by M. E. Kerr
Cardmaker’s elbow jabbed into my side. “See what I mean about him?” she whispered.
“Did you tell him I was one?” I whispered back.
Reverend Cardmaker said, “We thank thee, O Lord, for blessing us again with good food, good company, and goodwill in our hearts. Amen.”
Dinner was baked beans and franks and homemade brown bread.
“Cardmaker,” I whispered as the four little Cardmakers began a lot of noise at the other end of the table, “did you tell him I was an atheist?”
“I didn’t say you were or you weren’t. Besides, you said you were an agnostic. There’s not much difference in his eyes.”
“I said I was maybe an agnostic.”
“That’s the trouble with you agnostics,” Cardmaker said. “You’re so damn wishy-washy and jelly-spined. Maybe this and maybe that.”
Reverend Cardmaker spoke up then. He was a thin, tall man with very dark brown eyes and a perpetual little tip to his lips, as though he was always on the verge of telling a funny story.
“We’re having our annual New Year’s Eve service this evening, Flanders, and of course you’re invited, unless attending church is against your principles.”
“I’m not an atheist,” I said.
“She’s maybe an agnostic,” Cardmaker said.
“I’m probably not even that,” I said. “It’s not against my principles to go to church.”
“That’s very encouraging news,” said Reverend Cardmaker.
After dinner I helped Cardmaker with the dishes.
“Why did you tell him about being an atheist?”
“APE told him.”
“I never understood why you told APE.”
“I wanted to be expelled,” she said. “Two hundred and fifty dollars is a real bundle to my father!” She put the dish towel around her head like a scarf, and held a spoon up to her eye like a monocle. Then in this falsetto voice she said, “O sancta simplicitas!”
We both laughed.
By seven forty-five, everyone was leaving for the church, which was just across the street. I decided to stay with Cardmaker, and we got out the Scrabble board and tuned the radio to a rock station.
“I’d rather listen to something softer,” I said.
Cardmaker said, “I wouldn’t. The louder the better.”
I made the word flower and waited for Cardmaker to take her turn.
She said, “I didn’t go at Christmas, either.”
“Go where?”
“To church.”
“Did everyone else go?”
“Of course, dummy!”
“Well, I don’t belong to a very religious family. How would I know?”
“We always go. We all sit in a long row together!”
I said, “It’s your turn.”
The church bells began to ring.
I said, “It’s your turn, Cardmaker.”
“I heard you the first time.”
The bells were louder, and they began to play “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
Cardmaker made the word so.
I made lambent.
“That’s not a word!” Cardmaker said.
I said, “It means lightly flickering. Look it up.”
“It’s not a word anybody’s heard about!”
“It’s a word, though.”
“No one ever uses it. You should only use words people use.”
“It’s in the dictionary,” I said. “Play!”
She was biting her lip, actually chewing on it.
“Play,” I said. “It’s your turn.”
“I can’t think with those damn bells. Turn up the radio.”
“I can’t think with the radio turned up any louder!” I said. “Why don’t you just go and get it over with!”
“Because he said he didn’t want me going just to go. He said if I was going just to go, not to.”
“If you want to go, go.”
“He said if I wanted to thank God for last year and put in one of my long and unreasonable lists of requests for next year, all well and good, but if I didn’t believe in God, it would just be wasted energy and very much against his own conservationist principles.”
“Well, what are we going to do?” I said. “We’re not playing Scrabble.”
“I’m trying to think of a word,” she said. “I don’t have any vowels.”
“How long are those bells going to ring?” I said.
“Until everyone gets there.”
“How long is that?”
“HOW DO I KNOW!” Cardmaker shouted, and knocked the Scrabble board away from in front of her, scattering the pieces across the room.
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” Cardmaker said.
I said, “Why don’t you go?”
“And take God back?” Cardmaker said, the way someone asks something they want to hear a yes answer to.
I nodded.
“Let’s go!” Cardmaker shouted.
When I got back to Charles School, there was a letter from Butler Peabody.
Dear Flanders,
You were probably aware of my arrangement with Carolyn Cardmaker whereby we both benefited from invitations to our respective social events. With Carolyn absent now and also in the absence of Sumner Thomas (he has received permission from his father to enlist in the United States Army) I thought we might effect a similar arrangement. May I know your feelings in this regard?
B.P.
I replied,
Dear B.P.
The whole deal sounds too greasy to suit me, under the circumstances.
F.B.
I don’t know what exactly I meant by that, but the thought of us dancing around together while Cardmaker was back in Union and Sumner was marching around some army post just reminded me of something someone would do who wore his hair close to his scalp, slicked down and shiny.
Sometimes at night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d think of Sumner, and the poems he sent me, and the note his mother left, and I’d know the poems were written to his mother. I’d know he needed the army because the army would really tell him what to do with his life, for the rest of his life, because he was lost.
In the morning I’d think maybe I was all wrong. Maybe he just liked writing poems and maybe he just liked dressing up in uniforms, and maybe it didn’t make any sense to try and analyze everything. Where had it ever gotten my father? My father hadn’t even known his own wife wanted out.
France Shipp didn’t return after Christmas vacation. There were rumors circulating that she was pregnant. But Peter Rider was back at Wales, as handsome as ever, showing no signs of being involved in anything like that…. We never knew the truth. France didn’t write anyone, didn’t visit, was never heard from again after her roommate packed her trunk and Herbert wheeled it away to be shipped to her.
Agnes learned more about Stephen Woolwine. He was a fifty-year-old man who kept over a hundred dogs in his house. His name was in all the newspapers when the city voted to rezone his neighborhood and force him out. He was a bachelor and a scrap collector. The only place he visited (except for his junk-collecting missions) was St. Thomas Episcopal Church, which he attended faithfully every Sunday. The ASPCA took his dogs and Stephen Woolwine went to Richmond to live with a brother. His correspondence with Agnes ended abruptly with his notoriety.
The big news was that a man took Miss Blue’s place. He was a young man in his early twenties, the only man ever in residence at Charles School. Mr. Leogrande became our faculty chum, too, living on David Copperfield, but going to the john two flights down on Great Expectations.
He was a terrible teacher; he made science about as colorful as a sack of flour. But he had other things in his favor: He was a man, and he was nearer our age than the other faculty members. He had sex appeal, according to Agnes (My grandmother would not have been surprised that anyone named Ernesto Leogrande had sex appeal!) and for a while Agnes grew thin and was alternately weepy and giggly, and always on on
e subject: HIM.
Mr. Leogrande convinced Agnes to attend our Valentine dance, instead of putting herself in the infirmary as she always did. It was her first dance, and APE let Mr. Leogrande escort her to it.
The ice was broken after that. Agnes went to all the dances, but not with Mr. Leogrande.
What was it about those years that made young Italians pant after older women? Mr. Leogrande fell under Miss Sparrow’s spell. I looked out toward The Caravan one Sunday afternoon and saw them in a pouring rain, huddled under Miss Sparrow’s cape, which she was still wearing, walking as though it was a sunny summer day.
Sundays in church we looked for signs of tragedy, potential suicide, or homicide across the face of Reverend Cunkle. There were those who swore that there were new wrinkles and dark circles under his eyes from sleepless nights, and once in Sweet Shoppe Queue I was told by Ditty Hutt that Reverend Cunkle had cried in his wife’s lap, while she patted his bald head and told him, “Edward, there was no way for it to end happily.”
Agnes went to all the dances including the May Day dance. I don’t remember who her date was that time. Mine was John Dowder. Cute had planned it for months, knowing how I carried on about John ever since that Sunday when we all went out to dinner together.
He was exactly as I remembered him, as handsome, maybe more.
I don’t remember now what it was he said, what gross thing it was that made me cringe and blush and wish someone would cut his tongue out so he would just be there to look up at and lean against. It turned out not to be important. After his first dance with Agnes, anything about him that I didn’t like wasn’t going to have anything to do with me, anyway.
“Perfect match!” Cardmaker wrote after I wrote her the news. “Two great faces until they open their big mouths!”
One night near the end of the year, I went into Miss Mitchell’s room to ask permission to be excused from gym.
“Will we see you next year, Flanders?”
Sticking out from the edge of her desk blotter, I saw the picture of Miss Able pieced together and Scotch-taped. She had recovered it from the wastebasket where I had tossed it along with pieces of my father’s letter.
“I suppose I’ll be back,” I said.
“You only suppose?”
“It’s hard to be certain of much.”
I’d learned that in a year’s time at Charles School. Boarding school is like a little world, with all the lessons of the large one taught in minuscule.
The painting of Mary, Queen of Scots, was never recovered. It seemed fitting that it should be gone along with Miss Blue, the only one who would really have missed it.
People drop out of your life, some by accident, some by will, some by default: France Shipp, Sumner, Miss Blue…and some mean more and some mean less.
I never graduated from Charles School. In my junior year I went to live with my mother in New York City. I went to school there. Agnes wrote faithfully the news of Charles School. Some summers when I went up to Auburn, I stopped in Union to see Cardmaker, whose father had managed to fight the bishop and keep that parish.
I thought I’d never lose track of Cardmaker and Agnes, but I did. We lost track of each other, stopped writing. Cardmaker was marrying someone from Union when last heard of; Agnes was in her final year of Sweet Briar.
Eventually I even stopped wondering about them, where they were, what they were doing. Other people took their places and ultimately others took theirs. Time passed and few stayed and there were always more to come.
But I never forgot Miss Blue. I’m not sure why. I think of her every time I walk the streets of New York City. I try to imagine her way back that Christmas season, a tiny figure wearing a large cross, carrying a huge picture, enveloped by the tall skyscrapers and the on-rushing crowds, making her way along somehow. Then I have to stop imagining, for the city is too cruel to the likes of a Miss Blue. I can never look in the window of a pawnshop for fear one day I’ll see the painting of Mary, Queen of Scots, and beside it Miss Blue’s huge cross.
Sometimes when I pass a church I hear that tiny singsong voice repeating, “I talked to Jesus and He knew I knew He was there,” and I wonder all over again why she always smelled of gardenia, why that particular scent, and what she had been like when she was “Nesty.” How had she gotten from “Nesty” to our Miss Blue? Could it happen to anyone? To me? And what would it take to make it happen?
There are never any answers to these mysteries. But I still have a daydream that sometime I might come upon her. She was only around forty and she wouldn’t be that much older now.
In my daydreams she suddenly appears—in the half-light of early evening along Fifth Avenue in the forties…or in the Christmas crowds on a snowy morning outside Macy’s…at the back of a small restaurant, the kind that serves hot popovers and fresh-baked homemade bread… or on a city park bench in a circle of sun on a cold afternoon.
I see the light blue eyes look up—remembering the times I would see them trying to connect with someone else’s on the way out of Dombey and Son.
Our eyes meet. I smile. Does she recognize me, or remember meat all?
“Miss Blue,” I say. “It’s me. Is it really you?”
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.
My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.
I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.
I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)
Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.
Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the New York Times called it “important and useful as an introduc
tion to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”
One of the hardest books for me to write was Little Little, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.
I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called Deliver Us from Evie. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.
When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called Your Eyes in Stars.
Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me.
My book Night Kites is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.