The Saturdays (15 page)

The bus ride was hot and horrible because all the top seats were taken, but once they got to Central Park everything was all right. Mrs. Oliphant met them wearing a flowered dress and a hat that Rush privately thought looked like an order of fruit salad.

The terrace of the restaurant was cool and shady and they sat under an umbrella and ate ice cream. In the pool below the terrace a sea lion floated peacefully with his hind flippers out, and another swam to and fro under the water emerging at regular intervals, blowing noisily, and disappearing again.

The Melendys told Mrs. Oliphant all about the coal gas experience. They all told her. It was really quite an important and interesting thing that had happened to them, now that it was over.

“But now we have to buy a new furnace, and a lot of other things, so we can't go to the country this summer, because we haven't got enough money,” Randy told her expansively. Rush glowered at her and Mona gave her a kick under the table. Randy felt a hot red blush rising from her collarbone to the top of her head.

“Well, we
like
it, though,” she added lamely. “We really
like
staying here. There's the park, and the backyard, and rides on ferryboats and ever so many things to do even if we don't have as much allowance as we used—”

Rush kicked her this time; so hard that she couldn't help saying “Ouch.” Mona changed the subject.

“Oh, Mrs. Oliphant,” she was saying in an animated voice, “I
love
your bracelet. Isn't it
sweet?
Did it come from France?”

Usually Rush hated it when Mona acted like that. It always made him want to be tough and slangy by contrast. But today he was grateful to her. Mona could usually be counted on to save a situation, he had to admit that.

“No,” Mrs. Oliphant said in her deep, old voice. “It came from Venice. My husband bought it for me in nineteen-eleven.”

Randy went on eating her ice cream. It was so cool and comforting and delicious that by and by it cooled away the blush and she felt all right again.

In the closed storeroom at home the smell of burnt cloth was now very noticeable, but there was nobody there to smell it except a brindled old mouse who hastily departed to the second floor by a secret channel in the wall. In the collar of the dress that Randy had left on the bracket there was now a hole with brown fringed edges. It grew larger, second by second, the brown fringes writhed and curled; a tendril of blue smoke rose upward, and then all of a sudden there was a tiny flame licking and licking away at the collar.

“Nineteen-eleven,” continued Mrs. Oliphant. “That must have been the year I met your father for the first time.”

“Father! How old was he?” they cried.

“Oh, eleven or twelve. Bored to death he was. He'd been dragged all over Europe from museum to art gallery to cathedral. But I fixed that. I took him to Florian's in the Piazza San Marco and fed him ices, just as I'm feeding them to you, only instead of seals to look at there were pigeons, thousands of them, tame as a barnyard full of hens. And I took him riding in gondolas, and I introduced him to a family of other American children who were visiting there. The littlest girl was named Nora; she was only three or four and always tagging about and getting in the way. I remember your father said to me, ‘Anybody under six years old should be kept in a cage.' The funny thing is that years later he married her!”

“Mother!” they cried.

“What did she look like then?” Randy asked.

“Like Mona, rather, only of course much littler. She had very large dark eyes, and a tangle of yellow curls and she wore a huge ribbon bow on her hair. When she grew up she looked hardly any different except that she no longer wore a bow.”

Upstairs in the storeroom at home Randy's dress was blazing cheerfully. Hungrily the flames reached out, and caught at the succulent folds of the mothproof bag that contained Father's dress suit. Soon that was blazing too.

Mrs. Oliphant set down her teacup, and looked at them. “Do you know that I own a lighthouse?” she inquired suddenly.

“A lighthouse?” repeated Randy. She had a picture of Mrs. Oliphant polishing the lenses of a giant lamp, and directing its rays to the storm-tossed ships at sea.

“At least it
was
a lighthouse,” Mrs. Oliphant corrected herself. “And everything is there but the light. The tower and the house and the ocean and the rocks.”

“A lighthouse to live in; that sounds neat,” Rush said.

“It
is
neat,” agreed Mrs. Oliphant. “Why don't you all come and spend the summer in it? It's a big place and there's plenty of room now that my children are grown and married. There's still room for them when they come to visit, as well as room for you. You can live in the tower.”

“In the lighthouse itself?” Rush's eyes were glowing. So were Mona's and Randy's and Oliver's.

“In the lighthouse itself,” replied Mrs. Oliphant.

“But isn't it—I mean, wouldn't it be a-a-an imposition?” said Mona uncomfortably.

“I knew and loved both your father and mother from the time they were children,” said Mrs. Oliphant. “And it would give me great pleasure to have
their
children with me in my lighthouse. There! Does that sound as if I were being imposed upon?”

“No, I suppose it doesn't,” Mona admitted.

“And when I get tired of you I'll lock you all up in the tower with nothing to eat but bread and water. Or maybe milk and a jar of Mrs. Wilkins's cookies. I'll telephone your father this very evening and see what he has to say about it.”

At home at that moment Father came bursting out of his study. He lifted up his nose and sniffed.

“Cuffy!” shouted Father. “What's burning?”

Cuffy came out of the kitchen drying her hands on her apron. “Burning, Mr. Melendy? Why, nothing down here. I'm just…” She looked up the stairway at him and then beyond. Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, my lands, Mr. Melendy! Look upstairs! It must be fire!”

Isaac began to bark as Father raced up the stairs with Cuffy panting and thumping behind him. Above the noise they could hear an ominous crackling and snapping as they reached the top floor.

The Melendy children walked to Fifth Avenue with Mrs. Oliphant. They walked very slowly so that they wouldn't spoil the lovely coolness inside them created by the ice cream. Randy was hanging onto one of the old lady's arms and Oliver was hanging onto the other. Mona was carrying her knitting bag. Rush was just walking along monopolizing the conversation.

“Gee, I always thought it would be swell to live in a lighthouse,” he was saying. “From the first time I ever saw one when I was five years old. I bet the swimming's keen too, isn't it?”

“Yes, the swimming is extremely keen,” said Mrs. Oliphant. She said it just at the very second that Father was shouting to Cuffy to call up the Fire Department. “And tell them to hurry!” he told her.

Mrs. Oliphant said good-bye to them at Sixty-fourth Street and they got on a bus going downtown. There were plenty of top seats, now, and a wind that was almost cool rose up to meet them as the bus jolted and bucked along the Avenue.

“Oh, boy, what a break!” Rush kept saying. “Wouldn't it be swell if Father said yes!”

“Do you think she really meant it?” Randy asked.

“I suppose so,” Mona said. “After you told her we were practically paupers what else could she do? It's charity, that's what it is.”

“Well, so what's the matter with charity?” Rush said unexpectedly. “Don't you think it's dumb to say no out of some sort of cockeyed pride when somebody you like
wants
to give you a present that you want to take? She likes us and we like her. She has a lighthouse and no one to appreciate it, now her kids are all grown up. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think it's swell and I think she is too.”

“I do too,” Randy said wholeheartedly. Rush was wonderful, she thought.

“And as for being paupers, we're not!” he went on. “Any man with a house and four children and a dog and a housekeeper and furnaceman has to be a millionaire to be rich. Well, we're not rich by a long shot. But neither are we paupers.”

“All right,” said Mona meekly. “I believe you.”

After they got off the bus they walked through the street almost to their own block before they saw the fire engines.

“A fire!” yelped Rush joyfully, breaking into a run. They all ran with him; Mona holding onto Oliver's jacket to keep him from dashing into the street.

“My gosh, I think it's
our house!
” croaked Rush.

“I think so too,” said Mona. And Randy began to cry. She couldn't help it.

“Where's Cuffy?” asked Oliver bouncing along beside Mona. “Will they have to carry her down a ladder, do you think?”

“Oh, be still, Oliver, and quit bawling, Ran,” ordered Rush. “Look, one of the engines is going away, everything's probably all right. You don't see any smoke, do you? You don't see any fire?”

“There's Father now!” gasped Randy gladly, and she raced right past a policeman, two firemen, and up the steps into Father's arms. “What happened, what happened?” cried Randy, her arms tight around him. “Are you all right? Really?”

“I'm all right, and Cuffy's all right.”

“Is Isaac all right?” Rush asked breathlessly.

“We're all all right. There was a small fire in the storeroom, that's all. It's out now. We can't imagine how it started. Do any of you have an idea?”

Nobody had any. Randy kept her arms around Father, feeling weak with relief.

“None of you went in there today, did you? Didn't leave a light burning, or anything?” queried a fireman who had been talking to Father.

Randy backed away from her father suddenly. “I was there,” she said in a horrified voice. “I don't remember if I turned the light off. Maybe I didn't. Could that have done it?”

“Sure could, sister,” said the fireman. “Bad wiring, or maybe something was hanging too close to the bulb.”

“My dress!” moaned Randy. “I hung my dress on the light while I was looking for my hat. It's all my fault!” And she began to cry again.

“First coal gas, then a fire, and now a flood!” said Father exasperatedly. “The harm's done, and it's too late to wail about it, Randy. Perhaps next time you'll be more careful, that's all; not go about hanging your clothes over light bulbs in that extraordinary way. Your winter coat and my dress suit, the high chair, and a set of Thackeray seem to be about all that's gone. The storeroom is a mess: charred black, soaking wet, and they've chopped the wall full of holes: had to. But I'm covered by insurance, luckily.”

“Well, that's a break anyway,” said Rush, for the third time that day. Then he turned to Randy. “Remember I was the one who left the furnace door open when we almost suffocated,” he comforted her. “You're no worse than I am.”

Pale and chastened Randy helped Cuffy with the dishwashing after dinner. Willy Sloper was bringing barrels of debris down from the storeroom. When Randy set out the empty milk bottles in the areaway she saw something she hadn't expected, somehow. Regal and imposing even in its state of charred ruin, Cuffy's dressmaker's form stood in lonely distinction beside the garbage can and the trash barrels.

“Oh, Cuffy, did
that
get burned too?”

“Never you mind, my lamb,” Cuffy said. “For about a year now, I've been too stout to get into a size forty, and that dress form's been kind of on my conscience. Now, thank goodness, I won't have to reduce!”

CHAPTER VIII

Saturday Eight

School was over. The school books were dumped on the Office table for the last time. By and by somebody would stuff them into the already crowded bookcase, and no one would ever look at them except by accident, years later. There would be Randy's French grammar all scrawled with drawings of sorceresses and a question in her handwriting on the fly leaf that said “Nancy Curtin est nuts, n'est-ce-pas?” and a reply written by her friend Dorothy Janeway that said “Et comment!” There would be Mona's English history with the name Mona Melendy written in nine different handwritings, all her own: she couldn't decide which would look most distinguished as an autograph. There would be Rush's algebra full of businesslike notations and diagrams of airplanes: Curtiss P.40's, and Hudson Bombers.

“The day school is out is my favorite day next to my birthday,” Randy said.

“My favorite day is going to be next Saturday,” said Rush. For when Father had agreed to accept Mrs. Oliphant's wonderful invitation, Randy had said, “
Please
can we leave on Saturday?” They had all felt that it was very important to the I.S.A.A.C. for them to leave on a Saturday. So it had been arranged, and now Saturday was only two days away.