by Thomas Tryon
“Come on, Wackeem, for cripes’ sake, throw the ball!”
This command, from Dump Dillworth, had finally roused him to dazed action. He had picked up the ball and awkwardly launched it toward the plate, but the throw had gone wild, and as Junior rounded third and sprinted for home, the entire field, players and spectators a-like, had erupted in scornful hoots and catcalls (“Woo-woo!” “Chicken wing!” “Hey, Wackoff, where’d you learn to throw, at dancing school?”).
Hap had made no secret of his scorn and mandated this morning’s private practice session, and later Leo had overheard Phil muttering that it looked like the new boy might turn out to be every bit as twerpy as Stanley Wagner. Wally agreed: Leo was twerpy. Tiger, however, had gone to bat for him: just because every Jeremian excelled at some sport or other, even if it was only Ping-Pong, didn’t mean Leo had to. He’d rack up plenty of happy points for Jeremiah other ways, they’d see.
Leo had been grateful - but worried, too. Because the truth was that every true-blue Jeremian made a good showing at athletics; his cabin-mates were not an assortment of wimpy oddballs - not, as Reece pointed out to Leo at that night’s bull session, the kind of boy who had a pillow called Albert and wore a hat that looked like something out of the funny papers. There followed a lecture on the nature of teamwork and about winning. The Jeremians, Reece reminded them, were winners because they operated as a team (led by a leader like himself), and if you played the game properly you came out a winner, too, while, if you didn’t . . . well, look at Stanley Wagner.
“Yeah, look at him,” said Phil, scowling. Then, tossing his cap by its bill, he led the Jeremians out to Old Faithful to brush their teeth.
“So how do you like it so far, kiddo?” he asked, fetching up beside Leo at the fountain.
Leo replied that he liked it fine so far.
“Well, don’t screw up,” said Phil. “We don’t want any more spuds in Jeremiah.”
“Aw, can it,” the Bomber growled. “He’s going to get us plenty points. And wait till he plays his fiddle at Major Bowes.”
Fifteen minutes later, when taps sounded, Phil’s remark still rankled, but as Leo lay on his bunk, staring up at the molded impression of Tiger’s backside pressed into the canvas overhead, he felt reassured. Stanley Wagner had been a spud, no doubt about that, and Jeremiah had paid the price. As cabin monitor, and second-in-command to Reece, Phil felt responsible, that was all.
Unfortunately, however, that night had been a repetition of the first, with another bad dream that had again disturbed the cabin and left Leo wrung out with imagined horror, as well as the butt of more jokes, especially from Phil, who now let it be known that in his view, the new boy was fast proving that he had inherited not only the bunk of Stanley Wagner but his shoes as well.
Deeply shamed, Leo made feeble apologies, but how could he explain? Whom could he confide in, tell about the dreams that haunted his sleep and woke him up screaming? It was the same old story all over again, only in a new setting.
At the Institute, Superintendent Poe had repeatedly cautioned him: “These dreams of yours are affecting your daily work, my boy. We must do something about them. It doesn’t do to be made prey to foolish fancies. I shall arrange for you to talk to our Doctor Percival, he’ll get you over this childish business quick enough ...”
So Leo had seen Dr Percival, who asked him to talk about his dreams.
Leo tried: dark, fearful, frightening, something large and hideous waiting in the dark to seize and devour him.
“What sort of thing?” pursued the doctor. He might as well have asked, Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Leo tried to describe it but failed; it was nameless, springing from who knew what hidden corner of his mind. He tried to picture it; couldn’t do that either, just . . . big and dark and terrifying.
“You must just make up your mind to stop dreaming,” Dr Percival had concluded. “Or simply try to dream nice, pleasant dreams, hm? It’s as easy to dream happy dreams as unhappy ones. Just make up your mind.” He wagged his head sadly. “Until you do, I am afraid you will never grow up. You will always be a boy, with a boy’s thoughts and a boy’s fears. Therefore you must govern your thoughts, discipline yourself, put on blinders and reins.”
But the doctor had no answer when Leo asked him how he was to accomplish this, when every day he could hear the laughter of the boys echoing along those green grim corridors, and the mocking jingle they loved to sing:
Oh my oh me oh, a crazy boy is Leo Oh me oh my oh, his nightmares make him cry-o . ..
He would have given anything to be able to get away from that chant, to find someplace where no one knew anything about him, someplace where he could forget. And, miraculously, now he had his chance: Moonbow Lake was waiting.
“Hey, Nutbread, those two old farts want you in administration office pronto.” This from Measles, the head proctor and Pitt tattler, who poked his ugly puss in at the dormitory door, his loud voice echoing in the long, Spartanly furnished room.
Leo had been pasted with the name Nutbread for so long that he answered to it readily enough, and he had leaped from his cot to make tracks to the administration office, where he found thin, prim, dry-as-dust Supervisor Poe seated behind his desk; with him, thinner, primmer, dustier Miss Meekum. Mr Poe eyed him across his glasses rims and inquired starchily how Leo thought he might enjoy spending a few weeks in the country, then without waiting for a reply began explaining how, through the merciful intercession of the Society of the Friends of Joshua, who maintained an affiliation with the Pitt Institute for Boys, a place had been made available at a summer camp on Moonbow Lake.
The matter was settled inside fifteen minutes. Miss Meekum helped him to assemble his paltry possessions and put them into the cardboard suitcase he’d been loaned, with its broken corners and its fake-alligator-paper hide. In addition, two army blankets, stiff with age, had been made up into a bundle along with Albert, without whom he hadn’t slept a night since Butch got killed.
“Regrettably, there is no time to sew nametapes in your things,” she said. “You must take care and not lose them, clothes are hard to replace these days.” And, as though to apologize for the lack of printed identification in his underwear, she pressed on him a fresh cake of Lifebuoy soap, and a celluloid soap “keeper.” “If you are frugal with your soap it should last all summer. It’s really a wonderful opportunity,” she went on, drawing her hanky through her ringless fingers. “Just imagine - a lovely lake and green trees and meadows and ...” She paused in her recitation of the charms to be found in the Connecticut wildwood, her wrinkled face sobering while behind her pinched-on steel glasses her eyes, like the eyes of a doe, swam liquidly at the thought of his journeying all of fifty miles away for eight weeks of camping. “You’ll be able to get a fresh start, Leo, in a new place, where you can look forward, not back. And, please, no talk about ...” She trailed off, her lids fluttering. He regarded her solemnly, waiting for her to finish her sentence. "... about the bridge and all of that. You must erase life’s blackboard and put the past behind you. Will you do that?”
“Yes,” he had said, thinking how silly she was, Elsie Meekum. Foolish words just seemed to come bubbling out of her like Nehi rootbeer when you shook up the bottle.
But there was a bridge, wasn’t there? And carbonated though she might be at times, Miss Meekum was also often wise and prudent. He must remember.
“And be truthful at all times,” she went on. “You know your penchant for - exaggeration.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And don’t forget to practice your music, practice every day. You’ll be rewarded and the boys will like you for it. Play that pretty Paganini piece you’ve worked so hard on. Promise, now.”
Yes, he promised again. He was always promising her. Following these cautionary words there was further bounty as she presented him with, first, a fake tortoiseshell toothbrush holder, then a blue-covered spiral notebook with lined pages, a fountain pen, and a bottle of Parker blue-black Q
uink.
“Take these, my dear, and keep a record of the happy time that lies ahead of you,” she said. “A few jottings every day, and long afterward, when you are older, you will be glad to have such a memento.” She thrust out her face to kiss him.
He had shivered at the touch of her withered lips, unused as he was to such intimate contact, and his eye caught the flecks of her pink face powder as they sifted from her cheeks. Poor, shriveled, woebegone Miss Meekum - yet he honored her gende claim on him, for who else was there for him to love?
Besides, he owed her; he knew that. Owed her plenty. Foolish, flat-chested spinster though she was, she’d proved a mother to him when he’d had no other, wrhen his own mother was gone . . . gone across the L Street Bridge.
Suddenly he was sobbing, his body racked by painful spasms. Stop, he told himself, don’t be such a jerk. She’s dead and gone - dead and gone, and where’s the help for that? Who had the magic to bring her back? He lifted his tearstained face and pulled away bits of straw and grass. This wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was a crybaby.
Once more, high in the sycamore tree, the mockingbird offered its lighthearted song, its practiced notes interrupting his thoughts. He stiffened his spine, staring at the violin in his hand. If he wasn’t going to practice baseball he had better practice some more music - not just because he’d promised Miss Meekum he would but because he had been entered as a solo performer in the Major Bowes Amateur Night contest. He was a cinch to take a prize, Tiger had declared, and if he did he’d win extra points for Jeremiah. Extra points meant Reece would be pleased, and if Reece was pleased, everybody would be pleased.
Taking up his violin again, he fiddled an impromptu accompaniment to the mockingbird’s song, and when the singing stopped, Leo went on, segueing into an old favorite: “Poor Butterfly.” Of all the tunes from his earlier years, the ones his mother used to sing to him, this was the song he knew best. It had been her favorite; she’d heard it in a Broadway musical show she’s seen back during the World War. Such a wistful song, too; she always said it made her want to cry. Now, though she was gone, he remembered the song and played it often.
Poor Butterfly!
’Neath the blossoms waiting the words went,
Poor Butterfly!
For she loved him so.
Leo had loved that song from the first moment. He loved watching his mother as she played it, her pale lids fluttering, a little blue vein beating in her temple, her eyes shining - until there would come the brutal knocking from downstairs in the butcher shop; he would be pounding the broom handle on the ceiling, telling Emily to shut up, the noise was driving him crazy.
He rolled over and fingered his wallet out of his back pocket, then wiped his thumb and finger on the roll of his shorts and carefully extracted her photograph from one of the glassine windows. He held it with the utmost delicacy, for one corner was badly dog-eared, and the paper was in danger of cracking. The photo had been taken behind the pleated curtain of the little automatic picture booth by the entrance to Kresge’s 5 & 10 — four shots for a quarter, ten cents more for “artistic hand tinting.” “Smile, Mom,” he had told her, but she wouldn’t, she didn’t like showing her uneven teeth. What the camera had therefore captured was this other, gentler, and more tender smile, filled with caring and a pensive yearning - a trifle fearful too, the least tinge of anxiety in the eyes, those large, deep-set eyes.
He could see her still, her face framed in that high curved window that looked down on Gallop Street, watching for him as he came up the street from school, when she would smile and wave behind the glass. She would hurry down the hall stairs, finger to her lips to tell him that he shouldn’t make noise and tip off Rudy, who, if he knew Leo was home, would make him fetch the broom and sweep the butcher shop. “Come upstairs,” she would whisper, and there she’d have a treat waiting, hot chocolate and cinnamon toast on cold days, lemonade and cookies on warm ones.
On rainy days they would sneak up into the attic together, where they would go through boxes and old trunks, or she would read to him, fanciful stories, from Palfrey’s Golden Treasury or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, while he sat by her side and poured over the colored plates tipped in among the pages and protected by opaque sheets of paper, illustrations of Aladdin with his magic lamp; of Ali Baba in the cave of the Forty Thieves; of Robert the Bruce, whose kingdom hung on the gossamer thread of a single spider; of Daedalus and Icarus, and Theseus killing the Minotaur.
She was always thinking of things to amuse him, like taking him to the double bill at the matinee (despite Rudy’s objections), to The Big Trail and Min and Bill, maybe the latest Gold Diggers, or to Cimarron. Sometimes they’d visit the merry-go-round in the park, where a couple of times they’d accidentally happened across a friend of Emily’s, Mr Burroughs, a nice gentleman who bought Leo a balloon and a box of saltwater taffy and suggested that Leo not mention their fun to Rudy. But Leo didn’t need any prompting, because he never told Rudy anything. He hated Rudy. Always, after school, while picking up scraps of fat from the floor, he would watch him, surly and frowning under his trademark straw hat, his strong, hairy hands wielding the sharp-edged cleaver, a cigar butt plugging the corner of his lips like a cork in a jug. The sight of him in his long butcher’s apron, blotched with the blood of dead animals, made Leo sick at his stomach.
Rudy didn’t like Leo either; didn’t want him around, and he resented the time Emily spent with him, accusing her of making a sissy out of the boy. One night, when he went up to bed and failed to find his wife waiting for him, he went to look for her. Hearing voices from Leo’s room, he came rushing in and, yanking her out of the chair, flung her against the wall in a jealous rage, shouting that the boy was a mollycoddle and would grow up worthless. Leaving Emily, he rushed at Leo and dragged him to the window, where he threw up the sash, and turning Leo upside down, dangled him over the windowsill by his heels.
Below Leo, the world was spinning around; he was sure his end had come. The ground seemed to swirl up to meet him, making him sick, and Emily was struggling with Rudy, trying to drag Leo inside. Finally Rudy let go, and Leo felt himself falling! Falling down and down - a moment later he was safe in Emily’s arms. She soothed him and said it would be all right, while Rudy went around kicking the furniture. But when Leo was put to bed again and left alone, the panic rose in him and he lay there sweating, afraid to shut his eyes, for as soon as he did he saw himself looking down from a great height, and then he would start to fall, over and over, endlessly falling, falling . . . falling . . . down into the darkness . . .
That had been the start of his bad dreams, the dreams that sometimes roused him to screaming wakefulness and brought Emily to his side, calling him, while the awakened Rudy ranted and raged.
Rudy wasn’t Leo’s father; his real father had died when Leo was very young, and Emily had remarried. Why Rudy Matuchek? This was the subject of much speculation among the neighbors, why a sweet, attractive young woman would ever marry “a man like that!” Leo had no answer. All he knew was that he had loved Emily more than anything in the whole world, and now she was dead. He blamed Rudy, and why not, since it was all his fault, making her cross the bridge with him when he knew it wasn’t safe, leaving Leo with nothing but a cold bed in an old hops-drying room.
No, that wasn’t true, not quite. For Emily had left him something beyond price: the music, and her violin.
One day, when Emily had gone upstreet and Rudy was taking care of customers, Leo had sneaked into the front room and lifted down the black case from the shelf. He set it on the floor, unsnapped the catches. The instrument lay in its bed of shiny-worn purple plush, and as he took it out his thumb struck the strings and it made an interesting sound. Turning, he saw his mother in the doorway. He was afraid she would be angry at him for touching her violin, but she had come toward him, smiling, with out-stretched arms and tears in her eyes. She wasn’t angry, she was pleased. She told him about hi
s famous ancestor, the composer and concert violinist Joseph Joachim (the name had since received a minor alteration in spelling), who had played for the Emperor of Austria, and she showed him just how to tuck the instrument in the crook of his neck, moving his hand with her own so the bow slid across the strings, pressing his fingers on the fingerboard - there and there. That had been the start of Leo the violinist, and Emily put all her hopes and dreams of life in him: one day, she said, he would be a famous concert artist like Jascha Heifetz or Yehudi Menuhin.
Every afternoon, she gave him a lesson the same way her father had taught her, until he became technically proficient. She was patient and dogged, Leo was clever and persistent. He learned quickly. She called him her “prodigy,” her “little Paganini,” and she took him next door to Mrs Kranze, where he offered up “Poor Butterfly” for the old woman who lived in the back room, whose husband had played the viola with the Boston Symphony. The old woman kissed Leo’s cheek and said, “]a, gute, gute, sehr gute. ”
But when he was old enough to help out in the shop, the lessons stopped. “We need a butcher here,” Rudy barked, “not a music man. No rhapsodies in this house! Hear me?” That was when Leo learned just how determined a person his mother was. Before sending him off to school next morning she told him everything would be all right, and Leo divined that she intended he should continue with his lessons. But not here, not in the house. He must now begin with a professional teacher.
There was only one teacher of the violin in the whole of Saggetts Notch, a Mr Schneidermann, who occupied the quarters over the law offices in the Wooster Block at the end of L Street, on the other side of the river. Three days a week, after school, Leo would get on the trolley car and ride the length of L Street to the corner shop, where he would get off for his lesson. Emily told Rudy that Leo had gone to the YMCA branch for a swim lesson, and to put him further off the scent Leo would leave the empty case on the shelf and sneak the violin out under his jacket. Mr Schneidermann was a kind man and would never give Leo away, while - this was a happy coincidence - the lawyer on the street floor proved to be the same Mr Burroughs who’d bought Leo the saltwater taffy at the park, and he was happy to let Leo sneak up the back way, safe from prying eyes.