Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

“Any questions?”

  “Give him half a moment, Headmaster. He’ll understand.”

  “Chapel,” Headmaster said. “Must go do my Christian duty…”

  Robby’s eyes followed Headmaster’s to the sherry decanter, then through the window to the chapel spire. Robby looked at the school emblem on the wall behind Headmaster’s desk and at the desk itself. He then studied the threadbare carpet on the floor.

  “Are my parents dead, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “A bomb. I passed the ruins of your home yesterday, in the taxi on the way to the funeral.”

  “There was a camera in my room, sir. I got it last birthday. Mums made me leave it home.”

  “What’s he saying, Mrs. Jencks?”

  “Something about a camera, Headmaster. But he’s not sniffling.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Did you happen to see my camera?”

  “Rubble, my boy, all rubble. Pladroman House is rubble. End of an era and all that. Funeral yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t I go to the funeral?”

  “Lord, no place for a tadpole. All that sniffling going on. Press photographers buzzing about, trying to catch someone with her hanky down.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Burnes?”

  “Deepest jungle or frozen tundra?”

  “I don’t get you, my lad.”

  “You said I’m going to America.”

  “Yes. You’re being evacuated. Cheer up. Plenty of chocolate in America. No Latin.”

  “But am I going to the deepest jungle or the frozen tundra?”

  “I don’t know. Never been either place. Never been to America at all. You’re going to an uncle in New York.”

  “But, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “I haven’t an uncle in New York.”

  “Of course you have.”

  “I have a grandaunt, in Scotland.”

  “Several of us decided yesterday in a meeting after the funeral that you have an uncle in New York. Name of…let me see…Lowry. Thadeus Lowry. Must be an uncle somewhere on your mother’s side. A newspaper publisher, someone said. Probably publisher of The New York Times. Anyway, that’s where you’re going.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Safekeeping.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s my brave lad,” said Mrs. Jencks.

  Headmaster said: “The Evacuation Lady is coming for you at noon. Mrs. Jencks will help you pack while the other tadpoles are in class. We try our best, you know, to keep the war away from the tadpoles at Wolsley School. One only gets to enjoy childhood just so long. Tuition refund will be made to your family’s solicitors.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now I really must go and give Chapel.”

  Thus it was Robert James Saint James Burnes Walter Farhall-Pladroman, S.Nob., found himself seated on his cardboard suitcase the other side of the groundskeeper’s lodge at ten o’clock in the morning, as shunted from his mates’ view as World War Two itself.

  Robby thought of the camera he had never gotten to use. The two coffins in the church aisle. Would his mother have liked the flower arrangements? Mr. Colmap, the butler, would not appreciate the silverware he had polished all those years ending up in rubble. Cook probably wanted to grab her favorite saucepan when she heard the noise of the bomb. Boots was as lucky as Robby to be away from the house when it received a direct hit. Boots was in France with the army. Nanny would not have liked falling down through the whole height of the house in her nightgown. It would have scared her.

  Safely out of view of Wolsley School and of everyone left in the world who knew him, Robert James Saint James Burnes Walter Farhall-Pladroman, S.Nob., discovered himself sniffling. All these people who had been good to him were dead. No longer alive. No longer to be seen, heard, smelled, touched. Never.

  At first, Robby tried rubbing from his face that offending sniffling instrument, his nose. Then his hands seemed better employed as fists stuck in his eyes to dam the water which wanted out through them. All the rhetoric that had resounded in his head these eight years past—and which he had always supposed had been instilled in his head for just such a moment as this—bounced from one side of his head to the other, trampolined in his throat to hit the roof of his skull. The clearest maxims collided, wrestled with each other, broke each other into a jumble of disjointed syllables. They needed clarifying now. The water which is tears cannot be contained, even by fists. For a long while, the heel of one hand dammed an eye, the other hand rubbed his sniffler; for another long while, the heel of the other hand dammed his other eye, and the hand that had failed so miserably at eye-damming was set to the task of sniffler obliterating. Robby wondered if it might be just such sad exercise that made noses grow, and thus distinguish us.

  Robby had missed breakfast. Mightily he came to miss luncheon. Fiercely he came to miss tea.

  The Evacuation Lady arrived alone at dusk in a Morris Minor with the news that they were late and had to drive straight through to Southampton, if Robby were to make his ship for America on time.

  Voraciously, he missed his supper.

  However, by the time the Evacuation Lady arrived, Robby was no longer sniffling. His two eyes and his nose had ceased their mad competition for the attention of his fists. The center of his attention, the center of his being, had slipped millimeters toward his mouth. A single piece of Resounding Rhetoric had won the jumble in his brain. His upper lip was stiff.

  2

  Water Is Crossed and Thadeus Lowry Is Met

  A lifetime later (or so it seemed to him), Robby found himself sitting on his suitcase on a misty, blowing dock in New York Harbor. He had been sitting there since before dawn. Of course he had missed breakfast, and of course he had missed lunch. The past ten days his relationship with food had become strained. He had seen food seldom, and what food he had seen had parted from him quickly. He no longer missed his meals; he was simply hungry.

  H.M.S. Scaramouche had waddled into the harbor at three in the morning. She leaned, wheezing and sagging, against the dock as if hoping never to be asked to confront the sea again. The evacuated children were roused en masse for the last time, put together with their belongings, shouted into a double line and marched, slipping, stumbling, staggering down the gangplank, half asleep in the dark. Women with clipboards, in charge of sorting them out, awaited them on the dock. Robby was identified as someone to be picked up by a Mr. Thadeus Lowry. Mr. Thadeus Lowry was paged. Mr. Thadeus Lowry was not present. Robby was told to “Go over there, dear, and sit on your suitcase, out of harm’s way,” which he did. Other names were paged and women came forward from the group waiting on the dock: women in fur coats, women in cloth coats, women in nuns’ habits. Each greeted a child, or two, or three, and took her, or him, or them, off with her, doubtlessly to warm rooms and steaming breakfasts. Men, too, took some children: a man in a homburg, a man in a fedora, two men in yarmulkes. None identified himself as Thadeus Lowry. Each found it possible to leave the dock without Robby Burnes.

  After the sorting-out apparently had been fully accomplished, a lady with a clipboard walked over to Robby, said, “You’re Burnes, right? Waiting for Mr. Lowry?” The clipboard had told her so. “He must be delayed. Send him to me when he arrives. I’ll be in that little office over there.”

  Robby’s eyes followed her to a small, lit office on the side of the dock. Through the wide window he watched her sip a cup of coffee. He had never had coffee, having been assured by Nanny it would stunt his growth, and therefore did not want it now. He thought his recent diet had been sufficiently stunting.

  So he sat on his suitcase, scratching at Pomfrey’s name tag on a kneesock, then on Robby’s left leg. The wind from under the dock whipped up his short pants. His overcoat was precisely the length of his trousers. His blazer was a few inches shorter. Both his overcoat and trousers stopped three inches above his knees, and six inches abo
ve the tops of his kneesocks. Schoolboy fashion at that time required that he have a cap, undervest and drawers, a shirt, necktie, blazer, overcoat, shoes, kneesocks and blue knees.

  Buses and ambulances pulled onto the dock at dawn. Still keeping out of harm’s way, Robby watched as the war wounded, some on stretchers, some on crutches, some hanging on others’ shoulders, were unloaded from the ship. It was a silent operation. Except for the wind, and the engine of a bus or ambulance starting off, hundreds of people were moving, being moved on the dock, wordlessly, noiselessly. It took until well past noon to unload the wounded from the ship.

  The first Evacuation Lady had taken Robby by car from Wolsley School to the train and then by train to H.M.S. Scaramouche in Southampton. “Poor tyke,” she announced to the other passengers in the compartment as soon as the train began moving. “Orphaned by one of those nasty bombs. This is the Farhall-Pladroman boy, if you’d believe it. Burnes, they call him. You saw it in the newspapers. Pladroman House in London blown to smithereens. Just shows you: No matter how lucky you are…”

  Round, regretful eyes in a row of six contemplated Robby and considered his luck. A lady in a gray tweed suit and heavy brown shoes gave him six ginger cookies she had wrapped in a handkerchief, then used the freed handkerchief to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. Being in public, as he was, Robby ate the ginger cookies more slowly than he wished.

  At midnight, three new Evacuation Ladies were aboard ship, sorting things out. They busied themselves by continually referring to their clipboards and calling off names. Responding over and over, “Here, miss!” appearing to do absolutely no good, Robby finally crawled into a corner and slept. Later he was told that by doing so, he had missed several roll calls, sandwiches and warm milk.

  In the morning, roll was called again, and again, and Robby admitted to his name again and again. A different and separate roll was called before oatmeal was ladled out.

  “Why does everything on this ship smell of wet, rotten pine roots, miss?” asked an older boy.

  “That’s a disinfectant smell,” the Evacuation Lady answered, “so we’ll all stay healthy.”

  “Smells like a bloomin’ groundhog’s bloomin’ parlor,” commented the pithy lad. “I can hardly eat my mush, with the stink.”

  The Evacuation Ladies settled the children in two compartments, divided according to sex, except for someone named Palmerston who was clearly a boy but down on the clipboard as a girl and therefore kept getting shunted back and forth from compartment to compartment, and very shortly got himself put down on the clipboard as a discipline problem.

  Sleeping arrangements aboard the Scaramouche had been designed with twenty-year-old infantrymen in mind. It took most of the children less time to fall out of the bunks than to climb into them. After the first night they all slept on the steel deck. Childish discussion had resolved that it was much less uncomfortable sleeping on the deck than landing on it time and time again.

  It was the strategy of those who arranged the war to build ships as fast as possible to sink other ships even faster. The Scaramouche, built as a troop ship, probably between a Monday and a Thursday, undoubtedly had more downward speed than forward.

  The survival of these Liberty ships depended greatly upon the strategies of their individual captains. Some captains developed complicated, zig-zag routes to get their ships safely across the water, and some of these ships survived. Other captains simply went in a straight line as fast as their ships could go, and some of these ships survived.

  The captain of the Scaramouche had his own idea. He wallowed across the Atlantic. Thinking perhaps there was less chance of the ship being seen by the enemy if she were always in the troughs, he kept her broadside to every wave. Or perhaps he thought if he wallowed convincingly enough, with not much power coming from the engines, with no forward motion perceptible whatsoever, the enemies would think the Scaramouche already a struck, doomed ship and not spend a shell on her.

  The Scaramouche survived too, but, if put to a vote, her passengers—the wounded, the evacuated, the Evacuation Ladies—most likely would have opted for a torpedo in the engine room and certain death in the North Atlantic.

  The Evacuation Ladies ladled mush into the children, with milk, never spilling a spoonful from bucket to bowl. Yet within twenty minutes, every ounce would be on the deck, looking and smelling much the worse. Whatever the human body does to food, even in hastily rejecting it, does not improve it.

  “Children, you must try not to get dehydrated. Now, everyone have a nice cup of warm water and we’ll call the roll.”

  Even warm water is not improved by plunging into the intestines and coming to air again.

  “My God!” one of the Evacuation Ladies was heard to mutter. “I didn’t know what they really meant when they said these children were to be evacuated.”

  Some of the children, who, with great perspicacity, decided that part of the problem was caused by the continuous effort to take in food and water, abandoned the effort altogether. Still they stayed on their knees with the rest, vomiting boggy, pine-scented air.

  The pithy older lad summed up for everyone by commenting finally, “His Majesty’s vomit pit, that’s what this is, miss.”

  Finally sitting on his suitcase on the wintry dock a meter above roiling New York Harbor, Robby Burnes reflected that before leaving Wolsley School, he really had seen his suitcase only once before—the day he left home for Wolsley School.

  Nanny, sniffling, carrying the small, black, empty suitcase, appeared in the doorway of Robby’s bedroom shortly after breakfast. She put it on the bed, and opened it.

  Nanny was hugging Robby when Robby’s mother appeared, carrying six school uniforms, including shirts, socks and ties in her arms. Five were to go into the suitcase; one was to be worn. Her disapproval of Nanny’s expressions of sorrow made Robby’s mother firmly cheerful.

  “Here, here, now. Robby will love Wolsley School, won’t he?”

  Robby was studying the school emblem on the cap and on the blazer: a stag butting its head against an oak tree.

  “Robby’s been looking forward to going to Wolsley School ever so long now, hasn’t he?”

  Mothers, universally, when afraid of receiving an unsatisfactory answer, have a way of putting a question into the air. The air never answers, and thus equilibrium is maintained.

  “How do you do the tie, Mums? I’ll need to do it myself.”

  “Here, silly.”

  Robby’s mother brought Robby to the mirror and taught Robby the Windsor knot. Thus, with loving hands, was one more colt bridled.

  Robby’s father stood in the library of Pladroman House, which is what he normally did while at home, awaiting the moment to go off and sit in the House of Lords.

  “You’re off, are you?” he said, brusque and clubby with his only son newly emblazoned with stags butting their heads against oak trees. “Building blocks behind, balls in front?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any patter at Pater before handing over the sovereign?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d like to take my new camera to school. The one I got for my birthday.”

  “Ah!”

  “Mums says I mustn’t. Nanny says it will be on the mantel in my room when I get home for Christmas hols.”

  “I expect Mother’s right. I’m sure your teachers won’t want you running around snapping at them. Shy lot, teachers—especially in a strong draft.”

  He rubbed his hands together and then drew a gold sovereign from the pocket of his waistcoat.

  “There we are, then.” He handed it to Robby. “Traditions must be kept.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “A sovereign and a few words of wisdom from Pater. Deuced world we live in, Robby, especially at this moment. Your greatest joys, and your greatest hurts, will come from other people. Try to be interested in your fellow creatures, son, and try to be kind.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Off you go, now. I’ll go upstairs and try t
o cheer up old Nanny.”

  On the dock Robby’s hands were in his pockets for what warmth they provided. The fingers of his right hand were closed tightly around the sovereign.

  During the morning the sole remaining Evacuation Lady had looked at him through the window of the dock shed several times. Robby had looked back. No further words had passed between them.

  In what Robby knew must be the early afternoon, even for America, a portly man carrying a walking stick in a jaunty manner ambled onto the dock from the street. He stopped, looked this way and that along the cavernous, roofed dock. He apparently did not see the lit window of the little office. He approached Robby as the only animate thing in sight.

  Half a meter from Robby, he crouched on his walking stick and peered into his face. “What are you?”

  “Cold, sir.”

  The portly man had a puffy, red face, spotted with razor nicks and most veins showing.

  “Did anyone ever suggest within your hearing you’re a Robby Burnes?” the man asked.

  “Yes, sir. That’s what I am. A Robby Burnes.”

  “God love a goose.” The man stood up for a fuller view. “Certainly your legs aren’t long fellows.”

  “Are you my uncle, sir?”

  “Did anybody say I am?”

  “I think that’s the expectation, sir.”

  “You’re not at all what I was expecting, are you?”

  “What were you expecting, sir?”

  “Approximately nine paragraphs for the morning edition, easily written, gracing my byline, I,” the man said rather archly, “go under no name but my own, and that name is Thadeus Lowry. Of The New York Star, I might add.”

  “You’re to pick me up,” Robby said.

  “Pick you up?” said Thadeus Lowry. “Why would I do that?”

  Thadeus Lowry’s protruding eyes stared down at Robby and watched the boy shrug not once, but twice. Robby finally turned his head away and looked at the hull of the Scaramouche leaning against the end of the dock.

  The Evacuation Lady, having spotted Thadeus Lowry through the window, approached.

  “Are you Mr. Lowry?”