Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The first time I came down to the basement by myself was the night after Mrs. Callahan’s birthday party, when Mother and Hall were screaming so bad. Mother wanted Hall to stop drinking so much and Hall wanted Mother to shut the hell up about his drinking. Troo was sleeping over at Fast Susie’s and Nell was at a school dance. I was alone in my room reading My Friend Flicka when they started in on each other and then Dottie’s ghost began crying and I just couldn’t listen to all that. So I snuck out of bed and went on the tips of my toes through the kitchen, making sure I didn’t step on that piece of linoleum right in front of the stove that always made a sound like it had a stomachache, and down the steps past the Goldmans’ back door and down one more flight. I had my flashlight so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

When I got there, I sat on this hard brown suitcase that belonged to Hall when he was a sailor and had stickers all over it from faraway countries. I was gonna stay in the basement and read until the shouting coming down through the radiators stopped. I propped the flashlight up against this old lamp and made finger shadows on the wall for a while. I could do a bird and another kind of bird. When one bird was flying across the basement wall, it came across a picture of a lady in a hat sitting on a bench. Since I’d just been down there that afternoon helping Mother put shirts through the wringer, which I just loved to do because sometimes she made jokes about how she wished Hall was still inside one of those shirts, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed this picture. I got closer. When I touched it, it slid down the wall and behind where it used to be hanging was a hidey-hole. I could see the tip of something that looked like a shoe box. Then something squeaked like a mouse, which didn’t scare me, but then I thought it might be a bat and those did scare me because of this movie me and Troo saw called Horror of Dracula and it really was pretty horrible. So I waited until I didn’t hear the sound anymore and then stuck my hand inside that hidey-hole and lifted out the box and wondered whose it was. Mrs. Goldman’s? I checked the side and it said “Shuster’s Shoes, size 7,” so it had to be Mother’s because Mrs. Goldman had to wear special sturdy shoes, size 10, because her feet had gotten so bad in the concentration camp. And Nell wore a size 5. I lifted off the top. Two pictures and a little ring made out of a crinkly cookie wrapper like they put those chocolate chip cookies in up at the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory were laying on the bottom. One picture had kids in gowns and those flat hats with the tassels on them, the kind that Nell wore when she graduated. Only it wasn’t Nell’s picture. It was more old-fashioned and the kids had funnier hair than Nell’s, which I had no idea was possible. “Washington High School… Class of 1940… Jim Madigan Photography Studio” was written in swirly letters across the bottom.

So that afternoon, after talking to Wendy, I got to the bottom of the basement steps and took the shoe box out of the hidey-hole and sat down on the old brown suitcase. I slipped the cookie wrapper ring on my finger, but it fell off right away like it always did, so I stuck it back in the shoe box under the other picture. My favorite. The one of Mother with her wavy hair and freckles sitting in a rowboat down at the lagoon. She was about Nell’s age in this picture and she had on shorts that showed her pretty legs and trim ankles and she looked so very, very happy, a kind of happy that I couldn’t ever hardly remember seeing in her since Daddy died. Seeing her smile like that made me want to cry in that damp basement that smelled of coal clinkers. Cry and not have anybody to tell me to shut up with that crying. For goodness sake, why did God give you tear ducts if you weren’t supposed to cry?

The other picture, the graduation one, didn’t make me sad. It made me feel good because I knew a lot of the people in it. There was Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Latour and Mr. Kenfield and Mr. Fitzpatrick from the drugstore. And then I noticed two other people. A homely-looking boy whose ears kinda stuck out, but I couldn’t really tell who it was cuz he had turned his face away from the camera. Who was that? I knew I’d seen him before, but it wasn’t exactly him. And then way up on the top of this graduation picture, I noticed somebody who was tall. And had light hair. It was Rasmussen! I was shocked that I hadn’t paid attention to that detail before. He hadn’t changed very much. I would take this picture over to Granny’s the next time I visited and ask if she could’ve told right off that Rasmussen was gonna be a murderer and molester. Some of the boys on Vliet Street I knew would grow up to go to jail. Like Greasy Al Molinari, whose brother Coochie got taken away not too long ago for stealing the Cadillac car that old man Holz hauer kept in his garage but didn’t drive anymore. Reese Latour would go to jail, too. You could just tell by how mean they were that nothing good would ever happen to these boys. It shouldn’t anyway.

When I heard footsteps coming down the back stairs, I quickly stuffed everything back into the box.

“Who is down here?”

“It’s just me, Mrs. Goldman.”

“What are you doing in that dark basement, Liebchin?”

“Nothing.”

She was quiet. Then she said, “I understand.”

She went back up the steps, stopping on the landing. “When you are done with your nothing, please to come to the back door. I have made you a little something.”

Her doin’ that… I don’t know what the heck came over me. I just really used those tear ducts of mine. When I was all cried out, I wiped my face off on a dirty white blouse that was laying on top of the washer and stuck the shoe box back into the hidey-hole. And then I walked up the back steps and found a green glass plate outside Mrs. Goldman’s door. Six brown sugar cookies and a glass of cold, fresh milk in a jelly glass, just like Mother used to do for me, were on the floor outside Mrs. Goldman’s back door.

I took the cookies and milk out to the backyard bench and looked over at Troo’s Fourth of July bike and thought about Mother’s happy, smiling picture down in the hidey-hole and how nice Mrs. Goldman was even though she didn’t have to be, especially since those Nazis had been so unnice to her when they took away her little daughter for a shower and never brought her back. And even though things really hadn’t been going so hot for me lately, that fancy bike and that old picture and my sweet landlady made me feel so grateful that I brought my hands together and bowed my head and did what Daddy had always said to do when I was feeling this way. I thanked the Lord God Almighty for his blessings, especially for those luscious, luscious brown sugar cookies that I stuffed into my mouth faster than you can say Jackie Robinson. I didn’t save even a crumb for Troo.