Love Among the Walnuts Page 10

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'm positive," she said, even though she wasn't. She couldn't see the harm in giving Graham hope and encouragement. Those were things everybody needed, and Graham had had far less of them than he was entitled to.

  "When you said I should lift everything in the dining room, did you mean everything?" he asked her.

  "Sure," she said.

  So he picked her up and carried her into the library, where he set her down in a chair and then lifted her and the chair.

  That night they gathered in a dining room transformed by candlelight and Christmas decorations.

  Boom-Boom was so entranced, he couldn't eat. Mr. Moreland grumbled about not being able to see his food, but it didn't matter because he wouldn't be able to remember what he'd eaten anyway. Everett kept saying, "God bless us, every one," while Dr. Waldemar speculated whether using candles every night would significantly reduce the electricity bill.

  Bentley and Sandy remembered happy Christmases at Eclipse, and neither could tell if the shine in the other's eyes came from tears or from candle glow.

  Sandy thought Sunnie looked like an angel, with the candlelight reflecting off her white uniform and silvery hair. If Mousey and Horatio and Flossie and Attila were with them around the table, it would have been the most perfect Christmas of Sandy's life.

  They toasted each other with wine that Bentley had brought from Eclipse's cellars, scornfully leaving behind, in the darkest corner, the inferior bottle of port Bart and Bernie had brought last fall.

  Everett raised his glass and said, " True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.' Charles Caleb Colton. 1780 to 1832."

  "I know how much I value all of you," Sunnie said. "And I don't have to lose you to know that. I hope I never have to know what it feels like to be without your friendship."

  None of the inmates had ever had such words addressed to them, and Sunnie's declaration took them by such surprise that they were speechless. Ditto for Dr. Waldemar and Opal. There were sounds of swallowing and throat clearing and even a sniff or two before Opal said, in the softest, friendliest voice anyone had ever heard her use, "Have some seconds before the feast gets cold."

  After dinner they all went up to the sickroom to watch as Bentley administered another of his experiments to Attila. His last experiment had turned her feathers blue, but the color had finally worn off. He felt that she was ready for another try.

  They all held their breaths as he squeezed an eye-dropperful of something sticky and purple into her beak. Attila hiccuped. It was the first sound any of the sleepers had made in months. Could it mean she was waking up? Wouldn't that be the best Christmas present ever?

  After they had stood around her dishpan listening to her hiccup for an hour, they had to conclude that her hies did not mean she was waking up. All they meant was that she had the hiccups. Bentley was so disappointed, he almost wept. Not only hadn't he found a cure for the comas, but what he had developed wouldn't be useful in any way. Who would buy a concoction that induced hiccups in chickens?

  Glumly, Sandy and Bentley returned to Eclipse, and Opal and Sunnie saw everyone else off to bed.

  The next morning in the library—with a blazing fire, a Christmas tree, and a view through the French doors of the snow-covered stone porch and garden beyond—it was possible to believe that Santa Claus actually had paid Walnut Manor a visit. For the first time ever, there were presents under the tree besides the boxes of candy that Dr. Waldemar always gave everyone. Sunnie gave books, Everett gave beautifully hand-lettered quotations, and Virgil and Lyle gave Couch Potato membership patches. Graham had spent hours in the unheated barn, with the cow and chickens for company, making keepsake boxes with parquetry lids. Mr. Van Dyke had ordered mugs with each person's name. No one knew where Opal had found the time to knit them each a pair of mittens, and everyone was surprised at the cashmere mufflers Mr. Moreland had had delivered from the city for them all. With his white beard, he almost looked like Santa as he passed out the packages. "So we can build a whole metropolis of snow people without getting sore throats," he said gruffly.

  Boom-Boom's gifts were bottles of bubble-blowing liquid he had added to the weekly phone-in grocery order one day when Opal wasn't paying attention. Poor Eddy could only watch, but watch he did, especially the clouds of shimmering bubbles that, thanks to Boom-Boom, Virgil, and Lyle, floated around the library all day.

  Sandy and Bentley had spent hours discussing what their gifts should be. Neither of them were used to giving gifts, since they hadn't celebrated birthdays at Eclipse and had honored Christmas only with feasting and music. But the planning made Bentley remember the pleasure associated with trying to express affection with a present, and he taught it to Sandy.

  Bentley decided to give rides to the inmates in the Daimler, as far up Old Country Road as the passenger wanted to go.

  "But aren't we already in enough trouble for taking Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke and Everett and Opal to Eclipse?" Sandy asked. "Bart and Bernie may still report us for that."

  Bentley shrugged. "Might as well be hanged for a goat as a sheep, or whatever that saying is. I should ask Everett. How much more trouble can I get in for doing the same thing again? These folks have been locked up in here too long. I want to spring them, just for a little while."

  Sandy couldn't decide what his presents should be since he'd never given any before, except that they should be something extra special. Everything he thought of seemed inadequate.

  Finally he had decided to write letters, telling each person what he or she had done or said that had had special meaning to him. He even wrote one to Eddy, whom Sandy had come to see as patient and steady and a good audience, and without whom their little group would seem incomplete. He addressed the letters and put Christmas seals in the corners to make them look like real letters with stamps that had actually gone through the mail.

  Throughout Christmas day, and for days afterward, Sandy saw different inmates take his letters from their pockets and read them over and over again. He was glad he'd used his heavy imported stationery and his fancy fountain pen.

  He wrote Sunnie a letter, too, telling her how much he appreciated the tender care she had taken of his family and how much he had learned from knowing her. He had another gift he wanted to give her, as well, but for that he had to wait until the end of Christmas Day.

  Bentley spent most of the afternoon chauffeuring. Eventually everyone took a ride. Opal and Mr. Moreland went together, and they were gone the longest. Bentley said he'd taken them halfway to Jupiter. Lyle and Virgil, after much urging and cajoling, went as far as Eclipse, but only with Sunnie sitting between them, holding their hands.

  Even Eddy was loaded into the backseat, with Graham to hold him steady and Everett to offer him quotes about adventure and courage.

  Boom-Boom had needed almost as much persuading as Virgil and Lyle, but once he was in the car, he wanted to push every button, turn every dial, and then go along on everyone else's ride, too.

  Christmas Day was the most exciting holiday any of them had had for a long time, what with the bubbles, the rides, the real letters, and all the other gifts. The excitement helped them to forget that the sleepers still slept, and Attila still hiccuped.

  At last the dinner dishes had been washed and dried and put away, and Sandy gathered his presents and asked Sunnie to walk him to the door. Bentley had already put on his new mittens and wrapped his new scarf around his neck and gone to start the Daimler.

  "Wasn't this a wonderful day?" Sunnie asked Sandy as they stood in the front hall. "I know that sounds funny when we're in a place like this and your family is in the condition they're in, but we still had fun. I don't know how to explain it."

  "I think anything's bearable if you have the right people to bear it with you," Sandy said.

  "Why, of course, that's it," Sunnie said. "The right people make all the difference. Thank you again for your sweet letter. It's been my priv
ilege to be your family's nurse, and I don't need any thanks. But it's good to get them anyway."

  "I have another present for you besides the letter," Sandy said, taking a small box out of his pocket.

  "Oh, that's not at all necessary," she told him. "I've already had the best Christmas of my life."

  "I know it's not necessary," Sandy told her. "I wanted to do it." He put the little box in her hand.

  "Well, thank you," she said solemnly as she opened it. "Oh, Sandy, it's beautiful." On a pad of cotton lay a small gold signet ring with an S in fancy script on the face of it and a tiny diamond at each end of the S.

  "It was my baby ring," Sandy said. "And our initials are the same."

  "Well, it's just gorgeous," she said, slipping it onto her finger and holding out her hand so that the hall light struck the ring and made it shine. "Did you know that diamonds, since they crystallize in the isometric crystal system, are optically isotropic, though anomalous double refractions caused by strain are often noted?"

  Sandy noticed that Sunnie's voice trembled. "No," he said, "I didn't know that. But you've been reading about gemstones, so I'm not surprised you know it."

  "I just don't know what it means," she said, looking up at him. The two generous tears that spilled down her cheeks were bigger and shinier than the diamonds in the ring and caused a change in the pattern of Sandy's heartbeats that the diamonds never had.

  "Don't cry," he said, taking her shoulders gently in his hands.

  "I can't help it," she said, as two more tears followed. "My heart is so full, I guess the fullness has to leak out."

  Sandy's heart was full, too, of strange and bewildering sensations. Somehow, instinctively, he knew what to do about them. He bent his head and kissed Sunnie's soft mouth. And right away learned a whole lot of new and astonishing feelings.

  He raised his head just as Bentley tooted the horn of the Daimler. "I have to go," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

  Sunnie raised her hand to her lips, and all the way back to Eclipse, that's the way Sandy saw her in his mind: her eyes big and round and blue and her fingers touching his kiss, while a cirrostratus nebulosus of bubbles swirled around her.

  CHAPTER 16

  During the short cold days and long cold nights of January, Sandy sat at the card table playing Investment—as they had renamed their altered Monopoly game—with Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke. Sunnie's vitamins must have been having an effect, because Mr. Moreland remembered more and more of his financial knowledge and he transmitted it to Sandy in lucid installments.

  Bentley worked feverishly on his coma cures but succeeded only in developing something that eliminated Attila's hiccups and another that eliminated all her feathers. Opal gave him several pieces of her mind about doing that to poor Attila during the coldest month of the year, and then stayed up all night to knit a sweater to keep Attila warm.

  Sunnie never sat on the arm of Sandy's chair anymore when he played Investment, and she was subdued, though pleasant, when he visited her and his family in the sickroom in the mornings. Although he knew he would never forget what it had felt like to kiss her, he was sorry he had, since that had apparently caused a coolness between them. He was too inexperienced to know how to fix it. All he could do was watch her with his sad eyes, which she wouldn't meet. She didn't wear the signet ring, either.

  He knew she was busy: She had her sleepers. She had snow-person-building sessions every afternoon. She was always taking walks with Virgil and Lyle, who were watching less TV lately, or playing games with Boom-Boom, who had graduated from Candyland and Go Fish to gin rummy and Clue and, recently, to poker and the old Monopoly; or she was being carried around unexpectedly by Graham, who could now lift every piece of furniture in Walnut Manor, and sometimes several pieces at once, and whose clothes were held on by safety pins; or she was talking to Eddy, or reading stories to them all. No wonder she had no time for Sandy.

  But before the kiss, somehow there had been time.

  The one thing they all did was wait: wait for the next salvo from Bart and Bernie; wait for the board of directors to show up and do something about the kidnapping charge Bart and Bernie had threatened to bring against them.

  Nothing happened. And the waiting was making them all jumpy as crickets.

  Opal had caught up on her indoor chores and couldn't do any gardening until spring, so she took to hanging around the Investment game to keep her mind occupied. She hadn't had a cigarette in weeks, and had almost stopped keeping an unlit one in her mouth. She chewed gum instead.

  "Frisk it all!" Mr. Moreland said one day as he sat trying to play Investment, with Opal cracking her gum in his ear. "Are you trying to deafen me, woman?"

  "Obviously I'm not succeeding," she answered.

  "I can't concentrate worth a dalmatian with you doing that." He threw his cards onto the table and stood up. "And I'm bored with this game, anyway. I wish I had some real money to play with now that I remember what to do with it."

  Mr. Van Dyke pantomimed opening a book.

  "What?" Mr. Moreland said. "You'd rather read a book?"

  Mr. Van Dyke started turning red as he shook his head and made more incomprehensible gestures.

  "You want to churn butter? You want to blow up vegetables? Whát? I can't understand your signals." Mr. Moreland was getting red in the face, too.

  "I think he's trying to say something about looking at a business's books," Sandy said. Mr. Van Dyke nodded his head vigorously. "You mean Walnut Manor's books?" Sandy asked him. Again Mr. Van Dyke nodded.

  "Hot damask!" Mr. Moreland said. "Why didn't I think of that? He's right, Sandy. Your financial education isn't complete until you've had a look at a real set of books, balance sheets, statements, all that stuff. And Doc's got an office full of them right across the hall."

  "Good luck," Opal said. "He hasn't looked at any of it himself in years. He knew without looking that we were getting barely enough money to scrape along, so why should he waste his time plowing through the gobbledygook the board of directors sends us to find out what he already knew? Especially when he could be taking a perfectly good nap. There's a whole file cabinet of unopened records in there. That should keep your mind off the sound of my gum for a good long time."

  Mr. Moreland was so excited he whipped right over to the chair in which Dr. Waldemar was sleeping and shook him awake. "Okay if we have a look at Walnut Manor's financial statements, Doc? For educational purposes?"

  Dr. Waldemar, barely awake, nodded drowsily, and then his chin dropped back onto his chest.

  "You come along, Graham," Mr. Moreland said, taking charge the way he used to before he'd had to move to Walnut Manor. "I want you to bring a file cabinet in here from Doc's office. His office is too small for all of us to work in."

  Graham hitched up his safety-pinned pants and swaggered importantly into the office. After a couple of attempts, he managed to get the file cabinet across his back and, with muscles bulging he hadn't had even a few weeks ago, he conveyed it to the library.

  Like boys in a candy store, Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke dived into the drawers of the cabinet, pulling out unopened packages and envelopes, and scattering them on top of the Investment game on the card table, as well as all over the floor.

  "Let's get them in chronological order first," Mr. Moreland said. "Then, Sandy, my boy, your financial education will go into high gear."

  By the next afternoon, Sandy was more confused than ever. Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke didn't seem to be in much better shape.

  "I swear, L. Barlow," Mr. Moreland said, "I thought my memory was getting better, but I can't make heads or tails out of all this. None of these numbers makes any sense at all."

  L. Barlow Van Dyke had a blizzard of papers spread out in front of him on top of the buried Investment game. He squinted and turned the papers around and squinted some more. Suddenly his eyebrows went up and he handed a couple of sheets of paper across the table to Mr. Moreland. He pointed to several places, poking so
hard he almost made holes in the papers.

  "What?" Mr. Moreland asked. "You don't understand this? Neither do I."

  Mr. Van Dyke turned red and shook his head and poked the papers violently again.

  "You're killing a bug? You're doing exercises? What?"

  "I think he wants you to notice something," Sandy said.

  "Well, shingles! I sure am getting tired of these games of charades we keep playing." He peered closely at the papers for quite some time, while Mr. Van Dyke tapped his fingers impatiently on the pile in front of him and scowled.

  All at once Mr. Moreland's eyebrows went up, too. He and Mr. Van Dyke looked at each other across the table with delight, and they both laughed.

  "These books have been cooked," Mr. Moreland exclaimed.

  "They're cookbooks?" Sandy asked, more confused than ever. "I thought they were business books."

  "They are," Mr. Moreland said. "But somebody's been cooking them, altering them, playing with the numbers. Somebody's been embezzling Walnut Manor's money for a long time! No wonder this place is scraping along. Somebody's gotten very rich on our fees."

  By the time he finished saying this, everybody in the library, except Dr. Waldemar, was clustered around the card table.

  "Who?" Sandy asked. "Surely not Dr. Waldemar."

  They all turned to look at Dr. Waldemar, who snored peacefully away in his chair before the fire.

  "Absolutely not," Mr. Moreland said. He began scrabbling through the pile of papers. "Where's that list of the board of directors?"

  L. Barlow scrabbled along with him until they found what they were looking for. Quickly they both scanned the list of names, then looked at each other with perfect understanding. Mr. Moreland handed the list to Graham. "Read that list and tell me if you recognize any names on it. Then pass it along."

  Graham read the list and said, in a shocked voice, "My father's name is there."