Alice At The Home Front (7 page)

Alice made a note to remember that. “I’m being creative,” she’ll say the next time she spatters the Chinese ink.

On another wall hung the snowshoes. Gramp had told her they had been made by the Indians (he didn’t say if they were the Pequots or the Narragansetts) and had shown her how the Indians had designed them in the shape of a large foot, then how they’d woven the strips of raw hide in and out, like a basket and attached them to the frame.

“I remember you telling me about the snowshoes and the Indians, Gramp,” she said. But Gramp had dozed off.

Alice pictured herself climbing Mt. Pembroke in a snowstorm, but before she could figure out what would happen next, the scream of the siren started up, announcing the all clear.

Alice tried to pull Gramp up to his feet, but she lost her balance, and they both toppled back on the mattress laughing.

* * *

The next day, Gramp brought something home in a box, which he took into the kitchen. Gramp never went into the kitchen, so Alice followed him.

“What’s in that?” she asked.

“Listen,” said Gramp.

A rather loud meow came from the box.

“That’s not a kitten,” said Alice.

Gramp opened it and out stepped a junior cat (not a grown-up cat yet) with big green eyes and a sleek, silky black coat. He immediately wound in and out of Alice’s legs in a friendly hello.

“I love him, Gramp!” She reached down and hugged and petted him. “I’ll call him Bagheera. Like the black panther in the Jungle Book.” Her hand stopped in midpetting. “Have you told Mother about this?” Alice looked up at Gramp and frowned.

“Nope. It’s my house too, you know. I can have a cat if I want to,” said Gramp, grinning to himself. “Except he’ll be yours. He might like keeping ye company in the basement,” Gramp suggested.

Alice thought that idea was hunky-dory, and from that day on, she never went down to the basement for an air-raid drill without Bagheera curled up in her arms.

Chapter Eight
 

A Taste of Fear
 

“No, I’m not allowed out of the house except for school. I’m stuck here, Gladys. For the whole week!” Alice’s friend Gladys could be so dense sometimes, but she was a good chum. Alice shifted the heavy black telephone receiver to her other hand. “No, I can’t meet you anywhere. No, it’s not because I don’t
want
to come out. It’s a long story. All of it? Okay, here goes.” The spindly chair creaked as she leaned back and propped her feet up on the telephone table.

“See, I was sitting in my room spotting, and I had opened the window, ’cause I was trying to identify a plane that was circling somewhere over my roof where I couldn’t see it. All of a sudden, Bagheera hopped out on the window ledge and then on to the roof. I called and yelled, and he refused to come back in. Bagheera’s never been out, not once! Then a crow started scolding at him, ‘Caw! Caw!’ Like that from the branches of the maple tree. Of course, he wouldn’t come in
then
. He was scared stiff!

“What? … No. He’s never been out. Whadya think? He’s some kind of an alley cat? …
And
the roof was icy. Criminy, I didn’t know how to get him back! I wasn’t supposed to have the window open in the first place. So I made a beeline for the kitchen. But who was in the living room? Mrs. Brownell, of all things, so Mother cried out, ‘Say hello to Mrs. Brownell,” as I ran past. And I said, ‘I can’t now. It’s an emergency.’ I knew I was going to get it for being rude.

“Anyway, I headed for the refrigerator and began pushing things around until I found the roast chicken from Sunday’s dinner. It was supposed to last all week. But I grabbed a knife from the drawer, cut off a good chunk, rushed back up, and dangled it out the window. When Bagheera saw it, he crept up
so
careful, ’cause he knew the roof was icy, and he could break his neck.”

Alice listened and rolled her eyes. “Whadya mean, how did he know if he’d never been out? Cats
know
things, dummy; that’s how come they live nine lives. They’re not stupid like humans that live only one. Anyway, so he crept up real slowly and just as he put out his tongue for it—whish! The crow zoomed down like a B-25. ‘CAW!’ And snatched it out of my hand! Can you believe it? Right out of my fingers! And Bagheera
really
panicked then and slid down the roof to the edge. Yeoow! You could see his claws hanging on to the gutter, with his big green eyes scared to death, staring at me. Meowing at me like it was all my fault. Then I
had
to call Mother, and she called the fire department, and that’s how come I can’t go out.

“No, Bagheera’s fine, thank God.
I’m
not fine. Of course they got the cat; that’s their job—not just fires, they do all kinds of things. Why do you think people pay taxes? So the firemen will save their cats! Okay, Gladys, I’ll see ya Monday. Thanks for calling.”

The rest of the afternoon, Alice pasted the one-dollar war bond stamps she’d received for Christmas into her savings book but was short three dollars from having enough for a bond. Prudy Wainright had a dozen bonds already, but she was “a spoilt child,” Mother said.

That night at dinner, while Mother and Gramp finished off the bit of roast chicken that was left, Alice sat with a plate of vegetables—yucky broccoli, mushy turnips, and upchucky carrots—and moved them around from one side of the plate to the other, like toy soldiers that had lost a battle.

“I’m sure the crow is enjoying your share of the meat tonight,” said Mother—cruelly, Alice thought.

* * *

Alice hadn’t told Gladys the whole story of what had really happened the week before. Only about the cat, because it was funnier and would make Gladys laugh. What had really happened, a week before that, Alice would never forget. That time,
she
was the one out the window.

She was focusing the binoculars despite the bad weather when a sudden gust of wind snatched her logbook from her dormer window and blew it clear away, down along the roof to the gutter. Alice saw it lying there, soaking up the freezing rain, the ink fading fast. She was sure all of her notes little by little were being washed away in the downpour. Alice watched crestfallen while the wind whipped the pages of the book back and forth. Another burst of wind would tear them out in no time. All of her work would be lost—all of those months of note-taking wiped out! She had to retrieve it, so she grabbed the side of the window and climbed out onto the roof. Immediately she was almost blown over by the fierce gusts, and she realized the slippery leather soles of her shoes would never keep her from falling. Whipped by the wind, she lost her grip on the windowsill and began rapidly slipping down the roof toward the gutter.

Terrified, half crouching, she reached and grabbed at the edge of some shingles, barely able to get hold of them. While the wind blasted at her face, she lay on her belly and hung on to the shingles. But a minute later they broke away in her hand, and she slid down farther. She cried, “Mother! Gramp!” with a whiney little voice no one could hear, because it was whipped away in the wind. Hoping her clothes would provide some resistance against a fall, she twisted herself up, both her hands reaching blindly around, her fingers scraped and bleeding, searching, grabbing what they could find. Then a stronger gust of wind tore at her clothes, and she slid down inches closer to the edge. Terrified, she realized that when she reached the gutter, it would break away. It would be too weak to hold her, even if she could get a foothold. Now, sobbing and crying, she was sliding down again until her feet touched down on the flimsy metal. She heard a crack and felt the unsteady sway of it under her weight. She screamed. She heard the sound of an engine through the wind and rain, but there was nothing she could do now but to stay absolutely still so the gutter under her toes, which was swaying with each gust, would not give away—would not collapse at any minute taking her plunging to the ground below.

From the corner of her eye, she could see the book being lifted into the air by the wind and flying off like a wounded bird over the roof and out of sight. Alice didn’t want to hold on any longer then because what was the point? She might as well let go. She was about to do just that when a head with a steel helmet on it come into sight, and a fireman quickly lifted her up and carried her down the ladder and into the eager arms of both Mother and Gramp. It was Gramp who handed her the logbook, soaking but still readable, and said to Alice with a smile, “Might ye be lookin’ for this, little girlie?”

Chapter Nine
 

The Bracelet
 

The next morning, Alice was up early, awakened by a squadron of planes flying low over the house. She jumped out of bed, but they had already flown off except for the tail end of what she thought was a B 25 bomber disappearing into the cumulous clouds. She noted the date, the time and probable number of planes into her logbook. Then she got her books and notebooks out ready for school.

Alice bounced down the stairs to the dining room, singing, “Shuttin’ my mouth, yes I am. Shuttin’ my mouth for Uncle Sam.”

Not that Alice herself knew any military secrets she could tell, but she liked this catchy little tune they played before the newsreels at the movies.

She had already planned out her day. There was school, of course, and plane spotting, but she was also eager to see Mrs. Brownell, in case she had any news of Jimmy.

Beside her plate at the breakfast table, she found a little package covered with stamps of all different colors and writing that looked like shorthand. She knew at a glance that it was from Uncle David, and a sinking feeling in her tummy reminded her that she had not written to him since seeing Jimmy.

Alice tore open the package and found a bracelet of scarabs promenading in a circle on an elastic band. Trying it on, she was glad to find it fit snugly and didn’t hang off her wrist, like most bracelets did. Bagheera, her cat, looked on with interest from behind the sugar bowl.

Alice never had any trouble writing thank-you notes. She started one immediately, throwing her school books on the couch and extracting from her binder one of the special aerogram forms that were only one page long. To close it, you folded the edges up and licked. If you wanted to write more, which Alice often did, you had to start a new one.

Settling herself at the breakfast table again, she brushed away the crumbs from her place setting but didn’t manage to avoid staining the letter with a spot of grease from the butter. She thought about sticking one or two of Bagheera’s whiskers on to it for a souvenir but decided not to. Bagheera was a panther, after all, and too dignified to have his whiskers pulled.

Dear Uncle David,

Thank you SO MUCH for the beautiful scarab bracelet that fits me perfectly thanks to the rubber band. Did it come from an Egyptian tomb? And if it did, then are you sure it doesn’t carry a teeny bit of King Tut’s curse on it that killed those arkiologists? Ha-ha just kidding.

I’m S-O-O sorry I didn’t write last week, but let me tell you why.

And here, Alice told her uncle all about her meeting with Jimmy and his joining CAP and how Alice wanted to join too but realized she couldn’t find a way, being too young and without a plane of her own, and how unfair everything was.

She was surprised to get an answer from Uncle David soon after she’d sent hers, which read:

Alice, you already are working two jobs for the war effort. Just think. That’s more than all the girls in your school. You are a lucky girl. You should be very proud of your efforts and not keep wanting something more; otherwise, you’ll neglect your schoolwork, and you know what that means? It means you won’t be eligible to do interesting work in the future, maybe in aviation or engineering. They’ll say, “Sorry, Alice, your grades aren’t good enough.” And you’ll have to go sell hankies at Woolworth’s.

Hankies at Woolworth’s! How insulting! Alice dropped the letter on the floor. She’d never even thought of such a thing. She wondered what
eligible
meant but guessed it meant something hard to do, probably involving studying. Studying was okay, but what if you didn’t like the subject? What if you liked learning to write Chinese better? She thought of her special calligraphy brushes upstairs. They didn’t even teach Chinese at her school.

She thought about going to Chinatown in Boston and finding a teacher, preferably a man without a pigtail who wasn’t too busy selling cabbages or firecrackers, and getting him to move to Providence, so he could teach Chinese at Miss Whittaker’s or at least give Alice private lessons.

Maybe Uncle David could teach Arabic when he got back, with the fancy shorthand lettering and the throaty sounds.
That
would be fun.

Later, with these thoughts still in mind, Alice stood outside the grocery store hoping for the third time to catch Mrs. Brownell when she came out. Alice was determined to meet her “by accident” and not have to climb the stairs to Mrs. Brownell’s house and knock on her door.
She’s most likely to be at the grocery store, not the butcher, thought Alice, since meat at the butcher takes up all the rationing stamps. People only go there once a week. The grocer’s is more likely.

But Alice had waited around after school for two days in a row now and hadn’t seen Mrs. Brownell come out of the grocers or out of any other store. Had she stopped eating since Jimmy left? Had she taken to her bed, with Mr. Brownell having to spoon feed her Gerber’s baby food all this time? Was she on the brink of death?

Alice was trying to reason this out when, to her complete surprise, Mrs. Brownell came walking out of the post office down by the corner, clearly in good health and firm on her feet.

“Oh hello, Mrs. Brownell.” Alice caught up to her. “I’m glad to see you’re well and strong again and not having to eat baby food.”