# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 13

IT seemed only a moment after Tom had decided that Sara must tell the truth that Alice came into the sitting-room to find the goldfish bowl broken in a thousand pieces and the gasping fish beating themselves on the floor. The first thing was to rescue the fish. The next was to ask that mother's classic question:
"Who did this?"
Alice asked it in the silence of a deserted room, but she surmised that when goldfish lie flapping among the pieces of their broken bowl, children are not far off. Again she asked into the silence:
"Who broke the bowl?" and from under the table came Sara.
"'Twas me bwoke it," said this female Washington. That is what she seemed to her mother. That was what she seemed to her delighted father. His words seemed to have borne fruit already.
"How did it happen? How did you do it, darling?" they urged. Sara was prolific in detail.
"I runned up into 'em smash! Bang! Bang! I runned into 'em, I broke 'em. My, I broke 'em up!" She explained, it seemed to her mother, with an air of pride.
"Were you playing?"
"Yes; I was playing with a little girl."
"What little girl?"
"I don't know her name," Sara gave back guardedly. "She just came in. She's a bad girl." Sara stamped her foot and frowned at the bad little girl's villainy. ​"She says, 'Sara, shove the goldfish,' so I shoved 'em! Hard! Then, smash, bang, all gone!"
It was a dramatic performance, but while Tom was saying that a household should be run so that strange little girls wouldn't come in unbidden, Alice had an unconvinced feeling about this child.
"Where's Robert?" she asked.
"Off cwying somewheres," said his sister callously. Alice found him under his white iron bed.
"I didn't mean to kill them," he sobbed; "I didn't mean to. I just lifted it up to put it out of the sun and it slipped." But Sara, who had followed her mother and father, cried out hotly,
"You didn't do it, Robert Marcey! I did it. I broke 'em!"
"She's trying to shield her brother," said Tom. Alice gathered her son to her.
"They're not dead," she soothed. "Who was the little girl playing with you?"
"There wasn't any," said Robert. "Just Sara and me. It slipped, and when it went smash she laughed and jumped up and down. And we heard you coming and hid." But here the incomprehensible Sara gave way to temper. She wanted to have broken the bowl. She insisted on it with tears and rage.
Tom wanted to believe she did this to shield Robert. But Alice inclined to the belief, and Robert did too, that she thought smashing goldfish bowls rather a fine achievement.
Within the next day or two Sara piled up more evidence against herself. She loved adornment and it was hard to keep her from taking her mother's things.
Tom and Alice were sitting in the library next Sunday and Sara ran into the room. She was not looking for them, as she showed by clapping her hand over an old-​fashioned mosaic brooch of her mother's which reposed on her polka-dotted dress just above her stomach.
"Where did you get Mother's brooch?" asked Alice.
"Your bwooch?" questioned Sara blandly, clapping her hand over it.
"My brooch on your dress, Sara."
"On my dress?" asked Sara blankly, carefully surveying her extended hand, its five fingers wide apart. Tom tried another mode of attack.
"Take your hand off Mother's brooch," he said sharply.
"My hand?" asked Sara with grief. It was evident that she understood nothing of all this talk.
"Lift your hand up in the air, Sara," commanded her father. She lifted it up. Had the brooch just then flown down upon her like a bird and alighted in the middle of her person she could not have been a more surprised and bewildered little girl.
"Why, so 'tis!" she cried, deeply shocked.
It is an awful thing when an honest man realizes that his daughter is a natural-born liar; not only that, but a liar who lies with joy in the dramatic effect.
It was going to be a harder task than Tom imagined. If it were the fashion to write problem novels about things like this one could write one about the Truth and Tom and Sara.
"How do you make them tell it?" is the problem.
The material for the great scene in the third act is the clash of their two different life ideals. The scene of Tom sitting in a train taking Sara to New York to visit could be made heart-rending.
Sara sat behind her father with a kind fat lady, Tom with a man reading a paper. It could be a piece of fine acting to portray Tom's anguish at hearing Sara remark pleasantly to the fat lady:
​"We got five white pigeons to our house."
"Have you, dearie?" said the fat lady.
"Pigeons and ducks—little eenty ones, just like in the book my Gramma gimme; and they'll swim an' swim around in my back yard. Little ducks, chickens, we got; gobble-obble-obs; ducks wiv long necks like in the park—every kind."
Alas! the truth was that the Marceys owned not so much as a canary bird. There was no place for a duck to swim within a mile and a half of their house.
"I'm goin' to get a little brover," pursued Sara. "I had one little bover. He growed up big. Now I'm goin' to get another brover. P'rhaps a sister an' a brover."
This was the first intimation that Sara's father had of such news. But he had little time to ponder upon it. Sara, it seemed, had been merely giving her imagination a little trial spin when she invented a lake in the back yard, poultry of every kind, and a new brother. Now she started off with:
"My grandma's going to buy me a little woolly camel," and from there on she grew lyrical. There was nothing she didn't dare to tell the guileless fat lady, whom she must leave anyway in a few minutes and who never could ask her embarrassing questions in the future. Sara soared away, released from all confining realities. Now in the problem play Tom's face should have been contorted with anguish. This moment should have been one of the crucial ones, where Sara confirms his worst suspicions. But in real life we seldom live up to the histrionic possibilities which life presents us. In the face of Sara, the lyrical liar, Tom laughed.