The Penderwicks in Spring

by Jeanne Birdsall

  “Is Lydia going?”

  “She is, because we’re also going to look for a big-girl bed, which Lydia is very excited about, isn’t she?”

  “Non.” Lydia had no interest in a big-girl bed.

  Iantha said to Ben, “Tell your sister how much fun it is to sleep in a real bed.”

  Ben wasn’t sure he wanted Lydia to get a new bed. Her attempts to get out of the crib were becoming ever more determined. What would life be when she could simply roll out of bed and go wherever she liked? “She’ll really be able to escape now.”

  “Yes, but without the danger of falling on her head when she climbs out of the crib.”

  “Oh, yeah, that,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Lydia, sleeping in a real bed is fun.”

  Lydia gave him a suspicious look, then moved one of her spoons a quarter inch further left.

  “I think I’ll stay home,” said Ben, and trudged upstairs.

  Batty was in her room, listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a piece of music thrilling enough to keep her from going crazy waiting for Jeffrey. It was the only Beethoven symphony she owned, and was marred by a scratch in the beginning of the fourth movement. Someday when she had lots of money, she was going to buy all of Beethoven’s symphonies, with no scratches on any of them.

  The Beethoven served another purpose. It was loud enough to drown out any singing that might suddenly pop out of Batty. Her family was used to her humming—anybody can hum—but this was different, more like she’d become inhabited by a sprite fond of bursting into song at any old time. It had started the evening before, but while Batty had managed to keep it quiet when anyone else was around, she definitely needed to learn more control.

  Here came the fourth-movement scratch—iehn-iehn, iehn-iehn, iehn-iehn. Batty rushed to turn off the record player. In the sudden silence, she heard Ben’s private signal.

  “Come in,” she said.

  He did, looking grumpy.

  “That music was so loud you couldn’t hear me knock.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  And then it happened—her sprite tried to sing. Batty clapped her hand over her mouth and hoped Ben hadn’t noticed.

  He’d noticed. “What was that sound?”

  “What sound?” is what Batty said, except that it sounded like whu sohn because her hand was still over her mouth.

  “That sound you just made.”

  “Maybe your stomach was growling.”

  He stared at her suspiciously. His stomach hadn’t growled. “There it goes again!”

  “Maybe it’s my stomach!”

  She started to push him toward the door, but he resisted. “If it’s your stomach, why is your hand over your mouth?”

  She took away her hand but kept her teeth clenched, just in case, and tried again to get him out of the room.

  “Stop pushing me. I have to give you a message from Skye.”

  Batty’s sprite disappeared, and Batty stopped shoving her brother.

  “What message?”

  “I’ll tell you, but you can’t cry.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Jeffrey’s not coming this weekend.”

  She sat down on her bed with a thwump. “Why?”

  “Skye said he couldn’t because he wants to be her boyfriend and she doesn’t want to be his girlfriend.”

  Batty was horrified. They’d already been through all this. A few years earlier Jeffrey had decided that Skye should be his girlfriend, and she told him he was an idiot. Then he fell for a girl named Margot at his school in Boston who turned out to actually be an idiot, obsessed with clothes and money, which Jeffrey finally realized, then came to his senses and swore he was done with romance and would now turn his life completely over to music. He’d even asked Mr. Penderwick for a Latin motto that would express just that. Musica anima mea est. “Music is my life.” So why was he starting up with love again? Was he turning into a boringly normal teenager?

  “This is a disaster,” she said.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “Stop telling me not to cry. I’m not, anyway.” Or just a tiny little bit, because of the shock.

  “But Skye said Jeffrey could come for her birthday, so he won’t disappear forever like Tommy did,” said Ben. “Okay, that’s all, so I’ll go now. And don’t push me out!”

  Wiping her eyes, Batty realized that she shouldn’t have pushed him, singing sprite or no singing sprite. She didn’t like it when her older sisters tried to get rid of her.

  “I’m sorry I did that,” she said.

  But Ben had already left the room, head held high.

  At one end of Gardam Street, halfway round a cul-de-sac, was the path into a forty-acre slice of paradise called Quigley Woods, a wild realm of trees, rocks, and water, and a favorite refuge for all the Penderwicks. Batty hadn’t yet gone there this spring—so not since Hound’s death—but she went now, needing to be alone and think.

  Winter had more of a hold here than on the lawns of Gardam Street. Patches of snow stubbornly lingered in the shadows, far too many for Batty to stomp away. She broke into a run to warm herself up, racing under the still-barren trees. After a dip in the path and just before a low, crumbling stone wall, she turned off onto a path that led down to her favorite spot in the woods, chosen long ago with Hound. She had picked it for the ancient willow tree, both huge and graceful, and Hound, for the creek that ran under the willow’s vast canopy, where he could splash in the shallows while still keeping a watchful eye on Batty. But when she reached the willow, she found it already occupied by a male cardinal, furious with this human galumphing into his home.

  “Please stay,” she said. “I’ve come to visit, that’s all.”

  But the bird flew off, a red and unforgiving blur. Abandoned, Batty looked up through the bare willow branches to the soft blue sky. Maybe she shouldn’t have come here yet. Not until she’d stopped missing Hound so terribly.

  She sat down and leaned against the willow, glad for its familiar support, and tossed a stick into the creek. Her dad had once told her that Hound wouldn’t want Batty to mourn for long, that he’d loved her too much to want her miserable. She asked her dad how he could be certain, and he said that years ago someone had told him that very thing, before she died. “My mother, you mean,” Batty said, and he answered yes.

  It hadn’t helped.

  She wondered what Hound would have made of this singing business. He hadn’t been a particularly musical dog, showing no preference for Mozart or Motown, Beyoncé or Beethoven, if he’d ever even noticed the difference. Jeffrey had called him the perfect audience, since he would wag his tail for anything Batty played on the piano, even deliberate discord. She tried to picture him there in front of her, already wet from his first dip in the creek, his tongue hanging out with excitement, his brown eyes warm with love.

  “I wish I hadn’t let you die.” She said it to the creek and the trees and the sky and the bird that had flown away, so there came no answer. Never an answer.

  She had so been looking forward to seeing Jeffrey, to singing for him. Oh, now she was about to cry again. Except—except that Hound had never wasted time feeling sorry for himself, and Batty shouldn’t, either.

  She watched the creek, the sun glancing off the water, and listened to its gentle plashing.

  Maybe this wasn’t a disaster with Skye and Jeffrey. If Skye had said he could come in two weeks for her birthday, she must be counting on the boyfriendgirlfriend stuff to blow over pretty quickly. And since Skye’s birthday was eight days before Batty’s, there would still be time for Jeffrey to help plan the Grand Eleventh Birthday Concert.

  “I’ll just have to wait a little longer,” she said. “I can do that.”

  And while she waited, she could start learning about this voice Mrs. Grunfeld had discovered. After all, Musica anima mea est was Batty’s motto, too.

  She stood up, planting her feet firmly on the ground, sheltered under her willow tree. What was it that Mrs. Grunf
eld had said? “Open yourself to the music.” All right. Two deep breaths.

  Batty started to sing.

  SEVEN, NINE, MAYBE TEN SONGS LATER—Batty had lost count—she was wandering back through Quigley Woods, stunned with joy. It had come to her, this happiness, during the third song, “Here Comes the Sun,” when for just one instant she’d heard her voice as if it belonged to someone else. A voice that soared out across the creek and up through the willow branches, so rich and glorious it lured back the red cardinal, astonished by this phenomenon, a human who sang as beautifully as a bird.

  It wasn’t that Batty hadn’t believed Mrs. Grunfeld about her voice. While the orchid in the daisy field had seemed like an exaggeration, Batty had understood that she could sing well. But this was different. Mrs. Grunfeld hadn’t exaggerated. This voice—the one Batty had heard there in the woods—was indeed an orchid, and a great gift, one that she would need to take care of. No belting, for example.

  What a lucky girl she was!

  Close to the edge of the woods now, she stepped off the path to sit on a fallen log. There were practical considerations to explore before she broke back into the real world of Gardam Street. Like the training Mrs. Grunfeld had mentioned. Yes, Batty wanted singing lessons—she was certain of that now. And she wanted them from the person who had brought on this magic—Mrs. Grunfeld.

  But lessons cost money. Batty knew that she could go to her parents for the money—tell them about Mrs. Grunfeld, then sing for them—and that they would figure out a way to pay for the lessons. But that would mean giving up the surprise of the Grand Eleventh Birthday Concert, and Batty didn’t want to do that, now less than ever. Besides, she was too proud to ask for more money, not with the new car and her sisters’ college fees, not to mention the immoderatae grocery bills. For a moment, Batty considered giving up her piano lessons, exchanging one kind of lesson for another, but no, she couldn’t do that. The piano was too important to her, voice or no voice.

  She would have to earn the money for voice lessons on her own. Which meant launching her Penderwick Willing to Work business not when she became a teenager, not when she’d grown out of her shyness, but now, immediately.

  She got up and leapt back onto the path and headed home. First, she had to apologize properly to Ben for being so rude to him—she was too happy to have anyone angry with her. Then she’d get started on PWTW. Maybe she’d ask Ben to help with the details. He loved coming up with ideas, and as long as Rafael wasn’t there to encourage the wackier parts of his imagination, sometimes the ideas were decent.

  When she burst into the house, Iantha called out from the living room. “Is that you, Battikins?”

  Batty smoothed down her hair in an attempt to look less exuberant, and went in. Iantha was sitting cross-legged on the floor, using pins to mark the hem of the dress Jane was wearing, one that Jane had made herself. It was cotton, sprigged with tiny yellow and orange flowers, not particularly stylish but individual, a dress that an author might wear.

  “Yes, it’s me,” Batty answered. “You look nice in that dress, Jane.”

  “Thank you. I even designed it, believe it or not,” said Jane. “Wow, you look really happy. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing.” Batty tried looking less happy. This voice secret was going to be difficult to keep.

  “Turn, Jane,” said Iantha, and stuck a few more pins into Jane’s hem. “Batty, you do know that Jeffrey’s not coming, right?”

  “Ben told me. I’m very upset.” She tried to look like it.

  “But you look happy.” Jane was looking at her with what their father called her “writer’s gimlet eye.”

  Batty pinched her own leg to make her face look unhappy. If Jane decided that Batty’s emotions would make for good research, she’d be relentless in trying to figure out what they were.

  “Jane, turn,” said Iantha. “And stop trying to make Batty look not happy. Happy is good. And Jeffrey and Skye will work it out somehow.”

  “They have to, don’t they?” said Jane. “Skye can’t banish someone who belongs to all of us.”

  “Right, and turn again. Batty, do you want to come car-shopping? We’re leaving soon.”

  “No, thanks. I have—things to do.” She started out of the room. “Do you know where Ben is?”

  “Outside digging up rocks.”

  Batty went through the house, picking up a pad of paper and a pen as she went, and out the back door, where she found Ben attacking a new spot. He’d already dug up three interesting rocks, making himself filthy once again.

  “I’m sorry about before,” she told him.

  “I know it was you making that noise,” he said. “And it wasn’t your stomach.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t regular humming, like you usually do. It was like a fire engine siren. And then you pushed me.”

  “I was very rude, and I’m sorry. Good grief, Ben, please stop being mad.”

  He picked up one of his rocks and inspected it carefully. “I guess I could.”

  “You could? Because I have something to tell you.” Batty waited—he seemed to be listening. “I have to figure out how to make money.”

  Ben wasn’t sure how he felt about this. If Batty started making money, he and Lydia would be the only non-earners in the family. This was not a way he wanted to be linked with Lydia.

  “Why? Are you going to help pay for the new car?”

  “No, I need money for music stuff.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask what kind of music stuff, but he was still thinking about the car.

  “Maybe you could pay for a tire.” Ben thought it would be fun to own one of the tires on the new car. He could paint his name on the side. BEN BEN BEN BEN, rolling around and around.

  “Not even for a tire.”

  “Oh. Well, how are you going to make money?”

  “I’ll have a business called Penderwick Willing to Work.”

  “But what kind of work?”

  This was the problem, she told him, figuring out what work an almost eleven-year-old could do. Batty wished she was learning work skills at school, instead of clouds and exponents. Fixing shoes, for example, might not be a bad job. And she wouldn’t have to talk to strangers, except when they brought her the shoes. Even then, she wouldn’t have to look at their faces—just their feet.

  But Ben, as she’d hoped, wanted to help, and Batty put the pen and paper to use. Across the top she wrote PWTW (Penderwick Willing to Work) and then two ideas that had come to her as she ran home. She was proud of them—Light Cleaning (Dusting, etc.) and Light Lawn Work (Weeding)—but knew they were only a weak beginning.

  “It’s going to be a neighborhood odd-jobs business,” she said, “and this is all I’ve got so far. I can’t do carpentry or plumbing. I’m not sure I even know how to weed. But I can’t have an entire business based on dusting.”

  “Nick and Tommy used to cut lawns,” said Ben. “When Nick comes home, he could teach you how.”

  “There’s no point, since I’m too young to use the lawn mower.” The family rule was that you had to be twelve. Less chance of losing toes that way.

  “Well, then, maybe when Tommy’s home for the summer, you could follow along behind him and pick up the grass he’s cut.” Ben pictured bonding with Tommy over hard labor, having long discussions about basketball and Nick. He could do it if Batty didn’t want to.

  “Tommy doesn’t even talk to us anymore, Ben. Not since he and Rosalind split up.”

  “Skye figures they’ll get back together.”

  “I hope so.” The whole family hoped so, except perhaps Rosalind. No one knew what she hoped. “But still, I need jobs that don’t involve Geigers.”

  “You could dig up rocks,” he said, then graciously added, “I could show you how.”

  “No one pays to have their rocks dug up.”

  “Batty, you said you wanted my ideas, so write down ‘Digging Up Rocks.’ And if anyone wants it done, I’ll do it.”
>
  “But this is my business!”

  “Write it down. Please.”

  Without enthusiasm, Batty wrote Digging Up Rocks.

  Encouraged by his success, Ben had another idea. “How about home security? I can watch Gardam Street out my window with those binoculars Skye gave me. They have night vision and everything.”

  “You’re asleep at night. And what about when you’re at school? Robbers can come during the day.”

  “Write it down anyway.”

  “No.” Digging up rocks was silly enough.

  Ben scowled at his rocks, thinking. “You could teach piano.”

  “I already rejected that. Anyone who would pay a fifth grader to teach them would be awful, and awful music hurts my brain. I thought of babysitting, but what if the Yees asked?”

  Batty and Ben both shivered at the idea of babysitting for the rambunctious Yee children, who lived on the cul-de-sac.

  “How about pet-sitting?” Ben suggested. “The DiGintas have fish.”

  Batty was pretty sure fish were even harder to keep alive than dogs. Keiko had kept fish for a while, including one she’d named Ryan, after that movie star she liked, but one of the other fish ate Ryan, then died itself, and Keiko had cried for a whole day.

  “No pet-sitting,” said Batty.

  “Washing windows?” Once last summer Ben had helped his mother wash the windows with the hose, and he hadn’t forgotten how much fun it had been to get wet and soapy.

  “I guess so.” Batty wrote down Washing Windows. “As long as they’re on the first floor, because we’re probably not allowed to climb high ladders.”

  They struggled on, but after another half hour had added only Companionship and Taking Out Trash. It was a decent first step, though, and Batty hoped that neighbors would come up with their own ideas for chores she could manage. But now she had to figure out how to tell her parents about PWTW. Since she’d run back from Quigley Woods, she’d focused only on how to make money. She hadn’t taken even a moment to wonder whether her parents would approve.

  “How do I get Dad and Mom to let me do this?” she asked Ben.