The Book of Story Beginnings

by Kladstrup, Kristin

She felt a ruffle of excitement and an almost unbearable eagerness. “Where are Oscar’s composition books?” she said, sitting back on her heels and looking at the cat.

  At that very moment, she heard her father calling. “Lucy! Let’s unload that trailer!”

  “As if you would know!” Lucy said to the cat.

  Of course, looking at the cat, crouched like a sphinx in the sunlight pouring through the window, you’d never believe he didn’t know, she thought. Cats always managed to look as though they knew something.

  “What does a composition book look like, anyway?” she wondered aloud. Then she hurried downstairs to help her father.

  After only a few days in The Brick, Lucy’s mother claimed she needed to “get working and start earning some money again.” She set up an office in a small room behind the room with the baby grand piano — behind the music parlor, which was what you were supposed to call that room. Soon she had sequestered herself and was busily marking up a manuscript that had arrived by overnight mail the day after they arrived.

  Lucy’s father had already found the book about alchemy that Aunt Lavonne had described in her letter. He spent much of his time in the attic looking at her notes about it.

  When her father wasn’t in the attic, Lucy helped him with unpacking. While she worked, she thought about Oscar and his composition books. According to her father, a composition book was just a notebook with blank paper inside, not much different than a modern-day spiral-bound notebook — only there weren’t spiral bindings in Oscar’s time. After a week of poking around the house, however, Lucy still hadn’t found anything resembling a composition book.

  One afternoon, Aunt Helen and Uncle Byron took everyone on a tour of Martin. By the time they got back, it was nearly suppertime, and Lucy’s parents invited Helen and Byron to stay for frozen pizza. Lucy’s father and Uncle Byron wandered off to the kitchen to turn on the oven and talk. To Lucy’s dismay, her mother suggested that she play the violin for Aunt Helen.

  Lucy considered protesting. It wasn’t that she minded playing the violin. She played well enough to enjoy it. She just didn’t care much for people listening. On the other hand, she knew she couldn’t avoid playing without looking childish, so she gave in without a fuss and played.

  She was putting her violin back into its case when her mother asked why Aunt Lavonne had so little piano music. Other than a few old standbys —“Für Elise” and The Well-Tempered Clavier — sitting on the piano, they hadn’t found any other pieces.

  “Don’t tell me Lucy plays the piano, too!” exclaimed Aunt Helen.

  “Actually, I like playing myself,” said Lucy’s mother. “Lucy’s never learned because we’ve never had a piano before.”

  “Lavonne loved to play,” said Aunt Helen. “She kept her music over in the window seat.”

  As her mother and Aunt Helen left the room, Lucy wandered over to look at the window seat. Why hadn’t she noticed before that it opened? Raising the hinged lid curiously, she saw a jumbled pile of piano pieces — Beethoven sonatas, Chopin waltzes, and old sheet music titles like “Ramona” and “Heliotrope Bouquet.” To her surprise, she also found some violin music. She lifted a stack of yellowed pages.

  And then she saw the book that lay beneath the pages. It took a moment for the words on the cover to sink in:

  As she pulled out the book, she found another composition book beneath the first. And then another, and another, and another. The last one fell open as she held it, and Lucy saw that only the first few pages were written on. Looking quickly through the other notebooks, she saw that their pages were full. Lucy gathered the notebooks into a stack and jumped to her feet. “Dad!” she called. “Dad!”

  She almost ran into her father in the front hall. “The pizza’s ready,” he said.

  “No!”

  Her father raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “I’ve found the composition books! Please don’t make me eat dinner right now,” Lucy begged.

  “Oh, go on.” Smiling, her father waved her up the stairs. Lucy took them two at a time.

  She slowed as she passed the door of Oscar’s room. She should read the notebooks there, she decided. After all, they contained Oscar’s thoughts.

  As she entered, she saw that the smokehouse cat was occupying the bed. “Get down, Walter,” she said, using the name her mother had chosen. It was the name of some famous actor, but the cat didn’t seem to care that it was now his name. Lucy sat down next to him and opened the notebook on the top of the stack. The first entry was dated June 15, 1912. Lucy opened the second notebook and found that it began in December 1912. The third notebook began in September 1913, the fourth in January 1914, and the fifth in June 1914. There was only one entry in the fifth notebook.

  Oscar’s last entry, Lucy thought. She resisted the temptation to read it. She wanted to read the journal entries in order. Opening the first notebook, she began:

  June 15, 1912

  Today I bought this notebook at Sunderlund’s Store. Keeping a journal is important for a writer, which is what I want to be, so I have made a solemn vow to write every day. My friend Earl says it is foolish to think I will write every day. He wanted me to buy fishhooks.

  Seeing how nothing much happened today, I will describe my family. Besides me, there are my pa and ma; my sister, Lavonne; and my brother, Morris. Pa grows corn and raises cattle on our farm. He wants me to do the same someday. He doesn’t think much of my plans for becoming a writer. Ma likes to play the violin and read books. Lavonne is younger than I am — only eight years old and bothersome. Morris is just a baby, so he is bothersome mostly at night. That’s all I can think of to write about. Nothing much ever happens around here.

  Lucy grinned. Oscar’s journal sounded like the diary she had tried to keep during the past year. She could never figure out what to say, so her diary was peppered with comments like “Well, nothing happened today, again.”

  As she read on, she discovered that Oscar liked to read, just as she did. And he liked school. He was a good student, though he did seem to get into trouble frequently. Earl and I are talented at getting into scrapes, he wrote. Lucy, who hardly ever got into trouble, decided that Oscar’s life was more interesting than her own. And his family seemed happier than hers; she could tell they belonged in The Brick.

  Then she came to the last entry in the second notebook:

  August 2, 1913

  One of the horses got hurt this morning, so Pa came home early. Ma was in the music parlor playing her violin. The breakfast dishes were still on the table, and Pa yelled at Ma for leaving the mess. Nothing gets her more riled than being interrupted when she is playing music. She told him it was none of his business how she keeps house. Pa just laughed at her. It wasn’t a nice laugh. He said was that what she called it, keeping house? He said it was more like keeping a pigsty! Then they went at each other hammer and tongs, shouting all sorts of hurtful things. Lavonne and I were upstairs with Morris and heard everything. Did they think we wouldn’t hear? Finally Ma said, “Either you leave this house, George Martin, or I will!” The glass in the front door broke when Pa slammed it behind him. Now he is staying up at Uncle Ned’s. Ma looks as if she will break in half. I wish . . .

  The entry ended abruptly. Quickly, anxiously, Lucy grabbed the third notebook to see what had happened next. But the next entry was dated September 15, 1913, and Oscar described an outing to the county fair. Pa and Ma must have made up after their quarrel, because Oscar wrote about Ma blushing when Pa told her she looked like a cross between a princess and a bluebird in her new dress.

  It was getting dark and Lucy had to turn on a lamp. She continued reading, only vaguely aware of certain sounds — the back door creaking as Aunt Helen and Uncle Byron left, their voices fading, car doors opening and slamming, and the pickup truck grinding down the driveway. Not long after, her father tiptoed in with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk. He was gone before she had time to come out of her haze of reading.r />
  Later, she heard her parents coming upstairs and going into their room. She guessed that her father must have convinced her mother that Lucy was involved in something so important that she couldn’t be interrupted, not even to go to bed. Or maybe he had told her Lucy had fallen asleep in Oscar’s room. At any rate, nobody bothered her, and she kept reading.

  May 2, 1914

  It was damp this morning. “Mushroom hunting weather,” Pa said at breakfast, so we all went to the North Pasture. We searched for hours around the rotting logs and stumps in the woods there, and now we have a bag full of mushrooms. They are morels — very ugly, all wrinkled and poisonous-looking. But they will taste just fine tomorrow when Ma dips them in butter and bread crumbs and fries them in a pan!

  The best part of the mushroom hunt came at the end of the day. Pa made a bonfire so we could toast bread and cheese over the coals. Then, when the stars came out, Ma took out her fiddle. We all quieted down while she tuned the strings, and I got the funniest feeling. I felt as if I was looking at everyone from far away in space, or maybe even in time. They all looked so beautiful sitting in the darkness of the woods under the stars. Their faces were pink and warm and happy in the firelight. I felt perfectly happy and perfectly sad all at the same time, and tears came into my eyes.

  Luckily, before anybody noticed what a sop I was, Ma started to play songs that we could sing. She played “Buffalo Gals,” “Home Sweet Home,” and Pa’s favorite, “Billy Boy.” We always hold the note on the word she in the line that goes, “She’s a young thing and cannot leave her mother.” That makes us all laugh.

  “Billy Boy”! thought Lucy. The very same song she liked to sing with her father. She felt a strange, warm sort of feeling. She felt suddenly as if she knew Oscar, as if she were part of his family. She imagined herself traveling back in time, stealing through the dark woods toward the warm fire and their happy music. As she approached, everyone would turn to welcome her. . . .

  She was losing herself in this reverie — almost drifting off to sleep, as a matter of fact — when her mind began to picture how everyone must have reacted when Oscar vanished. She could see Ma distraught, Pa troubled. And she could imagine how Lavonne must have felt. Forlorn — that was how you would feel if you lost your brother.

  Lucy had to pull herself back to the present. It was like swimming up from a great depth to the surface of a lake. As she sat up and stretched, it occurred to her that it had been quite some time since her parents had gone to bed. Even Walter had disappeared, gone off for a nightly prowl.

  Tired though she was, Lucy opened the last notebook to its first and only entry:

  June 5, 1914

  I have decided to keep a notebook of story ideas. Not stories about my family, which are easy to write. My story ideas are strange ones that are hard to write about. I don’t even talk about them, except sometimes to Lavonne. She lurks around me so much I can’t not tell her what I think about. Besides, she likes my stories. They are like fairy tales, I suppose, full of kings and queens and adventures. Ma says people think fairy tales are simple stories but they are not. I guess I agree. My trouble is I have no talent for thinking up plots. The best I can do is come up with a good beginning. My book of story ideas is really just a book of story beginnings. Still and all, that is something.

  If Lucy hadn’t been so tired, she might have been disappointed. All that reading, and not a single clue. But she was half-asleep, and at the moment, she didn’t care. She left the composition books in a heap on the floor, then shuffled down the hall to her room, pulled off her jeans, and slid into bed.

  It wasn’t until she was almost completely asleep that she thought of something that might be important: If Oscar had begun a notebook of story ideas, where was it?

  “I read them!” Lucy announced the next morning. She dropped the stack of composition books on the kitchen table and slid into a chair.

  Her father was studying a recipe card. There was a can of soup, a box of rice, a carton of eggs, a head of broccoli, and part of a ham on the counter. “You don’t know anything about boiling eggs, do you?” he asked Lucy.

  “Are you cooking, Dad?”

  “Your aunt Helen left this recipe. She said it was easy to throw together, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.”

  “I didn’t know you could cook.” Lucy took a bowl out of the dish drainer on the counter. She poured some cereal from a box on the table.

  “I’m a chemist, Lucy. Chemistry and cooking are practically the same thing.”

  “I guess you ought to be able to figure out how to boil an egg, then.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said her father. “It’s all a matter of timing, I imagine.” He picked up an egg and weighed it in his hand. “About sixty grams, I’d say. The shell is fragile, not impermeable to the water as it heats. Let’s give it ten minutes.”

  “Dad — I read the composition books last night.”

  “I wonder where your mother keeps the pans.”

  “Aunt Helen puts them in the bottom cupboard next to the refrigerator. Mom hasn’t cooked since we got here. Did you hear what I said?”

  “You read the composition books. Did you find anything?”

  “Not exactly — maybe — I don’t know.” Lucy wondered what it was that she had found. A boy who wanted to be a writer. And a family who had picnics under the stars. She felt as if she had lost something. After all, that family now lived only in the pages of an old diary.

  “Dad, did you know that Oscar’s mother played the violin?” she asked.

  “I did. It’s his mother’s violin that you play.”

  “You never told me that! I thought the violin belonged to Grandpa Morris!”

  “Well, it did. He got it from his mother. She taught Morris to play when he was a boy.” Lucy’s father found the saucepan and filled it with water. He dropped in three eggs and set the pan on the stove.

  Lucy thought about the familiar feel of her violin in her hands, the bow drawing across the strings, producing notes that seemed to stretch over time. “Dad, is Oscar why you like to sing ‘Billy Boy’?” she asked.

  “Is Oscar what?” Her father lit the gas with a match.

  “In Oscar’s diary, he talks about everybody singing ‘Billy Boy.’ It was his father’s favorite song.”

  “Whose father’s favorite song?”

  “Oscar’s. Are you even listening to me?”

  Her father looked up from staring into the pot of water. “Lucy, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I guess cooking isn’t quite like chemistry.”

  “Why are you cooking?”

  “Oh, your mother’s so busy. I thought I could help — do something, anyway. Now that I’m not working, I mean.” Her father sat down at the table, looking a little depressed, and Lucy thought about how her mother had been disappearing into her new office more and more over the past few days. Just this morning she had been on the phone with someone. Lucy had heard, “I can get it to you by Friday, not Wednesday,” over the busy sound of papers being shuffled.

  “So, what did you find in Oscar’s diary?” asked her father.

  “Nothing really, I guess. Only that he sounds like someone I’d like to know.”

  “No clues?”

  “No — except for one thing. Oscar says he started a book of story ideas.”

  “He wanted to be a writer.”

  “I know. But where is the book of story ideas? Did Aunt Lavonne ever show it to you?”

  “I don’t think so. Lavonne used to tell me about his stories, but I got the impression he’d told them to her directly.”

  “Maybe she never saw it!”

  “Well, she would have read about it in his diary, the same way you did.”

  “But maybe she didn’t think it was important. I mean, she did say she thought there might be something she missed in the diaries. Maybe she missed the fact that Oscar says he started a book of story ideas.” Lucy opened the fifth composition book to Oscar’s final diary entry. />
  Her father read the entry, then looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re right. Though if such a book really existed — if it were anywhere in this house — Lavonne would have found it, even if she wasn’t looking for it.”

  “I guess it doesn’t really make much difference.” Lucy felt deflated. “A book of story ideas isn’t really a clue.”

  “On the other hand, maybe she didn’t think that last entry was important. Or maybe the book isn’t in the house at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe Oscar took it with him.”

  “That helps a lot,” Lucy said. “The only clue disappearing with the mystery.”

  “Has it been ten minutes yet?” Her father jumped up to look at the pot on the stove.

  Lucy decided that her father was probably right. If Oscar’s book of story ideas was somewhere in the house, Aunt Lavonne would have found it already. The book had probably sailed away with Oscar and that was that.

  On the other hand, there was another possibility. Maybe Oscar was secretive about his writing. Maybe he had hidden the book of story ideas from the prying eyes of his eleven-year-old sister, Lavonne. Maybe the book was so well hidden that Aunt Lavonne had never found it.

  Where could it be? Lucy thought first of the window seats. She hadn’t noticed that the one in the music parlor opened until yesterday. Maybe there were others.

  As it turned out, there were three. But they were filled with ordinary items like sewing supplies and blankets. Of course the book wouldn’t be in the window seats, thought Lucy, or Aunt Lavonne would have found it already.

  She tried knocking on walls, like Nancy Drew looking for a secret compartment. She actually started to enjoy herself until her mother’s voice came through the wall. “What are you doing, Lucy?” Before Lucy could even answer, her mother snapped, “Never mind! I don’t care what you’re doing. Just stop it!”

  She thought of the attic. In stories, important things were always hidden in the attic. But Aunt Lavonne had spent much of her life working in the attic of The Brick. It seemed unlikely that she would have missed something hidden there.