Journey to an 800 Number
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Authors: E.L. Konigsburg
Journey to an 800 Number
Also by E. L. Konigsburg
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth,
William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
From the Mixed-up Files
of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Altogether, One at a Time
A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver
The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper
The Second Mrs. Gioconda
My Father’s Daughter
Throwing Shadows
About the B’nai Bagels
(George)
Up from Jericho Tel
Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Colors
Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Inventions
Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s
T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit
Talk Talk: A Children’s Book Author
Speaks to Grown-ups
The View from Saturday
Silent to the Bone
The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
The Mysterious Edge
of the Heroic World
For Mae and Sid,
Leonard R.
and Michael B.
sister and brothers in law
and under the skin.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ALADDIN PAPERBACKS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1982 by E. L. Konigsburg
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and related logo are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Aladdin Paperbacks edition June 1999
Second Aladdin Paperbacks edition June 2008
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Konigsburg, E. L.
Journey to an 800 Number
Summary: Bo learns about kindness, love, loyalty, appearances, and pretense from the unusual characters he meets when he is sent to stay briefly with his father after his mother’s second marriage.
I.Title.
PZ7.K8352Jo [Fic] 81-10829
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-30901-4 (hc.)
ISBN-10: 0-689-30901-5 (hc.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-5875-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-4169-5875-4 (pbk.)
eISBN-13: 978-1-610-59-7869
Journey to an 800 Number
When my mother married Mr. F. Hugo Malatesta the First, she sent me to stay with my father while she went on a honeymoon. To my mother he was always your father, the camel-keeper. My mother divorced him because of his camel.
“What kind of a life is it for a wife and child to drive around the country with a camel,” she had said. “What kind of a life is it to spend your time getting people to pay to ride his hump?”
My father’s camel has one hump; it is a dromedary. Bactrians have one more hump and more hair. My father’s camel also has a name. Ahmed. I don’t know if Ahmed means anything as a name. As a camel it means a lot to my father, the camel-keeper.
“We have lots of fresh air and sunshine,” my father had said.
“Half the time we go to shopping centers and half the time those are under a roof and air-conditioned.”
“Aw, Sally,” Father had pleaded, “in small towns we’re always in some pasture. We move around a lot.”
“That’s the point, Woodrow,” Mother had said. “What kind of a life is it for a child to move around a lot, living in a camper, driving an animal that doesn’t even look interested? I could understand a dog, Woodrow, I really could. A dog wags its tail at you. A dog comes when you call it. A dog shows interest.”
“You can’t ride a dog, Sally. What would I do with a dog, Sally? No one would pay money to ride a dog—not even a big one, an English sheepdog, say, or a St. Bernard.”
“That’s my point, Woodrow. I want a dog.”
“We can’t manage a dog and a camel, Sal.”
“That is also my point, Woodrow. I want a dog and a house. And meals from china plates instead of from Styrofoam containers. I don’t want a life that is tied to a camel.”
My father said, “Ahmed has been good to us, Sally.”
My mother said, “Ahmed has been no better to us than we’ve been to him. I’ve gone my last mile for that camel.”
“What do you want me to do?”
My mother said, “I want to stop roaming, Woodrow. I want to settle down. Bo here is going to start school in a few years, and I mean for him to have a regular routine when he does, and I mean for him to have kindergarten before that. I do not want Bo to be a nomad.”
Father thought. “Tell you what we can do, Sal.
We can park the trailer in a regular trailer park. We can even take off the wheels and put it up on blocks. Then I’ll take Ahmed only as far as I can to be home on weekends. I’ll be a commuter.”
“You don’t seem to understand. I want regularity.”
“Commuting is regular, Sally.”
“But the money isn’t. I want a regular house and a regular income. I want to know that I’ll have the same amount of money coming in next week as this. You have to decide, Woody. Either me and Bo and a regular job or your camel.”
“But, Sally …”
“I’m not going to argue. You know that I don’t like arguing with you, Woody,” Mother had said.
In the United States it is difficult to get someone to take a full-sized camel off your hands, and my father had said that he didn’t want to give Ahmed to a zoo. Ahmed was, he said, not a wild animal. He was, he said,
trained.
He had a name.
So Mother left. She took me with her. I was four years old at the time.
First we went to the junior college at Morrisville, New York, where Mother got an associate degree in hotel management. Mother finished her degree when I was ready to start school. She then took the job of executive housekeeper at Fortnum School in Havemyer, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia.
She chose that job because it came with a cottage on the school grounds and free tuition for me
when I would get to seventh grade. In the meantime I went to the neighborhood school, and since Fortnum was in a nice neighborhood, my elementary education was quite satisfactory.
Mother’s job involved ordering light bulbs and bathroom supplies and keeping track of linen and food for the dorms. She didn’t actually clean the rooms or cook the food; she supervised the people who did. We developed quite a nice life for ourselves, even though we never got a dog. I did not mind not having a dog. I am not your basic animal lover.
We called ourselves Sarah J. (her) and Maximilian R. (me). Some people called me Max. I always told people that the R. was just an initial and didn’t stand for anything, but it wasn’t, and it did.
I was born after a rainstorm at 2:00 p.m. on May 15 in Taos, New Mexico. The rainstorm is important because my father had promised my mother that he would name me according to an old Indian custom. He had promised my mother that immediately following my birth, he would walk blindfolded outside the hospital. (A friend of mother’s would guide him.) Once outside, he was to take off the blindfold. The first thing he saw would become my name. The first thing my father saw was a rainbow. That was what the R stood for. My real name is Rainbow Maximilian Stubbs: the Maximilian because Mother thought it meant a lot. People began calling me Bo right away. We spelled it
Bo
instead of
Bow
so that no one would confuse my name with the first syllable of
bow-wow.
Both my parents always regarded it as a good omen that the first thing that Father saw after I was born was a rainbow. So do I. After all, there was a chance that I could have been called One Dog Squatting.
After we settled in Havemyer, no one called me Bo. Except Father. He would come to Havemyer about once a year, but he would not stay at our house on the Fortnum school grounds. He stayed at a campground outside town. Ahmed stayed with him. He drove to our place in his truck.
One year he asked me if I would like him to bring Ahmed to Fortnum to give the students rides. Free. I told him I didn’t think it was a very good idea. I didn’t tell him why. He didn’t ask.
One of Mother’s duties was to set up for tea and cakes when the Board of Trustees of Fortnum met. Mother would put on one of her good dresses and pour a second cup of coffee for anyone who wanted a second. She would stay in the background looking quiet and pretty, but listening. She knew that if the Board of Trustees started talking about cutting down on expenses, she would have to change the light bulb order from hundred watt to sixty and the toilet paper from two-ply to scratchy.
Mr. F. Hugo Malatesta the First was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Fortnum School in the fall, and he noticed mother at the first meeting he
attended. Mr. Malatesta’s wife had died two years before. His children were all grown. Both of his sons had gone to Fortnum School. One of them was a lawyer. The other was a stockbroker. His daughter was married to a lawyer and played tennis and raised money for worthy causes that got her picture in the paper quite a lot. Mr. Malatesta was near the age of retirement and well into the age of grandchildren. He had five grandchildren. One of them, F. Hugo Malatesta III, was two years younger than I. The F. stood for Francesco, pronounced Fran-ches-ko, but never used.
F. Hugo called mother on the telephone the afternoon following the evening of that first meeting, and he asked her to marry him in the spring. Mother said that she would marry him in the summer. She said that she would be happy to. Mother explained her reasons to me: I would be starting Fortnum in the fall, and she wanted me to go as a regular day student and not as the child of a servant of the school. Mother had been around the school enough to know that the children of faculty—and Mother’s rank was lower than faculty—have a name. They are called UW’s, which is the abbreviation for United Way, which means charity. Mother said she didn’t want me to be a UW when I entered Fortnum.