Eleven

One afternoon after school, about a week later, Sarah and Bianca walked to the library with Charley. Along the way they discussed the new assignment Miss W. had given them. She was finally free from her crutches and had returned to the school. They were to write an essay about an important living American. As soon as Miss W. announced the assignment Sarah knew her choice would be Jane Addams. Following her sister Viola’s suggestion, Bianca chose Susan B. Anthony.

“What did Susan B. Anthony do?” Charley asked.

“She’s still doing,” Bianca said. “She’s a leader of the suffragettes.”

“My man is Louis Sullivan.”

“What did he do?”

“He’s still doing too,” Charley said. “He’s one of the architects for the World’s Fair!”

A gust of wind plucked some loose papers Charley had stuffed into his notebook and they cartwheeled down the sidewalk, sending him on a wild rescue chase.

“Instead of giggling like ninnies,” he said when he returned, “you might’ve helped me.”

“We were having too much fun watching you,” Sarah said.

The library occupied one large room with shelves lining the walls, some only half filled with books. Two boys, soberly dressed in dark suits, and a pale, curly-haired blonde girl huddled inside an oversize gray sweater, were reading at one of the long library tables. Sarah laid her school bag down carefully so as not to disturb the three readers, but she needn’t have bothered. Charley’s wind-tossed papers crackled noisily as he tried to smooth the wrinkles out of them. He smiled apologetically when the girl in the gray sweater turned and stared at him.

Sarah was pleased to find a wealth of magazine and newspaper stories about Jane Addams. Her name was actually Laura Jane (she’d dropped Laura when she entered Rockford College). From the time she was very young, Jane Addams had thought of herself as ugly. Sarah studied a photograph of the young Laura and wondered why. Her eyes, said to be blue-gray, were large and almost overpowered her oval face with its small, pretty mouth. Laura Jane was only two years old when her mother died. A few years later she contracted a spinal disease which caused her to limp slightly. Sarah felt enormous sympathy for this motherless young girl who walked behind her father on the way to church so he wouldn’t be embarrassed by being seen with so ugly a daughter.

Oh, but the Addams home was beautiful! Sarah studied the photograph of the white house on a hill. It had columns, and a balcony, and a ruby-colored window set like a jewel in the front door. Sarah tried to imagine growing up in the peaceful town of Cedarville, Illinois, where the Addams family lived. It was not much larger than Distov, the Russian shtetl where she and Fanny had been born. Her family had lived in fear that Cossacks might break down their door at any minute. There had been nothing like that to fear in Cedarville, Sarah was sure. Her father kept the few precious books he’d been able to smuggle out of Russia wrapped in a sheet under his bed; John Addams’s books filled four walls of his study.

Suddenly, the librarian announced that the library would close in five minutes. Sarah reluctantly stacked the magazines and newspapers in a neat pile.

“Sullivan turns out to be a pretty queer duck,” Charley said as they walked home.

“I found practically nothing on Susan B. Anthony.” Bianca was disconsolate.

“That’s because men write the newspapers and they don’t think a woman is important enough to write about,” Sarah offered authoritatively.

“Men are dolts,” Bianca said. “It’s disgusting!”

“Not all men,” said Charley defensively.

Bianca glowered at Charley. “Men can vote even if they’re too drunk to hold a pencil! And their wives—who run the family and who never drink—aren’t supposed to be smart enough to vote!”

Charley grinned. “I’m going to get you a soapbox!”

“If Bianca and I were twenty-one now, would you think it’s right for you to be able to vote and not us?” Sarah demanded.

“Not if I wanted to stay alive!” Charley gave a mock salute. “Ladies, it’s been an indistinct pleasure…’’

He turned down his street and Sarah and Bianca walked for a few minutes without talking. Sarah broke the silence. “Jane Addams’s mother died when she was two, and then her father died just after she graduated from college. I don’t know what I’d do if my father died.”

Bianca shrugged. “My father is away so often I don’t think I’d notice.”

Sarah said nothing. She was learning it was better to be mute than to try to stumble around with empty words of comfort when Bianca said things like that.

“Then, when he does come home, he’s drunk and we all stay out of his way. But he’s great when he’s not drinking. He’ll take us kids to Lake Michigan, and buy us ice cream, and build sand castles.” Bianca’s voice had lightened and her face regained some of its liveliness.

“Does your mother come with you?”

“She has too much to do with the baby and cooking and housework. Does your father ever get drunk?”

Sarah almost wished she could say yes. She shook her head.

“You’re lucky. Viola won’t go, so I have to hunt him up in the bar and get him home. I hate it.”

“My father has never taken us to the lake. Not even once,” Sarah said. “We hardly go anywhere.”

But Bianca didn’t hear her. They had reached what they called their “good-bye corner.”

“Bye,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

Sarah walked home, her mind reviewing what Bianca had said about her father. Why had she blabbered about Jane Addams loving her father? And how she didn’t know what she would do if her father died. But how was she to know Bianca’s father drank so much?

Best friends should know such things about each other. How much did Bianca really know about her?

She was thinking about that when she opened the door to the butcher shop. As she walked through to their apartment, she planted a kiss on her father’s cheek.