The Book of Lost Things

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Well,” the mother said then, opening her purse, taking out a bill—was it a twenty? It might be a fifty, Max thought, but he didn’t like to stare at money—and passing it over to him. “I don’t know how to thank you, but I hope this …”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Max said, just as humbly grateful as the Poor Farmer would have been if the Miser had agreed to part with one of his herd of cows. “Most generous.” It was, in fact, exactly that: The bill was a fifty.

  “Not at all. You must have been pretty clever to get him here, and patient, and I think you were kind to my Angel as well. There isn’t money enough in the world to pay for all that.” She smiled teasingly at him, then, mocking herself, said, “Now if you could just tell me how to keep him from being such a runner-offer, I’d be in your debt forever.” Still smiling, she stood up, setting Angel-Humphrey on his feet. The little boy pulled to get free of her hand, but she held him fast. “Put it on our bill, Gabrielle?”

  “Already done.”

  “Thanks again. Max? I really mean it.”

  Max stood up, too. He said, “A leash.”

  “What?” The mother was distracted by her son, who was yanking her arm and crying, “Dadda! Dadda!”

  “If you had a kind of leash, like people do for their dogs when they take them for walks?” Max said.

  The mother sat down again, overwhelmed, but not so overwhelmed that she let go of her son’s hand.

  “Momma!” he protested, pulling at her. He looked at Max for help. “Maah?”

  Neither his mother nor Max paid any attention to him. “That’s brilliant!” the mother said.

  “Maybe, a leash with a chest harness,” Max went on. “A leather worker could probably make one with no trouble.” Actually, he agreed that it was brilliant. He was quite pleased with himself. This was what he was really good at, solving problems. He wished there was a job for a problem solver.

  “And until I have it I can use scarves, which will be soft and comfortable. I have plenty of scarves,” the mother said. “What kind of work do you do?” she asked him. “And where do you live?”

  “Five Thieves Alley. In the old city,” Max said, confident that she wouldn’t know the area, or the street, or the house.

  “Because if you’re looking for work, I can recommend you to my friends if they need a handyman,” she said. “Or to anyone who has lost a child,” she laughed, laughing at herself. “To pay you back, to thank you. I’m going straight to the saddlery,” she told him, rising again and swinging Angel-Humphrey up into her arms, where he squirmed to be allowed to escape. “A saddlery will know where I can have such a leash made right away. So I won’t ever lose my boy again. Oh, that was naughty of you, Angel. But it’s all turned out for the best, hasn’t it? Isn’t life wonderful?”

  In which we meet Gabrielle Glompf, and Max acquires a lodger

  Max stood at the window, watching the woman and her child leave the ice cream shop and turn to walk away down the street. The mother’s fingers were wrapped around the little boy’s hand. A fist squeezed his heart, and he thought that he wasn’t going to be able to wait for word of his parents.

  “Max?” Gabrielle asked, as if to call him to attention. “What’s your other name, Max?”

  Max didn’t really hear her, but he did turn to look at her, and he did see her, and that reminded him of who he was and where. “What?” he asked.

  “Are you still hungry?” she asked, in the kindest of voices. He noticed then that everything about her was suited to kindness, her soft hair, her round cheeks and gentle eyes, her quick hands, and her quiet way of moving around the shop. “I made a lemon cake with raspberry filling; it’s awfully good. May I give you a slice?” she asked, as if he would be doing her a big favor by accepting.

  “Yes, please. Thank you.” Max sat down again at the little table. While she was busy with the plates, he wondered how to answer her first question.

  “May I sit with you?” She gave him a thick slab of cake that had a bright red raspberry stripe running through its center. She set down a second plate carrying a thin slice for herself and sank into the chair opposite.

  “Please,” he said again, and also again, “Thank you.” He took a bite, and another, and then a third, enjoying the tart sweetness of the cake and the sugary sweetness of the jam.

  Eventually she asked him, “Feeling a little better?”

  How did she know how he was feeling? he wondered, but before he could even start to think about that, she went on. “I once knew a university student. Just like you. I know how hungry you get, with the odd hours you keep and the bad food you eat. Besides,” she added, with a smile that made her eyes shine, “I like to show off my baking.”

  She said this without pride and without modesty, as if she knew without a doubt how true it was; she said it the way Joachim sometimes asked Max to admire a particular petal in a painting, satisfied with the way he had captured the texture and color of it. Max took another bite and looked into her friendly face. “I’ve never tasted any cake as good. Not nearly as good. Really,” he concluded.

  She laughed. “It’s a talent,” she told him. “And what I believe is: If you have a talent, it’s wasteful not to use it. Foolish, too. Do you have another name, or are you just Max?”

  “Mister,” Max said, now with a smile of his own.

  “Max Mister?”

  “Mister Max,” he said, hearing how right it sounded. “It’s weird, I know.”

  “Only because it’s a name for a round person,” Gabrielle said, studying him. “Don’t you think? Round head, round stomach, plump arms and legs, little fat feet in polished shoes, pork-pie hat: that’s how I picture a Mister Max. Besides,” she said, hesitating, fork up in the air. “Since my own name is Glompf, I won’t comment on the oddness of yours. I mean, I should have been named something plainer, to go with Glompf, something that matches how I look, something like Bessie or Bertha or Martha.” This thought seemed to distract her, and she looked over Max’s shoulder briefly before she went on to ask, “What are you studying at the University?”

  “Oh,” Max said, because he didn’t know what to answer and also because he’d been thinking about how to feel round, really feel like a Mister Max, so as to look more like one. Then, “Math,” he said, since that was what he was going to do at three. “I can only take two courses at a time,” he added, in case she might expect him to know as much as a normal university student. “I have to work,” he explained.

  “I know how that is,” she agreed, with a seriousness that suited her little mouse face.

  “But what about you? Why aren’t you apprenticed to a pastry chef?” Max didn’t want to talk about himself anymore. He hadn’t yet decided what to say to strangers who asked who he was, what he was doing. “Angel’s mother says you should be, and I agree.”

  “There’s a black mark on my record,” she told him. “A very black mark—and that means I can’t get references. You need references.”

  “I’ll give you a reference,” Max offered.

  “I mean employment references, so everyone will know you are honest and trustworthy.”

  Max pointed out, “It’s obvious how honest and trustworthy you are. Anyone who looks at you can see that.”

  “It has to be in writing, officially signed and sealed, it has to be … And with this black mark,” she told him, her smile now as sad as rain, “not even my family will speak for me. They live up the mountain, miles and miles away from the city, but it’s a small village, so nobody has any secrets. I have shamed them, and they are angry. Mine is a common story, Mister Max.”

  Max didn’t ask, but she told him anyway: “Girls will fall in love—it’s what girls do—and love will turn sour as often as it stays sweet. But,” she said, with another of her kind smiles, “sometimes it’s very hard. I had a life full of promise and love, and then … Well, things change. They get ruined, or broken, and some things can’t be fixed, and we still have to earn a living, don’t we?”

>   Max could certainly say yes to that last question.

  “There was a time when I dreamed of apprenticeships, but I don’t have the heart for it anymore. Somehow. My only hope is that my family will come to feel better about me. I hope that, in time, my family will remember that I’m not the kind of person to steal or lie, even if nobody else believes that. And in the meantime,” she said, standing up as a pair of schoolboys entered, “I have my job to do.”

  “May I buy a piece of that cake to take to my grandmother?” Max said. “She’ll love it.”

  “Of course. You could come back some other day, as well. I’m always baking something, even if I’m not a real pastry chef.”

  Max said he would, and meant it.

  “You’re easier to talk to than most people,” Gabrielle said then, looking closely at him, as if she was wondering about him. “I think you must have your own story.”

  Max didn’t say anything.

  After she gave him Grammie’s cake in a bright white box tied around with a dark red ribbon and took his coins, Gabrielle reached out to shake his hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mister Max.”

  “The pleasure was all mine, Gabrielle Glompf,” Max answered, bowing slightly over her hand, as he had seen his father do on stage, playing the mysterious cloaked gentleman in The Stranger from Across the Sea.

  Max decided not to stop in at any other businesses to ask for work; he had spent the whole morning being told No, and that was long enough for him for one day. Besides, he had a fifty in his pocket. He had just earned enough to keep himself in lessons and in food for over a week. When he thought of that, Max was pretty pleased with himself, pedaling along the busy roads, keeping to an ordinary pace, not too fast, not too slow, nothing at all unusual about him to attract attention. He was just some student, or maybe some working man, riding home from a class, or to a job. He was just anybody, nobody at all.

  Except, of course, he wasn’t. He was Mister Max, returner of runaway children. He was someone who could pay his own way, someone who was not helpless.

  The only person he could boast to was Grammie, so on his way to his tutoring appointment he stopped by her library, across from City Hall. He found her seated behind the wide checkout desk reading a typewritten letter, a serious expression on her face. Wondering if—by some wild chance—the letter brought news of his parents, he waited for her to finish reading. This section of the library was a long room filled with books. There were books on shelves along all the walls, except where there were long, many-paned windows to let in light; in the room’s open spaces, books filled tall stacks that were lined up like trees in an orchard; there were even more books waiting in low shelves at the top of the wide staircase up to a special reading room, where periodicals and newspapers were spread out on a long library table; and next to the reading room, there was an entire room dedicated to books for children. The air in the library rooms was silent, full of ideas, the thinking of the writers of books, the thinking of the readers of books. And not just writers and readers, either, Max thought. The ideas and visions of artists emanated from tall, heavy volumes of art history in their special shelves behind Grammie’s desk, beside equally tall shelves filled with the decisions of lawmakers and the statistics collected by record keepers. Of course, the air was not literally thick with images and ideas, draped and swaying like cobwebs, but it had always felt that way to Max, who had been a regular visitor to Grammie’s library since he was big enough to ascend the stairs, turn left into the children’s room, and choose a book. Max was entirely comfortable in the library. He didn’t mind waiting, hands in his pockets, smiling in anticipation of her surprise to hear what he had done.

  Grammie took off her reading glasses, looking up from her letter to notice him and ask, “Shouldn’t you be at the house? What if Ari comes early?”

  “I’ve got plenty of time. I’ve got my bicycle. I want to—”

  “Have you had lunch? I already ate, but there is a piece of pie—”

  “No, thanks, I had a meat pie. Well, part of a meat pie, about half.”

  “You bought it at some stall in the New Town, didn’t you?” she accused him. “How many times have I warned you—”

  He interrupted, “I didn’t find employment but I—”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Grammie said, and she was so concerned about his reaction to what she was going to say that she folded up her glasses and began tapping them lightly on the desk. This made Max nervous, and halted his proud announcement halfway up his throat.

  “I’ve decided that it would be better, after all, if you lived with me,” Grammie said. “In my house. I don’t feel right with you all alone in that big house.”

  “It’s not big,” said Max.

  “It’s big for a boy alone,” Grammie told him unsympathetically. “And if you can’t find a job …” She let the sentence go unfinished, as if the end of it was so obvious she didn’t need to state it. “In any case, you need someone keeping an eye out.”

  That didn’t sound like independence to Max. He knew his grandmother loved him, so he didn’t want to reject her offer without seeming to consider it. But then, how could he reject it politely?

  “I’m fine,” he assured her. “I don’t feel lonely.”

  “And as headstrong as you are,” she said. “You’re very headstrong,” she told him, as if he hadn’t heard that a hundred times already in his life.

  “Besides, I did earn some money today. I earned …” And he reached into his pocket to pull out the bill and show it to her.

  “Fifty?”

  This was the amazed reaction he’d hoped for. He held the bill out. “Fifty.”

  “Well.” She took it into her fingers and looked at it. “Well, well.” She rubbed it gently. “It’s genuine. However did you manage that?”

  He told her, using his quiet library voice, about the child, the ice cream store, the dash down the street after the mother, and the happy return of Angel-Humphrey, which led to the reward he had earned.

  Grammie was impressed, he could see, and that made him even prouder of himself. Then she said, “You can’t expect to have a missing child turn up every day.”

  That was true, and he knew it, but he would have preferred not to have it pointed out right away.

  “Take the bill into a bank on the way home and change it into coins,” Grammie instructed him. “Nobody will notice if a boy has coins, but they might get suspicious about a bill worth fifty.”

  This was sounding less and less like independence.

  Grammie looked at him sharply. “It’s good advice, Max. You aren’t going to be too headstrong to take good advice, are you?”

  Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t, Max thought. He said, “I brought you a piece of cake from the ice cream shop.”

  “Won’t it have melted by now?”

  “Not ice cream cake, cake cake. The woman is a baker, too, a really, really good baker. Wait until you taste it.”

  “A better baker than me?” asked Grammie.

  One of the good things about Grammie was that she didn’t ask questions so you would tell her what she hoped to hear. She asked to find out what you actually thought. “Much. She’s good enough to be a pastry chef. You’ll see.”

  “I’ll have it for dessert tonight,” Grammie decided, and then said, “You can pack a few things after your lesson. This weekend we’ll move the rest over.”

  At that moment, a man entered the library and rescued Max with a request from a city official for information that was needed right away.

  Grammie was about to turn into a problem, Max could see that. He felt like hopping onto his bicycle and riding off, fast, to the lakeside or to the Starling Theater, and hiding out. He felt like eating that piece of cake and not giving it to his grandmother after all. He felt like painting a gray and windy skyscape. It would not be good for him to be somebody who was taken care of, he knew it. He didn’t want to hurt Grammie’s feelings, and he didn’t want to anger her, but m
ore than either of those he didn’t want to live dependently.

  In just a few minutes she turned back to him. “We’ll talk at supper,” she said, having apparently seen something in his expression that told her it was time for her to give in on something little, thus making it easier for him to give in on the big thing later on.

  Max grinned at her, and “I’ll stop at the bank,” he said, giving in on something little himself, with the same plan in mind. “So I’ll have coins to pay Ari with.”

  Grammie continued to study him, her eyes a sharp, thoughtful blue. “I don’t need to remind you, do I? That at the moment you’re all I have.”

  Max shook his head, no longer grinning, but did not try to explain that the way things were now, he was just waiting. Waiting to hear from his parents or waiting to hear about them. He hadn’t really lost them. He wasn’t really alone. Just independent.

  Because he had almost an hour before his tutor would arrive, Max decided to try a painting. As three o’clock approached, he stood in front of his easel on the grassy lawn between his back steps and the garden, feet apart and hand raised. He wore the red beret. He had clipped a piece of heavy paper to his easel, set out tins of gray and black watercolors on the easel’s tray, and prepared two small bowls of water. Holding his brush with the gentle grip Joachim had taught him, he wet the top of the paper and applied the first streaks of color that he would, he hoped, be able to turn into a turbulent, troubled, stormy sky. At the first brushstroke, his shoulders relaxed and the excitements and failures and irritations and pleasures of the day floated off, drifted away, leaving his spirit calm.

  The painting did not go well. He could see it clearly inside his head, but as so often happened, the picture did not turn out as he imagined. Also, with watercolors, you have to do your thinking in advance because you can’t erase or paint over your mistakes. Max wanted the sky in his painting to look windy, but wind itself can’t be painted; it can only be suggested, just as actual wind can’t be seen but only felt as it blows by. Wind is visible only in the effect it has on branches and flags and, for Max’s purpose, the speed of clouds across the sky. When Max stepped back to look at his work, he saw that he had failed. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he’d try again. He could figure out how to paint the wind, if not immediately then eventually, maybe. He would have to be patient with this wind, he thought as he studied his unsuccessful effort.