by Ian Woollen
Mikel promised to show her the sights. The cathedral, the market, the Grand Exposition. She was very excited about visiting the docks and ogling the ships from all over the world.
He told her about his youth at sea with the merchant marine. To show off his familiarity with harbor life and to display his status to any former mates who might be unloading freight, Mikel honked his horn and nosed the shiny car onto a long, busy quay. He eased the truck out along thick, creaking timbers overlaid on blocks of granite.
They pulled up near a fancy yacht, flying a royal flag, tied up at the end of the wharf. As the car slowed to a stop, two gentlemen hurried down the gangway from the yacht’s foredeck, embroiled in a heated exchange.
One man wore a bowler, the other a monocle. The man with a monocle wheeled a brass-clad steamer trunk behind him. Mistaking Mikel’s chauffeur uniform for that of a bellhop, and the big car for a hotel limousine, he deposited the luggage at Mikel’s feet and ran off after the other fellow, still arguing.
Mikel told Lubya to wait in the car, while he hoisted the steamer trunk and chased after the pair. It was tough going through the crowds under the weight of the trunk.
Meanwhile, Lubya did not realize that the uncleating of ropes, the whistles, the sudden activity of the deck crew announced the ship’s departure. When Mikel finally reappeared, exhausted, his back hurting, still lugging the steamer trunk, the yacht was headed back out to sea, under a full set of billowing, red sails.
Chapter 23
Expulsion
Anthony Wangert watched from the upper school playground as his little brothers raced after the kindergarteners, who squealed with delight at being chased by the most popular bad boys in the lower form.
Anthony leaned his broad forehead against the cool fence. He did not like to run around at recess. It risked messing up his school uniform. He noticed Robbie and Duncan and their two slaves, Vincent and Kayla, sneaking off into the bushes at the side of the gym. He knew what they were doing. Pirate silliness, leftover from last summer in Maine when, egged on by Geneva, all they could talk about was pirate treasure buried in Hangman’s Cove.
To further terrify the kindergarteners on the playground, Robbie and Duncan and Vincent and Kayla emerged from the bushes with red bandanas and eye patches and their faces smudged with beards and mustachios, a product of Robbie’s discovery that a lit match applied to a wine cork produced the perfect appliqué.
Anthony debated whether or not to intervene. Mary had asked him to watch out for his brothers at school, and Robbie and Duncan could get another detention for the smuggled matches. However, the more trouble his little brothers created, the better it made Anthony appear, especially to his father. Anthony resented that grownups always mentioned how much Robbie and Duncan looked like Daddy, while all that was said about him was he had his mother’s eyes.
Anthony whistled the ‘family whistle.’ Originally devised as a summons for the dog, it now applied to all Wangerts. Anthony started toward the lower form playground. At age eleven, aside from the bed-wetting, he was an accomplished young man. He could stop any adult conversation cold by trotting out all manner of gory information on fallout radiation burns and nuclear mega-tonnage. He pondered weighty philosophical questions, such as, “If an asteroid hit the moon and destroyed it, how would that effect the tides?” He served as an altar boy. He knew the way to his mom’s heart was through reading big books. With his father, he assisted on expanding the Wangert Public Relations collections. They were branching out from weaponry to harpoons and whaling gear, ferried home from antique shops in Maine.
“Duncan! Robbie! Stop right there!” Anthony called.
“Shut up,” Robbie said.
Anthony chided, “Look at all the dirt on you.”
“I don’t care,” Duncan said.
“Give me the matches,” Anthony ordered.
“We don’t have any,” Vincent said.
“You’re lying,” Anthony said.
Kayla, as usual, began to cry.
“I’ll tell the parents,” Anthony said.
“Our mother won’t care!” Vincent yelled.
“Give me the matches,” Anthony sighed. “If you get caught with matches, it’ll be big trouble.”
“Shhhh,” Robbie said, as a teacher approached, “we buried them.”
Anthony winced at their chronic deviousness, especially the way they managed to make him an accomplice. If he turned them in now, they would almost certainly sneak into his bedroom to wreak revenge.
Anthony turned to the approaching teacher and said, “The best punishment you could give them is washing their faces. They hate it.”
The pirate fixation had, indeed, taken deep hold of Robbie and Duncan. Blackbeard was their hero. Unknown to anyone—they didn’t even enlist Vincent and Kayla on this caper—Robbie and Duncan devised a plan to present the best Show and Tell their school had ever seen. Convinced that several of the sabers and swords hanging on the walls of their dad’s office must have belonged to Blackbeard, they cajoled Ward into taking them along on one of his downtown office Saturdays.
While Robbie kept Daddy occupied in his private office with a game of crazy-eights, Duncan slipped away to a conference room and carefully removed two swords from their sheaths. He re-inserted crude sword handles that the boys had made in the basement workshop, so the theft was not immediately apparent. The plan was to hide the swords in Daddy’s golf bag, which he always brought to the office on Saturdays (to practice putting in the hallway), and sneak them in from the car trunk.
The simple act of bringing two old swords to a second grade Show and Tell at the prestigious Regency School would not necessarily have warranted expulsion. Robbie and Duncan took it too far. They burned corks in the cloakroom for beards and burst forth with yells in a flailing swordfight demonstration, which destroyed the plants on the teacher’s desk. The clincher for expulsion was shredding the state and national flags, and replacing them with a bed-sheet Jolly Roger.
Expulsion from the Regency School qualified as news in the social circles of Indianapolis. Especially for a Wangert. It did not come at a good time for the family business. Fred Stark’s prediction about the dismal fate of downtown Indianapolis proved accurate. The “Crossroads of America” was fast becoming “Naptown.” The City Market closed. The art museum fled to the northside, along with the symphony orchestra. In addition to enduring repeated, caustic “I-told-you-sos” from his father-in-law, Ward struggled with increasing pressure to sell the aged Wangert Building and relocate his business to more upscale environs. Only then might Wangert Public Relations still be considered top-tier.
In regard to the public perception of his “where the hell did this come from” children, Ward tried to maintain a flexible, boys-will-be-boys position. Unlike Constance, who was horrified by their disrespectful anarchy. Robbie and Duncan’s expulsion from the Regency School, his alma mater, revealed to Ward his own lines in the sand. He decided to take a harder stance with the delinquents. He decreed the worst punishment they could imagine. No Maine. No Great Tusk Island. In the summer of 1965, they were sent to church camp.
It was horrible. They were driven fifty miles south in a blue church bus to a dismal assembly of Quonset huts on a dismal puddle in Brown County that called itself a ‘lake.’ No sign of a television set. The new rector of the Little Church on the Circle, the Reverend Paul Tyler, took a special interest in the church’s summer program. He was a former Eagle Scout and he misguidedly believed that girls should be allowed to play baseball. It was horrible and it rained. Robbie and Duncan scrawled pleas for rescue on postcards sent to their mother in Maine and their Stark grandparents and to Vincent and Kayla. They were forced to sing hymns and memorize the Lord’s Prayer and wash dishes after meals and make their beds and stir the batter for pancakes. A loud bell woke them up at dawn. The counselors handed out pencils and paper for pen-pal letters to poor Episcopalian kids in Africa. Care packages from parents were screened for sweets. Father Tyler d
ecreed swimming twice a day, even in the rain, and required them to earn a life-saving certificate. Scratching bug bites was their only outlet.
Thanks to a rumor that a few of the most homesick campers would be allowed one weekend visit home, Robbie and Duncan tearfully petitioned Father Tyler for a brief reprieve. In the bus on the way home, they threw paper airplanes. They punished their father by refusing to speak to him.
They spent the weekend in the bomb shelter, eating candy with Vincent and Kayla. Ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis paradoxically created an illusion of all-clear, the Wangert bomb shelter had become little more than a playhouse. A crack in the foundation caused leaking and mold. The kids didn’t mind. They built a winding slot-car track that ran from one room to the next.
Still, the damp crypt exerted an eerie pull. Like a medieval desktop skull, the bomb shelter drew pensive visits from grownups. When the Reverend Paul Tyler came to retrieve Robbie and Duncan for their second two-week stint, he shook Ward’s hand and requested a glimpse of the infamous pit.
Ward liked Father Tyler’s hearty grip and wry grin. He welcomed a few minutes alone with the minister to ask about his sons. “Be honest with me. Do you think they’ll ever mature?” Ward said.
“Sure. It’s just a matter of time. They’re the kind of boys who wake up one day and start reading stock quotes,” Paul Tyler said. “I would suggest that they could benefit from joining our men and boys’ choir.”
“Robbie and Duncan in the choir?”
Paul Tyler nodded. “We’re an inner city church now. Our choir director specializes in reclamation projects.”
Ward winced and grunted as he lifted the steel door to the bomb shelter.
The two men descended into the shadows. Ward reached around a corner and switched on the generator. He kicked a few toys aside and pointed out the food and water storage cabinets and demonstrated how the beds folded down from recessed sections of the wall. The flickering from the sconce lamps barely dented the gloom. Ward pulled back the folding door on the wine rack. He shrugged, “I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing to hear myself talking up these features, like a real estate agent trying to make a sale.”
The Reverend Paul Tyler shook his head and muttered, “This place is unbelievable … that it actually came to this! The existentialists tell us that suicide is an individual’s ultimate choice, and now God has given us the opportunity to destroy the entire world, if we so choose.”
Ward said, “Are you suggesting that, theologically, the atomic bomb is part of God’s gift of free will?”
“I could try that out as a sermon topic,” Father Tyler agreed.
Chapter 24
Behind the Blueberry Curtain
Many of Ward and Mary’s acquaintances summered at lake cabins in Michigan. For the working husbands, it was much more convenient than Maine. After a short week at the office, they drove a few hours north. Ward would have preferred that arrangement. His Maine cottage limited his contact with peers who were just as likely to be doing deals on Lake Michigan as on Meridian Street.
Entrenched in his un-air-conditioned office, Ward worked erratic seven-day weeks in the summer. He did not do well when his wife was away for long periods. His concentration and his shaving suffered. His letters to Mary diminished from daily to weekly. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to write them. He just couldn’t think of anything to say. He resorted to enclosing articles clipped from the newspaper. One scorching day was the same as the next. He demanded that his mother, too old now to travel, promise not to tell Mary about his ‘idiot box’ viewing. Their TV dinner conversations centered on Lawrence Welk. Alone in bed, he slept poorly.
He sympathized with Vincent and Kayla. Ward occasionally encountered them slumped on the kitchen steps when he got home from work. Once, he found Kayla in possession of a can of lighter fluid. She squirted the fluid on a crack in the driveway, tossed down a match, and then, oddly, seemed to be trying to help a line of ants escape the flames.
“Vincent, Kayla, what are you doing here?”
“We’re waiting for Robbie and Duncan.”
“They’re away. They won’t be back for a month.”
“We know,” Vincent shrugged, “that’s what we said. We’re waiting for them.”
When it got dark and Vincent and Kayla were still out there, Ward phoned Rusalka. She strolled over to fetch her hangdog children. One look at Ward revealed his similar condition. She handed him a pill from her purse.
“Dexedrine. Little help between neighbors,” Rusalka said. She deftly dropped a few more pills into his palm. “Elbert claims, same as vitamins.”
The Dexedrine changed Ward’s letter writing. He drew sketches in the margins and made business sound better than it was and penned a few dirty limericks and did his best to hide his frayed nerves with amusing descriptions of Constance’s suitors—doddering chaps who showed up after church and spilled sherry on their ties and made comments such as, “Thirty years of marriage is fine, but forty is a bit much.” To the boys, he wrote passages about the stars. He described his old astronomy teacher at the Rokeby School, a German refugee who had a comet named after him. Ward mail-ordered a telescope and assigned the boys their own personal star to track in the night sky. He waxed eloquent about the sleeping porch: “I savor the insect sounds and the fireflies and waking to the crisp morning air.” He wrote about bowling with Stu and Randy, and inventing a new drink called a “Panty-ripper.”
Mary noticed the change in Ward’s letters and wondered at its cause. Was he starting to enjoy their time apart? Mary wanted to believe that the annual pilgrimage to Great Tusk Island, difficult as it was logistically, at least provided grist for their nighttime pillow-talk tale.
Mary’s pillow-talk grist from that summer—never shared directly with Ward—was the vaporous appearance of He Who Remains Classified on a fishing boat off Zippy Cove. A sportsman’s vessel. Rigged for swordfish. The appearance of a fancy boat trolling offshore for two days caught her attention. She knew the identifying markings of all the local trawlers. The repeated flash of binoculars seemed odd too. As did the fact that, according to Marsden, nobody ever caught swordfish out there.
Mary set up her telescope tripod on the porch. She bent and squinted at a blurry close-up of a figure on the aft deck, a bobbing, male profile with a bare, familiar torso. The figure raised his binoculars in her direction.
Mary retreated inside and pulled down a moth-eaten pair of semaphore flags from the nautical decorations on the parlor wall. She flipped through a dusty guide book. An hour later, she ventured back onto the porch. Summoning her old crossing-guard clarity of arm movement, she emphatically waved the signal flags at the distant, glinting lenses. “G-O A-W-A-Y” screamed the flags.
Mary and the children drove to Maine in the middle of June on the skeletal interstate highway system. Ward flew out for a week at July Fourth. He helped the boys design and construct the Wangert float for the holiday parade. They scripted and shot Super-8 movies. Ward flew in again for the last week of August. He participated in rock-skipping contests and they ate shedders from Johnny Salter’s boat and everyone drove home together at Labor Day.
“We’ve landed behind the Blueberry Curtain!” Mary wrote to Rusalka in her first letter every summer, on stationary printed with the heading ‘From Our Island Cottage.’
The decision to send Robbie and Duncan to church camp in the summer of 1965 was hard, because Great Tusk Island exerted a steadying influence on them. As they grew up, the Wangert kids assimilated more easily into the community than other summer visitors. The islanders remembered Ward and Mary’s winter stay in 1951 and Mary’s involvement with the school. Johnny Salter, now a young fisherman, and his siblings, Del and Geneva, took the Wangert boys under their wing.
“Sure, I go through a bottle of mercurochrome every summer,” Mary wrote to Rusalka, “but when I shoo the kids out the door in the morning, I have faith the scruffians come back in one piece. This can be a dangerous place for fishermen. Our
friend, Clyde, recently lost an arm in a winch, but for children, the forests and the rocky shore are mysteriously safe.”
Great Tusk kids, by temperament and training, were much less prone to foolish risk-taking than their mainland counterparts. Robbie and Duncan’s show-off behaviors, such as racing bikes headlong down the fire road at Bowditch Mountain, only earned them scorn. Likewise competitiveness won zero points on Great Tusk. The nightly town softball game was conducted according to ‘island rules,’ which meant that no one under age eight, or over eighty, could ever be called out.
Another unusual characteristic of the island children was their willingness to do chores, such as stacking firewood, weeding gardens, shucking clams, and hanging out laundry. Robbie and Duncan received some reeducation in the chore department. They learned that anyone who didn’t know how to participate in the above activities was considered “slow.”
Another factor that contributed to the eventual taming of Robbie and Duncan was the experience of their first crush. They both fell for Geneva Salter, age twelve, who didn’t tolerate pipsqueak shenanigans. Geneva was twelve going on twenty. In Geneva, the chronic Salter shyness manifested more as a placid serenity. She played the guitar. She raised rabbits. Tall, with stiff yellow pigtails, she walked barefoot in the woods. A student of island history, she knew where the Penobscots had made their summer encampments, and thus where to find arrowheads. She introduced Robbie and Duncan to the local pirate lore and poetic nature wisdom, such as “leaves of three, let it be.”
Robbie and Duncan’s feelings for Geneva brought out differing sides in the boys. Robbie discovered a musical interest that his brother didn’t share. Duncan developed a fixation for the forest. He wanted a compass for his birthday. Robbie wanted a Gibson.