U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [386]
She hated it when commencement came, and there was
nothing about summer plans she could tel the other girls. She grew fast that summer and got gawky and her breasts began to show. The stuffy gritty hot weather dragged on endlessly at the Fishers'. It was awful there cooped up with the old people. Old Mrs. Fisher never let her forget that she wasn't real y Agnes's little girl and that she thought it was sil y of her daughter to support the child of a noaccount like Fred. They tried to get her to do enough housework to pay for her keep and every day there were scoldings and tears and tantrums.
Margie was certainly happy when Agnes came in one
day and said that she had a new job and that she and Margie would go over to New York to live. She jumped up and down yel ing, "Goody goody. . . . Oh, Agnes, we're going to get rich.""A fat chance," said Agnes, "but anyway it'l be better than being a servant." They gave their trunks and bags to an expressman and went over to New York on the el and then uptown on the subway. The streets of the uptown West Side looked amazingly big and wide and sunny to Margie. They were
-173-going to live with the Francinis in a little apartment on the corner on the same block with the bakery they ran on Amsterdam Avenue where Agnes was going to work. They had a smal room for the two of them but it had a canary-bird in a cage and a lot of plants in the window and the Francinis were both of them fat and jol y and they had cakes with icing on them at every meal. Mrs. Francini was Grandma Fisher's sister. They didn't let Margie play with the other children on the block; the Francinis said it wasn't a safe block for little girls. She only got out once a week and that was Sunday evening, everybody always had to go over to the Drive and walk up to Grant's Tomb and back. It made her legs ache to walk so slowly along the crowded streets the way the Francinis did. Al summer she wished for a pair of rol erskates, but the way the Francinis talked and the way the nuns talked about dangers made her scared to go out on the streets alone. What she was so scared of she didn't quite know. She liked it, though, helping Agnes and the Francinis in the bakery.
That fal she went back to the convent. One afternoon soon after she'd gone back from the Christmas holidays Agnes came over to see her; the minute Margie went in the door of the visitors' parlor she saw that Agnes's eyes were red and asked what was the matter. Things had
changed dreadful y at the bakery. Poor Mr. Francini had fal en dead in the middle of his baking from a stroke and Mrs. Francini was going out to the country to live with Uncle Joe Fisher. "And then there's something else," Agnes said and smiled and blushed. "But I can't tel you about it now. You mustn't think that poor Agnes is bad and wicked but I couldn't stand it being so lonely." Margie jumped up and down. "Oh, goody, Fred's come back."
"No, darling, it's not that," Agnes said and kissed her and went away. That Easter Margie had to stay at the convent al
-174-through the vacation. Agnes wrote she didn't have any place to take her just then. There were other girls there and it was rather fun. Then one day Agnes came over to get her to go out, bringing in a box right from the store a new darkblue dress and a little straw hat with pink flowers on it. It was lovely the way the tissuepaper rustled when she unpacked them. Margie ran up to the dormitory and put on the dress with her heart pounding, it was the pret-tiest and grownupest dress she'd ever had. She was only twelve but from what little she could see of herself in the tiny mirrors they were' al owed it made her look quite grownup. She ran down the empty greystone stairs, tripped and fel into the arms of Sister Elizabeth. "Why such a hurry?""My mother's come to take me out on a party with my father and this is my new dress.""How nice," said Sister Elizabeth,
"but you mustn't . . ." Margie was already off down the passage to the parlor and was jump-ing up and down in front of Agnes hugging and kissing her. "It's the prettiest dress I ever had." Going over to New York on the elevated Margie couldn't talk about anything else but the dress.