Save the Dragons!. Martin Berman-Gorvine
“It’s Jo now,” she said, pulling away and planting her hands on her hips.
Mum rolled her eyes as she walked up and planted a kiss on my cheek. “That is all we have been hearing since the beginning of school term,” she said. “But even her friends forget sometimes. She was so angry at Marcia for calling her Jodie that the poor girl went home practically in tears.”
“Mum, you’re exaggerating. I just want to be treated like a grown-up.”
“Contractions, dear. What have I warned you about them?” Mum said. As a refugee from the Home Islands, where they speak an even worse Creole than the Louisianans, Mum is death on contractions and anything else she regards as not being the King’s English.
“Just because you’re getting so tall doesn’t automatically mean you’re an adult, pet,” Dad rumbled.
Mum winced at the contractions as he ambled up to shake my hand. He is a head taller than her, and three or four inches taller than me, and his grip is as firm and unyielding as the moving part on the school’s babbage I once caught my hand in.
Still, I was glad to see him. I was glad to see them all and hear that familiar soft Nanticoke twang, and I was only a little bit embarrassed. So what if Curtis or one of my fellow upperclassmen was lurking somewhere nearby, watching everything so they could make me pay for it later? It did not matter! For one whole weekend, I was going to stay with my family in the Franklin Inn, the fanciest hotel in town, founded by Sir Benjamin himself, and forget all about school.
But first we were going out to eat in a superb Siamese restaurant in Rittenhouse Square; Dad was really splurging. Over the Pad Siam, with its crushed peanuts and Gulf of Louisiana shrimp, I had to endure a much more thorough interrogation than Curtis and Martha had subjected me to on Tuesday night, though thankfully, more about my marks than about my nonexistent social life.
It is Dad’s dearest wish that I attend King’s College, Oxford University next year (the one in Nanticoke, of course, not the one in the Home Islands, which is officially called Université Louis-Napoléon) and then follow him to work at the Directorate Royal for Research in Aerospace and Ground Odysseys National at Wallops Island, an easy half-hour ferry ride from our home in Gingo Teag.
I do not know what career I want to pursue, but I am certain it is not that. While I am proud of Dad for all his work on heavier-than-air craft, a young fellow must have his own dreams, even if he is not quite sure what they are.
So I tried to muster as much enthusiasm as I could when Dad asked if I had my university recommendations lined up. “Well, the pastor will write me a nice letter of recommendation, of course,” I said, shifting in my seat.
“Yes, Geoffrey Marks is a good bloke,” Dad allowed. “But what about your natural philosophy master, what’s his name.”
“Mr Goldberg. Yes, he is pleased with my progress.”
“‘Pleased with your progress?’” Jo mimicked. “That doesn’t sound very good to me.”
I gave her a dirty look.
“Jo is correct, dear,” Mum put in. “and Michael, please set a good example for the children. Tom, you must ensure he is more than simply pleased. You need to have him write you a glowing recommendation so you can be admitted into Oxford’s technical program, the way your father was.”
Jodie made matters worse by prattling on about her latest achievements, such as the Rachmaninoff violin solo she had played for an audience in Baltimore, with the Duke and Duchess of Maryland in the audience.
“And did they bow and curtsey to you?” I snapped.
“No, but the duchess did tell me afterwards that she was moved to tears,” Jo said, immune as always to sarcasm.
Mum tactfully changed the subject to her community work. She is chair of the Gingo Teag Tourism Advisory Council, which may not pay much of anything but is a very important job in a town that has basically two industries, the DRRAGON base and the dragon herself, Assa Teag Ashley, in her lair across the channel on Assa Teag Island. Mum also serves on the Island Beautification Committee and is a longstanding member of the school board.
My mum can bake a carrot cake and brew cardamom-spiced coffee for a dozen people in our spotless living room in less than an hour, and she knows how to sweet-talk the mayor or a key school board member into giving her what she wants, which is always something good for the town. If she possessed any ambition at all she could be mayor herself, or the M.P. from Nanticoke’s Sinepuxent Riding, but she prefers to stay out of the limelight.
“I am grateful to Gingo Teag for taking me in, and Gingo Teag is quite big enough for me,” she always says in her salty Liverpool accent. And, she has recently been able to add, “Besides, Franklin University Press is going to publish my book on the birds of the Chesapeake Bay, and that takes up the rest of my time. When I am not picking up your dirty socks after you.”
Then too, perhaps she thinks it as well not to stir up ignorant suspicions, being a refugee from the Home Islands. Anyone who is not a native-born “from-here” from Gingo Teag itself, like Dad, is a “come-here” in some people’s eyes. Like rotten Johnny Dorsey, who taunted me in third grade about being the son of a “French whore” until I bloodied his nose for him.
All the villagers knew about Mum was that Dad had brought her here suddenly, at the age of twenty-two, in the middle of what was supposed to be his graduate year abroad at the other Oxford. Not that Jodie, excuse me, Jo and I knew much more than that.
“Oh, I rescued your mother all right,” Dad would drawl whenever we asked what had really happened. He would look her straight in the eyes, and they would both burst out laughing. We could no more pry any details out of them than you can pry a live clam open with your bare fingers.
So I was relieved to let her go on about the Council, which was already busy preparing for the pony swim next July, when the Dragonfire Club rounds up the wild horses that live on Assa Teag and herds them across the channel to Gingo Teag. It is a great tourist event that draws almost as many people as come to town in the spring, when Ashley goes hunting in the marshes.
For that event, the Council is ready years in advance, not that that kept Mum from grumbling about the Nanticoke House of Burgesses’ failure to pay for a bridge across the marshes from the mainland, which has been in the planning stages for the best part of a century.
“If we had the bridge,” she complained, “we could accomodate twice as many tourists as we do now to watch Ashley catch her springtime breakfast.”
“Yes Mum, but where would we put them all?” Jodie—all right then, Jo, I will get used to it—pointed out. “We barely have enough hotel rooms as it is to house all those who do come over on the ferry. And all that carriage traffic might disturb her, and we haven’t got near enough recharging stations for all their batteries.”
“Look who’s an expert in dragon biology and carriage engineering,” Dad said, smiling as he ruffled her hair, cutting short whatever remark Mum was about to make.
But Jo is really not such a spoiled little brat—at least, not most of the time. After Mum and Dad checked in at the hotel she told them she wanted to show me the ornamental fountain in the lobby—which really was very impressive, with jets of water playing over a flock of brass swans that looked ready to take flight.
“So what’s troubling you, big brother?” she asked as soon we were out of earshot.
“I am not much bigger than you anymore,” I sighed, tossing a ha’penny into the sparkling water. “And who says something is bothering me?”
“You can’t fool me, Tommy boy,” she said, flicking my earlobe with her fingernail.
“Ow! All right, I’ll tell you,” I said, and proceeded to lay out the whole story from my first sight of Gloria’s Gateway Books, to its strange, impossible books and phonograph records, to Teresa’s failure to appear in Parliament Plaza Tuesday afternoon. She looked skeptical