Polly Shulman - The Grimm Legacy

The door to the social studies department office was open, so I knocked on the door frame. Mr. Mauskopf waved me in. “Sit down,” he said.

I perched on the edge of a chair.

He handed me my paper, folded in half along the vertical axis. Comments in his signature brown ink twined across the back. I took a breath and willed myself to look at the grade.

“Nice work, Elizabeth,” he said. Was that a smile on his face? Almost.

I opened the paper. He had given me an A. I leaned back, my heart pounding with relief. “Thank you.”

“What made you choose this topic?”

“I don’t know—I always loved fairy tales. They seem so—so realistic.”

“Realistic? That’s quite an unusual view,” said Mr. Mauskopf with a hint of a smile.

“You’re right.” I felt dumb. “What I mean is, all the terrible things that happen in fairy tales seem real. Or not real, but genuine. Life is unfair, and the bad guys keep winning and good people die. But I like how that’s not always the end of it. Like when the mother dies and turns into a tree and keeps helping her daughter, or when the boy who everybody thinks is an idiot figures out how to outwit the giant. Evil is real, but so is good. They always say fairy tales are simplistic, black and white, but I don’t think so. I think they’re complicated. That’s what I love about them.”

“I see.” Mr. Mauskopf consulted his planner. “You’re new this year, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “I used to go to Chase, but both my stepsisters are in college now, so the tuition . . .” I stopped, a little embarrassed to be discussing my family finances.

“Ah, so you have stepsisters,” Mr. Mauskopf said. “I hope they aren’t the evil Grimm kind?”

“A little,” I replied. Veronica’s a lot older, and Hannah— Hannah hated sharing her room with me after my father and I moved in. Hannah liked having someone to boss around the way Veronica bossed her. Hannah was always taking my things and never letting me use hers. But I couldn’t say any of that—it seemed too disloyal. “My stepsister Hannah was in your class—Hannah Vane,” I said instead.

“Say no more,” said Mr. Mauskopf. He gave me the ghost of a smile, as if we were sharing a joke. Then he asked, “Did you ever replace your sneakers?”

“My sneakers?”

“I recall seeing you give away your sneakers—very generous of you.”

“I haven’t had a chance,” I told him. I didn’t want to get into our embarrassing financial situation again.

“I see.” He cleared his throat. “Well, Elizabeth, this is all very satisfactory. Would you like a job?”

“A job? What kind of a job?”

“An after-school job. A friend of mine at the New-York Circulating Material Repository tells me they have an opening. It’s a great place. I worked there myself when I was your age.”

I tried to imagine him at my age, but the bow tie got in the way. “Is that like a library?”

“‘Like a library.’ Exactly. Well put.”

“Yeah—yes, please. I’d like that,” I said. A job meant money for things like new gym shoes, and it wasn’t like I had a crammed social schedule.

Everybody at Fisher had known each other for aeons. It was already taking them a long time to warm up to me, the new girl. Then I made the mistake of sticking up for Mallory Mason when some of the cool girls were making up songs about her weight and her braces. Worst of all, Ms. Stanhope, the assistant principal, overheard me and used me as an example of “compassionate leadership” in her next “class chat.” After that, nobody wanted to have anything to do with me except Mallory herself. But I didn’t actually like her.

Who knows? Maybe if I took the library job, I would make friends there.

Plucking his fountain pen from his breast pocket, Mr. Mauskopf wrote a number on a slip of paper, folded it vertically, and handed it to me pinched between his index and middle fingers. “Call and ask for Dr. Rust,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Mauskopf.” The bell rang, and I hurried to my next class.

That afternoon when I got home, I went straight to my room, avoiding the living room so Cathy, my stepmother, wouldn’t rope me into doing errands or force me to listen to her bragging about my stepsisters.

I wished my father were home so I could tell him about my new job. Not that he listened to me much these days.

Instead, I told Francie, my doll. I know it sounds babyish, but she was my mom’s doll, and sometimes talking to her makes me feel a tiny bit like I’m talking to Mom.

Francie smiled at me encouragingly. Of course, she always smiles since her smile is sewn on—but I still took it as a good sign.

Francie is the only one of Mom’s doll collection that Cathy let me keep after Hannah chipped Lieselotte’s nose. Lieselotte was the crown of Mom’s collection. She’s a bisque doll, made in Germany over one hundred and fifty years ago and worth a lot of money.

“I’ll just put these away until you’re old enough to take care of them properly,” Cathy had said when she packed the dolls away.

I knew back then it wasn’t worth protesting. Cathy always sided with her own daughters. At first I used to complain to my father, but he would just say, “I need you to get along with your stepsisters. I know you can. You’re my little peacemaker. You have a big, generous heart, just like your mother.” So I told Cathy I didn’t break Lieselotte, but I didn’t say who did.

“If you’re not old enough to take responsibility, you’re certainly not old enough to play with dolls this valuable,” said Cathy. “Now, don’t start crying—here, you can keep this one; it’s not worth anything. Even you can’t do much damage to a rag doll. You’ll thank me when you’re older.” She handed me Francie and shut the lid on Lieselotte’s look of faint, aristocratic surprise.

“Time to make a phone call, Francie?” I asked.

She smiled a yes.

I called the number on the slip of paper.

“Lee Rust,” said the person who answered.

“Hi, Dr. Rust? I—this is Elizabeth Rew, and my social studies teacher, Mr. Mauskopf, said to call you about a job?”

“Ah, yes, Elizabeth. Stan said you would be calling. I’m glad to hear from you.”

Stan? So Mr. Mauskopf had a first name?

“Can you come in for an interview next Thursday after school?”

“All right. Where do I go?” I asked.

Dr. Rust gave me an address not far from my school, east of Central Park. “Ask for me at the front desk; they’ll send you up.”

The discreet brass plaque beside the door said The New-York Circulating Material Repository. From the outside, it looked like a standard Manhattan brownstone, the last in a long row. Next door was a big old mansion, the kind that are now mostly consulates or museums. That place would have made an impressive library, I thought as I walked up the steps to the repository and pulled open the heavy doors. It was just the sort of place I used to go to with my father, before he met Cathy. We used to spend every rainy weekend in museums and libraries. Especially the less f amous ones, like the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society, with their odd collections of things—old china and tinsmiths’ tools and models of what the city looked like before the Revolution. We would play a game: pick out which painting (or clock, or chair, or photograph, or whatever) would have been Mom’s favorite.

I hadn’t been to a museum with my dad in years, but when I opened the doors, the slightly dusty smell brought it all flooding back. I felt as if I’d stepped back through time into a place that was once my home.

Through some trick of geometry, the entrance opened out into a large rectangular room apparently wider than the building that held it. At the far end was a massive desk, elaborately carved in dark wood.