Chasing Vermeer

Calder Pillay and Petra Andalee are sixth-grade students who attend the innovative Lab School in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago. Calder is fond of his eccentric teacher, Ms. Hussey, because she encourages curiosity. In one of her more unconventional assignments, Ms. Hussey gives her students the task of finding someone who has received a truly extraordinary letter.

As Calder walks home from school that day, he observes Petra walking ahead of him. Although they’re in the same class and live on the same street, Petra and Calder hardly know each other. Calder has always spent most of his free time with his best friend, Tommy Segovia. Tommy isn’t around anymore because he recently moved away to New York with his mother and new stepfather.

Calder briefly shifts his attention from Petra to the pentominoes that he always carries in his pocket. Pentominoes are shapes that correspond to 12 letters of the alphabet. They can fit together like puzzle pieces to form larger shapes. Calder sometimes uses them to send coded messages to Tommy.

Calder follows Petra to her favorite haunt—Powell’s Bookstore. He observes her watching Ms. Hussey as the teacher buys several volumes. Petra, hiding from Ms. Hussey, ducks into the stacks and bumps into Calder. She is annoyed that Calder now knows about her secret hideaway.

Back at home that evening, Petra contemplates her noisy family. She is the oldest of five children, and the house is in a perpetual state of turmoil. She overhears her parents arguing about a mysterious letter and Petra, thinking of her school assignment, is eager to find it. When she goes to search the trash, hoping her parents discarded the letter, she finds that someone has already taken out the trash.

Calder’s family is the opposite of Petra’s. He’s an only child living in a quiet household. Because his parents have never received any mysterious correspondence, Calder frets about completing his assignment. The next morning, when Calder spies Petra walking to school ahead of him, he awkwardly tries to start up a conversation with her: “By the time they got to school, both were worn out by trying to think of something to say, and trying not to say what they were really thinking” (26).

That morning in class, none of the students have been able to produce an interesting letter, so Ms. Hussey changes their assignment. She says that they need to look farther back in time to find a unique letter and announces that they will all take a field trip to the Art Institute in downtown Chicago. Petra feels unsettled, as though the class is on the cusp of something great or terrible.

Once the class arrives at the Art Institute, Ms. Hussey tells everyone to try to find a piece of art displaying a letter. When Calder notices Petra sneaking into a restricted area, he follows her. The pair is caught by a security guard in a storage room, and the guard returns them to Ms. Hussey. Petra explains to Calder that she went there because the best pieces of art could be hidden away in storerooms.

The next day at school, Ms. Hussey tells her students to find an object from home that feels like a work of art to them. They’re supposed to describe it without saying what the object is so that the rest of the class can try to guess.

That afternoon, as Petra is walking to Powell’s, she notices the shopkeeper, Mr. Watch, drop a book into the giveaway bin outside. She retrieves it out of curiosity. Entitled Lo!, the book was written by Charles Fort in 1931. It describes a multitude of unusual occurrences involving frogs and other creatures.

Fort takes an unconventional approach to the mysteries of life. He believes that all things connect, and nothing is a coincidence:

If there is an underlying oneness to all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere (42).

At home that evening, Fort’s book and his philosophy of reality enthrall Petra. Fort insists that a person’s perspective could change their world, and that people are so eager to dismiss things as coincidence that they ignore reality: “[Fort’s] thought was that most people bent over backward to fit everything that happened to them into something they could understand” (45).

As she drifts off the sleep, Petra has a vision of a woman in old-fashioned dress holding a quill pen. Petra describes the world of her dream as a “calm and deliberate world” and “a writer’s world” (49). She believes Fort is somehow responsible for her vision of the mysterious woman, but she doesn’t yet know how.

That same evening, Calder returns from school and goes to his room to do his homework. He uses his pentominoes to spell the word “Art.” Calder racks his brain for an object that he might consider “artistic,” then remembers a box that his Grandma Ranjana left him. A picture on top of the box shows a man in a long gown holding a scroll and a compass as he gazes out a window. The letters “Meer” are on a tall cupboard in the background of the picture. Calder decides to write about this object for his class assignment.

Later that night, Calder receives a coded letter from his friend Tommy. The code is an alpha-numeric cipher based on Calder’s pentomino set. In it, Tommy says that Frog, the boy next door, has vanished and someone may have kidnapped him. Calder sends an offhanded reply, encouraging Tommy to be a hero and solve the crime. After he mails the letter, Calder realizes he might be putting Tommy in danger by telling him to snoop around.