by Anne Nesbet
“You perhaps have experience with pigeons, Augusta?” asked Mr. Bertmann.
Experience with pigeons? Apart from seeing them fly blurrily by in every city she had ever lived in with her parents, none. She shook her head and felt a whiff of disappointment emanating from Mr. Bertmann.
“Ach, too bad!” he said. “But still: perhaps not personal experience with pigeons? Perhaps a family connection?”
Now Gusta really was perplexed.
“What do you mean, Mr. Bertmann?”
She did not see how a human person could be related, as family, to pigeons.
“Ah, well,” said Mr. Bertmann. “If you don’t mind, I will explain. But to explain, I will need to ask you some questions. About your heritage, Miss Neubronner, and about our pigeons.”
He cleared his throat as if he were about to enter into very important, serious topics of conversation, but of course Gusta simply wondered what he could possibly mean by any of that.
“When I was first told your name, child, I thought I recognized it: Neubronner! There are not so many little Neubronners running around the villages of the state of Maine. Agree?”
Gusta agreed, but only very quietly, on the inside. She still wasn’t sure where the oculist was heading.
“And then I kept thinking, and my thought was, your father, little Augusta Neubronner, might very likely be a fellow exile from the Old World. I mean: from Germany. Is that the case, child?”
Now Gusta felt just the faintest tinge of alarm. She pulled on the fingers of her right hand, trying to figure out where all these questions were leading, and what it was right or safe to say.
“Yes?” she said. “He was born in Germany.”
Surely that was vague enough?
But Mr. Bertmann’s eyes lit up. “Indeed! Now let us see how far the Goddess of Coincidence is willing to take us! Gusta, was his father, your German grandfather, by any chance, an apothecary?”
Gusta looked at him in confusion. Now she really was flummoxed. “What’s an apothecary, Mr. Bertmann?”
“Someone who crushes up powders and mixes tinctures and in general dispenses medicines to keep the ailing as hearty as possible.”
Someone who sold medicines!
“I don’t know, Mr. Bertmann,” said Gusta. “I don’t think so. I never met my grandfather, but I know he played the French horn. The Waldhorn. I never heard about medicines.”
“Or about experiments with pigeons?”
“Pigeons?” said Gusta. What could pigeons possibly have to do with medicines or horns?
“Ah, well,” said the oculist, that spark of wild hope in his eyes somewhat subsiding. “Of course, it was foolish of me to assume. But sometimes, you know, the coincidence does bump into you, like a door you forgot was open. There was an apothecary, in Germany, when I was a younger man, who made wonderful experiments with pigeons. He was, in fact, a kind of inspiration to me — and his name was Julius Neubronner. So you see why I hoped. Foolish of me. But there it is.”
“I never heard of my grandfather experimenting in any way with pigeons,” said Gusta. But she felt a little sorry for the oculist now. “What kind of experiments? Feeding them pills?” (And that thought made her feel rather sorry for the pigeons.)
“Oh, no!” said the oculist. “No, not at all, at all, at all! I haven’t explained properly. His experiments — his famous, tremendous experiments — were not medicinal, but photographic.”
“Photographic,” echoed Gusta.
“Photographic!” said Mr. Bertmann with great emphasis and definition. “Precisely so! He trained his pigeons to take quite wonderful photographs.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Bertmann,” said Gusta. “But I’m not sure — I don’t think pigeons could possibly take photographs. They don’t even have hands.”
The oculist nodded, enthusiasm for these remarkable pigeons and this remarkable long-ago apothecary lighting up every corner of his face.
“That is the beauty of his project, Augusta,” he said. “He built the tiniest little cameras and set them up with a mechanism to take a photograph like that”— he snapped his fingers lightly in the air —“Au-to-ma-ti-cally! While the pigeon flew through the air!”
“Is that really true?” said Gusta.
“It is really true,” said the oculist. “It is actually really, truly true. Julius Neubronner is the father of the great and underappreciated art of pigeon photography. Look at this, young Augusta: it is one of my most cherished possessions. I brought it all the way across the ocean with me.”
And he fished a small envelope out of his coat pocket, and in that envelope was a little square of cardboard that he held out now to Gusta so carefully that you might think it had been made of pounded silver and flattened gold.
It was a photograph, but at first Gusta couldn’t see what it was a picture of — there was a lot of rough scrubbly stuff, and what looked a little like a castle, but from a very odd angle, and there, where Mr. Bertmann was pointing, an astonishing pale feather’s worth of pigeon wing, in the upper corner of the image.
“Self-portrait with landscape,” said Mr. Bertmann. “Oh, that clever, clever bird! She managed to get a bit of herself into the picture. So everyone can know it was really a pigeon who took the picture.”
And then he added, as if it were a secret he was spilling, “It seems almost impossible, does it not? But I share with you now, Augusta Neubronner, that that is my most cherished dream. To build a tiny camera for my talented, intelligent pigeons! Well, we must all have dreams — dreams with wings, dreams with quickly clicking little shutters. Why don’t you bring Mabel downstairs now, like a helpful assistant, and I will show you where I’ve gotten to with my new secret project. Come along, come along!”
Mr. Bertmann gave her some seeds to help with the luring of Mabel, and then went downstairs ahead of Gusta, to give her practice in gathering up pigeons. Fortunately it turned out Mabel was perfectly willing to be lured.
“You’re wanted downstairs!” Gusta simply said to Mabel, gathering her into her hands.
Mabel didn’t protest in the slightest.
In the main room Mr. Bertmann was already beaming with pride at one of his worktables.
“Good, good!” he said to Gusta and Mabel, and then he showed them the astonishing thing that he had been working on, he said, for a very long while already, his secret project: the tiniest of little cameras, still all in bits and pieces. Eventually, he said, it would have a spring he could set to trip the shutter way up high in the air.
“Can you believe that?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Gusta honestly.
The oculist laughed.
“First things first,” he said. “First we must make you comfortable with each other, the person and the pigeons.”
He slipped Mabel into a little travel cage and said, “Now, Gusta, this will be part of your work for me, yes? Why don’t you run off homeward with our Mabel, and send her flying back to me before you step inside your grandmother’s house. Then I will know you are safely home, and Mabel and you will both have had some practice.”
“Yes, Mr. Bertmann,” said Gusta.
So she did just that: she carried the pigeon cage back up Elm Street, and ever so gently tossed Mabel into the air at the corner of Hoopes Road. And mottled Mabel vanished as quickly as a dream, rose blurrily into the blurry air, and flew away home.
I don’t understand why a grown man needs to play games with pigeons,” said Gramma Hoopes, “but as far as the note-taking and accounts-keeping and so on, that sounds like good training. In fact, I think Marion might as well get some use of that kind out of you, too. Marion?”
Marion looked up from the desk in Gramma Hoopes’s room where she was working over a large ledger book, dull red in color.
“Yes, Mother?” she said.
“I’m saying we might apprentice Augusta here to you, so she can get extra practice with accounts. Mr. Bertmann’s interested in her as a recordkeeper.”
; “Oh, are you nimble with numbers, dear?” asked Aunt Marion.
“I don’t know,” said Gusta. “I guess perhaps so. I hope so.”
It seemed like something a person would want to be, “nimble with numbers.”
“Come over here, then, and I’ll show you a thing or two about keeping accounts.”
Gusta pulled the stool over to Aunt Marion and looked dutifully at the ledger book, which looked as incomprehensible as account books usually look, with lists of things written down the left-hand side of the page, and then lines of numbers running in columns.
“Good, then,” said Gramma Hoopes with a satisfied nod, and she turned to leave the room. Marion and Gusta watched her leave, and as the door of the room swung shut behind her, both of them let out identical little sighs. And those matching sighs broke some thin, lingering layer of ice Gusta hadn’t even known had still been there, keeping her and Aunt Marion at arm’s length from each other. Now Gusta and her Aunt Marion glanced at each other, and very similar giggles bubbled up from deep within them. Suddenly Gusta could see that Aunt Marion was secretly much younger on the inside than she let people know.
“Look here. It’s not so difficult, really, if you are friendly with numbers,” said Aunt Marion. “I just keep all the expenses listed, like so, down the side of the page here — all the boys’ clothing, flour and so on, whatever the garden doesn’t grow, coal for the furnace, boots for me this year because my old ones fell apart, the new chicks in the spring — and income listed over here.”
There weren’t a lot of line items on the “income” part of the page — Board (State); Board (R. S.); eggs — but then one line had a pretty substantial sum by it and only a check mark for a label.
“What’s that?” said Gusta. She had to get her face pretty close to the paper to see the words and numbers there.
“Oh,” said Aunt Marion hurriedly. “That’s just the fund for improvements. That’s quarterly. You know, we got plumbing in the downstairs a couple of years ago, earlier than almost anyone else down this far on Elm Street. Though your grandmother still prefers to use the backhouse, I do believe.”
And she giggled again.
She went through a little pile of receipts and scraps of paper and transferred the numbers there into the various lines of her ledger book. She added numbers up so quickly, it was almost as if she were copying the totals down from some invisible piece of paper.
“You’re so fast!” said Gusta.
Aunt Marion was clearly very friendly with numbers. She tapped with her pencil against the table: tap-tap! It was a smiling sort of sound.
“I like keeping accounts,” said Aunt Marion. “I had a bookkeeping class at the high school, you know. I even worked in accounts at the mill for a while!”
“You did?” said Gusta. “For a salary?”
“Yes, well,” said Aunt Marion. “That was long ago and much bigger numbers!”
Gusta knew better than to ask why she wasn’t working with bigger numbers at the mills these days. The Depression had cost so many people their jobs.
But then, to Gusta’s surprise, Aunt Marion added, “Then, of course, Mother needed help with the Home. Mostly the work’s very simple here, keeping the children fed and dressed. But the account book makes me happy in a different way. I hear you like school, so maybe you understand.”
Gusta nodded. A smile, quick-blossoming and shy, made Aunt Marion look very young for a moment, but then she went back to business. “Well, now, Mother says you may be helping Mr. Bertmann with his accounts. Of course, I don’t know how he keeps his books, but I’ll show you what I do. Can you see all right? Watch how I work them . . .”
And she went over those numbers again. It made more sense this time. Gusta did the math in her head as they went, and Aunt Marion was pleased when she came up with all the right answers.
“You’ll have the knack of this in no time,” said Aunt Marion. “It’s a good skill to have, and it will be good to be useful for Mr. Bertmann. Maybe he’ll keep you on after the spectacles have been earned out! That would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it?”
Something in Aunt Marion’s voice wrapped around Gusta’s heart like warm arms. Maybe it was the way it sounded just a little bit like her own mother, but with something younger in it.
It was only later that Gusta realized not everything about Aunt Marion’s logical ledger book made logical sense. Of course, it made sense that money for special projects, like plumbing a toilet indoors, would show up in the family accounts. But why would that money show up on the income side of the page? Why would it show up quarterly? That made no sense. There was something strange about that line in Aunt Marion’s accounts, thought Gusta. Her mind poked at that thought for a while, and then it got distracted by thoughts of pigeons.
Pigeons and need.
Because Gusta had done some other bits of math recently, and the numbers weren’t very encouraging: What if Mr. Bertmann were willing to keep her on, helping with the pigeons in exchange for the official minimum wage of thirty cents an hour, after she had worked through the cost of her eyeglasses? It would still take approximately forever to make enough to pay some room-and-board money to Gramma Hoopes, and longer than that if she wanted to do something really helpful in this world, like pay for doctors to undo some of the damage done to Uncle Charlie. If Gramma Hoopes was right about surgeons wanting a hundred dollars to work on Uncle Charlie’s scarred-up hand, she figured she would have to work another — (math, math, math) — 333 hours. Three hundred and thirty-three! And that was only if Mr. Bertmann kept wanting that much help with his pigeons and was willing to pay actual money out, which was different from allowing Gusta to work off a debt, and Gusta knew that was not a sure thing.
Even with Mr. Bertmann being willing and able to pay her, if you figured about five hours a week of pigeon care after school, that meant more than a year of Uncle Charlie waiting in the gloom.
In other words, it couldn’t be done that way. Not through pigeons alone.
Nor could pigeons bring her papa home.
And meanwhile, the probably nonexistent Wish stayed stubbornly hidden, too. She had searched the parlor while dusting, and the front hall, too, and nothing there looked the slightest bit like an unused Wish.
But if pigeons and Wishes would not help her, and if Mr. Elmer Smith turned out to be the sort of labor organizer who never answered letters, what was left for Gusta to do?
Gusta’s heart felt sore as she sat on the edge of her cot and looked at her horn, all comfortable and unsuspecting in its case.
It was her heart and her voice, that horn.
But in hard times, what was a heart and a voice compared to a need?
And that was why, the next morning, a somewhat trembly Gusta came downstairs with her horn case in her hand.
“Augusta Hoopes! What on earth are you doing with that thing?” said Gramma Hoopes as Gusta swung her books over her shoulder with her other hand. It was going to be a long, bruising walk to school today, and her poor shins were already cowering.
“For my class,” said Gusta. “For show-and-tell . . .”
She hadn’t adequately thought through this moment ahead of time, she realized — this moment when Gramma Hoopes would be pointing at the horn and wondering why Gusta was hauling it off to school, of all places. For that matter, Josie was staring at her, too.
The truth was complicated: the gist of it was that her conscience had been aching for days.
The truth had Uncle Charlie in it, who needed that hundred-dollar operation on his hand, and all the secrets piling up in her, and the missing bit of her mother’s letter, and the Wish that, if it had ever existed, seemed determined never to let itself be found.
As happens sometimes, she was going to have to break a bunch of rules, trying to do the right thing: she was going to sneak over to the high school that afternoon, instead of coming right home. She had thought about it and thought about it, and she saw no way around the moral difficulty: she had to tal
k to Miss Kendall about the value of horns.
It was indeed an actual show-and-tell day in Miss Hatch’s class. That much was true. Miss Hatch had Gusta take the horn out and play a few notes for the class, and then when she asked for comments, up went Molly Gowen’s hand, quick as fireworks.
“I would like to point out, however, Miss Hatch,” said Molly Gowen, “that this metal horn thing of Augusta’s is not the biggest object ever brought in for show-and-tell, because I’m pretty sure my new Schwinn bicycle, which I brought in last month, is much bigger. Maybe you forgot about my bicycle, though, Miss Hatch? It’s bright green. And for another thing, that funny-looking case is not in very good shape. It looks like its owners may have been rather careless with it. I’d think probably we’re supposed to take better care of musical instruments than to —”
“Thank you, Molly,” said Miss Hatch in some haste. “And Augusta, I know your French horn must mean a lot to you, for you to have brought it with you all the way up here to Maine.”
It was like Miss Hatch had just whacked a knife through an enormous onion, not four feet from Gusta’s face.
A pang in her eyes and her heart made Gusta blink. She could not speak right away, because so many feelings were racing to the surface all at once, and they were all feelings that Gusta did not much want to have to share with everyone in that class.
“Yes, Miss Hatch,” she said, finally. How puny her voice was, apart from her horn! “It’s . . . It’s . . .”
“It’s PRETTY GREAT!” said George Thibodeau from the back of the room. Gusta was so grateful to him for interrupting that way — right when an interruption could not have been more needed — that she looked right out into that blur of faces and smiled instead of crying.
The sneaky, secret part of the plan came after school. To Josie and Bess, Gusta had said she would be staying late at school. That was true; what she didn’t say was that she was staying late so that Josie and Bess would go on home without her, not suspecting a thing.
At the end of the day, Gusta waited in the classroom until Miss Hatch started asking whether she felt all right, and then she walked out of the building and turned right instead of left, the French horn bumping in its usual way against her leg. The high school wasn’t too much farther down the main road.
