by Mary Chase
“Ye might,” he told her, stroking his beard with his small brown hand. “Pretend is tricky business—but unpretend, that’s even trickier.”
“Unpretend,” she repeated. “How?”
“So what’s going on at home now?” he asked her.
“At home now? Oh! Well! They’d be out looking for me. I’d be hiding from them. My mother would be so mad. She’d be calling me, she’d be…”
“Show me,” he said. “I’m slow to catch on to some things.”
“I’d be like this,” she answered, crouching down behind something that wasn’t there, hiding from a mother who wasn’t coming.
“And she’d be like this, coming up the street, her feet going like this….”
Now she folded her arms across her chest, walked with a hard stomp, and called in a sharp voice, “Maureen! Maureen! You get home.”
A chilly wind blew over the garden. The stars seemed to stand still. From someplace, somehow, a cross voice rang out through the night air of the “olden days” garden.
“Maureen! Maureen! Where are you?”
A light came up from somewhere, like a switch turned on. She was all alone again and a windy rain was falling on the dusty, littered steps of the Old Messerman Place. The windows were dark and dirty, without curtains. The screen on the door was moving and whining in the wind. The iron boy by the pond was weather-beaten, paint peeling off his arms. There were no pigeons on the roof. She heard a purring sound outside, beyond the boarded-up gates. It was the sound of cars moving toward the intersection. She heard the voices of children running down a sidewalk. That was Delbert Moody, calling out to Junior Boggs, “Paper drive tomorrow. Don’t forget the paper drive!”
“Paper drive tomorrow!” That was what the teacher had said to her as she left school in the rain—when? Had it all happened that afternoon, within an hour, maybe?
She walked slowly back to the house. There was the clean spot in the dusty window on the landing where she’d last seen the lace curtains and the tall grandfather clock. She went slowly into the kitchen through the swinging doors where Nora had carried the plates, one at a time. There was the big hole in the linoleum and the old trunks piled in the cellar below, the blackened tin sink, the pail of water, half filled, which Delbert had dragged in from the back porch the other day. The castles and bridges and the girls and lambs on the wall of the dining room were dim and dusty again. She remembered how the girls’ skirts had been red. Was it only a night or two ago? An hour ago? Or ever? She didn’t know. But it was now so faded you couldn’t guess what color they had been. And yet she did know. The color had been red, had always been meant to be red.
In the drawing room, as they’d called it, there was the chandelier hanging by one wire. The black piano had stood there by the wide window with the velvet drapes, gold ropes, and lace curtains. The satin sofa had been by the fireplace and she had sat on it, beside the mother who held her hand so kindly as they listened to little blond Lucrece playing the piano.
Now there was no mother there, no Nora or Lizzie. Nobody was ringing a tinkling bell and nobody was answering. It was all so sad and so lonely. She would never, never, never—no positively never—ever come back here again.
The Leaper was nowhere to be seen as she crossed the garden.
THE SEVEN SLINKY SISTERS
Maureen was getting herself out of the gate when the scream of police sirens split the air and a car ground to a stop at the curb just outside. The police! They would arrest her!
“In here,” called a familiar little voice. The Leaper was leaping off the wall and diving into a clump of bushes. He motioned her to follow. “Quick! It’s the cops.”
She followed him into the bushes, just in time, as a captain followed by three police officers ripped aside the boards easily, climbed inside, and ran over the garden.
“Lie low,” the Leaper whispered, “and not a sound out of yez.”
The policemen ran in and out of the summerhouse, beat the bushes at the back of the garden, turned flashlights into the shadowy corners of the wall behind the trees. Once, a flashlight played up and down over the Leaper as he sat cross-legged in the bushes. They thought he was a garden ornament, he was sitting so still. Had they moved the flashlight across, instead of up and down, they would have seen a little girl in a red sweater sitting cross-legged beside him—no ornament.
“Nobody out here, Captain,” called the officers.
“Look in the house there,” he ordered. “There’s some kind of a light there.”
The Leaper and Maureen could see Ingrid standing serenely in the hallway, a candle in one hand, a pigeon sitting on each shoulder and one on top of her large velvet hat with the plume, another on the newel post, two on the third step. The Leaper leaned forward. The Pigeon Ladies had never faced the officers before. Something was up.
The police captain bustled up to her. “What’s the idea, lady, bustin’ in here with this poultry?” He looked at the pigeons in disgust. “Take a look upstairs, boys.”
The three officers didn’t race up the stairs. They moved slowly, looking back down at Ingrid with the pigeons sitting so still around her and on her.
“Who are you,” the captain demanded, “and what are you doing in here?”
Ingrid raised her head haughtily. “Please,” she rebuked him, “remember your manners when you are speaking to your betters. I am Ingrid Messerman.”
“Well, well, well.” The captain removed his hat. “Say, I beg your pardon.”
He called up the stairs, “It’s all right, boys. It’s in the family.”
“Excuse me, Miss Messerman,” he went on, and there was a sheepish smile on his face. “We’re looking for a crowd of shoplifters supposed to be located here—the Seven Slinky Sisters.”
“Shoplifters?” Ingrid looked so innocent. “What on earth is that?”
“Say.” The captain was frowning. “Didn’t I hear when I was a little boy that the Messerman sisters had gone away a long long time ago?”
“We flew back,” she answered sweetly, “on a whim.”
“On a what?” he asked. “Is that a new kind of airplane?”
Ingrid didn’t answer that. “We were living in a lovely old mansion in southern Indiana, with Victorian cupolas and wrought-iron trim.”
“Sounds nice,” said the captain.
“Except,” she continued grandly, “when we lived in a ten-story, castle-type home on the shore of a large lake.”
“It must be nice to be rich.” He was studying her.
“Although,” she went on, “we were also quite fond of our chateau in the midst of a Japanese garden by the side of a rushing river. But for some years now, we have been here.”
“That so?” The captain’s voice was respectful, but he kept looking around the empty house and at the dusty floors, suspiciously.
“You ever see any stolen goods hidden away in here?” he asked.
Ingrid apparently did not like this question. “Kindly remember to whom you are speaking, and thank you so much for dropping in, you and your men upstairs.”
The captain didn’t seem to take the hint or know that he was being dismissed. He was still very curious about it all.
“These birds you got here?” he asked, studying the pigeons on the stairs, “and the ones you’re wearing? Pets, I suppose.”
“Pets?” she smiled. “Oh, no. Relatives. Please hold this.” She handed him her candle. Then, with her eyes on his all the while, she began to raise and lower her arms, as though a gym teacher were calling, “And-a-one, and-a-two, and-a-three—”
She went faster and faster, all the while smiling sweetly into his staring eyes. There was a sizz-sizz-sizzling sound, a popping noise. As Maureen gasped and the officer staggered back a step, Ingrid disappeared. In her place stood a large bird, the size of a turkey, flapping its wings and shrinking with each flap until now a gray pigeon waddled across the hall into the drawing room, followed by six others.
“So that’s how t
hey do it,” the Leaper muttered. “They’re a disgrace to all decent pigeons.”
They could see, sitting out in the bushes, how the captain grabbed hold of the stairpost to steady himself. From the flame of the candle, still grasped tightly in his hand, they could see his open mouth and his glassy, terrified eyes. He was every inch a police officer, and he crossed the hall after the pigeons into the drawing room.
They could hear him bawling out loudly, “Come back here, you birds. You’re under arrest.”
Then they heard a loud crashing sound like a chandelier falling. The officers raced down the stairs, their flashlights stabbing the darkening hallway. One officer held the door open as two more helped the injured captain across the garden to the gate. The Leaper and Maureen could hear them asking, “You all right, Captain?”
They saw him nod and then mutter, “Arrest those pigeons.”
“Sure,” they told him, “sure, sure. You lie down awhile and you’ll feel lots better.” They were humoring him.
The sirens screamed down the street. Seven pigeons were strutting proudly on the roof. Then they huddled close together, looking down at Maureen with beady black eyes.
They were watching her so intently they didn’t see the little figure on the roof stealing up behind them. Maureen had been watching them so horrified that she didn’t know when the Leaper had left her side and swung himself from the top of a tree onto the roof. He had something in his hand. It was a net, probably part of an old tennis net he had found in the summerhouse, or maybe a large fishnet. He had it over the pigeons so quickly and tied it so fast!
How they fluttered and flapped as he waved the sack back and forth.
Then he leaped to a tree, slid down, and jumped through the air to the pool with the iron boy.
“They could do with a long, long drink,” he told Maureen, his eyes twinkling. And he swung the sack full of birds around and around and around in circles so as to make it fall with a hard splash into the water. “They’re bad birds, and they always was.”
Maureen didn’t know a minute before that she would run to him, crying out, “No. No. Don’t. Please, please, no.”
“No?” He stopped swinging. “No? And why not? They’re demons and cause lots of trouble.”
But he walked close to her, dragging the sack behind him, looking up into her face as the birds fluttered frantically, crazily in the net.
“I asked yez—why not?”
“I dreamed,” she told him, “there was a woman—their mother—and she came into my room up there.” She pointed to the third floor of the old mansion. “And she said if I ever could, to please help them.”
The birds stopped fluttering and lay quietly in the net, not making a sound.
The Leaper looked across the garden and his eyes were like seawater again, as they were the first day she’d come there and he’d talked about the lady. He untied the top of the sack slowly. The birds flew up over the trees, into the sky, until they became tiny specks in the air, and then nothing at all.
“Where will they go?” she asked.
“Who knows?” He stroked his beard. “Some fine old house somewhere. That’s all they care for—finery. But wherever they go, her love will follow—from tomorrow to yesterday and back to today.”
Then he told her the story of the house and the people who’d lived in it, of the day the seven sisters had gone away, of the night they’d come back and found everyone gone.
“Didn’t they even cry—one tear?” she asked after a while.
“Nary a one.” He shook his head. “The only sad sigh was over some clothes. They were birdbrains and so they turned themselves into birds. Nobody ever stands still.”
“I’d cry,” she said after a bit, “if I came home and there was nobody there.”
Then she jumped up. “Home! I’ve got to go home!” And she ran across the garden.
“Goodbye to yez,” he called after her, “and good luck.”
“Goodbye to you, too.” She didn’t stop running. “And good luck to you, too.”
Then she was gone.
“Well, well,” said he to himself, “and I always said, didn’t I, that some good might come of it sometime?”
He saw now a black thing, sitting on the top of a back chimney. The cat, he told himself as he looked up at the shape with two sharp pointed ears silhouetted against the pinkish evening sky.
“How did that cat get up there?” he wondered, and, as he was wondering, he saw the thing raise wings out wide like a man in an evening cloak raising both arms hailing a taxi. He saw it glide, softly and beautifully, off the chimney top and across the garden.
It was the owl, the horned owl with a wingspread of four feet. The Leaper had seen him in the Old Messerman Place once or twice before. And he always meant bad news. While he was pondering what that could be, he heard two men talking as they went down the walk.
“They’re tearing this old place down next week and black-topping it for a parking lot.” Now he knew what the horned owl had come to tell him, and why Ingrid had been so bold with the captain. Tearing it down! Soon the Old Messerman Place would be gone, and nobody would ever remember what had been there any more than you remember what was written in chalk on a blackboard before the eraser rubbed it out.
“Oh, well,” he told himself, “things change.” And he was never surprised at change. Where would he go now? He didn’t worry. He would go someplace.
Then he decided to listen back. He could do this easily. So he listened to the piano playing an old song as the young people were grouped around it a long time ago.
Wait ’til the sun shines, Nellie, and the clouds go rolling by. We will be happy, Nellie, you and I.
His projection was good, but his voice bad. Somebody was sure to call the police.
—
When Maureen came to the kitchen door, she didn’t open it partway and thrust one arm inside. She opened the door and walked in. Her mother was standing at the kitchen sink. As she turned around, Maureen saw, for the first time, that there was gray in her hair. And in her eyes, as she saw Maureen, there was the same anxious look she had seen in the eyes of the Messerman mother.
“Where have you been?” Her voice was cross.
Even though the television was blaring upstairs, Henry, Diane, and Mr. Swanson heard her and came into the kitchen. They all frowned at Maureen. She didn’t mind at all. They didn’t look through her or past her.
“Answer me,” Mrs. Swanson demanded. “I asked you, where have you been?”
“I’ve been at the Old Messerman Place.”
There was silence in the kitchen.
“Didn’t we tell you, never, never go there?” Mr. Swanson asked her quietly. But his tone was deadly. “So why did you do it?”
She heard herself saying, “I went to take back that bracelet.”
Henry cried out, “Mother! She told the truth. Maureen told the truth.”
Diane said, “I knew she took that bracelet.”
Mr. Swanson said, “She said she did, in a straightforward manner, for once.”
“Like a little lady.” Mrs. Swanson was so happy. “Like a truthful, perfect little lady.”
—
That night at dinner, when Mrs. Swanson remarked, “You’re not eating, Maureen,” she didn’t answer, “Not eating Maureen! How could I eat myself?”
She asked a question. “Did you call me?”
“Call you?” Her mother frowned. “When?”
“When I was late today—home from school?”
“Call you?” Mr. Swanson laughed. “She yelled herself hoarse, all up and down the walk outside the Old Messerman Place.”
“Did you hear me?” Her mother was watching her face.
Maureen nodded. “I heard you.” But she didn’t say anything more—then or ever.
MARY CHASE decided to become a writer at age seven and never wavered from that goal. She spent fourteen years as a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado, then turned her
attention to plays and novels. Her best-known play, Harvey, ran for more than four years on Broadway and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This play was later made into the now-classic movie starring Jimmy Stewart.
Ms. Chase was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame and the Colorado Performing Arts Hall of Fame following her death in 1981.
PETER SÍS studied painting and filmmaking at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague and at the Royal College of Art in London. He has written and illustrated many award-winning books for children, among them Starry Messenger and Tibet: Through the Red Box, which were both distinguished as Caldecott Honor Books. Peter Sís lives with his wife, Terry Lajtha, and their two children in New York.