakeful city, missing Susan as much as Susan missed her.

  Susan finally grew sleepy as the pink light of morning washed the last faint stars from the sky. She crawled back in bed next to Helen and Lucy. The last sound she heard before she drifted off to sleep was the rattle of the milk wagon across the cobblestone street below.

  The next thing she knew, Helen was jostling her. “Wake up, Susie. Lenny Rubenstein is here, in the kitchen. He says there’s a phone call for you at the drugstore.”

  Susan struggled to consciousness through a black fog. Then her head cleared. Lenny’s family owned the corner drugstore, and they had the only telephone on the block.

  “Bea left early this morning, but she said to let you sleep till the last minute, and it’s seven o’clock now. Breakfast is on the table, and Lenny’s waiting to let you in the store.”

  Susan was up now and pulling on her clothes. Mum—it had to be Mum on the telephone. Who else would be calling her? Susan didn’t even know anyone with a telephone.

  “Hurry, Susie,” Helen said. “I’ll watch Lucy Lenny’s waiting for you.”

  Susan followed Lenny to the drugstore. The phone was in the back, in the little room where Mr. Rubenstein mixed his medicines. She picked up the receiver, her nerves strung tight. “Hello?”

  “Susan?” The quavery voice was one Susan didn’t recognize.

  “This is Susan.”

  “’Tis your Aunt Blanche. I’m sorry to be calling you so early, lass, but I’ve been distressed, I have, since I got your telegram last night. I got a ride into town this morning and roused poor Mr. Rucker from his bed to use his telephone. I haven’t seen nor heard from your ma in over a year, not since your dad’s funeral. Is she missing then?”

  Susan’s tongue would barely work. “She told us she was going to visit you on Saturday. We haven’t seen her since.”