by Jack Gantos
“You mean like a servant?” I asked, not enthused by the job description.
“No, like a good, loyal friend,” she replied with her jaw firmly set.
“And I’m to do everything she wants?” I asked. “If she says ‘Go jump in a lake,’ then I jump in a lake, right?”
“Without hesitation,” Mom replied, showing some impatience with my attitude. “She’s brokenhearted at the moment, and it’s up to you to provide her with a steady hand and keep her on an even keel. Her whole life was about serving Eleanor Roosevelt. I can’t imagine what she might do next, but she’s a great friend and for now we have to help her get through this rough patch.”
She was right. Miss Volker had treated me like her best friend. I think she was sixty-five years older than me, but it sort of evened out because I was her youngest friend and she was my oldest friend. I made her feel younger and she made me feel older. I asked questions and she gave answers. I made her feel smart and she made me feel clueless. She was helpless and I was good help.
We were a perfectly mismatched match, and five days later I carried our small suitcases onto the late-night train in Greensburg. The weather had turned cold and it was starting to spit snow. As the engine whistle sounded we rolled forward and I pressed my face to the window. The snow was picking up. Mom spotted me. I waved and she blew me a kiss. Then, just like in a romantic movie, we grew farther and farther apart and the only thing that kept us together was our love for each other.
Miss Volker and I settled into our seats. She quietly opened a book and I opened an egg sandwich Mom had made me for breakfast but I knew it would taste better for dinner because it was still warm. I’d ridden the train before on visits to see some family in Altoona, but this was my first big train ride across the whole state. In the dark, there wasn’t much to see out the windows except for sweeping car lights on a distant road, or a neon restaurant sign. When Miss Volker reclined in her seat and closed her book I reclined too and closed my eyes. I slept almost the whole way, with Miss Volker snoring next to me, and when we arrived at Pennsylvania Station in New York the next day it was like we had time-traveled from a sleepy old Pennsylvania full of tidy farms and barns to a new wide-eyed Pennsylvania jam-packed with bustling people inside the most gigantic building I had ever seen. The entire city of New York might have been under that roof for all I knew. I wanted to drag my feet and look around and explore the station, but Miss Volker was on the move.
“Keep up,” she said sharply when I drifted toward the ringing chimes and flashing neon flippers of a pinball parlor.
I carried our bags and stayed a step behind her. We left the train station and went outside. People passed by me wrapped in heavy coats with hats pulled down and their frosty breaths trailing behind them like chimney smoke. We caught a taxi to another train station across town. On the way we drove through Times Square, and I frantically looked around at the subway station entrance for a tiny statue of a cricket because our teacher had read us The Cricket in Times Square, which we all loved. I was going to tell Miss Volker about the book, but when I turned toward her she looked deep in thought, and so I didn’t bother her with any cricket-sized questions. I spotted a hot dog stand and looked for Mr. Spizz, but it was run by a young guy wearing a New York Yankees jacket.
At Grand Central Terminal I kept looking up at the amazing domed ceiling that was brightly painted to look like the stars at night, and I set down my suitcase and reached up toward them as if I were standing on the very tip of the North Pole. I kept trying to make eye contact with Miss Volker because I wanted to ask about everything, but she kept her eyes front and center and her jaw as tight as a locked drawer.
Then suddenly she froze in midstep. “Stop!” she ordered. “Do you feel that?”
“What?” I asked, staring down at the ground as if I was searching for loose change.
“The vibrations,” she said delicately, and tapped the tip of her shoe on the terrazzo floor.
I stood still and could feel the floor shaking.
“Deep below the floor where you can’t see,” she explained, “is where President Roosevelt and Eleanor had a secret train tunnel for their special Pullman car, the Ferdinand Magellan, named after the great explorer. During the war the car was bombproofed and renamed U.S. Car No. 1. The Roosevelts used the secret tunnel to avoid the crowds. The train stopped at a private elevator that took them directly up to the Waldorf Astoria hotel.”
“Wow,” I said. “Can we explore downstairs and try to find it?”
She looked toward the lighted face of the clock. “We have a train connection to make. Hurry up.”
I grabbed the luggage and we leaned forward and dashed off down a corridor toward a platform. In a few minutes we caught a local train to Hyde Park station. The train route took us north, with the tracks sometimes teetering just a few feet from the snowy banks of the Hudson River. I looked out the frosty window and wondered what ever happened to Henry Hudson after his crew rebelled and set him off his ship in Hudson Bay. I turned to ask Miss Volker if she knew more about the famous explorer, but her chin was down and her eyes were wet, so as Mom advised I kept my question to myself and just waited to be told what to do.
When we arrived at Hyde Park and stepped off the train we found the station platform was still tented in yards of coal-black bunting from the funeral procession. President Lincoln’s funeral train had passed through Hyde Park Station. President Roosevelt’s U.S. Car No. 1 had stopped here. Now it was as if our own train had traveled the distance between the stations of Tragedy and Sorrow.
Miss Volker fit right in, draped in her long black dress, black woolen coat, and black knit hat. Even the long lines of grief in her downcast face seemed to be etched in jet-black ink. I looked like her “hired hand” in my mismatched brown tweed suit and homemade plaid tie as I carried our scuffed-up leather suitcases. I kept my eyes lowered as we solemnly marched down a black carpet that was so thick our shoes were respectfully hushed.
But once we entered the station waiting room the scene shifted again and a more pleasant mood erased the cloudy gloom of the platform. We stood facing a cheerfully painted wall showing peaceful colonial life on the Hudson River. There were lines of stout sheep and cows all posed on their hind legs as if ready to dance. Stripe-shirted boaters rowed along the banks of the river and cheerful picnickers spread out under summer willow trees, and in the middle of this peaceable kingdom hung a large portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt entirely edged with wreaths of sunny yellow roses sent from dignitaries around the globe.
“The whole world knows yellow roses are her favorite,” Miss Volker said, stepping through the dark wreath of her own grief as she stood smiling in front of the portrait.
“They are Mom’s favorite too,” I remarked.
“Smart mother,” Miss Volker said, then she leaned forward and kissed the portrait of Mrs. Roosevelt on the cheek. That single kiss didn’t satisfy the size of Miss Volker’s love, so she pursed her lips and kissed the portrait on the other cheek.
I was smiling a little too much when she turned and scowled at me. I shrugged. “What?” I said innocently. “I’ve never kissed a picture before—it’s kind of funny.”
“Then you’ve never lost a parent, or a best friend, or a good pet, or a sainted lady named Eleanor,” she replied, and drew her shoulders up.
I thought about that for a moment. “I did kiss myself in the mirror once,” I admitted.
“Now that is abnormal!” she declared with a smile. “Only a narcissist would do something that perverse.”
I wasn’t sure if a narcissist was a person who loved himself too much, or was like Siamese twins who kissed each other. I was a little confused but I did make her smile, and that was a break in the clouds.
I wasn’t sure I had another joke in me and was relieved when a taxi driver wearing a blaze-orange hunting cap opened the station door and hollered out, “Anybody need a lift?”
“We do,” I called back. He stepped forward and picked
up our suitcases, and I steadily held Miss Volker’s arm as we followed him to his car, which he had left running to keep it toasty warm inside.
Once we arrived at Springwood, the Roosevelt home, I paid the driver from the wad of travel money I was in charge of. Miss Volker began to confirm our return ride to the train station, so I hopped out and carried our small leather suitcases into the gift shop and checked them with a uniformed guard who set them on a luggage rack. Then I trotted back to the taxi. Miss Volker had finished talking to the driver, and as the car pulled away I escorted her into the gift shop.
I took a deep breath and remembered what Mom had said as she packed my suitcase for my overnight stay in a New York hotel. “You have to take care of her. Be the grown boy—no, be the young man both your father and I expect you to be.”
I wanted to be that boy who could be counted on to act like a man. And now Miss Volker and I were here and there was nothing left to do but bravely do what we had come to do. It was time. I turned and looked Miss Volker in the eye.
“Are you ready?” I asked in a steady voice, and firmly reached for her elbow. She nodded, and together we stepped out of the back door of the gift shop and cautiously shuffled along an icy sidewalk of fresh snow that was peppered with coal ash and grit.
Perhaps because of the cold weather there were no other visitors that I could see. We took it slow and easy, and when we reached the arched passage through the thick gray wall of cypress trees we came to a stop. Before us spread the orderly winter garden with its pruned beds of silent roses where Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt were buried. Miss Volker’s hands felt like those dormant roses turned inward against the cold, and I hoped the warmth in her heart, like the roses, would return for a spring season.
In the center of the garden a green mat of fake grass had blown away from where it had covered Mrs. Roosevelt’s fresh grave. The exposed scar of yellowish dirt glinted like frosty nuggets of gold heaved up under the lowering western sun.
When Miss Volker nudged me with her elbow we started forward again. I thought of all the people who, three days ago, had just walked where I was walking. I might have been stepping where President Kennedy had been, and Miss Volker might have been walking in Jacqueline Kennedy’s footsteps. President Truman had been here and President Eisenhower. I was walking where they had been, and they had been here for the same reason Miss Volker was here—to say goodbye to the greatest American lady they had ever known.
When we approached a low hedge at the gravesite, more coal ash had been thickly scattered on the viewing area so people wouldn’t slip. Since we were the only people in the garden we stood as close to the gravestone as we could reach. There were several inches of pure white snow piled on the top of the low hedge and across the wide shoulders of the stone. We stood there a long time without talking. I figured Miss Volker must be having a conversation with her memory of Mrs. Roosevelt. It was a very lengthy conversation.
After a while my feet became numb, and inside of my too-tight church shoes I flexed my toes like a cat curling his paws. I rocked back and forth from toe to heel. I slowly lifted and lowered my legs. Beneath my soles ice cracked in thin glassy chips. I wiggled my fingers inside my wool gloves.
All along I kept peeking up at Miss Volker’s bowed face for any sign that she was ready to leave, but her face was as carved and hard as the solid ROOSEVELT headstone she stared at. Her ungloved fingers were now steepled together in prayer. I knew it had to hurt for her hands to be exposed to the cold, but I didn’t want to interrupt her by offering my gloves. This was her one moment to show Mrs. Roosevelt a lifetime of respect.
Earlier I had taken my hat off as my mother had taught me to do when I entered a graveyard, but my ears ached with cold and my stubby hair gave me no warmth. My brain felt like a bubble of air trapped in a cube of ice, so I put the hat back on and pulled it down over my ears as far as I could.
“Please, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I whispered to myself, “I know you are dead, but let Miss Volker wrap up her chat with your spirit before I’m forever frozen like some freakish kid gargoyle at your gravesite.”
Miss Volker looked down at the watch on her wrist, then glanced toward the opening in the cypress trees where we had entered the rose garden. “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”
“Ready to leave?” I asked with relief, and clutched her elbow.
“No, ready to write the obituary for the Norvelt News,” she said with renewed strength, and elbowed my hand away as if I were a pickpocket.
“I don’t have a pencil or paper,” I replied. “I’m not prepared.”
“Open my purse,” she instructed. “It’s all in there. I knew if I came here I’d get inspired.”
I opened the purse and removed a ballpoint pen and a notebook. At the same moment I got an unexpected jolt when I saw a hefty silver revolver in the bottom of her purse. Oh cheeze, I thought, but it wasn’t the right time to ask why she had a revolver on the trip unless she might use it on the train to get some old guy to kiss her. She must have had a better reason than that but my brain was too frozen to think.
I closed the purse and gripped the pen as if I were holding an icicle. I could barely say “Go,” as my jaw was rusty with cold. I lowered the tip of the pen against the paper as Miss Volker grandly threw her head back, straightened her shoulders, and with her right hand pointed directly at Eleanor Roosevelt’s name.
“She was born,” Miss Volker started, “on October 11, 1884. Yes, she was born into a rich family but her wealth did not spare her from family tragedy. Her mother died when she was eight, and her father died a year and a half later. She was sent off to England to be educated like a proper lady and later returned to New York, where she married the future president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She had six children, one of whom sadly died as an infant. When her husband moved to Washington in 1913 as the assistant secretary of the navy, Eleanor joined him. This was the beginning of a powerful new world for her. Living in Washington opened her eyes, and she began to realize her greatest wealth was her opportunity to make positive changes in America. Not only did she raise her children and help nurse her husband through polio, but she worked for the right of women to vote, helped form trade unions to protect women and men on the job, and started a factory to help disabled people find meaningful work. She taught history courses at a school for girls, she wrote for newspapers, and she edited a magazine.
“At the worst point of the Depression, once her husband became president, Mrs. Roosevelt increased her efforts to improve the lives of all Americans. She looked beyond the barricade of grand monuments that surrounded Washington and found before her a broken nation where so many were suffering through poverty and hunger. She rolled up her sleeves and got busy, and to our good fortune she started the little town of Norvelt, where she nurtured us with homes and education and jobs and the belief that farmers and coal miners were as important as presidents and generals. She did so much for so many, but she knew she was only one person and could only do so much on her own. So in the end she worked for the United Nations, with a goal to make every nation understand that each living soul around the world has more in common with each other than not, and that the true wealth of the world is not power, but peace and equality for all.
“I thank her for the riches she brought into my life. She gave me purpose of work and dignity in helping others, and through her efforts she certainly changed my life, and the lives of every Norvelter for the better.”
“And their kids too,” I chimed in. I wanted to thank her for more but decided to avoid saying anything about septic tanks and instead added, “Thanks for giving us a good school.” I didn’t mention anything about the blown-up walls because that wasn’t her fault.
“Amen to that,” Miss Volker said, and I think she patted me on my head but I couldn’t tell because my entire head felt as numb as a massive tooth that was about to be extracted. I was frozen, and even with the warmth of my closed hand the ink in the pen began to solidify and skip and then it st
opped and I thought my blood would stop flowing too.
“The pen is frozen,” I said to her. “Can we finish later?”
She swung her gaze toward the gap in the cypress hedge, and then back down at her watch. “We can,” she agreed. “But for now let us sing Eleanor’s favorite hymn.” She cleared her icy throat.
I couldn’t sing because I didn’t know the words, but it didn’t matter because my throat was a frosty tunnel and if I took a deep breath my lungs would be glazed in a cocoon of ice.
“O Lord,” she sang in her wavering voice, “make me an instrument of your peace.”
She paused to catch her breath for the next line and that’s when our cab driver reappeared, dashing through the gap in the cypress hedge. He ran up the sidewalk calling out, “Hey, lady! Hey, lady!” as he waved a black-and-yellow envelope over his head. I looked up at her and she smiled.
“Perfect timing,” she said under her breath.
“Perfect for what?” I asked, but there was no time for an answer.
About twenty feet away from us he suddenly slipped on a patch of ice and one foot shot straight up into the air as if he were an acrobatic circus clown. He bent over backward and I expected a disaster, but in a split second he reached behind himself with his free hand and stopped his fall. Still, he continued to glide toward us balanced on one foot while his back hand steered him along the ice as if it were a rudder.
“Lady,” he panted as he slowed to a stop and sprang forward onto both feet. His steamy breath, like tufts of white cotton, seemed pulled out of his mouth as if he were a pillow being unstuffed.
Miss Volker whispered a hasty “Rest in peace,” before she slowly turned her rigid face toward him. “May I help you?” she asked.
