Jewel of the East (15 page)

“What do they teach children in school these days?” she said. “Haven’t you read
The Good Earth
?”

“No,” Maisie said.

“But you’ve heard of it, of course,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

“No,” Felix admitted.

“You poor, ignorant things,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “
The Good Earth
is a novel by Pearl S. Buck that was published in 1931 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932.”

“Pearl won the Pulitzer Prize?” Felix said.

“
And
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “The first American woman to do that,” she added.

“She does love to tell stories,” Maisie said.

“What’s it about?” Felix asked.

“I shouldn’t tell you, should I?” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “You should both read it, I daresay.”

“Please tell us,” Felix asked.

“It’s about life in a village in China before the revolution,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “And that’s all I’ll say. You need to read it to really understand it.”

“I read a lot,” Felix said softly.

“What do you read? Comic books?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Well, now you’ll have to
read your friend Pearl Buck’s books, won’t you?” she said with a slight smile on her face.

“Yes,” Felix said.

Even though he felt scolded, he didn’t care. Pearl had become a famous writer! A prizewinning novelist! This made him so happy, he could ignore Great-Aunt Maisie’s comments.

“Great-Aunt Maisie?” Maisie was asking.

“What is it?” Great-Aunt Maisie said, pulling the collar of her coat tighter around her against the wind that was picking up.

“We can’t figure out how to get home when we’re… away,” Maisie said.

The wind whistled around them.

“You need to use your brain,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “How do you
think
you get home?”

“We don’t know,” Maisie said, clearly disturbed by Great-Aunt Maisie’s curtness today.

“At first we thought we just needed to give the object to the right person,” Felix explained. “Like we gave Pearl a jade box filled with dirt.”

“And?” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

“That isn’t how it works,” Maisie said. “We figured that out.”

“This time, we were sitting up in bed, talking with Pearl and all of a sudden we were on the floor of The Treasure Chest,” Felix said.

“Mmmm,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “Sitting up in bed. Talking.”

“Right,” Maisie said.

Great-Aunt Maisie looked at them as if she were waiting for something.

“Sitting?” Maisie guessed.

But Felix was already shaking his head.

“No,” he said. “We were standing with Alexander in the cemetery.”

“Well, talking then?” Maisie asked impatiently.

Great-Aunt Maisie didn’t answer. She just sat there, waiting. The wind grew louder still, and now gray clouds raced across the sky, blocking the bright sun.

“Just tell us!” Maisie said.

“Why should I tell you what’s as clear as the nose on your face?” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

“Wait,” Felix said thoughtfully. “Pearl was telling us about her sisters and brothers who died. And Alexander was telling us about being an orphan.”

“So?” Maisie said. “And Clara was telling us about her own aunt, the nurse.”

A small smile crept across Great-Aunt Maisie’s face.

“And?” she said.

Felix smiled, too. “They need to give us something as well, don’t they?” he said. “We give them an object from The Treasure Chest, and they give us advice or a lesson of some kind. Something we need back home.”

Maisie did not understand. “They didn’t
give
us anything at all,” she said.

But the more Felix thought about it, the clearer it became.

“But they did, Maisie,” he said. “You were furious with me in China, and Pearl told us how important and precious siblings are. No sooner did she say that and we made up, then we were home.”

“And Alexander told us how lucky we were to have our parents, even if they weren’t together,” Maisie remembered.

Felix nodded. “It was Clara who told us we should listen to you, Great-Aunt Maisie,” he said.

“Ha!” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “I’m glad someone has some sense.”

The trees began to practically bow in the increasing wind.

Great-Aunt Maisie shivered in her fur coat.

“I don’t like this wind,” she said, looking out toward the bay.

The water had turned from blue-green to
gray, and whitecaps now danced across it.

“Maybe we should go inside,” Felix suggested.

“Something’s coming,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “Something bad.”

“No, no,” Maisie said. “I think it’s just a winter storm.”

Great-Aunt Maisie stood. Her posture was perfect: her head held high, her back as straight as a ruler.

“We shall see,” she said. “We shall see.”

“Mom?” Felix asked their mother in the car on the way back from visiting Great-Aunt Maisie. “How old is Great-Aunt Maisie, anyway?”

“Hmmm,” their mother said. “Funny, but I don’t really know.”

“Do you think she’s a hundred?” Maisie asked.

“No,” their mother said. But then she said, “Well, maybe.”

Their mother grew thoughtful.

“She has so much spunk, doesn’t she?” she said with a small smile. “Hey! I just had a great idea.”

“Uh-oh,” Maisie said.

“She’s feeling so well,” their mother continued, “we should have her come home for Christmas.”

The very idea made Felix uneasy. If Great-Aunt Maisie got anywhere near The Treasure Chest, who knew what she would do? Of course, she didn’t have a shard from the Ming vase, and they had learned that they needed that to time travel. But what if she got a hold of theirs? Was it possible to go back in time alone? Felix thought he needed Maisie in order to do it, but who knew what Great-Aunt Maisie was capable of?

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, elbowing his sister.

“Me neither. Where would she sleep?” Maisie asked. “How would she get up all those stairs? What if she got sick or something?”

“I’m going to call her doctor as soon as we get home and see if he’ll approve it,” their mother said as if they hadn’t protested. “You know, when I was a very little girl, I had one Christmas at Elm Medona. I’ll never forget eating at that enormous table in the dining room on the Pickworth china, those two
P
s looping together. It took four butlers to even move the chair so that I could climb onto it.”

Their mother’s eyes had grown dreamy as she talked.

“I’ll never forget that Christmas. We had goose for dinner. And oysters and cheese soufflé.”

“Great-Aunt Maisie won’t want to come to Elm Medona,” Maisie said. “It will make her sad.”

“I know!” their mother said, still ignoring anything they offered. “I’ll re-create that dinner for her.”

“Goose?” Felix said miserably. “You’re going to cook a goose?”

“And mincemeat pies and, oh! That’s right, a plum pudding. The cook baked a ring into it, and whoever got the slice with that ring was going to have good luck.”

Felix thought about flying the kite with Mr. Kung and Pearl, how it had lifted and dipped before it floated upward.

Their mother smiled at them in the rearview mirror.

“This is going to be a good Christmas after all,” she said.

Over the next week, while Maisie and Felix fretted over how to keep Great-Aunt Maisie out of Elm Medona and The Treasure Chest, their mother studied cookbooks and made elaborate lists and menu ideas. Whenever they wandered past her, she looked up, happily dazed, and said things like, “I think that goose I had here as a child was stuffed with apples and prunes and chestnuts,” or
“Did you know that the secret to a good soufflé is to resist the temptation to open the oven door while it’s baking?”

On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, Maisie and Felix came home from school to find their mother sitting at the kitchen table with the Blond Woman.

“We haven’t done anything wrong!” Maisie blurted as soon as she saw her.

The Blond Woman glared.

“Maisie, Felix,” their mother said. “I invited Barbara here to discuss the possibility of actually having Christmas dinner in Elm Medona’s dining room.”

“It seems that if your great-aunt is in attendance, this can be arranged,” the Blond Woman said, clearly unhappy about the rule.

Her double chin rested on the top of her light-blue turtleneck, quivering ever so slightly when she spoke. A navy-blue cardigan was tied jauntily around her shoulders. Maisie wondered if she had a closet full of sweaters, the sleeves already looped together, waiting for her.

“Barbara was just explaining all the rules to me,” their mother said with false cheerfulness.

“Great,” Felix said with his own false cheerfulness.

Their mother sighed. “This will make Great-Aunt Maisie so happy,” she said.

“Well, we must keep Miss Pickworth happy,” the Blond Woman said.

She rose, smoothing her khaki skirt as she did.

“So,” their mother said, leading her to the door, “on Christmas Eve, we’ll have hors d’oeuvres and wine at six, serve dinner at seven sharp, dessert by eight thirty, and finish up by nine or nine thirty.”

“At the latest,” the Blond Woman said firmly.

“At the very latest,” their mother said agreeably.

From the window, Maisie and Felix watched as the Blond woman got into her fancy, foreign car and drove off. As soon as the sound of the engine disappeared into the distance, their mother let out a huge sigh.

“What an awful woman,” she said. “Smug and bossy and obnoxious. But,” she added, a smile spreading on her lips, “like all women like that, if you let her feel superior, she gives you exactly what you want.”

“Mom,” Felix said tentatively, “I know you have your heart set on this, but—”

She didn’t hear him, though. She was
humming some song Maisie and Felix didn’t recognize and making notes in the notebook she’d dedicated to Christmas Eve dinner.

On Christmas Eve morning, Maisie woke up to the sound of something so familiar, and so wonderful, that instead of groaning at the sun or burrowing deeper under her covers, she lay in bed with her eyes open and listened closely to whatever was making her feel so good this early.

From the kitchen down the hall came the smell of strong coffee and the murmur of voices.

Maisie’s bedroom door opened, and Felix practically bounded into her room. His cowlick stuck up sharply and his glasses were perched on the tip of his nose, both indications that he, too, had been awakened.

“He’s here,” Felix said.

Maisie nodded.

But Felix was taking her hands now and tugging her up and out of bed.

“I almost feel,” she said, running her fingers through her tangle of hair, “that if we walk in that kitchen he’ll disappear.”

Felix understood. He, too, was overcome by the feeling that these moments before they went down the hall to the kitchen were precious
and practically magical.

But he assured his sister, “He won’t disappear.”

Together they walked slowly down the hall, the voices growing louder as they neared the kitchen.

At the sound of their footsteps, the voices stopped. Maisie and Felix stepped over the threshold into the kitchen, right into the waiting arms of their father. He scooped them both up at once and hugged them to him so tightly that for an instant they couldn’t catch their breaths. Or was it being in his arms at last that caused that?