Then There Were Five

 

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For Two Roberts

Introduction

Quite often I receive letters from children asking to know if the Melendys are “real.” Are Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver really alive? they ask. Or were they ever? Was there once a real Cuffy, or a real Isaac? Or a house called the Four-Story Mistake?

The answers to these questions are mixed. It must be admitted that such a family, made of flesh and blood, whom one could touch, talk to, argue with, and invite to parties, does not actually exist. Yet in other ways, as I shall try to show, each of these people is at least partly real.

Once, when I was a child, I heard of a family named Melendy. I do not know how many children were in this family, or what kind of people they were; but for some reason I liked their name and stored it away in my mind to borrow for the Four-Story children at a much later date. So they began, at least, with a real name.

As I went along I borrowed other things: qualities, habits, remarks, events. I borrowed them from my children, from my own childhood, even from the dogs we have had; and from the conversations and recollections of many of our friends and relatives.

Mona and Randy, for instance, are partly made of things I remember about myself as a child (only the better things, of course), and things that I wish I had been, and that I would like to have had in daughters of my own. In Mona I also recognize my dearest cousin, as well as my roommate in boarding school who was going to be an actress, and who was frequently discovered acting the part of Joan of Arc in front of the bathroom mirror.

In Randy I recognize two of my long-ago best friends, as well as two of my long-ago best wishes: to be a dancer and to be an artist.

In Oliver I have borrowed liberally from the things I know and remember about my sons, and from many other little boys besides. Large patches of him are invented, of course, which is also true of the others. I never knew of a boy of six, for instance, who got away with an adventure like Oliver's Saturday excursion, but on the other hand I have been intimately concerned with a boy who collected moths just as ardently as Oliver did. The whole family was involved in this hobby of his: all of us went through the grief of caterpillars lost, strayed or perished; through the inconvenience of cocoons hung up in the wrong places, and the foragings by flashlight for special leaves to feed ravenous larvae while the forgetful collector slept in deepest calm.

Reminders of my sons' characters also occur in that of Rush, though not so often as in the case of Oliver. In Rush I trace memories of other boys I knew: one who played the piano marvelously well, and one who was a curly-haired rascal with a large vocabulary and a propensity for getting into, and neatly out of, trouble.

Cuffy is someone I knew when I was five years old, and someone else I knew when I was twelve. One of them was rather cross, the other very gentle. Both of them were fat people, elderly, and, in their different ways, knew how to love children so that they felt comfortable and cozy.

Father is composed of several fathers of my acquaintance, all of them kind and hard-working and deeply interested in their children.

As for Isaac, except for the fact that he is a male and not pure-blooded, he is exactly like our own fat freckled cocker spaniel who was gloriously won in a raffle by the father in our family.

The house which is called the Four-Story Mistake is made out of several queer old interesting houses that I have seen and is set in the kind of country which I have enjoyed the most: country with plenty of woods, hills, streams, and valleys.

Wishing has played a large part in these stories too, as you can see. The Melendys have and do all the things I would have liked to have and do as a child. There are plenty of them, for one thing, and I was an only child. They live in the country all year round, for another, and I lived in the city for most of it. They discovered a secret room, built a tree house, found a diamond, escaped from dangers, effected rescues, gave elaborate theatrical performances at the drop of a hat, got lost, and did many other striking things, all of which I would have liked to do.

So the Melendys, you see, are a mixture. They are made out of wishes and memory and fancy. This I am sure is what all the characters in books are made of; yet while I was writing about these children they often seemed to me like people that I knew; and when you are reading the stories of their trials and adventures I hope that you, too, will sometimes feel that they are “real.”

—
Elizabeth Enright
, 1947

CHAPTER I

All Summer Long

What a noise there was that day! It sounded like a pack of young sea lions.

But it was really only the Melendy children. They were building a dam.

Rush had thought of it. He had thought of it in the middle of the night in a dream, and this morning at breakfast he had told them about it.

“Listen, kids,” he'd said. “I've been thinking for a long time that we needed a bigger swimming place. The one we've got now is too little; when we're all in it together the congestion is fierce. And it's too shallow. Every time I dive off the bank I'm scared I'll come up with concussion of the brain.”

“Well, what are you planning to do?” inquired Mona with a tinge of sarcasm. “Widen the brook, or deepen it, or something?”

“Exactly, my dear Watson,” replied Rush with a flourish of toast. “I propose to build a dam at the foot of the bathing pool where the waterfall begins.”

Oliver and Randy greeted the idea with enthusiasm. Anything, work or play, that involved plenty of water and mud was agreeable to them. And even Mona could see that the idea had its points.

So there they were, hard at it, digging up rocks, hauling logs, and building them into a sort of walk across the brook. Everybody had ideas as to how the dam should be constructed. The air rang, quivered, with commands, directions, opinions, and arguments. Frequent arguments; and all carried on at an earsplitting pitch in competition with the noisy little waterfall.

The two dogs, Isaac and John Doe, added to the general pandemonium by running to and fro on the bank and barking. They always barked when voices were raised.

It was strange how the character of each Melendy was shown in his work.

Take Rush, for instance. He was fourteen and strong for his age. His bare ribs, like an Indian brave's, were striped with mud where he had slapped furiously at mosquitoes. He worked violently and fast: lugged the biggest rocks, lifted the heaviest loads, grunted, struggled, perspired, and from time to time was forced to give in and rest, from sheer exhaustion.

Mona was the eldest. She was very pretty and quite old: past fifteen. Her job was to stuff the chinks between the stones with dead leaves, wads of moss and grass, anything to keep the water from pouring through. This she did efficiently and quickly, pausing now and then to look at her own dark reflection in the pool or to wash the mud from her fastidious fingers. She was certainly the only one who bothered to do that.

Oliver, who was seven and three-quarters, worked like a little engine on a track. Back and forth he went, over and over, never getting tired because he never handled more than he could manage.

Randy, twelve, was the one who slipped and stumbled oftenest. Strange that Randy, who drew so well and danced like a fairy, should be so clumsy at manual labor. Already she had a swollen toe and a bruised thumb. Heaven knows what she would have before the day was over! Yet in spite of the punishment she took Randy enjoyed this engineering and her dark curls shook and quivered in the ardor of her exertion.

“It's sprung another leak over here, Rush,” called Oliver, imparting the bad news with an air of gratified importance.

“My gosh,
again?
” Rush splashed over to the spot. “This job is tougher than I thought it would be. How do the beavers do it?”

“Well, for one thing, they have tails as well as hands to work with,” said Mona, scooping up dead leaves.

“Yes, and teeth,” agreed Rush. “Every beaver I ever saw had teeth like a Japanese general's.”

“Don't be discouraged, Rush,” said Randy piously. “Think of Boulder Dam. I bet
those
men didn't get discouraged.”