The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Amedeo started to object, but Mrs. Zender said, “Do it,” and she walked over to the chair and sat down. The saleswoman gave Amedeo a quizzical look that was an open invitation to comment on Mrs. Zender—her manner and her dress—but Amedeo pretended not to notice. People passed and stared, but Mrs. Zender sat with her elbows resting on the arms of the office chair and did not acknowledge their presence with even a glance, and Amedeo was pleased that she did not.

  Amedeo tried out several samples and selected four. One for the living room with an answering machine; one for each of the bedrooms; and a cordless for the kitchen. He put them in the shopping cart, wheeled it over to Mrs. Zender, and instructed her to follow him to the checkout aisle.

  “Four?” she asked. “Why did you get me four? I need only two—my princess in the kitchen and an extension in my master bedroom. I don’t need four telephones for the Waldorf.” Then, as the clerk was ringing up the purchase, Mrs. Zender saw that one of the phones was cordless and another had an answering machine. “Why did you buy those?” she asked.

  Amedeo opened his mouth in astonishment but said nothing.

  The clerk stopped scanning the boxes and asked, “Do you want them or not?”

  “Of course I want them,” Mrs. Zender said. The clerk finished ringing them up, and Mrs. Zender presented her credit card. Amedeo was surprised she had one. She signed the sales slip with enough flourishes to make it suitable for framing.

  Amedeo was neither pleased nor patient as he was made to wheel the cart toward the car. Mrs. Zender walked slowly behind. It was minutes before she caught up with him. He stood at the trunk of the pink Thunderbird and squinted, hoping his eyes were flashing thunderbolts in her direction. When she finally arrived, she reached into her purse for her keys and held them out to Amedeo. He knew he was supposed to take the keys from her and open the trunk, but he kept his hands wrapped around the handle of the cart. Mrs. Zender jiggled the keys. Amedeo pretended he didn’t notice. She raised her hand so that the keys were right in front of his eyes, and she jiggled them again. Amedeo reached up and took them, unlocked the trunk, stacked the boxes in the trunk, slammed it shut, and walked around to the passenger side of the car.

  Once inside the car—safety first—he fastened his seat belt. Then he crossed his arms across his chest and stared straight ahead, hoping the fire he was breathing would warp the windshield.

  Mrs. Zender started the engine, and Amedeo shifted his gaze from the windshield to Mrs. Zender. She seemed totally unaware of his rage, so he erupted. Through clenched teeth, he said, “The point is you were right there in the store. You could have picked out what you wanted for yourself. You could have gotten off that chair and walked down aisle nine and seen for yourself what I had chosen. But no, you had to let me pick them out, and then you had to embarrass me in front of the girl at the checkout.”

  “I never thought I was an embarrassment to you.”

  “You weren’t, but you made me feel like a dope in front of the cashier.”

  “That tells me you embarrassed yourself.”

  “You could have had the saleslady help you. You could have called your order in. Why did you bother to ask me in the first place? You didn’t need me.”

  “I do need you.” She glanced at Amedeo and then into the rearview mirror. “Let’s not say anything more about telephones. They’ll be fine, and so will you.” And she backed out of her parking space and onto the road with what seemed like a single turn of the wheel. She shifted gears, cleared the lot, and zoomed down the street before saying, “Let’s stop at the Dairy Queen, and I’ll pick something out for you.”

  They were streets away from Dig-It-All before Amedeo had calmed down enough to say, “I have never been to the Dairy Queen. Must be Southern or sub-urban.”

  Mrs. Zender raised her eyebrows and smiled knowingly. “It’s a drive-thru experience.”

  “Then it’s definitely suburban.”

  Mrs. Zender expertly pulled into the drive-thru and spoke into a speaker encased in a large billboard, which displayed photographs of everything on the menu. Everything looked slightly blue. Mrs. Zender told Amedeo to trust her; she would order for both of them. She ordered two Peanut Buster Parfaits and drove around the billboard to a small window where a young woman handed her the order. Mrs. Zender paid, took the parfaits, and handed them over to Amedeo while she pulled the car around the corner of the building, parked, and turned off the engine. Amedeo studied his first Peanut Buster Parfait. It consisted of layers of frozen custard alternating with layers of peanuts embedded in hot fudge, topped with a mound of whipped cream and a cherry on top. Nothing was really blue: The chocolate was brown; the custard, cream-colored; and the cherry on top was red. The parfaits were presented in tall, domed, clear, cone-shaped plastic cups along with long red plastic spoons.

  Amedeo watched Mrs. Zender plunge her spoon deep into the cup and bring up a geological layer of peanuts, fudge, custard, and whipped cream. She closed her eyes, leaned her head back, and licked her spoon. “Ahh!” she said. “Queen for a day.” Opening her eyes to the sky, she added, “My mother is frowning down upon me right now.”

  “Your mother did not approve of Dairy Queen?”

  “She did not.” Mrs. Zender studied her parfait, scooped out another spoonful, licked her spoon clean, and swung it in the air like a conductor’s baton. “Neither did Mr. Zender.” She studied her parfait for the longest time. She fiddled with the spoon, mooshing the fudge sauce into the custard. “Mother thought that if I were thin, I would be a better match for Mr. Zender. Mr. Zender was a thin man.” She dipped the spoon back into the parfait. She polished off the rest of her custard, expertly scraping the plastic spoon along the inside of the container. She waited for Amedeo to finish before crushing her napkin and spoon into the now empty container. She handed them to Amedeo. He inserted one cup into the other and opened the car door, ready to throw them into the trash. Mrs. Zender said, “I want to tell you something.” Amedeo pulled the car door shut. “After,” she said. “After you throw that stuff away.”

  He hurried back to the car. Mrs. Zender said, “Fasten your seat belt.”

  “Is what you’re going to tell me that shocking?”

  She laughed. “Yes,” she said. She checked the rearview mirror, looked around, and backed out of the parking space in one grand swoop, put the car into drive and swung onto the main road before she spoke again. “I was thin once,” she said. “Does that shock you?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she said, looking straight ahead. “But this is what I want to tell you. Ninety percent of who you are is invisible. If you weigh two hundred and fifty pounds instead of a hundred and fifty pounds, people are seeing twenty-five pounds instead of fifteen. They may think they are seeing more, but it is still only ten percent.” She checked herself in the rearview mirror. “If I’ve done the math right.”

  “Did you ever weigh a hundred and fifty pounds?”

  “I think I did once. What is that in stone?”

  “Stone?”

  “British stone?”

  “How many pounds to a stone?” he asked.

  “I think they do it in kilograms.”

  “It must be very complicated.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “And so is the ten percent that I see.”

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  FOR LONG HOURS PETER VANDERWAAL sat at his office desk writing copy for the catalog of the exhibit that would be coming to Sheboygan. He wanted the catalog to be informative and entertaining. He also wanted it to be a souvenir, a monograph, a historic treasure of a historic show that he, Peter (thank you, Peter), had brought to Sheboygan. But it must also provide guidelines (hands up, if you have a question) for the docents who would lead student tours through the exhibit.

  He loved doing research. His kind of research was scholarly, sedentary, bookish. It gave him a chance to look up things that he had learned in school and meant never to forget—but had—an
d to look up other things that he knew would not be on the final exam but that he had always meant to look up when he had the time. The time (Applause! Applause!) had come.

  For his introduction to the catalog, Peter wrote a brief history of the sad fate of the arts in Nazi Germany.

  Organized hatred of Modern art did not start in Germany until Hitler came to power. It started because Adolf Hitler had always wanted to be an artist, had not once but twice been denied admission to the Vienna Art Academy. The committee considered his sample drawings so boring that they did not even extend him an invitation to take the formal exam. Simply put, Hitler’s art was not original, so when he came into political power, his resentment of the innovative, the creative, the unconventional grew and grew until he was determined to wipe Modern art off the cultural map of Germany. His war against Modern art started with words.

  He declared all Modern art to be degenerate.

  The Nazis plucked the word degenerate from a cauldron of myth and fear and loathing and distilled it into a politically correct reason for destroying Modern art. They used it over and over again like a battering ram.

  The word degenerate itself was essentially a medical term to describe the condition of people who were not “normal” because of a nervous disorder. They defined degenerate as something so far removed from normal—so decadent—that it could no longer be recognized as belonging to the same species. The Nazis took pleasure in listing degenerates: Cripples, the mentally ill, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Bolsheviks were all by nature degenerates. All of them carried within themselves the seeds of a heritage, which was inferior to the natural superiority of the true German. Any work done by these degenerates was ipso facto degenerate: Any music they wrote or played, any building they designed or built, any painting, poetry, literature that came from their diseased hands or minds was diseased, degenerate, and as such was an insult—even a threat—to fine German feeling and intelligence.

  According to Nazi theory, it followed that if the government allowed all of these inferior people—these mentally ill, these Jews and homosexuals, these Gypsies and Bolsheviks to live—they would procreate and produce a species that no longer belonged to Homo sapiens but to some lower, subhuman order, and eventually all German culture would degenerate. If these Modern artists were allowed to continue to produce their decadent, degenerate, insane art, they would be a grave threat to the natural superiority of German culture. To protect the art and refinement of the Aryan race all degenerates and degenerate work must be eliminated.

  Just as the state had a responsibility to remove criminals from its borders, it must remove Modern artists, for Modern artists were criminals. They were criminals because their work was destroying German culture. Modern artists must no longer be permitted to work. They must not be permitted to paint, draw, or sculpt, and they must no longer be allowed to buy any of the materials with which they committed their crimes. Gestapo agents were given permission to visit the studios of those artists listed as degenerate, and if they smelled turpentine or found wet brushes, they had the right to arrest the artists on the spot.

  In the summer of 1937, as a first measure in purging Germany of all existing Modern art, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, issued a decree that allowed his government agencies to seize all works of Degenerate art from public as well as private collections. Within three months, they had confiscated more than sixteen thousand works of art. Of those sixteen thousand, some were sold at auction, some were secretly given to Nazi officers, and some were burned as part of a fire drill in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Station. And of those sixteen thousand works of art, six hundred and fifty were chosen to be displayed at the exhibit entitled Entartete “Kunst.”

  In the year 1937, on two consecutive days, two art exhibits opened in Munich, Germany.

  On July 18, the Great German Art Exhibit opened in a newly completed state museum, the House of German Art.

  With great pomp, Adolf Hitler himself presided over the inaugural ceremonies and gave the major speech. He started out by praising the architecture of the new building and trumpeting the important role that he, himself, had played in its design. Hitler went on to praise the art of the Third Reich by contrasting it with Modern art. And then he got to the meat of his message: Racially pure work was good and exalted the Aryan way of life; Modern art was insulting, distorted, and the work of inferior racial strains. By the time he got to saying that Modern art was destroying motherhood, heroism, and German culture, Hitler was wildly waving his arms and spraying saliva. He twisted around and thrashed about, and then in a power-possessed rage, he shrieked his real message: It was forbidden for artists to use anything but the forms seen in nature in their art. If they were either stupid enough or sick enough to defy his guidelines, if they continued to present “unfinished” work, if they continued to exalt the Jew and insult the Aryan, it would be up to the medical establishment and the criminal courts to stop them. “We will, from now on, lead an unrelenting war of purification, an unrelenting war of extermination, against the last elements that have displaced our Art.”

  By the time he finished, even his own staff worried that Hitler had gone mad.

  The following day, July 19, 1937, in an old warehouse across the park, the exhibition called Degenerate “Art” opened. Six hundred fifty “racially impure, inferior works” of Modern art were crowded in nine small rooms. They were crammed together on the walls and floors. In an effort to make the work look ridiculous, some paintings were hung at strange angles. The walls were covered with cruel slogans painted in strong German blackhand. Young people were barred from attending because these six hundred and fifty works of Modern art were labeled pornographic.

  Goebbels declared that the work was “such dreck that a three-hour visit makes one sick.”

  But people flocked to it. More than two million people came to see the Degenerate art—five times as many as came to see the Great German Art Exhibit. Curiosity brought some, patriotic disdain brought others, and despite the insulting slogans telling people why they should hate it, despite every rant of propaganda the Nazis waged against Modern art, some people discovered its power and (secretly) liked it.

  After finishing the first draft of his copy for the catalog, Peter Vanderwaal bundled the pages together, tapped all four edges until they were as tight and even as a Marine honor guard, clipped them together, and laid them tenderly in the center of his desk. He glanced again at the title page and smiled to himself as he read it: Once Forbidden. (Crisp! Elegant! Apt!) He congratulated himself on his choice and resisted the temptation to read again what he had written. He knew it would be better to leave it alone for now so that in the morning he would have a fresher look. He knew—absolutely!—that there could not possibly be a better title. (Applause! Applause!)

  He left his office and paused just outside the door. The sun had already dropped and taken the day’s heat with it. It was early October, and he could almost hear the leaves turning yellow. Peter stuck his tongue out ever so slightly—only slightly—so that he could taste the air. It was time: time to take his pelzkeppe out of storage.

  Peter Vanderwaal had been in his twenties when he started losing his hair, so years before it became a fashion statement, Peter shaved his entire head. And long before it was common for men to do so, Peter had had each of his ears pierced: the right one twice; the left one, three times. His head shone like the moon, and his left ear twinkled like the bowl of the Big Dipper.

  The winter after he took the job in Sheboygan, Peter commissioned a furrier to make him a tall, large, wide-brimmed hat that was a slightly scaled-down version of the one worn by the bridegroom in Jan van Eyck’s famous painting The Arnolfini Marriage. It was his private homage to an artist and a painting he loved. In Sheboygan, Peter’s hat had become more famous than the one in the painting that had inspired it. Peter’s hat was known throughout the community as “Peter’s Pelzkeppe“—Peter’s Fur Hat.


  Peter treasured his pelzkeppe. “It is the next best thing to having hair,” he often said.

  He bought two wig stands—one for his office and one for his house. Each had a place of honor on the far right corner of his desk, set out like a museum display.

  Every year the children of Sheboygan had a contest. The first one to sight Peter’s pelzkeppe called “Beaver! Beaver!” and if that child had an eyewitness, he or she won the right to sign his or her name and date on a small plastic statue of a beaver and keep it until the next first sighting.

  Peter had known about the contest for years, but he pretended he didn’t. On the day he first donned his pelzkeppe, he carefully mapped the route he would take from his apartment to the art center. He walked very slowly in the direction of the neighborhood of the child he currently believed to be worthy of the trophy. Despite the chill that came from his slow pace, he would not speed up until he heard the cry “Beaver! Beaver!” Peter was aware of two occasions when a parent rather than a child had done the first sighting. It was the same woman. It was late autumn, and both times she was waiting with her child at the school bus stop. Since he was not even supposed to know about the contest, he said nothing. But saying nothing didn’t stop him from wanting to—even three “Beaver!”s later.

  As he walked back to his apartment after having finished writing the copy for the catalog, Peter’s thoughts turned to organizing all the activities that would be associated with Once Forbidden. (What a fine name.)

  The exhibit itself was already a cause célèbre. The town fathers and business philanthropists had generously donated money to keep the museum open extra hours to accommodate the many classes that would take tours. His staff, too, was helping out. They had pledged hours of overtime to train docents who had volunteered to lead the tours.

  To reward himself for the good work he had done that day, Peter allowed himself to fantasize about the grand opening party. It would take place the first weekend in November on the very cusp of the fall art and social season. It would be a gala occasion, but a formal one. He would wear his tuxedo—he loved to wear a tux—and he would request that all the male principals wear one too. He would ask all the women to dress very thirties-ish—as in 1937ish, to evoke the era of the original Entartete “Kunst.” Three sponsors were underwriting the event.(Thank you very much.) He would engage the best caterer in town to provide the food, and a string quartet to play background music. There would be champagne, and he himself would supervise the design of the invitations. There was a calligrapher on his staff who promised to address them. He would personally select every bite of food and every piece of music, and he would invite everyone he knew, everyone from his personal and professional lives, going back to his grammar school days in Epiphany, New York.