Belles on Their Toes (5 page)

Anne locked the front door and jumped into the cab.

“One cab for seven people, eight suitcases, a dog and two canaries,” the driver inventoried as we started down the driveway. “You should have ordered three at least.”

“We’re not too crowded,” Anne said as cheerfully as she could.

“Is that dog housebroken?”

“Usually,” Anne lied.

“I don’t think my insurance covers this.”

“It probably does,” she laughed weakly, “if you have an act-of-God clause.”

A block from the house, we saw Fourteen. The cab stopped, Tom called, and there was a streak of orange as the cat dived into his lap and then perched on his shoulder.

“Look at that,” Tom crowed, all of his complaints forgotten. “She was waiting on us. Smartest cat I ever seen, bar none.”

“Are there any other passengers or livestock we are supposed to pick up?” the driver asked.

“No,” Anne told him sheepishly.

“No cows, goats, or other children?”

“No.”

“You sure we got them all?”

“Yes.”

“And may one inquire where the destination is at?”

“Oh, excuse me,” said Anne. “The Lackawanna station.”

“I thought maybe it was Overbrook. You know, the Funny Farm.”

“No,” Anne said meekly. “The Lackawanna station. Please.”

She leaned back in the seat and tried to adjust Jane a little more comfortably on her lap. She closed her eyes and thought of Mother, now safe in England. She thought of previous trips, when we had driven to New Bedford and taken the Nantucket boat from there. She thought of Dad—strong, gay, and dependable—sitting behind the wheel of our old Pierce Arrow, blowing his bulb horns and shouting “road hog” at the drivers who swerved for their lives as we went barreling by in a cloud of smoke.

FROM ANNE’S STANDPOINT
, at least, the remainder of the trip to Nantucket had only about half the earmarks of a howling success—the howling half.

The hubbub of the night-boat dock demoralized Mr. Chairman, and he yapped, howled, and had to be dragged stiff-legged along the dock and to the gangplank.

Every two or three steps, Frank would stop and bat him to try to keep him quiet, but the wallops only made Mr. Chairman yap and howl all the louder.

Tom, with Fourteen and the bird cage under one arm and a bulging wicker suitcase under the other, kept shouting threats about how he’d dose the dog good if it didn’t shut up.

Each of the older children held the hand of his particular younger charge, and carried a suitcase. Martha discouraged eager porters, who came running to meet us, by telling them we were too poor to afford them.

By the time we singlefiled up the gangplank, which Martha negotiated almost on her knees, the rails were lined with grinning spectators. Anne and Ernestine looked straight ahead, pre tending not to notice, but the rest of us waved and grinned back.

“Carry your bags?” said a porter who was coming down the gangplank from the ship.

“No,” shouted Frank, who sometimes read
College Humor,
“let them walk.”

That was the sort of joke that appealed to Tom, and he laughed deafeningly, through his nose as always. “Henc, henc, henc, henc,” he cackled. “That’s a hot one.”

The purser was so engrossed by our entrance that he made no pretense of checking to see whether we had enough full-fare tickets. He did insist, though, that Mr. Chairman and Fourteen be checked with the freight, down in the hold. All through the night you could hear Mr. Chairman complaining about that.

We were allowed to keep the birds, and they ended up in Anne’s stateroom, where she shared the lower berth with Jane, while Fred and Dan shared the upper. Anne wouldn’t let either Jane or Dan drink any liquids after six o’clock, but the inevitable occurred anyway.

It wasn’t until the following morning, when we had transferred at New Bedford to the Nantucket boat, that Anne discovered Morton Dykes.

Morton was an Amherst man, and a sheik whom Anne rated high on her hit caravan. He was very tall—six feet seven or eight—and thin, but quite good looking in his patent-leather hair and Oxford bags. He and Anne had had a good many dates that spring, while she was at Smith. We had often heard her talk about him, but never had seen him before.

It wasn’t necessary to check animals with the freight on the Nantucket boat. Morton bumped into Anne on the upper deck, where all of us—including the birds, dog, and cat—were gathered.

Bumped is the word, because it soon became apparent that, so far as Morton was concerned, the meeting was not only un-premeditated and unrehearsed, but undesired.

“For goodnesssake,” said Anne, trying to straighten out her dress, which had been rumpled beyond repair by Jane, “Look who’s here. Hello, Morton.”

“Hello,” Morton almost whispered, edging away as if Anne had something he didn’t want to catch. “Good to see you.”

“Good to see you, too,” said Anne enthusiastically. When Anne was enthused, her voice had all the modulation of a cheer leader’s in the last minutes of the final quarter. Morton edged still farther away. “I knew you and your Mother were coming to Nantucket,” she added, “but I had no idea we’d be on the same boat.”

“We were on the night boat with you, too,” Morton reported resentfully. “We saw you come aboard.”

“Oh, you did?” was all Anne could manage.

“Was that your dog that howled all night?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Anne said.

Morton edged some more, and Anne finally realized that he didn’t want to be mistaken for one of our group. The realization made her furious.

“Come on over,” she said, “and meet everybody. Pull up a chair and make yourself at home.”

“No thanks. I’ve got to run.”

“Why don’t you bring your Mother up here, and we’ll all sit together?”

The suggestion caused Morton to drop all pretense of edging, and to break into an open retreat.

“See you around,” he whispered over his shoulder.

“Or,” Anne hollered after him, “we could all come and sit with you.”

Morton disappeared down a ladder to the lower decks.

“So that’s Morton Dykes,” Ernestine said. “Gee, he’s cute—and so tall. The least you could have done was introduce me.”

“I tried,” Anne told her bitterly. “You heard me try.”

“The whole boat heard you,” Martha said. “If you ask me, he’s a beanpole and a wet smack.”

“You’re just judging him as a potential book carrier,” Ernestine grinned. “You know those tall, thin ones get tired easily.”

“He seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere,” Martha said. “Does he always edge that way, like a crab?”

“He was ashamed of us,” said Anne. “Well, any feeling I may have had for him in the past is dead. Completely dead.”

“Why would anyone be ashamed of us?” Bill wanted to know. “You girls are crazy. He looked to me like he had heard about our chicken pox, and he hasn’t had them.”

“Martha’s right,” Ernestine agreed. “He is a wet smack.”

“Dead,” Anne repeated dramatically. “Completely dead.”

5.
Mother’s Bathing Suit

A
LL OF US, BUT
especially Anne, were glad to see our cottage at Nantucket.

Dad had named the cottage The Shoe, in honor of Mother, because he said she was like the old lady who lived in one. The Shoe was flanked by two circular lighthouses, which Dad had bought years before from the government. One lighthouse had been used by Dad as a study, and the other by us as an overflow dormitory.

We wondered how Nantucket was going to be without Dad. He had left his mark on every room in The Shoe. There were the dot and dash messages he had painted on the ceilings over our beds, the summer he decided we should learn the Morse code. There were the astronomical diagrams he had painted billboard fashion on the dining-room walls, showing the size of the earth and other planets, as compared with big stars. There were photographs of nebulae and constellations that had been given Dad by Harvard University, and which he had hung only two feet from the floor, so that even the smallest children could see them.

We went from room to room, looking at everything and finding it good.

The trunks had followed us from the express office at the dock. Martha opened them in the dining room, found a comfortable chair, and started giving us instructions about unpacking them.

Everyone came and got his clothes, and put them in the bureaus. Tom fed the animals and cleaned the kitchen. Frank and Bill put up the screens. Anne and Ernestine swept away a winter’s accumulation of sand.

“That’s the most efficient house opening we ever had,” Anne told us when we were through. “Everyone did a fine job, particularly Martha on the packing.”

“Martha is Dad all over again,” Ernestine agreed. “She’s naturally efficient.”

Martha grinned happily, pushed herself up from her chair, and started over to the trunks to get her own clothes. Someplace between the chair and the trunks, a terrible realization struck her. She knew the trunks would be empty, and they were. She knew, too, there wasn’t any use asking if anyone had picked up her clothes by mistake.

“Don’t anybody ever say I’m efficient again,” she squealed.

“Of course you’re efficient,” said Anne. “Stop fishing for any more compliments. I just finished saying you did a fine job on the packing, and we’ve got everything we need.”

“We haven’t got my clothes or bathing suit,” Martha shouted, “and we need those. I haven’t got a stitch except what I’ve got on my back.”

“Nonsense,” Anne said. “They must be around someplace. Who took Martha’s clothes?”

Martha shook her head, and she was near tears. “No use to look. I remember now. I didn’t pack them.”

“But the check-off lists?” Anne asked. “How could you forget your own clothes?”

“I don’t know.”

“You sure you didn’t pack them?”

“The check-off lists were for everybody else,” Martha said. “Since I was doing the packing, there wasn’t any use to have one for me.”

“Oh, Lord. That means we’ll have to get you a whole new outfit.”

“No we won’t,” Martha insisted. “The budget can’t stand it. I’ll go around in a barrel first.”

The boys started giggling, and Anne and Ernestine couldn’t help but join in. Bill sat down in the chair Martha had vacated, and made believe he was thumbing through a sheaf of papers.

“Name?” he asked Martha.

“Speak out so we can hear you,” said Frank.

Martha managed a sick grin. “Mud,” she said. “I admit it. Age, almost fifteen. Favorite pastime, eating crow.”

Anne still wanted Martha to go down to the village and buy some clothes and a bathing suit, but Martha was determined not to waste the money.

“I just need some things to bum around in,” she said. “I’m not a boy-crazy flapper, trying to impress an Amherst man. I’ll find something.”

Anne and Ernestine agreed they’d hand her down some clothes, and Frank said he’d hand up a sweatshirt, some jerseys, and a pair of dungarees.

“Swell,” Martha said. “I don’t have to worry about a bathing suit because I can wear Mother’s until she gets here. And I’ll write her to be sure to pick up my suit when she stops by Montclair.”

“I can see you in Mother’s suit,” Ernestine scoffed. “Why it’s practically a Gay Nineties model.”

“Who cares about that?” Martha said. “All I want is something to cover me. You two make me sick.”

Mother wasn’t a swimmer and didn’t like the water. She did occasionally wade in up to her knees, splash some water on her shoulders, duck down almost to her elbows, and then hurry home. If she met any of us en route to the beach, she’d inform us, through blue lips and chattering teeth, the surf that day seemed particularly refreshing. The waves on the bathing beach never got more than a foot high during a full gale, but even in a flat calm it was surf to Mother.

Mother’s suit left nothing exposed. Even Dad, who insisted that the girls wear black, old-fashioned models, had to admit that Mother carried modesty a little to the extreme, and that she seemed to put on more than she took off when she prepared to go in the water.

Her suit had numerous appurtenances, including a sash and a bandanna. But its two principal components were a black undergarment, that started with a hug-me-tight neck and ended several inches below the knees, and a huge, long, black, billowing outergarment, that Dad said might be useful to Barnum and Bailey if it were dyed khaki. The outergarment had long sleeves and hung down to Mother’s ankles, which themselves were encased in black cotton stockings and high bathing shoes.

“Mother’s suit is out of the question,” Anne told Martha. “You’d look completely ridiculous in it.”

“If it’s good enough for Mother,” said Martha, “it’s good enough for me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking about her clothes like that.”

“It’s not her clothes that are ridiculous,” Anne said. “A few years ago, everybody wore suits like that, and a good many people Mother’s age still do. But it would look ridiculous on you.”

“It’s not much more ridiculous than the suits Dad made us wear,” Martha protested. “We have to wear a black thing underneath, and sort of dresses, too.”

“I know it,” Anne admitted. “But at least ours end at the knees and have short sleeves.”

It had taken Anne years to get Dad to allow her and the other girls to bob their hair and wear short skirts, silk stockings, and teddies. Dad hadn’t approved of the style trends that had set in since the war. He said they were purely temporary, that girls eventually would come to their senses, and the fact that every one else dressed that way made no difference. He had refused to yield any more than the sleeves and a couple of inches around the hems of the girls’ swimming outfits. It was a sore point with the two oldest girls.

Martha kept insisting to Anne that she would look all right in Mother’s suit, and Anne finally gave in.

“All right,” Anne said. “If you don’t care how you look, I suppose I don’t. And since none of us should go out with boys until Mother gets here, I guess you can’t do Ernestine and me any permanent damage.”

Frank, Bill, and the younger children already had on their suits, and the two boys took the younger ones down to the beach, which was only a couple of hundred yards from the cottage. Martha said she’d slip on Mother’s suit and join them. Anne and Ernestine had to finish sorting sheets and blankets, and told Martha they’d be down in about half an hour.