The Village by the Sea (2 page)

The moment for crying and looking glum had passed. Her own heart seemed to quiver as though her father had reached out and touched it the way he had touched her mother's hand.

Her mother was giving Emma the look that stated it was past time to go to bed. She didn't want to leave them. She felt they were all in one of those places where people parted, train stations or airports.

“Why is Aunt Bea like that?” she asked, stalling.

“Envy,” said her mother in a matter-of-fact way.

Her father said, “It might help if you remember that we all feel envious now and then. Haven't you?”

“Philip, she must go to bed,” her mother protested. “And you don't have the strength to spare for a lecture.”

“I'm not lecturing,” he said, his voice momentarily strong. “I envy anyone with a healthy heart.”

Emma stared at her father. The little animal of fear inside her had grown very large. Her mother came to her side and stroked her hair. “I'll telephone you every evening,” she said.

“I'll call you, too,” her father said, “as soon as I can.”

2

Uncle Crispin

Emma wondered if Uncle Crispin had been somewhere around the day Aunt Bea had given her the watercolors. Aunt Bea filled the whole space of her memory just as she had filled the chair. Still, she thought she would have remembered him if he'd been there, he was so tall and so thin, and his eyes were a color she'd never seen before, yellowish, almost golden and flecked with green spots.

His head was bent forward tensely as he drove along the twisting highways. Huge trucks passed with explosions of wind that rattled and rocked the little car they were in. Now and then he took one hand from the steering wheel he was gripping so tightly and pressed a leather patch that had come partly loose from an elbow of his tweed jacket. He glanced at Emma and smiled.

“I don't suppose you have a needle and thread?” he asked. “Though if we stopped here for a bit of sewing, I daresay the authorities would cart us away. Aren't these roads dreadful? I always think I'll take the wrong ramp and never be heard from again. Or else a truck will scoop up the car and hurl it into the heavens.”

“Are you from England?” Emma asked.

“Yes. I was born in St. Ives, in Cornwall. I think there's a nursery rhyme, isn't there?”

Emma hesitated a moment, then recited:

“As I was going to St. Ives,

I met a man with seven wives.

Each wife had seven sacks,

Each sack had seven cats,

Each cat had seven kits:

Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were going to St. Ives?”

“That's the one,” said Uncle Crispin. “Do you happen to know the answer?”

His voice was soft, and he spoke to her so politely she guessed he hadn't spent much time with children and hadn't heard what they were supposed to be like. She didn't shout out the answer as she would have ordinarily, but said, “One,” in as polite a way as he'd spoken.

“I think so,” he said. “Though there are those who say no one was going to St. Ives. Rather a sad little rhyme, isn't it? Well, when I was fourteen or so, my father and mother brought me to your country, now mine, too. I went to school and studied the violin and eventually became a teacher of music. Did you know your father was once a student of mine? Ah … here's the last ramp I have to worry about. Your Aunt Bea says I have as much sense of direction as a sofa. But now it's a straight road all the way.”

“I think I knew you were my father's teacher,” Emma said.

“That's how I met Bea,” he continued. “Your father and I became friends. One day, long before he met your mother, I took him a piece of rare violin music I had come across, and there was his sister, Beatrice, who had dropped by to visit him.”

Recalling Aunt Bea, how she sat in the chair as unmoving as a large stone, it was hard for Emma to imagine her dropping by anyplace. That visit had been years ago. Maybe Aunt Bea was only half a terror then. Time changed people. Emma had seen photographs of her parents when they were children. Would anyone have guessed how that thin little boy or the plump, sleepy-looking little girl would look twenty-five years later? With her own thick brown hair that she could hardly drag a comb through some mornings, and ordinary blue eyes, how would she look twenty-five years from now?

What color had Uncle Crispin's hair been before it had turned so white? He looked nearly as old as her only living grandparent, her mother's father, who lived in California and whom she had once visited for a week.

Her grandfather had a horse called Wraith, she recalled, and she had been lifted up to sit in the saddle with him. How scared and joyful she had been, high above the ground on a living animal! It made her happy now, thinking of the ride they had taken through a great wide meadow of tall grass which brushed against her bare legs, her grandfather's arm strong around her waist. The memory blew away like mist in a breeze. She was back in the present, in the worry of her father's illness, the worry of what it was going to be like living with Aunt Bea for two weeks.

“Your father was a gifted violinist,” Uncle Crispin said. “In a way, I'm sorry he didn't go on with his career. But it's a hard life being a concert violinist—there are so many good musicians struggling to find work. I'm sure he's a fine teacher. Are you interested in music? Do you play?”

“The recorder,” she replied. “Everybody in school has to learn to play.”

“Good!” he said as though he really meant it. “You'll find it an immense comfort as time goes on. I teach most of the year and give private lessons in the summer. But I try to play for myself every day. A life without music would hardly be life.”

The idea that music could be a comfort was a new one for Emma. When her father played his violin at home in the small room off the kitchen which was like a big closet, his forehead wrinkled, his mouth was shut tight, and he looked lost in a dream.

“Is it strange to have your father teaching in your own school? Do you have to take his class?” he asked.

“He's the only music teacher, so I have to,” she answered. She hadn't thought it strange; it was certainly difficult at times. The children teased her and said her father went to sleep and snored in some of his classes. It wasn't true but she felt embarrassed just the same. Yet if she happened to pass his class-room and glimpse students looking at him with interest, she felt proud.

“Teachers' kids get scholarships,” she said. “That's why I go to the school.” There were days when she wished she went to a school where she didn't know anyone except a few other children, where teachers didn't give her a special smile when they passed her in the corridors.

“It must be hard for you to think about anything but your father right now,” Uncle Crispin said. “My mother was very sick for a time when I was a boy. I remember I felt as if I was sitting on a little chair in a huge empty house, no people, or cats or dogs, no books and furniture and pictures, and that I wouldn't be able to get up and move until she returned from hospital to give me her hand. Isn't that odd?”

“But she did come back,” Emma said, her heart suddenly pounding.

“Yes, she came back,” he answered. “And so will your father. I'm sure of that. I've been reading up on the operation. The doctors have it down pat these days.”

She didn't want to hear about the operation right now. She asked him quickly about his name. “I never knew anyone called Crispin,” she said.

“It's not too common, but you run across it every so often. St. Crispin was a Christian missionary in Gaul. He was martyred in 287. He was a shoemaker and is the patron saint of all shoemakers. When you come to read Shakespeare, his
Henry the Fifth
, you'll find Crispin there:

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother
.…”

Emma was startled. He seemed for a moment to have become another person, his voice booming, one hand gesturing at the windshield. But when he spoke again, it was in the mild, slightly apologetic voice she was getting used to.

“We've exchanged rhymes,” he said, smiling, “so we shall be friends.”

“What does martyred mean?” asked Emma, rather hoping he wouldn't burst into poetry again.

“To die for your faith,” he replied.

They had left the gasoline stations and shopping malls behind them. Sparse woods of stunted pine trees grew beside the road.

“See how the sky has grown so vast,” he said. “It's because we're close to the sea.”

She had noticed the light changing, touching the dark green pines with a white gleam. In the bright blue sky, she saw the white spark of an airplane's wing.

“Nearly there,” Uncle Crispin said after a while. A few minutes later, he turned off the blacktop onto a sand road that led through thick strands of pine and oak, many of the trees not much taller than Emma.

Uncle Crispin stopped the car.

“Emma, I want you to know how welcome you are. We're so glad to have this chance to know you—even in this circumstance.” He fell silent.

Emma wondered if she should thank him. He was fiddling with the loose patch on his jacket again. His hand fell back to the steering wheel as he turned directly to her. “Your Aunt Bea is a changeable creature,” he said. “She's harder on herself, really, than on anyone else. But sometimes she can be a little sharp. You'll learn, though, that her bark is really much worse than her bite. And, you see, we haven't had children stay with us. She tires easily. I do hope you will understand.…” He smiled at her, his eyes like two golden fish in his lined face. But there was worry there, too. This last year she had learned to recognize that look on the faces of grown-ups.

He peered through the windshield. “See,” he said, “there's our chimney. We have lovely fires in winter when the wind blows cold off the water.”

He gave a deep sigh and started the car. Had he said all he'd meant to about Aunt Bea? She was afraid, sitting in the warm sunlight that poured into the car as though it were a pitcher to be filled up. She longed to be home. There had been something hidden in Uncle Crispin's words. They don't want me here, Emma thought, and I don't want to be here either.

She imagined her mother calling them, saying, “Please take our little hippopotamus. She only weighs a thousand pounds and won't be a bit of trouble.” She grinned. What would Uncle Crispin say if she told him what she was thinking? They went over a bump. “Here we are,” he said.

When her father had told her Aunt Bea and Uncle Crispin lived in a log cabin, Emma had thought their house would look like the set of Lincoln Logs someone had given her for Christmas a few years ago. But as Uncle Crispin drove out from among the trees onto a large circular clearing covered with broken white shells, she saw that the house was not at all like the small cabin in the woods she had had in mind.

It was built of logs, but it was huge. In the brilliant light, it looked like a fort, dark against the sky, the shades pulled down on most of its many windows, and thick tangled shrubbery crowding up against its foundation. Two cement steps led to a broad door, the bolt across it rusty and ancient-looking.

“Your grandfather built it for his first wife, Bea's mother, in the days when such a place was called a bungalow,” Uncle Crispin said. “After she died, he kept adding on rooms. Then he married your father's mother and they moved to Connecticut. He left the house to Bea in his will. It looks overwhelming, doesn't it? We use only a few of the rooms. We never use that back door. The entrance faces the bay.”

They got out and walked around to the front of the house. A blaze of blue water stretched as far as Emma could see. In the far distance, small islands appeared to float above the bay, moored in their own shadows.

She ran across the hummocky grass to the railing of a wooden staircase that led down a steep cliff to a beach below. A gull swam through the air with strong strokes of its wings then drifted slowly downward like a feather, coming to rest on a post in the water.

“That post is all that's left of the dock your grandfather built for his boats,” Uncle Crispin said. “Aren't gulls comical? The way they find the only roosting spot for miles around?”

Out on the water, Emma saw a white sail like an angel's wing suddenly collapse, and a small figure in the boat grabbing up armfuls of sail. “He's probably going to turn on his motor and go through that canal over there to the right,” Uncle Crispin explained. “It leads to the ocean. In a month from now, there'll be so many boats trying to go through, it will look like a line waiting to go into a movie.”

“Will I be able to swim?” Emma asked.

“Oh, yes … though the water is still quite cold. But you won't go over your depth, will you?”

“No. I'm not such a great swimmer,” Emma said. “Do you and Aunt Bea swim a lot?”

“I go in but Bea doesn't care for bathing. And the stairs would be difficult for her to manage. They're fairly shaky. She doesn't like crowds. By the time the water warms up in July, there'll be dozens of people on the beach. More come every summer, and more houses are built and more shops for all the newcomers.”

He didn't look as sad as he sounded. “It's no one's fault the world is getting so crowded,” he said.

“Uncle Crispin—I've been wondering about the color of your eyes. What's it called?”

He laughed and touched her lightly on her shoulder. “How nice to have one's eyes noticed,” he said. “I think the word is hazel. It's unusual, isn't it?”