The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  I whipped out a notebook and pencil to sketch out a plan as I stumbled upstairs. I’d be busy for weeks now. When I was researching and writing a new paper I rarely spoke to anyone at all. But all during the holidays, whenever Humdinger passed the crèche he apparently removed the second baby Jesus. I guess he was serious when he said one was quite enough. I would replace it. I ordered quite a few. It made me unaccountably happy to know there was always a replacement Jesus at the ready. And finding one missing confirmed for me what I already suspected, that human nature being what it was, someone was always stealing the baby Jesus. Can’t blame them for wanting their own baby Jesus, though. Probably they’re all keeping them in their bathrooms in their soap dishes. Thank goodness we can afford for everyone to have his own. But that Humdinger is a strange fellow. I’ve seen him take three or four already. Greedy. Nobody really needs four baby Jesuses, do they? Oh well, must let the butlers have their quirks. Strange fellows. Strange profession to get into. Hope he likes his ties.

  MELINE

  IT WAS JUST TWO WEEKS before Christmas when Uncle Marten, Jocelyn, and I finally made it in to dinner all together again. I was feeling well enough to come downstairs to eat for the first time. My temperature was down now and I was eating meals again with regularity. The puppy, I noticed, followed Humdinger wherever he went, having given up on me because I was always asleep when he investigated my room, or Jocelyn, who slept by day and scavenged by night and, since that first night out, refused to take the puppy with her for fear of losing it. She had found a second aileron and part of a fuselage and was very busy. Mrs. Mendelbaum had an odd glazed look in her eye when we saw her at all, which wasn’t very often. I’m not sure she had even seen the puppy yet. But Humdinger provided the puppy with regular meals and let it out and in again. He was the only one who seemed to hear its high-pitched cries and could interpret them. He housetrained the puppy and cleaned up after it. He knew when the puppy was hungry or thirsty, when it needed to go out or have a door opened for it. And finally, because no one else seemed to have thought of it, he named it.

  “Aileron!” we heard him calling as we ate dinner. At first I thought he had spotted Jocelyn carrying one and then realized she was with me at the table. Then I thought maybe she’d carelessly left one in view of the house. When I realized that Aileron was what he had named the puppy it opened up a whole other sinister can of worms.

  “He knows,” I whispered in Jocelyn’s ear, casually strolling to her place at the table.

  Humdinger was in the kitchen making Mrs. Mendelbaum’s tray and putting the finishing touches on dessert. We were having profiteroles. His baking was coming along a treat. I noticed he used a lot of the cookbooks in the kitchen. “Aileron!” he called again. “Supper!”

  I looked sharply at Jocelyn to see if she had heard. She had, and her usually ashen skin went just a pale more ashen. Jocelyn and I heard the puppy bounding in and we stared at each other. Our great fear was that some grownup was going to discover what we planned to do and put a stop to it. When Humdinger came in with our profiteroles Uncle Marten said to him, “You named the puppy Aileron, I hear?”

  “It’s an airplane part,” said Humdinger.

  “I know what it is,” snapped Uncle Marten, which was so unusually severe for him that we all stared. He cleared his throat and furrowed his brow, saying, “Yes, well, I’ll be taking my coffee and cake upstairs, do me the favor of putting it on a tray and bringing it to me there.” It was also unlike him to order anyone, even the servants, around. He did it so seldom we never even thought of Humdinger or Mrs. Mendelbaum as servants, they were more like weird relatives who had happened in and stayed. And were expected to do all the work. Humdinger quietly filled a proper tray with doily and silver, napkin, cream and sugar, coffeepot, coffee cup, and a silver-covered plate of profiteroles. I hoped Uncle Marten appreciated all the trouble Humdinger was taking, when implicitly ordered to snap to and behave like a butler, which if you’d asked me, Humdinger had been doing pretty well anyhow, not to mention being cook, housekeeper, and nurse.

  When they had left the room completely I turned to Jocelyn and said, “He knows.”

  “Who do you mean, Humdinger or Uncle Marten?” asked Jocelyn, eating, I was amazed to see, her sixth profiterole. Well, had everyone gone mad since I’d gotten ill?

  “Humdinger. But what was with Uncle Marten? What’s going on? Has anyone said anything to you?”

  “Only Uncle Marten. He said that he saw me going out at night and I should be careful of the bull. That Humdinger seemed under the impression there was a bull about. Then he asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I couldn’t think of anything, so I said a soldering iron.”

  “Oh, excellent. Couldn’t have done better myself.”

  “Yes, well,” said Jocelyn, trying to look her usual irritable self but clearly pleased at the praise. “I couldn’t think of all the bits and pieces we undoubtedly need, all the tools. But I thought I’d tell you so you could prepare your Christmas list with the things we need.”

  “I think the first thing we need is the dolly.”

  “Yes, I should have told him I wanted a dolly,” said Jocelyn, her face falling and looking depressed again.

  “But the important thing right now is asking ourselves why Humdinger named the puppy Aileron? Come on, that’s not a word just anyone knows. He must know we’ve found one and have put it in the barn. He must have heard us talking. It’s not surprising, the way he pads around like that cat of his, making no noise at all, sneaking up on you.”

  “If he wanted to ask what we were doing with all those airplane parts, why didn’t he just ask?”

  “Because he knows what we’re doing with them and he wants us to know he knows.”

  “How could he know?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s strange. Offering you mints like that.”

  “I like the mints.”

  “Hmmm,” I said disapprovingly because I couldn’t for the life of me think why he shouldn’t offer her mints or why she shouldn’t like them. But there was something going on. Why wasn’t he offering me mints? Maybe she was in on it with him. But in on what?

  “Anyhow, Jocelyn, don’t tell Uncle Marten or Humdinger anything. Although I don’t think Uncle Marten secretly knows about our airplane parts because can you imagine Uncle Marten keeping anything a secret? There’s still a lot about both of them that we don’t know.”

  “Well, clearly, and vice versa. Not to mention Mrs. Mendelbaum. Did I tell you I found her once on the way to the bathroom humming and kind of sashaying, like she was dancing with a partner?”

  “That must have been a sight.”

  “Well, it was. I don’t know. It’s all so confusing. It’s all been so confusing while you were sick.”

  “It isn’t any more confusing than it has been up until now, you just didn’t have me to sort things out for you.” It was strangely comforting to think that I had this role, but Jocelyn didn’t think so, she looked at me as if I were crazy, and went upstairs to bed, and I was left again with the grim understanding that I had no role in anyone’s life anymore.

  * * *

  The week before Christmas, Jocelyn began to cough. It wasn’t much of a cough. In fact, she sounded a lot like the puppy when he was begging for attention. At meals he had taken to staying in the kitchen but making gentle noises that were a cross between a whine and a growl and ended up sounding as if he were clearing his throat in a not terribly effective manner.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Uncle Marten would roar. “Would someone please feed that mutt? HUMDINGER!”

  “He’s been fed,” said Humdinger, slipping into the room with a pair of covered vegetable bowls. He always made at least three vegetables for every meal in the mistaken belief we would eat them.

  “Well then, why is he making that noise?”

  “All dogs do that. They want to be fed all the time.”

  “Presumably not when they’re not hungry, though,” said Uncle Marten
. “My research has shown that the dog, as well as most mammals brought up in the wild, does not acquire neurotic relationships with food the way you or I do.”

  “Very good,” said Humdinger.

  “My relationship with food isn’t neurotic,” I said. “Although I had a friend in school once, Marianne, who ate everything in sight. And another one who wouldn’t eat at all.”

  “Not at all?” asked Uncle Marten.

  “Nothing.”

  “Impossible. She would be dead.”

  “She was. Eventually. She got thinner and thinner and then she was dead. And then I suppose she got thinner still.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “No, she did.”

  “You must have been very sad.”

  “Not so much. I didn’t know her very well. She wasn’t even a friend really, just someone I ran into in the halls. It was more of a shock. But her parents were very sad. And her friends. I went to the memorial service. Well, a lot of us did. Even the ones who didn’t know her that well. And a lot of people cried. Of course, it’s easier to cry at funerals. I cried, too. Not because I knew her so well or was so sad but just because everyone else was.”

  “That’s mean,” said Jocelyn.

  I didn’t know if it was mean. I didn’t want to think I was mean, but sometimes I saw myself through Jocelyn’s eyes and all my good intentions were as dust and I vowed not to speak honestly about anything again.

  Everyone was quiet at the table after that and I thought they were all being awkward and silly, thinking I’d put my foot in it because I was remembering death as it was before it had happened to us, but now it would mean something different and I had dredged it up and embarrassed myself. But when I looked around the table to confirm this, I realized I was being paranoid. Uncle had simply stopped paying attention and had stuck his nose back in his book and was taking notes, and Jocelyn, who clearly didn’t think about anything I ever said for more than two seconds, was on to the next and demanded that I recite to her the parts of a car. This, as you can imagine, caught me somewhat by surprise.

  “You said your father made you learn all the parts of machines you used. So, I guess you’re telling me that because you were going to get your driver’s license next year, he spent the last year teaching you how to put together a car.”

  Springing this on me out of the blue was very crafty. I wouldn’t have time to look up the answer. If I didn’t know it she could assume I didn’t know how to build an airplane either. As much as I admired her guile, it infuriated me that even this joint project couldn’t be based on trust. I pulled my chair up to hers and whispered, “I can’t believe you’re asking me to prove what I can do after you spent all those nights out in the rain. Why did you bother to look for airplane parts in the rain if you never believed me? Am I going to have to do this every week from now on? Am I going to have to prove and reprove things to you? Do you trust no one? Do you have faith in nothing?”

  “So?”

  I sighed. “Well, let’s see, there’s the carburetor and the cylinder block, head and valve train assembly, oil pump, piston, connecting rods, pins and rings, gaskets and seals, flat lifters, intake manifold, rocker arms—”

  “All right,” said Jocelyn. “I just didn’t want to find out I was spending my nights in the rain dragging airplane parts back to a barn for nothing.”

  This time I didn’t say anything but left the table and went to bed. After all, I might be getting better but I had still been very sick.

  JOCELYN

  MY COUGH was growing more persistent until I had to admit to myself that despite my superior fortitude, which in some superstitious corner of my mind made me feel I should be able to avoid the viruses that Canadians and Americans succumbed to, I was indeed going to come down with the flu just like Meline and Mrs. Mendelbaum. I was finding it harder and harder to wake up in the middle of the night and chillier and chillier when I did go out, and I didn’t seem to be able to warm up when I got back into the house until one day when I was dragging into Meline’s room to tell her about the slanted piece of metal I had found, and Meline made me draw her a picture and saw that I’d found a slat, instead of straightening up again from where I’d been bent over pad and paper, I collapsed on Meline’s bed. It was so warm and soft. No wonder she had been spending so much time there. I suddenly had the idea that perhaps I’d just stay there awhile and rest.

  Meline didn’t move from where she sat on the bed studying the picture I had drawn but said matter-of-factly, “Jocelyn, you have a fever. I noticed it first thing when you came into the room. Your eyes were too bright. Your cheeks were too flushed and you looked hot.”

  “How do you look hot?” I asked. I felt dreamy and warm and not like myself at all. It didn’t feel bad exactly, more as if I could be quite content if only I could lie still on a very warm and soft spot with a cool pillow for my face and never have to move again.

  “You might as well go to bed,” Meline said briskly. “Humdinger will probably end up having to send for the doctor for you, too. Luckily, I seem to be getting better and should be well enough to take your place finding the airplane parts.”

  I put my head down and it landed on Meline’s leg, so she gave me a little shove and I fell off the bed entirely and stayed lying on the floor.

  “Oh dear,” muttered Meline and started dragging me down the hall to my room, where fortunately Humdinger found us and carried me to bed, where it was discovered I had a temperature of 104. Dr. Houseman came out again and said that I had the flu like Mrs. Mendelbaum and Meline, but unlike Meline hadn’t developed pneumonia as a complication. Dr. Houseman and Humdinger seemed to be in the hall talking a lot, but maybe I was mistaken because time had taken on a warp and woof of its own as I lay hotly in the bed. Meline had disappeared completely, but as fuzzy as things were in the fever, other kinds of clarity abounded, and I knew Meline would struggle hardest against sympathy for me, for any of us, when she was most susceptible to it. Sympathy was just a slide into friendship. Avoid all slides. Avoid everything. And I dreamed long sick dreams of playgrounds and swings and teeter-totters and slides I refused to climb up.

  MELINE

  JOCELYN DIDN’T SEEM AWARE of very much. I’d go peek in on her from time to time to see if she was ready to go out into the rain, but she looked irritatingly hors de combat. She had no real sense of anything anymore, she murmured once when she saw me staring at her, except the sounds of scurrying, like mice. Giant mice. This was mostly Uncle Marten with his Christmas preparations and Humdinger doing Uncle Marten’s Christmas bidding. Then there was the normal activity of the household, people coming and going, getting snacks and such, and Mrs. Mendelbaum even sneaked down the hall periodically to look in on Jocelyn. She seemed to have a soft spot for her which she didn’t have for me. Probably she had a fellow feeling for her because they were both so stiff and crabby and difficult to be around. She said she wanted to check on Jocelyn because she didn’t trust the men. What do men know about illness? Pah! And made Humdinger make endless pots of chicken soup, which she believed cured everything, although Jocelyn wouldn’t eat anything except Jell-O and Popsicles when she was awake enough to even do that.

  Uncle Marten was apprised by Humdinger that Jocelyn was ill and had asked for Popsicles, so Uncle Marten, in the haphazard way he did everything, kept phoning the grocery stores and ordering boxes and boxes of them, which Sam would dutifully bring over, dropping them, as usual, with drunken abandon anywhere he happened to hover. Some Humdinger and I found, and others melted into the earth and we would find the boxes, a sodden sticky mess of sticks and wrappings, the flavored ice melted.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” I noted to Humdinger once when we went out together to look for them. We had heard the helicopter. “How the thing itself, in the case of a box of melted Popsicles, can disappear, leaving the wrappings so wholly intact. That the Popsicle itself disappears without the wrappings or box being disturbed.”

  “Like the soul leaving the
body,” said Humdinger. I think he had a dry sense of humor that he kept under wraps most of the time, the same way he never treated anyone disrespectfully or said anything contrary. I could never live like that myself. That kind of patience went with an ability to keep still and, of course, it was imperative, had been since I got here, to keep moving. You didn’t find airplane parts by being patient. You had to have a mission.

  Uncle Marten seemed to have his own mission. For weeks he had gone into Christmas overdrive. He was like an elf in a dressing gown, padding from room to room. He had further accessorized himself with a long silk nightcap, which with the maroon velvet dressing gown and carpet slippers made him look like Scrooge. Although, of course, he was the anti-Scrooge. He had stopped sending Humdinger out for packages and started scrounging the grounds for them himself. I was sitting by the fire, Jocelyn was up in her bedroom, and Mrs. Mendelbaum groaned softly but audibly down the hall from her. I watched as the small hunchbacked figure of my uncle went purposefully back and forth, hanging garlands, opening wet boxes full of candles and fruit and ribbon candy and port and glasses and linens and rugs. “Oooo, lookee, lookee!” he squealed once when unpacking a box of special Christmas dishes with gold rims and little Christmas trees printed on them. Because his steps were sort of shuffling, to keep on the backless carpet slippers, he did indeed look like some kind of strange large scurrying rodent. Occasionally he threw on a wool scarf and overcoat and scuffled outside—he kept a pair of carpet slippers just for the outside and would then come in and throw them off where Humdinger would collect them and put them in the dryer quickly in case Uncle Marten decided to forage out again for more boxes in a few minutes. His comings and goings were spontaneous and impulsive and unpredictable. He was like a toddler with new toys inside and candy strewn outside, unable to stay anywhere long with such temptation everywhere. Some of the things he unpacked he whisked immediately out of my sight as if I cared whether or not I saw my gifts ahead of time. Then one day it was time for the tree.