Fool's Errand E-Book

Jenna Zark

• Herausgeber: Dragon Moon Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: The Beat Street Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 251

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

When her best friend Sophie goes missing, 12-year-old Ruby Tabeata has a choice: wait for her friend to come home or defy her parents and find Sophie. 

Set during the 1950s Blacklist era when writers like Sophie’s mom were being jailed or fired, Fool’s Errand sends Ruby out of her city and her comfort zone.

With nothing to rely on but her grit and determination, Ruby has to outsmart the men chasing Sophie and her mom—discovering that whether or not you succeed, trying to save a friend is never a fool’s errand.

Read part one of this middle-grade Beat Street Series, The Beat on Ruby’s Street, to learn how Ruby’s story begins. 

Please Note: narrative language and dialogue was designed to evoke the 1950s. The author does not condone 1950s language in present times.  

Leseprobe

FOOL’S ERRAND

BOOK 2

THE BEAT STREET SERIES

Jenna Zark

Copyright © 2018 Jenna Zark

All rights reserved. Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form, by any means now known or hereinafter invented, including, but not limited to, xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any known storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

PRINT ISBN 978-1-77400-001-4

EPUB ISBN 978-1-77400-002-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Cover Design by Gwen Gades

Edited by Sandra Nguyen

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons, living or deceased, is unintentional. In addition, narrative language and dialogue was designed to evoke the 1950s. The author does not condone 1950s language in present times.

www.dragonmoonpress.com

To Pete, Josh, Lesley, Tara, Max, and Faye

And the artists who refused to give up

Acknowledgments

This book and series are dedicated to Susan Jeffers Casel, who encouraged me to create Ruby and whose courage, brilliance, and beauty will continue to shine, and whose season will always be summer.

I also want to thank Kim Hines, Rita Itzkowitz, and Caroline Kennedy for their insights, and the exceptional Pam Labbe for shepherding my work forward and making it visible.

I’m grateful as well to my brilliant editor Sandra Nguyen and cover artist/publisher Gwen Gades for her beautiful work and for delivering this book into your hands.

1—UNDER A BRIDGE

Sophie is missing.

I don’t know for how long, but I know she’s gone.

She’s my best friend in the world, since forever. Not exactly a Beat Generation-artist-type ’cause her mother was rich, but Mrs. T was the best comedy writer in town and the best mom to Sophie. (Sometimes I wish she was my mom.)

If you want to help me look, Sophie’s mother‘s name is Annie Tanya. I call her Mrs. T sometimes because it’s quicker, and she doesn’t seem to mind.

I say she was rich because the pile of money Mrs. T made is shrinking, and that happened because she lost her job. Something about the Blacklist, which is connected to how the government sees you, but it’s dumb because Mrs. Tanya doesn’t care about politics.

Funny isn’t easy, she always says, but she makes it look that way. She’s written scripts for a ton of TV shows and is mainly the only lady comedy writer in the world. She worked with guys like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon—some of the funniest funny men in the world—and a few years back wrote for Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. That was 1954, just four years ago, and she worked there just about four years, too. A producer named Max brought her into the business. I know every big shot in town is named Max, but that really is his name.

Sophie’s mom is also beautiful, like a dark-haired Doris Day, and I always thought she could be a great actress. But Sophie’s the real actress in the family. And since both of us were little, Mrs. T tried out her jokes on us and made us laugh.

Here’s what I learned works best when you’re trying to be funny:

• Bad jokes work best in the middle of an argument

• Hiccups can be funny, but not as funny as you think

• Jokes about politicians and people and things we know

• Things we think and never say

• Saying them in funny voices (Sophie’s specialty)

No one knows if Mrs. T is going to get the chance to be funny anymore because of the Blacklist—which isn’t something you can find lying around, but it exists the same as we do. You only mostly get on the list if someone at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Congress accuses you of being a Communist. I asked Sophie what that meant, and she says Communists are people in Russia who rebelled against rich guys who were lording it over everyone else.

But then somehow or other, this maniac named Joseph Stalin took over, and he started killing everyone right and left, and even though he’s dead, the people who took over are still dictators.

Mainly I think Congress believes everyone in Russia has cooties, which is what the kids around here say about people nobody likes. And Congress doesn’t want Americans to get them.

A lot of writers and actors in Hollywood thought the Communists were good guys at first, and then those writers and actors changed their minds. But that House Committee thinks there’s still a lot of Communists running around over here, and have to be “rooted out.”

The HUAC folks started pulling all these actors into court hearings and asking them questions. “Did you ever go to a meeting with Communists? Who are the Communists you know?” Mrs. T’s husband brought her to some meetings a long time ago, but she was never a Communist. She just went to the meetings because he asked her to go.

But if the committee wants you to name the people you met at meetings, they want you to rat on your friends, who are just like Mrs. T and didn’t mean any harm. If the committee asks you questions and you don’t want to answer them, you can say “I plead the Fifth,” which means you don’t have to speak about anything that could hurt you in court.

Except… once you plead the Fifth, the committee sends your name to all the producers in Hollywood and New York and you get blacklisted, and no one, I mean NO one, will hire you anymore. Period.

Plus some people even go to jail if they don’t name their friends.

This whole Blacklist thing didn’t just happen to Mrs. T—it happened to a lot of people, and because Sophie and her mom are Jewish, somehow that makes it worse, because a lot of people say bad things about Jews, which is stupid. Mrs. T’s producer Max is Jewish too, and he’s also in trouble with the House Committee.

What happened was Mrs. T wrote a sketch for a play that a group of actors were doing. Some were on the Blacklist already, and they wanted to let audiences know what was happening. The sketch Mrs. T wrote was pretty funny and made it look like all you had to do was eat red cereal to be called a Communist.

Except somebody who saw the play told the House Committee that Mrs. T was a Communist. And because Max helped produce the play, he got in trouble too, and both Max and Mrs. T got fired. That wasn’t fair at all, because it’s a free country and you’re supposed to be able to write whatever you want. Except Congress doesn’t see it that way.

The weird thing is, nobody thought this stuff could even happen in 1958. The Blacklist has been going on for like ten, twelve years, but it’s still happening and no one knows when it will end, if ever.

I don’t know how it started exactly, but there was a senator named Joseph McCarthy going after Communists in the government until he died a few years ago. Then the House of Representatives started bothering entertainers. If you don’t answer them the way they want, they write your name on a list that says you’re “Red,” which is the same thing as Communist. They share it with the papers and everyone else.

My mother Nell—I call her Nell-mom—says the suits in Congress just want you to conform, which means going to work and wearing ties, and if you’re a woman, staying home making Jell-O.

I hate Jell-O.

In Greenwich Village, here, Beats try to do the opposite of conforming, because we want to do things differently from regular people. And the last thing anyone expected was for Mrs. T and her producer Max to get this House Committee on their tails.

For as long as I’ve known them, Sophie and her mom were going gangbusters through the world. They had the biggest apartment I’d ever seen, and I loved going over there.

When Mrs. T lost her job in May, she tried to find some way to write on the Q-T, which means the down-low. You have to make up a name, or just write something and let someone else take the credit. I would hate that, but Mrs. T says she’d be lucky to find that kind of thing.

But because most of the writers are cats—I mean guys, not chicks—I mean ladies—it’s harder for Mrs. T to find work. She has some money saved up, but she also has to pay a lawyer in case those Congress guys bring her in for questioning. And lawyers are expensive, which means they cost a lot.

When Mrs. T had to stop working at the TV station, she started having trouble paying rent, because the apartment she and Sophie live in is expensive, too. And since Sophie’s dad left the family years ago, Mrs. T has to come up with every penny.

Nell-mom said they could crash at our place for a while—I’ve got bunk beds and there’s a fold-out in the living room—and they were here for a couple of weeks. Mrs. T told my mom they couldn’t impose on us anymoreeven though Nell-mom said we were in no hurry to get rid of them, which I didn’t like because it sounded like they were pets. But Mrs. Tanya said she thought they should go to New Jersey, where they have relatives. Except Sophie told me later that’s a story like the ones her mom makes up for TV.

Now it’s June and school’s out, which is good, because Sophie and me and our friend Gordy were really looking forward to being free for the summer. This year was the first time any of us had ever been to a real school, because we were mostly learning on our own at a store called Blue Skies in the neighborhood. The owners picked that name because their names are Sky and Blu.

Like I said, Beats don’t usually do what everyone else does, unless a social worker makes us. Which is what happened this year—and it’s why we had to start going to a regular school. Today was our last day, and Gordy wanted to get sodas at Sorocco’s to celebrate, even though we’d only been in classrooms for a month and a half. I think I can speak for everyone and say that was more school than any Beat should put up with, and we don’t want to go back in the fall.

Sophie said she’d see us later, ’cause she wanted to go home and see her mom. That was the last I saw of her, walking down Bleecker and heading over to Charles, getting smaller and smaller as she walked away.

I would have been home sooner, but it started raining buckets all of a sudden, and Gordy and I stayed inside Sorocco’s a while, waiting for it to stop. It didn’t stop exactly, but there was a break in the rain and we both left and by the time I got home, all the suitcases were gone and there was no Sophie and no Mrs. T.

That was around five, and now it’s close to midnight and extremely hot and humid, so you feel like you’re in a bathtub when you go outside, or even stick your head out the window like Mrs. Belusa does at my old digs on Perry Street when she’s yelling at you. We saw that Mrs. T left a note about that New Jersey relative, but of course I know better. I tried to tell Nell-mom, but she refuses to get upset.

I think Nell-mom changed after she married Chaz. She thinks it’s a good change, but I’d argue differently. She’s worried about me and my older brother Ray getting mad at her, so she’s always trying to be as sweet as pie, which feels like she turned into the kind of mom you’d see on TV—not that we have a television.

Because Chaz owns a gallery and charges high prices for his paintings (including Nell-mom’s), we get to live in a nice pad and things are mostly comfy-cozy. That’s if you don’t mind having your real dad on the road all the time and your brother skipping out whenever he can to join your father’s band.

Nell-mom has this thing, and she says all mothers have it: they want their kids to be happy. She’d do anything to make me happy, she says, and I don’t think I can tell her this, but if you try too hard, sometimes you do the opposite. Nell-mom is definitely, truly, completely trying too hard.

When I try to get her riled up over something, and I used to be pretty good at it, she smiles and acts real patient and wants to talk through what’s bothering me.

That’s nasty. And I even think she knows it.

“There’s no New Jersey relatives,” I tell her. “Sophie and her mom are under a bridge somewhere.”

“Oh, Ruby,” she says. “Annie must have had a good reason for leaving, and she would have told me if she and her daughter had nowhere to go. She wouldn’t put Sophie at risk like that.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

Nell-mom frowns. “What do you want me to do?”

I look at her, trying to figure out how far she’ll let me go.

“Come out with me and look for them?”

“It’s nearly midnight. You need to go to bed,” Nell-mom replies.

“How can I?”

“We’ll look tomorrow, Ruby.”

“Tomorrow could be too late.”

“I’m sure Annie knows what she’s doing,” Nell-mom says. “I trust her.”

I shake my head and look out the window, while Nell-mom goes over to the kitchen table and picks up a sketch pad to draw. I’m thinking about this couple I saw once under the Brooklyn Bridge when we had a school field trip about a month ago. A man and a woman sharing a sandwich, and when you got closer, you could see their clothes were dirty and torn, and the woman’s eyes were hungry, like an alley cat’s outside a diner at closing time.

How did that couple land under that bridge? Where did they live before? Did they have a wedding with a white dress and cake like Nell-mom and Chaz? Or did they just sort of live together like Nell-mom and my father, Gary Daddy-o? Do they have kids? And if they do, are the kids in a children’s home like I was for a while, until Nell-mom said she’d get married and brought me home? Did the man lose his job? Did either one of them even have jobs?

And why isn’t Nell-mom worried? Maybe it’s because she worries so much about me and Ray she doesn’t have room to worry about anyone else. Or maybe she just wants to focus on her art now that she finally has a little more money than she used to. Whatever the problem is, I don’t think I can get her upset about it. She’s just too focused on staying calm.

I put my hands on the kitchen window, which is starting to fog up with drizzle. Sophie, please don’t be under the Brooklyn Bridge tonight. I close my eyes and all I can do is think of you with your mom, trying to eat a roll you found in the garbage somewhere. What if you don’t even find that much?

I’m happy it’s not cold, but I’m also worried about where you’ll be when it turns cold. Luckily that won’t happen for a while. June is the month when the sun gets hotter and brighter, bongos are everywhere like sprouts all over the streets, and fruit blossoms into bunches of green, red, orange, and yellow on the bins outside stores. So it’s a pretty nice time to be outside.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to hightail it out of here right this minute. I can’t sit around here worrying. I just can’t.

Ray’s in his room, getting ready to meet Gary Daddy-o tomorrow on a gig in Maryland. He stuck around for the rest of the school year, but I have a feeling he’ll be gone until next fall. He understands about Sophie and her mom though, and even offered them his room for the summer. I just think Mrs. T was too proud to take it.

I wonder if Ray would go out with me, since Nell-mom looks tired, and once she and Chaz go to bed, we hardly see them until morning. I look out the window again, watching the soft white shine of streetlights on the building next door.

I start remembering all the slumber parties Sophie and I had growing up. Nights like this, we’d tell ghost stories with a flashlight until we both cracked up. We talked about moving to Paris when we both turn sixteen, which is four years away since we both turned twelve this year. My birthday was in April and Sophie’s was in February.

Whenever we talked about leaving, we said we’d wait tables at a café and get clothes that would be très chic so we could go to theater parties. Of course we’d have to learn French so I could write poetry like I want to do, and she could act in plays and TV shows.

She must have known they were leaving.

I knock on Ray’s door and he says, “Come in.”

He’ll be sixteen in September, and is starting to get tall and lean like Gary Daddy-o even though he looks mostly like Nell-mom, with blue eyes and curly hair. He’s got his suitcase open on the bed and the whole room’s a mess, with shirts and jeans and jackets strewn everywhere. Even the pictures on the walls have undershirts hanging from their corners. I ask him to go out and look for Sophie and her mom with me.

“Where?” he asks, and I stare at him. “Where do we even look?”

Good question. I look outside, trying to imagine where I’d go if I was Sophie.

“We could start with restaurants and stuff in the neighborhood—”

“They’re not in a restaurant,” Ray says.

“Where, then?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “They went somewhere far, don’t you think? Train station? They’d buy their tickets and wait around for their train? I don’t think they’d ride the rails.”

No, that wouldn’t be Mrs. Tanya’s style, though the idea of it makes me think of Sophie in a comedy movie, wearing an oversized hat and floppy coat.

“Where would they get a train?” I ask. “Where would they go?”

“I don’t know,” Ray replies. “But they’d buy their tickets at Grand Central Station on Forty-Second Street.”

“Can we go there?”

“I’ll go, but we’re taking a taxi,” says Ray. “I’m not waiting for a bus right now.”

All of a sudden, I’m loving my Ray-Ray because ever since Gary Daddy-o and Nell-mom split up, he’s become the kind of brother I always wanted him to be. Whatever he gets from his gigs with Gary Daddy-o, he spends, and it’s usually on other people—which is just about the most Beat thing you can possibly do. Even if part of him knows this may well be a fool’s errand that won’t work out, Ray won’t complain. He’ll just dummy up and ride along.

You probably know this already, but Beats don’t like money or buying too much stuff—or much of anything else that makes most people happy. Poets like Jack Kerouac say the Beats are “the root, the soul of Beatific,” “rising from underground,” the “hipsters of America.” That’s how Ray and I were raised to be. Just don’t call us Beatniks—that’s a Hollywood word.

“Think we’ll find a taxi?” I ask.

“No idea,” Ray says, closing the apartment door as quietly as he can.

“Let’s go down a few blocks to the avenue?” I ask, and he frowns, but walks along with me. Luckily, a cab stops when we’ve only gone a little ways and a lady gets out. We rush inside before the cabbie can turn around.

“What the—”

“Grand Central,” I tell him. “And step on it.”

I’ve just always wanted to say that.

But the cabbie gives me more than I bargained for. He’s weaving in and out of streets and nearly runs into three other cabs trying to get us there. I don’t even know what streets we’re on because he’s going so fast. All I can do is cringe when I hear his brakes squealing, which happens every other second. When he finally pulls up to the curb at Grand Central Station, I’m practically drenched from sweating buckets, but Ray is laughing hysterically. He pays the cabbie and I jump out, fighting the urge to kiss the ground.

“Keep the change,” Ray says, and I grab his hand and pull him toward me. I don’t want either one of us near that cab again for the rest of our lives. Ray lets me drag him into Grand Central before he drops my hand.

“Where—”

“This way,” Ray says, pointing toward the central ticket booths.

“No,” I tell him. “If they’re here, they’ll be in the waiting room.”

We walk through the station, edging closer to the benches. It looks like there are mostly single people waiting for their trains, but here and there you can spot families, with kids wailing or trying to go to sleep. A guy is feeding dog biscuits to a German shepherd and someone else is cooing to what seems like a guinea pig in a cage. For some reason, it’s not noisy even though a ton of people are here. In fact, it’s not noisy at all.

Sophie, Sophie, where are you?

“Look, Ruby!”

Ray’s voice shatters the quiet and I stop in my tracks to look at him. Wouldn’t you know it, he’s pointing upward at the ceiling.

“What are you—”

“Just look!”

Twinkly yellow stars and constellations in a turquoise sea meet my eyes.

“Zodiac,” Ray says, and for once I don’t want to tease him about being obvious, because I never learned much about stars at Blue Skies. I was hectoring Sky and Blu to take me to the Planetarium, but they never got around to it. This zodiac mural has a lot of cool stuff, like Aquarius, the water carrier; Pisces, the fish; Aries, the ram; Taurus, the bull; Gemini, the twins; and Cancer, the crab; plus constellations like Orion, the hunter.

Normally I’d stand here staring at this stuff for hours, but I’m just too worried right now. “It’s great, Ray,” I tell him, “but we’ve got to find Sophie.”

“Just for a second, Ruby,” says Ray. “See Pegasus?”

I’ve read about Pegasus in a comic they had at Blue Skies. I think he was Sophie’s favorite, because she loves horses and this one could fly. I can’t help but think of her looking up at him tonight.

“Just wanted you to see,” Ray says, and then for some reason, or no reason at all, my eye falls on a bench with a mother and daughter at the opposite end of the station room. Maybe it was Pegasus; maybe it was just taking my eye off the benches for a while; or maybe it was just the color blue they used on the zodiac that perked me up, but I felt like I could see more clearly now than I had since Sophie disappeared.

The woman had dark chin-length hair like Mrs. T and her daughter’s was only a teeny bit longer—like Sophie’s. I couldn’t tell if the girl had glasses, but it looked like she had a royal-blue sweatshirt the exact same color as my friend’s, and the back of her head—leaning on her mother’s shoulder—was exactly the same.

I ran like the wind, faster than Pegasus, with Ray right behind and then overtaking me. He practically flew at the bench, blocking my view until I grabbed at his shirt and he stopped, suddenly, his sneakers squeaking on the marble tiles of the floor.

“Soph?” I call, but when the woman looks up at me all I see are the tired eyes of a stranger. I can tell Ray is staring at me but I don’t want to look at him. If I do, I’ll have to admit something, and I don’t want to own it right now. Both of us know it anyway.

Sophie’s gone.

2—ON THE FLY

Miss Ruby Tabeata

18 Charles Street

New York City, NY

June 15, 1958

First of all, Ruby, I’m so, so, SO, SO sorry! I hope you won’t forever be mad at me—PLEASE!!!!!

I made my mother drop everything this morning so we could find a mailbox. Believe me, I know what you’re going through!!! I went through it myself when you disappeared after that social worker and the police invaded your home last spring. I was miserable the whole time you were away, wondering if I’d ever see you again, and that was for barely a week. I was furious someone like Mrs. Levitt could decide your parents weren’t good enough, just because they weren’t exactly married and you didn’t go to a real school. Everyone knows you have great parents, and you, me, and Gordy learned more from Sky and Blu than we’ll ever learn anywhere else.

No one was listening to me, though. All I could do was run over to your place and get your sweet kitty Solange and promise her we’d figure out how to get you back. All she could do was blink and meow at me. I think you know in your heart that no one in the whole world was gladder to see you than I was when you finally DID get back.

Okay, that was all of the FIRST of all.

SECOND, Mom and I are okay, and nothing bad is happening to us. No bandits on the road, no evil monsters or police chasing us, and we’re not being followed by the FBI (at least, not yet). Thank you, by the way, for being my bestest friend in the universe and understanding that even though I’m in a show-biz family and I want to be in show biz, I’m NOT being dramatic. I’m being real.

And now you don’t know where I am and you’re frantic. If I could call you I would, (if I could HUG you I would!) —but all I have is a letter right now. I wish I could ask the postman to drop all his other letters and just scooch this one over to your place. I really, really do.

THIRD. I was right when I told you we weren’t going to New Jersey. Where we really are is in Connecticut, because that’s where Mom’s producer Max lives, and as you know, he lost his job too. He has an old country house in Westport, which I’d give anything for because I think it’s where Lucy and Ricky Ricardo moved to for the last season on their comedy TV show. It’s a beautiful house and I wish we could stay here forever!!! But of course we can’t.

In fact Max says he’s going to have to sell this place and get a smaller place closer to the city and he’s so worried about the House Un-American Activities Committee he disconnected his phone and he falls apart every time we talk about it. He keeps saying, “I’m so sorry, Liebchen,” in that furry German-Jewish accent of his, and hugs my mom while he buries his head in her shoulder. Then she pats him on the back and says, “Now, now, Max.”

He looks so terrible Mom has to try and cheer him up, which is good because you know how impossible it is not to laugh when you’re around her. She starts imitating a congressman asking questions, patting an imaginary belly and harrumphing, and pretty soon Max and me are laughing our heads off. But wouldn’t you know it, Ruby, Max is laughing so hard there are tears in the corner of his eyes, and then he starts blubbering and Mom has to start all over again. And I can tell she’s getting tired.

When he’s not sad and Liebchen-ing, he’s trying to figure out how to help us. His big idea is to send us out to the Midwest to a town called Hammond, Indiana. He says he once had an uncle there and there’s good boardinghouses where we can stay. Plus, he can give us a little money to tide us over until my mom finds work.

I can’t even bear the thought of going, but Max and Mom both say they don’t think we have a choice. Max says Hammond is only 35 miles south of Chicago and that’s almost as big a city as New York. He promises Chicago has theater and bookstores and movies and jazz. But honestly, Ruby, how can anything compare to New York?

Of course, we don’t have a car, so we’ll have to find a bus or train to get into the city. I just hate the thought of leaving Ricky and Lucy’s neighborhood and most of all, leaving our own neighborhood and leaving you.

But Mom says she’s always been an optimist and we’re going to make it. We just don’t know how yet, but we will. We’re leaving first thing on a train to Indiana, and we should be there in a few days’ time.

We have enough money for a couple weeks, Mom says, and we may have to find some kind of cleaning work to tide us over. Last night I practiced cleaning our bedroom and Max’s bathroom, which was an unholy mess, tell you the truth. I wiped the sink down with toilet paper and dried it and scrubbed the floor around the toilet, just to get used to being a maid.