The entry hall alone took several minutes with Alex stopping to stare at the dusty Tiffany lamps and art nouveau statues, the dark, old oil paintings, and the hand-carved pewlike bench that circled the hall, bending to the curve of the wide staircase. Libby, still resenting his presence, said nothing at all, and Alex was silent too. Except that his darting eyes, even more jittery than usual, said things about how excited and fascinated he was. Libby led him up to the landing next and showed him Graham’s portrait, and he stood there staring for so long that she finally had to nudge him in the ribs and tell him firmly to come on. He came back to life then, but before he started moving, he said that he was going to have to read all of Graham’s books over again, because now that he’d seen his picture, he was sure he’d get a lot more out of them.
They went back down to the library next, and there on the couch by the fireplace were Gillian and Cordelia, reading The New York Times. Cordelia was wearing her gray wool flannel dress with the black braid trim, and Gillian was in her lavender jumpsuit with the wide stretch belt. They both looked up, stared in astonishment, and quickly managed welcoming smiles; Cordelia’s a little stiff and uncertain, and Gillian’s deeply dimpled and absolutely boiling over with curiosity.
Actually it wasn’t quite as embarrassing as one might expect. After Libby managed an introduction—“Uhh. This is my grandmother, Gillian McCall, and my great-aunt, Cordelia Wembley. And this is Alex Lockwood. He’s in the writers’ workshop with me and …”—she didn’t have to say anything more. At that point Alex took over and did most of the talking himself.
After he shook hands and said how honored he was to meet the family of Graham McCall, he kept right on talking, explaining how he had always wanted to see the house because he was a fan of Graham McCall’s books, and so were his parents. Watching him, Libby noticed that he seemed different. Almost as if he were another person than he was at school, calmer and more relaxed.
“My folks have been dying to see this place for years,” he told Gillian and Cordelia, “and so when I met Libby, I thought, here’s my chance to see it first and beat them to it. Kind of get one up on my parents.” He stopped and grinned, mostly at Gillian. “It’s kind of good for parents to be gotten one up on now and then, don’t you think? Keeps them from losing interest.”
Then he complimented Gillian on her dimples—and mentioned who had obviously inherited them—and Cordelia on her dress, and before long both of them were helping Libby show him the rest of the house. The four of them went through the library and Graham’s study, the great hall and dining room and then up the stairs to the billiard room and the upstairs sitting room. And all the way, even while he was climbing the stairs in his strange, awkward way, Alex chatted with Gillian and Cordelia, making them laugh and asking intelligent questions about the art and furniture and architecture, and even about Christopher and his poetry.
That really surprised Libby—that Alex knew about her father’s poetry. And it was obvious that it surprised Gillian and Cordelia too. Even the most successful poets usually aren’t really famous, and Christopher was probably a little less famous than most. But Alex knew quite a lot about him and his poetry, and he also seemed to be aware of other things about poets that you might not expect a Morrison Middle School student to understand. When Gillian offered to take him out to the gazebo where Christopher was working, to be introduced, he said, “Oh, no. I couldn’t interrupt a poet while he’s writing. That’s one of the Ten Commandments, isn’t it? Thou shalt not interrupt the writing of poetry.” And Gillian laughed and said that he was probably right and that if it wasn’t one of the Ten Commandments, it ought to be.
There were no more introductions to make, since Elliott was still at the bookstore, but the tour itself lasted a long time. Cordelia wanted to show Alex the Great Hall’s overhanging balconies, and Gillian decided he should see her dance studio with its practice bar and mirror-lined walls. Then Gillian and Cordelia went back downstairs, but before she left, Gillian told Alex about the third floor, and of course he had to see that too. Libby hadn’t been planning to mention it.
The old servants’ quarters on the third floor had been empty for a long time, except for Libby’s collections. The first room was mostly ancient Greece with a bit of Roman Empire. The furnishings consisted of a couple of old kitchen tables and a lot of shelves that had once been in the storeroom at Elliott’s store. The walls were covered with pictures, scenes of Greece and Rome, mostly illustrations from magazines, and on the shelves and tables there were several copies of Greek statues, a model of the Parthenon, a collection of old Roman coins (copies actually), and dozens of books and scrapbooks.
Alex walked around the room several times, bending forward to peer at pictures and picking things up to examine them more closely. “Hey, great!” he kept saying. “Wow!” and other enthusiastic remarks. “Did you do all this? I mean, did you collect all this stuff?” he asked finally.
So Libby explained how it had begun years before when she started making collections concerning whatever she happened to be studying. It had all been in one room at first, with a wall or table for each country and subject, but then the whole family got interested, and the collections grew until they spread out over most of the third floor.
The second room, the British Empire, was furnished and decorated much the same as the first, except that an illustrated time line ran all the way around the room, marked off with dates of all the important events. The illustrations, pictures of all kinds and sizes, were arranged above and below the time line, along with paper figures depicting all the English kings and queens. From each picture or royal figure pieces of yarn led to their proper dates.
The third room was dedicated to the pioneer period. There was a longhorn-steer skull on one wall, a stuffed rattlesnake on a table, and another wall was covered by a huge map of the United States with all the famous pioneer trails drawn across it in different colors.
Alex seemed to be particularly interested in the pioneer room. “This is amazing,” he said after he’d spent a lot of time staring at the rattlesnake and the miniature model of a Conestoga wagon pulled by an ox team. “Where did you get all this stuff?” So Libby explained about the attic. The McCall House attic was enormous and absolutely crammed full of souvenirs that various members of the family had picked up during their travels.
“All of them used to travel a lot,” she told him. “Gillian lived in France when she was studying to be a ballet dancer, and she got to go to most of the countries in Europe. And Cordelia traveled all over the world when she was married to Alfred Wembley. And Elliott has traveled a lot too. But most of the things in the attic used to be Graham’s. He loved to travel, and everywhere he went, he bought all kinds of souvenirs. Gillian says that Graham tried to bring the whole world back to Morrison with him. Like, he got that rattlesnake in Arizona, and the covered wagon is from Texas. Sometimes Gillian says that one of his souvenirs was a ballet dancer, from Paris—meaning herself, of course.”
Alex grinned, “Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. That’s exactly what she looks like. Not many people have grandmothers that look like a souvenir from Paris, but you do.” He went on grinning and nodding as he circled the room once more before he asked, “And all the books?”
“A lot of them are from Graham’s library, but the newest ones are from Elliott’s store. They all let me use things for my displays, but I have to give them back when I’m finished with the project.”
“You mean you change these rooms all the time?”
Libby nodded. “Most of them. Like, this room was China last year, and the British Empire used to be Napoleon. But the Thirties Room doesn’t get changed, because it’s not just a study project. The thirties is more like a hobby. Come on. You might as well see it too.”
The sign on the door said, You Are Now Entering the 1930s. And below the sign there was a collage of pictures of thirties scenes; original pictures painted by Libby and Gillian as well as some cut from magazines or photoco
pied from the pages of books—scenes from everything from a Laurel and Hardy movie to the Spanish Civil War. And when you opened the door and stepped inside, you found yourself in the past.
The room, which had been the servants’ parlor, was quite large and, unlike the others, was completely furnished. There were chairs, lamps, tables, and sideboards in the sleek, streamlined thirties style, with rounded, waterfall edges. A big old hand-cranked phonograph sat in one corner and a radio in an art deco floor cabinet in another. On the walls were under-construction photos of the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge, and others of famous thirties people, like movie stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda, and Shirley Temple when she was a very little girl, and the five Dionne sisters, the famous little girls who were the first quintuplets to live to grow up. The shelves held old, dusty books and comic strips, and miniature cars, mostly Model T Fords and Cords and Packards, and in the cabinets were thirties-style dishes and toys, and all kinds of other artifacts.
Alex looked around the room for so long that Libby finally curled up in one of the chairs with a Big Little Book that she hadn’t read for a while, Dan Dunn and the Lost Gold Mine. She’d finished the first chapter before he stopped looking and sat down on the couch.
“Incredible, as Mizzo would say,” he said. Libby didn’t say anything, and after a while he went on. “Anyway, I can see now why you’re so smart. What a great way to be educated.”
“It didn’t seem like being educated,” Libby said. “It mostly seemed like a kind of game.”
“Yeah, I know,” Alex said. “That’s what I mean. But why the thirties? Does it have something to do with Graham McCall? I mean, because so many of his books were about the thirties? At least the most famous ones?”
Libby shrugged. “I suppose he had something to do with it. He wrote about the thirties, and he collected a lot of the things in this room. And Gillian says she thinks the people in this house are still living in the thirties.” She smiled. “You know, like in the Great Depression. Gillian hates not having money. She says”—Libby imitated Gillian, rolling her eyes up and sighing dramatically—“I wasn’t cut out to be poor.”
They both laughed. Libby was thinking about what she had just done, acting something out like she always did but just for the family, when Alex pointed to the Big Little Book. “Could I see that for a minute?”
Libby handed him the book and he said, “Hey. Great. I’ve heard about these but I’ve never seen one before.” He leafed through the book quickly and then began to read. Now and then he read a line out loud, chuckling to himself or grinning at Libby.
She watched him and wondered—about a lot of things. By the time he closed the book and put it down, she’d gotten up her nerve to ask the thing she wondered about most.
“Errr!” she said to get his attention, and when he looked up, she asked, “What did you mean when you said you couldn’t write?”
He grinned and raised his eyebrows. “I can’t. At least not so anyone can read it. That’s why I’m in love with my word processor.” He shrugged. “It’s part of the whole problem.”
“Problem?” Libby asked.
His smile went lopsided. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed? Everybody notices. What it’s called medically is cerebral palsy, but I like to think of it as a kind of a dual personality. See, it’s like this. I have this smooth, cool, brilliant personality that only controls what goes on inside my head, and the rest of me is under the control of this fiendish practical joker. Like, this guy really gets his kicks out of making me look ridiculous.”
Libby knew something about cerebral palsy. “But I thought cerebral palsy—” she began, but Alex interrupted.
“Yeah, I know. Most people who have it are in wheelchairs or at least are a lot worse off than I am. My doctor says I’m one of the lucky ones.”
He looked away, and his almost constant grin faded. He didn’t seem to be actually talking to anyone when he went on. “Yeah. Real lucky. Too lucky to get much sympathy, but unlucky enough to be in for a hell of a lot of humiliation.”
12
That evening, the evening of the day that Alex appeared suddenly at the front gate, Libby climbed up into the Treehouse to write. She did it the proper and approved way this time—up the circular staircase, followed by Salome and Ariel. And as soon as the three of them were settled in the main room of the Treehouse, she got out the green journal, the one she’d been using to record information about Morrison Middle School and the FFW. Her first sentence was exactly what she’d been planning before Alex made his surprise visit. Nothing that happened that afternoon at the McCall House had changed her mind in the slightest about that.
Alex Lockwood, she wrote, is the most quick-witted person I’ve ever met. But when that was written, she just sat there for a long time drumming on the tabletop and thinking about what had happened that afternoon—the things that had been said, and maybe the things that should have been said and weren’t. Ariel jumped up on the table and batted at her drumming pencil, but she shoved her away and went on thinking.
I didn’t know what to say, she finally wrote, when he said that about humiliation. I just sat there staring at him in complete speechlessness. And then he started smiling again and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” And I said yes, I did, and he said no I didn’t and how could I when I’d lived in this great place all my life with all my fantastic famous relatives and never had any serious problems.
So, at that point, I got slightly furious and I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. And he said what did I mean, and I said I had a VERY serious problem. And he grinned and said what kind of problem, like mental or physical, or what? So I said, “Well, mostly physical, I guess,” and he stopped grinning and stared at me for a minute, and then he asked what was wrong with me, was I sick, or what.
So I said, “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m just not right physically for middle school. You know what they call me. Things like Mighty Mouse and McBrain and Little Frankenstein.”
He started grinning then and shaking his head like he was amazed about something. And then he finally said, “That is so funny,” and I said, “What is?” and he didn’t say anything for a while and then he said, did I know what he envied the most about me? “Guess,” he said. “Guess what you have that I envy most.” So I guessed maybe the McCall House or having a famous grandfather and he said no, that what it was, was something physical. “It’s the way you move,” he said. “I noticed it the first time I saw you. The way you move, like all of your bones and muscles work together perfectly, like a dancer or a gymnast. Like this completely efficient machine. Okay, small maybe, but absolutely efficient.”
So I said that was probably because I’d been taking ballet lessons since I was three years old. And he said that might be part of it, but most of it is something you’re born with. And then he said, “Cerebral palsy is something you’re born with too.”
It was getting late by then and it was cold in the Treehouse, and even Ariel and Goliath had given up and gone away, probably headed back to the warmth of the Great Hall. So Libby made her way up the tree limb to her room and went to bed, but there was more that she could have written if there’d been time, and she went on thinking about it after she was in bed.
Alex had gone on talking for quite a while. He’d talked about knowing that he was different before he started school —knowing vaguely but not worrying about it, because it didn’t seem all that important. But then, when he was six, he found out. Particularly if you’re a boy, he said, you find out what it means to be the only kid in the class who can’t throw a ball or catch one, or run across the playground without falling down. As soon as you start school, he said, you find out who you really are in a hurry.
“You find out you’re a clown,” he said. “A dork, a nerd, a spaz. Somebody who can be laughed at and pushed around and used for a punching bag.” Then he grinned. “And that’s just when you’re six. By the
time you’re eight, things really start getting unpleasant.”
He laughed about it. Libby found that really intriguing. She wondered if she would ever be able to laugh about some of the humiliating things that had happened to her at Morrison Middle School.
The next time the writers’ workshop met, Libby wasn’t the first one to arrive. She’d meant to be, but at the last moment she decided to go to her locker first, and it had taken longer than she’d expected. When she arrived at the reading lab, the rest of them were already there waiting.
As she opened the door, she thought she heard voices, but as soon as they saw who it was, it got suddenly quiet. Libby was hurrying to her seat when Tierney and Wendy began talking at once.
“Hey, Mighty Mouse,” Tierney said. “Where you been?”
And Wendy said, “Hi, Libby. You’re here after all. We thought maybe you were absent. I didn’t see you in the hall this morning, and then you weren’t the first one here like always. We’d about decided you were sick or something.”
Safely in her seat, Libby glanced around. Everyone was smiling. Alex’s grin was, as usual, crooked and jumpy, and Wendy’s was the usual, too, multipurpose bright and shiny. Tierney’s was something new, however, a real smile, even though it looked a little bit painful, as if her face wasn’t used to it. But G.G.’s was the same as always—a dangerous leer.
“I told you she was here,” G.G. said. “I saw her in math class—just like always.” He mugged a frightened expression, and tipping his binder up on end, he ducked his head down behind it.
They all looked at him—but nobody laughed. At least not until Tierney said, “Aww, poor baby. You don’t have to do that anymore, G.G. Your face is almost back to normal.”
Libby on Wednesday Page 9