Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Master

by Ann Hood

  “Hey, buddy,” his father said as he wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I guess so,” Felix said.

  His father opened the door of Room 208 wider so that Felix could come inside. How could he describe how good it felt to see his father standing there in his long gray gym shorts with the faded letters RISD practically completely gone and a T-shirt, also faded, with Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a man on the front. RISD stood for Rhode Island School of Design, which was the art college his father went to a million years ago. And that T-shirt was from the semester he spent in Florence. Those things, plus his father’s particular smell of turpentine and maybe sweat and something limy, were all so familiar and comforting that Felix, as upset as he felt, broke into a grin.

  “We used to call that bunking school,” his father said.

  He sat on the bed and picked up the phone beside it.

  “Could you send up a pot of coffee, some chocolate milk, an eggs Benedict, bacon, and some pancakes, please?” he said to room service. He glanced at Felix. “Blueberry?”

  Felix nodded, grinning even more.

  His father hung up and ran his hands through his curly hair. Like Maisie’s, his hair had a mind of its own.

  “So you’re not in school because . . . ,” his father prompted.

  “Dad,” Felix said, sitting beside him on the bed, “is there any way to retrieve a letter from the main post office in Cleveland, Ohio?”

  “No,” his father said. “Once a letter is mailed, it’s gone.”

  Felix groaned. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Why are you sending letters to Cleveland, Ohio, anyway?”

  Felix flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

  His father waited.

  “Lily Goldberg,” he said finally.

  His father waited some more.

  “She’s a girl,” Felix added.

  “Most people named Lily are girls,” his father agreed.

  “She moved to Cleveland and promised to stay in touch and, okay, I wasn’t a very good friend, but she was in Newport this weekend and didn’t even call me or anything,” Felix said, his words spilling out in a rush. “And,” he continued, “I wrote her a letter before I knew that.”

  “Ah!” his father said. “Of course, it’s possible that she was only here for a day, or her parents kept her too busy—”

  “Who’s side are you on, anyway?” Felix asked rhetorically.

  Room service knocked on the door, and his father let the guy in. He was rolling a big cart with white linen and lots of plates covered with silver lids and a white vase with a pink carnation in the middle. Felix watched his father sign for the food and then start lifting the lids, the smell of warm pancakes and bacon filling the room.

  His father plucked a piece of bacon from the plate and popped the whole thing in his mouth.

  “I say just wait and see what she does when she gets the letter,” he said while he chewed.

  Felix sniffed the little silver pitcher of maple syrup to determine if it was real or the fake stuff. He hated the fake stuff. But this smelled rich and maple-y, so he poured it over his pancakes and then carefully cut them into small even pieces. Felix didn’t like large chunks of pancake.

  “I say . . . ,” his father said as he cut into his eggs Benedict and watched the yolk run all over the hollandaise sauce, which Felix found disgusting. “I say females are a curious species.”

  Felix nodded. He took a bite of his pancakes, liking the way the blueberries and maple syrup tasted together.

  “Leonardo da Vinci,” he said after he swallowed. “He wasn’t from the Renaissance, was he?”

  His father laughed. “Where did that come from?”

  Felix pointed to his father’s shirt.

  “Ah! The Vitruvian Man.”

  “The what man?” Felix asked even as he took another bit of pancake.

  “Vitruvian. My shirt is too faded for you to see very clearly, but basically it’s based on the work of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. Da Vinci made a pen-and-ink drawing of a man in two superimposed images surrounded by both a circle and a square.”

  Felix squinted at the shirt but could only vaguely make out the man’s arms and legs there.

  “And, yes,” his father said, “da Vinci lived during the Renaissance.”

  “We’re studying the Renaissance in school,” Felix explained.

  “My favorite period,” his father said.

  He had polished off both halves of his eggs Benedict as he spoke, and now turned his attention to Felix’s pancakes.

  “Are you going to finish those?”

  Felix sighed. It was easy to only think of the good things about a person when they were far away. But here was his real father, right beside him, and Felix remembered how he always ate off everyone’s plate. Insatiable, his mother used to say, only half-kidding.

  “You can have some,” Felix relented, because it had been so good to be able to walk to his father for advice.

  His father grinned at him, stuck his fork in one of the pancakes, and put it on his plate. Obviously, big chunks of pancake did not bother him, Felix thought as he watched his father roughly cut the pancake into fourths and begin to eat it.

  “Since you’ve given yourself a holiday from school today,” his father said, “you can come with me to take that monstrosity of a dog you and your sister brought home to the vet.”

  “He’s going to need surgery,” Felix said.

  His father looked at him, surprised.

  Felix shrugged. “Just a guess,” he said.

  Felix and Maisie’s mother came home from work and a visit to Great-Uncle Thorne in the ICU looking more tired and more rumpled than usual.

  “He’s not getting any better,” she told them as she sunk into the pink pouf in Maisie’s room.

  “I wish we could do something,” Felix said.

  “Me too,” his mother said. “It’s so hard to see him hooked up to all those machines, just lying there like that.”

  Maisie thought about how today Mrs. Witherspoon had explained that the Renaissance was a rebirth in the arts in Europe after the Dark Ages, a period that lacked, as Mrs. Witherspoon said, Light. Intellectual, artistic, and political light. Maybe Great-Uncle Thorne was in his own personal Dark Ages, and then he would be reborn.

  “It’s been a rough day,” her mother said, pulling herself off the pouf. “I think I’ll take a cup of tea and get in bed.”

  She kissed them both on the top of the head and left the room.

  Felix looked at Maisie.

  “You know what we have to do,” he said.

  “Maybe he’ll be reborn,” she offered.

  “He will if we go up to The Treasure Chest,” Felix said.

  “I don’t know if we should do that until we find out what happened when Hadley and Rayne found Amy Pickworth.”

  “What does that matter?” Felix asked. “We can’t let Great-Uncle Thorne die.”

  Maisie frowned, considering. Then she got an idea.

  “You know how we were doing the unit on aviation and we tried to find Lindbergh?” she said, her eyes twinkling.

  “So?” Felix said. He always felt a little nervous about Maisie’s bright ideas.

  “Well, Mrs. Witherspoon said that the Renaissance started in Florence, Italy.”

  “So?” Felix said again.

  “Maybe we could go there. See for ourselves what it was like.”

  She was already heading toward the door.

  Felix sighed. He knew better than to argue with Maisie. And besides, they had to save Great-Uncle Thorne, didn’t they?

  “We don’t even have to go to The Treasure Chest,” he said, reaching into his pocket.


  Maisie paused, her hand on the doorknob.

  “What do you mean?”

  Felix reached into his pocket and pulled out the gold seal.

  “I think this will get us there,” he said, opening his palm for Maisie to see. “Great-Uncle Thorne always told us we should think more about where we’re going,” he added.

  “But . . .” Maisie hesitated.

  “I thought this was what you wanted,” Felix said, frustrated.

  “Don’t they speak Italian or Latin or something? How will we understand anybody? At least we had Pearl to translate for us in China.”

  Felix nodded slowly. “That’s a good point,” he said.

  They both gazed at the gold seal with the giglio at the end until Felix said, “Maisie, back at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, remember the Philippine village?”

  “What about it?”

  “Remember how all I heard was that woman speaking Tagalog, but you understood her completely? And she understood you, too?”

  “That’s right,” Maisie said. “I wonder why.”

  “Did you do anything different that day before we went up to The Treasure Chest with Great-Uncle Thorne and the Ziff twins? Anything that you hadn’t done before?”

  Maisie shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Absently, she moved the shard back and forth on its string around her neck.

  “We always do it the same way,” she said.

  Felix pointed to the shard.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know. The shard from the Ming vase,” Maisie said. “I put it on a string so I wouldn’t lose it.”

  “When did you do that?” Felix asked her. “Usually it’s in your pocket.”

  “But I didn’t have a pocket. And I knew we needed the shard to travel—”

  “Then that’s it, Maisie! That shard allowed you to communicate!”

  Maisie shook her head. “I don’t think so. I had it in my pocket in China and I couldn’t communicate.”

  “Maybe wearing it is different than having it in your pocket,” Felix wondered out loud.

  “If that’s true, then what will happen if we get separated? You won’t be able to talk to anyone, and no one will understand you. That would be a total disaster.”

  “I guess,” Felix said thoughtfully, “that we need another shard.”

  “How in the world are we going to get another shard? We can’t break one of the vases,” Maisie said.

  “I don’t know,” Felix admitted. “But there must be a way to do it.”

  “How did Great-Uncle Thorne and Great-Aunt Maisie do it?” Maisie asked. “They went to Egypt and France and everywhere. They must have both been able to communicate.”

  Felix looked at her.

  “You’re right,” he said. “But how?”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE SECOND SHARD

  Slowly, Maisie walked over to the Ming vase standing on its pedestal. There was the place where her shard fit in, she thought as she traced the hole with her finger. She slipped the thread with the shard on it over her head, and carefully placed it in its spot on the vase. And there, right above it, a small hole still remained.

  “What?” Felix said, watching Maisie’s face.

  “Somewhere, someone had another shard,” she said. “We just have to figure out who.”

  “And where,” Felix added, staring at the hole in the Ming vase.

  “Obviously, it’s either Great-Uncle Thorne or Great-Aunt Maisie,” Maisie said. “They must have needed it to time travel, too.”

  “I guess we should go into their rooms and search?” Felix said, not wanting to go into either of those bedrooms. Great-Aunt Maisie’s made him sad, and now with Great-Uncle Thorne in the ICU in the hospital, it seemed wrong to snoop around his room.

  “I’ll take hers,” Maisie volunteered. “And you can look in Great-Uncle Thorne’s.”

  “Okay,” Felix agreed, even though he got a pit in his stomach at the idea.

  Resolved, Maisie put her shard back around her neck and headed toward the door.

  “Wait,” Felix said thoughtfully.

  “Stop delaying!” Maisie said.

  Now Felix walked over to the Ming vase.

  “When you put your shard back, there’s only one other piece missing,” he said.

  “So?”

  “That means Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne only needed one shard to communicate when they time traveled.”

  “So?” Maisie said again, more frustrated. Sometimes Felix’s cowardice was endearing. But sometimes—like now—it was maddening.

  “So we already have one shard, and that’s all we need,” Felix explained. “What we have to figure out is how one shard lets both of us understand another language and speak it, too.”

  Maisie considered this. He was right. Somehow one shard worked for two people. But how?

  “Maybe we have to be touching each other or something,” Felix said, thinking out loud.

  Maisie shook her head. “That can’t be it. Remember, we spend time apart, like in China when we were separated.”

  “Maybe we should hold hands when we touch the object,” Felix said.

  Maisie winced.

  “So that we’ll be sure to land together,” he told her, insulted.

  “But what about if we get separated later?” Maisie protested. “Like in London when you were in the workhouse—”

  Felix shuddered. “Don’t remind me,” he said.

  “There has to be something we’re missing,” Maisie said, walking back into The Treasure Chest and staring at the small hole in the vase.

  Felix stifled a big yawn. “Why don’t we just sleep on it,” he suggested.

  “Okay,” Maisie said reluctantly, “but every minute we wait keeps Great-Uncle Thorne in that ICU.”

  Despite how tired Felix was, when he got into bed he couldn’t sleep. He tried counting backward from one hundred. He tried deep yoga breaths, which his mother claimed always put you to sleep. He even tried naming all the states alphabetically. But all he did was get from one hundred to one, breathe a lot, real slow and deep, and name forty-four states, which left him frustrated and more awake because he couldn’t figure out which six he forgot.

  Warm milk, Felix thought. His father swore by warm milk. Tryptophan, his father claimed, even though his mother said that was an old wives’ tale.

  Felix got out of bed and made his way down the long hallway to the Grand Staircase. Elm Medona was definitely creepy at night. He didn’t like the shadows or the way everything—clocks ticking, floorboards creaking, even his own footsteps—echoed. He walked faster, gripping the bannister as he started down the stairs.

  Something caught his eye, stopping him midway.

  A strange glow emanated from the wall.

  Felix swallowed hard and tried to keep himself from trembling as he moved slowly toward it.

  Surely it’s just a trick of light or shadow, he decided.

  He blinked.

  No, there was definitely a glow coming from . . .

  Felix stopped.

  The glow emanated from the photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie as a young girl, the one where Great-Uncle Thorne stuck his head into the picture.

  They both stared out at Felix, young and healthy.

  Felix sighed. Up close, he couldn’t see anything glowing.

  But just as he turned to walk away, he saw it again. Felix reached his hand out and touched the photograph, almost expecting it to be warm.

  It wasn’t, of course. But what he saw was that around Great-Aunt Maisie’s neck, a shard from the vase hung on a long chain. Felix peered at it. The shard was smaller than the one he and Maisie had. Maybe only half as big. But both holes in the vase were of equal size; he was sure of that.


  Puzzled, Felix took a step back. His father always told him when he took him to museums to study the pictures up close and then from a distance to fully see everything.

  Yes, the photograph was definitely glowing. But not around Great-Aunt Maisie, Felix saw now. The light seemed to come from Great-Uncle Thorne.

  And there, around his neck, almost a blur, hung a shard the size of the one Great-Aunt Maisie wore.

  A slow grin spread across Felix’s face.

  One shard. Broken into two pieces.

  “You’ve got to wake up!” Felix said to Maisie for about the millionth time.

  “Go. Away,” she mumbled for about the millionth time.

  “Maisie,” Felix said, shaking her a little harder than was polite, “I figured it out.”

  “Hey!” Maisie said, and pushed him back.

  “The shard,” Felix said. “There’s only one shard, but we need to cut it in half. You wear half and I wear the other half.”

  Maisie sighed, as loudly and dramatically as she could muster.

  “Like those dumb lockets Bitsy Beal and Avery Mason wear,” she muttered.

  They got them for Christmas, two halves of a big silver heart, split down the middle. All BFFs wear them, Bitsy had explained to Maisie when she caught her staring at the thing. It looked like the person wearing it had a broken heart, not a BFF. But apparently when the two halves were placed together, a perfect heart appeared.

  “I don’t know,” Felix said. “Maybe. All I do know is that once we break it in half and I get my own piece, we can go to Florence and find whoever should get the seal, and come home and save Great-Uncle Thorne.”

  Exhausted, he plopped down beside Maisie, who was frowning at him.

  “How in the world are we going to cut the shard?” she asked. “It’s porcelain. It might shatter into a thousand pieces, not just one.”

  “We’ll just get a hammer—”

  “A hammer?” Maisie said, disgusted. “That will definitely shatter it.”

  She was right. Hit the shard with a hammer and it would definitely break into bits.

  But Felix didn’t feel dejected for too long.

  “Wait!” he said, sitting up. “How about one of Mom’s CUTCO knives?”