Herbert Rowbarge

by Natalie Babbitt

  It was a happy thing to do. Seeing Herbert, the new boy smiled. By bedtime he was Herbert’s slave, and when the Noah’s Ark was produced, the friendship was cemented. Mrs. Frate, allowing him to sleep that night in the nursery with Herbert, gave Dick the first good rest he had had in many weeks. The Lord taketh away, to be sure, but the Lord also giveth. A healing had begun for Dick Festeen.

  Herbert knew nothing of the new boy’s story till long afterward. At the time, on that August night in 1882, he was glad to have Dick’s company, but far more than that, he was entranced by the Noah’s Ark.

  This toy, once bright with paint, and with all its pairs of animals intact, had belonged to the hard-eyed daughter of a Gaitsburg minister. After a few short weeks of possession, she had managed to destroy the hinge which allowed its roof to open and close, had scraped away most of the color from its hull, and had lost Mr. and Mrs. Noah and half the animals. All this had been done deliberately—several of the missing animals were discovered later, buried in the soil of a potted fern—because she had wanted instead, from a catalogue, a dollhouse of particularly rich design which made her father, the minister, uneasy. It had furniture upholstered in red velvet, and a lot of gold enamel, and it made him think of sin. So he gave her the Noah’s Ark as a substitute, and when she had completed its ruin, he took it away from her and gave it to the Children’s Home—to punish her, he said. But of course she was delighted, and of course, later, she got the dollhouse she had wanted in the first place, and a lovely set of dolls to go with it.

  The Lord taketh away, but the Lord also giveth. Herbert was much moved by the Noah’s Ark without for a moment knowing why. When it reached his hands, it still had seven of its little wooden animals: twin camels, twin elephants, twin bears, and one lonely lion that had lost its twin forever.

  Thursday, May 22,1952

  Louisa Rowbarge sits on her bed in the room that, nearly all their lives, she has shared with Babe. It is a pretty room, carpeted in blue, with yellow roses on the wallpaper and yellow bedspreads of the type known as chenille, with tiny tufts of cotton yarn pulled through the fabric to trace a geometric pattern. Most of the time Louisa likes the bedspreads, but this morning she knows they will give her trouble: she has a present to wrap, and experience has taught her that it’s hard to wrap presents on a soft and knobby surface. The dining-room table would be better, but she can’t do it there; Herbert Rowbarge is afoot downstairs and would be sure to see.

  Beside Louisa on the bed is an oblong box of flimsy cardboard labeled Boyd’s of Bell Fountain—Wearables for Men, which cradles, in slick tissue, a crisp new seersucker bathrobe folded just so, its tags and pins removed, ready to be lifted out and exclaimed over. Louisa takes the lid from the box for a final look, and sighs. What will he say when he sees it, she wonders: “Oh, this is grand,” or “Oh, another bathrobe”? The bathrobe seemed like a good idea yesterday, but now she’s not so sure.

  Footsteps on the staircase warn her that her father is no longer on the first floor, but coming up. She freezes, the box lid on her lap, and waits. The footsteps come along the hall outside her door, and anxiously she cries, “Daddy? Don’t come in!”

  The footsteps pause. “What?” he says. “Is that you, Babe?”

  “Louisa, Daddy. Don’t you dare come in.” This last girlishly, with a nervous little giggle.

  After a moment he says, dryly, “My God. What’s the matter? Are you entertaining a lover? Never mind. I don’t want to come in.”

  The footsteps move away and she hears him go into his own room, into the bathroom that is his alone. There is the sound of running water, then silence. Aspirin, she thinks; he’s taking aspirin again. And then—a sudden, sharp sound that makes her jump—glass shattering on the hard tile floor. She leaps up, goes to her door, and puts her head out. “Daddy?” she calls. “Are you all right?” There is no answer, and she calls again, “Daddy?”

  At last he says, sounding surprised, “I broke the tumbler. It jumped right out of my hand.”

  “Oh, Daddy, that’s too bad,” she says. “Well, leave it where it is. I’ll clean it up in a minute. Don’t you try—you’ll cut yourself.” She hears him come out of his bathroom, and shuts her door hastily.

  He pauses again in the hall outside and says, still sounding surprised, “That was the damnedest thing, the way it just—dropped.”

  “That’s all right,” she says through the door. “Everyone does that once in a while.”

  He is silent for a moment and then he says, “I suppose so. Well, I’m going down to the park now, Babe.”

  She opens her mouth to correct him again, decides against it, and says, “All right, Daddy. Be careful.”

  “Of what?” he asks.

  “I just meant—oh, you know, just be careful. It doesn’t mean anything. Will you be back for lunch?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

  She hears his footsteps on the stairs—slow footsteps, as if he were being careful after all—and she thinks to herself, he’s old, he sounds so old. Soon the garage door below her window grumbles up its track, the Lincoln coughs gently and begins to murmur. She crosses the room and peers down as the car backs into the turnaround and heads out the driveway.

  She feels lighthearted, suddenly, with her father gone. The house expands, seems almost conspiratorial. And then, remembering the bathrobe, she goes back to the bed and looks at it. The sense of doubt returns. But it’s too late now. She replaces the lid, which goes down with a flatulent pooh, and picks up a long roll of wrapping paper. She’s not so sure about the paper, either. The choice was between a roll with different kinds of pipes printed on it and “Dad” repeated over and over in brown and tan, and this one, the one they settled on, with puppies; a friendlier paper somehow, the puppies all roly-poly, tangled up in the words “Happy Birthday” spelled out in curling green ribbon. There is real green ribbon made to match, and it was this added feature that tipped the balance. But now—“Oh, dear,” she says aloud, and wishes Babe were there. When she and Babe are together, everything seems easy, everything makes sense. Alone, she is sure of nothing. The planet may slide at any moment from its orbit, the sun lurch sidewise, the carpeting break free from its moorings with a whump and roll itself thickly up to smother her.

  She spreads out a length of paper from its cardboard tube, and while she reaches for the scissors, it curls back up again slyly. She thinks of the carpeting—waiting, she knows, to do the same—and gives it a suspicious glance, but it keeps all innocent and blue to the floor, muffling its intent.

  This fear of being squeezed to death by carpeting is unique to her—Babe isn’t bothered by it—and seems to stem from a series of childhood nightmares having to do somehow with being born; this she has gleaned from reading, surreptitiously, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Louisa rather likes having a mild neurosis—especially the fact that it’s unique—except for when, on rare occasions, the nightmares make a reappearance. At times like that, she finds she’d just as soon avoid the kind of store where carpeting is sold, or where, beneath high ceilings with fluorescent lights, she will be apt to see, standing against a wall, great towering tunnels of menacing linoleum. Babe always laughs at her anxiety, but then she can say, and always does, in a solemn, righteous tone, “You were born first, Babe. Everything was easy for you.”

  Now, scissors in hand, tape at the ready, she spreads out the paper once more and at last the box is wrapped, secured by its ribbon in a loopy bow. “There!” says Louisa, and with the scissors she clips the ribbon ends smartly, at an angle. At least, she thinks, the box looks nice. Still, puppies—he’ll probably think it’s silly. Well, if he does, he does. She and Babe have done the best they can.

  She picks up the box and stands for a moment, puzzling. Where to hide it? It must, of course, be hidden. She knows he has no interest in his birthday, that it would never occur to him to go searching for presents, but hiding the box is part of the ritual. It will make her feel better to think of th
e bathrobe tucked away in some shadowy place, waiting for the big day.

  The closet. Of course. She crosses the room, sees her reflection coming toward her in the long glass on the closet door, and pauses. She forgets in between, and is reminded repeatedly as she moves every day around her room, how comforting it is to see herself this way. It’s as if Babe were there with her after all. She lifts a hand to tuck a stray curl back into its bobby pin and beams at Babe—Louisa, who beams back reassuringly. Then she opens the closet door and, on tiptoe, tilts the present onto an upper shelf, behind a hatbox and a heating pad. Maybe he will like it, she thinks, and then—yes, I’m sure he will. She closes the door and, humming, leaves the room and goes to clean up the broken bathroom tumbler.

  Winter 1883

  The love and attention lavished on him by Dick Festeen gave Herbert’s life a new dimension, one he quickly came to take for granted. For the Home continued crowded, so that Mrs. Frate continued to allow Dick to sleep in the nursery, and this meant that the two were together night and day. True, the Home was new—that is to say, it was ten years old—but almost at once it had proved to be inadequate.

  Built by a well-intentioned citizen of means, one Henry Wesseldine, and received with gratitude, since the need was great, the Home was also pointed to with pride—for Wesseldine, in the manner of the times, had spared not a thing but convenience. The building, attended by a barn and sheds, stood solid and imposing on top of its knobby little hill—one hill of hundreds bestowed, it is said, by the glacier on the otherwise simple surface of southeastern Ohio —and it was built to last, with foundations of whitewashed boulders and walls of smooth gray stone.

  Inside, the ceilings were lofty, the windows as tall as the doors, and every room had a fireplace with a gracious mantel and moldings. In the wide entrance hall, a splendid staircase fanned up to the second floor between oak banisters, and rich red carpeting softened its steps.

  But this, after all, was nothing but a shell. Wesseldine, for all his generosity, had provided no money for furnishings. These were donations, and looked it, and more than that, were too scant to relieve an all-pervasive hollowness. The kitchen was in the cellar, which made it convenient only for the rats. The privies were outside at a distance arrived at by compromise: too far in the winter, too near in the summer. And in the bedrooms upstairs, conceived for twenty children, thirty-two were housed in that winter of’83.

  The floor was divided in halves, front and back, with the nursery between. The front half, encircling the stairwell, was for the girls. The back half, with its own stairway—steep, dark, and free of carpeting —was for the boys. Each had two rooms with rows of narrow cots—five to a room, of course, in that curious way we have of assuming that Nature will be evenhanded. Once or twice there really had been twenty children to sleep in them, but they came and went, their number always changing, and in ten years they had never once been equally divided as to sex.

  In 1883, the proportion was particularly lopsided: eighteen boys, not counting Dick and Herbert, and an even dozen girls. So it was crowded on the second floor, especially for the boys, with extra cots squeezed in every which way and such total confusion at bedtime that the pale Mrs. Frate turned paler with every passing month. So Dick had a cot in the nursery, where he vastly preferred to be, and Herbert’s little life was the luckier for it. He was given his way in everything, and time passed with only one significant event.

  The doors at the Home—all the doors—were kept locked. Otherwise, the children opened them—to poach from the icebox and the storeroom, to visit back and forth between the girls’ half floor and the boys’, to poke around in Mrs. Frate’s big desk among such skimpy records as were kept there, or—to run away. So Mrs. Frate kept her keys in her apron pocket. The cook, Mrs. Daigle, kept another set in hers. No one else was ever allowed to unlock doors except for the handyman, who was responsible for all repairs and all the heaviest chores. And the handyman was sometimes careless.

  His name was Mr. Buzzey, and one morning in January, while Dick was attending a class in the schoolroom, Mr. Buzzey swayed up the central staircase and let himself into the nursery to mend a broken cupboard hinge. Herbert came near to oversee this work, full of questions and advice, but Mr. Buzzey ignored him in preference to singing, in a tender monotone, a popular song of the time, an appropriate song called “There Is a Tavern in the Town.” There was a tavern in the town, as Mr. Buzzey had reason to know. In fact, there were several, including the establishment operated by Mr. and Mrs. Mink in the very building where Herbert had been born. Mr. Buzzey sang of it now with affection, and when the cupboard hinge was fixed, more or less, he went away still singing, through the door to the upstairs hall, leaving that door wide open. And after a moment’s hesitation Herbert came up to it like Alice to the rabbit hole, took ten steps straight ahead, and fell down the central staircase.

  Loose-boned by virtue of his youth, and cushioned by the carpeting, Herbert arrived at the bottom without breaking. He was shaken, of course, but he did not cry, for two years with Clarissa had taught him that crying did more harm than good. He merely sat up, rubbing his head, and looked around. And as his eyes turned left, to the wall opposite the matron’s office door, he froze in an ecstasy of terror and delight. There was another child sitting at the bottom of another staircase, and that child was wearing the same shirt and trousers and was rubbing his head, too. Herbert Rowbarge had discovered mirrors.

  With no one to know that he was there, since Dick was still in the schoolroom and Mrs. Frate was counting linens in the kitchen, Herbert stayed a full half hour in the entrance hall, perfectly content. For not only did the boy in the mirror move as he moved, and make the same faces, this boy was the possessor of the other lion from the Noah’s Ark. He brought it out from a pocket just as Herbert was producing his own, and when Herbert pressed his lion to the surface of the glass, the other boy did the same, so that the two little wooden animals were together again at last. Herbert smiled at the boy in the mirror, and the boy smiled back, and the time they spent together in the entrance hall was a time of sweet discovery and peace.

  He was found at last by Mrs. Frate, and some sense of his pleasure must have radiated from him, for she paused a moment, watching, loath to disturb him. And then, when she went to him to pick him up, he saw with a start that another Mrs. Frate was picking up his newfound friend, and both began to shriek with rage, to be separated so. Only after her promise that he could come again and play there did Herbert allow himself to be carried away at last, and even so, she had to bring him back twice over to make sure the other boy still clutched the long-lost other lion and was there to wave goodbye.

  True to her word, she brought him, once or twice, to play again by the mirror. But his shrieks when the periods were over so convulsed him that Mrs. Frate decided it was bad for his constitution. After that, he stayed in the nursery, and, after that, it was easy to make him angry.

  In the daytime, that is, it was easy. Crossed, he would scowl at Dick, refuse to eat his supper, and keep to himself as much as he could. But at night, in bed, protected by the darkness, he would bring the lion out from under his pillow and turn it over and over in his fingers. Then, sleeping at last, he would have a dream which was to come to him now and again for many months thereafter.

  He would find himself arm in arm with the boy in the entrance-hall mirror. They would smile at each other, and float off together into a world that was neither the world of the mirror nor any other place he knew, but a far more magical place, a dim and watery place with little boats, a warm place far away. This was all that happened in the dream, but, dreaming it, he was eased. In the morning he would waken calm and cheerful, and the anger sometimes did not come back till long after breakfast.

  Friday, May 23,1952

  Babe and Louisa Rowbarge are walking down Lake Street toward the President McKinley Tea Room. On their right they pass a series of frumpy little stands —you could hardly call them shops—which will soon, in a week,
throw open their shutters and do a brisk business all summer long in bathing caps, postcards, painted tin buckets and shovels, straw hats, sunglasses, and all manner of glossy trash, most of it labeled RED MAN LAKE or MUSSEL POINT, OHIO, and all of it made in Japan. On their left is the broad brown lake itself, its shore here toothed with docks where bob all kinds of watercraft, from rowboats-by-the-hour to knife-prowed motorboats, privately owned, with lacquered decks and gleaming chrome—motorboats with cryptic names like Ten O’Clock and No One Home as well as the more expectable Suzy-Q. The motorboats look scrubbed and tidy, the rowboats less so, with their oars standing up on end, jumbled into dockside racks like pick-upsticks, just as the rowboats themselves are jumbled sometimes as many as ten at a single dock, their sides bumping hollowly, their green or gray paint scuffed and peeling. But all of them look inviting.

  “I love summer,” says Babe.

  “Me, too,” says Louisa.

  Ahead, where the banks of the lake curve sharply to the left, rises the long inner fence of the Pleasure Dome, right at the water’s edge. But there is a wide break, halfway along the fence, where, they know, there is a pavilion soon to be scattered with wooden benches and tables. Here you can sit and eat your hot dogs and your popcorn—or recover from your nausea incurred on the Tilt-A-Wheel—and look at the water before going back for one more ride on something safe like the Bumper Cars or the merry-go-round.

  “We’re lucky to live in a place like this,” says Louisa. “It’s so much fun.”

  “I know,” says Babe. “I always think that. What if Daddy’d been a lawyer or something? What if he’d stayed in Cincinnati?”