by Paula Fox
“The second one was my grandmother. She died before I was born. I thought she and my grandfather moved to Connecticut a hundred years ago,” Emma said.
“Well, my granny isn’t that old. She used to sail one of your grandfather’s boats. But she had to stop. When your aunt would come home from boarding school to visit her father, it would make her mad to see old Granny out there on the bay in a sailboat, tacking and coming about and hoisting the sails like an America’s Cup winner.” The girl threw back her head and laughed. Emma had to smile, too.
“You must be Alberta,” she said.
“Call me Bertie,” said the girl.
“My aunt said you have a blazing talent with watercolors,” Emma said.
“Wow!” cried Bertie. “I can’t paint the side of a barn.” She stooped to sift through Emma’s collection of shells and stones. “I used to make little heaps of things when I first came out here,” she said. “Let’s go down the beach.”
As she walked alongside of Bertie, Emma felt that, at last, her spirit was rising. She imagined it was the way you felt when the sailboat you were in caught the wind.
“Granny and your Aunt Bea don’t see each other these days,” Bertie told her. “The last time, Granny made her supper because your uncle had to go somewhere. Your aunt never stopped talking about a friend of hers who, she said, was the world’s greatest cook. It makes you feel grim, Granny said. You know she’s trying to make you feel bad. Like telling you I was so good at painting. Did you show her a watercolor you’d done? That would have set her off. What’s that book?”
“I didn’t show her anything,” said Emma.
She held out the book and Bertie took it quickly but with a gentle hand. Emma liked that. Most kids grabbed things from you. “Pretty interesting,” Bertie commented, looking through the pages. “I might have gone on collecting if I’d had this.”
“How long do you stay out here?” asked Emma.
“Until school starts,” Bertie replied. “My mother and father go to Denmark most summers to visit our relatives. I’ve never wanted to go with them. But I guess I’ll have to next summer. I love it out here with Granny. We have a good time together.”
“Look at the sun,” Emma said. Both girls halted. The great red ball of fire was sinking behind a line of low hills in the west.
“Are you coming down to the beach tomorrow?” Bertie asked.
“I’m coming down every day, early, even if there’s a storm,” Emma said. “I like to get out of that house.”
“Yeah,” Bertie said softly.
7
The Village by the Sea
When had the idea struck Emma and Bertie? Was it there all the time they roamed the beach, searching for shells they could match up with illustrations in Emma’s book? It must have grown slowly, the way light comes at dawn, and gradually reveals an island or a hill, a forest, that has been hidden by the dark.
They picked up other things beside shells; blue and green beach glass roughened by tide and wind and the abrasion of the sand, bits of wood as smooth as satin, a buckle from a belt, corks, a few glass bottles, stones of many shapes, and seaweed dry as paper, green sea lettuce and rockweed and Irish moss. There were egg capsules, too, devil’s purse black as ink, and the hard little collars where moon snails had lived. There were the shells of worm snails, spirals and corkscrews white as chalk, and sponges which were gray or yellow and crumbly, and the ghostly amber shells of crabs. Some of these things reminded Emma of old musical instruments her father had showed her in a music encyclopedia.
The third morning the two girls met on the beach, Emma handed Bertie what appeared to be a tiny pine tree around three inches tall. It was the tip of a branch she had found near the house. Bertie stuck it in sand beside their collection, which they kept at the foot of the cliff, away from the highest tide line. Emma turned a bottle upside down and stood it near the tree.
“An aquarium,” she said.
Bertie picked up the rusty belt buckle. “We’ll be able to use this,” she said. With a handful of twigs and seaweed, Emma made a cottage. She anchored the belt buckle in the sand against the cottage. “The door,” she said. She made two fingers into legs and ran them toward the door. “This is a girl running to the cottage. She’s just put her horse in the stable. We can build one of stone.”
“We can build a city!” cried Bertie.
“A village,” said Emma. “We won’t have time for a city.”
The idea had come out of the darkness.
Emma went to bed, eager for the night to pass, thinking of the day ahead. Usually, Aunt Bea didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. But she might. Emma began to get up so early, Uncle Crispin was still asleep. She left him a note that third morning, saying from now on she’d get her own breakfast.
She had liked Uncle Crispin very much when they’d driven out from New York City. She still liked him but he wasn’t the same with her as he had been in the car. In Aunt Bea’s presence, he looked worried, his brow furrowed, trying to make her laugh, trying not to be angry when she was mean.
Emma couldn’t look at the Monet poster. Aunt Bea kept on talking about the painter as if she owned him, like a piece of land she had inherited. Even when she wasn’t there at the dining table, Emma would glimpse the teapot as she went out the door to the porch and feel a kind of coldness steal through her as though the air had grown chill. Aunt Bea’s remarks about people were like being punched in the same spot over and over again. You got a kind of ache just listening to her, and the ache didn’t go away.
Lunch was hard. “What does cold-blooded mean?” Aunt Bea shouted imperiously at Uncle Crispin who was fixing himself coffee in the kitchen. “Just what it says, Bea,” he replied mildly. There were times when he didn’t answer her questions, when his mouth remained tightly closed.
Something was always going on between them, Emma reflected. They never left each alone unless Uncle Crispin was playing his violin or Aunt Bea was glued to the television set.
Emma had peeked into all the rooms except their bedroom. Uncle Crispin used one for his practicing. There were shelves holding music there, and a music stand, but the other rooms were empty except for the smallest, where a large old-fashioned trunk stood in the middle of the floor.
“Why is a senator more important than a representative?” Aunt Bea called from the living room.
“For mercy’s sake, Bea—” replied Uncle Crispin in an exasperated voice. “You grew up in this country. A senator has a larger constituency, serves a longer term and has more power. There are only two senators for each state—”
Aunt Bea must have kicked a teacup on the floor. Emma, snatching a cracker and an apple in the kitchen, heard it shatter.
“I don’t fill my head with unimportant details,” Aunt Bea cried. “Now look what you made me do!”
Emma fled to the beach.
It wasn’t so easy when Uncle Crispin was out giving a violin lesson at the time when Emma came up from the beach to grab a bite.
Aunt Bea, drinking tea, the table covered with wool and writing paper, said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t just run in and out. Visit with me. What’s so fascinating on the beach? I suppose you’ve met that girl next door. Sit down and eat a civilized lunch.” She was scratching at her fingers. Emma glimpsed a sheet of paper covered with handwriting, the letters like plump balloons.
“Bertie is waiting for me,” she said uneasily.
“So you did meet her!” her aunt accused. “Bertie! You ought to advise her to change her name. She’ll end up being called Bert, the truck driver. Look! I found this in my desk and I thought you’d love it!”
She was holding out a comic book, although the cover didn’t look like any comic book Emma had ever seen. She wanted to run out of the room. Aunt Bea continued to hold up the book, her mouth smiling, but something hopeless about her eyes, like someone watching a fire burn up her house. Emma reached for the book. Aunt Bea snatched it away. “No, no. I want to show it to you.”
Rel
uctantly, Emma stood beside her. Aunt Bea’s reddened finger pointed at every object in the cartoons: a brick, a small ramshackle jailhouse, a path with a single cactus growing beside it. Emma had to admit to herself that it was funny.
“You see, it’s always the same story,” Aunt Bea explained happily. “A triangle—Krazy Kat, Offissa Pup, and Ignatz Mouse. Look at the drawing itself. Wonderful! There’s nothing to match it these days. The mouse always ends up in jail for throwing bricks, but he’s the winner! That’s because Krazy Kat loves him so.”
“I have to go, Aunt Bea,” Emma said.
Aunt Bea bowed her head over the comic book. She looked up to gaze at her poster. She poured tea. Then she said slowly, “This is more valuable than anything you’ve got on the beach. Well—then go!”
Another day when Uncle Crispin was out, she had fixed Emma an enormous sandwich. “Look at that! It’s for you. And I’ve made some China green tea, very mild, suitable for someone your age.” She had set a place for Emma at the table with a huge ragged linen napkin and a heavy silver fork.
The sandwich was delicious, but Emma knew she would have to pay for it.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Crispin and I were in Sicily?” she asked in a high, rather silly voice. “It was winter when there were no tourists. They were home where they belong. We had driven along the southern coast … look, here’s a map I got out for you … and night fell. In Messina, we had heard of a marvelous hotel. We stopped there. We could see one dim light somewhere in what must have been the lobby. Can you imagine! Night—in Sicily—in winter! What looked like an empty hotel! We started to get out of the car when a pack of monstrous wild dogs came out of the darkness, howling, snapping their great jaws.”
Emma stared at her, her interest caught despite her wish to go. She remembered what Bertie had said when she told her about Krazy Kat, and how her aunt had tried to make her stay. “Granny says she goes nuts when he’s away.”
“We sat there all night,” Aunt Bea was saying, her eyes boring into Emma’s. “And in the morning, my dear, the dogs were still there, waiting for us, their big meal of the day. At last some peasant came along and shooed them away with sticks and stones, and the donkey hee-hawed and your poor Uncle Crispin and I got out of the car like two stone statues.”
“That’s a good story,” Emma said. “But I have to go now.”
“I have another,” Aunt Bea said, her eyes getting glassy, “about a cliff of birds on the west coast of Ireland.”
That day, Emma was rescued by Uncle Crispin’s unexpected arrival; a student was ill, a lesson cancelled, and Emma set free.
Every evening, her mother called. Each day there was a new event. Daddy was out of Intensive Care and in his own room. Daddy walked. He ate two tangerines for dessert and all the chicken. “Oh!” cried her mother, “you know how white-faced he’s been for so long? Now he looks as if he’d just taken a walk on a frosty day. You should see the color in his face!”
The knowledge that her father was really getting well sank into her. Often, during the hours with Bertie, she never gave him a thought.
“Yesterday evening, I just touched a key on the piano,” she was telling Bertie. “Uncle Crispin was making supper. She was in the living room and could hardly have heard that note. But she yelled, ‘Don’t thump!’”
“Never mind her,” Bertie said. The day was hot and she’d taken a quick dip in the water. Her freckled shoulders gleamed and her yellow hair was thick with salt and water. “We have to make the school today.”
In four days, they had built eleven houses out of pebbles, shells, seaweed, and bits of wood. “Abodes,” Bertie called them. Pine boughs and oak twigs and sea lavender formed hedges; and from plants plucked from the tangle that grew along the cliff edge, they made gardens. The mayor’s house was made of sand dollars roofed with pine cones. The house of the only rich family in their village was built of oyster shells. The main street, which went from one end of the village to the other, was formed of white bubble shells. Slipper shell paths wound around the gardens. The blue and green sea glass made fish ponds and a skylight for a painter’s studio. The village center was marked by a large dried starfish—a compass of the sea, Emma said.
“I like the painter’s studio best,” Bertie said, “the painter with the blazing talent.” She laughed. “As long as he doesn’t set his house on fire.”
“We don’t have any stores,” Emma noted.
“Let’s not,” Bertie suggested. “And no dentist’s office.”
“How big do you think it is?” Emma asked her.
Bertie paced along the stone wall they had built around the whole village. “About twelve feet long,” she said. She had offered to bring down some old doll’s house furniture, but Emma said they should only use things they found on the beach.
When they knelt on the sand and saw the bits of glass shine, and a breeze touched the little trees and hedges, they agreed that their village looked more real than if it had been life-sized. All around them was the lovely debris of the beach, all the things they had turned into abodes and streets and gardens.
“But I think we have to have a doctor’s office,” Emma said, “in case someone gets sick.”
Bertie knew about Emma’s father. She didn’t disagree. “I think we ought to have an inn, too,” she said. “Granny took me to lunch last October to a town on the Hudson River with this place that had been a revolutionary tavern. It was old-fashioned and cozy, like our houses.”
“We could have a one-room schoolhouse,” Emma said. “And we could make a jungle gym in the yard out of twigs.”
“The inn or the school first?” asked Bertie.
“The doctor’s office,” Emma said. “But it could be a house so that, when you have to have a shot, you could look out on a rose bush.”
“Fat chance,” remarked Bertie. “Doctors like you to stare at white walls and steel furniture—otherwise you might not be so scared.”
They would walk down the beach, sometimes together, sometimes each girl on her own, looking for treasure. The hours flowed like the waves of the bay, unmarked each one. They never had a special thing they were looking for. It seemed to work better that way—they had better luck when they were just mooning around. Bertie had sharp eyes. She would hold her head sideways like a shorebird looking for a sand shrimp, pounce, and come up with a prize. Only the yellow or white plastic bottles that washed up on the beach were absolutely useless.
8
A Dog, a Deer
For several evenings, Emma had not bothered to mark time on the calendar she had made. When, one night, she remembered, she saw there were only six days left of her stay on Peconic Bay.
As she sat down to supper the next evening, Aunt Bea leaned over her plate, her head bowed, her arms clasped, and said, “I don’t think she should spend so much time in the water, Crispin. She’s losing weight.”
“Do you stay in the water a long time?” Uncle Crispin asked Emma. “Though I hardly think she’ll shrink from bathing, Bea,” he added.
“Just now and then to cool off,” Emma replied. She hoped there would be no more questions. She felt apprehensive about mentioning the village.
Aunt Bea rocked back and forth a moment, staring into her plate. “What is this, Crispin? Some sort of Mulligan stew? A tribute to the Irish?”
“This stew has nothing to do with the Irish,” Uncle Crispin said, smiling as though his wife had said something clever.
“Everything English has to do with the Irish,” said Aunt Bea.
Uncle Crispin’s smile vanished. “What I made is a tribute to the good quality of the vegetables and meat that survived my unskilled hands,” he said in an exasperated voice.
Aunt Bea looked at Emma. “We’re having an argument,” she said with a touch of gaiety.
“An argument,” Uncle Crispin repeated. “Good. Then we can arrive at a peaceful settlement.”
“An argument is a fight,” Aunt Bea said. “It doesn’t lead to pea
ce.”
“Of course not. Unless one wants peace,” Uncle Crispin retorted.
In the silence which followed, Emma ate a carrot. It was not quite cooked, and it crunched loudly.
“Well?” Aunt Bea questioned her. “What about it? If you don’t swim, what are you two girls up to?”
“We’re building a—” she hesitated for a long moment—“a little village.”
Aunt Bea burst into hectic laughter. “The poor beach … no one lets it be!” she cried. “They build houses on it, rake it, cover it with radios and cheap ugly towels … the poor—”
The telephone rang.
“Do answer it, Emma,” Uncle Crispin said. “I’m sure it’s for you.”
“What a disciplined mother,” Aunt Bea said softly.
Oh, why does Aunt Bea have to comment on everything, Emma thought as she went to the phone. There was nearly always a sharpness in her voice, like a razor blade hidden in cotton.
“Hello,” she said, more loudly than she’d meant to.
“Emma?” inquired a familiar voice.
“Daddy!”
“This is my first phone call,” he said. “I’m sitting up wearing the sweater your mother made me.”
“The one with the one sleeve longer than the other?”
He laughed and said, “Yes.”
Her throat seemed to close, and for a moment, she was unable to speak.
“Emma, dear. I know how glad you are. Do you know how glad I am? Today, I walked nearly half a mile along the hospital corridor. They really ought to plant a few trees. First hospitals scare the daylights out of you. Then they bore the daylights out of you.”
Her heart thumping, Emma thought: Scare you to death.…
“I’m coming home in two days,” he said. “And Mom’s coming to get you Monday.”
“Is it all right?” she said breathlessly. “Is your heart all right now?”
“It’s pretty good,” he replied. “Emma, I can draw a deep breath. It’s wonderful. It’s like drawing up a pail of fresh, cold water from a well.”
She drew a deep breath herself. “Just like that,” he said. “Tell me—how has it been? I’ve thought of you whenever they weren’t fiddling around with me here. How is the terror?”
