Thomas Tryon - The Night of the Moonbow

Leo shrugged but offered no comment.

“But you must practice. It’s very important, if you’re going to have a career in music. You do plan to take it up, don’t you?”

“I – I d-don’t know,” Leo stammered.

“Don’t know?”’ she exclaimed. “Of course you do -gracious, don’t talk nonsense.” She sucked in her cheeks and ran her tongue around her teeth. “See here. I don’t know what silliness came over you at Major Bowes. But these things happen at times. A string breaks, you hit a clinker, you forget where you are in a piece.” She eyed him intently. “Look at me, please, when I am talking to you. Don’t you want to be a musician? Don’t you want to be an artist?” she demanded.

“Yes, I want to play on the radio with Toscanini,” he blurted. Dagmar clapped her hands.

“Well, then – to be a fine musician requires not only diligence and practice but the will to be. No matter who tries to get in your way. All great artists have a sense of destiny, you know,” she went on, “that is what helps them become great. And they are strong, like steel, hard, because they cannot let anything or anyone stand in the way of their talent. They make the most of the moment when it comes. Carpe diem! You know what that means, don’t you? Seize the day! And fly on wings of song!”

On wings of song! Leo stared at her wonderingly.

She smiled her crusty, wrinkled smile. “Your mother would like that, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes.” Leo looked at her. How did she know about Emily?

Dagmar nodded with satisfaction. “I thought so. You loved your mother very much, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

She used the hand-strap to redistribute her weight into her corner of the seat. “You haven’t told me how you lost her.”

“It was an accident. A train accident.”

“Oh?” She drew down the upholstered arm and_ leaned toward him. “That is a tragedy, indeed.”

She straightened and lit one of her Camels. “See here,” she said, picking a fleck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, “suppose I invited you to the Castle – you and your friends. Would you like that?”

Would he! He had thought to leave camp without ever clapping an eye on the famous shrunken head, and here was Dagmar suggesting a visit. And what a feather in his cap if he could walk into Jeremiah and make the announcement that they were going to the Castle.

“Oh yes! Very much,” he said.

“Well, you shall come, then, and see the shrunken head.” She paused, eyeing him. “And afterward, if you happened to bring along your violin, we might have a spot of music. Would you like that?”

“Perhaps. Who would listen?”

“I would, for one. And our friend, Fritz. I know you like Fritz. And, why, the boys of Harmony. You must invite them all, every one. Do you have any music?”

“Just some old pieces.”

“Sometimes the old pieces are the best ones. Do you know ‘Traumerei’?”

Yes. Leo knew the piece.

“Paganini’s Caprice in A Minor?”

Yes, he knew the Paganini, too.

“Suppose you just brush up a bit, then,” Dagmar said. “I shall have the piano tuned for the occasion. We shall play duets in the music room.”

Leo stared; if he played with her – surely he could do it then, could – how had she put it? – fly on wings of song! And see the Castle! He could hardly wait to get back and tell the guys!

“We’ll leave you here, then,” Dagmar said as Augie pulled over at the mailboxes. “Goodbye. Don’t forget – practice. It won’t make perfect but it helps.”

She waved and he waved back, cupping his hands and shouting: “Tack; tack, tack.” Then he made tracks for Jeremiah to tell Tiger and the others all about it. The moment he walked into the cabin, however, he met trouble. Not unnaturally, it originated in Garbage Gulch, which was what, in his journal, he’d dubbed Phil and Wally’s bunk rack. Tiger wasn’t around; Leo had forgotten, there was a meeting of the Sachems, who’d asked Tiger to attend. But Phil was there.

“We saw you,” he said, “getting out of Dagmar’s car. Doesn’t she know it’s against the rules, giving campers rides?” He draped his swim towel around his neck.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” Leo said, feigning innocence as he kicked off his sneakers. “Maybe you can remind her on Saturday – at the Castle.”

They didn’t get it. “What are you talking about?” Monkey asked. “Everybody knows we’re not allowed to go to the Castle anymore.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Leo retorted, flipping his hole card, an ace. “Because we’re invited to visit Dagmar there – next Saturday.”

Phil chose not to believe it. “Who’re you kidding?” he scoffed.

“I’m not kidding. I fixed it with her. For lunch and everything.”

Phil was astonished. “You fixed it?”

Dump snorted. “Aw, c’mon, Wacko, what d’you mean, fixed it? How?”

“It wasn’t hard. I just talked her into it, that’s all. I said it would be nice; a lot of the guys haven’t seen it.” “Including you, I suppose.”

“Why not? There’ll be music, too,” he added, tugging on his trunks. “Dagmar and I are going to play duets.” “Hope it’s better playing than at Major Bowes… ” Wally muttered as Leo hopped outside to pull his towel from the line.

“Don’t worry, Wally,” the Bomber said, saluting the news with a stupefying chain of farts. “You can ahvays stop your ears.”

Phil and Wally’s expressions said there was something fishy in it all, but Monkey and Dump and, on the opposite side of the cabin, Eddie Fiske signaled approval, and in a few minutes the news was being spread among the assembled swimmers at the dock that the Friend-Indeeders had been invited back to the Castle – and, according to the way he told it, all thanks to Wacko Wackeem.

In the age of the electric Frigidaire, Kelsoe’s icehouse was less a building than a relic of an earlier time, less a fact of life than a sentimentalized tradition. For years Moonbow campers had been hearing from Pa and Henry Ives tales of the “good old days,” when the Friends of Joshua would come out from Putnam in wintertime, sleighing and jingle-belling over the backcountry roads, bringing their saws to cut the ice and their baling hooks to haul the blocks up the tin-sheathed ramp from the shore to be stored, covered with sawdust and battened down under tarpaulins, against the coming hot summer months.

Decidedly smaller than a barn, the icehouse nonetheless had the atmosphere of one, with its lofty, shadowy spaces, its thick rooftree and timbers set with trunnels, mortised and tenoned; there was hardly a nail in the whole place. High in the rafters, gray papery wasp nests the shape of footballs swung in the breeze among mud-dauber dwellings so firmly chinked into the corners that they blended with the architecture. Half-rotted surfaces were overgrown with dark-green mosses and blue lichens, with patches of chemical-orange toadstools that thrived in the loamy soil. Here and there along the well-adzed rooftree, families of birds nested – barn swallows in little half-cups of mud and, in one corner, the straw-and-twig sack of an oriole. The cool interior smelled of mold, a pungent, mushroomy kind of odor, and over the years the room had become the habitat of whole colonies of grubs and termites, and spiders of a sort completely different from those that inhabited the meadow.

Leo had already found the place a good one for spiders; now he had decided it would be a perfect spot to practice in as well, a hideaway where he could fiddle to his heart’s content, where the walls would not only provide sounding boards for his music but prevent the sound from carrying to unwelcome ears. He shed his cap, the one Reece had objected to – these days the felt crown sported even more bottle caps, and buttons with views of Ausable Chasm and Niagara Falls that he’d traded for around camp; even a Coast Guard anchor he’d swapped for his Mel Ott bubble-gum card – and, having come across a beat-up peach basket to sit upon and an all-but-backless chair for a music stand, he made himself at home just within the side entrance. He opened his knapsack and brought out some sheet music, then unsnapped the catches of his violin case. He began softly, a do-re-mi scale, up and down, up and down, checking to see if he had gone rusty.