The Penderwicks in Spring

by Jeanne Birdsall

  “I’ve asked you here so that you could sing for me,” said Mrs. Grunfeld.

  “Sing!” Batty almost turned to leave. She couldn’t sing alone, here, in front of this person who knew so much about music. “Why?”

  “This morning in chorus I thought I heard—” She paused. “I’ll know better after you sing.”

  “But I never sing for anyone except my sister Lydia, who’s two years old and doesn’t count.”

  “Would it help if I closed my eyes? Or we could both close our eyes, and then you will sing.” Mrs. Grunfeld closed her eyes. “You see. I am no longer here.”

  “Mrs. Grunfeld, please don’t make me.”

  She opened her eyes. “My dear, I wouldn’t dream of making you sing. I’m just hoping you will do so, as a favor to me.”

  A favor? What kind of teacher was this? “I guess I can try. What should I sing?”

  “Anything except ‘Shenandoah.’ ” Mrs. Grunfeld closed her eyes again, waiting.

  Batty searched her memory, but her entire repertoire was gone, fled, vanished. Maybe it was the stress of standing here on display, out in the middle of the room. Batty looked longingly at the piano bench.

  “Maybe I could manage if I sat at the piano,” she said.

  “Do you play? Excellent. Go ahead, dear, and open yourself to the music.”

  Batty sat and let her fingers rest on the white keys. The feel of the piano gave her courage, and now a song came creeping back into her mind. It was on one of the albums Jeffrey had given her, with lyrics set to music by Chopin. Tentatively, Batty picked out the melody—having her back to Mrs. Grunfeld helped, no matter whose eyes were closed—then dropped her hands into her lap and started to sing.

  “I’m always chasing rainbows, watching clouds drifting by. My schemes are just like all my dreams …”

  She had chosen well. Chopin’s exquisite melody pulled her in, letting her forget herself, until all at once she came to the end and was jolted back into the Wildwood Elementary School music room with a teacher she’d just met that morning. She swiveled around on the bench, with no idea of what to expect. Mrs. Grunfeld still had her eyes closed.

  “That was the key of G, Batty? Try it in C.”

  Surely it was time for explanations. “But—”

  “And a little more slowly this time. Larghetto.”

  So Batty sang “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” again, more slowly and in the key of C. Halfway through, she realized that this was a much better key for her and that larghetto gave her the time she needed to appreciate Chopin’s melodic intervals. Huh, she thought. She’d never bothered to consider such things in terms of singing.

  This time when Batty finished and turned around, Mrs. Grunfeld’s eyes were open and she looked pleased with herself.

  “Thank you, Batty,” she said. “I was correct this morning. You have a beautiful voice. Rare and beautiful.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t agree?”

  Batty didn’t agree or disagree. Music for her was the piano. “I just never thought about it.”

  “And your family. They don’t sing?”

  “No.” Batty didn’t want to mention that they sounded like depressed sheep. “Mrs. Grunfeld, are you sure? That I can sing, I mean?”

  “Yes, quite sure.”

  Batty slid back and forth on the piano bench, trying to let this all sink in. It was true that lately her voice had felt richer, like molasses instead of maple syrup, but she’d paid no attention, thinking it was just part of growing older.

  Mrs. Grunfeld said, “Since this is news for you, I can assume you’ve had no voice training.”

  “You mean lessons?”

  “Yes, lessons. When and if you do decide you want training, you must choose a teacher who won’t make you do that awful belting everyone is being taught these days. People see it on television and think it’s the correct way to sing.” Mrs. Grunfeld stretched out her arms and sang, loudly, with an extra tremor in her voice that could have been dramatic, but just sounded silly.

  “I have seen people sing like that on television.” Batty was increasingly impressed with Mrs. Grunfeld’s breadth of knowledge.

  “Very bad for children’s voices, too.”

  “I won’t belt, I swear,” said Batty, surprised to find herself promising not to do something she’d never considered doing. “Not for years and years, if ever.”

  “Excellent.” Mrs. Grunfeld nodded, pleased. “If you ever have questions about singing, come to me. Yes? I will be here every Tuesday and Friday.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Grunfeld.”

  “You’re welcome. And thank you for singing for me. It was an unlooked-for treat, like finding an orchid blooming in a daisy field.”

  Batty left in a daze. An orchid in a daisy field! Her father would love that description.

  “What happened?” asked Ben. “I heard someone screeching.”

  “That was Mrs. Grunfeld belting.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story.” A story Batty wasn’t yet ready to tell Ben. It was only right that she tell her father and Iantha first. “So never mind, and promise you won’t mention it at home or to Rafael or anybody.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t think some lady screeching was interesting enough to repeat.

  “Penderwick Family Honor!”

  “Okay! Penderwick Family Honor. Will you carry Minnesota home for me?”

  Hidden behind Minnesota, Batty imagined her father’s face—all their faces—when she sang for the family, the surprise and pride. “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” would be a good song to begin with, and then maybe a Beatles song. Her father loved the Beatles.

  But then she thought of Rosalind. She really should wait until Rosy got home. Could she keep such an excellent secret for so long, twenty-two days now? And—oh!—if she could wait that long, she should wait just one extra day and sing for the whole family on her birthday. As an extra-special birthday present for herself.

  She and Minnesota abruptly stopped dead on the sidewalk. “Jeffrey’s coming tomorrow!”

  “I know that,” said Ben. “Skye said he’d bring me a Celtics T-shirt. They just beat the Knicks. Rafael says there’s also a Celtics team in Scotland, but they play soccer. And that someday the two Celtics teams will play each other, but in a game neither play, like ice hockey or cricket.”

  Batty had stopped listening when Ben began quoting Rafael, diving deep into plans of her own. Jeffrey’s coming this weekend was perfect timing. He could help her put together a singing concert for her birthday. They’d done little concerts before, including one when she was five and just learning the piano. This, though, this would be the best ever. The Grand Eleventh Birthday Concert! And Keiko could help her figure out what to wear—something serious and dignified, yet creative and glamorous.

  “It will be wonderful!” she said.

  Ben was surprised but pleased by her enthusiasm for the Celtics teams. “Especially if they play ice hockey.”

  A LONG ROW OF HYDRANGEA BUSHES ran along one side of the Penderwick home. Now, in the spring, they were mere clumps of sticks, drab and bare, with an occasional withered blossom from last year that had hung on through the winter storms. To Ben, the drabness made as little impression as would the delirious beauty that always arrived midsummer, when the bushes drooped with masses of multi-flowered pompoms, large as grapefruits, in shades of pinks, blues, and purples. No, what he cared about was the space between the bushes and the house, a narrow corridor of privacy he’d claimed as his own the previous summer. There, he’d stored the rocks not exciting enough to be taken inside, and he and Rafael had constructed things from them—roads, bridges, and building-like structures that could double as military installations and alien-invasion forces.

  After breakfast on Saturday morning, Ben shoved through the hydrangeas, set down a large cardboard box, then brushed away the dead leaves and sticks that had accumulated since the previous fall. The winter hadn’t done
damage to his work. Good. Sometimes he thought he’d like to build real roads and bridges when he grew up. And maybe he could convince Rafael to be an architect, like after they’d made several movies and wanted to move on to new careers. Together they could build whole cities.

  Ben crouched down and opened the cardboard box. First out, one of his most prized possessions, a model UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, with real doors and seats. This had been a gift from Nick, oldest son of the Geiger family across the street, handed over before he’d gone overseas to fly around in helicopters just like this one, helping to fight a war. Lieutenant Nick Geiger of the United States Army, that’s who he was now. Ben’s mom had shown him on a map where Nick was fighting: a place with mountains, desert, and lots of small villages, all very far away.

  Nick—and his younger brother, Tommy—had grown up mixed together with the Penderwicks, sometimes babysitting for them, and always making good jokes, plus teaching sports to everyone from Rosalind on down, though not as far as Lydia, and also failing with Batty, hopeless as she was at sports. Nick had taught Ben football and had promised to start on basketball the next time he came home on leave. He was due home sometime this spring. It couldn’t be soon enough for Ben, who missed him terribly.

  With the Black Hawk safely out, he dumped the rest of the box onto the ground. Here was a hodgepodge of action toys, many of them inherited from Nick and Tommy, plus a battered Millennium Falcon from Ben’s mom. There were several from Ben’s father, too, his birth father, that is, not his dad. These were all Star Trek figures, especially from The Next Generation, Worf, Troi, Picard, and a few evil-looking Romulans. All that Ben knew about this father, who had died in a car crash before Ben was even born, came from stories his mom told him. Sometimes he and Batty talked about their dead parents, but not often and usually not with sadness. It’s hard to be sad about people you’ve never met, especially when the parents you ended up with are so good at being parents.

  Ben’s box had also yielded up a Chinook with only one set of rotor blades, a transporter room with a big crack down the middle, and lots more figures. Other than the Next Generation ones, Ben could identify only about half, including Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, Spock, and Ginny Weasley, whose red hair was almost the same shade as his. The rest of the figures he used for his own purposes. An authoritative man in a blue uniform was Nick. And there was one mean-looking guy all in black that Ben called Dexter Dupree, after a man famous among the Penderwicks for his loathsome personality. Dexter had once been married to Jeffrey’s mother, but they’d divorced several years ago, after which she’d managed to marry and divorce another man, and was rumored to be engaged yet again. Ben set Dexter on a rock and spoke to him in his deepest voice, using the military code he’d learned from Nick.

  “Ready for defeat, Delta-Echo-Xray-Tango-Echo-Romeo?”

  “Never, never,” squeaked Dexter, who wasn’t smart enough for code.

  “Ha, ha, ha. You’re doomed.”

  Ben balanced Nick on the Black Hawk—he was too big to fit inside—just out of reach of the rotor blades. “This is your leader, November-India-Charlie-Kilo. Prepare for departure. Start engines. Schwoof, schwoof, schwoof, schwoof—”

  “There you are.”

  His position had been discovered by a person or persons unknown! Ben tipped Nick into the underbrush for safety, then parked the Black Hawk behind the Millennium Falcon.

  “You’re entering a war zone,” he said in the deep voice. “Prepare to defend yourself.”

  “Okay.” The intruder turned out to be Skye, now shoving through the bushes. “In the mood for some goalkeeping?”

  Skye was always trying to put him into an old catcher’s mask and chest protector—more hand-me-downs from the Geiger brothers—so she could shoot soccer balls at him. This was not Ben’s idea of fun.

  “No,” he answered.

  “What’s Captain Apollo doing?” She pointed down at the man in the blue uniform, half hidden by a dried-up hydrangea bloom.

  “That’s Nick.”

  “Nick as a Colonial Warrior? I guess that works.”

  “He’s coming home soon, right, Skye?”

  “We hope so, buddy. The Geigers will let us know as soon as they hear anything.” She kicked aside more dead leaves. “Okay if I sit down?”

  He scooted over to make room, and down she came, squashing Dexter with her knee.

  “Sorry, Spike,” she said.

  “That’s Dexter,” said Ben.

  “Actually, this is Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s a bad guy. So Dexter works, I guess.”

  “Good.” Ben had gotten the bad part right.

  She picked out a female Romulan. “This can be Jeffrey’s mom, Mrs. T-D-M—”

  “I thought she was Mrs. Tifton now.” After Jeffrey’s mother had divorced the husband after Dexter, Mr. Menduzio, the Penderwicks had decided it was simpler to stick with calling her Mrs. Tifton, no matter how many more times she got married and divorced.

  “You’re right. Horrid woman. Okay, so the Romulan is Mrs. Tifton, and you’ve got Dexter, so this Dalek can be Menduzio.” She smashed the Dalek into the Romulan. “Exterminate! Exterminate!”

  “Mercy, mercy!” shrieked Ben, tossing Dexter into the fray.

  “No mercy for you, horrible parent and stepparents,” said Skye. “Blam, blast, boom, blom!”

  “I’m melting! Melting!”

  Skye put down her now quite defeated figures.

  “So, Ben,” she said. “You’re a boy.”

  “Yes,” he answered warily. It didn’t seem like a good way for the conversation to go.

  “And you have friends who are girls, right? Like Remy?”

  “That was a hundred years ago.”

  “Well, if she were still your friend, would you make the mistake of wanting to move past friendship and into romance?”

  Ben was confused. Skye usually made more sense than this. “Are you wanting to be romantic about Nick?” he asked tentatively.

  “Nick! Good grief, no!”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Let me put it another way,” said Skye. “Jeffrey’s getting all weird and talking about wanting me to be his girlfriend.”

  “Oh. That is weird.”

  “So I told him not to come this weekend.”

  “Not come here?” Ben couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Jeffrey was an honorary Penderwick, always welcome at their house. Plus, there was that Celtics T-shirt he’d promised to bring Ben.

  “Only for this weekend, so that he has time to get sensible again. I said he could visit for my birthday. That’s only two weeks from now—not too long, right?”

  “I guess not.” He turned the rotors on his Black Hawk. “So you’re not going to make him disappear like Rosalind did with Tommy?”

  “Rosalind didn’t—”

  “Yes, she did, Skye.” Tommy Geiger had been Rosalind’s boyfriend for years and years and then suddenly wasn’t anymore when they went to college. Batty had tried to explain it to Ben—something about new beginnings and exploring options—but none of it had made sense to him. “Tommy didn’t even come over to see us when he was home at Christmas. And I wanted to show him my presents. I always show him my presents.”

  “Okay, she sort of did, but it wasn’t all her fault. They decided together that they needed a break. Anyway, I figure they’ll get back together one of these days. And I’m not breaking up with Jeffrey—I’m wisely keeping us from getting together in the first place. It’s completely different from Rosalind and Tommy.” Skye picked up the Dalek and squeezed it mercilessly. “I just don’t want a boyfriend right now. I want to get out of high school and go to college and learn, learn, learn, and soak up the universe. I wish you understood.”

  “Well, I don’t want a girlfriend, but not just now. Never.”

  Which meant he did understand that part, but not about soaking up the universe.

  “Thank you, that’s a help, anyway. If you won’t d
o soccer with me, I’m going to take a long bike ride to think. Will you tell everyone about Jeffrey not coming? I can’t tell Jane because she’s still asleep, and I can’t tell Dad or Iantha because they’ll get all concerned and make me feel awful.”

  “But I’m busy!” protested Ben. It was times like this when he most wished he had brothers. Or if he couldn’t have actual brothers, that Nick, Tommy, and Jeffrey would stay where they could do the most good—on Gardam Street with Ben.

  “Please.”

  “Oh, all right.” It was hard for him to refuse Skye when she lowered her dignity enough to say please. “But you have to tell Batty.”

  “Why can’t you tell her, too?”

  “Because she’s looking forward to him coming the most.” Which meant she might cry, and Ben didn’t think he should have to deal with crying when this was clearly Skye’s problem.

  But after Skye said please three more times, he gave in.

  Ben found both his parents in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Lydia was there, too, sitting on the floor, making mysterious patterns with spoons. Ben and Rafael sometimes wondered if she picked up signals from aliens trying to connect with earthlings. If so, the aliens had picked the wrong human, that’s for sure.

  “Lydia loves Ben,” she said, looking up from her spoons.

  “I know that.” He turned to his parents. “Skye said to tell you Jeffrey isn’t coming this weekend.”

  “Why not?” his mom asked. “Is he all right?”

  “He wants to be Skye’s boyfriend.” Ben wasn’t sure if that fell into the category of being all right. “And she doesn’t want a boyfriend because of soaking up the universe. But she said Jeffrey could come for her birthday.”

  Ben’s parents were exchanging the kind of looks that meant they’d be discussing this after Ben left the room. That was fine with him. He was already weary of talking about it, and there was still Batty to tell.

  “Is Batty upstairs?” he asked. “ ’Cause I need to see her.”

  “Yes, she is, but wait a minute,” said his dad. “We’re shopping for a car today. Want to come along?”