The Four-Story Mistake (16 page)

“What was her name?”

“I was worried you was going to ask me that. Anastasia was the first name, wasn't it, Will? But what was the last?”

“Well, 'twasn't Bulova, 'cause that's the watch. And 'twasn't Popova, 'cause that's the muffin. 'Twas something kinda like 'em, though.”

“Did she ever come back here?”

“No. Years later when she wanted to come home for a visit her papa wouldn't let her. He wouldn't have anything to do with her by that time. They say he even boarded up her room, and that he burned up the portrait he'd had painted of her over in Europe.”

“But he didn't burn it up!” cried Randy, and stopped aghast. The blood vow!

“What's that? He didn't? How do you know?”

Just then, thank heaven, Father knocked on the door, and Rush flew to open it.

Randy told Oliver the whole story the next morning. “Just think,” she said at the end, “I found the room, I discovered Clarinda in a way, and now it turns out that she wanted to be a great dancer, just like me, and what's more she became one. Why, it's like some kind of magic sign!”

That afternoon they had a meeting in Clarinda's room. Rush presided.

“I think you'll agree,” he said, “that the time has come for this place to stop being a secret. Father and Cuffy and Willy and people like Mr. and Mrs. Pepper really have a right to know. What do you think?”

They all agreed wholeheartedly. The secrecy was beginning to weigh on their consciences.

“And besides, now maybe we'll get some real chairs to sit on,” observed Oliver realistically from the orange crate. “And Clarinda will have a nice room to live in again.”

They all looked at Clarinda, with her rose, her columns, her red dress; and each of them admired her for a different reason.

Mona admired her because she had become famous in spite of everything.

Rush admired her because she had had courage, and because from the beginning she had known and pursued her destiny.

Randy admired her because she had triumphed as a dancer even in that difficult and ancient day.

And Oliver admired her because she had dared to descend from a third-story window on a ladder made entirely out of sheets.

CHAPTER X

The Caddis House

The remainder of the winter progressed fairly evenly. True, Rush and Randy found it necessary to take some of the starch out of Mona when she referred too loftily to her “program” or her “fan mail.” True, too, that Randy's life-and-death struggle with arithmetic never got any easier, and that Rush and Floyd Laramy, though maintaining a sort of armed truce, were never to become bosom friends. True, Oliver had to go to bed without his supper on two unhappy occasions, and Isaac was severely spanked when he eloped with a whole leg of lamb, and all of them got into trouble from time to time: the fact remained that the Melendys always looked back on that winter as one of the pleasantest in their whole lives.

They were so busy. Twice a week Mona and Cuffy departed for New York and Mona's broadcast. Rush gave his lessons every day, and on Sundays the whole family went dutifully to the Methodist church and listened to him play the organ. Randy did a lot of warped-looking knitting and Oliver was building himself a whole fleet of battleships to float in the brook when spring came.

For gradually the winter was beginning to slow down. The ice thawed, and mud was everywhere. Cuffy had pinned large, stern signs to the back and front doors.

“
WIPE YOUR FEET
!!” they said. It was still raw and cold, but every now and then there would be a day, or an hour, or a moment, when the sun came out, and there was something different in the air: a sort of glimpsed fragrance, like when the kitchen door is opened for a second while the birthday cake is being baked. It was a smell of promise.

The little brook bellowed hoarsely; there was a swelling at the joints of the twigs, and the first skunk cabbages appeared, brown cowls beside the brook. And at night, tinkling, jingling, gurgling, with high silvery notes, came the voices of the peepers. The dark was spangled with their voices.

Randy and Oliver spent as much time as possible slopping about in the swamp and the brook, or anything else that was sufficiently wet. There were things to find in the water, now that spring was coming. There were frogs' eggs in the swamp pools; great, transparent clumps of tapioca full of black polka dots, each of which would someday be a tadpole and eventually, if all went well, a frog. Randy and Oliver had three jarfuls under observation at home.

In the brook there were caddis houses. Rush had discovered these first. They were tiny cases, not much more than an inch long, and about as big around as a soda straw. They were constructed of bits of twig and shell, tiny pebbles, and choke cherry pits, all held together with a miraculous, silky cement that was created by the retiring little architect who lived inside. All one ever saw of him was a flicker of spidery legs; a tiny, beady head withdrawing.

“Someday he'll come out of there with wings,” said Rush, who had looked him up in the dictionary. Randy thought caddis houses were very interesting; she never tired of searching for them, so minute and delicately made, so deceptively like twigs, rolling softly on the floor of the brook.

Out by the stable stood a stricken-looking cage of chicken wire and odd boards. Oliver had built it with time, noise, and effort. “I'm just waiting for the snakes to wake up,” he explained. “Then I'm going to catch a few and keep them in here and tame them.” Cuffy shuddered at the mere idea, and Mona said, “How revolting!” as usual.

The spring rains were torrential that year. Late in March it rained for three and a half days without stopping: not a pause, not a minute's fitful sunlight; nothing but streaming windows and roaring gutters for three and a half solid days. In the morning the Melendys rushed from the front door into the Motor, which smelt terrible in wet weather, and from the Motor they rushed into school. In the afternoon it was the same thing all over again in reverse, from school to Motor; from Motor to house. It was very boring.

However, there were compensations. There was the Office, of course. And above all there was Clarinda's room in which there were now four chairs, a table, and a rag rug; and Clarinda was properly hung (“or do you say hanged, I wonder?” said Rush) on the wall. For the room was no longer a secret. How surprised Father had been! Willy, too, and Cuffy. They had felt a little sheepish, as well, at having overlooked the discrepancy in the Office windows for so long. Everybody came to see it: Mrs. Oliphant all the way from New York; Mr. and Mrs. Wheelwright, the Coughings, the Purvises, old Mr. and Mrs. Pepper, and all their friends at school. Mona had written a theme about it in English class, and the teacher had written “Ex.” (which meant excellent) on the upper right-hand corner, and a note which said, “Very orig. subj. well handled.” Yes, Clarinda's room was a great success.

The cupola, too, was a good place to be in when it rained. The rain pattered and resounded on the roof; and looking through the four glass windows was like looking through four waterfalls. Randy sat there by the hour (it was too cold for anybody else), humped up in the middle of the cot with an ancient Navajo blanket over her shoulders.

At last, on Saturday afternoon, the rain ceased. Rush closed the lid of his piano and stretched up and up and up as if he would have liked to push his arms right through the roof. “Let's go out, kids, what do you say?”

Randy heard him from the cupola and came tumbling down the ladder-stairs. But Mona didn't want to go out because it was still too wet. She was always like that lately. She seemed to want to do what she thought people ought to want to do. If it was wet, she stayed in; if it was time for bed, she went immediately to bed; if the other girls at school wore ankle socks and pleated skirts, she wore them too: never shorts or overalls. When it was time to do homework, she did homework without dawdling or finding excuses. She never got into trouble of any kind. Of course, she was quite old by now, fourteen, and she was an acknowledged radio actress, and all that. Still, it was disappointing.

Rush and Randy weren't like that at all. They were always getting into trouble. They hated going to bed on time, never desired to do their homework at the appointed hour, and both wore whatever was handiest, oldest, and most comfortable. And they both loved wet weather when it wasn't so violent that it kept them indoors.

“Besides, it isn't really
wet,
” Randy insisted. “It's just dripping a little.”

“But it's cold,” objected Mona.

“Well, it's the end of March already,” said Rush. “It's not the same kind of cold as winter. And we can wear our rubber boots.”

“Okay,” Mona said loftily. “Go on out in it if you want to, Rush.
I
don't. Get bronchitis again, if you like, and go around coughing like an old sick mule.”

“Oh, nuts,” cried Rush. “That was a long time ago. Christmastime. It sounded worse than it was.”

But Randy wasn't going to argue. She didn't enjoy argument the way Rush did. Already she was rummaging among the battered piles of foot gear on the closet floor; among the dozens of rubbers, overshoes, boots, ski boots, and ice skates that had accumulated there during the past months.

“Here are your boots, Rush,” she said. “But I can only find one of mine. Mona, can I wear one of yours instead?”

“As far as I'm concerned you can go out barefoot,” replied Mona haughtily, turning a page of
War and Peace.
She had taken to reading heavy grown-up books and talking about them afterward to grownups, who were often impressed.

“The young intellectual,” remarked Rush, putting on his old cracked poncho. Randy put on her sticky, yellow slicker, and they went downstairs. When they opened the front door the large, bounding March wind came to greet them. Black, wet branches leaped against the sky, raw and leafless, and shaken drops fell on their heads.

“Listen to the brook!”

It sounded like a river, the brook did, roaring and tumbling between the rocks, swollen and made strong by the rain.

“Where'll we go first, Rush?”

“Up on the hill to see if the tree house blew down.”

So they went up the hill through the woods. All about and overhead the wind surged and swam; the branches creaked and scraped and shook cold water down. Below, the soaked dead leaves of last year clung to their rubber boots.

“Like wet cornflakes,” Randy said.

“Like wet corn plasters, you mean,” Rush said vulgarly, and they both laughed heartily. It seemed a good joke at the moment. Oh, it was wonderful to be outdoors again.

“Smell how different it is!” cried Randy. “Air never really
gets
into a house.”

It was true. The broad, wild wind had the most wonderful smell; an odor of earth and space and wetness, and the beginnings of spring.

Randy had a little trouble in walking. At every step the Mona rubber boot, which was several sizes too large, kept sinking away from her foot with a hollow, puffing sound. But it wasn't enough to spoil her pleasure.

“Look, it's okay!” said Rush when they came to the top of the hill; and gazing up Randy saw that the tree house was still firmly anchored to the giant branches of the oak. Even though it dipped and swayed, not one board was loose.

“Pretty well constructed,” boasted Rush.

“Let's go up,” said Randy. They got the ladder and went up, Rush first, and Randy behind, keeping the Mona boot on by sheer will power and nothing else.

“It's a boat!” she cried when they had clambered over the railing into the tree house. “See how it rocks. You be captain, Rush, and I'll be crew.”

“Reef the sail!” ordered Rush, catching on immediately. “A monsoon is coming up. I smell ugly weather in the China Sea.”

Randy could smell it too. Excitedly she reefed in imaginary sail while the tree house rolled and tossed: buffeted by wild semitropical tempests.

“A U-boat aft!” shouted Rush. “It's a destroyer now, Randy. Man the guns!” And Randy manned imaginary guns at the top of her lungs.

It was very fine and exciting. When a gathering of crows seesawed windily overhead, cawing in rusty voices, she and Rush let them have imaginary antiaircraft fire. The blood of battle surged in their veins; and soon, though the rusty cawing of the crows continued to clamor faintly on the wind, they were proud victors. About them on the sea the remains of two U-boats and seventeen Japanese fighter planes lay demolished and abandoned.

After a while when they got tired of war, Randy said, “Now let's go and see what the brook's like.” As they climbed down the ladder Rush's poncho flapped about his head, and Randy's Mona boot at last fell off, but she found it again.

The brook was even better than they had hoped. At the place where the water habitually came down the rocks in a little waterfall there was now an enormous, brawling cascade, big enough to knock a man off his feet. The banks were submerged, and under the water the little, new, beginning plants and ferns waved frantically to and fro.

They stood and watched the falling water for a long time. There was something magnificent and satisfying in its force and power; when they looked away the land and trees seemed to be moving, too; to be gliding along with the brook. “Sort of like when you're dizzy after rolling downhill,” shouted Randy. She had to shout to be heard.

Then they went wading in the comparatively quiet shallows some distance below the fall. The water embraced their rubber boots and inside the boots their toes felt cold but protected. Rush and Randy bent down looking for caddis houses. They invaded a wet, mysterious world. The water was dark and clear, like root beer, and on the bottom they saw shifting sand and pebbles, water-sodden twigs, and glittering flakes of mica. There were lots of caddis houses, and they gathered quite a collection, comparing them and examining the different mosaic patterns of the little tubes.