The Night of the Moonbow (11 page)

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 his 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.

Soon the trip on the green trolley to Mr Schneidermann’s became a regular part of Leo’s routine. As he passed over the bridge he would gaze from the streetcar window down into the river thirty feet below, where Mr Kranze and his crew (Mr Kranze was a foreman on the state bridge-and-highway commission) were working to replace some badly rusted beams in the old king span. The view both exhilarated and repelled Leo. He knew he was safe on the streetcar - the gong went ding-ding, the wheels went rattle-and-clank, and on the overhead wire the little wheel that ran along gave off bright sparks - yet what if the bridge were to give way? Two years before, the thaw-swollen Cataraugus River had overflowed its banks and risen to street level, carrying away entire houses. And though the bridge itself had held, a woman and her child had been drowned in the flood, and Leo imagined that the woman was Emily, he the child, and that the bridge actually did give way and they both drowned in the foaming torrent.

Sometimes, when Rudy was too busy in the shop to miss her, Emily would go upstreet on the trolley car with Leo, to listen to him play. And sometimes, while Leo went upstairs for his lesson, Emily would wait downstairs in Mr Burrough’s office - she could hear perfectly well, she assured Leo - and when the lesson was over, Mr Burroughs, who said to call him John, would offer Leo taffy treats wrapped in colored waxed paper.

For a time Leo - and Emily - had been content in the belief that they were getting away with their subterfuge. Rudy seemingly paid no attention to their comings and goings (he was giving them enough rope to hang themselves, Leo later decided), all he cared about was his butcher shop. Then Leo had exciting news: John Burroughs arranged for Leo to travel by bus to Hartford to play an audition at the music school in that city, and Leo played so well that he was offered a special scholarship to continue his music education.

Emily was ecstatic. Her dream, she said over and over, was to have Leo play for the great conductor, Toscanini, and someday to be accepted into his radio orchestra, so she could tune in the program and hear Leo play. There was no doubt in her mind that she was raising a true musical prodigy, like Mozart or Chopin, and she craved the same sort of fame for her son.

But it was not to be. One day Rudy discovered the box of saltwater taffy John had given Leo, and he forced from him the truth about where the candy had come from. He cursed the name of Burroughs and swore he’d kill the man. He dragged Emily by the hair into the bedroom and berated her. Then he beat her mercilessly, until the terrified Leo ran down the stairs, out through the door, and over to Mrs Kranze. She called the police, who came and took Rudy away in the wagon, and Emily had a mouse in her eye for nearly a week, and an ankle she’d fallen on that had to be taped for her to walk.

When they let Rudy out of jail he came home sullen and unchastened, and snicked his belt out of his loops and bent Leo over his knee. And if the punishment failed to fit the crime, what did Rudy care? Leo was sent to bed without his supper and Emily wasn’t allowed near him. He cried himself to sleep and awoke to cloudy skies: that day the rains came and the river began to swell - the river that would free him from Rudy’s tyranny, but lose Leo his beloved mother as well.

He returned the photograph to his wallet, then rolled over on his stomach, feet crossed in the air, chin propped in his palms, as he regarded what he could see of the Haunted House: its yellow-painted clapboards and mermaid’s scales aged to an unappealing mustard shade, its tall, narrow windows bare of shutters, the glass broken out long ago, so that the empty oblongs stared out with a grim sort of blindness. Not surprising, Leo thought, when they had only a weed lot and a heap of coke cinders to gaze upon. Strange, the feeling the house gave him. What was it? Terrible things had taken place in those empty rooms that reminded him of

-    what? What did it remind him of?

He shut his eyes tight, trying to squeeze out the dark thought that was like a slippery fish, an eel, maybe; it came swimming out of the black ooze, to dart past his eyes in a bright flash, then, before he could catch it, to be swallowed up again in the inky blackness. It was like fishing at the bottom of the sea, where stinging, paralyzing creatures lurked, anemones that bloomed like flowers and then shocked you to death.

A piece of the puzzle was missing, something he needed to put it all together, but like the little fish it eluded him. Perhaps it was better this way; sometimes it didn’t do to pry into these matters too much. Lift up a rock and you never knew what might crawl out. Maybe that was why people got amnesia, so they wouldn’t remember what they wanted so badly to forget. Leo knew a thing or two about amnesia. He remembered the doctor’s face, not Dr Percival at the Institute, but the other doctor - Epstein was his name

-    who wore the white coat with the row of pens and pencils picketing the edge of his starched pocket. Eagle pencils they were, funny how Leo could remember a minor detail like that when he couldn’t remember - again that little fish of thought swam into his ken, but though he baited a hook he had no luck.

Resettling himself in a more comfortable position, he took his pen and notebook and began writing. Miss Meekum had been right: the notebook would give him a record of his Moonbow summer, one he’d cherish at a later time, and he’d been not only jotting down accounts of his day-to-day activities, and making notes on spiders, but trying his hand at stories, and character sketches of some of the campers he’d met so far - the ones he didn’t care for, bullies like Bullnuts Moriarity, and some of his cronies from High Endeavor, and the ones he did, like the other Jeremians, especially Tiger and the Bomber, and, next door in Ezekiel, Junior Leffingwell and Emerson Bean and Dusty Rhoades, who had been friendly toward him.

His concentration was broken as he heard a Tarzan yell, and, looking up he saw Tiger and Harpo charging across the meadow; with them came Eddie Fiske and the Bomber, venting the throaty cry of the born Berserker, charging at Leo head down, arms spread like airplane wings, palms flattening the tops of the Queen Anne’s lace. He threw himself down beside Leo, narrowly missing the violin case, which Tiger yanked from destruction only at the last moment.

“Cripes, spud, watch where you’re dumping that big can of yours, will ya?”

The Bomber looked around him. “I didn’t do nothin’. Jeez...”

“You would’ve crushed it if you’d sat on it.”

“But I din’t sit on it!”

“Yeah, but you
almost
did.”

“Nerts.”

The Bomber made himself comfortable, then pulled an Oh Henry! bar from his pocket and began peeling off the wrapper. The three boys had met up at Orcutt’s and made their purchases together. Tiger spilled out between his bare knees the contents of a small paper sack: flat squares of brightly wrapped bubble-gum packets, each one containing a card bearing a portrait of either a befeathered Indian chief or a famous baseball player. He offered Leo his choice of the packets to start his own gum-card collection: Leo got Lefty Gomez.

“Hey, Leo, aren’t you supposed to be at Sandbag College?” the Bomber asked, munching on the Oh Henry! bar.