The Village by the Sea

by Paula Fox

“I’ll see you,” Bertie said.

  “See you …” replied Emma.

  Emma stood for several minutes on the porch. She hated the thought of finding Uncle Crispin smiling and chatting as if nothing had happened, and Aunt Bea drinking tea. She hated Aunt Bea.

  She heard no sound from inside. She walked softly into the foyer, closing the door carefully behind her as she had done that first day.

  When she went into the dining room, she saw Uncle Crispin in the kitchen, standing in front of the stove looking down at the burners. Nothing was cooking. He turned and looked at her. “Hello, Emma,” he said pensively. As if he’d read her mind, he added, “Bea won’t be down this morning. She’s not feeling well. She said to say good-bye to you.”

  Though he spoke quietly, Emma felt as though an iron door had been closed and bolted. She would never know what had gone on in their bedroom when Uncle Crispin returned, without the tea, with the news of Emma’s discovery. “Good-bye,” that was to be all.

  She guessed what would happen when her mother arrived. She would thank Uncle Crispin for taking care of her; she would ask politely after Aunt Bea. Her mother would be happy not to have to see her. What would it be like? To be a person people were happy not to see?

  Suddenly Emma knew that Uncle Crispin would be glad to see her go—not because he didn’t like her; she was pretty sure he did—but because he had his wife to take care of. They were all right, the two of them, as long as they were alone. When someone came, Bertie’s grandmother, or Emma herself, or anybody at all, it was like ripping open the nest of two creatures in hibernation.

  She remembered the hot coal Uncle Crispin had talked about. Was he safe from the heat of it? Burnt to a Crispin, she said to herself, thinking he would have liked that joke—at least, part of him would.

  She would have been happy now except for that lump of hatred that had lodged in her throat—something she couldn’t swallow. Her father had come through the operation; she was going home at any minute.

  It happened as she had imagined it would except for one thing. While her mother was putting her things in the back seat of the rented car, Uncle Crispin bent down and said softly in her ear, “I can’t say how sorry I am about your sweet village.” She couldn’t say how sorry she was either. She had not thought of the village as “sweet.” She didn’t like that description of it; it seemed to make the village less than she knew it to be.

  She shook his hand. He was not a person you could throw your arms around and hug. She said thanks for everything—she meant that—and good-bye. And it was over.

  Her mother gripped the steering wheel as they drove out from the sandy road, over a bump, to the main road.

  “How was it—in a word?” she asked Emma, turning to give her a quick smile.

  “Long,” replied Emma.

  “For me, too,” said her mother.

  When she had embraced Emma, Emma had felt her rib cage, the sharp bones of her wrists. She had lost weight and she was very pale.

  “I’m so relieved to get away from hospital smells,” she said. “Walking by those rooms every morning, seeing patients sitting up, looking stunned and weak and scared.”

  Emma knew her mother was telling her something she wouldn’t have told her father. “Daddy’s in good shape,” she went on. “Although getting completely well takes time. After you’ve been really sick, you have to think about doing the right thing all the time. It changes life.” She sighed. “I missed you so much. Tell me how it was. What did you do every day? Was it hard with Aunt Bea?”

  “Like Daddy said,” replied Emma.

  “You mean—a terror?” her mother asked.

  Emma didn’t reply. She had suddenly recalled Aunt Bea crying out that morning that her heart was broken.

  “Emma?” her mother questioned. “Well—all those days. I guess a lot happened, too much to tell all at once. I can’t help being curious about Bea. I’m sorry she and Daddy aren’t close. I always wanted a brother or a sister. But, of course, she was nearly twenty when he was born. It might have been tough even if she wasn’t always so—” she hesitated, searching for the right word—“so unhappy. Not that I really know her.… I’ve only seen her a few times over the years.”

  “But you knew Daddy’s mother?”

  “Yes, she was a merry, generous woman. Bea made her very glum though, Daddy told me. He said it was as if Bea carried a sign whenever she saw his mother, like someone on strike, saying: You are an interloper. And she never once put that sign down.”

  “I met a girl,” Emma said, not wanting to think about Aunt Bea for a while. She told her mother how she and Bertie had spent every day on the beach, collecting shells, finding their pictures in the guide to seashore life. She couldn’t bring herself to speak of the village yet. To even mention it was to see the torn starfish, the ruined houses, the crushed deer in the yellow circle of the flashlight.

  “There are oatmeal cookies in the glove compartment,” her mother said.

  Emma ate three of them. “I forgot to get any breakfast,” she explained.

  Her mother reached out her arm and pulled Emma to her side. “It can’t have been a picnic,” she said. “You didn’t complain when I called you up. That was such a help.”

  Emma felt uneasy. She was concealing not just the misery Aunt Bea had caused her, but the immense pleasure she and Bertie had had in the making of their village.

  But Emma was more sleepy than she was uneasy. The heat in the front seat of the car was like warm molasses. She knew she was sinking into it. Her mother said something. “Yes,” she said as alertly as she could, not knowing what she was answering. She didn’t wake up until her mother shook her gently. The car was idling in front of the apartment house. She was home.

  “You go in,” her mother said. “Daddy is waiting. I have to park this heap somewhere until I return it to the rental agency.”

  He stood with the door wide open. He was wearing a thin, short-sleeved blue shirt and his skin was rosy. He even looked a little plump. Emma walked in and set down her suitcase and shopping bag. She felt a strange shyness, as though she were meeting him for the first time, until he put his arms around her.

  “I’m much stronger,” he said. “The hospital itself makes a person a little sick but I’m all over that. Put your stuff away. I made you lunch. It’s chocolate pudding.”

  She laughed and he let her go.

  “Just chocolate pudding?” she asked.

  “Lots of it,” he said.

  She went to her room. When she woke up tomorrow she would hear city summer sounds outside her window. It would be getting hot pretty soon but she wouldn’t mind that too much. She wouldn’t ever have to wake up in the silence of the big log house, figuring out how to avoid Aunt Bea.

  In the kitchen, she sat down at the small round table where they ate most of their meals unless there was company, when her mother would set up two card tables in the living room for the guests.

  Her father had put toasted peanut butter sandwiches in a straw basket. There was a big bowl of chocolate pudding.

  “Mom’s parking?” he asked, watching her eat.

  She nodded. There didn’t seem to be a lot to say—not yet anyhow. She wondered what those two were doing now out on Peconic Bay? There would be the steaming teapot, and Uncle Crispin sifting through his music if he had a lesson today. Aunt Bea might lay out a hand of solitaire. Maybe she wouldn’t slap the cards down on the table without Emma around. Maybe she wouldn’t think so much about all the wrongs that had been done to her without Emma to remind her of all the old ghosts, the big trunk in the closed room upstairs. Would she think about the village? How she had kicked it away?

  “You’re thinking so hard,” her father observed.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at him, smiling. He didn’t ask her what she was thinking about. But she could feel that he was waiting.

  “Will you get your diary? While we wait for Mom, you can read me what you want to from it.”

  “
I’m sure I didn’t write anything except the first day,” she said. She couldn’t recall what she had written.

  “We can start with that,” he said. “Then you can just tell me.”

  She got up and went to her room and took the diary from the bag. There was so little in it, it was easy to find what she’d written.

  I’m here, it said. Uncle Crispin is really nice. The bay and the beach are great. Aunt Bea is—

  Something had been added where she had left off. It wasn’t in her handwriting. The letters were big and plump and round. “Aunt Bea is—” she read aloud, “a sad bad old woman.”

  She put down the diary on the table. Only a few hours ago, when Emma had gone downstairs in the big log house, she remembered she had heard the sound of those white moccasins whispering across the floor. Aunt Bea had gone into her room, had written those words about herself in the diary.

  The lump she had felt inside ever since she had told herself she hated Aunt Bea dissolved all at once. She breathed deeply. It felt like the first real breath she had taken in days; it was like what her father had described to her, “drawing up a pail of fresh cold water from a well.”

  Aunt Bea would have looked in her diary. It was just like her. But what she had written for Emma to see was not like her, not as Emma had known her. It wasn’t an apology. It was, Emma felt, something deeper, a secret about herself.

  She would keep it a secret, Emma knew, all of it. She picked up the diary. It was as though she was holding Aunt Bea in her hand, and she had grown as light as the piece of balsa wood Bertie had found that said: Lodgings. She took the diary and put it on a shelf in her closet.

  When she walked back into the kitchen, her father smiled up at her expectantly.

  “I hardly wrote a word,” she said. “But I’ll tell you about it.”

  She sat down. “We built a village, my friend Bertie and I,” she began.

  About the Author

  Paula Fox is a notable figure in contemporary American literature. She has earned wide acclaim for her children’s books, as well as for her novels and memoirs for adults. Born in New York City on April 22, 1923, her early years were turbulent. She moved from upstate New York to Cuba to California, and from one school to another. An avid reader at a young age, her love of literature sustained her through the difficulties of an unsettled childhood. At first, Fox taught high school, writing only when occasion permitted. Soon, however, she was able to devote herself to writing full-time, but kept a foot in the classroom by teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the State University of New York.

  In her novels for young readers, Fox fearlessly tackles difficult topics such as death, race, and illness. She has received many distinguished literary awards including a Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer (1974), a National Book Award for A Place Apart (1983), and a Newbery Honor for One-Eyed Cat (1984). Worldwide recognition for Fox’s contribution to literature for children came with the presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.

  Fox’s novels for adults have also been highly praised. Her 2002 memoir, Borrowed Finery, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and in 2013 the Paris Review presented her with the Hadada Award, honoring her contribution to literature and the writing community. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

  Fox lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Martin Greenberg.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1988 by Paula Fox

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3745-7

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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