Shoebag (12 page)

“There were no school songs at your father’s school. No secret clubs, no school uniforms — they didn’t even live in the school. They lived at home!”

“Well, it was an ordinary public school,” said Mr. Sweetsong.

“A very, very ordinary public school. Be glad, Stanley, that you can be a Miss Rattray boy! The very first Miss Rattray boy there’s ever been!”

But Stanley would miss Castle Sweet with its great gardens, its tiny red gazebo down by its round blue pond, and its long green lawns where Stanley played croquet with Tattle, the chauffeur. Often, after a game, Tattle would let Stanley see his pet tarantula, a South American red-toe called Weezer.

Stanley was ten years old, the very same age that his mother had been when she went to Miss Rattray’s, and the very same age his father had been when he went to the very ordinary public school.

Stanley was short for his age, with brown hair and large brown eyes that fixed on Castle Sweet longingly as they left it. “I will miss my home,” he said.

“But you will appreciate it more, dear, each time you return,” said his mother.

“And when we see you next, at Thanksgiving,” said his father, “you will already be bigger and braver than you are now, and you will probably be eager to go back to school.”

“I am not brave,” said Stanley, “and I will never be eager to leave Castle Sweet.”

Behind glass, in the front seat, Tattle drove the limousine very slowly, for he knew Stanley wanted to prolong his last moments at the estate.

“I will miss Tattle, too,” said Stanley, “and Weezer.”

“Who ever heard of missing a chauffeur?” said his mother, “and who ever heard of missing a spider?”

“
I
would miss Tattle if he were to leave us,” said Mr. Sweetsong.

“Who ever heard of a chauffeur leaving us?” said Mrs. Sweetsong. “Cooks leave. Maids leave. Such servants come and go. But chauffeurs don’t. Tattle loves our Rolls Royce.”

“So do I,” said Stanley.

“You are spoiled, darling,” said his mother. “You probably think everyone lives as luxuriously as we do, but you will learn at Miss Rattray’s that you are a very special little boy. Heir to a fortune!”

“If I’m a hair to a fortune, then —”

“Not
hair,
darling.”

“Hair is what you have on your head, dear boy,” said his father.

“If I’m an heir to a fortune, then why can’t I keep my private tutor and not have to go away to school?”

“Because,” said his mother, “you need friends.”

“I don’t know how to make friends.”

“Besides,” said his father, “we don’t want you to be an heir with a big head. An heir with a big head would have too much hair to comb. Ha-ha.”

“Not funny,” said Stanley.

“Where does a sheep get his hair cut, son?” said his father.

“Where?” said Stanley.

“At the baa-baa shop. Ha-ha.”

But nothing could make Stanley Sweetsong laugh late that afternoon in early September.

Tattle turned right at the end of the driveway and the long, silver limousine headed over the rolling hills of Bucks County, on the way to Wayne, near Philadelphia.

“What is Philadelphia known for, Stanley?” asked his mother, who was trying to get his mind off leaving home.

Stanley knew full well that it was the fourth largest city in the United States, known for Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. But he did not feel in a mood to mention independence when his own was being taken away. So he sat over in the corner of the backseat and sulked. And did not answer his mother.

“Here’s a clue,” said Mr. Sweetsong, “‘…
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’”

Mrs. Sweetsong said sharply, “That is the Gettysburg Address, dear. That is
not
the Declaration of Independence!”

“You see, Stanley?” said Mr. Sweetsong. “Your mother knows more than I do, because your mother went to Miss Rattray’s School for Girls.”

“And now one boy,” said Mrs. Sweetsong.

T
HE LILTING TONES OF
Miss Rattray sounded down the hall.

“Your room,” said she, “is right this way. … We are so pleased to have you, Stanley. Would you like some dinner? We are serving dinner in the dining hall.”

“I’m not hungry, thank you, Miss Rattray.”

“Well, then. You settle in and after dinner you’ll meet the little girl who lives in the room next to yours.”

“The Doll Smasher,” Shoebag said. He stayed up in the corner of the ceiling, for he was known to be fairly fearless (except when he was expected to kill anything. And except around the yellow cat who lived by the rag mop in the kitchen).

Shoebag also wanted to get a good look at this boy, who was about to enter the very room where Shoebag had been sleeping earlier.

Miss Rattray led the small boy inside. “Your trunk is right there near the closet, Stanley. You may unpack it and put your clothes in the bureau drawers.”

“At home a maid does that,” said Stanley.

“But you are not home now, dear.”

“Will I have a roommate, Miss Rattray?”

“On this particular hall, no one has roommates. You cannot have a roommate, for you are the only boy in Miss Rattray’s School for Girls. And the little girl next door to you cannot have a roommate because —”

“Because,” Shoebag silently finished the sentence for her, “she is a Doll Smasher.”

“Because,” Miss Rattray finished her own sentence, finally, “she is a very special little girl.”

“So am I a very special little boy,” said Stanley Sweetsong, “according to my mother.”

“Then you two should get along very well, Stanley,” said Miss Rattray. “You will share the bathroom across the hall.”

Miss Rattray was a very tall, sturdy woman, who looked as though a string suspended from the ceiling was attached to her head. She had a very erect posture, large black spectacles, and short black hair. She wore a blue-and-white striped seersucker suit, for the school colors were royal blue and white.

“I hope you will be happy here, Stanley.”

“The bed isn’t made,” said Stanley Sweetsong.

“Here we make our own beds, dear.”

“I have never made my own bed in my entire life.”

“No time like the present to start,” said Miss Rattray.

Then with a smile and a wave she left the boy by himself in the room, except for Shoebag, now clinging to the twenty-second slat in the Venetian blind.

When the boy sat down on the unmade bed, he put his hands up to his face and sobbed.

“Cheer up,” Shoebag said. “It’s not
that
bad here.”

But, of course, humans rarely hear anything roaches have to say, and Stanley Sweetsong was crying too loud, anyway.

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Shoebag Returns
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My real name is Marijane Meaker.

When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like
Ladies’ Home Journal
. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is
Shoebag
, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.

My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.

I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of
Harriet the Spy
—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.

I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s
The Pigman
, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!
was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York,
Dinky
was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.

Gentlehands
, a novel as successful as
Dinky
but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the
New York Times
called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”

One of the hardest books for me to write was
Little Little
, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.

I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called
Deliver Us from Evie
. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.

When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called
Your Eyes in Stars
.

Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired
I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me
.

My book
Night Kites
is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.

I have also written a teenage autobiography, called
Me Me Me Me M
e, which deals with my years growing up in upstate New York during the thirties and forties. My older brother, Ellis, was a fighter pilot in the naval air force, seeing action over Japan. After World War II, he fought in Vietnam for our secret airline Air America, and later in Korea. He was my favorite relative until Vietnam. We had a major falling-out over the war when he called me a “peacenik.” We never felt the same about each other after that, up until his death in the nineties. My much younger brother has lived with his family most of his life in Arizona. We don’t see as much of each other as we’d like because of the distance between our homes.

I have always given my parents credit for my becoming a writer. My father was a great reader. Our living room was filled with walls of books. I grew up with him reading to me, and ultimately began reading any novel he did. But I am a writer largely due to my mom’s love of gossip. Our venetian blinds were always at a tilt in our house because Mother watched the neighbors day and night. Many of her telephone conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!” On execution nights in our prison, my mother and her girlfriends huddled outside in a car, waiting for the executioner to go inside. He was one of ten men who entered the prison together on execution night, so no one snooping could know who had really pulled the switch.

I have taught writing for thirty-four years at nearby Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. We benefit, in part, the Springs Scholarship Fund. My teaching inspired me to write
Blood on the Forehead: What I Know about Writing
. A dozen members who had never finished a book became published writers after joining the class, and we also have members who are already professional writers. Currently, I am in the middle of a memoir called
Remind Me
. The title comes from an old Mabel Mercer song: