Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Soon the leaves would be turning and before we knew it we’d be drinking warm Ovaltine instead of cold. Ethel had taken us that morning to get new pairs of loafers up at Shuster’s and then over to Kenfield’s to the going-back-to-school aisle to get pencils and erasers and crayons. And then the three of us took some Coca-Cola over to Granny, who stuck shiny gold pennies into the crackling brown shoes and said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

After lunch, Troo and me and Barb were sitting on a playground bench, enjoying the last day of vacation. Barb asked, “You girls ready for the block party tonight?”

Troo’s tongue tip was sticking between her lips but she still said, “Yup.” She tied her knot off down on the bottom of her lanyard and held it up to inspect it. It was white and gold. We were both making new lanyards for Mother so she could attach a whistle to it and call us whenever she needed us to bring her anything, since she couldn’t walk too good with her shrunken-up legs.

“So… who you think’s gonna be Queen of the Playground?” Barb asked, in a teasing way.

“Mr. Gary?” Troo said.

Barb laughed and laughed at that until Troo said, “Sally is going to be Queen this year.” Then she flashed Barb one of her danger looks and said, “She better be anyway. Or there will be hell to pay.”

Both ends of Vliet Street were closed off with yellow blockades. And folding tables were stacked with food up and down the block. Mr. Gary had called Ethel all the way from California and told her to hire Johnny Fazio’s band the Do Wops for the block party. Mr. Gary could afford to do that because, like Ethel said, “He may be light in his loafers, gals, but he ain’t so light in his wallet.” Then she leaned down to me and whispered, “Tol’ ya that boy had some fanciful ideas.”

So that night there were Christmas lights hanging from everybody’s front porches and all of us were glad because now we could go back to the way we were before there was a murderer and molester, which was a big relief. Like when the war was over, Mr. Dave said. The night was bittersweet, he said.

The band had a little stage over on the baseball diamond and they were playing some good rock ’n’ roll by Chuck Berry called “Johnny Be Good,” which made all the girls swoon at Johnny Fazio. Mother came to watch for a while but she couldn’t dance. Mr. Dave was taking good care of her, though. He’d bought her a nice pair of pink open-toed shoes she liked so much from Jim the brownnose salesman, who was the top dog of Shuster’s Shoes now that Hall was in jail. And around Mother’s finger was that ring I’d found down in the hidey-hole. That cookie wrapper ring. Mr. Dave had given it to Mother when they were engaged and she had kept it all those years.

I sat next to her on one of the wooden benches when Mr. Dave went to get her a plate of food. “Are you happy now?” I asked her.

I didn’t think she heard me at first so I was going to ask again but then she said, “Happy? Well, for a while there I didn’t think I was going to get to see you and Troo grow up and…” She didn’t give me one of those sad looks like she used to, but there was some sadness in her voice. “You’ve forgiven me, haven’t you? Let bygones be bygones?”

“Yes,” I said, even though it wasn’t the complete truth. I had forgiven her. Mr. Dave, too. But I had one last thing to do before I could let bygones be bygones.

“That reminds me. I got a little early birthday present for you.” Mother dug around in her skirt pocket and came out with Daddy’s Timex. “He’d want you to have it.”

She dropped it into the palm of my hand. It looked smaller than it used to.

“Go on, put it on,” she said. “I had it sized for you. It’ll grow with you.”

I slid the stretchy silver band over my wrist and put it up to my ear and remembered how the sound of it had always made me feel safe when I’d rest my cheek against Daddy’s hand.

Then Mr. Dave came back with plates full of food for both of us. He sat down on the other side of me and said, “Gosh, I’ll be darned. I seem to have forgotten my watch. Anybody know what time it is?”

I held up my hand so he could see. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking, I thought.

And then we settled in and ate and watched everybody dancing their heads off. You should have seen Ethel and Ray Buck goin’ at it. They were really something! Better even than Justine and Tony on American Bandstand, in my opinion. Ethel brought Mrs. Galecki in her wheelchair for a little while, even though everybody was talking behind their hands about how Mr. Gary had run off with Father Jim and how they were gonna go to hell, but I could tell that didn’t bother Mrs. Galecki at all, or maybe it was the new medicine that made her smile so much.

That night Troo was well on her way for her new fat lady job, me too, that’s how much food we ate. Nana Fazio’s spaghetti and meatballs and Mrs. O’Hara’s (who was about to become Mrs. Officer Riordan) corned beef and Mrs. Latour’s slumgoodie. Nell had even made Mother’s special tuna noodle casserole with the potato chips on top. (It was still kinda black, but a lot less black than the last time she’d made it.) Of course, Ethel brought her Mississippi blond brownies. And Mrs. Goldman brought us some beautiful tomatoes from her garden in a straw basket. Mrs. Kenfield came alone and empty-handed.

While everybody was dancing the Stroll, I was having some growing pains and felt a need to stretch my legs. It was dark by then and the crickets had started up and, I knew, so had the creak creak creak of the swing. I missed hearing it even though it had always made me feel lonely. I could hear Troo’s “Chopsticks” laugh and Nana Fazio yelling something in Italian and everybody clapping along with the music as I stood in front of the Kenfields’. But when I looked up to the porch and saw him there, the bulk of him, I wondered what the devil had come over me. I turned to go back to the party, but Mr. Kenfield called out of the dark, “Come here, Sally.”

I climbed the steps and just for a second I thought I’d take off, but then he patted the other side of the swing and so I sorta had to do it because I didn’t want to be rude. But my heart, it started knocking against my ribs like it’d been locked out in a storm. I was afraid of Mr. Kenfield. And I could not ever remember him talking to me before. He probably was going to have a big talk with me about how me and Troo were always stealing stuff from his store or maybe he would even call Mr. Dave down from the party and tell him that he thought I should be sent to Juvenile Hall.

I sat down next to him and looked at his hands. His nails were bitten down to the half moons. “How come you aren’t at the block party, Mr. Kenfield?”

He threw his cigarette into the bushes. “Don’t feel much like celebrating.”

“Is it because of Dottie?”

In the glow of his porch light I could see his face get real mad and it looked like he was about to yell something, but then he quieted down.

“You know,” I said, resting my hand on top of his since it looked so forgotten about and coulda used a little Jergens lotion. “Like my mother always says, ‘It’s best to forgive and forget. Let bygones be bygones.’ ”

He said gruffly, “You’re your mother’s daughter, all right. The apple didn’t fall far from that tree.”

Mr. Kenfield reached deep down into his trouser’s pocket and took something out. It was a picture of Dottie. You could tell he looked at it a lot because it was sort of worn down and grayish, like him. Dottie was sitting on this very same swing, smiling so big with her hands behind her head.

“You know who that is?” He pointed at the photograph.

I looked up into his face. There was a shadow across his eyes. “Yes.”

“You know what she did?”

“Yes.” She’d done the same thing Mother had. Fallen in love and had a baby with someone she wasn’t supposed to.

“It’s a mortal sin. Some things you can’t forgive and forget.”

“You’re wrong about that, Mr. Kenfield. You should let Dottie and her little baby come home because I know how much you miss them. I don’t think God would mind that at all.”

He put his hands up to his face then so I wouldn’t see, but I recognized that sound. Mrs. Goldman had been wrong. It hadn’t been Mrs. Kenfield, crying every night in Dottie’s room. It was her daddy. Who did not have a stiff upper lip after all.

I got up and left then. Because that sound, that weeping from the heart, I knew that sound. And I also knew there was nothing I could say that would make him feel better. Nothing else hurts worse in the world as much as tears for the missing.

“Test… test… one… two… three,” Barb said up on the stage in front of the microphone. “Could I have your the stage in front of the microphone. ”Could I have your attention, please? It’s the time you’ve all been waiting for. Test one… two… three.” The microphone made a high screechy sound. Barb laughed when we put our hands over our ears. She was standing on the stage next to Johnny Fazio and you could see plain as the nose on your face that Johnny Fazio had the hots for her.

Barb announced, “It’s time now to reveal the name of the girl who is this year’s Queen of the Playground.” She turned toward Johnny and said very seriously, “May I have a drum roll.” She looked back at the crowd, holding the gorgeous rhinestone crown up to the stage lights. It was so beautiful that no words could describe it.

Troo picked up my hand and squeezed it. I knew it was me. Had to be. But just as Barb said, “The Queen of the Playground this year is…,” and looked over at me… I looked over at Wendy Latour. She was holding Artie’s hand and smiling so purely. She was dressed in a pink party dress with lace on the neck and had some rouge on her cheeks and something shiny on her lips.

And for the second time that night, I didn’t understand what came over me, but I jumped right on that stage and took the microphone out of Barb’s hand and said into it, “The Queen of the Playground this year is… Wendy Latour.”

When I thought later about why I did that, I figured it was because of that plastic Cracker Jack ring Wendy always wore on her wedding finger. She needed to be Queen more than I did. I knew I would go on in life and I would get married and have kids, maybe even marry a pharmacist someday. But for Wendy… well, at least she would always have that rhinestone crown.

When Artie brought her up to the stage to be crowned, Wendy gave me one of her huge hugs and then started throwing those Dinah Shore kisses at everyone. Just like a Queen should. Barb announced Teddy Mahlberg as the King and Wendy gave him a royal hug as well, which he took pretty well. Then everybody started going nuts with their hooting and hollering, but that was also because they were, a lot of them anyway, three sheets to the wind, and I had noticed that this generally improves people’s moods.

All of us got a partner when Johnny Fazio sang the last song of the night called “That’s Amore,” which Nana Fazio told me was Italian for love and was certainly the right song to sing because there sure was a lot of love dancing going on. Including me and Henry Fitzpatrick, who gave me my first on the lips smooch after we got done with the box-step waltz. His lips tasted like black licorice, which I never liked, but the rest of it wasn’t half bad.

Seeing us all there like that, I thought of how much my lush daddy would’ve loved the party. I wished he was there. If he was, I knew he woulda given me two thumbs up. And when I tried to say, “I’m sorry for saying what I said…,” he would just hug me close with his tan hairy arms and tell me he knew I hadn’t meant those awful things I said on the day of the crash. And how proud he was of me for doing what he had asked me to do. Keep my promises. Tend my garden.

After the party was all over, the Vliet Street kids called to each other, “See ya tomorrow at school.” I walked home by myself, gazing up at the great beyond, thinking about how love never really dies. It’s always out there, leaving a twinkling trail to another place where you can go and rest when you need to forget that things really do happen when you least expect them. And sometimes, those things can change your life forever. But what Daddy hadn’t gotten around to telling me, and what I figured out that night all by myself, was that no matter what horrible things happen… you have to go on with your life with all the stick-to-itiveness that you can muster up.

So with the fireflies flashing and the chocolate chip cookies smelling and the Moriaritys’ dog barking two streets over, I sat down on the O’Haras’ front steps and looked up and said in my most certain voice, “To the clear blue of the western sky, it’s me, Sal your gal, telling my Sky King, my magnificent Sky King… roger, wilco and out.”