Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin Read Free Book Online Page B

every few minutes, an engine whistled, the platform quivered, and one of the seventy-five daily trains swallowed up a new group of commuters for the thirty-eight-minute ride to Penn Station that had made suburban living possible. Now, the fathers departed, our neighborhood, like some newly conquered province, belonged to the women and children.
    At my mother’s assenting nod, I dashed next door to fetch my best friend, Elaine Friedle, and together we gathered up our gang, upward of a dozen children roughly our age, and began our day’s activities. After breakfast, our energy at its height, we raced our bikes down the street, with playing cards clothespinned to the spokes to simulate the sound of a motorcycle, challenging one another to see how many times we could circle the block without holding on to the handlebars. Carelessly discarding bikes on the nearest lawn, skate keys dangling from multicolored lanyards around our necks, we zipped past each other on roller skates, throwing up our hands and shouting in the sheer exuberance of our performance. Then it was on to our endless games of hide-and-seek. My favorite game was ring-a-levio, in which the players on one team would crawl carefully up to the protected circle, hoping to free an imprisoned teammate, and would dart away with a squeal if intercepted by one of the opposing team’s guards.

    My friends from the block were like an extended family: me, Eddie and Eileen Rust, Elaine Lubar, Marilyn Greene, Elaine Friedle, Ginny and Judy Rust. The house in which I grew up was modest in size; for my parents, however, it was the realization of a dream.

    Our days might have seemed shapeless to an adult, but to us, there seemed a definite rhythm to our activities. When we began to tire, we played potsy, a form of hopscotch, on the sidewalk, leisurely jumped rope, rolled marbles, played jacks, or flipped cards against the stoop to see who could come closest to the bottom stair without actually hitting it. After lunch on steamy afternoons when there was no baseball game in progress and no one to take us to the beach, we would jump through the spray of one of the sprinklers which were constantly watering our precious lawns, or lounge on blankets in the shade of a favorite tree for games of Go Fish, Monopoly, and Chinese Checkers.
    In the late-afternoon sun, we set up our Kool Aid stands, strategically placed to catch our fathers as they returned in twenty-minute intervals from work, rounding the corners with jackets over their arms as they walked down our street, their faces glistening with sweat, anxious, we thought, for the refreshing drinks we were glad to sell them for the price of a nickel. As my father approached,trying, usually without much success, to maintain a professional demeanor, I would hand him a cup and happily receive the coin he placed in my palm. Soon the summons would come from the front doors of the houses, and we would race in to dinner, not because we were hungry, but in the hope that if we finished quickly enough we could reassemble for another hour or so of play before the encroaching dark put an end to our day on the block.
    The small section of Southard Avenue that lay between St. James and Capitolian was my world. Our street, unconnected to any major thoroughfare, and lined by large maple trees which cast a cooling shadow on our activities, was our common land—our playground, our park, our community. If an occasional car passed, we would stand aside, waiting impatiently for the intruder to leave our domain. If we never thought of our neighborhood as safe, that was because it never occurred to us that it could be otherwise—except, of course, for the weed-choked hovel on the corner where the strange and fearsome “Old Mary” lived.
    The house in which I grew up was modest in size, situated on less than a tenth of an acre, and separated from the neighboring houses by the narrowest of driveways and a slender strip of grass. For my parents, however, as