The Night of the Moonbow (15 page)

Resolved to heed the silent warning, Leo shut his own eyes and tried to get some sleep. But sleep would not come that night, and he lay long awake, thinking about the luckless Stanley, who might have had bad dreams too, and about his sudden, mysterious departure. Leo decided he didn’t want to know too much about Stanley.

Ma Starbuck, seated with her ear as close to Pa’s static-riddled Atwater-Kent radio speaker as her bulk would allow, nodded emphatically. As usual, “Ma Perkins” was right. If Lauralee, a “modern” housewife, really wanted to hold on to her mate, Buzz Morgan - a “real good” garage mechanic who tuned up engines over at Zeke’s Service Station - she was just going to have to quit flirting with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who happened by.

“Ma Perkins” was a latter-day oracle in the Starbuck household, and no matter how busy she was, Ma stopped what she was doing to catch the quarter-hour broadcast, which just now vied with the whirr and clatter of the antiquated Gestetner machine grinding out The Pine Cone. Ma was used to doing several things at once (there was a brace of apple pies cooling on the shelf outside her kitchen window), but “Ma Perkins” was too good to miss, and not until Lauralee had agreed to watch her step (though she sure would like to “get outta this burg and see some city lights”) did Ma return to her typewriter, set up by the window so she could keep an eye on the compound formed by three façades - barn, store, and office - that was the hub of the upper camp.

Across the way in the barn, morning crafts session was in full swing. One of the oldest in the district, the barn was well suited to its current purpose, its old stalls, tackrooms, and lofts having been readily transformed into workrooms - the Marconi Radio Shop (in the hayloft), the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop, the Rembrandt Paint Shop, the Silas Marner Weaving Shop, the Paul Revere Metalworking Shop - and on any morning except Sunday the place rang to the din of ball-peen hammers on sheet copper and saws eating wood, to the ceaseless hum of voices as young craftsmen went about the business of creating a work of art, this summer under the gentle guidance of Fritz Auerbach.

From time to time one of the boys would lay down his tools and come out to the pump for a cooling drink or to make a purchase at the Coop (stopping by the office first to get the money from his spending envelope). The Coop had once been exactly what its name implied, a chicken coop housing a flock of Rhode Island Reds, from which, in the camp’s earlier years, Ma had extracted her nickle of “egg money.” Nowadays, for two hours every morning and another in the evening, from behind its full-length oilcloth-covered counter, the counselors took turns vending materials for leather craft, beadwork, woodburning, and other handicraft projects, as well as candy bars and soda pop kept chilled in an old cold box upon which the legend MOXIE had all but worn away.

Now, through the window of the barn that marked the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop, Ma glimpsed the feathered Tyrolean cap belonging to Fritz Auerbach. He was hard at work on his pet project, a scale model of a village in Austria called Durenstein, which, when completed, was intended as a special gift for Camp Friend-Indeed.

“Hi, Fritz,” she called. “How’s it going with all the little folk?”

Fritz put his head out the window and laughed. “No little folk today, Mrs Starbuck, only little houses.”

“I thought you was gonna call me Ma, like everybody else at camp.”

“Okay, Ma, you’re the boss.” He tipped his hat brim over his eye and withdrew, catching his feather in a knothole. Ma beamed approvingly. She liked Fritz; everyone did.

Though he supervised all arts-and-crafts activities, the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop was Fritz’s personal duchy. Here he had set himself up with a sturdy workbench, a vise, chisels, knives, scroll saws, and other wood-working tools, and the adjacent walls were hung with tiny figures, human and animal, cleverly carved from chunks of wood and destined for the village: bushy-tailed squirrels, a tortoise, a deer, a man in lederhosen and a feathered cap. For Fritz was a master woodworker, and the Swoboda corner had become extremely popular with many of the campers, from the older boys in High Endeavor, eager to learn his carving secrets, to the cadets from Virtue like Peewee Oliphant, who crowded around him as he perched on his stool amid the aromatic sawdust and wood shavings.

Durenstein, the village on the outskirts of Vienna, was a place Fritz knew well - a little corner of his childhood that held many happy memories, unclouded by the misfortunes that had befallen him since. Sometimes, as he worked, he would tell the campers stories about how on Sundays in springtime he and his family would drive out of the city in their big touring car to take lunch under the arbor at a little cafe where the hasenpfeffer was tasty and they would drink May wine with strawberries in each glass and afterward sing the old German songs.

But no more. Fritz did not care to hear those songs any longer. It saddened Ma, for it didn’t seem likely he would ever see his family again - at Durenstein, or anywhere else. The Auerbachs had been one of the oldest and most respected banking families in Vienna; since the Austrian Nazis began their bid for power they had coveted the fortune of the family of Jews, and one night - this was some months before the Anschluss, when Hitler’s panzer units had rolled across the border into Austria -the Brownshirts had descended on the Auerbach house, breaking in at the front while the family escaped through the alley with only the clothes on their backs and a few bits of jewelry. Fritz, who had been away at school in Geneva, was sure his father would try to reach New York, and had himself made his way to America to wait, boarding with a family in Middletown and earning his tuition at Wesleyan by private tutoring in the German language. Among those he had taught had been Rex Kenniston’s younger brother, and it had been on Rex’s recommendation that Fritz, though a Jew, had been offered the post at Camp Friend-Indeed.

The results, Ma decided, had been gratifying. For Fritz, who had the most reason for complaint of all the young men on Pa’s staff, gave the impression of being the most content, and was the most easygoing and pleasant to be around, doing his utmost to hide the anguish that had already touched his dark, curly hair with silver. He was also - as Ma’s friend Dagmar Kronborg had pointed out with satisfaction - responsible for bringing to Friend-Indeed something of the “culture” the boys had encountered heretofore only on occasional visits to the Castle. Indeed, he had turned the so-called White House, the small cottage of which he was sole tenant, into the acknowledged cultural hub of the entire camp.

Ma smiled to herself. Being a “cultural hub” suited the little house, she thought, picturing it set in the grove of slender birches: the low, narrow doorway elegantly fronted by a sliver of porch, with its decorative bits of curlicue and filigree, and boasting a pair of Doric columns that had once framed the doorway of a building in Junction City. The tiny one-room “playhouse” Pa had contrived with Henry Ives in order to keep Ma close to him in that long-ago time when love was fresh had in recent years been the residence of Hap Holliday, who had been far from pleased at being relegated for the season to a bunk at Bachelors’ Haven, the staff dorm. But Ma had made up her mind as soon as she heard Fritz’s tragic story from Dr Dunbar. “That boy’ll need a home,” she had told Pa, “a place where he can be alone.” And when Fritz had moved into the cottage with his meager possessions - the few treasures he’d brought with him from Switzerland (an antique chess set, an album of stamps, and a pewter-lidded stein reputed to have come from “King Ludwig’s castle at Neuschwanstein”), a small shelf of books, and a collection of classical and jazz recordings that he played on an old Victrola he’d picked up in a Junction City secondhand shop - she knew she’d done the right thing. Besides, lately Fritz was proving an agreeable companion for Leo Joaquim, giving him a game of checkers and lending him books. A well-educated, cultured person like Fritz was bound to have an effect on the poor orphan, might even influence his entire future, help to mold him into the sort of person Ma believed him capable of becoming. “Glad Men from Happy Boys,” wasn’t that the Moonbow motto, Pa’s favorite slogan?

The sun having crept into her eyes, she adjusted her celluloid eyeshade to cut the glare as she checked on Willa-Sue, who was sitting on the slatted bench under the grape arbor, among the ragged clumps of snapdragons and hollyhocks, cradling her doll, and watching Jezebel, who was on the hunt for mice among the arbor’s sagging posts.

Ma sighed. Pa himself had carpentered the arbor some twenty-five years before, and in those happier days he and she would sit side by side on that same bench, holding hands and planning the future, in anticipation of which Pa had also constructed a cradle. But it wasn’t until the thirteenth year of their marriage that their union had been blessed by the precious gift of a child, a baby girl born just before Christmas, and when two whole summers had passed and they had yet to hear her first words it had dawned on Ma that there must be something wrong. Medical science and Doc Thomason had confirmed her suspicions. Pa had been brokenhearted, taking it as a personal insult

— Starbuck males didn’t breed mental defectives - and a new chapter had opened in the life story of Mary and Garland Starbuck.

Pa took to sleeping in the spare room in the narrow bed and turned away from his daughter and his wife; even the camp that he had founded, and its “boys,” seemed to lose their place in his heart. As for Ma, being by nature optimistic and resourceful, she had taken the disappointment in her stride. If Willa-Sue was a bit slow, that was all right; at least she wasn’t sickly or peaked, the way some children were, and Ma could help her along with her lessons. The trouble was, the boys enjoyed making fun of her. One camper in particular, and that had been most upsetting because of who he was; though it had happened so many years ago now, Ma had never forgotten it. She had been sitting right here in this very chair in this same office; the boys were hiking past the window to the dining hall. A few had stopped to play with Willa-Sue; another - Reece Hartsig, then a camper in Harmony - had impatiently urged them to hurry up.

“Come on, you spuds, leave the dummy alone and let’s hop it!”

The dummy.

“Dum-dum dummy,” the boys shouted and ran away. Ma had grabbed the child from her playpen and carried her inside as if she’d been burned by fire. Pa, connected up to his radio set by earphones, had missed it all. She never told him what had happened. It would have done no good, no good at all.

It was then Ma finally realized that the man she lived with was no longer the man she had married. And nowadays -nowadays, out for a walk among the Moonbow byways, he had his eyes forever on the treetops and the little birds that hopped about among their branches, and on the clouds floating above the trees, and on the sky beyond the clouds, and saw almost nothing of the doings of “his boys.” And this was too bad, because there were some problems Ma couldn’t solve - in particular those concerning that same Reece Hartsig and the new boy in Jeremiah, Leo Joaquim. The morning after the Snipe Hunt Reece had come storming into the office, griping about the dumb trick Leo had played on Phil and Wally and demanding that Ma switch him with Talbot in Isaiah; the new boy, he said, would never make a Jeremian, and would cost the cabin the Trophy. Ma wouldn’t budge. To Jeremiah had Leo come, in Jeremiah would he stay. Frankly, she thought him real clever, resourceful too (not many new campers so much as suspected the truth behind the Snipe Hunt), but even if she had been so inclined she would not have acceded to Reece’s request, which would have meant separating Leo from Tiger Abernathy. She had reminded the counselor of the happy points his new camper was already earning for Jeremiah with his spider collection, and Reece had seemed mollified. Still Ma couldn’t be sure; if only Pa would have a word with him - but she knew the likelihood of that was small, the summer would be gone before he did.

She forced herself out of her morose reverie and returned to the task at hand. As she completed the last page of The Pine Cone and peeled it from the machine, Leo himself appeared in the barn doorway and headed for the pump. For some reason Willa-Sue had fixed her interest on the new boy from the first day - probably because he was one of the few campers who paid her a degree of attention - and now, slumped on the bench, she ogled him across the compound, idly fingering the ribbon Ma had put in her hair.

“Willa-Sue, pull your dress down,” Leo told her as he passed. “People can see up it.”

Ma shook her head at the child. “Willa-Sue, honey,” she called through the window, “you heard what Leo said. And leave off tugging your ribbon, it looks so pretty. The way you look today, you could be a movie star if you wanted. What would my lambie-pie like for lunch? How’s about a nice cold plate?”

Willa-Sue’s dour features set like plaster and she eyed her parent with a sulky expression.

“Horsecock,” she blurted.

“Now, hush you, Willa-Sue, I told you, nice girls don’t talk like that, that’s boy talk. If you don’t want a cold plate, how’s about a nice sammich?”

WillarSue jammed a thumb in her mouth and stared. “What kind of sammich would my honeybunch like?” Ma prompted.

“Penis butter and jelly.”

That old joke; Ma shook her head despairingly, and called through the window for Leo to keep an eye on Willa-Sue while she went into the kitchen to make lunch; obligingly he carried his copper mug full of water over to the arbor and sat down beside her.

***

“Wacko Wacko, chews tobacco ...” Willa-Sue stared at Leo, her bug-eyes slightly crossed, a giddy expression on her sallow face.

“Wacko, Wacko, chews tobacco,” she said again.

Leo spoke sternly. “I asked you not to call me that. My name’s Leo: L-e-o. Leo. For ‘Leopold.’ It’s the name of a king. Leopold, King of the Belgians.”

“Lee-pole.”

“Pold. With a d. Lee-oh-podub. Can you say it?”

“Leo-pol-dub.”

“Well, it’s better than Wacko,” he muttered.

“Wacko, Wacko.” She rolled her eyes and burred her lips at him.