Journey to an 800 Number

by E. L. Konigsburg

  “Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Pacsek. Lilly,” I said. “Sabrina did not tell me what was going on. I guessed. I have a very logical mind. Please let her come to the pool. I promise you I won’t blow your cover. I promise you Sabrina will be waiting by the door of Cleopatra Hall by the time your farewell luncheon begins.”

  “But what about Trina Rose? You know the star of the show. She’s in the employ of the hotel. You’re even related to her.”

  “Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Ander—”

  “Lilly.”

  “Lilly. I can assure you that Trina Rose has more secrets than the chairman of the CIA. And some of them are just as important. She wouldn’t want to know yours.”

  “But I wouldn’t want a nice gentleman like your father to think that I’m doing something …”

  “I promise you I will not tell my father,” I said.

  I asked Sabrina how long she and her mother had been living like this.

  “Three summers,” she answered. “What do you think Mother does in the winter?”

  I thought about jobs that had long vacations. I could only think of schoolteacher, so that is what I guessed.

  “No. We go out only three weeks in the summer. We’ll drive home from here.”

  “I can’t guess what your mother is. It’s hard to tell. She seems to be everything she pretends to be.”

  “She is. My mother is an eight hundred number.”

  “You mean that your mother is toll free?”

  “That’s the least of what I mean,” she said. “Suppose you get a catalogue from Bloomingdale’s Department Store in New York and another one from Neiman Marcus in Dallas and another from a gift shop in New Hampshire. All of them will invite you to ‘Telephone your order toll-free twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Use our toll-free number. Call 1-800 … anywhere in the Continental United States.’ Someone has to be there to answer the phone, and for eight hours a day Lilly is a someone. She sits in a room with ninety-nine other people. Each of them has about eighty catalogues that they take orders from. It is the most anonymous job in the world, speaking to people you’ll never know and who will never know you. Always available. Always a polite voice. Never a face. Never a personality. Never a before. Never an after.”

  “Airlines and hotel chains also have eight hundred numbers.”

  “Yes. They are one degree less anonymous because they handle only one product, but they still sit in a room with a hundred people and they are just a polite voice that you talk to once, that you don’t know where it’s coming from.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Omaha. That’s the home of the catalogue eight hundred numbers.”

  “How did you get started doing conventions?”

  “There was a convention in Omaha. It was a convention of meat packers. Their convention headquarters was at the Howard Johnson Motel. That night was Mother’s birthday, and we had decided to go out to celebrate. It was raining, and we ran inside the first door we came to after we parked the car. And there we were in the hall leading to the ballroom. Everyone was milling around having drinks, and some old gentleman came up to Mother and introduced himself and kept looking at Mother’s bosom. Later we realized that he was looking for her HELLO badge, and when he went to introduce her to someone else, Mother said she left it in her room. The gentlemen knocked themselves out bringing Mother drinks and bringing me Coca-Colas. When the banquet was ready to start, we waited until almost everyone was seated, and we saw there were empty places. We knew they had already been paid for, so we sat down and were served just like everyone else. Mother and I enjoyed the whole evening.

  “When Mother got home from work the next day, we got dressed up again and headed for the Howard Johnson’s. We never even discussed it with each other. Everyone welcomed us back, and we enjoyed the wine and cheese. There was always Coke for me.

  “That summer we decided to go conventioneering. We decide what time we want to take our vacation, and what towns we want to visit. Then Mother calls the eight hundred numbers of several large motel chains in those cities and asks if their convention rooms are available for those dates. If they say they are not, she pretends to be upset and politely asks what organization is meeting there. When we find out, we begin our research.

  “We go to the library. There is a book in the library called The Encyclopedia of Associations. It gives the addresses and the names of 13,589 organizations, all you could ever think of. And some you never could.”

  “Name one I never could.”

  “How about The American Council of Spotted Asses in Fishtail, Montana? Or how about The National Button Society of Akron, Ohio? It has both a junior section and a shut-in section.”

  “Have you ever been to a convention of spotted asses?”

  “Of course not. It’s got only ninety members. Lilly and I, as well as the asses, would be spotted. No, we choose large and preferably rich organizations. Mother prefers professional ones; I, business ones. The professional ones are more interesting, but the business ones are freer with the money.

  “Mother finds out what groups are meeting in the towns we want to visit, and she writes some letters of inquiry so that we can get letters back. We reproduce their letterheads and send the hotel a letter on the faked stationery, saying that Lilly will be arriving at such and such a time and that she is to be a speaker or a workshop leader, and that the hotel is to charge her bill to the organization. Then she signs the president’s name with a slash and some initials, which tells the people that some secretary signed the correspondence in the boss’s absence. You get the president’s name from the same encyclopedia.”

  “We appear at the convention and check into our room. We carry a supply of various HELLO badges, but sometimes—like at the travel agents convention—you need a special one to get on and off the convention floor. That’s when Lilly goes into her act about the lost badges and so on. Sometimes, she picks a last name from the list at the registration desk. Lilly can read just about anything upside down. Sometimes she has to produce a copy of the letter she wrote. One thing or another always works.

  “After that it’s easy. We simply appear at the meetings and at the banquets.

  “Lilly loves the research. She loves being a travel agent or a physical therapist. She loves being something other than anonymous, other than an eight hundred number. I think conventions are part of the war against anonymity. I’ll bet small countries don’t have them.”

  “Have you ever been caught?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “Don’t you just hate never being yourself?”

  “I am always myself. I know when I’m pretending. Pretending is perfecdy normal for me.” She looked at me with those eyes that looked like you could float an ocean liner in and then said, “It’s you, Maximilian Stubbs, who doesn’t know who you are.”

  “I don’t know what makes you say that.”

  “Your HELLO badge.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t have a HELLO badge.”

  “Yes you do. It’s always the same. It’s always the Fortnum crest on your blue blazer. It’s like you have to look at that to know who you are.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I never pretend to be something I’m not. It even got me into trouble with a kid named Manuelo when we were in Tulsa.”

  “Everyone pretends. Everyone with everyone some of the time and everyone with some people all of the time. Except freaks. They’re the only ones who can’t pretend. But I’ve told you that.”

  “I don’t think Trina Rose pretends.”

  “What do you call performing?”

  “But that’s part of her. If it’s pretend, it’s real.”

  Sabrina smiled. “Yes, it is.”

  “Woody doesn’t pretend.”

  “Yes, he does, Max. Woody is too real not to have some pretend about him.”

  “What’s your real name?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s Pac
sek,” she said. “And maybe it’s Stubbs.”

  “You are infuriating,” I said.

  It was 12:15. Sabrina got up and said, “Just call any eight hundred number. One of them is bound to be my mother.”

  Then Sabrina left.

  When I went back to Suite 1424, Trina Rose was still asleep. The first call from Mordred still had not come. I shook her gently and began the awakening process. It was a little early, but I wanted to talk to her.

  After Trina Rose had had her second cup of coffee, I said, “I just saw Sabrina. She and her mother were at a convention of physical therapists.”

  “Invite them up,” Trina Rose said. “I’d like to meet them.”

  “They’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” I said. “I had a talk with Sabrina. I also had a talk with Father, and I want to know about when my mother was Sally Ghost.”

  “That’s when I met her. She was this lost girl, freaked out and scared. I had an old station wagon, and we teamed up and headed from San Francisco to New Mexico. Everyone said that there was good clean air outside Taos, and that’s where I took Sally Ghost.

  “Woody took us in and gave us everything we needed: food and love and kindness. He gave that to everyone who crashed his place, but Sally Ghost was special to him from the minute we arrived. Everyone saw it. She became his pet.”

  “Like Ahmed?”

  “No. Much more than bloody Ahmed.”

  “I know about them,” I said.

  “Know what, Love?”

  “Know that my mother was pregnant when they got married.”

  “Do you know that now, Love?”

  “Yes. I just found out. Last night.”

  “That’s the kind of guy bloody ole Woody is. He married Sally Ghost and made her Mrs. Woodrow Stubbs. He was crazy about that girl, and he loved you like you was his very own. Just the way he did Sally Ghost.”

  “What do you mean? He loved me like I was his very own? My mother was pregnant when they got married.”

  “Yes. But not by him, Love. Not by him. Sally Ghost was pregnant when we arrived at the ranch. Didn’t he tell you that, Love?”

  There was an air space in my throat that swelled like a small balloon, and my heart developed sharp edges and began flipping like a match box bruising me inside. I swallowed that balloon and let it tamp down all the screaming that was inside of me. I did not cry.

  “Didn’t you know that, Love?” Trina Rose asked.

  “No,” I said, fighting that balloon that had risen again in my throat. “Then tell me, Trina Rose, who is my father?”

  “Why, I’d say Woody is. Wouldn’t you, Love?”

  I asked nothing more.

  There were three more days before I was to fly back to Havemyer. I thought I might check out of Suite 1424 and move into the camper so that I could spend more time with Woody. But I decided against that. I decided instead to play it the same way as I had been, to keep up my Trina Rose Vegas routine, and that is what I did. There was no reason to worry Woody by letting him know what I knew. There were many questions to be asked, but I would ask them slowly, and I would start asking them in Pennsylvania. I would just enjoy being his son, Bo, even if I didn’t enjoy his camel.

  On our last shopping trip, Trina Rose decided to buy Mother and Mr. Malatesta a wedding present. True to Trina Rose’s style, she bought them something huge that they wouldn’t use. She bought them an electric wok and told me to take it back on the plane with me. It sat between Woody and me as we drove to the airport.

  Woody was wearing his Pinocchio hat and the red scarf around his neck. I wore one of my cowboy shirts and my new boots and I had my blazer thrown over my lap. Woody pulled a clipping from his shirt pocket. “I found this in the paper today,” he said, handing it over to me.

  The article was about the tallest man in the world, eight feet two inches. He had just died. He was known as the gentle giant.

  I reached across the wok box and took it from him.

  “Thought you might like to save it for Sabrina.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I laid it on the wok box that was between us and folded it. When I picked it back up I saw printed on the wok carton: ORDER REPLACEMENT OR ADDITIONAL PARTS. CALL 1-800-298-4520, 24 HOURS A DAY, INCLUDING SUNDAYS.

  “I don’t know if Sabrina collects dead freaks,” I said. “Besides, I don’t know how to get in touch with her.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if she gets in touch with you,” he said. “She knows who you are.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think she thinks she does.”

  I tucked the clipping into the breast pocket of my Fortnum blazer and put my blazer on top of the wok box. I lifted both of them up and shifted them to my other side. Then I slid over, closer to Woody. He lifted an arm from the steering wheel and pulled me to him, and I rested against him as we drove to the airport.

  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 interest 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.”