The LeBaron Secret (21 page)

And by the end of her first year in school, she was told that she could skip the fourth grade and go directly into the fifth.

In the fifth grade, of course, she was a year younger than the other boys and girls in her class. They refused to be her friends not only because she was younger, but because she was too smart.

But it was in the fifth grade that Sari Latham became aware of … the Van Dusen Sisters.

The Van Dusen Sisters were something.

The Sisters, Coralee and Roxanne Van Dusen, were twelve and thirteen, respectively, and yet they were both only in the fifth grade. Both should have been further along in school, of course, but instead of having been allowed to skip a grade, the Van Dusen Sisters had been Held Back. This troubled the Sisters not at all. They despised school, and hated their teachers, and, in turn, their teachers despised and hated them. Coralee and Roxanne Van Dusen were above all that. They strode about the hallways of the school like grand duchesses on a yacht, and paused, posing in their high-heeled shoes, hips and pelvic bones thrust forward in the manner of the fashion models of the day, tittering and whispering their little confidences and secrets to each other. The Van Dusen Sisters had no friends whatsoever, but didn't care. They were aristocrats, sufficient unto themselves, and looked down their noses with disdain at all who were not members of their private, chosen circle.

The Van Dusen Sisters were not rich. No child at Sari's school was rich. The rich children of Terre Haute lived in another part of the city altogether, and went to something called Country Day or else far away in a region of the universe that was known vaguely as “The East.” The rich children were the sons and daughters of food and meat packers, brewery owners, the owners of a sanitary can plant, or the paint and varnish works, the box factories, and the paper and rolling mills. One never even saw these people. And yet the Van Dusen Sisters, who had never met any of these people either, affected all their supposed haughty and high-toned and roguish and impudent airs.

With their stylishly shingled hair-dos, the Sisters fairly pranced about. They wore not only wobbly French-heeled shoes, but also the daringly short-short skirts that were presaging the Flapper Era. The Shocking Sisters were five years ahead of their time! The Sisters rouged their knees, painted their lips, and dusted their faces chalky white with Freeman's Face Powder, which cost twenty-five cents for a single tiny box. Furthermore, the Sisters both had
breasts
and, even more than that, wore tight brassieres to bind themselves down and achieve the fashionable flat-chested look. The Van Dusen Sisters were the talk of Terre Haute, even of the whole of Vigo County. It was said that at night Coralee and Roxanne Van Dusen went out and spooned with young men who drove Overland 4 automobiles, and it was even whispered that the Sisters didn't mind “going all the way,” whatever that meant. Their circle of acquaintanceship was said to extend far beyond the city limits and county lines—to as far away as soldiers stationed at Camp Atterbury!

At school, the Van Dusen Sisters never said hello to anybody. They simply made their impertinent observations or asked their rude questions, and strutted off. But what impressed Sari about the Van Dusen Sisters the most was the fact that, somehow, they had managed to achieve grown-up status instantly, and had stepped from little girlhood into full adulthood without having to be bothered with any of the growing pains or insecurities or self-doubts of adolescence. They were
finished people
. They were not only
there
, in the wondrous world and landscape of grown-upness, but they seemed to
belong
there, to be
at home
there, and never to have lived anywhere else. They seemed
always
to have been at ease lighting up their Murad cigarettes and (it was said) tilting back their silver flasks of hard liquor. It was not that Sari envied or admired the Van Dusen Sisters exactly. It was more that she wondered if it would ever be possible for someone as shy and uncertain as herself to step, with such supreme self-confidence, into the world of grownup men and women who talked in grown-up ways and did grownup things.

When Sari entered the sixth grade, the Van Dusen Sisters were still in the fifth. Coralee and Roxanne had been held back again, a fact they seemed to regard as some delicious private joke. Indeed, the Sisters attended classes only sporadically—only when, it was said, the truant officer came after them. And when they did appear at school they spent most of their time with their bobbed heads together, whispering, and from their whispers you would occasionally hear words and phrases such as “hangover,” and “getting my period,” and “moonshine hooch.” Sari was quite sure that the Sisters were unaware of her existence, was sure they had never even noticed her, since they had never once so much as glanced in her direction. And so she was startled one day to discover that her presence had at least made a passing impression on their gaudy, glamorous lives.

It had become a fact of Sari's life that the only real friends she had at school were the younger children she had gotten to know during those first months of kindergarten. Too young—and, again, too smart—to be tolerated by her present classmates, she was still treated fondly by the younger children. She joined them at lunch-time, and at recess times, played their games with them, and, because she was three years older, frequently was picked as captain of their teams. One day, during lunch hour, she saw the Van Dusen Sisters striding imperiously toward her in their thin high heels. She had expected to pass by them unnoticed, as usual, but today, for some reason, the Sisters suddenly stopped and planted themselves in front of her.

“We know all about you, Polack-Pants,” Coralee Van Dusen said in her customary abrupt, confrontational way.

“We know,” echoed Sister Roxanne, snapping her chewing gum loudly.

“We know why you only play with all the little kids.”

“We know, Polack-Pants. It's not because they like you. Don't get that big idea.”

“It's because the little kids are the only ones you can boss around!”

Then they were off, hips swinging, short skirts swishing. And Sari had stood there, all alone, in the corridor of her school, for several minutes, close to tears. With their worldly ways and knowledge, were they right?

Perhaps what the Van Dusen Sisters said was true.

Perhaps Sari belonged to no world at all.

Perhaps she never would.

The Van Dusen Sisters never spoke to her again. By the seventh grade, they had simply disappeared.

At home, it was somewhat different. But there it was Gabe Pollack's world, and Mrs. Bonkowski's world, and she did not really belong to either of them. At home, Gabe Pollack liked to talk, and clearly he enjoyed having Sari as his principal listener. At night, sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, in the room they shared on Wabash Avenue, she listened to him.

“Do you know what the most powerful weapon in the world is, Sari?” he asked her once. “More powerful than any weapon of war? More powerful than the bank account of the richest millionaire?”

“What's that, Gabe?”

He smiled at her, reached out to the low dresser that stood between their beds, and picked up a yellow pencil. “This,” he said to her. “Mightier than the sword. With this little pencil, you can write words. Words can be put into sentences. Sentences can express ideas. Ideas can change men's minds. And men's minds can change the world.” On looking back, Gabe's youthful notions do not seem terribly startling or original, but to Assaria, six years younger than he, they seemed both profound and fascinating.

It was at this dresser that he sat, many evenings after work, and wrote his stories. The stories had a double purpose. They were to help Gabe improve his command of English, and he also someday hoped to sell them to his editor, so that he could call himself “a real newspaperman,” and not just be a delivery boy. Often, when he had finished writing a story, he would read it aloud to her. The stories were always based on some aspect of the city's life that he had observed during his working rounds, and a typical one would begin: “Today, on a bustling street in downtown Terre Haute, a poor Negro shoeshiner was offering his services to the city's businessmen as they passed by, crying, ‘Shine, suh? Shine, suh?' All at once, as if from nowhere, and for no reason that was clearly perceptible to onlookers, a well-dressed young dandy with a sneer on his face and contempt in his eye, lunged toward the lad and, with the toe of his well-polished boot, kicked …” The stories often had a moral—the triumph or the vindication of the underdog or the little fellow—and Assaria found them beautiful and heartbreaking. And yet Gabe had not succeeded in selling any of them. But he remained cheerfully undiscouraged, and continued to place his stories in the editor's pigeonhole in the mornings when he arrived for work. “This is America,” he would say to her. “This is the land of the little fellow, where if a fellow works hard enough and long enough, he gets his due.” Once he said to her, “Someday, I'm going to run my own newspaper—a newspaper for the little fellow. I'll do it. Wait and see.”

And sometimes he would read to her from other people's works. His favorite author was Herman Melville, and his next favorite was Joseph Conrad, because Conrad had been born with another language—Polish, in fact—and had taught himself to write in English. She could remember him reading to her from
Lord Jim:

She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes—

And Assaria said, “I'd like to grow up to be just like that!” Then he finished the sentence:

—and not a thought of her own in her head.

“But not like that,” she had said, and they both laughed.

And he read
Moby-Dick
to her, and she remembered when he came to that haunting final passage:

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising
Rachel
, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

He looked at her quickly, his large eyes dark and bright, and she felt tears in her own eyes, too. She had known that she was called an orphan, but had had only a loose understanding of what, in the human sense, the word meant. Now she knew.

Often the two of them would sit up very late into the night in that room on Wabash Avenue, long after the hour Mrs. Bonkowski had told Assaria should have been her proper bedtime, while Gabe talked, dreamed aloud to her, read his own and other writers' stories to her, and told her all his plans.

When Assaria reached age eleven, Mrs. Bonkowski decreed that their sleeping quarters in the room should be divided by a heavy burlap curtain. “It's only proper,” she said. “It's either this, or two separate rooms, and Gabe says he can't afford a second room for you. I run a proper house here, and what
I
can't afford is talk.”

But, sitting under the covers in their respective beds, Sari and Gabe would usually keep the curtain parted as they talked into the night. Finally, he would cry, “Taps! Soldiers rest! Lights out!” Then he would tuck her quickly into bed, close the curtain, turn out the light, and undress himself in the dark.

Who could have dreamed a father more wonderful than that?

Then came that glorious day in the early spring of 1923 when Gabe burst into the room, just before suppertime, full of news. “Guess what!” he cried. “I've got a new job! Working for a big paper in a big city, Sari—San Francisco! One of the biggest cities in the West! I sent them my stories, Sari, and they've hired me. As a reporter, a real newspaperman—for thirty dollars a week! I'm going to San Francisco!”

Sitting on her bed, and seeing his good, broad face so happy, she knew that she shouldn't be thinking only of herself, that she should be happy for him too, but the fact was that she was, all at once, worried. “Am I going to San Francisco, too?” she asked him.

“Of course you are!” he said. “You don't think I'd go off to San Francisco and leave you here, do you? We're going together, and we're going in
style
. We're going to San Francisco, and we're going in a Pullman car.” And he had stepped quickly to where she sat, lifted her by the armpits to her feet, and swung her around and around.

As he swung her, her feet left the floor, and suddenly her whole body seemed to swell and fill with a strange rush of totally new excitement. What was this? She felt choked and dizzy, and deliriously happy all at the same time. Bright wings were fluttering inside her, crimson wings over which she had no control, and clinging to him, hugging her body tightly against his, she felt her eyes close and her head go hot, as though with fever, and suddenly without meaning to she was kissing him, kissing his cheeks, his ears, his eyelids, his throat, and then his mouth, her body pressed against him, arched and expectant—flying to him—and kissing him again, her mouth opening to him, her tongue searching for his.

Just as suddenly as he had picked her up, he set her down again, dropped his arms, and took two quick backward steps away from her. He stared at her, but his face was no longer happy. His eyes were wide, and his face was flushed, and he looked dismayed. “I've got to go out,” he said. Then he turned on his heel, pulled open the door to the room, and was gone.

That night at supper, Mrs. Bonkowski said, “Where's Gabe? Why isn't Gabe here?” Then she threw Sari a quick, suspicious look. “Where's your friend Gabe? He's late for supper.”

“He had an errand to do, I think.”

“Well, supper can't wait for latecomers, can it?” Mrs. Bonkowski said. “If he's late, he's late, and that's all there is to it. I hope he isn't counting on me leaving something for him in the ice box. He knows the rules—no p.g.'s in the kitchen.”

“He's got a new job,” Sari said. “In San Francisco. We're moving to San Francisco.”