The Metropolitans by Carol Goodman
* * *
When Joe came over to tell Kiku that Dr. Bean and Miss Lake wanted them to follow them, his sister Jeanette looked up and said, “Okay, Sose Tehsakóhnhes, but you’d better get back before dinner. I’m not waiting for you to start.”
When they were in the hallway, Kiku repeated the words, sounding out the syllables. “Zohseh DEH-sawGÓHN-hes? What does that mean?”
“Sose means Joseph, and the rest is my Mohawk name,” he told her. “The name my Tóta gave me.”
“Uh huh,” Kiku said. “I guessed that. But what does it mean? Jeanette was explaining that your grandmother gave you your names based on what you were like, so . . .” Kiku arched her eyebrow.
Joe looked embarrassed. “I guess I was always trying to take care of Jeanette when she was born. It means: ‘he protects them.’”
“Oh!” Kiku said, her eyes widening. “That . . . that suits you. Say it for me again.”
Joe repeated the name three times while Kiku said it after him, both of them standing in the hall, looking into each other’s eyes. For some reason that Kiku couldn’t identify, they both suddenly blushed and looked away from each other. “Um . . . I just have to powder my nose,” Kiku said, “you go on.”
She took out the new compact Madge had given her for Christmas and applied powder until the pink in her cheeks subsided. What was that about? she wondered. They’d only been repeating Joe’s name . . . Tehsakóhnhes, she said softly to herself now . . . but suddenly it had seemed as if they had been saying something else, as if they were telling each other a secret. Or as if they were really seeing each other for the first time. But that was silly. It was just Joe and they were old friends by now.
When she snapped shut the compact, she saw she was standing in front of a pretty watercolor of fairies dancing in a circle. Why, it looked like an original William Blake! She recognized it from her art history class. It was William Blake’s illustration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The man and woman on the left-hand side were Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, and the pointy-eared man dancing in the middle, with hands flung up and a wreath on his head and a mischievous smile, was Puck.
Only now that she looked at it more closely, she thought Puck looked sort of familiar.
“What’s wrong?” asked Walt, who’d come up next to her.
“Does this look like . . .” But then she realized Walt had never met Sir Peter Bricklebank, and anyway, the idea was absurd. Just because she’d met the real Merlin and the real Lady of the Lake didn’t mean she’d met the real Puck.
* * *
It was true that, to his knowledge, Walt had never met Sir Peter Bricklebank, but he had met a man who looked an awful lot like the dancing man in the painting. It had been two years ago on his first visit to the Metropolitan Museum. He had come on a school field trip, but because he didn’t know enough English to trust himself talking to his classmates, he had wandered away from his class. He’d been standing in front of a landscape painting that reminded him of home when he heard someone sigh.
He turned to find a strange, spindly man in a tweed suit and lavender cravat, leaning on a goat’s-head walking stick. “I miss my home, too,” the strange man said. “We are fellow exiles.”
Walt had been too surprised to ask how the strange man knew he’d lost his home. Instead he had blurted out, “It’s not my home I miss, it’s my parents.”
“Oh!” The man had turned his elfin face to study Walt. “That is bad. We must see what can be done about that. . . .” And then he had wandered off, swinging his walking stick and talking to himself.
Crazy, Walt had concluded, but he’d come to the museum every Sunday after that in the faint hope that the man would reappear with some plan to bring his parents over from Europe. Eventually he had forgotten about the strange man and found other distractions and comforts in the museum—in its ancient artifacts that had outlasted plagues and wars, in paintings that captured lost places and faces of long-gone people, in every creation that shouted or whispered “I was here! Remember me!”
And eventually coming to the museum had led to meeting Joe and Kiku and Madge and Miss Lake . . . and Dr. Bean, who had drawn him aside earlier to tell him he knew where his parents were and he had a plan for getting them out.
So in a way, he had the funny old man to thank.
“Thank you,” he said to the dancing man in the picture.
As he turned to find the others, he thought he heard the echo of laughter.
* * *
Miss Lake ushered Madge and the others into an octagonal room at the base of a tower that overlooked the river. Madge thought she’d had enough of towers to last a lifetime, but this one looked pretty cozy, with a cheery fire burning in a grate, comfy chairs, books lining the walls, and a big desk covered with papers and teacups and quill pens. She really should get the doc to hire her as an assistant; she’d have this mess sorted in a trice. There was also a big cardboard folder covered with swirly lines and tied together with a ribbon on top of the desk.
“That’s my Christmas present to Dash,” Miss Lake said when she saw Madge looking at it. “Just some boring old drawings. I think you’ll like your presents better.”
She handed each of them a little cardboard box, covered with those same swirly lines and tied with ribbon. Madge opened hers, tucking the ribbon in her pocket to save for later. Inside was a little enamel pin shaped like a shield, quartered, with four symbols inside it: a cup, a sword, a crown, and a wave.
“You are truly Knights of the Kelmsbury,” Dr. Bean said while Miss Lake pinned the shield on each of them.
“Does this mean we get to keep the powers we got?” Walt asked, his face glowing in the firelight.
“You’ll always have some of the power you’ve been given,” Miss Lake said. “Joe will understand languages, Kiku will be able to move unnoticed wherever she wants to go, Walt will be exceptionally strong, and Madge . . . Madge will always be able to bring out the best in all of you. You’ll have to watch to make sure you are always using your gifts to good purpose, or they will prey on you. But they will fade into exceptional talents, not supernatural ones, unless . . .”
“Unless what?” Kiku had asked.
“Unless we—or the people we love—are threatened again,” Joe said. “Right?”
“Belisent might not be dead,” Kiku said. “I saw a ripple in the water after she went down, like a snake slithering beneath the water—”
“And when the FBI agents took off Mordred’s gas mask, they found an empty set of clothes,” Walt said. “Isn’t that right, Doc? They might both be alive, licking their wounds, planning their next move.”
“Yes,” Dr. Bean said, looking suddenly old and very tired. “But let us hope that it takes them a very long time to recover and that we can undo the harm they did. And that the war will be over and all our loved ones and families”—he looked meaningfully at Kiku and Walt—“are reunited and safe by then. In the meantime, I believe we’ve got a Christmas dinner to eat, which I can tell by the smells emanating from the kitchen is almost done. Shall we?”
Miss Lake held out her arm to steady Dr. Bean as he got up. Gosh, Madge thought, he is old. She followed the rest of them out but trailed behind them, and halfway down the hall, she doubled back to the study. She was just going to do a little tidying up so the doc would come back and find a neat desk, but when she entered the room, she went straight toward the big cardboard folder. Boring old pictures, my foot, Madge thought. Sheesh, adults really are dim sometimes.
As she opened the folder, the pages inside came sliding out, as if they had been waiting for Madge to free them. “Eep!” Madge cried, kneeling down on the floor to pick them up. “Why’d you have to go and do that? Now I’ll never get them in order.”
The pages looked a little like the ones from the Kelmsbury, with the same brightly colored figures and fancy border
Only in the picture it wasn’t Madge talking to the nun in the cloister, but a man in a leather tunic with a crown on his head. Because that’s who she’d been in the vision—Arthur. Only she hadn’t told anyone that because . . . well, because that was the biggest piece of malarkey yet.
She looked down at the bottom corner of the page and saw a tiny gold monogram: VdL. Miss Lake had drawn the pictures, just as she had drawn the original Kelmsbury, only this time it was about the adventures of Madge and her friends. It felt funny to be part of a book (Is my hair really that red?) and to think of kids reading it one day. They’d think it was all made up, of course, a bunch of malarkey, but maybe they’d still feel a little bit of the magic.
She opened the big portfolio to put back the pages and saw that there were more pages inside. The first page showed Madge and Walt and Kiku and Joe on a big ship. That was funny; they hadn’t gone on a big ship. She turned the page and saw a picture of the four of them climbing a mountain in the middle of a blizzard—
“They may not come true.”
Madge turned and saw Miss Lake standing in the doorway. “They’re visions of a possible future if you choose to answer the next call. I’m not sure if these things will happen, but I think you’ll have a choice.”
“You think? Don’t you know?”
Miss Lake tilted her head so that the wave of silvery hair hid one eye, and she smiled. “How could I know for sure? None of the knights have ever made it this far.”
“Then why have we?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Miss Lake said, “but I think it may have to do with you being children. The rivalries and jealousy that broke up Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Morgaine just weren’t important to you four. Perhaps it’s because the bonds we make as children are the most important ones.”
“Oh,” Madge said, “I can see that, but you said that was only part of the reason.”
“The other part is who you are. You each had lost something so important that you needed each other very much. And so the bonds you formed with each other are stronger than any that the others have made.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Madge said. She looked down at the page she had turned to. It showed Walt and Kiku jumping out of a burning plane while Madge and Joe leaned out the plane door yelling, bombs exploding all around them.
“The next call will be to get Walt’s parents,” Madge said.
“That doesn’t mean you have to—” Miss Lake began, but Madge didn’t hear the rest of what she said. She was looking down at the page. Her hand was trembling. She could turn to the next page to see if Walt and Kiku had landed all right—to see what happened next—or she could toss all the pages in the fire. Part of her just wanted to be a kid again. To go to school, and be a big sister to Frankie and the twins, and goof around with her new friends.
But she knew that when the call came, she would answer it. In the meantime, though, she could smell something good coming from the living room. She closed the portfolio and walked back with Miss Lake. They found everyone gathered around the piano. Kiku was playing that song everyone sang on New Year’s Eve that Madge never did really understand (just what the heck was an “Auld Lang Syne,” anyway?), but when they came to the verse—
We two have paddled in the stream
From noon until dinnertime,
But seas between us broad have roared
Since times gone by.
—Madge sang louder than anyone.
Let the seas roar as loud as they liked. Nothing was going to get between her and her friends from now on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU TO my knight-in-shining armor agent Robin Rue and her ever-helpful squire Beth Miller of Writers House for championing this book. Thank you to my wizard of an editor Kendra Levin for shepherding it through its many shifting shapes until it reached the right one. Thank you to Janet Pascal and Laura Stiers for your careful fact-checking of many, many details, and to a whole Round Table of brave knights at Viking who brought this book to light: Nancy Brennan, Maggie Rosenthal, and especially Ken Wright.
Thanks to my ever-faithful friends Wendy Gold Rossi, Scott Silverman, and Ethel Wesdorp, for plowing through early drafts, and thanks to my family, Lee and Nora and Maggie, for listening to all my versions of this tale. Thank you to Peter Bricklebank for lending his magical name. Thanks to Sarah Alpert and Leon Husock for contributing their love of Arthurian lore, and a big special thanks to Haruko Hashimoto for reading and consulting on Japanese details.
There were many research squires involved: Matthew J. Boylan, Senior Reference Librarian of the New York Public Library, gave me a very thorough answer to my query on library hours in 1941. Valerie Phillips took me through the exhibit on Indian boarding schools at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, that first inspired the character Joe. Elizabeth Graham’s book The Mush Hole: Life at Two Indian Residential Schools (Waterloo, Ontario: Heffle Publishing, 1997) was an invaluable and heartbreaking guide to the history of the Mohawk Institute.
I owe a special thanks to Arnold Printup, Tribal Historian of the Saint Regis Mohawk tribe, for listening to me patiently as I described the quest I was on, sharing with me his own knowledge of the Mohawk tribe, and then referring me to Carole Marie Katsi´tsienhá:wi La France Ross (aka Tóta), tribal elder and Mohawk language teacher. Carole, your knowledge and generosity brought Joe to life. Your dedication to keeping your own language alive has been an inspiration. Niáwenhkó:wa.
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Carol Goodman, The Metropolitans