Down the Strings

By Nancy Means Wright

Drusie Valentini doesn’t fit in with her arty family: her extravagant puppeteer father, his gypsy-like assistant Fey, who moved in when her mother left—or her pesky younger brother Punch. A party that a boyfriend talked her into ends in disaster, and getting her sent to a strict boarding school. In a year when it seems that everyone is pulling her strings, Drusie is forced to come to terms with her life. Young adult fiction by Nancy Means Wright; originally published by Dutton

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belgrave House
• Release date: Jan 1, 1982
• ISBN: 9781610845267

Book preview

Wright

Chapter One

I’m on a merry-go-round, in a penny carnival in some southern mill town I don’t even know the name of. The people flash by me like hummingbirds. For a couple of hours, I suppose, they’ll feast on the rides and shows, and then cruise home through the pale steaming landscape that goes on and on as far as the eye can see. It’s a relief to think that tomorrow is Labor Day, and we’ll be heading back to our Broken House in cool green Vermont.

The purple horse I’m riding shoots up and down with the pop music inside the control room and never goes anywhere. It’s like those nightmares you have of running and running in place. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my little brother Punch, who has a ring right through my nose, I sometimes think. This is his reward for taking down the sets from tonight’s marionette show all by himself. And I’m baby-sitting while Dad and Fey play bingo in some tent. Punch is ahead of me now, his round bottom squashed onto the red pony with the hind legs that stretch out straight as if it’s flying. And that’s our Punch—a bright balloon skimming the ground, with no strings to hold him down.

He probably can’t help it if he’s that way. He’s my father all over again, except for the shape. My father is tall and lean with a bushy red beard, dark piercing eyes, and a voice that would make a Victorian maiden tremble my grandmother said once—and not in a very flattering way, either. Grandmother never wanted my Vassar mother to marry a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, who went right from the cradle into the theater, she said, and when he failed there, turned into a puppeteer.

But Mother is another story. She isn’t here right now, and for the moment it’s going to take all my energies to get through another end-of-the-season spree. We’ve just completed a five-state tour with Valentini’s Marionettes, and a full house practically every night. Dad has money in his pockets, I’m afraid, and it doesn’t take Grandmother to remind me that he can’t bear to leave it there. Today, for example, we all got up at noon where we were camping on the carnival grounds, and the four of us went to the biggest tourist trap in town for lunch.

The four of us, I should explain, are Dad and Fey, his more-or-less assistant; Punch—his real name is Quigley after some dead relative; and me, Drusie. My full name is Drusilla, after no one in particular. My mother saw the name on somebody’s check in the bank. Drusilla Valentini. Can you imagine a name like that coming out of a mother called Elizabeth Fanning? And I’m stuck with it, along with my father’s carroty hair, and my grandmother’s long bony fingers and feet. But what can you expect, Grandmother says, when you mate an Elizabeth Fanning with a Dominic Valentini?

Anyway, there we were, spooning up the most expensive dish on the menu, some kind of goopy lobster thermidor that cost $11.95 a serving, when back home the Yankee Power Company is probably moving in to shut off the lights. After all that lobster, Dad couldn’t eat the dessert he ordered: gummy pecan pie heaped with whipped cream that filled you up with one mouthful and bloated Punch’s belly until he had to rush away from the table. A complete waste, Grandmother would have agreed. And with food prices soaring, too.

After the meal we all used the restaurant powder rooms: fancy ones with pink tile and pink naked babies holding pink toilet paper between their palms. Fey had to go into the men’s room to rescue Punch while Dad was paying the bill. She found him sitting on the toilet reading a magazine someone had left. Afterward, Dad announced that we were all going shopping for back-to-school clothes. I had to smile. Dad had picked that phrase up from Grandmother, who used to visit every fall and take us to buy our clothes—most embarrassing, as she was always prissy with the salesgirls. She started doing this one time after Dad blew all the tour money on new Mediterranean-style furniture for every room. Mother sold most of it the next winter. Like Grandmother, she prefers antiques.

We don’t need any back-to-school clothes this year, I told Dad. Grandmother bought all that stuff on sale last spring. Punch already has ten pairs of corduroys and at least fifteen flannel shirts.

Yeah, but I don’t have any painter’s pants. Punch stares me down. And I’m out of underwear. We used the last pair except what I got on to clean up the stage, remember?

So that’s what that black rag was, I said. And turned my head before he could stick out his pink tongue.

That settled it. We headed out for a department store: Dad and Fey in the lead, then Punch, teetering between the cracks in the sidewalk, and finally myself, trying to keep a little dignity in the rear. Dad looked fine of course; he always managed to look comme il faut (Grandmother again) even when he was down to his last dime, like in midwinter scriptwriting time.

But Fey was a sight. To start from the bottom: She had on red sandals, with wraparound thongs up to her hairy blonde knees, and an orangy gauze skirt that dipped down on one side and came up short in the rear. Over that was a filmy Indian blouse cut down to her boobs, with yellowy stains under the arms and a large round blob on the flyaway sleeve. She wore a pile of homemade bracelets and beady necklaces, one of them twined in a blonde braid that hung down on the opposite side from her one gold earring. She looked right at home in the carnival we’d just left, but here in the street people tended to stare. Dad just took her arm, of course, and laughed and chatted with her as if she were some first lady, when she’s no lady at all—at least not in the Grandmother sense.

We took that department store by storm: Punch running wild, trying to charge everything, and arguing that his father could buy and sell the store if he wanted. Thank heavens I’m a lot older than Punch or else I’d spend my whole life running away from his big mouth and tall tales. I’m a high school sophomore this fall, although I should be a junior—I missed a lot of school here and there on tours.

Then the idiot got into the toy department. I’d ditched him awhile before and was trying on a pair of Levi’s when I heard this yelling coming up from the basement, too high-pitched and nasal to ignore. It kept coming closer. When I looked out of the dressing room, there was Punch with a huge orange stuffed rhinoceros in his arms, and an overweight salesgirl puffing up the steps after him.

He tried to pay me with some tickets to some puppet show, the salesgirl screeched at two other salesgirls who had come running.

It’s fair. It’s perfectly fair! Punch was squealing where she’d cornered him in the Women’s Underwear.

The kid’s nutty as a fruitcake, the girl said, still panting, her purple eye makeup melting down her cheeks. I just waited there, pants half zipped, holding the dressing-room curtain over my nose so Punch wouldn’t see me. He was looking around for somebody to rescue him, though, so I ducked back into the booth and took off the Levi’s. They were too big anyway; everything bags over my skinny hips.

When I came out, I heard more hollering in some far corner of the store. I headed toward the noise, figuring that’s where the family reunion would take place, as it had other times. Sure enough, there they were, Dad and Fey, closing in from opposite ends of the store: Dad moving slow and dignified, combing at his beard with his fingers; Fey coming in fast with flushed cheeks. I moved in to cut her off. She was new at this game, likely to spoil it with her weird appearance and some silly protest like: How could you possibly punish a sweet young child like this? And so on. I caught at her gauzy arm. Let Dad handle it, I said.

Dad was laughing now, waving his arms, making the supervisor, a blue-haired woman with a plastic-y face, see the humor: a child with an overactive imagination—big for his age, so that people expected too much. To him, ma’am, those tickets were worth the price of the toy. His own dad’s show, you see, ma’am. Not that I’m excusing him—of course not!

Punch stood close to Dad, his eyes fixed on the orange rhinoceros the supervisor was clutching to her chest. The woman began to melt, but she didn’t give up the rhino until Dad had pulled out his wallet and thrust a green bill at her. Then she was all smiles, and she handed the animal to Punch and patted his head. As a final gesture, Dad presented her with two tickets to the show. She made a gurgling noise and said she just might possibly go. When I looked at Fey again, her mouth was slightly open, her violet eyes fixed on Dad.

Dad and Punch swung back to us then, the rhinoceros dragging between them. Punch was wide-eyed, his cheeks working as if he’d swallowed a fly or was going to bawl; Fey rushed over to embrace him. He peered over her shoulder, blinking his eyes at me as if I’d been the one trying to take away his precious rhinoceros. Dad didn’t say a word, just marched ahead out of the store with a little smile. We followed him down the street to a candy shop. I waited outside while the others flocked in. A while later they all barged out again with plump white bags. Punch’s cheeks were bulging, his chocolate hands wrapped tight around the rhinoceros.

You can see then why Punch has that round belly. Nothing is denied him, as Grandmother complains, and they can’t see they’re only hurting him, she says, turning him into a spoiled jelly-belly. The belly bounces up and down now on the red pony ahead of me on our merry-go-round while Punch gazes out at the spectators. Fey’s head flashes into view, and vanishes as we make another turn. Then she reappears, her arms loaded with stuff she’d won, I suppose, at bingo. Punch has an absolutely poker profile, as if he were some cool hero riding off in pursuit of a robber.

Hey, you gonna cut those guys off at the pass? I yell up at him. The head with its wreath of chestnut curls rotates slowly back. The reins dangle in one hand.

Don’t you know a space rider when you see one? We just got cut off our ship. If I can’t make contact again, we’re doomed. We’ll just keep going round and round and round and roun-

The voice fades into the swell of the tinny music that whines slower and slower and finally grinds to a halt. The space cowboy sits tall in the saddle until the end. Then slowly he loosens his reins and slides down off his horse. He gazes at the crowd for a minute as if waiting for their cheers. Fey blows a huge pink bubble, pops it, and stares back at him. But we’re saved. He’s made contact. Which is a lot more than I can say for myself.

Chapter Two

When people drive past our Broken House, they go slowly and stare out their windows. Whether it’s because of the house itself, an old barn-red building with a placard put up by the local DAR that says 1815, or because of the assortment of go-carts and black plastic garbage bags on the front lawn, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s because Punch is sitting there doing a puppet show and selling Kool-Aid. He does this when he’s out of candy during Dad’s off-season—which can be any time, but is usually spring and fall. Then the tourists with kids in the car skid up onto the lawn and sit on the crates Punch provides to watch his version of Jonah and the Whale, or Hansel and Gretel, starring his own homemade Wicked Woolly Witch. He charges twenty-five cents for the Kool-Aid and fifty cents for the show, and at that they’re getting a bargain, because Punch can really make those marionettes dance.

Sometimes I envy him. But mostly I yank down my front window shade and turn up my radio to drown out the noise of his tape recorder. Punch tapes his own shows, of course, like Dad, who does it because the script would tie him down. You have to be one with the marionette, he tells people. Like playing a musical instrument. You’re always aware, he says, of how you’re coming down the strings.

Tonight even my radio doesn’t drown out the noise inside. Dad and Fey and a couple of actors are in the studio taping a new show, doing more laughing and boozing than anything else, I think. There aren’t any of the old fancy dinner parties with three or four couples that Mother used to throw.

In general, though, Dad is very serious about