Aunt Elena must have said those same words once before to Hal, and death had parted them. My own hands were very cold, and I wondered if her hand, holding Uncle Douglas’s, was cold, too, and what she was thinking. But she looked at him with love and trust and her voice never trembled and I realized all of a sudden that she probably felt all the wonderful things I felt about Uncle Douglas, and a few more besides.
Then the wedding was over. Uncle Douglas kissed Aunt Elena and it seemed everybody was kissing everybody else. Commander Rodney’s oldest son, Leo, who’s a slob, kissed me, and I had to get into the car to go back to the stable before I could wipe it off.
Back at the stable everybody spilled in and out of the house, on the porch, on the grass, and now at least I did help, serving punch, passing sandwiches, with Leo at my heels saying, “Let me take this, Vicky,” “I’ll do that,” until I wanted to shove him over the cliff. Why couldn’t he be more like his father?
Suzy and Maggy were dancing around, getting in everybody’s way, but so happy and pretty nobody minded. Aunt Elena glowed and Uncle Douglas beamed and Daddy started pouring champagne and everybody was eating and laughing and talking and then I felt a hand at my elbow and it was Uncle Douglas. He said softly in my ear, “We’re going to slip away now, Vic. Tell Maggy we’ll see her tomorrow. And we’ll see you in California in a month. No, love, don’t kiss me, I don’t want anybody to know we’re going. I’ll give you a big kiss by the Pacific ocean instead of the Atlantic. Okay?” And he was off around a corner of the stable.
Two
That night the four of us and Maggy went down to the beach for a cook-out. We’d helped get the stable all cleaned up after the reception, and Mother and Daddy and Grandfather said they were too full of lobster salad, and stuff to feel like eating, so we left them sitting out on the screened porch talking.
We had a picnic basket full of hamburgers and hot dogs and sodas and some charcoal to add to the driftwood. It would be our last night with Maggy as part of the family. The next day some friends of Grandfather’s were going to drive her down to New York where she was to meet Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and fly out with them to California.
Now right in the midst of sounding all sentimental I must admit that life with Maggy wasn’t always easy. In fact there were times when we could cheerfully have wrung her neck. But you get used to somebody in two years, and even her faults were familiar and comforting and part of the quiet, secure life in Thornhill. I sat on my rock and turned away from the sea, and looked at Maggy with the rosy glow of sunset behind her, and wished she weren’t going to fly out to California the next day, but that we were all going to drive back to Thornhill. I didn’t feel like talking, and it seemed that nobody else did, either, not even Maggy. Usually she never stops talking; it doesn’t matter whether she has anything to say or not, it’s just yak, yak, yak, right in the middle of homework or somebody else’s conversation at the dinner table.
But Maggy stood there, barefooted in the soft sand, shifting her weight from one foot to the other in a rhythmic sort of way, just as quiet as the rest of us. Rob went off to the hard sand at the water’s edge to dodge the little waves and collect shells. John built the fire, and after a while Suzy said, “Well!” very brightly, but that was as far as she got.
I don’t mean to give the impression that, except for Maggy, we’re usually a quiet family. We’re anything but, and Rob must have felt that there was something funny about our silence, because he turned away from the water, dropped his shells, came over to my rock and leaned against me.
John looked up from where he was crouched beside the fire, feeding it little bites of driftwood, and said, “We’d better decide who wants hot dogs and who wants hamburgers because we haven’t got too much time.”
Everybody began talking about food, and things were better. That’s something I’ve noticed about food: whenever there’s a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.
John had hot dogs cooked black; Suzy had hot dogs medium; I had hamburger rare (“I’ve seen cows hurt worse than that and get better,” John remarked for the several-hundredth time); Maggy had a hamburger cooked until it might have been a piece of old shoe; and Rob had a hot dog roll with three toasted marshmallows for filling. With the food, tongues loosened and we began to jabber about the wedding, Maggy began to brag about living in California, and Rob fell asleep. As the last light drained from the sky the fire seemed to grow brighter, and then we saw the beam from Grandfather’s big flashlight as he stood up at the head of the bluff waving it down at us. We called up that we’d be right along; John put the fire out; we cleaned up our stuff and staggered up the path. Suddenly we were all very tired, and John and I half had to carry Rob, who couldn’t seem to wake up.
When we got back to the stable Mother went up to the loft with the little ones. John and I went out to sit on the screened porch for a few minutes with Daddy and Grandfather. There was no light on the porch itself, but lights shone through from the kitchen windows, and moths of all sizes batted against the screens, trying to get in. The great beam from the light house swung around, once every minute, bathing us all in its brilliance. John was sitting on the old couch next to Grandfather, and suddenly, in the sweep of light, I had the funniest feeling that he didn’t seem to be my own brother, familiar as an old shoe, someone I fought with frequently, but who could be depended on always to be there when I needed him. To help me with my math homework, for instance: John’s a whizz at math and it’s always been a struggle for me. Or at high school dances: if I needed him John was always there to see that I had plenty of partners and didn’t get stuck, or have to spend long minutes in the girls’ room taking off and putting on lipstick to kill time before going out to the dance floor again.
Grandfather must have been thinking about John, too, because he turned to him and said, “What with all the festivities for Elena and Doug I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you. We’re all very proud of you, son.”
John gets terribly embarrassed when anybody praises him, and, since he’s an outstanding kind of person, that happens far oftener than he’d like. As the lighthouse beam swept across his face I could see that he was blushing. “I’m scared stiff,” he said. “Do you think I’ll do all right?”
John’s the first boy from our regional high school to be accepted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a matter of fact his acceptance came through early and that was one reason the principal of our school made all kinds of exceptions and gave him his diploma ahead of time with a special little ceremony at Assembly, so he could be best man for Uncle Douglas and not miss any of our trip. We were all getting out of school several weeks early, but John was the one it made the most difference to, because he would have been Valedictorian of his class, and graduation week is something you really don’t want to miss. As for me, I was glad not to be getting this final report card, because it had been much my worst year. I’ve always done well at school, but this year I’d study hard for a test, and get a D, a mark I’d never turned up with before; and then I wouldn’t study for another test at all and get an A, and none of it made very much sense.
Mother came out onto the porch just then. Rob, she told us, was asleep before he got into bed. Suzy, who has always had the ability to get right to sleep whenever she feels like it, had hardly waited to say good-night. Maggy, ever since her thirteenth birthday, has felt that she should go to bed at least as late as John does, and she was furious at still having to go up with Suzy, and was lying there in the dark glowering.
“But she has a big day ahead of her tomorrow,” Mother said. “She’d better get some rest.”
John stretched luxuriously. “As for us, we can lounge around on the beach all day.”
Daddy, who was sprawled on an old wicker chaise lounge, grunted, “Aside from the time you’ll spend helping me get the station wagon ready.”
Mother shoved Daddy over and sat by him, then turned to me. “What got into you this morning, Vicky? W
hy did you run off when I needed you?”
I looked at the screen door, where a moth was clinging, his wings momentarily flattened against the criss-cross pattern of the wires. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to go down to the beach for a while to think. I didn’t mean to stay so long.”
I expected Mother or Daddy to let me have it then, but all Mother said was, “I guess we all feel the need to go off and sort things out, Vicky. This is a pretty big step for all of us. For Daddy and me, too, you know. Next time you want to disappear for a while check with me first, will you?”
I was grateful not to be getting a bawling out. Here I was going around moping and if I sat down to think about it I’d probably have to admit that it was harder on Mother than anybody, and she wasn’t making any kind of fuss at all. From the way she behaved on the outside you’d have thought that moving from our own house, that stood on its hill about a mile outside a small New England village, to an apartment right in the middle of New York City was no more important than a trip to the Island.
Well, it was a lot more important than that. None of us could remember living anywhere except Thornhill, or having Daddy be anything but a busy, always overworked country doctor. We knew he’d spent what few spare moments he had in research, and that he’d kept in close touch with his old professors and colleagues at medical school, but when he came back from a meeting in New York and told us that he’d accepted a post teaching and doing research at his old school we all flipped. Well, we flipped if it can mean just plain shock and doesn’t mean we were wild with joy. We weren’t. At first we weren’t anything but stunned. We didn’t even realize all at once that it meant leaving Thornhill, that it meant moving to New York. But Thornhill’s over a hundred miles from New York. Daddy couldn’t very well commute.
Funnily enough it was Rob who was the first to catch on to what it really meant. He got terribly upset, the way he sometimes does, and burst into tears and said that he wouldn’t move to New York, that Daddy couldn’t leave Thornhill, and then he got very white and suddenly looked very grown up and not at all the baby we always thought him, and said, “You’re not going to sell the house! Daddy, you can’t sell the house!”
“No,” Daddy said. “We hope we won’t ever have to sell the house, Rob. We’re renting it for the next year to the doctor who’s taking over my office. He and his wife are people you’ll all like, they’ve got a darling baby, and they’ll take care of the animals for us.”
“The animals!” Rob got positively green with dismay. “Aren’t they coming with us?” He put his arms around Rochester’s neck. Rochester’s rear end wriggled with affection; then, as Rob’s grip tightened with intensity Rochester gave him a big slobbery kiss of friendship and apology and pulled away so abruptly that Rob sat down hard on the floor.
Daddy laughed and said, “We can’t very well take the animals on a camping trip, Rob.”
We all went into a state of shock again. “CAMPING TRIP!”
Now Mother and Daddy were both laughing, and Daddy said, “We thought it might soften the blow if we bought a tent and sleeping bags and took a trip out to California to see Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and Maggy. It’ll be a break between our two lives. Once I really get going in New York I’m not going to be doing much vacationing for a while.”
This was easy to believe. Daddy never was able to do much vacationing. And the idea of going all over the United States was fabulous because we’d never done much traveling. To the Island to visit Grandfather. A trip to Washington, D.C., last spring vacation. That was pretty much it. John and I liked the idea of travel, and Suzy was thrilled with the thought of all the new insects and animals she’d see. Suzy has wanted to be a doctor ever since she could talk, but sometimes I think she’d much better be a veterinarian.
Rob went off and came back clutching Elephant’s Child, his filthy and favorite stuffed animal. Elephant’s Child has a music box that plays Brahms’ Lullaby and Rob has had him since he was a baby and even starting school couldn’t change his feelings about Elephant’s Child. John says Rob will probably take Elephant’s Child off to college with him and play Brahms’ Lullaby in the dormitory at night. And Rob, being Rob, probably will, and be so matter of fact about it that nobody will even laugh.
“Yes, Rob,” Daddy said, “you may take Elephant’s Child.”
Aside from being pleased about new bugs and things on the camping trip Suzy didn’t say very much, but you could tell that she was thinking and sorting things out in her own mind the way she does, and the next night when I’d gone to bed early to study for a Social Studies test the next day, one of those stupid, multiple choice things, she came in wearing her polka dot pajamas and plunked herself down on the foot of my bed.
“Maggy’s asleep,” she said morosely.
I kept on reading. “Oh. That’s good.”
“Vicky,” Suzy said passionately, “what does he want to do it for?”
“Who?” I asked stupidly. “What?”
She punched at my book. “Daddy. Why does he want to go to New York?”
“You know,” I said. “He explained it all. He’s gone as far as he can with his research here, and if he really wants to go back to New York and be with a big hospital again—”
“The hospital here’s one of the best in the country!” Suzy defended.
“Yes, but it’s a little hospital, Suzy, and it doesn’t have a medical school or a nursing school—oh, you want to be a doctor, you ought to understand, you of all people—”
“We’ve been perfectly happy here,” Suzzy said. “Daddy, too.”
“I know, but I just explained, and his practice is getting so big and he’s so busy and you know he’s been saying for years he doesn’t have enough time for study and research.”
“We’ll have to leave all our friends—and go to new schools—”
It was all perfectly true, and I argued to convince myself as much as Suzy. “Well, maybe it’s like John. John’s learned everything he can at Regional and next year he’s going on to M.I.T. Maybe that’s how it is with Daddy. He’s gone as far as he can here and he has to take the next step.”
“At least John’s not dragging the rest of us with him,” Suzy said. “I think it might have occurred to Daddy that we might be involved in this, too.”
We were all certainly involved in it; it was probably the most involved spring we ever had, with Daddy and John poring over the Montgomery Ward catalogue and brooding over various tents and sleeping bags and air mattresses, and Mother being demanding about cooking equipment, and Aunt Elena coming up to Thornhill with designs for her wedding dress and Suzy’s and Maggy’s handmaiden dresses, and Uncle Douglas deciding to paint another portrait of Mother before moving out to California, and Daddy finishing up a million things at home and at the office and the hospital.
So it was no wonder, now that Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena were safely married, we sat out on Grandfather’s screened porch and felt that we couldn’t possibly move an inch, even to go to bed. And maybe that was why Mother didn’t blast me for disappearing in the morning before the wedding.
I thought it would be nice if I did something to make up for it, so I said, “If anybody feels like lemonade or coffee or tea or anything before bed I’ll make it.”
Mother leaned against Daddy and yawned. “Thanks, Vicky, but let’s all just go to bed. Come on, Wally.”
Daddy yawned, too. “Come on yourself.”
“Father can’t go to bed until we get off the porch,” Mother said. “Come on, Wallace. I’m so tired I’m like a piece of cooked spaghetti. Give me a shove.”
Daddy gave her a shove and she slid off the chaise longue and onto the floor, and then we were all laughing, and John pulled her up. We kissed Grandfather good-night, Mother and Daddy went to sleep in Grandfather’s big double bed, John and I went on up to the loft, and for some reason just being silly out there on the porch had made me feel better. Even if everything around us was different from now on, where we lived and school and
everything, as long as Mother and Daddy were the same, as long as the family didn’t change, then there was still something to hang on to.
Three
The next day we saw Maggy off and then lazed around on the beach. In the afternoon Daddy and John got the car ready and practiced setting up the tent on the small patch of lawn in front of the stable, while Mother, Suzy, Rob, and I stood around criticizing. John got mad, and Rob thought he really meant it and went and flung his arms around him to comfort him, which slowed things down. But the tent was really quite easy to manage. It hangs from tubular aluminum poles that fit together, so that there isn’t any pole in the middle of the tent at all. The back of the tent lifts up and hitches over the end of the station wagon with the tail gate down. Mother, Daddy, Rob, and John were to sleep in the tent, and Suzy and I in the back of the station wagon, and we’d all be under one roof.
The next morning we got up at five o’clock and put the last things in the car. It was a soft morning, with the light a kind of fuzzy, golden-pink, the sort of hazy early morning that always brightens up and clears into a beautiful day. We hugged and kissed Grandfather good-bye and got into the car. Suzy and I wore Bermuda’s and knee socks and sweaters, and John and Rob and Daddy wore jeans. Daddy doesn’t like women in pants and Mother never wears them, but she looked comfortable and all ready for the trip in a plaid skirt and white blouse and red cardigan.
The Moon by Night Page 2