Night of the Juggler

Daily News. The name which had, in fact, topped all others had been Bert Lahr, but this had been disallowed (privately) on the assumption that the children’s votes had been influenced by adults who remembered the great comedian from The Wizard of Oz. The contest officials decided to name the little cat Judy, which they thought would satisfy all age groups, but Jomo’s gift had turned out to be a male, and so they had decided on the lovely but epicene Garland, a name which had not received a single vote in the contest.

He could not tell time, but he could estimate it with reasonable accuracy. And now he knew it was time to look at “greenropes.”

The growling of the lions waiting to be fed had fixed the time for Gus Soltik. Soon, very soon now, he thought, as he hurried toward a place of concealment he had already chosen, thick privet underbrush just behind the wall bordering the eastern side of Central Park at Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties-soon, he was thinking with a surge of agitation, because he mustn’t be late. The bus would be stopping at the intersection, and she would get off and stand talking to her friend, the winds blowing their green skirts about their white legs, and it was very important that he see her now, because tomorrow was the anniversary of his mother’s death.

Shortly after three o’clock a yellow bus with black trim from Miss Prewitt’s Classes stopped at Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties of Manhattan. When the front doors opened with a gentle pneumatic hiss, a pair of chattering youngsters climbed down the steps and stood at the intersection waving good-bye to friends, who waved back to them from behind the windows of the bus which was accelerating, heading toward the southern boundaries of Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street.

The names of the two girls were Kate (Katherine Jackson) Boyd and Tish (Patricia) Tennyson, and they were eleven years of age and wore identical uniforms, which consisted of smartly cut black blazers, short green flannel skirts, green berets, white socks, and black moccasins.

The girls lived in adjoining apartment buildings whose drawing-room windows faced the verdant and dramatic views of Central Park.

Kate Boyd had shining blond hair which she wore in a ponytail, secured by a green ribbon, and a pale, unblemished complexion from which her cherry-dark eyes blazed with an almost comical intensity. It was apparent from even a superficial view of these youngsters that the confident excitement and aggressiveness in Kate’s manner completely dominated her friend, Tish Tennyson, whose skin tended to be sallow and whose chubby hips and rounded stomach had scored permanent diagonal creases in her green flannel skirt.

As the crisp gusting winds whipped their hair about their foreheads and cheeks, the two girls hugged their book bags to their chests and chattered at each other with ferocious intensity. Their present preoccupation and stimulation stemmed from a mix of heady ingredients: boys, older boys at that, practically men, and the girls’ shabby betrayal by these adult and arrogant males.

Kate and Tish had scored a coup for their fifth-grade class. They had worked up their nerve to approach Bob Elliott, who was seventeen and the leader of a rock group called The Purple Dreams, with an offer to play the Prewitt School’s “sweet young thing” afternoon tea dance.

To their surprise and delight, Bob Elliott had accepted; The Purple Dreams were cool and “in,” thus an impressive catch indeed for a fifth-grade tea dance. Even though the fee was high, one hundred dollars for a three- hour gig, plus fifteen dollars for the transportation of their electronic gear, Kate Boyd had committed the class funds to the project without reservations, knowing that whatever the price, it was a triumph and worth it.

But this morning their excitement and dreams had collapsed, after Bob Elliott had called to tell them the gig was off because two of The Purple Dreams were down with the flu. This, while wretchedly disappointing, was something they could live with, but at lunch in a pizzeria near Miss Prewitt’s, Kate had learned a bitter, unacceptable truth: Bob Elliott had simply dropped them to play a more prestigious date at Darwin Prep’s senior dinner dance.

Kate Boyd, who was flamingly outraged by any and all degrees of injustice, had cabbed across town to Bob Elliott’s apartment immediately on learning of his betrayal.

“He just laughed at me,” Kate said for about the fifteenth time to Tish.

“Laughed at me. He said we were just kids and wouldn’t understand his music anyway.”

“Did you really say it to him?” Tish said with a thread of excitement in her voice. “What you told me?”

Kate sighed. “No, I didn’t.”

“But you said you said it.”

“Well, I wanted to. I wanted to say, ‘I’d like to kick you’”-Kate lowered her voice theatrically-”’right in your jewels, Bob Elliott.’”

“But you didn’t.”

“Don’t be stupid. I wanted to, it’s the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t, Kate.”

“You don’t even know what it means,” Kate said.

Tish looked anxiously at Kate. She could stand neither Kate’s dismissal nor Kate’s displeasure. “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “Where’d you hear it?”

“They were in bed and she was laughing,” Kate said, and then added the logical prologue to the sentence as almost an afterthought: “I heard my mother say it to my father.”

“When’s your mother coming back, Kate?”

“Well, we’re not sure. She calls every day, of course, but she’s got to take care of her aunt.”

“What’s the matter with her aunt?”

Kate shrugged in what she meant to suggest was a gesture of casual dismissal, but she felt the sting of tears in her eyes and looked quickly away from Tish, tilting her face against the cold, freshening breezes.

“She’s got some kind of flu, from Brazil or from Greece or wherever it’s coming from this year.”

Again Tish felt a pang of anxiety; she shouldn’t have asked about Kate’s mother.

“Can I call you later, Kate?” Tish asked, with a fruitless effort to make the question sound casual. “I mean, after homework?”

“If you want to,” Kate said, and hurried off into the lobby of her building where old Mr. Brennan, the uniformed doorman, greeted her with a genuine smile and walked the length of the foyer with her to the elevators.

At about six o’clock that night, Luther Boyd let himself into the Fifth Avenue apartment which he had rented for three months from a theatrical producer who was staging a show in London, a production (he had explained to Boyd’s complete disinterest) which would feature Sir Laurence Olivier as an albino Othello, surrounded by an otherwise all-black cast, save for Desdemona, who would be played by the Oriental actress Yoko Tani, whose role- as opposed to the others-would be comprised of operatic recitative and arias. Luther Boyd had wished him well but without excessive conviction since the last play he himself had seen had been a production of Camelot after Julie Andrews had left the company.

The walls of the large apartment were covered with memorabilia of the theater: faded playbills, first-night telegrams, the glossy photographs of actresses and actors with intimate greetings and signatures. None of this held much interest for Luther Boyd, although he knew that some of the glamorous faces awed and fascinated Kate.

Luther Boyd thought there was something sentimental and childish about the lavish salutations and congratulations on the photographs and in the telegrams. And he thought there was something tacky and unsporting in the defensive effusions which obviously stemmed from box-office flops. But he could live with all this. He had rented the apartment, not for its furnishings, but for the dramatic and sustaining views of Central Park afforded him from the formal drawing room and his book-lined study. The shining crowns of Chinese elms and black alders that he could observe from these fifth-floor windows gave him cheerful memories of the six hundred open acres which surrounded his dairy farm in southern Pennsylvania. Also, he enjoyed walking in the park in the evening, and since flora and fauna and terrain were as much his profession as his pleasure, his investigations satisfied him as both a soldier and a naturalist.

On his leisurely strollings from the southern end of the Mall (his customary starting point) north past the cruciform esplanade of the band shell and then farther north to the boathouse and lake, he had observed dozens of domestic and exotic trees and shrubs; in his east-west crisscrossings along this north-south route (he had been advised to avoid the Ramble), he had found what amounted to a naturalist’s laboratory. In these few weeks Boyd had seen and studied, sometimes to his astonishment, towering cork trees, monumental magnolias with leaves like polished green leather, English and peach-leafed hawthorns, cucumber trees, bald cypresses, red and silver maples,