City Boy (24 page)

“I'll tell you what,” said Bookbinder. “The boy wrote a letter and then foolishly mailed a blank sheet instead.”

“You think so?” The mother looked a little more cheerful.

“What else could it be? Let's wait till tomorrow. He writes every day, that's one sure thing. We'll know tomorrow.”

Mrs. Bookbinder slept restlessly that night. Next morning she sat at the kitchen window, watching for the postman. In time he came, with a letter from Felicia and a penny postcard from Herbie with the usual two sentences. It read: “I'm feeling fine and hope to hear the same from you. Can you send me a jar of lemon sourballs? Your loving son, Herbie.” She was so relieved that she immediately telephoned the father, who gruffly said he had known all along there was no reason to worry. He was glad to hear the news, all the same.

The next day and the next brought more penny postcards. The following day, Saturday, an envelope came from Herbie. Mrs. Bookbinder tore it open eagerly and with a little foreboding.

It was another blank page.

That evening she debated the mystery again with her husband, who explained it as absent-mindedness once more, but with less assurance. He prevailed on her at last not to telegraph or telephone, but to wait for one more mail. The next day was Sunday. The mother fumed and fretted all day and wanted to know what was wrong with a government that couldn't arrange to have mail delivered on Sunday. This was the one political criticism that Mrs. Bookbinder was heard to utter in her lifetime.

Monday morning the mail brought two more blank letters from Herbie.

Frantic, Mrs. Bookbinder rushed into the street and took a taxi to the ice plant. In her husband's office she indulged in mild hysterics, and was finally calmed by Bookbinder's decision to call the camp at once by long-distance telephone. He picked up the receiver on his desk and put through the call.

It was impossible for the parents to have acted otherwise, unless they had been monsters of coldness. Yet Herbie was in excellent health, and there was a simple explanation of the mystery of the blank letters.

The mother and father had erred, in the first place, to praise the boy's devotion. The fact was that Mr. Gauss, after much trouble in previous years over the failure of boys to write home, had issued an edict requiring a daily communication from each boy. No rule was made as to length or content, but Mr. Gauss insisted that a piece of mail of some nature leave Camp Manitou every twenty-four hours, bound for each set of parents. The girls were exempt, experience having shown that they were less neglectful than the boys. This order of Uncle Gussie's was, of course, mightily resented, the more so when the discrimination between the sexes became known. But Mr. Gauss was not a man to be swayed by the mutterings of boys, or he would not have been either a school principal or a camp owner. This was the third year the law had been in effect, and it was enforced by “dockings.” A boy who failed to hand in a letter was docked from the next day's swimming. A second offender was docked from the movies. There were few second offenders. Movies were too precious a release from camp routine.

At first Herbie had greatly enjoyed the novelty of letter writing. Perhaps his first rapture would have tapered away in time, but it shriveled very swiftly when he learned that he was writing under compulsion. It changed the nature of the deed. He was fond enough of his parents, and missed them enough, to have written fairly full letters once or twice a week, but Mr. Gauss's law erased the natural motive of love, and substituted the more reliable but less pleasant one of fear. Herbie quickly followed the lead of the old campers like Ted in supplying himself with a stack of penny postcards. His way was by no means the worst. A senior in Bunk Fifteen actually used a rubber stamp with the words “I am feeling fine and hope to hear the same from you.” This was one of the most durable jokes at Manitou.

Herbie's blank letters were inexcusable, but they came about in a natural way. A dance for Intermediates and Seniors was impending, and Uncle Sandy had scheduled a dancing class during the letter-writing period. A letter collected at the door was the price of admission to the class. Now and then Herbie was crowded for time, and it took a few seconds less to address an envelope than to write a postcard. He had sent off the first blank letter in desperation when a few more seconds would have meant being locked out of the class. He expected a surprised reaction either by mail or telephone. When nothing of the sort developed he congratulated himself on his luck. Next time he was pressed he used the trick with a smaller twinge of conscience; and thereafter he did it with no misgiving at all.

The last thing Herbie wanted to do was to torture his parents, but the mind of a normal boy is like a criminal mind in a way. He does things that he knows are wrong, and, because of an incomplete awareness of how the world goes, he blithely hopes that somehow he will escape the evil consequences. The iron working of cause and effect is a reality which all of us only reluctantly accept. In time it impresses itself on the criminal, and he goes to jail; and on the boy, and he grows up. In both cases there is a sad, if necessary, loss of freedom.

Herbie was lying on the grass under a white birch that overlooked the lake, having the most peacefully pleasant time of his life, when the law of cause and effect caught up with him in a shattering instant. One moment he was a delighted spectator of the bloody fight between Tarzan and Caraftap in the underground wonder world of the Ant Men; the next moment he was a miserable culprit in this dry old world of ours, slowly being dragged to his feet by one ear which was in the grip of Uncle Sandy.

“Bookbinder, why aren't you out on the handball court where you belong?” grated the head counselor, with a terrifying squint at his prey.

Herbie babbled something meaningless.

“Do you know that there's a long-distance telephone call for you, and that I've been searching the grounds for you this past half hour?”

The news struck Herbie dumb, and took so much starch out of his knees that he would have sat down again if not for Uncle Sandy's helpful support of his ear. He knew at once that the crime of the blank letters had come to light, and he felt the horrid sickness of heart that comes only to the guilty when they are found out. The lake suddenly was bluer than it had ever been, the air sweeter, the grass more inviting; and he would gladly have bribed the head counselor with a hundred thousand dollars, if he had had a hundred thousand dollars, to set him free, explain everything satisfactorily, and erase the bad thing he had done. Guilty grownups who are rich enough sometimes do exactly that by means of a lawyer. But Herbie was a guilty little boy, without the means to conjure away punishment. The past, the hidden past which fools say is gone forever and of no concern to us, had reached forth its dead hand into the present, pointed a blue finger at Herbie, and spoken hollowly, “There is the man.”

Marching up the hill with Uncle Sandy, the boy stammered a full confession of what he had done. To his amazement, the head counselor seemed to grow less stern with every step they took toward the telephone. When Herbie finished the tale of his mischief, they stood outside the camp office, and Uncle Sandy was actually smiling.

“Well, Herb,” he said, “you've been pretty foolish, but boys will be boys. The main thing now is to let your folks know that you're in good health and happy. Isn't that right?”

“Sure, Uncle Sandy,” said Herbie, ready to grovel with gratitude.

“Well, then, let's tell them that, shall we? I've already explained about the letters, and all you've got to do is make them feel you're O.K. and having a swell time. Come on.”

He led the boy up the steps of the guest house to the camp office. This was a hot, small room, pervaded by a smell of mimeographing ink, and full of papers, charts, and files. A wall telephone hung beside the scarred wooden desk. Uncle Sandy rang the operator by cranking a little handle.

“Ready now with our party,” he said, and handed the receiver to Herbie. Just as the boy put it to his ear, Mr. Gauss mysteriously appeared through the open doorway, wearing his best pushed-up smile and nodding his head genially and regularly like a mechanical Buddha.

Herbie heard various buzzes and a click that almost broke his eardrum, and then the voice of his father.

“Hello, Herbie?”

“Hello, Pa. Gee, it's swell to hear your voice.”

“Mama was worried about you. You're all right, aren't you?”

“Oh, sure, I'm swell, Pa. I'm havin' a wonderful time. Gosh, this is a swell camp. We're havin' all kinds of fun.”

The mechanical Buddha went into high gear and nodded faster.

“That's fine,” said his father's voice. “You shouldn't have sent us those blank letters, boy. Uncle Sandy explained all about it. But if you're in that much of a hurry next time, just don't bother writing.”

Herbie, mystified by this, looked at the two men, then said, “Sure, Pa. I'll remember.”

Uncle Sandy hadn't quite explained all. He had told Mr. Bookbinder that boys who were in a hurry to catch the mail often did the same thing just to let their parents know they were thinking of them. He had omitted the detail of compulsory writing. Herbie surmised as much, but he had no intention of arguing.

“All right, Herbie. How's Felicia?”

“Fine, Pa.”

“Good-by, boy. We'll come up to visit you when I'm not so busy. Here, talk to your mother.”

“HELLO, darling.” His mother's voice was charged with emotion. “Are you really all right?”

The query irritated Herbie. Being treated as a criminal was not pleasant, but it was part of a man's lot when he had done wrong; being fussed over like a baby was unendurable.

“Heck, Ma, if I wasn't all right I wouldn't be talkin' to you, would I?”

At the change in his tone the Buddha head stopped nodding with a jerk, and wagged reprovingly from side to side.

Herbie heard his mother laugh a little wildly. “It's so wonderful to hear you sound healthy and happy, darling. Don't send me any more blank letters. They give me sleepless nights.”

“O.K., I won't, Ma,” said Herbie impatiently. “I promise.”

“Are you having a good time, darling?”

Herbie looked at the head-wagging Mr. Gauss and the yawning Uncle Sandy. Everything he did not like about Camp Manitou flashed before his mind's eye in an instant—repairing the fields, sweeping floors, marching out to games he hated, writing postcards under duress, submitting to Uncle Sid's stolid rule, living under one roof with Lennie, being cut off from Lucille, eating, sleeping, and waking to the calls of a bugle: in a word, the cage of rules which was the price of the joys of the country. A loud “No!” rose from the depths of his heart to his tongue, and he had to clamp teeth and lips shut to keep from uttering it. Flanked by Gauss and Sandy, who held peace or misery for him in their hands, how could he risk frankness?

“Herbie, I asked you something,” said his mother anxiously.

“Ma, I'm having a great time. Best fun I ever had in my life.”

The head-shaking stopped at once and reverted to such a fast nod that Mr. Gauss's face seemed to become a pink blur.

“God bless you, my boy. Kiss Felicia for me. We'll see you soon. This call is costing a lot of money. Good-by.”

“Good-by, Ma,” said Herbie, and hung up the receiver.

Let parents who ask such questions of children confined in institutions, be the institution a camp, a school, or anything else that relieves them of their parental duties, make very sure of two things: first, that the child has privacy; second, and this is more important, that the child can trust the parent's secrecy. Many of these institutions are excellent and necessary. Children who can spend a summer at camp are generally considered lucky. But none of these places can be run wholly without that cheap universal lubricant—fear.

As soon as the telephone talk was over, Herbie saw a change for the worse in the aspects of the owner and the head counselor. Uncle Sandy's face hardened, and Mr. Gauss shook his head sorrowfully.

“I am very disappointed in you, Herbert,” he said. “Incredibly disappointed.” He did not pause to inquire whether the boy was disappointed in him and his camp. “Is there no honor in you boys? No decency? I have been scrupulous,” he went on in an injured tone, “I have been scrupulous, I say, to forbid any form of censorship or reading of campers' mail, and is this the thanks I get?”

Herbie hung his head. He was too innocent to answer that Mr. Gauss was not entitled to much thanks, since censoring the letters might have landed him in prison for tampering with the mails.

“And I have always regarded you, Herbert, as one of the finer boys in school and at camp. I repeat, I am incredibly disappointed. Aren't you, Uncle Sandy?”

“Can't say he shows much camp spirit,” said the head counselor.

“Incidents such as this,” pursued the camp owner, “make me wonder whether the uncertainty and toil of running a camp are worth while. Or perhaps you believe there is no uncertainty, no toil in it? Answer me, Herbert.”

“I—I'm sorry, Mr. Gauss,” mumbled the boy. “I promise I won't do it no more.”

“Any more.”

“Any more.”

Herbie saw a hand appear under his downcast eyes. He looked up. Mr. Gauss was beaming once more, and offering a handshake.

“Then I'll say no more about it, and I think I can promise you in turn that Uncle Sandy will not be too harsh this time,” he said.