The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel by Daniel Stern Page A

first hearing of this.
    “Does that mean she’ll be dancing with boys during school hours?” she had asked Max.
    “No, dear,” he’d replied, “it’s not ballroom dancing. It’s … it’s supposed to be expressive. I don’t know. Something like ballet, only more so.”
    “Oh, ballet. That’s nice.”
    “And don’t you think she dances with boys, anyway?”
    “All right, Max. All right. Lay off, please.”
    The letters from home became increasingly interested in her dancing on her informing them she was to perform at the annual concert. Before that they had been concerned about her grades (which had been a little better than in high school, though not much) and with her social life ( Don’t cheapen yourself, whatever you do, Elly. Remember your own value. Get a lot of sleep and don’t make friends with just anyone ). Of course if her parents had had their way, Elly would be safely ensconced at home, with Max driving her to Crofts each morning and picking her up each afternoon.
    Her victory had been hard won. Beginning with sulking she had proceeded to more drastic measures slowly. Gradually she began to increase the number of times she saw Jerry Wilson. The Wilsons were the poor people whom they had known for years, first in Indianapolis when Max first went into business for himself, and later in Colchester, where Wilson had moved for a job in Kaufman’s new factory.
    Rose tried to stop Elly from seeing Jerry, it seemed to Max, because the Wilsons were the past, the struggling times. The Wilsons still struggled while Rose and Max Kaufman moved themselves and their daughter to the hill outside of town, to their glass house. Rose couldn’t bear the idea of Elly and Jerry. Max, on the other hand, didn’t like the family as people. Wilson had committed what was to Max the greatest possible sin: he had changed his name from Wilcowsky to the closest Anglo-Saxon equivalent. He knew their boy to be what he called a “wise guy.” The problem, however, meant much more to Rose than it did to him.
    Elly let it be known that she had made up her mind to go to Vernon. She then drew quite clearly the parallel between going to Crofts and seeing Jerry Wilson or away to Vernon, out of danger. The first action Rose took was to forbid her daughter to see Jerry. Elly shrugged this maneuver off as preliminary and easily dealt with. They couldn’t watch her twenty-four hours a day and she altered her schedule accordingly, seeing him quite as often, but keeping odd hours, which aroused, in turn, further suspicion. Finally, as registration time approached and they showed no signs of cracking, Elly carefully moved into a full offensive: the locked door and refusal of food (but Rose caught Max smuggling a snack in, and refused to believe the girl was starving, thus dooming that strategy to failure). The hysterical threats of suicide were something Max, for one, could never believe, having heard the rhetorical “I’ll kill myself” from his mother and never having become an orphan, and having a wife addicted to meeting defiance of her will with “I’ll kill myself” and never having become a widower.
    Finally, carefully planning it to coincide with Jerry Wilson’s trip to Chicago, Elly went (innocently enough it seemed to her hosts) to visit her cousin Charlotte and her father, Harry. The prediction of her parents’ interpretation of his disappearance proved correct. They called Mr. Wilson, who disclaimed all knowledge of Jerry and Elly running off together (a little wistfully, as the idea of a liaison between his son and Kaufman’s daughter could easily lead to a foreman’s job for him at the plant).
    Finally, in a random call to Max’s brother Harry to inform him of their predicament, she was found. “I left you a note,” she lied coolly. “I can’t help it if it got lost.”
    At this point Kaufman decided to take a hand for Elly. He was a little frightened by what he was certain was her lying about the note and by