Silent to the Bone

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Margaret was visiting Tower Hill Road the night that Mrs. Zamborska was killed. The accident happened on the Saturday night of a weekend when Dad had visiting privileges. My mother and father took Branwell in while Dr. Zamborska went to the hospital with his wife. Margaret always said that that was when she bonded with Branwell and began her career as his chief (and usually only) baby-sitter.

  Margaret never baby-sat for my father, but she often did for Branwell’s. Her visits to our house were just that—visits. I like Margaret, and she likes me, but she doesn’t like my mother. I like my mother very much and can understand why my father prefers mine to hers, but I can also understand why Margaret doesn’t. I guess she figured that baby-sitting for me would be doing a favor for my mother, and when she came to our house on Tower Hill Road she wanted to be her father’s daughter, not my mother’s helper.

  * * *

  When Margaret came back to the add-on living room, she poured us each a glass of cold cider, and we sat at the kitchen table and talked. I told her about making out the cards and how I had put her name on one and how Branwell had chosen her. I asked her if she could tell me why.

  “Because I was there.”

  “Where?”

  “Let’s first talk about when.”

  * * *

  The summer before last when Branwell returned home from The Lovely Condominium, Dr. Zamborska asked Margaret to meet Branwell at the airport. She didn’t mind that Dr. Zamborska still thought of her as his baby-sitter and actually was pleased that he felt that he could still call on her when he needed help.

  When Branwell got off the plane, he was surprised to see Margaret instead of his father, but Margaret told him that his dad was stuck in a meeting. She had not seen Bran for several months and thought he was looking good and told him so. The Ancestors had sent him home dressed in a navy blue blazer, a white shirt with a button-down collar, and a necktie. Most kids would have taken off the necktie as soon as the plane took off, but not Branwell. He was the good grandson all the way home. With his fair skin and red hair, Branwell never tanned, but after a month in the Florida sun—even with double-digit sunblock—he had freckled. When he reached over the carousel to retrieve his bag, Margaret noticed a band of sunburn across the back of his neck. She said, “You’ll have to get a havelock.”

  Branwell replied, “Yeah, either that or let my hair grow long.”

  Margaret said that she thought Branwell was probably the only kid in this state who would know what she meant. Being a little disappointed that she didn’t think I would also know—I didn’t—I asked her what a havelock was. She told me that it was a cap that has a flap of cloth attached to cover the neck, named after Sir Henry Havelock, the man who invented it. “Like a sandwich is named after the Earl of Sandwich.” (I didn’t know that either.)

  It was the last Friday in July, the sidewalks were still soaking up summer heat, and the house on Tower Hill Road felt stuffy—unused—when they got there. Branwell looked around expectantly. Margaret knew he was looking for his father, whom he thought would be looking for him expectantly. Of course, in the past Dr. Z had always met his plane, waiting at the gate, craning his neck to look down the jetway to get a first glimpse of him. When Bran didn’t find his father downstairs, he went upstairs to get rid of his suitcase and to use the bathroom. While he was upstairs, Dr. Zamborska returned home, and Branwell came flying down the stairs to see him but stopped short, halfway down, for his father was not alone. Standing beside him was Dr. Tina Nguyen. Tina.

  Margaret told me, “The look on Branwell’s face brought tears to my eyes.” I asked her why, and she studied me a long time before she answered, “Because I had been there. I recognized the look.”

  Then—right then and there—just thinking about it made Margaret’s eyes fill with tears again—right there in front of me. She sniffed the tears back and said, “I remembered coming home from summer camp when I was twelve years old. I remembered coming downstairs for supper that evening. I remembered going into the family room, where my parents usually had a glass of wine before dinner. And I remembered seeing them there: Mom and Dad and your mother. I had not seen my parents for a month, and I had hoped to have them to myself that evening. But I looked over at my dad—our dad—and I think I knew, even before my mother did, that we were never again going to be the same kind of family we had been.”

  “Is that when Dad moved out?”

  “Not quite. He waited until the fall term was over. He moved out at the first of the year, right after Christmas break. But from that evening on, I knew it was only a matter of time before he would. So when I saw Branwell come down the stairs to find his father with Tina, I knew that he knew. I knew what he was feeling. Branwell knew, just as I had known, that it would be only a matter of time before Tina would move in, and they would be a different kind of family from what they had been before. I had once been in that same sad place.

  “Then Dr. Zamborska said, ‘We thought we’d go out for dinner this evening, Bran.’ Branwell smiled and said something to the effect that The Ancestors did a lot of eating out. ‘Mostly at the clubhouse.’ Then he smiled and said, ‘I’ll just go upstairs to take off my jacket, and then I’ll be blue peter.’ ”

  I asked Margaret if that was the first that she had heard of blue peter, and she said it was. I asked her if she knew what it meant, and she told me that she guessed.

  “Couldn’t you find it on the Internet?” I asked. (Margaret spends almost all her waking hours on the Internet.)

  “Didn’t try.”

  “Want me to tell you?”

  “I know you’re dying to.”

  “It means ‘ready to sail.’ When a ship is ready to sail, it flies a blue flag with a white square that stands for the letter P—blue peter. Is that what you guessed?”

  “I guessed it meant ‘ready.’ You didn’t ask me if I guessed whether it had to do with sailing ships.”

  “I thought you’d like to know.”

  “It’s not that my life would have been unfulfilled and empty if I had never known, but if you had not had this wonderful opportunity to tell me, yours might have been. Now, do you want me to tell you about the rest of that evening when I picked Branwell up from the airport?”

  “Blue peter,” I said.

  “I hope that means you’re ready to listen.”

  “It doesn’t mean that I’m ready to sail.”

  “I guessed as much,” Margaret said. “Dr. Zamborska started to say something, and I knew what it would be. He was about to tell Branwell that he hadn’t planned on Branwell’s joining them, that he had planned on just him and Tina going out. But before he could even start to say it, I got to his side and poked him with my elbow to interrupt. ‘Now that everyone is together,’ I said, ‘I guess I’ll be running along.’ And I was out the door before either Dr. Z or Tina had a chance to reply.

  “He had asked me to stay to baby-sit. He had been planning to take Tina out to the Summit Inn, where you do have to wear a jacket and tie. I found out later that he had a ring in his pocket and had planned on asking Tina to marry him that very night. But when I saw that look on Branwell’s face, a look I recognized from my own personal wardrobe of bad memories, I decided that it would be wrong for them to leave him—especially on his first night home. So I walked out. I left Dr. Z to work out the details. He quietly canceled his reservations at the Summit, and they all went to One-Potato for supper.”

  * * *

  Even before he had left for his month with The Ancestors, Branwell knew who Tina Nguyen was. She was part of his father’s research team.

  Dr. Zamborska’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C. They pay for three assistants. The assistants are graduate students who help Dr. Zamborska’s research while they study for advanced degrees. They spend an average of four years studying with him. Each time one graduates, others apply for the job. Dr. Z is known as a fair but strict teacher and mentor. Many apply, but only one is chosen.r />
  Dr. Zamborska never dated any of them. He never went out with anyone he had worked with, but Tina was something different. For one thing, she was not a student.

  Tina Nguyen represented something new in Dr. Z’s lab as well as in his life. She was already a Ph.D. when she arrived at the university. She was a molecular biologist working on identifying genes associated with complex genetic traits. She answered an ad that Dr. Zamborska had put in The Journal of Genetic Research because she wanted a challenge. She came to work at the start of the summer term in June, and they had gone out together a couple of times even before Bran had to leave for Florida. Bran never told me much about Tina except to say that she had a lot in common with his father. She was brilliant. She was interested in the Genome. And she rode a bicycle everywhere.

  What Bran didn’t know was how much time they had been spending together in the lab, cultivating more than just DNA.

  I was at summer camp part of the time that Branwell was at The Lovely Condominium. I left home a week before he did, so I got home a week before him, and when I did, you had only to see Tina and Dr. Zamborska together to know how full of each other they were. They could hardly keep their hands off each other, which made a lot of people smile, but to tell you the truth, I found it a little embarrassing, and I wondered if Branwell would, too.

  * * *

  Margaret said, “I have no doubt that Dr. Zamborska is brilliant, but he is also stupid. He had always treated Branwell like a grown-up, and I guess he thought that Branwell would take the news like a man, but he had no business letting all that love between him and Tina ripen while Branwell was away and never even sending out a hint. When our father abandoned me, I at least still had a mother. But when Dr. Zamborska fell in love with Tina, Branwell was just left out.”

  DAY EIGHT

  5.

  There was good news about Nikki. The pressure inside her skull had gone down and stayed down, and the doctor removed the tube from her brain. When the guard brought Branwell into the visitors’ room, I got the feeling that he was glad to see me. It could only be a feeling, because he certainly wasn’t telling me so, but something positive was definitely there, and I don’t think there is any feeling I like more than the one that someone is glad to see me.

  I watched Bran’s face brighten when I told him the good news about Nikki.

  But after that, when I started telling him what Margaret had told me about his homecoming the summer before last, he seemed to sink back into himself. When I got to the part about how embarrassing it had been to see how Dr. Zamborska and Tina could hardly keep their hands off each other, he just stared across the room. I looked over at the wall he was staring at to see if I could see what he was seeing, but, of course, I couldn’t. Whatever he was seeing was inside his head, and it made him as lonely as his silence. I wished I had skipped that part, but it was too late. You can’t unsay what has been said.

  To make him feel better (or maybe to make myself feel better) I told him that I was glad he had asked me to talk to Margaret. She had been there. She understood feeling left out, and she helped me understand it, too. As I said that, Branwell had a less faraway look in his eyes. I began to believe that he had chosen Margaret not because she would make him speak but because she would make me understand.

  Before I left, I took out the flash cards again and laid them on the table—all except the MARGARET one. The one that got two blinks was THE ANCESTORS.

  That was when I was certain that Branwell was not choosing the people who might make him speak. The Ancestors were hardly listener-friendly.

  The last time I had spoken to them was when Dr. Z and Tina got married in the university chapel over Labor Day weekend last year. When he saw me, Mr. Branwell said, “Connor Kane. Good name. You should have gotten Branwell’s red hair to go with it.” And then he asked me, “Have you met the Russians?” He meant the Zamborska side of the family from Pittsburgh. I didn’t know what to say, and I wasn’t about to tell him that all of the Zamborskas—including Dr. Zamborska’s mother and father—had been born in the United States. Besides, the generation that emigrated came from Ukraine, which wasn’t Russia when they emigrated and isn’t Russia now either. But I didn’t say anything. There was an awful lot that went unsaid when you were with The Ancestors.

  When The Ancestors found out that their only grandson was about to have a stepmother whose name was Tina Nguyen and that she was only six years old when she came to America, his grandfather had asked whether she was one of the boat people who had escaped from Vietnam in 1975 after that war. (She was.)

  Branwell told The Ancestors that Tina had started school without knowing a word of English and was the Illinois state spelling champion when she was in fourth grade. His grandfather said, “Those Orientals are very good with details.”

  “What did you say when he said that?” I had asked.

  Branwell laughed. “I asked him if he wanted to know what word she won on.”

  “Did he?”

  “He said he did.”

  “What was it?”

  “Molybdenum.”

  “What did he say when you told him?”

  “He said that he wasn’t surprised, and when I asked him why, he said, ‘Well, now, you know molybdenum is a chemical element. We used it in the automobile industry. There’s no getting around it—those Orientals are very good at that sort of thing. Like Tina, a lot of them go into the field of science.’ ”

  “And fingernails,” his grandmother had added.

  Branwell did not understand what the field of fingernails was, so his grandmother explained that Chrissy, her manicurist, was Vietnamese. “All the people—men as well as woman—who work there are. As a matter of fact, the Vietnamese appear to own fingernail parlors all over Florida. They do good work.”

  “Of course they do good work,” his grandfather had said. “I told you, those Orientals are very good with details.”

  Then Branwell issued me a challenge. “SIAS attitude of The Ancestors.”

  I had to think real hard. This is the SIAS I came up with. “Those Orientals will never be our Orientals because they have the wrong slant on things.”

  Bran gave me four stars and wanted to give me five (because, he said, it was subtle), but I told him that we were not going to have grade inflation with our SIAS’s.

  The Ancestors stayed with Bran for the entire week that Dr. Zamborska and Tina were on their honeymoon. Out of respect for Tina (she said), his grandmother would not allow them to eat with knives and forks. She decided that they must learn to use chopsticks. Actually, Branwell was quite good with them. The Ancestors were not. But they were determined. When Bran held his bowl up close to his face to eat his rice—the way he had seen it done in Chinese restaurants—his grandmother said, “We never allow our bowls to leave the table.” And Branwell never told them that We may not, but people in Chinese restaurants do.

  Branwell would never choose to open up to two people who didn’t want to hear that “Orientals” do on occasion allow their bowls to leave the table or that his new stepmother was a superb cook in the French manner. Branwell didn’t want to talk to The Ancestors. He wanted me to see them because they, like Margaret, would help me understand what had happened to him.

  * * *

  I had overheard my parents say that The Ancestors were due in town today with a famous big city lawyer they had hired. I knew that The Ancestors did not change habits easily, so if they were already here, they would be at the motel where they always stayed, which was walking distance from the Behavioral Center.

  I decided to try to find them at the motel. If they weren’t there, I would leave a message for them, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to, because if they called my house, I would have to do more explaining than I wanted to.

  (I was beginning to see advantages to being struck dumb.)

  They were there. In the motel restaurant. Having the Early Bird supper special. They were surprised to see me. Mr. Branwell invited me to join them, but I
told him that my mother was expecting me to have supper at home, so I ordered a Coke and a plate of French fries—something that would hold me but wouldn’t spoil my appetite.

  After the server brought my order, I told The Ancestors that I had just been to see Branwell, and Mr. Branwell asked, “So how did you find him?”

  “You know that he’s not talking.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “We’ve hired a lawyer—a big city attorney. He’s not available until tomorrow afternoon. That’s when we’ll see our grandson.”

  I did not know if this attorney came from a big city or if he was a big attorney from a city (big or small) or if big meant best. Like when a store advertises their biggest sale ever, and they mean their best. I didn’t tell them that I didn’t think any lawyer—even the biggest—would be able to get Branwell to speak. Especially if they were there when he was.

  Instead, I asked them about last summer.

  Nikki had been due to arrive in early July, and Bran had told me that he had hoped to be able to skip his visit to The Lovely Condominium—or at least postpone it—but The Ancestors had made it very clear that they expected him for the month. They had booked a cruise of the Caribbean and did not let Bran know about it until all the reservations had been made, and they would have lost their deposit if they canceled.

  “We thought it best that Branwell not be around when the new baby arrived,” Mr. Branwell said bluntly.

  Mrs. Branwell said, “We arranged everything. First-class suite. Top deck. Then we made arrangements to spend a few days in Lauderdale so there would be time to do some shopping for the clothes he would need. We allowed time for the clothes to be altered. He’s growing so fast, that boy.”