The Gawgon and The Boy by Lloyd Alexander

Author:Lloyd Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

13 The Consulting Detective

Mrs. Jossbegger died in November. My grandmother and The Gawgon did not feel up to a funeral. Leaving me with them, my mother and my aunts attended the service. They had put on the black dresses they kept available for sad occasions. Afterward, my mother reported it was nicely done. Aunt Rosie thought it was skimpy. "I'm sure they did the best they could," my mother said. "Everyone's cutting back, these days."

"Cutting back? On funerals?" Aunt Rosie said. "Heaven help us, where will it all end?" Mrs. Jossbegger's absence ended the corn-cutting sessions. As for the stock market crash, Uncle Rob's visit troubled me. I privately asked my sister about it. "If you paid attention to something besides drawing those dumb pictures, you wouldn't have to ask," she said-which meant she understood no more than I did. What, I wondered, had it to do with our grandmother?

"You really are the stupidest blighter," my sister said. "Don't you know anything at all? Grandmother counts on Father to help out. She has to. She doesn't make enough money from the lodgers. The house doesn't even belong to her." I had never heard about that. "Whose is it?"

"Father's," my sister said. "That's right. He owns it. He lets her live there free, but it's still his house. He buys stocks for her, too. That must be what he and Uncle Rob were talking about.

"Father will take care of everything," she went on. "Anyhow, it's got nothing to do with blighters. It's none of your business."

My sister knew the hallways and back stairs of the adult world, so I believed her. But if it was none of my business, all the more reason to make it so. Next time I saw The Gawgon, I asked her to explain the puzzling crash. She tried her best; still I did not grasp it, only that it was not good.

"No, it isn't good," The Gawgon said. "Something like it happened before, years ago, and that was very bad, too. It all worked out in the end. I hope it works out again. President Hoover says it will. But when politicians promise everything's going to be rosy, I start feeling my pockets."

I let it go at that. I would make it my business some other time. I had enough crowding my head. As threatened, The Gawgon dipped me into geometry. If this was supposed to teach me to think, it felt more like frying my brain. The notion of pi, a number that could stretch out endlessly, bewildered me. But at least I was good at drawing circles.

The Gawgon could sense when my mind wandered hopelessly beyond her reach. To give me some relief from theorems and propositions, she handed me a book of mystery stories.

"Better than just mysteries," she said. "Sherlock Holmes can show you how to pay attention to details and figure things out logically.

"Arthur Conan Doyle started out as a doctor," The Gawgon said. "He wrote to pass the time between patients. Since he didn't have a lot of patients, he ended up writing a lot of stories.

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