“Down-town,” Lucy said.
“Did Mother give you a nickel?” I asked, and I was sort of mad, because Mother owed me a nickel and hadn't paid me, because she said she didn't have one, and if she gave one to Lucy, why, all right for Mother!
“No, she didn't give me a nickel, Mr. Smarty!” Lucy said. “If you want to know so much, we're going down to Mr. Schwartz's shop to see if he'll let Mamie have a father.”
I guess that would sound pretty funny if you didn't know what she meant. It was paper dolls.
Girls always play paper dolls, I guess; so Mamie and Lucy and all the girls played them; they got them out of the colored fashion plates in the magazines—brides and mothers and sons and daughters.
The trouble was that a good family has to have anyway one father in it, and the magazines didn't have colored fashion plates of fathers. They didn't have any fathers at all.
Some of the girls drew fathers on paper and painted them, but they looked pretty sick. I guess all the girls were jealous of Lucy because she was kind of Swatty's girl, and Swatty sort of borrowed an old colored tailor fashion plate out of his father's store and gave it to Lucy. So Lucy had the only real fathers that any of the girls had. She gave Mamie a couple of fathers out of the fashion plate, but they were the ones that had been standing partly behind other fathers and had mostly only one leg, or pieces cut out of their sides or something. They didn't make Mamie real happy, I guess, so she thought she'd try to get some good fathers. They were going down to ask Mr. Schwartz for a fashion plate.
Swatty was frightened right away, because he hadn't asked his father if he could have the old fashion plate but had just sort of borrowed it. So he said:
“What are you going to ask my father?”
“I'm going to tell him he gave you one for me,” Lucy said, “and I'm going to ask him if he'll give me one for Mamie.”