The Willoughbys (2 page)

"My goodness, we don't want a baby!" their mother said, coming forward to take a look. "I don't like the feel of this at all."

"I'd like to keep it," Jane said in a small voice. "I think it's cute."

"No, it's not cute," Barnaby A said, looking down at it.

"Not cute at all," Barnaby B agreed.

"It has curls," Jane pointed out.

Their mother peered at the baby and then reached toward the basket of beige knitting that she kept on a hall table. She removed a small pair of gold-plated scissors and snipped them open and closed several times, thoughtfully. Then she leaned over the basket and used the scissors.

"Now it doesn't have curls," she pointed out, and put the scissors away.

Jane stared at the baby. Suddenly it stopped crying and stared back at her with wide eyes. "Oh, dear. It isn't cute without curls," Jane said. "I guess I don't want it anymore."

"Take it someplace else, children," their mother said, turning back toward the kitchen. "Dispose of it. I'm busy with a meat loaf."

The four children lugged the basket back outside. They thought. They discussed the problem. It was Barnaby A, actually, who came up with a plan, which he explained to Tim, since he made all the decisions for the group.

"Fetch the wagon," Tim commanded.

The twins got their wagon from where it was kept, along with bicycles, under the stoop of the house. The boys set the basket inside the wagon while their sister watched. Then, taking turns pulling the handle of the wagon, they transported the baby in its basket down the block, across the street (waiting carefully for the light), and for two more blocks and around the corner to the west, going some distance farther until, reaching their destination, they finally stopped in front of a very forbidding house that was known as the Melanoff mansion. The gentleman who lived there was a millionaire. Maybe even a billionaire. But he never came out. He stayed indoors, with the moldy curtains drawn, counting his money and feeling hostile. As with Scrooge from another old-fashioned story, tragic events in his past had caused him to lose interest in life.

The mansion was much larger than the other houses in the neighborhood, but it was unkempt. A wrought-iron fence around its yard was tilted and twisted in places, and the yard itself was cluttered with pieces of discarded furniture. Some of the windows were broken and boarded over, and a thin cat scratched itself and meowed on the porch.

"Wait, A," said Tim, when his brother began to push open the front gate. "I need to add to the note" He held his hand out to Jane, who had placed the folded paper carefully in the pocket of her ruffled frock, and she gave it to him.

"Pencil," Tim demanded, and one of the twins—for all the children were accustomed to carrying whatever Tim might need and demand—handed him a pencil.

Barnaby B turned so that Tim could use his back for a table.

"Could you tell what I wrote, B?" Tim asked his brother when he had finished.

"No. It felt like scribbles."

"You must train yourself better," Tim pointed out. "If
my
back had been the table, I would be able to recite each word and also the punctuation. Practice when you have a chance." Barnaby B nodded.

"You, too, A," Tim said, looking at the other twin.

"I will," Barnaby A promised.

"So will I," offered Jane.

"No. You needn't, because you are a girl. You will never be called upon for important work," Tim told her.

Jane began to cry a little, but very quietly, so that no one would notice. She vowed, through her quiet little tears, that one day she would prove Tim wrong.

"Here is what I wrote," Tim told them, holding up the note. He read it aloud. "'P.S. If there is any reward to be had for this beastly baby, it should go to the Willoughbys.'"

The other children nodded. They thought the P.S. was a good idea.

"You might say
must
instead of
should,
" Barnaby B proposed.

"Good idea, B. Turn around."

Barnaby B turned and Tim used his back for a table again, erasing one word and replacing it with the other, which Barnaby B could feel him underline. Then Tim read it aloud: "'If there is any reward to be had for this beastly baby, it
must
go to the Willoughbys.'"

He refolded the note and leaned down toward the basket. Then he paused.

"Turn again, B," he commanded. After his brother had turned to make a table of his back one more time, Tim wrote an additional sentence. He folded the note and pinned it to the baby's sweater.

"Get the gate, Jane," Tim said, and she pulled it open. "Now, one, two, three: HOIST!" Together the boys lifted the basket containing the baby from the wagon. They carried it to the sagging, dusty porch of the mansion and left it there.

The Willoughbys walked home.

"What did you add to the note at the end, Tim?" Barnaby A asked.

"Another P.S."

"What did it say, Tim?" asked Barnaby B.

"It said, 'Her name is Ruth.'"

Jane pouted. "Why?" she asked.

"Because," Tim said with a sly smile, "we are the ruthless Willoughbys."

2. A Parental Conspiracy

Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby were seated in front of the fireplace after dinner. He was reading a newspaper, and she was knitting something out of beige wool.

The four children, in flannel pajamas, entered the room.

"I'm making the cat a sweater," Mrs. Willoughby told them, holding up the knitting, in which one small, thin sleeve had already been formed.

"I was hoping maybe you were making a second sweater for me and B," Barnaby A said. "It's difficult taking turns with a sweater."

"I've explained and explained," their mother said in exasperation. "A, you wear it on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. B, you have Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. On Sunday you can fight over it."

She turned to her husband. "It's disgusting," she said, "the way children today all want their own sweaters." She knit a few more stitches industriously.

"Children?" Mr. Willoughby said in an impatient voice, putting his newspaper down. "Did you want something?"

"We were hoping that perhaps you would read us a story," Tim said. "Parents in books always read stories to their children at bedtime."

"I believe the mother usually does that," Mr. Willoughby said, looking toward his wife.

"I'm busy," Mrs. Willoughby said. "The cat needs a sweater." Hastily she knit another stitch.

Mr. Willoughby scowled. "Hand me a book," he said.

Tim went to the bookcase and began fingering the volumes that were lined on the shelf. "Make it fast," his father said. "I'm in the middle of an article about interest rates."

Quickly Tim handed him a volume of fairy tales. His father opened it in the middle as the children arranged themselves in a semicircle by his feet. They looked like a painting on a Christmas card. "God bless us, every one!" murmured Barnaby A, but Tim poked him. Mr. Willoughby began to read aloud.

Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: "What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?" "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman. "Early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them one more piece of bread, and then we will go to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.
"

Jane's lower lip trembled and she gave a small sob. Barnaby A and Barnaby B looked very nervous. Tim scowled.

"The end," said their father, closing the book with a snap. "Bedtime"

Silently, though Jane was still sniffling, the children scurried away and up the staircase to bed. Mrs. Willoughby turned to her needles and began a new row of stitches. Mr. Willoughby picked up his newspaper but did not begin reading again. Instead, he stared into space for a moment. Then he said, "Dearest?"

"Yes, dearest?"

"I need to ask you a question." He chewed his lip briefly.

"Yes, dearest?"

"Do you like our children?"

"Oh, no," Mrs. Willoughby said, using her gold-plated scissors to snip off a bit of yarn that had made a snarl. "I never have. Especially that tall one. What is his name again?"

"Timothy Anthony Malachy Willoughby."

"Yes, him. He's the one I least like. But the others are awful, too. The girl whines incessantly, and two days ago she tried to make me adopt a beastly infant."

Her husband shuddered.

"And then there are the two that I can't tell apart," Mrs. Willoughby went on. "The ones with the sweater."

"The twins."

"Yes, them. Why on earth do they look so much alike? It confuses people and isn't fair."

"I have a plan," Mr. Willoughby said, putting his paper down. He stroked one eyebrow in a satisfied way. "It's thoroughly despicable."

"Lovely," said his wife. "A plan for what?"

"To rid us of the children."

"Oh goodness, do we have to walk them into a dark forest? I don't have the right shoes for that."

"No, this is a better plan. More businesslike."

"Oooh, goody. I'm all ears," she replied with a malevolent smile, as she meticulously dropped a few stitches to make a hole for the cat's tail.

3. Contemplating Orphanhood

"Shouldn't we be orphans?" Barnaby B asked.

The Willoughby children were seated on the front steps playing a complicated game to which only Tim knew the rules.

"Why?" asked Barnaby A, moving down a step because the rules said he must if he asked a question, and of course "Why?" was a question.

"Because," Barnaby B explained, "we are like children in an old-fashioned book. And—"

"Mostly they are orphans," Jane said. She moved down two steps because she had interrupted, which was against the rules, and now she was the lowest of the four.

"Worthy and deserving orphans," Barnaby B added.

"Winsome, too," added Jane.

The three younger children each moved down one more step just on general principles. Only Tim, who had invented the game and its rules, remained at the top of the short staircase that led to the front door. "I win," he announced. "Let's play one more time."

They all moved to sit side by side on the middle step.

"The baby we left at the mansion was an orphan," Jane pointed out, "but she wasn't deserving at all, or worthy or winsome."

"Don't be such a dodo, Jane," Tim said. "You have to move down a step for that. Ruth was not an orphan."

With a sigh, Jane moved down. "But—" she began.

"She had a mother, dodo. She had a hideous mother who abandoned her in a basket. A true orphan has a dead father and then perhaps a mother who dies of cholera in India, like Mary Lennox in
The Secret Garden.
"

"Oh, yes!" said Jane, enthusiastically remembering. "Or Pollyanna! Her parents were dead so she got to take a long train ride all by herself! And Anne of Green Gables, remember? She came straight from the orphan asylum!

"Those are all girls, though," she added. "I wonder if there are boy orphans."

"Yes. James. The Giant Peach fellow. His parents were eaten by a hippo who escaped from the zoo," Barnaby B pointed out.

"Down one step, B," Tim commanded.

"Why?"

"For not saying
hippopotamus.
Willoughbys do not use silly nicknames."

"I think it was a rhino, actually," Barnaby A said, still thinking about James. "Oops. Sorry," he said when Tim glared. "I meant rhinoceros."

"But your full name is Timothy Anthony Malachy Willoughby." Barnaby B pointed out. "Isn't 'Tim' a silly nickname?"

Tim simply pointed to a lower step. Barnaby B moved down. His twin joined him.