Much more important than his ordering her around when no one else even tried to, or constantly banging things in time to the noise that came from his beltline, was his ingenuity in figuring out new places to build huts. Neither could remember when they had started, for it seemed to them that they had been building huts forever. It was Robin’s scheme to make a treehouse in the fork of the old hickory above the roof of the Crouses’ barn and to make a lookout lodge out of Claudine’s cupola where nobody ever went, not even Aunt Lily to store winter stuff. And to build a hut in the back of the abandoned diner off Main Street, using some of the things that Robin’s Uncle Burgie, who sold secondhand stoves, sinks, iceboxes, sump pumps and hockey skates, couldn’t get rid of, after they’d been standing outdoors for a season or two.
Like many married couples, Claudine and Robin derived separate benefits from their joint household arrangements. What was unusual was that Robin’s pleasures were those you would commonly associate with a wife (although there was nothing sissyish about him), while Claudine’s were of the kind ordinarily thought of as a husband’s (although again she was no tomboy but an almost fragile girl, with those large, wondering, rather bulbous blue eyes). That is, what Robin enjoyed was the planning involved in making each place livable: finding scraps of carpeting, making pictures to hang on the walls, gluing up chairs out of abandoned camp stools, even rigging up hammocks for their sleeping bags, and then decorating with the boat paints and lacquers he grubbed from his father’s garage.
But Claudine, although she cooperated willingly enough, was at bottom attached to the huts as sanctuaries. Just as a man will come home from a hard day in the world of affairs in search not of distractions but of a quiet zone for reflection and refreshment, so Claudine looked forward to her hours alone, when she had no obligations at home and Robin was busy feeding his hamsters or taking his accordion lessons.
It was from Robin’s Uncle Burgie that Claudine got the big stack of old business diaries. They had some whitish mold on the binding part, and they dated back to 1926, but as Claudine pointed out to Robin, the inside pages were absolutely clean even if the days of the week didn’t correspond, and lots of them were personalized with initials and enhanced with fascinating facts, like: Bleriot Crossed the Channel This Day, or Hebrew Feast of Pentecost Begins This Day. Robin wasn’t interested in these facts, however, or even in doing much with the diaries.
“Don’t you want to find out who Bleriot was? Or what the Hebrew Pentecost is? If you came to Feb twenty-two and it said G. Washington Born This Day and you were a foreigner, wouldn’t it arouse your curiosity?”
“Everybody knows Washington. Even foreigners. Besides, I’m not a foreigner. The reason I got the diaries, they’ll look good on the shelf.”
“What shelf?”
“I know where to get the shelving. If you help me cover it, I’ll put it up for you.”
In return for her cooperating, Robin turned the diaries over to her. Standing there in rows, they posed a challenge beyond looking up Charles G. Dawes and Gertrude Ederle: all those blank pages cried out to be filled, while she was alone, quiet and sheltered, in one of the huts through which they had scattered the shelving and the diaries like so many branch libraries.
At first Claudine simply copied into them things that she liked. Sometimes it would be a special story out of the newspaper, like the one about the eleven-year-old girl who got up every morning at five o’clock to practice figure skating for two and a half hours before school so she could try out for the Olympics. Then, increasingly, it would be a poem or a stanza from a poem in one of the books that Aunt Lily was always bringing back from the library: live ones like Richard Eberhart and Horace Gregory, dead ones like Mallarmé (because his name sounded like marmalade) and Keats (because his mask was cool and his poems were not). She liked to copy down parts she didn’t understand, because often they sounded the best. Sometimes she would look up the words in the dictionary; so she got to know not only Bleriot and Dawes but “sacrosanct” and “hyperbolic.”
It took a good three or four months, and a couple of diaries all filled, before Claudine got up the nerve to put her own stuff in them. She started with what she called Wondering. “I wonder,” she wrote, “why that girl Nanette got up every morning at five o’clock to go ice skating. Did she set the alarm herself? Did she make her own breakfast? Did she want to show her father she could be the greatest skater in the world? Why didn’t the newspaper article tell all the things you would want to know?” Or: “I wonder what made Horace Gregory write that poem about the girl sitting at the piano. Was it just because he saw her once, in his own house? Maybe he made it all up. If I knew where to write to him, would he tell me, or would he think I was crazy?”
When she saw that Robin was really not interested in using the diaries, or even in looking at them, Claudine began to make up things out of her head for them.
“Sayings All My Own” was what she called them at first, and they fitted nicely into the one-day space of one diary, if she didn’t write too small. If she was feeling businesslike, she would note that “The weather this day continues brillig and fine for Father’s business. It makes people restless, so they get out on the road.” Or, if she was moody and somewhat ingrown from having been left alone by her father, Aunt Lily and Robin Wales, she would allow herself to become abstract and general: “Grownups believe that grownup is a babyish word. They prefer to call themselves adults. They don’t think of children at all. They worry about them and they yell at them, but they don’t think of them. It’s more like putting them out of their minds. PS: Where does the expression come from, putting somebody out of his misery? Ask Robin.”
But then when Robin asked her one day, “Say, Claudie, are you using those diaries?” she was almost ashamed to reply, “Yes, I put sayings into them.”
Robin didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about that, though. Claudine became all the more eager to fill the diaries, for now that they had become hers alone, she felt a funny responsibility to fill those hundreds of empty pages with her own words. Copying or pasting would be cheating.
She decided to make up a story with all kinds of things in it, descriptions of herself and her daily life, Robin and his radio, their mutual enemies, so that when she got to the end the diaries would have everything in them, like a good long novel.
“Today begins my life story,” she wrote on New Year’s Day. “My father was a very brave soldier, wounded during the Battle of the Bulge. Now he is the prop, of a very big service station, the biggest Mobilgas station within a radius of 30 mi. He is 53, the oldest father I know of. My mother was a beautiful French girl named Adrienne who came to live in Phoenix with my father but could not have any children until I was born after 9 yrs of married life. She named me Claudine after her dead sister and then died herself before leaving the hospital. It was a tragedy of life for my father. I never knew her but Aunt Lily has lived with us ever since and is like a mother to me. Everyone says so. She is 48. Cont. tomorrow.”
Next day, alone up in the cupola, Claudine curled her feet beneath her and began to write. “What do I look like? I am four foot nine inches tall and weigh 87 lbs. Aunt Lily says that if I hold up my chin and straighten my shoulders some day I will be a distinguished looking woman. But right now I am homely, and I bet anything I am always going to be homely.”
She paused to reach for a hand mirror that Robin had gotten from his Uncle Burgie. It had a fancy curved plastic handle, but the back had fallen off and a piece of the silver foil had peeled loose, so that when you looked at yourself in it there was a little hole smack in the middle of your forehead. You could squint through the hole clear to the tree outside the window, so that instead of seeing the skin on your forehead there would be a chickadee sitting freezing on the bare branch. “It goes to show,” she wrote, “that once you can see not only the outside but the inside of your head, what you will find is a bird sitting on a branch where your brains are supposed to be.” And while she was at
it, she made up a poem about the mirror with the hole in it that showed you the world as well as your face.
Not long after this, Claudine brought a newspaper clipping up to the cupola and stuck it in the diary with LePage’s paste. It read: MODERN KIDS KNOW TOO MUCH, STATE PROF CLAIMS. Underneath the headline she wrote, “Why is he so sure. If he went to my school he’d claim just the opposite. Those kids don’t know anything except the Top Ten.” She hesitated, and then crossed out the last four words out of loyalty to Robin. “The real trouble is, they see more and more on TV, but they know less and less. They act wise but they think stupid.”
When there was nothing special in the newspapers, Claudine wrote about her teachers (“Miss Bidwell wears stretch support stockings but she makes fun of other people”), her father (“I wish he didn’t have to work such long hours, but what would he do at home? He never knows what to talk about to me or Aunt Lily”), and how she was changing so much every day it made her dizzy, even though when she looked in the mirror there she was, with the same popeyes and the same hole in the middle of her forehead. The only person she didn’t describe, for reasons that weren’t quite clear to her, was her Aunt Lily, who had to be in there when she wanted to write about food or clothes or books.
In about six months the diaries in the cupola were all written in. Claudine had to bring in the ones from the hut behind the diner and those Robin had wrapped in a poncho for her in the tree-house hut, and before she knew it they were filled up. Spring had come, and Claudine had been keenly aware of it, deserting the diaries for days on end to go fence walking and bike riding with Robin; but always she returned, when she was alone, to the diaries. It was almost as if without them she would have no excuse for being alone—or even for being.
And indeed it was strange that, once she had finished writing in the last of the diaries and brought her story up to date, putting on paper practically everything she had ever wanted to say, Claudine fell ill.
It was a tremendous worry to Mr. Crouse, who couldn’t cope with sickness, especially when the doctor wouldn’t put an exact name to it. Despite everything his sister did, from making broths and compresses to reading to Claudine by the hour, her fever did not abate and at last she had to be taken to the hospital. There her weakened condition and lassitude were labeled as probable infectious mononucleosis, a very popular disease with children, but nobody would commit himself for sure. All they knew was that it seemed likely to be a long, slow business.
For Lily Crouse the house was now unbearably quiet, even though Claudine usually kept to herself when she was home. Just the idea that Claudine was up there in the cupola, doing Lord knew what with the Wales boy or even all by herself, had been comforting; but to come home from the library to that huge, ugly house and find it absolutely empty was almost more than Lily could stand. She would even have welcomed Robin’s noisy presence, his piercing whistle and jangling transistor, but he never came by now—she was more likely to bump into him in the corridors of the hospital, where he came regularly to bring Claudine the gossip about Eddie, Walter, Miss Bidwell and others.
One day, driven by uneasiness and loneliness, although she tried to tell herself that it was simply a desire to track down a lost library book (Gavin Maxwell’s book on otters, actually, which Claudine had loved), Lily climbed the steep steps to the cupola. She had never once gone there during all the time that Claudine and Robin had been using it as a hideaway. Maybe Claudine had actually asked her not to, and she had promised—she couldn’t quite remember. In any case the funny room looked absolutely unfamiliar; the kids had festooned the place with political posters and crepe paper left over from old birthday parties. A tatty, grease-stained straw mat lay on the floor and, against the wall, a lopsided bookcase was propped at one corner with broken ends of brick. In the bookcase were three rows of old diary volumes. Lily pulled one out and began to riffle its pages idly.
Several hours later, Lily crept down the stairs, her legs aching from having squatted for so long in one position. She went directly to her room and sat down at the desk where she kept the household accounts and mailed out statements to Fred’s customers. Now she addressed an envelope to Josephine Schaefer, a classmate who had been working in New York for some years as a secretary in a large and aggressively successful publishing house.
Dear Jo, she wrote, Under separate cover I am mailing you a carton of diaries which I have just found. As you will see, they are numbered in consecutive order with little pieces of adhesive tape. They are the work of Claudie, who has apparently been doing this writing on the sly for quite some time. I don’t exactly know what to make of them—which is why I am taking the liberty of imposing on you. Is there someone in your office whom you could show them to?
Lily gnawed at the corner of her mouth, and then added: The thing is, Claudie has been in the hospital for some time (that’s why I haven’t been able to get down to the city) with an undiagnosed illness from which she is recuperating very slowly. I have a feeling now that it is all mixed up with what she’s been writing, but anyway I don’t want her to know I’ve been reading her private diaries—much less that I shipped them out of the house for anyone else’s eyes. I’m sure you understand. Forgive me for not writing sooner, but as you can imagine things have been difficult here, what with Fred having to have a quick dinner and then scoot off to the hospital. Say hello to Janie—yours ever—Lily
It seemed to her only days later that the phone was ringing, wildly and demandingly, as Lily entered the empty echoing house. She hastened anxiously to the telephone, reaching out for it as she ran.
“Lily, it’s me—Jo. Mr. Knowles says he sat up half the night with Claudine’s diaries, and he wants to talk to you about them. All right?”
“Why, yes,” she said uncertainly, “I suppose so.”
In a moment a man’s voice was saying, “Miss Crouse, I am grateful to you for sending us your niece’s diaries. I would like very much to publish them, exactly as they are, and I think the firm will agree with me. They’re a find. They’re brilliant, they’re unspoiled, there isn’t a false note. Still, I have to ask you something.”
Lily wanted very much to speak, but no words would conic out. She moistened her lips, but it was no good.
Fortunately Mr. Knowles did not seem to expect a formal reply. “Miss Schaefer tells me that you’re a librarian, Miss Crouse, and that Claudine is a small-town child, never been to New York more than once or twice, to Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Museum. Can you assure me that you haven’t had anything to do with her manuscript—I mean in the way of suggesting things to her to include or to leave out, or to change in any way?”
“Mr. Knowles,” Lily said heatedly, “I never even knew those diaries existed until a few days ago. I never changed one word before I mailed them in to Jo. And if you don’t believe me—”
“Your word is more than enough. I would like to take a run up to visit you, though, if I may. And Claudine, of course. When would it be most convenient, Miss Crouse?”
All she could think of to say was “Claudie is a very sick girl.”
“Then we’ll be in touch. Perhaps when she’s well enough to travel, you can both come down here, as guests of the firm?”
That was the way it stood when Lily made her next visit to the hospital—she tried to space her visits between those of Fred and of Robin Wales. Claudine was propped up on two of those long, flat, slablike institutional pillows, her head so small and unsubstantial that it looked like some doll’s carelessly placed in the middle of the bed. The pallor of her lengthy confinement accentuated the glitter of those pale prominent eyes, grown even more bulbous during the illness. Her forehead, too, jutted more sharply than ever (I’ll have to make her bangs, Lily thought; surely that will help), while her body seemed scarcely to exist beneath the hospital blanket. She had been reading A Tale of Two Cities, which lay beside her on the coverlet.
“I like this,” she said, pointing to it but scarcely opening her eyes. “Can you
bring me some more Dickens books?”
“Listen, Claudie,” Lily said determinedly, “I found your diaries.”
Claudine gazed at her blankly. “They weren’t lost.”
“I mean, I read them.” More unnerved by Claudine’s silence than she had been by Mr. Knowles’s talk, Lily added lamely, “It wasn’t that I meant to pry. I was looking for a library book, and I just wondered what was in those old diaries, and then when I did open them…”
Claudine stared at her, expressionless. She did not protest, or indicate that she had any intention of interrupting. Finally Lily added, “Well, I thought they were just fascinating. Claudie, I do hope you’re not angry.”
“Why should I care?” Claudine gazed at her in puzzlement. “Listen, no fooling, can you bring me some more Dickens books? Like Nicholas Nickleby? I hear that’s real good.”
Lily stood helplessly at the bedside. It would be better to have Fred there, she guessed, before trying to explain about the publisher; and the doctor too—maybe she oughtn’t to reveal anything more without consulting him. “Of course,” she said. “I would have brought them with me now, except that I was a little, well, flustered.”
Claudine could not have said why, but this announcement of Lily’s, which only a month or two ago would have made her so angry that she would have been tempted to throw a babyish tantrum, now gave her a comfortable and comforting sense of relief. Is it like a secret that you don’t want to tell but are sick of keeping and are glad when someone else finds it out and relieves you of the responsibility? It was almost better, she thought sleepily, snuggling down into the blankets, than the pills that the nurse gave her to swallow every evening and that made her drift off to sleep as though someone were paddling her off into the darkness on a Venetian gondola. As she heard Aunt Lily’s footsteps fading away down the corridor, Claudine found herself thinking dreamily, It’s over, it’s over, and I’ll get well now.
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 38