William Starling was not so easily distracted from old grudges that played well. “It feels like last year. I remember, remember vividly, the scenes, the tantrums,” he said. With a glare at Max, he concluded, “The refusal to eat.”
Max, who had never thrown a tantrum in his life, not that he remembered, and who had certainly never refused to eat, did not take this bait.
“Don’t tease him, William,” Mary Starling said to her husband. “You can’t blame him for wanting to go his own way. He’s a chip off the old block, and you’re the old block he’s chipped off of, so go write that letter to our Maharajah.”
The response arrived the next day: Telegrams had been sent, to and from India, and a ticket, “for the little boy,” would be waiting for them on the boat. A carriage would call for the little family at nine in the morning to transport the travelers and their luggage to the Flower of Kashmir, scheduled to leave port at noon. At the docks in Bombay, they would be met by the Maharajah’s Daimler automobile.
Max, flush with victory, asked, “Can I take my bicycle?”
William Starling, equally flush, answered, “Your bicycle? Why not? What an adventure!” He rose from the table and held a hand out to his wife. She rose to stand with him, and even though there was only Max as audience, they bowed to one another.
The way in which William and Mary Starling took bows, thought Max, who had spent years observing his parents both on and off stage, was a little drama of its own. Always, of course, there were the smiles, brilliant smiles and shining eyes to tell the audience—any audience, however large or small, whether in theater seats or on a street corner—how much the actors appreciated the attention, the admiration, the applause. Max could recognize the half bow for social occasions, the slight nod of the head for close friends and family, the deep bow with bent knees and lowered heads if there happened to be royalty present for a performance. He liked best to see his parents turn to one another in front of the lowered curtain, where William bowed from the waist to his wife, who gave him in return her best court curtsey. This meant they each felt the other had performed with extreme excellence that evening. It was the opposite of a bow the couple took with their hands clasped between them as their free hands reached out to the audience. Those clasped hands meant trouble for someone.
The very next day they canceled performances and advised the remaining members of the Company to go on the road and share among themselves the major roles usually taken by William and Mary. Notices were posted, one at the entrance to the Starling Theater, one beside the stage door, and even one beside the small, seldom-used back entrance hidden away down an unlit alley. Closing indefinitely as of April 15, the notices read, and they were signed in bold, looping handwriting, William Starling, Manager and Director. It was arranged that the gas and electricity would be turned off at the theater after the last performance. “We’ll give them Adorable Arabella,” William decided. “It’s your most popular role, my dearling, and for good reason. You are Arabella herself. They won’t forget us, with your Arabella as their last memory.”
William Starling announced his good news to everyone he met. “We are about to embark on the time of our lives!” In restaurant dining rooms and public houses, in streets and in stores, he proclaimed it. Everyone joined in his excitement and applauded his luck, for William Starling was a one-of-a-kind character, vivid, extravagant, larger than life. To be in his presence was to feel more alive yourself. “I’m off to see the world!” he cried joyfully. “I’ll send you a postcard!”
Grammie had doubts. On Thursday, the day the theater was dark, she took the well-worn path across their adjoining yards and knocked on the kitchen door. She always knocked and waited to be invited in because, as she said, “When relatives live so close together, it’s especially important to have good manners with one another.”
When she came into the front parlor, which was strewn with costumes from among which would be selected those to be taken to India, Max’s father waved the letter in front of her nose, then folded it up and put it in his pocket. “Show your mother the jeweled brooch,” he said to his wife, rolling the last two words around in his mouth like a candy.
Grammie was not won over so easily. “If you can’t judge a book by its cover,” she said, “still less can you judge a letter by its gilded edges. Think about it, William,” she advised, in the schoolteacher voice she had perfected when she was a young widow with a daughter to raise.
“There she goes!” cried Max’s father, throwing his hands up into the air in dramatic exasperation. “Dragging books into everything! Raining on our parade!”
Grammie stuck to her point. “I have my doubts about this. Why all the mystery?”
William Starling turned to his son. “Your grandmother, Max, is a stay-at-home, and this makes her an excellent librarian. We, on the other hand, are not. Au contraire! We are adventurers! And she”—now he glared at Grammie, as if she were the villain in one of his productions. He pointed an accusing forefinger right between her eyes. “She knows this full well. Full well!” he repeated.
Grammie laughed, as William and Mary and Max all knew she would.
Then Max’s mother brought the pot of fish stew out to the dining room table, where thick slices of dark bread were already set out in a bowl, and they all sat down to supper. Before she began to ladle the thick tomato and fish and potato and onion mixture into bowls, Mary Starling looked around at the posters on the walls, at the books and scripts lined up in the tall bookcase, and took a deep breath. She said to her mother, “We talked it over and decided not to have you read the letter.” Grammie raised an eyebrow. “You’re a good librarian, and you’ll look everything up.” Grammie opened her mouth. “And then you’ll start to teach us all about the country, and its people, and its geography and history, and we won’t,” she concluded hurriedly, before Grammie could interrupt, “have the adventure of discovering things for ourselves.” She spoke more quietly than her husband, more like a judge than a politician, more like a king than a general.
Grammie admitted, “You’re right. Absolutely right about me. I hope that by my age I know the person I am, and you’re right about what I’d do. But I’d be foolish not to worry.”
“You don’t ever need to worry about me,” Max’s father assured her. “I’m invincible.” To prove his point, he thumped his chest with his fist.
Grammie humphed, but said nothing. Max’s mother passed around bowls of steaming stew. Max passed around the bread.
“And I would never let anything happen to your darling daughter or your precious grandson,” William Starling promised.
Grammie humphed again.
Max’s mother offered her own kind of comfort. “There’s no use to worrying, you know that. And there’s no need for it. Not about us,” she added, with a quick, glad smile at her husband. “We always land on our feet, don’t we?”
“That’s all very well for you, but what about Max?” asked Grammie. “What about his education?”
“He’ll be attending the School of Life! He’ll graduate from the University of Experience!” William Starling declared, although in fact they had made no plans other than to inform Max’s teachers that he would be out of school and out of the city and out of the country for the foreseeable future.
Grammie persisted. “He’d be better off staying with me. Attending the school of his own life.”
Mary Starling spoke gently. “We’re always grateful to you for the way you took care of Max when he was little. Always. But he is twelve, almost thirteen, old enough to travel in a foreign country and not get himself in trouble. Old enough to get a lot out of the experience, too.”
Nobody asked Max what he thought, and of course he minded, when it was his life they were having opinions about. He was seated at his usual place at the table, and he looked from one of his parents to the other, minding. He also minded Grammie trying to turn him back into the little boy she’d so often had in her care, for a night or a month, a little boy wh
o couldn’t be left on his own in his own house. In fact, the only thing he didn’t mind right then was being taken out of school. At school they called him Eyes, and it wasn’t a friendly nickname. He said, to nobody in particular, “I want to go. I really do.”
With all three of them against her, Grammie could only sigh. “I know, I know, you’re always fine, and”—she turned to Max—“you’re old enough to look out for yourself. I know. I’d just feel better if I knew where in the world you’ll be.”
“You’ll find that out, my dear little mother-in-law, when you get our postcards.”
In which Max loses his parents
Two trunks and three suitcases waited by the front door, early on the morning of their departure. The Starlings had packed for life in a distant and unfamiliar land, where they would be asked to perform as well as to teach. Light summer clothing for when they arrived, and also clothes for the long sea voyage. (“We’ll be dressing for dinner, of course. I’ll need at least four evening gowns,” Mary Starling said, adding, “and you’ll both need your tuxedos,” although, as far as Max knew, he didn’t have any formal evening wear.) A selection of plays had to be included. (“We must have Shakespeare,” William Starling decided. “Do you think Julius Caesar? Or A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The comedy,” he announced.) Grammie had made sure their trunk carried a supply of soap and toothpaste.
Max had concerned himself with watercolor paints, brushes, and paper. “There are artists in India, and very good ones,” his father had protested, “so there are sure to be supplies there.” But Max had paid no attention. “When it comes to his painting, he doesn’t give an inch,” his mother observed, which might have been a complaint, but Max didn’t care. “Maybe he’s an artist,” Grammie suggested, and although Max thought she was wrong about that, he didn’t say so. He had in fact insisted on a final lesson on the morning of their departure, arguing that an independent twelve-year-old was perfectly capable of riding his bicycle up to the gangplank on his own, that Yes, he would be there no later than eleven-fifteen, and Yes, he would remember to ask for his ticket from the steward who would welcome him on board, because undoubtedly his parents would be busy, settling in.
They had imagined the start of the journey, the seagoing liner pulled away from the Queensbridge docks by small tugboats, towed through the drawbridge and out onto the river, then cast off after a mile to follow the fast-flowing water down to the seafront city of Porthaven, where it would enter the ocean and cross to foreign lands. “Foreign lands!” cried William Starling. “You don’t want to miss that, my boy,” and “I don’t,” Max agreed.
They had worked out the timing as if it were a play. Not long after Max rode off to his lesson, the carriage would arrive to take his parents, and their luggage, down to the docks. “I want to be the first on board!” William Starling declared, and turned to his wife with a laugh. “I want you to be the second!” To Max he spoke sternly. “Don’t dawdle. Leave yourself enough time to get from the New Town to the docks,” he said. He warned, “If you miss the boat you have no chance of catching us, and then what would you do?”
“I won’t miss it,” Max answered.
“He’d go to his grandmother’s,” Mary Starling said, “and wait to hear from us.”
“I said, I won’t miss it,” Max repeated, impatient to be off. They kept saying that twelve was old enough to be responsible and independent, but they still treated him like a little boy. “I’ll see you on the Flower of Kashmir,” he said, and left before they could think of anything else that might go wrong that they could warn him about.
He rode out through the Bishop’s Gate and across the New Town and in twenty minutes had arrived at the house where his teacher lived, a low four-room building with an attached studio and a large walled garden. Joachim’s oil paintings were small, detailed pictures of what was growing in his garden: a narcissus, the branch of a pear tree in bloom, red berries against white snow. He sold his work at one of the galleries in the New Town and was reluctant to take on pupils, unless—like Max—they had a clear idea of what they wanted to learn. “Watercolors,” Max had told the man when his grandmother had taken him for an interview. “I want to paint the sky, skyscapes.”
Joachim did not ask why. His interest was in line and color, in shape and shading, in technique, not people and what made them say and do what they said and did. He considered the boy for a long time, then “I can teach you that,” he said, and told Grammie, “Ten per class, one class a week, start tomorrow,” before turning back to his easel.
The painter was a gray and gloomy man, gray hair and short gray beard, gray eyes and a gloomy gray outlook on life. His way of teaching was to give an instruction, about technique or color or design, and then get back to his own work while Max tried to apply what he’d been told. Mostly, Joachim ignored his pupil, but early on he had presented Max with a bright red beret. “Work clothes,” he’d said, holding the gift out to Max. Max always wore the beret when he painted, and he found that, like any good costume, a red beret made it easier to concentrate, to feel and see like a painter. It seemed to Max that both he and Joachim enjoyed the lessons.
“You again,” Joachim greeted him when he wheeled his bicycle in by the garden gate that April morning. Seeing the carpetbag that Max had hanging from his shoulder, he asked, “You aren’t thinking of moving in, are you?” but went back to his own easel before Max could answer. On the canvas a perfect blue hyacinth, attended by two plump green leaves, floated on a creamy background. Joachim peered into his picture, almost dipping his nose into the tiny petals. “Don’t just stand there,” he told Max.
Max put on his beret and got to work. He set his paper on the easel at the proper angle and, with a last glance up into a pale spring sky, mixed what he hoped would be the right amount of cerulean blue with water. Then he picked up a broad brush, to wet the upper third of his paper, and lost himself in his painting. Minute after minute went by unnoticed as they worked, facing away from one another, undistracted by breeze and insect and the occasional bird, until—after a while, long enough for Max to have discarded three attempts and made a good beginning on the fourth—Joachim sighed and set his palette down on the ground beside him.
Joachim often sighed as he worked, since what he could get onto the canvas with his paints and brushes never matched what he was imagining, but he never put down his palette. Max turned to see Joachim running paint-smeared fingers through his untidy gray hair. He leaned closer to his painting, squinting at it as if not quite sure what he was looking at. “I’m too old for this,” he said, maybe to himself, maybe to Max.
Max decided to respond, whichever of them the painter had been talking to. “You’re not so old.” After all, his teacher’s hair was gray, not white. His face was no more wrinkled than Grammie’s, and she certainly wasn’t old.
“Old enough to be going blind. And what’ll I do then, batblind? Who would buy what a blind painter paints?”
Max was imagining what those pictures might look like. “They might be strange,” he said, “and interesting.”
Joachim gave a sharp, sarcastic bark of a laugh. “Ha ha. I paint what I see in my garden, you know that, and I’m not seeing very clearly these days. Oh, I see the colors all right, but the edges of things are blurry. The details.”
“Get glasses,” Max suggested. “You’re not young—”
“You can say that again.”
“You’re not young,” said the always cooperative Max.
“Very funny.”
“Grammie told me that after forty most people need reading glasses.”
“And has your know-it-all librarian grandmother also gone to eye doctor school?”
When Max had an idea about how to fix some problem, he grew impatient for the plan to be put into execution. “But will you? Will you get glasses?”
“You know,” Joachim told him gloomily, “it could be it’s not only my literal vision that I’m losing.”
That would be a different pro
blem, but equally serious, Max knew. If Joachim was losing his metaphorical vision, that would be a problem to which Max couldn’t begin to imagine any solution. “I wish I wasn’t going away just now,” he said.
“As if you being here will make any difference.” Without turning to look at Max, Joachim picked up his brush and palette to get back to work. “If I’m going blind in not too long a time, I’d better build up an inventory, wouldn’t you say?”
“I wish I knew when we’re coming back,” Max said, following his own thoughts.
“So you could get a quick medical degree and miraculously cure me?” Joachim laughed again, still sarcastically. “Ha. Ha ha. You’re a bright boy, Max, but you are no genius.”
“No, so I could …,” Max thought. What could he do, after all, if Joachim really was going blind, or—worse—if he was going to lose his painter’s vision, his painter self? That would be like his parents losing the stage; their whole life couldn’t be the same if they did that. “If I were here, I could pester you until you went to a doctor and found out for sure about your eyes,” he finally said.
“Thank you very much,” Joachim said, meaning the opposite. “End of lesson,” he decided, and at the same time they heard the bell on the clock tower of City Hall ringing. The bell fell silent. Its final notes seemed to echo in the air. Max had not heard its first notes. “What time is it?” he asked.
Sighing at the interruption, Joachim turned away from his easel. “Noon, maybe. Could be ten.”
“I heard it ring ten,” Max remembered. He grabbed at his pad and his box of watercolors, and pulled on the traveling jacket suitable for first-class accommodations that his mother had asked him to wear. He slung the carpetbag over his shoulder.
“You were working,” Joachim explained, his attention back on his painting.
“It doesn’t feel late, but—” Max didn’t take the time to shake his teacher’s hand and thank him. Or even, he realized as he pushed his bicycle through the wooden gate that opened out onto a back alley, to pay for the lesson. He stopped just long enough to call back, “Ask my grandmother for today’s fees. She’ll be at the library,” and he pedaled off as fast as he could.