Up From Jericho Tel

by E. L. Konigsburg

  “Malcolm Soo,” I said, “I think there is hope for you after all. What did you have for Thanksgiving?”

  “We went to my aunt’s house in Elmhurst over in Queens. We always go to her place for the holidays.”

  “You have an aunt living in Queens?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cousins, too?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You never asked.”

  “You always led me to believe that you were a half-orphan.”

  “I am. What does having an aunt have to do with being a half-orphan?”

  “A lot. It has a lot to do with it.”

  “Name one thing.”

  “Not now.”

  “ ‘Not now’ because you can’t ever.”

  “I can, too. I just don’t want to. I just can’t believe that someone who has an aunt living in Elmhurst, Queens, would let someone invite him and his father to Thanksgiving Day dinner even though they already had an invitation.”

  “You seem to forget, Jeanmarie, that you never did invite me.”

  “But I would have. I was going to ask my mother to ask you and your father. Now, I’m glad we didn’t because you would have refused. Does your aunt live in a house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does she live with her husband?”

  “Yeah. He’s my father’s brother.”

  “I just think you ought to have told me about all those Soos. That’s all. I just think that if I had an aunt and an uncle and a couple of cousins, I would have told you.”

  “I couldn’t have told you. We weren’t speaking to each other.”

  “You could have told me before we weren’t speaking to each other.”

  “It never came up.”

  “Now you not only have an aunt and an uncle and one of each kind of cousin, you also have Lynette Hrivnak to visit. You are a social animal, Malcolm Soo. Like a termite.”

  “And you are jealous.”

  “I am not jealous. I may not have been as busy socially as you, but I have been busy.”

  So Malcolm and I spent our first day back together at the Tel, sitting over Rahab Station waiting for Spot to appear. It was a very full kind of waiting, for we had a lot of catching up to do. I told him about seeing Then Spot become corporeal right before my eyes, and I told him about my visit with Nicolai. I told him about seeing Vixen! with my mother, and I went through the whole plot of the movie with him. He loved it. He said, “She must be a pretty good actress to be able to play an innocent.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe when she played in Vixen!, she was innocent. She had only been married three times by then.”

  I told him about visiting with Nicolai Ion Simonescu at his house in Glen Cove, and Malcolm was interested in everything I had to say. He asked about Anna Karenina, and I repeated our conversation as best I could, which was pretty good, which, in fact, was perfect, except that I left out the part about making a date with Nicolai and Anna for Midwinter’s Night, and for reasons already stated, I also left out the part about having seen Emmagene Krebs.

  Malcolm asked what else I had done over Thanksgiving. I told him nothing else, but he insisted. “I know there is something else, Jeanmarie.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There is a language other than words.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes.” He scuffed the ground with the toe of his shoe. “Now I do. I think that passing through the Epigene has helped me to see the unseen. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the idea that there’s more to life than its facts, but it seems that is a fact of life.”

  Malcolm had told me that a funny thing had happened to him on Thanksgiving day. It involved his cousin, Mildred Soo. The family was all sitting around the dining room table after having eaten, and Mildred had taken the wishbone and asked him if he would like to make a wish with it. Each of them rested one elbow on the table and held onto one end of the bone. Mildred told him to close his eyes and make a wish. He did. He opened his eyes and saw that Millie’s were still closed. He waited, his elbow still resting on the table, and as he did, he heard her wish. Heard it inside his head. He quickly looked around the table and saw everyone smiling at them, their expressions unchanged. Millie had certainly said nothing out loud, but he knew that she had wished that someone named Robert would call. Millie opened her eyes, and they pulled on the wishbone, and Millie got the long half, and Malcolm said, “He’ll call.” And Robert did.

  “Now I’ll tell you what else,” I said. “I saw Emmagene Krebs.” And I described what I had seen at Washington Square Park.

  Malcolm was silent a long time. He had picked up a twig and was drawing circles on the ground with it. “If Emma-gene Krebs is still a poor busker, still singing out her eighteen thousand songs, then it doesn’t seem likely that she took The Regina Stone. She would be as rich as Nicolai unless she is crazy like Widdup and Fiona. But, of course, she wouldn’t be crazy like them. She could be as crazy, but she wouldn’t be crazy in the same way.”

  I told Malcolm that I wasn’t so sure that Fiona and Widdup were crazy, that I had seen a whole hardcover book written about talking to plants.

  “But, Jeanmarie, their plants answer.”

  “You just said that there is a language other than words.”

  Malcolm rolled his eyes up to the sky. “Jeanmarie,” he said. “Jeanmarie,” he repeated.

  “What?”

  “Jeanmarie, just because I believe that robins sing, do I have to believe that they sing opera?”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that you still have to deal with facts. You may not see the facts. You may not want to see them. But there are times when the facts are there and you have to find them and deal with them. And Widdup and Fiona are crazy. They may be nice crazy, but one of the reasons that they are crazy is that they don’t deal with the facts.”

  “What about being invisible?”

  “I can deal with that. It is a fact. And being invisible has shown me that there are invisible facts.”

  “Are you talking about electricity and x rays?”

  “No!” he said impatiently. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets. He thought a while before he added, “Maybe yes and no. I’m talking about invisible forces as real as ξ rays, yes, but not ones that can be measured, no. And you are quicker and probably better at seeing those forces than I am, and if there was anything I missed in the past few weeks it was seeing the unseen.”

  “Well, Malcolm Soo, if there was anything that I missed in the past few weeks, it was your pigheadedness.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Pigs are supposed to be pretty smart, you know.” That was the closest I would come to telling him that I had missed him. “I have something else to tell you,” I confessed. Malcolm asked what it was, and finally I told him that I had made a date with Nicolai and Anna Karenina for Midwinter’s Night in Washington Square.

  Tallulah says, “Actresses who take small sums posing nude for magazine centerfolds have little to show for it”

  thirteen

  THE FIRST DAY back at school after Thanksgiving vacation is not like any other first day. It is the day that is a beginning only to mark an end. You no more than set your foot inside the door than you begin a countdown to Christmas. By the time Christmas recess begins, there is a kind of coming togetherness—between teachers and students and also between classes—that doesn’t happen at any other time of year. That may partly account for the fact that I felt closer to Malcolm when we returned to school than I ever had before. Closer to him than I ever had to any other classmate. Maybe it was just that we had quarreled and made up, and scar tissue is tough. Maybe it was just that Malcolm had also missed the us of us, and even though he couldn’t bring himself to say it, he allowed it to show.

  On that first Monday after Thanksgiving when we got to Jericho Tel, Now Spot was lying on his back, his
four feet sticking up in the air, stiff as a frozen turkey. He was trying to out-perform Then Spot so that we would tell Tallulah how good he was. He played dead even after we tapped the ground, and he landed on top of the Epigene on his back. I was glad that he was not human or living, for he would have caused himself a spinal injury that could have resulted in serious permanent paralysis.

  Then Spot sniffed Malcolm as if he were the corner of an unfamiliar building. After he had satisfied himself that Malcolm was a friend, he jumped up on him; his paws rested on Malcolm’s shoulder, and he began licking his face. Malcolm did not seem to mind. For a neat person, Malcolm did not seem to worry about parasites very much. I came to the conclusion that neatness and cleanliness were like apples and pears: both may be fruit, but they don’t naturally grow on the same tree.

  Tallulah was lying on her back with one arm beneath her head and the other across her eyes. Her feet were propped up on about fourteen pillows, and her silver birdbath ashtray was overflowing. “Tallulah is exhausted,” she said by way or greeting. “Spots, Now and Then, have been behaving like children. As soon as I sent Now Spot Topside, Then Spot began to whimper. There is nothing quite so unsatisfactory as a whimper; it is the unfairest sound. Tallulah has truly suffered.”

  Then Spot was covering Malcolm’s face with doggy kisses; and I thought that was about as satisfying as breathing mud, but Malcolm seemed to find it pleasant. He certainly did nothing to stop him.

  Tallulah told us that we better get Topside immediately. She didn’t tell us where we were going, didn’t give us instructions, didn’t get up and didn’t have to. I knew that we were going to visit Patrick Henry Mermelstein.

  WE WERE IN a music store. Behind the counter was a young man who seemed to be too young to be as bald as he was. What hair he had was reddish gold. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses, a blue pullover sweater and jeans that had a soft, worn look. Malcolm and I had been deposited on a counter-top just to the right of the front door. The store was large. There were record bins that were labeled CLASSICAL or HARD ROCK or R&B or C&W. Music was being piped throughout the store that I could recognize as CLASSICAL. The door opened, and in walked two teenagers dressed in jeans. Malcolm jumped down from the countertop, more excited than I had ever seen him before. I looked again at the customers. They were the cousins Soo. I knew it.

  Patrick Henry told them hi, calling one Reuben and the other Mildred. They greeted him, calling him P.H. They walked to a room in the rear of the store beyond the sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. We followed them and watched as they hung up their jackets and hats and pulled a large cardboard carton out from under a table. We could see that the carton contained a top hat, a deck of cards, a stream of handkerchiefs all tied together and a lot of other equipment that a magician might need. As soon as Patrick Henry came into the back room, Reuben left and went up front to mind the store.

  Malcolm and I silently waited in a corner as we watched Patrick Henry Mermelstein give Mildred Soo magic lessons. They were working on card tricks. P.H. said to Mildred, “Pick a card,” and she did, and when he was halfway through the trick, Millie said, “I saw that.” Patrick Henry told her that of course she did, that if she had not seen it, he would have been a good magician and a terrible teacher.

  “What you have and I don’t, Mildred, is talent,” he said. “It takes more than practice to be a star. It also takes talent.”

  “What do you think of Doug Henning?” Millie asked.

  “It’s hard for me to say. I’ve only seen him on TV. I only trust live magic. When I see a magician performing before a camera, I always wonder how much is done with camera angles and special effects.”

  They worked for a while longer as Malcolm and I sat fascinated and silent. Millie did everything easily and very often perfectly on her first try. Watching Patrick Henry trying to do a trick was like watching an expert typist use a typewriter with the Russian alphabet: he knew all the moves but was puzzled that the finished product looked so strange. Malcolm moved closer to the table and invisibly and smoothly moved the cards and coins in the correct direction so that there were no spills and everything came out fine.

  “You seem to be doing everything right, today. Don’t you miss performing, P.H.?” Millie said.

  “I do, Millie, I do.” He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Reuben’s playing The Carnival of the Animals” he said absentmindedly. He tilted his chair back and continued staring at the ceiling. “I never made it. No one would hire me. I tried out for a small nightclub once, and the manager told me that I couldn’t make chalk disappear with an eraser, but I kept going to auditions. The heck of it was, I didn’t know that I was incompetent. I tried to make a living as a sidewalk vaudevillian. During the Christmas season, I helped out in my uncle’s music shop. One evening after the Christmas rush was over, we closed the shop, and my uncle brought out a flute in a worn leather case and began playing. He was awful. I listened for a while and then said, ‘I think you need some practice, Uncle. You’ve gotten rusty.’ He replied, ‘Rust has nothing to do with it. It is not practice that is missing. It is talent.’ I knew that he was telling me something, but I was not ready to give up yet. A person who has talent has to believe in it, and a person who has no talent has to believe it. Then something happened that convinced me to give up.”

  Patrick Henry let his chair fall forward. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He lay his glasses down on the table and continued, “There were three of us buskers who used to pal around together, and we became friends with an old actress by the name of Tallulah. There was a ventriloquist, a singer by the name of Emmagene Krebs and me. Emmagene sang folk songs on the street. She had a sweet, untrained voice—genuine talent. She always said that she had eighteen thousand songs to sing. She kept count of how many she had sung and how many she had left. Then one Twelfth-Night, we were having a party at Tallulah’s, as we did every year, and Tallulah died. Heart attack. No wonder, she smoked more than she ate. Emmagene became terribly upset, slightly hysterical, I’d say. She said that all of us were doomed to die as buskers, and only a handful of people would have heard her songs. She ran out of the house and disappeared. I guess that Tallulah’s death had reminded all of us that we all have only eighteen thousand songs to sing, and my uncle’s flute had reminded me that it takes more than practice to become a star.”

  Millie said, “I would like to do a live performance, P.H. Let’s go out on the street.”

  “Are you crazy? I can’t take time off from the shop. I promised myself when I opened this store that I would be a good businessman. My busiest season has just started.” He wiped his glasses and put them back on. He shook his head. “Funny, I haven’t thought about Tallulah in years. I haven’t seen Nicolai—he’s the ventriloquist friend I mentioned—in about four years. I got an announcement of the birth of his second child. I sent a Brahms recording, and I got a sweet thank you note from his wife, but I haven’t seen the kid yet. I’ll bet she’s three years old by now.”

  I had been so interested in the magic and the conversation that I had not noticed when Malcolm left the back room. Suddenly, the music that had been playing over the intercom stopped. I heard someone clearing his throat. I knew where Malcolm was. I sat quietly and invisibly and awaited further announcements. I had a pretty good idea what they would be.

  Malcolm’s voice came booming out from the speaker. “NOW HEAR THIS. NOW HEAR THIS.” Patrick Henry Mermelstein and Mildred Soo jumped. Before they could say anything, Malcolm bellowed into the microphone, “You, Patrick Henry Mermelstein will appear at Washington Square in Greenwich Village on Midwinter’s Night, the twenty-second of December, and present magic to the people assembled there. Curtain up at eight P.M., P.H.”

  Patrick Henry Mermelstein slammed his hands down on the table and sent cards and coins quivering to the floor. He ran to the front of the store. Reuben Soo was running from the front of the store to the back. The two of them collided. “Why did you say that?” they ask
ed one another. They both denied saying anything and headed back to the room where Millie was picking up the cards.

  “Don’t you have enough to do at the front of the store without interrupting my magic lesson?” she asked her brother.

  “That was not me,” he said. “Have you been learning to throw your voice?”

  She stood up. “If I were, would I want to sound like that?” she asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like Malcolm.”

  Malcolm snorted into the intercom. “Mildred Vivian Soo, what is your problem with Malcolm?”

  Millie looked scared. “No problem. I promise you, no problem.”

  “Then why, Mildred Vivian Soo, do you not want to sound like Malcolm?”

  “I wouldn’t mind sounding like him. Really, I wouldn’t.”

  “Yes, you would. Say why, or you will grow fat and your hair will fall out.”

  “Because h-e-e-e doesn’t be-be-believe in magic.”

  Malcolm waited a long time before he answered. “Do you believe in it, Mildred Vivian Soo?”

  “Y-e-e-e-s-s-s,” she stammered.

  “If you really do, Mildred Vivian Soo, why are you so frightened now?”

  Mildred squared her shoulders, swallowed hard and said, “I am not frightened. I am just surprised.”

  Malcolm said, “Good. Then persuade Patrick Henry Mermelstein to be in Washington Square Park on Midwinter’s Night at eight o clock.”

  “Do you want me there, too?”

  “No. You and Reuben are to watch the store while P.H. goes busking.”

  “Yes, sir,” Millie said.

  “And you’re to do a good job of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And next Thanksgiving, you’re to help with the dishes.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. I got a phone call.”

  “Next time you’ll help.”

  “I told you I got a phone call.”

  “And I told you that next time you’ll help. Say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”