Читать книгу Isabel's War - Lila Perl - Страница 7

Two

Still in my slightly damp bathing suit, I’m looking all over Moskin’s for Ruthie. This sailor boy, Roy, really looks groovy to me. I’ll bet he can do the Lindy. And he doesn’t seem to have that supercilious attitude toward twelve-year-old girls that my brother Arnold has. So maybe, war or no war, the summer at Shady Pines won’t get off to such a dreary start after all.

The best place to find Ruthie when she isn’t taking care of the guests’ kids is in the hotel kitchen. When I was younger, I have to admit, it was my favorite hangout, mainly because of the crock, always filled with big thick cookies topped with cinnamon and sugar or with chocolate sprinkles that were there for the taking.

Sure enough, Mrs. Moskin, Ruthie’s mother, who’s in charge of the kitchen and does most of the hotel cooking, spots me with a nod of her chin toward the cookie jar. As usual, she’s wrapped in a white apron that looks like flour sacking and wears a head cloth that completely covers her hair. Even her pale eyebrows and her broad-featured face appear to be dusted with flour.

Mrs. Moskin enfolds me in a warm, familiar hug. “About time you came in to say hello, Isabel. You were already at the lake? Take a cookie.”

I guess I have been rude. It was always the custom in the past to greet Minnie Moskin the moment one arrived, and I’m sure my parents have already done so. It’s just that I’ve been in such a bad mood over all the arguing with my parents and the war suddenly being an excuse for everything.

As to Ruthie, Mrs. Moskin tells me she’s now having a story hour in the children’s dining room. “Oh,” I say, “then I won’t bother her until after I change for supper. I have something interesting to tell her.”

Mrs. Moskin smiles and nods approvingly, almost as if she knows about the sailor I met in the woods, who’s coming to Moskin’s this evening. But of course that’s silly. How could she?

I trudge across the hotel grounds to the Annex. It’s already getting toward late afternoon and there aren’t many people around. Moskin’s guests, the older ones anyway, often take afternoon naps before dinner and then make an early rush for the showers before getting dressed for the evening meal.

The door to my room is slightly ajar, which isn’t surprising since nobody locks their doors at Moskin’s and my mother may already have gone in and out several times. I just wish she’d shut the door, though, because Moskin’s is the main haunt around here of bees, wasps, hornets, horse flies, and even bats.

I nudge the door wide open with my foot, already starting to undo my bathing suit top, when I’m struck by the presence of a tall young woman bending over a suitcase on the twin bed next to mine.

“Excuse me!” I say indignantly. “You’re in the wrong room. This one is mine.”

The figure across the tiny room turns. She’s not quite old enough to be called a young woman. She’s a girl, taller, skinnier, and older than I by maybe a couple of years. She has honey-brown hair that is long and wavy, a swan-like neck, and luminous gray-green eyes.

“Oh,” she says, “you must be Isabel. I am Helga.”

Her accent is a little strange, and automatically I say, “Pardonnez-moi?” French, as you can see, comes to me at the flick of an eye when I’m baffled.

“Helga,” she repeats. “We will be roommates. You speak some French but I am sorry. I speak only German and the English I’ve learned living a few years now in the English countryside. I hope it will be good enough for us to have many conversations.”

All this time I’m holding my detached bathing suit top up to my chest. Helga may be a girl close to my age, who even speaks my language, but she might as well be a menacing alien from Mars or even a Nazi storm trooper.

“Excuse me,” I say, rapidly reattaching my bathing suit top. “I just remembered something.”

Two seconds later I’m banging on the door of my parents’ room, a short distance from mine in the annex. My mother, in her cotton pique summer negligee, opens it and peers out suspiciously.

“Oh, it’s you. Why are you making such a racket? Your father is napping. How come you’re still in your bathing suit?”

She is asking me questions. What nerve. I brush them all aside. “Who is Helga?” I demand. “What is she doing in my room, unpacking a suitcase on the other bed? You told me I was going to have my own room this summer.” I know that I’m screeching out here on the annex porch. But I really don’t care.

My mother reaches for my shoulder and hustles me across the threshold, while my father grunts irritably from one of the twin beds, where I’ve probably ruined his pre-dinner nap.

“It all happened while you were at the lake,” my mother explains quietly but none too apologetically. She sits down on the other twin bed and motions for me to do the same. “You see, the Frankfurters arrived late this afternoon with this wonderful surprise, their niece.” Harriette Frankfurter is my mother’s best friend. “She was smuggled out of Germany in 1939 and has been living in England. They finally got her over here to live with them. She has no other family, poor thing.”

“Okay,” I say hesitantly. “But what has that got to do with me having to share a room, when I was promised I’d have one all to myself.”

“Isabel, how can you be so selfish? For one thing, the Moskins are short of rooms right now. And Helga is fourteen. So she really shouldn’t have to share with her aunt and uncle.”

“Fourteen,” I snap. “She’s too old for me. I don’t think we’d be such good roommates. And her English is kind of...well, stiff.”

“Nonsense,” my mother cuts in. “She’s a lovely child. I had quite a conversation with her myself. You and Ruthie and Helga will make a wonderful threesome. And you’ll have a companion when Ruthie is busy with her duties. Don’t you have any feeling at all for somebody who’s been through a terrible time in this war? Go back to your room and be as nice as you can to her. I’ll see you at dinner.”

I’m still grumbling to myself about the war, the war, and how it’s causing so many problems and annoyances, when Helga and I cross over in the slanting sunlight to Moskin’s main building where the dining room is located. Believe me, though, it’s nothing fancy, just big and buzzing with noisy conversation, as the guests of Shady Pines whet their appetites with glasses of tinkling water and vigorously tear apart Minnie Moskin’s home-baked rolls.

Helga is wearing a flowered chiffon dress that is much too pretty and dressed up for the occasion. But I didn’t say anything to her. Maybe it’s all she has in the way of dress-up clothing. I have no idea what people have been wearing in wartime Germany and England, but I imagine it’s something drab and practical.

We head for the big round table where my parents and Mr. and Mrs. Frankfurter, Helga’s aunt and uncle, are already seated, watching our approach with appraising eyes. Everybody oohs and aahs at how lovely Helga looks. Before they can say a word about me, I spot Ruthie at the far end of the dining room where the Moskin family has its own table, and I dash off to tell her my news about Roy, the sailor I met in the woods.

Ruthie is having a quick bite because she has to watch the little ones while their parents are at dinner.

Ruthie’s eyes widen. “Really? A sailor. How old do you think? Cute?”

“Very. You’ll see. I’m sure he’ll show up at the social hall later.”

Ruthie nods in the direction of the table where Helga is sitting and chatting with my parents and her aunt and uncle. “What about her?”

“Oh, well, I don’t think she’s his type. She’s sort of foreign, you know. Anyhow, I’m still recovering from the shock of having her dumped on me like that. I was supposed to have my own room, you know.”

Back at the table, my mother gives me a sour look. “What was so important that you had to tell Ruthie?” She turns to Helga. “You must excuse my daughter. Her manners...well, she tends to be a little impulsive.”

Helga looks at me forgivingly. I doubt if she even knows the English word impulsive. Meantime, Harry the waiter is bearing down on us with a tray laden with plates of soup. Harry, with his polished black hair, his dark seamy face, his swirling dancer’s movements, has been the headwaiter at Moskin’s ever since I can remember.

“So Miss Isabel, who’s your new friend, the beauty?” Harry asks me familiarly as he elegantly sets a brimming soup plate down in front of Helga.

“She’s Helga. From Germany,” I reply.

Harry is already halfway around the table, and my parents and the Frankfurters are filling in the details of Helga’s presence at Moskin’s. With his free hand, Harry lifts two fingers to his lips and tosses a kiss of approval in Helga’s direction.

I turn to Helga. “Don’t mind him,” I tell her confidentially. “Harry is such an old flirt. He blows kisses to all the ladies around here. He does it for the tips, you know.”

But Helga isn’t really listening to me. Nor has she touched her soup. She’s looking up at one of the busboys who’s been standing, mesmerized, just behind Harry’s shoulder. I think his name is Ted. And Ted’s gaze, in turn, is riveted on Helga.

Aha, I think to myself. So this is how it’s going to be. Helga, the pale green-eyed beauty, the waif, the teenage princess from abroad, adored and admired by men from sixteen to sixty. And me, the twelve-year-old kid, with the semi-developed body, a mop of black hair, and a nose that’s just crying out for a plastic surgeon who can be spared from the front lines.

The evening meal at Moskin’s goes on much longer than usual tonight. People from other tables come over to talk to the Frankfurters and to question Helga with curious, pitying expressions on their faces. “Did you ever see Hitler, that bum?” one of the guests inquires.

Helga shakes her head, mouthing a silent no and explains that she lived in a medium-sized city in northern Germany before she was spirited away to England with other children of endangered or broken families. Nobody, of course, asks what happened to Helga’s parents and the rest of her family in Germany. They may by now be in a prison camp or even dead. Probably no one really knows, not even the Frankfurters.

All this time, Helga has hardly eaten a thing. A few spoonfuls of soup, a chicken wing, some peas and carrots. “You have no appetite?” another hovering Moskin guest wants to know. “No wonder you’re thin as a rail.”

To my surprise, Helga stares back at the woman almost angrily. “We don’t eat like this in England, and not in Germany either before leaving. Here in America....”

Helga’s Aunt Harriette breaks in apologetically. “What Helga’s trying to say is that we haven’t felt the brunt of the war here yet. Our food is much too rich for her after the wartime diet she’s accustomed to.”

Helga just lowers her eyes. “Thank you, Aunt Hattie,” she says, after the nosy-body leaves the table, only to make way for others.

I suppose it is hard to be the center of attention, although of course I wouldn’t know. The one thing that’s on my mind at the moment is how late it’s getting and what if Roy has already arrived at the Shady Pines social hall with nobody there to greet him.

“You’ll all have to excuse me,” I blurt out suddenly. “I just remembered something terribly important.”

“Isabel,” my mother says in a warning tone, “I hope you’re not being rude.”

“No, no,” I assure her. “I’d be rude if I didn’t take care of this...um, problem, right now.”

I dash out into the lobby of the main building and look around quickly for a glimpse of Roy in his sailor garb. A few guests have already set up card games and others are sitting and talking in groups, the men smoking their after-dinner cigars. It’s already dusk as I make my way across the bumpy lawns of Shady Pines, out past the Annex, and beyond it to the squat wooden building that was the scene of so much fun last summer. By this time in the evening, the band at Moskin’s would have begun playing catchy tunes from the Hit Parade of 1941 and even earlier...peppy songs like “Boo Hoo” and “The Love Bug Will Bite You (If You Don’t Watch Out).”

I race up the wooden steps of the casino, which is dimly lit and not very inviting from the outside. Would Roy even know that this was the fun palace with all the “action” that I described to him this afternoon? Nobody is here, nobody, that is, except a handful of little kids, mainly the eight- and ten-year-olds from the lake. Some of them are fooling with the jukebox, trying to get it to play without putting money in. Others are jumping off the stage, scrambling back up, and jumping off again.

“Quels stupides!” I mutter under my breath. I grab one of the little boys. “Listen,” I say, “did you see a sailor come in here, a young fellow in a white Navy uniform?”

“Nah,” says the kid, with a snide grin. “Whaddya think, the fleet’s in? Don’tcha know the whole U.S. Navy’s in the Pacific fightin’ the Japs?”

I turn away in disgust and go sit in the dark on the casino steps until Ruthie finally turns up a good half-hour later. She sits down beside me. “He didn’t show, huh?”

“You’re sure you didn’t see him anywhere around the main building?”

“No, I looked everywhere on my way over here. He was probably too shy. Or he couldn’t find his way in the dark.”

“Or,” I say, in quiet despair, “who’s going to bother keeping a promise to a twelve-year-old girl with a chest that’s too small and a nose that’s too big?”