Herbert Rowbarge

by Natalie Babbitt

  France had, in some ways, been good for Frank, however. It had taken the red from his cheeks, but it had firmed him up, and left him rather handsome in a wholesome Ohio way. He went to work at the Pleasure Dome, to “learn the business,” and was industrious and earnest in every task assigned to him, while every night he stayed at home with Dick in the cottage Dick and Herbert had lived in when they first came to Mussel Point. It was larger now, and modernized—a second story added, and a bathroom —but it was still a simple place, not like the Rowbarge house three miles away.

  “Why don’t you move out of that dump?” Herbert would say to Dick, with every passing year.

  And Dick would always answer, “Why should I, Bertie? I like it.”

  And that would be that.

  But there was money in the bank, more money than Dick had ever dreamed of, and when Frank came home from France, Dick, to celebrate, and without saying anything to anyone, went out and bought sixty acres of farmland outside Mussel Point, and thought, at night, of cows.

  “Dad,” said Frank one night at supper in the early spring, “you know, the park is nice and all that, but, gee, I don’t know. Sometimes it seems kind of … well, I don’t want to hurt your feelings if you like it as much as Mr. Rowbarge does, but … well, sometimes it seems kind of foolish to me.”

  Next morning Dick went out and bought a tractor.

  During the seven years that followed, the Rowbarge twins grew up. And one Sunday night in ’25, at dinner with the Looses, Opal said, “Herbert, what are you going to do about these girls?”

  “Do about them?” said Herbert, glancing at Babe and Louisa where they sat side by side across the table. He glanced at them as seldom as possible, and never without the same dull resentment that had settled in his stomach on the day they were born. Still: “What’s the matter with them?” he demanded. “They look all right.” They looked, in fact, not at all like Ruby, and he wondered, sometimes, who they did look like. They were of medium height, like Ruby, but unlike him or Ruby, they were big-boned, and wide of hip and mouth. And their hair was a funny shade of tan. He had once told Opal they resembled his Cincinnati aunt, but to himself he observed uneasily that there was something inelegant about their looks, something that was not, on the whole, high-toned. They were good girls, though, and never gave him trouble. It might, he admitted to himself, have been far worse.

  Opal had had her hair bobbed the week before, and the change was not successful. She was aware of this and it made her even sharper than usual. “Good grief, Herbert, open your eyes,” she said now, impatiently. “They’re eighteen years old, and it’s time you gave a minute of your precious time to planning for their future. Do you intend to send them to college?”

  “College!” said Herbert. “What for?”

  “Why, to educate them. You’ve heard of education?”

  “They’re educated,” he said. “My God, they just graduated from high school.”

  “And I suppose you think that’s enough.”

  “Well, Opal, it was enough for you and their mother,” he said mildly.

  “Honestly, Herbert,” she sighed. “That was the Dark Ages. Nobody went, back then. But lots of girls go to college now. I’d go in a minute if I was their age.”

  Stuart helped himself to more mashed potatoes, and boomed, “Watch out, Herbert, old man! Since the ladies got the vote, they’re getting mighty bold!”

  “Oh, be quiet, Stuart, and eat your dinner,” Opal snapped, and Walter, who was fifteen now, guffawed. But no one told Walter to be quiet. No one ever had.

  Babe and Louisa sat looking back and forth as the talk went on. College? It might be fun. But if Daddy was against it … Babe was a little firmer than Louisa, but neither was so firm as to oppose him.

  “Well, I think it’s a lot of foolishness,” said Herbert, “and I’m not going to do it. They’re fine just the way they are.”

  “All right,” said Opal. “Very good. But then you’d better get going and find husbands for them somewhere.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Opal,” said Herbert. “They can find their own husbands.”

  “Around here? There aren’t any nice young men around here. Not a single solitary one. Unless you want them to marry hayseeds.”

  “Let ’em marry Frank Festeen,” said Walter gleefully. “They’re both sweet on him.”

  “We are not!” said Babe.

  And Herbert said, “Frank? Oh, come now, Walter. Where’d you get a notion like that? That’s nonsense.”

  But, after dinner, Opal took Herbert aside. “Walter doesn’t miss much, in case you didn’t know it,” she told him. “If he says the girls are sweet on Frank, I expect he’s probably right.”

  “Well?” said Herbert impatiently. “What if they are? My God, Opal, they’re only children, after all.”

  “Herbert, I swear sometimes I think you’ve got just enough sense to run the park and none left over for anything else. They’re eighteen. When I was eighteen, I was engaged. Now, look, Frank’s a nice boy and all that, but he’s got no background any more than Dick does. The Nill name has always stood for something in this county, and it’s up to all of us to take pride in it and protect it.”

  Though most of the time he didn’t like Opal, Herbert had always respected her. He had watched her, and learned a great deal from her, and now he chewed a thumb thoughtfully. On the whole, he had to admit he agreed with her assessment of Dick and Frank. Rich as Dick was, he’d never made the slightest effort to improve himself. He hadn’t sent Frank to college, or built a decent house, or anything.

  Opal, observing him closely, saw and pressed her advantage. “And of course you’ll want to protect the Rowbarge name, Herbert,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t want farmers in the family, either. Oh, I know, Dick’s your partner, but he started out pretty low, or so you’ve told me, and it’s just not suitable to think of taking his son into the family.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Opal,” said Herbert. “No, it wouldn’t be a good thing. I’ve known Dick all my life, but still …”

  “What goes on between you men,” said Opal, “with all your back-slapping and cigars and filthy stories, is entirely your own affair. But when it comes to family, that’s something else again.”

  “All right, Opal,” he said. “I’ll keep my eyes open. You’re right—when the girls do get married, it’s got to be to people at our own level.” He said it, and believed it was proper. He and Dick, well, they were different from each other. They’d always been different, right from the beginning. Both orphans, yes, but that was where it ended. And now, recalling this, his resentment of his daughters pricked him anew. Drag down everything by marrying Frank Festeen? Certainly not. “But,” he added aloud to Opal, “I still can’t believe there’s anything serious in it. Those girls—they hardly know how to pull up their socks. In love! Why, it’s got to be nonsense!”

  But it was not nonsense. For Babe was in love with Frank, and Louisa, who loved him too, though not, they agreed, so much, was generously set on helping. At night, in the room they insisted on sharing, they crimped their hair, tried rolling their stockings, and talked of nothing else. Frank was handsome and dear and good, they told each other. So what if he hadn’t gone to college like Daddy and Uncle Stuart? That didn’t make him a hayseed. Why, Frank was raising flowers on that farm out there, not just oats and corn. And there was talk of a greenhouse someday. No, he was certainly not a hayseed. Babe loved him, and they would find a way to make him love her back. And marry her. Soon. But—what if Daddy didn’t like it? Well, my goodness, wasn’t Frank the son of Daddy’s dearest friend? And business partner? Of course Daddy would like it. So, when an opportunity came, one day in the Fun House, they reached out eagerly and took it.

  The town of Mussel Point and Red Man Lake were not, that summer, what they once had been. Before the Pleasure Dome, when Herbert had first scouted out the site in 1900, he had walked along the dusty country roads, past endless shabby farms, and if he
hadn’t had his map in hand, he’d never have known there was anything so wet and lovely as a lake ahead. The only clues were clumsy little signs, two or three, on farmhouse gates, advertising the sale of worms for fishing. And then the road made a sudden turn and there it lay, enormous, brown, serene, with tiny islands—a quiet place and almost all untouched. And the town was a thin collection of cottages and stores, presided over by the Nill National Bank. A center for the farmers in the countryside around, nothing more.

  But now the town was fat, and the lake was no longer serene. In fact, if you were coming down from Lima or Ada, or over from Wapakoneta, you couldn’t even see the water, for the Pleasure Dome was built along that side and hid the shore from view. What you did see, first off, was the parking lot.

  The parking lot—vast, unpaved, and lumpy—was by itself a marvel. All day long and far into the night the cars roared in and out, spraying pebbles and keeping the thick summer dust so agitated that it hardly ever got a chance to settle, but swirled in coarse tan clouds from Memorial Day on the one end till Labor Day on the other. And if this was a marvel, the park itself was a miracle, for Herbert had made of it a huge and living thing, a snarling, glorious, dreadful, magical thing stretched out a half a mile along the water’s edge and bounded by a place where he had spread rough yellow sand and made a beach for swimming. It was an act of creation, but he never would have wished it done in seven days. Why should he want it to be finished? The world, he sometimes thought, could have used another day or two of work; he would not stint, himself. He tinkered with his Garden ceaselessly, uprooting this and adding that, refurbishing and staking, testing its fruits—in this case, frozen custard and popcorn—and tending with paternal pride his flock of employees. He was everywhere at once, and nowhere so often as at the merry-go-round.

  The merry-go-round was the same one he’d had since 1907. There were bigger ones available, of course—much bigger. But he did not like the bigger ones. Their animals stepped round in ranks of three or four. Pairs were what he’d wanted, were what he still wanted. It was, as it had always been, his Noah’s Ark, his Peaceable Kingdom, and, with its shrill calliope, the speaking heart of his soul’s own country.

  There were many other rides, of course. In addition to the Tilt-A-Wheel, the Ferris wheel, and the Flying Saucer, still big attractions, there was a lethal machine called the Whip that flung you around a figure-eight-shaped track and nearly snapped your head off. There was the Aeroplane, which opened like an umbrella and whirled you out sidewise. There was a ride called the Bullet that closed you into a sort of cage and swung you up and around on a long steel arm while the cage itself revolved, so that some of the time you were upside down. And of course, soaring on skinny stilts, there was the scalloping, endless spine of a roller coaster, like a Loch Ness monster’s skeleton bleached white and perilously flimsy in the glaring summer sun. Along this narrow track, all day and far into the night, a little train of linked red cars clanked up and hurtled down the scallops, and just above the gates to the park, the track rose to its highest point, a dizzy, crazy height, and doubled back on itself down a grade so steep it was a wonder anyone survived it.

  The shooting gallery was still there, though twice rebuilt and expanded, and many other games involving missiles to hurl at targets. There was a Penny Arcade, with an eerie mechanical gypsy who could tell your fortune. There were even, for the littlest customers, ponies, plumed and docile, to ride around a ring. And now, this year, there was a brand-new thing—a Fun House.

  If the merry-go-round was the heart of the park, the Fun House was its brain, an unhinged brain that suited the park exactly. For it was not so much a Fun House as a madhouse, a place of chaos and hysteria, with steps that switched to ramps and back again, and rocking floors, and little rooms constructed fiendishly to warp your sense of gravity and distance and send you bouncing off their walls. It had a twisting, mirrored maze so disorienting that you walked right into yourself before you knew it, and bumped your nose. There were little holes in the floors from which sharp jets of air would suddenly blow your clothes up, and sirens, just as sudden, that deafened you. It was, said Herbert happily, a dilly. It was also, on the day before it opened, the residence of Fate.

  They all came down that day to try it out—Dick and Herbert, Babe and Louisa, and the Looses. And Frank came over from the farm. It had become a ritual, this viewing of new attractions. While the park roared on around them, and visitors paused to wonder who these privileged people were, they would slip behind the canvas shroud obscuring whatever the new thing was and give it a cheerful inspection. And it was always aptly timed: too late to make the alterations Opal would invariably suggest. “It should have been red, not blue,” she would say, or “It should have been faster.” Or slower. “Well, maybe next time, Opal,” Herbert would answer. “Too late to change it now.” And she would say, “You should have let me see it sooner,” and he would nod and say he wished he had. And then it would open and be a huge success.

  This time it was a little different, for the Fun House was not a game or a ride but a cluster of lunatic jolts. Dick, with his crutch, stayed just inside the entrance. Not for him steps that turned into ramps, and rocking floors. Opal and Stuart circled its small central room, exclaiming at their reflections in crazy mirrors that stretched their necks or gave them legs like barrels. Walter went off to test the buttons that controlled the sirens and the jets of air. Herbert stayed with Dick, discussing possible improvements. And Louisa and Babe and Frank went through an archway to the mirrored maze, and disappeared.

  Ten minutes passed, then twenty. At last Louisa emerged, alone. “Where’s Babe?” said Herbert. “Or Louisa. Or whichever.”

  “I’m Louisa, Daddy,” she said brightly. “Babe’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Go get her,” he said. “It’s time we were going along.”

  “She’ll be out in just a minute,” said Louisa. Her brightness faded and she began to twist her fingers nervously.

  “Is she lost in there?”

  “Oh, no, Daddy. You can’t really get lost,” she said quickly. “I’m sure she’ll be right out.”

  “Frank’s in there, too,” said Dick. “He’ll take care of her.”

  At this, Opal looked at Herbert, raised her eyebrows pointedly, and said, “Ahem.”

  “Oh,” he said. He went down the steps that turned into a ramp—hopped down, with care—and crossed the little room. “I’ll get her,” he said. “I ought to check things out in there, anyway. I haven’t seen it since they finished up.”

  “No, Daddy, wait!” wailed Louisa. “I’ll go—you don’t have to bother.”

  “Stay where you are,” said Herbert, and he went through the archway into the maze.

  It was a terrible mistake. The instant he went in among the mirrors, he knew it and cursed himself for a fool. Everywhere he looked, in this labyrinth of narrow passages, he saw himself: walking toward himself, beside himself, coming and going at angles. The dreaded, half-sought-for twinkling down his spine began, intensified, was suddenly unbearable. Alarmed, he tried to hurry, groping his way along with sweating hands, and saw his own blanched face and staring eyes reflected at every turn. He felt all at once a queer desire to sink to the floor, to give in, to stay there babbling at himself forever—a desire so overwhelming that his panic doubled. “Damn them,” he gasped unreasonably, “it’s all their fault.” And then, from over his head, a siren shrieked, and his thudding heart lurched crazily. “My God,” he whispered. “Oh, my God.” He began to run, caroming off the mirrored walls while a dozen Herberts did the same. He rushed into his own embrace with arms outstretched, fell backward, and sat down heavily to gape with a joy more horrible than horror at the gaping Herberts all around him. With a final burst of will, he picked himself up, and, rounding a sort of corner, reeled into a cubicle. And there he saw before him an endless, measureless corridor tapering far off into infinity. Leaning along it was an endless row of Babes and an endless row of Frank Festeens. And s
he was kissing him.

  At once his fear turned bottom up, exploding into rage. With a strangled exclamation, he grabbed for her arm and spun her around, and somehow found the route back to the archway, dragging her, terrified, behind him. “Your boy’s in there,” he said to Dick in a voice that froze even Opal in her tracks. “Send him home. I’ll speak to you later on this. Tonight.”

  “Do you love her?” asked Dick.

  And Frank said, “Well, I’ve always liked her, Dad. Liked ’em both. They’re nice kids. But I don’t think I exactly love Babe, to be honest with you. No.”

  “Then why were you kissing her?”

  “Well, I wasn’t, that’s just it,” Frank explained. “I mean, we were acting kind of silly, sure. She was dancing around, making faces in the mirrors and things like that, and then all at once she sort of tripped, and I caught her, and, well, all of a sudden she kissed me!”

  “He may say you have to marry her,” said Dick sadly. “He looked pretty upset.”

  “Then of course I’ll do it,” Frank said. “If it’s what she wants.”

  “You’ll stay away from him, do you hear me?” said Herbert in a voice that was still unsteady. “You’ll stay completely away.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Babe sobbed. “It was me. I did it.”

  “I know that,” said Herbert coldly. “That was perfectly plain, and I’m ashamed of you. I hope you’re ashamed of yourself. What are you, anyway? Some kind of easy woman?” Like your mother, he almost added. Or mine, he almost let himself think. And he sent her upstairs, where for hours she wept in her sister’s arms.