“That is the old dumbwaiter. Gone now.”
Miss Stickleback and Theo walked their fingers along the floor plans of their own halves of the apartment slowly calling out the names of the rooms they must be passing through. Stopping when they arrived at where the back rooms are now, they turned to look at each other.
“Look,” Miss Stickleback exclaimed in her sharp, high voice, tapping a finger loudly on the book. “There’s a room!”
Theo, Miss Stickleback, Oskar, Mr. Bunchley, and Marilyn bent their heads close together as they peered over the yellow paper of the large page.
“And a little terrace,” said Theo.
“My Gott,” said Oskar.
•
Fifteen minutes later all five of them stood in Miss Stickleback’s study, staring at the side wall. The book of plans lay open on her lilac love seat.
“The old door should be behind that,” said Oskar, pointing at a large armoire. “We’ll have to move it. All right?”
Mr. Bunchley and Oskar heaved, pushed, and cajoled the heavy armoire away from the wall.
As the armoire moved inch by inch like a crotchety old elephant, Theo and Miss Stickleback stood staring at the slowly widening space behind. The armoire had been her mother’s and had always stood in just that spot. Even the painters had never moved it. “Just paint around,” Miss Stickleback had said, and they always did.
Now the widening yellowy-white rectangle of ancient uncovered wall held everyone spellbound until Theo exclaimed, “There it is!”
The outline of a door showed clearly in the wall where the doorway itself had been walled up in plaster. Though the moldings had been removed, as the building had shifted and fidgeted over the decades, little cracks showed exactly where the doorway had been.
•
The next morning, the second day of the new year, as the January gray of the New York sky got a little less gray, the forgotten room woke up to the sound of drilling in its north wall. The drilling rattled away at a high pitch. Then a heavier, lower rattle droned and shook the wall becoming slowly louder until with a hiss the end of a large, spinning, silver bit poked through, sending dust and small pieces of plaster onto the floor. The silver bit withdrew. There was a pause. And then there was even louder drilling. Another bit appeared and disappeared. Then the end of a tough red finger emerged and tapped and probed around the edge of the hole.
The finger went away and a watery brown eye appeared. It was replaced by a bright gray-blue one and then a dusty green one.
Some muffled conversation could be heard but not understood through the hole.
Another pause.
Then the sound of a hammer striking hard repeated steadily a dozen times, stopping and then beginning again. After fifteen minutes of this, a piece of wall the size of a framed diploma broke through and fell heavily to the floor, sending bits of itself skidding over to the draped legs of old Mrs. Waterby’s piano.
Oskar’s face appeared in the hole, along with a “Son of a gun!,” then Mrs. Stickleback’s face, then Theo’s.
Now there was more furious pounding, loud talking, laughter, and more pounding.
Some while later, Oskar, Mrs. Stickleback, and Theo stood by the piano in the center of the forgotten room and slowly looked around. Dust motes floated slowly in the thin morning light.
•
On the second Saturday of April of that year, around dusk of that early-spring day, the first notes of Chopin’s Nocturne no. 6 in G minor sounded, echoing gently between the embracing walls to the north and south before falling lightly into the courtyards below.
Miss Stickleback sat at her great-great-aunt’s piano and carefully struck the keys with her elegant fingers and touched the pedals with her feet.
Theo sat between his parents in the first row of chairs on the terrace along with the fifteen other invited neighbors, including Mrs. MacDougal.
Oskar and Mr. Bunchley stood on the other side of the piano near the door to Miss Stickleback’s apartment.
In the months since its discovery the forgotten room had recuperated, Oskar overseeing all the work. Its walls and ceiling had been replastered, new coats of paint in eggshell and high gloss, Naples yellow and bright white had been gently applied. The old Persian rug was cleaned by experts who brought its reds and blacks beautifully back to vigor. The floor was replaced in bamboo, and, of course, the piano was cleaned carefully top to bottom, low to high, and tuned. Miss Stickleback had placed a photograph of her great-great-aunt, showing a graceful young woman, on the piano lid. The terrace was swept and waterproofed, and Mr. Bunchley contributed a potted rosebush, which was placed along the railing. Together Theo and Miss Stickleback carefully washed each glass bead of the small chandelier.
The last chord of Chopin slowly moved into each corner of the room and lingered there until its notes had become a part of the walls themselves. There’s not another way to say it— the forgotten room was fully awake once more, its long uncomfortable sleep was over. It was alive again. And it was magical.
Miss Stickleback turned to Beethoven.
Mouse Exchange
SOMETIMES you like a change.
You want to see something new. You grow tired of your same four walls. And you would like to see how other people live.
So you decide to swap houses with someone in a faraway place. You give them your house in exchange for theirs. Just for a month, say.
Now, this sort of thing, while understandable, is frowned upon by building managers—and even more so by someone like Mrs. MacDougal.
“These people coming with their children and their suitcases! I don’t know what’s in those suitcases!” she said. “How would I? They could be full of bombs for all I know!”
So it’s frowned upon and doesn’t happen very often. But there is one set of building residents over which the wishes of Mrs. MacDougal have no sway whatsoever—the building’s mice.
Mrs. MacDougal can shake her fist all she wants and send off a hundred e-mails to the building manager and the board of directors, the mice of the building run things their own way, and they love a good house exchange.
The Brownbacks, for example, who live at 777 Garden Avenue and are, therefore, city mice, took a different house in the country every summer. However, like any family, the Brownbacks didn’t always agree on what made for a vacation and what made for an ordeal.
•
“This is lovely!” said Mrs. Brownback, emerging from the long entryway into the grand living room of their home for the next month. “So spacious!”
She moved quickly from one corner to the next, pushing her nose into the furnishings, running her quick fingers over everything she came across.
“Oh, look, they’ve left us some acorns and they’re huge!” she said, holding an acorn high above her head. “We are going to eat well here!”
“Mom, I hate acorns,” said Jimmy Brownback, her eldest. “Don’t they have any pizza, or maybe some Chinese food?”
Jimmy was following his mother into the living room when Mr. Brownback entered, carrying two pieces of luggage, which he dropped loudly onto the straw floor. He gave the place a stern once-over with his large brown eyes. Then addressing his wife he said, “Have you looked at the fields out there? Breathtaking is the word. Breathtaking! I can hardly breathe! There’s something weird about the air!” He clawed at his throat.
“It’s called fresh air, dear,” said Mrs. Brownback. “Trust me, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll love it. Besides, it’s good for your digestion.”
“Leave me alone with what’s good for my digestion!” said Mr. Brownback. “I’ll decide what’s good and what’s not good for my digestion!”
Mr. Brownback burrowed into the couch. You must remember, however, that Mr. Brownback’s complaints were all part of the fun of the thing.
A moment later, Ernie, Eddie, Edith, Emily, and Frank, the quintuplets, appeared in the living room and began swarming over everything in sight, talking and joking and exclaimi
ng about their discoveries all at once, as was their habit.
•
On the other hand, sometimes the adventure can be disappointing.
Mr. Brownback pressed the front door keys into Mr. White-foot’s paw and told him again how to get to the basement, what to do if the toilet backs up, whom to see with any little electrical problems. Then, with a twitch of his delicate tail, he turned to catch up with the rest of the family already headed to the countryside and the Whitefoots’ home. The whole Whitefoot clan was eager to explore its new home for a month, sure that it would be the starting place for wonderful new experiences.
The Whitefoots were a family of nine. There were Mr. and Mrs. Whitefoot, and then, in no particular order, since they were all the same age, Jerry, June, Jumper, Jean, Jennifer, Jasmine, and Jack. Their home in the country was beneath an ancient spiny fitzer on the old Cliffdale Farm. It was a kind of garden apartment. It had numberless rooms (arithmetic is not stressed in mouse education) arranged within and around the fitzer’s thickest roots, where the Brownback family was no doubt at that moment continuing to exclaim over the spaciousness of the digs.
Mrs. Whitefoot, contrariwise in the Brownbacks’ apartment at 777 Garden Avenue, was exclaiming over the cramped quarters she was facing now.
“How do they live like this? I have to tuck in my tail just to turn around!”
The Brownback apartment was, by local standards, a rather swell mousehole, as it occupied much of the interior of the wall that separated Miss Nancy’s kitchen from Miss Nancy’s living room. The naked hot-water pipe in the wall kept things warm year-round, and where its joint led to the kitchen sink, it provided an excellent surface for warming up leftovers. Also, as the walls were old, the latticework that appeared here and there out of the crumbling plaster provided a wonderful array of beds, stacked up as far as little mouse eyes could see.
And there was very convenient access to Miss Nancy’s kitchen. A large hole that let in the gas pipes opened onto the back of the oven. From there it was an easy couple of jumps to get out under and up and into the oven, which Mr. White-foot and Jean promptly did, returning half a minute later with cheeks full of goodies.
“Thay,” said Mr. Whitefoot, “the landlady here ith a pretty good cook, munch, munch. Here,” he continued, removing pawfuls of crisped brown potato bits, crunchy pizza crustlets, and hardened soufflé morsels, and handing them around.
In the meantime, Jumper and Jasmine had found Miss Nancy’s bedroom, the clothes dresser, and above all, the sock drawer. This looked softer than any countryside bed of layered straw, milkweed down, and even duck feathers ever could.
And then, after the first snoopings, Mr. and Mrs. Whitefoot were discussing the itinerary for the next days when Jerry, June, and Jennifer burst back into the main mouse living room followed by a panting Jack.
“We saw it! We saw it!” they all shouted at once.
The others stared a bit.
“We saw it!” said Jack.
“What? What did you see?” cried Mrs. Whitefoot.
“The cat!” said Jack.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Whitefoot.
“I knew there would be one here!” said Jack.
“The brochure didn’t mention anything about cats,” said Mrs. Whitefoot.
Later, when the elder Whitefoots were taking their siesta, Jack said to Jumper, “We saw the cat. And I’m going to fight it!”
Jumper just twitched her whiskers.
At this time, the cat Jack saw, Miss Nancy’s cat, Carole Lombard, lay belly-up on the sofa, paws stretched over her head. Quite unaware that the apartment had new tenants, she grunted contentedly in her sleep.
•
Jack was a bit of a lad. He was a doer, a darer, and a diver-in. Don’t let the name “mouse” mislead you. Large as a baby, Jack was huge as an adolescent. He came out last of the litter, but he came out biggest. And even then he came out swinging— his tail, anyway.
Never a bully, mind you, yet always ready to scrap. First, it was playful fisticuffs or sparring with his sisters and brothers. And then he had more serious bouts with other mice in the countryside. Very soon he was noticed at the neighborhood gym in the overturned apple crate next to the barn. From the first afternoon Jack set four feet in the boxing ring of the apple crate, he knew this was home. He was a born fighter.
Henceforth, every afternoon, Jack raced straight from school to the apple crate. He watched the old fighters, learning from them as he did them favors, carrying their gloves, washing their towels, holding the punching bag. Soon enough, however, Jack began training as well. Jumping rope with his tail, shadowboxing, punching the punching bag—his training routine was extremely strenuous. And to fuel his newly rippling muscles, Jack took to eating eight, ten, even eleven entire pumpkin seeds at a time, which is a lot if you’re a little mouse.
And this is precisely what Jack no longer was: He was a big mouse, a mammoth mouse, hamster-size at least, maybe even rat-size. And because of his liking for pumpkin seeds—plenty of protein there—he became known as Pumpkinseed Jack.
Pumpkinseed Jack entered the ring formally when he turned nineteen weeks, that is, about the usual age for a young mouse fighter. From his very first fight he broadcast to the neighborhood that he was a mouse to watch. Though he was sometimes prone to leave his nose unprotected—he didn’t always keep his paws up—he had a worrying jab and a tremendous left-and-right-hook combination that, by the time he was twenty-two weeks old, had left a string of knocked-out mice in the ring. None had lasted through more than the fourth round.
And when no more mice in the neighborhood would face him, Jack looked farther afield. His fame grew. Mice from all around the countryside came to the apple crate to fight him— and to lose. Jack looked even farther afield. He boxed a vole, a shrew, and a mole in quick order and none could withstand him. The mole, though blind, had a formidable nose that could tell where each of Jack’s sweaty paws was at all times, and the mole possessed talented paws of his own that were like steel shovels. The mole landed a couple of blows to Jack’s left ear and belly, which, for the first time in his career, surprised Jack. They had sent him reeling for a couple of seconds. Still Jack pulled himself together, danced forward and back as the mole lumbered heavily, then polished the mole off with an extended flurry of combination punches, the likes of which that sporting crowd at the apple crate had never ever seen before.
As a matter of fact, the mole only whetted Jack’s appetite for ever more challenging opponents. In the weeks that followed, Jack took on a rat (mean and ruthless), a squirrel (squirrely), and a muskrat (big, but slow and stupid). Jack defeated them all. Then he dispatched a chipmunk, a flying squirrel, and an enormous gopher. Jack was the greatest fighting mouse anyone had ever seen.
When Mrs. Whitefoot had announced her intention that the family would spend a month in the city, Jack couldn’t believe his good luck. This would be a chance for him to make his mark in the wider world. New York City! Where Muhammad Ali had fought! Where Mike Tyson was born! Where Knut Knuckleson, the Norwegian Rat from Sheepshead Bay, got his start!
As Jack had dispatched one local fighter after another, his fame grew. He became the hero of little mice from yards around. But Jack had begun to crave more. He wanted to face the toughest opponent. He wanted to fight on the biggest stage. It was his dream to fight a cat in New York City. If he could win that one, his name would go up in lights with all the rest. It would be the Fight of the Century.
And now here was his chance. Everything had lined up as he’d hoped. He had the city. He had the cat. Now he needed the fight.
•
While Jack planned the Fight of the Century, the rest of the Whitefoot clan threw itself into seeing all that the city had to offer. They took in spectacular shows. Not on Broadway exactly; the shows were on Miss Nancy’s enormous flat-screen TV in the living room. Nevertheless the programs astounded all the Whitefoots. Mrs. Whitefoot frequently had to shush her brood to keep their squeals of astoni
shment from betraying the location of the prime seats they had inside the radiator cover. Also, they ate out nearly every night—sometimes in Miss Nancy’s oven, other times higher up in the kitchen cabinets where the Rice Krispies and Kashi Medley tasted even better than ever because of the fabulous view they had from there. Evenings, if they weren’t watching the big screen, the Whitefoots might venture outside their immediate nest, into the walls of other apartments on their own floor or the floors above and below.
This is what they really liked. Just watching the great parade of city life—mice, cockroaches, and even a rat or two— was the very best entertainment. Everything was moving about, scuttling and scurrying. It was like an endless party. The Whitefoots always came home from these excursions utterly exhausted, tumbling into bed and sleeping through the day. They became only truly awake again when the nighttime returned.
While the rest of the family saw shows, ate fine foods, and strolled like boulevardiers, Jack trained. And he studied his opponent. After the first excitement of seeing the cat, Jack had settled down to a more systematic observation. The cat was a female—mice can sense these things—not in great shape, but big. At least once a day the human being in the house, Miss Nancy, hitched the cat up to some kind of leather device and left the apartment with the cat. Jack wasn’t sure exactly what the meaning of this was but assumed it was some kind of fitness training. The cat had twice-a-day meals and nibbled in between. She had good-size paws, plenty of teeth, fine white whiskers. All in all, she looked like a worthy and truly formidable opponent.
That evening, as Jack jumped his tail the usual thousand times, he pondered his fight strategy. The cat’s paws were large. No doubt about that. He would have to be quick enough to avoid a direct blow anywhere. Even Jack knew that he couldn’t survive too many punches a cat like that could give him. He would have to get in close, lead with his snappy left jab and then rely on a barrage of hooks. In fact, Jack reasoned, if he got in close enough quickly enough he could neutralize the danger from the cat paws, because if the cat tried to really punch him, she would wind up punching herself instead. He would just need to get inside those paws right away and then stay inside them. Of course, that would bring him closer to the cat’s mouth. He wasn’t sure what rules the cat would be playing by. She might just call “home rules” and try to bite his head off.
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