Alexander Graham Bell: Master of Sound #7 (2 page)

Now Maisie and Felix wondered if their mother would watch the movie at all.

After Maisie threw up, their mother gave her some ginger ale and a cool washcloth for her forehead. Then she went into her room and called their father. From all the way down the hall, Maisie and Felix could hear her, first yelling, then crying.

“Why did you have to open your big mouth?” Felix groaned, flopping on the bed beside his sister.

“Why didn’t she call Dad back so he could tell her himself?” Maisie grumbled.

The door to Maisie’s room flew open and their mother stood there, her face all blotchy and her eyes red and puffy.

“I guess there are lovebirds everywhere,” she said. “I guess everyone is getting married.”

“You aren’t, are you?” Felix asked anxiously, imagining his mother marrying Bruce Fishbaum.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

“You’re not?” Maisie said hopefully.

Their mother dropped onto the pink pouf.

“Do you feel well enough to watch the movie?” she asked Maisie.

“We don’t have to watch—” Felix began.

“I want to watch the movie,” their mother said. “I made a plan for your first night back home, and no one is going to mess it up. Not Thorne or…anyone.”

“Great,” Maisie said weakly.

“It is great,” their mother said.

The three of them sat miserably watching
My
Fair Lady
as Henry Higgins tried to teach Eliza Doolittle how to speak proper English, all the while falling in love with her. No one made jokes. Their mother didn’t sing along with Eliza. Instead, they sat in silence, munching popcorn and Twizzlers and feeling all mixed-up.

When the movie ended, they watched the credits roll, none of them moving.

“Thanks, Mom,” Felix said. “What a terrific homecoming.”

“I never understand why Eliza falls in love with Henry Higgins when he’s so old,” Maisie said.

Their mother sighed. “Who knows why people fall in love with each other?”

The television screen went dark.

“Do you like her?” their mother asked.

“Who?” Felix said, his heart sinking. He didn’t want to make his mother feel worse.

“You know,” she said. “Agatha.”

“She’s okay,” Maisie said.

“Maybe…,” Felix began slowly. “Maybe you and Dad can get married again. Before it’s too late.”

His mother tousled his hair gently. “It doesn’t work that way,” she said.

Suddenly the overhead light flashed on and Great-Uncle Thorne walked in, tapping his walking stick as he moved.

“Plans, plans, plans!” he said happily, waving his black leather agenda at them.

He studied their faces. “Why so glum?” he asked.

Their mother shrugged.

“General malaise?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked her.

“Something like that,” she said.

Maisie made a mental note to look up that word, too.
Malaise
. Unlike
impertinent
, she couldn’t guess what
malaise
might mean.

“You three need to start making arrangements so that everything will go smoothly,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, opening his agenda.

“Of course,” their mother said agreeably. “We’ll do whatever you need.”

“Good, good,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, flipping pages.

“When’s the big day?” Felix asked him.

“June sixth. Penelope wants to be sure to be married under the sign of Gemini. Her last one was a Capricorn wedding, and we know how that turned out.”

He tapped a page with his long finger.

“Ah! Here we are. The engagement party is one month from today,” he said.

“How can we help?” their mother said.

The idea of making plans seemed to cheer her, Felix thought, relieved.

“Well, Jennifer,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “I think if the party is one month from today, then you can take…let’s see…two weeks, yes, two weeks, to move out.”

“Move out?” Maisie repeated because their mother seemed too dumbfounded to speak.

“I suppose you could move back to the servants’ quarters,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, flipping more pages.

“Back upstairs?” Felix said.

“Have you all gone deaf?” Great-Uncle Thorne boomed. “Obviously I need all of the rooms for the guests. And then after the wedding, Penelope will move to Elm Medona, and she certainly can’t be expected to have a ragtag group of relatives living here once she becomes lady of the house, can she?”

“You’re throwing us out of Elm Medona?” their mother said to Great-Uncle Thorne.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

Their mother smiled with relief.

“That’s good,” she said. “I thought you just said we needed to move out.”

“I did!” Great-Uncle Thorne said, thumping his walking stick. This one had a diamond and sapphire tip that glistened in the glow of the TV. “Can’t you hear correctly?”

“But—” their mother said, confused.

“I’m not throwing you out. I’m asking you to leave. Two entirely different things, Jennifer. You and your charming children have been my guests here, and now it’s time for you to move on.”

Great-Uncle Thorne and their mother stared at each other.

“Well,” their mother said at last.

“Good,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. He snapped his agenda shut. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have so many details to attend to. Must get started.”

They watched him walk across the room and out the door.

“This,” their mother said, “has been a terrible day.”

“I like it upstairs,” Felix said truthfully.

Maisie and his mother glared at him.

“I do,” he said.

“I suppose it’s better than sleeping…on the street,” Maisie said in a huff.

With that, she too walked out.

“I’m glad you’re an optimist,” his mother said. “Always seeing the glass half full.”

Felix smiled. He almost recited the rhyme his father used to say at times like this:
The optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut and the pessimist sees the hole.

But then he thought better of it. This was the perfect time to just be quiet.

M
uch to Maisie and Felix Robbins’s surprise, when they returned to Anne Hutchinson Middle School after spring break, two new students started class. And those new students were twins.

Felix watched as the new girl walked down the aisle, directly to Lily Goldberg’s empty seat. He almost shouted for her to sit somewhere else, as if he could hold that seat for Lily, as if Lily might come back from Cleveland. But Felix knew that was ridiculous. He stared sadly as the new girl sat there trying, he thought, to look invisible.

“Class,” Miss Landers said, “this is Rayne Ziff. She and her twin sister have moved here from San Francisco.”

Everyone turned to stare at Rayne Ziff, impressed. San Francisco was about as far away as a place could be, an exotic city with fog and hippies and the Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, Miss Landers was asking the class what they knew about San Francisco and in reply, they were shouting these very things.

“Earthquakes!” Jim Duncan called out, and Miss Landers wrote that on the board, too.

Felix remembered how she had done this on his first day, and it made him feel wistful.

Bitsy Beal was bragging about her trip to San Francisco, where they stayed at some fancy hotel called the Mark Hopkins and ate Crab Louis and sourdough bread.

“
I
,” Bitsy Beal said in her braggiest voice, “know a lot about San Francisco.”

“Rayne’s father is here for just a few months to teach at the Naval War College,” Miss Landers said, to change the subject.

The Naval War College was on the other end of Newport, a serious-looking compound that Felix had never seen closeup; you had to be in the US Navy to get past the gate.

“Do you know Ghirardelli Square?” Bitsy Beal
was asking the new girl. “And Fisherman’s Wharf?” She glanced around to be sure she was impressing everyone with her sophisticated knowledge of San Francisco.

“Well,” Rayne said, “I know them but I never, like, actually went there. If I could help it,” she added under her breath.

Bitsy looked at her, surprised. “Why not?”

“Because that’s where all the tourists go,” Rayne said.

Someone tittered.

“I think we should read a book that takes place in San Francisco,” Miss Landers said, saving the day as usual. “Now let me see if I can think of one…”

Across the hall, Mrs. Witherspoon was introducing Hadley Ziff to Maisie’s class, but she didn’t let Hadley sit down. Instead, she made Hadley stand in front of the class and tell them where she was from and why they had moved here.

Maisie studied Hadley carefully as she talked about San Francisco and the Naval War College. It was as if Maisie was looking at a photographic negative of herself. Maisie had curly dirty-blond hair; Hadley had curly jet-black hair. Maisie had
green eyes; Hadley’s were a startling light blue. Maisie’s skin was golden; Hadley’s was so white that the word
alabaster
from three vocabulary tests ago came to mind.

“And, in conclusion,” Hadley was saying, “my great-great-grandmother was from Newport. She died young. And tragically.”

As Hadley finally made her way back to her seat, Maisie saw that she had on hot-pink high tops. Maisie glanced down at her own lime-green ones and smiled. When she looked back up, Hadley was pausing by Maisie’s desk, smiling right back at her.

“Harrumph!” Great-Uncle Thorne said at dinner that night when Maisie told everyone about Hadley and Rayne Ziff.

They were eating one of Maisie’s least favorite dinners,
duck l’orange
, which Great-Uncle Thorne said was among the ten most civilized meals in the world. She never asked him what the other nine were because he would tell her, in excruciating detail.

“Their great-great-grandmother was from Newport,” Maisie said.

“Impossible,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “I don’t know anyone by the name of Ziff.”

“She died young,” Maisie told him. “And tragically.”

“Navy brats!”

“What’s wrong with the navy?” Maisie challenged as she tried to hide the greasy dark duck meat under the wild rice, which was also terrible.

“They’re rapscallions, those navy kids,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, motioning for Ayfe the maid to bring him more
duck l’orange
. “They have no real home, no roots. And it shows, the way they run around town without any regard for anyone or anything.”

“Not all navy children—” their mother began.

But Great-Uncle Thorne boomed, “What does it matter? They come and go, like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They’re transient, Jennifer.”

Their mother rolled her eyes.

“I’m glad there are new kids at school,” she said. “It makes it more interesting.”

“And they’re twins,” Maisie said, as if simply by having another set of twins at school meant they were destined to become friends.

“I liked being the only twins,” Felix said. Their school in New York had been overflowing with twins—and two sets of triplets. But here being a twin carried a certain amount of cachet.

Felix looked at his sister, who had grown strangely still all of a sudden. He watched as a slow smile spread across her face.
What is she up to?
he wondered with a sinking feeling.

“Don’t invite them to Elm Medona,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, digging into his third helping of
duck l’orange
. “Who knows what they might take?”

“Take?” their mother said indignantly. “You mean steal?”

“That’s right. My little Rodin I like so much, or the onyx cat from Egypt. They could slip them in their pockets and be on the next boat to Shanghai.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” their mother said. “I’m sure these girls are perfectly nice and not thieves at all.”

As his mother and Great-Uncle Thorne talked, Felix kept his eyes on Maisie. It was almost as if he could see right into her head, as if he could see her brain working.

“I agree,” Felix blurted out. “No new twins at Elm Medona.”

“Felix!” his mother reprimanded.

Maisie narrowed her eyes at her brother.

“Twins,” he said, meeting her gaze, “can read each other’s minds. Right, Maisie?”

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t have to; it was a rhetorical question. She knew that Felix knew exactly what she was thinking: wouldn’t it be fun to have another set of twins go into The Treasure Chest with them? Now all she had to do was figure out how to get back in there.