“You missed the best episode of Wheat Theater,” the supper club owner sympathized. He was a man with the gestures and facial expressions of a woman. He was the most exotic thing the Sweethearts had ever seen.
“Oh, it was dire. Anna Peal went into this castle made all of snow and she thought it was all beautiful, even though it was so cold. It was because she had a coldness in her heart. Because she was still angry with her mother, even though she thought she wasn’t. So she almost froze to death, but once she really forgave her mother, with all her heart, then the castle melted.” He poured another cup of coffee. “It was an allegory.”
But Irini missed all of this. “We can’t just leave,” she told the other Sweethearts. “What about Walter? He’s off rescuing us.”
“We need to get Cindy to a doctor,” said Fanny.
“Which way did he go?” one of the men asked.
“Up the road.”
“There’s some cabins. Not right on the road. There’s the Runnberg place. But no towns without crossing the lake. Hard to say when he’d be back. But if you want to wait…”
Of course Irini didn’t want to wait. Irini wanted breakfast and a shower, same as anyone else would want. But it didn’t seem right to just go. How would they ever find Walter again?
“We’ll leave him a note,” said Margo. “We’ll send someone back for him. Come on, Irini.”
So Irini went as far as the campsite, where she had a stack of pancakes, but then she didn’t get in the truck. “We should take some food back for Walter,” she said. “And a sleeping bag. A fishing pole. A frying pan. Toilet paper.”
“I thought Walter was off rescuing us.”
“We can’t just leave him.” Irini looked around the circle stubbornly. “Really, someone should stay.”
Really, she expected someone to stay with her. She thought Arlys might offer, acting the part of the hero. Or Margo, who was one of her very best friends. Maybe Claire, who was nowhere near so close to her, but was terminally tender-hearted. Surely Claire would offer. She knew she could count on Claire. None of them would meet her eyes.
“We have to get Cindy to the doctor’s,” said Fanny, as if Irini hadn’t heard her the first time, as if otherwise, minus this one detail, Fanny would be right there with Irini, spending another night on those awful beds.
“I’ll stay with you,” said Ruby.
So the boat took the two of them back and motored away again, its ripples widening in greater and fainter loops. Stillness had already settled on the compound. The bunkhouses, they now knew, had been a prisoner-of-war camp. There had been real Germans up here in the woods during the war. They’d been caught up in Greenland during the battle for the weather stations. Good fishermen. One of them had been an artist. The girls in Le Coeur would see some of his paintings in the diner there. Watercolor scenes of the lake.
The bunkhouses were more uncomfortable now that they knew it was a P.O.W. camp. The quiet seemed less peaceful, more desperate and homesick. Irini would have liked to fill the silence up, but Ruby was not much for conversation. They ate some cheese sandwiches the men had provided. They chose their bunks for the night and lay the sleeping bags out in preparation.
They sat by the water and watched the sunfish. The ducks seemed to expect food. They paddled about in a demanding way, quacking and squawking, then they came right up on the bank and tried to bite Irini’s toes. It made Irini even more uncomfortable, thinking about prisoners of war who fed ducks. She and Ruby had very little bread to spare, but really, they had no choice. The ducks were taking no prisoners.
“You’re a very quiet person,” Irini observed once to Ruby.
Ruby said no doubt it was all those brothers. “Who was listening if I talked?”
“I always wanted a large family. You must miss them very much.”
“Yes.”
“I always wanted a brother. You’re lucky to have so many.”
“They’re all right,” Ruby said.
“I bet they’re proud of you. Do you think they’ll ever come to one of your games?”
“Maybe.”
“I’d like to meet them sometime.”
“Sure.”
What Irini was really struggling to say was that she was grateful to Ruby for staying with her. Since she couldn’t seem to edge up on it, she decided just to say it. Ruby turned to her with that dimpled-milk smile. “I really like Walter,” Ruby said. It gave Irini a moment’s pause.
“Ruby,” she said.
“Mmm?”
“Do you ever worry that you play baseball too well? To attract a guy, I mean. Guys don’t really like girls who do things like baseball really well. When you’re trying to get a guy, it might be smarter not to be quite so good.”
“Oh.”
The word was not sufficiently apprehending. This was an important point. Not understanding this could ruin Ruby’s whole life. Irini wanted to help. “Guys don’t like girls with muscles. They don’t like girls who can outrun them, or strike them out, or make them look bad. They like a softer look. They like girls who are more feminine.”
“I don’t think you can just say ‘guys,’ ” said Ruby. “There are all kinds of guys. I’ve lived with a whole mess of them my whole life.”
It was the longest speech Ruby had ever made. Irini certainly couldn’t say the same. She deferred to Ruby’s greater experience, although she was still pretty sure she was right.
Maybe there were all kinds of guys. But the better a girl got at just about anything, the fewer the boys who’d be willing to date her. Why narrow your options, when they were already narrow enough?
In the afternoon, while Ruby napped, Irini sat in the camp kitchen. There was a hollow shell that had once been a wood-burning stove. There was a sink with a pump that didn’t work; Irini had tried it with her good arm.
There were six wooden tables with benches. The tabletops were scratched with use, but no one had carved into them. No initials. No hearts. Nothing to tell Irini about the men who had eaten here.
They were Germans! Maybe Nazis. The men here were men who had lost, and a good thing too, but hard to imagine. Hard to imagine losing at something so big.
But how bad could it be? Irini would not feel sorry for Nazis. They had spent the war in the beautiful, remote woods and now they were home again.
She closed her eyes, put her head down, and imagined sounds—soup bubbling on the stove, spoons clicking against the sides of metal bowls, German words and voices. She had a good imagination. Then she made the sounds go away again.
She found she knew a few words that she could say to these men. “Schlaft in himmlicher Ruh’,” she told them. “Schlaft in himmlicher Ruh’.”
Walter returned next day, in a borrowed truck with a large Thermos of coffee and sandwiches for eleven made on the strangest bread imaginable, a sort of pancake you could open like a purse. When he found that Ruby had waited for him in an abandoned P.O.W. camp when she could have been sleeping in a hotel and eating in a supper club, he just couldn’t say thank you often enough. “That’s so sweet of you,” he told her. “That’s just the nicest thing.”
The truck was more battered than their bus. It started up with a suspenseful, tubercular noise. Walter had liquor on his breath. Irini was the expert and she could tell as soon as they got into the cab together, even though she wasn’t sitting next to him. His eye was green by now, a dark green bloom beside his nose. He looked as if he’d gotten very little sleep; his face had that sort of sag. It was mystifying. Yesterday morning he was kissing Irini, and now, twenty-four hours later, here he was, back again, unshaven and drunk, and looking at Ruby as if he could eat her alive. He was looking at Ruby, but probably when he said thank you like that, probably he meant Irini, too.
33
In fact, Walter had really big news, but he waited to tell them until they had all three squeezed into the truck and taken off for Le Coeur to try to hook up again with the team. The road ranged from very bad to worse than you
could believe. It was only wide enough for a single car, but then only a single car, only their car, ever seemed to be on it. It was patchily paved; you never knew what you might find under your wheels. Irini bounced against the door, bounced against Ruby. She had had a headache for two days running now. It was taking a toll.
Yesterday Walter had said good-bye to Irini and left the compound. He walked along the road for several hours. The woods did nothing but get denser. But sometime well after noon, he had finally heard a truck, which he was able to flag down. It was going the other way, back toward the bunkhouses. There were two men inside and neither of them spoke English. They looked Italian, he thought, but he would have understood at least a few words if they’d been speaking Italian. He’d tried to tell them that there were girls to be rescued. They nodded and smiled at him. They made a series of incomprehensible gestures of their own and finally all agreed that he would ride along in the back. He figured that when they reached the road leading to the compound, he could make them take it. To the extent that he had a plan, that was it.
But they turned too early. They turned where there was no road at all, just a space between the trees. They drove toward the lake. They passed a couple of old campsites; Walter could see where the campfires had been. They passed a new campsite, maybe even the one the girls had been taken to. But they kept going, swerving around the trunks of trees, until they finally reached a little set of tents all off by themselves. In these tents were many more people who spoke no English.
And a few who did. Walter was taken to a younger man, a man who still had all his own teeth. “Welcome to Little Persia,” the man said.
They were show folk. More like gypsies than like circus people—there were no clowns, no horses. They offered a bit of gymnastics, some card tricks, some dancing. They had a man who could turn himself inside out, or at least that was what they’d told Walter. Probably there was some small snafu in the translation. Probably he was just very agile. They had a woman who could tell the future and she told Walter he had already met the woman he would marry. Irini and Ruby took this news in silence.
The end of summer was their biggest season and they were coming down from Canada for the rich pickings of the United States. Walter told them about the accident and about the girls who played baseball and this was something they all expressed a great desire to see.
“They fed me,” said Walter. “They fed me the best meal. Maggie is going to die for that recipe. I don’t think it can be traditional. It had venison in it, all wrapped in some sort of leaf. Kind of like stuffed cabbage. They sang for me. I sang for them.”
“You were drinking,” said Irini accusingly. While she and Ruby were defending themselves from wild ducks.
“Gosh, yes. I had no choice. And then they loaned me the truck. So that I could go and get the baseball-playing girls.”
“We’re going back there?”
“After we fetch the rest of the team in Le Coeur. I have to. I promised. Anyway, I have to return the truck.”
“It sounds like fun,” said Ruby.
“And then what? How do we get home?”
“We have to play them. If we win, they take us.” Walter kept his eyes on the road. “And of course, we’ll win. They had no idea about Ruby here.”
“It sounds like fun,” said Ruby.
“What if we lose?”
“Cash. But that’s not possible.”
Irini said nothing. When Walter spoke again his voice was obviously defensive. “It was the best I could do,” he said. “These people are professional bargainers. I was the chump from Hoboken.
“Certainly I had no way of knowing you’d be arranging your own rescue and all you’d have to do for it was get baptized.”
The road required Walter’s full attention for a while. Irini clung to the side of the door and tried not to let the bouncing jar her head. “And anyway, that’s not all,” Walter told them.
Out in back of one of the tents, leashed to a tree with a chain, was a gorilla. It wasn’t even full-grown yet, an adolescent, with the softest hands and the saddest face. Chi Chi. They had traded a bear for her to some schmuck up in Canada. “Can you imagine?” said Walter. “A bear for a gorilla?”
“They all felt very bad about the chain,” said Walter. “They said they’d like nothing better than to find a nice home for Chi Chi in the off-season. Here Gramps is, looking and looking for an ape, and here I stumble over her.” He paused for maximum dramatic effect and then tried to disguise it with a casual tone.
“They said she bowls,” he said.
Hard as it is to believe, utterly unfathomable as it seems to us now, Fanny could not have cared less about the ape. As the chaperone she had considerable authority over the team’s whereabouts and plans. Should things get legalistic, in the case of a dispute, she probably had as much to say about this as the coach. Perhaps more so. She was, after all, much bigger than Walter. “We are going straight home to Magrit,” she told Walter in a voice that begged him to just try and argue with her. “The bus will be right and running by tomorrow. We’re climbing aboard and letting Norma drive us home as fast as she can. We have no reason in the world to visit Little Persia.”
“This is a smart gorilla,” Walter said. “She bowls. She’s just the thing for Gramps now. You’ve seen him. Someone has to do something.”
“He thinks he wants one, but Mrs. Ada will just end up taking care of it. She has enough to do, what with India’s independence and all. And it does not bowl. Take it from me. You misunderstood. Probably it bawls. Our families are worrying about us or they will be once they know the ordeal we’ve had.” Fanny had tried to call, but with Cindy off the switchboard, telephone service in and out of Magrit was spotty. “And Cindy has got to go home.”
Cindy turned out to have cracked the bone in her lower arm. For anyone else it would have been a minor injury. For Cindy it meant that for six weeks, someone else would have to comb her hair, dress her, clean her after the toilet, and spoon-feed her. It was a nightmare and she was taking it as such.
Walter was not putting up much of a fight. Perhaps he was returning to sanity from whatever it was besides the liquor that had possessed him in Little Persia. The magic spell Chi Chi had cast. “What about the truck?” he asked.
“Return it,” Fanny advised. “It doesn’t belong to you.”
34
In the end they all went to Little Persia after all. Or at least, they went past it. When the Christian fishermen drove them back out to the bus, they met Little Persia on the road. On the basis of Walter’s description, the Persians were moving for the night to the abandoned P.O.W. camp.
“Baseball, baseball,” they called to the girls in the back of the Christian fisherman’s truck as it passed. “Stick, stick.”
Walter pulled them over for some side-of-the-road conversation. He expressed great regrets about canceling the game. He gestured many times to Cindy. Her arm was hurt, he told them. She required immediate doctor’s care. Of course she had already seen a doctor in Le Coeur. Her arm was professionally swaddled. Clearly the more he spoke, the less the Persians believed in a team of girls who played baseball. They agreed to help right the bus, but they asked for cash this time, no wagers.
Norma and Carl looked the bus over and talked shop. They had a passionate discussion that ranged from tune-ups to tire rotations to alignments. They weren’t in complete agreement on alignments. There was a long argument at the end of which they agreed to disagree. The fishermen talked about Christ and God’s role in saving them from the accident. Irini said that He could have spared them the accident altogether. “Sometimes He has to get your attention first,” the fisherman told her. Irini was the only one on the bus who didn’t attend church at least occasionally. This made it seem as if the accident was for her. Like it was her fault.
While Irini was thinking about this, Walter showed the girls Chi Chi. She was sitting cross-legged in the backseat of a dented green De Soto. She had a regal, disdainful air. She
looked at them only out of the sides of her eyes. It was impossible to imagine her bowling. She was more the tea-party type.
Eventually the team limped home to Magrit. This required enormous effort, especially on the part of Carl and the Christian fishermen, but they proved equal to anything. Under Norma’s direction, they patched tires and greased axles and hitched and towed. Whatever was needed they gave like Christians.
No one in Magrit knew they had done anything but play a game in Willrest that weekend. The girls knew this, and yet they couldn’t help coming home, expecting a welcome, a little fuss, a little hoopla. Instead everyone expressed a faint surprise that they were back so soon. It was in many ways, Irini thought, the story of her life.
Most of the Sweethearts were not planning to be at work on Monday, so when Collins House called to give them the day off, it was a bit redundant. Norma took over for Cindy on the phones. Irini cleaned up, wrapped herself in her old robe, took her father’s usual chair—the comfortable one—and told him about their adventures. She wasn’t really much of a storyteller, but her father was good with questions. He didn’t want to hear about the bus rolling off the road, with Irini trapped inside like a seed in a maraca; he motioned her quickly past that part. But he liked Little Persia. He liked Chi Chi and he liked especially the part about the watercolors painted by the German prisoner of war that now decorated the walls of the Broad and Bonny Supper Club. He went off to Bumps to wait until Norma got off the phones and hear her version.
He would have loved to hear about Walter kissing her, but Irini didn’t tell him that part. She didn’t really think he could handle it.
Consternation was greater at the Tarken place; the weeping was loud enough to be heard over at the Doyles. “You girls just shouldn’t leave Magrit,” Mrs. Tarken said to Irini in the yard the next day. Mrs. Tarken was so upset she hadn’t put lipstick on, so upset she had gone after her eyebrows with excessive pluck. Without lipstick and eyebrows, her face was unfamiliar, worn away like a stone, smoothly moonlike. It rose over the pea patch at Irini. “I just said to Sissy, you have better things to do than play baseball, young lady. I just said to Sissy, you are off that team. We don’t owe the Collinses anything.” She was pulling up carrots, shaking them by their throats. The loss of Jimmy was the only thing left on her face.
The Sweetheart Season Page 29
