Us and Uncle Fraud

  Mother pulled the blankets up around our shoulders and tucked them in. I heard her move away and check the window—open a bit to the cool early April air—and then the door closed quietly again.

  I heard her go to Stephie's room, and I could imagine the same ritual, the rearranging of the blanket over my sister in her crib, the adjustment of the window, the tiptoeing away.

  She didn't check on Tom. After a certain age, Mother said, people didn't like to be looked at while they slept. I still did. It was reassuring, pretending to be asleep and hearing her slippered feet pad through the room for a final check on my comfort.

  I heard Mother and Father's door close, and after a few minutes, I heard the snap of their light switch and knew that now, too, their room was dark.

  I listened. I wanted to hear Uncle Claude come upstairs. My room shared a wall with Marcus's, and I knew that through the wall I would hear him find the Life Savers on his pillow. Maybe I would hear him unfasten the strap on the small box and check its priceless, fragile contents.

  But he didn't come. I could hear footsteps downstairs; I heard the refrigerator door open; I heard ice cubes being shaken from their tray and emptied into a glass. A faucet ran briefly. The footsteps came from the kitchen and went back into the living room. I heard the creak as Uncle Claude settled into Father's leather chair.

  Marcus turned and sighed in his sleep. I stared at the ceiling, not at all tired, and wondered what Claude was doing downstairs.

  Finally I turned the covers back and climbed out of bed. Marcus didn't stir. Barefoot, I crossed the room and went out into the dark hall. In the bathroom, a small nightlight glowed. I shivered in my flannel nightgown, blinked in the dim light, and tiptoed down the stairs.

  At the foot of the stairs, I made my footsteps heavier on purpose, so that I wouldn't startle Uncle Claude. I didn't want him to think that I was a sneak.

  But he wasn't startled at all. He glanced over, lifting his eyes from a magazine in his lap, and smiled.

  "Louise Amanda," he said. "You're a night owl, just like me. I could tell that the minute I met you."

  "How?"

  "Large pupils in your eyes," he explained gravely. "And those are a sign that you can travel in dim light. I have the same characteristic."

  I peered into his eyes, and he was right. His eyes were brown, like mine, with large black pupils.

  "Nocturnal beasts we are," he said.

  "How did you know my middle name?" I asked him. "I never tell it to anybody."

  "Louise Amanda," he repeated. "It could almost be one word : Louisamanda. The Louisamanda Purchase, 1803, a date from history. Or it could be the name of a museum. Do you know that outside of Copenhagen there is a museum called the Louisiana? The man who built it named it for his wives. He married only people named Louise. He married one Louise after another.

  "It's at the edge of the Baltic Sea," he went on, and picked up his glass and sipped. A bottle of Father's whiskey was on the table beside him.

  "Have you been there? At the edge of the Baltic Sea?" I asked him.

  He nodded. He refilled his glass from Father's whiskey. "Yes," he said, "I've been there. Once I told him that he should name his museum Louisamanda. But he became belligerent, and said I should build my own museum. He was right, of course. You can't put names to other people's things. I apologized to him for my suggestion and slunk away, duly chastened." He sipped again.

  I sat down on the couch, opposite Father's chair. "How did you know my middle name?" I asked again.

  "Thomas Frederick Cunningham," Claude said, "your ubiquitous older brother, was named for his great-grandfather, Thomas Frederick Newbold, who served without distinction in the army during World War I.

  "That was my grandfather," Claude explained, taking another drink, "and therefore your brother's—and your—great-grandfather."

  He refilled the glass again.

  "Louise Amanda. Your great-grandmother. She was born Louise Amanda Taggart; she married Thomas Frederick Newbold, who served without distinction in the army; and she died at the age of forty-two, having given birth to six children, four of whom survived, one of whom was Marcus Newbold, who was your mother's father, and therefore mine. And so your very brash and freckled brother is named—"

  He looked at me and waited for the answer.

  "Marcus Newbold Cunningham," I said, and he nodded and sipped.

  "But then there's Stephie," I pointed out. "Who had Stephie's name?"

  "Stephanie Ann Cunningham," Claude sighed. "Who knows? Your parents had lost their sense of heritage by then. Your sister received a name with no history. She will survive it, I expect. I have."

  "Doesn't your name have a history?"

  "I am attempting to create one for it," Claude said gloomily. "What time is it, Louisamanda?" He looked at his wrist and squinted, but couldn't seem to focus on his watch.

  I could see the hall clock from where I sat. "Almost eleven," I told him.

  "The night is young," Claude muttered. "If you were twenty-eight years old, I would invite you to join me at the opera."

  I laughed aloud. "There's no opera in this town," I pointed out.

  "We would go to London," he said, and picked up the whiskey bottle. He held it against the light and shook it from side to side. It was empty. "If only you were twenty-eight years old, I would take you to London in the morning."

  Suddenly I was sleepy. I yawned.

  "Uncle Claude," I asked shyly, "what's in the box?"

  He stared blankly at me.

  "The priceless, fragile secret in the box I took upstairs," I reminded him.

  "Go to bed, Louisamanda," Uncle Claude said. "I thought you were a creature of the dark, but suddenly your pupils have diminished in size. They've turned to sinister slits."

  I rose immediately, embarrassed, and headed for the stairs. "I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have asked."

  He squinted at me. "Are you duly chastened?"

  I wasn't certain what he meant, but I nodded. "Yes," I said.

  "Good. I'll tell you in the morning what's in the box. I'll tell you and your freckled brother—Marcus Newbold Cunningham—but no one else. Now then: Do you know how to say good night in three different languages?"

  "No."

  "One. Bonne nuit. That's French. Say it."

  "Bonne nuit," I said.

  "God natt. Swedish."

  "God natt," I repeated.

  "Gute Nacht. German." He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  "Gute Nacht," I said, but he didn't hear me. "Bonne nuit. God natt. Gute Nacht," I murmured, memorizing as I went up the stairs and back to Marcus's room.

  "I want you and Marcus to show me your town, Louise," Uncle Claude said at breakfast. "If you don't mind, of course."

  Tom glanced at him suspiciously through his metal-rimmed glasses. Usually Tom was the one selected for such tasks. Tom could recite the history of our little town, pointing out landmarks : the grave of the World War I flying ace, the place where the river had crested during the flood of 1913, the site recently selected for the new library to be built next year.

  But Claude smiled pleasantly back at my older brother. "I remember when I was passing through three years ago, Thomas, and you showed me around. Did a remarkable job of it, too, for a boy who was then no more than—what? Thirteen?"

  "Eleven," Tom said, going back to his scrambled eggs. "Three years ago I was only eleven. Same as Louise is now."

  "Is that a fact? I'm amazed. I could have sworn you were at least thirteen, giving an authoritative tour the way you did."

  Marcus and I grinned at each other. Tom was known for his air of authority—he always had been—and we were sure that Uncle Claude was needling him. But Tom nodded, taking Claude's comment as a compliment. "Not much has changed," he said, "but the kids can show you around this time. If you have questions you can ask me when you get back."

  "Would you mind taking the baby along?" Mother asked. "She could use the fresh air." r />
  Marcus and I groaned in unison. Stephie was such a pest; she dawdled and whined. But Claude reached across the table to tickle her under her chin. "Want to go for a walk, Picklepuss?" he asked. "Are your legs up to a sturdy hike?"

  Stephie dimpled and nodded, orange juice on her upper lip.

  Upstairs, pulling sweaters over our heads in his room, I said to Marcus, "He said he'd tell us what's in the box. He said he'd tell us this morning. Only you and me."

  Marcus took his baseball cap from the top of a lamp and pulled it down over his mountain of curls. "When?" he asked. "When did he say that?"

  "Last night. I couldn't sleep last night, and real late, I went downstairs and talked to him."

  "Liar. You went to sleep before I did."

  "I am not a liar. Ask him. We sat downstairs and drank whiskey, and he told me he'd been at the edge of the Baltic Sea."

  "You drank whiskey? I'm going to tell Father. It'll stunt your growth. You'll end up a midget if you drink whiskey before you're grown-up. What did it taste like?"

  "I didn't drink it, stupid; Claude drank it. Father's whole bottle of whiskey was gone when I went up to bed."

  "That's why Father was so mad this morning," Marcus said knowingly. "I heard him tell Mother that her brother is a lush."

  "Well," I said slowly, "at least he's been at the edge of the Baltic Sea. I don't know anyone else in the whole world who's been there."

  "And he's got that box full of stuff for us, and this morning he's going to tell us what it is, right?"

  "Right."

  "Louise! Marcus! Are you ready?" Mother was calling from the foot of the stairs. We ran down.

  "Here," she said and handed me a dollar. "Stop at the grocery store on your way home and buy a dozen eggs. Make sure they're white ones, for dyeing. A dozen's enough, don't you think?"

  Marcus calculated. "That's four each for me and Louise and Stephie. Tom says he's too grown-up now for Easter eggs, the jerk."

  Mother sighed. "Twelve's enough, then. Be sure to hold Stephie's hand. And show Uncle Claude where they've pointed the brick on the bank, and, let's see, maybe he'd be interested in the window display at Baumen's Department Store—"

  Claude appeared, with his shabby jacket on, and interrupted her. "Right," he said, "we mustn't miss that. And we'll check out all the churches to see how they've decorated for Easter." He was grinning.

  "Claude," Mother said, in the same chiding voice she used with Father, "stop that. Don't be disrespectful." But she was grinning back at him.

  Holding Stephie by her hands, we swung her down over the porch steps and started off.

  3

  Our town was not a town of distinction. It was like a hundred—maybe a thousand, maybe a million—other small towns, built a century ago along the eastern bank of a sluggish, tan river with an Indian name.

  Like all those other towns, it had a main street lined with stores and banks, a movie theater, a newspaper, a couple of gas stations, and a post office. There was a library, small and turreted, on a side street; next year they would build a new, expanded one, and the little Gothic library in which I had grown into a literate eleven-year-old would be torn down to make way for a parking lot.

  There was the Town Hall, which contained the police station and small jail, and the hospital in which we (all but Stephanie) had had our tonsils removed. The elementary school that Marcus and I attended was a squat brick building near the center of town, an easy walk from our house. Tom attended the junior high; it, and the senior high beside it, were "regional schools" five miles from town. Yellow buses collected Tom and the others from the corners of neighborhood streets, and the same buses navigated the flat, patchwork countryside to pick up the "farm kids"—the kids with German, Slavic, and Scandinavian names—waiting at the mailboxes that dotted the winding country roads.

  On the other side of the river, reached by an impressive bridge, the teacher's college sprawled over a brown, almost treeless hill. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, if the wind came from the west, as it usually did, we could hear the exuberant cheers or distressed groans of the crowd as the college team fought its way toward a Class C football championship. Father's paper paid little attention to the sports events at the college; the headlines came from the better teams of the universities that lay many miles away.

  Our town was divided into neighborhoods by economic class: the poor neighborhood, the middle, and the rich; we were in the middle, always had been, always would be, and we neither looked down on the poor nor aspired to be part of the rich. No one did.

  We walked past the imposing Presbyterian Church that stood at the end of our block.

  "Yesterday," I said to Uncle Claude, who had lifted Stephie to his shoulders and was carrying her there, "all the church bells were ringing. It was before your train got in. Yesterday was Good Friday; did you know that?"

  Claude, striding along the sidewalk with Stephie holding both ears like handles, glanced down at me. "Of course I knew that," he said. "In the middle of the afternoon, my train slowed down and gave seventeen long, penitential blasts of its whistle. We were passing a dairy farm at the time, and four hundred cows fell to their knees and bowed their heads."

  "Moooo," crooned Stephie from her knobby-shouldered perch.

  Marcus had lagged behind to squat and retie his shoe. I waited for him while Stephie and Uncle Claude sauntered on ahead, mooing together.

  "Ask him, Louise," ordered Marcus. "Ask him about the box."

  "I can't. He told me he'd only tell you and me. So I can't ask him when stupid Stephie's there."

  Marcus frowned. "Great," he said sarcastically. "So we have to spend the whole morning showing him around this dumb town."

  I shrugged. We plodded ahead to where Claude had turned and was waiting for us, Stephanie still attached to his shoulders like a giggling growth.

  We were on the corner of our residential street, where it joined Main Street, and we had a choice of going north or south. "Which way would you like to go, Uncle Claude?" I asked politely. "If we turn left, you could see the school that Marcus and I go to. Or if we turn right, there's the Town Hall in about two blocks. If you stand behind the Town Hall, you can look across the river to the college."

  "I'm sure you go to a fine school," Uncle Claude said, "since you've both turned out to be such fine, intellectual people. But frankly, I've seen enough schools to last me a lifetime. And as for town halls—" He made a face.

  Marcus and I both grinned. We felt the same way about the Town Hall. But we couldn't think of much else to show him. It simply wasn't a very interesting town.

  "That's it!" Claude said suddenly. "I couldn't hear you very well, because I have these human earmuffs on, but I could read your lips, and you're absolutely right."

  Marcus and I looked at each other. Neither of us had said a word.

  Claude pried Stephie's grip loose from his ears. "My dear," he said to her, "do you have large pockets in those overalls?"

  "No," Stephie said. She clutched the collar of his jacket to steady herself on his shoulders.

  "Well then," Claude told her, "it's a good thing I loosened your grip. In two more minutes, my ears would have fallen off, and without large pockets to carry them home in, we would have had to leave them right here on the sidewalk. Perhaps a large dog would have come along and had them for dinner, but then what would hold my hat on when winter comes?"

  Marcus and I both looked automatically at the sidewalk, picturing detached ears lying there like dead oak leaves in October.

  "Now," Claude went on, "I believe what I understood your moving lips to suggest was this: that you will show me the most interesting, exciting, dangerous, secret thing in your town. Something that very few people know about. Are you two in agreement about what that thing is to be? Consult with each other and decide before we set off."

  My imagination soared. Every child knows of dangerous secret places, and each has a favorite. I knew that Marcus's was the ladder of the water tower on
the south side of town; he had climbed it once almost to the top. He had walked the bridge across the river, too, with his friends: something we had been sternly forbidden to do. I was afraid of heights, so I had shared few of Marcus's secret places. But I had my own.

  One of my friends from school was the daughter of a professor at the college. She had told me that in the Science Building, there on the hill across the river, if someone boosted you to a certain windowsill, you could peer into a lab and see dead babies floating in jars of fluid. Peering at the dead babies would have been my choice, but to get there we would have had to walk the bridge, something I was unwilling to do.

  Marcus looked at me slyly. He had been pondering the choices too. "Leboffs'P" he suggested.

  I nodded. It was the perfect choice, one of the secret places Marcus and I shared: a short walk, no perilous heights, a true secret, and a valid danger; but there was still an obvious problem.

  "Stephie will tell on us," I pointed out.

  "We'll just tell Stephie that we're showing Uncle Claude where the rich people live," Marcus whispered. "She can't even talk well enough yet to tell Mother anything more than that. Heck, we can tell Mother that—that we showed the Leboffs' house to Uncle Claude. She'll never know the rest."

  I nodded in agreement. He was right. Together we turned back to Uncle Claude, like two conspirators.

  "This way," I said. "We turn left for a block, and then we turn right, up that street over there."

  Now he and Stephie followed us. "Horsie!" Stephie cried, and he trotted a bit, jouncing her up and down.

  Although we had only three blocks to walk, we were moving from one world to another: from the world in which we lived, in our rambling shingled house, the world of houses like ours, with back yards and porches and hammocks and fences draped with honeysuckle in summer, to the more elegant, more austere world of the mansions built where the river bank was steep.

  These were the homes of the people who had founded our town, families who had been there for a century. There were not many of them, and they were not among our friends; their children attended our schools only until they were twelve or so, and then they were sent east to boarding school. There had been an Evelyn Leboff in the grade above Tom, but she was gone now, to a school in Connecticut; and in Marcus's fifth-grade class there was a solemn, spectacled boy named Francis Hartmann, who lived here on what we called "The Riverbank." He was brought to school each day by his father's driver, and he never invited anyone home to play after school. That was simply the way it was.