Skating with the Statue of Liberty Read Free Page B

play cards?” He pulled a deck out of the small bag by his feet.
    “Me play!” Giselle whined, wiggling down from AuntGeraldine’s lap and crawling over Maman so that she could squeeze in between the boys.
    “You’re too little,” said Jean-Paul.
    Giselle climbed onto Jean-Paul’s lap and grabbed at the cards, knocking some to the floor.
    “Giselle!” Jean-Paul cried out.
    “Maman!” Gustave said, nudging his mother across the aisle. “Tell Aunt Geraldine that Giselle is annoying us!”
    Maman groaned. “Can’t you boys tell her a story? Then maybe she’ll go to sleep. She’s cranky because she’s tired.”
    “No way. Not me. You do it, Gustave.”
    “She’s
your
sister.”
    “Forget it.”
    Aunt Geraldine was already asleep in the corner, leaning against the window, her head tilted back and her mouth slightly open. Gustave looked reluctantly at Giselle, who was sucking her curled index finger. She was a decent sort of kid when she was in a good mood, but she was being aggravating right now, and he couldn’t think of any fairy tales. Then he grinned, remembering the way Marcel had once narrated “The Three Little Pigs” for a skit at Boy Scouts.
    “Once there were three stupid little pigs and a very smart, hungry wolf,” Gustave started. “But one of the pigs wasn’t
quite
as dumb as the others.”
    Giselle took her finger out of her mouth and looked at him with big, dark eyes.
“Les maisons?”
    “Yep, you know this story? They made houses.”
    By the time he had gotten to the part of the story where the wolf tries to blow down the brick house, Giselle had fallen asleep. Gustave finished the story out loud anyway, murmuring it to himself. He wasn’t going to stop before telling the best part—the part where the wolf slides down the chimney, lands in the boiling water, screams his way back up the chimney, and runs away forever. Giselle’s curly head was heavy, warm, and damp on his arm. Gustave shoved her upright several times, trying to get her to lean on Jean-Paul instead, but she kept flopping back against him, and finally he let her stay there. Across the aisle, Maman’s eyes were closed. Jean-Paul seemed to have fallen asleep too, with his head leaning against the rain-spattered window. Gustave let his head fall back on the seat, listening to the wheels of the train, the chuff of the engine, and the intermittent, lonesome wail of the whistle.
    In the darkness, behind his closed eyes, Gustave could be almost anywhere. His mind drifted along with the rhythm of the train wheels. Gradually, the wheels started to sound like the ticking of the clock in their old apartment in Paris, where they had lived before the war. In his mind, Gustave could see the way the sunlight fell across the wooden floor. It was Sunday morning, and he was running with Marcel and Jean-Paul down the steps of the apartment building and over to the bakery at the corner. For a moment, Gustave could almost smell fresh French bread, could feel it, warm and crusty, in his hand.
    He pulled himself awake, focusing his eyes on the cold American night outside and the rain running downthe train window. He wouldn’t think about Paris again. That world was gone. Misery twisted inside him. The Nazis were in Paris now, their soldiers on the streets in ugly green uniforms, their banners draped arrogantly over French buildings. Although Gustave and his parents had fled Paris just before the Germans came, he had seen photos in the newspaper. Sometimes Jean-Paul talked about what it had been like, but he usually wouldn’t say much.
    Gustave pushed his memories of Paris away fiercely. If he wanted to think about France, he might as well think about the tiny village of Saint-Georges-sur-Cher, where he and his parents had been living until recently. Things were better there because, unlike Paris, it wasn’t in the part of France occupied by the Germans. But even in Unoccupied France, the Germans still told the French leaders what to