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fine thing"
    Commander Melanoff knew what a monogram was. In the days when he had gone each morning to his factory, he had worn shirts with his initials hand-embroidered on the pocket.
    "I don't know her initials," he explained sadly to the saleslady.
    "Oh, dear. Do you know her name?"
    "Ruth."
    "Lovely. Why don't we embroider 'Ruth' on all her clothes, then? A short name suits that purpose so well. If her name were, say, Clementina, then we would have to rethink, wouldn't we? Monograms are charged by the letter. Clementina would be very costly."
    "Money is of no importance. I want the best," he replied.
    And so all of her clothing was adorned with her name.
    He cleaned the house on behalf of Ruth's well-being. He carried all the pizza boxes to the trash and washed the mouse droppings from the countertops and the floors. But when she crawled across the newly cleaned living room floor and grabbed the edge of the elegant draperies, swirls of dust arose and moths that had been living in the deep folds of fabric were dislodged and flew in confusion around the room. Ruth laughed at the sight of the fluttering insects, but Commander Melanoff took down the heavy draperies and added them to the pile of trash, on top of the pizza boxes. He called in fumigators to rid the house of moths; then he washed the windows, which had become so caked with grime that the neighborhood was blurred.

    The only thing he did not clean or dislodge as he went about his work with brooms and sweepers and buckets and brushes was the towering stack of unopened mail from Switzerland, the six years of messages and telegrams and letters that were still piled against the wall of the front hall.
    Ruth, who was still acquiring teeth, occasionally pulled a bit of paper from the lower portion of the stack and chewed on it. One morning Commander Melanoff, who had prepared the baby's morning oatmeal in the kitchen, picked her up from where she was happily crawling on the hall floor. She spat a scrap of yellowing paper into his hand.

    He looked at the torn words and phrases and groaned, remembering those early days when he had still had hope.
    ***
    Carefully he tied a bib around her neck to protect her pink hand-smocked monogrammed jump suit. "There you are, Baby Ruth," he said, and sat her in the highchair he had ordered from a costly catalog. Spooning the oatmeal into her mouth, he thought about the stack of mail. He decided that he must throw it all away. But time passed, and he could not bring himself to do it.
    Often the baby played in the hall, and sometimes she grabbed at the letters. In her first weeks with Commander Melanoff, she could reach only the earliest mail. But when she began to pull herself up and stand on wobbly legs, she reached higher. Once she withdrew a sealed envelope with a Swiss stamp from the middle of the stack. She tore the envelope open, removed a folded letter, and chewed on it briefly. Then she crumpled the damp paper into a ball and rolled it across the floor for the cat to chase.

    The cat could not read, for it was a cat. Ruth could not read, for she was a baby. Commander Melanoff, who was a grown man with several college degrees, could read extremely well but never noticed the wad of paper that eventually wedged itself under a radiator. So no one knew that a letter mailed four years earlier had announced, "THEY ARE FOUND ALIVE!"

12. Another Cryptic Communication

    "They survived the crocodiles," Tim announced glumly, entering the kitchen and holding up another postcard.
    "Let's see! What does it say?" Jane and the twins wiped their hands quickly and rushed over to see. They had all been helping Nanny bake some cookies, a very old-fashioned thing to do.
    Tim held it out and began to read it aloud.
    "'Dear ones,'" he read.
    "I wonder why they call us dear ones when they're trying to sell us," Barnaby A said, looking puzzled.
    Nanny added raisins to the bowl of dough. "It's a nicety," she explained, stirring.

    "They're just