“Don’t you dare tell them, Alida,” said Gertrude. “Don’t you tell them how we snoop or about Martin Leveret and all that. If you tell them—I warn you, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Gertie!” Isadora admonished. “No need to be so snappish. You could have said it in a nicer way, a Fairchild way.”
Gertrude took a deep breath and exhaled extravagantly. “There. I blew the nasty demon out of me. He might come back, but I’m in control for now. Please, Alida, keep our secrets with us. We’re naughty sometimes, but we’re not downright evil.”
“I would never betray you,” I assured them. “Anyway, it’s not my place to tell them. That’s up to you. But I do think this weird stuff about Le Clerc and Martin Leveret is more worrisome than you think it is. I believe you ought to consider telling them about at least that much.”
“We will take it under advisement,” Isadora said.
Harry nodded solemnly. “We’ll form a development committee of executives to explore the film potential of the idea.”
“You can even be on the committee and have a vote,” Gertrude proposed. “In fact, let’s have a vote right now.”
Returning the four pieces of evidence to the envelope, Isadora said, “All in favor of keeping Mother and Father in the dark about this, raise your hand.” They all raised one hand. “All in favor of spoiling the fun and destroying the adventurous spirit of the Clyde Tombaugh Club, raise your hand.”
I did not raise my hand. “All right, all right. Far be it from me to second-guess such a prestigious development committee. But when ruination befalls us, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Rafael drew our attention with a prolonged, loud yawn. He sat in the doorway of the wine room, looking as profoundly bored and impatient as a cat.
“Okay, all right,” Gertrude said. “It’s time to take Alida up the secret stairs to the roof.”
Harry pretended to be horrified. “You intend to throw her off the roof?”
“If I ever throw anyone off, it’ll be you. But that would be pointless because you’d just bounce like a big, rubber dummy.”
And so Isadora returned the drawer to the table and filled it with the corkscrews and other items she’d taken from it earlier, and we left the wine room, extinguishing the fake candles held aloft by the six little bronze men. We ascended into the Japanese cabinet and returned to the hallway. With midnight soon upon us, we flew through the dark house in pursuit of our flashlight beams, as quiet as the ghosts that—perhaps—did not exist within these walls.
Never in my life had I been as happy as I was in that moment. Maybe the Bram harbored someone with bad intentions, and maybe the “challenge” the children had accepted was something more sinister than a game. However, being allowed to indulge in girlish fun, compressing an entire childhood into a few months or a year before taking on the solemn responsibilities of adulthood, seemed not too much to ask.To the roof!
Seventeen
I could not fathom why the stairs to the roof should be hidden from easy discovery, with the entrance through a greenhouse grotto.
The Bram had a conservatory with three tall, windowed walls and a domed glass ceiling of many panes with beveled edges through which sunlight descended as though in a rain of prismatic crystals, littering the limestone floor with geometric fragments of rainbow colors. At night, as now, it was a jungled darkness of palm trees, lush ferns of numerous varieties, rhododendrons, and more, twined through with clematis and wisteria and night-blooming jasmine. This cultured wildness drew the beams of our Evereadys into its feathery clefts and lacy lacunae, folding light away in its bowers, revealing little. Sprays of small orchids—white and pink—were the exception to the rule of gloom, seeming to glow with a radiance of their own when our electric torches revealed them.
The fourth wall was a work of cunning masonry disguised as a natural rock grotto about twenty feet wide, fifteen feet from front to back, and roughly eight feet from floor to ceiling. In the center of that space, a shallow pool glimmered with the lights we carried, like a magical lens through which we might look into a strange city extendingdeep beneath the Bram. At the back of this little cave, a doorless opening led to a circular staircase of concrete steps and painted walls.
Rafael appeared enthusiastic about a visit to the roof. He sprang ahead of us, taking the steps two and three at a time, at once disappearing around a turn, undaunted by a vertical race into blackness where our Evereadys could not reach. When we arrived at the top, we found him standing on a landing in front of a midnight-blue door that bore an image of a silvery moon encircled by a ring of stars, as though a mystical revelation lay beyond.
Isadora unlocked the door and crossed the threshold. I followed the others and discovered we’d come into a stair-head vestibule. As I stepped into the cool but pleasant night air, onto a large section of roof that was flat and rimmed by a parapet, I asked, “Why all this? Why not just normal stairs, a plain door?”
“Mother and Father,” Isadora said, “wanted us to be raised in a place that teased our imagination and expanded our minds, a place that would be fun.”
“What we all know,” Gertrude added, “is they built it to tease their imagination, not just ours. They’re old, smart, and busy—but they like having fun as much as we do, though they’ll never say so.”
“They aren’t old,” Isadora said. “They’re just mature—though they’re in love with the idea of childhood.”
“That’s why they make good movies,” Harry said. “Groucho Marx was here for dinner last year with some other people, and he said, ‘Kids, you little goats, the reason your parents make good movies is because they’re basically children.’”
Isadora picked it up from there. “Groucho said, ‘I don’t like children, noxious little things, but I like your parents. I don’t like the three of you. You’re too small and far less sophisticated than I am. If you want me to like you, grow up. There’s no guarantee that I’ll likeyou, but as long as you don’t become critics, there’s a small chance of winning my approval.’”
Mr. Marx had made such a strong impression that Gertrude, too, remembered part of the conversation word for word. “He told us, ‘I would say it’s been nice meeting you, but I’m not a liar. Now stop your annoying babble. Go to your rooms. There are hungry bogeymen under your beds, and if you don’t give them a chance to devour you, they’ll come down here and eatourdinner.’ He was funny. Isadora thinks he was nice. I’m not sure about that, but he was very funny.”
“The thing is,” Isadora explained, “Mother and Father want us to be what they weren’t—and not go through what they went through. That’s why the grotto and the hidden stairs and the Merlin door, which is what we call it. That’s why the other quirky fun things about the Bram.”
“‘What they weren’t, what they went through?’” I asked.
“What they’ve come through isn’t for us to talk about. They’ll tell you when the time is right, when you’ve settled in and all the legal hooey has been dealt with.”
