Francie Read online

  “Why, no, I—”

  “Do you really think you ought to go in and sit down there, and try to talk to a lot of kids who have nothing to say to you?”

  “Of course not! It’s just that the system’s all wrong,” said Pop, “but I’m just as glad I’m getting Francie out of this for a little while. Maybe in another sort of civilization she’ll realize that parents have some rights too!”

  Aunt Norah shook her head and sighed.

  “Well, come on. If we’ve got to go, we’ve got to go,” said Pop, “unless we feel we ought to go upstairs instead and skulk in our own rooms. I guess the other way is less awkward. I suppose that’s why you long-suffering older generation evolved it.”

  He looked in at the party as he and Aunt Norah paused, coated and hatted, on their way to the front door. With difficulty he refrained from glowering. A few couples—Francie was among them—were dancing to the radio which was turned up to deafening volume. Others were in groups, animatedly discussing things which Pop either did not understand or thought they did not understand, and doing it at the top of their lungs to be heard above the music. He noticed several couples holding hands not at all self-consciously.

  “We’re off, children,” called Aunt Norah.

  Francie waved, hesitated, and then on a sudden warm impulse ran over to kiss them both. She looked flushed, happy, and very pretty. Out on the front porch, Pop blew his nose. “She’s not so bad,” he said. “Spoiled—all of them are spoiled—but she’s a nice kid.”

  “I’m glad you’re beginning to realize that!” said Aunt Norah.

  “Well, come on then,” Pop said, as he led the way to the car. “If we’re to go into exile for the whole evening, let’s get going!”

  Time flew by faster than Francie had ever known it to go. Before she could catch her breath, before she had really accepted this uprooting deep down inside her, the parting time had come and she and Pop were on the train rushing east.

  However dizzy and breathless she felt, she found New York absolutely heavenly. She was in a hurry to write Ruth about it, and yet in a hurry to do more running around outside the hotel: two theaters in one day, the stores, “21” and the Stork Club for lunch with Pop, the stores again, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, which nearly knocked the stores out of her mind and made her dig her sketchbook out of the bottom of her suitcase; then a hairdresser’s and again the stores.

  Two whole hours one afternoon she spent wandering the plazas and corridors of Radio City, trying to satisfy her urge to capture these crowded impressions in sketches on paper. Her rough drawings did not please her, but Pop seemed astonished and impressed.

  “That’s a big chunk of talent you have, Francie. You’re better than your mother already, and she was pretty good.”

  She found herself thinking often of her mother in New York. She knew her mother had loved the city, and Francie, feeling closer to her than she had for a long while, loved it too.

  “I’m nearly dead,” she wrote at last, in a quiet space forced on her by the time of day, when nothing was open for shopping. “Oh Ruth, I’ve had the most divine time with the paintings. There are lots to be seen in small galleries, I just found out, and I’m so excited I can hardly wait to get back to work. I’ve done some sketching here, of course, but I mean seriously back to work. I wonder sometimes if it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time, going to State. Art is after all my only true interest.” She added another line under “true” and paused, nibbling at her pen, to look into the hotel mirror. It was a pity she hadn’t waited to buy all her sweaters and things here, she mused. They had a better look, somehow. If Ruth could only see the yellow twin set she had on right now.…

  “… my only true interest.…” She smiled at the words. Her head was such a tumble of interests at the moment.

  “Pop has given me my head in the way of last-minute clothes and I’ve gone mad, so it’s just as well you and I decided against that blue tweed coat. I did much better here at Saks’. Pop’s being absolutely sweet about everything, and sometimes I think I’ve never done him justice. He isn’t just a businessman at all, though he seems to be pretty good at that by the way—it might sound like boasting if I told you how they treat him at his office. But he isn’t as difficult as I’ve always thought. For one thing, he didn’t mind my getting a hair-do at Antoine’s. Also, anybody less understanding would probably make me trail along to Central Park Zoo. Of course, I wasn’t above doing some of the touristy things, like Radio City and going to the top of the Empire State Building, and I loved that—but I kept thinking of Doris the time her father showed her around New York and treated her like a baby. Pop at least lets me pick out my own clothes, and he orders my meals as if I were grown up. (I wouldn’t know what to pick, anyway.) I’m waiting in the hotel room now because he had to go to the office to wind up a lot of things, but I’ll phone down soon for a coke and start dressing. Tonight we’re going to the theater again, and tomorrow we actually sail. I’m feeling much better about England and everything. If Pop’s going to be as decent as this all the time I haven’t got a thing to worry about.”

  While Francie was scribbling away so happily, Fred Nelson at his desk in the office sorted out a few last papers and chatted to his secretary. “I’m afraid I’ve neglected things this trip, Miss Peterson,” he said, “but I’ve got my little girl with me, and you know how it is.”

  “Don’t I, Mr. Nelson. There’s nothing like the responsibility of a child in a big city.”

  “Francie’s not a child any more,” said Mr. Nelson, sighing. “I only wish she were. She’s so sure she’s grown up.…”

  “It must be a great problem,” said Miss Peterson.

  “Well, I’m letting her have her head just these few days. It’s going to be a big change for her over there. Of course I’ve been doing the Near and Far East and haven’t been in England since before the war. But we hear enough about it. I’m afraid she won’t have the sort of fun she’s accustomed to. So I’m being indulgent.”

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Nelson; she’ll land on her feet all right after a little while. It’s only that life in England is apt to be drab just now, isn’t it? I get letters from the girl in our office over there, so I know something about it. You tell your little girl to buy plenty of warm underthings. And take candy along, and butter; that’s what my girl friend tells me.”

  “Butter?” Fred Nelson looked horrified, as only a hotel-dweller can be horrified at such a domestic suggestion.

  “Oh yes. It comes in cans, you know. Of course you can leave a standing order here for those things. I’d better wait until you find out for yourself,” said Miss Peterson.

  “Well then, I guess I’ll run along.” Mr. Nelson picked up his hat from the desk. “That just about winds it up, I think. I promised Francie I’d take her somewhere nice and lively for dinner before the show.”

  “That’s right. Give her a good time the last night, poor kid,” Miss Peterson said, and it was probably just as well that Francie could not hear her sympathetic words.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was a cold, raw day. The tossing sea was lead-colored. Francie sat in her deck chair, wrapped in a ship’s blanket, luxuriating in gloom. It had been a rough trip. Her father was seasick, the other people who ate at their table were seasick, and Francie was beginning to wonder if she herself were altogether well. Perhaps not, she thought. She had waked up that morning with the urge to paint. Not just sketch, as she had in New York, but to try something more ambitious. Today, she resolved, she would paint a picture with the sea in it, that sea which had so excited her when she first saw it in New York. But when she got up and dressed and made her way down the slanting, tipsy corridor to knock on the door of her father’s cabin, discomfort caused her to forget about painting. She wanted only to get out on deck and breathe fresh air.

  Now, comfortable again and looking down a vista of empty deck chairs, she began to feel proud. “It really must be rough,” she thought.
“Practically everybody’s laid up. I must be tougher than I thought.”

  At the end of the line of chairs, next to the place where the deck narrowed, she saw a girl of her own age whom she had noticed the day before, sitting as she herself was sitting, wrapped in a blanket. She was a pretty, fair-haired girl, dressed very much like Francie, though Francie took that for granted. In Jefferson the girls chose their clothes from local stores, and meekly followed the styles en masse.

  “I wonder,” thought Francie, “if she’s nearly sick too?”

  The girl probably felt someone looking at her, because she turned her head and met Francie’s gaze. She smiled. “Are you a good sailor?” she said across the chairs.

  “I was just wondering,” said Francie dubiously. “How do you feel?”

  The girl laughed a little. “I don’t want to ask myself,” she said. “Maybe we ought to take a walk; shall we?”

  They made their way down to the end of the deck and around the windy side, where it was impossible to shout above the gale. By the time they had done the round once they felt like old friends.

  “Your first trip?” asked Francie.

  “No, I’ve crossed once, the other way. In ’41.”

  “Once?”

  “I’m English,” explained the girl.

  “You don’t talk a bit like an English person.”

  “I’ve been in the States all this time. I’m practically American by this time. I’m Penelope Harley.”

  “I’m Francie Nelson … Are you going home now?”

  “Yes. I came over as an evacuee, it seems so long ago now. It seems forever.” She looked pensive, and Francie gazed admiringly at her. The new girl was slender, with a confident sort of style in the way she wore her clothes.

  “Are your parents with you?” Francie asked at last, when they had been duly buffeted on the windward side, and were back again in shelter.

  “My people? No, they didn’t come with me, you know. It was Mummy who said I must come to America. I wasn’t very keen on it and Daddy was absolutely against it from the very beginning. He was Navy; he didn’t like the idea of sending off his child if all the other children in England couldn’t be shipped to safety at the same time.”

  “What a funny idea,” said Francie.

  Penelope looked at her. “Do you think so? I don’t, especially; I understood the way he felt. I held out, too, for a long time, until all the other children who were going had already gone. But Mummy couldn’t bear it. As soon as she was left alone, I was sent.” Penelope talked as if to herself, arguing with someone in memory. “I tried not to go even then, but the suspense was too much for her, I suppose … She was only thinking of my good.”

  “I hope you went to nice people,” said Francie. She did understand the “funny idea” after all, she realized. She had a bad habit of calling anything new funny and pushing it away, she reflected.

  “Oh, they weren’t strangers. It wasn’t as bad as that. I went to cousins, and they couldn’t have been nicer. It was fortunate after all that Mummy was so stubborn, the way things turned out. I’m not boring you, I hope?”

  “No, no. Do please go on.” Francie gripped her new friend’s arm as they plunged again into the wind. She had long ago forgotten that she wasn’t feeling well.

  “Daddy was killed,” said Penelope.

  “Oh, how awful.”

  “Mine sweeping,” said Penelope. “Most of the men in his ship were lost with him. When my aunt heard the news she begged Mummy to come over as well, to be with us, and Mummy wouldn’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” asked Francie.

  “Oh, she—she just had to stand by after his death. Do her part, you know.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. But how awful for you.”

  Penelope didn’t reply. In a companionable silence they continued around and around.

  “You’ve had a romantic sort of life,” Francie said at last. “It makes me feel very ordinary.”

  “Why ordinary? Is this your first time across the Atlantic?”

  “Yes. I haven’t really been anywhere in the world but the Middle West,” Francie explained. With a novel sense of humility she took her turn and told the story of her life. It seemed, all of a sudden, rather prosy; she forgot she was Jefferson’s glamour girl. “So now I’m going abroad for the first time,” she said.

  Penelope said, “You couldn’t feel any more afraid of a new country than I do of my own. It’s quite as if I were immigrating; I’ve forgotten all I ever knew about England.”

  “Why didn’t you go back sooner? After all, the war’s been over quite a while.”

  Penelope looked uncomfortable, but before Francie could retract her careless question, the English girl went on.

  “There were—difficulties. At first Mummy was working and there wasn’t any place for me. And then—well, she married again and it seemed wiser somehow for her to get used to her new life before I came over. Not that she didn’t want me.…”

  She broke off, her fair skin flushing painfully, and Francie hurried to ask a safer question. “Are you going on with school, or have you decided to quit?”

  “Oh, I’m going on, for one more year at any rate. I want to stay away from home until I can see how things are.”

  “Away from home?” repeated Francie, puzzled. “Oh, you mean you’re going to boarding school, of course. Pop told me but I forgot for a minute; there are lots of boarding schools in England, aren’t there? At home not everybody goes away, but you probably know that.”

  “I do know. I ought to; I went to day school myself in New Hampshire. But boarding school is what one does in England, and I must say it’s going to be convenient for me, since Mummy’s married again, and I don’t know my stepfather. Maybe I won’t like him, and he’s sure to be wondering about me too, if we’ll get on and all that. Well, of course we’ll get on; I mean, we’ve got to. But if it’s an effort, I’m better away at school, don’t you think? Where I can figure out what my next move should be.”

  “Oh yes, Penelope. How hard it must be.” The ship or the rough weather or some other unusual circumstance gave Francie a new impulse toward friendship. She felt drawn toward this girl whom she had found for herself.

  The wind died down slowly. Forgetful of the weather the two girls lounged in deck chairs and chattered until the moment when the deck stewards came around with cups of beef tea. Afterwards they went to play table tennis.

  Francie managed to do some painting after all when the weather grew calmer, and she found in Penelope not the worshiping admiration she had had from Ruth back home, but a more understanding and critical eye. Penelope really understood that a girl might have a yearning to do something big with a talent because she herself burned with high ambition. The English girl was interested in the theater. Not in the acting end, but in stage-managing and producing. Her school in New Hampshire had given her some opportunity to develop her talents and she hoped eventually to do something with them professionally.

  “Though I haven’t told Mummy about this yet,” she confessed to Francie. “I’m not sure she won’t be frightened by the mere mention of the theater. And of course I’ve no idea how Uncle Jim will react. It’s better, I think, to let them in gradually on how I feel.”

  Francie noted that concern about Uncle Jim, her stepfather, and how he would react about this and that, punctuated most of Penelope’s talk. She was glad that no such anxiety faced her as beset her new friend.

  What with painting and talking, walking and deck games, the crossing was over before they knew it, and it was morning of the last day. The ship was moving slowly into dock at Southampton when Francie came out to watch. She had got up early, but she found Penelope there before her, standing very still on the deck, her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets. Her yellow hair blew in the wind, but she didn’t try to smooth it, and she didn’t notice Francie coming toward her at the rail. She was deep in thought and she looked rather apprehensive, staring ahead at England.

/>   Francie cleared her throat, and Penelope jumped.

  “Oh, there you are. All packed and ready?”

  “Packed, but not exactly ready. What do you suppose we do now?” said Francie. Should she say something encouraging? Perhaps Penelope wouldn’t like being understood; better not.

  “I suppose it’s good-bye for the time being,” said Penelope. “Your father says you’re going straight on to London and he’ll decide your fate after that, but my people live in the New Forest, and I expect they’ll be on the dock now, waiting for me. It’s only a short drive away as Americans count distance. But we must keep in touch.” She was quite gay now.

  “Yes, we will. Anyway I will,” said Francie, “though I guess you’ll be awfully busy picking up where you left off. By the way, Penny, Pop says he’d like to know more about whatever school you go to.”

  “Fairfields? I’ll give him the address and he can telephone the headmistress if he likes. Or wait, Mummy might know more about it than he’s likely to hear from one of the staff. He’d better phone Mummy. Later he can ask the school secretary to send him a prospectus.”

  “That would be fine,” said Francie without enthusiasm. The prospect of an English school did not intrigue her, though she wanted to keep in touch with Penelope.

  “It may be full up, but sometimes there are last-minute cancellations. Usually, in fact.…” Penelope turned from the rail. “There’s the breakfast gong—our last meal before we dive into the land of austerity. I hope you remember that, Francie, and eat hearty. I’ll be seeing you later at the customs shed.”

  She smiled and waved, but Francie could see that she was agitated, nevertheless. And no wonder, she mused, with all these new adjustments she must begin to make as soon as the ship docked.

  Francie sighed, remembering that she had a few adjustments to worry about on her own account. She wondered anxiously if she were properly dresssed. When asked, Penny had suggested country-type clothes for traveling, and sensible shoes. People in England didn’t try to look smart for the train, Penny said.