Penny from Heaven (5 page)

When I get home, Frankie’s waiting on the front porch.

“Couldn’t take hearing the baby cry no more,” he tells me. Baby Michael’s real colicky, and I guess no one’s been getting much sleep at Frankie’s house these days.

He sees the fur stole and asks, “That your fancy new coat?” It irritates Frankie that the uncles are always giving me presents, even though he knows it’s because my father is dead and everybody feels sorry for me.

“It’s not for me. It’s for Mother,” I say. “This one’s for me.” I hold up the red coat.

“‘Little princess,’” he mimics. “You’ll look like Red Riding Hood in that getup.”

“Aw, shut up, Frankie,” I say.

Frankie follows me into the house. It’s dark and quiet.

“Me-me? Pop-pop?” I call out, and then I find the note on the table.

Penny,

Gone shopping. Put the tuna casserole in the oven at 4:30.

Love, Me-me

“You want to stay over for dinner tonight? Me-me made a tuna casserole,” I tell Frankie.

He considers it and then shakes his head. “Nah, I want to survive the summer.”

Frankie’s brought his baseball mitts, so we go out to the backyard. He wants to practice fielding, and he has me throw him ground balls. After a bunch of grounders, I throw the ball high in the air.

“I tell ya, it’s a crying shame, you being a girl,” he says. “That arm of yours is like a cannon.”

Frankie’s always trying to get me to play on his team. Sometimes I do if they don’t have enough boys.

“I mean it,” Frankie says. “You got talent. Must be Uncle Dom’s blood.”

“Long as I don’t end up living in a car,” I say.

“If he was still playing ball, he wouldn’t be living in the car,” he says.

“Why do you think he quit, anyway?” I ask.

“Beats me,” he says. “Maybe he wasn’t good enough. I gotta use the can.”

“I gotta use the can” is his favorite expression. He heard Benny say it, and now he says it every chance he can get. It sounds a lot ruder than “tinkle.”

After a while I get to wondering where Frankie has wandered to. I walk into the house and hear the sound of water leaking. I go into my bedroom and look up and see water coming through the ceiling. By the time I get to the upstairs bathroom, Frankie’s already put every towel on the floor and water’s still coming out of the toilet.

“What did you do?” I demand.

“Nothing!” he says.

“Why’d you use this bathroom?”

“I don’t know. I like it. It’s bigger,” he says.

“You gotta make it stop!” I say.

“Get me a wrench,” he orders, just like Pop-pop.

I run downstairs and fetch the toolbox. By the time I get back upstairs, the leak has slowed to a trickle.

“This stupid toilet,” I say.

“Here, gimme that,” Frankie says, and grabs a wrench and looks behind the toilet. “I think this is the thing that stops the water.”

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I ask.

“Sure, sure,” he says. “No problem.”

He twists something and I hear a crack, and suddenly water starts spurting everywhere. A regular flood!

“Frankie!” I shout.

“It ain’t my fault!” he shouts back.

My mind is whirling. I can’t call my mother, because she’s at work, and Me-me and Pop-pop are shopping.

“I’m calling Uncle Dominic,” I say, and the minute the words leave my mouth, I know it’s the right thing to do.

I call the store and Aunt Fulvia picks up.

“What’s the matter, hon?” she asks.

“I gotta talk to Uncle Dominic,” I say in a rush. “It’s an emergency!”

Uncle Dominic gets on, and I explain to him what’s happened. He pulls up and gets out of his car a few moments later, carrying a toolbox. With his slippers and his bloodstained apron from Falucci’s Market, he’s a sight to see.

“It won’t stop,” I say. “I don’t know what to do.”

Frankie’s standing at the top of the stairs.

“You do this?” Uncle Dominic asks.

“What?” Frankie says. “It just broke. It’s always breaking. Tell him!”

“He’s right,” I say.

When we reach the bathroom, Uncle Dominic takes one look behind the toilet and shakes his head. “Stay put. I gotta go down to the basement.”

Frankie and me hold our breath, waiting, and suddenly the water stops.

“It stopped!” I yell.

Uncle Dominic comes back up a minute later.

“What’d you do?” Frankie asks him.

“I just shut off the water,” he says.

“Jeez,” Frankie says. “That was it? I could’ve done that!”

“Frankie,” Uncle Dominic says, “I don’t think plumbing’s your calling.”

Frankie waves his hand. “As if I’d wanna be a plumber.”

Uncle Dominic gets down on his hands and knees by the toilet and does this and that. Then he goes back downstairs and turns the water back on. When he comes back up, he says, “That should do it.”

“Is it okay to use?” I ask.

Uncle Dominic flushes experimentally. There’s no flood!

“You’re safe,” he says.

Uncle Dominic and Frankie and me mop up all the water, and when we’re finished, it looks good as new. Well, aside from the rugs being soaking wet and all the towels. We drag everything outside to hang on the clothesline.

“Come on, Frankie,” Uncle Dominic says. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Thanks, Uncle Dominic,” I say, and I mean it. “You saved my life.”

“Anything for you, Princess,” he says with a small smile.

As I lie in bed that night, I stare at my new red coat hanging on the back of the door. It’s beautiful, probably the most beautiful coat I’ve ever owned when it comes right down to it.

But when I hear the toilet flush above me, I know which uncle gave me the best present today.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Translator

My mother’s laughter wakes me up.

It’s a light, happy laugh—a sound I’m not used to hearing.

I push back the covers and open the door to my room and go out to the parlor. I can see my mother through the screen door. She’s standing on the porch talking to Mr. Mulligan. She’s holding four bottles of milk.

“Pat,” she says, and laughs again.

I open the screen door and they both stop talking.

“Hi, Bunny,” she says. “You’re up early.”

“It’s hot,” I say. “Hi, Mr. Mulligan.”

“Hello, Penny,” he says with a big smile.

“Mr. Mulligan was just telling me how he might be getting a new route. Isn’t that interesting, Penny?” my mother asks.

“Real interesting,” I say, trying not to roll my eyes.

“I better be off. Lots of deliveries yet,” Mr. Mulligan says, and tips his hat. He walks back to his truck, whistling.

We go inside to the kitchen, and Mother pours a cup of coffee, smiling to herself. She didn’t smile when I gave her the fox stole last night; she just shook her head and put it in the closet, saying, “Now, where would I ever wear this?”

“It’s going to be just you and Me-me and Pop-pop for dinner tonight,” she tells me. “I have to work late.”

“Okay,” I say. I feel bad for my mother sometimes. She works so hard. None of the other kids I know have mothers who have to work. But then, most of them have fathers.

“Do you have to work at your uncle’s store today?” she asks.

“We have deliveries this afternoon.”

Her mouth purses slightly. “Then be sure to give Me-me a hand with the chores this morning.”

I go to my bedroom and come back a moment later.

“Here,” I say, holding out a small envelope. “Uncle Ralphie paid me.”

“Bunny,” she says, “you don’t have to give me your money.”

“I want to,” I say, going over to the Milk Money jar and dropping it in. “Maybe we can save up and buy a television.”

“We’ll see,” she says, which means no.

“Are we going to Aunt Francine and Uncle Donald’s for vacation this summer?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “At the end of August.”

“Do we have to?”

“But that house is right on the lake,” my mother says, by which she means the house belongs to relatives and is free.

Aunt Francine is my mother’s older sister. She and her husband have a cabin on Lake George in upstate New York, and we go there every summer. It should be fun, but it isn’t, because I always have to watch their seven-year-old daughter, my cousin Lou Ellen. Lou Ellen’s a brat.

Last summer she got mad because I wouldn’t play dolls with her. That night when we were taking a bath together, she reached across and turned on the hot water faucet and it burned me on my back. Mother rushed me home to see Dr. Lathrop, our family doctor, because she didn’t trust the doctor at the lake. I had to go to the hospital and everything. Dr. Lathrop had been in the army and knew all about burns and put this medicine on my back called Scarlet Red that stained everything I wore. I had to get a whole new wardrobe.

The worst part, though, was watching my mother. She went kind of crazy when I got burned. The entire drive home I kept telling her it didn’t hurt. Dr. Lathrop said my nerve endings were destroyed, which is why I didn’t feel any pain. I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the summer: no playing, no baseball, no bicycle riding, no going to the beach, no nothing. I just lay on my stomach listening to the radio and Pop-pop burping. But Mother thought I was going to die. Even now I’m surprised she lets me leave the house.

“Well, I’m not taking any baths with Lou Ellen,” I say.

“That’s probably a good idea,” she says, buttering a piece of toast and passing it to me. “Are you getting excited for your birthday? It’s almost here.”

“I guess,” I say with a shrug. When I was little, I used to ask my mother for a father, but I haven’t asked for that in a while.

“Twelve’s a big birthday,” she says.

Twelve has always seemed pretty old to me. The girls who are twelve are in seventh grade and worry about their hair and are always trying to borrow their older sisters’ bras.

“What did you get when you were twelve?” I ask, curious.

“My first real piece of jewelry,” she says.

“Really?”

“It was a single-strand pearl necklace. Me-me and Pop-pop said that twelve was old enough to take care of something precious. I still have it.”

“I know that necklace,” I say.

“I wore it to my very first dance. My dress was peach crepe de chine,” she muses, looking out the window, twisting the ruby ring on her finger. It’s her engagement ring from my father.

The sun is streaming through the green gauzy curtains, and my mother looks so beautiful standing there. She is the most beautiful woman I know when she smiles, which isn’t nearly often enough.

“Did you kiss him?” I ask. “The boy you went to the dance with?”

“Penny!”

“Well, did you?”

“Now, what would you know about kissing, Bunny?”

Not much. I can’t imagine kissing any boy, certainly none of the ones I go to school with. How can you kiss a boy who you watched pick his nose in kindergarten?

My mother shakes herself and looks down at the watch on her wrist.

“Just look at the time! I’m going to be late for work at this rate,” she says, and gives me a quick hug, her perfume swirling around me, lily of the valley.

Long after she’s gone, I imagine my mother—young, beautiful, and wearing a peach crepe de chine dress—twirling under the moon in my father’s arms as Bing Crosby croons “Dancing in the Dark.”

Me-me’s cleaning up the breakfast dishes when Pop-pop says, “Thought I’d take Penny for a stroll into town. Need me to pick up anything?”

Me-me smiles and says, “Let me get my list.”

Across the table Pop-pop winks and I roll my eyes.

I’m just his excuse to go to the tobacco shop to buy cigars. He’s not supposed to smoke cigars anymore because Me-me doesn’t like the way they smell up the house, but he still buys them every chance he gets and smokes them secretly. There’s a pile of cigar stubs behind the azalea bush in the backyard that’s been growing for a while now.

Me-me hands me the list. She knows better than to give it to Pop-pop.

“Ready to tear up the pea patch, old girl?” Pop-pop asks me as he slaps on his hat.

“Ready,” I say.

We start down the block. Pop-pop’s walking pretty good with his cane. I’ve noticed lately that he doesn’t have too much trouble walking when he wants to get cigars. It’s only when Me-me wants him to take out the trash that his old war wound starts acting up.

“Hello, Mrs. Farro,” Pop-pop calls.

Pop-pop was the block captain during World War II, so he knows everyone. During air-raid drills he had to go around the neighborhood making sure that people had their curtains drawn and their lights off; otherwise, the Germans and Japanese would know where to bomb us. Mrs. Dubrowski, who lives next door and is kind of eccentric, would never turn her lights off during the drills, no matter how many times Pop-pop tried to reason with her. Pop-pop said he thought that we were going to be bombed to kingdom come because of “that woman.”

“Your tomatoes are looking well,” he says.

“It’s all this sun,” Mrs. Farro says. “I think it’s our best harvest since the war.”

Pop-pop says that during the war food was rationed, and near the end there wasn’t much meat, so people started making burger patties using mashed baked beans and called them Truman-burgers after President Truman. Me-me says that there were butter shortages, so we used margarine. She said it came in white slabs, and to make it look better, you would knead in the yellow-orange coloring it came with. I still don’t know what Germany and Japan had to do with us not having meat and butter. It’s just one more thing I’ll probably never understand, like why my mother doesn’t like my father’s family.

My father’s family doesn’t talk about the war, but Pop-pop sure does, every chance he gets. Pop-pop’s favorite story is about a friend of his who was a translator. This fella was in college, at Harvard, and the government drafted him and taught him Japanese, and it was his job to interrogate the Japanese prisoners of war in California. The information he got from the prisoners helped the government decide to drop the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, but after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese gave up.

Pop-pop showed me a photograph of the translator at the surrender of the Japanese at Tokyo Bay. He looks sort of sad. You’d think he’d be happy the war was over, but I guess he wasn’t.

Sometimes I feel like a translator. Mother is always asking me this or that about my father’s family, and I have to try to figure out what she means, like it’s a different language. Certain things just get her upset. Like when she finds out that the uncles have taken me to Shady Grove Cemetery. I don’t know why this bothers her so much; you’d think she’d be happy I visit my father, but it has the opposite effect. Or if I go to the Catholic church with Nonny, she gets angry even though she doesn’t go to church herself. Or if they give me a fancy present or something like that. There are times when I just wish I knew the language she was speaking.

“Can we get lunch at the Sweete Shoppe?” I ask Pop-pop. The Sweete Shoppe is a luncheonette that has a full fountain. They make awfully good egg creams and ice cream sundaes.

“Got to eat, I suppose,” he says, and then mutters, “Reckon any place is safer than your grandmother’s kitchen.”

The Sweete Shoppe is nearly empty; it’s too early for the lunch rush. There’s a lady with her daughter sitting in a booth and a man sitting at the counter sipping coffee.

We take seats at the counter, and the waitress comes over to take our order. “What can I get for you?”

“Hamburger deluxe,” Pop-pop says, and turns to me. “What’ll you have?”

“A sundae with butter pecan ice cream, please.”

Pop-pop looks at me. “That’s your whole lunch?”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“Don’t tell your grandmother,” he says.

The food arrives and I take a bite of my sundae. It’s delicious. The hot fudge tastes perfect with the butter pecan ice cream.

I watch Pop-pop as he carefully takes the lettuce and tomato and pickle and onion off the hamburger and sets them on a little plate on the side. He does the same with the fries.

“Why don’t you just order a plain hamburger?” I ask.

“I like the deluxe,” he says. “I like knowing I can eat it if I want to.”

“But you never do,” I say.

“What is this? An interrogation?”

Pop-pop polishes off his hamburger in about four bites and then leans back and burps loudly. I pretend that I don’t know him.

We pay and go back out and start down the street again. A bunch of men in army uniforms walk by us and enter the VFW hall. Usually on the Fourth of July, all the veterans get dressed up and have a parade. Pop-pop says that after the war ended, there was a big ticker-tape parade in New York City. Now
that’s
a parade I’d like to have seen.

Pop-pop stops outside the tobacco shop. “I’ll just be a minute.”

I sit down on the bench, where another kid is already sitting. His name is Robert and he’s skinny and only in second grade and he’s always sitting out here.

“Want one?” he asks, showing me a handful of gum balls from his pocket.

“Thanks,” I say, and take a red one. It’s warm and melting, but I pop it in my mouth anyway.

“Where’s Frankie?” he asks.

“At home, I think,” I say. I’m not surprised he knows Frankie. Everyone does. It’s just the kind of boy Frankie is.

“What’s your father smoke?” I ask.

“Camels,” he says. “What about yours?”

“Cigars,” I say. “It’s my grandfather.”

He nods wisely. “I thought he looked kind of old.”

A boy named Arthur comes up with his father.

“Wait here with the other kids, you hear?” his father tells him.

Arthur sits down next to Robert. We’re like the three monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.

Next to the tobacco shop is a café. There are always old Italian men there, drinking dark coffee that looks like tar served in little cups and reading the Italian-language newspapers. They’re newspapers that are printed in Italian so people can find out what’s going on if they don’t know English. Uncle Nunzio told me that my father used to write for one of these Italian-language newspapers every once in a while, although his main job was writing for a regular English-language newspaper.

“Buongiorno, signorina,”
they call to me.

“Buongiorno,”
I call back.

“How’s the professor’s little girl today?” one of them asks.

“Good, thanks,” I say.

They all loved my father. He used to help them when he was alive, translating and writing letters, because most of them didn’t know English. A lot of them fought for Italy in World War I.

I’ve always thought it was confusing that Italy was on our side in World War I and on the other side in World War II. It must have been hard for my uncles who fought, because they might have been fighting against their own family. Maybe that’s why they don’t like to talk about the war.

Stanley Teitelzweig and his older brother, Jack, walk by.

“Hi, Penny,” Jack says, stopping in front of me.

“Hi,” I say back, feeling a butterfly tickle in my stomach.

“Having a good summer?” Jack asks.

“Sure,” I say shyly. I’ve never really been interested in boys before, unlike some of the other girls at school, but Jack’s different. Something about his curly dark hair and his green eyes. He sure is cute!

Stanley’s staring at my head.

“Say, Penny, what happened to your hair?”

“Uh—uh—uh,” I stammer, “I got it cut.”

“Boy, you should go to a different place next time,” Stanley says.

I close my eyes. When I open them, Pop-pop is standing next to Jack.

“These boys bothering you, Penny?” Pop-pop asks with a scowl.

“Pop-pop,” I say quickly.

“They look like trouble to me,” he says, and burps loudly.