Bagombo Snuff Box (26 page)

“Everybody ready?” he said. “Good! Fortissimo! Con brio!
A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four!” Helmholtz stayed earth-bound this time. He
weighed a ton.

When Bert came to his office after school, Helmholtz had an
agenda. He wanted the lonely boy to stop disliking Charlotte. She appeared to
be a warm person, who could lead Bert into a social life apart from the band
and Helmholtz. He thought it important, too, that the dangers of alcohol be
discussed.

But the talk wouldn’t go at all as planned, and Helmholtz
sensed that it wouldn’t as soon as Bert sat down. He had self-respect on a
scale Helmholtz had never seen him exhibit before. Something big must have
happened, thought Helmholtz. Bert was staring straight at him, challenging, as
though they were equals, no longer man and boy.

“Bert,” Helmholtz began, “I won’t beat around the bush. I
know you were drunk at the football game.”

“Mr. Fink told you?”

“Yes, and it troubled me.”

“Why didn’t you realize it at the time?” said Bert. “Everybody
else did. People were laughing at you because you thought I was sick.”

“I had a lot on my mind,” said Helmholtz.

“Music,” said Bert, as though it were a dirty word.

“Certainly music,” said Helmholtz, taken aback. “My goodness.”

“Nothin’ but music,” said Bert, his gaze like laser beams.

“That’s often the case, and why not?” Again Helmholtz added
incredulously, “My goodness.”

“Charlotte was right.”

“I thought you hated her.”

“I like her a lot, except for the things she said about you.
Now I know how right she was, and I not only like her, I love her.”

Helmholtz was scared now, and unused to that. This was a
most unpleasant scene. “Whatever she said about me, I don’t think I’d care to
hear it.”

“I won’t tell you, because all you’d hear is music.” Bert
put his trumpet in its case on the bandmaster’s desk. The trumpet was rented
from the school. “Give this to somebody else, who’ll love it more than I did,”
he said. “I only loved it because you were so good to me, and you told me to.”
He stood. “Good-bye.”

Bert was at the door before Helmholtz asked him to stop, to
turn around and look him in the eye again, and say what Charlotte had said
about him.

Bert was glad to tell him. He was angry, as though Helmholtz
had somehow swindled him. “She said you were completely disconnected from real
life, and only pretended to be interested in people. She said all you paid
attention to was music, and if people weren’t playing it, you could still hear
it in your head. She said you were nuts.”

“Nuts?” echoed Helmholtz wonderingly.

“I told her to stop saying that,” said Bert, “but then you
showed me how really nutty you are.”

“Please tell me how. I need to know.” said Helmholtz. But a
concert band in his head was striking up Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete
with the roar of cannons. It was all he could do not to sing along.

“When you gave me marching lessons,” Bert was saying, “and I
was acting drunk, you didn’t even notice how crazy it was. You weren’t even
there!”

A brief silence followed a crescendo in the music in the bandmaster’s
head. Helmholtz asked this question: “How could that girl know anything about
me?”

“She dates a lot of other bandsmen,” said Bert. “She gets ‘em
to tell her the really funny stuff.”

Before leaving for home at sunset that day, Helmholtz paid a
visit to the school nurse. He said he needed to talk to her about something.

“Is it that Bert Higgens again?” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s even closer to home than that,” he said. “It’s
me this time. It’s I. It’s me.”

The factory made the best centrifugal pumps in the world,
and Merle Waggoner owned it. He’d started it. He’d just been offered two million
dollars for it by the General Forge and Foundry Company. He didn’t have any
stockholders and he didn’t owe a dime. He was fifty-one, a widower, and he had
one heir—a son. The boy’s name was Franklin. The boy was named for Benjamin
Franklin.

One Friday afternoon father and son went out of Merle’s
office and into the factory. They walked down a factory aisle to Rudy Linberg’s
lathe.

“Rudy,” said Merle, “the boy here’s home from college for
three days, and I thought maybe you and him and your boy and me might go out to
the farm and shoot some clay pigeons tomorrow.”

Rudy turned his sky-blue eyes to Merle and young Franklin.
He was Merle’s age, and he had the deep and narrow dignity of a man who had learned
his limitations early—who had never tried to go beyond them. His limitations
were those of his tools, his flute, and his shotgun.

“Might try crows,” he said.

Rudy stood at attention like the good soldier he was. And like
an old soldier, he did it without humility, managed to convey that he was the
big winner in life, after all. He had been Merle’s first employee. He might
have been a partner way back then, for two thousand dollars. And Rudy’d had the
cash. But the enterprise had looked chancy to him. He didn’t seem sorry now.

“We could set up my owl,” said Rudy. He had a stuffed owl to
lure crows. He and his son, Karl, had made it.

“Need a rifle to get at the crows out there,” said Merle. “They
know all about that owl of yours and Karl’s. Don’t think we could get any
closer to ‘em than half a mile.”

“Might be sport, trying to get at ‘em with a scope,” said
Franklin softly. He was tall and thin, in cashmere and gray flannel. He was
almost goofy with shyness and guilt. He had just told his father that he wanted
to be an actor, that he didn’t want the factory. And shock at his own words had
come so fast that he’d heard himself adding, out of control, the hideously
empty phrase, “Thanks just the same.”

His father hadn’t reacted—yet. The conversation had gone
blandly on to the farm, to shooting, to Rudy and Karl, to Rudy and Karl’s new
station wagon, and now to crows.

“Let’s go ask my boy what he’s got on tomorrow,” said Rudy.
It was a formality. Karl always did what his father wanted him to do, did it
with profound love.

Rudy, Merle, and Franklin went down the aisle to a lathe
thirty feet from Rudy’s. Merle’s chin was up. Rudy looked straight ahead.
Franklin looked down at the floor.

Karl was a carbon copy of his father. He was such a good
mimic of Rudv that his joints seemed to ache a little with age. He seemed
sobered by fifty-one years of life, though he’d lived only twenty. He seemed
instinctively wary of safety hazards that had been eliminated from the factory
by the time he’d learned to walk. Karl stood at attention without humility,
just as his father had done.

“Want to go shooting tomorrow?” said Rudy.

“Shoot what?” said Karl.

“Crows. Clay pigeons,” said Rudy. “Maybe a woodchuck.”

“Don’t mind,” said Karl. He nodded briefly to Merle and
Franklin. “Glad to.”

“We could take some steaks and have supper out there,” said
Merle. “You make the steak sauce, Rudy?”

“Don’t mind,” said Rudy. He was famous for his steak sauce,
and had taught the secret to his son. “Be glad to.”

“Got a bottle of twenty-year-old bourbon I’ve been saving
for something special,” said Merle. “I guess tomorrow’ll be special enough.”
He lit a cigar, and Franklin saw that his father’s hand was shaking. “We’ll
have a ball,” he said.

Clumsily Merle punched Franklin in the kidneys, man to man,
trying to make him bubble. He regretted it at once. He laughed out loud to show
it didn’t matter, laughed through cigar smoke that stung his eyes. The laugh
drove smoke into the walls of his lungs. Pleasure fled. On and on the laugh
went.

“Look at him, Rudy!” said Merle, lashing the merriment onward.
“Foot taller’n his old man, and president of what at Cornell?”

“Interfraternity Council,” murmured Franklin, embarrassed.
He and Karl avoided looking at each other. Their fathers had taken them hunting
together maybe a hundred times. But the boys had hardly spoken to each other,
had exchanged little more than humorless nods and head shakes for hits and
misses.

‘And how many fraternities at Cornell?” said Merle.

“Sixty-two,” said Franklin, more softly than before.

‘And how many men in a fraternity?” said Merle.

“Forty, maybe,” said Franklin. He picked up a sharp, bright
spiral shaving of steel from the floor. “There’s a pretty thing,” he said. He
knew his father’s reaction was coming now. He could hear the first warning
tremors in his voice.

“Say sixty fraternities,” said Merle. “Say forty men in each
. . . Makes twenty-four hundred boys my boy’s over, Rudy! When I was his age, I
didn’t have but six men under me.”

“They aren’t under me, Father,” said Franklin. “I just run
the meetings of the Council and—”

The explosion came. “You run the show!” roared Merle. “You
can be as damn polite about it as you want to, but you still run the show!”

Nobody said anything.

Merle tried to smile, but the smile curdled, as though he
were going to burst into tears. He took the strap of Rudy’s overalls between
his thumb and forefinger and rubbed the faded denim. He looked up into Rudy’s
sky-blue eyes.

“Boy wants to be an actor, Rudy,” he said. And then he
roared again. “That’s what he said!” He turned away and ran back to his office.

In the moment before Franklin could make himself move, Rudy
spoke to him as if nothing were wrong.

“You got enough shells?” said Rudy.

“What?” said Franklin.

“You got enough shells? You want us to pick up some?” said
Rudy.

“No,” said Franklin. “We’ve got plenty of shells. Half a
case, last time I checked.”

Rudy nodded. He examined the work in Karl’s lathe and tapped
his own temple. The tapping was a signal Franklin had seen many times on hunts.
It meant that Karl was doing fine.

Rudy touched Karl’s elbow lightly. It was the signal for
Karl to get back to work. Rudy and Karl each held up a crooked finger and
saluted with it. Franklin knew what that meant, too. It meant, “Good-bye, I
love you.”

Franklin put one foot in front of the other and went looking
for his own father. Merle was sitting at his desk, his head down, when Franklin
came in. He held a steel plate about six inches square in his left hand. In the
middle of the plate was a hole two inches square. In his right hand he held a
steel cube that fitted the hole exactly.

On the desktop were two black bags of jeweler’s velvet, one
for the plate and one for the cube. About every ten seconds Merle put the cube
through the hole.

Franklin sat down gingerly on a hard chair by the wall. The
office hadn’t changed much in the years he’d known it. It was one more factory
room, with naked pipes overhead—the cold ones sweaty, the hot ones dry. Wires
snaked from steel box to steel box. The green walls and cream trim were as
rough as elephant hide in some places, with alternating coats of paint and
grime, paint and grime.

There had never been time to scrape away the layers, and
barely enough time, overnight, to slap on new paint. And there had never been
time to finish the rough shelves that lined the room.

Franklin still saw the place through child’s eyes. To him it
had been a playroom. He remembered his father’s rummaging through the shelves
for toys to amuse his boy. The toys were still there: cutaway pumps, salesmen’s
samples, magnets, a pair of cracked safety glasses that had once saved Rudy
Linberg’s blue eyes.

And the playthings Franklin remembered best—remembered best
because his father would show them to him, but never let him touch—were what
Merle was playing with now.

Merle slipped the cube through the square hole once more. “Know
what these are?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Franklin. “They’re what Rudy Linberg had to
make when he was an apprentice in Sweden.”

The cube could be slipped through the hole in twenty-four different
ways, without letting the tiniest ray of light pass through with it.

“Unbelievable skill,” said Franklin respectfully. “There
aren’t craftsmen like that coming along anymore.” He didn’t really feel much
respect. He was simply saying what he knew his father wanted to hear. The cube
and the hole struck him as criminal wastes of time and great bores. “Unbelievable,”
he said again.

“It’s unbelievable, when you realize that Rudy didn’t make
them,” said Merle, “when you realize what generation the man who made them belongs
to.”

“Oh?” said Franklin. “Who did make them?”

“Rudy’s boy,” said Merle. “A member of your generation.” He
ground out his cigar. “He gave them to me on my last birthday. They were on my
desk, boy, waiting for me when I came in—right beside the ones Rudy gave me so
many years ago.”

Franklin had sent a telegram on that birthday. Presumably,
the telegram had been waiting on the desk, too. The telegram had said, “Happy
Birthday, Father.”

“I could have cried, boy, when I saw those two plates and
those two cubes side by side,” said Merle. “Can you understand that?” he asked.
“Can you understand why I’d feel like crying?”

“Yes, sir,” said Franklin.

Merle’s eyes widened. “And then I guess I did cry—one tear, maybe
two,” he said. “Because—you know what I found out, boy?”

“No, sir,” said Franklin.

“The cube of Karl’s fitted through the hole of Rudy’s!” said
Merle. “They were interchangeable!”

“Gosh!” said Franklin. “I’ll be darned. Really?”

And now he felt like crying, because he didn’t care, couldn’t
care—and would have given his right arm to care. The factory whanged and banged
and screeched in monstrous irrelevance—Franklin’s, all Franklin’s, if he just
said the word.

“What’ll you do with it—buy a theater in New York?” Merle
said abruptly.

“Do with what, sir?” said Franklin.

“The money I’ll get for the factory when I sell it—the money
I’ll leave to you when I’m dead,” said Merle. He hit the word “dead” hard. “What’s
Waggoner Pump going to be converted into? Waggoner Theaters? Waggoner School
of Acting? The Waggoner Home for Broken-Down Actors?”