Read Online Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth - Free Book Online

classical music, as who should say: the sort upper-graders had to listen to in class. Up through the floor of his bedroom came the rumble of tympani and a brooding figure in low strings. Ambrose paused in his dressing to listen, and thinking on his late disgrace frowned: the figure stirred a dark companion in his soul. No man at all! His family, shaken past tears, was in attendance at his graveside.
    “I’ll kill that Wimpy,” Peter muttered, and for shame at not having lent his Silver King bike more freely to his late brother, could never bring himself to ride it again.
    “Too late,” his father mourned. Was he not reflecting how the dear dead boy had pled for a Senior Erector Set last Christmas, only to receive a Junior Erector Set with neither electric motor nor gearbox?
    And outside the press of mourners, grieving privately, was a brown-haired young woman in the uniform of a student nurse: Peggy Robbins from beside Crazy Alice’s house. Gone now the smile wherewith she’d used to greet him on her way to the Nurse’s Home; the gentle voice that answered “How’s my lover today?” when he said hello to her—it was shaken by rough, secret sobs. Too late she saw: what she’d favored him with in jest he had received with adoration. Then and there she pledged never to marry.
    But now stern and solemn horns empowered the theme; abject no more, it grew rich, austere. Cymbals struck and sizzled. He was Odysseus steering under anvil clouds like those in
Nature’s Secrets.
A reedy woodwind warned of hidden peril; on guard, he crept to the closet with the plucking strings.
    “Quick!” he hissed to his corduroy knickers inside, who were the undeserving Wimpy. If they could tiptoe from that cave before the lean hounds waked …
    “But why are you saving my life?”
    “No time for talk, Wimp! Follow me!”
    Yet there! The trumpets flashed, low horns roared, and itwas slash your way under portcullis and over moat, it was lay about with mace and halberd, bearing up faint Peggy on your left arm while your right cut a swath through the chain-mailed host. And at last, to the thrill of flutes, to the high strings’ tremble, he reached the Auditorium. His own tunic was rent, red; breath came hard; he was
more weary than exultant.
    “The truth of the matter is,” he declared to the crowd, “I’m just glad I happened to be handy.”
    But the two who owed him their lives would not be gainsaid! Before the assembled students and the P.T.A. Wimpy James begged his pardon, while Peggy Robbins—well, she hugged and kissed him there in front of all and whispered something in his ear that made him blush! The multitude rose to applaud, Father and Mother in the forefront, Uncle Karl, Uncle Konrad, and Aunt Rosa beside them; Peter winked at him from the wings, proud as punch. Now brass and strings together played a recessional very nearly too sublime for mortal ears: like the word
beyond
, it sounded of flight, of vaulting aspiration. It rose, it soared, it sang; in the van of his admirers it bore him transfigured from the hall, beyond, beyond East Dorset, aloft to the stars.
    For all it was he and not his brother who had suggested the gang’s name, the Occult Order of the Sphinx judged Ambrose too young for membership and forbade his presence at their secret meetings. He was permitted to accompany Peter and the others down to the rivershore and into the Jungle as far as to the Den; he might swing with them on the creepers like Tarzan of the Apes, slide down and scale the rooty banks; but when the Sphinxes had done with playing and convened the Occult Order, Peter would say “You and Perse skeedaddle now,” and he’d have to go along up the beach with Herman Goltz’s little brother from the crabfat-yellow shacks beside the boatyard.
    “Come on, pestiferous,” he would sigh then to Perse. But indignifying as it was to be put thus with a brat of seven, who moreover had a sty in his eye and smelled year round like pee and old