Peter and Veronica (5 page)

She twirled around a couple of times while she was waiting for him, and Peter got the impression that she must think she cut a pretty glamorous figure. It made him snicker again, but call out kindly, “Hi, Veronica. How was the pie?”

“O.K.” Veronica’s face grew thoughtful as the two of them fell into step. “But that Stanley—oh, is he a pest! He wouldn’t eat any. He kept hiccuping all night, and my mother said it was my fault.”

“Why was it your fault?” Peter yelled, as a gust of wind nearly blew off his hat.

“Oh, because I didn’t take him along with me yesterday. Every time he doesn’t get his way he hiccups. I can’t stand him.”

 Veronica was always saying that Stanley was a pest and that she couldn’t stand him, but just let anybody agree with her, as Peter well knew, and she was sure to fly off the handle. So he just held on to his hat and said nothing,

“Listen,” said Veronica, “on Friday, when we go skating, suppose I come and pick you up instead of you coming to my house?”

The vision of his mother’s cold eyes and tight mouth over this morning’s breakfast table made him say quickly, “No, no! Let’s meet someplace else.”

“Where?”

“In front of the library.”

“O.K.”

Other rain-draped figures began to congeal on the path ahead.

“There’s Bill,” Peter said. “He’s got my snake handbook. Let’s catch up with him.”

He hurried along, and it wasn’t until he had nearly caught up with Bill that he realized Veronica had not followed along after him. He turned, and saw her billowing along a different path that led through the park. What a character! She’d never walk with the other kids if she could help it, only with him.

He hesitated but it was too late to catch up with her now, and besides, Bill had stopped and was waiting for him.

“Have you got my snake handbook?” he shouted.

“Yup, here it is.” Bill handed him the book and the two of them hurried to catch up with the other kids. There were Paul Lucas, Frank Scacalossi, and Jeffrey Lobel walking about three feet behind a group of girls, and acting as if they were worlds apart. The boys were tussling with each other, splashing and snorting and watching the girls out of the corners of their eyes. Peter and Bill joined the boys. Jeffrey turned around when he saw Peter, and yelled, “Hi, stranger! Long time no see.” Then he yanked Peter’s hat off and began tossing it around to the other boys. Peter elbowed Bill in the ribs, stepped on Frank’s foot, butted Jeffrey, and retrieved his hat from the puddle where it had landed. Then all of them paused for a moment to look at the girls.

There were only three of them—one in pink, one in yellow, and one in blue plaid. The one in blue plaid was the smallest one, and she was the one Peter looked at longest. That was Roslyn Gellert. Not that girls interested him much. Veronica didn’t count as a girl. But if he had to give an opinion as to which girl was the least obnoxious in his class, he would have said Roslyn Gellert.

Last term, in eighth grade, his teacher had asked him to help Roslyn with her math. He had enjoyed watching the way her soft face wrinkled helplessly over the work, and the fact that her mother had given him milk and homemade doughnuts on the two occasions that they had studied at her house. She was not a particularly pretty girl or a particularly smart girl or even a girl much admired by the other boys. But she was the shortest girl in the class, a few inches shorter than he, and this final virtue, along with her others, made him think pleasant thoughts about her when he didn’t have anything more important to think about.

The girls seemed impervious to the fact that there was anybody at all walking behind them. The one in pink had a pink umbrella that matched her raincoat, and she shifted it so that she could lean over and whisper something in the one in yellow’s ear. Both of them began tittering.

“Can’t stand that Lorraine Jacobs,” said Frank. “She’s the worst one of the bunch.”

A sudden gust of wind blew the pink umbrella out of its owner’s hand, and Frank bounded off in pursuit. The girls stopped and waited until he brought it back.

“Thanks, Frank,” Lorraine said smoothly. Then she turned and smiled at all the boys. “Oh, hello there,” she said, as if she were suddenly aware of them.

The two camps converged and stood with the rain pouring down on them, waiting.

Then Lorraine said, “I was going to ask all of you if you could come to a party at my house this Saturday night?”

“What kind of a party?” Paul asked suspiciously.

“Oh, not a birthday party,” Lorraine said quickly, “just a party.”

“Who’s going to be there?” Peter asked, not looking at Roslyn.

“Linda, Frieda, Roslyn, Reba ... some of the other kids ... and me,” she giggled. “And all of you, if you can come, and Marv Green. I want to ask him, and ... oh, I don’t know.”

“What’ll we do?” Bill asked.

“Gee, whatever we feel like,” Lorraine said. “We can play games and maybe dance ...”

“DANCE!”

“And we’ll have refreshments. It’ll start about seven-thirty and end about ten-thirty. Just let me know, will you?”

She and the other girls joined ranks again and began walking off. The boys huddled together behind.

“Parties are stupid,” said Frank, looking at Lorraine’s pink back. “I’m not going. Are you, Bill?”

“Naa. Are you, Peter?”

“Well,” said Peter, watching Roslyn’s red umbrella bob up and down, “I don’t know. I’ll go if Marv goes.”

Paul said, “They’re sappy, those parties. All they want to do is dance.”

The other boys nodded. Peter had never been to an evening party with girls, and although he felt uncertain, he thought he might just try it this once, especially if Roslyn was going to be there.

“I’m not going to dance,” said Bill, “but if there are refreshments, maybe I’ll just look in for a little while, if Peter goes.”

By the time they arrived at school, the boys had agreed to go, if only for the sake of the refreshments, but all of them had decided to meet first at Frank’s house and go together. Peter was pretty sure Mary would go as long as he was going.

Peter’s home-room teacher, Mr. Bailey, was very popular with the boys and heartily disliked by the girls. He walked with a cane, due to a wound he had suffered in the First World War, over twenty years ago. He had been a colonel in the American Army in France, had received the Distinguished Service Cross, and liked to reminisce. He was now an officer in the Civil Defense, and had inspired some of the boys in the class to go down to their local headquarters and volunteer as messengers. Every morning he liked to discuss the present war over in Europe with his class and analyze the rights and wrongs in the strategy used by the Allies against Hitler. It was only a matter of time, he said, before the United States became involved in the war, and he, for one, was ready. The boys enjoyed listening to him while the girls usually kept looking at the clock. Except for Veronica.

But it was not for his wound or his war stories that the girls disliked him so. It was mainly because he called them by their last names, the same way he did with the boys. It was, “Jacobs, bring this down to the office,” and “Gellert, collect the permission slips,” or “Kirby, sharpen the pencils.” They had waited a long time for high school where teachers were supposed to call them “Miss Jacobs,” “Miss Gellert,” “Miss Kirby,” and did, except for here, in their own official room.

And if his lack of sensitivity over their names wasn’t bad enough, his affection for low life was the final straw. Mr. Bailey taught science, and his room was filled with cases and cases of snakes. No stuffed squirrels or owls for him—like Mr. Gray, their old nature teacher in P. S. 63, used to display. All these snakes were live—thirty-seven of them. Mr. Bailey got a big kick out of the fact that this term he also had thirty-seven students in his class, and he proceeded to name each of the snakes by one of his students’ names. At first, he suggested that each student feed and look after his own namesake, but the reaction had been so violent on the part of the girls—and some of the boys, too, for that matter—that Mr. Bailey had been forced to withdraw his suggestion and ask for volunteers. Five had volunteered —Bill Stover, Harold Jenkins, Ralph Crespi, Veronica Ganz, and Peter Wedemeyer. Since Peter’s hand had gone up first, he was appointed captain of the snake squad, and along with his corpsmen, cleaned the cases and fed and watered their inhabitants.

On rainy days, when the students were unable to eat their lunches in the schoolyard (there being no lunchroom in the annex), all classes had to eat in their own home rooms. Problems arose when a number of girls objected to eating their lunches while many of the snakes were eating theirs. Lorraine Jacobs, one day, had put up a book in front of the case adjacent to her seat, to cut off the view of her neighbor who was not quite finished digesting his meal of kicking frog legs. Mr. Bailey had accused her of cruelty to animals, and although she murmured under her breath about cruelty to humans, she still had to take down the book and skip lunch for the day.

Mr. Bailey was entertaining them with incidents involved in the rout of Verdun when Veronica, who was putting water in some of the cages, cried out suddenly, “Mr. Bailey, Mr. Bailey, he’s dead!”

Mr. Bailey grabbed his cane and heaved himself up to his feet. “What’s that, Ganz? Who’s dead?”

“It’s Ralph Peterson. He’s not moving. Oh, I think he’s dead.”

Everybody looked at Ralph Peterson, the boy, who smiled nervously. Mr. Bailey hurried to the back of the room, pulled the snake out, and inspected it. Everybody could see how it hung limp and unmoving from his hand.

“He’s dead, all right,” Mr. Bailey said bitterly, “and he was the best one of the bunch.” He peered into the cage and shouted. "Just look at this mess in here, Ganz! The whole floor is full of water. I told you a million times their cages had to be dry."

Veronica blinked and looked helplessly at Peter. But she said nothing while Mr. Bailey continued to berate her. When he had finished and waved her away with his hand, she slowly sat down at her seat and suddenly sunk her head in her hands.

Peter stood up quickly and said, “Mr. Bailey!”

“What is it, Wedemeyer?”

“It’s just that Veronica wasn’t responsible for taking care of Ralph Peterson’s cage. All of us on the squad divided up the cages, and Ralph Peterson’s was Harold Jenkins. But you know he was sick last week—I mean Harold Jenkins—and I thought I had remembered to look after all his snakes but I guess I hadn’t.”

“That doesn’t make any difference,” said Mr. Bailey unfeelingly. “The snake’s dead, and your squad just wasn’t on the ball. Make sure it doesn’t happen again, Wedemeyer, or I’ll have to appoint a new squad.”

“Yes, sir,” said Peter, sitting down. He tried to catch Veronica’s eye, but her face was still buried in her hands.

When the bell rang for the students to go to their first class, Lorraine and some of the other girls surrounded Veronica in the hall, and cooed sympathetically about the injustice that had been done. Peter hurried up, too, and heard Veronica say sadly, “He just didn’t realize it wasn’t me, and the snake was a beauty.”

“Well,” said Lorraine, “don’t you feel bad about it. It wasn’t your fault.”

Veronica nodded but she still looked unhappy. Lorraine reached out and put an arm on her shoulder and said suddenly, “Say, would you like to come to a party I’m giving this Saturday night?”

That Lorraine Jacobs wasn’t really such a bad egg, after all, Peter thought. He smiled encouragingly at Veronica, who suddenly had a frantic look in her eye and seemed even more unhappy.

“Party?” she said. “What kind of party?”

“Oh, not a birthday party,” said Lorraine, “just a party. A lot of kids in the class will be there. I hope you can make it too.”

When Peter arrived home from school that afternoon, his mother was sewing something on the sewing machine.

“Hi, Ma,” he yelled, as he came through the door.

No answer.

He came up behind her and gave her a quick peck on her cheek. She stopped sewing and looked at him coldly. “So what do you want?” she said.

“Oh, Ma,” Peter said, “don’t be like that.”

She resumed sewing, and Peter stood there trying to think of some topic of conversation that might make her happy.

“Ma,” he said, “I’m going to a party, Saturday night.”

The sewing machine stopped whirring. “What kind of a party?” she said suspiciously.

“Oh, not a birthday party,” he said quickly. “It won’t cost anything to go.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Who’s giving the party?”

“Lorraine Jacobs.”

“Oh,” said his mother, moving her chair back and looking at him with a look that was not quite so cool, “Rose Jacob’s girl—a nice girl. Who else is going?”

“Marv Green and Roslyn Gellert and Paul Lucas ...” Peter named some of the children he knew his mother approved of.

“And ... anybody else?”

“I guess so. I don’t know all the kids she’s asking.”

“She’s a smart girl,” his mother said comfortably. “She’ll know whom to invite. I don’t have to worry about her. What time is the party?”

“Seven-thirty to ten-thirty.”

“All right. I’ll tell Papa to come and get you at ten-thirty.”

Peter yelled, “I don’t want Papa to come and get me. I’m not a baby any more. Don’t you dare tell Papa to come and get me. It’s just a block away. I know the way home.”

“All right, all right. He can stand on the corner.”

“If I see him standing on the corner,” Peter said between his teeth, “I’ll go the other way.”

Mrs. Wedemeyer suddenly began to laugh. She pulled him into her lap and stroked his hair and kissed him, and he let her do it because of the way she had cried yesterday. But it wasn’t easy, and he certainly wished she’d stop treating him like a five-year-old.

When she still hadn’t arrived by four-thirty, Peter decided she wasn’t coming. Once more he skated up to the corner to look for her, and sure enough, this time he saw her skating across 169th Street. Somebody was with her, or more accurately stated, somebody was following along behind her. It was Stanley.