All right, I’ll be honest here. I had a feeling too.
Waiting at the elevator was Jackson Sloan. He gave Mom this raised-eyebrow questioning look. She shrugged. It was a mystery.
Jen showed her pass to a guard, who unlocked a room.
As she ushered us in, I could see her hands were shaking. She looked ready to explode.
“This is a showing for an upcoming auction of minor Dutch paintings of the Renaissance,” she said. “These aren’t Rembrandts or Vermeers, you understand, but gifted painters all the same. More affordable,” she added, shooting Jackson Sloan a significant look. Then she mouthed wedding present! so broadly that even the guard could have read her lips.
We let three or four seconds pass before Mom said, “Jen!”
“Okay, okay! So there’s a lot of great work here, and I was going through it yesterday after the paintings had been uncrated and were being hung . . .”
All of a sudden she was sobbing, right there in the Christie’s viewing room, like she was having a nervous breakdown. Clearly this was something she couldn’t handle. So she just grabbed Mom’s hand and led her across the room. We followed behind them like sheep.
She stopped in front of a small painting. It showed a woman sitting at a table beside a leaded glass window, light streaming in. In front of her on the table was a wooden stand and on the stand was a picture. She held a paintbrush in her hand. But she wasn’t looking at the picture; she was looking out at us.
Actually she was probably looking at herself in a mirror, since this was a self-portrait. That’s how they did it back then, before they could work from photographs.
But the really interesting thing was that the artist was a woman—unusual for the 1600s. And judging by her clothes and what we could see of her house, she must have been doing pretty well for herself.
All of this washed over me in perhaps two seconds, because my eyes had gone straight to her face—the creamy skin, the sweet smile, and that remarkable halo of pale blond hair.
Jen was still sobbing uncontrollably. Seconds later my mother was too. The guard was getting nervous. Barrett was practically cutting off the circulation in my right arm. And for a moment I wasn’t sure my legs would hold me up.
Because, lest there be the slightest doubt: hanging around the artist’s neck, suspended from a golden chain, was a scallop shell.
Acknowledgments
When I was very young, I moved with my mother from Abilene, Texas, to New York’s Greenwich Village, where we lived in a basement apartment on Perry Street. The apartment backed onto a spectacular garden that ran the whole length of the block, with winding walkways, boxwood hedges, stone statues, ivy-covered walls, and burbling fountains—utterly magical and quite unexpected in a big, noisy city.
My parents had divorced early on, so it was just Mother and me—a tight little family of two. She was young then, still in her twenties—glamorous, flamboyant, and delirious with joy to be out of small-town Texas and living a Technicolor dream life in the Big Apple. Her friends were poets, painters, and actors. They listened to jazz and talked about literature and art. I wanted to be just like them.
Famous people were everywhere. I watched Mary Martin fly across the stage as Peter Pan on Broadway. The poet Dylan Thomas came to one of Mother’s parties. She met the artist Jean Miró through a friend, and I still have some of his beautiful prints. Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived near Washington Square Park, allegedly took a fancy to me when I was taken there for walks. And I got to be in the “peanut gallery” on The Howdy Doody Show, where I met Buffalo Bob and—my hands-down favorite character—Princess Summerfall Winterspring.
It was a strange life for a little girl, certainly not what you’d call normal, but while much of my childhood has faded from memory, I could tell you a thousand stories about the New York days. They ended when Mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She had to go away for treatment, and I was sent back to Texas to live with family. Things were never quite the same after that, which of course is why I remember it so vividly. It was a golden world, since lost, a world my mother, with her bright spirit, magically gave to me.
While we were still living on Perry Street, Mother wrote her first book, a murder mystery set in our apartment. When, years later, I too became a writer, I often thought of using that lost world in a book of my own. But I couldn’t seem to find a story to go with the setting. Then an old idea about a magical Chinese bowl and a boy who gets trapped in time began to shape-shift in my subconscious. The bowl became a delftware platter and a new story line emerged.
I wrote several chapters and a loose outline and sent them as a proposal to my editor, Rosemary Brosnan. At that point I already had my characters: a mother and her daughter; their wonderful roommate, Jen; and a precocious boy named Barrett Browning. I had my setting: the apartment, the garden, the Village, and the school I attended. And I had the broken shards of a delftware platter in a cookie tin. But the story itself—about the girl’s father, who returns from a POW camp after the war—was still pretty vague.
Rosemary liked the proposal. And having worked with me for years, she already knew that the plot would change—probably drastically—as soon as I started writing. And she trusted me to change it in a good way. But she did make one stipulation: the book should be set in modern times, not the 1940s.
That was a blow. I had already done an enormous amount of research. I knew when the POWs returned from Europe and the ships they traveled on. I knew what was playing on Broadway at the time, what a dress would cost at Bergdorf’s, and exactly where Eleanor Roosevelt, who would somehow fit into my story, was living.
But what troubled me more than the wasted research was the prospect of writing a contemporary story. I didn’t want to write about kids who were always texting and tweeting and taking selfies. That stuff is so not magical.
But I gutted it up and got to work, trying to adapt what remained of my plot to the world we live in now. And I quickly discovered that letting go of historical constraints freed me to follow my imagination wherever it wanted to go—to write a book not about history but about family, friendship, and loss, secrets and misunderstandings, kindness and second chances.
Which leads me—finally—to the acknowledgments. With her unerring wisdom, my ever-astute editor, Rosemary, opened the door to the book I really needed to write. So, heartfelt thanks for guiding me and trusting me all these years, and for being such a kind and generous friend.
Copious thanks to my husband, Peter, who listened to hours of my dinner-table dithering as the plot was coming together, who read the manuscript numerous times, and who suggested that maybe a painting could be the message from Sofie at the end.
Many thanks to my fabulous agent, Marcia Wernick, for being there whenever I need a bit of sage advice or moral support. And I’m grateful to the good-hearted members of my writers’ group—Marc Talbert, Ashlee Glasscock, Mark Karlins, and Mary Lee Updike.
Finally, though Joplin’s story is completely different from the life I lived on Perry Street, the themes that run through it are deeply personal and very real. I realize now that this whole book has been a love letter to my mother, and a celebration of that wild and glorious together-time we had before she got sick and everything changed.
So I would like thank my mother, Fay Grissom Stanley, for being such a wonder and for teaching me so much. You formed the person I became, opened my eyes to a world of possibilities, made me a writer, and taught me how to love.
Fay Grissom Stanley
Perry Street apartment, 1950
About the Author
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
DIANE STANLEY is the author and illustrator of beloved books for young readers, including The Silver Bowl, which was named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews and Book Links Lasting Connections and was an ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice; The Cup and the Crown; The Princess of Cortova; Saving Sky, winner of the Arab American National Museum’s Arab American Book Award and a Bank Street College of E
ducation Best Book of the Year; Bella at Midnight, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and an ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice; The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy; The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine; A Time Apart; and The Chosen Prince.
Ms. Stanley has also written and illustrated numerous picture books, including three creatively reimagined fairy tales: The Giant and the Beanstalk, Goldie and the Three Bears, and Rumpelstiltskin’s Daughter. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. You can visit her online at www.dianestanley.com.
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Books by Diane Stanley
The Chosen Prince
The Silver Bowl
The Cup and the Crown
The Princess of Cortova
Bella at Midnight
Saving Sky
The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine
The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy
A Time Apart
Credits
Cover art © 2017 by Jori van der Linde
Cover design by Sarah Creech
Copyright
JOPLIN, WISHING. Copyright © 2017 by Diane Stanley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
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ISBN 978-0-06-242370-2
EPub Edition © June 2017 ISBN 9780062423726
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FIRST EDITION
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