Very Rich

by Polly Horvath

  “Don’t be stupid, Rupert,” said his mother. “This is no time for make-believe.”

  “No, I really am. I’m friends with Aunt Hazelnut and Uncle Henry and Uncle Moffat and even Mrs. Rivers. And Turgid Rivers is my best friend.”

  Rupert didn’t tell his mother about being blood brothers because that was a secret. But surely the blood vow was to cover just such a situation.

  “Right, Rupert, I’m sure they’re practically a second family to you,” said his mother, snorting derisively and taking another sip of coffee as if a whole long life of listening to lies had caused her to be neither excited nor appalled by them.

  “I’m not. I’m not. We can go to their house right now and I can explain what happened—that you are my mother—and then they will give you back your job.”

  “Don’t be silly, it wasn’t a Rivers who fired me. It was the manager. I’ve never even met a Rivers.”

  “Exactly,” said Rupert. “Don’t you see? That’s why we have to go tell them. Then they can tell the manager that he made a mistake. Come on.”

  Rupert stood up and yanked on his mother’s sleeve, attempting to pull her to her feet.

  She’d been sitting on the porch letting snow drift down on her for so long she was covered with a light dusting, as though she were a statue.

  “Cut it out,” said his mother. “I’ve had enough. All this has just knocked the stuffing out of me. Do you still have those menthol eucalyptus chips? I think this calls for polishing off the rest of them. If you want to do something for me, run along and fetch them.”

  Rupert went up to his bedroom to get his mother the chips from the pillow where he’d stashed them. He had planned to give them back to her anyway after a decent interval as he always did. But when he reached into the pillow and felt around, he pulled out not just the chips but the suit. The suit!

  He raced down to the front porch, holding it out in front of him excitedly.

  “Look, look!” he cried. “This is my proof. You see this silk suit? Uncle Moffat, that’s Mr. Rivers’s brother, took me to the Union Club for lunch. He had this silk suit made for me. He’s having six shirts made for me too, but I haven’t picked them up yet! Although why he hasn’t told me if they’re ready, I don’t know! I just keep wondering at school all day long, why doesn’t he come and tell me if the shirts are ready? WHY?” Rupert was getting more and more agitated so that he had begun to rattle on, thinking out loud and sounding, he was afraid, crazy.

  Mrs. Brown evidently thought so too, for she stood and backed up against the porch railing, staring at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  Rupert knew that nothing he said would convince his mother, so he put the suit jacket on over his clothes and said, “Look!”

  His mother looked at him in horrified silence for a moment and then put her hands over her eyes and wailed, “You shoplifted a SUIT? Couldn’t you find something more useful to steal?”

  “How could this have come off the rack?” he demanded. “It’s been tailored for me.”

  Rupert then told her all the things he had learned about the making of the suit. The different fabrics, the weights of wool, the way it should be cut. He turned around and showed her how this suit had been put together specifically for him, and when he was done, he saw a bit of belief come into her eyes and with it a kind of massive confusion.

  “But, Rupert,” she said, “why would anyone give you a suit?”

  “Never mind. It’s a long story. But now you have to believe me so we can go to their house and tell them what happened and get your job back.”

  His mother stood up. She went inside and got the thin raincoat she wore all winter and put it on. He noticed that she also brushed her hair and put on lipstick. He stared at her red mouth, wondering how old the lipstick was and where she had kept it all these years, for he had never seen her wear it before. He wondered if it was the same lipstick she had worn to Coney Island that day, for her lips had been red then too.

  “Well, come on,” she said. “Much good it will probably do us.”

  As they walked to the Riverses’, Rupert’s heart swelled with the excitement of everything working out. Of everything leading to this happy ending, for surely once the Riverses found out his mother worked as a cleaner, they would give her a much better job.

  When they got to the gate of the Riverses’ house his mother turned to him and said, “How do I look?”

  “You look good,” said Rupert, but he knew it didn’t matter how she looked because she was with him.

  Then he pressed the buzzer on the gate. He pressed it again. And then a third time. No one answered. He started to press it a fourth time but his mother stopped his hand.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t want to make them mad. They probably have some kind of hidden camera. They can probably see who is pressing the buzzer and they don’t want to answer. Well, of course they don’t. Come on, let’s go home. Quick, before this gets any worse.”

  “Maybe nobody heard,” said Rupert. “They would answer if they saw it was me. And even if they were all out, they have a butler who answers the door. They even have a cook.”

  “A cook and a butler,” said his mother breathily to herself as if the grandeur of this household were not to be believed.

  Rupert rang the buzzer again and, when still no one answered, began to ring it over and over and over.

  “Stop it,” said his mother. “Let’s split before they call the cops.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Rupert. “I’m friends with them. I really am.”

  “Sure, Rupert,” said his mother, her old cynical tone returning. “Come on.”

  She pulled him from the gate and they started home, when suddenly Rupert saw the librarian coming toward them, her hands full of shopping bags.

  “Hello!” he said in relief, and ran up to her.

  It took her a moment to place him and then she said, “Why, it’s Rupert, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Mother, this is the librarian who lives with the Riverses,” he said. “This is my mother, Mrs. Brown.”

  “How do you do, Mrs. Brown,” said the librarian.

  “Okay,” said Rupert’s mother.

  “We were just coming to talk to the Riverses about something,” began Rupert when the librarian interrupted.

  “Oh you’re too late for that,” she said. “Yes, you’re sadly much too late for that. They’re gone.”

  “Gone?” echoed Rupert.

  “Oh, yes. All of them.”

  “All of them? Turgid?” asked Rupert, flabbergasted.

  “Yes, indeed. Mrs. Rivers moved to Cincinnati. She’s opening her own diner and calling it Beth’s Place. Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. A Rivers working in a restaurant! Mr. Rivers put up a good fight, but she said she was going and taking the children with her and he could do as he pleased. Well, he was never any good without Mrs. Rivers. She was the heart and soul of that outfit. So off they all moved. Boom. Without a by-your-leave. I hear they’re living in a hotel, looking for a house, and Mrs. Rivers is terribly happy. Now Henry, he has simply disappeared. I always did think he was a little odd. He may come back because everything he owns is still in the house, but he’s been gone for days now. Before Mr. and Mrs. Rivers and the children left even. Mrs. Rivers thought the police should be informed, but Turgid said that Henry had told him he was going adventuring and not to worry if he was gone some time. He said there was a pun in that sentence, but I can’t find it. Moffat took his children to Wisconsin to join his wife, with whom he has reunited. They are going to dairy-farm. He said they had split up because he was on the fence about it. Her ruling passion was cows. Cows! What’s in a cow? he wanted to know. But eating at the Union Club reminded him, he said, that what was in a cow was steak and hamburgers, and perhaps his wife would consider having half dairy cows and half steak hamburger cows. He could get behind that. So off he popped with William, Melanie, and the other Turgid. Oh, dear, Rupert, I was supposed to tell yo
u that your shirts are ready and you need only pick them up. I thought you might come in to the library and I’d tell you then, but you don’t use the library, do you?”

  “I don’t have a library card,” said Rupert.

  “Well, you should get one. It’s free, you know,” said the librarian.

  “Are they really free?” asked Rupert in astonishment. If it was true, all along there had been books for Elise. Books for him!

  “Yes, Rupert, they really are,” said the librarian.

  “Right, free,” said Mrs. Brown. “Where have I heard that one before?”

  The librarian paid no attention, she was busy placing family members and rambled on, “Hazelnut, as you know, took off without a forwarding address. Well, they were none of them surprised about that—she was a Macintosh. And the cook and butler left because they had no one to cook or butler for except me and I’m not really a family member. Or, as they put it bluntly, not a prestigious-enough person to serve. It turns out that in the butlering game, it’s all about who you work for. So it looks as if I have the house and all twenty-four bedrooms to myself. Anyhow, I’m just getting home from the grocery store. And then I’ve got housework to get to; the cleaning staff quit as well, or I’d ask you for tea. Were you coming over for a reason or just to visit?”

  “My mother lost her job at the steelworks and we were going to ask the Riverses to make them give it back to her,” said Rupert.

  “I need that job,” said Mrs. Brown. “Or we’ll lose the roof over our heads.”

  “That is a shame,” said the librarian. “I’d ask you to move in with me, but I’ve only twenty-four bedrooms. If I had, say, twenty-five, I’d make a guest room, but as it is, I really haven’t got the space. Well, good luck to you. Best get in before the ice cream melts.” And so saying, the librarian pushed the code into the security panel and the gate opened for her. She disappeared down the walkway.

  Rupert stood for a second staring at the house through the gate.

  “I met them and so much happened and now…” he paused, fumbling, having difficulty expressing his confusion—the time machine, Mrs. Rivers, Uncle Moffat, Aunt Hazelnut and her jewels, his friend, his friend—poof—all gone.

  “No, I understand.” His mother stared in the same direction as Rupert. “Things go by so very fast and then it’s as if they never were.”

  His mother appeared for a second to be looking far into a past with the same expression Turgid had looking into a future he hadn’t expected or wanted as she said, “It wasn’t what I thought, I wasn’t what I thought….”

  Time gave you everything and took everything away again. How often could this happen to you before you didn’t want to feel anything? Not the bad, not even the good?

  Rupert had wanted his mother to see all that he had—the ocean, the sun dropping into the Pacific, Aunt Hazelnut’s jewels, and the expressions on people’s faces as they ate the sparkle salads. How lucky he had been. But maybe his mother had tired of seeing anything, even her own children. His father had said she was a rock. But Rupert now wondered if he was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t that she had no feelings, maybe she’d just had too many of them.

  As they walked home, houses on both sides of them stretched ahead like a corridor, and right at the end in the middle the sun hung, a pale wintry wonder lighting the snowy dusk. But only Rupert saw it.

  When they got home they found the mail scattered on the front porch, where the mailman had thrown it. He refused to put it through the mail slot. He had a cat.

  “Letter for you,” said his mother, handing an envelope to Rupert as if nothing would amaze her anymore. She opened the front door and they went inside. “Silk suits, mail,” she muttered. “The world’s gone crazy.” And she moved on to the kitchen, shaking her head, to begin making supper while Rupert looked at the envelope in surprise.

  The only mail he’d ever gotten had been from Aunt Hazelnut, but it wasn’t Aunt Hazelnut’s handwriting. He ripped it open. It was from Charlie and Chas.

  Dear Rupert,

  We thought you would like to know how things worked out here in Florida. We can’t tell Hazelnut because we don’t know where she is, our letters to her have been returned, but perhaps you could pass on to her the news the next time you see or hear from her. In the meantime, we knew you’d want to know whether it was circus performers or astronauts we became. Well, we started out as one thing but then changed our minds. When we were teens Nutty used to tell me that your life was a unique and therefore glorious thing—NOBODY has one just like yours—floating about in a universe that morphs and remorphs itself and so it does, but I think she’d still be surprised to find we’d become…”

  Rupert finished the sentence in amazement. He would have thought it would have been the other. He was about to reread the letter when there was a scream from the kitchen.

  Everyone in the house ran there to find Mrs. Brown, oatmeal spilled all down her front, and their father standing by the stove looking pleased as punch, dressed in a suit.

  “Children,” said Mrs. Brown. “Your father has a job.”

  So then they all had to hear the story, how Mr. Brown had been working on his Trans Am in the driveway that morning when a man had stopped to ask him about it. Mr. Brown told him how he had reworked the engine and what it could do. From there they had a long chat about cars in general. The man owned a used-car lot and wanted to buy classic cars but couldn’t find a mechanic he could trust to work on them. The more he and Mr. Brown talked, the more they realized they understood cars the same way—what you should and shouldn’t do with them. Then the man said he wanted to not just fix up classic cars but sell them. However, he needed the right salesman. And he thought Mr. Brown was the man for him. He hired him on the spot to be both mechanic and salesman. Rupert’s father would start the very next day. So that afternoon Mr. Brown had walked into town and bought a suit with the money they had saved for the next rent payment.

  “A suit,” whispered Rupert’s mother. “Two suits in one day.”

  “Anyhow, don’t worry, I’ll get the rent payment together again. I’ll be making more than you,” he said to Rupert’s mother in amazement.

  “I always thought I’d be the one with the suit,” whispered Mrs. Brown, and then told him the briefer story of losing her job.

  “Hey, never mind,” said Mr. Brown. “Let’s not think about that until tomorrow. Let’s just celebrate. Wait until you see what I got.”

  He dashed out to the front hall and returned with two big bags. The children clamored around him demanding to know what he had. Mr. Brown made them guess, and when they couldn’t he shouted, “Hamburgers!”

  Everyone ate their hamburgers huddled around the television and they were even better than Rupert had hoped. Elise, who was sitting next to him, was made bold by the happy mood in the room and jumped up.

  “I got a star note today,” she said. “My teacher sends them home when you’ve done really good work. I put it in my pillow. I’ll go get it.”

  “Don’t bother,” said her mother, getting up and heading for the stairs. “You just charm those teachers. That’s how you get those things. I suppose next thing you’re going to be getting a suit too. I’m going to bed. I’ve got to look for work tomorrow.”

  His mother still longed for a suit and crocodile pumps and the life that went with it, thought Rupert. But it wasn’t his suit that had made him happy, or any of the things the Riverses could have given him. It was what, as a result of being with them, he had seen. The Riverses were lucky to live in the very rich neighborhood. But in the very poor, the poor, the middle class, the rich, or the very rich part of town, everyone had eyes.

  Aunt Hazelnut was right; your life, YOUR life, no matter who you were, no matter where you were, was a unique and glorious thing. Some lives contained more money, but all lives contained equal wonder. Although to see it you had to see everything else as well, and seeing came at the terrible price of feeling.

  This is a decision you could
n’t make for anyone but yourself. You could not force others to see or feel but you could share what you had.

  “Come on,” he said, jumping up and taking Elise by the hand, pulling her to her feet. They headed upstairs.

  “Listen,” he said, going into the bedroom, “tomorrow we’re going to the library to get library cards and we’ll get books of stories to read. But tonight I’ll tell you one of mine.”

  Elise jumped into her bed and Rupert sat on the floor.

  “One winter night, Elise,” he began, and then the words flowed, “while all Steelville slept—the very poor, the poor, the middle class, the rich, and the very rich—I came out of a dark garage to sparkle-lit tables floating in the night….”

  MANY THANKS TO:

  MARIE CAMPBELL

  MARGARET FERGUSON

  LYNNE MISSEN

  KARLA REGANOLD