The Four-Story Mistake (14 page)

“Mona Melendy, the Princess of the Pancreas,” said Rush. But the voice was continuing.

“This afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, we present another chapter in the lives of the fascinating Penfold family. Added to today's performance is a surprise in the form of a new little lady who is to play the part of Polly Penfold, fourteen-year-old sister of Diana, Bob, and Jimmy. She is little Miss Mona Melendy, blonde, blue-eyed, pretty as a picture. I just wish you could see her, ladies and gentlemen; I know you would give her a great big hand. And now,
THE PENFOLD PEOPLE
!”

“Boy, she'll never be the same again,” said Rush, but Cuffy sh-h-h-ed him indignantly, and the play began. There was a lot of talk at first between some young lady and a man who seemed to want to marry her.

“Sister Diana and a swain, I guess,” said Rush sourly. “All this love stuff gives me a pain.”

“Oh, Barry. I—I just
wish
you'd stop talking about it,” pleaded the young woman tearfully. “You know there's no one else to take care of them now that Daddy's gone away. They need me so.”

“Now, Diana [It was Mona's voice], you know that's all nonsense. We can look after ourselves perfectly well.”

“Polly! You've been eavesdropping! Where were you?”

“Oh, I was just sitting under the piano sort of thinking.”

And so it went; a whole half hour of it.

“Gee, she sounded swell,” Rush pronounced at the end. “It's a pretty hammy program, I'd say, but she's good. I just hope she doesn't get stuck up, that's all.”

“She won't. Mona's wonderful!” said Randy fervently.

Cuffy was so overcome that they actually caught her in the act of mopping her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Why,
Cuffy!
” cried Randy. I never knew you were so sentimental.”

The days went by. Mona's broadcast became an accepted part of the routine of their lives. Her picture appeared in newspapers every now and then, and after a week or two she even began getting fan letters! Randy and Rush (especially Rush) watched her like hawks for the first sign of temperament. But apparently there was no temperament. Mona was blissfully happy and kept her word to Father: she darned Rush's socks, ate spinach, went out for basketball, and performed with grace all the duties which were loathsome to her.

On the contrary, toward the end of January, it was Rush who seemed to be indulging in fits of temperament. After school he lurked about indoors and snapped at anyone who suggested going out. When his music went wrong, he crashed his fists down on the keys and slammed the piano lid shut. He wouldn't eat enough, and spent useless hours lying on the floor listening to the radio.

“Come on out, Rush,” begged Randy one day after school. “It's a wonderful day and Isaac needs a good run; he's getting as fat as a pig.”

“I don't feel like it,” replied Rush ungraciously.

“Ah, please! Mona's still at school, making up for Tuesday, and Oliver's got to stay in on account of his cold. I don't feel like playing all alone.”

“So what? I don't feel like going out.”

“I wish you would. We could go for a ride on our bikes. And you ought to: you look like a potato sprout from moping indoors all the time.”

Rush turned on her furiously. “Will you please, for Pete's sake, get out of here and mind your own business? If I want to mope, I'll mope, and neither you nor anybody else can do a thing about it. This is one country that's still free.”

“What's the matter with you, Rush?” Randy was almost in tears. “For two weeks now you've been just as cross as a bear. You snap at everybody all the time. Gee whiz, you never used to be like that; I mean we quarreled sometimes, everybody does, but mostly you were always swell.”

Rush glowered and kicked the piano stool. He hated like poison to apologize for things, but he knew just as well as anybody else what a beast he was being, and Randy was a good kid. She deserved an explanation.

“Well, I guess it's like this, Ran.” Rush cleared his throat, pushed his hands into his pockets, and clenched his fists. “It's kind of hard to say. I mean it's about Mona, and you'll think I'm a heel. It's not that I'm jealous, exactly. Or maybe I am in a way, but not just because of all the glory she's getting. No. I mean, gee, here I am a guy thirteen years old: the eldest son of the Melendy family, et cetera, and what am I doing to help swell finances? Nothing, that's what. And here my sister, only a year and a half older, is able to buy Defense Stamps like chewing gum, and add to the family exchequer besides. If I could just do
something!
”

“But why can't you?” Randy said.

“Tell me what! I've been racking my brains, of course, what do you suppose? But I can't think of a thing. Grover Pettybone has the Carthage paper route, and he's so old I wouldn't want to give him any competition. I could sell magazine subscriptions, maybe, but look at the population of Carthage! I'd be lucky if I sold a dozen, including the ones Father and Cuffy'd think they'd have to buy. I could shovel off snow, or mow lawns, or work in gardens, but this is the sticks, and most everybody lives on his own land and uses his own family instead of hired hands. No, I tell you it's a problem!”

“I can think of something,” Randy said slowly. “But you won't like it.”

“What is it? Why not?”

“You could give piano lessons,” said Randy firmly.

“Wh-a-a-t? You're nuts!”

“Now don't be like that, Rush. You know as well as I do that there hasn't been a music teacher for miles around, ever since the last one got married and moved to Hartford. Mrs. Wheelwright told you that the same time she told me. And she told us that Judge Laramy was mad as hops 'cause she'd talked him into buying a piano so Floyd and Myrtle could learn to play. And then right after he got it, she went and eloped.”

“Well, what's that—”

“Now wait. I know of three other families that have pianos just standing around going sour. And the one in the school gym. Nobody
ever
plays that except Melva Jenks, and all she ever plays is ‘My Rosary.' I bet you could get more pupils than you could take care of in no time at all. You're good too. You know you are. Remember how you outgrew that teacher in New York, and how even Mr.
Dohansky
said you were a project—progeny, or whatever it is.”

“Prodigy,” Rush corrected her. “Well, sure. But if you think I'm going to waste my youth trying to pound music into a goon like Floyd Laramy, you're crazy.”

“All right,” said Randy, sweeping out of the room. “I thought you really wanted a job. But I guess it was just talk as usual, that's all.”

“Listen, you stop being Cuffy,” Rush called after her; but left alone, he went over to the piano. Standing, he touched the keys with his left hand: a warm chord came to life and hung, slowly, diminishing on the air. Yes, he was good, all right. I'd be a dope if I didn't know that, he thought. He sat down on the piano bench, and under his fingers the music began to grow, up and out, tall and wide: a tree of sound, springing from strong, orderly roots.

Maybe she's right, thought Rush against the music. I guess I could do it. The picture of Floyd Laramy's broad, unsmiling face floated across his mind. Floyd Laramy who enjoyed two things, eating and fighting, and who thought Rush was a sissy because he knew about music and liked mathematics. Rush sighed and closed the piano lid. “I guess I could do it. But, boy, at what a cost.”

This is a day of sacrifices, Rush told himself. In wartime everybody makes sacrifices. But that was just a lot of words: he might as well have been saying one, two, three, the cat ran up the tree. All he knew was that he wanted to do something. He wanted to help: his family and, in a way, his country. “Let's see if I've got a little gold halo shining around my head,” Rush said aloud and went and looked in a mirror. But he hadn't.

That is how it came to pass that on the bulletin board at school the next day there was a little card saying: “Piano lessons. 50 cents an hour. Rush Melendy.”

Mr. Coughing, the principal, helped. He spoke to Judge Laramy who spoke (firmly) to Floyd and Myrtle. He also mentioned the matter to the half dozen other parents who had pianos as well as children, and in a week's time Rush had eight pupils: one every day after school and three on Saturdays. Each day, besides his schoolbooks, he carried a briefcase with music in it, and finger exercises, and lined music paper.

February was very cold. There was what Willy (who really knew nothing about it) called a “black frost.” The brook froze over solid. Even the little cascade was covered with a deep, ruffly collar of ice, although underneath it you could still hear the water tinkling and rushing. After school each day they tried out Mrs. Oliphant's ice skates. They could hardly wait to get back in the afternoons, flinging their books down on the hall table, searching for their skates, not even removing their mittens as they snatched a quick cookie from the jar in the pantry. For the next hour or two, until it was really dark, their part of the valley was filled with the sound of voices, bumps, outcries, and the peculiar ringing strokes of blades on ice.

Mona and Rush had had the most practice. They spiraled about on the glossy surface, falling very seldom. Randy fell a lot. She would seem to be getting the hang of it, to be skimming like a bird over the cold, black mirror, and then, slam, just as she was breathing naturally and trying not to wave her arms, down she would go! In a sitting position most frequently, but often on her face, her side, the back of her head. All the places where her bones met in corners, like knees and elbows, were bruised and sore. But the cold held, the ice became even stronger, and her persistence triumphed; at last she was almost as good as Mona herself.

Oliver just walked on his skates, taking each one completely off the ice before he set it down again. He walked with a strange, jerky gait, keeping close to the banks, his arms flapping like wings, and his mittened fists grasping at twigs, branches, passers-by, and anything to balance himself; he fell on an average of once every three minutes. He didn't smile or speak; his eyes were set in a stare of glassy intensity, his tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth, and from time to time he made a small grunting sound of effort. Oliver took skating hard, and refused to be helped.

One Friday when the brook had been frozen for more than a week, Rush said, “We're all pretty good now. What do you say we go exploring down the brook and see where it takes us? When we come to rough places or holes or open water, we can make our way along the banks.”

“Why, you know perfectly well we'll just end up in Carthage,” Mona said.

“The other way, then, why not? We've never gone very far in that direction, even walking, the woods are so thick,” Randy suggested.

“All right. You want to come along, Oliver?”

“Huh?” said Oliver, who hadn't heard a word. “I don't want to go anywhere. I'm busy working.” Which was true. Nobody could have called Oliver's method of skating a pleasure.

They had to walk down the banks at the side of the frozen cascade, and then they took to the brook again. It was dangerous and eventful skating: boulders kept rearing up from the ice, and there were twigs and snags of dead branches sticking out like antlers to trip one, and live twigs and branches reaching down from above to slap one's face and pull one's hair. Expertly Mona curved and dipped and dodged. Randy toiled along painfully in the rear, and Rush, bless him, would skim ahead and then come swooping back with words of comfort and encouragement.

“Come on, Sonja Henie,” he'd call cheerfully. “Look out for that air hole. You're doing swell.”

It was all woods on both sides. Thick, thick, noiseless woods. I wish I could look at 'em, thought Randy, eyes glued to the ice under her feet. This way I'll never know where I've been.

“Want to rest awhile?” asked Rush, returning. “Whew, I'm hot, and you're brick-red yourself.”

“It's from holding my breath,” explained Randy, sinking gratefully down on the cushion of dry snow and dead leaves that covered the bank. Rush sat down beside her and took off his knitted cap. His curly hair was damp from heat, but his breath came out in a little white frosty cloud.

“Boy, have I ever had a day,” said he.

“My ankles hurt,” said Randy. “Why? What happened to you?”

“Well, you know Floyd Laramy?”

“Yes, worse luck. What's he done now?”

“Today was his lesson day. Gee, Randy, it's been tough. Everybody else, all the other kids, are swell. I think they like studying with me because I'm a kid myself. Some of them are kind of dumb, but they're all swell, and Steve Ladislas is even going to be pretty good someday if he works. But that Laramy guy! You know what he does? He pretends he's deaf, and whenever I tell him anything he says ‘I beg your pardon? I didn't quite catch it.' And kind of grins in a nasty way. He's had five lessons now and he still doesn't know an eighth note from his own shoe, and he can hardly play the C major scale. So today I went in right after school. Boy, is that piano a beauty, you could play Chopsticks on it and it would sound like the Chromatic Fantasy, but it's just being wasted. First thing that happened was that I sat on the bench by Floyd and he slammed the piano lid down on my knuckles. Look.” Rush took off a mitten and showed Randy his bruised fingers.

“The pig!” said Randy warmly. “What did you do?”

“Oh, he pretended it was an accident, said he was sorry and all that. But I saw through him. Next thing he kept knocking the music off the rack, and I kept picking it up, like a dope, and saying ‘Now look, Floyd. This is a whole note. See? It's round like a doughnut.' And so on, and so on. And then I say, ‘Now play me the G major scale very slowly.' And what does he do? He lies down, just lies down on the floor and says, ‘Ho hum, am I ever fatigued. Doesn't this beastly grind get you down, old boy?' He's making me look like a sissy, see, because I'm giving music lessons. So I say, ‘Cut the comedy, drip, and play me the G major scale;' and he gets up and says, ‘Make me,' and so I say, ‘Okay, I'll make you,' and, uh, I-uh, well, Ran, I
socked
him.”