100 Cupboards

Lying in bed and unable to sleep, Henry thinks about baseball and watches moonlight creep through the big window. A sharp thump against the wall startles him. It happens again. Nervous, Henry gets out of bed and goes down the squeaky stairs to use the bathroom, but it’s occupied. He sits on the stairs to wait, and out of the bathroom comes a short, elderly, bald man in rolled-up tweed pants, a dirty t-shirt, and a long bathrobe. He walks to Grandfather’s room, turns, and stares at Henry.

Henry yawns and stretches, then notices that he’s sitting on the stairs for some reason and needs to use the bathroom. He hurries back upstairs and climbs into bed, where he has the odd feeling that he’s forgotten something. Though puzzled, he quickly falls asleep.

Henry sleeps late, then comes downstairs. He greets Dotty—who’s busy pulping apples—and has a cereal breakfast. Dotty tells him Frank expects him at the barn. Still groggy from sleep, Henry goes to the barn, where Frank calls down to him from a high loft. Henry climbs up a wall ladder two floors to Frank’s office. Frank sits at a desk covered with knickknacks and a computer. Lately, he sells things online and just unloaded two tumbleweeds to a foreign collector who, in a bidding war, bought the weeds for $1,500.

Frank invites Henry to join him on a trip into town. They drive the long way on bouncy dirt roads, explore the downtown for hours, eat cheeseburgers, fries, and ice cream, and finally attend a rummage sale, where Frank buys Henry a baseball glove and a pocketknife. On the way home, they collect more tumbleweeds.

After dinner, Henry visits with the girls. They argue about what game to play and chat briefly about Grandfather’s room, which has been locked since he died two years ago. Henry can’t help thinking he knows something about that room, but he can’t put his finger on it. They go to the barn to play, but their games feel too young for Henry. He returns to the house, borrows a novel to read, goes to his bedroom, and quickly falls asleep.

He’s awakened by bits of plaster falling on him. He looks up: Sticking out of the curving wall above, two knobs turn slowly, accompanied by the thumping sound. He clears away more plaster and finds that the knobs protrude from an old metal door less than a foot wide. Around the left knob are 19 strange letters; around the right knob are Roman numerals, I through XXII. Henry spins the knobs easily, but the door won’t budge.

Henry sneaks downstairs to the kitchen junk drawer, retrieves a pencil and scrap of paper, and returns to the attic, where he multiplies 19 letters times 22 numerals and gets 418, the total number of possible combinations between the two knobs.

Behind him, Henrietta asks what he’s doing. She heard him go downstairs and became curious. He explains the knobs and says he’ll try every combination until one of them opens the door. She asks what he thinks might be behind the door, and he guesses old shoes or fountain pens, while she hopes for a map to a “secret city,” or keys, or diamonds.

Henry gets to work, trying one combination of letter and numeral at a time while Henrietta sits on his bed and watches. After 110 tries, she gets up and rubs the knobs clean, which reveals three more arrows. Henry lies back, discouraged: With four arrows, the number of possible combinations could climb into the thousands.

They decide to leave it for tomorrow, and Henrietta goes back to her room. Henry takes his plaster-strewn blanket out near the barn, where he shakes it clean. Then he sits and looks at the grass, the blades glinting with moisture in the starlight, and then up at the stars themselves, which seem to gaze back at him, as if commenting to each other about how little Henry really knows of the wonders of life.

Sensing that something important has been revealed to him, Henry returns to the house. He fetches his knife, goes to the attic, and begins carving the plaster from around the knob door.

Early the next morning, Henry wakes and looks up at his handiwork from the previous night. He’s cleared plaster from a large area around the two knobs, revealing dozens of cupboard doors. He showers and returns to his bedroom, which is covered in plaster and dust. He stares at the wall. Each cupboard door is unique, some with carved shapes, others with strange knobs and handles.

He goes downstairs, finds a broom and dustpan, and carefully cleans his bedroom. The plaster loads up his blanket, which he drags downstairs, out the back door, and past the barn to a culvert, where he dumps the heavy load. Exhausted and sweating, Henry lies back in the tall grass and promptly falls asleep.

Frank finds him snoozing alongside remnants of plaster. He uses a bat to hit plaster bits into the distance like baseballs. He wakes Henry and tells him the tumbleweed sale fell through when a Texas competitor offered tumbleweeds with photos and certificates of authenticity. He says he’s decided to set his tumbleweeds free, and the wind will do the rest. He doesn’t mention the plaster.

Frank says they should play some baseball, but first he wants to finish sharpening Henry’s knife. Henry runs ahead, finds it in his bedroom, and brings it down. Frank looks at it—it’s been worn down by all the plaster removal—and comments that it’s in worse shape than he remembered, and he really should get Henry a new one. He gets to work on sharpening the knife, and Henry goes back upstairs.

In his bedroom, Henrietta sits on his bed, staring up at the wall. Again, she wonders what’s in the cupboards. Henry supposes cupboards cover the entire wall, but he’s already damaged his knife and fears that doing so again will make Frank suspicious. Henrietta says there are more tools in the basement and the barn.

Dotty calls them down to lunch. Anastasia asks what they were doing, and Henrietta says they were just talking. Henry adds that it was about secret cities and lost doors. Penelope says she once found a secret door in the bathroom, but it only contained an old shower mat and some mouse droppings.

Dotty and Frank discuss the door to Grandfather’s room, and Frank decides he’ll open it today. He stands and declaims in a loud voice, quoting from Shakespeare and Homer’s Iliad, like a hero going into battle. The girls applaud. He gathers tools, and he and Henry go upstairs to Grandfather’s door.

Frank removes from Grandfather’s door the knobs, back plate, and the rest of the locking assembly, but the door doesn’t budge. Frank tries kicking the door and lunging against it; the door is solid and heavy and won’t open. Frank strikes it with a sharpened axe, over and over, but all he produces are small nicks. He chases Henry away so he can think.

Henry uses his pocketknife to scrape paint off a narrow window in one of the cupboard doors in his bedroom wall. The paint comes away, and Henry peers through the glass but can see only darkness. Henrietta brings him a box of old posters that he can hang on the wall to hide the cupboards from nosy people.

Henrietta looks through the glass and decides it’s a mailbox, like at a post office. They can barely see something inside that resembles a post card. Hanging onto the cupboard door above the mailbox, Henry leans in for a closer look, but the door he’s holding suddenly slides open and releases a cool breeze. Henry reaches into the cupboard, grabs a string, and pulls out a key. Just then, the breeze turns into a gale with the sound of trees whipping around in the wind, and they sense a rainstorm. Henrietta tells Henry to close the cupboard door quickly before her parents hear the noise and feel the damp breeze. Henry forces it closed and slides a metal latch home.

Henrietta says these cupboards must be magical, but Henry believes they’re “quantum,” as “when things can sometimes be where they aren’t, or two places at once” (76). Then he realizes that quantum effects are microscopic, which doesn’t apply to the cupboards, so he simply has no idea how they work. Henrietta is anxious to explore further, but Henry fears what they might find. She wonders what door goes with the key Henry retrieved.

They’re interrupted by the sound of an engine revving downstairs. Frank, wearing goggles and holding a chainsaw, stands at Grandfather’s door. He puts the spinning chain blades against the door, and wood chips fly. The saw bounces, and it and Frank fly backward. The saw barely misses Frank’s legs and instead hits the floor, grinding a hole in the carpet.

Dotty appears from downstairs. She asks if he’s ok, and Frank says he’s merely embarrassed. Dotty says it’s time to leave for the barbecue.