Skating with the Statue of Liberty (24 page)

“She's coming!” someone near the door called, and a moment later the auditorium door swung open, and Mrs. Heine came out with a list.

“May I have your attention, please!” she said, clapping her hands. The students quieted immediately. “I'll read the names of everyone chosen to sing at the rally,” she proclaimed, “and then I'll announce the soloist.” She began reading a long, alphabetized list of names. Gustave realized that September Rose was going to have to listen in suspense nearly all the way through before Mrs. Heine got to the “Ws.”

Mrs. Heine was reading the letter “S” now. “Rose Sapienti, Martha Teagan—” Here she was interrupted by many loud shrieks from Martha's crowd. “Peter Underhill, Larry Upton,” she went on. “And September Rose Walker. Those are all of our singers. And now for the one chosen to sing the solo.” She paused dramatically.

“You made it!” Gustave wanted to say to September Rose, but she was on the other side of the hallway with a crowd of people in between them. Still, he caught a glimpse of her excited expression, and he knew that, despite what she had said, she was hoping that her name was coming.

“The soloist for the Joan of Arc Junior High 1942 Victory Rally chorus is…” Mrs. Heine paused dramatically. “Elsie James.”

31

S
eptember Rose wasn't at the Joan of Arc statue when Gustave arrived, and she wasn't there five minutes later or ten minutes later. Had she changed her mind about going to the library? Gustave walked around for a while, looking downhill. The sun was out, and the river glinted between the trees, which were covered now with a faint haze of green. He was dipping his finger in a puddle and drawing the Cross of Lorraine in water all over the base of the statue when he heard feet trudging up the stairs to the park.

“Hi, Gustave,” said September Rose. “Sorry I'm late. What's that?” Her eyes were red.

“It's the symbol of the French Resistance. It's Joan of Arc's symbol too.”

She traced a finger over the double-barred cross. “I like it.”

“Mrs. Heine should have picked you,” Gustave said awkwardly. “But at least you're in the chorus.”

September Rose stamped in a puddle and stared down at the ripples in the water. “I
was
better than Elsie, wasn't I? Or maybe I just wanted to think I was. Maybe you just think so too because you're my friend.”

“No! You sang the best. Everybody thought so.”

“Not everybody.”

“Elsie sings fine. She's nice. But your singing is very…I don't know the English word. It makes you feel the music. It makes you think about the words.”

Brotherhood
, Seppie had sung. Brotherhood from sea to sea. Listening to her voice, Gustave had imagined the oceans shining. And he had thought about how brotherhood was a French value too. Liberty, equality, fraternity. There was something about the way September Rose had sung “America the Beautiful”—with such conviction, her voice bringing the words of the song so vividly to life—that was enough to make anyone hearing her believe in those words, or at least think they did, while they were listening.

“That's why everyone clapped for you,” he said. “They didn't clap like that for Elsie.”

“Mrs. Heine didn't want a soloist who looks like me, I guess. After she announced the results, when mostly everyone was gone, I was coming out of the restroom and I overheard her talking with another teacher. She said that Elsie sings like an angel and looks like one too. Elsie is
so
pretty,” September Rose said wistfully. “I love her hair, don't you? It's kind of like a cross between cotton candy and sunshine. I wish I had hair like that.”

Gustave shrugged. He watched September Rose
tracing the Cross of Lorraine with her finger over and over. “But her hair isn't like Josephine Baker's,” he said finally.

September Rose looked up. “True.” She rubbed her fingers over her eyes. “I should put on my curls.” She took an eyebrow pencil out of a pocket in her schoolbag. Using her reflection in the puddle of water, she traced a curl onto each cheek. Then she pulled her long necklace out of another pocket, looped it twice around her neck, and lifted her chin defiantly, sniffing. “That's better, right?”

“And what Mrs. Heine said about angels…that's only true if angels have skinny voices.”

September Rose laughed shakily. “Thin voices, you mean? Well, it's Mrs. Heine's loss,” she said, blinking hard. “I get to sing solos at my church all the time. Let's go. The library's not that far. It's at Amsterdam and Eighty-First.”

She started off, walking quickly and purposefully, not talking. Somewhere in the eighties, they crossed over to Amsterdam Avenue. It was a quiet street, but as they walked down it, an older blond boy suddenly jumped out at them from between two buildings and swung something in their direction. It hit Gustave's right calf, just below the knee. Sharp pain shot up his leg, and it buckled under him. “Hey!” he shouted angrily, doubling over. The boy sprinted down the street, leering over his shoulder and shouting something before vanishing around the corner. Gustave heard the words “Get out!” and “lover.”

“Are you all right?” September Rose asked, glaring after the boy.

Gustave's pants leg was covered with white dust, and his leg hurt like crazy. He rubbed it, and it started to feel better. “What was he talking about?” Gustave asked.

“Why can't people just leave us alone?” September Rose burst out furiously.

“It was because we were together? What did it mean?” But he knew she wouldn't say.

“He's just some stupid hoodlum! He had one of those stockings filled with bits of chalk. They're really dangerous. I know a kid who lost an eye when he got hit with one on Halloween. Can you walk all right?”

Gustave nodded. He limped for a few steps, and then his leg was moving normally again. Farther down the block they saw a white patch on a knocked-over garbage can where the boy had whacked it. They walked most of the rest of the way to the library without talking.

Lover? Gustave thought. Had that boy been teasing him and September Rose, saying he was her boyfriend? But his shout hadn't sounded at all like teasing. It had sounded like a threat. It had happened twice now, in two different neighborhoods. This must be the kind of thing September Rose's brother was worried about. The reason he had told her they shouldn't be friends.

32

A
s Gustave and September Rose neared the library, they walked past a synagogue. September Rose looked at the Star of David carved into the pale stone wall. “I wanted to ask you something,” she said. “Your friend who's missing. He's Jewish too?”

“Yes.”

She played with the zipper on her schoolbag. “So he's in danger, you think? Because the Nazis don't like Jews?”

“Yes.”

“He's our age? Is he all by himself?”

“He's with his mother, and maybe an uncle, we're not sure. His mother couldn't leave her job when my family left Paris, so they stayed. Now we don't know where they are.”

September Rose twisted one of her braids as they waited for another light to change so they could cross the street. “What's he like?”

“Marcel?” So many memories rushed through Gustave's
head that it was hard to know what to say. “He's smart, but not always good in school. He's good at sports, especially
le foot
—I mean, soccer. He's funny. He always plays tricks. On teachers sometime…” English was slipping away from Gustave, and his throat was getting thick, but words were tumbling out of him anyway, faster than he had ever spoken in English before. “He was a Boy Scout with me. One time in Paris we had a race to find things on a list. A search…”

“A scavenger hunt? Like, find a bottle cap, find a fishhook, find a magnet, that kind of thing?”

“Yes. But part of it was we couldn't tell what we are doing. We needed a teacher to write his name—”

“A teacher's signature?”

“Right. So Marcel doesn't tell about the scavenger hunt. Instead, he says to the teacher that he collects signatures of famous people. The teacher laughs and says, ‘But I am not famous!' Marcel says, very serious, ‘Oh, monsieur, I think you will be someday.' ”

September Rose smiled. “Smart! I bet your team won the scavenger hunt!”

Gustave shook his head, watching three yellow taxis going by, one right after the other, each one splashing through an enormous puddle and sending up a tall spray of water. “No.” The dream about Marcel that he'd had on the ship rushed back at him. “One thing we never got in time. We never found a yellow feather.” His throat hurt too much to get any more words out.

“A yellow feather. Hmm. If we wanted a yellow feather, I wonder where we could find one here,” September Rose
said. Her face was starting to look cheerful again. “I think Lisa's aunt has a parakeet. But parakeets are mostly green, not yellow, right? But I think some of their feathers are yellowish. Or, hey! You could dye a feather yellow the same way you color an Easter egg, with onion skins! Do you do that in France? Well, I guess Jews wouldn't. Here's the library, Saint Agnes.”

It was smaller and less intimidating than the main branch, the one he'd visited with Cousin Henri and Jean-Paul back on his first day in New York, but it didn't have the majestic lions on each side of the door. Gustave and September Rose went up the steps together. Inside it was nearly silent, with high ceilings and furniture made of dark wood. September Rose pointed to the circulation desk. “You go there to get a card,” she whispered. “If you have any trouble, I'll help you.”

A friendly-looking woman with short, curly dark hair was behind the desk. When Gustave had explained what he wanted, she pushed some papers toward him.

“Fill these forms out in triplicate, please.”

Gustave took them and went to the large wooden table where September Rose was sitting. The top form asked for his name, age, address, school, and parents' names. That was easy. But something the librarian had said was bewildering. He flipped through the papers looking for an envelope with a sticky flap.

“What am I supposed to lick?” he whispered to September Rose.

“What? Nothing!”

“She said, ‘Lick it.' ”

“I don't see anywhere to lick.” September Rose flipped through the papers. “You just fill out that form three times.”

“She said, ‘In trip,' and then, ‘Lick it.' Is something getting mailed somewhere?”

September Rose suddenly laughed out loud, and a man at the next table turned around and scowled at her. “Fill this out
‘in triplicate'
! Is that what she said? That means fill out the same form three times! I'm going to go find some books on Abraham Lincoln for my report.”

Gustave filled out his information three times and brought the completed forms back to the desk. As the librarian typed out his library card, September Rose returned and dropped a stack of books on the table with a loud thud.

“There!” The librarian handed him the small rectangle. “Don't mark up the books. And return them on time. Is it your first library card?” She smiled at him.

“My first library card in America,” he said, fingering it.

“You're from France, aren't you? Well, have fun! Read lots of good books. Do you need help finding anything?”

“For school, I need to find three things about Charles de Gaulle. My teacher said probably newspaper articles, not books.”

“That's ambitious! Well, let's see what we can find.”

When she was finished helping him, he had several newspapers and two magazines. “And if you need a
French-English dictionary you can use this.” She handed him a thick book, much bigger than their dictionary at home.

Gustave thanked her, then joined Seppie at the table. Even with the dictionary, the newspaper articles were hard to read, so Gustave was glad they were short. He had to look up lots of words. But an hour later he had taken notes and was starting to write his report. He looked over at September Rose, noticing that she had already written two pages. He worked hard for another hour, and with lots of erasing, checking the dictionary, and rewriting, he had written a short paragraph by the time a bell sounded and the lights flicked on and off three times. “They're closing!” September Rose slammed a book shut. “I'm almost done memorizing mine. How's yours going?

“I wrote it. It's going to be short. I don't want a lot to memorize.”

“Makes sense.” She peeked at his paragraph. “ ‘
Charles de Gaulle is a French hero
,' ” she read out loud. “That's a good way to start. It'll make people pay attention.”

When they walked past the circulation desk, the librarian was putting on her own coat.

“Did you see that?” September Rose whispered as they went out the front door of the library.

“What?”

“Her hat. It had a yellow feather in it. Like the one you and your friend Marcel couldn't find. Maybe it's a sign. Maybe it means that your friend's all right.”

Outside, the buildings on the opposite side of the
street were silhouetted against a dusky blue sky. Gustave looked behind him. The librarian was coming down the steps, the yellow feather in her hat illuminated by the streetlight overhead. He didn't think that he believed in signs. “Maybe,” he said.

September Rose looked unhappy, as if going outside had made her think about the auditions again. “Do you think Elsie James will stand in front for the whole performance at the Victory Rally?” she asked. “Do you think she's going to wear something special? She has the prettiest dresses. Remember that peach-colored one with the lace collar? She wears it to school sometimes. Maybe she'll wear that.”

Gustave shrugged. “I never noticed it. At least Mrs. Heine didn't pick Martha.”

“True—that would have been a lot worse.” September Rose paused at the street corner. “I don't feel like going home and telling Granma about the auditions. She'll say it's all for the best or that everything happens in God's own time or something like that, and I don't want to hear it.” She fidgeted, tightening the straps on her schoolbag. “My brother's Negro Youth Group is meeting at five-fifteen in back of a furniture store near here. Do you want to go with me?”

“He said you could come this time?”

“Not exactly.” September Rose twirled a braid around her finger and let it go. “They're planning something. I want to go spy on them and see if I can find out what's going on and how he got that black eye. He wouldn't ever tell us what happened. I just want to hear what they say.”
Her voice was nervous, but her eyes were gleaming with excitement.

“Won't they see us?”

“Not this time, they won't. They usually meet at people's apartments, but Alan's friend Willie works at the furniture store, and he has to get right back to work after the meeting, so they're gathering behind the building. I've been there once before with Alan when he was getting together with his friend. There's a shed. We could hide behind it. Come on—it'll be exciting!”

Gustave hesitated. His parents knew he was at the library, but he was supposed to be home soon, and he didn't want to get punished again. But spying did sound like fun. “As long as it won't take too long.”

“I'm sure it won't—it's almost nighttime. Come on!”

The furniture store was squeezed between two larger businesses. September Rose looked about furtively and led the way around the side. “There's the shed,” she whispered. “They should be here any minute. They're meeting on the back steps.”

Gustave and September Rose crouched behind the shed in the shadows. It was a cool night, but not cold, and even in the heart of the city, the evening air smelled like warming earth and spring. A light above the back entry to the building lit up a set of concrete steps, a rectangle of cement, and a garbage bin.

Two Negro boys who looked as if they were high school age came out of the back door together.

“The one in the blue shirt is Alan's friend Willie,” September Rose whispered.

A minute later two girls of about the same age walked down the alleyway and up the steps to join them. The four of them stood there talking quietly, their faces illuminated by the electric light.