As soon as she awoke, refreshed and clear-headed, Claudine remembered those drowsy speculations. She had been right—it was all over—and she was restlessly eager to get out of the hospital. But the funny thing was, she observed in the next few days as she became more aware of others around her, that now Aunt Lily seemed to be suffering from the same symptoms that had afflicted her.
“I hope Aunt Lily didn’t catch that bug from me,” she said to her father when they were alone at home together, with Lily off to the library once again.
“Tootsie, what arc you talking about?” Mr. Crouse demanded. “She’s not sick or feverish. In fact she’s back at work.”
“Yes, but she’s acting far away, like I was when it was first coming on. In fact… so are you.”
And her father refused to look her in the eye. What was it, then? He was stubborn, like all adults, and there was no point in pressing him any further.
But Claudine knew she was right, and her suspicions were confirmed that Friday when she found her aunt furiously cleaning the house, as it had never been cleaned for as long as she could remember. What was more, Aunt Lily had made her a new corduroy jumper and bought her a blouse to go with it. Both had to be worn on Saturday morning, when Aunt Lily herself came out of her room with a brand-new outfit and two bright red spots on her cheekbones that might have been rouge but more likely were just plain excitement.
“What is this, the Fourth of July?” Claudine asked and was immediately sorry, for her aunt looked stricken.
“You know my friend Jo,” Aunt Lily said, all in a rush. “Well, she is going to stop by for a bite of lunch with her boss, Mr. Knowles. He looks forward to meeting you.”
“Me?” The whole thing sounded fishy. But it wasn’t; it was all just as Aunt Lily had said. When it was over with, when Jo and Mr. Knowles had driven off in his little white sports car, Claudine couldn’t even wait to wave goodbye to them before she was off to explain everything to Robin, who had been forbidden access to the house, much less to the cupola, for the entire day.
“He’s a great big stoop-shouldered man with the most beautiful shoes you ever saw,” she explained to Robin when she found him at last, up in the treehouse. “They look like they’re handmade out of that cloth they use to put over loud-speakers—you know, with the little nubs in it.”
“What’s so great about that?”
“He wants to publish my book.”
“What book?”
Claudine had to tell him the whole business of the diaries, which in fact she had almost forgotten about until Mr. Knowles brought up the subject.
“Wait a minute,” Robin said wisely. “Wait a minute. You mean that guy came all the way up here from New York City just to see those old books I gave you? Just because you wrote some stuff in them?”
“He read it already. He wants to call it Claudine’s Book. He says it’s one of the best books he’s read in a long time, and anyway I’m the youngest person he ever heard of to write a whole book.”
“Are you going to get money for it?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that. Anyway my father would keep it for me, like he does my birthday money. Mr. Knowles was more interested in how I wrote the book, and where I wrote it, and all that. He made me take him up to the cupola and show him just how it was.”
Robin was eying her somewhat suspiciously. “Did you tell him all about our huts?”
“Only what I had to. I mean, about your giving me the diaries and things like that. He didn’t care about the huts, he just wanted to make sure I wrote it all myself.”
“Who did he think wrote it? Me?”
Claudine shrugged. “What’s the difference? I told him you were my very best friend, and that was why you gave me the diaries, and he said if I wanted to I could dedicate the book to you, instead of to Daddy or Aunt Lily.”
But Robin had already lost interest, which was all right as far as Claudine was concerned, because in her heart she was even more surprised than he that anyone else, particularly a grownup, should be all that interested in what they had been doing. Robin had a pretty grandiose plan for a dam that would convert the little creek behind the Wales house into a fish hatchery.
They put a good part of the summer into the dam, with very few arguments except when Robin insisted on being insufferably bossy, and Claudine felt no great need to be off by herself, clipping newspapers and writing thoughts down—the way it was last winter, she reflected, when I was younger. They never did exactly finish the hatchery, because school started before they had collected all the stuff for the dam. And then, a couple of months after school had begun, Claudine’s book arrived.
On the front of it was a great big picture of her with a dopey expression and her hair pulled back with a ribbon, and underneath in big letters, Today begins my life story…
“Gee, I look awful,” she said to her aunt.
Lily stared at her, astonished. “Aren’t you excited? Aren’t you proud?”
“I guess.”
“Wait till the other children see the book. And your teachers! Then you won’t be such a cool one.”
It was true: the fuss was really something when the books turned up all over Phoenix. Kids that had ignored her for years wanted her to sit with them in the cafeteria. She was elected vice-president of her home room and made playground monitor. And Miss Bidwell—the old faker!—acted like she and Claudine had always been dear friends, and even asked her to sign her autograph on the title page of the book.
“But you know something?” she said to Robin as they pushed through the piles of heaped-up leaves on Genesee Street on their way home. “I think the whole thing is a pain in the neck.”
“This is only the beginning, folks!” Robin shouted at her. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
“I’d rather be left alone.”
“Then you shouldn’t have written all that. Who forced you to do it? Nobody twisted your arm. When you make your bed you have to lie in it.”
“That’s a cliché. You don’t even know what a cliché is.”
But it did make her uneasy in the days that followed, being stopped at her father’s service station or in front of Dohrmeyer’s Meat Market by total strangers who wanted her to pose with them for pictures, or sign things, or tell them what she would be when she grew up: was it really all her fault for writing in Robin’s diaries? Claudine became more irritable as the demands on her got worse, and finally she took it out on Robin, mainly because instead of sympathizing he kept giving her more clichés.
“If it hadn’t been for you and your Uncle Burgie and all those old diaries, I never would have gotten into all this trouble.”
Robin was very hurt. He said she was ungrateful and bratty, and he wasn’t going to play with her any more. In fact he wasn’t even going to talk to her. She could hang out with her new fair-weather friends instead.
In the middle of all this a group of strangers checked in the Al-Rae Motel up the street from Mr. Crouse’s Mobil station and fanned out from there like a bunch of G-Men after a kidnaper—as if everyone in Phoenix didn’t know what they were up to even before they had unpacked their bags. There were four of them, three men and a young woman researcher. They were all employed by a big picture magazine—the bearded Hungarian, weighted down with leather tote bags, was a photographer, the cynical young man with pockmarks was a writer, and the man who spoke in a whisper (as though, Claudine thought, he was ashamed of his own voice) was a consulting child psychologist.
The girl researcher, who was pretty, with a big wide mouth and an Irish grin, turned up everyplace you could think of, the photographer trotting along after, muttering in Hungarian and measuring the air with his light meter. They walked right into the school as if they owned it—you could see them through the seventh-grade window—and took millions of pictures. Then they went off in their rented Ford to the F. Crouse Mobil station, and the next day, which was Saturday, they were prowling around Robin’s huts, even trying to climb into his
treehouse. Claudine was afraid that Robin would think she had tipped them off (actually, they must have studied up on the huts in her book) and would get twice as sore. But he was keeping to his promise not to talk to her.
The other two, the pock-marked writer always grinning skeptically, as though he didn’t even believe that the world was round, and the whispering psychologist, were much less in evidence. For a while Claudine didn’t even know where they were, and it wasn’t until they came to her house and sat down in the parlor with Aunt Lily that she got wind of what they were up to.
Aunt Lily thought Claudine had gone to the movies with Robin to see a Charlton Heston movie about God, so it was easy to sneak in through the kitchen pantry and listen. The child psychologist was doing most of the talking, in his tiny baby voice, and Aunt Lily, all dolled up with coral earrings and toilet water and her silk scarf, was sitting on the edge of her chair ready to fall off, listening so hard her earrings were practically standing on end.
“Surely it is obvious to a woman of your intelligence, Miss Crouse,” the child psychologist was whispering, “that you have been responsible for the upbringing of one of the most remarkable children of modern times. That is, assuming that Claudine did all of the writing of the book herself.”
“Why did you add that?”
From her vantage post Claudine could not see the psychologist, but she was in line with Aunt Lily’s bust, rising and falling very fast, and with the pock-marked writer, grinning like an absolute fiend.
“Because in all of my years of experience, both in the clinic and in the field, I have never encountered such a combination of insight and steadfastness in one so young.”
“You have to remember, Dr. Fibbage (that was what the name sounded like to Claudine), she has been very ingrown. She’s had only one real friend, and no one but me to turn to for books and ideas.”
The writer broke in, “Miss Crouse, I must say that it is your ideas and your sensitivity that I find in Claudine’s Book.”
Claudine was fascinated by the expression that stole over her aunt’s face. It was exactly like that of Aunt Lily’s fat friend Marie Klemfuss when someone tried to tempt her off her crash diet with a slice of angel-food cake—a mixture of fear, greed and calculation.
“Well,” her aunt said slowly, “if Mr. Knowles believed me when he first decided to publish it, I don’t see why I should have to explain any further.”
“Mr. Knowles couldn’t have known you as we do.”
Aunt Lily turned red, and the writer, Mr. Craft, added hastily, “I’m not suggesting that you would ever deceive anyone. But in addition to being an intellectual, you are a very modest person. Obviously you would be reluctant to confirm the extent of your influence on little Claudine.”
Little Claudine! All of a sudden she felt like throwing up. She tiptoed backward, pulled open the screen door soundlessly, and bolted off down the street. When she got to the Waleses she went right on into the kitchen without knocking and almost bumped into Robin, who was running his thumb around the inside edge of a jar of Skippy peanut butter.
“Don’t tell me you’re not going to speak to me,” Claudine said breathlessly, taking advantage of the fact that Robin’s mouth was stuck with peanut butter. “If you heard what I just did, you’d want advice too.”
He listened quite impassively to her description of Aunt Lily and the two visitors, and even turned down the volume of his transistor. But when she reached the part where Aunt Lily got the hungry look in her eye, Robin held up his hand.
“Just a sec.” He twisted the dial to a roar. “And now the one you’ve asked for, the Madmen singing the number-one hit of the week, ‘Weeping and Wailing.’ ”
Robin turned off the radio and said, very practically, “It’s all clear to me. Those people are out to make trouble for you. They’ll hound you worse than the Beatles.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“They’re just zeroing in on you now—I heard all about the technique on Long John’s program. First they interview your friends, then your enemies, and then your family. By the time they get to you, they know all about you and you feel like they’ve been reading your mail or listening to you talk in your sleep. Well, that’s the way the ball bounces, Claudie.”
“You and your expressions. They’ll be after you too, watch and see.”
“They were already. Where do you think they came before they got to your house?”
Claudine stared. “What did you tell them?”
“Nothing special.” Robin was very casual. “I told them I got the diaries from Uncle Burgie for decoration for the huts. I told them I never knew what you did with them. I told them you had a good imagination, almost as good as mine.”
“Thanks.”
“They asked me about your aunt. I said she was the smartest lady in Phoenix, smarter than all our teachers put together, starting with Miss Bidwell.”
“That wouldn’t take much.” Claudine thought for a moment. “Got any crackers?”
“Just Ritz.”
“I like them.” She dug deep into the box he offered her. “I can tell you’ve got an idea.”
Robin nodded. “As long as everybody thinks you did the book all by yourself, they’ll be after you. People like that Mr. Fibbage—”
“Dr. Fibbage.”
“What’s the diff? He’ll hang around studying you like you were in a bottle. And they’ll keep on pointing at you wherever you go. When you get to high school all the teachers will say, Well, Miss Crouse, I should think anyone who could write a whole book could do better than eighty-two on a simple test. And if you want to go to college—”
Claudine shuddered. “I could change my name, though.”
“They’re on to you. You think Jackie Kennedy could change her name?”
Claudine listened intently. Robin had a crazy imagination, but he was very smart when it came to practical matters. Smarter, in fact, than her own father, the only other person in the world with whom she might have consulted about this thing. Her father would be of no help at all. He meant well, when he was around, but he had never been able to bring himself to say anything to her about the book (as if it was dirty), so this was a decision she would have to make by herself. Ever since the business about the book had come out, Mr. Crouse had taken to looking at his daughter peculiarly; and now that it had gotten out of hand, he seemed positively frightened of her, as though he had fathered a witch.
Claudine walked home slowly. By the time she got there, the pockmarked writer and Dr. Fibbage were standing on the porch saying goodbye to Aunt Lily, who was clenching her hands tightly together, as if she held something between them, like a little bird, that she was afraid would fly away.
“Well, well, well,” whispered Dr. Fibbage, “and here is Claudine. Just the very person I’d like to see.”
“Would you like to see us, Claudine?” asked Mr. Craft, grinning at her as if he were about to eat her. The way he put it, she would be chicken if she said no. “I’ll buy you a soda downtown if it’s all right with your aunt.”
“If Claudine would like to go …” Aunt Lily said faintly.
“Sure I would.” Before anyone could say another word, she was leading the way to their shiny rented car. “I’ll be back soon, Aunt Lily.”
“We won’t keep her long.”
“A very unusual woman, your aunt,” the psychologist whispered to her from the back seat, and peered at her intently.
“That’s for sure,” Claudine said.
“You’re not so very usual yourself,” Mr. Craft remarked as he headed the car down to Main Street. “Muscling in on my racket like that. I got enough trouble with the competition without having to fend off eleven-year-old kids.”
“I’m almost twelve.”
“Big deal.”
“Say, Mr. Craft,” she asked, “do you like writing?”
“It beats working, I’ll tell you that. But then I’m not famous. Just well known. How about you?”
“Oh, I got bored with it by the time I finished up the diaries. I don’t think I’ll do any more.”
“What makes you say that?” the doctor demanded eagerly.
“I just told you. It’s boring. Besides, I got sick of my aunt nagging at me to fill up all those diaries.”
“You what?” All of a sudden Dr. Fibbage was panting like a dog in the summer sun. “You mean your aunt knew about the book while you were writing it?”
“Hey,” Claudine said to Mr. Craft, “stop here, at O’Molony’s Pharmacy. They’ve got the best ice cream, with the little chunks in it, not the Softi-Freeze stuff.”
“Wait a minute,” Dr. Fibbage whispered at the top of his lungs as they stood in front of the drugstore. “You haven’t answered my question yet.”
“Can I have my sundae? Then we can talk some more.”
In the booth, after she had ordered a Phoenix Monster Sundae, Claudine said to Dr. Fibbage, “Why did you get so shook up when I told you my aunt knew about the book?”
“Because it was supposed to have been as much of a surprise to her as it was to the rest of us, later on.”
“Oh, she’s just modest. You said yourself she’s very unusual. The fact is, she thought up the whole thing, practically. Mr. Craft, he careful, you’re spilling coffee on your tie.”
“My hands are shaky. That’s what too much writing does,” the writer said to her. “I thought I heard you say the book was your aunt’s and not yours. Isn’t that silly of me;”
“Well, if you’ll promise not to tell anybody… I mean, I promised my aunt I wouldn’t tell anybody. But I don’t think it’s fair for me to keep getting all the credit and have people buying me sundaes and taking my picture and everything, when actually most of the good stuff in the book is Aunt Lily’s. She loves to make believe. It was her idea right from the start, except she was afraid people would make fun of her, so she decided to put everything in my name.”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 39