“Where is it?”
“In New York, where we live. St. Andrew’s. So of course it was the only logical place for me to go. Add to that, it’s only a few blocks from our apartment. My father teaches Chaucer and all that gluck at Columbia. He and my mother are in England this summer. They’ll probably come back speaking Chaucerian. A nyghtengale, upon a cedir grene, Under the chambre wal there as she lay, Ful loude ayein the moone shene … kookie stuff, but my father makes it sound as though it had some sense. Your father’s a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“John says you’re going to be living in New York next year. How d’you think you’re going to like it?”
“It’s going to be different from Thornhill, that’s for sure,” I said.
“Know where you’re going to be living?”
I shook my head. “When we get back Mother and Daddy are going to look for a place, and see about schools and stuff.”
“You sound kind of nervous about it,” Andy said.
“I think maybe I am.”
“I’ll give you my phone number. You give me a ring or drop me a line or something when you know where you’re going to be, and maybe I can show you around. I know New York inside out, and believe me, there isn’t any place in the world like it.”
“Is this good or bad?”
“Both. Some people hate it and some people love it. As for me I wouldn’t want to live any place else. If my father didn’t work at Columbia, and if I didn’t want to go away from home for college, I’d stay right there. But after I get out of school I’m coming right back. And if I have to do graduate work or something I’ll do it right there.”
“Graduate work in what?”
Andy flung out his arms in a wide, kind of despairing gesture. “You got me there. I haven’t the faintest idea. Don’s all set to teach English and write and stuff on the side. He’s really good. He’s already sold a couple of stories. Steve wants to do something overseas in the diplomatic service or the U.S.I.A. or something. Maybe the Peace Corps for a while. As for me, I’m no dope, I’ve got a perfectly good mind, and I haven’t the faintest idea what to do with it.”
I rolled over on the grass and felt so grateful to Andy I could have hugged him. “Oh, Andy!” I cried. “Me, too! John’s always known he was going into physics or chemical engineering or something. And Suzy thinks she’s practically through medical school. Zachary’s going to be a lawyer. And I just don’t know where I’m going.”
“Who’s this Zachary?”
“Oh, he’s this boy in California.”
“Old friend?”
“No, we just met him this summer. The thing is, he knows what he’s going to do, John knows what he’s going to do, Suzy knows, everybody knows except me.
“I bet you’re no slouch in school, though,” Andy said.
“I get good enough grades and stuff. I just don’t have any talent.”
Andy extended his hand. “Shake. You’re in good company. I don’t let it worry me. After all, we’ve got till the end of sophomore year in college before we have to make up our minds what we’re going to major in. The main thing is to find a good general college, with high scholastic standing, take as wide a range of subjects as possible during the first two years. And then, by golly, inspiration had better descend. Listen, if your parents haven’t done anything about schools they could do worse than look up St. Andrew’s.”
“Isn’t it a boy’s school?”
“Co-ed. Nursery school right on through. It’s run by these Episcopal nuns but they’re really swell. Most of them have Ph.D.s and stuff. Then there’re a lot of lay teachers, too. Some really good men. Take our Latin guy. He’s this Mohammedan from Indonesia and he’s teriff. Another thing, it’s not too expensive as schools go. I don’t know if you’re rolling, or not.”
“We’re not.”
“And if John’s going to college and there’re three of you going to school that’s going to take quite a hunk. If you want to get into a good college you’ve got to have a good education. Steve took four languages before he ever went to college. French, German, Latin, and Russian. Not many schools give you that. He wanted to take Spanish, too, but they wouldn’t let him carry that heavy a load, because he had to do all the regular stuff, math and history and all, along with the languages. And you don’t have to be an Episcopalian or anything. I mean, the kids are everything. All races and colors and all that, too. Last year Head of School was from Sao Paolo, Brazil, though he’s lived here for six years. His father’s in the embassy. This year it’s just a plain old New Yorker.”
I looked at Andy and he looked kind of self-conscious. “Such as you?”
“Well. Yah.”
“Congratulations. I think that’s swell.”
He grinned and began pulling up little pieces of grass. “I have to admit I’m pleased. Don was Head of School his year, and Steve was valedictorian, so the competition was pretty stiff all around. You see, I happen to think it’s a great school. It’s not just like being the head of any old school. Listen, where are you going next? I don’t mean after school, I mean after Yellowstone.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Daddy wants to go to some place that isn’t crowded.”
“He does? We know the place. Honest. It’s a little campsite hardly anybody knows about in the Black Ram mountains. It isn’t in any of the camping books or anything. It’s this beautiful sort of plateau way up high in the hills and there’re never more than a couple of tents there. Want me to tell your father about it?”
“Sure. It sounds like fun.”
Some people came strolling up, then, to ask about Great Fountain, so we sent them off to ask the people who’d been there ever since morning and seemed to know all about it.
Mother and Daddy and the others came by after swimming, and Daddy said I ought to go back and help Mother get dinner.
Andy said, “Sir, she’s waited all this time, wouldn’t you consider letting her off just this once? She’s bound to start spouting soon. Not Vicky. Great Fountain. And I’ll treat her to a hot dog or something afterwards. Not Great Fountain. Vicky. And we could meet you at the evening program.”
Mother said, “We’re not going to have anything exciting for dinner and I can get along without you perfectly well, Vic. This kind of patience ought to be rewarded. Anybody else want to stay and watch?”
I sat very still in concentration. No. No. I want to talk to Andy alone. I love you all but I don’t want you here now. No.
I was concentrating so hard I didn’t realize they’d all decided not to stay until they’d gone. Old Faithful was due again in a few minutes and they were going to watch that.
Then Don and Steve came wandering by and announced that they were going to get dinner, and Andy said to go ahead without him, we’d just pick up a hot dog and a coke.
After they’d gone he said, “Bored or anything, Vicky?”
“Nope.” I felt happy and peaceful. Andy was so relaxed about everything you couldn’t help being relaxed, too, when you were with him. And I was excited, too. But it was a very different kind of excitement from being with Zachary. There wasn’t any fear in it.
After a while I realized that it was growing dark, and Andy said, “Oh, come on, isn’t she ever going to spout?” And then there was a sort of bubble and gasp from the geyser and great lacy curtains of spray began to rise, to fall, to rise, until finally there was a tremendous high fountain of silver, shivering and pulsing and flinging itself up into the sky and then falling down in a delicate shower and then shooting up again.
We sat and watched it in silence, and it seemed to go on and on, and finally it just drifted down and disappeared.
“Now that’s what I call worth waiting for,” Andy said in a satisfied way. “Come on, Vicky, I’m starved. We’ll miss most of the evening program, but I don’t think anybody’ll mind.”
After we’d eaten we went back to the tent to get sweaters and the others had all skipped the program, too, and were sitti
ng around the fire, gabbing. Just as we came up we heard a commotion down the road. Suzy ran off to see what it was, and came back, full of excitement, to report that there was a cub up a tree and the rangers were trying to get it down.
“Grab a sweater, Vicky,” Andy said. “Let’s go.”
We didn’t even wait for the others but ran down the road and joined the group watching. Luckily almost everybody in the tents around was at the evening program, so we had a really good view, because what had happened was that during the day a mother bear had ripped up several tents. If a bear goes into a tent with food in it, that’s just rough luck. They give you enough warnings so you deserve what you get, like that brat Jo-Lee feeding the bear her sandwich. But this bear had gone after a couple of tents with no food, and when that happens the rangers go after the bear. They had managed to get the mother bear into an enormous trap, but they hadn’t been able to get the cub, who had run up a tree.
There were four rangers out after the cub. One was up a tree with a lasso. Two others, also with lassoes, were standing on the ground just below. The fourth ranger was back with the campers, probably to keep some dumb jerk from trying to get in the hunt and getting hurt. Everybody watching had flashlights trained on the bear. The ranger with the campers was the one who’d come along that afternoon when Andy stuck the lighted cigar against the bear’s nose. He yelled “Hi!” at us as though we were old friends, so Andy and I stood by him, and soon Suzy had slipped through the crowd to stand close to the ranger so she could ask questions.
The cub hunt was like something out of Disney. Half way up a tall, slender pine, looking cute and adorable like something in a cartoon, was a fat little cub. At first you couldn’t imagine why the ranger had to climb gingerly up a nearby tree, why he couldn’t just climb after the cub, pick it up, and bring it down to its mother. But in a minute you saw why. As soon as the ranger in the tree got his lasso anywhere near the cub, the little thing stopped looking like a stuffed toy and turned into a wild animal, and a fat little bear cub is plenty big enough to rip a grown man to shreds. I realized for the first time how lucky that darned Jo-Lee was to have somebody with presence of mind like Andy around when the bear grabbed her.
Suzy wanted to know why they were trying to catch the poor little cub anyhow, and our ranger explained that in the first place they wanted to give the cub back to its mother, and in the second place if a mother is captured and the cub isn’t then the other bears kill the cub.
Maybe, I thought, man isn’t the only species who isn’t good to his own kind. I still had Zachary and his darned song lurking in the corners of my mind ready to spring at me. What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.
Andy obviously wasn’t thinking scary thoughts the way I was, but he must have been thinking along the same lines, at least about life and all, because he turned to me with a big, happy grin, and said, “This guy Santayana, I was reading him in school this year, he says, ‘There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.’ I’m sure enjoying it. I hope it’s going to be a good long one.”
Suzy turned pleadingly to the ranger. “Then when you catch the cub what are you going to do with it?”
I could just imagine Suzy begging Daddy to let us take a bear cub home with us.
The ranger explained, “We band both the mother and the cub, and then we take them a hundred miles out into the wilderness. Most of them stay there and everything is fine. But if a banded bear—and these are the bears that are apt to be vicious around human beings—is seen in a campgrounds, then we have to destroy it.”
“You mean you shoot it!” Suzy wailed.
“We have to, honey,” the ranger said. “We’ve given it its chance, and we can’t risk people being hurt. Look! They’ve got a couple of lassoes around the cub.”
That diverted Suzy and we turned back to the cub hunt. It was really thrilling: the small group of us standing around in the moonlight with flashlights aimed at the cub as it ran up and down the tree; the rangers with their lassoes; the cub switching trees in desperation, and the ranger very quickly switching, too! And Andy holding my hand in a calm, protecting sort of way.
The cub would slide slowly almost all the way down the tree, nearly within reach of the lassoes, and then give a jerk of his head and shinny back up the tree, while everybody let out a sort of groany sigh. Poor little thing, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him because how could he know that the rangers were trying to put him back with his mother so the other bears wouldn’t kill him?
People were beginning to drift back from the campfire program when the rangers finally got three lassoes around the cub. He fought, he snarled, he thrashed about ferociously, and I realized that I was clutching Andy’s hand hard. The rangers held the cub off from them with poles, and finally managed to get a barrel over him, so they could then get him into their truck. There was a lot of wild growling, scuffling, shouting and then it was over.
Everybody relaxed, and I thought I ought to let go Andy’s hand, now that the excitement was over. But he took my hand again very firmly and walked me back to the tent.
Nineteen
The next day we went to Andy’s campsite in the Black Ram mountains. Don got out their map, and Steve took a red pencil and marked in the rather wind-ey, back-tracking course for us. Just as we were leaving Andy gave me a slip of paper with their address and telephone number on it.
“Now promise you’ll call when you get to New York,” he said. He turned to John, “Make your dumb-cluck of a sister call me, hunh?”
Suzy stuck her head out the car window, “I’ll call you if she doesn’t, Andy. I like you lots better than Zachary.”
I almost belted her one.
We drove off, and, except for feeling mad at Suzy, I was all warm and sort of glowy over Yellowstone, in spite of the fact that nothing really had happened. But I had Andy’s address and phone number in my pocket. And there was Zachary’s poem. I had two unforgettable souvenirs of the trip if nothing else.
It was real western country all day, quite different, again, from anything we’d seen. There were great stretches of range, with barren, lava-like mountains rearing up on the horizon. Up, up, up, along the most curvy roads yet, if that’s possible. More of the beautiful wild horses, and enormous herds of sheep, and well-fed cows and bulls. Up on the plateaus were lush, green fields, clear streams, evergreen trees, early spring wildflowers, and quite a lot of snow in the shady, protected corners. There were quite a few ranchers’ chuck wagons, and the only people we passed were cowboys, real ones, and some of them Indians. I felt that Thornhill was a very small world to have spent so much of a life in. I wonder if we’ll feel that way about our earth when we get into interplanetary travel?
We stopped about four thirty at Andy’s campgrounds, and it was just as nice as he’d said it was. It was just a little green shelf below the mountain’s crest, bordered on one side by the peak of the mountain, on the other by a stream that ran icy cold from melting snow. There was a riot of wild roses all in bloom and the grass was speckled with buttercups and daisies. When you were right out in the sun it was wonderful and hot, but the stream, swollen with melted snow, was much too cold for swimming. There was only one other tent there, and who did it turn out to be but the nice Greek professors and their wives from Glacier!
Then.
We hadn’t even finished setting up camp when there came the familiar sound of a station wagon being driven too fast for the roads. And there was Zachary, this time with his parents. We hadn’t actually seen his parents since that first night in Tennessee.
He parked the station wagon in the campsite next to ours, got out, and demanded, “Who is this Andy?” I must have looked very startled, because he went on with elaborate patience, “This guy at Yellowstone. Andrew Ford.”
Suzy bustled up to him and said, “Andy’s nice. How’d you find out about him anyhow?”
I usually wished Suzy’d keep her nose out of my affairs, but she’d just asked a q
uestion I wanted to know the answer to and pride would have kept me from asking.
“How do you suppose I found you?” Zachary asked impatiently. “I was at Yellowstone last night and I didn’t even see you. Why weren’t you at the campfire program?”
“But how did you know we were here?” Suzy asked.
“I cooked up a very convincing story about having to get hold of my cousins because of family illness and this morning they let me look at the register so I knew you were there. So I went around asking people, for crying out loud, and these three boys said you’d been camped right by them, and they told me you were coming here, and that red-headed one seemed kind of annoyed that the others had told me.”
“Relax, Zach,” I said, much more calmly than I’d have been able to before I met Andy. “Suzy and I have to get the air-mattresses in the sleeping bags. Either help us or get out of the way.”
“I’m going to help Pop.” Zachary looked stormy. “I’ll see you later, Vicky.”
“He talks as though he owned you or something,” Suzy said indignantly. “I like Andy much better.”
“As Christopher Marlowe said, comparisons are odious. Hold the sleeping bag straighter so I can shove the air mattress in.”
“Don’t spray it, say it,” Suzy said.
My heart was kind of thumping. I was glad to see Zachary and I wished he hadn’t come. I wanted to go on enjoying the relaxed feeling Andy had given me, but I was excited that Zachary was still following me, that he’d gone to all that trouble, inventing cousins, and all, and that he and Andy didn’t seem too happy about each other. I mean! Nobody in Thornhill had ever gone on that way about me!
I pretended to be very calm, and as though nothing important had been happening, and helped Mother get dinner while Zachary and his father went through the long rigamarole of laying the linoleum carpet and tying the plastic cover over their tent. The Greek professors were bug-eyed.
The Moon by Night Page 19
