New Moon (12 page)

Then, as suddenly as it came, the cult of the parents left. The campus returned to ordinary time and the bugle took back our days.

One afternoon in mid-August we had the best, most special adventure: the four bunks of Midgets hiked together into the woods to
pick blueberries. The deeper into the wilderness we went, the more bushes there seemed to be, thick with fruit. Our last one stood in a shaft of sun in a clearing so prolific its blue filled the remaining space in our containers. That night the cooks made us our own private pies to the envy of the rest of the camp.

Swago had come and gone in an eternal moment—Chipinaw was abiding and whole.

At the end of that summer I didn’t go back to the City. After the other campers left on the bus, a large black Cadillac came for me. “Ready for Grossinger’s?” asked my grandfather’s driver, Joe, as he pulled up at the bunk. After he wedged my trunk and duffel bag into the car, I sat quietly next to him as he steered unevenly up the hill on which we had so recently conducted flag-raising and spread eagles. Then we bumped along farm roads, past small lakes and bungalows. It was Uncle Wiggily Land, though the cartoon rabbit was transcended by a game board without end.

We glided up a short hill into a cluster of gingerbread castles. GROSSINGER’S HAS EVERYTHING! proclaimed a large notched sign. I saw small jeeps marked S & H Grossinger, some double-parked, others darting about. Amid ornate brown and yellow villas, crowds in beach clothes filled thoroughfares, oblivious to traffic. It was like the Nevele but on a giant scale and with a combined feeling of Times Square and a village fair. Apart from anything perceptible, I had a sense of having entered a new zone of the universe, like Yankee Stadium or the Plaza.

I stood in a marble alcove. Light poured through white curtains onto an orange rug. A Creole singsong summoned “Mr. Richard” to a palatial kitchen where a portly lady named Beulah handed me a bowl. Shiny pots and utensils hung on the walls, plants covered the window sill. There were two vases of flowers, several rows of spice jars, egg-shaped statues for salt and pepper, and a yellow ceramic stove with an overhanging oven—a scullery from a fairy tale.

Bearing strawberry ice cream and a plate of cookies, I sat on a sofa in the living room a bit dazed, taking stock.
This was Uncle Paul’s house.
Suddenly a blond kid a bit younger than Jonny burst in the front door and greeted me with a yodel-like call and a finger pointing to stairs up which he sailed. That was my new brother Michael.

I found him on the second floor down a short hall where he demonstrated a closet filled with toys, stuffed animals, and dozens of games, though in total disarray: boards, tokens, cards, dice, and spinners on the loose and scrambled; different seasons of baseball cards randomly strewn, electric planes, electric boats, miniature football fields with knights and cows on them, the flattened court of ping-pong basketball in among children’s books. As Michael pulled out these items willy-nilly to show me, I got into the spirit. Soon we had most everything in the room and we were riding jumbo toy elephants and tossing clothing and cushions in the air, my mood having changed from trepidation to madhouse.

Our bedlam was interrupted by a stern but bemused voice. I looked up and knew at once this was Aunt Bunny. “Okay, you guys. If you want to play together, behave. Clean up now. Right away.” Afterwards, she led me away into her room, “to get acquainted,” she said.

She looked a little like my mother—dark hair, deep eyes, a large-featured strong face but with an indescribable aura of empathy like the first baseball card of Gil McDougald. She asked me about camp, so I described cookouts, salamander hunts, blueberry pie, and learning to swim. Instead of expecting me to tell her everything was great, she made faces at most of the activities and said I deserved a badge of honor for surviving such a joint.

I smiled bashfully. There was such an obvious buoyancy and kindness to her.

Then she planted herself, chin in hands, on the edge of the bed and asked to my surprise how I liked Doctor Fabian.

“A lot!”

“Is he good on the fears?”

I nodded.

“You and I share that. I don’t know if it makes us special people
or just unlucky.”

“Are you afraid of diseases too?” I asked.

“Every one in the book. Cancer, leukemia, MS; I’m even afraid of ones people only inherit. Howd’ya like to see your Aunt Bunny a sudden dwarf, or a giant?”

I laughed at her exaggeration of mock horror, then warmed to the topic, “Sometimes I hear about new ones that make me scared. When I see an ad on the subway for something like ‘nephereetis’ or MS, I think about having that disease.”

She raised her eyebrows and nodded enthusiastically. “It’s on sale. You can’t even pronounce the name, but you know what it feels like to be dying from it just from looking at the picture.”

“Yup!”

That evening after dinner, sitting alone with Aunt Bunny in her room again, I betrayed the Towers household a dozen times before bedtime snacks. Descriptions of my life there just poured out of me. At hearing criticism of someone else my mother would have flashed a gleam of triumph, but Aunt Bunny seemed honestly pained and said that my mother was one of the frightened people in the world too but too proud to admit it.

She and Uncle Paul had a baby Debby’s age named James. He was cute as a chipmunk, and I carried him around and set him on the floor beside his toys where he made faces and squealed. Michael brought in a record-player and put the needle on
“Jimbo, Jimbo, / whatcha gonna doeeoo?”

After Aunt Bunny read Michael and me a story about Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch in her funny dialect, I was led to my room on the third floor, a realm I shared with Beulah. There was a smaller empty guest room down the hall. My one was a large, spooky chamber with two closets, one to the left and one to the right of a quilted double bed with posts. Under the far window was a radio cabinet with a knob for AM, FM, and short-wave bands. It drew in late-summer ballgames from distant cities; these mixed with songs and voices that waxed and waned in the country night. When I moved the stiff knob one click to short wave and turned the dial, it made squealy, squeaky sounds as foreign languages rolled across each
other. After I finished playing with the radio, I explored the closets.

They were empty but had ominous second closets inside. I
had
to know what was in them before I got into bed. Their doors squeaked spookily as I pulled on the handles. They were as tight as if they had never been opened.

A musty odor enveloped me, and I felt wobbly and homesick, though I was not homesick for the Towers family and could recall no other home.

I stared at old paintings, bottles, lamps, and furniture covered in sheets and dust, locked trunks, portraits of strange people, jacketless hardcover books, bottles, jars. Everything was covered with cobwebs, dead insects, grime that stuck to my touch like mud.

Who were these people? Why I had been brought to this place?

I didn’t belong here, in an assigned room in a strange family’s huge bed, now mine—two new brothers, a different father, a stepmother.

It was a stark capsule into which to place a nine-year-old already on a strange walkabout.

But I climbed into the sheets in exhaustion—for the day had begun at Chipinaw—and fell asleep.

In the morning Beulah had a picnic ready for us. After pancakes and bacon, Aunt Bunny, Michael, and I carted her basket onto a small blue bus. It wound among hills of golfers, down a glen, and then pulled up at a smaller version of Chipinaw Lake.

“This is my favorite spot in the whole hotel,” Aunt Bunny announced as we strode across gravel onto a beach.

From a wee cabin a custodian selected fishing rods and prepared a can of wet leaves and worms. As we finished collecting our gear, Michael pranced ahead to the dock. We got into the bright green rowboat he had chosen. With Aunt Bunny on one oar, me on the other, we made our way out to deep water and cast our lines. After a few minutes I felt a tug and pulled my first small fish wriggling and flipping into the bottom of the boat—such a sad thing bleeding on the hook but its yellow fins luminous in my hand as Aunt Bunny undid it. By lunchtime we had six of them.

That whole day my mind was as empty of fantasy and fear as
it had ever been. I was delighted by every tinge and nuance … racing in my sneakers across the beach to get a pail of water for our catch, setting it beside me on the bus, and handing it triumphantly to Beulah.

Uncle Paul made quite a fuss about our success when cooked versions appeared on our dinner plates. “Well, I married a fisherwoman.” He turned to me. “I bet you didn’t know when you came here you were going to have to catch your supper?”

I shook my head. It was inane but good-humored.

After dinner, Aunt Bunny made popcorn in expanding silver bags that filled to the brim and began to split, hot white kernels popping through. She dumped it in a bowl, then shook salt over it, poured melted butter on top, and stirred it with a wooden spoon. I didn’t know that such an operation existed.

Then she and I set up a board for Monopoly. Michael watched and tried to claim properties and plop down hotels before he knew the rules. Eventually he was satisfied to let me make the moves and just be on my side. Aunt Bunny had grown up in Atlantic City on which the game board was based, so she had stories about real Baltic and Ventnor. As we landed on each property, she told us what it was like to visit them as a little girl. Some of her tales were funny, like her mother stepping in a puddle on Marvin Gardens and splashing her father’s new pants or fleeing an aggressive beggar on Oriental.

“Park Place,” she announced upon my reaching it and pulling out the correct bills to buy it. “That’s where all the expensive properties and high rents still are. You’re a big-time landlord now.”

I grinned despite myself. That she had played in a park by Pacific and St. James Place and gone to dinner on the Boardwalk turned the board’s yellows, reds, and blues into bucolic gardens, flags of a more peregrine world; it wasn’t Monopoly anymore, it was a map of Aunt Bunny’s Oz.

The next day my stepmother led me down the road to the Hotel itself. We entered at a row of indoor shops, like at the Nevele except more in all directions. One was a barber, another a clothing store, another a jeweler, another a lady’s hair salon. Lobbies were packed with people, many of them in fancy clothes and pool gear, greeting
or waving to each other.

On nearby walls hung pictures of baseball players and movie stars posing with Uncle Paul and other family members. As we passed offices, people waved and shouted hellos to us. Pointing at me, Aunt Bunny repeated, “This is Richard, Paul’s son.” Acknowledgments and handshakes went on room after room, floor by floor.

Upstairs where the flow and bustle were headed, we came to a dining room so large I couldn’t see the other end from the entrance. Tables stretched in all directions. As the crowd surged in, waiters glided past, bearing trays stacked with metal-covered plates. It smelled like a restaurant but looked like a busy city.

Uncle Abe, the tiny cherubic maître d’ wearing a carnation in his lapel and lots of cologne, hugged me and had me kiss him on the forehead, then led us to the section where, he explained, family members and celebrities sat. At a cluster of three tables every boy and girl was a new cousin, every adult an aunt or an uncle. I was introduced to each, though a few of them I had met on Saturdays at Chipinaw.

After lunch Aunt Bunny and I came home by a different route, past flower gardens around a flagpole, along the edge of a baseball field where men were choosing up a game. I stopped a moment to watch a bobbling catch by a fat guy who lost his glasses while trying to hold on to the ball. Then she led me to her garden behind the house.

I weeded and trimmed with her, picking strawberries, snapping off pods swollen with peas, helping her assess the ripeness of tomatoes of different shades of green, pink, and red, as we put our pickings in baskets and colanders. I could walk in my mind through gateways the smell of tomato leaves opened as plants brushed against my cheeks and hair and their essence oozed into the summer air. Their piny resins, though mildly poisonous (Aunt Bunny said), were piquant and suspenseful, made of moss and peppermint both. They told me everything I needed to know about this place.

The family had a collie named Boy, and he became the first animal I got to know up close. Initially I was cautious, but Boy wasn’t. He came right up, drummed his paws, and jumped up on me. It
wasn’t long before I was wedded to this creature, taking him on expeditions as we traversed the Hotel grounds. He ran alongside me and chased crabapples and sticks I threw, his eyes meeting mine in expectation of action.

I thought how amazed Jonny and my mother would be. To us dogs were alien, hostile creatures whose very existence on sidewalks we viewed with contempt, concern if they growled. We always sidled away from the man who walked his bulldog. Here I was wrestling with a collie like Lassie while he barked and pawed. I buried my nose in his pungent belly and again allowed myself to be an unrepentant turncoat…. because this was, maybe, paradise. But did I merit it, a boy who still wet his bed and made trouble? Would they discover who I was and kick me out, send me back to the Towers den?

The next morning I walked to the Hotel myself. Now that I knew the protocol, I headed straight for the family section. Jay was sitting beside Aunt Ruthie and his older brother Siggy. My father’s sister, Aunt Elaine, a tall blonde woman, arrived soon after with her kids Susan and Mark.

After dessert and permission from his mother, Jay led me into the kitchen, which was as busy as a factory: chefs in tall hats, soups and cakes, melon balls and juices crashing onto counters from their hands. “We go where we want here,” he said. “It’s not like camp where they order you around.” I huddled close to him.

With my cousin introducing me at every station, cooks and bakers treated our incursion as an honor. The high point was getting served chocolate-chip cookies on a wooden paddle straight out of an industrial oven.

We found our way down a back staircase, past the bar, which was dark except for a pink glow. We continued through a closed nightclub behind it, out a stage door into bright sunlight, then along flagstone to a pool crammed with swimmers and people sunning on towels, the surrounding patios colorful with umbrellas. The water was too bright and twinkling to look at.

From the edge of the pool Jay led us into crowds around piles of
folded towels, past a basketball game, to the edge of a golf course, down along tennis courts and the sand-covered pipes of an ice rink, onto a road beside greenhouses and handball courts. We passed groups of men and women and caddies carrying bags of clubs. Everywhere, I saw riotous arrangements of pansies, zinnias, gardenias, petunias, and other flowers, as well as fountains, gazebos, and wishing wells, trimmed lawns and bushes shaped in smoothly rounded designs around cottages. I bathed in intoxicating wafts of geraniums and roses.