by Paula Fox
“It needs physical strength, too,” Uncle Crispin said. For a little while, Aunt Bea ate and was silent. Still, Emma found herself waiting as though for a loud alarm clock to ring. She wasn’t as startled as she might have been, earlier in the day, when Aunt Bea exclaimed loudly and scornfully, “Canned peas!”
“At least, they’re French canned peas,” Uncle Crispin observed with a smile.
“At least …” Aunt Bea mocked. But she smiled, too.
When the saucers of chocolate ice cream were set down on the table, Aunt Bea looked at Emma. “Have you seen the Connecticut estate?” she asked.
Emma looked at her blankly.
“The house my father built for your grandmother?” she asked more loudly, as though Emma were deaf.
Emma shook her head. “They both died before I was born,” she said.
“Well, of course, I knew that,” Aunt Bea declared. “You’re grandmother made him build that place—using my poor, dead mother’s wealth. Everybody knew that! I admit it was a beautiful house. My father had style and your grandmother had push. I was at Smith College then. They never invited me—not once—to visit there.”
“That isn’t quite true, Bea,” Uncle Crispin reproached her. “You’ve often told me about spending Christmases there.”
“Those are fairy tales,” Aunt Bea said self-righteously. “I was just a lonely girl. Can you blame me for making up stories? It’s too pathetic! I thought Philip might have taken you, Emma, to see the place where he grew up. God knows what sort of people own it now. I’m sure it’s worth a fortune.” She swallowed a spoonful of ice cream and scraped the saucer fiercely. “All I inherited was this nightmare of a cabin.”
“This is a fine house,” Uncle Crispin disagreed. “We’re lucky to have it, and the bay and the countryside are splendid.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Aunt Bea said insistently, “and the countryside is nothing but a tired suburb.”
Emma helped to clear the table. Aunt Bea grabbed up her cards and spread them out in another hand of solitaire, slapping the table with them.
In the kitchen, Uncle Crispin washed and Emma dried. She heard the scrape of chair legs against the floor. A moment later, television voices murmured from the living room.
Emma had never heard of any Connecticut estate. Those grandparents had always seemed far away from her, buried in time, like people she might read about in a history book. The way Aunt Bea had spoken made her feel she was to blame for some mysterious trouble that had occurred years before she was born.
“You’re a helpful girl,” commented Uncle Crispin.
She wanted to ask him about that trouble. Aunt Bea had been smoldering so, banging her plate, slapping down the cards. “I don’t think Mom and Daddy have a lot of money,” she said. “I never heard about the estate.”
Uncle Crispin sighed. “It’s all ancient history,” he said. “I think the place was sold for taxes years ago. I know your father had to work hard to stay in music school. I’m afraid your Aunt Bea broods about the past too much.”
Emma leaned against the counter, watching him scour out the sink. She felt a hard lump in he jeans’ pocket. She reached in and took out the plastic deer.
“Look what I found in the bathroom,” she said, holding it up to him. “It’s only plastic but it’s pretty, isn’t it?”
Uncle Crispin dropped the sponge he had been using and snatched the deer from her hand to look at it closely.
“Where was it?” he demanded. He stared at the deer as though it were a biting insect.
“Under the sink, in a dust ball,” she answered uneasily.
He dropped it in his shirt pocket. Without another word, he put away the scouring powder and sponge.
Emma went to the living room and stood uncertainly for a moment next to the fireplace.
Aunt Bea patted a cushion on the little sofa. “Come sit with me and watch this movie,” she said, smiling at Emma. “It’s a good one. I’ve seen it three times. You see that little boy? You can tell he’s lower class by his cheap suit. Look at that ridiculous suit! But he’s adorable, isn’t he? And he’s going to get into all kinds of trouble, carrying messages between that man and woman who are in love.”
Emma, astonished by this outburst, sat down. Aunt Bea suddenly put her arm around her and giggled. “We’ll be all cozy here and watch together, shall we? Now … ssh!”
Uncle Crispin came into the room and went to the long table where he sat down and began to look through a sheaf of music. He sat stiffly as though he were balancing an object on his head. When Aunt Bea withdrew her arm, Emma was relieved. It had begun to feel like a log on her back.
“Don’t you want to see the wonderful English countryside in the movie, Crispin?” Aunt Bea called out gaily.
“I have seen it,” Uncle Crispin replied curtly.
Emma glanced at her aunt, who had made a little moaning sound like a puppy. She was staring at her husband’s stiff back, looking as baffled as Emma felt. She doesn’t get her way all the time, Emma thought to herself.
She turned her attention to the movie. The little boy who carried messages for the man and woman who loved each other didn’t understand what was going on between them, any more than Emma understood why Uncle Crispin had grown so distant since he had taken the deer from her hands, or why Aunt Bea was acting so fondly toward her.
“Don’t you hate commercial ads?” Aunt Bea asked during a break in the movie. “Everybody seems so stupid—talking in those horribly cheery voices!”
Emma hadn’t given much thought to the people who tried to sell you things during commercials. You waited until they were over. But her aunt’s friendliness encouraged her to ask a question. “You said there was a girl next door? The one who’s so good at watercolors? Is she here yet?”
“Oh—that girl. The grandmother is an old busybody; she used to drop in, uninvited, but I put a stop to that. What is that girl’s name, Crispin? Ontario? Quebec?”
“Alberta,” stated Uncle Crispin, not turning around.
“Why, yes,” said Aunt Bea. “Imagine naming a child after a Canadian province! She’ll be someone for you to play with. Of course, some children play wonderfully by themselves. I always did. But then I was imaginative.” She gave Emma a sunny smile as though she’d complimented her.
Two weeks isn’t long enough to get used to such a person, Emma thought.
“I think I’ll go to bed now,” Emma said.
“But the movie isn’t nearly over—don’t you want to watch it with me?” Aunt Bea asked her plaintively.
“I’m pretty tired,” Emma said. She was never too tired at home to stay up on those special occasions when Daddy would say, Oh, let her stay up just this time, even when she could hardly keep her eyes open.
“Tired!” exclaimed Aunt Bea. “A young girl like you! How truly boring!” She turned from Emma and leaned forward intently, her eyes on the television screen.
“Of course you must be tired, Emma,” Uncle Crispin said. His voice was gentle and light again, not the way it had been in the kitchen when he questioned her about the deer. Emma looked at her aunt. “Good night,” she said softly. There was no reply.
At the foot of the stairs, Uncle Crispin asked, “Do you think you have enough blankets? It can be quite chilly even at this time of year.”
“I don’t need any more,” Emma answered, wanting only to be alone in her room.
“Good night, my dear,” he said.
As soon as Emma closed her door, she turned on the small lamp on the bedside table and went quickly to the calendar she had drawn. She took a red crayon and drew a thick X in the first box. The first day was over.
She woke up and for a moment had no idea of where she was. The full yellow moon looked pasted to the pane like a little kid’s drawing on a school window. She heard voices. For a while she lay there listening to the distant sounds of them. They grew louder. Emma got up and opened her door a crack.
“I didn’t,” Aunt Bea was say
ing over and over again.
“Where did you hide the brandy bottle?” Uncle Crispin cried. “Where did you hide it, Bea! Don’t you think I know where that plastic deer comes from? Didn’t I find those deer all over the house where you used to drop them on the floor after you’d yanked them from the bottles?”
“It’s an old one.” Aunt Bea’s voice rose to a wail. “I swear it. You know I’ve stopped drinking, Crispin.”
“Have you, Bea? Have you? I want to believe it.”
“You know how I save everything,” her aunt went on in a calmer way. “You know I’ve stopped all that.”
There was a long pause. Then Uncle Crispin said, “I do want to believe that. But you act as if you’re still drinking. As if in your mind—all right, then, now hush.”
“If you don’t believe me, who will?” Aunt Bea asked sadly.
Their voices dropped to a murmur. Then there was utter silence. Emma crept back into her bed, pulling the cover over her head. “Daddy,” she whispered into the dark.
5
The Lonely Beach
“I can offer you coffee, plover eggs, and marmalade,” Uncle Crispin said. “I also have in my larder whistling cereals, bacon with nitrates which are not supposed to be good for you, hens’ eggs, and cheese. Perhaps you’d like an orange and an omelet?”
“Could I have a glass of milk and bread and butter?” Emma asked.
“Of course. I don’t really have plover eggs. I was thinking about English breakfasts this morning. They start you off into the day like an overloaded donkey. Which reminds me—” he paused to pour a glass of milk and set it before her on the table—“of the time years ago Bea and I started out on a picnic. Bea and I in a very small rowboat—all that was left of her father’s fleet of boats—with several lobsters, a huge picnic hamper, blankets and so forth. We were going to one of those little islands in the bay. We hadn’t gone thirty feet from shore when the rowboat began to sink, and the lobsters floated out of the sack they were in and swam away.”
He buttered a slice of bread, held up a jar of lemon marmalade and looked at her questioningly. She shook her head, no, wondering if Aunt Bea permitted the blackberry jam to be eaten only in her presence.
The worried expression on Uncle Crispin’s face didn’t match the cheer in his voice. Was he thinking about a hidden bottle of brandy? Had he thrown away the plastic deer? His voice often had a pattering effect like a light rain falling on a roof. Sometimes the patter made Emma restless.
“Now and then your Aunt Bea keeps to her room in the morning,” he said, not looking at Emma. “She doesn’t always sleep well.”
Emma had seen people who were drunk on the streets, and once at home. A neighbor in her apartment house had come weeping to the door. He’d lost his key, he mumbled. Her father had supported him with one arm and found the key in a pocket of the man’s jacket. Aunt Bea wasn’t like the weeping man or the staggering people on the street. But there was something lopsided about her as though she’d lost her balance a long time ago and couldn’t get it back. Emma wished she hadn’t found the deer. It had been in her mind when she awoke that morning. It was quiet in her room. She heard a gull cry. She had thought of her father who, by that time, must be in an operating room.
A bypass was a little road off a main one. As she visualized such a road, it changed into a country lane she and her father and mother had walked along one early evening in upstate New York. She could see herself on the lane, carrying a musty bird’s nest her father had just plucked from a bramble bush and handed to her.
A main road to her father’s heart was blocked. Now there would be a lane, a bypass. She shivered and got up and quickly dressed. She had paused at the foot of the staircase, drawn a deep breath and braced herself for greeting Aunt Bea. When she discovered only Uncle Crispin in the dining room, she realized by the relief she felt how much she had dreaded seeing her aunt.
“Please, what time is it?” she asked him now. She could hear bacon frying and see Uncle Crispin’s back as he bent over the stove.
“Eight-forty exactly,” he replied.
Emma looked down at the bread and butter on her plate. To take one bite of it would be like swallowing a whole loaf.
Uncle Crispin was suddenly beside her, pulling a chair close to hers and sitting down. He took a table knife and cut the bread into little pieces.
“Try eating it that way,” he said in a kindly voice. The worry on his face was gone; it showed only concern for her.
“Mom’s going to telephone me,” Emma said breathlessly.
“She certainly will,” he said. “The operation is not likely to take very long. You can go down to the beach after you eat. I’ll call you the second the telephone rings.”
She didn’t think she could do that—leave the house before she had heard her mother’s voice.
They both looked up at a shuffling noise in the living room. Aunt Bea appeared on the dining room threshold. Her hair stood up all over her head like milkweed in a wind. She was wearing one of the cotton robes Emma had seen in the bathroom. It was printed with tiny faded pink rabbits. Her feet were bare.
“Crispin. One would like the room to be darker. Can you draw the shades?”
“Good morning, Aunt Bea,” Emma said.
“Tea,” Aunt Bea said.
Perhaps Aunt Bea is drunk on tea, Emma thought. As she slumped into a chair, Emma realized she had just seen her aunt standing up for the first time. She was much taller than she would have guessed. It wasn’t that she looked small when she was sitting down—it was that she seemed so shapeless. Uncle Crispin had drawn the shades and set the kettle to boil on the stove. Aunt Bea’s eyes were closed; her hands clutched the robe, but one finger tapped against her ribcage as though something about her always had to be moving.
Recalling the voices in the middle of the night, Aunt Bea’s awful wail, Uncle Crispin’s angry protests, Emma looked for a sign of what had happened.
She ate two bits of bread. Uncle Crispin poured hot water into the teapot and sat down to eat his bacon.
“How cheerfully you poison yourself!” Aunt Bea exclaimed, her huge eyes open now and staring at her husband. Uncle Crispin didn’t look up. He said nothing, but he certainly didn’t look cheerful. Perhaps his silence was the sign, Emma thought.
“I’ll go upstairs and make my bed,” Emma said.
“I should think so,” remarked Aunt Bea. “It’s the maid’s decade off. Who else would make it?”
“Bea!” protested Uncle Crispin.
Aunt Bea’s fingers tightened on her robe.
“I’m sure Emma doesn’t expect anyone to make her bed,” he said smoothly.
Aunt Bea had been sitting rigidly, her head held high as though she were posing for a photograph. Now she sank down into her chair, looking at Emma through half-closed eyes. “Oh … I don’t care! What do I care about bed-making.…” She giggled suddenly. “Poor Crispin. You’re the only one who worries about such things in this house. We don’t—do we Emma?”
Being near Aunt Bea was like being surrounded by a cloud of gnats. She was smiling and Emma could see the glint of her chalk-white, rather long teeth. Slowly, she pointed a finger at Emma, reaching out as though to poke her.
“A watched phone never rings,” she said.
“I think I’ll go read,” Emma said.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those children who reads all the time!” shrieked her aunt.
“Bea! What on earth are you saying!” cried Uncle Crispin.
“I say what I think—unlike other people,” Aunt Bea said sulkily, and grabbed up her cup of tea.
Emma escaped into the living room. It was better yesterday when Uncle Crispin had been hearty and cheerful with her aunt—even though he had sounded a little fake.
She walked to the long table and touched the violin case. She wanted to look inside it. It might be one like her father’s. He had taught her to name all the parts of a violin before she could read.
�
��Here. Let me show you,” Uncle Crispin said, opening the cover. He had come so silently to her side, she hadn’t heard his footsteps. Maybe he, too, wanted to get away from the dining room.
“It looks just like Daddy’s,” she said. The instrument was as beautiful as a bird in flight. When her father played, the hair-thin strings of the bow often broke. He would replace them, completely absorbed in what he was doing, his fingers so quick and practiced as he tightened a peg screw.
“Purfling,” she said as she touched the border.
“That’s right. Clever girl,” Uncle Crispin said, and picking up the violin and placing it under his chin, he played a cadenza.
There was a loud groan from the dining room.
Uncle Crispin’s face went blank. He replaced the violin in its worn blue velvet bed. “Come out on the porch,” he said. “The day will lift your spirit.”
He pushed aside a tattered beige curtain revealing a narrow door she hadn’t known was there. It would be a way of getting out without having to go through the dining room, she thought, a way of avoiding Aunt Bea.
A cool wind, scented with pine and roses, touched her skin. “If you read out here, you will be able to hear the telephone yourself,” Uncle Crispin said. “It was thoughtless of me to suggest you go to the beach.”
Uncle Crispin was making her feel uneasy, too. “It’s okay,” she said as she usually did when she didn’t understand what some grown-up person was saying to her.
“No one ever uses these sweet old rocking chairs,” he said. “It’s a pity.”
Aunt Bea is already off her rocker, Emma thought to herself.
“I’ll read here,” she said to Uncle Crispin. Her spirit might lift just a little if she could be alone for a while. He was looking at her worriedly. It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren’t certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”
“Crispin!” Aunt Bea called from the dining room. He gave Emma a quick smile and went back into the house.
