“Shoo—shoo,” Aunt Charlotte said as Miss Black stretched out her hand.
“I’ve asked you to come, Mrs. Taylor—” G-nan began.
Aunt Charlotte surveyed her. “Stand back,” she said, standing immovable herself. “Theodore, find me a proper chair out of drafts. There’s a storm coming.”
They all knew what to do then on account of Summerton. Whenever there was a thunderstorm there the relatives all met at Uncle Warren’s house, because it was stone, and sat in the parlor with handkerchiefs over their eyes till it was over.
Theodore placed a large straw chair in the middle of the hall, where it was away from all windows and chimneys; Hubert gathered up glass ash trays and put them under the chair legs for insulation; Jane got a large napkin from the dining-room sideboard. Aunt Charlotte reached for it blindly after she had sat down, as her eyes were already covered by her jeweled hand. “Good gracious,” she said suddenly, realizing that she had on a great deal of metal, “Miss Black take care of these!” She stripped her fingers and handed the rings to G-nan. While there was a heavy boom, rain started to splash down on the red tin roof covering the piazza. “You had better find these children places of safety, Miss Black,” said Aunt Charlotte when the thunder had died away, looking out with one eye. G-nan was much amused.
“Surely, Mrs. Taylor, you’re not afraid of a little thunder,” she said.
“Never mind what I’m afraid of; do as you’re told,” said Aunt Charlotte.
Edie wondered if she had ever heard such beautiful words, and everyone looked at G-nan to see how she was going to do it. The Fair Christine and Lou were not sure what was supposed to happen, but they stared to see too. Lou could not wait.
“I want to be here,” she said, walking up to Aunt Charlotte and putting her arms around her knees.
It completely destroyed the insulation.
“Remove this child, instantly,” said Aunt Charlotte. She tried to brush Lou away with the back of her hand as if she were a piece of dust, but Lou was holding up her face with her eyes shut and clinging as hard as she could, while the booms of thunder were exploding everywhere. Chris stepped forward and peered under Aunt Charlotte’s bandage. “She wants you to give her a kiss,” she said in careful explanation. G-nan tugged and tried to loosen Lou’s hands, but she was like an octopus.
“I said remove this child,” Aunt Charlotte repeated, drawing herself back and waving her bandage hurriedly at the crowd. “Somebody take her away. She is dangerous.”
It was Edie who thought of pinching Lou in the leg. “A crab, Lou,” she said, in a whisper, “a crab’s got you. Persecute him.”
Lou let go and walked away to examine her legs. “Take him off,” she said. “Mith-thes, you get ’im off.”
“I will,” said Edie. She made a scoop with her hand just touching Lou’s leg in back.
“Thank you,” said Lou, and she put up her arms to give Edie one of her hugs and kisses. It made Edie let go of Widgy who was just as afraid of thunderstorms as Aunt Charlotte and had been trembling in her arms. She wanted him to learn bravery, but all Widgy wanted was to get under something, and the minute he was on the floor he dashed for Aunt Charlotte’s spreading skirts.
“Merciful heavens, what now!” said Aunt Charlotte, shuffling her feet to get him out. Edie went down on her hands and knees.
“You better hurry,” said Theodore as there was a sharp crack. “Dogs are full of electricity.”
“I command you,” said Aunt Charlotte, moving her feet faster, “to remove this animal.”
There seemed to have come a lull or else the storm was over. There was no thunder for a while and the rain on the roof could hardly be heard. As soon as Edie had captured Widgy and sat down again, Aunt Charlotte rose. “We will go into the parlor,” she said. “Edith, I have come to have a talk with you.”
“Now for the inquisition,” said Theodore under his breath, but Edie heard him. Well, she was going to stand up for her rights.
Aunt Charlotte had not taken a step when the crack came. It was not so much the noise as its sudden terrible sharpness. There was something like a pistol shot multiplied a hundred times, and it dropped a ball of fire right by the front door. This was perfectly round, and it whizzed out of the entryway into the hall. It missed Aunt Charlotte and everyone round her, but it headed straight for Edie. There was not even time to know that this was the end of Edie. Only it wasn’t. The ball went under her chair while she sat with her feet tucked up holding Widgy in her lap. Her hair rose a little off her head and so did Widgy’s—that was all. The ball crossed the parlor after it had gone under Edie, knocked down a lamp on the table, then jumped through a window and was gone. The glass tinkled to the floor. No one spoke or moved.
“I bet that was lightning,” said The Fair Christine after a while.
They did not want to laugh. As Hubert said later, they were all almost dead, and Edie was dead and resurrected, though all she did was wipe her face on her pinafore and say, “I’m hot.” The person who was really made queer by it was Aunt Charlotte. She said she was going to leave at once.
“Not now,” said Theodore reasonably. “There might be another.”
“I don’t wish to stay for it,” Aunt Charlotte said.
Nobody really wanted to keep her except G-nan, and Aunt Charlotte did not even listen to her, so they handed her her things politely. Hubert did her rings up in the blinder so that the lightning could not see them.
“But what about Edie,” said The Fair Christine, backing before her as she went toward the door. “Is she good or bad?”
Aunt Charlotte turned slowly and considered Edie, who was still sitting in the same chair. Her hair had subsided, but she was able to get a few sparks out of Widgy by running her fingers lightly over his back.
“My dear Edith,” she said, “I do not know whether you are being taken care of by God or the Devil. I shall not try to think.” She paused to take her breath deep into her lungs. “But as your protector seems very powerful, I shall leave you to him until your parents come home.”
CHAPTER THREE
Millard’s Cove
When Edie got back from a visit to Susan Stoningham in Connecticut, she found changes at Aunt Louise’s that she had never dreamed could happen. G-nan had disappeared and so had the new girl who was supposed to help Cook and Gander. Instead, there was a small round woman called Hood—just Hood—who looked like a popover, to take care of Chris and Lou. And besides her, there was Mr. Parker.
“Mr. Silas Applegate Parker,” Jane told her on the way from the station. “He’s fairly young and he’s nice. He’s only been here since yesterday, and he had a nightmare right away. We all had to get up at two o’clock and save him from being drowned in the cabin of the P.D.Q. He yelled bloody murder.”
“How dandy!” said Edie. She hugged Widgy whom Jane had been thoughtful enough to bring with her. “But what is he here for?”
“Aunt Charlotte said that if he could just keep us all alive, it would exceed her greatest expectations.”
“Phithers!” said Edie. “I bet that means me too.”
“I bet it does,” said Jane. “Did you have a good time?”
“Partly,” said Edie.
She didn’t think she would tell Jane, but she had found visiting boring. Nothing much ever seemed to happen at other people’s houses except changing your clothes and being polite, and what was the worst, there was nothing to eat from morning till night except at meals. Edie was glad to be back, very glad. She walked everywhere, even to the vegetable garden and the bridge over the railroad track, to make sure that nothing had changed. It hadn’t. Nor inside either, except that it had added Mr. Parker, who might be an improvement Edie thought, as she was told he never did anything at all unless somebody asked him to, but was having a happy summer enjoying the sea air and Aunt Louise’s red cushions. He was as long and thin as a string bean, and Cook was trying to “build him up.” Everybody was enjoying this, they said, because there had begun
to be not so much stew and more swordfish for meals.
Life at Aunt Louise’s was also delightfully the same. Within half an hour of getting back Chris went out to see if there were any ripe mulberries, and later Edie herself found the little goat on the second floor eating Mr. Parker’s straw hat.
Sport, Father’s beagle, got ticks when he escaped from Hubert who took him to do an errand in the Ford.
“He was only chasing a cat down Main Street,” said Hubert.
But the cat seemed to have known exactly what to do about him. By evening they had to put him on a newspaper and pull off hundreds of horrible bulby bloodsuckers while Chris and Lou squatted on their haunches and screeched with admiration.
Cook came in the next day and asked personally to see Mr. Parker just at the time they were all starving for lunch. The little one, she said, had eaten it up.
“Not all of it,” said Mr. Parker, taking off his glasses. “That would be impossible.”
“She give the rest to the dog, your honor,” said Cook. She added that she would leave at once.
“There’s no train till tomorrow,” said Mr. Parker with what Theodore called “remarkable resourcefulness.”
Instead of chicken that day they had a picnic on the beach—of lobsters that Theodore was sent for posthaste on his bike, with the chocolate pie that Lou had not been able to reach. Lou had to be “sent to Coventry” Mr. Parker said, but she was able to watch them from her window. She had talked to them the whole time. “I can thee you, I can thee all of you. Why don’t you come and get me? I did not eat a thingle thing. Never, no never.”
She had sounded so sad away off up there that Jane asked to let her out. And what did she do? She was so full of stolen lunch that she walked right past them and into the water while they were all breaking lobster claws and sat down up to her neck. Jane had to save her from drowning.
Jane lost the bands for her teeth, which she was able to take out in the summer, and offered a dollar’s reward for them. After Hubert’s crawling all over the lawn until his pants were bright green, Edie found them undamaged at the edge of the shell drive. They spent the dollar together, however, on “eats” in the village, and Hubert said she was a remarkably good kind of guy.
Life could not have been more interesting. The only trouble with an interesting life was that nobody else could stand it, and Mr. Parker even from the window seat said he could observe that “chaos prevailed.” There would have to be a set of rules. The best way to straighten everything out, he thought, was for them all to have jobs, so that when their father and mother came home it would not be to “pandemonium.”
“Even Chris and Lou?” said Edie suspiciously.
“Certainly,” said Mr. Parker, pacing up and down the wicker-chair room while he was thinking.
“I’ll bet he hadn’t thought of it till that second,” Edie said to Hubert afterwards. Mr. Parker was ready for them just the same. Each one to his capabilities, he said. Chris could keep track of and pick up the magazines. Lou must let Sport in and out. Jane was to do the flower garden, which had been neglected, Hubert the lawn and cars, and Theodore was to take care of the boats. Edie had to feed the animals.
“It will never work,” said Theodore when Mr. Parker went back to the red cushions. “I shall be the sole member of this family who does anything. Wait and see.”
This speech started Jane, at any rate, off on the right track. She went out at once and weeded the sweet peas until they were a mass of naked stems, and Stanley, Aunt Louise’s part-time man, came and looked at them and her, silently, with his chin in his hand. Chris loved keeping the magazines in order. It might be hard to get one to read, but Mr. Parker said he liked it a good deal better than having them “scattered from Dan to Beersheba.” Lou was just as conscientious. She invited Sport in and out continually until the door slamming was more, Gander complained, than the Saints themselves could put up with. “Where’s that Hood?” she kept asking the air in the hall and dining room when she was stirring it up with her duster. Edie stuffed food into the animals willingly. If people thought the fruit from the dining-room table disappeared too quickly, she reminded them that it was by Mr. Parker’s command.
It was only Hubert who fulfilled Ted’s direst predictions. He came out of Mr. Parker’s lecture yawning as if he wanted to lose the top of his head, and he went at once to the chintz window-seat cushions and gave a lecture of his own.
He had thought, he said, that they had come to the beach for a summer of complete relaxation. Hadn’t he slaved all winter—
“Your marks show that!” said Theodore.
Was it his fault, he said, that he had had two of the pettiest-minded masters in school in both Latin and Greek? Or that the mathematics master had had a grudge against him? In a few years he would be a wage slave forever.
“Go away and let me rest,” he said.
He did this by eating whenever there was anything in sight to eat and by leaving his couch only to lie in the sun on the float and crawl into the water and out again occasionally. He became even too weak to have his hair cut or pull up his socks, and some days he let his sneaker laces flop. Pretty soon he took them off altogether. He was giving his feet their freedom, he said. And night and day Ted could testify he wore the same T-shirt that had once been white. When The Fair Christine and Lou said he had promised to take them rowing, he said he had never told them such a thing in his life.
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Ith he crazy?” asked Lou.
“Yeth,” said Hubert. “Now will you go away?” And he rolled up a piece of paper that came off some milk chocolate, put it in his mouth, and blew it out at her like a bullet.
Cook, Gander, and Hood began to “build him up” like Mr. Parker, bringing him extra things to eat.
“He will certainly attain the most prodigious proportions,” said Theodore.
Edie loved every bit of it.
They had continual conferences about him either in the boathouse or on the P.D.Q., where he could not hear them, and Edie found her suggestions as good as anybody’s. In fact, they were acted upon. Jane thought he had gone into a decline, Theodore thought he was faking, and Edie was sure he was going out at night like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ted said he would soon find out about that by putting a lasso around Hubert’s feet after he had gone to sleep. “It might be a counterirritant, at that,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked Edie.
“Something that’ll scratch him awake.”
Edie thought it might, all right, but Hubert came down to breakfast the next morning as sleepy and calm as ever and Ted was late and not a bit calm. Hubert had woken up before him and tied him up with his own lasso. He was almost as big as Ted now though thinner, so what could Ted do except make remarks about people who thought they were smart. It only affected Hubert by making him reach for the banana Ted wanted. But he seemed to have strength enough to hold on to his half until the banana slipped out of its skin and there were two terrible crashes and afterwards Mr. Parker had to stop eating and reading long enough to catch and separate them. There was one thing about Mr. Parker. He might be thin and quiet, but several times they had noticed that he was awfully strong.
In spite of the first counterirritant not being a success, Edie thought she would try one of her own. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, which always seemed to be the time nobody was around, she investigated the kitchen closet. There, as she expected, was a nice fresh, crisp box of saltines on the middle shelf. It took only a few minutes to crumble these all up in Hubert’s bed just far enough under the covers not to show. Even then he did not get counterirritated. He only came into Edie’s room in the middle of the night, told her to get up while she was drunk with sleep, ordered her into his bed, and went to sleep soundly in hers. Edie might have slept too, but that Widgy finding a feast had to eat crackers all night and snuffle trying to get them all out. In the morning, Ted tipped them both on to the floor thinking it was Hubert.
&nbs
p; “For heaven’s sake,” he said, as Edie and Widgy rolled out with what was left of the saltines, “is this a transmogrification? Get your kennel out of here.”
So what with one thing and another, like dropping pennies on the trains as they went under the bridge, using the player piano, letting Jocko the monkey look in fat Mrs. Johnson’s living-room window just once, besides all the usual things that you could do with sun and sand and water, it was much better than visiting.
But, naturally, just when Edie was sure she was as good as anybody and that they would let her take part in everything, it had to stop.
What got Hubert out of his decline was nothing they were able to do but an enormous black yacht. She dared the narrows and came slowly and sedately into sight just off Aunt Louise’s dock at lunchtime one day. She took up most of the harbor, and her engine room bells and down anchor made them all clutch their napkins and fly to the windows.
“Well, what do you know!” said Theodore.
“She may have engine trouble,” said Jane. “Do you know who she belongs to?”
Nobody did, and because Gander squawked and hissed so much, they had to go back to the table.
“Probably the Queen of England calling on fat Mrs. Johnson,” said Edie. “Hey, kids, don’t eat all the dessert before it gets to me.”
Chris and Lou immediately slipped out of their seats again and Jane followed them because she did not like the blancmange there was for dessert.
“They’re sending in a boat,” she reported, “and it’s heading for our float.”
“It’s got a sailor in it,” said Chris.
“Two thailors,” said Lou. “It’s whithing.”
“It is whizzing,” said Jane. “Probably they don’t know that Mrs. Johnson is next door.”
“Come back and sit down, Chris and Lou,” said Mr. Parker.
“That sailor is coming to our house,” said The Fair Christine very definitely as they got into their chairs. Lou nodded hard. “I want to thee a thailor,” she said.
Terrible, Horrible Edie Page 7
