Authors: Elizabeth Enright
“I don't think so,” Rush said humbly. “I just thought if you left the door open it would be better. More air and everything.”
“My fault,” whispered Willy tragically. “Doggone me for a dang old fool. Why, you mighta all been suffocatered in your beds. Pretty near was too, and I'd'a been to blame!”
Rush found himself whispering in sympathy. “Oh, that's all right, Willy. You probably did tell me and I forgot. Anyway I should have known: a fine engineer I'll make! And
anyway
we're all okay!”
“Dang old fool,” muttered Willy to himself, shaking his head.
It was at that moment that Father's taxi drew up. At a quarter to four on Sunday morning he found himself greeted by an emergency van, a crowd of curious onlookers, and a policeman who didn't want to let him go into his own house. When he did go in he found dozens of other policemen, his entire family in the front hall attired in bathrobes and pajamas, and Willy Sloper, who drifted toward him like a ghost and whispered, “It's all my fault, Mr. Melendy.”
“
What's
all your fault?” cried Father. “Why can't you speak up? What are you whispering for? What in the name of heaven
is
all this? What's been going on?”
Cuffy explained. Rush explained. Willy explained. Isaac barked. Mona and Randy and Oliver sat in a pale solemn little cluster on the stairs.
“That furnace!” said Father. “Out she goes before the fall; I've stood enough from her. More than enough. Are you sure you're all all right?”
“I almost suffocatered,” said Randy in a stately voice.
“But you feel all right now?”
“Yes, except my head hurts.”
“Mine does too,” said Mona, hoping she looked pale.
“I feel hungry,” Oliver said.
“Well, let's all go down to the kitchen and get something to eat. Maybe it'll make us feel better. You come too, Willy. I'll just run down and take a look at the old villainess in the basement. I want to talk to the emergency men for a minute too.” Father ran lightly down the stairs and the rest followed more slowly. There were rivulets and ponds of water under every window; the rugs were soaked, and the drawing-room curtains hung limp and damp. The house smelled of rain but it was a good smell. The serpent had been vanquished.
Father joined them in the kitchen.
“Randy, are those your clothes downstairs in the basement?” he asked, opening the icebox door.
“Oh, gee whiz! Yes, they are, Father.”
“What are they doing down there? Even your shoes are tied to the clothesline.”
“Well, I fell into the lake at Central Park this afternoon,” began Randy. It all had to be explained.
“You've had quite a day, haven't you, Randy?” said Father when she had finished. He looked out the window at the retreating, screaming emergency van, and the slowly departing crowd of people who seemed disappointed that there had been no disaster. He looked at his disheveled family, and then he took a cold lamb chop out of the ice box and tossed the whole thing to Isaac.
“Be it ever so humble,” said Father. “There's certainly no place like home.”
“So what it's come to is this,” Father told them the next day. He had called them all into the study. “We're going to have a new furnace; an oil one this time that can't cause so much trouble.”
“But what about Willy Sloper?” interrupted Randy anxiously. “If we have an oil furnace, what will Willy do?”
Father smiled. “Don't you worry, Randy. There'll always be work for Willy in this house. He's practically a member of the family.”
That was a relief to everyone.
“Now a new oil furnace costs at least two hundred dollars,” continued Father. “I don't pay much more than that in rent every summer for the valley house.
This
house we own; it's ours. But though there's no rent there is a mortgage and there are taxes. In addition to that it needs new wallpaper, the roof has to be fixed, and the third-floor stairway has to be repaired before it goes down like a stack of dominoes. All that costs money, and an authority on economics always seems to be just as poor or a little poorer than other people. It's going to be rather a struggle. What I'm trying to tell you is this: we'll have to forget about the valley this summer. I hate telling you you'll have to stay in the hot city, but I don't know what else to do. Maybe a couple of weeks at the shore in August. That's the most I can promise.”
There was an appalled silence.
“Well,” Mona said at last, “other people do it. I guess we can if they can.”
“We have the yard,” added Rush. “And the roof.”
“And there's Central Park,” said Randy. “And the tops of buses, and the hose. We can cool off in the hose.”
“Oh, boy!” cried Oliver. “That's what I like! Cooling off in the hose.”
“Well, you're good kids,” Father said. “There never were any better ones. Cleaner, maybe, or quieter, but never any better.”
“And another thing,” Randy said. “I'm president of the I.S.A.A.C. so it's all right for me to suggest it. We don't really need as much allowance as you give us. Why, I bet we could get along fine on a quarter apiece, couldn't we, kids? Except Oliver of course⦔
“I can get along on a nickel,” interrupted Oliver stoutly.
“After all money isn't everything,” said Randy, rather proud of herself, as if she had made a remarkable discovery.
“You're good kids,” repeated Father. He didn't seem to be able to think of anything else to say.
“Then there's the Pig if Necessary,” offered Rush.
“The what?” Father looked startled.
“The pig bank in the Office,” Rush explained. “It's got about a dollar and ninety-six cents in it. Maybe more by now. It's not much, of course, but if you could use it⦔
“Oh. Oh, thanks, Rush,” Father said. “But I don't think I'm reduced to that just yet. You keep it in case of emergency.”
The first few days were fine; they all felt self-sacrificing and practiced economy with zeal. Every unnecessary light was turned off. The telephone was hardly ever used. They took all the empty ginger ale bottles back to the grocery, and went by the Good Humor man with their faces averted.
But by Thursday it became very hot. The ailanthus trees were in profuse full leaf. Through the open windows of the house drifted the myriad noises of other people's living: radios quacking away, typewriter keys pecking, dishes clashing together in sinks, voices talking, pianos being played, and a woman singer who practiced scales dutifully hour after hour, day after day.
“You know, Ran,” Mona confided that day after school. “I keep thinking of the valley. Last night I dreamed about it. Do you remember the bobwhites? They say âbob' and then take a deep breath and say âwhite' afterward.”
“I know,” said Randy. “And the mourning doves. The way they sound so far away even if they're right in the tree up above you. I love mourning doves, the whole summer in the valley always sounded of them.”
Up in the Office, Rush was playing the piano. He started to thunder through the Revolutionary Etude as usual and then stopped.
“Nuts!” he exclaimed. Something had happened to a note in the middle register: it plinked like a guitar and ruined the whole effect. There was a pretty good piano in the valley house. “Oh, nuts, oh, nuts,” repeated Rush unhappily, and closed the lid. And besides the piano there was a tennis court at the valley, and a dammed-up pool in the brook where they swam. The water was dark and tingling and cold; Randy said it was like swimming in iced root beer. And besides that there was the treehouse Rush had built in the beech tree, where no one else could come unless invited. There was the carpentry shop in the garage. There were the Sayles kids on the next farm who had a hayloft as big as a hotel ballroom, and horses to ride on, a mother who made the kind of pie you think of when you say the word “pie.”
“Nuts!” repeated Rush. He went back to the piano, opened the lid, and crashed roughly down on the keys with his two closed fists. It made a good, loud, angry noise.
“What's the matter with you?” inquired Oliver, coming in. He was wearing an Indian war bonnet, and there were four cap pistols stuck in his belt.
“Oh, nothing.” Rush closed the piano lid sheepishly. “Come on, Hiawatha, let's find something to do. We might rig up a wigwam for you in the backyard. Let's see if Cuffy will give us an old sheet.”
“Boy!” commented Oliver enthusiastically, galloping out of the Office beside his brother on a nonexistent pinto pony.
Saturday was a day out of August by mistake. Not even the shades flapped in the open windows. In their economical mood the I.S.A.A.C. members had planned no excursion for themselves, and now they were sorry.
Randy lay on the floor. “I'm so bo-o-o-red!” she groaned, exactly as she had groaned on a wet Saturday many weeks before.
As if in reply the telephone downstairs began to ring. Nobody paid any attention; Cuffy always answered it, and it was probably for Father anyway.
“We might get on a subway and see how far it goes, and then get off and go exploring,” suggested Mona. “It might go to Brooklyn, or Astoria, or the Bronx, or some other interesting place.”
“Educational and inexpensive,” agreed Rush without much enthusiasm. Lugubriously he began to play the Chopin Funeral March for Randy's benefit. She adored funeral marches.
“Oh, Randy!” shouted Cuffy from downstairs.
“Yes, Cuffy?”
“Telephone, hurry.”
“Telephone for me!” Randy sprang to her feet. “Oh, I hope it's something nice!”
“Probably just that bird-brain Dorothy Janeway wanting to gossip again,” said Rush gloomily.
But it wasn't Dorothy Janeway this time. Randy came back looking pleased. She demonstrated her pleasure by a series of glissades and two high leaps.
“Do I remind you of Zorina?” she said.
“You remind me of a kangaroo,” replied Rush absentmindedly. “Come across, Randy. What was the telephone call about?”
“We're all going out for tea,” she told him. “Mrs. Oliphant's invited us to have tea with her at the zoo.”
“Even me?” asked Oliver, who was up to his ears in plasticine.
“Of course you too. All the I.S.A.A.C. members. You'll like it. Tea doesn't mean tea. It means ice cream.”
“Well, that's a break,” said Rush. “I like Mrs. Oliphant. When're we going?”
“Oh, in about an hour. Four o'clock she told me.”
“I suppose we'll have to get cleaned up?” Rush said wistfully, gazing at the front of his shirt. It bore the marks of interesting encounters with chalk, maple syrup, machine oil, and good plain dirt.
“Oh, yes. Spick-and-span, of course. I'm even going to wear a hat. I wonder where my straw hat is? I haven't seen it since last summer.”
Randy went leaping out of the room and they could hear her calling, “Cuffy, where's my straw ha-at?” And Cuffy's muffled answer from the kitchen, “My lands, child,
I
don't know. Did you look in the storeroom?”
Randy went into the storeroom and turned on the light, there were no windows. The place was full of things: winter clothes in mothproof bags, two old cribs, the family high chair, a couple of suitcases (though most of these were kept in the basement), everybody's ice skates, quantities of books and old magazines, stacks of framed pictures, and many other things including a sewing machine, and the stately dressmaker's form, size forty, that Cuffy built her dresses on.
Randy got so hot looking for her hat that she finally took off her dress and hung it up on the light bracket. By the time she discovered the hat she had discovered several other things as well: Cuffy's old pattern books, for instance, a forgotten Halloween costume, and a snapshot album full of pictures she wanted to look at.
Bearded with dust, wearing a petticoat and her straw hat, Randy at last emerged from the storeroom, her arms full. She banged the door shut behind her with her foot. Careless Randy. In the storeroom the electric light burned brightly as before; and as the door slammed shut a sudden draft lifted the wide collar of the dress she had hung on the bracket and dropped it over the bulb.
“Cuffy,” said Randy, coming down the stairs slowly, “did you ever really wear clothes like the ones in this pattern book?”
“What in heaven's name is all that truck?” inquired Cuffy. “Here, let me look.” She held the book far away so that she could see it better. “Why that's not so long ago. Nineteen hundred and twenty-six.”
“Nineteen-twenty-six!” repeated Randy. “Even Mona wasn't born
then!
Why, it's a terribly long time ago.”
“Is it? Yes, I guess it is. Well, that's how we dressed. Hats pulled down over our ears like they was football helmets. Skirts up to the knee. Belts almost
down
to the knee.”
“Cuffy, even you?”
“Certainly me, why not?” said Cuffy haughtily. “I only weighed around a hundred and forty-six then.”
“Well, I don't know how you could wear things like that; I should think it would make you feel silly.”
“You never can tell,” said Cuffy. “Someday the clothes you're wearing now will look just as outlandish to you. Things change. Time changes 'em.”
“Time,” announced Rush, poking his head out the door. “Timeâmarches ON!”
“March on yourself, my fine young man,” scolded Cuffy. “You can't go till you're clean, and you'll never get clean without taking a bath.”
At last, radiant with scrubbing, wearing their best clothes and with the I.S.A.A.C. pins sparkling on their chests, they left the house. Upstairs in the closed storeroom there was only the faintest odor of hot cloth.