LIKE MOST GROWN-UPS, Sam Kellow’s parents never guessed that their son ever thought about money. like most grown-ups, they thought he did not appreciate its value, and they both liked to say things to him like “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and “If you knew how much that cost, you wouldn’t do that.”
But in truth Sam knew a lot about how much things cost, and when the family arrived in Toronto in the middle of a blizzard, he knew they were there to sell his mother’s latest painting to the mysterious Mr. Edward St. John de Vere. He also knew they were down to their last fifty-three dollars and twenty cents.
Sam was only nine years old but he had a brain like a computer. He could add, subtract, do five-number long division in his head. He knew what sort of a hotel you could stay in for fifty-three dollars and twenty cents, and it certainly wasn’t a hotel like the one his father drove up to. The moment Sam saw the King Redward Hotel looming up through the snowstorm he got a very bad feeling in his stomach. When he saw the doorman, with all his gold buttons and medals on his big black coat, he knew this was a very expensive hotel and he felt even sicker.
What if his mother could not sell the painting she was carrying with her? What if the mysterious Mr. de Vere had died, or had been called away on business, or saw his mother’s new painting and didn’t like the faces on the people or the color of the sky?
They would be stuck in this hotel with a big bill and no money.
But even while Sam was worrying, his father was smiling and throwing his car keys to the doorman. His father was a gambler. In other words, he made all his money (or lost all his money) by guessing which horse would win a race, which playing card would turn up on the top of the deck, which drop of rain would run fastest down a windowpane. Money never bothered him, not ever. People said of Earl Kellow that he was the sort of man who would give you his last dollar, and although Sam was proud of his father, this also made him very nervous.
When they traveled to a strange city, Sam never knew whether they would be living on peanut butter sandwiches or sitting in a fancy restaurant being served that famous, fabulous, flaming ice-cream cake called Bombe Alaska.
He never knew whether they would stay in a palace or a fleapit, and in fact Sam knew plenty of both, and now that he was nine he knew which he liked better.
He watched his father tip the doorman five dollars and the bell captain two dollars, and when the porter brought their single suitcase to the room, Sam saw how much Earl Kellow gave him and he knew they now had only forty-four dollars and twenty cents left in all the world.
Sam looked at his mother to see if she was worried, and she looked down at him and smiled. He could not tell.
People were always telling Sam what a handsome woman his mother was, as if he never noticed himself. She was as tall as his father. She had big feet and hands and wild, curling blond hair and a pair of eyes which were different colors, the left bluish and the right brownish.
Her name was Vanessa and you might think—looking at those size-ten feet and those hands—that she would paint paintings as big as a dining-room table, but no—her paintings were no bigger than a matchbox.
No one ever explained how Vanessa Kellow could do it, how anyone could do it, and even if she had been two feet tall, you would have considered it a miracle. For these tiny paintings showed entire cities. Not just the buildings and the streets, but the bakers and butchers, and the stews bubbling in the pots, and the freckles on the faces, and the cat sleeping in the basket, and the fluff under the beds, although you could not see these things without a special magnifying glass, and then you might find a ruby ring in a secret drawer or a jar of blue-and-green-striped candy in a cupboard, and even then you would have the feeling that there were many things, things that were there, that you could not see.
People would go crazy when they saw his mother’s tiny paintings. They just had to own them, straightaway, and if they were rich people, they would pay a lot of money for the privilege. The only problem was, it took a whole year to do one little painting.
And it was one of these paintings, wrapped in tissue paper in her purse, that she was about to deliver. The minute they came into the hotel room, his mother set about fitting the painting inside a little box and then wrapping it in gold paper.
“Wow,” his father said, looking out the window of the hotel room. “Look at that city. Look at all that snow.”
His father loved new cities, new games, new people to gamble with. Sam did not understand why they couldn’t stay at home in Australia and just gamble there. Instead the family traveled the world, from race course to race course, from casino to casino, from Sydney to Paris to Tokyo to London to Toronto, seeking what his father called the Big Bazoohley, which meant the Big Win, the Big Prize, the Jackpot.
Sometimes he got the Big Bazoohley and sometimes he did not, but in any case he was tall and handsome and fun to be with, even when he lost. He could balance a dining chair on his nose and find pennies behind your ears. He had bright blue eyes and he could play cricket and baseball, and wherever they traveled there was something about him that made people like him and lend him money when he had none of his own.
Sam stood beside his father and watched the snow come down. The flakes were huge, and the fall was dense. The snow blew in swirls and eddies. It stuck to the window ledge and filled the ledge, and as they watched, it began to creep up the glass as if it meant to pull a soft white blanket over the face of the hotel.
“Gee, it’s beautiful,” his father said. Sam would have agreed if he knew that they could stay inside where it was warm and safe, but he couldn’t look out the window. He looked instead at the expensive gold-framed mirrors, at the big sunken bath, at the forty-eight-inch TV, at the perfect green grapes in the glistening silver bowl.
“How will Mum get to her appointment?” he asked his father. “Maybe she won’t be able to get there in all of this snow.”
“This is Toronto,” his father said. “This is a great city in the snow. They have a wonderful subway system. They have shopping centers underground. And as a matter of fact, Mr. de Vere has a mansion which is totally underground. You reach it from a door on the Bloor Street subway platform.”
Sam was too worried about his mother to think it strange that a rich man would have his front door on a subway platform. He looked out the window. The snow was falling so fast now. It lay itself on the roofs below and all the streets and made everything soft and curved and white and quiet. In all that great city nothing was moving but the flashing yellow lights on the top of the snowplows.
“But how will she get to the subway?”
“I’ll take the hotel elevator,” his mother said. She stood in the middle of the room with the tiny gold-wrapped painting held in the palm of her hand. “The Bloor and Yonge lines run through the hotel basement. Neat, huh?”
“Neat,” said Sam, but when his father wanted him to go out and sled and play in the snow, he said he would rather stay in the room, and so, when his mother left, Sam and his dad stayed in the room and they watched the cartoon channel and after a while Sam stood and went to the door, where he tried to see, without being obvious, how much this hotel room was costing.
Four hundred and fifty-three dollars a night. Plus tax.