NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (42 page)

In about six months the diaries in the cupola were all written in. Claudine had to bring in the ones from the hut behind the diner and those Robin had wrapped in a poncho for her in the tree-house hut, and before she knew it they were filled up. Spring had come, and Claudine had been keenly aware of it, deserting the diaries for days on end to go fence walking and bike riding with Robin; but always she returned, when she was alone, to the diaries. It was almost as if without them she would have no excuse for being alone—or even for being.

And indeed it was strange that, once she had finished writing in the last of the diaries and brought her story up to date, putting
on paper practically everything she had ever wanted to say, Claudine fell ill.

It was a tremendous worry to Mr. Crouse, who couldn’t cope with sickness, especially when the doctor wouldn’t put an exact name to it. Despite everything his sister did, from making broths and compresses to reading to Claudine by the hour, her fever did not abate and at last she had to be taken to the hospital. There her weakened condition and lassitude were labeled as probable infectious mononucleosis, a very popular disease with children, but nobody would commit himself for sure. All they knew was that it seemed likely to be a long, slow business.

For Lily Crouse the house was now unbearably quiet, even though Claudine usually kept to herself when she was home. Just the idea that Claudine was up there in the cupola, doing Lord knew what with the Wales boy or even all by herself, had been comforting; but to come home from the library to that huge, ugly house and find it absolutely empty was almost more than Lily could stand. She would even have welcomed Robin’s noisy presence, his piercing whistle and jangling transistor, but he never came by now—she was more likely to bump into him in the corridors of the hospital, where he came regularly to bring Claudine the gossip about Eddie, Walter, Miss Bidwell and others.

One day, driven by uneasiness and loneliness, although she tried to tell herself that it was simply a desire to track down a lost library book (Gavin Maxwell’s book on otters, actually, which Claudine had loved), Lily climbed the steep steps to the cupola. She had never once gone there during all the time that Claudine and Robin had been using it as a hideaway. Maybe Claudine had actually asked her not to, and she had promised—she couldn’t quite remember. In any case the funny room looked absolutely unfamiliar; the kids had festooned the place with political posters and crepe paper left over from old birthday parties. A tatty, grease-stained straw mat lay on the floor and, against the wall, a lopsided bookcase was propped at one corner with broken ends of brick. In the bookcase were three rows of old diary volumes. Lily pulled one out and began to riffle its pages idly.

Several hours later, Lily crept down the stairs, her legs aching from having squatted for so long in one position. She went
directly to her room and sat down at the desk where she kept the household accounts and mailed out statements to Fred’s customers. Now she addressed an envelope to Josephine Schaefer, a classmate who had been working in New York for some years as a secretary in a large and aggressively successful publishing house.

Dear Jo
, she wrote,
Under separate cover I am mailing you a carton of diaries which I have just found. As you will see, they are numbered in consecutive order with little pieces of adhesive tape. They are the work of Claudie, who has apparently been doing this writing on the sly for quite some time. I don’t exactly know what to make of them—which is why I am taking the liberty of imposing on you. Is there someone in your office whom you could show them to?

Lily gnawed at the corner of her mouth, and then added:
The thing is, Claudie has been in the hospital for some time (that’s why I haven’t been able to get down to the city) with an undiagnosed illness from which she is recuperating very slowly. I have a feeling now that it is all mixed up with what she’s been writing, but anyway I don’t want her to know I’ve been reading her private diaries—much less that I shipped them out of the house for anyone else’s eyes. I’m sure you understand. Forgive me for not writing sooner, but as you can imagine things have been difficult here, what with Fred having to have a quick dinner and then scoot off to the hospital. Say hello to Janie—yours ever—Lily

It seemed to her only days later that the phone was ringing, wildly and demandingly, as Lily entered the empty echoing house. She hastened anxiously to the telephone, reaching out for it as she ran.

“Lily, it’s me—Jo. Mr. Knowles says he sat up half the night with Claudine’s diaries, and he wants to talk to you about them. All right?”

“Why, yes,” she said uncertainly, “I suppose so.”

In a moment a man’s voice was saying, “Miss Crouse, I am grateful to you for sending us your niece’s diaries. I would like very much to publish them, exactly as they are, and I think the firm will agree with me. They’re a find. They’re brilliant, they’re unspoiled, there isn’t a false note. Still, I have to ask you something.”

Lily wanted very much to speak, but no words would conic out. She moistened her lips, but it was no good.

Fortunately Mr. Knowles did not seem to expect a formal reply. “Miss Schaefer tells me that you’re a librarian, Miss Crouse, and that Claudine is a small-town child, never been to New York more than once or twice, to Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Museum. Can you assure me that you haven’t had anything to do with her manuscript—I mean in the way of suggesting things to her to include or to leave out, or to change in any way?”

“Mr. Knowles,” Lily said heatedly, “I never even knew those diaries existed until a few days ago. I never changed one word before I mailed them in to Jo. And if you don’t believe me—”

“Your word is more than enough. I would like to take a run up to visit you, though, if I may. And Claudine, of course. When would it be most convenient, Miss Crouse?”

All she could think of to say was “Claudie is a very sick girl.”

“Then we’ll be in touch. Perhaps when she’s well enough to travel, you can both come down here, as guests of the firm?”

That was the way it stood when Lily made her next visit to the hospital—she tried to space her visits between those of Fred and of Robin Wales. Claudine was propped up on two of those long, flat, slablike institutional pillows, her head so small and unsubstantial that it looked like some doll’s carelessly placed in the middle of the bed. The pallor of her lengthy confinement accentuated the glitter of those pale prominent eyes, grown even more bulbous during the illness. Her forehead, too, jutted more sharply than ever (I’ll have to make her bangs, Lily thought; surely that will help), while her body seemed scarcely to exist beneath the hospital blanket. She had been reading
A Tale of Two Cities
, which lay beside her on the coverlet.

“I like this,” she said, pointing to it but scarcely opening her eyes. “Can you bring me some more Dickens books?”

“Listen, Claudie,” Lily said determinedly, “I found your diaries.”

Claudine gazed at her blankly. “They weren’t lost.”

“I mean, I read them.” More unnerved by Claudine’s silence than she had been by Mr. Knowles’s talk, Lily added lamely, “It wasn’t that I meant to pry. I was looking for a library book, and I
just wondered what was in those old diaries, and then when I did open them…”

Claudine stared at her, expressionless. She did not protest, or indicate that she had any intention of interrupting. Finally Lily added, “Well, I thought they were just fascinating. Claudie, I do hope you’re not angry.”

“Why should I care?” Claudine gazed at her in puzzlement. “Listen, no fooling, can you bring me some more Dickens books? Like
Nicholas Nickleby
? I hear that’s real good.”

Lily stood helplessly at the bedside. It would be better to have Fred there, she guessed, before trying to explain about the publisher; and the doctor too—maybe she oughtn’t to reveal anything more without consulting him. “Of course,” she said. “I would have brought them with me now, except that I was a little, well, flustered.”

Claudine could not have said why, but this announcement of Lily’s, which only a month or two ago would have made her so angry that she would have been tempted to throw a babyish tantrum, now gave her a comfortable and comforting sense of relief. Is it like a secret that you don’t want to tell but are sick of keeping and are glad when someone else finds it out and relieves you of the responsibility? It was almost better, she thought sleepily, snuggling down into the blankets, than the pills that the nurse gave her to swallow every evening and that made her drift off to sleep as though someone were paddling her off into the darkness on a Venetian gondola. As she heard Aunt Lily’s footsteps fading away down the corridor, Claudine found herself thinking dreamily, It’s over, it’s over, and I’ll get well now.

As soon as she awoke, refreshed and clear-headed, Claudine remembered those drowsy speculations. She had been right—it was all over—and she was restlessly eager to get out of the hospital. But the funny thing was, she observed in the next few days as she became more aware of others around her, that now Aunt Lily seemed to be suffering from the same symptoms that had afflicted her.

“I hope Aunt Lily didn’t catch that bug from me,” she said to her father when they were alone at home together, with Lily off to the library once again.

“Tootsie, what arc you talking about?” Mr. Crouse demanded. “She’s not sick or feverish. In fact she’s back at work.”

“Yes, but she’s acting far away, like I was when it was first coming on. In fact… so are you.”

And her father refused to look her in the eye. What was it, then? He was stubborn, like all adults, and there was no point in pressing him any further.

But Claudine knew she was right, and her suspicions were confirmed that Friday when she found her aunt furiously cleaning the house, as it had never been cleaned for as long as she could remember. What was more, Aunt Lily had made her a new corduroy jumper and bought her a blouse to go with it. Both had to be worn on Saturday morning, when Aunt Lily herself came out of her room with a brand-new outfit and two bright red spots on her cheekbones that might have been rouge but more likely were just plain excitement.

“What is this, the Fourth of July?” Claudine asked and was immediately sorry, for her aunt looked stricken.

“You know my friend Jo,” Aunt Lily said, all in a rush. “Well, she is going to stop by for a bite of lunch with her boss, Mr. Knowles. He looks forward to meeting you.”

“Me?” The whole thing sounded fishy. But it wasn’t; it was all just as Aunt Lily had said. When it was over with, when Jo and Mr. Knowles had driven off in his little white sports car, Claudine couldn’t even wait to wave goodbye to them before she was off to explain everything to Robin, who had been forbidden access to the house, much less to the cupola, for the entire day.

“He’s a great big stoop-shouldered man with the most beautiful shoes you ever saw,” she explained to Robin when she found him at last, up in the treehouse. “They look like they’re handmade out of that cloth they use to put over loud-speakers—you know, with the little nubs in it.”

“What’s so great about that?”

“He wants to publish my book.”

“What book?”

Claudine had to tell him the whole business of the diaries, which in fact she had almost forgotten about until Mr. Knowles brought up the subject.

“Wait a minute,” Robin said wisely. “Wait a minute. You mean that guy came all the way up here from New York City just to see those old books I gave you? Just because you wrote some stuff in them?”

“He read it already. He wants to call it
Claudine’s Book
. He says it’s one of the best books he’s read in a long time, and anyway I’m the youngest person he ever heard of to write a whole book.”

“Are you going to get money for it?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that. Anyway my father would keep it for me, like he does my birthday money. Mr. Knowles was more interested in how I wrote the book, and where I wrote it, and all that. He made me take him up to the cupola and show him just how it was.”

Robin was eying her somewhat suspiciously. “Did you tell him all about our huts?”

“Only what I had to. I mean, about your giving me the diaries and things like that. He didn’t care about the huts, he just wanted to make sure I wrote it all myself.”

“Who did he think wrote it? Me?”

Claudine shrugged. “What’s the difference? I told him you were my very best friend, and that was why you gave me the diaries, and he said if I wanted to I could dedicate the book to you, instead of to Daddy or Aunt Lily.”

But Robin had already lost interest, which was all right as far as Claudine was concerned, because in her heart she was even more surprised than he that anyone else, particularly a grownup, should be all that interested in what they had been doing. Robin had a pretty grandiose plan for a dam that would convert the little creek behind the Wales house into a fish hatchery.

They put a good part of the summer into the dam, with very few arguments except when Robin insisted on being insufferably bossy, and Claudine felt no great need to be off by herself, clipping newspapers and writing thoughts down—the way it was last winter, she reflected, when I was younger. They never did exactly finish the hatchery, because school started before they had collected all the stuff for the dam. And then, a couple of months after school had begun, Claudine’s book arrived.

On the front of it was a great big picture of her with a dopey expression and her hair pulled back with a ribbon, and underneath in big letters,
Today begins my life story
…

“Gee, I look awful,” she said to her aunt.

Lily stared at her, astonished. “Aren’t you excited? Aren’t you proud?”

“I guess.”

“Wait till the other children see the book. And your teachers! Then you won’t be such a cool one.”

It was true: the fuss was really something when the books turned up all over Phoenix. Kids that had ignored her for years wanted her to sit with them in the cafeteria. She was elected vice-president of her home room and made playground monitor. And Miss Bidwell—the old faker!—acted like she and Claudine had always been dear friends, and even asked her to sign her autograph on the title page of the book.