by Anne Nesbet
“What in heaven’s name?” said her grandmother. “What is this racket? Downstairs these boys keep making more noise than a flock of crows, and now there’s going to be foghorns in my bedrooms?”
“It’s just my horn,” said Gusta, holding it out.
“No,” said her grandmother, with a sharp-edged shake of the head. “That is no sound for the inside of a house. You’ll wake up Delphine and frighten the cows. Or wake up the cows and frighten Delphine, and I don’t know which is worse.”
The cows were all the way across the road in the barn that belonged to Uncle Bill and Aunt Verla, so this all seemed a very unfair line of argument.
“Not in this house,” said her grandmother firmly, and she turned around and went back downstairs, while Gusta and Bess and Josie sat very still, each of them for that first moment simply trying not to giggle.
“We can take it outdoors when it gets a bit warmer around here,” said Bess. “Out into the woods on Holly Hill, since you said it’s a forest horn.”
“Golly, it’s like my singing, isn’t it?” said Josie. “Mrs. Hoopes just doesn’t see the point of it, music. Not horns, not singing. Too bad it’s not jam — then they’d appreciate it. Hey!”
The other two looked at her.
“It’s an idea I just had. Just now, this very minute! Singing and jam!”
“What?” said Bess and Gusta together.
“Miss Marion’s jams take the blue ribbon at the fair, don’t they?”
Bess nodded. “Sure they do!”
“And that makes that jam really truly worth something, doesn’t it? Even for Mrs. Hoopes! Well, listen: we can do that, too! I flat out forgot about the Blue-Ribbon Band! That’s it, girls: we need to start a band.”
“What?” said Bess and Gusta again.
“We need to enter the county fair contest for Blue-Ribbon Band this summer,” said Josie, as if explaining something very simple to a child about the age of Delphine.
“Oh!” said Bess. “But, Josie, that always goes to the Kendall Mills men. You should see them, Gusta — uniforms and big drums and everything. Now that’s a band. That’s got nothing to do with us.”
“Think, Bess! Why can’t we be a band, too? Not the same as the Kendall Mills Band, sure. Not as fancy. Not as tall. But our own kind of band. And I’ll sing, and Gusta will play her twisty horn, and you’ll do . . . something band-ish, and we’ll be so good they’ll just plain have to give us a ribbon. Don’t you see? A ribbon doesn’t have to be blue to be a genuine, real ribbon. Any color ribbon will make people sit up and take notice. But think: everybody assumes the Blue-Ribbon Band is always the one from the mills. So who even enters against them? Almost nobody!”
“Ohh!” said Bess, as if she were understanding Josie’s argument all at once. Gusta was still a few feet behind, scrambling to catch up: something about a band, and the Kendalls again, and a fair.
“And if they give us a ribbon, a red ribbon, say, then even Mrs. Hoopes will have to admit singing is real. As real as jam.”
The girls sat in silence for a moment.
“Golly,” said Bess. “That’s so clever, Josie. Except I still don’t know what I could possibly do in a band.”
Josie flicked her hand through the air, a gesture that meant finding a role for Bess in their band would be easy as pie.
“You’re saying we’ll enter a contest against grown men with uniforms and everything? So we can win a second-place red ribbon?” said Gusta. She was finally beginning to catch up.
“Exactly,” said Josie. “I mean, we’ll take the blue ribbon, if they hand it to us — don’t get me wrong. But, hey! Red’ll do.”
As you know, children,” said Miss Hatch one morning, “the new airport is nearing completion, down in South Springdale. This is an important milestone for the economy of southern Maine, and in these times of trouble . . .” and so on.
Miss Hatch was a very principled and well-meaning teacher, but sometimes she became overly enthusiastic about certain topics, like, apparently, the construction of new airports. Now that Gusta was sitting right up front, she could do nothing to amuse herself at moments like this but stare in the direction of her teacher’s voice and tell herself stories secretly, inside, trusting that her face looked like the face of a girl who was paying very careful, close attention to everything her teacher had to say.
And then she heard a few magical words, twenty dollars and contest, and she started paying close attention for real. Twenty whole dollars! That was real money — one-fifth of that operation Uncle Charlie needed — and unlike lost Wishes, these twenty dollars got extra possibility points from being mentioned by a teacher in class.
What Miss Hatch had just said was, “The Springdale Aviation Committee and the Springdale Tribune are sponsoring a contest for the best patriotic essay on the theme of ‘A Vision of America from On High.’ And, children, the winner will win twenty dollars and see his or her essay printed in the newspaper!”
There was a lively rustle of interest in that classroom. From the box of old glasses and rows of old shoes in the nurse’s office, from everything Bess had said about her father, off work and struggling, Gusta knew perfectly well she wasn’t the only person in town who really needed some extra money.
“What an honor it would be if the writer of the winning essay came from our classroom!” said Miss Hatch, while the students all imagined what they would do with twenty dollars. “I have decided, class, that we will all write essays this spring on this subject. The best will be presented by their authors as recitations at an all-school assembly in spring, and the very best sent on to the contest. Children, we all must try our hardest to write a fine essay! What a wonderful opportunity to improve our writing!”
A hand had zoomed into the air somewhere to Gusta’s right.
“Yes, Molly?” said Miss Hatch.
“The theme of vision works so well with our Seven-Point Health Certificates, too, doesn’t it, Miss Hatch? The patriotic duty of having good health and good vision? Isn’t that right?”
Oh, heavens. The worst thing about that Molly Gowen, Gusta thought fiercely, was simply . . . everything. And then in particular, on top of everything, the way she was so earnest about it all. It was like she coated all her meanness with a hard-sugar layer of wholehearted sincerity. The patriotic duty of having good vision! Who was that aimed at, if not at her, Gusta? But Molly wasn’t finished, of course.
“And, Miss Hatch! Good vision is all about nutrition, keeping our eyes healthy, right? Every morning and every evening, a glass of healthy, nutritious —”
Just as the knot forming in Gusta’s stomach was about to pull itself as tight as a noose, she was rescued by the rumble of a voice from the far back of the room: “SPRINGDALE DAIRY!”
Even though they all knew it was terrible — awful — unforgivable — to interrupt, the sound of most of the class trying to swallow back outright laughter all at once filled the room, as if the air had changed to something lighter and brighter.
“— Sharp’s Ridge milk!” finished Molly nevertheless, shooting the sharpest possible arrows from her eyes to the back row of the room.
“George Thibodeau!” said Miss Hatch, and from the complicated layers of irritation and affection in her voice, Gusta somehow knew that Miss Hatch was truly fond of — and at the same time truly aggravated by — the representatives of both sides in the Dairy Wars. “I’m sure you don’t mean to be so thoughtlessly rude to your classmate, but this is really too much.”
And off he went to the principal’s office, poor George Thibodeau, but at least they weren’t talking about vision anymore.
“Molly,” said Miss Hatch, once George had left the room. “I’m glad you are enthusiastic about this project, and I’m sure we will each one of us be able to come up with our own interesting approach to this theme. Now come see me up front while the rest of the class works on the morning math problems.”
Since Gusta now sat as close to the teacher’s desk as anyone in
that room could sit, she had the advantage or disadvantage of having to overhear a lot of conversations between Miss Hatch and her fellow pupils. She couldn’t really help it. Her ears worked fine, and the thing about ears is that you can’t turn them tactfully in a different direction.
What she heard now was Miss Hatch saying very kindly, “Molly, dear, I’m sure you will write an excellent theme! But do remember that your contributions to our classroom discussion do not always have to be advertisements.”
Oh, but it would take more than a mild hint like that to shut down Molly Gowen. Molly paused only for a millisecond — Gusta’s pencil hovered above the long-division problem, waiting in some suspense — and then Molly said, “Miss Hatch, advertising is patriotic — they just said so in the newspaper. My father read it aloud to us: ‘Especially now when the world is so full of’— What did they say? ‘Misery,’ I think —‘Especially now when the world is so full of misery, it’s good to get the pleasant news that comes in the ads!’ They said that in the paper, Miss Hatch!”
“How interesting, I’m sure,” said Miss Hatch patiently. “Nevertheless, Molly, I’m certain there’s a difference between what’s appropriate in a newspaper and what belongs in our classroom discussions. But quick now, back you go to your desk: I don’t want to keep you from your mathematics.”
That very afternoon, Molly and a couple of the other girls stood up to say that they were going to be starting a Real Americans Club, sponsored by the Women’s Patriotic Society of Springdale, and that they would be happy for anyone who was or wanted to be a Real American to join. They were intending to undertake fun and educational activities, like preparing a theatrical entertainment on the history of the flag.
“And in a world at war, we can’t be too careful about the people around us. Why, there are more than one thousand four hundred aliens hiding in Springdale right now! They did a count, and that’s what they found. So my father says it pays to be cautious. We should be proud to be Real Americans, and we should give our business to Real Americans, and maybe ask some questions about people running businesses that sound American but when you think about it are run by people with names like Thibodeau, and what kind of name is that —”
“Thank you, Molly,” said Miss Hatch hastily. “Let’s not wander off the rails here: Thibodeau is a fine old French-Canadian name. And no one has said anything about aliens hiding. Noncitizens have been registered, that is all. That’s really the opposite of hiding.”
“Plus, I’m American!” said George Thibodeau from the back of the room. “And my dad’s American. Thibodeau is an American name now.”
“Yes, it is,” said Miss Hatch. “It certainly is. In our class we are proud to have American names that come from different places in the world. But raise your hand when you want to comment, please, George.”
Miss Hatch seemed quite put-upon by the Dairy Wars today. She sighed and started over again.
“If there’s going to be a point in having a Real Americans Club, children, it has got to be to help all of us, wherever we may come from, become better citizens of this country, to become better Americans, no matter who we are or what our names are. I’m glad that Molly and Sally and Jane are inviting everyone in the class to be part of their club, because we know that everyone here — no matter where he or she was born or who his or her parents may be — aspires with all his or her heart to be a Real American.”
Gusta’s own heart fluttered a little during the second half of Miss Hatch’s second sentence. What did it really mean, to be “real”?
There was so much Miss Hatch could not know about her students — so much she didn’t know even about Augusta Hoopes Neubronner, sitting right there in the front row and carrying all those secrets buried in her heart. Did Miss Hatch guess? Did she know what she was saying?
Because it was another one of the Seven-Point Certificate items looming over Gusta now. The school nurse had called her into her office two days ago to ask again about Gusta’s birth certificate.
“Your parents must have it,” said the nurse. “I can’t understand why they wouldn’t send you up with it, since they knew full well you would be enrolling in school.”
“Everything was in a hurry,” Gusta had said. “I’m sure my mother didn’t even think of it, since I was just coming to stay with family.”
“We will write to her and ask,” said the nurse, so the problem was delayed.
But here’s the thing: there was no birth certificate.
Here’s the other thing: if there had been, it would have spilled one of Gusta’s secrets.
Her parents had traveled up and down New England before they settled in New York City, where the labor union movement was so vigorous and strong.
When Gusta was born, they were living in Calais, Maine, which is so far north it’s on the border with Canada. Her mother had wanted to give birth at home, which was how it was done in the corner of Maine where she had been raised, but Gusta’s father thought his new son, the future “young August,” who might even hope to live long enough to see the twenty-first century, should be born in a hospital, because that was clearly the modern and sensible thing to do. So when the time came, they went across the river, because that’s where the closest hospital was, and everything went as well as they could have hoped (except of course that “August” turned out disappointingly to be “Augusta”) — only that meant that Gusta had been born in Saint Stephen, technically, and Saint Stephen wasn’t in the United States at all. It was in Canada.
Nobody had seemed to care at the time. People traveled back and forth across that river every day. But Gusta’s father had worried about it enough that he didn’t want any pieces of official paper saying Canada was where Augusta had been born.
Gusta’s mother joked that Gusta would never become the president of the United States, that’s all. Apparently presidents had to be born on this side of the river. But who ever heard of a girl becoming president, anyway?
That was why Gusta’s stomach was tying itself up in knots now, the second time in a single school day. And the second time caused by something said by that Molly Gowen!
Was Gusta a Real American?
Gusta wasn’t even sure she knew, and Molly certainly seemed to have her doubts.
During afternoon recess, for instance, Molly Gowen made a point of walking by Gusta a few times, staring at her from so close by that Gusta could see the wild, worried sparks in her eyes.
“Neubronner,” said Molly, as if something troubling had just occurred to her. “You, Augusta Neubronner. What kind of a name is that?”
So it wasn’t the very best of days, but after school Josie was waiting out front, bubbling over with news.
“Gusta!” she said. “They want your horn over at the high school — how about that?”
Gusta must have looked as surprised as she felt, because Josie laughed.
“Listen, silly. No need to look all worried. I was telling Miss Kendall about your horn —”
“You were?” said Gusta.
“Well, yes,” said Josie. “It just happened to come up. We were talking before the chorus rehearsal. Anyway, I said Mrs. Hoopes’s own granddaughter just came to our door with a great big old horn in a case, and Miss Kendall’s eyes lit up — you should have seen them! She said what kind of horn? And I said I didn’t remember exactly what it was called, but the twisty kind, sort of seashell-looking, not skinny like a trumpet. And she said, ‘Oh! A French horn! That’s just what I’ve been looking for!’ And then she said, ‘Do you think there’s any chance Mrs. Hoopes’s granddaughter would be interested in selling her instrument? A horn like that, if it’s in good shape, might be worth a whole lot of money.’ And I said —”
“But why does the chorus want a horn?” said Gusta. She had the very beginning of a sick sort of feeling growing in her, as if a seed of ice had planted itself in her belly and was beginning to grow. It was the words whole lot of money that had done that to her. They surely did need money, didn’t they,
with Uncle Charlie sitting hopeless in the gloom that way, and her father gone, and her mother working to make ends meet —
“You haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been telling you all this time, then, have you? Miss Kendall runs most of the music program at the high school — all the choruses and the orchestra, too. And they’re short on instruments because of the fire last year, when the school burned down and everything in it. But don’t worry, I said you wouldn’t sell your horn in a million years. I didn’t tell her exactly why, but there’s our band to think of, after all.”
Gusta felt an icy wave of guilt run through her. She remembered that pill’s worth of paper, and her mother’s anxious footnote: in case of need . . . that horn . . . her room and board.
“I wonder what it means, ‘a lot of money,’ ” said Gusta sadly.
Because now they were passing by Bess’s house, where Uncle Charlie languished in his shadows for want of a surgeon’s care.
Gusta’s uncle Jay, her mother’s youngest brother, came over for supper that night, which he did now and then, though he boarded down the lane at the farmhouse his older brother Bill had built when he got married to Verla. Uncle Jay had a happy-go-lucky grin that made Gusta like him right away, and not just Gusta: Jay was popular with all of Gramma Hoopes’s boarders. The younger boys spent the early part of supper telling him all about the big school essay contest on the topic of “America from On High.” Everyone around that table had a lot of respect for the meaning of twenty dollars, and of course appearing in the newspaper wasn’t anything to sneeze at, either. But what Donald and Ron and Clarence were actually most excited about wasn’t even the money or the newspaper — they didn’t really think they had a chance of winning — it was the airplanes.
“Wouldn’t I just like to ride in one of those things!” said Donald. “Wouldn’t I just like to look out of those windows and see the clouds like pillows all beneath me!”
“Well, and that’s just what I mean to do, kids,” said Jay. “I saw a notice in the newspaper that they’re looking for Aviation Cadets to train up, and I mean to volunteer.”
