Abby in Wonderland

  “You?” I cried in disbelief. How could this little kid be my gram? A closer look revealed that same determined, bright expression in those nearly black eyes. She was who she is even then, I thought, delighted to see my grandmother as a child.

  “And that’s Iris, and on the other side is Leah. Behind us is my brother, Solomon.”

  I knew my great-uncle Solomon was dead. “How did he die?” I asked.

  “World War Two took him. He enlisted in the army just six years after this photo was taken. He was only eighteen when he died.”

  “How terrible,” I said.

  “It was terrible,” she agreed sadly. There was a slight hardness in her dark eyes, as if she didn’t want to feel too much about this and was choosing not to relive it. She sat forward and ruffled my hair. “But let’s not talk about such things on a glorious summer day.” She stared down at the album in her lap. “The question is,” she said, “how am I going to assemble all this before the party? I want to show it to the whole family.”

  “I’ll help you,” I volunteered enthusiastically. It would be fun. There was so much about my extended family I didn’t know. I was eager to learn it all.

  Corley, Anna’s friend, showed up bright and early on Monday morning. “Hi,” I said as I came down the stairs, still in my nightshirt.

  I’d forgotten how unusual-looking Corley is. She’s very petite, with wild, frizzy carrot-red hair and huge glasses.

  “Hello there, Abigail,” she said. I cringed at the sound of my old-fashioned full name. Corley is one of the only people on the planet who insists on using it.

  She sat on the couch with Anna, who had a book of music open on her lap. “I think this is a misprint,” Corley said, showing Anna the specific notes in question. “I don’t think the notes are supposed to go like this.”

  I know Anna admires Corley as a musician. Corley plays some violin, like Anna, but her specialty is the cello. It’s kind of comical because when she plays, you can hardly even see her sitting behind it.

  Yet Corley is an extremely good, serious cellist. She plans to be a concert performer someday. I suppose that’s the basis of her friendship with Anna. They’re both devoted musicians.

  “Is it possible?” Anna asked, staring down at the musical notes in the book. “I’ve never heard of a book having a mistake like that in it.”

  “It happens, and when it does, it causes all sorts of problems,” Corley assured her.

  “What problems? Who has problems?” Gram Elsie asked as she walked into the living room from the casual dining room next to it.

  “I was trying to learn a new piece, by Mozart, yesterday, but I couldn’t make it sound right,” Anna explained. “Corley thinks there’s a misprint in the musical notation.”

  Gram put her hands on her hips and studied Corley. “You can tell that just from looking at the notes?” she asked, impressed.

  Corley blushed appreciatively. “I’ve played this piece myself, so I’m familiar with it. I don’t have my book with me or we could check it right now.”

  “There’s a music store in town,” Gram said. “Grandpa and I are heading that way in a few minutes. Why don’t you girls take a ride with us? While we’re there you can go in and compare your book with another one. Anna, if you need a better book, we’ll buy you one.”

  “Why are you going into town?” I asked Gram Elsie as I made my way through the dining room and into the kitchen for some breakfast.

  “Oh, for this and that,” she replied. “Want to come?”

  “Maybe.” I noticed that an extra-large-sized poster board had been laid out on the dining room table. Small piles of Gram’s old photos were placed on different parts of it. “What are you working on?” I asked. Curious, Anna and Corley joined me at the table.

  “Grandpa had a brainstorm last night,” Gram said, joining us. “He suggested that I make a big family-tree poster and put it up for the party,” she explained. “Then, when all the family is here — except for a few, like my too-busy-to-come niece Jean — I can ask them to lend me any more letters and pictures and documents they might have. Then I’ll take all their information home with me and buy that computer software you suggested, Abby,” Gram said. “With that, I can make a whole packet about our family and send it to all the relatives.” She winked at me. “Grandpa was very enthusiastic about buying a scanner to put the pictures in. It’s the excuse he’s been waiting for to buy more fancy computer equipment.”

  Anna had picked up a half-inch stack from the corner of the board. “Who are all these people?” she asked.

  “My mother had twelve brothers and sisters,” Gram explained.

  Twelve! I thought. That’s thirteen kids — even more than the Pikes!

  “Wow!” Corley cried. “If these twelve kids had kids themselves they’re going to take up half your tree.”

  Gram’s expression grew serious. “They should but they don’t,” she said solemnly. “My mother came to America in the nineteen-twenties. Nine of her siblings stayed in Germany and were killed by the Nazis.”

  “In the Holocaust, you mean?” Corley asked softly.

  Gram nodded. I nodded too. All my life I’d learned about the unthinkable evil of the Holocaust; how, during World War II, the Nazis tortured and killed millions of people just because they were Jewish. I’d read books about it (for instance, Anne Frank’s diary) and we learned about it in school.

  Still, books and classes couldn’t prepare me for Gram’s words. Even though I’d known nine of her aunts and uncles had died in the concentration camps, I’d never felt it so strongly before.

  Our family tree was suddenly making history seem very real, very personal.

  “Maybe I won’t go into town with you,” I said. “I’ll stay here and work on the family tree instead.”

  Grandpa Morris came into the room and studied the tree. “The tree should branch off, with the Russian part of the family on one side and the German on the other,” he suggested. “Then you can make the trunk the part where everyone funnels down into America.”

  “That’s what I planned,” Gram agreed.

  “Grandpa,” I said, “while Gram, Anna, and Corley go into town, why don’t we stay here and draw the tree?”

  “Can’t,” he said with a quick glance at Gram. “I have to go with Gram today.”

  “No, you don’t, Morris,” said Gram.

  “Yes, I do,” he argued. His tone was firm.

  “You don’t,” Gram said again.

  “I do — and that’s the end of it.” Grandpa walked toward the stairs. “I’ll be right down and we’ll leave.”

  Gram Elsie sighed. Something was going on between them, but what?

  At that moment, the phone in the kitchen rang. Gram hurried off to answer it. I noticed Mom coming down the stairs. “Corley!” she cried. “How good to see you again.”

  I stood in the dining room, looking down at the faces of my ancestors. Among the nine people who died in the Holocaust was a girl about my age, my great-great-aunt Marta. I picked up her picture. Her large brown eyes seemed to gaze directly into mine. She even looked a little like me. It made me shudder.

  As I laid the picture down, I could hear Gram on the phone. Her voice had risen slightly, as if she were nervous or upset.

  “Yes, I understand that you need to check it again,” she said. “Well, of course it’s upsetting, but better to know than not know. Yes, I’ll be there at two o’clock.”

  I suddenly felt this might be a personal conversation. Not wanting to eavesdrop, I moved into the living room, where Corley was updating Mom about people from our old neighborhood.

  Dropping into a chair, I pretended to listen to Corley, though my mind wasn’t really on what she was saying. I kept going over what I’d just heard.

  What was Gram having checked at two o’clock today? It was something upsetting. That had to be why Grandpa had been so insistent about going with her. She was dealing with something he didn’t want her to face alone.
r />   What was wrong?

  I didn’t mean to, but from that point on I started to watch Gram Elsie more closely. When Anna, Corley, Gram, and Grandpa returned from town that afternoon, I tried to pry information from Anna.

  “Where did Gram and Grandpa go?” I asked, cornering my sister in the kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “They dropped us at the music store and left. Can you believe Corley was right about my music? She’s so smart. It was a mis —”

  “They didn’t say where they were going?” I interrupted her.

  She shook her head. “They said they were doing ‘this and that’ — errands, I assumed.”

  “If they were doing errands they’d have had bags with them,” I said. “Did they?”

  Anna frowned. “Okay, Nancy Drew, what’s going on?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her my concerns, but I shut it again before saying anything. If Gram wanted everyone to know about this — whatever it was — she’d have told us. To tell what I’d overheard would be like revealing a confidence. “Nothing’s going on,” I said. “I’m just interested in what everyone did.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what they did,” Anna said.

  When I went into the living room to find Gram, she wasn’t there. “She’s taking a nap,” Grandpa Morris told me.

  “Isn’t she feeling well?” I hoped this would give Grandpa Morris an opening to talk about what was happening.

  “Just a headache. Want to draw that family tree or go to the beach?”

  I glanced at the board on the table and then out the window. While everyone was in town, Mom and I had sat at the table and sorted the photos into piles by family group and by year. The most time-consuming part had been trying to figure out where pictures with no year marked on them belonged.

  “I’ve done enough tree work for now,” I told him. “I need some sunshine.”

  Mom, Anna, and Corley joined Grandpa and me for a trip to the beach.

  “I hope this great weather holds for the party,” Grandpa said, gazing up at the glorious blue sky.

  “This party is very important to Mom, isn’t it?” my mom observed as Corley and Anna walked down to the water. “More so than usual, it seems.”

  I’d been about to join Corley and Anna, but I hesitated, interested in hearing what Grandpa would say. “Yes, she’s determined that the whole family be together this time.”

  “But she’s already received some refusals, hasn’t she?” Mom said.

  “Yes, and it makes me so mad. What could Jean and the girls be doing that’s so important? And Leah! She could take the Long Island Railroad for heaven’s sake! What could be easier?”

  “Why are they still fighting, Dad?” Mom asked.

  “Ask Leah, the big mouth!” Grandpa Morris cried. “That woman couldn’t keep a secret if the fate of the earth depended on it. Just one time your mother requests that she not tell the whole world about her —” He cut himself off and looked at me, suddenly noticing I was there. I guess my expression told him I was a little too eager to hear.

  “You know, and whatever.” He mumbled the end of his sentence.

  “What?” I asked.

  He waved his hand. “Oh, who cares. It was a long time ago and it’s not important anymore.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me?” I demanded.

  “Because it’s not worth going into,” he said, pulling off his polo shirt. “Enough talk, the water is waiting for us. Come on, Abby, race you.”

  He began to run and I raced him to the water. There was no longer any doubt in my mind where Mom got her secret-keeping abilities. She was the daughter of two big-time tight-lipped secret keepers.

  * * *

  That evening and the next day, Gram seemed fine. Better than fine, in fact. She was on an all-systems-go setting for most of Tuesday. That was partly because her best friend, Molly, arrived, in a van crammed with party decorations.

  I like Molly. I’ve never met anyone at all like her. She’s overweight and wears these big, blousy, colorful outfits. That day she was wearing a red-and-orange tie-dyed outfit with flowing sleeves. She has thick gray hair, which she usually wears bundled up on top of her head with lots of strands falling loose.

  Molly calls everyone except my grandparents “honey,” “darling,” or “sweetie.” It makes her sound very affectionate, but I suspect it’s just because she doesn’t want to have to remember any names. (She knows my grandparents’ names, so she just calls them Elsie and Morris.)

  She and Gram began hauling things out of the back of the van. These were not ordinary party decorations. Molly works as a set designer for Broadway shows. She’d managed to borrow a few spectacular set pieces for Gram’s party. Some were from an Off-Broadway production of Alice in Wonderland. But others were Molly’s own inspired choices.

  “Careful with that, darlings,” she told Anna and me as we staggered under the weight of a golden throne. “Until last week that was the king’s throne in The King and I. It had to be changed when the new actor came in to play the king. He needed a bigger throne. Still … it may have to go back if a smaller king comes in after this one leaves to make a movie in two months.”

  “For now it’s the White Queen’s throne, my throne,” Gram said. “I’m honored.”

  “You should be,” Molly said. “Not everyone gets to share a seat with the King of Siam.”

  That afternoon we helped set up prop pieces, which included an ivy-wreathed column that had been used in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a candelabra from The Phantom of the Opera, and a movable cardboard wall painted to look like stone from Les Misérables.

  “These will create a Wonderland effect,” Gram Elsie said, her face glowing.

  “Wait until you see what else I’ve brought,” Molly said, disappearing into her van for a moment. She pushed a TV-sized cardboard box toward the back of the van. Then another one. “Elsie, have your sweet granddaughters help me with these,” she called from inside the van.

  Anna and I sprang to the back of the van to help. “Costumes!” Anna cried as she pulled open one of the boxes.

  “Broadway costumes!” Molly said as she climbed out of the van with a third box in her arms. “There aren’t any complete Alice in Wonderland costumes in here, but there’s certainly enough to begin creating from.”

  “Gram! Look at this!” Anna cried, lifting a gorgeous golden, jeweled crown from the top of the box. “How about this for your White Queen costume!”

  Gram Elsie took it from her. “Molly, did you steal the crown jewels for this one?” she asked.

  “Another fabulous fake,” Molly said. “Put it on.” Gram placed the crown on her head. “You must have been a queen in another lifetime,” Molly pronounced. “It’s you!”

  Gram smiled and took it off. “It certainly made me feel queenly.”

  We were so busy that the rest of the day flew by. By the time we were done, we had all the things we’d need to make the backyard the most wonderful Wonderland I could imagine. Gram, Molly, Anna, and I stood together admiring our work. “No one will believe this!” I said. “This will be the most awesome party ever.”

  As I spoke Grandpa came out and handed Gram the cordless phone. “It’s the caterer,” he said. “He wants to make some change in the menu.”

  Gram took the phone and listened to what the caterer had to say. “That sounds fine,” she said. “But I need to look at our original menu before I can be sure. I’ll have to go inside to find it.”

  “I’ll get it,” I volunteered. “Where is it?”

  “On the right-hand night table in our bedroom,” she informed me.

  “Be right back.” I sprinted into the house and up the stairs. In Gram and Grandpa’s bedroom I looked at the right-hand night table and saw a box of tissues and an issue of Time magazine. No list. The left-hand table was empty.

  I made a slow turn around the sunny, neat bedroom. Where else would Gram put that list? I wondered.

  Crossing
the room to Gram’s desk, I lifted some blank notepads, hoping the list would be beneath them.

  It wasn’t. But I couldn’t stop staring at what was underneath. A glossy pamphlet entitled “What You Need to Know About Breast Cancer.”

  My heart pounded. Breast cancer. Why did Gram have information about breast cancer?

  With a trembling hand, I picked up the pamphlet. More brochures and papers lay beneath it. There was more information about breast cancer, an X ray of some sort, and a letter, addressed to Gram, typed on a doctor’s letterhead.

  Although I ached to read the letter, I didn’t. Seeing it made me realize it wasn’t right to snoop through Gram’s things. I restacked everything and straightened the pile.

  Breast cancer! I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew cancer was a terrible, life-threatening disease. People could die from cancer.

  “Abby!” Grandpa Morris called from the stairs. Suddenly feeling guilty, I practically jumped away from the desk. He appeared in the doorway. “Gram wants to know if you found her list,” he said.

  “No,” I replied in a quivering voice.

  Grandpa stepped farther into the room. “Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

  “I — I’m fine. I just can’t find that list anywhere!”

  He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure she has it all in her head anyway. She always does.”

  I gazed up at him. Did he know about this? He had to! How could he be so calm and cheerful? How could either of them act normal? I wanted to blurt out, “Grandpa, does Gram have breast cancer?” but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wasn’t supposed to know.

  “She said she might have left it in the kitchen,” he said, leaving the room. “I’m going to look there.”

  I wanted to follow him. But my feet felt glued to the spot where they stood as my mind reeled with this new information. Gram didn’t even look sick. She’d shoved around heavy theatrical props with us all day. It was so confusing. Maybe she didn’t have breast cancer. She might be collecting the information for a friend.