“Policeboy,” said Orion. “Fireboy. FISHBOY!”
“Why doesn’t he just dress up as a girl?” said Roo, as if his brother weren’t at the table with him. “That would be easy. He does it every day anyway.”
“Do you want to be a girl for Halloween, Claude?” Rosie was careful to keep her voice exactly neutral. If he were going to wear a dress to school, Halloween was the day to do it. Maybe this wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe he’d get it out of his system.
“Girl’s not a costume,” Claude said reasonably. And then, “I want to be Grumwald.”
“Grumwald?” said Penn.
“Yeah. Grumwald.”
“You can’t be Grumwald.”
“Why not?”
“Grumwald doesn’t look like anything. Grumwald’s only a story we made up. Grumwald doesn’t exist corporeally.”
“Core what really?” Claude was still precocious, but he was only five.
“Grumwald doesn’t exist except in our heads,” Penn revised.
“That’s good,” said Orion. “Easy costume.”
“I don’t need help,” said Claude. “I’ll make it myself. What does he look like, Daddy? In your head?”
“He looks like you,” Penn said.
“Why him?” said Roo.
“Well, he used to look like you,” Penn told Roo. “He looked like each of you. He looks like all of you really.”
The morning of Halloween was the first one in months Claude came downstairs in anything other than a dress. He was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt and a crown he’d cut out of red construction paper. It took Rosie a heartbeat to place him. It had been so long since he’d come down to breakfast looking like her little boy.
“Arrr, that’s not a costume.” Roo popped up the moss-stitch eye patch Rigel had knit him to look at his baby brother.
“Yes it is.”
“You’re just dressed as you.”
“Without the girl clothes,” said Ben.
“Claude as Claude instead of Claudette is not a costume,” said Roo.
“Dad said Grumwald looks like me,” said Claude.
“No one’s going to give you candy without a costume,” said Rigel. Penn suspected that was not strictly true, but he did worry (number seventeen or so) Claude would feel left out at school when everyone else was dressed up.
“This isn’t all of it,” said Claude.
“Where’s the rest?” said Orion.
“It’s a surprise.”
“Well, get it!” everyone said.
Claude grinned, clomped upstairs, clomped back down again. In his hands, a foot, maybe more, taller than he was, Claude held a cardboard cutout, crude but recognizably human: circle head atop rounded shoulders, no neck, sloping into too-long, uneven arms with tiny hands—Claude seemed to have traced his own and cut them out—a torso attached to thick legs with feet sticking out in opposite directions at right angles, the toes all stacked atop one another as if viewed from above, all of it covered head to toe in aluminum foil. A hole was cut out for the mouth with a balloon taped underneath. Glued all over the balloon were words he must have cut from catalogs, for the scraps read things like “Available in size S, M, L, and XL,” and, “Order by Dec. 21 for guaranteed Christmas delivery!” and “Choose from honey lavender, meadow sage, pumpkin orange, or heathered denim,” and “Now with leak guard technology!”
“What the hell is that thing?” said Roo.
“Roo!” Rosie and Penn said together, though it was not an unreasonable question.
Claude propped his cutout up against the kitchen wall and stood on his tiptoes to peer around the balloon into its mouth, and it dawned on Penn like sudden sun: Prince Grumwald peering into the armor outside his bedroom to release infinite story, words without end, the ceaseless narrative of catalog shopping. Tears came to his eyes immediately. It was the most perfect Halloween costume he had ever seen.
“That’s gay,” said Roo.
“Roo!”
“It’s creepy,” Rigel and Orion said together.
“It’s Halloween.” Claude shrugged.
“That’s true,” they agreed.
“How will you hold that thing and your candy?” Roo asked.
Claude grinned, produced a hollow plastic pumpkin also covered in aluminum foil, and hung it from a hook taped to the back of the knight’s right hand.
“No one will know who you’re supposed to be,” Ben warned.