Barking at Butterflies and other stories

Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles

Last summer they quarantined the camp two weeks after we’d arrived.

Uncle Marvin called all us counselors into the dining room one July night and announced briefly that there was a polio scare at a nearby camp. He went on to say that whereas all of our campers had of course been vaccinated, he nonetheless felt it would be in the best interests of public safety if we voluntarily agreed not to leave the campgrounds until the threat had subsided. The words “public safety” were Uncle Marvin’s own. He was the principal of a junior high school in the Bronx, and he also happened to own Camp Marvin, which is why it was called Camp Marvin and not Camp Chippewa or Manetoga or Hiawatha. He could have called it “Camp Levine,” I suppose, Levine being his last name, but I somehow feel his choice was judicious. Besides, the name Marvin seemed to fit a camp whose owner was a man given to saying things like “public safety,” especially when he became Uncle Marvin for the summer.

I was Uncle Don for the summer.

The kids in my bunk had never heard of Uncle Don on the radio, so they never made any jokes about my name. To tell the truth, I’d barely heard of him myself. Besides, they were a nice bunch of kids, and we were getting along fine until the voluntary quarantine in the best interests of public safety was declared by Marvin, and then things got a little strained and eventually led to a sort of hysteria.

Marvin’s wife was named Lydia, and so the girls’ camp across the lake from Camp Marvin was called Camp Lydia, and the entire complex was called Camp Lydia-Marvin, which was possibly one of the most exciting names in the annals of American camp history. I was Uncle Don last summer, and I was nineteen years old. Across the lake in Camp Lydia was a girl named Aunt Rebecca, who was also nineteen years old and whom I loved ferociously. When the quarantine began, I started writing notes to her, and I would have them smuggled across the lake, tied to the handles of the big milk cans. I love you, Aunt Rebecca, my notes would say. And I would look across the still waters of the lake and try to imagine Becky opening my note, her dark eyes lowered as she read the words, her quick smile flashing over her face. I imagined she would look up hastily, she moved hastily, her eyes would dart, the smile would widen, she would stare into the distance at the pine trees towering over the boys’ cabins, and maybe her heart would skip a beat, and maybe she would murmur softly under her breath, I love you, too, Uncle Don.

I hated Camp Marvin.

I will tell you what I loved.

I loved Rebecca Goldblatt, that’s all. I had loved Rebecca Goldblatt long before I met her. I had loved her, to tell the truth, from the day I was twelve years old and was allowed to join the adult section of the public library. I had clutched my new card in my hand that bright October day, the card unmarked, every space on it empty, and wandered among the shelves. It was very warm inside the library, warm and hushed, and as I walked past the big windows I could hear the wind outside, and I could see the huge tree out front with its leaves shaking loose every time there was a new gust, and beyond that on the other side of the street some smaller trees, bare already, bending a little in the wind. It was very cold outside, but I was warm as I walked through the aisles with a smile on my face, holding my new library card, and wondering if everyone could tell I was an adult now, it said so on my card.

I found the book on one of the open shelves. The cover was red, tooled in gold. The title was Ivanhoe.

And that night I fell in love with Rebecca, not Rebecca Goldblatt, but the girl in Ivanhoe. And then when they re-released the movie, I fell in love with her all over again, not Elizabeth Taylor, but Rebecca, the girl in Ivanhoe. I can still remember one of the lines in the movie. It had nothing to do with either Ivanhoe’s Rebecca or my own Rebecca Goldblatt, but I will never forget it anyway. It was when Robert Taylor was standing horseless, without a shield, trying to fend off the mace blows of the mounted Norman knight. And the judge or the referee, or whatever he was called in those days, looked at Robert Taylor, who had almost hit the Norman’s horse with his sword, and shouted, “Beware, Saxon, lest you strike horse!” That was a rule, you see. You weren’t allowed to strike the horse.

Oh, how I loved Rebecca Goldblatt!

I loved everything about her, her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her eyes. Her eyes were black. I know a lot of girls claim to have really black eyes, but Rebecca is the only person I have ever known in my entire life whose eyes were truly black and not simply a very dark brown. Sometimes, when she was in a sulky, brooding mood, her eyes got so mysterious and menacing they scared me half to death. Girls’ eyes always do that to me when they’re in that very dramatic solitary mood, as if they’re pondering all the female secrets of the world. But usually her eyes were very bright and glowing, like a black purey. I shouldn’t talk about marbles, I suppose, since marbles started all the trouble that summer — but that was how her eyes looked, the way a black purey looks when you hold it up to the sun.

I loved her eyes and I loved her smile, which was fast and open and yet somehow secretive, as if she’d been amused by something for a very long time before allowing it to burst onto her mouth. And I loved her figure which was very slender with sort of small breasts and very long legs that carried her in a strange sort of lope, especially when she was wearing a trenchcoat, don’t ask me why. I loved her name and the way she looked. I loved her walk, and I loved the way she talked, too, a sort of combination of middle-class Bronx Jewish girl with a touch of City College Speech One thrown in, which is where she went to school and which is where I met her.

I think I should tell you now that I’m Italian.

That’s how I happened to be at Camp Marvin in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with a girl named Rebecca Goldblatt across the lake in Camp Lydia.

I know that’s not much of a problem these days, what with new nations clamoring for freedom, and Federal troops crawling all over the South, and discrimination of all sorts every place you look. It’s not much of a problem unless you happen to be nineteen years old and involved in it, and then it seems like a pretty big problem. I’m too young to have seen Abie’s Irish Rose, but I honestly don’t think I will ever understand what was so funny about that situation, believe me. I didn’t think it was so funny last summer, and I still don’t think it’s funny, but maybe what happened with Uncle Jimbo’s marbles had something to do with that. I don’t really know. I just know for certain now that you can get so involved in something you don’t really see the truth of it anymore. And the simple truth of Becky and me was that we loved each other. The rest of it was all hysteria, like with the marbles.

I have to tell you that I didn’t want to go to Camp Marvin in the first place. It was all Becky’s idea, and she presented it with that straightforward solemn look she always gets on her face when she discusses things like sending food to the starving people in China or disarmament or thalidomide or pesticides. She gets so deep and so involved sometimes that I feel like kissing her. Anyway, it was her idea, and I didn’t like it because I said it sounded to me like hiding.

“It’s not hiding,” Becky said.

“Then what is it if not hiding?” I answered. “I don’t want to be a counselor this summer. I want to go to the beach and listen to records and hold your hand.”

“They have a beach at Camp Marvin,” Becky said.

“And I don’t like the name of the camp.”

“Why not?”

“It’s unimaginative. Anybody who would name a place Camp Marvin must be a very unimaginative person.”

“He’s a junior high school principal,” Becky said.

“That only proves my point.” She was looking very very solemn just about then, the way she gets when we discuss the Cuban situation, so I said, “Give me one good reason why we should go to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to a camp named Marvin, of all things, would you please?”

“Yes.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“We would be together all summer,” Becky said simply, “and we wouldn’t have to hide from my father.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life,” I said. “You want to go away and hide from him just so we won’t have to hide from him.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Becky said.

“Then what is it, if not hiding from him?”

“It’s not my fault he’s a bigoted jerk!” Becky said angrily, and I didn’t realize how much this meant to her until that minute, because tears suddenly sprang into her eyes. I never know what to do when a girl starts crying, especially someone you love.

“Becky,” I said, “if we run away this summer, we’re only confirming his...”

“He doesn’t even know you, Donald,” she said. “He doesn’t know how sweet you are.”

“Yes, but if we hide from him...”

“If he’d only meet you, if he’d only talk to you...”

“Yes, but if we run away to hide, then all we’re doing is joining in with his lunacy, honey. Can’t you see that?”

“My father is not a lunatic,” Becky said. “My father is a dentist and a prejudiced ass, but he’s not a lunatic. And anyway, you have to remember that his father can still remember pogroms in Russia.”

“All right, but this isn’t Russia,” I said.

“I know.”

“And I’m not about to ride into the town and rape all the women and kill all the men.”

“You don’t even know how to ride,” Becky said.

“That’s right,” I said, “but even if I did know how to ride, I wouldn’t do it.”

“I know, you’re so sweet,” Becky said.

“Okay. Now if your father believes that I’m some kind of assassin with a stiletto, that’s his fantasy, you see, Beck? And if I sneak away with you this summer, then I’m joining his fantasy, I’m becoming as crazy as he is. How can you ask me to do that?”

“I can ask you because I love you and I want to be alone with you without having to sneak and skulk all the time. It isn’t fair.”

“What isn’t fair?”

“Sneaking and skulking all the time.”

“That’s right.”

“When I love you so much.”

“I love you, too, Beck,” I said. “But...”

“Well, if you love me so much, it seems like a very simple thing to do to simply say you’ll come with me to Camp Lydia-Marvin this summer.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Donald?” Becky said.

“This is a mistake,” I said, shaking my head.

“We’ll be alone.”

“We’ll be surrounded by eight thousand screaming kids!”

“The kids go to sleep early.”

“We’ll be hiding, we’ll be—”

“We’ll be alone.”

“Damn it, Becky, sometimes...”

“Will you come, Donald?”

“Well, what else can I do? Let you go alone?”

“I think that’s what scares my father,” Becky said, the smile coming onto her mouth, her black eyes glowing.

“What are you talking about?”

“That fiery Italian temper.”

“Yeah, go to hell, you and your father,” I said smiling, and then I kissed her because what else can you do with a girl like that whom you love so terribly much?

That’s how we came to be at Camp Lydia-Marvin last summer.

The quarantine was very ironic in an O. Henry way because we had gone to camp to be together, you see, and when Uncle Marvin had his bright quarantine idea, he really meant quarantine, the girls with the girls and the boys with the boys. So there was Rebecca clear the hell over on the other side of the lake, and here was I with a bunch of counselors named Uncle Bud and Uncle Jimbo and Uncle Dave and Uncle Ronnie and even Uncle Emil, who was a gym teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School in Manhattan. All the uncles took the quarantine in high good spirits for the first week, I guess. I must admit that even I found a sense of adventure in tying my love notes to the handles of the milk cans. I never once questioned the validity of a quarantine that allowed milk to be passed from one side of the lake to the other. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the milk cans, I would have gone out of my mind immediately. As it was, I almost went out of my mind, but not until much later. And by that time everybody was a little nutty.

I think it all started with the kids. Everything usually starts with kids. I once read a Ray Bradbury story called “Invasion” or something, about these Martians, or aliens, anyway, I don’t remember which planet, who are planning an invasion of Earth, and they’re doing it through the kids. Boy, that story scared me, I can tell you, since I have a kid brother who gets a very fanatical gleam in his eye every now and then. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

The thing that started with the kids was the marbles. Now every kid who goes to camp for the summer takes marbles with him. There’s usually what they call Free Play or Unassigned, and that’s when the kids go to ping pong or tether ball or marbles. Marbles were very big at Camp Marvin, especially after the quarantine started, though I’m still not sure whether the quarantine really had anything to do with the craze. Maybe there was just an unusual number of marbles at camp that summer, I don’t know. At the end there, it sure seemed like a lot of marbles. The most marbles I had ever seen in my life before that was when I was eight years old and still living in Manhattan, before we moved up to the Bronx. My mother and father gave me a hundred marbles for my birthday, and they also gave me a leather pouch with drawstrings to put the marbles in. I went downstairs with the hundred marbles, and I lost them all in a two-hour game. I almost lost the pouch, too, because a kid on the block wanted to trade me forty immies and a steelie for it, but I had the wisdom to refuse the offer. I’ll never forget my mother’s face when I went upstairs and told her I’d been wiped out.

“You lost all the marbles?” she asked incredulously.

“Yeah, all the immies,” I said.

“How?”

“Just playing immies,” I said.

They didn’t play immies at Camp Marvin; they played marbles. They used to draw a circle in the dirt, and each kid would put five or six marbles in the circle and try to hit them out with his shooter. I didn’t know how to play marbles because all I played as a kid was immies, which is played by the curb, in the gutter. In fact, it was best to play immies after a rainstorm because then there would be puddles all over the street, and you never knew where the other guy’s immie was. You just shot and prayed and felt around in the dirty water with your hand spread, trying to span the immies. It used to be fun when I was a kid. A city street is something like a summer camp all year round, you see. There are always a thousand kids on the block and a hundred games to choose from: stickball, stoopball, skullies, Johnny-on-a-Pony, Kick the Can, Statues, Salugi, Ring-a-Leavio, hundreds of games. I sometimes wonder why the Herald Tribune sends slum kids to the country. I think somebody ought to start sending country kids to the slums. In a way, when the marble craze started at Camp Marvin, it was very much like a craze starting on a city street, where one day a kid will come down with his roller skates, and the next day the roller-skating season has started. It was the same thing with the marbles at Camp Marvin. A couple of kids started a game, and before any of us were really completely aware of it, there were marble games being played all over the camp.

It would have been all right if the craze had restricted itself to the kids. But you have to remember that we were quarantined, which meant that we worked with the kids all day long, and then were not permitted to leave the grounds at night, on our time off. Children are very nice and all that, and someday I hope to have a dozen of my own, but that summer it was important to get away from them every now and then. I mean, physically and geographically away from them. It was important to have other interests. It was important to have an emotional and mental respite. What it was important to do, in fact, was to hold Becky in my arms and kiss her, but Marvin of course had made that impossible with his stupid quarantine. The funny thing was he didn’t seem to miss his wife Lydia at all. Maybe that’s because they’d been married for fourteen years. But most of the rest of us began to feel the strain of the quarantine by the end of the second week, and I think it was then that Uncle Jimbo ventured into his first game of marbles.

Jimbo, like the rest of us, was beginning to crave a little action. He was a very tall man who taught science at a high school someplace in Brooklyn. His real name was James McFarland, but in the family structure of Camp Marvin he immediately became Uncle Jim. And then, because it is fatal to have a name like Jim at any camp, he was naturally renamed Jimbo. He seemed like a very serious fellow, this Jimbo, about thirty-eight years old, with a wife and two kids at home. He wore eyeglasses, and he had sandy-colored hair that was always falling onto his forehead. The forehead itself bore a perpetual frown, even when he was playing marbles, as if he were constantly trying to figure out one of Einstein’s theories. He always wore sneakers and Bermuda shorts that had been made by cutting down a pair of dungarees. When the quarantine started, one of the kids in his bunk painted a big PW on Jimbo’s dungaree Bermuda shorts, the PW standing for prisoner of war — a joke Jimbo didn’t think was very comical. I knew how he felt. I wasn’t married, of course, but I knew what it was like to be separated from someone you loved, and Jimbo’s wife and kids were away the hell out there in Brooklyn while we were locked up in Stockbridge.

I happened to be there the day he joined one of the games, thereby starting the madness that followed. He had found a single marble near the tennis courts and then had gone foraging on his free time until he’d come up with half a dozen more. It was just after dinner, and three kids were playing in front of my bunk when Jimbo strolled over and asked if he could get in the game. If there’s one thing a kid can spot at fifty paces, it’s a sucker. They took one look at the tall science teacher from Brooklyn and fairly leaped on him in their anxiety to get him in the game. Well, that was the last leaping any of them did for the rest of the evening. Jimbo had seven marbles. He put six of them in the ring, and he kept the biggest one for his shooter. The kids, bowing graciously to their guest, allowed him to shoot first. Standing ten feet from the circle in the dust, Jimbo took careful aim and let his shooter go. It sprang out of his hand with the speed of sound, almost cracking a marble in the dead center of the ring and sending it flying out onto the surrounding dirt.

The kids weren’t terribly impressed because they were very hip and knew all about beginner’s luck. They didn’t begin to realize they were playing with a pro until they saw Jimbo squat down on one knee and proceed to knock every single marble out of the ring without missing a shot. Then, because there’s no sucker like a sucker who thinks he knows one, the kids decided they could take Jimbo anyway, and they spent the rest of the evening disproving the theory by losing marble after marble to him. Jimbo told me later that he’d been raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, and had played marbles practically every day of his childhood. But the kids didn’t know that at the time, and by the end of that first evening Jimbo had won perhaps two hundred marbles.

I wasn’t sure I liked what Jimbo had done. He was, after all, a grown man, and he was playing with kids, and one of the kids he’d beaten happened to be a kid in my bunk. I watched that kid walk away from the game after Jimbo collected all the marbles. His name was Max, which is a funny name for a kid anyway, and he was walking with his head bent, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, his sneakers scuffing the ground.

“What’s the matter, Max?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Come here, sit down,” I said. He came over and sat on the bunk steps with me. I knew better than to talk about the marbles he had lost. I talked about the baseball game that afternoon and about the volleyball tournament, and all the while I was thinking of those hundred marbles I had got for my eighth birthday, and the leather pouch, and the look on my mother’s face when I climbed to the third floor and told her I’d lost them all. It was getting on about dusk, and I said to Max, “Something very important is going to happen in just a few minutes, Max. Do you know what it is?”

“No,” Max said.

“Well, can you guess?”

“I don’t know. Is it the boxing matches tonight?” he asked.

“No, this is before the boxing matches.”

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“It happens every day at about this time,” I said, “and we hardly ever stop to look at it.” Max turned his puzzled face up to mine. “Look out there, Max,” I said. “Look out there over the lake.”

Together, Max and I sat and serenely watched the sunset.

The madness started the next day.

It started when Uncle Emil, the gym teacher from Benjamin Franklin, decided that marbles was essentially a game of athletic skill. Being a gym teacher and also being in charge of the camp’s entire sports program, he naturally decided that in order to uphold his honor and his title, he would have to defeat Uncle Jimbo. He didn’t declare a formal match or anything like that. He simply wandered up to Jimbo during the noon rest hour and said, “Hey, Jimbo, want to shoot some marbles?”

Jimbo looked at him with the slow steady gaze of a renowned gunslick and then said, “Sure. Why not?” Lazily he went back to his own bunk. In a few minutes he returned with a cigar box containing his winnings of the night before. They drew a circle in the dust, and each put twelve marbles in the circle. I was only sitting there writing a letter to Becky, and I guess they decided I wasn’t doing anything important, so they made me referee. Jimbo was wearing a yellow short-sleeved sports shirt and his sawed-off dungarees. Emil was wearing spotless white shorts and a spotless white T shirt, as if he were about to settle the Davis Cup at Wimbledon or someplace. They flipped a coin to see who would shoot first. Emil won the toss.

Standing behind the line they had drawn in the dust some ten feet from the ring, Emil held his shooter out and sighted along the length of his arm. Jimbo stood watching him with a faintly amused look on his face. I looked up from my letter because I was supposed to be referee, even though I’d been in the middle of telling Becky I loved her, which I always seemed to be in the middle of doing whenever I got the chance. Emil licked his lips with his tongue, cocked his thumb against the big marble in his fist, and then triggered his shot. The marble leaped from his hand, spinning across the open air in a direct, unwavering, deadly accurate line toward the middle of the circle. It collided with one of the marbles in the ring, which richocheted off onto another marble, which struck two more marbles, which knocked out yet another marble for a total of five marbles knocked out of the circle on the first shot. I must admit I felt a slight thrill of pleasure. I can remember thinking, All right, Jimbo, this time you’re not playing with kids. But I can also remember looking over at Jimbo and noticing that he didn’t seem at all disturbed, that he was still wearing that same faintly amused expression on his long face.

Emil walked to the ring and, grinning, turned to Jimbo and said, “Want to forfeit?”

“Shoot,” Jimbo said.

Emil grinned again, crouched in the dust, picked up his big marble, and shot. He knocked two more marbles out of the ring in succession and then missed the third by a hair, and that was the end of the game. I say that was the end of the game only because Jimbo then shot and knocked out all the remaining marbles in the circle. And then, because he had won this round, it was his turn to shoot first in the next round. He shot first, and he knocked four marbles out with his opening blast, and then proceeded to clean up the ring again. And then, because he’d won this round as well, he shot first again, and again cleaned up the ring, and he kept doing that all through the rest period until he’d won seventy-five marbles from Uncle Emil.

Uncle Emil muttered something about having a little rheumatism in his fingers, throwing his game off, and Jimbo listened sympathetically while he added the seventy-five marbles to the collection in his bulging cigar box. That afternoon Emil came back with a hundred marbles he had scrounged from the kids, and Jimbo won them all in a matter of a half hour. That evening Jimbo went to the mess hall to pick up a cardboard carton for his marble winnings. And, also that evening, he became a celebrity.

I guess I was the only person, man or boy, in that camp who didn’t want to try beating Uncle Jimbo in the hectic weeks that followed. To begin with, I am not a very competitive fellow, and besides, I only knew how to play immies, not marbles. Marbles required a strong thumb and a fast eye, Jimbo explained to me. My thumbs were pretty weak and my eyes were tired from staring across the lake trying to catch a glimpse of a distant figure I could identify as Becky. But everyone else in camp seemed to possess powerful thumbs and 20/20 vision, and they were all anxious to pit these assets against the champion. When you come to think of it, I suppose, champions exist only to be challenged, anyway. The challengers in this case included everybody, and all for different reasons.

Uncle Ronnie was a counselor whom everyone, including the kids, called Horizontal Ronnie because his two favorite pursuits both required a bed and a horizontal position. He wanted to beat Jimbo because the quarantine had deprived him of the satisfying company of a girl named Laura in Camp Lydia. Jimbo won two hundred marbles from Ronnie in an hour of play.

Uncle Dave taught mathematics at Evander Childs High School, and he thought he had figured out a foolproof system that he wanted to try in practice. The system worked for fifteen minutes, at the end of which time Jimbo blasted the game from its hinges and then barged on through to win a hundred and fifty marbles.

Uncle Marvin, too, had his own reason for wanting to beat Jimbo. Before the season had begun, when Marvin was still hiring counselors, he had offered Jimbo twelve hundred dollars for the job. Jimbo had held out for thirteen hundred, which Marvin eventually and grudgingly paid him. But the extra hundred dollars rankled, and Marvin was determined to get it back somehow.

You may think it odd that he decided to get back his hundred dollars by winning marbles from Jimbo. After all, marbles are marbles, and money is money. But a very strange thing had happened in the second week of the madness. Marbles, which up to that time had only been round pieces of colored glass, suddenly became the hottest item of currency in the camp’s vast and complicated trading system. Before then, dimes were very hot property because the Coke machine in the counselors’ shack took only dimes. The kids weren’t allowed to enter the counselors’ shack, nor were they allowed to drink Cokes, all of which made it absolutely necessary for them to have dimes so they could sneak into the counselors’ shack and drink Cokes. Almost every letter home, before the marble madness began, started with the words, “Dear Mom and Dad, I am fine. Please send me some dimes.” But suddenly, because Jimbo kept winning marbles with such frequency, there was a shortage of marbles in the camp. Marbles became a precious commodity, like gold or silver, and the basis of the camp economy. If you had marbles, you could trade them for all the dimes you needed. You could, in fact, get almost anything you wanted, if you only had marbles. Uncle Jimbo had a lot of marbles. Uncle Jimbo had a whole damn suitcase full of them, which he kept locked and on a shelf over his bed. He was surely the richest man in camp.

He became even richer the afternoon he played Uncle Marvin and won five hundred marbles from him, a blow from which Marvin never recovered. By this time, beating Jimbo had become an obsession. Jimbo was the sole topic of camp discussion, overshadowing the approaching Color War, eclipsing the visit of a famous football player who talked about the ways and means of forward passing while nobody listened. The counselors, the kids, even the camp doctor, were interested only in the ways and means of amassing more marbles to pit against Jimbo’s growing empire. They discussed shooting techniques, and whether or not they should play with the sun facing them or behind their backs. They discussed the potency of the mass shot as against a slow deliberate one-at-a-time sort of game. They discussed different kinds of shooters, the illegality of using steelies, the current exchange rate of pureys. The kids loved every minute of it. They awoke each morning brimming with plans for Jimbo’s ultimate downfall. To them, beating him was important only because it would give them an opportunity to prove that adults, especially adult counselors, were all a bunch of no-good finks.

On Monday of the third week of the madness, the smart money entered the marbles business — and the gambling element began taking over.

But before that, on Sunday night, I broke quarantine.

I am usually a law-abiding fellow, and I might never have broken quarantine were it not for Horizontal Ronnie, who, I later came to learn, had very definite criminal leanings.

“Look,” he said to me, “what’s to stop us from taking one of the canoes and paddling over to the other side?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a polio scare.”

“Don’t you want to see What’s-her-name?”

“Rebecca.”

“Yeah, don’t you want to see her?”

“Sure I do.”

“Has every kid in this camp and also in Camp Lydia, by Marvin’s own admission, in his very own words, been inoculated against polio?”

“Well, yes,” I said.

“Then would you mind telling me how there is a polio scare?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Fine. I’ll meet you at the boat dock tonight at nine o’clock. I’ll take care of getting word to the girls.”

I guess I didn’t trust him even then, because I took care of getting word to Becky myself that afternoon, by sending over one of my notes tied to an empty milk can. That night, at nine o’clock on the dot, Ronnie and I met at the boat dock and silently slipped one of the canoes into the water. We didn’t talk at all until we were in the middle of the lake, and then Ronnie said, “We’ll come back around eleven. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Boy, that Laura,” he said, and fell silent again, apparently contemplating what was ahead. Laura, whom I had only seen once or twice before the quarantine, was a very pretty blond girl who always wore white sweaters and tight white shorts. She also wore a perfume that was very hard to avoid smelling, and the few times I had seen her was in the counselors’ shack where she kept playing the “Malaguena” over and over again on the piano. She was a very mysterious girl, what with her sweater and shorts and her perfume and her “Malaguena.” She was eighteen years old.

“I think I know how to beat him,” Ronnie said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“Jimbo. I think I know how to beat the bastard.”

“How?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Ronnie said, and then he fell silent again, but it seemed to me he was paddling more furiously.

I met Rebecca under the pines bordering the lake. She was wearing black slacks and a black bulky sweater, and she rushed into my arms and didn’t say anything for the longest time, just held herself close to me, and then lifted her head and stared into my face, and then smiled that fast-breaking smile, and fleetingly kissed me on the cheek, and pulled away and looked into my face again.

We skirted the edge of the pine forest, the night was still, I could feel her hand tight in my own. We sat with our backs to one of the huge boulders overlooking the lake, and I held her in my arms and told her how miserable I’d been without her, and she kept kissing my closed eyes as I spoke, tiny little punctuating kisses that made me weak.

The night was very dark. Somewhere across the lake a dog began barking, and then the barking stopped and the night was still again.

“I can barely see you, Becky,” I whispered.

I held her close, I held her slender body close to mine. She was Becky, she was trembling, she was joy and sadness together, echoing inside me. If I held her a moment longer my heart would burst, I knew my heart would burst and shower trailing sparks on the night. And yet I held her, wanting to cry in my happiness, dizzy with the smell of her hair, loving everything about her in that timeless, brimming moment, still knowing my heart would burst, loving her closed eyes and the whispery touch of her lashes, and the rough wool of her sweater, and the delicate motion of her hands on my face. I kissed her, I died, I smiled, I listened to thunder, for oh, the kiss of Rebecca Goldblatt, the kiss, the heart-stopping kiss of my girl.

The world was dark and still.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you,” I said.

And then she threw her arms around my neck and put her face against mine, tight, I could feel her cheekbone hard against mine, and suddenly she was crying.

“Hey,” I said. “What... honey, what is it?”

“Oh, Donald,” she said, “what are we going to do? I love you so much.”

“I think we ought to tell him,” I said, “when we get back.”

“How can we do that?” Becky said.

“I can go to him. I can say we’re in love with each other.”

“Oh yes, yes,” Becky said breathlessly. “I do love you, Donald.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do.”

“He...” She shook her head in the darkness. I knew that her eyes were very solemn, even though I couldn’t see them. “He won’t listen,” Becky said. “He’ll try to break us up.”

“Nobody will ever break us up,” I said. “Ever.”

“What... what will you tell him?”

“That we love each other. That when we finish school we’re going to get married.”

“He won’t let us.”

“The hell with him.”

“He doesn’t know you. He thinks Italians are terrible.”

“I can’t help what he thinks,” I said.

“Donald...” She paused. She was shaking her head again, and she began to tremble. “Donald, you can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he believes it, don’t you see? He really believes you are some — some terrible sort of person.”

“I know, but that doesn’t make it true. And simply because he believes it is no reason for me to behave as if I believe it.” I nodded my head in the darkness. I felt pretty convinced by what I was saying, but at the same time I was scared to death of facing her father. “I’ll tell him when we get back,” I said.

Becky was quiet for a long long time.

Then she said, “If only I was Italian.”

I held her very close to me, and I kissed the top of her head very gently. Right then I knew everything was going to be all right. I knew it because Becky had said, “If only I was Italian,” when she could just as easily have said, “If only you were Jewish.”

Horizontal Ronnie swung into action the very next day.

He had been inordinately silent the night before on the trip back across the lake, and I hadn’t disturbed his thoughts because I assumed he was working out his system for beating Jimbo. Besides, I was working out what I would tell Becky’s father when we got back to the city.

The course of action Ronnie decided upon was really the only one that offered the slightest opportunity of defeating Jimbo and destroying his empire. He had correctly concluded that Jimbo was the best marble player in camp, if not in the entire world, and had further reasoned it would be impossible to beat him through skill alone. So, discounting skill, Ronnie had decided to try his hand at luck. At eight o’clock that Monday morning, as the kids lined up for muster, Ronnie came over with his fist clenched. He held out his hand to one of the senior boys and said, “Odds or evens?”

“Huh?” the senior said. The senior boys at Camp Marvin weren’t exactly the brightest kids in the world. In fact, the junior boys had written a song about them which went something like “We’ve got seen-yuh boys, dumpy, lumpy seen-yuh boys, we’ve got seen-yuh boys, the worst!” Besides, it was only eight o’clock in the morning, and when someone thrusts his fist in your face at eight o’clock in the morning and says, “Odds or evens?” what else can you reply but “Huh?”

“My fist is full of marbles,” Ronnie explained.

“Yeah?” the senior boy said. Mention of marbles seemed to have awakened him suddenly. His eyes gleamed.

“They’re either an odd number of marbles or an even number,” Ronnie went on. “You guess odds or evens. If you’re right, I give you the marbles in my hand. If you’re wrong, you match the marbles in my hand.”

“You mean if I’m wrong I give you the number of marbles you’re holding?”

“That’s right.”

The senior boy thought this over carefully for a moment, then nodded and said, “Odds.”

Ronnie opened his fist. There were four marbles in his hand.

“You pay me,” he said, and that was the beginning of the Las Vegas phase of the marble madness.

If Uncle Marvin saw what was going on, he made no comment upon it. The common opinion was that he was still smarting from his loss of five hundred marbles to Jimbo and deliberately avoided contact with everyone in the camp. It is doubtful that he could have stopped the frenzy even if he’d wanted to. The kids, presented with a new and exciting activity, took to it immediately. Here was a sport that required no skill. Here was a game that promised and delivered immediate action: the closed fist, the simple question, the guess, the payoff. Kids who were hopeless washouts on the baseball diamond suddenly discovered a sport in which they could excel. Kids who couldn’t sing a note in a camp musical set the grounds reverberating with their shouted “Odds or evens?” A large shipment of marbles from home to a kid named Irwin in bunk nine only increased the feverish tempo of the gambling activity. The simple guessing game started at reveille each morning, before a kid’s feet had barely touched the wooden floor of his bunk. It did not end until lights out, and even after that there were the whispered familiar words, and the surreptitious glow of flashlights.

Uncle Jimbo, startled by this new development, stayed fastidiously away from the gambling in the first few days. Ronnie, meanwhile, exhibiting his true gambler’s instincts, began by slowly winning a handful of marbles from every kid he could challenge, and then became more and more reckless with his bets, clenching his fists around as many marbles as they could hold. Before too long, a bookie system became necessary, with counselors and campers writing down a number on a slip of paper and then folding the slip, so that a challenger had only to guess odds or evens on a written figure rather than on an actual fistful of marbles. That week, Ronnie successfully and infallibly called bets ranging from a low of three marbles to a high of a hundred and fifty-two marbles. It became clear almost immediately that if Jimbo were to defend his title, he would have to enter this new phase of the sport or lose by default.

I think he was beginning to like his title by then. Or perhaps he was only beginning to like his wealth. Whatever it was, he could not afford to drop out of the race. He studied the new rules, and learned them. They were really quite simple. If someone challenged you, you could either accept or decline the challenge. But once you had accepted, once the question “Odds or evens?” was asked in earnest, you either called immediately or lost the bet by default. In the beginning, Jimbo took no chances. He deliberately sought out only those campers whose luck had been running incredibly bad. His bets were small, four marbles, seven marbles, a dozen marbles. If he won a bet, he immediately pocketed a portion of his initial investment and then began playing on his winnings alone. And then, because he thought of himself as a blood-smelling champion closing in for the kill, he began to bet more heavily, taking on all comers, swinging freely through the camp, challenging campers and counselors alike. Eventually he wrote a bookie slip for five hundred and seven marbles and won the bet from a kid in bunk seven, knocking him completely out of the competition. Jimbo’s luck was turning out to be almost as incredible as his skill had been. He lost occasionally, oh yes, but his winnings kept mounting, and marble after marble poured into the locked suitcase on the shelf over his bed. It was becoming apparent to almost everyone in the camp — except Uncle Marvin, who still didn’t know what the hell was going on — that an elimination match was taking place, and that the chief contenders for Jimbo’s as yet unchallenged title were Ronnie and the nouveau riche kid in bunk nine, who had parlayed his shipment from home into a sizable fortune.

Irwin, the kid in bunk nine, was a tiny little kid whom everybody called Irwin the Vermin. He wore glasses, and he always had a runny nose and a disposition to match. Ronnie, correctly figuring he would have to collar every loose marble in the camp before a showdown with Jimbo, went over to bunk nine one afternoon and promptly challenged Irwin the Vermin. The number of marbles being wagered on a single bet had by this time reached fairly astronomical proportions. It was rumored that Irwin owned one thousand seven hundred and fifty marbles. Ronnie, whose number of marbles now totaled nine hundred and four, sat on the edge of Irwin’s bed and wrote out a slip of paper with the number 903 on it.

He folded the slip of paper and then looked Irwin directly in the eye.

“Odds or evens?” he said.

Irwin blinked behind his glasses, grinned maliciously, licked his lips with his tongue and said, “Odds.”

Ronnie swallowed. “What?”

“Odds,” Irwin repeated.

“Yeah,” Ronnie said. He unfolded the slip, and together they walked back to his bunk where he made payment. “I’ve got a few marbles left,” he lied; he had only one marble to his name. “Do you want to play some more?”

Irwin looked at him steadily and then, true to his nature, said, “Find yourself another sucker, jerk.”

Ronnie watched Irwin as he left the bunk loaded down with his winnings. He must have seen in that tiny figure retreating across the grounds a symbol of all his frustration, the quarantine that kept him from the mysterious Laura, the defeat of his system to beat Jimbo. It was late afternoon, and the cries of the boys at Free Play sounded from the ball diamonds and the basketball courts far off in the camp hills. Ronnie must have watched little Irwin walking away with his shattered hopes and dreams in a brown cardboard carton, and it must have been then that he made his final decision, the decision that brought the marble madness to its peak of insanity.

I was coming back from the tennis courts, where I was trying to help little Max with his backhand, when I saw Ronnie striding across the grounds towards Jimbo’s bunk. He was carrying an old battered suitcase, and there was something odd about his walk, a purposeful, angry stride which was at the same time somewhat surreptitious. I looked at him curiously and then followed him past the flagpole and watched as he entered the bunk. I stood outside for a few minutes, wondering, and then I quietly climbed the front steps.

Ronnie was in the middle of forcing the lock on Jimbo’s suitcase. He looked up when I entered the bunk and then went right back to work.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he answered.

“It looks like you’re trying to break open Jimbo’s suitcase.”

“That’s right,” Ronnie said, and in that moment he broke the lock and opened the lid. “Give me a hand here,” he said.

“No.”

“Come on, don’t be a jerk.”

“You’re stealing his marbles,” I said.

“That’s just what I’m doing. It’s a gag. Come on, give me a hand here.”

The next second was when I almost lost my own sanity because I said, I actually heard myself say, “You can go to jail for that!” as if even I had begun to believe there was a fortune in that suitcase instead of hunks of colored glass.

“For stealing marbles?” Ronnie asked incredulously. “Don’t be a jackass.”

His answer startled me back to reality, but at the same time it puzzled me. Because here he was, a grown man, twenty years old, and he was telling me these were only marbles, and yet he was thoroughly involved in all this frantic nuttiness, so involved that he was in Jimbo’s bunk actually stealing marbles which he claimed he knew were only marbles. He opened his own suitcase and then, seeing I was staring at him with a dumfounded expression, and knowing I wasn’t about to help him, he lifted Jimbo’s bag himself and tilted it. The marbles spilled from one bag to the other, bright shining marbles, yellow and red and striped and black and green; glass marbles and steelies and glistening pureys, marbles of every size and hue, thousands and thousands of marbles, spilling from Jimbo’s bag to Ronnie’s in a dazzling, glittering heap.

I shook my head and said, “I think you’re all nuts,” and then I walked out of the bunk. Ronnie came out after me a minute later, carrying his own full suitcase, bending over with the weight of it. I watched him as he struggled across to the flagpole in the center of the camp. He put the bag down at his feet and then, his eyes gleaming, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Where’s Jimbo McFarland?”

There was no answer.

“Where’s Jimbo McFarland?” he shouted again.

“Stop yelling,” I called from the steps of the bunk. “He’s up at the handball courts.”

“Jimbo McFarland!” Ronnie screamed. “Jimbo McFarland!” and the camp voice-telephone system picked up the name, shouting it across behind the bunks and down by the gully and through the nature shack, “Jimbo McFarland!” and over to the lake where some kids were taking their Red Cross tests, and then up into the hills by the mess hall, and across the upper-camp baseball diamond, and the volleyball court, and finally reaching Jimbo where he was playing handball with one of the counselors.

Jimbo came striding down into the camp proper. He walked out of the hills like the gunslick he was, his back to the sun, crossing the dusty grounds for a final showdown, stopping some twenty feet from where Ronnie stood near the flagpole.

“You calling me?” he said.

“You want to play marbles?” Ronnie answered.

“Have you got any marbles?” Jimbo said.

“Will you match whatever I’ve got?”

Jimbo hesitated a moment, weighing his luck, and then said, “Sure,” tentatively accepting the challenge.

“Whatever’s in this bag?” Ronnie asked.

Again Jimbo hesitated. A crowd of kids had begun to gather, some of whom had followed Jimbo down out of the hills, the rest of whom had felt an excitement in the air, had felt that the moment of truth had finally arrived. They milled around the flagpole, waiting for Jimbo’s decision. The gauntlet was in the dust, the challenge had been delivered, and now they waited for the undisputed champion to decide whether or not he would defend his title. Jimbo nodded.

“However much you want to bet,” he said slowly, “is all right with me.” He had irrevocably accepted the challenge. He now had to call or lose the bet by default.

“Okay, then,” Ronnie said. He stooped down beside his suitcase. Slowly, nonchalantly, he unclasped the latches on either side. He put one hand gently on the lid, and then he looked up at Jimbo, grinned, quietly said, “Odds or evens, Jimbo?” and snapped open the lid of the bag.

From where I sat, I saw Jimbo’s face go white. I don’t know what crossed his mind in those few terrible moments as he stared into the bag at those thousands and thousands of marbles. I don’t know whether or not he even made a mental stab at calculating the number of glistening spheres in the suitcase. I only know that he staggered back a pace and his jaw fell slack. The kids were silent now, watching him. Ronnie kept squatting beside the suitcase, his hand resting on the opened lid, the sun glowing on the marbles.

“Well, Jimbo?” he said. “Odds or evens?”

“Odds or evens, Jimbo?”

Perhaps Jimbo was feverishly calculating in those breathless moments. Perhaps he was realizing he had walked into a trap from which there was no return: he would either call correctly and become the marble king of the entire world; or he would call incorrectly or not at all, and lose his fortune and his fame.

“Odds or evens?” Ronnie demanded.

Odds or evens, but how to call? How many thousands of marbles were in that suitcase, and really what difference did it make when it all narrowed down to a single marble, the real difference between odds and evens, one solitary marble, call wrong and the empire would come crashing down. Jimbo took a deep breath. The sweat was standing out on his face, his eyes were blinking. The kids around the flagpole stood silently awaiting his decision. Ronnie squatted by the suitcase with his hand on the lid.

“Odds or evens?” he asked again.

Jimbo shrugged. Honestly, because it was what he was really thinking, he said, “I... I don’t know.”

“Did you hear him?” Ronnie said immediately. “He loses by default!”

“Wait a minute, I...”

“You refused to call, you said you didn’t know! I win by default!” Ronnie said, and he snapped the lid of the bag shut, latched it and immediately lifted it from the ground.

“Now just a second,” Jimbo protested, but Ronnie was already walking away from him.

He stopped some five paces from the flagpole, turned abruptly, put the bag down, grinned, and said, “You stupid jerk! They were your own marbles!”

For a moment, his announcement hung on the dust-laden air. Jimbo blinked, not understanding him at first. The kids were silent and puzzled in the circle around the flagpole. Ronnie picked up the bag of marbles again and began walking toward his bunk with it, a triumphant grin on his face. And then the meaning of what he had said registered on Jimbo’s face, his eyes first, intelligence sparking there, his nose next, the nostrils flaring, his mouth then, the lips pulling back to show his teeth, and then his voice, bursting from his mouth in a wounded roar.

“You thief!”

His words, too, hung on the silent air, and then one of the kids said, “Did he steal them from you, Uncle Jimbo?” and another kid shouted, “He’s a crook!” and then suddenly the word “Thief!” was shouted by one of the senior boys and picked up by a junior, “Thief!” and the air rang with the word, “Thief!” and then it was shouted in unison, “Thief! Thief!” and all at once there was a bloodthirsty mob. A kid who had come down from the ball diamond waved his bat in the air and began running after Ronnie. Another kid seized a fallen branch and rushed past the flagpole with it. The others bellowed screams of anger and rage, hysterically racing toward Ronnie, who had dropped the suitcase and turned to face them. There was a pale, sickly smile on his mouth, as though he hadn’t expected this kind of backfire. “Look,” he said, but his voice was drowned out in the roar of the kids as they rushed forward with Jimbo. Ronnie turned and tried to run for his bunk, but Jimbo caught his collar from behind, and pulled him backward to the ground. I saw the kid raise his baseball bat and I leaped to my feet and yelled, “Stop it! Goddamn you, stop it!”

The bat hung in midair. Slowly they turned toward me.

“It’s only marbles,” I said.

The camp was silent.

“It’s only marbles,” I repeated. “Don’t you see?”

And then, because I had intruded upon a fantasy and threatened to shatter it, because the entire spiraling marbles structure was suddenly in danger, they turned from Ronnie, who was lying on the ground, and they ran toward me, shouting and screaming. Jimbo, the champion, struck me on the jaw with his fist, and when I fell to the ground, the kids began kicking me and pummeling me. There was more than anger in their blows and their whispered curses. There was conviction and an overriding necessity to convince the unbeliever as well. I refused to be convinced. I felt each deliberate blow, yes, each fierce kick, but I would not be convinced because I knew, even if they didn’t, that it was only marbles.

I quit Camp Marvin early the next morning. Not because of the beating. That wasn’t important. I carried my two suitcases all around the lake to Camp Lydia. It was raining, and I got soaking wet. I waited at the gate while one of the girl campers ran to get Rebecca. She came walking through the rain wearing her dirty trenchcoat, walking with that peculiar sideward lope, her hair wet and clinging to her face.

“Come on, Beck,” I said. “We’re going home.”

She looked at me for a long time, searching my face with her dark solemn eyes while the rain came down around us. I knew that word of the beating had traveled across the lake, but I didn’t know whether she was looking for cuts and bruises or for something else.

“Are you all right?” she said at last.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Becky, please go pack your things.” And then, as she turned to go, I said, “Becky?”

She stopped in the center of the road with the rain streaming on her face and she looked at me curiously, her eyebrows raised, waiting.

“As soon as we get back,” I said, “today, this afternoon, I’m going to talk to your father.”

She stared at me a moment longer, her eyes very serious, and then she gave a small nod, and a smile began forming on her face, not the usual fast-breaking smile, but a slow steady smile that was somehow very sad and very old, even though she was only nineteen.

“All right, Donald,” she said.

That afternoon I went to see her father at his dental office on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It was still raining. When he heard who was calling, he told his receptionist he didn’t want to see me, so I marched right in and stood beside his chair while he was working on a patient, and I said, “Dr. Goldblatt, you had better see me, because you’re going to see a lot of me from now on.”

He didn’t want to make a very big fuss because a patient was sitting in the chair with her mouth open, so he walked over to his receptionist and quietly asked her to get the police, but I just kept standing by the chair very calmly. He didn’t know it, but I had been through the hysteria bit before, in spades, and this mild case didn’t faze me at all. Finally, when he realized I wasn’t going to leave, he again left his patient sitting in the chair, and he told his receptionist to never mind the police, and he led me to a private little office where we sat on opposite sides of a desk.

He looked at me with dark solemn eyes, almost as black as Rebecca’s, and he said, “What the hell do you want from my life?”

“Dr. Goldblatt,” I said, “I don’t want anything from your life.”

“Except my daughter,” he said sourly.

“Yes, but that’s not from your life, that’s from hers.”

“No,” Dr. Goldblatt said.

“Dr. Goldblatt,” I said politely, “I didn’t come here to ask your permission to see her. I came here to tell you that we’re getting engaged, and as soon as we graduate we’re going to get married.”

“No,” Dr. Goldblatt said. “You’re a Gentile, she’s a Jewish girl, it would never work. Don’t you know the trouble you’re asking for? Different religions, different cultures, how will you raise the children, what will you...?”

“Dr. Goldblatt,” I said, “that’s only marbles.”

“What?”

“I said it’s only marbles.”

The office went very silent, just the way the camp had when I’d shouted those words the day before. Dr. Goldblatt looked at me for a long time, his face expressionless. Then, all he said was “Marbles.”

“Yes,” I said, “marbles. Dr. Goldblatt, I’m going to pick up Becky at the house tonight at eight o’clock. At the house. Dr. Goldblatt. I’m not going to meet her in some dark alley any more.”

Dr. Goldblatt said nothing.

“Because she’s too nice to be meeting in dark alleys,” I said, “and I love her.”

Dr. Goldblatt still said nothing.

“Well,” I said, “it was nice talking to you.”

I got up and offered my hand to him, which he refused. I shrugged and started for the door. I had my hand on the knob when I heard him say behind me, “Marbles. This is what my daughter picked. Marbles.”

I didn’t let him see me smile. I walked downstairs to the street. The rain had tapered off to a fine drizzle. The gutters ran with water, and large puddles had formed in the hollows near the curb. I could remember sticking my hand into puddles just like those long ago when I was a kid, when the loss of a hundred immies had meant a great deal to me.

I called Becky from a telephone booth in the corner drugstore.

The nut — she cried.