My Most Excellent Year (36 page)

Hucky discovered
other
things to keep him awake. Somehow the chorus girls all decided that he was just about the cutest thing they’d ever seen on two small feet—especially when they found out he was deaf. So they kept coming over to pat his head and hold his hand and feed him carrot cake and tell him what a sweetheart he was. Meanwhile, Hucky had all of these bosoms in his face, and he didn’t know which one to look at first. (I hope he remembers every one of them when he’s fifteen, because it’ll never happen to him again. I’m an authority. They all ignored me like I had a rash.) And the best part? Nobody even wondered what we were doing there. I guess they probably figured we belonged to somebody famous.

“CURTAIN CALLS, PLEASE.” The voice came over the speakers in our orchestra room and everybody ran upstairs at the same time like in a Raid commercial. My heart jumped a little all over again when I remembered what we still had to do, but I also knew we’d come too far to lose in the ninth. Even the Sox could have held on to a lead like ours. So I stood up and pretended I was Carlton Fisk.

“Pick up your jacket, buddy,” I said to Hucky, who was still annoyed that all of his breasts had left. “Time to move.”

“Where are we going?”
he asked, sliding off his chair.

“Surprise for you.”

“For
me
? What is it?”

“What do you want more than anything in the world?”

“Marbles?”
From the theatre above us I could hear the applause and the “bravos” and all the rest of that junk, and just a few seconds later people began flooding off the stage and filling up our room on their way to places like the Stork Club and the Cub Room. So I
grabbed Hucky’s hand and steered us through the tuxedoes, toward the hallway where the doorman had told us Aunt Julie would be. And all of a sudden, in between people’s shoulders and necks, I saw her. Wearing a dark blue dress with glittery beads. Talking to a short man with a bald head and three other women. And I couldn’t help stopping in my tracks.
OH MY GOD. THAT’S MARY POPPINS!
Hucky was too short for the view (which was a good thing because I would have needed oxygen to start him breathing again), but I had to blink twice just to make sure she was real. I mean, I wasn’t expecting her to be wearing old-fashioned clothes with black clumpy boots and a hat with a flower sticking out of it, but who’d have thought she was still going to look the same anyway??

By the time we’d worked our way through the crunch to where she’d been standing, she wasn’t there anymore—but I didn’t panic because I still had the doorman’s directions in my head. “Turn right.” Which is just what we did. We found ourselves in a short empty hallway (painted the kind of yellow that looked like a baby threw up after he ate strained bananas), where we spotted a closed door to our right with a taped-up sign on it that said
MISS ANDREWS
.
Dude! Grand slam!!
But while I was raising my hand to knock, there was a voice behind us.

“Hey. You kids. Get away from there!” I turned around and saw a security guard ten feet away and closing in on us fast. Hucky hid behind my right leg, scared to death and I don’t blame him. This guy reminded me of the Hancock Tower, but blue and with feet. We backed up into the corner until we were trapped under a glass case with a hose and an axe in it—and just as he reached for my arm, the door opened and Mary Poppins stepped into the hall with a
big question mark on her face. I was so grateful to see her up close, I knew right away how those two little Banks kids must have felt when they noticed her floating down into Cherry Tree Lane. The movie wasn’t lying. All of the things they asked for in the nanny song were still there. “Kind.” “Witty.” “Sweet.” “Pretty.” And it didn’t take her long to get a handle on the situation.

“Is there some difficulty?” she asked the cop politely, planting herself between him and us on purpose. (I mean, it’s not exactly as if it looked like a fair fight.) As soon as Hucky recognized her, he forgot all about the trouble we were in and clapped both hands over his mouth. Meanwhile, I knew I had just one shot before we both got hauled off to the clink, so I’d better make it a good one.

“Ms. Andrews,” I blurted, coming out from under the fire extinguisher while Hucky followed me cautiously, “my name is Anthony Keller and this is Hucky Harper. You sent him a letter, but we forgot to tell you that he thinks you
are
Mary Poppins, and he doesn’t understand why you haven’t come to live with him yet.” Mama, remember how she sized up Jane and Michael Banks with her eyes when she first met them? Because that’s exactly what she did to me and Hucky.

“I see,” she said, looking me up and down. And then “Hmmmm” when she got to Hucky. I didn’t know if she was doing it for show or not, but with her finger tapping on her chin just like in the movie, I got the feeling she was going to take her magic tape measure out of her pocket next. And the whole time, you could tell from her expression that she remembered writing Hucky directions about how to hop into chalk pavement pictures and giving him her loveliest of wishes. So after a second, she turned to the policeman.

“Thank you, officer,” she said firmly, like he was Mr. Banks. “I know these children.”
Home free!
The cop wasn’t exactly happy about it, but he probably figured she could have sent him flying across West Forty-fourth Street just by waving her hand, so he grumbled his way back down the hall and left us alone. By then, Mary Poppins had turned all of her attention to Blake Edwards’s youngest nephew, Seth, who still couldn’t believe he wasn’t dreaming the whole thing—especially when she knelt down in front of him and signed, “You must be Hucky.” Mama, you had to see the eyes-wide look on his face.
It’s HER! It’s really HER!!
All he could manage to do was not fall over on his six-year-old butt.

“I think we need to have a little talk, don’t you?” she asked, putting her hands on his shivering shoulders. Hucky nodded. It was the only time since that first day at Amory Park that I’d ever seen him speechless. (He’s kind of like Augie that way.) And when she stood up to take his hand, he turned to me in shock.
Is this really happening??
You’d think he would have learned by now not to keep his nanny waiting.

“Spit-spot,” she signed sternly, tugging on his arm. As she led him into her dressing room, he glanced over his shoulder at me with his bottom jaw still hanging open. So I signed a fast warning right back at him.

“Close your mouth, Hucky. We are not a codfish.” Then they were gone.

Nine seconds later my phone rang. I didn’t even have to check Caller ID to find out who it was. My brother and I invented synchronicity when we were six.

When I glanced over my shoulder, I recognized her right away. She was the “Maybe This Time” one. I had to watch her sing that damn song the whole year I was ten, before Augie got tired of her and moved on to her mother. Right now she was wearing a black dress and a black coat with fur, and she didn’t seem too pissed off that I wouldn’t have known her from Clint Eastwood.

“Who’s on the phone?” she asked, poofing up her big black hair and smiling at me like I was maybe her best friend or her agent.

“My brother Augie,” I said. “Look, do you think you could talk to him for a second? He knew your birthday by heart when we were seven, but he’s not really weird.” She didn’t say anything back, but instead took the cell phone out of my hand and put it up to her green earring.

“Augie? It’s Liza.”

Pause.

“March 12, 1946. It was a natural childbirth.” I couldn’t believe he was actually
testing
her to see if she was real! (Yes, I could. He’s Augie.) I guess she convinced him, because she stayed on the phone for another twenty seconds discussing her parents, her Oscar, and her next concert at Radio City. If her date hadn’t shown up to yank her away, they might have used up all of my unlimited air time.

“Bye, Augie,” she said in a rush. “Lenny’s here.” She flipped my phone shut and handed it back to me—but before she left, she took a program out of her purse, opened to the title page, and kissed it so
that there were lipstick lips. Then she wrote, “For Augie.
Loved
our talk. Forever, Liza.” And after she handed it to me, Lenny dragged her toward the exit.

For the first time in almost twenty-four hours I had a couple of minutes to myself, and I was wiped. So I sat down on a gray stool, put my head into my hands, and tried to piece together exactly how I’d wound up in a vomit-colored hallway backstage at a Broadway theater 200 miles from home without stopping to ask any questions first. But the way it turned out, I wasn’t the only one doing the wondering—because right around then my phone rang again. This time it wasn’t my brother.

I hung up the phone feeling like crap. Hucky was ten feet away from me, getting all of his wishes granted at once, and meanwhile I’d really let down my father. How could both of these things happen at the same time?
X and y have specific values, and they only add up one way.
But before I could figure out any answers, the puke-yellow door opened again. This time it was Hucky leading Julie Andrews, and not the other way around. His eyes were sparkling, and it didn’t take a spoonful of sugar to see that hers might have been too.

“I think we’ve just about got that straightened out,” she said to me in her let’s-clean-up-our-room voice. “I explained to Hucky
that I can only come to stay with children who’ve been left alone. But since he has
you
, he doesn’t need me after all.” For a minute I thought she’d gotten me mixed up with somebody else.
Me? Up there with Mary Poppins? ME??
And just to make sure I knew she hadn’t, she narrowed her forehead the same way she did when Uncle Albert was floating on the ceiling and spoke quietly so that I’d know it was just her and me. “Do we understand each other, Anthony? I don’t expect you to let him down.” By then I would have said yes to just about anything she asked. I mean, the last thing I needed was to piss off Mary Poppins. But this was a no-brainer anyway.

“Don’t worry,” I swore on my honor. “That’ll never happen.” She knelt in front of Hucky one more time and brushed his favorite piece of hair out of his face.

“I want you to write to me,” she signed. “And I promise to write back. All right?” Hucky nodded, not taking his eyes off of hers. “And always remember that if you ever
do
need me, I’m here.” I guess that was all he really wanted to find out, because he suddenly wrapped his arms around her neck and pressed his whole face against her cheek. And when she hugged him back, I had to turn away.

How was I supposed to know that
I
needed her too?

The rest of our adventure was wrapped up by Pop. The Keller limousine showed up in Shubert Alley just like he said it would, but there were so many movie stars looking for limos of their own that we wound up dropping off somebody named Vanessa Redgrave at the Ritz Carlton on our way to Penn Station. Hucky sat through it all in a daze, holding my hand and staring straight ahead into whatever world Julie Andrews had opened up for him. Meanwhile,
I had the driver to deal with. His name was Tim, he’d been a Yankees fan since he was four, and Bucky F. Dent was one of his idols. I was ready to get out of the car at Forty-first Street and
walk
.