Herbert Rowbarge

by Natalie Babbitt

  Herbert knew he had behaved unreasonably, had blown the thing up out of all proportion. He had blown it up, in fact, to fit the proportion of his panic in the maze, and thinking of that, unwillingly, on his way to talk to Dick, he shuddered and wondered how long it would be before the madness he had so long expected would finally overtake him.

  To Dick he said, tiredly, “It won’t do, of course.”

  “No,” said Dick, profoundly relieved.

  “She’s too young.”

  “Yes, there’s that, and also, Bertie, they’re not in love. Not really.”

  “He isn’t, anyway,” said Herbert.

  “No, he’s not. I’m sorry, Bertie.”

  “It will all blow over,” said Herbert. He stood up and said, more firmly, “I’m going to have that maze torn out, though, Dick. We don’t want it turning into a spot where these young people think they can go to spoon.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Dick. “You could put something else back there.”

  “Yes, add some more contraptions. Of course, that means putting off the opening.”

  “Well,” said Dick, “that’s all right. Another month or two won’t matter.” There was a pause, and then Dick said, “Bertie, I been wanting to talk to you anyway, so I’m glad you came over. I want to pull out. Out of the park, I mean.”

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, only I’m fifty-three, Bertie. And I’m tired. I want to go out to the farm, with Frank. I can’t do much real farming, just like you said before we came here, when we sold out down to Gaitsburg. But Frank wants to start the greenhouse, Bertie. And—I want to do it with him.”

  “Back to the farm,” said Herbert. “Dick, you haven’t changed at all.”

  “No, I guess I haven’t.”

  “Well, the park’s half yours. I’ll buy you out.”

  “No—no, don’t do that. I already got more money than is good for me.”

  “Dick, don’t be an ass. I’ll get a lawyer on it and see what’s fair, and I’ll buy you out. If you really mean what you say.”

  “Yes, Bertie, my mind’s made up.”

  “Well, we came a long way together.”

  “Yep.”

  “Just a couple of damned orphans.”

  “Yep.”

  Herbert said, then, “I’m grateful to you, Dick, for keeping all my secrets.”

  “Well, Bertie, there never was anything I wouldn’t do for you. You know that.”

  “Yes, I guess I do.” For an instant Herbert was on the brink of telling Dick about the Fun House, about what had really happened to him in the mirrored maze and the real reason why he wanted to tear it out. But just in time he backed away from it. What was the use? They clapped each other on the back, shook hands, and said good night.

  Frank married Myra Dillon, a girl from the next farm up, the following summer. It was, said Opal to Herbert, a very appropriate match. It was, said Babe to Louisa, the end of everything.

  Wednesday afternoon, May 28, 1952

  Babe Rowbarge stands at the counter in Aunt Opal’s kitchen, cutting olives on a board. Arranged on a platter at her elbow are little rounds of toast, heaped with mayonnaise and tuna, and she tops each one with half an olive set cut side up so that its bright red nubbin of pimento can be seen to full advantage. Beside her waits a tea cart made of gold-toned metal, with two glass shelves. The top shelf holds Aunt Opal’s silver tea service, glowing from its morning rubdown and flanked by tiny linen napkins, a plate of lemon slices, and four cups and saucers of fluted porcelain thin as the shells of eggs. The cups and saucers have been handed down from a grandmother brought as a bride to Ohio, protesting all the way, from far-off, more civilized Connecticut. The silver is Aunt Opal’s own, bought whole and entire in Cleveland.

  Babe sinks the last half olive into place and, stooping, sets the platter on the bottom shelf of the tea cart beside matching platters of coconut macaroons and fruit-betty bars dusted with powdered sugar. These last are something new she has made from an enthusiastic recipe in a magazine. They look all right, but on the whole she thinks she won’t repeat the effort. It took an hour to dice the figs, prunes, dates, and nuts, a fact the recipe has chosen to suppress.

  “There!” says Babe, standing up to admire the full effect. Then she goes to the swinging door and pushes it open to listen. It is Aunt Opal’s turn to host Wednesday bridge, and from the card room the steady talk of the women, interspersed with moans and cries and brief, intense silences as crucial cards are played, has not yet come to a climax. “Shoot,” says Babe to herself. “Too soon to boil the water.” She lets the door swing to, and leans against the stove with a sigh. Oh, well, she thinks, on Sunday she’ll be moving back home, and Louisa will take over here. Not that it’s so much easier helping Daddy, but at least he doesn’t entertain at bridge, and even if he did, Fawn would chop the fruit and shine the silver. Aunt Opal always had a girl until five years ago, but with the start of this nice arrangement with her nieces, she let the girl go except for once-a-week cleaning. “She’d just be underfoot,” Aunt Opal said. “We don’t really need her now.”

  A movement outside the window attracts Babe’s attention and she peers out to see her sister waving at her. In a moment the back door opens and Louisa comes in. “I had to park on the street,” she exclaims. “Is Wednesday bridge here today? Oh-oh”—seeing the tea cart—“I guess so. What’d you make? What are those?”

  “Fruit-betty bars,” says Babe.

  “They look yummy,” says Louisa. “What’s in them?”

  Babe holds out the pan in which the bars were baked, where a few broken chunks remain. “They’ve got everything in them,” she says. “Too much trouble.”

  Louisa takes a chunk, tries it, and says, “They’re yummy, though. Mmm—dates! Listen, Babe, I’m on my way down to Ellison’s for aspirin—”

  “Aspirin!” Babe interrupts. “You just bought a whole bottle!”

  “Well, I know,” says Louisa, “but Daddy dropped it this morning, right in the toilet, and he’d taken the cap off already, so of course they were all ruined. He broke a glass, too, last week. He’s been dropping things a lot lately.”

  “I don’t like the sound of it,” says Babe. “Did you call Dr. Herdman?”

  “Well, I was going to,” says Louisa, “and then he seemed all right and so I didn’t. What I think is, he’s all worn out. This is the hardest time of the year, right before the park opens. He’s either down there with Walter, or Walter’s out at the house with him, and it’s business, business, business all day long.”

  “I suppose so,” says Babe. “I wish he’d slow down.”

  “Well, anyway, Babe,” her sister continues, “I stopped by to ask you about an idea I had. For his birthday. You know, something to give him besides the bathrobe. They sent me over to Walter’s this morning for some papers he forgot on his desk, and while I was in there I noticed that plate from Kenyon Walter’s got on the radiator. With the administration building on it? And I suddenly thought what a nice thing that would be for Daddy. He’s always been so proud of going to Kenyon.”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” says Babe. “He’s been mad at them for a long time.”

  “I know,” says Louisa, “but still.”

  “Well, maybe,” says Babe. “How would you get one, though?”

  “Well, I thought I could just write over there and ask,” says Louisa. “There’s probably a college store or something that sells them. Walter would know an address.”

  “Well … all right,” says Babe. “Why not? It’s a nice idea. We’re going to need something, not to look so silly next to Walter’s fancy photograph.”

  “That’s just it,” agrees Louisa. “That’s just what I thought.”

  A voice from the living room calls, “Babe? Dear—where’s our tea?”

  “Oh, Lord,” says Babe. “They’re ready, and the water isn’t hot.” She turns the flame up high under the kettle and calls back, “Any minute, Aunt
Opal.”

  “I better get out of your hair,” says Louisa. She picks up a second chunk from the fruit-betty pan. “These are really good!” she says.

  “Want to stay for tea?” asks Babe. “I’m sure it would be all right.”

  “Oh—no,” says Louisa. “I have to get down to Ellison’s.” She goes to the door and then turns back. “Babe,” she says, “let’s see if we can get Daddy to go away for a while after the park opens. You know. Take a little vacation. He hasn’t done that in years.”

  “When did he ever do it?” says Babe. “I don’t remember his ever going away.”

  “Oh, yes, there was that one time, a while ago. A long while ago, now I come to think of it. But, Babe, the point is, he really needs a rest.”

  “It wouldn’t be much fun for him alone,” says Babe.

  “Well,” says Louisa, “maybe one of us could go along.”

  “Louisa,” says her sister, “he wouldn’t want that.”

  Louisa hesitates, and then she says, “Well, no, I guess he wouldn’t.”

  The water in the kettle begins a rustling sound, and the voice from the other room calls again: “Babe—dear—how are things coming?”

  “Two minutes, Aunt Opal,” Babe calls back. “Everything’s almost set.”

  “Well, anyway,” says Louisa, “I think I’ll suggest it to him. It won’t do any harm.”

  “No, it couldn’t hurt,” Babe agrees.

  Then, soon, Louisa gone, the tea cart wheeled in, the guests and Aunt Opal pacified, Babe returns to the kitchen, where she leans once more against the stove and, turning the pages of the magazine which contains the fruit-betty recipe, comes to an article entitled CAN ABSENCE MAKE THE HEART GROW FONDER? Advice from Three Wives on How to Keep Romance Alive When Hubby’s Job Keeps Him on the Road. Picking at crumbs from the fruit-betty pan, Babe starts to read and is soon absorbed, as if the problems of the three in the article are pressingly her own, the wise solutions something to try herself as soon as time permits.

  November 1936

  In the fall of ’27, Walter Loose went merrily off to Gambier, eighty miles away, to begin his freshman year at Kenyon. He came home for the holidays more full of himself than ever. College, he said, was the berries. He carried a pocket flask, demanded a roadster for Christmas, was given it, and promptly drove it into a tree. He invaded Herbert’s office at the park one afternoon, “drunk as a skunk” by his own admission, and insisted that Herbert sing with him. “C’mon, Uncle Herbert, you know how it goes. “The first of Kenyon’s goodly race’—c’mon, Uncle Herbert —‘was that great man Philander Chase.’ Wassa matter? You forget the words? ‘He climbed a hill and said a pray-ay-yer …’ Well, never min’, ol’ man. Say, listen, I tried to look you up in the annuals and I couldn’ fin’ you anywhere!”

  Herbert, disgusted, threw Walter out of his office, but for months thereafter he was fearful that his tidy web of lies would come unraveled. He needn’t have worried. Walter, it was discovered in the spring, had been drunk most of the year and had spent so little time in class that he had flunked every one of his final exams. A letter from the Dean to Stuart explained that “Walter does not have, at this time, what we look for in a student at Kenyon,” and closed with the hope that Walter would be “happier at another institution.” It was kindly put, but the meaning was plain. Walter had been expelled.

  Stuart was heartbroken. Now there would be no medical school, no son to take over his practice. But Herbert was so relieved to know his secret would be safe that he took Walter’s side at once. It was the college’s fault, he argued convincingly. Why, they had exposed the boy to all these modern temptations and done nothing to protect him, and now they were punishing him for a situation that was their fault entirely. By God, he asserted, they’d never get another penny from him! He would sever all connections, remove his name from the rolls. He’d been thinking of a major gift to the Alumni Fund, but now—well, let them cry for it. And he played this scene so well, so feelingly, that Opal, grateful, looked on him with more favor than she ever had before.

  Walter, at first, was as saddened as his father. Life at Kenyon had appealed to him strongly, and now to have it denied him was a shock. Very little had ever been denied him: he was staggered by the loss, and also sobered. Still, to have his Uncle Herbert for a champion eased his soul, and when his father said he’d have to get a job to prove he could be a man, he went to Herbert’s office once again and asked to be taken on.

  It was the very thing, Herbert decided. Frank Festeen was settled at the greenhouse, and Babe and Louisa—what use were they? The park must be left to someone when the time came, or sold out of the family. And Herbert had always liked Walter. You couldn’t help but like him, he was such a rascal. But could Walter be trained? Could he be serious, and care? He could. He took to it right away. For it was fun to be serious about the Pleasure Dome, and Walter insisted on fun.

  “You know, Uncle Herbert,” he said at the end of a year, “it’s a lot like dreams at the Dome, I think. It’s all kind of crazy and beautiful, and you can fly, and fall a long way without ever hitting the ground, and it’s got those crazy mirrors where everything’s all twisted out of shape. And it’s mostly a night thing, like dreams, don’t you think so? I mean, it’s fine in the daytime, but at night, with all the colored lights and noise and people yelling, it’s just … well, it’s just amazing! Then, of course, it’s like a circus, too. Like being a person in a circus where you ride the animals, like on the merry-go-round, and perform all those death-defying acts. It’s just one great big party! Why, you can go in there and pay your money and do all kinds of things you’d never get away with outside. Y’know what I mean?”

  Herbert knew what he meant. “I take it you like it, then?” he asked.

  “You bet, Uncle Herbert. It’s the nuts!”

  “Well, then, Walter,” said Herbert, much gratified by the boy’s enthusiastic talk, “I’ll make you a proposition. We’ll give it another year or two, and if you’re still feeling this way about it, well, you’re my nephew and the logical person to take over someday. If you show me you can handle it.”

  Walter grinned. “Don’t worry about that!” he declared. “I can handle it. You’ll see.”

  “You know,” said Herbert, “I do believe you can.”

  All through the deepest days of the Depression the Pleasure Dome thrived, for people needed fun as much as ever, more than ever. And in spite of “that man in the White House,” who seemed determined to ruin everybody who wasn’t ruined already, Herbert continued to prosper. But by 1936, with Walter more and more of a help, more and more eager to “handle the details” in ways that Dick had never been, Herbert had a little time on his hands—time to think. He had always kept himself too busy to think, but now he thought about his life and began to grow restless. He was fifty-six. “My God,” he said to himself, “I’m getting old. In four years I’ll be sixty.” Sixty. There was something about it that filled him with melancholy, something not concerned with the piling up of years so much, but rather with a sense of some vital element too long missing.

  “It’s just you’re missing Ruby, Bertie,” said Dick one night as they sat together in Frank’s new house at the farm. Dick’s grandson, Joe, was snugly tucked in bed upstairs, and Dick was sitting while Frank and Myra went to the movies over in Bell Fountain. San Francisco was playing, and “Myra can’t miss a Clark Gable picture,” Dick had said on the telephone. “Come on out and spend the evening with me and Joe.” And Herbert had gone, gladly. Maybe Dick could ease him of his loneliness. But now, at this mention of Ruby, Herbert shook his head impatiently.

  “It isn’t that, Dick. Not at all.”

  “Well, I only meant a sense of family, you know,” said Dick. “A sense of things continuing. Pretty soon the girls will get married and have their own kids, and then you’ll feel better.”

  “They’ll never get married,” said Herbert. “They’ve got all they need in each other.” He paused and then ve
ntured: “No, it isn’t the idea of things continuing. It’s more as if things never even started. Or at least got started wrong somehow.”

  “Why, Bertie,” said Dick, “it seems like you ought to be real satisfied. Just look what all you’ve done.”

  “Dick, I don’t mean that. Not the park. Oh, I don’t know.” And he pulled at his chin forlornly.

  “Bertie, listen. What you need is to get away,” said Dick. “Go off somewhere and take a vacation. Why, you’ve never really had one, all these years, with the park so much work in the summers.”

  “Maybe,” said Herbert. “Maybe. I just don’t know.”

  But Dick’s suggestion that he get away stayed with him, and one morning in the autumn he woke up thinking that he would take a trip, after all. He would go back to Gaitsburg, to the Home. Maybe that was what it was, that old and growing sense of something missing. Maybe he needed to know whose son he was.

  He drove across the state, one glittering Friday in November, in a brand-new Lincoln touring car. He had bought the car, he confessed to himself, to show off, to go back in style. But even so, he was nervous about going back and almost at once began to wonder if he shouldn’t turn around, forget the whole idea. He took his time, while he wondered, following the rivers whenever he could—the Big Darby toward Columbus, the Scioto south to Chillicothe—rolling along with them gently down, down, down toward the wide Ohio. He stopped for coffee, for lunch, for coffee again, eating and drinking slowly, always thinking he could turn back any time he liked, and then, finding he had come all the way to Rodney, five miles from Gaitsburg, he stopped again, for gasoline this time, and lingered in the greasy office of the filling station, staring at a rack of folded maps, the flyspecked displays of fan belts and windshield-wiper blades, till at last the attendant, coming in, asked if he would move the Lincoln away from the pumps to make room for other customers. “Friday, y’know,” said the boy respectfully in his soft, south-Ohio twang. “Lotsa folks be needin’ gas for the weekend.”