Isadora threw up her hands in exasperation. “If only it were that easy. Mother and Father aren’t the kind who beat people with sticks.”
“You never know,” Harry said. “Kaiser Wilhelm seemed like an okay guy, everyone’s friend. Then the Germans sank theLusitania, twelve hundred people drowned, and the next thing you know, there’s a world war and ten million people are killed. So, after all, he turned out to be the kind of guy who would beat you with a stick, and even worse.”
“Whoever said the kaiser was an okay guy—those people were idiots,” Isadora declared. “Anyway, Daddy and Momma wouldn’t have any interest in sinking ships and ruling Germany. So what does this clue mean? We better find the third envelope quick.”
As the day progressed, we didn’t stop our search to have lunch. We didn’t eventhinkabout lunch. We lived for the hunt, and Rafael was as engaged in the mission as we were. He was so enthusiastic and got so worked up that we had to put him on a leash and take him out to pee three times. When the clue in the fifth envelope proved to be crushingly difficult to solve, clever Rafael earned our everlasting gratitude by finding the sixth for us. He could make no more sense of the clue than the rest of us, but his nose eventually led him to the conservatory, among the palms and ferns and orchids, where the envelope was taped to the underside of a teak bench. We gave him two dog biscuits and hoped that he might come to our aid yet again and quickly find the remaining three, but whatever trace scent had drawn him to number six did not exist on any further envelopes. By our own wits, we acquired the ninth and final clue, which consisted ofDad has gone early to bed. That was the easiest clue of all, aimed at Harry, and he solved it in a minute flat. Four Laurel and Hardy shorts had been released in 1928, andEarly to Bedwas Harry’s favorite of the four. Dad—Franklin—always sat in the same seat when watching a movie inthe Bram’s screening room. The five of us flew through the house and found the ceramic turkey eighteen minutes before the deadline, under the theater seat. A triumphant procession ensued, concluding in the kitchen, where the treacherous adults were still cooking and the air was redolent of a feast to come.
Mrs. Symington said that Laurel and Hardy had called to express their regrets for not being able to attend the December dinner after all, but members of the Clyde Tombaugh Club were too hard-boiled to fall for a razzing that obvious. Having been taught the proper way to arrange a place setting, we four set the table. We were so high on the day’s adventure and on the prospect of a turkey that wasnotceramic, the task was almost as much fun as the hunt had been. After we all freshened up and changed into our best clothes, we gathered at five o’clock for a long dinner marked by much laughter.
Here are a few things I thought that evening, now more coherent and polished than when I first thought them. On this holiday when we give thanks, we are expressing gratitude not merely for the food and drink, but as well for family and friends, for this world of great beauty and the opportunities it offers. We’re giving thanks for our life, because even when life is hard, there are joys to be had in living it, even if those joys come from finding ways to escape the hard world for a while, as books allowed me to escape. Happiness and despair are choices to be made. If I hadn’t embraced books and lived in the worlds within their pages, I might have sunk into despair, unable to see the light even when it shone. Had that happened, I wouldn’t have survived to be brought here by Loretta and Franklin, to know Izzy and Gertie and Harry, to experience Thanksgiving and so much else. Sometimes it might seem that hope is for fools, but it is only such fools who have any chance of making it through the long night to a new dawn.
After the dishes had been washed and dried and put away, after we had said good night and gone to our rooms, I remained in a stateof elevated happiness not far short of rapture, grateful for relief from evil, pain, and loneliness. I went onto my balcony. The night was cool, but I was not chilled. The overcast had begun to break up. Among the clouds were jigsaw pieces speckled with stars. The garden lights had been extinguished. With the softest lamplight at my back but otherwise darkness all around, I felt as I had on my first day here, when I had stood on this balcony in warm sunshine. I had come from slavery to freedom, a miraculous journey that had taken less than a tank of gasoline; as measured in consequences, however, it was a voyage of ten thousand miles. I could not rightly wish for more, and yet I felt that if the balcony fell away from the house and crashed to pieces on the terrace twenty feet below, I would not go with it. I would stand in midair, unfazed, and then would step forward into an even greater freedom the nature of which I could not yet imagine. As I inhaled deeply, the clouds opened as slowly as the shell of a mollusk, revealing a moon as round and white and perfect as a pearl.
Twenty-Five
At a late breakfast on Friday, with just the siblings and me at the table, Harry declared that the trouble with all holidays was the next day. The next day was reliably a major letdown. “Next days are nothing days. Nothing happens. No one has the energy to do anything interesting. It makes you want to gross out everyone by eating bugs, just to get something started.”
“I love the day after,” said Isadora as she spread marmalade on a slice of toast. “I like to lie around thinking about where I’ll go on the day after I’m twenty-one and finally grown up. I’ll travel somewhere exotic the day after every holiday, somewhere related to the holiday just celebrated. I’m going to see the world ten times over. After Thanksgiving, I might go to Turkey. You know, after the fall of Rome in the fifth century, Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years. That’s six times older than the United States. What must a city that old be like? It must be wondrous. Strangely enough, I read that Turkey raises a lot of cattle and sheep, but they don’t raise any turkeys.”
“You,” said Harry, “are the perfect example of why I might eat an entire bowlful of squirming bugs if that would change the subjectto something halfway interesting. Anyway, Constantinople is called Istanbul now. If you ever go there, just remember they were allied with the Huns in the war. You’ll have to wear a tent, only your eyes showing, wherever you go.”
“I am fortunate,” Gertie said, addressing me directly, “to be the middle child. The first child was spoiled because she was the first. The third child was spoiled because he was a boy following two girls, so a son was a big deal. As you can see, the excess attention they received has left them both mentally ill, while I remain sane and sensible.”
Harry’s next-day hypothesis was not destined to be elevated to the status of a theory on that twenty-eighth of November. The hallway door opened and Anna May entered the breakfast room, not in her maid’s uniform on this vacation day but in evident distress. “I didn’t sleep. Not all night. I gotta spill something. Your parents gotta know. I let it go too far. I didn’t mean for something like this to happen. I let it go too far because I thought he’d just give it up. But not him, never him. He clings to bad ideas like a tick to a cat. I should’ve known. Where are your folks?”
Isadora sprang to her feet. “I’ll take you to them. They’re in the study, working on a script. I believe it’s a pirate picture, but they want Wallace Beery for a featured part, so it must be to some extent a comedy. I love Wallace Beery, don’t you? He’s such a big, bearish, goofy sweetheart.”
The door to the kitchen opened, and Mrs. Symington entered. She was surprised to see Anna May on a holiday weekend. “Annie, what are you doing here?”
“She needs to see Father and Mother,” Isadora said. “I’ll take her to them. It’s no trouble at all.”
“You finish your breakfast, young lady,” Mrs. Symington said, motioning for Isadora to sit down. “Annie, come tell me all about it.”
Anna May followed her boss into the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind them. We four young detectives froze for a few seconds and then erupted from our chairs as though we received an electric shock. The compulsion to eavesdrop was stronger than the inclination to do the right thing and mind our own business. When we hesitated and exchanged glances, however, we wordlessly acknowledged that Mrs. Symington would expect us to surrender to curiosity and would catch us in the act. Humiliation and perhaps even punishment would follow. There wasn’t enough room at the door to accommodate all our ears anyway. We sat down to our unfinished breakfast.
Isadora looked glum as she stirred a spoonful of Welch’s grape jelly into her half-finished glass of orange juice. She couldn’t yet set off to see the world ten times over, so she compensated by being adventurous when it came to food combinations. “So much for the idea that the day after a holiday is always dull. Something big is about to happen. Everything is going to change. We will remember this day for the rest of our lives.”
“How it’s going to turn out,” Harry disagreed, “is it’s going to be even less interesting than a cat with ticks. The ‘he’ she was talking about will be some pasty-faced Elmer Gantry she fell in love with, but the cad stole the church money and ran off with the Sunday school teacher.”
“If you’re going to be a successful Mississippi River steamboat card sharp,” Isadora said, “you better learn to read people better than that. Anna May’s whole life is hanging by a thread. She’s ready to throw herself in front of a freight train. She has leprosy or a brain tumor, and the man she loves won’t stand beside her in her hour of need.”
“When I’m a writer,” Gertrude said, “I for sure won’t write any stories that stupid. I’m going to write stories that make people happy, stories about a talking mule, books about a rabbit whose best friend is a duck and they have adventures.”
“Move over, Hemingway,” Harry said.
Isadora put down her grape-jelly-and-orange-juice cocktail without tasting it. “When did you decide to be a writer?”
“Like forever. At least eight years ago.”
“When you were two?”
“Two and a half,” Gertrude corrected.
The siblings continued to be siblings, but my thoughts harkened back to my first day at Bramley Hall. Something had been worrying Anna May since I’d met her almost three months earlier. On that occasion, as she stood in the receiving line, her smile had been weak and brief. She had been mantled in anxiety as surely as an angel would be clothed in light. Mrs. Symington had said Anna May was going through a rough patch but was a lovely person and would warm to me in time. My first night in the Bram, I had dreamed that Rafael and I were prowling its many rooms, looking for someone who didn’t belong there. At one point, I dreamed that I woke and that a shadowy figure stood at my bedside, watching me. It had been Anna May.Are you there?I had asked.No,she’d said. Of course Anna May left every day at five o’clock, and the visitor who had spoken just one word to me had been an eidolon, a phantom shaped by a sleeper’s mind. As I finished my breakfast, I assured myself that Anna May’s urgent visit this morning had nothing to do with events back in September. Whatever brought her here on the day after Thanksgiving had no more to do with me than it did with leprosy. My imagination had caught a fever from Isadora.
Seven hours later, as I was ensconced in a library armchair, reading R. D. Blackmore’sLorna Doone, Franklin and Loretta came to share with me the truth of the situation, which did indeed tie me to the worried housemaid. They sat on the sofa opposite my chair. Anna May had remained at the Bram for less than an hour after she arrived at breakfast. My two guardians had been busy in the six hours since her departure. “There’s no way or reason to withhold this news from you,” Loretta said, “and we don’t want you to hear it in pieces from otherpeople.” Franklin assured me that I had nothing to fear. He said they were on top of things. Although Loretta was as beautiful as ever, her face had little color, and she looked fatigued. “Dear, you know there are good people in our business. You’ve met a few. You’ll meet more, people we know and respect and trust. The tabloids claim the motion-picture industry is full of depraved people. They call it ‘Hollywood Babylon.’ There is some truth in that, maybe a lot of truth. Some actors and actresses aren’t prepared for fame, not the level of fame movies bring, fame unlike anyone in history has experienced before—and they’re showered with stupendous wealth virtually overnight. Everyone knows their faces, and millions adore them, so some are the kind who soon adore themselves. They become monsters of self-regard. Others regret the loss of privacy and don’t know how to deal with adoration. It makes them a little crazy. Or they feel they don’t deserve it, fear losing it and falling out of favor. Whatever their story, they often turn to the same escape—cocaine, marijuana, heroin. Sometimes, when they take up with terribly immoral people, they find themselves doing things that leave them with no self-respect, until they believe the only way out is suicide.”
Anna May was not an actress, but her brother, Connor, believed he was and that he should be known throughout the world. Although he snagged a variety of small roles, stardom eluded him. According to Franklin and Loretta, Anna May had known her difficult and troubled brother was a dope runner, a go-between who drummed up business in the world of moviemaking and delivered merchandise from a major drug dealer to the customers. This income kept him in high style while he waited for his big break. The work not only brought Connor into contact with Hollywood players but also involved him with numerous hangers-on and seedy hustlers. One of those was Willy Joe Maxwell, a freelance photographer who peddled his work not merely to legitimate magazines and newspapers but also to the most lurid tabloids. Withoutour knowledge, Maxwell had been a threat to me since I came to Bramley Hall.
