Throwing Shadows

by E. L. Konigsburg

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Why, back to home we always say that there’s some folk who don’t know that they’re through the swinging doors of opportunity until they’ve got swat on their backside.”

  She picked up her telephone.

  A lady came down the hall, a magnifying glass swinging from a chain around her neck. Her name was Mrs. Fortinbras, only don’t pronounce the s. She looked at my pictures through that magnifying glass, and I felt real proud that someone was taking that much of care with them. She took off her glasses and then she studied on me for a while. Finally, she said, “These photographs are not entirely clear and there are fingerprints on a couple of critical places, but it looks as if you might have a very fine screen there. If you ever want to bring it in and have it examined directly, it can be arranged by our staff.”

  I thanked her real kindly, and I asked her to write her name on the back of one of the pictures and that is how I knowed about that silent s.

  I put the pictures back between the cardboard and then back inside my pocket, and I said to the lady at the desk, “I’ll be back.”

  She didn’t look a bit like she was glad that I had kept the door of opportunity from swatting her on her backside.

  I caught up with my group somewheres between Leonardo da Vinci and the bathrooms in the National Gallery, and I didn’t tell the first person about what I had been up to. I saved it all for Ma because she deserved to know it first.

  Ma was out loud happy when I gave her my news, and she stopped trying to sell the screen altogether after that. Both of us was waiting, just waiting, for something to happen, and we knew it would when school was out for the summer.

  I told Ma that I thought we ought to pay the Freer a visit, and she was right surprised at how firm I was about it, but she didn’t hesitate much either. She loaded us and the Chinese screen into the station wagon and drove us all the way north to Washington, D.C.

  “Do you remember the name of the lady, William?” she asked.

  I told her yep, that it was Fortinbras with a s on the end that you’re not supposed to pronounce and that I had had her to write it on the back of a Polaroid.

  “Good boy,” Ma said.

  We got ourselves to the Smithsonian, that part they call the Freer Gallery, and Ma, she found herself a parking space that wasn’t too awful far so’s we could walk it. We marched us up to the desk there and asked to see Mrs. Fortinbras right off, and I handed the woman, who was a different one this time, the Polaroid with the name writ on the back so’s there’d be no mistake about who it was we wanted and so’s to cut down on the delays.

  The woman behind the desk asked what was it about, and I said, “Same thing’s as is on the other side of that there picture. Mrs. Fortinbras and I talked about it last spring.”

  She asked Ma and me to wait, and she got on her telephone, and we waited for only near a half-hour before Mrs. Fortinbras came on down the hall, still wearing that magnifying glass on a chain around her neck.

  I said, “Hey,” to her and she said, “Hello,” back and then I said, “This here is my ma,” and Mrs. Fortinbras stuck out her hand for Ma to shake it, and Ma did. Ma shook it real good.

  First thing Ma said was, “We brung the screen.”

  “Where is it?” Mrs. Fortinbras asked.

  “In the wagon,” Ma said. “Should we of carried it in?”

  Mrs. Fortinbras said, “Suppose you drive your wagon over to the delivery entrance, and I’ll have our men bring it to one of the examining rooms.”

  Ma said, “Shucks, I lift heavier than that any time I do a estate sale. William and me’ll just carry it on over from the parking lot, seeing’s that I found a good spot not too far from here.”

  Mrs. Fortinbras said that they’d let us put the wagon in the employee lot if we drove it around like she said to do.

  So we backed the wagon on up to the delivery, and two men came and lifted out that screen that was resting in its bed of washed bedspreads from Mrs. Birchfield’s, and that made us feel that already it was important, just like Ma had thought all along.

  We went along with the screen to the examination room where Mrs. Fortinbras was waiting and where the two men lifted it onto a examination table. Mrs. Fortinbras said that she would do the examining of it her own self. Ma and I sat around and waited while Mrs. Fortinbras went over the thing with her magnifier, and then she turned to us and asked would we leave it with her for a few days so’s they could run some tests, and we said, “Sure.” Came time for us to sign a receipt that we had left it of our own free will, and Mrs. Fortinbras asked us what valuation we put on it, for insurance purposes, and Ma said, “Ten thousand dollars.” For the life of me I don’t know where she come up with that figure since all’s we paid was REBNN, that is, a hundred twenty-five.

  We decided to leave our wagon in that employee parking lot all day and use our time for me to show Ma all the things that had been showed to me in the spring. And that Ma is a real good appreciator. She said to me, “You know, William, I do think that had I been city born, I might could get a job in one of these here museums. I think I could of. I got some real delicate feelings about some of these here things.” And it would make you sad to think of Ma wasted in our little old town until you saw Ma’s face as she looked at the things in the museum. That face just had to make a person happy.

  We drove on back to our motel, and we looked for any messages, but there wasn’t any. And the whole next day, too, there wasn’t. We didn’t sit around waiting. We went to visit at Congress and take a tour of the White House.

  The third day we couldn’t decide should we call over at the Freer or wait one more day when a call came right through to our room. It was Mrs. Fortinbras. She said that she was making a recommendation to the Museum that they buy—she said purchase—the screen at the price what Ma said, ten thousand dollars.

  Want to know what Ma said? She said, “Since I been waiting here, Mrs. Fortinbras, my customer back home said that he would double his offer. So’s I’m afraid I’ll have to ask twenty. Thousand, that is.” That’s what Ma said, cool as well water.

  Mrs. Fortinbras talked over the phone some more, and I heard Ma saying,” I’ll do that, Mrs. Fortinbras. Sure, I understand.”

  I was dancing around the room, that’s how anxious I was to know what was going on.

  When Ma hung up, she told me that Mrs. Fortinbras said she needed a written offer from her customers back home.

  “Yeah, Ma,” I said. “Who might that be, seeing’s how we couldn’t peddle the thing for a even five hundred?”

  “Why, Bert and Ray,” Ma answered. “I’m sure if I call them, they’ll come up with a written offer just like Mrs. Fortinbras needs.”

  “What do you think we have there in that screen, Ma?”

  “Some genuine Chinese painting done along about the time that Marco Polo went to China. You know Marco Polo, William?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I can’t remember when he went to China.”

  “Long about the year 1260,” Ma said. “I been doing some reading.”

  When Ma put a call through to Huntington Antiques, Bert answered the phone, and Ma told him pretty quick what it was she was calling about. And the first hint I had that Bert wasn’t too happy about Ma’s getting into the museum and all was that he said that he wasn’t sure he could send her a written offer because what if the government held him to it. The Smithsonian was a government affair. Ma said that gosh, she hadn’t thought about how the Smithsonian was a government affair. I took the phone from her and said to Bert as how he was making his promise to Ma, not to any government, and he oughtta know Ma wouldn’t hold him to no twenty-thousand-dollar promise. He kept on saying “government,” and I kept on telling him that it was between him and Ma, and he could ask Ralph Nader if’n he didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t let go—even though it was long distance—’til he got my point. Finally, he said he’d send Ma a offer in writing saying he was dying to pa
y twenty thousand dollars for the Chinese screen. Ma took the phone back and said to him that he should send a telegram. She said that she would pay him back. She figured it’d be cheaper than living in the motel, which was right expensive.

  We got the telegram and carried it on over to the Museum, and Mrs. Fortinbras told us that the committee that decides whether or not to buy things wouldn’t be meeting until early next month. Would Ma mind leaving the screen? Ma asked was the Museum considering matching the offer we had from Huntington Antiques, and Mrs. Fortinbras said yes, it was. They were prepared to pay twenty thousand dollars for the screen, and Ma said that that being the case, she was prepared to leave it for them to look at some more.

  We got a telegram from the Museum when we’d been back home eight days. It said that the committee had voted to purchase the Chinese silk screen and please to send them a bill and please to keep quiet about it until the Museum itself made the announcement. I just pretended that I hadn’t even read that last part of the telegram, and I called up the newspaper and told them, and a writer from the newspaper came on over to the house and listened to Ma’s story and published two of my Polaroids besides, not even complaining that they were a little out of focus or that they had fingerprints on them in the wrong places.

  We must have got a hundred phone calls the day that story came out in the paper. There was people who had umbrella stands and others who had statues and some who had paintings, but all of them was sure that they had themselves a museum piece and would Ma please to come on over to their place to look at it. One lady told Ma she would love to have her to come over and look at a Rembrandt painting she wanted to sell except she couldn’t tell Ma who she was because she had to keep it a secret so’s she wouldn’t get robbed. Ma said she understood.

  I told Ma that what I couldn’t understand was why Bert and Ray hadn’t called us up to congratulate us. A lot of other dealers had. Ma said that she understood why they had not, and she was feeling pretty sad about it.

  I asked Ma if she thought that they was jealous about the money, and I reminded Ma that she had offered the screen to them first for a hundred twenty-five. Ma said that the money was just a little bit of it. “What do you suppose is the big part of it then, Ma?” I asked.

  “It’s hard for me to know the words for saying it, William,” she said. “I know what it is that’s bothering them. It’s the same thing that bothered them about the panetière, but I don’t know the psychological words for it.”

  Bert and Ray finally called the next day, and I heard what Ma told them. Ma said, “It seems like I got took pretty good, Bert. I found out that that there screen I sold the Museum for twenty thousand dollars was really worth twenty-five thousand. Guess I just still got a lot to learn.”

  Well, that was it.

  Bert and Ray come on over to the house that night and teased Ma about how she got took by the Freer Gallery, and Ma just laughed at herself right along with them.

  Well, that was it.

  Bert and Ray just couldn’t stand being beat out by Ma, who had been their student just a few years ago. Bert and Ray couldn’t stand that Ma already knew more about antiques than they did, not only because she studies on them, but also because she’s got all these delicate feelings about things that you can’t hardly help but notice when you watch her looking at something or touching it so gentle.

  But Ma’s been so wore down byeverything, including living all them years with Pa, that she figures won’t nobody love her if she shows that she knows one thing more than they do.

  But I look back on how good she stuck by her guns with that screen when all them dealers and one decorator laughed us out of their shops, and I figure that if she can stand by her guns with strangers, she soon will be able to with people who have us over to tea. And I figure that I got six more years before I finish school and have to go off and leave her, and I’m going to work on her. I pushed her up them steps to Huntington Antiques, and I got her to go to that Freer, and I figure that I can help her to find out how being grateful to Bert and Ray is something she should always be, but outgrown them is something she already is. By the time I leave home, she’s gonna be ready to face that fact and live with it. She’ll need it, being’s she won’t have me around to push her here and there anymore.

  here’s a glimpse at the latest

  extraordinary novel

  from two-time Newbery Medalist

  e.l. konigsburg

  The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON ON THE SECOND FRIDAY IN September, Amedeo Kaplan stepped down from the school bus into a cloud of winged insects. He waved his hand in front of his face only to find that the flies silently landed on the back of his hand and stayed there. They didn’t budge, and they didn’t bite. They were as lazy as the afternoon. Amedeo looked closely. They were not lazy. They were preoccupied. They were coupling, mating on the wing, and when they landed, they stayed connected, end to end. They were shameless. He waved his hands and shook his arms, but nothing could interrupt them.

  He stopped, unhooked his backpack, and laid it on the sidewalk. Fascinated by their silence and persistence, he knelt down to watch them. Close examination revealed an elongated body covered with black wings; end to end, they were no longer than half an inch. The heads were red, the size of a pin. There was a longer one and a shorter one, and from what he remembered of nature studies, their size determined their sex—or vice versa.

  The flies covered his arms like body hair. He started scraping them off his arms and was startled to hear a voice behind him say, “Lovebugs.”

  He turned around and recognized William Wilcox.

  William (!) Wilcox (!).

  For the first time in his life Amedeo was dealing with being the new kid in school, the new kid in town, and finding out that neither made him special. Quite the opposite. Being new was generic at Lancaster Middle School. The school itself didn’t start until sixth grade, so every single one of his fellow sixth graders was a new kid in school, and being new was also common because St. Malo was home to a lot of navy families, so for some of the kids at Lancaster Middle School, this was the third time they were the new kid in town. The navy seemed to move families to any town that had water nearby—a river, a lake, a pond, or even high humidity—so coming from a famous port city like New York added nothing to his interest quotient.

  Amedeo was beginning to think that he had been conscripted into AA. Aloners Anonymous. No one at Lancaster Middle School knew or cared that he was new, that he was from New York, that he was Amedeo Kaplan.

  But now William (!) Wilcox (!) had noticed him.

  William Wilcox was anything but anonymous. He was not so much alone as aloof. In a school as variegated as an argyle sock, William Wilcox was not part of the pattern. Blond though he was, he was a dark thread on the edge. He was all edges. He had a self-assurance that inspired awe or fear or both.

  Everyone seemed to know who William Wilcox was and that he had a story.

  Sometime after William Wilcox’s father died, his mother got into the business of managing estate sales. She took charge of selling off the contents of houses of people who had died or who were moving or downsizing or had some other need to dispossess themselves of the things they owned. She was paid a commission on every item that was sold. It was a good business for someone like Mrs. Wilcox, who had no money to invest in inventory but who had the time and the talent to learn a trade. Mrs. Wilcox was fortunate that two antique dealers, Bertram Grover and Ray Porterfield, took her under their wings and started her on a career path.

  From the start, William worked side by side with his mother.

  In their first major estate sale, the Birchfields’, Mrs. Wilcox found a four-panel silk screen wrapped in an old blanket in the back of a bedroom closet. It was slightly faded but had no tears or stains, and she could tell immediately that it had been had painted a very long time ago. She priced the screen reasonably at one hundred twenty-five dollars but could not interes
t anyone in buying it. Her instincts told her it was something fine, so when she was finishing the sale and still couldn’t find a buyer, she deducted the full price from her sales commission and took the screen home, put it up in front of the sofa in their living room, and studied it. Each of the four panels told part of the story of how women washed and wove silk. The more she studied and researched, the more she became convinced that the screen was not only very fine but rare.

  On the weekend following the Birchfield sale, she and William packed the screen into the family station wagon and tried selling it to antique shops all over St. Malo. When she could not interest anyone in buying it, she and William took to the road, and on several consecutive weekends, they stopped at antique shops in towns along the interstate, both to the north and south of St. Malo.

  They could not find a buyer.

  Without his mother’s knowing, William took photos of the screen and secretly carried them with him when his sixth-grade class took a spring trip to Washington, D.C. As his classmates were touring the National Air and Space Museum, William stole away to the Freer Gallery of Art, part of the Smithsonian that specializes in Asian art and antiquities.

  Once there, William approached the receptionist’s desk and asked to see the curator in charge of ancient Chinese art. The woman behind the desk asked, “Now, what business would you be having with the curator of Chinese art?” When William realized that the woman was not taking him seriously, he took out the photographs he had of the screen and lined them up at the edge of the desk so that they faced her. William could tell that the woman behind the desk had no idea what she was seeing, let alone the value of it. She tried stalling him by saying that the curatorial staff was quite busy. William knew that he did not have much time before his sixth-grade class would miss him. He coolly assessed the situation: He was a sixth grader with no credentials, little time, and an enormous need. He squared his shoulders and thickened his southern accent to heavy sweet cream and said, “Back to home, we have a expression, ma’am.”