“Which cathedral?” I asked.
“The most beautiful one,” said Corwin, “the one with the best statues.”
“All right,” I said. “Which coffee shop?”
“An all-night one with very tall booths. It could happen.”
“How about the street? Which street?”
“All streets. We’ll take a map.”
I had studied the map on the endpapers of my book — an astonishing maze.
“We’d better get there soon,” said Corwin. “They’re probably building new streets in Paris right this minute.”
“What if I don’t want to, being a lesbian?”
Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.
“So you think it might be permanent?”
Driving slowly home, we passed an old man shambling along, coat flapping, hair streaming. It was Mooshum. We stopped the car just ahead, then turned around on the empty highway and cruised up beside him. He continued to stumble eagerly forward, so I jumped out and pulled him over to the car.
“Hey, get in!”
He looked at me, distracted.
“Oh, it’s Evey.”
“Get in the car, Mooshum, where are you going?”
“Visiting around.”
He let me put him in the car and, once he was in, he said in a grand voice, “Take me to lovey!”
“Okay.” I looked at Corwin wearily. He was staring straight ahead. “It’s my aunt, Neve. He wants to go and see her.”
“Why not?” said Corwin, shifting gears with a gesture of resignation.
As we were driving to Pluto, I realized that by now my mother was probably talking to the tribal police. She would be frantic over Mooshum. So as soon as Aunt Neve answered the door — wearing a bathrobe, no makeup, hair matted flat — I told her that I needed to use her telephone. Mooshum and Corwin sat down on Aunt Neve’s springy golden couch and waited while she left the room to brew some coffee. Mooshum flapped his hands at Corwin and hissed at him to leave. I turned away from them with the phone and put my hand over one ear.
“Mama? I’ve got Mooshum and we’re at Aunt Neve’s.”
Mama said a few explosive things, but was mostly relieved. She said something to Dad, then said, “Here, your dad needs to talk to you.”
“Evey? Are you at—”
“Aunt Harp’s.”
“Oh!”
His voice was strained, tense, more excited than I’d ever heard. “Look,” he said, “is there any way you can take a look at her mail?”
“What?”
My father told me that Mooshum raided his stamp collection when Mama refused to send one of his letters, and he glued several valuable, extremely valuable (my father’s voice shook a little), stamps on an envelope he sneaked into the mail two days before. I opened my mouth to say that I’d mailed the letter for Mooshum, but thought better of it.
“I got a little upset last night,” said Dad. “This morning he decided to take off…”
Just then the doorbell rang.
“Will you get that, dear?” Aunt Neve called from the bedroom, her voice a melodious trill. I was pretty sure that when she came out she would look perfectly groomed.
I set the phone down and answered the door. It was the postman with a postage-due letter among the other mail. I paid the postage with coins from my pocket and tucked the letter into my bra. I closed the door, set the rest of the mail on the neat little side table, and picked up the telephone.
“Well, I’ve got it. The letter has a one-cent stamp on it, blue, Benjamin Franklin.”
I could hear my father struggling with some emotion on the other end.
“It’s called the Z Grill. Honey, if you get that stamp back here safely, I promise I’ll send you to Paris.”
I put the phone down. My father never called me, or anyone, honey. And this was the second time that morning I had been promised a trip to Paris. I stared at Mooshum. His hair was a clean silver, swept into a neat tail. His teeth were back in, a white slash in his rumpled face. He was perfectly shaved. His clothes were spotless, shoes polished. He had his handkerchief out to touch the drip off the end of his nose.
Mooshum gave me a significant look that I understood to mean get out of here, so I grabbed Corwin’s hand. We sneaked quickly out, back to the car, and immediately peeled out back onto the road. Once we were driving, we tried again to talk, but nothing came out right. I put my hand on Corwin’s leg, but he just let it sit there and we both fell silent. It was awkward and my arm began to ache with the strain.
“We better start saving for our tickets,” he said before I got out of the car. We were parked in the road outside of my house.
I kissed him, and left. When I looked out the window of the house about ten minutes later, the car was still there. The next time I looked, it was gone.
Aunt Neve kept Mooshum at her house that night. Just as I was about to head back to school the next morning, she pulled up in her yellow Buick. I watched from the doorway as Mooshum extricated himself from the passenger’s side and walked around the front of the car, quick like a young man, brushing his hand across the hood and staring hawklike through the windshield at Aunt Neve. As Aunt Neve drove away, he stood waving slowly. The Buick disappeared, but he didn’t move. He kept his hand in the air until he shrank and became old again. When he finally turned and shuffled toward the house, I walked down the steps and took his arm.
“Awee!” His face was full of emotion as we climbed the steps. “At last, my girl. If only Father Hop Along was here. I almost wish it. At last, I have something to confess.”
I WAS NAMED for Louis Riel’s first love, a girl he met soon after his release from Beauport Asylum, near Quebec in 1878. He had been locked up there for treatment after suffering an attack of uncontrollable laughter during Holy Mass. Riel’s Evelina was blond, tall, humble, and a lover of sweet flowers. It was Mooshum who actually suggested to Mama that she name me for this lost love of Riel’s, and he was always proud that she had taken his suggestion.
FOR MONTHS, ALL winter, in fact, my father held a grudge toward Mooshum for nearly sabotaging his retirement by stealing not only the Z Grill, but a three-cent Swedish stamp issued in 1855 and colored orange instead of blue. That one was returned for insufficient postage. At least Mooshum had used a return address, I observed, looking at the envelope over Christmas break.
“Don’t joke. This is our family’s future,” said my father.
Mooshum had used a harmless paste of flour mixed with spit to stick it onto the envelope. The stamp did not even bear a killer or cancellation, because the postman in Pluto hadn’t known quite how to handle the mistake, except to ask at the door for postage. Dad had gently soaked both stamps off the envelopes and put them back on their album pages. He showed me all of his favorite stamps. Until he agreed to a price by mail, he planned to put the whole collection in a safe-deposit box that was not in his sister’s bank.
In late March, driving to Fargo with the collection, my father hit a patch of black ice and spun off the road, rolling the family car to the edge of a beet field. It was a sudden and deceptive freeze. He was alone, and unconscious, so the stamp albums were left behind. Since the windows were shattered entirely from the frames, much of what was in the car flew out as the car rolled, popping open the doors. The albums were left somewhere in a cold drenching rain that began soon after he came to consciousness at St. John’s Hospital. He asked for his stamps at once, but of course the last thing the doctors were interested in was a stamp collection.
After we got to the hospital and made certain that Dad was all right, Joseph and I went looking for the stamps. We found the albums about a hundred feet from where the car had come to rest. The leather-bound books were splayed open, warped, and ruined. We picked stamps off cattails and peeled stamps from wet clods of mud. When we brought what we’d found to his hospital bed, Dad looked sick. He pretended to fall asleep. Our mother said, “He is in despair.” We hadn’t known the stamps could really be that valuable.