by Thomas Tryon
“Thanks,” Leo said.
“Anytime. Listen ...” Tiger’s voice sank to a whisper. “I’m really sorry - about what happened, I mean. It wasn’t fair of Reece to let it go on that way. You shouldn’t have been paddled. Sometimes things just go too far, that’s all. It won’t happen again. Friend-Indeeders don’t act that way.”
He said it with such assurance that Leo got the feeling Tiger was making himself personally responsible for seeing to it.
“ ‘Never say die,’ ” Tiger added, then was gone.
Emerson took a drink and gave Leo a curious look. “What was that about?”
“Nothing, Emmy, something between us Jeremians, that’s all. Have a Black Crow,” he added. “Just don’t get licorice on your sheets.”
Hearing a footstep, he tucked the candy under his pillow and swallowed as Wanda returned to dole out his pill, give the boys another drink of water, and turn out the light. When she’d gone again Emerson corked right ‘off; he was a good sleeper. Ten minutes later, however, Leo was still awake, and, lying there, he turned his head and stared out the window into the velvety summer dark, where gleaming fireflies hung in luminous clusters, and the thick air hummed with the persistent twang of night peepers.
It was such sights and sounds that reminded him of earlier, childhood days, when Emily was still alive, when he and she would sit sipping lemonade on the back porch, watching the nightpeepers at the bottom of the yard. Before . . . well, just “before.”
His last living memory of her was on the evening of the big storm, when he was alone with Rudy in the Gallop Street house, anxiously waiting for her to come home. He would never forget the storm raging outside, the wind that banged the shutters against the clapboards and threatened to loosen the chimney bricks - and the river rising hourly, the Cat River that threatened to carry the whole bridge away. The L Street Bridge that would bring her home on the trolley - the bridge everyone feared would wash out.
It had rained so hard all day that Rudy hadn’t opened the shop - few customers would have come - and the streets ran with water. At the south end of town the river flooded the dike, and the torrent rushed under the L Street Bridge. Schools were closed; Leo stayed in his room, praying that Emily would come home: there had been a telephone call and she had hurried away right after lunch, telling Leo only that she had to go see somebody. As the hours passed he became panicky. Where had she disappeared to in all this awful weather? If she was going upstreet she would have to cross the L Street Bridge; it was the only way. What if - No, he wouldn’t think it, he mustn’t! Suddenly he wanted to go and shout at Rudy, tell him to do something to save her.
Rudy was downstairs in the front room, drinking whisky from a glass, his ear glued to the radio for the latest bulletins, and from time to time Leo would go lean over the stair railing and listen to the announcer giving further details: roads were being washed out; more volunteers were manning what remained of the levees, and a special crew had stayed all afternoon sandbagging the supports of the bridge.
Around four Leo lay down on his bed and dozed; the storm seemed far away; the rattle of the rain in the tin drains lulled him. He was awakened by the sound of another trolley car coming down the street; he tiptoed to the front window. Yes! There she was! He watched with relief as a man helped her down. He recognized John Burroughs. John was coming to their house! Something wonderful was going to happen, Leo felt sure of it. Something that would change his life. He was going to the music school after all! He was sure of it! He ran into the hallway and leaned over the banister, saw them coming into the vestibule. Glimpsing him from below, Emily motioned for him to stay upstairs and wait. The doors to the front room closed behind them.
To calm himself, Leo found his violin and began to play. The song was “Poor Butterfly.” But then had come Rudy’s footsteps on the stairs. The door was flung open. “No rhapsodies in this house,” he shouted, and Leo put the violin away. When he heard the parlor doors slam shut again, he crept to the head of the stairs and listened, he heard their voices, Emily’s, Rudy’s, John’s.
“Didn’t I say? No rhapsodies in this house?!” came the angry roar from below.
When John spoke in a reasonable tone Rudy only shouted more angrily. Then Emily was crying out, and John was saying he would take Emily away, Leo too. “You don’t love her, Matuchek,” John went on. “You use her badly. She is a good woman and doesn’t deserve such treatment.”
“You call her a good woman? When you have her in your bed? What kind of man are you?” Rudy ranted. “To run off with another man’s wife!”
From that moment Leo’s memories remained a blur; he recalled a series of images, yet all occurring at the same time, frozen, as in a tableau, and illuminated by blinding flashes of lighting, while the storm raged outside:
“You can’t take her!” Rudy is shouting. “She’ll never go with you. If you want the kid so much, go ahead - take him.”
“I’m taking him with me—” That is Emily’s voice.
“Shut your mouth, you whore.”
Rudy must have struck her then, for she cries out in pain; Leo can bear it no longer; he starts down the stairs, then stops, cowering against the wall as the doors slide open and Emily comes hurrying through, John behind her, then Rudy. Rudy grabs John by the shoulder and swings him around, and the two men struggle.
Catching sight of Leo on the staircase, Emily reaches out to him. He wants to rush down, to fly to her and throw his arms around her, hide his eyes so he can’t see. But at that moment the combatants break apart. John stands disheveled, breathing heavily, while Rudy pulls away and with another curse runs into the shop. Emily entreats John to leave quickly, before there is more trouble. “He’ll do something terrible, I know it.” But John refuses. “Not without you. Come with me, now. Leo too. We’ll all go.”
Leo starts down the stairs. Quickly - quickly - Mother, let’s go before - before the bridge — we must get across the river . . . All around, the thunder crashes. A livid streak of lightning turns everything silver. He trips on the stair, stumbles, sees, in another flash of lightning, Emily’s white face twisted in an agony of pain and despair - “Mother!” -he reaches out to her - “Mother! MOTHER!”and then he is falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .
He awakes. Where is he? In a white world, pristine in its brightness. A white room, in a white bed with white sheets and coverlet; white, everything is white. In the corner someone sits, a nurse: she wears a white uniform and cap. Is he in a hospital, then? Shortly afterward a doctor comes in;
Leo is sure he’s a doctor because of the stethoscope around his neck. He talks in a coaxing sort of voice, asking lots of questions. Later the nurse talks to him. Her name is Miss Holmes. He doesn’t like her much. She is determined to amuse him. She lays out cards for a game: Authors. Right off Leo draws four Longfellows and a pair of Hawthornes; it’s not hard to beat someone as dumb as Miss Holmes. She has a mustache like the bearded lady in Barnum & Bailey’s.
Later, he has a visitor. A woman calling herself Mrs Kranze, who says she knows him. Is she crazy? Leo has never seen her before. A friend, she tells him; she is a friend of his mother’s.
“I want my mother,” he says, as if the saying would produce Emily’s corporeal form. Mrs Kranze’s face is all screwed up, tears are squeezed from her puffy eyes.
“Gone. She’s gone.” She sobs onto his hair. “Poor child, poor, poor boy. What is to become of you now?”
Mother? M-mother? Where is she? The pain in his head is bad; the darkness is coming back, the white room is turning to black, and out of the blackness, the terrible jolt of memory. Something about the bridge? Yes, that’s it - the bridge - the L Street Bridge - his mother - the bridge. “Did she go over the bridge?” he asks. “Did she go across?” Mrs Kranze stares at him, biting her lips, the tears running down beside her large nose. “Yes,” she says, at last, “across the bridge.”
***
Over at Three Corner Cove the darkness was suddenly cleaved a
s the Oliphants’ porch light came on. In a moment the phonograph began playing:
You go to my head Like a sip of sparkling Burgundy brew And I find the very mention of you Like the kicker in a julep or two.
Honey appeared and sat down on the top step, eating from a dish propped on her knees: Ice cream? Leo wondered. Her hair burnished by the lamplight, she seemed to go with the music; she was sparkling burgundy, and he wished he were sitting next to her. But then-, as he watched, someone else materialized from the shadows. Reece sat beside her until she finished her ice cream and set the dish down. Then he got up and pulled her to him, and they began dancing, to the music.
The thrill of the thought
That you might give a thought
To my plea
casts a spell over me.
Still I say to myself,
“Get a hold of yourself,
Can’t you see that it never can be.”
Leo’s heart was doing flip-flops. If he required any schooling in the way of a man with a maid, there it was, chapter and verse, the music, the starlight, the sweet nothings whispered in the ear. That was how grown-ups behaved, he guessed; Reece wasn’t a boy, but a man, a combination of brain, muscles, glamour, and good looks, the flickering flame around which pretty moths like Honey Oliphant were bound to flit. And even after he had fallen asleep he continued to see the pair, turning and turning together, whirling like love phantoms in the dream dark, round and round in each other’s arms while the music played and the moonlight danced on the water of Moonbow lake and there were kisses in the shadows.
The luscious lipsticked damsel with tresses of gleaming gold leaned languidly upon the casement while down below her lovesick troubadour strummed his mandolina and crooned “Come into the Garden, Maude.” The more passionate his song, the more languidly the beauteous creature leaned across the sill, her hand like some pale and fragile blossom as it gestured for her lover to ascend, a la Rapunzel, by making a ladder of her long lustrous looks. The song ended, the troubador flung away his instrument (it was a ukulele) and climbed -- or tried to— in order to receive a kiss from his lady’s rosy lips. Success, however, was not in the cards. It was a difficult moment; the weight of the amorous swain loosened the poor damsel’s hair, which when it pulled free revealed Gus Klaus in female disguise, while the troubadour (Zipper Tallon) tumbled to the floor amid shouts and laughter, and the stage curtains (campers’ blankets strung on a wire) swung to.
Cheers and jeers and thunderous stamping of feet greeted the conclusion of the skit, the noise rising to the roof beam from which the famous Camp Friend-Indeed horn chandelier shed upon the scene the glow of some two dozen kerosene lanterns. In the camp’s earliest days Pa and Hank Ives had put the structure together out of the antlers of countless deer, elk, and moose, along with a pair from an African antelope contributed by Dagmar Kronborg and taken from the trophy walls of the Castle itself. More than six feet in diameter, three times that in circumference, suspended on a thick hawser through a block and tackle screwed into the rooftree, the fixture now actually shook, so great was the din.
Until a few years before, the Major Bowes Amateur Night theatricals had been held in the dining hall, but, thanks as usual to the generosity of Big Rolfe Hartsig, who had sent one of his construction crews over to put up the Teddy Roosevelt Memorial Nature Lodge, all such camp activities were now presented in the building on the lower campus, which this evening was filled almost to overflowing; every seat was taken, with the younger fry seated cross-legged on the floor in front of the stage, each camp unit with its respective group of counselors, each counselor doing his best to quell the high-spirited rowdiness that always enlivened such gatherings. Up front the center section had been reserved for staffers and their guests, among whom tonight was Ma’s old friend Dagmar, making her first visit to Friend-Indeed since Stanley Wagner’s malfeasance had led her to bar the Castle to campers. When she walked in, there had been a buzz among the boys - did this mean all was forgiven? - and embarrassed looks, but now, after the third skit of the evening, she seemed one of them again, obviously enjoying herself, her laughter ringing out above that of the loudest camper in the room.
Next to appear, a solo effort, was Mr Jerome Jackson, the Brown Bomber, performing one of his specialties, his famous impression of Fats Waller (“I’se a-muggin’s, boom-dee-ah-dah”). Leo, sitting rather gingerly among his other cabin-mates, glanced around, checking the rows for some sign of Reece, who hadn’t shown up for the entertainment. His nose was out of joint because, having assigned “his boys” his own choice of a skit - “The Kindergarten,” one of his favorites and an old chestnut - he had discovered at the last minute that a switch had been made. Without consulting him, Tiger and the Bomber had persuaded the others to veto the classroom comedy in favor of an idea Leo had gotten while in the infirmary. Learning of the change, Reece had branded the whole business a conspiracy (“A
Jeremian is loyal to his counselor and sticks by a bargain”), and a violation of the team spirit that had always heretofore characterized Cabin 7 (Phil and Wally, out of deference to their leader, had refused to take part), and after dinner he had driven off with Honey Oliphant in the Green Hornet to take in a drive-in movie.
The curtains had closed on the Bomber (to loud whistles and applause), and the succeeding presentation was about to get under way. Once again the rafters shook to hand-clapping, foot-stamping, catcalls, and cheers as Pa made another introduction, venturing the announcement that the Ezekiel cabin’s contribution to Major Bowes Night would be nothing less than the famed entertainment known as “The Old Lady and the Cow” - groans around the hall - or “An Udder Laff Riot” - laughs and applause - the role of the Old Lady to be essayed by that sterling thespian Emerson Bean (now recovered from his poison ivy), the cow jointly by those sterling look-a-likes the Smith twins, otherwise known as the Coughdrops.
Watching this corny routine, the Bomber whispered to Tiger that Ezekiel was attempting either to empty the hall in a hurry or to put the audience to sleep. Having played the rear end of the cow often enough himself, he knew you couldn’t help getting a boffola laugh when the front end, feet crossed, sat down on the rear end, and then both ends sat on the Old Lady, whereupon all three wound up on the floor; but the Smith brothers were woefully inept and in need of rehearsal, while the old, moth-eaten costume, which kept stretching perilously, then sagging, had nothing whatever about it that might be considered bovine. Then Smith-behind got tangled up with Smith-before, Old Lady Bean’s long skirt was heavily trodden upon, and when the fabric tore away altogether, revealing undershorts, printed in sloops and maritime pennants, the unlucky accident produced the single genuine laugh the skit afforded.
“ ‘All right, all right,’ ” Pa said when the hilarity subsided, imitating the familiar nasal monotone of radio’s famous
Major Bowes as he gave the “Wheel of Fortune” a good spin. “ ‘Round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows,’ ” and the sock and buskin were passed along at last to the Jeremians. After a positive bouquet of an introduction, which wilted from its very floweriness, Pa announced the title: “The Doctor Is Definitely In,” or “Oh, Doc, You Struck a Nerve,” and no sooner had the performance begun than everyone in the audience knew that here was surely the hit of the evening.
The stage curtains parted to reveal a large bedsheet stretched taut across a wooden frame. A spotlight from behind illuminating this makeshift screen, and there appeared upon it the silhouette of a figure who pantomimed being afflicted with a bad stomach ache. Next, the audience was treated to the sight of a buxom nurse featuring an oversized poitrine and derriere, who assisted the patient in ridding himself of his coat, then proceeded to take his temperature with a three-foot-long outdoor thermometer. The nurse (the Bomber) grew considerably agitated, while the patient (Monkey Twitchel) became sicker by the moment. Presently an offstage bell rang and a voice announced “Dr Mackinschleisser - call sur-ger-ee.”
Now onto the shee
t were tossed the capering shadows of three assistants (Fiske and Dillworth, and one shorter than the rest - Abernathy, of course), and the nurse proceeded with a remarkable amount of ado to scrub up, using a jumbo sponge and a basin the size of a potato tub. Ablutions completed, the three assistants heaved the protesting patient onto the operating table, then stumbled over one another getting out of the way as the gangly silhouette of the doctor was catapulted onto the screen as though shot from a cannon. Tall, thin, and of an antic disposition, Dr Mackinschleisser, hero of the piece, was rendered the more hilarious by his very two-dimensionality. Alternately tipping his Derby like a boulevardier and furiously twirling his furled umbrella, which he spun between his fingers like a drum major’s baton, he brought down the house as soon as he appeared onstage. By the time he had executed the complex business of removing his gloves — starting each fingertip with a neat clip of his choppers, and finally rolling the gloves into a ball, popping them into his mouth, and devouring them - tears of laughter could be observed. Now, opening his Gladstone bag, the doctor pulled out a stethoscope, whose rubber cords he first snapped at the nurse’s behind, then got stuck in his eye as he attempted to fit the instrument into his ears. Keenly listening to the patient’s heartbeat, he wagged a disconsolate head: the prognosis was bad. Not so bad, however, that the patient might not once or twice lift his head from the table, for which trouble he received a whack with the doctor’s oversized mallet.
At last, after some tricky mathematical calculations with a jumbo set of calipers upon the patient’s chest, presumably to determine the location of the heart, the incision was made (by means of the vigorous employment of a lumberman’s cross-cut saw), the body cavity was exposed (held open by a pair of carpenter’s clamps), and the doctor proceeded to remove the sundry causes of the patient’s discomfort: a pair of hip boots, a baseball bat, a hot-water bottle, a tennis racket with three balls, a pocketbook, some ladies’ hosiery, a string of breakfast sausages, a toilet plunger, assorted crockery, cutlery, and cookware, a head of cabbage, a waiter’s tray, plus yards of stuffing which even in silhouette looked suspiciously like excelsior. Finally, after further intensive probing, there followed a baby by the heels, crying, for which pains it received a stiff whack with the mallet.