The Orphan and the Mouse Page 7

  Making him mad, as all his associates well knew, could be a bruising experience.

  Anyway, now her problem was solved.

  Helen continued to work for the law office until, a year later, one of the lawyers mentioned her to his friend Philips-Bodbetter. At their initial interview, Mrs. George suppressed a smile when asked if she had previous experience working with children. Oh, yes. Plenty. Hadn’t she run a household with five younger siblings from the time she was ten years old? A household where the only source of income was her mama’s paltry wages from cleaning for those better off?

  But that was not the kind of experience these people wanted to hear about. They wanted her to have been a teacher at a school for girls, something in that line. So Mrs. George lied with her usual smoothness. Why, yes, she had indeed. Before marrying the late lamented Douglas George, she had taught school in her hometown. As for references, she would be happy to provide the name of the superintendent, only she couldn’t be sure the address was still accurate. It had been more than a decade, after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When Judge Mewhinney was anxious or upset, he blinked in a rapid, twitchy way that about drove Helen George crazy.

  “My dear,” she said gently, “could you stop that? Please?”

  It was Wednesday evening, and the two were drinking sherry in her parlor, the judge sitting in the club chair, his cigar in an ashtray by his side, she on the chintz sofa across the room.

  The two were arguing, Mrs. George struggling to keep her temper in check.

  Hadn’t her part of the operation gone perfectly?

  Didn’t she deserve some credit?

  Instead, the judge seemed to take for granted her success—easy to do, she supposed, when his own part of the business consisted of signing papers in the comfort of his office. Adding insult to injury, he now dared to question whether their business records were safe in her keeping.

  “Stop what?” he asked—blink-blink-blink.

  Mrs. George sighed. “Never mind.” It would be simpler if she just looked away.

  “I have a locked safe in my office in the courthouse, which is well protected by police,” said the judge. “Your so-called hiding place can’t possibly be as secure.”

  “It is because it’s secret,” she said. “In contrast to the courthouse, no one ever visits this apartment except Polly in the afternoons, and you in the evenings. Now”—she tried to change the subject—“I believe you have a document for me? And I have one for you.”

  Mrs. George disturbed the napping cat when she rose to retrieve the papers from the writing desk by the door. The judge, meanwhile, took a puff of his cigar before pulling his briefcase into his lap, removing a sheet of paper, and reading aloud:

  “ ‘Certificate of a live birth in the City and County of Philadelphia. Sex: male. Race: Caucasian. Mother: Janet Rose Dimitri. Father . . .’ Hmmm.” The judge looked up. “That has been left blank. ‘Birth weight and length:’ Et cetera. Et cetera. In short, we have a healthy baby boy. ‘Name: Arthur Robert Dimitri.’ ”

  “Not anymore.” Mrs. George handed the judge the adoption papers Mrs. Dimitri had signed. “In fact, Carolyn renamed him Charlie this afternoon, according to Polly. And Miss Grahame will have her own name for him, his real name.”

  The judge put the adoption release into his briefcase, which he then closed and latched.

  “You’ll file that with the clerk tomorrow?” Mrs. George said.

  “And the clerk will issue the amended birth certificate, making it all but impossible for Miss Dimitri to find her son—if ever she were inclined to do so.”

  “He’s no longer her son,” said Mrs. George. “He’s a lucky little boy who’s getting—”

  “—an opportunity he never could have expected.” The judge finished her sentence. “Yes, I know, Helen. And Miss Grahame gets the blond baby she’s always wanted, and we get—”

  “—an appropriate fee.” Mrs. George interrupted in case he was about to say something as vulgar as “rich” or “money” or “cash.”

  “What about Miss Dimitri?” the judge asked, blink-blink-blink. “What does she get?”

  Mrs. George was running out of patience. “Miss Dimitri has only herself to blame for getting into trouble. We’ve been through all this before, Jonathan.”

  On the lamp table by the love seat was a manila folder labeled Joanna Grahame. Mrs. George slipped the birth certificate inside and laid it back on the table. Then she sat down, picked up her glass, and sipped her sherry.

  After a few moments, the judge asked, “When does the boy go to his new home?”

  “Miss Grahame has obtained a nurse through an agency. The nurse is traveling here by automobile. She will stay the night in a hotel and come here before breakfast tomorrow. Once she has the boy, she’ll return with him to New York City, and there he’ll be united with his mother. Miss Grahame and her son go home to California next week.”

  “There to live happily ever after,” said the judge.

  Mrs. George said tartly that she had no reason to expect otherwise. Then, pleading a headache, she announced she would turn in early. The judge left shortly after that . . . but Mrs. George did not retire immediately to her bedroom. Instead, she stood quietly in her parlor, listening as her caller’s footfalls grew fainter on the stairs. When she could no longer hear them, she took Joanna Grahame’s folder from the lamp table, went into the kitchen, wrapped it snugly in white butcher paper, and secreted it in a hiding place whose location even the judge did not know.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  For a legend, Andrew Mouse was awfully annoying.

  That was Mary Mouse’s assessment, and they hadn’t even been together a full twenty-four hours.

  He followed her around. He never shut up. If she had an idea, he had one, too. To his credit, he was willing to apologize. But that turned out to be a mixed blessing when his apologies went on so long they became monologues in a one-mouse show:

  “Do I talk too much? I talk too much. I’m sorry I talk so much. I don’t mean to. It’s just that I was alone so long. It’s like I stored up all these words and now they’re spilling out. Tell me I don’t talk too much. But I do. Don’t I?”

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha!” said Andrew, and then he asked, “Have I told you the story of why I went away?”

  It was midday for the mice, the middle of the night in human time. On their spy mission earlier, Mary and Andrew had inhaled more cigar smoke than was good for them, and gained two pieces of intelligence. First, the boss had obtained the new human pup in the nursery by thievery. Second, her hiding place for papers was the cold white box in the kitchen of her apartment, the box that otherwise held comestibles.

  Andrew and Mary were both professional thieves, but neither had heard of stealing a pup, let alone stealing a pup to trade. Mary had been horrified, Andrew somewhat less so. Human behavior, he reminded her, was infinitely strange.

  At any rate, neither of these pieces of intelligence pertained to them. The important thing was that no one had mentioned an exterminator, and, in other news, the predator had not ventured from the sofa.

  Now Mary looked forward to lunch in a pleasant cellar picnic spot where a grate high in the cinder-block wall afforded a breeze.

  “No, Andrew,” Mary said in response to his question. “You haven’t told me yet why you left, but I have a feeling you’re about to.”

  Andrew’s whiskers drooped. “I won’t if you don’t want me to. I suppose it’s not very interesting. I suppose I’m not very interesting. I’m boring, aren’t I? I’m sorry.”

  Mary sighed. “Go ahead and tell me.” While he talked, she calculated, she could finish the last of the tomato seeds they’d foraged for their meal.

  “You see”—Andrew brightened—“I wanted to be like Stuart Little himself. He left his family—”

  “—his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick C. Little, and his brother George, of New York City,” Ma
ry recited.

  “—and borrowed a sports car from his friend the surgeon dentist, and drove out of the city in search of Margalo—”

  “—the pretty little brown hen-bird with a streak of yellow on her breast.”

  “Precisely,” said Andrew.

  “Did you have a car?” Mary asked.

  The idea of a car had been fascinating and attractive to the mice of the Cherry Street colony. Scurrying could only get you so far.

  “Sadly, no,” Andrew said. “I hitched a ride on a newspaper delivery truck, which is how I ended up at the Market Street Newsstand.” He tried to say this modestly, but the sparkle in his eye gave away his pride. Leaping from the sidewalk to the truck’s running board had been no mean feat.

  “And was there a Margalo?” Mary asked.

  Andrew said, “If you truly wish to understand my story, Mary Mouse, I will have to begin at the beginning.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Andrew arranged his tail, settled back on his haunches, clasped his front paws one in the other, and began: “I was a puny pup.”

  Oh, dear, thought Mary. We really are going back to the beginning.

  “And furthermore,” Andrew continued, “I was picked on by my brothers and sisters, my cousins, even my uncle Fitzgerald. Another mouse might have been defeated by such harsh treatment, but I determined to overcome it, to make something of myself.

  “How did I do this? First, I set a schedule and did pull-ups, push-ups, and tail-ups every day. In addition, I ate only healthy scraps. I meant to avoid growing plump . . .”

  Mary vowed to eat only one more tomato seed, two at most.

  “. . . so that I could squeeze in and out of the tiniest spaces and, with my superior speed and agility, elude all predators.”

  Mary swallowed. “What about mental training?”

  Andrew looked up as if he was surprised to be interrupted. “Ah, of course. Well, more than any mouse excepting the scholars, I studied the story of Stuart Little. And the more I learned, the more I realized that I must follow in his mouse-tracks if I wanted to attain wisdom.”

  “And did you attain wisdom?”

  A little exasperated, Andrew said, “That came later.”

  “Sorry,” Mary said.

  Andrew scratched his haunch. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The only way to follow the path of Stuart was to liberate myself from the colony. I had observed that the newspaper delivery truck came to the home on a fixed schedule in the early morning. Knowing I would have only one chance to make my escape, I practiced the necessary maneuvers over and over again, using the running boards of vehicles parked at the curb as targets.

  “It was a dark and cold winter morning when at last I made my move. I did not say good-bye. Carrying nothing, I squeezed through the foyer portal, then scurried beneath the front gate. Waiting at the curb, shivering and alone, I soon heard the deep rumble of truck tires on the macadam and saw headlights in the gloom. The brakes squealed. The truck stopped. The driver rolled down his window and tossed a newspaper over the fence.

  “I had only a few seconds, and I made the most of them. I leaped to the running board and dug my claws into the rubber.”

  Mary’s heart pounded in sympathy.

  “I felt exultant! I thought I was safe,” said Andrew.

  “And weren’t you?” Mary asked.

  Andrew shook his head. “I hadn’t counted on one thing—the rush of freezing wind that followed the truck’s acceleration. It dislodged my claws and pushed me backward toward the precipice. At any second, I expected to be dashed to my death!”

  Mary shuddered. This was a good story. Lots of suspense.

  “Then, at the last possible moment, the truck braked, and I somersaulted forward. I was dizzy and off-balance, but when the driver’s door opened, I managed to stumble sideways into the truck’s cab. A few minutes later, the truck stopped to drop off a bundle of newspapers at the Market Street Newsstand, and the driver alighted to visit with the owner, Mr. Valenti. That was when I took the opportunity to disembark.”

  “Why there?” Mary asked.

  Andrew’s beady eyes turned dreamy. “It was the smell of people and comestibles,” he said. “I was ravenous, and the newsstand smells were delicious. I thought I could do worse than to make it the first stop on my quest.”

  “But it wasn’t the first stop,” said Mary. “You stayed there.”

  Andrew nodded. “I did.”

  Mary felt a little harrumph of satisfaction. So the big-time, boy-wonder mouse hadn’t gone on such a magnificent odyssey at all. He had gone to the Market Street Newsstand . . . and finis. She thought of a question.

  “Uh, just what exactly is a newsstand?”

  “A wonderful place,” Andrew said, “a small wooden shelter that’s busy all day with humans learning the news of the world from colorful and interesting magazines and newspapers, some of them with photographs.”

  “Are there photographs of mice?” Mary asked.

  “There is an occasional photograph of”—Andrew lowered his voice to a whisper—“rats. And they are always shown in an unfavorable light.”

  “Naturally,” said Mary.

  “Besides that, there are photographs of predators and, even more often, of canines. But the vast majority of the photographs show humans.”

  “Such a self-centered species,” said Mary.

  “The newsstand was a good home,” Andrew said, “but it did have its perils. Mr. Valenti was larger even than the usual full-grown male, and he often wore heavy boots. While usually it was easy to hear him coming, I still worried about being squashed. Also, the newsstand was only open from five-thirty a.m. till eight p.m., which meant there was no heat overnight.”

  “And you mentioned the comestibles?” Mary prompted.

  Andrew offered a detailed and rhapsodic account of the candies, gums, nuts, crackers, and packaged cookies on offer at the Market Street Newsstand, besides well-considered opinions on the merits of Wrigley’s spearmint versus Juicy Fruit gum and Milky Way versus Hershey chocolate bars.

  “Was it the quality of the comestibles that kept you from leaving the newsstand and completing your quest?”

  Andrew’s whiskers bristled. “Who says I did not complete my quest? At the Market Street Newsstand, I realized that the true nature of my quest was not spatial but mental.”

  Mary covered her mouth with her paw to keep from laughing. Did he not know how pompous he sounded? But when his whiskers drooped again, she felt a pang of remorse. “Please continue,” she said.

  Andrew wiped his paw across his face. “At the Market Street Newsstand . . .” he began, then stopped and cocked his head. “Where was I?”

  Mary came to a realization. “Andrew Mouse,” she said, “have you memorized your story word for word?”

  The auditors had memorized the story of Stuart Little word for word, and most mice knew a few passages by heart. But it would be strange for a mouse to memorize a personal story so exactly. The implication was that the story must be very, very important.

  Andrew looked sheepish. “Yeah. I practiced a lot.”

  Mary could just see it. All alone on cold winter nights in the newsstand, Andrew pacing back and forth to keep warm while declaiming the story of his life. Probably he had envisioned his triumphant return to the colony, the crowds of cheering auditors, the tale retold over Cherry Street generations. Instead, the populace had gone away, and his only auditor, Mary Mouse, had not cheered even once.

  Andrew’s likely disappointment awakened her sympathy. “A mental journey,” she prompted.

  “Right,” he said. “In short, the way that I attained wisdom and fulfillment and completed my quest was this: I learned to read.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Mary was flabbergasted.

  For generations, the auditors of the Cherry Street colony had observed that when Miss Ragone told a story, she looked at the book she held and at regular intervals turned its pages. From this observation, they concluded that
the markings on the book’s pages contained the story, which Miss Ragone deciphered through the process the humans called reading.

  Mice had to memorize every story they told. How convenient for human beings that they did not!

  The auditors—whose job was to listen to stories, then retell them—were especially eager to learn this useful human trick. From their observations of the classrooms on the second floor, they deduced that Miss Ragone taught the human pups to read, and the auditors duly attended her lessons. In addition, thieves were assigned to steal pages for the auditors to study. But try as they might, the mice could never make sense of the marks on the pages. They did not resemble words, but only misshapen mouse-tracks.

  “Please forgive my skepticism,” Mary said to Andrew, “but the colony’s wisest mice have tried and failed to learn to read. Why were you able to do so on your own?”

  “I had certain advantages,” Andrew said modestly, “including an almost infinite supply of reading material at the newsstand, and the lack of distractions like a social life, or pups.”

  Mary felt a pang at the mention of pups. How were her own girls faring? Had they arrived at their new home safely?

  “Mary?” Andrew cocked his head. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s just—”

  “What a bonehead I am,” Andrew said. “You miss your own pups, don’t you? I shouldn’t have spoken so casually.”

  Mary wiped her nose and shook out her whiskers. “Tell me how you did it, how you learned to read.”

  Andrew continued his story. “There was a male human pup who visited the newsstand sometimes,” he explained. “His name was Mario, and he was very badly behaved. He tried to steal candy when no one was looking, and comic books, too.”

  “A thief like us,” Mary said.

  Andrew disagreed. “Not at all. We stole only for the good of the colony. This little Mario stole out of greed.”