Hilda and Pearl Read online

The lobby floor was tiled in a pattern. Sometimes, to leave the building, Frances walked entirely on dark tiles, first diagonally, then straight, then diagonally again, ending near the mat in front of the door, but today she just crossed the floor and went out.

  Lydia lived three blocks away. “She’s in her room,” Lydia’s mother said. She didn’t say hello. Frances’s mother, who didn’t like Lydia’s family, would have greeted a visiting child.

  Lydia was sitting on her bedroom floor in front of her dresser. The bottom drawer was open and everything she owned seemed to have been dumped out. She looked up. She was sitting cross-legged and she looked to Frances like a pixie. She was skinny, and all she needed was a pointed cap.

  “What are you doing?” Frances asked.

  “Greetings, noble friend,” said Lydia. Her voice always squeaked a little. She made Frances feel large. Frances took off her coat and sat down on the floor. “I’m folding these things. Everything is a mess.”

  “Can I help?”

  “If you want.” Lydia was making piles. Some of her clothes no longer fit, but she wanted to keep them. Her mother wanted her to clean out her drawers, which were so full it was impossible to find anything. “She threatened me,” Lydia said solemnly. But everything Lydia said was a bit of a joke.

  When Frances talked to Lydia she found that she too talked in small jokes. She wasn’t sure how it happened. “There’s been a disappearance,” she said now, thinking that she would regret her tone if Simon turned out to be dead.

  “A mystery. Speak.”

  “My beloved cousin,” said Frances.

  “Simon the Great. Not again,” Lydia said. She had heard about Simon’s night out during the summer. She had speculated on where he had gone and what he might have done. Lydia thought Simon had probably been conducting a black mass, sacrificing animals he caught in the woods. “Was there a full moon?” she’d asked.

  Now Frances told her about Simon’s disappearance from Uncle Mike’s banquet, and Lydia was so interested she forgot to fold underwear. She lay down on her back on top of her clothes. Frances lay down next to her. She was lying on sweaters and underpants, with socks mixed in, looking at the ceiling.

  “Do you think he was kidnapped?” Lydia asked. She mentioned the Lindbergh baby and other kidnappings. One of them, she said, involved a Jewish child. “And you’re Jewish,” she concluded.

  “Why would someone kidnap Simon?” Frances asked. They were not rich. Her uncle would have trouble paying a ransom.

  “Blackmail,” said Lydia. “Maybe it’s to get your father to confess.”

  “Confess what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you mean, though? What would he confess?” She wondered if Lydia could know about the notice from the Board of Education, but there was no way she could know.

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “You must have meant something.” Frances was upset now, but Lydia’s voice changed when she spoke again.

  “Maybe your father is a spy,” she said, drawing out her words, whispering. Of course it was all a joke. “Maybe in his youth, he was—”

  “A pirate,” said Frances. She didn’t want to think about spies—like the Rosenbergs—even if it was a joke.

  “A pirate. Precisely. No, a gangster.”

  Frances folded her hands behind her head. “I don’t think he’ll talk,” she said, tentatively enjoying herself again.

  “He’ll have to,” said Lydia. “They’ll begin sending Simon’s fingers and toes, one by one. Little packages,” she said. “Little bloody packages.”

  Frances didn’t love Simon much but she didn’t think she should let Lydia go this far. The little packages reminded her of the wrapped-up shoes. “Do you want to see something I found?” she said.

  “What?” Lydia sat up.

  “You won’t tell?”

  “Hope to die.”

  Frances explained that she had been looking for clues to Simon’s disappearance in her mother’s drawers. Lydia nodded. Frances took the little parcel from her coat pocket. It looked sweet, wrapped in her green and orange kerchief, and for a moment she was sorry she was going to show the shoes to Lydia. Then she carefully unwrapped the kerchief.

  “Baby shoes,” said Lydia. She seemed disappointed.

  “The mystery is,” said Frances, “why would my mother keep my old baby shoes in a paper bag under her sweaters? And—get this—it said ‘Racket’ on it.”

  “Racket?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Precisely.”

  “They weren’t yours, dummy,” said Lydia. “They belonged to a murdered child. Racketeers got him.”

  “But who?” said Frances, considering whether this idea had potential. She wasn’t sure what racketeers were.

  “We must find out. It will be our task,” Lydia said. “These will be the Official Shoes. Whoever has them must find out the murderer. Probably the same person has murdered Simon.”

  “Do you think so?” said Frances in an ordinary voice.

  Lydia spoke slightly more artificially than usual, as if to make a point. “There is, my dear, no telling.”

  “You are right,” said Frances, joking again, so Lydia would know she understood.

  “Where shall we keep the shoes?” said Lydia.

  “I’m keeping them under my pillow.”

  “Foolish. They’ll be found. Hurry, there’s no time to lose.” She stuffed the clothes back into the drawers while Frances watched. Then they left the bedroom and Lydia went for her coat. “Where are you going?” came her mother’s voice.

  “Out to play.”

  “What do you mean? It’s raining. And you didn’t straighten up your dresser.”

  “I’m almost done,” said Lydia, winking at Frances.

  “You better be.”

  “I will be beaten,” said Lydia to Frances in a low voice, “but we must do our duty at any cost.”

  “She won’t really beat you, will she?” said Frances, as they left.

  “She’ll slap my face,” said Lydia, demonstrating on herself. “But we must find a proper place for these sacred shoes.”

  They left the house and began to walk toward Prospect Park. Now it was really raining. They kept their hands in their pockets and their heads down. Frances clutched the shoes inside her coat pocket. “Conceal the evidence at all costs,” said Lydia when a man passed them.

  In the park they took quite some time deciding what to do. No one was there; the rain was steady. A woman with a dog walked along the path near the lake. They followed her at a distance and observed her, but she was nondescript. Finally Lydia drew Frances into a small grove. Some of the tree roots came above the ground. At the back of one tree, two roots ran along the ground a few inches apart. They emerged from a bulbous knob and disappeared into the earth after a couple of yards. “This is the place,” Lydia said. They found a stick and took turns digging a hole right at the fork below the knob. Frances insisted that they make it deeper than was necessary. She hated to give up the kerchief, which she often wore. Finally Lydia suggested a sock, and Frances sat down on the wet ground, took off one shoe and her sock, and put the baby shoes into the sock. They stuffed the little package into the hole as far as it would go and covered it with dirt. Frances’s foot was cold without a sock. Her shoe was wet. Lydia sprinkled dead leaves over the roots and they walked away. No one was nearby.

  “We will meet at the root of the Great Tree in a week, precisely at midnight,” said Lydia. “Then we can dig up the shoes and decide whether to take action.” Frances knew she didn’t really mean midnight. She didn’t know what action they could take, but something would occur to them. They walked to Frances’s house together. Frances wanted to go in and put on dry socks. Lydia went home alone. “I don’t think my mother would like it if I had company,” Frances said.

  Her father had come home. He was drinking a cup of coffee and talking to her mother. “D
id you find Simon?” Frances said, opening the apartment door.

  “How can we find him?” he said. “A boy in New York! There are a million boys in New York.” He wiped his lips and looked at her mother. “I can’t tell you how many times I saw him—thought I saw him.”

  “You walked around near the hotel?” Hilda said.

  “We did that at first. Then we came here and walked around here. We searched the schoolyard and talked to every kid we saw. We rang doorbells, but Mike doesn’t really know who his friends are.”

  “Pearl won’t come here.”

  “I know.”

  “And she won’t let me call her. She says when the phone rings, she thinks it’s Simon, and she can’t bear it when it’s only me.”

  “Why didn’t you go there?” Nathan said.

  Her mother looked at Frances. “I could stay here by myself,” Frances said. “In case the phone rings. I won’t run away.” She ought to have thought of that … she shouldn’t have been sneaking around in the park while her mother was worrying alone.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” said her mother. “If he doesn’t come home. Frances, are you wearing only one sock?”

  “The other got wet,” she said, “so I took it off.” She hurried into her bedroom.

  The next day, Uncle Mike came to the house to call for Nathan. “Where are you going to look today?” said Frances.

  Mike just looked at her. “Try the Forty-second Street library,” she said, but not in a loud voice, and she was pretty sure he didn’t hear her. Once she had gone to the library on a class trip, and she’d wanted to run away from the class and stay there.

  Her father was shaving. Uncle Mike would not sit down. He barely spoke to her mother. When her father came out of the bathroom, she saw Uncle Mike look at him and she knew how Mike must have looked when he was a little boy.

  It had stopped raining. Her father put on his coat. “Pearl says, if you’d come—” said Mike to her mother.

  “Of course,” said her mother, and her cheeks reddened. “Frances can stay here. Frances can answer the phone if it rings.”

  She knew her father was uneasy about leaving her alone. Maybe he thought she would be kidnapped, too. The men left. Her mother was still in her bathrobe, and now she went to get dressed. Frances followed her into the bedroom. Her mother put on her panties under her nightgown and worked her girdle on, but then she took her nightgown off and Frances could see her breasts. “Did you want two children?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Two children. Did you want two children?”

  Her mother had turned to put on her brassiere, and now she reached behind herself to fasten it. “I love children,” she said, not harshly. Frances was surprised that her mother said that, although she thought it was true that her mother liked children. Her mother was nicer to Lydia than Lydia’s mother was to her.

  “You stopped with me,” said Frances.

  “That’s right,” said her mother. Frances couldn’t think what to say next.

  Her mother put on her slip, and then sat down on the bed. She put on her stockings. She rolled each of them carefully, then unrolled it up her leg, smoothing it, holding her fingernails out of the way just as if Simon were not lost. She pulled up her slip and stood for a moment to fasten the garters in the tops of the stockings. She looked over each shoulder to check the seams. Then she sat down again instead of walking over to put on her blouse. She was wearing only her slip, and Frances looked at her mother’s heavy arms, which looked girlish even though they were fat. The wrists and hands were small.

  “Frances, you know there was another baby, don’t you?” her mother said. Her voice was low and Frances thought she should not have asked her mother about children. Frances wanted the conversation to be over.

  “Yes,” she said, though she didn’t really know. She remembered that her mother had said she’d gotten fat when she was pregnant the first time, so there had to be a second time.

  “Girls your age know everything,” said her mother. “I knew you knew.” She was speaking very quietly.

  “I don’t know everything,” said Frances.

  “It’s all right,” her mother said. “It’s not a secret.” She stood up and put on her blouse and skirt. Frances was afraid she wasn’t going to speak again. “So,” she said, more brightly, “I once had another baby. She was born a long time before I had you, but she died.”

  Frances wanted to know how the baby had died, but she didn’t think she ought to ask. Maybe she would ask another time. This must be the miscarriage Simon had spoken of. Of course her mother had kept the shoes she’d bought for that baby. Maybe she’d bought clothes, too, not just shoes. People did that—they bought things for a baby before it was born.

  “Was she born dead?” Frances said.

  “Oh, no,” said her mother. She must have died in the hospital, then, Frances thought, just after she was born.

  Now Hilda was all dressed. “I don’t know why I talked about this today,” she said. “We have enough trouble to think about. Don’t worry about that baby. It was a long time ago.”

  Frances thought that if she could only ask the right question, she could find out what she needed to know, but she didn’t have time to think. She didn’t know what it was she needed to know. She could imagine a tiny baby, dressed in white—she’d seen that in a book or someplace. Maybe they had buried her in white. “Simon once told me you had a miscarriage,” she said. She was embarrassed, because it was a private thing about her mother, because she wasn’t sure how a miscarriage happened, but also because it was the only time she and Simon had ever talked that way.

  “No,” said her mother. “Did Aunt Pearl tell him that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He picks up all sorts of things. You never know what’s coming next,” her mother said affectionately, as if Simon had not done what he had done that weekend, as if the things he did weren’t important.

  “Maybe I forgot what he said,” Frances said.

  Her mother turned and looked at her, her hand resting on her dresser. “Do you and Simon talk a lot?” she said.

  “No.”

  “I mean, he never said anything about running away, or where he’d go?”

  “No,” said Frances, and at once she thought, for the second time, that it was bad for all of them that Simon had run away. She had been a little proud of him, a little excited. She had been wondering whether her classmates would know on Monday what had happened, whether the teachers would ask her questions, or whether she might have to stay home, as if it were a Jewish holiday. But her mother turned and looked at her as she left the room, and suddenly Frances almost was her mother and knew how it would be to be looking at herself, a girl, to be wearing nylon stockings, facing the window, not the door, and feeling gray and terrible about Simon, tattered and frightened.

  Soon her mother left. Frances promised to stay indoors and not to open the door to anybody. “What will you do?” her mother asked.

  “I have homework.”

  Frances was alone for many hours. She had never been alone for so long before. When her parents had left her previously, they’d always returned before she finished whatever it was she was doing when they left. Now she had time to think. The apartment felt different, empty of her parents. When her mother left, she walked through all the rooms and looked in the closets. She looked behind the shower curtain into the bathtub. For a second she thought she might find Simon lying in the tub, laughing at her for taking so long to find him—or drowned.

  She turned on the radio and then the television, but was unable to find a program she liked. Finally she took out her homework and began to work at the kitchen table. It didn’t take long, even though she did it slowly.

  For lunch she made herself a sandwich. She found some tuna fish salad in the refrigerator and toasted the bread, but she burned it and had to scrape off the black parts. She was confused. She thought she’d done it just the way her mother did, on Medium Dark,
but it was burned. She found herself crying as she scraped the bread with a knife, getting black crumbs all over the tablecloth. It was bad that she could cry over burning the bread but not about Simon. She didn’t like toast that had been burned. The sandwich didn’t taste good, even though she scraped for a long time.

  After lunch, time went even more slowly. She cleaned up the kitchen to give herself something to do and to keep her parents from knowing that she’d burned the toast. She had a glass of milk and some cookies. After a while she sat in the living room, but she had finished her library book and she didn’t know what to read. It was the last of the books she’d taken out that week.

  She went into her room, then into her parents’ bedroom, and lay down on their bed. She was cold, so she pulled the bedspread around her on both sides like a blanket. She knew she should take off her shoes, but she didn’t; she just held her feet upright so the soles didn’t touch the bed. She thought that Simon could have spent Saturday in a library, but that libraries were closed on Sunday. It was not raining. He could be outdoors somewhere, but she didn’t know where he could have gone at night. She wondered whether you could sneak into a department store and sleep in the beds at night. Maybe they had night watchmen who would discover you and have you arrested. Probably they did. Frances was thinking about that when she heard voices and she saw her father and Uncle Mike standing near the bed looking down at her. She realized that she had fallen asleep, because now she remembered dreaming that she was at school. Someone—the teacher or the principal—told her that her mother had come for her, and Frances had searched the school in increasing anxiety, looking for her mother. Finally she saw her mother through a glass panel in a classroom door. It was the kindergarten room, and some small kindergarten chairs had been arranged in a row for several mothers, who sat and watched the children. The children held hands and walked in a circle. It was like Open School Week, but Frances’s mother was watching the kindergarten children. Frances was unable to get her mother’s attention through the glass, and the door was locked. She knocked on the glass, but the teacher just looked up and frowned at her, and shook her head no.