Lost in the Funhouse (8 page)

The Sphinxes all got to laughing and fooling around about Herman Goltz’s sister and about Peggy Robbins and her boyfriend. Some of the fellows wanted to take after them and razz them, but it was agreed that Tommy James was a tough customer. Somebody believed there had been a scar across his temple.

Herman wailed “Oh lover!” and collapsed against Peter, who wrestled him down into the creepers.

Cheeks burning, Ambrose joined in the merriment. “We ought to put a sign up!
Private Property: No Smooching.
”

The fellows laughed. But not in just the right way.

“Hey guys!” Sandy Cooper said. “Amby says they was smooching!”

Ambrose quickly grinned and cried “Like a duck! Like a duck!”; whenever a person said a thing to fool you, he’d say “Like a duck!” afterward to let you know you’d been fooled.

“Like a duck nothing,” Sandy Cooper rasped. “I bet I know what we’ll find inside.”

“Hey, yeah!” said Peter.

Sandy Cooper had an old flashlight that he carried on his belt, and so they let him go in first, and Peter and Herman and the others followed after. In just an instant Ambrose heard Sandy shout “Woo-hoo!” and there was excitement in the Den. He
heard Peter cry “Let me see!” and Herman Goltz commence to giggle like a girl. Peter said “Let
me
see, damn it!”

“Go to Hell,” said the gritty voice of Sandy Cooper.

“Go to Hell your own self.”

Perse Goltz had scrambled in unnoticed with the rest, but now a Sphinx espied him.

“Get out of here, Perse. I thought I smelt something.”

“You smelt your own self,” the little boy retorted.

“Go on, get out, Perse,” Herman ordered. “You stink.”

“You stink worst.”

Somebody said “Bust him once,” but Perse was out before they could get him. He stuck out his tongue and made a great blasting raspberry at Peter, who had dived for his leg through the entrance.

Then Peter looked up at Ambrose from where he lay and said: “Our meeting’s started.”

“Yeah,” someone said from inside. “No babies allowed.”

“No smooching allowed,” another member ventured, mocking Ambrose in an official tone. Sandy Cooper added that no something-else was allowed, and what it was was the same word that would make him laugh sometimes instead of sicking his Chesapeake Bay dog on you.

“You and Perse skeedaddle now,” Peter said. His voice was not unkind, but there was an odd look on his face, and he hurried back into the Den, from which now came gleeful whispers. The name
Peggy Robbins
was mentioned, and someone dared, and double-dared, and dee-double-dared someone else, in vain, to go invite Ramona Peters to the meeting.

Perse Goltz had already gone a ways up the beach. Ambrose went down the high bank, checking his slide with the orange roots of undermined trees, and trudged after him. Peter had said, “Go to Hell your own self,” in a voice that told you he was used to saying such things. And the cursing wasn’t the worst of it.

Ambrose’s stomach felt tied and lumpy; by looking at his
arm a certain way he could see droplets standing in the pores. It was what they meant when they spoke of
breaking out in a cold sweat:
very like what one felt in school assemblies, when one was waiting in the wings for the signal to step out onto the stage. He could not bear to think of the moustachioed boyfriend: that fellow’s wink, his curly hair, his leather jacket over white shirt and green tie, filled Ambrose’s heart with comprehension; they whispered to him that whatever mysteries had been in progress in the Den, they did not mean to Wimpy James’s brother what they meant to Peggy Robbins.

Toward her his feelings were less simple. He pictured them kicking her out of the Nurses’ Home: partly on the basis of Herman Goltz’s story about his sister, Ambrose imagined that disgraced student nurses were kicked out late at night, unclothed; he wondered who did the actual kicking, and where in the world the student nurses went from there.

Every one of the hurricanes that ushered in the fall took its toll upon the riverbank, with the result that the upper beach was strewn with trees long fallen from the cliff. Salt air and water quickly stripped their bark and scoured the trunks. They seemed never to decay; Ambrose could rub his hands along the polished gray wood with little fear of splinters. One saw that in years to come the Jungle would be gone entirely. He would be a man then, and it wouldn’t matter. Only his children, he supposed, might miss the winding paths and secret places—but of course you didn’t miss what you’d never had or known of.

On the foreshore, in the wrack along the high-water line where sandfleas jumped, were empty beer cans, grapefruit rinds, and hosts of spot and white perch poisoned by the run-off from the canneries. All rotted together. But on the sand beach, in the sun and wind, Ambrose could breathe them deeply. Indeed, with the salt itself and the pungent oils of the eelgrass they made the very flavor of the shore, exhilarating to his spirit. It was a bright summer night; Peggy Robbins had just been kicked out of the Nurses’ Home, and the only way she could keep everybody
from seeing her was to run into the Jungle and hide in the Sphinx’s Den. As it happened, Ambrose had been waked by a clanking in the alleyway and had gone outside to drive off the black dogs or the Arnie twins, whichever were rooting in the garbage. And finding the night so balmy, he strolled down to the rivershore and entered the Jungle, where he heard weeping. It was pitch black in the Den; she cringed against the far wall.

“Who is it?”

“It is the only man who ever really loved you.”

She hugged and kissed him; then, overcome by double shame, drew away. But if he had accepted her caresses coolly, still he would not scorn her. He took her hand.

“Ah Peggy. Ah Peggy.”

She wept afresh, and then one of two things happened. Perhaps she flung herself before him, begging forgiveness and imploring him to love her. He raised her up and staunched her tears.

“Forgive you?” he repeated in a deep, kind voice. “Love forgives everything, Peggy. But the truth of the matter is, I can’t forget.”

He held her head in both his hands; her bitter tears splashed his wrists. He left the Den and walked to the bank-edge, leaned against a tree, stared seaward. Presently Peggy grew quiet and went her way, but he, he stayed a long time in the Jungle.

On the other hand perhaps it was that he drew her to him in the dark, held her close, and gave her to know that while he could never feel just the same respect for her, he loved her nonetheless. They kissed. Tenderly together they rehearsed the secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx’s Den; then he bore her from the Jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of Earth’s waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon. In the shallows they paused to face each other. Warm wavelets flashed about their feet; waterdrops sparkled on their bodies. Washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge.

In the lumberyard down past the hospital they used square pine sticks between the layers of drying boards to let air through. The beach was littered with such sticks, three and four and five feet long; if you held one by the back end and threw it like a spear into the water, nothing made a better submarine. Perse Goltz had started launching submarines and following them down toward the Jungle as they floated on the tide.

“Don’t go any farther,” Ambrose said when he drew near.

Perse asked indifferently: “Why don’t you shut up?”

“All I’ve got to do is give the signal,” Ambrose declared, “and they’ll know you’re sneaking up to spy.”

As they talked they launched more submarines. The object was to see how far you could make them go under water before they surfaced: if you launched them too flat they’d skim along the top; if too deeply they’d nose under and slide up backward. But if you did it just right they’d straighten out and glide several yards under water before they came up. Ambrose’s arms were longer and he knew the trick; his went farther than Perse’s.

“There ain’t no sign,” Perse said.

“There is so. Plenty of them.”

“Well, you don’t know none of them, anyhow.”

“That’s what you think. Watch this.” He raised his hand toward the Jungle and made successive gestures with his fingers in the manner of Mister Neal the deaf and dumb eggman. “I told them we were just launching submarines and not to worry.”

“You did not.” But Perse left off his launching for a moment to watch, and moved no farther down the beach.

“Wait a minute.” Ambrose squinted urgently toward the trees. “
Go … up … the … beach.
They want us to go on up the beach some more.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, and even though Perse said “What a big fake you are,” he followed Ambrose in the direction of the new bridge.

If Ambrose was the better launcher, Perse was the better bombardier: he could throw higher, farther, straighter. The deep shells they skipped out for Ducks and Drakes; the flat ones they sailed top-up to make them climb, or straight aloft
so that they’d cut water without a splash. Beer cans if you threw them with the holes down whistled satisfactorily. They went along launching and bombarding, and then Ambrose saw a perfectly amazing thing. Lying in the seaweed where the tide had left it was a bottle with a note inside.

“Look here!”

He rushed to pick it up. It was a clear glass bottle, a whisky or wine bottle, tightly capped. Dried eelgrass full of sand and tiny musselshells clung round it. The label had been scraped off, all but some white strips where the glue was thickest; the paper inside was folded.

“Gee
whiz!
” Perse cried. At once he tried to snatch the bottle away, but Ambrose held it well above his reach.

“Finders keepers!”

In his excitement Perse forgot to be cynical. “Where in the
world
do you think it come from?”

“Anywhere!” Ambrose’s voice shook. “It could’ve been floating around for years!” He removed the cap and tipped the bottle downward, but the note wouldn’t pass through the neck.

“Get a little stick!”

They cast about for a straight twig, and Ambrose fished into the bottle with it. At each near catch they breathed: “Aw!”

Ambrose’s heart shook. For the moment Scylla and Charybdis, the Occult Order, his brother Peter—all were forgotten. Peggy Robbins, too, though she did not vanish altogether from his mind’s eye, was caught up into the greater vision, vague and splendrous, whereof the sea-wreathed bottle was an emblem. Westward it lay, to westward, where the tide ran from East Dorset. Past the river and the Bay, from continents beyond, this messenger had come. Borne by currents as yet uncharted, nosed by fishes as yet unnamed, it had bobbed for ages beneath strange stars. Then out of the oceans it had strayed; past cape and cove, black can, red nun, the word had wandered willy-nilly to his threshold.

“For pity’s sake bust it!” Perse shouted.

Holding the bottle by the neck Ambrose banged it on a
mossed and barnacled brickbat. Not hard enough. His face perspired. On the third swing the bottle smashed and the note fell out.

“I got it!” Perse cried, but before he could snatch it up, Ambrose sent him flying onto the sand.

The little boy’s face screwed up with tears. “I’ll get you!”

But Ambrose paid him no heed. As he picked up the paper, Perse flew into him, and received such a swat from Ambrose’s free hand that he ran bawling down the beach.

The paper was half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, torn carelessly from a tablet and folded thrice. Ambrose uncreased it. On a top line was penned in deep red ink:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

On the next-to-bottom:

YOURS TRULY

The lines between were blank, as was the space beneath the complimentary close. In a number of places, owing to the coarseness of the paper, the ink spread from the lines in fibrous blots.

An oystershell zipped past and plicked into the sand behind him: a hundred feet away Perse Goltz thumbed his nose and stepped a few steps back. Ambrose ignored him, but moved slowly down the shore. Up in the Jungle the Sphinxes had adjourned to play King of the Hill on the riverbank. Perse threw another oystershell and half-turned to run; he was not pursued.

Ambrose’s spirit bore new and subtle burdens. He would not tattle on Peter for cursing and the rest of it. The thought of his brother’s sins no longer troubled him or even much moved his curiosity. Tonight, tomorrow night, unhurriedly, he would find out from Peter just what it was they had discovered in the Den, and what-all done: the things he’d learn would not surprise now nor distress him, for though he was still innocent of that knowledge, he had the feel of it in his heart, and of other truth.

He changed the note to his left hand, the better to wing an oystershell at Perse. As he did so, some corner of his mind remarked that those shiny bits in the paper’s texture were splinters of wood pulp. Often as he’d seen them in the leaves of cheap tablets, he had not thitherto embraced that fact.

April 21, 1931

Ophir Hall

White Plains, New York

Sir:

Welcome to America. An ordinary citizen extends his wish that your visit with us be pleasant, your surgery successful.

Though not myself a native of your kingdom, I am and have been most alive to its existence and concerns—unlike the average American, alas, to whose imagination the name of that ancient realm summons only white elephants and blue-eyed cats. I am aware, for example, that it was Queen Rambai’s father’s joke that he’d been inside the Statue of Liberty but never in the United States, having toured the Paris foundry while that symbol was a-casting; in like manner I may say that I have dwelt in a figurative Bangkok all my life. My brother, with whose presumption and other faults I hope further to acquaint you in the course of this petition, has even claimed (in his cups) descent from the mad King Phaya Takh Sin, whose well-deserved
assassination—like the surgical excision of a cataract, if I may be so bold—gave to a benighted land the luminous dynasty of Chakkri, whereof Your Majesty is the latest and brightest son. Here as elsewhere my brother lies or is mistaken: we are Occidental, for better or worse, and while our condition is freakish, our origin is almost certainly commonplace. Yet though my brother’s claim is false and (should he press it upon you, as he might) in contemptible taste, it may serve the purpose of introducing to you his character, my wretched situation, and my petition to your magnanimity.