The Family Under the Bridge Read online

  FOR

  Mary Lindley Steere

  THE FAMILY UNDER THE BRIDGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  ONCE there was an old hobo named Armand who wouldn't have lived anywhere but in Paris. So that is where he lived.

  Everything that he owned could be pushed around in an old baby buggy without any hood, so he had no worries about rents or burglars. All the ragged clothing he owned was on his back, so he didn't need to bother with trunks or dry-cleaners.

  It was easy for him to move from one hidey-hole to another so that is what he was doing one late morning in December. It was a cold day with the gray sky hanging on the very chimney pots of Paris. But Armand did not mind because he had a tickly feeling that something new and exciting was going to happen to him today.

  He hummed a gay tune to himself as he pushed his buggy through the flower market at the side of Notre Dame cathedral.

  The flowers reminded him that someday it would be spring even though it wasn't bad winter yet.

  There were pots of fragile hyacinths and tulips crowded together on planks in front of the stalls. There were pink carnations and oleanders in great tin pails. Most of all there were bouquets of red-beaded holly, clumps of white-pearled mistletoe and little green fir trees because it would soon be Christmas. Armand's keen eye caught sight of a pile of broken branches and wilted flowers swept away from one stall. "Anabel" was the name written over the stall, and Armand touched his black beret to the stocky woman whose blue work apron hung below her wooly coat.

  "By your leave and in gratitude for your generosity, ma-dame," he said to the woman who was surely Anabel. He piled the broken branches on top of his belongings in the baby buggy. Then he fastidiously picked a sprig of dried holly from the litter and pulled it through his torn buttonhole. He wanted to look his best for whatever gay adventure was waiting for him this day.

  The woman who must have been Anabel only frowned at Armand as he trundled his buggy toward the Rue de Corse. Past the ancient buildings he shuffled, his buggy headed for the far branch of the Seine River.

  But as he entered the square in front of Notre Dame, a hand grasped his arm from behind.

  "Your fortune, monsieur," wheedled a musical voice. "You will meet with adventure today."

  Armand let go of the handle of the buggy and whirled around to face a gypsy woman in a short fur coat and full, flowered skirt.

  He gave her a gap-toothed smile. "You, Mireli," he greeted her. "Your people are back in Paris for the winter?"

  The gypsy woman's dark face beamed under the blue scarf. "Doesn't one always spend the winters in Paris?" she asked, as if she were a woman of fashion. "But have you taken to the streets so early?"

  Armand shrugged his shoulders under the long overcoat that almost reached to his ankles. "It's back under the bridge for me," he answered. "I've had enough of the crowded corners and tight alleys in the Place Maubert. And I'm tired of sorting rags for that junk dealer. I'm ready for that adventure you're promising me."

  Mireli could understand. "That courtyard we rent seems like a cage after the freedom of the long, winding roads," she said, "but the men have found plenty of work for the winter. A city with as many restaurants as Paris has more than enough

  pots and pans to be mended. Of course the children can talk of nothing but the fields and woods of spring."

  "I can't abide children," grumped Armand. "Starlings they are. Witless, twittering, little pests."

  Mireli shook her finger at him. "You think you don't like children," she said, "but it is only that you are afraid of them. You're afraid the sly little things will steal your heart if they find out you have one."

  Armand grunted and took the handle of the buggy again. Mireli waved him away, swaying on bare feet squeezed into tarnished silver sandals. "If you change your mind about the bridge, you can come to live with us," she invited. "We're beyond the Halles—where they're tearing down the buildings near the old Court of Miracles."

  Armand tramped under the black, leafless trees and around the cathedral by the river side without even giving it a glance.

  In the green park behind the flying buttresses, some street urchins were loitering. Two of them played at dueling while a third smaller one watched, munching a red apple. The swordsmen, holding out imaginary swords, circled each other. Closer and closer came the clenched fists, then the boys forgot their imaginary swc.ds and began punching each other.

  They stopped their play as Armand went by. "Look at the funny old tramp!" one cried to his playmates.

  Armand looked around because he wanted to see the funny old tramp too. It must be that droll Louis with his tall black hat and baggy pants. Then he realized that he was the funny old tramp.

  "Keep a civil tongue in your head, starling," he ordered. He fingered the holly in his lapel. "If you don't, I'll tell my friend Father Christmas about your rude manners. Then you'll get nothing but a bunch of sticks like these on my buggy."

  The boys looked at him with awe. Father Christmas is the Santa Claus of France. He rides down from the north on his little gray donkey and leaves presents for good children.

  The small boy held out his half-eaten apple. "Are you hungry, monsieur?" he asked. "Would you like the rest of this apple?"

  But the biggest boy mockingly punched the air with his fist. "Pouf!" he scoffed. "There's no Father Christmas. He's just make-believe."

  "If you doubt my word," said Armand with dignity, "just take a look in the Louvre store. You'll find him on the mezzanine floor."

  He grinned like one of the roguish gargoyles on the cathedral. There really was a Father Christmas and it was his friend Camille, who felt the urge to work when the weather turned cold.

  "I believe you, monsieur," said the boy with the apple. "I saw Father Christmas outside the store yesterday. He was eating hot chestnuts on the street."

  Armand hunched his shoulders and quickly walked toward the bridge. Mireli was right. These starlings would steal your heart if you didn't keep it well hidden. And he wanted nothing to do with children. They meant homes and responsibility and regular work—all the things he had turned his back on so long ago. And he was looking for adventure.

  Down a few blocks was the bridge under which he lived when the weather wasn't too raw. And plenty of company he had during the summer with all the homeless of Paris staking their claims to this space or that.

  "But first I must have dinner," he told himself, looking up at the restaurant across the street. He licked his thumb and held it up. "The wind is just right," he decided.

  So he parked his buggy beside the low wall and settled himself in the breeze that came from the restaurant. He pulled all the kitchen smells deep into his lungs. "Ah, steak broiled over charcoal," he gloated. "And the sauce is just right. But they scorched the potatoes."

  For two hours Armand sat on the curb enjoying the food smells because that is the length of time a Frenchman allows himself for lunch in the middle of the day.

  Then he daintily wiped his whiskered lips with his cuff and rose to his knobby shoes. "And just keep the change, waiter," he said generously, although there wasn't a white-uniformed waiter in sight. "You'll need it for Christmas."

  He started down the steps that dropped from the street to the quay beside the Seine. He bounced the back wheels of the buggy down each step. "I am really quite stuffed," he told himself, "but I wish I had taken that apple. It would have been the right dessert after such a rich sauce."

  Down the quay he pushed the buggy toward the bridge tunnel that ran along the shore. On the cobbled quay a man was washing his car with the free Seine water. A woman in a fur coat was airing her French poodle. A long barge, sleek as a black seal, slid through the river. It was like coming home after a long absence, thought Armand. And anything exciting could happen under a Paris bridge.

  As he neared the tunnel, his eyes widened with surprise and anger. A gray canvas was propped over the niche that had always been his own. And a market pushcart was parked by the pillar.

  He raced his buggy across the cobblestones toward the arch. When he arrived there, he reached up and angrily tore down the canvas with one swoop of his arm. Then he jumped back in surprise and horror.

  "Oh, la, la!" he cried. "Starlings! A nest full of them!" Because three startled children snuggled into a worn quilt looked up at him with eyes as surprised as his own. The little girl and the boy cowered deeper into the quilt. But the older girl quickly jumped to her feet. She had direct blue eyes and they matched her determined chin and snubbed nose and bright red hair.

  "You can't take us away," she cried, clenching her fists. "We're going to stay together because we're a family, and families have to stick together. That's what mama says."

  CHAPTER TWO

  j4 S Armand glared at the children, a shaggy dog that

  I % should have been white came bounding across the

  A- ~m^ quay. It protectively jumped between the tramp and

  the children, barking fiercely at Armand. The hobo quickly

  manuevered his buggy between himself and the dog.

  "If that beast bites me," he cried, "I'll sue you for ten thousand francs."

  The girl called the dog to her. "Here, Jojo! Come, Jojo! He won't take us away. He's only an old tramp."

  The dog stopped barking and sniffed at the wheels of Ar-mand's baby buggy.

  The man was insulted. "I'll have you know that I'm not just any old tramp," he said. And he wasn't. "I'm not friendless, and I co
uld be a workingman right now if I wanted. But where are your parents and who are you hiding from? The police?"

  He studied the children closely. Redheads they were, all of them, and their clothes had the mismatched, ill-fitting look of poverty.

  The older girl's eyes burned a deep blue. "Our landlady put us out because we don't have enough money to pay for the room since papa died," she explained. "So mama brought us here because we haven't any home now. And she told us to hide behind the canvas so nobody could see us, or they'd take us away from her and put us in a home for poor children. But we're a family, so we want to stay together. I'm Suzy and they're Paul and Evelyne."

  The boy swaggered a little. "If I was bigger, I'd find a new place for us to live," he boasted.

  "It looks to me like you've already found a new place," said Armand, "and it's my old place. You've put me out of my home just like that landlady did to you."

  Suzy was apologetic. She moved the pushcart over and measured Armand with one eye closed. Then she carefully drew a long rectangle on the concrete with a piece of soft coal.

  "That's your room," she said. "You can live with us." On second thought, she scrawled a small checkered square at the foot of the rectangle. "There's a window," she said gravely, "so you can look out and see the river."

  Armand grumbled to himself and pulled his coat tighter

  across his chest as if to hide his heart. Oh, this starling was a dangerous one. He'd better move on. Paris was full of bridges, the way the Seine meandered through it. No trouble finding another one. But as he started away, the girl ran over and clutched him by his torn sleeve.

  "Please stay," she begged. "We'll pretend you're our grandfather."

  Armand snorted. "Little one," he said, "next to a millionaire, a grandfather is the last thing I hope to be." But even as he grumbled, he began unpacking his belongings.

  He stacked the branches and twigs, and made a pile of the dead leaves he had gathered. He pulled out a dirty canvas and a rusty iron hook. He set a blackened can with a handle near the leaves. He sorted some bent spoons and knives. Last of all, he pulled out an old shoe with a hole in the sole.

  "Might come across its mate one of these days," he explained to the children. "And it fits me just right."

  The children wanted to help him. Oh, these starlings were clever. They knew how to get around an old man. Lucky he wasn't their grandfather. But he laid his canvas over the rectangle Suzy had made for him.

  He started a fire with the branches and dead leaves. Then he hung a big can over the fire. Into it he dropped scraps of food he unwrapped from pieces of newspaper.

  "In the good old days of Paris," he told the children, "they used to ring bells in the market places at the close of day so the tramps would, know they were welcome to gather up the leftovers. But no more. Nowadays we have to look after ourselves."

  They watched him eating his food. Even the dog that should have been white watched each morsel that went into his mouth and drooled on the concrete. Armand wriggled uneasily. "What's the matter?" he asked gruffly. "Haven't you ever seen anybody eat before?" They said nothing in reply, but four pairs of eyes followed each move of his tin spoon. "I suppose you're hungry," he growled. "Starlings always have to be eating. Get your tinware."

  Suzy pulled some stained, cracked bowls and twisted spoons from the pushcart. Armand carefully divided the food, even counting in the dog.

  It was dark by the time the children's mother joined them. The lights of Paris were floating in the river, but the only light in the tunnel flickered from a tiny fire Armand had made. He could not see the woman's face well, but he felt the edge of her tongue.

  "What are you doing here?" she demanded of the hobo.

  Armand was angered. "And I might ask you the same, ma-dame," he retorted. "You have taken my piece of the bridge."

  "The bridges don't belong to anybody," said the woman. "They're the only free shelter in Paris."

  Suzy tried to make peace. "He's a nice, friendly old tramp, mama," she explained, "and he's going to live with us."

  "I'm not a friendly old tramp," said Armand indignantly. "I'm a mean, cranky old tramp, and I hate children and dogs and women."

  "Then if you hate us," said Paul, "why did you give us some of your food?"

  "Because I'm a stupid old tramp," replied Armand. "Because I'm a stupid, soft-hearted old tramp." Oh, la, la! There it was. He had let slip that he really had a heart. Now this homeless family would surely be after that too.

  The mother was displeased to hear that the children had accepted the hobo's food. "We are not beggars," she reminded them. "I have a steady job at the laundry, and that is more than he can say."

  She went to work warming a pan of soup and breaking a long loaf of bread that she had brought with her. Armand sat in the rectangle marked by Suzy and thought that this woman's trouble was pride, and that pride and life under the bridge weren't going to work out well together.

  By the dying light of the fire, the woman went back and forth to her pushcart, pulling out moth-eaten blankets and

  making bed-places on the concrete. Just overhead the automobiles roared, lights garlanded the bridge and people walking along the higher quay laughed lightly. But it could have been a million miles away from the little group under the bridge.

  "You ought to put the starlings in some charity home until you find a place of your own, madame," suggested Armand, after the children had dropped off to sleep. "This life is not for them. Now, you wouldn't want them to end up like me, would you?"

  "Families should stick together through the lean times as well as the fat," replied the woman. "And I have hopes. Pm going to see my sister-in-law soon. She may know of a place for us out in Clichy."

  Armand stretched out on his canvas without bothering about any covering. He was used to the cold. He never felt it any more. But he was sure these children would feel it. As he lay on the hard concrete an uneasy thought worried him, like a mouse gnawing at his shoestring. Now that he had befriended these starlings, his life would never again be completely his own.

  When gray morning seeped into the blackness under the bridge, Armand woke to find the woman gone and the three children feeding some stale bread to Jojo.

  "Are you still here?" asked Armand. "Don't you go to school or something today?"

  Suzy shook her red head. "We can't go to school again until we get a place to .live. Mama says the teachers might begin asking us questions, then the people would take us away from her and put us in a home."

  "Your mama wants you around more than I do," said Ar-mand. "Children should go to school. Where would I be today if I hadn't gone to school when I was a starling?"

  "Oh, I like school," said Suzy with her blue eyes glowing. "I like to read and write. I want to be a teacher when I get big. See, a man on a barge threw this piece of coal to me and I use it for a pencil. I hope we'll soon be able to go back to school again."

  "Then that's where we're different," confessed Armand. "I never did like school. But you surely must go some place during the day. Your mama can't expect me to be a nursemaid. I've got places to go."

  "Oh, may we go with you?" begged Suzy. "Evelyne is a real good little walker. She won't get tired."

  "No," cried Armand in alarm. "You can't go with me, and that's the whole cheese of it."

  "Please take us, old tramp," implored Paul. "It's so cold hiding down here with nothing to do."

  "That's not polite, Paul," warned Suzy. "Now he won't take us with him unless you apologize."

  "But what can I call him?" asked Paul. "I don't know his name."

  "What is your name, monsieur?" asked Suzy.

  "Armand," replied the hobo.

  "But your last name?" asked Paul. "Ours is Calcet."

  Armand shrugged his shoulders. "I've forgotten," he admitted. "I think it used to be Pouly or Pougy. Something like that. Just call me Armand."

  "All right, Monsieur Armand," said Paul. "I apologize for calling you an old tramp. Now will you take us with you?"

  "Of course he will," said Suzy quickly. "He really has a good heart even if he looks so bad. And may Jojo go too?"