Not enough, if the life of Robby Burnes is to be saved!
Kind people have been giving their hard-earned money unstintingly to The Robby Burnes Ransom Fund.
The children at Manhattan Public School 169 (the school to which Robby Burnes was going Thursday when he was kidnapped) Friday donated $47.
“It’s really our War Bond money,” said Clarissa Allbright, a student caught in the schoolyard after school. “Principal said for once we can give without interest.”
St. Theresa’s Parish, in the Bronx, is having a special Holy Name Bingo Evening tonight. Profits will go to The Robby Burnes Ransom Fund.
Bingo organizer Guido Savallo said, “It’s the least we can do. Kidnapping a kid’s a terrible thing. I mean, stealin’s one thing, but stealin’ a kid…you know? I mean, you can tell whoever’d do a thing like that don’t have no family of his own, you know what I mean?”
“I want to donate $1 to The Fund to get the little Duke back,” said Mrs. Morris Blumgarten, 82, of Brooklyn. “How would I feel if my husband didn’t come home from work one night?”
Thomas (Tootsie) Auchinchlos, just back from a vacation in Florida, donated $116. “That’s okay,” said the Manhattan street-worker. “I won it on the ponies anyway.”
One donation, of $20, was signed, simply, “Rosey the Riveter.”
A bowling club in Huntington, workers in a Newark paint factory, an infantry troop at Fort Dix about to go overseas, perhaps never to return—all have given to The Robby Burnes Ransom Fund.
What about you?
“Uncle Guido!” Frankie Savallo screamed as if he could communicate with his uncle directly through the newspaper. “Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean ‘Kidnappin’ a kid’s a terrible thing’? Always criticizin’ me! Read this, Marie! It’s Uncle Guido, runnin’ the bingo up in the Bronx. Right here he says, ‘You can tell whoever’d do a thing like that don’t have no family…’ My own Uncle Guido said that! Right here in the newspaper! About me!”
“Hoosh, Frankie. It’s all right.”
“Here, I fall off a roof for him in the middle of the night, spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, and here in the newspaper he says I ain’t got no family! My own Uncle Guido!”
“Frankie, you know he’s just sayin’ that for the Holy Name,” Marie soothed. “None of that bingo money will see anythin’ but the darkness of his own pocket. Now you know that, don’t you, darlin’?”
“Yeah, but Marie—insultin’ me here in the newspaper. My own Uncle Guido! What does he mean I don’t have no family of my own? I got my Uncle Guido, don’t I? Whatsa matter with him?”
“Console yourself, Frankie. Here’s this policeman sayin’ it’s a nice professional job and he takes his hat off to us.”
“‘Nice professional job’! Even the cops say it’s a ‘nice professional job.’ And my own Uncle Guido says it’s notta nice!”
“Calm yourself, Frankie. Your Uncle Guido would be jealous, if he knew.”
The New York Times, on page thirty-six, also reported the kidnapping of Robby. Or reported its having been reported.
BOY REPORTED KIDNAPPED
It has been reported by The New York Star that Robert James Saint James Burnes Walter Farhall-Pladroman, S.Nob., son of the late William Duke of Pladroman, was kidnapped in New York City Thursday.
A ransom of $100,000 is demanded by the kidnappers to be raised by public subscription. The boy arrived in New York Wednesday aboard an evacuation ship from England. He is eight years old.
“Hunh!” said Frankie at this last report of a report. “Fat lot of good The New York Times does us!”
“But it’s right!” chirped Robby. “It says I’m eight years old!”
And the Saturday evening edition of The New York Star reported that the Robby Burnes Ransom Fund was up to forty-two thousand dollars.
“Look at that!” exclaimed Frankie. “Forty-two thousand dollars!”
And he looked at Robby with a new appreciation.
“That’s all well and good,” questioned Marie in a soft voice, “but how do we get the money?”
Frankie thought about that quietly.
“Do you think you might swallow your pride, Frankie darlin’,” Marie asked gently, “and ask your Uncle Guido how we collect all this perfectly marvelous ransom people have put up for us?”
“My Uncle Guido!” scoffed Frankie. “He’s not my uncle anymore! He says I don’t have a family!”
“Anyway, Frankie…” Marie studied her fingers fanned out on the kitchen table. “Precious little of the ransom we’d see if your Uncle Guido collected it for us.”
“My Uncle Guido—” Frankie began his expostulatory aria. And he sang and he sang and he sang. He sang high on the scale, and low on the scale. He recited, he declaimed, he reflected. Uncle Guido had never given him much encouragement, he remembered. Uncle Guido had stolen a bicycle for Tony—not Frankie. Uncle Guido bought off the police the time Tony stole the mail truck; he never did such a thing for Frankie. Uncle Guido gave Tony a job smashing the windows of stores which were late paying protection to Uncle Guido; Frankie had to work putting eggs in boxes in a huge, cold warehouse. Uncle Guido gave Tony a new mohair suit; he sent Frankie up onto an icy roof five stories high. Now Tony came and went as he wanted, and Frankie was in a wheelchair. All because of Uncle Guido! Frankie was inconsolable. Frankie was heartbroken that Uncle Guido should criticize him that way in the public press. “Uncle Guido! Columbus!”
Supper was potatoes and french toast. Frankie wailed all through it. Robby took supper as an excuse to dress in his now dry stockings, underwear, shirt and tie.
After supper, while Frankie continued to expostulate in his chair, Marie undressed him, and bathed him with a sponge. Robby watched from the cot. Like most domestic routines, this scene was enacted without either participant speaking directly of it. Frankie could not undress himself without great difficulty, could not fetch water from the kitchen sink, could not wash himself thoroughly. Therefore Marie did it. And when Marie lifted Frankie bodily from the chair, a look in Frankie’s eyes communicated with Robby more completely than could any five-act opera. Frankie’s powerful arms were around Marie’s neck. Although they were helping him to pull himself up, they were pulling himself up against her strength. Robby saw Frankie’s eyes over Marie’s bent shoulder. You shouldn’t be here, kid, Frankie’s eyes said to Robby. No way you should be here.
So, later, after the radio was off and Marie had helped Frankie lift himself from the wheelchair into his cot and Frankie’s eyes had signalled the same message to Robby, You shouldn’t be here, and the lights were off and Marie was snuzzling in her separate cot and the problem of how they could collect the ransom had not been solved, Robby solved the problem by removing it: Quietly he turned back the blankets of his cot, stepped into his shoes, knotted the strings, tiptoed to his overcoat and cap on a chair, picked them up, tiptoed to the door, and opened it.
“Robby?” Frankie whispered from his cot.
Robby stood still in the open door.
“Good luck, kid. Thanks for helpin’ me with the picture puzzle.”
Robby closed the door behind him quietly, and tiptoed down the corridor.
16
Philology
Robby escaped.
However, the question presented itself almost immediately upon his arrival on the dark stoop outside the Savallos’ tenement that, although escaping is All Well and Good, clearly the Right Thing to Do, to where does one escape in America when one is escaping? From what Robby could see, America was all over the United States. And thus far in America Robby had been left shivering on a dock for eight hours, force-marched through a snowstorm, plied with liquor, starved, robbed of his parents’ pictures, marched some more, mugged, starved some more, insulted, sent off on a fool’s mission (to find a school in a land where there obviously aren’t any), kidnapped, nearly suffocated in an underground train, and finally fed while the adults at table casually talked of his eventual dismember
ment. He had escaped…but from what? Jam, lamb and eventual dismemberment. He was to press on relentlessly…but to where?
Subsequently, Robby was to decide that rhetoric is not unlike marmalade: It’s exciting enough to take into one’s system, but after a slightly sticky sensation turning vapid in one’s innards, one is left with little substance other than having had a sweet illusion.
Before him America lay dark and still. He was on the top of a stoop at the top of a T-intersection. The road before him seemed to go nowhere but along itself; it was lightless and changeless. The street that ran from his left to his right was identical in its rightness and leftness; neither side had any characteristic which made him decide in its favor. Robby had already learned that walking blocks and blocks and blocks in New York was no guarantee of getting anywhere, even when one had an idea of where one wanted to get. Both streets before him were broken with potholes and curbs which had not withstood the weight of time. What little light there was reflected icily from the streets’ black surfaces. Black snow formed ranges between sidewalks and streets. The hundred or more windows he saw in the brick buildings around him were blind with drawn shades. Smashed vegetable crates and excelsior from Saturday’s market hours littered the sidewalks and streets.
To that point in his life Robby had not had great experience in making choices. He had never had to decide before where he was going, because he had always been told. He was going to breakfast, to chapel, to class, to luncheon, to nap, to sports, to tea, to commons, to bed. He was going ’round with Tom the driver to the garage to get petrol for the Rolls; he was going to the zoo; he was going to the Thesigers’ for tea. There had always been some place to go; the future was downstream and to get there all one had to do was flow along nicely. Standing on the stoop, Robby even wondered if he might not sneak back into the Savallos’ kitchen apartment and whisper-ask Frankie, now that Robby had escaped, where was he supposed to go—but, no, Robby remembered that Frankie seldom went out these days. The last place Frankie had gone had been five stories up to an icy roof on a dark night, from which he had descended involuntarily and speedily.
When escaping from a kidnap situation, Robby expected a logical place to go would be to the police. But the police, in the figure of Will’um, had known of Robby’s plight and done nothing to encourage his freedom except advise the kidnappers, share their dinner with them, and recommend dismemberment. Robby had heard his father say that police control crime, but it was an education to Robby to discover how precisely, directly and deliberately police control crime. Subsequently, Robby would phrase the reality of crime as a perfect syllogism. Crime exists; police exist: ergo crime and police coexist.
Frankie had already appealed to His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States and even if Frankie hadn’t expressed himself clearly regarding the captivity of Robby Burnes, whoever answered the embassy’s phones clearly expressed complete indifference. Perhaps there would be more concern if the embassy knew that Robby was no longer sheltered nor fed, but Robby had understood one fact regarding the British embassy above all others: It was a long distance. Supposedly the school to which he had been assigned was within the neighborhood of the Lowrys’ flat, and he had never gotten there. A long distance in America, Robby already understood, was prohibitive.
Robby wondered where the Evacuation Ladies might be found on a late Saturday evening. At least they knew his name. They had called it enough. They knew Burnes, Robert as coming between Adowitz, Abraham and Collins, Peter. Robby envisioned the Evacuation Ladies’ Saturday evening as sitting around a warm parlor in cardigans practicing their roll-calling. Besides having no idea how to contact the Evacuation Ladies, Robby’s pride came to the fore. On Wednesday Robby had been a problem which the Evacuation Ladies had solved to their own satisfaction. Problems solved on Wednesdays should not reappear on Saturday evenings. It would disappoint them. Possibly make them think they’d shirked their work.
And Thadeus Lowry. Shivering on the stoop Robby thought long and hard about Thadeus Lowry. Contacting Thadeus Lowry would be easy. All he need do was ask anybody—if there happened to be anybody around. Everyone knew Thadeus Lowry of The New York Star, had said Thadeus Lowry of The New York Star. Thadeus Lowry might be glad to see him. Thadeus Lowry had done several days’ work now, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and, Robby presumed, Saturday, and might be glad to return to one of the clubs where he was a regular and discuss again the time in 1938 when the Bishop stole the altar plate. Doubtlessly all this work would have been damaging to Thadeus Lowry, in his chérie’s terms, brutal, in his own, absolutely exhausting. However, Robby was shrewd enough to realize Thadeus Lowry might not be glad to see him. He and Ronald Jasper had discussed that Thadeus Lowry had not had a good story since the Bishop stole the altar plate in 1938 and that Thadeus Lowry stood on such thin ice regarding his continued employment at the newspaper that he was getting water on the knee. It was clear to Robby that Thadeus Lowry had a good story now. The Thadeus Lowry byline had been on the front page of The New York Star three days running. Even The New York Times had reported the news that Thadeus Lowry had a story. The goal of one hundred thousand dollars raised from the public via Thadeus Lowry’s prose had been set. Robby tried to envision the expression on the face of Thadeus Lowry if Robby—when less than half the money had been raised—skipped gaily into the city room of The New York Star chirruping some playful ditty as “Never fear, Uncle dear, I’m here” between editions. The expression on Thadeus Lowry’s face might be similar to that on the face of Frankie Savallo on that dark night just after leaving a roof five stories above the ground and discovering he couldn’t fly.
Besides, reasoned Robby, Thadeus Lowry and his wife had a disdain for food which Robby did not share. In the short time Robby had spent with Thadeus Lowry, Robby had discovered that being well-fed was an illusion to which Thadeus Lowry clung most fervidly and uselessly. He dreamed meals, luncheons, teas, dinners and breakfasts before they happened and after they had never happened. He even reported savory meals in the newspaper, dinner of roast duck, sausage and plum pudding, breakfast of kippered herring, muffins and weak tea which no one had ever savored. Robby knew he had had chowder biscuits, bread, water and catsup. Robby thus came to make his first mature decision in the most mature way. His criterion was that element upon which all worthy decisions are made, the fulcrum upon which everyone decides where he will go next, what he will do next, upon which all life plans and employment projections are settled, upon which nations are constructed and collapsed, governments are elected and ejected, revolutions are raised and subsided, wars started and stopped. Robby decided on behalf of his stomach. He was going to go where there was food; he was going to do whatever was necessary to eat. So decide we all.
Robby considered where he had seen food since arriving in this land of milk and honey. Why, to make the legend good: right in front of him! In bringing him to her home, Marie Savallo had marched Robby through an open-air market full of oranges and apples and bananas and melons and potatoes and tomatoes and heads of lettuce and cabbages and sausages and hams and pudent chickens and food Robby had never even seen before. And the market was right in front of him! At most, down half a block and through that building full of animal carcasses now closed. In the dark it did not look it, it did not seem possible that this landscape was the fringe of an area peopled with aproned men and women all trying to empty their pushcarts full of food. Having a memory of the past, Robby knew a hope for the future.
He decided to stay right where he was. He decided to go nowhere.
Yet it would be a long night, and a cold one. Standing on the Savallos’ stoop he already knew it to be a long night and a cold one. He needed shelter. An enclosed place, off the snow and out of the wind. A place where he had some hope of snuggling into warmth.
The landscape didn’t offer much. At first he didn’t think it offered anything at all. The stoops were solid, the cellar-ways fenced, the sidewalks and streets snowbound and slick. There was a small p
aneled truck parked at the curb in front of him.
He went down to the van, tried the handle of the back door, and, to his surprise, it opened. With his hands he rummaged around inside. On the floor of the van were burlap sacks of potatoes. He had shelter, food, and a place to snuggle himself into warmth.
He had reasoned, sought, and found.
Robby climbed into the back of the paneled truck, pulled the door closed behind him, snuggled among the sacks of potatoes and, having recapitulated ontogeny, fell asleep.
* * *
Robby felt and heard a door slam.
Then he heard and felt an engine start.
The motor was making the paneled truck vibrate.
Robby’s shelter began to move down the street, away, he feared, from his source of food.
Tossing off the potato sacks, Robby crawled forward and pressed his nose against the glass separating him from the cab. There were no streetlights. Cars and trucks in the wartime streets had hooded headlights. He had only a three-quarter view of the head of the man driving the van.
Yet Robby knew it was Tony Savallo.
He sank back against the potato sacks under the little window. Good old Tony Savallo. Loving Tony Savallo. He placed the clear, tight skin of his hand against my cheek and tousled my hair. Masculine Tony Savallo. Smelled of lead pencils, as a man should smell of something. Kind and gentle Tony Savallo, a man of peace. Wouldn’t go to war; rather help his uncle run bingo for the church. Calm and still Tony Savallo. Said little but “thank you.” Slept with the dignity of a kingly sarcophagus at Westminster. Wise, understanding Tony Savallo. Understood more than greed in Marie’s kidnapping me, perceived her loneliness and compassion and love. Good old Tony Savallo!
The van slowed, stopped.
Robby got up again, knelt on the potato sacks, pressed his nose and cheeks against the small, thick window. Behind the driver’s wheel, Tony was looking through his open window. He was watching a man walking along the sidewalk. Robby could see the man as a walking silhouette against an empty lot covered with fairly white snow. Tony was pointing something through the window, at the man.
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