The flag line was repeated again, higher. “L’étend-ah-ard sanglant est levé.” Gustave’s voice cracked. He couldn’t sing any longer. He stood with his head down, desperately squeezing back the tears in his eyes.
Mrs. Heine played a few more bars, then stopped. “The French!” she said to the room at large. “Can’t even sing their own national anthem!”
Somehow Gustave understood that comment perfectly well.
“Sit there.” She gestured to the center section, to the row in the very back of the classroom. “You’re an alto. More or less,” she added in an undertone. Gustave glanced up just long enough to see, blurrily, where she was pointing.
He made his way to the back and slid into a seat at the end of the row while Mrs. Heine spoke to the class, her voice rapid and sharp and unintelligible. By now he wasn’t even trying to listen.
“Gustave!” a voice whispered from his right. “Don’t let her get to you.” September Rose, a few seats away, was leaning over to get his attention. He didn’t understand the words, but he could tell that she was saying something friendly.
Mrs. Heine put a record on the record player. When the music ended, Mrs. Heine talked for a few minutes and then class was over. Gustave waited while September Rose gathered up her things.
“What means ‘get to you’?” He quoted her words back to her in a whisper.
September Rose glanced around. The two of them were screened from view by the chaos of many people talking and gathering books. She spoke slowly and clearly, and he understood most of it. “I meant, don’t let Mrs. Heine make you feel bad. It’s not just you. She used to be mean to this other Jewish boy too. You’re Jewish, right? That’s why you came to America?”
Before Gustave could answer, September Rose hurried off down the hall, but he caught up with her in homeroom. She was in the back, getting her red coat from her cubby. As Gustave pulled on his coat, she looked over at him, checking to be sure the two of them were alone before walking over to whisper, “The kids all call the music teacher Mrs. Hiney.”
“Hiney?”
“Shhh! Yes, Hiney!” She giggled and tapped the back of her gray skirt. “Hiney! Behind! You know?”
Gustave laughed.
“So you’re really from Paris? Have you seen the Eiffel Tower?” September Rose made the shape of the tower with her hands.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Did you ever go up it?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky!” She turned to go.
“Wait,” Gustave said. “What means ‘French kiss’?”
“Oh, from yesterday in the cafeteria?” September Rose grinned. “It’s a way some people kiss. Touching tongues.” She stuck hers out, wiggling it, and touched it with her fingertip, and then Gustave understood. “Martha’s such a flirt,” she added. “Especially with the new boys.”
“Flirt?”
“Like this,” September Rose said. She batted her eyes, flipped her braid over her shoulder, and made a kissy mouth like Martha. She laughed as he nodded. “You get it, huh? Bye!”
She threw on her coat and darted across the room to the door, slipping through a patch of sunshine from a high window. The back of her neck was a smooth, rich brown. It reminded Gustave of something. For a moment he couldn’t think what, and then he remembered. The chestnuts that fell from the trees on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. He used to collect them with his friends, rub them with a handkerchief until they were smooth and gleaming, and carry them in his pockets, throw them at things, drop them into the Seine from the bridges. Maybe it was because of the questions she had asked him, but that was what the warm brown of her neck reminded him of. Paris and chestnuts.
12
Fridays quickly became Gustave’s favorite day of the week. School got out an hour early, so there was never any music class on Fridays. Fridays also always began with algebra, which was now Gustave’s favorite subject. As soon as he realized that Americans wrote their numbers a bit differently, it was very easy to follow. He didn’t even have to listen to the words. He simply looked at the equations the teacher was writing on the board and figured out what to do by himself. One day, Mrs. Rider was explaining how to solve two equations containing two unknowns, x and y. Gustave suddenly saw how to do it, and she called him up to the blackboard. He solved the problem without talking, smiling to himself, while the others were still calling out bewildered questions.
Geography was the next period after algebra. That day, they were starting a new unit on Africa, and Mr. Coolidge had those maps pulled down. As Mr. Coolidge rapped his pointer on the maps and began to speak, Gustave glanced at the book of the boy next to him to see what page he was supposed to be on, then flipped open his textbook. He stopped at a photograph of French soldiers riding on méharis, camels. Once, in Paris, he had read a book about those French soldiers who rode camels in Africa. It had seemed like a glamorous and exciting life, a life dedicated to the glory of France. For a while he had wanted to be one of them, a méhariste, galloping through the desert under an enormous black sky full of stars.
Gustave absentmindedly twisted the eraser end of his pencil against the page, tearing it. He glanced up and covered the rip with his hand, worried that he would get into trouble. It was a long time ago that he had wanted to be one of those soldiers. He had been younger and stupider in those days. Back then he hadn’t known anything about what war was really like.
Mr. Coolidge tapped his pointer on Morocco. “So,” he said loudly to the class, and Gustave focused on him again, “what is a ‘casbah’?”
Martha waved her hand wildly in the air.
“Yes, Martha?”
Martha ran her fingers through her silky hair, taking her time, making sure the whole class was watching her. “A casbah is a walled-in city like that one in Algiers,” she said slowly and clearly, circling her arms like walls around a city. Then she started talking more quickly. Gustave heard the movie star names “Charles Boyer” and “Hedy Lamarr.” Suddenly Martha looked directly at Gustave and winked. She drawled in a fake French accent, “Come vid me to ze casbah!”
Gustave’s face went hot as the class exploded into laughter. “In the casbah they Frrrrench keeees!” Martha added, giggling. Someone nudged Gustave from behind.
“Oh, I see, you know about the casbah from the movies!” Mr. Coolidge chuckled. Gustave stared at the floor and waited for the class to be over.
—
At lunch, Gustave sat with Frank again. Leo was there too, and Miles, a curly-haired boy with a cheerful, ruddy face.
“You know Martha likes you, Gus!” Miles laughed.
Gustave shook his head, but the other boys at the table all started talking about Martha and girls and kissing. Leo looked annoyed. After a moment he thwacked Gustave’s leg and said, “Hey, Gus, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you wear those dumb pants?”
His voice was mocking, and after he spoke, the boys all looked at Gustave’s legs. He pulled his feet under him. “French,” he said curtly.
“Sharp!” Leo sneered. “Or should I say chic?”
“I am surprise you know a French word,” Gustave said.
Miles jabbed Leo with his elbow and laughed good-naturedly. Leo ignored him and stood up, pulling his own pants up as far as they would go. He waddled around the table like Charlie Chaplin. “Look at me!” he said. “I’m wearing those dopey French pants. Aren’t I the cat’s meow?”
“Ooh la-la! The cat’s meow!” another boy jeered, looking at Gustave. A lot of the other boys made cat noises. Gustave reddened angrily and looked away.
Miles put down his sandwich. “Want to play Battleship?” he asked Frank with his mouth full, getting out graph paper. “Gus, it’s a two-person game. Watch, and next time you can play.” Gustave turned his back on Leo, observing the game. He had played something very similar in France.
Miles and Frank each had two pieces of graph paper. On each page, they numbered one axis and put letters on the other. Then each boy drew the
outlines of ships on one piece of graph paper, keeping that piece hidden behind a propped-up book so that the other boy couldn’t see.
“B six,” Frank called out.
Miles ran his finger up to B and across to 6. It intersected with a ship he had drawn on the graph paper. “Hit!” he said sadly.
“Take that, you swine!” Frank shouted, marking an X at B6 on his blank piece of graph paper, which he had labeled Miles’s ships.
“Hey! I’m not the enemy, you are!” Miles said indignantly.
A few minutes later Frank glanced at his watch and got up, stumbling over his schoolbag. “I forgot. I’m supposed to go pick up an extra assignment from the math teacher. See you, fellas. Want to take over for me?” He pointed at his empty seat.
Gustave concentrated on the game. After he had sunk three of Miles’s ships, Miles jumped up. “You win! I’m getting some of that prune pudding before they close.” He hurried to the cafeteria line. A minute or two later, Leo said something to Gustave loudly, as if he had said it before. Gustave looked up, startled.
“I said, do you want to learn some American, Frenchie? Want to learn what to say to an American girl?”
Gustave shrugged.
“They like you to tease them, see? So if the girls come over today, I’ll help you. I’ll say the name of some film star. Who do you think is hot stuff? Hedy Lamarr?”
That was the film star that Martha had named in geography class. “No!”
“Okay, so she’s not your type. How about Rita Hayworth? So I say, ‘Hey, Gus, how about Rita Hayworth?’ And you go like this.”
Leo let out a long, slow wolf whistle, his hands curving in and out in the shape of a woman’s body.
“You got it? Do it!”
Embarrassed, Gustave imitated what Leo had done.
“Swell!” Leo’s eyes gleamed. Then I’ll say, ‘So, Gus, how about Martha?’ And you say, ‘Flat!’ That means she’s pretty, like Rita Hayworth. Got it?”
Stifled laughter came from some of the boys.
“She’ll love that, Gus!” Leo insisted. “Try saying it. Come on!”
Gustave muttered it quickly, and there was more laughter. Gustave didn’t understand everything Leo was saying, and he didn’t know the word Leo was telling him to repeat, but something was definitely off.
“Great, Frenchie!” Leo reached over and slapped him on the shoulder. “The American girls are gonna love you!”
The boy next to Leo jabbed him with his elbow and muttered something that sounded like an objection, but Leo just grinned.
The table suddenly quieted. “Hey, here they come!” Leo said, smoothing his hair across his forehead. Gustave looked over his shoulder. Martha and a group of girls crowded behind him, giggling.
“Is there room here for me?” Martha asked loudly, wiggling into the spot next to Gustave and bumping her hip up against him. “So, whatcha eating, Gus?”
She reached over, picked up his apple, and took a bite. Her big hazel eyes locked on Gustave’s. Where she had bitten, he saw a smear of red. A girl his age was wearing lipstick? He felt hot, and his skin prickled, but he couldn’t seem to look away.
Leo cleared his throat. “Gus has something to tell you, Martha,” he said.
Martha stopped chewing and smiled at Gustave. “What do you want to tell me, Gus?” she crooned, as if the two of them were alone.
“Hey, Gus,” Leo demanded loudly, “how about that Rita Hayworth?”
Gustave whistled feebly, trying to sound suave like Leo, and curved his hands in and out. Martha’s cheeks went pink.
“Yeah, Gus!” one of the boys snickered. The others were silent, grinning and waiting.
Leo leaned forward. “And Gus, how about Martha?”
Martha was gazing at Gustave intently now, her eyes sparkling.
“Come on, Frenchie!” Leo coaxed. “Did you forget your English lesson already? How about Martha?”
There was something wrong with what Leo had told him to say. Gustave was quite sure of that. But no other English words were coming into his head. “Martha?” Gustave said slowly, playing for time. And then he knew what to say.
“Chic!” he said loudly, smiling at her. “Cat’s meow!”
Just as he said it, Leo whistled a short, sharp note, dropping his hands through the air in two parallel lines. He looked confused when he realized Martha was smiling.
“Hey, wait—you didn’t say what we practiced!”
“He said I was the cat’s meow!” Martha said haughtily, tossing her head. “And chic! That’s French for ‘stylish’! And the French know style!”
Gustave grinned. Miles had appeared a minute ago and was standing at the end of the table holding a bowl of pudding. He slapped Gustave on the shoulder as he went by. “Good one, Gus!”
13
After that, school got a little bit better. In the second week, Gustave had started going to a special language class, once a day, while the others had art or physical education. Three other students who didn’t speak good English were also in the class. The two girls were identical twin sisters from Spain, and the other boy, who was older, was from Austria. They had all been in school in America longer than Gustave had. None of them spoke French, not even the teacher, but the class helped.
After a couple of weeks, Gustave discovered that if he didn’t fight so hard to understand every word, if he relaxed and kind of let himself float on the surface of the language, like a cork on a bobbing ocean, after a moment his brain often made sense of what he was hearing. And he was starting to feel more confident about speaking in front of several people at once. He never said anything in class, though, except a very few words when he absolutely had to.
Leo started eating lunch with another crowd most days. Gustave usually ate with Frank and Miles. The two of them often played chess at lunch with a pocket-sized chess set, and sometimes they played a pencil game with dots and squares that three people could play. Most of the time Gustave couldn’t understand the conversation in the noisy cafeteria unless someone spoke to him directly, but at least nobody bothered him. Even Martha, to Gustave’s relief, seemed to have lost interest in him. Lately she had started going with her group of friends to flirt with Leo at lunch. Once she perched on Leo’s lap and ate a bite of his sandwich.
Gustave noticed that a lot of kids brought ripe bananas to eat for lunch. But the two green bananas on his apartment windowsill had never turned yellow. When the peel was still greenish gray but had started going dark in spots, Gustave had decided it was time to try them. He’d peeled the bananas and shared them out for dessert. His parents had looked dubiously at the unfamiliar fruit, but remembering the delicious smell of the bananas in the shop, Gustave picked up his piece and took a big bite. His teeth furred over instantly, and a bitter taste filled his mouth. “Eeuh!” he said, spitting it out. “Don’t even bother!”
“Manners, Gustave,” his mother chided, scooping up the plate with the spit-out lump. She and Papa had dumped their pieces, untasted, into the trash.
September Rose sometimes glanced at Gustave across the cafeteria, but she didn’t talk to him again. When he was near her in class or in the hallways, he tried to think of something to say, but it took too long to think of the words. One day during music class, he planned out a sentence in English. As soon as the bell rang, he turned to her and said it. “I like you singing.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said. “So long.” And she was out the door.
Mostly, the first few weeks of school went by in a blur of confusion. Gustave drifted along, trying to be in the right classroom at the right time, trying to decipher the English swirling around him.
Papa had found a job, finally, working as a janitor at a department store. Then Maman got hired to do piecework at home, sewing artificial flowers and feathers and spangles onto hats. Soon the small apartment was overflowing with hat-making materials. But Gustave’s parents still had a lot of tense conversations about money. The two of them had started studying English in n
ight school. While Gustave was home in the evenings, struggling through whatever he could do of his homework with the French–English dictionary, Maman and Papa walked to Joan of Arc Junior High three nights a week for night-school classes. There were a few other French men and women, but mostly the students were from different countries. They could hardly understand each other at all, but they laughed a lot, Maman reported. Once, Mrs. Szabo, the teacher, had brought a coffee cake to share. It sounded like a lot more fun than regular junior high school. Gustave’s parents were learning about American citizenship in night school too. Some of the other students, who had been in the country longer, were preparing to take the exam to become citizens. One night Papa and Maman came home with a book called The New American. At the back were sixty-one questions to study for the citizenship exam. Gustave flipped through it as he ate his breakfast the next morning.
“Are we going to become American citizens?” he asked, alarmed.
“It takes five years before you can apply,” Papa said. “So we’ll see. Maybe. Or maybe we’ll go back to France. It depends what happens with the war.”
On the evenings when his parents didn’t have night school, they often listened to a secondhand radio Papa had brought home. When the news came on, his parents fell silent, and Gustave stopped doing homework. They all listened intently to the rapid English, trying to find out how the war was progressing. After the broadcasts were over, Gustave’s parents bombarded him with questions about what it had meant, and he answered as well as he could. The broadcasts were mostly about Japan and the Philippines. Sometimes there were alarming stories of German U-boats surfacing within sight of the East Coast of the US and of nighttime explosions at sea. People walking along the beaches found empty, charred lifeboats and smashed pieces of American ships. But there was very little information about what was going on in Europe.
Skating with the Statue of Liberty Page 6
