The Calder Game

by Blue Balliett

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Author’s Note

  Author’s Whisper

  Acknowledgments

  After Words

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Q&A with Blue Balliett

  Real Places, Real People

  Play the Calder Game!

  A Royal Forest

  Play with an A-maze-ing Puzzle

  Designated Graffiti Area

  Also Available

  Copyright

  I make what I see.

  It’s only the problem of seeing it.

  — ALEXANDER CALDER

  Nobody ever listened to me

  until they didn’t know who I was.

  — BANKSY

  The setting is a very old town in England. It is dawn, a pale October dawn that pours through the streets like cream, erasing line and dissolving shadow. Red ivy stirs against damp stone; the houses are stone, the walls are stone, the street is stone. A lace curtain has escaped through an open window and waves unseen in the early light. Now a black cat blinks, stretches, and slowly crosses the empty square, stepping carefully around a raised sign that reads, MINOTAUR, ALEXANDER CALDER, 1959.

  Someone sneezes behind closed shutters. A light goes on in a kitchen and a man in plaid pajamas fills a brass kettle. In other houses, butter sizzles and silverware clinks. The first truck of the day rattles across cobblestones and comes to a sudden stop. The driver sits for a moment looking straight ahead, his mouth open, then hops out and hurries to a nearby door. He bangs the knocker twice, sticks his head in, and shouts, “It’s gone! The sculpture is gone!”

  Soon enough, the town realizes that a boy is also gone.

  Exactly two weeks earlier, on a shiny, blue morning in the United States, three kids sat talking.

  “Your dad is really taking you to England?” Petra Andalee asked, her voice thin with surprise.

  Tommy Segovia’s eyebrows shot up and his mouth opened in a slowly widening O. “Lucky,” he muttered.

  Calder Pillay pulled a piece of yellow plastic out of his pocket and ran the W-shape back and forth over one leg, back and forth between Petra and Tommy. “Yeah, I wish you guys could come,” he said. “We’re going next week, so I even get to miss school.”

  The three sat silently for a moment, banging their heels against the hollow sides of a circular piece of sculpture near the University of Chicago campus. Sun glinted off the metal, making it difficult to see.

  Tommy, Calder, and Petra were all twelve, and all lived in the neighborhood known as Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. Tommy and Calder had been friends since second grade, and Petra and Calder were much newer friends. Tommy and Petra weren’t really friends at all, but they were trying; at times this threesome balanced perfectly, and at times it fell apart.

  All were seventh graders at the University School, and all had a new classroom teacher they hated. At least they agreed about that. Her name was Bettina Button, and she never said what she meant. Even worse, she pretended she was always right. She had a flat face that fit her name and a tight helmet of hair the color of American cheese. Her clothes were pastel — pale greens and blues and pinks that might have been soft and gentle on someone else, but on Ms. Button looked more like battle gear. She ignored questions, looked busy when she wasn’t, and had the kind of ungenerous smile that stopped the minute it wasn’t needed. According to Ms. Button, learning was a job that left little time to experiment and no time to talk.

  Their teacher from the year before, Isabel Hussey, had loved class investigations, understood noise and mess, and always listened. Her long, swishy hair was forever trying to escape from clips and ties, and sometimes she wore earrings that didn’t match. She admired the colors red and black. No classroom idea was too odd, and no approach too unusual — forever curious, she was not afraid of making mistakes. In comparison to Ms. Hussey, Ms. Button was a disaster. No, she was more than that: She was deadly.

  “You get a break from the Button,” Tommy said wistfully.

  Calder held the yellow W like a strange visor over one eye, cutting the glare. It was one of a set of twelve pentominoes that he carried everywhere, and Petra and Tommy were used to seeing him fiddle with them while he thought. Shaped like letters of the alphabet, the set was actually a math tool; Calder used it for playing around with number patterns, geometry, and his own puzzles. He’d also discovered that the pieces worked beautifully for other kinds of problem-solving. In fact, he was convinced that pentominoes could do almost anything.

  “My dad is going to a conference on city gardens in a place called Oxford, but we’re staying in a small town nearby. Someone offered him this extra airline ticket, and he and my mom thought I should go. I guess there’s lots for me to explore — even a real hedge maze made of symbols.”

  “Awesome,” Tommy said. He thumped his backpack savagely, then picked his nose. “I wish we could escape, too.”

  Tommy lived alone with his mother and his pet goldfish, Goldman; they always had a cozy home, but had moved many times. They had even left Chicago the year before, which was a disaster. Tommy was very glad to be back, but still wouldn’t have minded going on a trip like this, especially during the school year. He was an expert collector, and had picked up street treasures for as long as he could remember. He was sure that England, with all its old stuff, must be fabulous for finders.

  Petra was busy fishing for a red sock that had disappeared in her shoe. “A maze with a message, she said. “You’ll be around bushes that speak!”

  Calder and Tommy nodded. They both knew the way words came alive for Petra. She always carried a pocket notebook, and believed that language was more than a string of symbols — it was a landscape, a place with its own secrets. Coming from a large, noisy family, she loved everything about writing: the privacy, the curves and lines of letters on a page, the quiet way an idea sometimes appeared out of nowhere.

  She lifted her head and stopped tugging. “Hey, I wonder if the symbols can be und
erstood while you’re wandering around lost, inside the maze?”

  Calder shrugged happily. “I’ll find out.”

  Tommy groaned. “Yeah, and you get excused from any more ruined field trips,” he said, giving Calder a whack.

  “Ow! Just while I’m gone.” Calder whacked him back.

  Petra, retying her shoe, only sighed.

  All thought back to a trip the week before to the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art. With Ms. Hussey, the trip would have been thrilling; with Ms. Button, it had been humiliating and frustrating, a day of tangled disappointments.

  Although the three kids had no idea at the time, this field trip was the quiet start of a dangerous and extraordinary game, a game that circled around the wishes and dreams of someone they had never met.

  That September, Chicago had exploded with the largest-ever show of the artist Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Pieces borrowed from collections around the world filled the entire Museum of Contemporary Art.

  A mobile is a sculpture with parts that move; it has four dimensions, because it changes over time. When Calder first began making them, his invention shocked the art world. Sculpture that could change from one moment to the next? Was this possible, and was it still art? Suddenly, here was sculpture that was playful yet serious, simple in design yet rich in variation — people looked, and then looked some more. How had Calder done it?

  The artist’s changeable creations excited some of the greatest minds of the day. Jean-Paul Sartre, a famous French thinker, wrote in 1946:

  A mobile, one might say, is a little private celebration … a pure play of movement.… There is more of the unpredictable about them than in any other human creation. No human brain, not even their creator’s, could possibly foresee all the complex combinations of which they are capable.… If you miss it, you have lost it forever.…

  He also compared a Calder mobile to a jazz improvisation, and to the flow of pattern seen in the sea.

  Albert Einstein apparently sat and watched a Calder mobile for a very long time, so long that people wondered what he was doing. He muttered, with admiration, that he wished he had thought of it.

  Calder created thousands of mobiles between 1930 and his death in 1976. Most consisted of a number of smooth metal disks connected with wire and painted black, white, red, yellow, or blue — only primary colors. The artist explained that the inspiration behind his earliest mobiles was the solar system: objects suspended, yet in motion. He also mentioned bubbles, snowflakes, coins, and poetry.

  Never before had so many Calder mobiles been seen in one place. They ranged in size from palm-sized to several stories high. Written on the museum’s walls, in red and black, were words spoken by the artist and others, as well as photographs of Calder in his studio and in his homes in France and Connecticut. For those in other countries who loved his art, it was a Calder feast, and an excuse to come to Chicago for a visit. Thanks to an anonymous donor, the museum opened its doors to everyone, free of charge, for the length of the exhibit.

  Tommy had not been enthusiastic about the field trip to see this show. As the class trooped off the school bus, he scowled.

  “We have to wait in that LINE?” he asked, then muttered a bad word, but not softly enough. Ms. Button spun around.

  “You’ll not only wait in line, you’ll wait at the very end of our class line,” she said in a voice that sounded painfully like an overstretched rubber band. Tommy mimicked her silently, his eyes half closed, as he wandered slowly toward the back.

  When Ms. Button saw the grins on other kids’ faces, a crimson flush crept upward from the collar of her shirt. As she spun angrily away, an unexpected thing happened: A button popped off her coat. It flew, bounced, and rolled, spinning to a perfect stop by Tommy’s sneaker. He picked it up.

  He glanced quickly toward Ms. Button. She hadn’t noticed.

  The class watched, fascinated, as Tommy slid the large, baby-blue button into his pocket. No one said a word.

  He took his place quietly — the class was near the end of a line that snaked around the block. Ms. Button had warned them before leaving school that there would be a wait outside on the street, and that she expected them all to stand in silence. She’d allowed each one of them to bring two dollars to buy a souvenir, but no clipboards or pencils. What would happen, she had asked, if someone accidentally drew on a piece of art? Remembering this, Tommy rolled his eyes, peering impatiently over the sea of heads. Ms. Hussey had always wanted them to bring something to write or draw on when they went to a museum. Now there wasn’t even anything to do while they waited. Plus, he wasn’t allowed to stand with either Calder or Petra. Ms. Button had separated all friends for the trip, hoping they would behave. Behave … that was her favorite word. Sometimes it felt like they were all being punished just for being kids.

  Ms. Button was now patrolling back and forth in front of the class like an army general. Tommy waited until she turned away from him and then threw a pebble, hitting Calder on the ear. Calder scratched his head.

  Tommy tried again. This time, his old friend looked around, raising his eyebrows in a silent question.

  Tommy slowly inched the blue button into sight, holding it as if he were going to flip it like a quarter, and then slid it back into his pocket, timing it all so that Ms. Button wouldn’t see. Calder grinned, but from where he was standing, he couldn’t keep track of Ms. Button’s every move. With a quick glance over his shoulder, he faced Tommy, held the F pentomino upright on the top of his head, and crossed his eyes.

  Ms. Button swooped down on him. First she snapped her fingers, then she held her hand open in front of his face. “I’ll take those. All of them. Right now, and you won’t see them again for some time. What did I tell you about bringing toys on this trip?”

  Calder’s hand remained in his pants pocket, and no pentominoes appeared. “They’re not toys,” he said slowly.

  “Oh, and I suppose a math tool is something you stick on the top of your head?” Her tone was biting.

  Calder slowly pulled several pentominoes out of his pocket and handed them over.

  Ms. Button snapped her fingers again, standing motionless until she had all twelve pieces.

  Calder’s shoulders drooped and he watched anxiously as Ms. Button threw his pentominoes carelessly into her shoulder bag. He knew she didn’t value them. What if she lost one? That was his oldest set. Plus, he felt disgusted by the idea that they were in the same bag with her lipstick and tissues.

  Worry and a gnawing sense of injustice now dulled his excitement about going to the museum. He’d hoped that something fabulous would happen to him on the day they went to visit the exhibit. But not anymore.

  Calder Pillay had been named after the magical Alexander Calder. Long before their son was born, his parents had become fascinated with the artist’s work — it was one of the things they loved about Chicago. There were three giant Calder sculptures in the city, public pieces that dated back to the 1970s.

  The Pillays always went out of their way to walk beneath and through Flamingo, which rose some five stories high in a downtown plaza. A cheerful red creature, the sculpture swooped in a bridge-like arc between black skyscrapers.

  Flying Dragon lived in the garden next to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Pillays thought it looked like a cross between a huge butterfly and an airplane.

  And then there was the gigantic Universe in the lobby of the Sears Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world. Calder’s parents had taken him to visit this again and again — yellow, blue, red, and black, the separate motorized parts turned and spiraled around one another in countless combinations. Alexander Calder was clearly an extraordinary thinker, and Calder Pillay had grown up liking his name.

  He’d seen many pictures of the artist’s other work — wire circus figures, prints, rugs, brass jewelry, and even cooking utensils. He’d been taken to small exhibits of mobiles in Chicago, but had never seen more than five or six together. These airy, drifting sculptures felt
incredible, almost too perfect to believe: They always moved in a just-right way. Calder knew there were hundreds to see in this show, and had been so excited about going that he’d been up before his parents that morning. He was determined to have a terrific day despite Ms. Button.

  After all, how could anyone get in the way of the great Alexander Calder?

  Petra, watching from another part of the line, felt terrible for Calder and even Tommy. Why was it that the boys in the classroom got in trouble so much more than the girls? Ms. Button was always taking things away from them or making them sit by themselves.

  Yesterday Tommy had been sent out of the room for saying to Ms. Button, “What’s so great about this dead Calder guy, anyway?” Petra knew Tommy wasn’t big on museum art, and was really asking. Ms. Button, however, seemed to think it was all a part of a plot.

  “You kids are trying to sabotage this field trip, aren’t you?” she asked when the class giggled. “Can’t you take anything seriously?”

  It made Petra feel sick. Ms. Button seemed to have no idea of how much they were capable of doing. She was too busy trying to maintain order, which of course made everyone try to be bad.

  Sunk in their own vaguely sad thoughts, the kids shuffled toward the museum. And the quieter the class got, the more relaxed Ms. Button became. Didn’t she understand that silence was sometimes a sign that things weren’t going well?

  The class dragged quietly up the long flight of stairs to the museum. At the top, Ms. Button forced them into a tight clump and reminded them grimly of all the rules: no touching, use polite voices, everyone must stay together. She said all this with her eyes hard and her forehead creased into a fence, the lines both vertical and horizontal. Tommy called it her tic-tac-toe head, only this time it didn’t feel funny. If even one person misbehaved, Ms. Button warned, the entire class would lose recess for a week.

  Once inside the building, though, something uncontrollable began to happen that even Ms. Button didn’t have a punishment for: wonder.