The Sixty-Eight Rooms

by Marianne Malone

  “Well, I’m not the curator in charge but I am the senior staff member down here and oversee the maintenance of the rooms. They’re one of our most popular exhibits,” Mr. Bell said. “In answer to your question, they are all connected—there’s a small corridor behind them for access. You passed by doors in there and probably didn’t notice.”

  “Could you show me?” Jack was never shy about asking for something.

  “Sure, I can show you,” Mr. Bell answered. “Follow me.” He led Jack and his mom back into the exhibition; to the left there was a small alcove with a door, much closer to where Ruthie stood looking at a Japanese room.

  “So that’s how you get back there?” Jack asked.

  “That’s right. But we don’t have reason to go back there very often. The rooms don’t require very much maintenance, just an occasional dusting or a new lightbulb.”

  “Can I look?” Jack asked eagerly.

  “Jack, I’m sure Mr. Bell can’t open that door for museum visitors!” Lydia exclaimed.

  “I don’t believe I’ve been asked before.” Mr. Bell seemed to be having fun as he looked around to make sure there wasn’t a large crowd of kids nearby. The other guard was around the corner, out of eyeshot. Mr. Bell pulled his key ring out of his pocket. It held a mixture of keys: home, car and about three or four clearly labeled AIC, with a different number on each. The door itself had no knob and could be opened only with a key. “C’mere,” Mr. Bell said somewhat slyly as he put the key in the lock and opened the door a crack. He had a twinkle in his eye. “Take a peek.”

  As Jack peered in, Mr. Bell turned his attention back to Lydia and explained that the doors were always kept locked even though the museum wasn’t really worried about theft. “Nobody has ever tried to steal anything from these rooms. Unlike the artwork upstairs, these rooms are only valuable all together. No one would steal just a single item. Besides, someone would have a hard time getting their hands through the small openings in the back. We have another set of keys to open the glass windows from the front when repairs have to be made.”

  While Mr. Bell continued to talk to Jack’s mom, Ruthie watched as Jack took the opportunity to slip just inside the door to the corridor. If Jack was expecting to see something spectacular he was disappointed. There were only some cleaning supplies, a chair, some stacked boxes and beyond those a narrow corridor dimly lit by the light coming from the back of the room displays. It looked like the backstage area of a theater. He came out again. His mom and Mr. Bell hadn’t stopped their conversation and didn’t even seem to notice that Jack had gone in and out of the corridor.

  “That was neat. Thanks,” he said.

  “Lucky!” was Ruthie’s somewhat frustrated reply when Jack came over to her and told her what he’d seen.

  “C’mon. Maybe you can look too,” he said, pulling at her sleeve. By now most of their class was nearly finished viewing all sixty-eight rooms and was congregating out in the hall near the entrance.

  Jack led her back over to the alcove where the two grown-ups still stood chatting.

  “This is my friend Ruthie. Can she look too?” Jack asked without a second’s hesitation.

  “I can’t be showing your whole class, now can I?” Mr. Bell replied at first. Then he observed Ruthie’s disappointed face. Glancing around to see that most everyone in the exhibit had moved on, he added, “Well … Ruthie, is it? I suppose one more look won’t hurt. But just a real quick one.” He had not yet relocked the door, so as he stood facing out into the gallery, he reached behind him. With a subtle movement he opened the door.

  Ruthie couldn’t help feeling a little let down by what she saw—kind of like how she’d felt the first time she saw The Wizard of Oz and Toto pulled back the curtain so that everyone saw the mechanism that controlled the wizard. It spoiled the experience in a way, even though she knew that this corridor had to exist and that ordinary lightbulbs must create the “sunlight” for the tiny rooms. She liked the front view so much more.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” Mr. Bell said as he walked a few feet away to gently stop a young child with very sticky fingers from leaving fingerprints all over the glass windows of the rooms.

  Ruthie’s eyes had barely adjusted to the dim light of the corridor, but Jack, in that same minute and a half, had found something on the floor in the darkened corner behind a stack of boxes and stashed it in his pocket.

  “Jack!” Lydia said in a loud whisper. “Come out of there. You were only supposed to look!” Jack dutifully obeyed her.

  Ruthie opened her mouth to form the question “What did you find?” but Jack shot her a quick look that said, Don’t ask me now! The two of them stepped out of the alcove and into the main space in front of Mr. Bell and Lydia. Jack closed the door behind them.

  “You know, my little girl used to come back here and do her homework after school when she was young—younger than the two of you. She used a box as a desk. She’s all grown up now. I’ve been working here for that long!”

  “Thank you very much for letting us take a look,” Ruthie said.

  “Yeah—that was great!” Jack added enthusiastically. Mr. Bell smiled and winked at the two of them. He reached out to shake their hands and then Jack’s mother’s hand as well.

  “I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope we’ll bump into each other again soon,” she said to him.

  “The pleasure was mine,” he answered.

  “Okay, you two, back to the group,” Lydia declared. The rest of the class had already assembled at the entrance to the exhibit.

  “Wait till you see what I found,” Jack said under his breath to Ruthie.

  “What? More money?”

  “Better!”

  “There you two stragglers are!” Ms. Biddle scolded, coming around the corner toward them. “Next time keep with the group, okay?”

  “Sorry!” Jack said with a smile.

  “Well, all’s well that ends well,” Ms. Biddle answered, smiling back. No one ever stayed mad at Jack when he smiled at them. Ruthie thought that Jack was really smiling about the fact that he had some newfound treasure in his pocket—and it was something he didn’t seem to want anyone else to see. That was how she knew it must be something fantastic.

  WHAT JACK FOUND

  ON THE BUS FOR THE return to school, Jack waited until everyone was busy. He looked around to make sure no one was watching.

  “Look!” He pulled a small metal key with lots of decorations on it out of his pocket, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He held it in the palm of his hand. Then he rubbed it a little with his sleeve and it glinted silvery gold.

  “It’s beautiful!” Ruthie was impressed.

  “It’ll be the best one in my collection by far!” Jack said. “I wonder what it opens.”

  “Are those initials on it?” Ruthie could see fancy letters inscribed in the metal, adorned with carvings of leaves and vines.

  “Looks like a C and an N,” Jack said.

  “No, that’s an M,” Ruthie corrected. Jack turned it over in his hand and the two of them studied it. “It looks valuable, Jack.” As she looked at it a new thought crossed her mind. “Maybe you stole something important!” At that moment a blueberry muffin came flying across the bus and landed in Ruthie’s lap. Jack quickly closed his fist around the key and put it back in his pocket.

  “Sorry about that,” a voice from the front yelled. “I meant that for Ben. Throw it on back, okay?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ms. Biddle, walking down the aisle and holding out her hand for the muffin. “You guys know the rules: no throwing food—on the bus or anywhere else!” Ruthie held up the muffin for her.

  “What are you two looking so guilty about? You weren’t the ones throwing food, were you?”

  “We were just minding our own business, Ms. Biddle,” Jack said, adding, “That was a great field trip, by the way.”

  Sheesh, Ruthie thought. He is such an operator sometimes!

  “Why, thank you,
Jack. And please thank your mother again for being a chaperone.”

  “She likes to do junk like that. No problem.” He smiled.

  “Okay, class,” Ms. Biddle announced. “We’re almost back at school. Put away your cards, food wrappers, CDs, you name it—I want this bus spotless. Anything you leave on the bus gets tossed!”

  As they gathered their backpacks Ruthie said, “We’ve got to get back to the museum. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to the museum with you!” he replied instantly.

  “Ruth Elizabeth Stewart!” her mother’s voice called to her. “Come and get your backpack off the dining room table. And please set the table for dinner!”

  “All right, all right,” Ruthie answered grudgingly. She was using her parents’ computer, which was set up in a corner of the living room, to Google information about the Thorne Rooms. “I’ll be there in a sec.” When a sec turned into several minutes, her mother came over to her.

  “Homework?” she asked.

  “Uh-uh. I’m looking up the Thorne Rooms,” Ruthie replied. “We saw them today at the Art Institute.”

  “I hope you saw more than just dollhouse rooms today! That doesn’t sound very educational.”

  “Have you ever seen them, Mom?”

  “Not those actual rooms, but I’ve certainly seen miniatures before. I had a dollhouse when I was a little girl.”

  “Then you shouldn’t criticize what you don’t know about,” Ruthie snapped. “You always tell me not to.” She immediately felt a little guilty about being so hard on her mother, but she couldn’t help it.

  “You’re right,” her mother agreed, but Ruthie could tell she was still feeling impatient with her. “Now please set the table.”

  Ruthie absently went to get the knives, forks and spoons, unaware of the scowl on her face.

  “You know, sweetie,” her mother said as she came back into the room carrying the salad, “you should take me through the rooms sometime and show me what you liked about them. I’ll be more open-minded—especially about something you find interesting.”

  “Okay, Mom,” she answered. Her mom went back to the kitchen. But Ruthie couldn’t stop thinking about the rooms and how beautiful they were. She looked at the plain silverware in her hand and the paper napkins they always used. Everything she looked at—the plates, the table, the chairs, the room itself—seemed boring compared to those rooms, and she couldn’t help feeling that her surroundings mirrored her life: okay but nothing special. Dull. Then she thought about the key Jack had found and what—or whom—it might belong to. Maybe it was a valuable antique that had been lost and they would get a reward of thousands of dollars for finding it. Now, that wouldn’t be dull! Or perhaps the key had a mysterious but important history. She felt a little shiver of excitement about the unknown possibilities the key might hold.

  Ruthie’s parents dropped her off at Jack’s the next morning on their way to watch Claire’s soccer match. When she arrived, Jack hadn’t finished breakfast yet. Meals at his house were served on a table made from an old wooden board that had been sanded and polished smooth but still had lots of dents and grooves in it because it had been used for something else before it was made into a table. The board sat on four tree-stump legs. The chairs did not match; Jack sat on a science-lab stool that he could spin around and around—as long as no one else was eating at the time, his mother had ruled. This morning Lydia had made blueberry pancakes, and she offered some to Ruthie.

  Jack had decided it would be fun to eat with chopsticks. He speared a pancake dripping with syrup and plunked it in his mouth.

  “Jack, you know you’re not supposed to hold them that way! Hold them correctly,” his mother directed. Ruthie was surprised that Lydia didn’t make him stop altogether, since she usually insisted he have really good table manners. But she seemed preoccupied this morning.

  He ignored her direction. “So, Ruthie,” he said after a gulp, “my mom says she knows that guard guy she was talking to yesterday … what was his name again?”

  “You mean Edmund Bell?”

  “Yeah, that guy.”

  “I recognized his name from his ID tag,” she explained to Ruthie, “and he fit the description of someone I’d heard of. He was a photographer.”

  “What do you mean ‘was’ a photographer?” Jack asked.

  “He had a great start at a career about twenty-five years ago. Everyone wanted his photos.”

  “What did they look like?” Ruthie asked.

  “As I recall, Edmund Bell was known for beautiful portraits of people from all over the world. But he was especially praised for a series he made in the African American community here in Chicago. He was really talented. But then he just stopped working. I don’t know why.”

  “I liked him,” Jack said.

  “So did I. Do you two have much homework this weekend?”

  Jack looked at Ruthie for the answer. “Not too much, thankfully,” she replied.

  “We’re going to go back to the museum this morning,” Jack told Lydia as he chewed. “Ruthie wants to see the Thorne Rooms again and I said I’d go with her since her parents won’t let her go by herself.”

  “Mmm. That sounds nice. More pancakes, Ruthie?”

  “No, thank you. They’re great but it’s my second breakfast.” As she got up and took her plate to the sink, Jack asked his mom something that Ruthie half wished she hadn’t heard.

  “Mom, are we gonna have to move?”

  His mother sighed. “I hope not, Jack. I really like this loft but … Well, don’t you worry about it. Something will happen, I’m sure.”

  Ruthie couldn’t help pondering those words: something will happen. That was exactly how she’d been feeling since yesterday.

  RUTHIE BRAVES IT

  RUTHIE AND JACK ARRIVED EARLY, so they had to wait outside by the big bronze lions that guard the steps leading up to the front entrance of the Art Institute. It was a cold and gray February morning. They were not the only people waiting, but they were the only two kids without grown-ups attached. Ruthie’s parents had just started letting her go to a few places in the city without them, but she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere by herself yet. They liked that she was with Jack. They thought he had street smarts that they hoped would rub off on her. Her parents had recently given her a cell phone, but she wasn’t supposed to use it for any social calls; it was strictly for communicating with them. It was a start, she thought, and it gave her some freedom.

  As soon as the doors opened they made a beeline for the central stairs and ran down to the lower level. The Thorne Rooms were just around the corner. Ruthie felt something in her stomach as soon as they entered—not a bad, sick feeling but a sort of warmth that slowly spread in all directions. It was weird but good. She turned and noticed a look of frustration on Jack’s face.

  “Where’s Mr. Bell?” he asked, his tone impatient.

  “Why do we need him?” she asked.

  “Ruthie, don’t you want to find out what that key belongs to? We need to get back in the corridor.”

  “We can’t do that, Jack.” Even though Ruthie was very curious about what the key belonged to, she figured that the answer—if there was one—would be found by looking at the rooms from the front.

  “Well, we can’t even think about it till Mr. Bell shows up. Just look interested,” he directed.

  “I am interested!” She had been so preoccupied this morning with her own wish to spend more time gazing into these little worlds that she hadn’t really paid much attention to Jack’s desire to get another look in the back.

  “I’m going to ask the lady at the information desk what time he gets here,” Jack decided abruptly.

  “Go ahead. See what you can find out,” Ruthie answered. “I’m gonna look at the rooms.” She browsed the gallery, looking first at some of the American rooms, stopping at one in particular: a rustic kitchen with a small wooden child’s chair sitting next to a fireplace large enough to walk into—that
is, if you were five inches tall.

  She looked at a few more rooms. It felt to Ruthie that she was seeing some of them for the very first time—there was just so much to look at. What she’d thought were her favorites yesterday were surpassed today by things she hadn’t noticed then: little inkwells with quill pens made from the tiniest of feathers, vases smaller than the fingernail on her pinkie and filled with delicate roses that looked fresher than real ones, cigar boxes covered with jewels. She could spend years here.

  “Guess what?” Jack said, sounding upset as he came up behind her.

  “I give up. What?” Ruthie asked, not too terribly concerned.

  “Mr. Bell doesn’t work on the weekends! Now we’ll never get a chance to get into that corridor—unless we come on a school holiday or something.”

  “But it isn’t all that exciting back there anyway,” Ruthie said.

  Jack looked at her with disbelief.

  “Of course it is,” he answered, and left her side.

  At this point Jack’s natural curiosity was in full swing. He was not going to give up a perfectly good Saturday morning simply waiting while Ruthie enjoyed herself. He headed to the alcove; maybe he could talk some other guard into opening the door for him. There was no guard, however, at or near the door.

  Looking at it, Jack noticed something—the door was not closed tightly!

  “Hey, Ruthie,” he said as he ran over to her. “Do you remember Mr. Bell closing the door yesterday?”

  “I wasn’t paying any attention. Why?”

  “Because it’s not closed! I think I pulled it only partway shut; I don’t remember hearing the sound of the latch.”

  “He was pretty distracted talking to your mom,” Ruthie remembered.

  “Doors like that lock automatically when the latch catches, so that means it’s not locked. We can get in there! I know we can. Nobody’s watching!”