Hannah, Divided Read online

  Milkmaid. Joe had not used that nickname in a while.

  “Perhaps it was his time,” she said.

  “Christmas! The good guys never win,” Joe lamented. “Ever!”

  It did not seem to Hannah that Baby Face Nelson could have so much as breathed the same air as the good guys. Some people’s heroes were beyond comprehension.

  “Are you hungry? My ma packed me some leftovers.” Hannah jumped up. “I’ll warm them on the stovetop for us, and we’ll have a feast.”

  “Sounds fine. Thought I’d seen the last of you,” Joe admitted. “The headmistress of Ottley Friends, that Miss Jordan, has been ringing up here every second. I musta took down a gadzillion messages on the phone pad. If Sweet weren’t up in Boston, she’d likely boot you for missing more school than you said. Crumple up the notes, and she’ll never be the wiser. And don’t tell me there’s no such number as gadzillion.”

  “All right, I won’t,” said Hannah, “even if there isn’t.”

  In the kitchen, Hannah found the red wax pencil Beverly had used to make grocery lists. She opened the back door and on it drew a perfect X. Maybe tramps did not come to 5 Delancey Place, but there was plenty of food in this house. Now any passerby could see it plainly. It was one piece of Hepp’s advice she could put into effect. She would add some of her old home into the new. Starting with hospitality.

  31. FUTURE PERFECT

  UPON HER RETURN FROM Boston, Mrs. Sweet summoned Hannah and Joe to the parlor, where she give them the news they had been waiting for. “The Wexler scholarship exams will be held at Thomas Jefferson High School in North Philadelphia on December eighteenth,” she announced. “It’s rumored that nearly one hundred students have registered.

  “My bridge partner, Rose DeVrees, has a boarder, a scrap of a thing from Providence, Rhode Island, who received full academic aid on a Carnegie Scholarship. But I told Rose that our Hannah could count numbers from here to Timbuktu.” The hungry smile Hannah knew well by now appeared in Mrs. Sweet’s face. “Oh, I can pick a clever child from the herd. I wasn’t appointed to the Mayor’s Education Reform Board for nothing. Run along, now. I expect you’ve both got plenty of studying to do.”

  The test was twenty days away, Hannah noted when she was back in her bedroom. Twenty. She tried to get a feel for the number. Twenty was where calcium appeared in the Periodic Chart. 20/20 was perfect vision. Yes, Hannah reassured herself. Twenty meant strong bones and sharp eyes and good luck.

  “Miss Jordan says I deserve a scholarship,” Hannah told Joe the next night after supper. “But, Joe, if each teacher says that to each student, then which ones of us don’t deserve it?”

  “I deserve it,” said Joe. “I’m smart and I’m ready.” He knotted a length of butcher’s twine tight around the remains of a beef brisket while Hannah held the paper in place. They had taken to packing their leftovers into a hamper for Mr. Barnaby, who had come to Hannah’s aid when she had inquired about local soup kitchens. Mr. Barnaby’s fiancée, Eleanor, said she could use anything for the Goodwill with much appreciation.

  Hannah wished she had thought of it beforehand. Sometimes the simplest learning came so slow.

  “Do you think I deserve it?” she asked. “Honest, Joe. Do you think I’m ready?”

  “Who knows? You against me, remember? But it’s a crying shame to give out a taste of learning and then egg-candle us, looking for our dark spots. Picking out the best, sending home the rest.” Joe began to jump around the kitchen, tossing the wrapped brisket and catching it like a football.

  Joe was a piece of India rubber these days, Hannah decided. With the exams approaching, he bounced harder and higher. He was reaching to grab the scholarship with both hands.

  I’m reaching high, too, Hannah thought. I deserve it as much as Joe, don’t I?

  She could not imagine working any harder, and yet at the same time she could feel herself sinking deeper into the usual obstructions. Patterns and sequences began to crowd in thickly from their safe edges to the center of her day. Thirty-two absorbed more time than usual. Sixteen wipes of each side of her face with her washcloth, sixteen raps upon each side of a plate before eating from it, sixteen chews on either side of her mouth before swallowing. She even paced thirty-two times around her room every time she entered or left. It made her comings and goings cumbersome.

  Thirty-two did not stop at the door of Ottley Friends, either. Hannah found herself tapping any doorknob thirty-two taps before using it. Thirty-two was how many times the point of her pencil had to touch the upper right-hand corner of her paper before she got to work.

  The girls noticed. They giggled or made fun, but one of them must have complained to Miss Jordan. When Miss Jordan summoned Hannah to her office, she was sympathetic.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, Hannah. I always triple-check the locks on my front door before I go to sleep.” Miss Jordan leaned forward. “Not once, not twice, but three times!” She laughed gently. Her face was open, inviting Hannah’s confidence. “To me, triple-checking is a safeguard against danger. Is that what you believe your tapping and counting might be? A safeguard against dangers?”

  “It was Helene Lyon who ratted me out, wasn’t it?”

  “Hannah, what an expression! And that’s not the point. The point is that you must try to stop these impulses.”

  “I’ll try to hide them better, Miss Jordan,” Hannah answered truthfully, “but I don’t think I can stop.” Even as she spoke, her fingers itched to tap a pattern on her knees. Her heart was beating fast and frustration prickled at her skin.

  “Dear, there’s no need to shout.” Miss Jordan held out her empty hands, palms up. “I wish I comprehended your affliction, Hannah. It couldn’t be easy for you. But you’ve come so far. It would a shame if you stumbled on account of this distress.”

  Hannah nodded and blinked first one eye then the other.

  Onetwothreefour. Onetwothreefour.

  And again. And again.

  “You are driving yourself into a state,” observed Miss Jordan. “You need to relax and take deep breaths. Also remember to chew your food slowly, and get plenty of sleep.”

  Hannah could feel her cheeks and temper flame. As if she didn’t know that! As if she wanted patterns of thirty-two galloping around and around her brain like tireless horses on a racetrack! Miss Jordan talked as if tapping might be cured with the right trick, like having someone scare you to stop your hiccups!

  Thank goodness for Joe, the one chum who had made the world shrink to a comfortable size. During their evenings of supper and study at the kitchen table, Joe’s good-natured conversation provided freedom from the grip of her day.

  “These word problems are dopey,” Joe declared one night, looking up from a set of drills that Hannah had created just for him. “Christmas! Who cares how many cakes of soap Mr. Hooper sells, or how many miles Milo walks in five point three hours? I say, take the bus, Milo!”

  “Math always means something. It always has an answer. I’ll tell you what’s dopey—grammar.” Hannah scowled at her primer. “These tenses—ugh! The past progressive. The future perfect. ‘I will have been gone.’ ‘We will have been finished.’ Why is it called the future perfect? It’s neither.”

  “The future perfect,” said Joe patiently, “is easy as fish stew.”

  “You’re cracked!” Hannah threw her arms open wide. “The future perfect is like saying that what had happened and what will happen have crashed into each other, like trains on the same rail out of different stations!”

  “Well, all right.” Joe laughed. “Read something good, instead. Look here, I’ve saved you a clipping on our boy Dutch Schultz. He’s out on parole for tax fraud in New York, but if I know the Dutchman, he’ll get himself off scot-free.”

  Joe drew a square of folded newspaper from his trouser pocket and flipped it across the table. “Go on, read it. Schultz is Hoover’s plus Mayor LaGuardia’s new Public Enemy Number One. I’m starting a new scrapbook on him. All right, don’t
read it, then. Gee, you’re so het up, lately, Hannah.”

  “I am not!”

  “You are, too.”

  “Am not!”

  “Are, too, and you should see your face!” Joe looked around, then pushed up from his chair and crossed the kitchen, where he detached the silver metal teakettle from its hook above the sink. He brought it back and held it in front of Hannah as if it were a mirror. “Look!”

  Hannah stared at her dented, lopsided image. She was no Joan Crawford, no Claudette Colbert, either, but her fierce eyes and the passion of feeling that ignited her face startled her so much that she burst out laughing.

  “Well, if I’m het up, then so are you,” she retorted. “Only you bounce, while I boil.”

  “I won’t argue with that,” Joe admitted. “And I won’t argue with you. But you ought to find some enjoyment in your day. You can borrow my skato anytime I’m not using it. I wouldn’t charge you more than a penny an hour.”

  Which was kind of Joe, especially since he loved his skato, but Hannah knew that math itself was her one pure enjoyment. With sharpened focus and speed, egged on by Mr. Cole’s enthusiasm, she redoubled her efforts. She constructed bases, built areas, balanced equations, and memorized the laws of right angles and the hypotenuse. The answer was there, its question a lock to be picked and pried. Natural, integer, rational, real. The answer was always waiting and perfect and standing alone.

  In some ways, Hannah thought, studying was like milking. If you weren’t concentrating on the task in hand, the twitch of a cow tail or buzz of a fly or jump of a cat could shock and tip you smack off your stool.

  Don’t tip, she scolded herself, and then she tapped under her desk eight times, for luck, and then another eight, and then another, and another, until she had to jump up from her desk with her hands squeezed together to make herself stop.

  32. A GLASS WISH

  “I LOST IT IN THE war,” said Mr. Cole abruptly on the afternoon of their final lesson.

  Hannah looked up from her paper. “Lost what?”

  “My eye,” said Mr. Cole. “Grazed by a German Maxim MG. It fires six hundred rounds of bullets per minute, but it only took one bullet to cancel my vision.”

  She put down her pencil. Mr. Cole had never spoken of anything so personal before. He spoke of math, and sometimes of his other passion, coffee—Mr. Cole’s favorite coffee was a roasted bean from the Yakima Valley in Washington, almost impossible to get hold of. But he never spoke of the Great War.

  “Would you like to see it?” he asked. On her surprised look, he offered, “I’ll hold my hand over the socket, so as not to scare you. Because,” he explained, “it’s my superstition that if a scholarship candidate holds my eye and makes a wish, it might come true. Well, frankly,” he added, now looking slightly embarrassed, “I’ve never taught a scholarship candidate.”

  Hannah nodded agreement. “I can see how you might consider your glass eye to be a lucky charm, sir,” she said. “Like my thirty-two.”

  Mr. Cole looked pleased to hear it. He set down his chalk, turned his back, and in the next moment had pivoted around to face her again. He dropped the eye into Hannah’s open palm as his other hand patched tight over his eyeless socket.

  Hannah cupped Mr. Cole’s eye. Warm and marbled blueish-green, it was heavier than she would have imagined. She stared hard into the oblong eye that had watched her so unflinchingly all these weeks. An eye that had checked her homework and looked for her mistakes and remembered to find the places to praise her, too.

  It might be an object through which to see the future. Or, yes, even something to make a wish on.

  “You must have been in shocking pain, sir,” she said. “A horrible thing, to lose an eye.”

  “I would have given more,” Mr. Cole answered quickly. “It’s not much to sacrifice, one eye, if it brings hope that the futures of our children are safe from war. I hope never to bear witness to another.”

  Hannah placed the eyeball in Mr. Cole’s palm and he turned away. When he faced her again, he was his regular, two-eyed self. “Good luck tomorrow, Hannah,” said Mr. Cole. “It’s been difficult for you, these past few weeks. But whatever the result, it is always important to test your mettle.”

  The shock of his words made her flinch. Why, he believes that I will fail, she realized in a pulse of fresh unease. “Mr. Cole, if I don’t get that scholarship, am I finished forever?” she blurted. “It happened to my friend Beverly. She never got a second chance. Who’s to say where I go next?”

  It seemed to her that Mr. Cole’s answer came rushed, as if he had given thought to the matter. “Well now, Hannah, second chances are not impossible,” he said. “There are other schools and other scholarships, if you know how and where to look. Just last week, I read of plans to initiate a Marie Curie Fellowship, that will be particularly encouraging of young female scientists and mathematicians.”

  Hannah bit her lip. “Before he got sick, my granddad McNaughton knew of a school up in Boston. Perhaps I could look into that.” Speaking Granddad’s name set an immediate lump in her throat, and she twisted her fingers together, trying to resist the urge to tap.

  Then she could not help herself and she tapped the sides of her chair.

  Mr. Cole did not reprimand her. “Boston, exactly. Follow up on your tips and leads, as the newsmen say. Now.” The gaze of Mr. Cole’s sighted and glass eye bore into her. “Did you make a wish?”

  Hannah nodded yes, although she had forgotten.

  33. AN OTTLEY FRIEN D

  “I HAVE ONE FINAL announcement,” said Miss Jordan toward the end of that afternoon’s school assembly.

  Soft grumbling and squeaks of shoes on the bare floor sounded in impatient protest. It was the last hour before Ottley Friends let out for the holiday break, and the assembly had been interminable, with assorted recitations, hymns, and concertos.

  Plenty of style, thought Hannah, but with little of the intimacy of a Miss Cascade production.

  Miss Jordan squinted from her podium and spied Hannah in a shadowy corner of the theater. Dread sent a twinge down her spine. Don’t, her mind whispered fervently. Don’t point me out.

  Unfortunately, Miss Jordan was no mind reader. “Hannah Bennett, will you stand up a moment, please?”

  Reluctant, mortified, Hannah rose to her feet while the speculating eyes of the other girls met hers as they turned to stare. Whatever this was about, she wished she had been warned! Personal appearance had not been first in her thoughts these past weeks. After two months’ growth, her bobbed hair exactly resembled the haystack Roy had called it. Besides which, she was wearing her same wrinkled middy from yesterday. She probably looked as if she had been receiving fashion tips straight from Mr. Cole.

  Beaming and oblivious, Miss Jordan lifted her voice. “Everyone knows that Hannah Bennett has been our guest here at Ottley Friends as she prepares for the very difficult Wexler scholarship exam that is taking place tomorrow. Mr. Cole has declared that Hannah’s achievement in mathematics is equal to a college student’s. I, too, can vouch that her progress in other subjects has won my confidence.” Miss Jordan’s smile raised Hannah’s own hopes. “Girls, join me in wishing Hannah good luck tomorrow.”

  “Good luck tomorrow, Hannah,” sang the uninspired chorus. Yet some of the girls’ gazes lingered, even after Hannah mumbled her thanks and ducked deep into her seat. Well, college-level mathematics was no small potatoes, as Joe would say, thought Hannah with some pride. More importantly, Miss Jordan spoke with real faith in her abilities. Perhaps the scholarship was within her reach, after all.

  After the Ottley Friend’s alma mater was sung and the assembly dismissed for the year, Hannah darted from the theater to avoid the gaggles of socializing and holiday plans. Halfway down the corridor, a voice stopped her.

  “Hannah! Wait a minute!”

  She turned.

  Lillian Shay’s plump cheeks were pink as she hurried to catch up. “I don’t know when you’re going back to … um …
your country home,” she started, her soft hands twisting the straps of her beaded purse, which was the Ottley fashion fad of the moment. “But some of us girls are gathering at my house tomorrow evening. It’s my family’s annual Christmas tree-trimming party. I’d be keen for you to come, too. That is, if you’re not tired out from test taking.”

  Before Hannah could answer, Lillian reached into her purse and pulled from it a small green envelope. On it, the name Miss Hannah Bennett was neatly scripted in gold ink. As if Hannah, too, were one of Lillian’s friends. For a moment, a sparkle of excitement lit inside her. She’d never been to a tree-trimming party—what fun! What a thing to tell the girls back home!

  Then reason caught the better of her.

  “I appreciate your charity, Lillian, but I’m afraid I must decline,” she said. “You’ve spelled my name wrong besides. It’s Miss Tippity-tap to you girls, isn’t it?”

  The pink in Lillian’s cheeks deepened. “I’m not offering charity. And I didn’t mean to tease about your funny tapping habits, queer as they are. At least, I didn’t mean for you to overhear. Oh, Hannah, do you truly think I don’t know how perfectly hateful it is to wear an affliction on the outside?” she exclaimed in a burst of feeling. “Gosh, I’m forever being teased about my weight—no matter how much I’d love to be slim, it’s an impossible task. Everyone’s terribly hard on me for it. No one seems to understand that it’s not for lack of work or will.” Lillian’s face was puckered with sincerity. “Hannah, if it’s not too late, I’d like to make amends.”

  She extended her hand that held the envelope. Hannah’s gold-scripted name glinted temptingly. “Please. Would you consider it?”

  With careful fingers, Hannah reached out and took the invitation. Then she slipped it deep into her pocket. She swallowed; her throat had become dry with unexpected and overwhelming shyness. “Thank you, Lillian,” she said. “I’m not leaving for Chadds Ford until Monday. Of course I’ll consider it. And,” she added honestly, “I think it’s awfully nice of you to consider me, too.”