Cherry Ames Boxed Set 5-8

by Helen Wells

  “I guess we’d better dance, at that,” Cherry said and turned on the radio.

  They danced for half an hour, until they were breathless. Even Dr. Johnny, who preferred to “just sit,” was pressed into service as a partner. Finally, when they could find no more dance music on the radio, they sat down around the living room to talk.

  George wanted to play games. Apparently he knew dozens of them, and started off with riddles.

  “How do you make slow horses fast?”

  “Say giddap,” Josie solemnly guessed.

  “Spurs. Sugar,” Cherry and Danny called out.

  “Nope. To make slow horses fast, don’t feed ’em.” The others objected. “A pun!”

  “All right, no puns,” George agreed. “Why is it useless to send a telegram to Washington today?”

  They all thought. Dr. Johnny murmured, “Because Washington is dead.”

  “Right! Hmm, a sharpie,” George approved. “Which is bigger, Mr. Bigger or his baby?”

  “That’s silly,” sniffed Bertha Larsen.

  “The baby is just a little Bigger,” said George. “Stop laughing—here’s a different kind. Will someone give me a piece of paper?”

  Vivian handed him the telephone pad. George wrote down, and asked them to read:

  F U N E X?

  S, V F X.

  F U N E M?

  S, V F M.

  O K,M N X.

  They sputtered and puzzled, and finally it dawned on them. They declaimed triumphantly, “Have you any eggs? Yes, we have eggs. Have you any ham? Yes, we have ham. Okay, ham and eggs.” This talk made Tiny look hungry.

  Dr. Johnny had a game in which “It” must not laugh or smile. Since Tiny was mumbling, far too soon, about refreshments, the embarrassed boys chose him to be “It.” The young doctor explained that the object of the game was to make “It” laugh or smile against his will, by asking foolish questions. “It” had to give ridiculous answers. “Everyone but Tiny can laugh all he wants. All right, go!”

  Tiny stood up and faced the crowd, his expression deadpan.

  Ben asked dramatically, “Why do you pour glue in your pockets all the time?”

  “So I’ll stick at things.” They chuckled. Tiny assumed a scowl.

  “How recently have you telephoned an elephant?” Gwen threw at him.

  “Last week, but Jumbo’s trunk line was out of order.” Tiny very nearly smiled at his own joke. They were laughing by now.

  Mai Lee inquired, “Have you ever dug for clams in a mining camp?”

  That was too ridiculous for Tiny. He broke down and guffawed. “Hasta la Coca-Cola” Tiny gave up. “Who’s ‘It’ next?”

  This nonsense went on and on until it suddenly was ten o’clock. Tiny said in so many words that he was starved.

  The girls again told their guests how extra nice they were to bring refreshments and excitedly opened the packages. They found man-sized sandwiches and cakes, to which they added glasses of milk and a big bowl of apples.

  Having supper quieted them down. The talk turned to New York, since the city was new to the girls, and then to their districts. Mai Lee described Chinatown and Vivian enthused about Long Island. In the midst of this rather perfunctory conversation, Cherry dropped a bombshell.

  “Did I ever tell you about the mysterious recluse in my district? The woman no one has seen for eighteen years?”

  “Your mysterious wha-a-at?”

  “Eighteen years! Why did she do it?”

  Immediately everybody’s mood changed. Cherry herself, sitting on one of the blue chairs, looked sober.

  “No one seems to know why she did it. But it looks as if she intends to stay locked in that mysterious old house until the day she dies.”

  The young men asked practical questions: how did she manage to live? Cherry explained about the arrangements with the grocer, the furnace man, the well-dressed man who apparently was a banker or lawyer and who came once a year. Even Dr. Johnny was affected by the story. The girls wanted to know what Mary Gregory was like.

  “Nobody really knows what she is like,” Cherry replied. “The grocer saw her only once, eighteen years ago, and he gives a good report on her. But the rest of the neighborhood believes—Well, there is a disturbing legend about her.”

  Cherry broke off, debating whether to repeat what struck her as fantastic. But the others insisted that she go on.

  “Well, just this afternoon,” Cherry began hesitantly, “I was walking past that old Victorian mansion, but on the other side of the street. I started to cross the street when two children called out to me, ‘Don’t go over there! Stay away from the witch’s house!’” She smiled. “A little boy of eight, and a cute little girl about five. They were protecting me, you understand. They told me the same tale I’d heard from a soda fountain boy—a boy who grew up in that neighborhood—”

  Cherry repeated Joe Baxter’s tale of the strange shadows at Mary Gregory’s windows at night. She described the thing that Joe said looked like hangman’s gallows and the eerie figure flitting around it.

  “Whew! That is odd,” Ben Taylor admitted.

  “Are you sure,” Mai Lee asked, “that it isn’t something the children have merely imagined they saw, or made up out of whole cloth?”

  Cherry shook her head. “Some of the grownups have seen the same scary performance with their own eyes.”

  There was a hush.

  “Maybe she was performing some curious rites of her own,” Dr. Johnny mused.

  Cherry sighed. “If there is something strange in that house, as the legend says, Mary Gregory keeps it well hidden.”

  “Why only at night?” two of the guys asked curiously.

  “Because witches appear only at night,” Josie said in all seriousness.

  They smiled at that. Yet the testimony of a whole neighborhood was not to be ignored. Dr. Johnny asked if anyone ever saw the woman.

  Again Cherry hesitated. It sounded so incredible, dreamlike, to say it aloud.

  “One of my patients, a Mrs. Persson, used to see Mary Gregory summer nights, late, on an upstairs balcony. Just a glimpse of a white dress, and a white, ghostly figure. Sometimes, she says, you could hear piano music coming from that house long past midnight.”

  “Why doesn’t someone just go up to the front door and ring the bell?” Josie inquired.

  “Neighborhood people have tried that,” Cherry said. “Mary Gregory never answers. But I talked to—”

  Cherry shook her head, troubled, wondering why she was telling all this. It had frozen their cheerful little party into a kind of horror. Perhaps she was talking about it because it was weighing on her mind.

  “You talked to whom?” the others prodded.

  Cherry lifted her dark eyes. “To the furnace man and the postman. The postman didn’t reveal much. He did tell me she sends and receives mail, but it—wait, you’re guessing wrong! The mail is mostly to department stores and a coal company and a bank and so forth, to enable her to order things she needs, without stirring out of her house. You see? Beyond that, I suspect the postman is as mystified as I am.”

  “And the furnace man?”

  “Just notes to and from her, about coal and repairs. The furnace man never once has seen her. Doesn’t even hear her moving around. He says it’s uncanny and that something unearthly is going on in that old house.”

  It was strange, very strange, they all muttered. What they could not understand, above all, was the gallows and the grimly dancing figure silhouetted on the blinds at night. Cherry was forced to believe that although the “witch” legend was superstition, Mary Gregory really did do something peculiar behind drawn blinds at night.

  CHAPTER IX

  Unknown Neighbors

  THE LONG, COLD, FALL RAINS HAD STARTED. THE TREES stood bare now on Cherry’s district, lashed by heavy winds. Bundled into her heavy overcoat and overshoes, Cherry tramped the quiet streets, going from patient to patient. Sometimes it was lonely, out alone in the pouring rain day a
fter day, entering strangers’ homes and working hard to make friends of them, stopping for lunch at any counter or diner that was near.

  Today, at least, she was going to see a family she already knew, the Perssons. Cherry started off, black bag swinging, to check up on Uncle Gustave. The card of invitation to the Craft Shop still was tucked in her purse: there had been so many urgent sick calls recently that this had had to wait.

  “I could walk to the Perssons’ by passing Miss Gregory’s house. It’s only a little out of my way.”

  The Victorian mansion loomed up in the pouring rain. Because its protective trees were stripped of leaves now, Cherry could see the house more clearly. The windows were richly curtained in lace, in an old-fashioned style. They all seemed to be tightly closed. The heavy, oak door on the porch had swollen from the rain: it might be almost impossible to pry open. Probably it had not been opened in years. Cherry went along the fence to the back of the house, and peered at the back steps.

  “Wish I could just go inside the kitchen and call out to ask if she’s all right,” she thought. Yet she had no right of entry. Mary Gregory had not summoned the nurse. Still—

  Impulsively Cherry unlatched the gate and walked across the wet back yard. She was surprised at how hard her heart started to beat. She mounted the steps and raised her fist to knock. But some curious respect for the recluse restrained her. Or was it pity? Whatever it was, Cherry slowly withdrew her hand, turned, and went away.

  It was a long walk to the Perssons’. Cherry got thoroughly drenched.

  When Ingrid Persson opened the door and saw the dripping nurse, she exclaimed: “I will make you hot coffee!”

  Cherry giggled. “Do I look that drowned? How are you, Mrs. Persson? No coffee, really, thanks.”

  Both of them avoided mentioning the incident of the bus and Driver Smith. Mrs. Persson led Cherry in to see Uncle Gustave.

  “Another nosebleed yesterday, Miss Ames.”

  “What he needs,” Cherry said softly, “is not medicine but psychology.”

  They came into his orderly room. The little man sat up weakly on his bed. He was fully dressed but downcast, his beloved tools untouched.

  Cherry checked him over, asked a few questions, then came to the real point of her visit.

  “How would you like to build as much as you like, with all the tools and materials supplied to you?”

  His eyes turned bluer than ever with delight. Then he scoffed, “There is no such chance.”

  “But there is! Laurel House—”

  “No. Charity I do not take.”

  “This isn’t charity. You join and become a member.” Cherry carefully explained. Hope crept back into Uncle Gustave’s pinched face. “And here is the membership card Miss Stanley sent you.”

  Mrs. Persson beamed with approval. The little man reached for the card, then let his hand fall limp. “Now I remember. Constant told me. It is for children. For learners. To learn to hammer nails. Bah! I am no child, I am a master craftsman.”

  Cherry had not foreseen this valid objection. “Maybe—maybe you could become an instructor,” she groped, and hoped that she was not encroaching on Miss Stanley’s jurisdiction. “Or—ah—Laurel House wants to build a Music School. They need help, advice, an experienced builder. I told them about you and they wish you would help.”

  “Go once,” Mrs. Persson urged. “Only once, Uncle Gustave. See how it is.”

  Uncle Gustave was sitting up straight now. “If they need me, yes. Yes, I will go and help them.”

  Cherry and Ingrid Persson exchanged grins. Cherry left some vitamin tablets, but she did not think Uncle Gustave would need them now.

  “Will you stay for coffee and kondis, Miss Ames?”

  Cherry hesitated. She did not like to refuse this woman who was so starved for friends. But work pressed her, Cherry regretfully explained, and she took her leave.

  Her calls led her again past the lonely old mansion. Cherry stood for a moment beside the fence, wondering about Mary Gregory, wondering what that house held. Perhaps she would never find out.

  “This isn’t getting my calls made!” Determinedly Cherry started out again on her round of healing.

  But Cherry could not stop speculating about the mysterious recluse, even though some colorful people filled her afternoon. The Sergeyevskys were among today’s patients, with their high-necked blouses, tea, and strangled English. Cherry called on a couple who kept twelve cats. She found a woman living in a damp cellar, and coughing, and promised to help find more healthful quarters.

  She showed a nervous young father how to bathe his brand-new baby: the baby stood the ordeal better than the young man. Cherry went back to the Terrell cottage, where Jimmy was all but well now, and gave weary little Mrs. Terrell final instructions on cleaning up after the contagious illness.

  All these people seemed so lonesome. They were so glad to have a visitor. And Cherry was touched by the respect and affection her uniform called forth.

  Miss Culver was last on today’s list, because Cherry had to go to the settlement house and pick up the painting kit for her. Cherry wished she could be doing something for Mary Gregory, too. That woman must be far lonelier than all the rest.

  Laurel House was full of lights and people and activity. It was a cheering, sociable place to come to on a rainy day. Cherry asked for the social worker, Evelyn Stanley, and waited, peering in at the pottery studio meanwhile.

  “Hello, Miss Ames! The painting set is all ready.” Miss Stanley came running lightly down the stairs. Today she wore emerald green, and looked as thoroughly alive as Laurel House itself. “Why, Miss Ames. What are you looking so pensive about?”

  Cherry pushed her curls off her red cheeks. “Ohhh—maybe it’s the rain, Miss Stanley. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been seeing so many lonesome people today. You know, I come from the Middle West where everybody knows everybody else. If you don’t know ’em, you say hello anyway and pretty soon you get acquainted. I just can’t understand it, here in the city, where neighbors live side by side and don’t have a real friend outside of their own families.”

  “I know. It worries me, too,” Evelyn Stanley said. “And a settlement house simply can’t reach everyone. Big cities are lonely.”

  “I worry about lonesome people like my Perssons and my Miss Culver.” And Mary Gregory, Cherry added silently.

  “Me, too,” the social worker said. “I wake up at night sometimes, wondering who’s all alone, only a few blocks away.”

  “The pity of it is, they’d like one another if only they could get acquainted.”

  The two young women sat down on a bench together, brooding.

  “I did have a piece of an idea,” Cherry said cautiously.

  Miss Stanley brightly glanced up. “Mm? Let’s hear it.”

  “You don’t know about me and my ideas,” Cherry warned.

  “Oh, you too? I’m another dangerous idea woman.”

  They laughed and liked each other. Cherry said:

  “Well, it’s this. Everybody’s interested in good things to eat. No matter how little people may have in common, even if they came originally from different countries, they’d enjoy sampling one another’s cooking. They’d have food to talk about, for a start. Maybe if we had—oh, call it neighbors’ dinners—people could get acquainted that way.”

  Evelyn Stanley’s eyes had an absorbed, glazed look which Cherry suspected spelled action. “You have something there! Matter of fact, I think it was tried in another section of New York City, and people ended up being friends. They went into one another’s homes—it’s nicest at home—each family took a turn playing host—”

  “I’m afraid people around here haven’t the means or facilities,” Cherry said. “Is there any chance that Laurel House could lend a hand? I’m sure lots of my people would like to be invited—bring their pet foods as the price of admission—” She could ask Josie and Bertha and Gwen, whose districts adjoined and were served by Laurel House, to invite their pa
tients too.

  “—and invite not only your patients. Everybody! Dishes of all nationalities, all regions,” Evelyn Stanley was planning aloud. “I’ll ask our head caseworker right away.”

  The two of them looked at each other like conspirators.

  “We’re nearly forgetting Miss Culver’s paints!”

  Cherry’s head was full of all these possible doings when she trotted back through her district, went upstairs, and knocked on Miss Culver’s door.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s the nurse, Miss Culver—with a surprise for you!”

  The door opened onto the gracious, shabby room and some of the weariness went out of Miss Culver’s face. “Something for me?”

  “Open it and tell me if you like it,” Cherry said eagerly. “If you don’t, we’ll figure out something else—”

  Miss Culver’s hands shook as she undid the big, bulky package. Cherry suspected it was a long time since anyone had given this gentle lady a present.

  “Why—why, it’s paints!” Miss Culver shyly fingered the brushes, the bottles of pigment. “But, my dear Miss Ames, this will be wasted on me. Hadn’t you better give it to someone who can paint?”

  “How do you know you can’t paint?” Cherry demanded, smiling at her.

  A slow smile lit up Miss Culver’s face. “Do you know, I’ve wondered if I couldn’t paint—a little. I’ve sat here at my window and wished I could try—Oh, I’m going to enjoy this. Thank you very much indeed, Miss Ames.”

  Cherry explained that the gift came from Laurel House, and that Miss Culver, when she grew stronger, would be welcome in their painting group. She showed Miss Culver how the easel opened, and stood it at the window, adjusted low so that the frail woman could paint sitting down.

  Then Cherry attempted to check Miss Culver’s physical condition, but that lady was thinking too hard about her painting kit for Cherry to get any but sketchy answers. However, Cherry was satisfied with her improvement. She chuckled at Miss Culver’s parting comment: