Raising Demons (20 page)

Later, when I went upstairs to straighten Sally's room and make the bed, because I thought that probably she would not want to stay up for dinner after playing outdoors, I could still hear them distantly for a while, but when I moved on to pick up the crayons from Barry's floor they were out of earshot. I decided to straighten Barry's bookcase, and so I stayed upstairs longer than I had thought to, and when I came down to the kitchen again I went to call them in for fruit juice and cookies, and they were not there. I went outside and looked up and down the driveway, and out across the lawn, calling them, and then went and looked in the barn, calling them, and then behind the barn, still calling, and then I went all around the outside of the house. Anywhere farther than that was out of bounds, as they both knew.

I sat down on the back steps and tried to think. I knew they could not have come to any harm because our big dog Toby was lying comfortably in the sun in the barn doorway and even though Toby has never growled at anyone except the laundry man I was fairly sure that he would do
some
thing if any danger approached, even if it was only to come into the house and try to hide behind me. Toby's presence also argued that they were nearby. I called again and again, and Toby lifted his head and looked at me wonderingly, as though Sally and Barry were right in plain sight and he could not understand the increasing agitation in my voice. I did not like to go in and call my husband at the college; when I saw Laurie come up the street on his bike I got up and went to meet him with as little appearance of concern as I could manage.

“Laurie,” I said, “Sally and Barry have wandered away somewhere. I can't find them.”

“Pudge's tree, probably,” Laurie said. He rode past me and toward the barn door, going swiftly, directly at Toby. Toby yawned and closed his eyes, and Laurie braked the bike an inch from Toby's nose. “You lazy dog,” he said. Toby yawned again. “Go look in Pudge's tree,” Laurie called back at me.

“Where
is
it?”

He took his bike into the barn, wheeling it carefully past Toby, and reappeared. “I thought
you
knew,” he said. “Want a cookie?” he asked Toby, and Toby, alert, rose and followed him toward the back door.

“Laurie,” I said, “
listen
.”

“Sure,” he said. “Don't you worry. Pudge'll bring them back okay.”

Jannie came along a few minutes later, lingering and giggling with her friend Carole; Jannie said that Sally and Barry were almost certainly in Pudge's tree, and Carole added that her little sister Jeanie had often told all of them at their house about Sally's friend Pudge and his magic tree. “Jeanie says that Sally goes there
lots
,” Carole said, and Jannie added, “Pudge takes good care of them, it's all right,” and they went on into the house to join Laurie and Toby at the cookie jar.

For almost half an hour, only the combined efforts of Laurie and Jannie, and Carole's offers to go home and get Jeanie and ask
her
, prevented me from telephoning my husband at the college, or our local policeman, or at least my mother in California. Then we heard laughter from behind the barn, and Sally and Barry wandered toward us, holding hands and chatting happily.

They refused to say where they had been. I held on to them, and stumbled questions, trying to keep my voice gentle, and Sally shook her head and smiled. “I said I wouldn't tell about it,” she explained. “You
can't
, with a magic country, because then they won't let you come back, ever. Were we gone for ten years? Because everyone looks about the same.”

“Barry,” I said, “where did you go? With Sally?”

“Cookies,” he said, grinning. “Many happy cookies, and the flowers on a queen.”

“He says he won't tell,” Sally said hastily.

The next morning, when I got up after a night spent checking on Sally and Barry every half hour, I found a great tub full of spring flowers on the back porch, tulips and daffodils and pussy willows. There was a note tucked in among the stems, and it read: “Thanks so much for letting the children come; delighted with their little visit. Tell Barry I'll send him a ‘flinky' one of these days. Hope you like their flowers. ‘Pudge.'”

I showed the note to my husband privately, and we decided that perhaps it was not altogether healthy to let Sally fill her mind with these fancies, and we would say no more about it. However, later, when Barry stopped in the bathroom doorway to watch his father shaving, it seemed a good moment for a diplomatic question, and his father said carelessly, “By the way, when you went to Pudge's yesterday, what was he wearing?”

“Crown,” said Barry.

“Was anyone else there?”

“Trixie Pixie?”

“No,” said his father. “Where did you go?”

“You are the daddy,” said Barry reassuringly, “and I am the Barry, and Sally is the Sally, and Jannie is the Jannie and Laurie is the Laurie and Mommy is the Mommy.”

 • • • 

When I married the man who is at present my husband and the father of my children it did not occur to me to specify that his behavior should in no way prevent my buying an evening paper. It is not a usual request to make during such a ceremony, for one thing, and, for another thing, the possibility of my being unable to buy an evening paper if I wanted one seemed, to say the least, remote.

Actually, it was only for about three days that we had to do without the paper. Thanks to a fortunate hurricane which took part of the cornice off the First National Bank most of the affair was quickly forgotten, and since my husband's cigarette lighter broke almost at once, the subject largely died down, to be revived only by the most tactless and humorous of our friends. I wonder sometimes if things could have been handled differently in some way, but of course there is not much use worrying about it now. If, perhaps, I had refused to call Mr. Williams back in Burlington? If I had neglected to answer the phone at all?

Whenever the phone rings I have of course the quick wonderful thought that some remarkable and astonishing surprise is going to happen. (“Lonesome for you in California; plane tickets arriving special delivery . . .” “Investigation proves you only surviving heir . . .”) However, what I always expect is a kind of surprise for
me
, too. When I answered the phone on a bright morning when the sun was really warm and the trees were really green and the air had that authentic scent of flowers, it was a call for my husband, from a man with a pleasant, although unfamiliar, gentlemanly voice. He asked for my husband by calling him “the Professor,” which is perhaps a legitimate title for a teacher in a girls' college, but which is a title rarely, if ever, used except by the kind of friend who thinks that sort of thing is terribly funny. At any rate, I held out the phone and remarked that it's for you, Professor, and my husband grudgingly put down a gold
moidore
he was checking for precise weight and went to the phone.

I heard him say “Hello?” and then “What?” and then “
What
?
” Then he sighed and said, “All right, all right. And what did you say your name was?”

There was a long silence and then he hung up.

“Yes, dear?” I asked, hovering. (“Paris concern offering all expenses you and family . . .”)

“Look,” he said. “I want you to pick up that telephone and call a man named John Williams, at the
Gazette
, in Burlington, Vermont. Person to person. Collect.”

“Why?”

“Never
mind
why. He just said that if I thought it was a practical joke I could hang up and call him right back and prove he was a real person.”

“Why should you have to prove—”

“Never
mind
why,” my husband said again. He laughed shortly. “Prominent local educator!” he said.

Eying my husband apprehensively, I took up the phone and put through a call, person to person, collect, to John Williams, Burlington
Gazette
, Vermont. Because Burlington is only a hundred miles from the small Vermont town where we live my call went through smoothly, unlike a call to New York City, for instance, when—because of course New York City is not in Vermont—it is sometimes necessary to spell out everything, beginning with N for Norman, E for Edwin, W for Wilfred, Y for Yolanda, and so on. When I heard the same pleasant unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line, and he agreed that he was indeed John Williams, I said, “Hello, Mr. Williams?”

“Right,” he said cheerfully. “Give us the Professor.”

I might say that I have rarely seen such an expression on my husband's face. Delighted, he was, and yet incredulous. He kept saying, “I can't believe it,” and, “This
must
be a joke.” He and Mr. Williams talked for a long time, and every few minutes my husband would give a little giggle.

When he finally said, “Well, I'll see you on the fifteenth, then,” and hung up, there I was, right next to him, curious, and—I had been married for fourteen years—deeply suspicious.

“Well?” I said in a voice used by wives who have been married for fourteen years. “Well?”

“Well,” my husband said, putting his shoulders back and pulling in his stomach. “
Well
.”

I followed him into the study and resisted a strong impulse to slap the gold
moidore
right out of his hand. “
Well
?
” I said.

My husband looked at me out of the corners of his eyes and opened and shut his mouth several times. “Now I want you to be reasonable,” he said at last.

I prepared myself to be reasonable. I sat down quietly in a chair, clenched my fists, and smiled tightly. “It's only,” my husband said, “that I have to go to Burlington.”

“So?”

“Well,” he said hesitantly, “I'm going to Burlington, is all.”

“How perfectly splendid,” I said. “I know how you've longed to see Burlington.”

“
I
don't know why they picked on me,” my husband said. “A prominent local educator is what Mr. Williams kept telling me. It certainly isn't anything
I
ever thought of doing. And of course,” he finished brightly, “it might
still
be a practical joke.”

“You are going to
have
to stop twisting your hands like that,” I said. “And if you give that evil chuckle once more I will gag you with a dish towel.”

“I can't help it,” my husband said, “I feel like a fool.”

“Hah,” I said eloquently, and got up and headed for the kitchen and the breakfast dishes. “Look,” my husband wailed despairingly. “I
got
to go, I
said
I would, and besides it's
not
what you think.”

“I bet it is,” I said.

“It is
not
,” he said, coming after me. “It's only a kind of contest, sort of. I'm a judge, sort of. And even if I am a judge it doesn't necessarily mean—”

“Yes?” I said, when he stopped abruptly.

“Well,” he said.

“If I may presume to ask just one question,” I said carefully. “If I am not too presumptuous, if I am not in any way interfering with your private affairs—and please believe that I would not for a moment dream—”

“Look,” he said.

“If you are absolutely sure that I can be trusted with your secret mission, may I just possibly ask—what
are
you judging?”

“Girls,” he said.

“
What
?
”

“They want me to be a judge in the beauty contest to choose Miss Vermont, so she can enter another contest and be Miss America.”

I am genuinely sorry for the way I acted then. I have tried to explain to my husband but of course there is really no way of explaining, or at least none that would help the situation any. I am really sorry, though. I was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs with the tears running down my cheeks and my sides aching and my husband standing there looking offended and saying, “Well, I didn't really think it was as funny as all
that
,” when the back door slammed open and Laurie trotted in, shedding jacket and hat as he came. He was always the first child home at lunchtime, because he rode his bike to school. Moreover, although not overly endowed with personal dignity, he had a strong and uncompromising estimate of what was proper and fitting, particularly in a parent.

“Where's lunch?” he said. “What's wrong?” He looked from me to his father, and said, “Hey?”

“Laurie,” I said feebly, “Daddy is going to judge a beauty contest.”

“
Dad
,” said Laurie, turning purple.

“Prominent local educator,” my husband said defensively.

“Oh, my gosh,” Laurie said. “Oh, my gosh, my gosh. Does anyone
know
about it?” he demanded of his father.

“Look,” my husband said.

“What about my friends?” Laurie said. “Suppose someone finds out?”

“It's an honor,” my husband said. “For heaven's sake, you'd think someone in this house would think it's an
honor
.”

“Here come the girls,” I said, in a hushed voice. “They will have to be told, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Laurie said bitterly, “the whole
world's
probably going to be told. Oh, my gosh. Yeah,” he said to the girls as they came through the door, “get out the old man's bathing suit. He's a crazy, mixed-up daddy.”

I went out onto the porch and captured Barry, who had finally been prevailed upon to accept the notion of a nursery school car pool, and rode home three days a week with a neighbor, but then still had to be dragged and pushed and wheedled up the back walk to the lunch table.

“They was muskets in my school this day,” Barry told me, as one reporting a grievance, “muskets.”