The Willoughbys (9 page)

"No-o-o!" wailed Tim, holding up a postcard. "They've again survived!"

Everyone tiptoed to his side, even Nanny, though she checked the oven time first (because a soufflé must be very carefully timed, she had told them, and not many people were careful enough about this aspect of soufflé baking). Tim read the card aloud.

"'Dear Ones—'"

"Hah!" they all said aloud, but quietly because of the soufflé (excessive noise can be the death of a soufflé, Nanny had explained).

"'Such an adventure! The helicopter crashed and the pilot plummeted into the raging volcano! Cleverly, we clung to a rotor and were spun to safe ground. Only the pilot was lost and it didn't matter because he was Presbyterian.

"'We wonder why the house is still unsold. Perhaps it is because of the cat. Please have her put to sleep.'"

Jane looked down at the cat, who had just rubbed against her legs with a loud purr. "She sleeps every night, and a lot during the day as well," she said. "Why should we put her to sleep more often? When would she pounce about chasing bits of fluff?"

Her brothers looked meaningfully at each other, wondering whether to explain to Jane what their parents had meant. Nanny shook her head at them. So they remained silent.

"Does it say anything else? Or just end with that cruel sentence about the cat?" Barnaby A asked.

"A bit more." Tim continued reading.

"'Now off to our next excursion! And this one on our own! No more guides for us! We are to climb an alp! One that has never been successfully climbed! It is cluttered with frozen bodies. But we are prepared. We have bought pitons for our feet and crampons to attach to our heads.'"

"I don't think pitons are for your feet," Barnaby B said. "I read a book about mountain climbing. Pitons are spikes that you hammer into the ice."

"I read the same book as B," said his twin. "Crampons are for your feet. For your boots, actually. Why would they put them on their heads?"

"Because they are dolts," Tim said, remembering again that Nanny had outlawed the word and looking at her defiantly.

"They are dolts indeed," Nanny said. She stared at the postcard and murmured, "I myself am Presbyterian."

Jane was on her knees, playing with the cat. "Where are we going to live?" she asked piteously. "And can the cat come?"

The kitchen timer buzzed, and they tiptoed to the kitchen to eat soufflé and make a plan.

16. Two Terrible Tourists

The small Swiss village was so remote that travelers rarely passed through. Even the train that had been buried there six years before had been on its way to someplace else, to a different town with museums and shops that sold plastic models of alpenhorns and Saint Bernards.

For that reason, because it was such an unusual happening, the villagers took notice of the two tourists who arrived wearing sunglasses and carrying badly folded maps. The townspeople murmured to each other about the odd clothing: Bermuda shorts on both man and woman, and Birkenstock sandals on their feet. "Whatever are they doing here?" they said to each other in low voices. They watched the couple enter the small
gasthaus
on the main street.

"We need a big lunch," the man said to the waitress. He picked up the menu and glanced at it. "I can't read this. It isn't in English. Tell me, in a civilized language, what you have to eat. We need nourishment.

"We're going to climb that alp," the man announced loudly, pointing through the window toward the towering mountain.

His wife, looking at the guidebook, said, "Listen to this!" and read aloud to the pretty waitress, who was the daughter of the proprietor, "'Never been successfully climbed. With good binoculars one can see, in summer when the deepest snow has abated, the frozen bodies of several famous climbers. It is too dangerous for rescuers to retrieve these poor lost souls and they remain there as a reminder to others and a tribute to the ferocious power of this mountain.'" She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and squinted through the window.

"I can't see the bodies," she whined. "I want to see the frozen bodies."

"Can I get a good thick steak?" the man asked the waitress.

She shook her head, and he gave a sigh of exasperation. "These foreigners," he muttered irritably to his wife.

"Well, how about a Reuben sandwich?" he asked.

"No, I'm sorry," she said politely. "We have fondue. We're very proud of it. It is our national dish."

"
Fondue?
Good lord, do you know what I call that? Fon doo-doo, that's what. Well, we'll have hamburgers. We need something substantial. And some drinks with
ice cubes
in them, for heaven's sake. I don't know why, in a country with ice everywhere, one can't get a drink with ice cubes."

The pretty waitress took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. No hamburgers. I could ask Father to make you a cheese sandwich."

Grouchily they agreed to cheese sandwiches and grouchily they ate them when they arrived. Then they grouchily paid the bill without leaving a tip.

"What are you staring at?" the man asked the waitress as they turned to leave.

She blushed, and apologized. She had been staring, actually, at their heads, thinking for a moment that they may be royalty because they seemed to be wearing crowns of some sort and because they had
acted
a bit like titled people from minor principalities. Now, however, she could see that on their heads they were wearing hiking equipment intended, actually, for the soles of hiking boots. It was quite startling.

Later, when the two had gone, headed to the trail at the foot of the mountain, noisily dragging the pitons that they had attached by string to their ankles, the waitress cleared the table and said in a worried voice to her father, "They're planning to climb the mountain. But they don't even have warm clothing. And for some reason they are wearing crampons on their heads."

He shrugged.

"Should we send someone out to stop them?"

"We Swiss never get involved," he said. "Anyway, no one is available. Everyone is going to the wedding. So are we." He went to the door of the
gasthaus
and hung a sign there that said
GESCHLOSSEN, BIN AUF HOCHZEIT
:
Closed for a wedding.

The wedding was a very exciting event for the village. Finally, after years of bachelorhood—so many that his mother had been wringing her hands in despair—the tall, thin postmaster, Hans-Peter, had fallen wildly and wonderfully in love with the some what mysterious and very meticulous foreign lady who had been rescued from the avalanche. She had already rearranged his postal boxes as well as his kitchen utensils. on this day they were being married in the village church at the foot of the forbidding mountain. The bride was wearing an edelweiss wreath in her neatly curled hair. Her young son, in his lederhosen, was acting as ring bearer.

Not only the post office but all of the local shops were closed for the afternoon. All of the villagers gathered, first for the ceremony and then for the lengthy celebration, which included yodeling, beer drinking, and many dances in which the dancers bumped their behinds together and clapped their hands.

A happy day, to be sure.

But not for the bride's son. For his mother's sake, he danced and yodeled and smiled. He was polite to the postmaster and called him Schtepfader. But beneath his pretense, the boy was deeply unhappy not just at the wedding, but in the little village. Nothing about Switzerland agreed with him. He was very clumsy on skis. The sound of cowbells hurt his ears. He was allergic to cheese, and cuckoo clocks made him very nervous. He had twice nicked his fingers with his Swiss army knife. His lederhosen itched, and his knees were always cold. And though the memories were blurred after such a long time, and though his mother had said again and again, "If he cared about us he would have written!" the boy did recall a kind and loving man with a thick mustache, a man he had called Papa, who had once read to him, animal or adventure stories usually, in a quiet voice while they sat together in a porch swing.

He wanted desperately to go home.

17. An Auspicious Change

It was surprising to the Willoughby children—and to Nanny—how difficult it was to plan their own futures, now that they were parentless and soon to be homeless as well.

"I think this would be easier if we were modern children," Tim said, "but we are old-fashioned. So our choices are limited. Jane?"

"Yes?" Jane asked. She was on the floor, playing with the cat again.

"I think you must develop a lingering disease and waste away, eventually dying a slow and painless death. We will all gather around your deathbed and you can murmur your last words. Like Beth in
Little Women
"

Jane scowled. "I don't want to," she said.

Tim ignored that. "Nanny?"

She was at the sink, rinsing the plates on which she had served the soufflé. She turned, wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at Tim curiously. "Yes?"

"You must renounce the world and enter a cloistered convent. We will visit once a year and talk to you through a grill. All but Jane, of course, because she'll be tragically dead, cut off in the flower of her youth."

"I
told
you. I'm Presbyterian. We don't enter convents."

Tim thought. "Missionary work, then. Prepare to go to darkest Africa and convert heathens."

Nanny scowled and picked up a dishtowel.

"What about us?" the twins asked together.

"A and B: you must run away and join the circus. Toby Tyler did that. Remember we read that book?"

"Yes," said Barnaby A. "I liked it. It was very old-fashioned. Toby was an orphan, very worthy—"

"—and his pet monkey died," finished Barnaby B.

"But we don't
like
the circus," Barnaby A said, "except for occasional elephants."

"And we're allergic to hay," his brother pointed out.

"Old-fashioned children do not have allergies," Tim announced. "If you don't like the running-away-to-the-circus idea, then you can build a raft and sail down the Mississippi like Huckleberry Finn."

"We can't swim!" the twins wailed.

"That makes it even more of an old-fashioned adventure. Now, as for me—"

"Yes, what about you? We're all off dying of obsolete diseases and sneezing with allergies and drowning in whirlpools and getting lost in the jungle looking for heathens, and you're probably planning something wonderful for yourself!" Barnaby A said angrily.

"Not a bit. I'm going to have a typical old-fashioned-boy future. First of all, I'm going to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and—"

"What are bootstraps, exactly?" asked Jane, looking up from the floor, where she was tantalizing the cat with a piece of straw from the broom.

"Never mind. It's not important. I'm going to wear torn, patched clothing and sell newspapers on cold, windy street corners, saving every hard-won penny, in hopes that someday a well-to-do businessman, maybe with a beautiful daughter, will recognize my worthiness, like Ragged Dick in that book by what-was-his-name, Horatio Alger? Remember him? And—"

"A well-to-do businessman," repeated Nanny. "You mean a tycoon?"

"Yes, exactly. A wealthy industrialist."

"A benefactor?"

"Pollyanna had a benefactor!" Jane recalled. "Not till the end of the book, though"

"Yes," said Tim. "This will be like that. And he will—"

"I have an idea," Nanny said suddenly, untying her apron.

Tim scowled. "You're always interrupting, Nanny! And what do you mean, you have an idea? I've had a whole
list
of them!" he said.

"But we don't
like
your ideas," said Jane. She stood up; the cat, startled, scurried out of the kitchen, pretending that it had planned all along to leave. "What's your idea, Nanny?"

But Nanny had left the kitchen as well. She had retrieved her official dark blue nanny cape from the closet in the hall, had flung it around herself, and was opening the front door. "I'll be back in an hour, children," she called.

***

And so it happened that the entire Willoughby family, plus Nanny, and the cat, moved into the mansion. When Nanny, reminded of him by the mention of benefactors and tycoons, had described their plight to Commander Melanoff and volunteered to take on the role of caregiver for Baby Ruth, his eyes lit up with joy. A few days later, they pulled the wagon, containing packed boxes of undies and the cat in its carrier, to their new home, leaving everything else behind except what they were wearing, which included the beige sweater (it was Barnaby A's day for the sweater), because Commander Melanoff assured them that he would provide for all their needs.