“You call her a good woman? When you have her in your bed? What kind of man are you?” Rudy ranted. “To run off with another man’s wife!”
From that moment Leo’s memories remained a blur; he recalled a series of images, yet all occurring at the same time, frozen, as in a tableau, and illuminated by blinding flashes of lighting, while the storm raged outside:
“You can’t take her!” Rudy is shouting. “She’ll never go with you. If you want the kid so much, go ahead – take him.”
“I’m taking him with me-” That is Emily’s voice.
“Shut your mouth, you whore.”
Rudy must have struck her then, for she cries out in pain; Leo can bear it no longer; he starts down the stairs, then stops, cowering against the wall as the doors slide open and Emily comes hurrying through, John behind her, then Rudy. Rudy grabs John by the shoulder and swings him around, and the two men struggle.
Catching sight of Leo on the staircase, Emily reaches out to him. He wants to rush down, to fly to her and throw his arms around her, hide his eyes so he can’t see. But at that moment the combatants break apart. John stands disheveled, breathing heavily, while Rudy pulls away and with another curse runs into the shop. Emily entreats John to leave quickly, before there is more trouble. “He’ll do something terrible, I know it.” But John refuses. “Not without you. Come with me, now. Leo too. We’ll all go.”
Leo starts down the stairs. Quickly – quickly – Mother, let’s go before – before the bridge – we must get across the river… All around, the thunder crashes. A livid streak of lightning turns everything silver. He trips on the stair, stumbles, sees, in another flash of lightning, Emily’s white face twisted in an agony of pain and despair – “Mother!” -he reaches out to her – “Mother! MOTHER!”and then he is falling… falling… falling…
He awakes. Where is he? In a white world, pristine in its brightness. A white room, in a white bed with white sheets and coverlet; white, everything is white. In the corner someone sits, a nurse: she wears a white uniform and cap. Is he in a hospital, then? Shortly afterward a doctor comes in;
Leo is sure he’s a doctor because of the stethoscope around his neck. He talks in a coaxing sort of voice, asking lots of questions. Later the nurse talks to him. Her name is Miss Holmes. He doesn’t like her much. She is determined to amuse him. She lays out cards for a game: Authors. Right off Leo draws four Longfellows and a pair of Hawthornes; it’s not hard to beat someone as dumb as Miss Holmes. She has a mustache like the bearded lady in Barnum amp; Bailey’s.
Later, he has a visitor. A woman calling herself Mrs Kranze, who says she knows him. Is she crazy? Leo has never seen her before. A friend, she tells him; she is a friend of his mother’s.
“I want my mother,” he says, as if the saying would produce Emily’s corporeal form. Mrs Kranze’s face is all screwed up, tears are squeezed from her puffy eyes.
“Gone. She’s gone.” She sobs onto his hair. “Poor child, poor, poor boy. What is to become of you now?”
Mother? M-mother? Where is she? The pain in his head is bad; the darkness is coming back, the white room is turning to black, and out of the blackness, the terrible jolt of memory. Something about the bridge? Yes, that’s it – the bridge – the L Street Bridge – his mother – the bridge. “Did she go over the bridge?” he asks. “Did she go across?” Mrs Kranze stares at him, biting her lips, the tears running down beside her large nose. “Yes,” she says, at last, “across the bridge.”
Over at Three Corner Cove the darkness was suddenly cleaved as the Oliphants’ porch light came on. In a moment the phonograph began playing:
You go to my head Like a sip of sparkling Burgundy brew And I find the very mention of you Like the kicker in a julep or two.
Honey appeared and sat down on the top step, eating from a dish propped on her knees: Ice cream? Leo wondered. Her hair burnished by the lamplight, she seemed to go with the music; she was sparkling burgundy, and he wished he were sitting next to her. But then-, as he watched, someone else materialized from the shadows. Reece sat beside her until she finished her ice cream and set the dish down. Then he got up and pulled her to him, and they began dancing, to the music.
The thrill of the thought
That you might give a thought
To my plea casts a spell over me.
Still I say to myself,
“Get a hold of yourself,
Can’t you see that it never can be.”
Leo’s heart was doing flip-flops. If he required any schooling in the way of a man with a maid, there it was, chapter and verse, the music, the starlight, the sweet nothings whispered in the ear. That was how grown-ups behaved, he guessed; Reece wasn’t a boy, but a man, a combination of brain, muscles, glamour, and good looks, the flickering flame around which pretty moths like Honey Oliphant were bound to flit. And even after he had fallen asleep he continued to see the pair, turning and turning together, whirling like love phantoms in the dream dark, round and round in each other’s arms while the music played and the moonlight danced on the water of Moonbow lake and there were kisses in the shadows.
The luscious lipsticked damsel with tresses of gleaming gold leaned languidly upon the casement while down below her lovesick troubadour strummed his mandolina and crooned “Come into the Garden, Maude.” The more passionate his song, the more languidly the beauteous creature leaned across the sill, her hand like some pale and fragile blossom as it gestured for her lover to ascend, a la Rapunzel, by making a ladder of her long lustrous looks. The song ended, the troubador flung away his instrument (it was a ukulele) and climbed -or tried to- in order to receive a kiss from his lady’s rosy lips. Success, however, was not in the cards. It was a difficult moment; the weight of the amorous swain loosened the poor damsel’s hair, which when it pulled free revealed Gus Klaus in female disguise, while the troubadour (Zipper Tallon) tumbled to the floor amid shouts and laughter, and the stage curtains (campers’ blankets strung on a wire) swung to.
Cheers and jeers and thunderous stamping of feet greeted the conclusion of the skit, the noise rising to the roof beam from which the famous Camp Friend-Indeed horn chandelier shed upon the scene the glow of some two dozen kerosene lanterns. In the camp’s earliest days Pa and Hank Ives had put the structure together out of the antlers of countless deer, elk, and moose, along with a pair from an African antelope contributed by Dagmar Kronborg and taken from the trophy walls of the Castle itself. More than six feet in diameter, three times that in circumference, suspended on a thick hawser through a block and tackle screwed into the rooftree, the fixture now actually shook, so great was the din.
Until a few years before, the Major Bowes Amateur Night theatricals had been held in the dining hall, but, thanks as usual to the generosity of Big Rolfe Hartsig, who had sent one of his construction crews over to put up the Teddy Roosevelt Memorial Nature Lodge, all such camp activities were now presented in the building on the lower campus, which this evening was filled almost to overflowing; every seat was taken, with the younger fry seated cross-legged on the floor in front of the stage, each camp unit with its respective group of counselors, each counselor doing his best to quell the high-spirited rowdiness that always enlivened such gatherings. Up front the center section had been reserved for staffers and their guests, among whom tonight was Ma’s old friend Dagmar, making her first visit to Friend-Indeed since Stanley Wagner’s malfeasance had led her to bar the Castle to campers. When she walked in, there had been a buzz among the boys – did this mean all was forgiven? – and embarrassed looks, but now, after the third skit of the evening, she seemed one of them again, obviously enjoying herself, her laughter ringing out above that of the loudest camper in the room.