The Village by the Sea (3 page)

He speaks about himself as though he were someone else, Emma thought, as though he were that gull sitting on the post or the sailor who was, she noted, now entering the canal leading to the ocean.

“Why don't you go and say hello to Bea? I'll fetch your things from the car.” He waved toward the long porch that ran along the front of the house. At one end a large tangle of small pink wind-blown roses grew on a trellis. Six rocking chairs sat on the porch and scattered among them on the wide boards were several cups and saucers. As she walked slowly up the wooden steps, she saw the cups were empty but stained with tea or coffee. Behind the screen door in front of her, it was dark.

She hesitated and looked once more at the bright bay. If only she could run down the rickety stairs to that beach! If only she could run all the way home! How could anyone related to her father be a terror? What did it mean?

She turned to the door and opened it quickly.

3

Aunt Bea

Caution made Emma put one foot behind her to ease the screen door so that it wouldn't bang. She found herself in an entrance room of some sort. For the moment it took her eyes to adjust to the dimness, she saw only the dull gleam of a string of keys hanging from a hook on the wall before her. She put out one hand and felt the folds of an umbrella and next to it the stiff canvas of a rain hat. On a narrow shelf lay a flashlight, several pale candle stubs, and still another empty teacup. In a room on her right a grand piano stood in front of shaded windows. Emma was reminded of a large grazing animal she had seen on a television nature program, but she'd forgotten what it was called.

She sensed movement on her left and turned at the moment a teapot held by a small, plump hand tilted in midair. She heard the steamy whisper of pouring tea. An arm covered in dark cloth descended and the teapot clanked as it hit a table where a woman sat. Her frizzy steel-colored hair was very long, caught at the nape of her neck by a thick putty-colored rubber band. Below the hem of her long black skirt, Emma glimpsed white moccasins, a design of blue, red, and white beads across the toes.

Emma walked toward her. The woman didn't turn her head but picked up a spoon and stirred her tea languidly. The clink of spoon against china was the single sound in the shadowy room, its space largely taken up by an oval table and some chairs. A bookcase stood against one wall, most of its shelves filled with dishes among which were piled a few books.

Emma swallowed noisily. “Hello, Aunt Bea,” she said. “I'm Emma.”

For a moment, the woman made no sign she had heard her. Then she put her spoon down in a finicky way and let out a bray of laughter that ended abruptly. “Who else would you be?” she asked. She turned her head toward Emma. “I see you're wearing blue denim like everyone else in the world,” she remarked.

“I brought a dress and a skirt and two blouses,” Emma said.

“You'll hardly need such an impressive wardrobe here,” remarked her aunt. “Sand, sea, and sun, you know,” she added in a tone of voice that seemed to say such things were silly.

“There wasn't much traffic,” Uncle Crispin announced as he came in carrying Emma's things. He, too, had closed the screen door so quietly Emma hadn't heard it. “You'll be glad to know, Bea, that Philip was in good spirits. I think he's optimistic about the operation.” He turned on a small standing light near the table.

Aunt Bea showed no sign of gladness. She had begun to scratch one hand with the fingernails of the other. She appeared entirely absorbed by what she was doing. She smoothed the hand and plucked away at her thumb, her fingers moving like small gears in an intricate machine, her head at a slight angle. She's like a parrot, Emma thought, cracking open seeds.

“One hopes he'll come through the hands of those doctors without more complications,” Aunt Bea said at last, her hands at rest in her lap. “Crispin, did you remember to get my Ceylon tea?”

“Yes, I bought plenty in the city,” he answered.

“One would think the idiots who run the markets out here would know enough to stock decent tea,” she said. She looked into her teacup, frowned, and lifted the brown teapot again.

“Philip sent his love,” said Uncle Crispin.

“His love …” Aunt Bea repeated thoughtfully. “What a peculiar usage. How can one
send
love?” She didn't appear to expect an answer, for she went on to speak of something entirely different. “Did you know, Emma, that the English upper classes pour milk into their cups before the tea, and the lower classes add milk after they've poured?”

There was no milk pitcher on the table. Emma didn't understand what Aunt Bea was talking about. Although she struggled to think of something to say, nothing came to her.

“It hardly makes a difference, Bea, what people do with their tea,” Uncle Crispin said.

“It makes every difference,” Aunt Bea said, smiling to herself as though she knew a secret that pleased her.

“I'll take Emma to her room. I'm sure she'd like to unpack and settle in,” Uncle Crispin said.

Aunt Bea nodded, then asked, “What's in that shopping bag?”

“Some books,” Emma replied. “Jigsaw puzzles, a diary.”

She didn't mention the present at the bottom of the bag for Aunt Bea. Her mother had wrapped it hastily in newspaper at the last moment this morning, and tied it with knotted laundry string.

“Jigsaw puzzles at your age!” Aunt Bea exclaimed. “I thought only old ladies passed the time with such things.…”

“Well—I'm practicing,” Emma said. She wished she hadn't. Had she meant to be so fresh? The words had burst out of her. But to her surprise, Aunt Bea seemed amused and emitted her braying laugh again.

“Come along, Emma,” Uncle Crispin said, picking up her bag and suitcase. She followed him into a large living room crowded with furniture, most of it wicker and all of it dusty. Only the big television set looked new. In front of it was a small sofa strewn with tired-looking pillows and several articles of clothing, scarves, a sweater the color of laundry soap, and a long, soiled lilac bathrobe. On the floor, around the sofa's carved wooden feet, stood empty glasses and dirty teacups. Rusty pine boughs filled the hearth of a large stone fireplace.

“I must clean up around here,” muttered Uncle Crispin.

The room was gloomy and dark like the other rooms except for a deep straw basket overflowing with knitted things, small blankets and shawls in luminous shades of mauve and rose.

They went up wide uncarpeted stairs to a hall along which were seven or eight closed doors. A narrow, tall window at the end of the hall framed the tops of pine trees and the sky.

Uncle Crispin opened one of the doors. “We thought you'd like to be able to see the bay,” he said. Sunlight streamed through unshaded windows onto gray floorboards and an oval braided rug. He put her things next to a bed. On its wooden headboard was painted a large, lily-like blue flower with curling leaves; an afghan throw in shades of green lay across the foot of the bed. “Your Aunt Bea made that,” Uncle Crispin said, pointing to the throw. “She's a marvel with wool. She painted the flower, too. There's a table you can use for a desk. The top drawer in the bureau sticks, but if you yank hard, it will come out. Do you need more than one chair? There are dozens more in rooms we don't use. Too many chairs for the likes of us.”

One chair was enough, Emma told him.

“When you've put away your things, come down and we'll have lunch,” he said. “You must be very hungry.”

“It's a nice room,” Emma said. She wished he wouldn't leave her alone in it though. He seemed to guess what she was feeling. He took her hand and led her to the windows. “The water is beautiful at this time of the year,” he said. “It's beginning to be a summer sea. I find it comforting though I don't know why.”

From the window, Emma could see the stairs leading down the cliff, and the clumps of grass she had run across. As she stared out at the bay, she remembered the little house in northern New York state which her parents had rented for several summers until her father grew too ill to leave the city and his doctor.

He had played his violin in the mornings on the screened porch. At twilight, the three of them had taken walks along dirt roads and across meadows where grazing cows would raise their heads to stare at them curiously. There had been no soaring gulls there, no water except for a trickle in a tiny stream bed near the house.

Uncle Crispin sighed as he let go of Emma's hand.

“Comforting—like playing music?” she asked.

He laughed and said, “You will think I'm always looking for comfort.”

She didn't think that but of Aunt Bea in her chair in the dining room, smiling faintly to herself.

“And then there is the comfort of lunch,” Uncle Crispin said. “It'll be ready in a jiffy. The bathroom is two doors down on the right. There's a yellow towel for you on a rack.”

He left her at the window. It was not the water she was seeing but her father in a narrow hospital bed, the same sunlight that was now warming her touching an iron bar at its foot. Her mother was there, too, sitting in a low chair beside him. They must be speaking together in low voices—perhaps about her so far away from them.

She began to unpack the shopping bag, putting her books, the two jigsaw puzzles—one for each week—and a big pad of newsprint drawing paper on the table. She opened the diary. There was only one entry, on May second:

Daddy is sicker
, it read.
I have to go to school anyhow. He won't be there in Room 103, giving music lessons. Could he die?

She put a small alarm clock on the table next to the bed, then unwrapped the present for Aunt Bea—she might have something disagreeable to say about the newspaper and string. The present was a bowl from Italy. Would it please Aunt Bea so that she would smile at Emma and not to herself? She went to the diary and with a pencil wrote the day's date. Under it, she wrote:
I'm here. Uncle Crispin is really nice although a little peculiar. The bay and the beach are great. Aunt Bea is
—but she couldn't think of one single word to sum up her feeling about her aunt. And she felt uneasy as though one of the doors in the silent hall had opened, and an unknown person had come creeping to her room to look over her shoulder and see what she had written.

Would it help if she changed her clothes? Put on a skirt and blouse? Would Aunt Bea welcome her then? She didn't think so. She put everything away in the bureau, avoiding the sticking drawer. Uncle Crispin's voice called faintly from below, “Lunch, Emma …”

Two weeks is only fourteen days, Emma told herself as she went down the stairs.

Emma was sure Aunt Bea had not moved from her chair. She saw a glass of milk and a grilled cheese sandwich on the table near the brown teapot. She handed the Italian bowl to her aunt before she sat down to eat.

“My mother got it for you,” she said. “It's from Deruta, Italy.”

“I know where it's from,” Aunt Bea said irritably. “If there's one thing I know about, it's faience.”

“How pretty,” Uncle Crispin remarked. “How thoughtful of your mother. Eat your sandwich before it gets cold, Emma.”

“French faience is the best, of course,” Aunt Bea said, turning the bowl in her hands. “As everyone—nearly everyone—knows.”

“Really, Bea, it's a lovely bowl, so bright and cheerful,” Uncle Crispin said. Aunt Bea held out the bowl without looking at either of them. Uncle Crispin took it from her quickly and put it on one of the less crowded bookshelves. It was only the impression of a second, but Emma had suspected Aunt Bea had been about to drop the bowl on the floor.

“Cheerful, I suppose that is the best word for it,” she was saying. “You will thank your mother for me, Emma.” She picked up a fat silver pen covered in intricate scrolls and began to do a crossword puzzle in a newspaper folded on the table in front of her.

“Can't I fix you something, Bea?” Uncle Crispin asked. He sounded as though he were asking her a favor.

“I'll have a bite later on,” she said. “What I want now is fresh hot water for my tea.”

Emma sat down. She was terribly hungry. As soon as she bit into the sandwich, she felt like a noisy parade. She had meant to drink the milk in sips but she heard herself gulp. Aunt Bea didn't look her way; she was intent on the puzzle.

“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.