Skating with the Statue of Liberty (9 page)

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A
fter 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 night 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.

Every afternoon when Gustave came home, he checked the bank of mailboxes in the lobby of the apartment building. So far, there had been no answer from Nicole. Once or twice a piece of mail got put in his family's mailbox by mistake or an advertisement came, and
each time his fingers touched an envelope, Gustave felt a rush of excitement and hope. But it was never a letter from France.

One afternoon Mr. Coolidge kept Gustave after school to go over the reading from the night before. Gustave managed to answer some of Mr. Coolidge's questions about African art. “Good!” Mr. Coolidge said. “You understand a lot! Why won't you ever answer when I ask a question in class?”

Gustave shrugged and looked away.

By the time he got back to his apartment building, it was late and the lobby was dim, lit by just one lamp near the door. Gustave went as he always did to the bank of mailboxes, dialed the combination, and reached in. When his fingers felt an onionskin envelope, his heart skipped a beat. He pulled it out. It was pale blue, definitely airmail, though it was too dark to see more. He tore up the stairs, fumbled through his bag with cold fingers to find his key, and unlocked the door. No one else was home. He flipped on the light.

“N.M., La Chaise, Saint-Georges-sur-Cher,” it said on the back triangle of the envelope. It was from Nicole! But the envelope looked strange. Both ends had been ripped open and resealed with official tape. It had been opened on one end in France by a censor working for the Nazis. Then it had been opened again on the other end as it came into the US.

It was a disgusting feeling. A Nazi soldier had read his personal letter. Gustave felt as if he had been handed a chocolate bar, and then, just as he was taking a bite, he
saw that there was a gigantic cockroach squatting on top of it.

Fighting down nausea, Gustave tugged the letter out of the envelope. As soon as he started reading, he could tell from Nicole's wording that she had known unfriendly eyes were going to slide over her letter before he got it.

30 January, 1942

Cher Gustave
,

I'm so glad you got there safely! We hear reports all the time about ships sinking while crossing the Atlantic Ocean, so I was worried. I'm afraid I don't have an answer to your question. Everyone in Saint-Georges is fine, but we heard there was an arrest yesterday in

We have a new teacher at school, Monsieur Faible, who tells us all the important things the Germans want us to know. Studying with Monsieur Faible is very educational. War, he says, is good for the character. It promotes discipline. It helps us learn new skills. He's definitely right. I, for example, am learning to cook. I try to invent new things to do with rutabagas. The Germans don't like them, so that's what we French people eat. I'm so sick of rutabaga soup and mashed rutabagas. So yesterday I made rutabaga pancakes. They still have that same insipid taste, but at least they
looked
kind of like real pancakes. Papa ate them with enthusiasm. He said I hadn't burned them too badly
.

Papa was hungry because he works very hard. All farmers do. I didn't think the pancakes tasted very good myself. But I'm sure you'll be glad to know Papa has been working so much
that even my rutabaga pancakes taste good to him. Because he is such a diligent worker, someday I might be able to tell you what you want to know
.

Spring is on its way
.

Je t'embrasse
,

Nicole