by Paula Fox
She lowered her voice. “They’ve been arguing about stew,” she told him. “Daddy, she’s so mean! And, Daddy—did she used to drink a lot of brandy?”
He didn’t answer quickly. She listened to him breathing, so happy at the even sound of it, she nearly forgot what she’d asked him.
Finally, he said, “Yes, she did. But she stopped. I admired her for that. But she has a habit of resentment. It’s a kind of addiction, too, like brandy.”
“Is she especially mad at your mother because of the house in Connecticut?” Emma asked in a whisper. She had heard the sound of a chair being pushed across the floor.
“I think so,” he said. “She’s been angry at my mother for a thousand years. It’s pretty hopeless being mad at ghosts.” He paused, then, his voice filled with concern, asked her, “Has she been terrible to you?”
Emma thought a moment. “No, it’s not that,” she said.
“Emma, your supper is getting cold, Crispin’s wonderful stew!” shouted Aunt Bea, her voice carrying from the dining room.
“I heard that,” Emma’s father said. “She always could say wonderful so it could slice you in half. Never mind. It’s hard to believe, but she doesn’t care what the target is—she wants to feel the stones leaving her hand—it won’t be long, my duck.”
“I’m so glad, Daddy,” Emma said feelingly.
“So am I,” he said.
On her way back to the dining room, she passed the long table. Uncle Crispin’s violin was elsewhere, but behind a pile of music books, she saw the tiny plastic deer. Without thinking she grabbed it up and stuck it in her pocket.
“It was Daddy,” she said to the two of them, sitting silently at the dining table. “Mom’s coming to get me Monday. That’s a day early.”
“He must be doing very well indeed,” Uncle Crispin observed. He looked quite tired, Emma thought.
“You might try to disguise how happy you are to get away from me,” Aunt Bea said, pouting.
“Oh, it’s not that!” protested Emma. “It’s going home, seeing them. It’s—”
“All right, all right …” muttered Aunt Bea. “I know that.”
“I’m going home Monday,” Emma told Bertie.
“That’s only four days,” Bertie said. “And I think we have to have a library, and a church for everyone, no special kind.”
“We ought to have a little forest, too,” Emma said, “behind the village, at the foot of the cliff, so that people can go on picnics in the summer. There has to be a wild place.”
“That’s a good idea,” Bertie agreed.
“I have a wild creature to put in our forest,” Emma said, showing Bertie the deer.
“Did you find that on the beach?” asked Bertie.
“No,” Emma replied.
“But you said we should use only what we found lying around on the sand,” Bertie recalled.
“I know I did,” Emma said. Since she couldn’t explain to herself why she wanted the deer to be part of what they had made, she could hardly explain it to Bertie. The deer was the right size, but she didn’t think that was the whole reason. The doll’s house furniture Bertie had offered would have been, too. She felt cranky suddenly as though Bertie was arguing about the deer—which she wasn’t. But they weren’t building doll’s houses.
The village had taken on a life of its own. The tiny twigs and branches looked like real trees when they swayed in a breeze. The street of luminous shells gleamed. In the gardens behind the houses, the hedges and flowers stirred, and the studio skylight often seemed lit from within. It wasn’t a place built for dolls with their hard little bodies and frozen faces.
She sighed. “The deer comes from a brandy bottle,” she said to Bertie. “They had a big fight about it.”
Bertie nodded as though she knew all about that. Emma supposed she did. By now, they knew each other’s feelings about Aunt Bea. They didn’t talk about her much. When they did, Emma didn’t feel uneasy as she had at first. In fact, it was a relief. Yesterday, she had mentioned to Bertie how Aunt Bea only looked really happy when she was watching a television program.
Bertie had said, “Granny thinks she’s usually happy when she’s watching all her enemies.”
“Who are her enemies?” Emma had asked.
“Oh—everybody,” Bertie had said vaguely. “Everybody out there in the world.”
Remembering that, Emma said, “Your Granny must really hate her.” They were gathering round stones for the library.
“Oh, no,” Bertie said. “She thinks she’s funny. But she said she supposed she wouldn’t find her so funny if she had to live with her.”
“We could use a horseshoe crab for the church,” Emma suggested. “Its tail would make a good spire.”
They couldn’t find a horseshoe crab so Bertie said they could build a Greek temple for people to go into and be quiet for a while. “That’s a good idea,” Emma said, “and we can use sticks for columns and one of those flat, slatey stones for the roof.”
They set off on a search. Emma wasn’t cranky anymore. She was thinking only of what they might find, half-buried in the sand, waiting to be discovered.
On Friday, Aunt Bea was alone when Emma went to the house to get a glass of milk. She insisted Emma look at some things of hers she had been saving for a surprise.
Moving heavily, panting a little, she led Emma up the stairs to one of the rooms Emma had looked into. Inside it was the old-fashioned trunk.
“It’s from the Civil War,” Aunt Bea said proudly. “It belonged to my great-grandfather who was an officer, of course. See his initials? K.B.? And here are spots of melted wax from the candles he stuck on it so he could write letters to his wife, whom he adored. Now …” and she flung open the lid. A smell of must and age, of old cloth, filled Emma’s nostrils. Her eyes widened at the quantity of laces and silks, frail as moths’ wings, that billowed up.
Aunt Bea stared at her triumphantly. “These marvelous things belonged to his wife,” she said. “Look at the tiny stitches! Look!” She held up a garment whose seams were nearly invisible. “No machine could do that,” Aunt Bea said. She picked up a large fan, opened it, fluttered it in front of her face and peered over it at Emma. “This is beyond price,” she said. “Irreplaceable!” Reverently, she put back what she’d taken from the trunk.
“Your grandmother tried to steal this,” she said harshly. “But I wouldn’t let her. This trunk is my one triumph!”
“It’s beautiful,” Emma said desperately, feeling she might not get out of the room with its dry ghost smell of clothes, the possession of a vanished woman, the trunk sitting there like a tomb. Anger had pinched Aunt Bea’s face. Her eyes narrowed as she looked in a corner of the room as though the person who had enraged her was standing there, visible only to her.
Suddenly she smiled, not turning her head. “I suppose you want to get back to your mud pies with old Bert,” she said scornfully.
Emma started to protest that they weren’t making mud pies, that “old Bert” was Bertie, tall and thin and sweet. But she said nothing. She had suddenly noticed that Aunt Bea was wearing not one but two of the old robes she had found in the thrift shop and the buckles were missing from the sandals on her feet. Her face was flushed as though she’d been running. Maybe she didn’t drink brandy anymore, but something in her mind was making her drunk.
“I’ll go now,” Emma said quietly. She left the room, then the house.
Bertie was waiting, standing at the edge of the village, her hands on her hips. Emma began to tell her about the trunk, but Bertie held up her hand. “Wait! Just look!” She pointed at the beginning of the main street. Emma saw an animal print. The artist’s studio had been knocked apart, and there was a trail of paw marks leading to the forest.
“Oh!” she exclaimed.
“A dog,” Bertie said grimly. “While I went up for lunch with Granny, someone took their dog for a walk or let it out of the house. Can you beat that? It’s all wrecked.”
�
�It isn’t wrecked,” Emma cried. “It’s a little shaky. And that’s all. Come on. We can fix it.”
There were tears on Bertie’s cheeks. Emma forgot about Aunt Bea and her old, sour anger.
“Bertie, it isn’t that bad. Honestly. Look, he only ran over a little bit of the street and a couple of the houses.”
Bertie didn’t move. Emma squatted down and picked up the studio skylight. “Come on, help me,” she said. “Things always happen. It isn’t just our beach.”
It didn’t take long to repair the damage, to smooth away the dog’s knobby paw marks.
“I suppose it could have been worse,” Bertie admitted after they saw that everything was back where it had been. “The dog probably thought it was a public facility for dogs.”
That afternoon, they finished the library. It looked to Emma like the one built of fieldstone in the town near the cottage in upstate New York.
Bertie found a large flat slab of slate for their temple almost as soon as she started looking for one. They had a lovely time making the forest, drawing with a small stick a network of tiny paths leading to a clearing for picnics.
“Tomorrow, we’ll make everything perfect,” Emma said. “We ought to build a fireplace in the clearing so people can cook there.”
“We need a sign for the inn,” Bertie remembered. “I could print one when we decide on the name.”
“Maybe we’ll find something tomorrow,” Emma said.
They took a short swim. It had been a good day’s work. Emma had even liked fixing the damage done by the dog.
Just before they parted, Bertie said, “We could call the inn The Sign of the Deer.”
Emma said they ought to think of something else. She didn’t tell Bertie, but she wanted the deer to be hidden in the forest.
“We’re lucky there haven’t been any high tides,” Bertie said as Emma started up the stairs. “Just one, and everything would have been washed out to the bay.”
Looking down on the village, Emma felt exhilarated. They had built it in a place full of dangers: tides, a storm, wandering animals, anything could have destroyed it. But it was there, smaller than life, but just as strong.
For supper that night, there were scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes. Uncle Crispin had had too many lessons to do much shopping or cooking. Aunt Bea piled up a saucer with ice cream. She grinned at Emma as she ate great spoonfuls of it.
“It’s divine,” she murmured.
“How’s your beach project?” Uncle Crispin asked.
“It’s great,” Emma replied. “When we finish it tomorrow, will you come down and look at it?” She was looking at Uncle Crispin, but because Aunt Bea’s grin had seemed so friendly, she turned to her and asked, “Will you come, too?”
“I can’t wait to see it,” Uncle Crispin said. “I remember building a tree house when I was a boy. A friend and I. His name was Bob. Yes … Bob and I built a wonderful roost, like Tarzan’s. It was the best time of my life.”
“Really,” Aunt Bea said in a rather buttery voice.
“As a child,” Uncle Crispin said.
“I read and painted,” Aunt Bea said, holding her head stiffly. “I never did things like that, sticking my hands in dirt or nailing old sticks together and pretending I was doing something important.”
“Oh, Bea …” Uncle Crispin said in a hopeless way.
She giggled suddenly. “Oh, Crispin! Can I have a touch more of ice cream? It’s so delicious!”
Emma’s father phoned just as they finished the last of the ice cream. He sounded calm and as if he were at home. Some friends were coming to visit him that evening so their conversation was a short one. It felt to Emma almost as though it was the time before he had become sick, even though he was still in the hospital.
As she started back through the living room to help Uncle Crispin clean up the supper dishes, she heard him say, “There, there, my dear …”
She paused near the fireplace.
Aunt Bea’s voice was soft, murmuring. Then it rose a little. “My trunk …” Emma heard. “My mother …” Then it surged like a wave at its crest. “Oh, Crispin,” she said. “When I woke up this morning, I thought my heart was broken!”
There was silence. Emma went to the entrance of the dining room. Uncle Crispin was crouched next to Aunt Bea, his arms around her waist. She rested her cheek on his head, the fall of her gun-metal hair hiding his ear and neck. They both looked up at Emma, their faces bewildered as though they hadn’t known anyone else was in their house.
9
Vandal
“You won’t believe this even when you see it!” cried Bertie who was waiting on the beach for Emma Sunday morning.
She held out a two-inch square of balsa wood. “Careful!” she warned as Emma took it. “It’s almost falling apart.”
One side of the square was blank; on the other, faded but legible, was one word: Lodgings.
“It was way down there,” Bertie said, pointing at a spot on the beach where several people were pushing a large raft into the water. “It must have been in the sand since last summer … from some kid’s building set.… I was walking around there early this morning. I dropped my apple, and when I bent down to pick it up, I saw a plastic house roof. Underneath it was the sign.”
Emma thought the sign itself was a sign that they had finished their village.
Bertie sharpened a twig on a stone and threaded it through the balsa wood and stuck it in the sand in front of their inn.
“Is it really done, do you think?” she asked Emma wistfully.
“Just in time,” said Emma. “But look. Some of the stones in the library have slipped. We can fix that and check on every cottage and the doctor’s office and the temple. Everything.”
They spent an hour or so doing what was unnecessary, for the village was, they agreed, now as perfect as it could be.
Wind had shifted sand; some of the hedges were down, twigs fallen on paths. The village had taken on a weathered look, that of an old, old place which no highway would ever lead to, which you might only discover if you were riding a horse one afternoon by the sea. You would give the horse its head; it would wander over the crest of a low hill and, looking down, you would see the village in the sleepy, sun-dazed quietness.
That was what Emma was thinking in a dreaming way. As if Bertie had sensed what was in Emma’s mind, she said, “We should have built more stables for horses.”
“You have to stop somewhere,” Emma replied. “We’d end up trying to build the world.”
“We did,” Bertie declared. “Granny wants to see it. But her sciatica is so bad, she really can’t come down the stairs. I told her I’d take some pictures with her camera.”
The hearings Aunt Bea had been watching weren’t on television that day. She was in her usual chair at the table. She was wearing a somber gray dress whose skirt reached her ankles. Around her neck was a necklace of small luminous blue stones which she twisted and curled about her fingers.
“We’ve finished our village by the sea,” Emma said as Uncle Crispin set before her a plate of lettuce and slices of avocado for her lunch.
“Whatever you’ve made—it isn’t by the sea,” Aunt Bea said sharply. “It’s by the bay.”
“I’m eager to see it,” Uncle Crispin said quickly. “Bea, let me fix you something. Soup? A sandwich?”
“I have no appetite today,” Aunt Bea said, tightening the necklace around her throat.
“But you’ll come down to see the village?” he asked. “It would do you good.”
“It wouldn’t do me a bit of good,” Aunt Bea said, looking up at her poster. She let go of the blue stones and smiled to herself. “I can see all the beach I need to ever see in my Monet. I haven’t time for such excursions.”
She shook her head slowly as if everything was too much for her. She’s telling herself a story, Emma thought, all about what she has to put up with, she and Monet.
Uncle Crispin sighed. “We’ll go down, Emma, as soon as
you’re finished. We can do the dishes later.”
“Don’t expect me to clean up after you,” Aunt Bea said shrilly.
“No one expects any such thing,” retorted Uncle Crispin.
After they left the house and were going down the stairs, Emma felt for a moment transparent with happiness, as though it were a light shining through her.
Even though she would have to part from Bertie, she was going home tomorrow. The days which had, at first, seemed to stretch before her like a road with no end, had gone so fast she had been taken by surprise when she realized her time by the bay was just about over.
Bertie was down below, running back and forth near the water. When she saw them, she shouted, “Good!”
The three of them stood together by the stone wall around the village.
“What a piece of work!” exclaimed Uncle Crispin. “It could be a little corner by the sea in Dorset or Cornwall in England. Look at the gardens! You two are wonders!” He stooped down. “What a lovely place to live!”
Emma and Bertie smiled at each other.
“Have you named it?” Uncle Crispin asked, standing up. He was peering at the forest. Emma felt a start of fear. She didn’t want him to see the deer.
“Look at the library,” she suggested hurriedly, “the one with brown stones. No, we haven’t named it yet.”
“Just the sort of library where one would like to spend a drowsy afternoon,” Uncle Crispin said. “Well—it is the most extraordinary thing you’ve done.… I thought it would be like a large sand castle. I had no idea it was such a serious project.”
After he had gone back to the house, Bertie took a number of pictures of the village. “When I see you back in the city in September, I’ll give you copies of whatever turns out right,” she promised.
“If a teacher asks us to write a composition about what we did this summer—” Emma began.
“—we can do an illustrated one,” Bertie said.
“Let’s take a walk,” Emma said. They lingered, though, by the village, looking at their work. Emma felt a little sad. “It was doing it that was so great,” she said. They started off.
