The Four-Story Mistake (17 page)

Suddenly Randy made the strangest sound: a sort of smothered yell.

“What's the matter, Ran?” Rush looked up.

“Oh, oh,
oh!
” was Randy's only reply. She was staring at something in her hand with a flabbergasted expression.

“Well, what
is
it?”

“I think,” said Randy slowly. “Rush, I think it's a diamond.”

Rush relaxed. “Oh, Randy,” he groaned tolerantly. “Wake up. You're always finding diamonds that turn out to be glass, and emeralds that turn out to be pieces of ginger-ale bottle, and gold that's nothing but old beer cans. Don't you ever get discouraged?”

“But look at it, Rush. Please just take a look.” She held out her hand. The little case that lay in it was like all the rest: a variation on the same patched-together dwelling place. But there was one difference: halfway down one side of it there was a small, round stone like a tiny glass doorknob. It was no larger than a chokecherry pit, but it was clear as a drop of dew on a fine morning, and its surface was shaped, carved, and faceted in a way that could only have been accomplished by some man's skill.

“Holy Moses,” said Rush in a quiet, detached way.

“It
is
one, isn't it?” said Randy, giving a sort of floundering leap and forgetting about the Mona boot, which instantly fell off and filled with water. She picked it up, tossed it on the bank hardly noticing, and stood like a heron with one wet foot drawn under her.

“Well, I'm not certain,” replied Rush, not noticing either. “Of course it's probably only a rhinestone. But even that's queer enough.”

“Oh, no, Rush. It's a diamond all right,” said Randy with all the assurance of Mr. Tiffany himself. “But what in the world is it doing there, decorating a worm's little house?”

“Darned if I know. Maybe it fell out of a ring or a pin. Maybe years ago, who knows?”

Yes, probably it had fallen out of some lady's ring, and dropped into the water with a tiny splash and disappeared. Randy could see the lady's white hand, long and narrow and snow white, except for pink-polished nails. The hand hovered in and out among violet plants beside the brook. To and fro, and to and fro it went, with the sun striking great shuddering, shifting sparks of light from the diamond on the third finger. Suddenly there is a cry, the violets fall to the earth. “My ring, my ring!” cries the lady's voice. “The stone is gone!”

“I wonder who it belonged to?”

“Chances are you'll never find out. Probably it's only a rhinestone, but you'd better keep it anyway. Here comes Mona, maybe she'll know.”

In a half-reluctant, offhand way Mona was coming down to the brook; walking slowly with her galoshes flopping. The thought of outdoors and the wild wind had got between her and the pages of
War and Peace
in spite of her.

“Mona!” cried Randy exultantly. “Guess what! I've just found a diamond stuck to a caddis house!”

“And Willy's struck oil on the front lawn, and Cuffy's inherited a million dollars, and I'm the Countess Natasha Rostova in disguise,” replied Mona sarcastically, without altering her pace.

“Well, she's found
something,
” said Rush in a solemn, impressive way. “Believe it or not. I think maybe it's the McCoy this time. Come see.” And Mona forgot about her age, talent, and position in the world, and flapped inelegantly across the sodden leaves to the brook.

Randy kept the miraculous caddis case in a tumblerful of water that day and the next; but on Monday she transferred it to a bottle which she put in her schoolbag. During the school lunch hour she bicycled down to see Mr. Lapvogel, the Carthage jeweler.

“Well, I wouldn't of believed it,” Mr. Lapvogel said a few minutes later, removing the thimble-shaped magnifier from his eye. “No, sir, I wouldn't of believed it no matter who told me.”

“You mean it's really a diamond?”

“The genuwine article. It's a nice little stone: nice color, nice work. Course tisn't big. Couldn't get so much for it.”

“About how much would you say, Mr. Lapvogel?”

“For this here? Oh, say around seventy-five, maybe eighty-five.”

“Dollars?”

“Sure, dollars. Course you don't want to sell it, though, do you? That's a curiosity, that is. A rare, rare curiosity.”

Randy looked down at her jewel with a pang. Probably the only diamond I'll have ever, she thought. The many clocks and little watches in the store ticked and whispered hastily, like insects in old, dry wood. Randy gave a sigh that blew a scrap of paper off the counter.

“No, Mr. Lapvogel. I'm not going to keep it, I'm going to sell it. Everybody in this family has been earning money except me and Oliver; and after all Oliver's only a child of seven. Do you—I mean, would you feel like buying it yourself? You could put it in a ring or something and sell it, couldn't you?”

“Why, sure, guess I could. I'd buy it all right, only don't you think I'd ought to get your papa's permission first? You sure he wants you to sell it?”

Randy said, “Father and I talked it over. He thought you might want to be sure of that so he wrote you a letter. Here it is.”

Mr. Lapvogel read the letter and was convinced. “Tell you what, I said seventy-five, maybe eighty-five, didn't I? So I'll give you eighty, that okay?”

“Oh, yes,” said Randy faintly. “If you're sure it's not too much.”

“Is that any way to close a business deal?” inquired Mr. Lapvogel. “You'd ought to say to me ‘Eighty? Well, I don't know. Maybe I better go see what they say over to Braxton,' and like as not I would have offered ninety.”

“Oh,” said Randy, feeling very young. But Mr. Lapvogel was smiling. He went over to the large, forthright safe at the back of the shop, and squatted down in front of it. Randy watched him twirling the nickel knobs, his brow seamed in concentration, and his lips moving as he recited the combination to himself.

A few minutes later he slammed the safe door shut.

“Seventy. Seventy-five. Eighty,” said Mr. Lapvogel, counting out the soft, old bills. “There 'tis.” Randy had never seen so much money in her life. She folded it respectfully, and stuffed it, bulging, into her patent leather pocketbook.

“I'm going to put your diamond on display in my window,” said Mr. Lapvogel. “Right slam in the middle of the window on a kind of black velvet stand, with a card attached telling the whole story.”

“I'll come and look at it often, with a covetous eye,” said Randy. She could imagine her diamond, throned on velvet; the center, the climax, of Mr. Lapvogel's distinguished, though flyspecked, collection: a costly display of enamel lockets and novelty pins shaped like everything from an elephant to Mickey Mouse; link bracelets, wrist watches, bead necklaces, engagement rings, and at the back an arrangement of electric clocks looking on gravely, like a jury.

“And I'm going to tell Cal Joiner about it first. He's editor down at the
Post-Clarion.
He'll put a piece about it in the paper, with your name and all. Maybe your photo too.”

There was a certain satisfaction in that idea. Randy paused at the doorway. “I'm kind of scared to walk down the street,” she confided. “I never felt so valuable before.”

“What you going to do with all that cash?” inquired Mr. Lapvogel. “Buy a little fur coat?”

“No, indeed.” Randy looked at him proudly. “I'm going to buy a War Bond. Mona's bought two out of her own earnings, and Rush has one out of his, and there's another that belongs to all of us together from our show. But I'm going to get this one by myself with my diamond money.”

“Well, you're a patriotic girl and a good citizen,” said Mr. Lapvogel approvingly. “Maybe I'd ought to of given you ninety after all.”

Randy laughed at him and waved her pocketbook. “Is that any way to close a business deal?” she said.

The little Carthage bank lay at the foot of the hill beside the church. She had been there with Father several times and knew Mr. Craven quite well. He was a tall grey man with glasses who always peered through the bars of his cage and said, “My, my, almost as tall as Daddy, aren't you? When are you going to open a checking account with us?” Then he would give a little dry laugh like the crackle of a new dollar bill.

“How do you do, Mr. Craven,” said Randy, with dignity. “I would like to buy a bond. A War Bond.”

“Don't you mean a stamp, sister?” said Mr. Craven, glancing at her in a grown-up way.

She opened her purse and spilled the money out on the shelf in front of his cage. “I want as big a bond as that can buy. And here's a note from my father telling you it's all right.”

Mr. Craven's eyes widened. He looked as if he would like to know where she had got all those bills. Randy didn't tell him, though she would have enjoyed watching his face if she had said, “You see, Mr. Craven, I found this diamond in our brook the other day—”

The bond was a fine one, substantial and important looking, and there was even some money left over. Not much, but enough so that after school Randy was able to go and buy presents for her family. She rode home on her bicycle, after a glorious hour of shopping, with the wire carrier full of presents, and the bond pinned with a large safety pin to the inside of her blouse. It had a starchy tickle against her ribs, but she didn't mind.

The sky was warm and blue; a robin flew across the road, and there were tassels on the alders. The forsythia bushes were almost in bloom: they rested light, golden, frothy, like sunlit clouds along the fences. Randy sang as she rode; she had not yet recovered from her good fortune. Why, it's a miracle, she kept thinking, I had a real honest-to-goodness miracle happen to me. Whoever heard of a girl just putting her hand into a brook and picking up a diamond? But it happened; and to me! That's the thing I can't get over.

She coasted on the long downhill part of the drive, and coasting, stared at the scene before her: she saw it very sharp and clear. The funny, fancy old house, and the towering, somber spruce trees, and the scattered crows that seemed always to be hovering and calling high above.

Rush and Isaac were running out of the woods, with Isaac barking; Oliver was sitting astride one of the iron deer, wearing a cowboy hat and all his MacArthur buttons; Cuffy and Mona were bent over a flower bed examining the new rabbit-ears of green that sprouted from the damp earth. Father's absorbed profile could be seen in the study window, and Willy, wearing faded blue overalls, was burning off the dead grass on the lawn. The air smelled deliciously of smoke.

Randy swooped expertly around the driveway circle, brought her bike to a slow and graceful stop and dismounted. As she gathered up her presents from the wire carrier, the bond crackled against her chest. Yes, finding the diamond had been a miracle. But Randy couldn't help feeling that there were many miracles in her life. Wasn't it a miracle to live in the country in spring? And to have a wonderful family that she was crazy about, and a house with a secret room and a cupola, and to be eleven and a half years old, and very good at riding a bicycle?

Anyway that's how I feel today, thought Randy. Tomorrow maybe I'll feel some other way; cranky, or dull, or just natural. But that's how I feel today.

CHAPTER XI

Addition and Subtraction

And at last it was really spring: flowers everywhere. The woods were carpeted with them: bloodroot wrapped in its cloak like an Indian princess, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, Dutchman's-breeches, hepatica (blooming out of a little fur mitten), and dogtooth violet. Down near the creek there were real violets by the hundred, by the thousand, starring their heartshaped leaves. Even the trees were full of flowers, apple blossom, and snowy pear, and cherry. Of two huge lopsided bushes near the house, one suddenly burst into a rash of orange rosettes and the other turned into a shower of pink fringe almost overnight.

Each day the children woke early and couldn't bear not to get up. The birds made such a racket: such a warbling and calling and whistling and rustling in the trees and vines; and the smell that drifted in through the open windows was so wildly exciting; a fragrance so new, never breathed before, so sweet and mysterious and inviting that one couldn't stay indoors, much less in bed. Cuffy was constantly having to put her head out the window to tell people to come in “and put on some bedroom slippers at
least!
”

On Saturdays and Sundays life was pleasantly disorganized; nobody had meals in the house. They wandered about, eating sandwiches in the woods, in the orchard, beside the brook, anywhere. The brook was a never-failing source of delight. Rush invented a sport called “sure-footing” which consisted of leaping with speed, agility, and daring from boulder to half-submerged boulder. As a result, there was always a pair of sneakers out drying on somebody's windowsill at the Four-Story Mistake, and there were frequently shorts, shirts, and dresses on the clothesline as well. Usually Randy's shorts and dresses: she fell in oftenest.

Rush and Willy started an ambitious Victory Garden, and Mona and Cuffy and Randy took care of the flower garden. Oliver veered between one and the other as his fancy took him, and sometimes (quite often) he just forgot about them both. The world seemed to expand with spring. It was larger, newer. The woods became thick and deep; and familiar vistas were hidden, made secret by thousands and thousands of opening leaves. Grass rose up tall and soft on the fields like fur on the back of a cat. Everything had to be explored all over again, for suddenly all had been created anew.

Many interesting things happened to the Melendys that spring. Many additions were made to the household. For one thing, another dog came to live with them. On a sunny day in late April a ragged, jet-black mongrel appeared from nowhere and never left again. Nobody had ever seen or heard of the dog before; he simply materialized, appeared, and became their devoted companion from then onward. They called him John Doe, Johnny for short, and he and Isaac were a happy pair, hunting for the same rabbits, collecting similar burrs and ticks, and at night lying side by side, paws twitching, noses quivering, as apparently they dreamed the same dreams.