The Four-Story Mistake (3 page)

Father and Willy proceeded up the stairs relieved, and the children followed at their heels. The house was so big that there was a bedroom for each of them and even one left over in case they had a guest. They ran about exploring one another's rooms. “Look, mine has a
window
seat,” shouted Randy; and then feeling that she was being disloyal to their last house, she added, “But I liked the wallpaper in my old one best.”

Mona said, “Mine has a little alcove and I'm going to make a dressing table to fit into it. A real one with a ruffle, and a powder box on it that plays music.”

Rush said, “Mine has a tree outside it that I think I can climb down.”

Oliver said, “Mine is for me all by myself and nobody else.” He had always slept in the same room with Cuffy before.

And Father said, “
Mine
is down at the end of the corridor, and quiet as the tomb.” He sounded very happy about that.

Then Cuffy called them and they all went down to the kitchen and had a strange, interesting supper of shredded wheat with brown sugar and condensed milk on it, hot cocoa, canned peaches, and cookies that tasted of cardboard box.

The kitchen was bigger and higher than the one at home and the stove had a sort of black metal canopy over it, very royal. Out of doors the wind howled and the rain lashed, and right in the middle of supper the lights went out!

It was wonderful; the children loved it. “Blackout! Take cover, men! The Messerschmitts are overhead!” hissed Rush dramatically.

“Guess a wire's blew down somewheres,” said Willy's voice.

“That's right. I wonder if it often happens in storms out here?” said Father. “Come on, Willy, there are some candles in a box in the front room. Help me find them, will you?”

In springing to obey Willy fell over a packing case and smashed two jelly glasses and the kitchen teapot.

“Nobody move,” Cuffy ordered the children like a policeman. “I don't want nobody getting cut on glass. Soon's we have a light I'll clean it up.”

They all sat in the dark and went on with their supper.

“It's interesting eating in the dark,” Randy remarked. “Things taste different. They taste
more.
”

Oliver just sat quiet with his plate in his lap. It was dark, it was strange: there they all were together inside the fortress. Outside in the enemy night the foe pressed toward the house: Nazis, Iroquois Indians, pirates, robbers, it didn't matter which. All four probably. When they got too real he put out a cautious hand, and sure enough there was Cuffy beside him. The enemy sank back affrighted.

Father and Willy reappeared with lighted candles in their hands. They were like naturalists returning with rare orchids from the jungle; there was a quiet pride about them. At that very instant the lights came on again!

“Have you ever noticed how the sun comes out if you carry an umbrella on a cloudy day?” said Father.

After supper they all had baths in the two new bathrooms. They all brushed their teeth over the new basins. Each said good night and padded into his new paint-smelling bedroom.

Randy lay in her own old bed that she was used to. It was still raining: she could hear it, and there were drops on the window. A light came and went, came and went, among the tossing branches: from Willy Sloper's room above the stable, perhaps. Maybe it was going to be nice living in the country after all. Delightful facts and probabilities floated in confusion through her mind: in bad storms the lights went out; there were woods to explore; her room had a window seat, a real window seat, where she could curl up and read, just like a girl in a bookplate. And there was a stable; maybe they could find something alive to keep in it; maybe there were hickory nut trees, she thought she smelled them; maybe there was a brook, she thought she heard one. And on top of the house there was a cupola, a tiny turret with four long windows looking east and north and west and south. Tomorrow she would explore it all for the first time. “The first time, the first time,” was the refrain that sang through Randy's thoughts tonight instead of “the last time, the last time,” as it had been this afternoon.

Wind and rain lapped the house in a deep ocean of sound and movement. Glass rattled in the windows, and someplace faraway something banged from time to time: a shutter probably. Cuffy, hollow-cheeked without her teeth, tiptoed from room to room adjusting windows and pulling blankets up under chins. At last every light was out, every room was still. The house was full of sleep.

It was beginning to be home.

CHAPTER II

A View Apiece

Rush woke up early the next morning. The bluejays woke him up. He, who could sleep through the metallic thundering of ash cans and the honking of taxis, was startled out of sleep by the jeering mew of the bluejays in the Norway spruce outside his window.

The room was strange in the daylight. There was a carved marble mantel over the fireplace with a cherub's head in the middle that looked like Henry the Eighth as a baby. But on top of the mantel were some of his books, his clock, the socks he had taken off last night, and the World's Fair savings bank with nothing in it but two aspirins, which he had dropped in there once when he was sick and was supposed to take them and didn't. And there was the little brown photograph of his mother. The sight of these possessions made him feel at home, and so did Isaac at the foot of the bed.

Rush got up and Isaac hopped down, and they both went over to the window to look out.

At first they couldn't see anything but the tangled needles of the Norway spruce beside the window. The rain had stopped hours ago, but now a heavy mist rose up from the earth and obscured the valley. After a while, as Rush watched, a tree swam into view, looking pale and ghostly; then another and another. The mist was lifting, and it was going to be a good day. The air was full of a sound of dripping, and the cries of jays, and another sound: a rushing, pouring one.

“Gosh, I believe it's a brook!” exclaimed Rush. “Why didn't Father
say
there was a brook? Come on, Isaac, let's go see.”

With more stealth than necessary, Rush peered out into the empty hall, closed the door noiselessly behind him, and tiptoed down the stairs. A warm, hopeful smell of coffee seeped out of the kitchen. That meant that Cuffy was up already.

“Pretend it's the headquarters of a German general,” Rush whispered to Isaac. “His orderly is making coffee. We've been concealed in the rafters all night, intercepting code messages. To be discovered means certain death.” Crouched like an Indian, silent as a panther, Rush reached the big front door and opened it. He and Isaac stepped out, free men.

The air was moist and mild. Veils and plumes of mist drifted by like the finest smoke. Wet drops fell on Rush's head, and cold wet leaves clung to the soles of his bare feet. He couldn't stop smelling the air in great, deep, loud sniffs. It was so delicious: it smelled of water, and mud, and maple trees, and autumn.

Isaac found smells to his own taste, too: a fragrance of squirrels, and field mice, and moles, with a faint intoxicating hint of skunk. He trotted to and fro, zigzagging from side to side, doubling back, snuffing and pausing with his tail quivering, and twigs caught in his ear-fringes.

Rush walked in the direction of the roaring sound, but from time to time he found it necessary to stop and examine some new object of interest. There was a summerhouse, for one thing, with cast-iron trellis walls, and a half-rotted floor full of leaves. And there was a sycamore tree with a cave in its trunk more than big enough for Rush and Isaac. A good place to come and think in. There were also two iron deer who looked as though they had been frozen in a mood of disapproval.

The roaring grew louder and louder. And then between lifting mist veils Rush saw the brook! At one point it was a broad, brown stream gliding smoothly in its course, and at the next it had turned into a little torrent brawling and hustling down between the rocks in a cascade, and breaking below into snowy eddies and cuffs of foam.

Rush stood at the edge of the little cataract, and watched it. A very valuable thing to have right in your own backyard; he felt extremely proud of it. Then he walked to the point above it where the water was held in a clear, brimming brown pool. At the bottom he could see the turning sand like brown sugar, lacy filaments of leaves, twigs with rotted bark, and stones with moss on them.

He dipped his right big toe into the pool and the cold spread upward through his leg in a little electric shock. After a moment of consideration he pulled off his pajamas and plunged in.

Cold! It was cold enough to make his teeth rattle in their sockets and his hair stand on end, and it wasn't more than three feet deep at its deepest point, but at that moment Rush wouldn't have traded it for the pearl-lined pool of a maharaja.

“Come on, sissy,” he said to Isaac, and Isaac with a look of loathing, but obedient to the last, flung himself into the water.

When Rush came out he was red as a boiled lobster and he felt like Superman. He thumped himself on the chest, and uttered several ear-splitting sounds which he fondly imagined to be good imitations of Tarzan's jungle cry. There was nothing to dry himself with except the top of his pajamas, so he used that: first on himself, and then on Isaac. Then clad only in the pajama trousers, and holding the jacket over his head like a drenched banner he marched back toward the house.

But he felt so fine with the wind tickling his bare ribs that when he came to the house he walked right past it toward the stable. He might as well see everything, he thought.

“Hi there, Robinson Crusoe, where's your clo'es?” said a voice. And Rush saw Willy Sloper sitting on an overturned bucket under a tree. There was a little fire in front of him and he was cooking something over it. Something that smelled equally delicious to both Rush and Isaac with their differently attuned noses.

“Hi, Willy. What's cooking?”

“My breakfast,” Willy said. “Coffee. Hot, black coffee, strong enough to lift a safe. And bacon; crisp, juicy bacon. And eggs still warm from the grocery store. I done the marketin' early; I rode to the village with the milkman and I rode back with the garbage collector. Awful nice fellas both of 'em. Want some breakfast?”

Rush refused politely although he could feel the hunger in his stomach uncoiling like a cobra.

“Why don't you go up to the kitchen, Willy? Cuffy will give you breakfast.”

“I know, I know. But it's just that I like eating outdoors this way. It reminds me of Van Cortlandt Park.”

“It's the gypsy in you,” Rush said.

“The hobo, more likely,” Willy told him. “I always had a kinda good-for-nothing streak in me, like a stray dog. I always kinda thought I'd like to hit the road; walk, and ride the rails, and be a bum. Carry my coffee pot on a string around my neck; and not have nothing on my back in the way of responsibilities except a change of clo'es, an extry pair of shoes, and this here old frying pan.”

“Why didn't you ever?” asked Rush, who thought the idea sounded pretty good himself.

“Well? I tellya. It's from my father's side of the family I get this idea 'bout hittin' the road. But from my mother's side of the family I get a mean conscience that's always kep' me earnin' my livin' whether I wanted to or not.”

Willy sighed, and removed bacon from the frying pan to a thick chipped plate.

“Ain'tcha cold? Whereya been?”

“Swimming,” said Rush dreamily, watching Willy break four eggs into the frying pan and set them over the fire.

“Swimming! That you I heard a while back makin' them noises?”

“Yes, I was being Tarzan,” Rush explained.

“Tarzan! Sounded more to me like a rooster with the croup!”

Rush didn't reply. He was staring fascinated at the eggs. He watched the transparent whites become opaque, changing from liquid to solid. He watched their four golden eyes looking up at him enticingly. He swallowed, unable to stir or to remove his gaze from those hypnotic eggs.