Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
“When I grow up and have children,” Isadora said, “I will never be so cruel as to subject them to emotional turmoil like this.”
I pledged myself to the avoidance of becoming an unfair adult. “On my next birthday, I’m not going to accept being eighteen. I’m going to insist on being sixteen and move backward from there.”
Gertrude said, “If we have to pay a price to have dinner with Laurel and Hardy, why don’t our parents just beat us with sticks?
This search isn’t going to go well. It’s already not going well.
I’m a nervous wreck. It would be more humane to just beat us with sticks and then let us go to the dinner. ”
Isadora threw up her hands in exasperation. “If only it were that easy. Mother and Father aren’t the kind who beat people with sticks.”
“You never know,” Harry said. “Kaiser Wilhelm seemed like an okay guy, everyone’s friend.
Then the Germans sank the Lusitania, twelve hundred people drowned, and the next thing you know, there’s a world war and ten million people are killed.
So, after all, he turned out to be the kind of guy who would beat you with a stick, and even worse. ”
“Whoever said the kaiser was an okay guy—those people were idiots,” Isadora declared. “Anyway, Daddy and Momma wouldn’t have any interest in sinking ships and ruling Germany. So what does this clue mean? We better find the third envelope quick.”
As the day progressed, we didn’t stop our search to have lunch.
We didn’t even think about lunch. We lived for the hunt, and Rafael was as engaged in the mission as we were.
He was so enthusiastic and got so worked up that we had to put him on a leash and take him out to pee three times.
When the clue in the fifth envelope proved to be crushingly difficult to solve, clever Rafael earned our everlasting gratitude by finding the sixth for us.
He could make no more sense of the clue than the rest of us, but his nose eventually led him to the conservatory, among the palms and ferns and orchids, where the envelope was taped to the underside of a teak bench.
We gave him two dog biscuits and hoped that he might come to our aid yet again and quickly find the remaining three, but whatever trace scent had drawn him to number six did not exist on any further envelopes.
By our own wits, we acquired the ninth and final clue, which consisted of Dad has gone early to bed.
That was the easiest clue of all, aimed at Harry, and he solved it in a minute flat.
Four Laurel and Hardy shorts had been released in 1928, and Early to Bed was Harry’s favorite of the four.
Dad—Franklin—always sat in the same seat when watching a movie in the Bram’s screening room.
The five of us flew through the house and found the ceramic turkey eighteen minutes before the deadline, under the theater seat.
A triumphant procession ensued, concluding in the kitchen, where the treacherous adults were still cooking and the air was redolent of a feast to come.
Mrs. Symington said that Laurel and Hardy had called to express their regrets for not being able to attend the December dinner after all, but members of the Clyde Tombaugh Club were too hard-boiled to fall for a razzing that obvious.
Having been taught the proper way to arrange a place setting, we four set the table.
We were so high on the day’s adventure and on the prospect of a turkey that was not ceramic, the task was almost as much fun as the hunt had been.
After we all freshened up and changed into our best clothes, we gathered at five o’clock for a long dinner marked by much laughter.
Here are a few things I thought that evening, now more coherent and polished than when I first thought them.
On this holiday when we give thanks, we are expressing gratitude not merely for the food and drink, but as well for family and friends, for this world of great beauty and the opportunities it offers.
We’re giving thanks for our life, because even when life is hard, there are joys to be had in living it, even if those joys come from finding ways to escape the hard world for a while, as books allowed me to escape.
Happiness and despair are choices to be made.
If I hadn’t embraced books and lived in the worlds within their pages, I might have sunk into despair, unable to see the light even when it shone.
Had that happened, I wouldn’t have survived to be brought here by Loretta and Franklin, to know Izzy and Gertie and Harry, to experience Thanksgiving and so much else.
Sometimes it might seem that hope is for fools, but it is only such fools who have any chance of making it through the long night to a new dawn.
After the dishes had been washed and dried and put away, after we had said good night and gone to our rooms, I remained in a state of elevated happiness not far short of rapture, grateful for relief from evil, pain, and loneliness.
I went onto my balcony. The night was cool, but I was not chilled.
The overcast had begun to break up. Among the clouds were jigsaw pieces speckled with stars.
The garden lights had been extinguished.
With the softest lamplight at my back but otherwise darkness all around, I felt as I had on my first day here, when I had stood on this balcony in warm sunshine.
I had come from slavery to freedom, a miraculous journey that had taken less than a tank of gasoline; as measured in consequences, however, it was a voyage of ten thousand miles.
I could not rightly wish for more, and yet I felt that if the balcony fell away from the house and crashed to pieces on the terrace twenty feet below, I would not go with it.
I would stand in midair, unfazed, and then would step forward into an even greater freedom the nature of which I could not yet imagine.
As I inhaled deeply, the clouds opened as slowly as the shell of a mollusk, revealing a moon as round and white and perfect as a pearl.