…and there are, of course, all the people remaining in Manhattan whom Lucinda knew prior to her parents’ departure. The “princess” and the little girl, Adele, in the neighboring boarding house, who live with her jealous husband and her grandparents entwined in the world of actors respectively. The “rag and bones man” who inveigles himself into the picnic Lucinda arranges with Tony Coppino the fruit stand boy. The Irish policemen on the beats around her residence. An Italian boy taking care of his father’s fruit cart. She travels through the neighboring blocks befriending a range of working class residents of the area with whom she has not had the freedom to interact, connected as she has been to the short leash of a nursemaid or a governess. Lucinda, tucked up into the sewing room of the sisters’ apartment, finds it marvelously freeing to skate as she wills and stravage about the neighborhood(s) after her school lets out with only a note for her caretakers. (There are family members and close friends nearby who stand willing to take Lucinda in during the parents’ absence, but the parents find these two ladies the best option.) The Misses Peters together allow Lucinda far greater freedom than her parents ever did, weary as they were of rearing four boys older than Lucinda herself by some years. Lucinda Wyman isn’t abandoned to her own devices but rather placed with the best caretakers the family can find at short notice: two maiden ladies of their acquaintance, one of whom is a teacher at Lucinda’s school and the other the sister of the teacher. The story is fairly easy to describe: a ten-year-old girl is left behind in Manhattan when her parents go abroad to Italy on a tour to help the mother regain her health.

Ruth Sawyer did spend a significant portion of her childhood in the New York she describes in Roller Skates, and indeed her parents did go on a tour of Europe during the summer Sawyer was ten years old.

There may be some truth in this tale, but on the whole it’s a fictional autobiography, as with Jane Eyre, David Copperfield or Catcher in the Rye.

The conceit of Roller Skates is that it’s a partial biography of the author/narrator, built on her childhood diary written in her tenth year.

Roller skates by ruth sawyer