Father's Arcane Daughter

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Well, Heidi began to cry when they buried the dog. She warmed up with little sighs while Michel and Paulette were making their cemetery. By the time Paulette is waiting in the railroad station, Heidi had begun real shoulder-shaking sobs and shudders. Something about that poor, bruised, lonely little Paulette reached Heidi and made her ache. She wept like a pitcher of iced tea in July, and when the lights went on, I saw that she was a sight.

  I didn’t want us to leave our seats until the theater emptied. Luellen, who knew that she would be mistaken for our mother, agreed. We started out as soon as everyone else had left.

  What we hadn’t counted on was the line of people waiting to get into the next show. Luellen and I walked out with Heidi, red-eyed and sobbing between us. To add to the vision, my sister was sucking her thumb. I couldn’t stand it. I pulled her thumb from her mouth and didn’t realize until I saw the look of the lady across the velvet rope how cruel I must have seemed. I only hoped that Maurice would be waiting at the curb so that I could immediately dissolve into a dark back seat with my wet lump of a sister.

  Mother took one look at Heidi and demanded to know what had happened. Luellen explained that it had been a very sad movie.

  “What is really the matter, Heidi?” Mother asked. Her voice was shrill. “What is it?” she asked again, tipping Heidi’s head upward. “Tell Mother what is bothering you.”

  Heidi shook her head and said nothing. She edged over toward me and took my hand. When she wiped her eyes it was with the hand that held mine, and my palm became moist with her tears. She would say nothing. Mother said, “I know! It’s that Caroline again!” Then she threw up her hands and left.

  I looked at my sister and said, “Haven’t I always stuck by you?”

  She nodded.

  “You know,” I said, “how hard it is for you to stop sucking your thumb?” She nodded. “Well,” I said, “you’re my bad habit. Don’t worry. I won’t give you up. I won’t let them lie to me.”

  eleven

  “Do you still have the envelope?” she asked. ‘Right here” I answered. I took it from the inside pocket of my jacket. “I often think when I watch the Academy Awards Show on television, when the announcer says, ‘May I have the envelope, please?’ that I already have the envelope, please”

  “But you don’t have to open it to know who the winner is”

  “Correction. I know who the winners are.”

  THE NEXT THURSDAY I waited until we were at her apartment before I asked, “Why can’t Heidi come with us anymore?”

  “Simple!” she answered. “I have ’been forbidden to king her.” She gave me a smile that looked like a substitute for tears.

  “Who forbade you?”

  “Father.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is a coward!”

  How could she call Father a coward? How could she of all people? Father who brings her coffee with one sugar and a dash of cream and- Father who smokes a cigar and wears a golfing sweater with her—how could she call him a coward? ‘’What right have you to say such a thing?” ‘

  “As much right as you have.”

  “You do not!” I said. “I am his son, and I would never call him a coward.”

  “Well, I am his daughter, and I would.”

  “You are not. You should not.”

  There was a deep quiet. She pulled in her breath and said, “Is that the way it is with you, Winston? Is that the way? You don’t believe that I am Fathers daughter?”

  “Its not that… It’s just that you don’t seem like …” Then I couldn’t finish that thought, so I said, “If you were really his child, you wouldn’t call him-a. coward.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe if I really were his child, I would not call a handicapped sister, handicapped. I would call her Heidi instead of Hilary, and I would make believe that she is. cute.” She stood up and walked into the kitchen. I followed. From the back of a kitchen cabinet, from behind an electric Sunbeam coffee percolator, she took out an envelope. We walked back into the living room, and she plopped down on the sofa. Tm tired,” she said. “Exhausted.” She held the envelope between her thumb and index finger. “I’m tired of all the pretense. Yours and your mother’s and your father’s. Mine, too.” She held the envelope out toward me. “In this envelope is the evidence that establishes beyond a doubt whether I am Caroline Adkins Carmichael or whether I am not. I want to give you this envelope, Winston. I want you to take it home with you. You do whatever you like with it: open it, burn it, use it as a bookmark. You decide whether it is more important to know for sure who I am or whether it is enough to know what I am.”

  I took the envelope.

  “I’ll take you home now,” she said.

  We said nothing to each other all the way home. The envelope rested on my lap,.heavy as fate.

  I CAME IN through the breakfast room. It was still early. Heidi was sitting at the table—early day at Holton Progressive. I. sat down across the table from her. How many Thursdays had it been since we had sat like that? She seemed to catch the mood. “What’ll we do today, Winston?” she asked. And she smiled because she really didn’t expect an answer. Then she saw the envelope. “Did Caroline give you Joyce’s cream pie?”

  “Not today.”

  “Did Caroline give you that yellow envelope?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “A proper case of identification, my dear girl.” I lifted it up toward the light “Witihin this plain yellow wrapping is sealed the answer to…”

  Heidi reached up and grabbed the envelope from my hand. She pinned it under her fist on the table. “Don’t open it, Winston. Don’t open it. Rip it up. Hide it. But whatever, whatever, whatever you do, don’t open it.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. I studied her face. She was scared. My sister, the golliwog, was frightened. I had never seen her like that. So alone, so frightened. A kind of fright all the more terrible because she was now fully aware of her isolation. “Why are you frightened, Heidi?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to know what is in the envelope.”

  “Aren’t you tired of being lied to? Don’t you want to know?”

  “Yes. I am tired of being lied to. And no, I don’t want to know. That envelope doesn’t have the lies that hurt. Whatever that envelope says doesn’t matter.” She looked down at her fist, set heavily like a paperweight on the envelope. “You said, remember, that you wouldn’t abandon me?”

  I won’t.

  “Will you do something brave for me?”

  “What? What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to kidnap me.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How can I kidnap you?”

  “In a taxi. Just like Caroline.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “to where?”

  She looked up at me as if she couldn’t possibly understand my innocence. “Why, to Caroline’s, of course.”

  And then I knew what I had suspected that day of the Christmas reception and the days following when Heidi struggled with a fork and the days after that when she had gone to Bunny Waldheim’s knowing that she was being measured. I knew something about my sister Heidi—Hilary. I knew that she had all the makings of a brave soul. She had the makings but not the focus. And I knew that I had to answer her bravery with some of my own. I would kidnap her. In a taxi. To Caroline’s.

  “Your first executive decision,” said.

  She laughed. “I guess it was. I’ve made many others involving a hundred thousand times more money, hut there was never one more important. I can close my eyes now and see the look on the cab driver’s face when you told him you would sign for the taxi fare.”

  “He held you hostage in the cab while I ran up and got Caroline.”

  She laughed. “You see it really was a kidnapping. Caroline paid the ransom ”

  “Twelve dollars and sixty cents cab fare.”

  “You weren’t worth much more than that then.” She put on an old Heidi
pout, and I said, “Well, maybe thirteen dollars even.”

  WE WENT UP to Caroline’s and she gave us rye bread and butter while she called Bunny Waldheim and asked her to hurry over.

  “What are you trying to do?” Bunny Waldheim asked.

  Heidi answered. “Be normal.”

  Caroline looked at Heidi and said, “You’ll never be that Heidi. If I have, given you hopes for that then forgive me.”

  Bunny Waldheim bent down toward Heidi and tried to soften what Caroline said, “What Caroline means…”

  Caroline wouldn’t let her finish. “What Caroline means is just what she said. What Caroline means is that if Heidi wants to ‘be normal’ she can just go on home and continue the pretending. If Heidi wants to develop what she has—a fine mind—and if Heidi wants to work—and I mean really work at overcoming her disabilities… then I’ll agree to call her father and argue her case.”

  It seemed to me that Caroline could have been kinder. I put my arm around Heidi’s shoulder and attacked, “Why did you say ‘her father’? I asked. “Why didn’t you say my father’? Or ‘our father’?”

  Caroline’s look was cold and tired. “You have the envelope,” she said. “You have your answer. Which truth do you want to live with?”

  twelve

  “I’VE LIVED with truth in a sealed envelope for almost two dozen years,” I said.

  “How-often have you been tempted to open it?” she asked.

  “In my days of rage and during my adolescence, at least once a week. Whenever I got angry, I would want to open it. Anger at you. Anger at her. Anything could prompt me to want to open the envelope. And anything could stop me.”

  “I think I know what really stopped you.”

  “What?”

  “Learning to live with a more important truth.”

  I shook the envelope, it was now ochred with age, the paper was almost powdery. “What do you suppose is in here? A confession? Do you suppose Caroline made a confession and sealed it in here?”

  “The envelopes’ not thick enough for that,” she said. She walked around to the front of her desk. Her walk was smooth and heel-toe, only a brother could recognize some vestige of the galumphing golliwog. And this brother chose not to—knowing the price in pain and practice that she had paid in learning to walk.

  “I think today is the day to open it,” she said. “You may not know what is in here, but you do know, don’t you, what it will tell us?”

  I nodded. “How long.have you known?” I asked.

  “A long time. I’ve been certain since Father died.” She picked up the manilla folder from her desk. “How long have you known?”

  “I think I started knowing when I saw Father’s cigar. butts in her apartment. I had begun suspecting that Saturday we visited her unexpectedly and found Father there. But I didn’t recognize what it was until much later. I was in college, enjoying the leisure of a life of literature—a life she gave me, really—when I realized that she loved him. I realized then that by being our sister she had sacrificed ever being his wife.”

  “Do you suppose Father knew?”

  “Some part of Father knew. But Father had grown callouses over all the important nerve endings. He recognized that he felt different—happier—with Caroline than he did with anyone else. But he would never have allowed himself to call it the kind of love that it was. He went along with the myth that she was our sister because he was always uncomfortable with strong emotion, and it suited him better to think that the love he felt for Caroline was the love a father feels for a daughter. I’ll bet, though, that he spent many a sleepless night worrying about how he felt about Caroline.”

  One of the buttons on her desk lit up. She reached across and answered, “Hilary Carmichael here.” She listened and said, “I’ll see him tomorrow.” She pushed the button to off and held the famous old envelope to the light. Then she turned to me and smiled, “How many times have you done that?”

  “Over the course of the past twenty-three years? I’d say about a thousand—about once a week—taking time off for a doctoral thesis and a honeymoon.”

  “Open it today,” she urged. “Today will be a good day to do it.”

  She handed me the envelope. I took an enamel-handled letter opener from her desk. The paper was so old that there was almost no tearing sound. Two pieces of paper fell out. They had been wrapped in a blank sheet of stationery from Finchley School.

  One was the academic record of Caroline Adkins Carmichael at Finchley School. There were some D’s, but mostly C’s. Math had been dropped in her junior year and her senior year, too. The other was the record of the school testing program. On the individualized Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Test, Caroline had scored 92. On the Stanford Binet, 97.

  Heidi and I smiled at each other. Of course. The Caroline who came back had to be far more intelligent than the real one. She had to be smart enough to be two people.

  “I think now that you are ready for this/’ Heidi said. She walked around to the presidential side of her desk and handed me the manilla file folder she had been fingering all morning.

  “Here’s some of the best reading you’ll do since the Rubiyiat of Omar. Khayyam” she said.

  CONFIDENTIAL REPORT ON MARTHA SEDGEWICK

  Submitted hy Miss Agatha Trollope, Headmistress, TimMey School

  IT WAS WHILE the Carmichael family was in Palm Beach in the spring of 1953 that the woman calling herself Caroline Carmichael made her first visit to me. I was not surprised to see her. I knew that she would appear sooner or later.

  She came to the point of her visit quickly. “Miss Trollope,” she said, “I’ve decided to return to college. I would like to get a bachelor degree, so I shall not be returning to the junior college I attended before… before… my disappearance. There will be no need for me to transfer any of my credits from there, but the University does insist upon having my high school record. That’s why I’m here. I was wondering, Miss Trollope, if you still kept copies of records from, say, as long ago as when I graduated.”

  I smiled as I began to suspect what was on the lady’s mind. “ And, may I ask, is the University requiring you to take some entrance exams? Are they subjecting you to a testing program?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, they are.”

  I knew now what the woman wanted. I was half-willing to comply. I liked her well enough, but I wanted to know more. “Why do you choose to return to college?” I asked.

  “I have a project. I want to get a degree in special education. I want to.teach the handicapped.”

  “All the handicapped?”

  “A single person hardly can be expected to teach all the handicapped,” she said.

  “A single person can expect to teach a single handicapped person.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Yes, she can.”

  “A noble notion,” I said. I studied her a long time.

  At last I said, “The resemblance is remarkable, but,” I added softly, “you are a much nicer person.”

  She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said. “If Caroline Adkins Carmichel had had the opportunities I have had, perhaps she would be as nice as you think I am.”

  “Perhaps,” I answered, “but, of course, she could never be as intelligent.” Then, “You really must love that little girl. What is her name?”

  “Heidi. Her real name is Hilary, but her mother calls her Heidi because it is what she wants her to be—something sweet from a storybook. But it is not for.her as much as it is for the boy, Winston. He needs to have Heidi freed so that he can be.”

  “They are lucky children to have an intelligent woman like you helping them.”

  She laughed. “Yes,” she said, “if I were as stupid as Caroline Carmichael, I would never be able to pass the entrance exams for the University. I would have to go back to some place like Candlewood, someplace where one only needs a good family name.”

  “I won’t forge incorrect records,” I told her.

>   She gasped.

  I laughed. “But I will agree to say that they have been lost.”

  “What will you do with the old records?” she asked.

  I got up and made my way into the dining room. From the china closet I removed a yellow envelope. “I’m going to give those to you.”

  “You’ve been expecting me, I see.”

  “I’ve had these records out since the day of that fancy reception. I first suspected then.”

  Martha smiled. She took the envelope from me. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Have the University call me. I’ll tell them whatever they need to know.”

  Thus I began my long acquaintance with Martha Sedgewick. From subsequent visits I learned the following facts of her life as they apply to her masquerading as Caroline Adkins Carmichael. I set down these facts, not in the order I learned them, but in the order they happened.

  In 1952 Martha Sedgewick returned to the United States from Ethiopia where she had lived for sixteen years. She had gone to Ethiopia with her mother and father who were teachers. She returned an orphan. She did not return to her native Chicago, but went instead to Pittsburgh to find the sister of Harris, the man she had loved and worked with in Ethiopia. Harris’s sister was dead. He had no other living relatives, and neither did she. She was depressed. She didn’t want to adjust to Eastern Standard Time, and she didn’t want to face Eastern Standard people, So she accepted night duty— 11:30 P.M. to 7:30 A.M.—at the nursing home in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh.