The Headless Cupid

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  David sat down again. “Well, I read about how you measure walls in old houses. You measure on the outside and the inside, and if it doesn’t add up the same there’s probably a secret room or passage.”

  Amanda nodded thoughtfully. Still sitting with her chin on her fist she began to look around at the parts of the house you could see from the landing. There was a lot to see.

  Right out in front of the landing and at almost the same level was the hall chandelier, and beyond that the fan-shaped colored glass window above the front door. When the sun was low, it shone through the glass and was spattered by the crystals of the chandelier into hundreds of shivering spots of red and green and gold. The front door was wide and thick and set in a carved frame of shiny dark wood. To the right and left, doors led into the living room and parlor and dining room, and if you leaned against the banisters, you could also see the kitchen door, farther down the hall.

  The staircase itself was one of the best parts of the house. It was not very wide, but it was made of the same dark shiny wood, and the banisters were elaborately carved. The fanciest posts were at both ends of each flight. They were carved to resemble a thick vine, twirling up to a huge wooden ball, and on each side fat wooden cupids reached up to touch the ball with chubby fingers. David’s father said the banister was very unusual and in good condition considering its age. There were only a few places where the wood was chipped or cracking, and there was one cupid, there on the landing, who had a missing head.

  David reached over and ran his fingers over the spot where the cupid’s head should have been.

  “Who did that?” Amanda asked.

  “I don’t know,” David said. “We didn’t. It must have happened a long time ago. See, somebody sanded off the place where it broke and varnished over it.”

  “We didn’t do it,” Janie said. “Somebody else did. Why didn’t they just glue it back on, David. Why doesn’t it have a head? Did it ever have a head?”

  David sighed. “Sure it had a head. All the other cupids do. Watch out!”

  Janie was stomping around over everybody’s legs and fingers to get over to the cupid with the missing head. She squatted down with her nose almost touching it.

  “Poor little cupid,” she said in a soap-opera voice. David had a pretty good idea what was coming. Janie was going through a phase about gruesome things, the worse the better. “Poor little cupid,” she said. “There it was, just playing with its little brother cupids, and along came this hungry giant with a great big ax and chopped—”

  “Shut up, Janie,” David said loud enough to drown her out because Blair and Tesser were both getting big eyed.

  “And the poor little cupid’s head fell off and it—” Janie went right on.

  “Janie! Shut up!” David yelled. “That’s not what happened, Tesser.”

  “What happened?” Esther asked.

  “Well, the other cupids just took his head and hid it—for a joke.”

  “No,” Janie said. “It was a horrible gi—”

  “Listen, Janie,” David said. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her over backwards and sat on her and held her mouth shut. Sometimes it was the only way to get Janie’s attention. “Listen, Janie. They took his head and hid it because he talked too much. That’s what happens when you talk too much.”

  When Janie stopped sputtering and closed her mouth, David realized that he’d almost forgotten about Amanda, sitting there watching. He stole a glance at her as he let Janie up, but it didn’t tell him anything. Amanda was still sitting there with her chin on her fist, watching all of them. There was something very mysterious about the way you could never tell what she was thinking.

  Chapter Three

  AS SOON AS AMANDA’S THINGS WERE ALL IN HER ROOM, SHE WENT inside and locked everyone out. The twins wandered off downstairs and, after waiting around for a while outside Amanda’s door, Janie started moving her horse corral to her own room. David went into his room and got out a book he’d been reading. He left his door open and pulled his big comfortable reading chair over to where he could see across the hall to the door of Amanda’s room. He read for quite a long time, but she didn’t come out.

  Usually David enjoyed reading, and he was partway through a very good book, but that afternoon he had a hard time keeping his mind on the story. For some reason, he felt restless. Once, walking along the hall to the bathroom, he heard something in Amanda’s room. It was low and rhythmical, and it went on and on in a kind of singsong.

  A little later David decided he ought to go check on Janie, just to be sure she wasn’t doing something she shouldn’t. Of course, now that there was a mother in the family again, David didn’t have to be responsible for the little kids anymore, at least not when Molly was at home. But he didn’t mind helping out a little now and then. After all, he was certainly used to it.

  So he walked past Amanda’s door again, and the chanting sound was still going on. He stopped and was listening for a second, when the low singing sound suddenly broke off, and a voice said, “Ow!” very loud and clear. This was followed by a string of words that weren’t quite as clear. But clear enough to get the general feeling.

  It sounded like, “You mutter, mutter crow! I’m going to mutter, your mutter, mutter!”

  Then there was a loud twang, as if something were hitting wire and a squawk and then footsteps. David hurried on down the hall.

  When it got close to dinnertime and Amanda still hadn’t opened her door, David gave up trying to read and went down to the kitchen. Molly was there peeling vegetables. She seemed to be feeling all right, although she was quieter than usual and her eyes looked a little red.

  David said, “Hi” and stood around waiting. Usually that would be enough to get Molly started. Ordinarily, Molly was very talkative.

  But she only said, “Oh, hi, David.” And then after a long pause she asked, “Did you meet Amanda?”

  “Sure,” David said. “I helped carry her things up to her room.”

  “That was nice of you,” Molly said. David waited, but she didn’t say any more about Amanda. Finally he went over and looked in the sink.

  “Are you all through peeling?” he asked.

  “No, there are the potatoes to do yet.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that,” David said.

  Molly smiled a funny quivery smile, and for an uncomfortable second David thought she might be thinking of hugging him. So he explained quickly that he didn’t mind peeling potatoes because he could peel them around and around to see how long a strip of peeling he could make without breaking it. So Molly went on with the rest of the dinner, and David finished the potatoes. While he peeled, he watched Molly, now and then, out of the corner of his eye.

  Molly didn’t seem much like a mother to David, but he realized this was probably because she was very different from his own mother. His own mother had been a very unusual person. There was a dreamlike quality to his memory of her, and it wasn’t just because she had been dead for more than a year. She had always been a little like a person from a dream—beautiful and gentle and uncertain, and full of strange ideas about things that never happen to ordinary people.

  Molly was entirely different. She usually wore bluejeans and baggy old shirts smudged with paint because she was an artist. She was very small and bouncy, and she wore her brown hair in a ponytail and went around with bare feet half the time. Everything except painting she did hard and fast, and a lot of the time it came out all wrong. When that happened she usually made a big joke of it, but once in a while she got really mad, for a minute or two.

  David still wasn’t really used to having Molly for a mother, but it didn’t bother him now, not anymore. It had for a while. The way he felt about Molly had done a lot of changing. At first he’d thought she was great, when she and Dad were just friends and she’d gone places with the whole family and come over to cook dinner on the housekeeper’s night off. He’d thought she was a lot of fun, the way she laughed and played with the little kids and treat
ed David almost like a grown-up. But then, when he found out that she and Dad were thinking of getting married, he’d changed his mind for a while. He’d begun to notice other things about her. The way she yelled when she got mad and the way she dressed, and how she began acting as if Tesser and Blair and Janie belonged to her, instead of to their mother who hadn’t been dead very long, even if they had almost forgotten her already. David hadn’t forgotten her.

  Finding the right house had been a big problem. They had to have something with at least four bedrooms and not very expensive. Molly had been looking for a long time before they found the Westerly place, and she could hardly believe it when they heard how big and cheap it was. It was later that they began to find out some of the reasons why it was so cheap.

  One of the reasons was that it was so far from the city. But Dad said he didn’t mind the commute, since college professors have odd schedules and he didn’t have to drive at rush hour. Another reason the house was so inexpensive was its age and condition.

  It wasn’t exactly that the Westerly place was run down. In the real estate office they told Molly that the old house was in amazingly good shape, and that was true in a way. Two old ladies had lived in the house all their lives and had always taken good care of it. They had kept it clean and painted and repaired. The main problem was that it hadn’t been changed or remodeled a bit in probably more than fifty years. The bathrooms, for instance, still had pull chain toilets, and bathtubs that sat up high on iron eagle claws clutching round iron balls. Esther had really been impressed with those claws when she first saw them. She had looked and looked, and had even gotten down on her hands and knees to inspect them more carefully.

  “What are those?” she had asked David.

  “Those are its feet,” David told her. “The bathtub’s feet.”

  Esther backed away quickly and asked, “Do bathtubs walk?”

  Of course Esther had just never seen that kind of bathtub before, and there were some things in the Westerly place that not even David had seen before. Like an icebox instead of a refrigerator, and a very noisy water heater that sat next to the woodstove and only heated when the stove was being used. In fact, Molly said that the whole kitchen in the Westerly house ought to be in a museum someplace and that was exactly where it was going as soon as she could afford something to take its place. Molly said that she’d always loved old houses, but trying to learn to cook for a big family in that kitchen, after having only Amanda to cook for in a modern apartment, was enough to send a person into shock.

  Molly was setting the big round table in the middle of the kitchen—for seven people now that Amanda was there—when they heard Dad’s car in the driveway. Molly ran out to meet him. David heard her say, “Oh Jeff, I’m so glad you’re home. What a day—” and then her voice got lower, and he couldn’t hear anymore. They stayed outside for several minutes longer. When they came in, David’s father was saying something about Amanda; but before David could get the drift of the conversation, the twins came in from outdoors and Molly changed the subject.

  Amanda was late coming down to dinner. Janie began talking about her the minute she sat down at the table.

  “Amanda’s here,” she told Dad. “We helped her carry her things up to her room.”

  “So I heard,” Dad said.

  “She has a crow that’s very dangerous, and a snake and a horny toad, and she has special clothing for doing magic ceremonies in and—”

  Janie stopped suddenly, and everyone looked up and saw Amanda standing in the door of the kitchen. She was still wearing her ceremonial robes and absolutely no expression, except for a trace of her upside-down smile.

  “Oh, hi,” David said, and then everyone else at the table started saying hello, too. After it had been quiet for a second, Blair said a soft short “Hi,” like the last little clink at the end of a long clatter.

  Amanda didn’t say anything. She only looked around at all of them; it was a long, cool, critical look. David had seen almost exactly the same expression on Molly’s face when she was looking at a really bad painting. But on Amanda, the expression seemed to be almost built in. She even managed to chew and swallow without changing it enough to notice.

  The only thing Amanda said during the meal was “yes” and “no” when Dad or Molly asked her a direct question. And for a while no one else said much either. Usually the only conversational problem around the Stanleys’ table was everyone trying to talk at once, but that night there were long, nervous, quiet spaces.

  Finally Molly asked Janie what she’d been doing all afternoon, and Janie started telling about her horse corral and the personalities of all the china and plastic and imaginary horses that lived in it; and for once it was almost a relief to listen to Janie. It was probably the first time in her life that Janie had ever gotten through a meal without being told to be quiet at least once.

  That night in bed, David stayed awake for quite a long time thinking, mostly about Amanda. He thought about the slow, cool way her eyes turned towards Dad when he spoke to her. It reminded David of the way Skip Hunter had always looked at Mr. Endicott, the sixth-grade teacher, even when Mr. Endicott was yelling at him.

  Skip had lived two houses away from the Stanleys’ old house in the city, and he had really been more of a neighbor than a friend; but he and David had spent some time together on weekends. Skip used to come over to look at David’s reptile collection. But then David had to get rid of the collection because the second housekeeper after his mother died had been really hysterical about snakes. After that Skip quit coming because he really had liked the snakes better than David. Actually David hadn’t liked Skip very much either, but he was interested in Skip in a way, because everyone else was.

  Everyone was interested in Skip because he had the biggest reputation of anybody in the school. He had been suspended four times and arrested twice; and in the fifth grade, he had given the teacher a nervous breakdown. Everyone said that Skip was the coolest kid in the school—and it was probably the truth.

  Once, David had decided to make a project of watching Skip to find out about being cool. He had decided that being cool was never being embarrassed or nervous or bashful. It was also never taking anything, or anybody, very seriously. It was particularly cool to be bored when other people were taking themselves seriously, whether they were being seriously enthusiastic, or excited, or angry. After studying Skip all semester, David felt sure he understood about being cool. The only thing was—he couldn’t do it. As a matter of fact, Skip told a lot of people that David was as uncool as you could get—and that was probably true, too.

  Blair was awake for a while that night, too. After they’d both been lying there for a long time, Blair sat up and looked over at David.

  “David,” Blair said, “that crow.”

  Blair had a way of saying what he was going to talk about before he began, as if he were giving it a title.

  “Yes,” David said. “What about the crow?”

  “That crow is angry.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is,” David said. “What do you think it’s angry about?”

  “I don’t know,” Blair said. “But it’s very angry.”

  After Blair finally went to sleep, David got out of bed and stood in front of the mirror. He stood sideways and then turned very very slowly and deliberately, giving the mirror a long slow look. He did it several times, but it never was just right. It would take a long time and a lot of practice to develop a thing like that. He wondered how long it had taken Amanda.

  Chapter Four

  BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING WAS A LOT LIKE DINNER THE NIGHT BEFORE, at least as far as conversation was concerned. Amanda was looking quite different because she was wearing jeans and a shirt instead of the occult outfit and all the braids were combed out into frizzy waves; but she was just as silent as ever. When Dad or Molly spoke to her, she waited before she answered. First, she waited before she looked at them, and then she waited staring right at them, and then, one split second be
fore you were sure she wasn’t going to answer at all—she said something. Something—but never very much.

  David was a little puzzled by the way his father was behaving. Jeffrey A. Stanley, Assistant Professor of geology at Amesworth College, had had a lot of experience with kids of all ages. He was a large man with a strong thin face, and there was a very firm look about him that seemed to impress most people. Not that he was mean or unreasonable. David usually thought his father was pretty fair and understanding. He did have a temper though, and definite opinions, and he wasn’t the kind of person you could stare in the eye with a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it expression on your face. Not ordinarily.

  Dad seemed to realize that David was puzzled, because he managed to explain things a little before he left for school. After he kissed Molly and Janie and Esther goodbye, he asked David to help carry some things out to the car. He did have a few books and a briefcase to take, but nothing he couldn’t have managed himself, so he obviously really just wanted a chance to talk to David alone.

  On the way to the garage, which, at the Westerly house, sat back from the house and still had a hayloft because it had once been the stable, Dad asked, “Well, what do you think of your new sister?”

  “Well,” David said. “She’s pretty interesting. I mean, I don’t think she’s going to be boring or anything. But she certainly has a mind of her own, doesn’t she?”

  His father smiled. “True,” he said. “She very definitely has a mind of her own. But we have to remember that she’s a bit upset and unhappy right now and—”

  “You mean about you and Molly getting married?” David said.

  “Yes, that’s part of it.”

  “Yeah,” David said. “Well, I didn’t like it much either when I first heard about it, remember? Until I got used to the idea and got to know Molly better and everything.”

  “That’s right. But it’s different for Amanda, and a little harder, I think. Her own father is still alive and that makes it more complicated for her. She’s been through some difficult times in the last few years, and now she has this new adjustment to make. It’s not going to be easy for her, and it may not always be easy for the rest of us. It’s going to take some extra effort—and a lot of patience.”