Spirit (9 page)

‘You don't think that story was true, do you?' Molly asked Elizabeth. ‘I mean, it couldn't have been, could it?'

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘There aren't any boys around called Frank, are there? Not unless she changed his name. It's just that I can't believe all those words she used. And all that description of doing it. I never knew anything about doing it when I was eleven.'

‘And “veritable fountain”! What did she mean by that? It sounds disgusting!'

‘Spermatozoa,' said Elizabeth, emphatically.

‘Spermatozoa? I thought Mrs Westerhuiven said spermatozoa looked like tadpoles.'

‘Well, I don't know,' said Elizabeth. ‘I'm going to have to talk to Laura later.'

‘Mrs Westerhuiven definitely said they looked like tadpoles.'

Inside Endicott's, an L-shaped stainless steel counter ran along the back and right-hand walls, and it was at this counter that a dozen of the local high-school boys and girls were perched, swinging their legs and drinking sodas and milk shakes and eating ice-cream sundaes. There were four tables, too, all of which were already crowded, but Elizabeth and Molly managed to squeeze in at the end of one of the banquettes.

The noise was up to its usual pitch. At the next table, three fifth-grade girls were screaming with laughter; while down at the far end of the counter, two boys were popping their fingers
and trying to sing ‘They're Either Too Young Or Too Old' in a growling disharmony of recently-broken voices. Another boy accompanied them by raking a sundae spoon down the side of the tall chromium wire cage that held the oranges for Fresh-Squeezed Juice, and tapping with a fork on the porcelain jar of Borden's Malted Milk.

Behind the counter was a huge crystalline pyramid of upside-down ice-cream dishes, and a coffee urn, with a glass showing the coffee level, and glass jars of pecan nut cookies and Baby Ruths and Planters peanut bars, as well as all the shining paraphernalia of milk-shakers and ice-cream scoops.

Judy McGuinness was sitting on a stool right beside Elizabeth, and Elizabeth gave her a nervous smile. Judy McGuinness was head cheerleader and last year's Prom Queen and just about everybody's heroine. She was round-faced and very pretty, in an exotic, Ava Gardner way, with heaps of curly black hair and violet eyes and – envy of envies – a natural beauty spot. Her parents allowed her to wear lipstick out of school and so she always did, a vivid red shade of Stadium Girl. She was dressed in a blue striped blouse and a pair of well-tailored white slacks rolled up to mid-calf, so that everybody could see her critically fashionable odd socks, one purple and one blue.

‘Hi, Buchanan,' Judy drawled. ‘How's your mom these days? Any better?'

‘She's very well, thank you,' said Elizabeth. She hated it when people asked her about mommy.

‘Is she home for the rest of the summer?'

‘She's home for good now.'

‘Well, that's
marvellous
. I didn't know! You must remember me to her. She can remember people, can't she?'

‘Of course,' Elizabeth flushed. ‘She remembers everything.'

‘Really? I thought – '

‘She's not
insane
or anything, if that's what you're trying to say.'

Dan Marshall, the school's star swimmer, tanned and toothy, was sitting beside Judy, his hand resting lightly but possessively on her arm. He gave Elizabeth a wink and a ‘gee-up' click of his tongue.

‘You tell 'em, kid,' he said. In the mirror behind the counter, between the white-painted lettering for Popsicles and Banana Splits, Elizabeth saw herself flush hot and crimson. She hated it when she blushed; and these days she seemed to be blushing all the time.

At that moment, however, Old Man Hauser appeared, wearing a soda jerk's cap and a red bow tie and a white apron double-tied around his waist. Although the drugstore was called Endicott's, Old Man Hauser had owned it for as long as anybody could remember. He was a calm, dry-voiced seventy-three-year-old, with a face that always reminded Elizabeth of a withered swede. Nobody knew what his first name was. He insisted on being called Old Man Hauser. Laura used to think that he had actually been christened Old Man', but Elizabeth thought it was pretty unlikely.

‘Good afternoon, Lizzie,' he smiled. ‘What's it to be today?'

‘Two malteds, please,' said Elizabeth. She had never seen him in a soda jerk's cap before, and she couldn't help smiling at him. ‘Where's Lenny today? He's not sick, is he?'

‘Lenny? Sick? Of course not. But he's wishing he was.'

‘I don't undersand. He was here yesterday.'

‘Certainly he was here yesterday. But didn't he tell you? He had the greeting. They're sending him off to Fort Dix on Saturday, for training.'

‘Lenny's been
drafted?
' Elizabeth was horrified. ‘Why didn't he tell me?'

Old Man Hauser shrugged. ‘He didn't think they'd take him, on account of his ears. He was sure they were going to classify him 4-F, the same as they did Sinatra. It came as quite
a blow when they told him he was 1-A, and fit enough to fight the whole German army single-handed.'

‘Oh, no,' said Elizabeth.

‘What are you worrying about, kid?' Dan Marshall asked her, with a grin. ‘Lenny's going to be fine. You know what they used to call him at school? “Magic Miller”. He never got detention. He never got lines. If anybody ought to be worried, it's Hitler.'

‘That's the love of Buchanan's life you're talking about, sweetheart,' Judy told him.

‘He's home if you want to see him,' said Old Man Hauser. ‘I gave him the day off to say goodbye to his folks.'

‘Thanks, Mr Hauser,' said Elizabeth, and turned to go.

‘You don't want your malteds?' asked Old Man Hauser. ‘Here, have a double-dip cone to go. Come on. It's on the house.'

‘Hey,' said Dan Marshall, ‘I wish I was in love with Lenny. Maybe I could get free ice-cream, too.'

‘You're in love with yourself and nobody else,' Judy told him.

‘Ouch,' he replied.

Molly stayed at Endicott's because she would go weak at the knees if she didn't have her daily malted on the way home from school, and might even die of malnutrition. Elizabeth walked along the hot, glaring street, trying to lick her chocolate-and-strawberry double-dip faster than it was dripping down her wrist.

Lenny lived in Putnam Street, a quiet, elm-shaded avenue of large Queen Anne houses with turrets and carpentered porches. Originally, these houses had been built for Sherman's more prosperous citizens, its doctor and its lawyer and the owner of the Sherman Sawmills. But now the sawmill was derelict, and there weren't enough people living in the area to
support a lawyer, and the last remaining doctor was so old that he needed a doctor himself. Several of the houses were empty; most of them were shabby and scurvy with weathered paint.

Lenny's house – in the very middle of Putnam Street – was in better repair than most, but then Lenny's father owned and ran the local hardware store, and he could buy all his paint and putty at cost. Elizabeth walked across the lawn to the front door. The garden was unkempt and weedy, but some effort had been made to clear the rose beds under the verandah, and round at the side of the house there was a well-tended vegetable patch, where the bright green leaves of bean plants fluttered, and summer squash shone yellow as Chinese lanterns. A station-wagon was parked in the grass-tufted driveway, its engine still sporadically ticking as it cooled down.

From inside the house, she could hear the radio, tuned to the latest war news. ‘. . . after a sustained air bombardment to knock out its airstrips and underground hangars, the Italian island of Pantellaria was taken by the Allies yesterday in what is proving to be . . .'

She climbed the steps, banged at the heavy doorknocker, and waited. There was a warm sweet aroma of baking in the air, muffins and cornbread. After a while the door opened and there was Mr Miller thin as a rail in his baggy grey trousers and his shirtsleeves and his yellow braces. The sunny street was reflected in his glasses.

‘Lizzie!' he smiled. ‘Come on in. You're just in time to wish Lenny goodbye!'

‘He's leaving
already?
' asked Elizabeth.

‘They called this morning, said he had to report this afternoon, at five.'

‘But I haven't even had time to buy him a present!'

‘Oh, don't you worry none about that. You can always
send him something, if you're minded to, when he gets to Fort Dix. He'll probably appreciate it more. I know I did, when I was in the service.'

Mr Miller ushered her into the house. She had always liked the Millers' house because every room was crammed with the oddest knick-knacks and bits-and-pieces. A picture of Quonochontaug beach, made entirely out of clam shells. An old-fashioned spinning wheel, half of a plough, a lobster pot. Mrs Miller was standing at the kitchen table, prying muffins out of the baking-tray; and she smiled as Elizabeth came in, the smile of a woman who knows when goodness comes into her house. She nodded her head towards the back door, which had been left ajar; and out on the boarded verandah, Lenny was feeding the canaries, looking smarter than Elizabeth had ever seen him, in shirt and necktie. He was a lean, good-looking, but rather reticent kind of boy, like a young Jimmy Stewart. He was summer-suntanned, with a distinctive mole on his upper left cheek, and his hair short and shiny and quiffed at the front.

‘Go on, Lizzie, go talk to him,' said Mrs Miller. ‘He could use some friendly talk.'

Elizabeth went out onto the verandah. Lenny was obviously aware that she was there, but he continued to coo and tweet to his canaries, and prod a bone-white cuttlefish shell through the bars of their cage.

‘Lenny?' ventured Elizabeth at last.

He looked at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, from hay fever, maybe. Lenny had always suffered from hay fever.

‘I didn't know you'd been drafted,' she said.

He shrugged, and pulled a face. ‘Oh, sure, of course I was drafted. These days, you have to be a loony, or crippled, or dead already.'

‘You didn't
tell
me,' she repeated.

He pushed the last fragment of cuttlefish shell through the bars. ‘Lizzie . . . you would have found out sooner or later.'

‘But you would have gone! And I wanted to give you a present, and everything!'

‘Hey, come on kid,' he told her, and stood in front of her with his thin arms folded, and smiled. ‘I don't need no presents, not from you.'

Elizabeth couldn't stop her throat from tightening. ‘I wanted to give you something, that's all, to remember me by.'

He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I don't need nothing to remember you by. How could I forget you?'

She stared at him, wide-eyed. ‘You mean that?'

‘What kind of doofus do you think I am?'

Mrs Miller called out, ‘Lenny – why'n't you take Lizzie down to the orchard and fetch me some of them pie-apples?'

‘Okay, ma!' Lenny called back. Elizabeth had never seen him act so obliging. He was always grumbling that his mother and father took advantage of his good nature, and made him run errands whenever his favourite radio show was on; or made him wash the dishes when he wanted to go fishing.

They stepped down from the verandah into the thick hot glare of the garden. The sun was so bright that Lenny had to keep one eye screwed up. Their ankles rustled through the grass; the birds sang an inquisitive, spangled song.

‘Aren't you afraid?' asked Elizabeth. There were very few secrets between them. In spite of the difference in their ages (which in anybody older, would have amounted to nothing at all), they both believed in mystery, they both believed in magic. They had once leaned on the railing of the wooden bridge where Lake Candlewood darkly emptied its waters into a lush and overgrown stream, and Lenny had said, ‘You may not think it . . . nobody may think it . . . but trolls live under this bridge, sure as eggs.'

‘Trolls?' she had asked him, peering into the gurgling shadows. ‘What are trolls?'

‘You don't know what trolls are? Trolls are what you're afraid of.'

‘What do you mean?' she had challenged him.

‘Exactly that, stupid. Trolls are what you're afraid of. Anything. Being embarrassed, coming last in maths, making a fool of yourself in front of your parents. Drinking your first beer and puking. Wrecking your father's car. Dying. All that stuff.'

‘Dying?' she had asked him; and that was what she was asking him now. Only this time the danger of him dying wasn't just an idle conversation on a bridge. This time, the danger of him dying was real and immediate. She had seen newsreels of fully-laden GIs dropping out of DUKWs into ten feet of water, and never coming up again. She had seen men lying on the roads of Normandy, as if they were sleeping. But who would sleep in the middle of the road on a summer afternoon, when there was a war to be won?

Lenny picked a cooking apple from a tree, twisting it around so that the stalk snapped. There was so much brightness and shadow; and flying insects criss-crossing the garden in random, sunlit patterns.

‘I'm not afraid. Well not
too
much. The way the war's going, I'll probably never even get to Europe, let alone fight.'

Elizabeth watched him picking apples and said nothing for a long time.

‘I don't know . . .' he said, after a while. ‘I'm kind of looking forward to it. I know I'll have to obey orders and all. But at least they won't be dad's orders, or old man Hauser's orders, or Dan Marshall's stupid orders for Moron's Ecstasies.'

‘Oh, yuk,' said Elizabeth. A Moron's Ecstasy was Endicott's ultimate sundae, including eight different flavours of icecream, bananas, Melba peach, raspberries, mixed nuts, tutti-frutti, pineapple and whipped cream. It cost a whole dollar, and was the current craze among school seniors who wanted to show that they had stomachs of steel.