The Books of Fell

by M. E. Kerr

  She was standing in front of the window. I could see The Tower in the distance, where the Sevens clubhouse was. I remembered standing at the top of that thing that night I was asked to join. I remembered the Sevens serenading me down below:

  The time will come as the years go by,

  When my heart will thrill

  At the thought of The Hill,

  And the Sevens who came

  With their bold cry,

  WELCOME TO SEVENS,

  I Remember the cry.

  WELCOME TO SEVENS!

  “What’ll you do this afternoon?” I asked Keats.

  “Shop,” she said.

  I had a sudden vision of girls streaming down from The Hill after classes, on their way into Cottersville to shop.

  I walked Keats out the door, but she held up her hand as I tried to see her down the stairs and out the front.

  “No, Fell, you get as much done as you can. I’ll be back for you around six.”

  “Don’t snack,” I said. “I know a great place we can get some lobsters. My treat.”

  “This is funny, isn’t it, Fell?” Keats said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember us? Can you imagine lobster being the highlight of our evening back then?”

  “Was it escargots? Shrimp? I don’t recall.”

  She gave my arm a punch. Then she leaned into me and kissed me. “Remember now?” she said.

  “Of course! It was sautéed eel.”

  She blew me another kiss as she walked away from me. I smiled at the idea both of us were thinking the same thing about the night ahead of us: how far we’d come from the time we couldn’t keep our hands off each other … when we’d named the backseat of my car “The Magnet” … and when we kept making our dates earlier because we couldn’t wait.

  “Fell?” Keats called at me from downstairs. “It’ll be more like seven. I want to shop for shoes out at the mall.”

  • • •

  As it turned out, she was waiting outside in her little baby-blue Benz at quarter after six, top down.

  It wasn’t my treat, either … wasn’t fish, but ribs charcoaled on an outside grill.

  We dined at a long redwood picnic table, covered with a blue-and-white-checked cloth.

  We were in the backyard of 11 Acquetong Road, home of the Homers, Tom and Lucy and Little Jack.

  We’d been invited to Little Jack’s birthday party, but it seemed we were to celebrate without him.

  THE MOUTH

  Oh, the excitement (the rapture, really) of meeting your other! Can you imagine what that would be like?

  Neither could they, of course, because neither one knew he was meeting someone on that bus who would change him forever.

  Life is mysterious, you know, or we’d have some clue as to what we’re all doing here.

  “Is this seat taken?” he asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  “I’m Nels Plummer.”

  “Leonard Tralastski. Hi!”

  He sat beside Lenny on the aisle seat of the Gardner bus. Everything about him seemed to be the opposite of Lenny.

  Lenny was tall, dark, black haired, and brown eyed behind the thick glasses he could not see without. He had a plain, average sixteen-year-old face, regular features, no ethnic imprint.

  Nels, same age, was short, light skinned, and blue eyed. He had one of those round, angelic faces, and angel hair, too, golden and curled. He wore a little slanted grin most of the time, but it wasn’t particularly warm or friendly.

  Lenny’s clothes were picked out and bought at Macy’s with an employee’s discount, by his mother.

  Nels’s came from Brooks Brothers after he deliberated over them for a long time.

  Lenny had on a brown suit and a wool tie.

  Nels would not have worn either thing, not ever!

  As they began talking, they discovered three things immediately.

  1. About the same time Lenny’s father was dying a World War II hero, Nels’s mother was dying in childbirth. Then that summer past, Nels’s father died, too. Poor little tyke was alone in the world … almost … almost. (Presque, as they say in Paris; and in Madrid they say casi. See how many languages you can say “almost” in.)

  “All I have is this older sister, but she’s too busy working,” said Nels.

  “All I have is my mother, and she’s too busy working, too,” said Lenny.

  2. Lenny was the big reader, but the smart one was Nels, who claimed he read only Swinburne.

  “Who?” said Lenny. “He’s a poet.”

  “I must have missed him,” said Lenny, who never read poetry except for kinky stuff: HOWL! or Leonard Cohen.

  3. Neither boy had a big collection of friends back home… “or even one,” Nels admitted.

  • • •

  If Nels was comfortable being friendless, Lenny wasn’t. He made excuses for himself. He said how sick he’d been as a kid, how he’d invented Handy as a result and become fascinated by ventriloquism.

  Nels groaned. “Remember I told you I had a sister?”

  “Yes. Annette.”

  “She’s adopted. They adopted her because they didn’t think they could have children…. Then guess what.”

  “You came along.”

  “Right, Lenny. Out of the blue, a mortal surprise to my mother…. But before I made my appearance, Annette was spending most of her time in bed. She was always sick with something. That’s how Celeste came into the picture.”

  “Who’s Celeste?”

  “My sister’s dummy. My father had it made for her. She was this big deal in our house when I was growing up.”

  “Is she wooden?”

  “Wooden. Red wig. She’s like another sister, Lenny. You see, Annette is a real ventriloquist. A professional. She’s considered very good, I guess.”

  “I’d love to see her.”

  “She works for Star Cruises aboard the Seastar.” “Neat!”

  “Except for the fact that I hate that little tree stump of hers!”

  Lenny looked at him to see if there was a possibility he was serious. He was.

  He said, “Celeste had her own room when I was growing up, and more toys than I had…. Now my sister’s a fat pig because of her. You should have seen Annette when I was little, Lenny. She could have been a movie star!”

  “How could Celeste make her fat?”

  “She wanted her that way.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “She’d open this ugly little red mouth and whine: Tick tock tickers! Where’s my Snickers? That’s her favorite food. Snickers bars.”

  “I suppose Annette had nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh, sure, Annette’s partly to blame.”

  Lenny said to himself: Partly.

  Nels said, “My sister is always on this seafood diet.”

  “You can’t get that fat eating seafood.”

  “On my sister’s seafood diet she sees food and eats it.”

  Lenny laughed, but he was thinking, He’s not kidding about the dummy doing that to his sister, is he?

  • • •

  The school was coming into view.

  It was at the top of a big hill.

  Lenny said once that it “loomed” at you just as you rounded a bend and saw the city sign: COTTERSVILLE.

  The bus was met by a dozen boys in light-blue blazers and navy-blue pants.

  All the blazers had gold 7’s over the blue-and-white Gardner insignias.

  Nels raised an eyebrow in a cynical expression as he looked out the window at them and back at Lenny.

  The group began to form a seven, all the while singing:

  Others will fill our places,

  Dressed in the old light blue.

  We’ll recollect our races.

  We’ll to the flag be true.

  And … da da dee da da dee — I can never remember the words, but Lenny got to know them by heart. He loved that song as much as Nels didn’t.

  Nels made up
some vile verses of his own, so irreverent only he’d sing them.

  Anyway, as they walked down the aisle of the bus, Nels asked, “What’s the seven supposed to mean?”

  “Search me,” Lenny said.

  “Well, it must mean something,” said Nels.

  (You better believe it, Big Guy.)

  chapter 3

  Lucy Horner made spareribs that fell off the bone when you touched them with a fork. She made fresh applesauce from the apple trees in the yard. Potato salad with hard-boiled eggs in it.

  After she’d served us this double-layer fudge cake with a butter icing, I was mellowed out on home cooking and into a soaring chocolate high.

  They could have convinced me of anything, even that Little Jack was innocent.

  Innocent … heartsick … and don’t forget: eager to contact me.

  I told Mr. Horner that if his son had been all that eager, it would have been as simple as picking up the phone.

  “He wanted to. He couldn’t.” “I tried to stop him from driving that day,” I said, “but he laughed and called me Felly.”

  “He wanted very badly to see you. He still does.”

  “What for? To say he’s sorry he was bombed?” I wanted to rub it in that Little Jack had been drinking. Somebody had to admit that. The police must have known. Maybe the Horners didn’t.

  But they did. Mr. Horner’s eyes looked past me to some safer place in the distance.

  He said, “I think the two of them had a fight in that car, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been about Jack’s drinking.”

  “He hasn’t touched a drop since,” said Mrs. Horner. She was taking the candles out of the birthday cake to save, same as my mother’d save them for the next cake. When she’d come out with the cake inscribed HAPPY SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, JACK! she’d made some apologetic noises about it being his favorite cake, and even though he wasn’t there it wouldn’t seem like his birthday if she didn’t bake it.

  She had these big brown eyes, and a cherubic face framed by mounds of tangled hair.

  I felt sorry for her, not sorry enough to join her in singing “Happy Birthday,” as Keats did … but sorry a woman like that had to be stuck with such a son.

  “Says he’ll never drink again,” Mr. Horner said.

  I don’t know why they both sounded as though that was some kind of major accomplishment. He was several years away from the legal drinking age.

  I wanted to get back to the alleged fight. I asked Mr. Horner why he thought there’d been one.

  “Jack was crying one night and — ”

  “Crying his eyes out,” Mrs. Horner interrupted. “I’ve never seen our son weep that way.”

  “He could hardly talk, but he did manage to get out that the last words he said to Dib were Shut up!”

  “Dib must have been reminding him he had one DWI and if he got another he’d be in big trouble. That’s what I think,” said Mrs. Horner.

  I jumped right in at that point. “But apparently he didn’t get in big trouble.”

  “Fell, Jack was run into. That old Cadillac crossed the line and rammed into Jack.”

  I couldn’t really give either one of them a hard time. It was as though Central Casting had picked them to be The Nice Parents…. He even smoked a pipe, which gave him a sort of philosophical air: the thoughtful type. A pharmacist by profession, you could imagine him ministering to people, wearing one of those short white coats people wear who can’t have the long one that means MD.

  “We’re not proud of what happened,” Mrs. Horner said.

  “We’re not ashamed of it, either,” her husband said defensively. “Jack didn’t murder anyone, by design or by accident. Jack’s a victim, too.”

  “Well …” said Mrs. Horner.

  “Well what? He is!”

  “Well, he didn’t get charged for driving while drinking. We should be very grateful for that.”

  He shot her a look.

  Then he sighed, and by his posture seemed to cave in with relief that someone was finally saying what had been unspoken all evening. He stretched his legs out in front of him, ran his hand through his thinning hair, and sighed again.

  “In a small town, people are family,” he said.

  She said, “If Mrs. Greenwald, across the street, has a migraine and late at night needs something strong to get her out of pain, Tom’s not going to tell her sorry, you have no prescription.”

  Keats was nodding in agreement and sympathy.

  “The authorities knew Jackie had that one DWI, and his license was suspended…. He could have been in real trouble.”

  “He’s never going to drive again, either. Never! That’s what he says,” Mrs. Horner said.

  “That’s what he says now,” said Mr. Horner.

  “I’m glad he’s not driving this weekend, with all the drinking that’ll be going on there.”

  “I doubt there’ll be drinking,” he said.

  “What kind of a convention doesn’t have plenty of drinking?” she said.

  He said, “Jack’s at a ventriloquists’ convention.”

  “The fellow driving the car? Ever hear of Lenny Last?” Mrs. Horner said.

  Keats snapped a finger. “Of course! Now I remember! Lenny Last and Plumsie!”

  “He was a ventriloquist,” Mr. Horner said. “I never heard of him.”

  “I heard of him and I saw him!” Mrs. Horner said. “He was on The Tonight Show once, and I saw him on an afternoon show, too.”

  “Anyway, that’s where Jack’s heading tonight. He’s going to a convention and selling the dummy,” said Mr. Horner.

  “How did he get the dummy?” Keats asked before I could.

  “It seems Lenny Last was alive for a while,” Mrs. Horner said. “He spoke to my son. He said, ‘Please take care of the dummy for me.’ That’s why I feel so bad about what Jack’s doing.”

  I helped myself to another piece of the cake. It was the real thing, made from scratch, not the airy fluff that you opened a box, added an egg to, and then baked.

  “He’s doing the only sensible thing,” said Tom Horner. “How do you take care of a dummy? You turn it over to someone who knows how to pull its strings.”

  “Tom, it doesn’t have strings. It’s not a puppet.”

  He ignored the correction and turned back to me. “This fellow Last had only one relative: his mother. She’s in a home in upstate New York. I called her to offer my help, and she asked me to place a death notice in The New York Times. She put everything but his hat size in it, said she didn’t care that it’d cost an arm and a leg. And I helped her get the body up there, too. Who was going to do it all if I didn’t?”

  “Tom did everything he could for the old lady.”

  “She had no quarrel with the idea that Jack keeps the dummy. She seemed relieved, if you ask me.”

  “Then our telephone began to ring off the hook,” said Mrs. Horner. “This fellow was eager to buy the dummy.”

  “Are you too young to remember Charlie McCarthy?”

  “I’ve seen him in old movies,” I said. “He always wore a tux and a top hat, and the ventriloquist’s lips moved.”

  “Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,” Keats said. “Sure. Edgar Bergen was Candy Bergen’s father.”

  “The same men who made Charlie made Plumsie,” said Mr. Horner.

  “They were brothers,” she said. “The McElroy brothers. I remember the name because we’ve got McElroys for neighbors.”

  “This fellow trying to buy the dummy is up to a thousand dollars now. One thousand dollars!”

  “That’s why Jack went out to The Hamptons. He thinks the dummy’s probably worth a lot more.”

  I was waiting for Keats to squeal, The Hamptons!

  Mrs. Horner said, “But he did the dumbest thing of all. He forgot Plumsie’s suitcase. Called us last night — ”

  Then it came. “The Hamptons? That’s where I live!”

  “You’re kidding, Kates!” Mrs. Horner just couldn’t g
et the name right.

  “Keats will be heading there tomorrow,” I said.

  “There’s a God in heaven!” said Mrs. Horner. “Do you know a place called Kingdom By The Sea?”

  “Cap Marr’s place, sure,” said Keats. “Everything there is named after a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “And the rooms don’t have numbers, they have names. Jack’s in one called ‘The Raven.’“ Mr. Horner’s face was wrinkled up suspiciously. I didn’t figure him for a poetry lover.

  Keats laughed. “Yes, that’s the place, all right. It’s very romantic. There’s a big fountain in the courtyard. Cap Marr’s dead wife was supposed to be related to Poe … Last year they had a convention of numerologists.”

  I’d never heard any of it. I’d only lived in Seaville under two years. But I remembered the place. It was outside of Amagansett, a huge structure that rambled on behind the ocean dunes. Last time I’d seen it, it looked like an old, abandoned amusement park.

  “Would you take the suitcase to Jack?” Mrs. Horner asked Keats. “It’s got a whole wardrobe for the dummy inside. The convention begins tomorrow and runs to Monday.”

  “Fell?” Keats looked at me. “Will you be finished by tomorrow? Would you come with me?”

  “It sounds good to me, sure.” It sounded better than work. It sounded better than responsibility.

  “Jack thinks he can get a better price if he’s got all Plumsie’s clothes. They’re very fancy duds, Jack says.”

  “I would love to peek in on a ventriloquists’ convention,” said Keats. “I can’t think of anything more bizarre.”

  “And that’ll give Jack the chance to talk with you, Fell,” Mr. Horner said. “I think he wants you to know exactly how the accident happened.”

  And how it went unreported that Jack was drunk, with a suspended license for one DWI already — sure. Jack wanted to fill me in on all that.

  But I was full of good food and pleasant summer-night-backyard vibes. It wasn’t the Horners’ fault they loved their son.

  Keats and Mrs. Homer rambled on as they went in to get Plumsie’s things. I watched some bumblebees duck inside a red rose, leaned back, shut my eyes, and almost forgot Mr. Homer was across from me.

  I sat up and glanced over at him.