The Secret Inside You

If you grew up within driving distance of New York City during a particular period in history, you and your classmates would inevitably be bundled up at some point in your academic career and dragged en masse to the Museum of Natural History, so you could while away the hours peering at creepy dioramas of Neanderthals frozen in time, or rampant dinosaurs recreated from their fossilized remains, or a giant life-size blue whale dangling precariously from the ceiling.

When the time came, I too made the trek to that museum, but I didn’t have to like it. By the time I was in fourth grade, the only New York museum worth my time was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and all because of a book.

This is the actual book. I’ve kept it all these years. It’s called From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg, who died in 2013 at age 83. I’ve never read any other books by her except this one. Mixed-Up Files was enough to carry with me all these years. And only a few years ago did I realize the debt my writing owes to it.

The story doesn’t sound terribly remarkable. Feeling unappreciated in her white-bread Connecticut household, a young girl named Claudia decides to run away from home. She knows herself well enough to know that she requires money and comfort to pull off this caper. She enlists the help of her brother Jamie, a master card cheat, who has the princely sum of $24 to his name. The two run away to New York City and move into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By day, they educate themselves by tagging along with school groups. By night, they swipe pocket change as they bathe in the museum’s fountain and sleep in Marie Antoinette’s bed.

While living in their magnificent digs, Claudia becomes obsessed with nailing down the provenance of a mysterious statue of an angel, which the museum has recently acquired. Some evidence identifies the statue as the work of Michelangelo, but the experts beg to differ, as they always do. Claudia and Jamie spend the remainder of their money to travel to the home of the statue’s last known owner of record, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who just might know the truth. Eccentric, witty, rich, and marvelously perceptive, Frankweiler offers the children a challenge: The truth is hidden somewhere inside her Mixed-Up Files, a long bank of file cabinets in her office. If they are clever enough, they can find the answer. The children accept the wager, and what they discover in their search makes me want to cry like a baby forty years later.

I like two things about this book. It just took me until adulthood to figure out what they are.

One is that the book is written in first person by Frankweiler herself, who appears at the very beginning, writing a letter to her attorney, and saying that she feels compelled to explain the changes she is about to make to her last will and testament. She tells us that since she’s interviewed the two children extensively, she feels qualified to present this unbiased account. This narrative framework seems dodgy, but I’m currently using it with a book I’m writing. It seems to be working.

With that intriguing intro, she leaps into the story, though she will not appear as a character in the main action until the last quarter of the tale.

I think you should read Mixed-Up Files if you haven’t already, so I won’t give any spoilers. (If nothing else, see if it is suitable for the child in your life.) Suffice to say that Claudia and Jamie solve the mystery, and Frankweiler—a proxy for Konigsburg herself—manages to save one last satisfying secret for the book’s final pages.

The second reason the book charmed me is that it’s remarkably wise. The author understands that all children—young and old—want to feel special, and solving a mystery is one of the best ways to arrive at that specialness. This may partially account for the mystery lover’s addiction.

Here’s the quote that sells it. Frankweiler, in a conversation with Jamie, says:

Claudia doesn’t want ad­ven­ture. She likes baths and feeling comfortable too much for that kind of thing. Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside, where it counts.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely true. Konigsburg, throughout her long career, became known for spouting similarly profound gems in her writing. I sometimes like reading quotes people have pulled from her books. She was that good. Here’s another:

Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.

When I was still working at Scholastic, one of my office mates was lucky enough to interview Konigsburg about one of her new books. Like me, my friend loved Mixed-Up Files and so she was tempted to ask a few questions about that book. One too many questions, I might add. Konigsburg bristled, saying Mixed-Up Files was her second book, it was old, and puh-leeze, she was trying to promote the new book.

Today I know in my heart how she must have felt. But Mixed-Up Files won the Newbery Award in 1967 and has touched millions of readers since. E.L. Konigsburg wrote 21 great books, and I’m sure that in time I’ll read them all. But if I never do, all I need is this one. It is that special.

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com