Us and Uncle Fraud (3 page)

Mother sighed. "Twelve's enough, then. Be sure to hold Stephie's hand. And show Uncle Claude where they've pointed the brick on the bank, and, let's see, maybe he'd be interested in the window display at Baumen's Department Store—"

Claude appeared, with his shabby jacket on, and interrupted her. "Right," he said, "we mustn't miss that. And we'll check out all the churches to see how they've decorated for Easter." He was grinning.

"Claude," Mother said, in the same chiding voice she used with Father, "stop that. Don't be disrespectful." But she was grinning back at him.

Holding Stephie by her hands, we swung her down over the porch steps and started off.

Our town was not a town of distinction. It was like a hundred—maybe a thousand, maybe a million—other small towns, built a century ago along the eastern bank of a sluggish, tan river with an Indian name.

Like all those other towns, it had a main street lined with stores and banks, a movie theater, a newspaper, a couple of gas stations, and a post office. There was a library, small and turreted, on a side street; next year they would build a new, expanded one, and the little Gothic library in which I had grown into a literate eleven-year-old would be torn down to make way for a parking lot.

There was the Town Hall, which contained the police station and small jail, and the hospital in which we (all but Stephanie) had had our tonsils removed. The elementary school that Marcus and I attended was a squat brick building near the center of town, an easy walk from our house. Tom attended the junior high; it, and the senior high beside it, were "regional schools" five miles from town. Yellow buses collected Tom and the others from the corners of neighborhood streets, and the same buses navigated the flat, patchwork countryside to pick up the "farm kids"—the kids with German, Slavic, and Scandinavian names—waiting at the mailboxes that dotted the winding country roads.

On the other side of the river, reached by an impressive bridge, the teacher's college sprawled over a brown, almost treeless hill. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, if the wind came from the west, as it usually did, we could hear the exuberant cheers or distressed groans of the crowd as the college team fought its way toward a Class C football championship. Father's paper paid little attention to the sports events at the college; the headlines came from the better teams of the universities that lay many miles away.

Our town was divided into neighborhoods by economic class: the poor neighborhood, the middle, and the rich; we were in the middle, always had been, always would be, and we neither looked down on the poor nor aspired to be part of the rich. No one did.

We walked past the imposing Presbyterian Church that stood at the end of our block.

"Yesterday," I said to Uncle Claude, who had lifted Stephie to his shoulders and was carrying her
there, "all the church bells were ringing. It was before your train got in. Yesterday was Good Friday; did you know that?"

Claude, striding along the sidewalk with Stephie holding both ears like handles, glanced down at me. "Of course I knew that," he said. "In the middle of the afternoon, my train slowed down and gave seventeen long, penitential blasts of its whistle. We were passing a dairy farm at the time, and four hundred cows fell to their knees and bowed their heads."

"Moooo," crooned Stephie from her knobby-shouldered perch.

Marcus had lagged behind to squat and retie his shoe. I waited for him while Stephie and Uncle Claude sauntered on ahead, mooing together.

"Ask him, Louise," ordered Marcus. "Ask him about the box."

"I
can't.
He told me he'd only tell you and me. So I can't ask him when stupid Stephie's there."

Marcus frowned. "Great," he said sarcastically. "So we have to spend the whole morning showing him around this dumb town."

I shrugged. We plodded ahead to where Claude had turned and was waiting for us, Stephanie still attached to his shoulders like a giggling growth.

We were on the corner of our residential street, where it joined Main Street, and we had a choice of going north or south. "Which way would you like to go, Uncle Claude?" I asked politely. "If we
turn left, you could see the school that Marcus and I go to. Or if we turn right, there's the Town Hall in about two blocks. If you stand behind the Town Hall, you can look across the river to the college."

"I'm sure you go to a fine school," Uncle Claude said, "since you've both turned out to be such fine, intellectual people. But frankly, I've seen enough schools to last me a lifetime. And as for town halls—" He made a face.

Marcus and I both grinned. We felt the same way about the Town Hall. But we couldn't think of much else to show him. It simply wasn't a very interesting town.

"That's it!" Claude said suddenly. "I couldn't hear you very well, because I have these human earmuffs on, but I could read your lips, and you're absolutely right."

Marcus and I looked at each other. Neither of us had said a word.

Claude pried Stephie's grip loose from his ears. "My dear," he said to her, "do you have large pockets in those overalls?"

"No," Stephie said. She clutched the collar of his jacket to steady herself on his shoulders.

"Well then," Claude told her, "it's a good thing I loosened your grip. In two more minutes, my ears would have fallen off, and without large pockets to carry them home in, we would have had to leave them right here on the sidewalk. Perhaps a large dog would have come along and had them for dinner, but then what would hold my hat on when winter comes?"

Marcus and I both looked automatically at the sidewalk, picturing detached ears lying there like dead oak leaves in October.

"Now," Claude went on, "I believe what I understood your moving lips to suggest was this: that you will show me the most interesting, exciting, dangerous,
secret
thing in your town. Something that very few people know about. Are you two in agreement about what that thing is to be? Consult with each other and decide before we set off."

My imagination soared. Every child knows of dangerous secret places, and each has a favorite. I knew that Marcus's was the ladder of the water tower on the south side of town; he had climbed it once almost to the top. He had walked the bridge across the river, too, with his friends: something we had been sternly forbidden to do. I was afraid of heights, so I had shared few of Marcus's secret places. But I had my own.

One of my friends from school was the daughter of a professor at the college. She had told me that in the Science Building, there on the hill across the river, if someone boosted you to a certain windowsill, you could peer into a lab and see dead babies floating in jars of fluid. Peering at the dead babies would have been my choice, but to get there we would have had to walk the bridge, something I was unwilling to do.

Marcus looked at me slyly. He had been pondering the choices too. "Leboffs'P" he suggested.

I nodded. It was the perfect choice, one of the secret places Marcus and I shared: a short walk, no perilous heights, a true secret, and a valid danger; but there was still an obvious problem.

"Stephie will tell on us," I pointed out.

"We'll just tell Stephie that we're showing Uncle Claude where the rich people live," Marcus whispered. "She can't even talk well enough yet to tell Mother anything more than that. Heck,
we
can tell Mother that—that we showed the Leboffs' house to Uncle Claude. She'll never know the rest."

I nodded in agreement. He was right. Together we turned back to Uncle Claude, like two conspirators.

"This way," I said. "We turn left for a block, and then we turn right, up that street over there."

Now he and Stephie followed us. "Horsie!" Stephie cried, and he trotted a bit, jouncing her up and down.

Although we had only three blocks to walk, we were moving from one world to another: from the world in which we lived, in our rambling shingled house, the world of houses like ours, with back yards and porches and hammocks and fences draped with honeysuckle in summer, to the more elegant, more austere world of the mansions built where the river bank was steep.

These were the homes of the people who had founded our town, families who had been there for
a century. There were not many of them, and they were not among our friends; their children attended our schools only until they were twelve or so, and then they were sent east to boarding school. There had been an Evelyn Leboff in the grade above Tom, but she was gone now, to a school in Connecticut; and in Marcus's fifth-grade class there was a solemn, spectacled boy named Francis Hartmann, who lived here on what we called "The Riverbank." He was brought to school each day by his father's driver, and he never invited anyone home to play after school. That was simply the way it was.

All of the houses on The Riverbank—there were only seven—were grand estates by our standards, fortresses of massive stone set far back on sculptured lawns and in some cases surrounded by forbidding walls and gates. But the Leboffs' house was the grandest. When, in third grade, our class had turned a page in our geography books to reveal a photograph of something labeled "A Norman Castle," a murmur had passed through the room. "The Leboffs' house," we had all whispered. I had squinted at the page and pictured Evelyn Leboff, then a tall, bony girl with long braids, strolling beside the moat.

There was no moat at the Leboffs' house, and, in truth, it was not so much a Norman castle as it was a miniature version of one. It had the same stone turrets, the same massive door, but they were all condensed to a scale suitable for human life—though certainly a different form of life from the one we knew.

Uncle Claude stood at the end of the long gravel driveway, with Stephie still on his shoulders, and whistled.

"Now that," he said, after his admiring whistle had expired, "is what I call a house. What do you call it, Miss Picklepuss?" He tilted his head and looked up at my little sister.

"House," she said solemnly. "
Big
house."

"Come on," Marcus said and started up the wide drive.

"Well now, Marcus the Newbold," Uncle Claude said, laughing, "I've clean forgot to bring my engraved calling cards. And I never go calling on royalty without my engraved calling cards."

"It's okay," I said. "Come on. They're not home."

Marcus was already partway up the drive. After a moment, Claude lifted Stephie from his shoulders and set her down on the driveway. She whimpered a little and held her arms up.

"I'll give you a ride back home," Claude said. "But for now I need a rest. My muscles are crying out. Listen: Can you hear them?" He knelt beside Stephie and put his shoulder to her ear. She listened, the way she always listened to Father's gold watch. Then she nodded.

"Quite a racket, isn't it?" Claude said and stood back up. "All those tiny muscle voices calling, 'We need a little rest, please!'"

Stephie nodded again, grinned, and took his hand. We started up the driveway.

"The Leboffs go to Europe every spring," I explained to Uncle Claude. "They leave the fifteenth of March, and they don't come back until June fifteenth."

"Louisamanda," he said, "I know you are a very precocious person, but you're overlooking something. A house like this has servants. Now I know that footmen and chambermaids died out with the Tyrannosaurus, but, even so, there's going to be a housekeeper in there, and I have a very strong suspicion that at this very moment she is looking through the windows at us, phoning the police station, and announcing: 'There is a band of Visigoths and Huns storming my driveway. Please come and pour boiling oil from the tower.'"

I laughed and shook my head. "The housekeeper is Mrs. Shaw, and every year from March fifteenth to June fifteenth she goes to Kansas City and visits her daughter, who has a fatherless child and a severe skin problem that causes her torments of itching." I was especially proud of that bit of gossip, which came from my mother, who had heard it from her friend Mrs. Mallory.

"Torments of itching?" Uncle Claude asked in amazement. "
Torments of itching
? How do we know it's not contagious? How do we know this entire driveway is not crawling with itching germs that have been brought here from Kansas City?"
He stamped his left foot hard on the gravel. "There. I think I got one," he said.

Stephie laughed and stamped her foot. "Me, too," she said. "I got one, too."

Marcus was waiting for us under the portico at the end of the driveway, where it curved around for cars. "Hurry up," he called.

"And there's no one else here, once Mrs. Shaw has gone to Kansas City to visit her itching daughter?" Uncle Claude asked. He was looking up at the massive house.

"No. And we can—well, wait. I'll let Marcus tell you."

When we reached the place where Marcus stood waiting, he beckoned for us to follow and turned to head for the back of the house. I had done this with Marcus before, so I knew where he was going. But Uncle Claude held back.

"Marcus," he said, "you are my good and trustworthy friend. But I am not going to go one step farther until you explain where you're taking me. I will plant my feet right here in this ostentatious driveway, and they will take root. I will become part of the shrubbery. They will have to prune me every fall and sprinkle bone-meal fertilizer over my shoes."

"Me, too," Stephie said, and she planted her feet.

Marcus sighed. "My friend from school," he explained in a loud whisper, "Kenny Stratton? His father is the Leboffs' driver. When they're here, I mean. He takes care of their cars, and he drives the
Leboffs everywhere. The cars are over there." Marcus pointed beyond the house to the side, where an extension of the driveway led to a large structure that had once been a carriage house and was now converted to a garage.

Uncle Claude looked and nodded. "Duly noted," he said.

"And when the Leboffs are away, like right now, Kenny Stratton's father takes care of the house. He checks it every night at six."

"Promptly at six? You're sure of that? He doesn't sometimes lose track of the time and come at—" Uncle Claude glanced at his watch—"eleven
A.M.
?"