“Ah, no.” Rannuccio slapped his hand against his forehead and groaned. “She’s hungry again.”
“Of course I am,” said Celeste. “We haven’t eaten for hours. Aren’t you hungry, Caro?” She turned to Caroline, who admitted that she was. Then she turned back to me.
“I’m hungry, too,” I said.
“Back to the market!” Celeste clapped her hands with delight and skipped away. We all hurried after. Antonio handed me my watch, and I slung it back over my head, where it banged and swung against my sweater as I trotted along.
Like a row of obedient ducks, we followed Celeste along the canal. On either side of the water, the stone street was twenty or thirty feet wide. In most places it was filled with people going about their business, unaware of our existence. I nearly walked into someone who I thought would step out of my way. After that I was more careful to avoid other people on the street. It was harder than you might think to remember that they couldn’t see me. And hard to keep Celeste and the others in view.
Ahead of me, Celeste began to sing as she walked, and it was easier to follow her voice. She led the way to an open plaza filled with stalls of fruit and vegetables.
Around the plaza were shops—everything that anyone could possibly want to eat. The five of us walked through the market and helped ourselves. Celeste took mainly pastries. She started a collection in the crook of one elbow. Rannuccio and Antonio each slipped a roasting chicken off racks where they turned above the coals. Caroline walked to the wine seller and casually selected a bottle from crates outside his door. Then we took the food we had collected to an empty bench beside the canal. I hesitated.
“Couldn’t we pay somehow?” I asked.
The other four children looked at each other. “I’ll show her,” said Caroline, and led me to the back of the market, where side streets led deeper into the city. We walked to the opening and I looked into impenetrable gray mist. Next, Caroline led me to the wine seller and opened the door to the shop. On the other side was the same thick gray fog.
“There isn’t anything there,” said Caroline when I reached out a hand to touch it. “It’s a painting. It only goes so far.” She closed the door and led me back to the bench by the canal.
“You see?” Celeste asked when we returned. “It’s a painting. When you go back, everything will be just exactly as it was before you came.”
“Except that Olga’s coat will not be here anymore,” said Antonio as he licked the grease from the chicken off his fingers.
We ate our lunch and then we began our search. Celeste, Rannuccio, Antonio, and Caroline had already looked to see if anyone was wearing the coat. It was springtime in Canaletto’s Venice, and anyone wearing a fur coat would be easy to find. They had looked in gondolas and other boats, as many as they could get into. We walked along the canal, looking in the market stalls and the shop-windows. We made our way down one side of the canal until the gray mist stopped us, then crossed a bridge and began to work our way up the other side. I stopped outside an arched doorway. The others turned back.
“What is it?” asked Rannuccio.
“I don’t know.” I looked around. There were two gondolas, pulled up at the side of the canal. They were tied to brightly striped posts like horses in stalls. The gondoliers were sitting on the edge of the street, with their feet dangling over the water. The street was made of large, uneven paving stones, and steps led up from it into the archway on my right. Under the arch was a chamber where people could stand out of the rain. At the back of it, in the shadows, was a glass door. It was the door that had caught my attention. It had glass panels on both sides, and I could see a wooden staircase with blue carpet beyond it.
I climbed up the steps to the archway and walked closer. Set in the door frame was a small brass plate with a button on it the size of my fingertip. It was an electric doorbell. I stepped back. At the top of the door was an address, and when I saw it, I knew that we had found what we were looking for. The address was 5478-B. Venice had certainly never contained an address like that.
I turned the knob and pushed open the door. Celeste, Antonio, Caroline, and Rannuccio came behind me, but when they reached the doorway, they found they could go no further.
“This is not the painting,” said Antonio.
I went in alone.
I climbed the stairway. I turned once, then again. My friends were out of sight. There was a landing at the top of the stairs, and on the left a door. There seemed to be no lock. I tried the knob, and when it turned, I found a dim room filled with hunting trophies and dust. There were bookcases on the walls and above them the mounted heads of various animals. There were antelope and ibex and bongo. Above the empty fireplace was a huge sad-looking buffalo with its hair fallen out in patches. Here and there on the bookshelves were stuffed rabbits and gophers and birds. The windows were dirty. The room smelled musty and sad. I wrinkled my nose and looked around for Olga’s coat. There was a table in front of the fireplace. It was empty except for a layer of dust and a rolled bundle wrapped in twine. I picked up the bundle and felt the softness of the fur. It was dark brown, and each individual hair was tipped with silver. I tugged at one end of the bundle until I saw the stitching in the collar, and then I was sure. It was Olga’s coat. I tucked it under one arm, and I turned to go.
“What could you possibly want with that old thing?”
Sitting in a wing chair at the far end of the room was a harlequin dressed in turquoise and yellow and blue and red. He had no face, only a white porcelain carnival mask with ribbons hanging from its sides. Their bright colors were obscured by the same fine gray powder that coated everything in the room.
“Well?” he asked me.
“I’m taking it back to its owner,” I said, and hurried toward the door.
“Why bother?” asked the harlequin, and lounged further back in his chair. He didn’t seem anxious to stop me. I stopped myself.
“Why do her a favor?” he asked. “What has she done for you?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but the harlequin dismissed all my answers with a wave of his hand.
“Big deal. Some tea, cookies, a bunch of second-rate puzzles. She hasn’t changed anything, you know.” He leaned forward and planted his elbows on his knees. “If you go back, everything will be just the same. You’ll get on the ferry tomorrow and go home to your dull life and your dull governess, and you still won’t have any friends. You won’t have anything to do all day but stick together boring puzzles and spend every afternoon with your mother at dull tea parties with dull ladies. Why would you go back to that? Why bother?”
What else could I do?
“Stay here,” he suggested. “She can’t make you climb back through the frame. She can’t fit through to come after you herself. You have friends here, why not stay?” He was very persuasive. I wavered, thinking of the splendid day I had spent with my friends.
“No one will miss you,” the harlequin pointed out. “No one will even notice that you are gone.”
Olga would notice.
“Only because she wants the coat,” the harlequin said. “That’s all she cares about. She doesn’t care about you.”
But I knew that wasn’t true. I was important. Olga had said so. She had said I was more important even than the coat.
The harlequin went on. “Stay,” he said. “You’ll never grow old,” he said. “You can stay here forever and nothing will change.”
It might have been a persuasive argument for an adult, but I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be old enough to tell my mother, no, I wouldn’t go to her horrible teas. I thought of all the puzzles in the world without solutions. I suddenly realized that I wanted to go to college. It was an unusual thing for a girl to do, but I knew I could if I wanted. I would go to college and spend my whole life learning the solutions to puzzles.
“Stay,” said the harlequin.
“No, thanks,” I yelled as I threw myself at the door and jumped down the stairs three at a time. I burst ou
t into the street and was lucky to miss knocking Celeste down. In a parade, we marched down the street and out to the Grand Canal. Rannuccio picked a gondola that he thought might pass under the picture frame, and we all piled in.
The boat passed the frame, but of course it did not stop. Very nimbly I had to throw myself up at the passing square with all my friends pushing and pushing until their hands could no longer reach.
“Good-bye! Good-bye!” I yelled as I teetered on the edge of the frame. With only one hand to balance by and the other wrapped around the coat I thought I was on my way back into the canal, but strong hands reached to pull me from the other side. I fell through the frame and landed in Olga’s lap.
Later, after one last cup of tea and a long talk, we walked down to the beach together. At the waterline, Olga stopped to give me another fierce hug. “Good-bye, Charlotte. You will forget about me soon, but remember to keep looking for more puzzles.” She kissed me on the forehead, then freed the last knot in the twine that wrapped the bundle and shook out a stiff dark fur coat as large as herself. As she walked into the water, she pushed her arms through its short sleeves and wrapped herself, clothes and all, in the fur. She fell forward into the next wave and was gone. When the crest of the wave had passed there was no sign of Olga. Only the brown head and shoulders of a seal bobbed in the water.
Somewhere behind us a car honked. We were stopped at a traffic light that had turned green. The cabdriver put the car into gear and hurried through the intersection. “Lady? Did you want to go to the East Building or the West Building?” he asked.
“West Building, please,” said Aunt Charlotte.
The cab pulled around a corner and bounced across a cobblestone parking lot. It stopped in front of a pair of huge metal doors, and we got out. Aunt Charlotte went to pay the cabdriver, but he waved one hand out the window.
“No charge,” he said. “Free ride. Best story I heard in my life, in my entire life.” He drove away, his wheels squeaking on the cobblestones.
“Well,” said Aunt Charlotte, looking after him, “I did think that it took a long time to get here.” Her cheeks were pink, and she looked pleased.
“Was that the end of the story? Did you ever see Olga again?” I asked.
Aunt Charlotte took my hand, and we walked into the museum.
“No, that isn’t quite the end of the story. I never did see Olga again, and it may surprise you to hear that I quite forgot about her for many years. Then one day, when I was home from college (I studied chemistry), I came to a fund-raiser here at the museum. I brought my fiancé because I thought it would probably be very boring. During the speeches we slipped away and went to look at the paintings. Your great-uncle Emlin, you don’t remember him, I suppose, was majoring in art history. He told me little snippets about the paintings we passed, until we reached this one.”
My aunt had stopped at a small painting of a profile of a girl. Only her head and shoulders fit into the frame. She was wearing a dark coat and a hat with a wide flat brim that matched. Her blonde hair was long and straight. Her nose was tilted up, and her lips curved in a delighted smile.
“This,” said my aunt, “is Celeste.”
I read the plaque at the bottom of the picture carefully. It said “An Alsatian Girl by Jean-Jacques Henner.” I looked up at my aunt.
“Yes, well,” she said, “you can just imagine how surprised I was. It had never occurred to me that my friends must have had paintings of their own. All of my days with Olga came back in a rush. I dragged my fiancé through as much of the museum as was open, telling him the story as we went. He was able to suggest likely painters for each subject, but no others of my friends were here. Later, I paged through art book after art book until I found them all.”
She tugged at my hand, and I followed her out of the gallery.
“I badgered the curators here at the National Gallery and donated pots of your great-great-grandfather’s money so that this museum could acquire the portraits of each of my friends, I even found the Canaletto. You’ve seen it. It’s the painting at the top of the stairs at home.”
One by one, she showed me all of her friends. We walked across the main hall to look at Lady Caroline Howard painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The hat on her head did look like a small wedding cake. She was reaching out with one silk-gloved hand to brush the petals of the rosebush beside her.
Antonio was in the galleries at the other end of the museum. His nameplate said only “A Youth,” but he had the chestnut hair that my aunt had described. Around the neck of his shirt was a thin collar embroidered with the same deep black as the velvet on his cap.
“See the tassels on his hat?” Aunt Charlotte asked. “I always forget those tassels until I see them again.” They were tiny tassels, marked by just a dash of gold paint.
Rannuccio was not on display. My aunt led me by the hand through a door marked “Museum Officials Only.” Behind it were cement corridors lit by bare lightbulbs. In a windowless office we found a man who was expecting us. He took us to a room filled floor to ceiling with racks of paintings. He slid one painting from the racks and carried it to an easel. Then he left us alone to admire Rannuccio in his fancy clothes.
Afterward, we went to the café. We sat in silence, Aunt Charlotte sipping her coffee while I drank my soda. Finally I had to ask, “Is it a true story, Aunt Charlotte?”
Aunt Charlotte looked at me without saying anything for a while. Then she said “I’ve told you my story. What you believe is up to you, Marguerite.”
What you believe is up to you.
Instead of Three Wishes
Selene and the elf prince met on a Monday afternoon in New Duddleston when she had gone into town to run an errand for her mother. Mechemel was there to open a bank account. He had dressed carefully and anonymously for his trip in a conservative gray suit, a cream-colored shirt, a maroon tie. He was wearing a dark gray overcoat and carried a black leather briefcase. Selene hardly noticed him the first time she saw him.
He was standing on the traffic island in the middle of Route 237 when she went into Hopewell’s Pharmacy and was still there when she came out again. She thought he must be cold on a November day with no hat and no gloves. He looked a little panicked out on the median by himself. The traffic light had changed. The walk sign reappeared, but Mechemel remained on the island, rooted to the concrete, with his face white and his pale hair blown up by the wind. Selene walked out to ask if he needed a hand.
“Young woman,” he snapped, “I am perfectly capable of crossing a street on my own.” Selene shrugged and turned to go, but the light had changed again and she, too, was stranded. While she waited for another chance to cross, the cars sped by. The breeze of their passing pushed Selene and the elf prince first forward, then back. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation. When the walk sign reappeared, she was eager to get back to the sidewalk and catch her bus for home. A few steps into the crosswalk, she noticed that the elf prince still had not moved.
Rude old man, she thought, I should leave him here. But she stretched out a hand. Without looking at her, the elf prince put his arm around hers, and they walked to the curb together. Once they were up on the sidewalk, he snatched his arm away, as if it might catch fire.
“Well,” he said with a sneer, “I suppose you expect a reward now.”
Selene looked at the crosswalk. She looked at the old man. A nut, she thought. Nice suit, though.
“No, thank you,” Selene said aloud. “Happy to oblige.” She gave him the pleasant but impersonal smile she used on customers when she worked after school at the cafeteria.
“Of course you are.” His voice dripped sarcasm, and Selene took a step back. “But I can’t let you get away without one, can I?” When he fumbled in the inside pocket of his suit coat, Selene took several more steps back. He pulled out a wallet. From the wallet he extracted three small white cards and pushed them at Selene.
They looked like business cards. Instead of a printed name, a filigreed gold line wr
apped itself in a design in the middle of each white rectangle.
“What are they?” Selene asked.
“Wishes,” said the elf prince. “You’ve got three. Just make a wish and burn a card. It doesn’t”—he looked her over with contempt—“require a college education.”
“Thanks, but no, thanks,” said Selene, and handed the cards back. She’d read about people who were offered three wishes by malevolent sprites. No matter what they wished, something terrible happened. She looked carefully at the man. Behind the nice suit and the tie, he was just as she thought a malevolent sprite might appear.
“What do you mean, ‘Thanks, but no, thanks’?” The elf prince was irritated. “They are perfectly good wishes, I assure you. They’re not cheap ‘wish for a Popsicle’ wishes, young woman. They are very high-quality. Here.” He pushed them toward her. “Wish for anything. Go ahead.”
“I wish for peace on earth,” Selene said, and sneaked a look over her shoulder. Her bus was coming up the street but still two blocks away.
“That’s not a thing!” snarled the elf prince. “That’s an idea. That’s a concept. I didn’t say wish for a concept. I said a thing. A material object. Go on.”
Selene stood her ground. “I’d rather not.”
“Look,” said the elf prince, “you get a reward for doing me a favor. I can’t go around owing you one. What do you want?”
Selene could hear the bus rumbling up behind her. “Why don’t you pick something for me?” she asked. “Something you think is appropriate. How would that be?” The bus stopped beside her, and the doors sighed open.
“Well,” said the elf prince with some asperity, “I can hardly think—”
“—Of something off the top of your head? I’m like that, too,” said Selene. “Tell you what, when you think of something, you can send it to my house. It’s easy to find. We live in the New Elegance Estates.”
She hopped onto the bus. The doors closed behind her, and the elf prince was left standing on the sidewalk as the bus drove away.