Wizard of Washington Square

by Jane Yolen

  “It worked!” Leilah whispered when Pickwell had disappeared. “He’s headed for the dragonry.”

  David clapped her on the back. “That was brilliant!”

  Just then they heard a small splash followed by a loud yelp. David grabbed Leilah’s hand. “Let’s go and see what’s happening,” he said.

  “Happening?” said Leilah, pulling away. “What’s happening is that we’re getting out of here.”

  But David had tiptoed down the tunnel. When Leilah got to him, he was standing with his hand over his mouth.

  “It was big and white and had teeth,” he said. “I think…I think it was an alligator. It took Old Pickleface by the seat of his pants and crawled into the water. He was waving his umbrella about and sputtering. Pickwell, I mean. Not the alligator.”

  Leilah nodded. She had heard about the big white alligators that were supposed to live in the sewers below New York. Once they had been baby alligators sent as presents to the city’s children from grandparents and rich uncles who lived in Florida. But the mothers had flushed them—the alligators, not the rich uncles—down the toilets. And so the alligators grew and flourished in the dark world beneath the streets, growing fat on sewer rats and white in the always-dark world.

  “Maybe we should rescue him?” Leilah asked tentatively.

  “Are you crazy?” asked David, and for a moment he really believed she was. “Then they’ll get us too. The alligators.”

  “But we can’t just let him…die or something,” Leilah protested.

  “Why not?” David said bitterly. “Look what he was going to do with D. Dog. And the table. And us.”

  “Well, that is hardly cause to let him die,” said Leilah. “I think we’d better go and find out whether the Wizard can help.” It wasn’t a statement. It was a command.

  “Nonsense,” said the Wizard after he heard about Mr. Pickwell’s predicament. “The alligators won’t eat him. They may be only alligators, but they do have taste.”

  And so it was, some two hours later, that Mr. Pickwell climbed out of a manhole cover on Forty-second Street and Broadway. He was soaking wet, scratched, and fuming. His temper was as foul as his clothes, for he had traveled the length and breadth of the New York sewers in the alligator’s mouth. And when a policeman arrested him for, of all things, obstructing traffic, Mr. Pickwell tried to hit the officer with his now broken umbrella. It was another hour before Mr. Pickwell’s papers had dried out enough so that he could prove to the police sergeant at the station house that he was a Very Important Personage. By then, his moustache was completely unwaxed and wilted, and he looked very little like the picture in his wallet. He finally phoned his lawyer, who paid his bond and got him out of jail for the night, though he would still have to return to stand trial for assaulting a police officer. Mr. Joseph Pickwell of VIP Interiors went home in a twit.

  “Poor man,” said Leilah, clucking sympathetically, for they had watched it all in the tapestry. But David and the Wizard were chuckling.

  “I always thought he was all wet!” said the Wizard happily.

  Recalled

  IT WAS JUST BARELY nine o’clock when David and Leilah met at the base of the Arch on Monday morning. David had almost beaten the sun up. He had surprised his mother and father at the breakfast table with the announcement that he had found a friend—indeed, several friends (for he counted the table, too)—and would be at the park all day again. His mother wondered whether he oughtn’t bring the friends around so they could see them. But David’s father was so pleased that he shushed David’s mother immediately and gave David two dollars for lunch and a treat for his friends.

  The Wizard was ten minutes late and still yawning when he appeared at the door with the statue. It had remained in the warren for safekeeping. No one had worried about Pickwell showing up, but to be sure, they had switched the signs back. The Wizard guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that Pickwell would not come to the Village again. He had had enough.

  “Sorry to be late,” the Wizard said. “But I was up past midnight studying some spells that might help us, and I overslept this morning.”

  “Did you find anything?” asked Leilah.

  “I’m not sure,” said the Wizard. “I wrote them down, though, and put them under my hat.”

  “Oh, great,” said David. “We might find them next week sometime.”

  “No, no, child,” said the Wizard. “Not that hat. My nightcap.”

  “And when does it give back things?” asked David. “On the full moon?”

  “The next morning. Always!” said the Wizard as he brought out his nightcap from a pocket in his robe. He reached into the cap and extracted a small scrap of lined paper on which was written a short couplet. “We’ll have to play the game, though. Just like the last time.” He smiled. “At least if this doesn’t work, we’ll have some fun.”

  “But what if you change David and me into statues by mistake?” said Leilah.

  “There’s that, of course,” said the Wizard.

  “Yes,” David pointed out sarcastically. “It’s the touching, you know.”

  “That’s true,” said the Wizard, admiration in his voice. “However did you know? That’s a wizard’s secret.”

  “You said it often enough,” said David.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. I’m not supposed to. I must have forgotten,” said the Wizard, looking around over his shoulder as though someone might be watching. “But it’s true, you know,” he whispered confidentially. “About the touching, I mean. So I had already decided not to swing you two but to concentrate on the statue.”

  They walked over to the grassy area and took their places. David and Leilah pretended that they had just been swung around and made statues. David stood like a sword swallower swallowing the world’s longest sword. Leilah was a snake that had just dined on a pink hippocampus.

  The Wizard stood between them and started to swing around, holding the marble statue in one arm and the piece of paper in the other. He squinted at the verse he had written and chanted:

  “Swinging here, swinging there,

  Swinging statues everywhere,

  Sage and parsley, thyme and chive,

  Help me bring ’em back alive.”

  When he had finished the verse, he threw the statue into the air. It went straight up and started down, turning end over end over end.

  “Hey,” shouted David, “wait a minute! You’ll break it! It’s already chipped.” He ran under the falling statue and waited for it to come down. He spread his arms to catch it and missed. David closed his eyes, expecting to hear it shatter on the ground. But what he heard was D. Dog barking and whining, and when he opened his eyes he saw his terrier jumping up and wriggling and doing all the dog things he had been saving to do for a day.

  “You did it! You did it!” squealed Leilah. “That was first-class magic, even if you did have to peek at your paper.”

  But the Wizard did not hear her. He was still whirling around and around. A curious humming sound was in the air, and under the Wizard a small whirlwind was building up. First it picked up pieces of dust and dirt and old candy wrappers. Then it gathered in half-eaten peanuts and peanut shells, back pages of the Village Voice and the jacket of a Grove Press novel. And at last it picked up the Wizard himself. As he began to rise in the air, the wind blew his beard straight up as if pointing the way. His eyes were closed and his face had an ecstatic smile.

  “Where are you going?” shouted David above the humming. “Wait—we haven’t thanked you yet. I even have money for a special treat. Wait….”

  Just as he cleared the tops of the maples, the Wizard looked down at David and Leilah and at a small crowd of bearded young men and long-haired young women who had gathered there. “Recalled. Recalled,” he shouted down happily. “I’m going home. Recalled.”

  “Will you ever come back?” Leilah yelled up as loudly as she could, afraid that he could not hear her in the rush of wind.

  “If
you need me, I will come. We are bound by the Rule of Need,” came a voice out of the whirlwind. “Recalled….”

  Like a gas-filled balloon that has escaped from a child’s fingers, the Wizard rose slowly at first, then faster and faster, a small speck in the sky rising higher and higher until at last he disappeared.

  “That sure is some trip,” said one of the bearded young men. They laughed and went on their way with the longhaired women.

  David and Leilah looked until they could see nothing more. Then they waited silently a few minutes longer to be sure.

  “Is he gone? Really gone?” asked Leilah, afraid she might have to cry.

  “I guess so,” said David who was hugging D. Dog and starting to sniffle—just a little—himself.

  “What about all his stuff in the warren?” asked Leilah.

  “Are you kidding?” David said. “After that whirlwind, moving furniture should be a breeze!”

  Leilah giggled. “That’s a pretty good joke!” she said.

  They walked out of the park, D. Dog at their heels, and started toward an ice-cream man who was coming down Fifth Avenue.

  “Do you believe it really happened?” asked David. “I mean—really?”

  “Look at D. Dog,” said Leilah, pointing at the terrier, who was running ahead of them now.

  “What do you mean?” asked David as he looked. D. Dog turned and started to run back toward them. He was limping slightly on his right rear paw.

  “The chipped foot,” said David.

  “Exactly,” said Leilah.

  “Well, will we ever see the Wizard again?” David asked.

  “I guess so. If we really need him,” Leilah answered.

  “What I really need now is an ice cream,” said David. “My treat!”

  And smiling secret smiles, the two friends ran up to the vendor to get their cones.

  A Note from the Author

  WHEN I WORKED AS A young editor in New York, I lived in Greenwich Village and loved to spend Sundays in Washington Square Park, where people sang and played guitars around the fountain and children ran in and out of the water screaming with joy.

  And one day I noticed that there was a black door in the side of the great monument. It puzzled me. Why a door in a monument? I had assumed it was solid stone.

  No one had an answer for me at the time. None of my friends knew. This was long before the Internet and Google. I checked in some libraries, but found nothing helpful.

  So … I made up the answer. That’s what writers do. We make things up. And if we make them up really well, other people believe what we have written. At least, they believe it for the life of the story. I tell you that a wizard lives in the monument—an awkward, not-terribly-good-at-his-job wizard whose magic often goes awry. And all that follows is a story.

  Jane Yolen

  A Personal History by Jane Yolen

  I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

  We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

  When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

  I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

  And I am still writing.

  I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

  The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called Once Upon a Time.

  These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including Not All Princesses Dress in Pink and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like Wild Wings and Color Me a Rhyme.

  And I am still writing.

  Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!

  Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

  And yes—I am still writing.

  At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.

  Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)

  Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.

  Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book Owl Moon in 2011.

  Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.

  Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Jane Yolen

  Cover design by Gabriel Guma

  978-1-4804-2331-2

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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