by Paula Fox
“How do you spell sheets?” she demanded.
Emma started to answer but caught herself in time, drowning the s-h in a swallow of milk. Uncle Crispin spelled out the word. “No, no,” Aunt Bea protested impatiently. “I meant bed sheets not sheets of paper.”
“They’re spelled the same way,” Uncle Crispin said. She filled in some squares. “And was Orestes Ophelia’s brother?” She looked up at her husband and waved the pen at him as though she were about to throw it.
“Laertes was her brother,” Uncle Crispin answered calmly as he poured hot water into the teapot.
“Well, spell it, for heaven’s sake,” Aunt Bea ordered him.
He spelled it very slowly.
Emma thought of two boys in her class who asked the homeroom teacher questions in the same commanding way, as though to test her knowledge. They were no more embarrassed than Aunt Bea seemed to be by their own ignorance.
She dropped the silver pen on the table. “Pastime for idiots,” she said. “Why do I bother.…”
She began to stare fixedly at something over Emma’s shoulder. Emma couldn’t help turning around to see what it was.
In deep shadow near the bookcase hung a large poster of a painting she hadn’t noticed until then. It was of a vast cliff towering over the sea under a sky full of thin white clouds. An arm of stone that bent in the middle like a great elbow stuck out of the cliff and dropped into the water. Just beyond rose a stone tower.
“What do you think of that?” Aunt Bea asked Emma softly.
“The cliff is so high,” Emma began, “that it looks—” she hesitated, then said questioningly, “alarming?”
“Good!” exclaimed Aunt Bea. Emma didn’t feel praised. There was something in the way Aunt Bea had said that word that suggested she was a dunce who had said the right thing—for once.
“What else?” asked her aunt briskly. It was like a test at school.
“There’s a little boat,” Emma said. “I can’t see how many people are in it. It looks like a toy next to that cliff.”
Aunt Bea nodded. “The silliness of human beings next to the force of nature,” she said as if to herself. “Life is a laugh.” She wasn’t laughing. When she went on, her voice rang out as though she were on a stage. “That happens to be a reproduction of a painting by Claude Monet—The Cliffs at Étretat. No one can paint like that anymore. It’s all a sham these days, the painters are all fakes.”
“They paint differently now, Bea,” said Uncle Crispin. “There are fine painters today, too.” Although he had contradicted her, his voice was agreeable, friendly. Was he running her aunt like a little circus, as her father had said?
“There you go—being reasonable, fair!” Aunt Bea said, and she laughed loudly, looking all around the room as though many people hidden from Emma’s and Uncle Crispin’s view were silently laughing with her. Uncle Crispin smiled as he went into the living room. Maybe, Emma thought, his being reasonable was an old joke between them. Aunt Bea was looking at her.
“I assume you brought the watercolors I gave you,” she said. “This is the place to use them.”
Emma had not used the watercolors even once. Her voice faltering, she answered, “I didn’t bring them. I’m not much good in art class. I sort of like to draw, though.”
On Aunt Bea’s face, Emma recognized her big doll’s expression, her eyes enormous and unblinking. “The child in the neighboring house along this cliff has a blazing talent,” she said. “Absolutely blazing.”
She couldn’t think of what to say to that. But Uncle Crispin returned from the living room, his hands filled with glasses and cups, and saved her from having to answer. Aunt Bea was still staring at her as though waiting. “I’m going to take Emma for a walk on the beach,” he said.
Aunt Bea opened her mouth in a noisy yawn and sank back in her chair. She heaved herself forward, poured tea, plucked for a moment at her fingers, and once more picked up the silver pen. Without a glance at the definitions, she filled in all the remaining spaces of the crossword puzzle.
Emma took her glass and plate into the kitchen. To be out of sight of her aunt, even a few feet away, was a relief. Uncle Crispin was rinsing cups in the sink. He glanced at her briefly. “You would like a walk, wouldn’t you?” he asked in a low voice. She nodded. He lined up the dripping cups on the counter. “Aren’t they pretty?” he commented. “So many ordinary things are pretty, so nice. You have only to look at them.”
Emma looked at him, not at the cups. She felt a rush of affection for him. She didn’t know if he was ordinary, but he was certainly nice.
Aunt Bea paid no attention to them as they went past her to the screen door. Once out of the house, Emma felt free for the first time since she had awakened that morning in her own bed.
She ran ahead of Uncle Crispin and, holding on to the narrow splintery handrail, went down the tottery stairs to the beach and jumped into the sand. She raced to the water which curled against the shore in waves not much larger than Emma’s fists. There was so much to look at—pebbles and shells, seaweed, worn bits of glass and driftwood.
She waited for Uncle Crispin, who picked his way across the sand like a cat. “I hate sand in my shoes,” he said as he joined her at the water’s edge. For a while they walked along on the firmer sand. Now and then he would point out something to her: a house whose shingled roof she could see—it was so close to the cliff edge—where a girl her own age, he thought, spent the summers with her grandmother. Emma wondered if the girl was the one with the blazing talent. Then a tall run-down looking house where, he told her, two ancient sisters lived with an elderly gardener who cooked their meals and did their shopping. It was rumored they had a little roulette wheel, and every night the three of them gambled until dawn.
They sat down on a damp log that had washed up on the shore. Uncle Crispin explained that a small Coast Guard cutter flying across the water was probably on a rescue mission. “Someone has got into trouble, no doubt,” he said. People often came out from the city and rented sailboats without knowing the least thing about sailing.
“Look how the water changes,” he went on. “Its color tells you what time of day it is.”
Emma realized the water was a deeper blue than when she had first looked at the bay. A faint rosy blush touched the distant shores of the islands on the horizon.
“I can’t always come down to the beach with you,” he went on. “I give private violin lessons in the summer. But you can wade in the water and play on the beach.”
“When we go to the country, I go out a lot by myself,” she said.
He looked at her curiously a moment. “I said play on the beach—but I don’t know how children play. I think my childhood was very serious. I can recall reading and the rooms where I read. I suppose I must have played, too. I never cared for sports.”
Grown-ups had been telling Emma to go and play all her life. She hadn’t thought about what it meant until this moment. You played games, of course, but there was something else the word “play” didn’t seem to fit.
“You make up things,” she said, “and part of it is like a kind of dream. You don’t know what time it is. When you pretend you’re somebody else, or you dress up a stuffed animal in baby clothes, you’re really thinking in a way that’s hard to explain.”
“I remember thinking a lot,” Uncle Crispin said, “but I don’t believe the adults around me suspected it.”
Emma grinned. “My math teacher told me I don’t think at all,” she said.
“Math is different from what we’re talking about. Music is a special way of thinking, too. What we’re talking about is imagining.”
While they spoke, Emma drew a circle in the sand with a stick. She chose two pebbles for eyes and a piece of dried seaweed for a mouth and placed them inside the circle. “That’s my math teacher,” she said. Uncle Crispin laughed. “A startling resemblance, I’m sure,” he said. “I guess we’d best go back. I hope you like roast chicken. I’m not bad at that.”
They had walked a good distance from the stairs, Emma realized. She had been happy for a while. Every step that brought them closer to the big log house pressed the happiness further into the sand. It was like walking to the place where you would get bad news.
“Your Aunt Bea is a smashing cook,” Uncle Crispin said. “The trouble is she puts too much effort into it and wears herself out. She won’t settle for ordinary cooking. I’m sure she will do you a fine dinner before you go home. Then you’ll see.…”
What she saw was the way Uncle Crispin’s forehead wrinkled when he spoke of his wife.
They reached the stairs. Emma started up very slowly. Uncle Crispin put his hand on her shoulder. It was a light touch. But then, everything he did was light and quick. He was like a grasshopper hiding in tall grass, suddenly leaping into sight for a brief moment, she thought.
“Philip is young,” he told her. “That is the great thing. Youth and strength make a great difference.”
She realized she hadn’t given a thought to her father for the last hour or so. How could you forget someone in trouble for even a moment if that someone was one of the two most important people in your life? Yet she had.
Perhaps she was as gross as Jay Withers, a boy in her homeroom whose glittering black eyes widened with laughter when he knocked into a kid in the school corridor and made her drop her books, or yapped at stray, frightened dogs when the class was taken to the park during a recreation period. Thinking about Jay gave her a strange kind of comfort as she looked at the porch, the dining room windows behind which sat Aunt Bea. Jay was back in the city where her home was.
4
Night Voices
A ray of sunlight slid under the drawn shade of a dining room window and touched the bottom of the poster of Monet’s cliff with a burst of glimmering brightness. Aunt Bea must have moved during their absence, for she had changed her clothes. She was wearing a long beige linen skirt and the thick cotton sweater Emma had seen on the couch in the living room.
The skirt was wrinkled and the sweater was full of holes, but she looked what Emma was sure her mother would call dashing. It was a puzzling thought. The last thing Aunt Bea was likely to do was to dash off anywhere. She was winding a ball of wool from a skein on the table. The teapot was steaming. There must be rivers and brooks and still ponds of tea throughout Aunt Bea’s body, thought Emma.
“Here’s some divine blackberry jam I made last autumn,” Aunt Bea said, nodding toward a glass jar. “If you want to make yourself some toast …”
“What a treat,” Uncle Crispin said and went to the kitchen. Shortly he brought back a plate of toast. Aunt Bea wound the wool steadily, her head bent over her hands. Emma stood on the other side of the table from her, not sure whether she should pull out a chair and sit down or what she should do.
That was part of Aunt Bea’s being a terror. She forced Emma to think about every single movement she made. Uncle Crispin spread a piece of toast with jam and held it out to Emma. She took it, then before she could stop herself, she asked, “Do you know the joke about where the six-hundred pound gorilla sits down?” Uncle Crispin smiled encouragingly. Aunt Bea bent further over the wool.
“Where does he sit down?” asked Uncle Crispin.
“Wherever he wants to,” Emma said. She and Uncle Crispin laughed. Aunt Bea broke off the yarn and looked up unsmiling, straight at Emma.
“When young people have heart trouble, it’s more serious for them than for old people,” she said flatly. Emma felt as if she had been suddenly slapped hard on the back and had all the air knocked out of her.
“You ought not to say that, Bea,” Uncle Crispin said, the laughter gone from his face. He looked stern and distant. Emma stole a glance at Aunt Bea. She had begun winding another ball of yarn. Her face was as blank as a sheet of paper.
“The operation is supposed to make him well,” Emma said. Her voice sounded very small in the silent room.
“And it will,” Uncle Crispin said firmly.
“One hopes so,” murmured Aunt Bea. “Do eat your toast, Emma.”
“I must put the chicken in the oven,” Uncle Crispin said, going back to the kitchen.
Emma bit into the toast. The jam really was divine. She started to say so, but words of praise wouldn’t come to her lips. Instead, she said she wanted to go to her room and work on a puzzle. Aunt Bea looked up at the Monet poster, her hands still. She wants me to look at it, Emma thought, and I won’t. She felt thorny and sad. She finished up the toast quickly. She knew she would end up hating that poster.
Once in her room, she closed the door and went to the table where she opened the pad of newsprint. With a blue crayon, she drew a calendar for the days she was to be away from home. It filled an entire page. She had held the crayon so tightly that her hands were streaked with blue wax. She lay down on the bed and read The Secret Garden for a while but found she couldn’t concentrate. At last she gave up trying and went down the hall to the bathroom.
Aunt Bea must have taken a bath before she’d changed her clothes. There was still steam on the medicine chest mirror. Hanging from a hook on the door were four or five bedraggled cotton bathrobes. Two damp towels lay on the floor. Dozens of small jars of creams stood on the windowsill, their lids scattered amidst them. There were balls of dust everywhere. Peering at a large one beneath the sink, she saw a flash of white at its center. She knelt and plucked it out. It was a plastic deer not longer than an inch. A string was tied through a loop between its tiny antlers. Emma looked at it curiously, then put it in her pocket. She found a yellow towel she guessed was hers bunched up in a corner near the tub.
The hall was utterly silent. She pretended for a moment that Aunt Bea and Uncle Crispin had gone away. She would be able to manage by herself—though maybe it would be spooky at night. Her mother had given her ten dollars in case she needed something. There was probably a store not far away where she could buy a few groceries. She began to love the idea, and the pleasure of it set her running down the hall to the narrow window. But the thump of her own feet on the floor broke into her dream. Uncle Crispin, she knew, would not leave her alone. She wasn’t so sure about Aunt Bea.
Looking out over the tops of the pine trees, she spotted the roof of a house, the place where the girl and her grandmother spent the summer, a two- or three-minute walk through the little wood, she guessed. A phone rang from below. A moment or two later, Uncle Crispin called up from the living room, “Emma, it’s for you.”
The phone sat on the end of the long table next to a closed violin case. Uncle Crispin, wearing a blue canvas apron, held out the receiver to Emma. She took it eagerly, noticing at the same time how gently his other hand rested on the case. For an instant, it seemed to her he was petting it as if it were a beloved creature. “Your mother,” he whispered.
“Oh, Mom!” Emma breathed.
“Daddy is settled in,” her mother told her. “He has a lovely nurse named Lucy Biggs and his window looks out on the East River.”
Emma’s eyes filled with tears. She could not speak.
“Emma?” Her mother’s voice was alarmed. “Uncle Crispin says you’ve settled in, too—that you had a walk on the beach with him.…”
“I’m okay,” Emma managed to say. She could see Aunt Bea’s back, her moving elbows.
“You don’t sound okay,” her mother said.
Uncle Crispin had gone back to the dining room. Emma pressed the phone against her mouth. “Is it true what Aunt Bea said?” she said, almost whispering. “That when you’re young, heart trouble is more serious?”
“The same old Bea,” her mother said grimly. “Listen, Emma. Heart trouble is always serious. But everything is looking hopeful for your father. I want you to be hopeful, too.” She was speaking slowly, trying to be patient. Emma longed for the weight of her mother’s arm around her shoulders, the way she would run one finger across her forehead and around her face as though she were tracing it.
“I’ll be hopeful,” Emma
said, wondering how you could feel hope when fear, like a thick fog, hid everything but itself. “Are you going to call me tomorrow?” she asked.
“Of course I am,” her mother said. “I’m going to call you all the time.” Emma pressed the receiver closer to her ear. “But Uncle Crispin—he is nice, isn’t he?” her mother said. “A patient, kind person.”
“Yes … he’s cooking our supper right now,” Emma answered.
“I have to go back to Daddy, Emma.”
Emma thought she could actually hear the miles between them as though each one of them was a small bell, sixty-five of them all striking, the sounds growing ever fainter. Her mother was only half there on the other end of the wire; the rest of her was walking back down the hospital corridor to her father.
“When will you call?” asked Emma.
“As soon as I can,” said her mother. Then the phone went silent; her mother was entirely gone.
She went to the window that looked out on the bay. The water was as red as blood in the sunset. The far islands bloomed like blood-red roses. She turned away to the dining room. Aunt Bea was playing a hand of solitaire. Her fingers tapped the back of each card before she put it down. Tap, tap, tap, her fingers clicked like fast heartbeats.
“Supper,” announced Uncle Crispin. Emma went in. The table reminded her of something she’d read in a story long ago. There were balls of wool, playing cards laid out for solitaire, the brown teapot, empty cups, the newspaper with the filled-in crossword puzzle, Aunt Bea’s silver pen, and three plates and flatware. She remembered. It was a bit like the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland. Aunt Bea looked as sleepy as the dormouse but her hands were moving, touching the plate in front of her, the pen, the wool, with restless fingers.
The roast chicken and baked yams were good. Uncle Crispin told Emma about one of his students, an elderly woman whose arthritis had nearly disappeared because of the exertion of playing the violin.
“What the violin requires is talent,” Aunt Bea interrupted shrilly.