by Lous Lowry
Mrs. Willoughby had not yet thought of a reply to that when her husband appeared in the kitchen. “Bed and bathroom,” he announced. “Thank goodness. Now, where’s the bed? I need a nap.”
“I’ll show you in a minute,” Mrs. Poore said. “But this is a business and I must do things in a businesslike way. First, I must take your name, and you must pay me twenty-five dollars.” She found a pencil stub in the same drawer where the Band-Aid had been. Then she took a crumpled paper napkin from the wastebasket and smoothed it with her hand. “Name first,” she said.
“We are Mr. and Mrs., ah, Henry Frances.”
Mrs. Poore wrote that on the napkin. “This will be your bill,” she explained. “How many nights will you be staying?”
“Just one, I think. We’re looking for relatives who live on this street. Do you happen to know anyone named Willoughby? Someone who lives in a mansion? There seems to be a mansion next door.”
“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Poore said. “It has thirty-seven windows. A billionaire lives there but I’m afraid I don’t know his name. He has never invited me over. Of course, I wouldn’t have anything to wear if he did. I have only this one threadbare dress.”
Frances Willoughby spoke up. “I know exactly how that feels! They gave us used clothing to wear when we left Switzerland. This hideous brown dress! The indignity of it!”
Mrs. Poore looked up. “You don’t mean to say that you are also poor?”
“No, of course we’re not!” Henry Willoughby replied.
“We have been temporarily without funds for very complicated reasons,” his wife explained. “As soon as we find our offspring . . . our heirs . . . our— Oh, I don’t know what to call them!”
“Call them Tim,” her husband said in a choked voice. “And Barnaby A, and Barnaby B, and— Oh dear,” he snuffled, and then pulled himself together. “Jane.”
“Just a moment. Are you going to be able to pay this bill?” Mrs. Poore held up the torn napkin on which she’d been writing. “Because I’m so very sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t show you to your room until it’s paid for in full.” Secretly she’d been delighted that they had mistaken the second B for bathroom because it meant, she realized, they would not be expecting—or realizing they were entitled to—breakfast. She could save the handful of raisins she had been intending to add to the next morning’s gruel.
“Oh, we’ll pay it,” Mr. Willoughby grumbled. “The American embassy finally agreed to give me dollars for my Swiss francs, even though they were soggy and stained. I think they did it to get rid of me.”
“I kept mine,” Mrs. Willoughby said, patting her sodden purse. “I still have them. But they’re covered with mold.”
“You’ve always been a pack rat,” her husband commented. He turned to Mrs. Poore, took his wallet from his pocket, and removed some bills. “Here. You said twenty-five dollars?”
“Actually, it’s twenty-six,” Mrs. Poore said, and handed him the bill she had created.
“An extra dollar for emergency medical services?” he said, reading what she had written.
“Your wife’s foot.”
“My wife’s what?”
“I have a very serious blister, Henry,” Mrs. Willoughby reminded him. She was standing now and holding one leg bent, with her foot up.
“Did I mention that you look like a flamingo?” Mr. Willoughby muttered. Then, scowling, he counted out the money. “By the way,” he told Mrs. Poore, “there are no towels in that bathroom. We’ll need towels.”
“Oh. Wait a minute.” She took the bill from him and added something to it.
“Twenty-eight dollars now,” she said. “Because of towels.”
Mr. Willoughby’s face turned deep pink. His wife recognized that as a sign that he was about to bellow. “Henry,” she directed him in a terse voice, “just pay it.”
He flung the money onto the kitchen table and then followed his wife to the nearby bedroom. Mrs. Poore called after them. “Toilet paper’s free!” she said, graciously.
When they had closed the door behind them, she sighed an enormous sigh. She felt proud of herself. She had behaved like a businessperson instead of a pitiful, destitute Marmee of a woman. And they seemed like decent people. She wished that she had been able to put chocolates on their pillows. Ah, but the days of chocolates were gone. Chocolates were a felony now.
17
Winston and Winifred had hoped that Richie’s parents would invite them to stay for dinner, but it hadn’t happened. His mother had come briefly into the drawing room and had introduced herself, but then she went away again. After a while, Richie took them up the grand staircase and showed them his room, which in addition to a large bed was filled with chairs and couches and clothing, and had an adjoining playroom, where they gasped at the array of toys. But Richie yawned as he pointed to this or that and described the games and devices.
“We could come and play each day, Richie,” Winston said.
“Okay.” Richie glanced around the room. “But what would we play? I’m bored with everything.”
“Parcheesi or something. We should talk about it, maybe over dinner,” Winifred suggested. “I’m a little hungry.”
Richie brightened. “Oh,” he said, “that’s a good idea. Shall I come over to your house?”
“Not today,” Winston said. “We’ll invite you for dinner another time. Your dad said he saw someone going into our house. So I suppose our mother has company.”
“Yes,” Winifred added. “Probably Mother would appreciate it if we stayed out of the way. I wonder where we might go to have dinner.” She glanced slyly at Richie, who was examining the instruction booklet that had come with a game that was only partially unwrapped.
“This looks boring,” Richie said.
“It’s getting very close to dinnertime,” Winston said in a loud voice. “Probably a good idea to put that away, now, Richie, and think about eating. I wonder what your family might be having for dinner.”
“Boring steak, probably,” Richie said.
Winston and Winifred both fell silent. Steak? They had heard of steak but had never tasted it. Dinner at their house was usually a grayish stew. Their mother had instructed them never to ask what was in it. Once, when their cat, Radish, had been missing overnight, Winston had stared at the lump of something on his spoon and murmured in dismay, “Radish?” But his mother had looked horrified, and replied, “Of course not. Turnip.” And shortly thereafter, Radish had reappeared, wandering in through an open door, and had vomited a small mound of grass and bird feathers on the kitchen floor. The stain was still there.
“Do you have dessert at your house?” Winfred asked, after a moment.
“Yeah,” Richie said with a shrug. “Boring cake, usually. Or pie.”
Winfred and Winston both whimpered slightly. They waited. But Richie still did not invite them to dinner.
Finally Winifred said with a sigh, “Well, we’d better go. We’ll see you tomorrow, Richie. Your dad said we should come for a few hours every day.”
“Okay,” Richie said. He turned away and began, with a bored look, to finish opening the package containing the new game. Then he paused suddenly and said, “Wait! What’s that?”
He was looking with interest at the small object that Winston had removed from his pocket. Winston looked down at it and explained, in embarrassment, “It’s just a dumb broken car. I’m going to throw it away when I get home.”
“Can I see it?” Richie asked.
Winston handed him the battered toy. “My dad made it, and he gave it to me a long time ago,” he explained, “but then he went away, and we don’t know where he is, possibly Alaska, and the toy car broke, and he’s not around, so . . .”
Riche examined it and spun its three wheels with his finger, one after another. “It just needs another wheel,” he said.
“I know. Like I said, I’m going to throw it awa—”
“You think we could make one, maybe?” Richie asked. He looked excited by t
he idea. “A new wheel?”
Winston frowned. “Well, yeah, if we had the right tools, I suppose we—”
“We’ve got tools!” Richie said. “My dad has a whole set of tools from the Sharper Image catalog! And we’ve never used them!”
“What’s the Sharper Image catalog?” Winifred whispered to her brother. Winston shrugged and whispered back, “I have no idea.”
Richie, more animated than they had ever seen him, had run from his room and was calling loudly down the long staircase. “Dad? Mom? Can my friends stay for dinner?”
18
Back at the little house next door, Mrs. Poore, on hearing that her children were dining out, offered, for a small additional fee, their share of mystery meat stew to her B-and-B guests. She didn’t call it that, of course. Instead, she said, “Would you care to dine with me? I have a nice beef bourguignon.” Long ago, Mrs. Poore had taken French in high school. They had had a unit on cooking and dining, and she still remembered things like coq au vin and beef bourguignon. She no longer knew exactly what they were.1 But she pronounced them correctly.
It was the first time she had ever had guests, but she knew how to be fancy. In the trash bin she found a glass jar that had held the boiled onions that she had added to the stew. Now she rinsed the smell of onions out of it, filled it with water, and went outdoors to pick flowers for a centerpiece. The rhododendrons belonged to her neighbors, but she could reach them through the fence to snip off some blossoms. And lily of the valley grew in a thick patch on the corner, under a stop sign; it was easy to pick a handful of that.
But when she began to arrange the flowers in the glass jar, they didn’t fit. There were too many. No problem. She arranged the blossoms—crimson and white, a lovely combination, Mrs. Poore thought—and set the bulky leaves aside. Hmm, she thought, looking at them: green. Wasn’t there a rule someplace, something about food groups, a rule that said people should eat green stuff? She decided to use the leaves to make a salad.
Next door, in the mansion, Richie’s father, Tim Willoughby, looked at the sumptuous meal in the mansion’s dining room and almost wept. He was overwhelmed with the awareness that all of this luxury would soon disappear. (At this very moment, his company’s trucks were all heading from various corners of the country to the huge dump in the desert which had been designated the Candy Conflagration Area. Fires were already burning there, and the surrounding air smelled like butterscotch and mint and caramel.) Sadly he smiled at his two young guests and ushered them into the dining room, where a platter of roast beef was resting on the mahogany table. Linen napkins, rolled into napkin rings, were waiting at each place. Candles in silver candlesticks flickered. Richie’s mother, using a silver spoon and fork, was tossing a salad heaped with leaves of radicchio and romaine in a handsome wooden bowl.
At the same moment, in the little kitchen next door, Mrs. Poore removed some squeezed lemon slices, left over from her lunchtime almost-tea, from the garbage. She squeezed them one more time, coaxing out a few last drops of lemon juice, and then stirred a little olive oil into the lemon juice with a bent fork. She poured the mixture over the rhododendron and lily of the valley leaves in a cracked, stained bowl, creating a salad that she planned to serve to Henry and Frances Willoughby.
The salad was a very unfortunate decision. She should have paid better attention in her high school botany class. She didn’t know, hadn’t learned, didn’t remember, that both plants2 were highly poisonous.
19
In their room (actually, Mrs. Poore’s bedroom, but they didn’t know that, of course), Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby discussed their situation and made plans. Glancing through the one small window (one of the six windows in the little house, as Winifred had noted many times), Henry Willoughby said, suddenly, “That must be it.”
“What must be it?” his wife asked.
“What’re you, a parrot? You always repeat what I say.”
She glared at him. “Squawk,” she said, parrot-like.
He ignored that. “I meant that the house next door—that mansion—is probably the one where the person named Willoughby lives. Remember what that kid at our old house said? Someone named Willoughby lives in a mansion? On this street? This is the only mansion around. It has to be it.”
“Let’s go ring the doorbell and find out,” his wife suggested. “I’m going in my socks, though. I’m never putting on those shoes again.”
Her husband frowned. “I’m hungry. And that woman? The one who overcharged us for the room? She said she’d give us dinner. Well, give’s the wrong word. She’s charging us for it. Probably overcharging. But let’s eat, get some sleep, and then ring the mansion’s doorbell tomorrow.”
That made sense, his wife thought. She was very hungry as well. They were actually glad that Mrs. Poore had invited them; they had no idea where to find a restaurant—the whole neighborhood had changed so much since they had left it thirty years earlier—and in any case they didn’t relish another long walk. But they felt a little disheveled. Mrs. Willoughby had put on a pair of thick socks and was shuffling about in them because she couldn’t bear the thought of squeezing her sore feet back into the too-small high heels that had produced blisters. Her husband had a very stubbly face because there was no hot water in the bathroom and he couldn’t shave, even though the embassy in Switzerland had provided them with basic toiletries: toothbrushes, combs, and a razor.
“Am I remembering correctly,” Frances Willoughby asked Henry Willoughby with a sigh, “that we were once somewhat, ah, elegant?”
He looked up from his efforts. He was trying to rub off the spots that had accumulated on his shirt: coffee and toothpaste and something else that he couldn’t identify. “I was,” he replied. “I don’t remember that you ever were.”
Mrs. Willoughby winced. “I had that nice dress that I wore on holidays,” she reminded him.
“It had those swirly things on it,” her husband said, “and some feather decorations. It made you look like a peacock.”
She pouted. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” she chanted, but he wasn’t listening. “And by the way: You need a haircut. And a shave. You’re very stubbly and unkempt. It makes you look old.”
Mr. Willoughby looked at his wife with an irritated frown. “You had to mention that, didn’t you?”
“Mention what?”
“Our ages. I was hoping to forget about this odd problem.”
She remembered then. “We’re actually very young!” she said. “Younger than everyone we knew before we went to Switzerland! And—ha ha!—they’re old now.”
“Yes, but our children—”
“I’m not going to think about them,” Mrs. Willoughby said.
“But they—” her husband began.
But Mrs. Willoughby put her hands over her ears and chanted loudly, “La la la.”
Mr. Willoughby gave up on the conversation about the children, though he was now remembering them with great fondness. Little Jane had had such a winsome smile. And the eldest—Tim—he was a stalwart boy, a natural leader who had often spoken on behalf of all four of them when they wanted something: a meal, perhaps; clean pajamas; or fresh water in the bathtub. And the twins! It hadn’t been fair, he now thought, to make them share a name, and just one sweater. They deserved two. Oh, what bad parents he and his wife had been! He dabbed his eyes.
“Well,” he said, pulling himself together after a moment, “let’s go to dinner. Maybe there will be candlelight so no one will notice how we look.”
When they arrived for dinner in the Poore kitchen, though, there were no candles. Light came from the dim bulb that hung, swaying, from the ceiling. Against the wall, a refrigerator with rust around the door handle made an agonized wheezing sound. Plates of varying sizes were arranged at three places. A large bowl of salad was in the center of the table, and the stew bubbled in its pot on the stove.
“If I could just afford a microwave, I could’ve heated that stew up so much faster,” Mrs. Poore comm
ented. “It’s one of the things we’ll buy, when my Ben comes home with his fortune.”
“What’s a microwave?” Mrs. Willoughby whispered to her husband.
But he didn’t know. He shrugged and muttered in reply, “Some newfangled gizmo.” They both watched as their hostess poked at the stew with a long-handled spoon. It didn’t look very appetizing. But they were hungry.
“How about if I go ahead and serve this salad?” Mr. Willoughby said, and reached to the center of the table, where the bowl of greens waited.
20
Winifred and Winston Poore, at the same moment, were marveling at their dinner. Several courses! Soup, to start with. Back in their house, soup was a frequent meal, but it was always the main course, and consisted of the previous night’s stew with water added. But here, in the mansion where Richie lived with his parents, the first course, served by a maid, was a delicious thick soup in porcelain bowls with a thin gold rim. And special soup spoons! The Poore children had to watch carefully to see what utensil to use, because there were several pieces of silverware lined up at each place.
“Yum!” Winslow said, after his first spoonful.
“Wild mushroom bisque,” Richie’s mother explained.
“You could kill someone with wild mushrooms if you picked the wrong kind,” Richie announced. “That’s how the King of the Elephants died, in Babar. He ate a toxic shiitake.”
Then he added, “I have the whole set of Babar books. First editions. After dinner I’ll show you my Book Room.”
“What about these mushrooms?” Winifred asked. She suddenly felt a little nervous even though the soup was delicious.
“No need to worry,” Ruth Willoughby reassured her. “These are quite safe. Actually, Tim and I have studied mushrooms1 quite extensively. The ones in your soup are morels and chanterelles.”