The Village by the Sea (7 page)

“Bea—do make an effort! I'm sure Emma would like a little distraction after what she's been through waiting to hear about Philip.”

“She hasn't been through anything—yet,” Aunt Bea said ominously.

They weren't looking at Emma. She knew they weren't thinking about her either. Whatever it was that was going on was between them.

Aunt Bea sighed hugely and heaved herself out of the chair. It seemed to take a long time before she was on her feet.

“For heaven's sakes!” she exclaimed. “Let's go then! I don't want to stand here forever!”

In the car, Emma stared at Uncle Crispin's white hair. He was inclined forward, and, she could see in the rearview mirror, he was squinting against the sunlight. His face was strained; he looked as though the drive they were to take was a difficult chore. Emma would have been just as glad not to have come. She had hoped the trip to Montauk would help her not think about her father. But she seemed to be thinking about him more every minute.

Hospital corridors were silent. Emma remembered that, and the hard narrow bed she had lain upon, holding her mother's hand, as the bed moved along on rubber wheels pushed by an attendant she couldn't see. Nurses had passed them carrying paper cups of medicine or little trays with something worse, a needle for one of the patients behind the half-open doors.

Her father moved so lightly on his feet. He would be lying still now in a bed with iron bars around it, a grown-up's crib.

“Look at that,” Aunt Bea said from the front seat. “Isn't that new, Crispin? The trailer camp? Why do people want to live in such hideous things? I suppose a trailer has its convenience. You turn off the ignition and you're home. And look at that fat tub in a guard's uniform at the gate!” She laughed loudly. “Don't tell me they're afraid of a crime wave in there! What do they have that's worth stealing?”

“Trailers don't cost as much as houses,” said Uncle Crispin. “A lot of people can't afford the kind of homes you'd approve of, Bea.”

“Boo-hoo …” said Aunt Bea.

She was wearing a large pink straw hat that hid her hair. Now and then she touched the brim of it with her fingers. Red and scored with scratching, her hands looked as though she'd plunged them into a thorny thicket. Emma tried not to look at them. Yet the upward movement of her aunt's arm, her wounded fingers slipping across the rosy pink straw, stirred a reluctant pity in her.

In these last months, her mother, too, had begun to do something strange to herself. Often, when she was reading a book or cooking a meal, Emma had seen her suddenly grip her arms and press them fiercely across her chest as though the apartment air had grown bitterly cold. She had known her mother's thought at those moments had been about her father's sickness.

What was Aunt Bea's thought when she tore at the flesh of her fingers?

Emma stared out the car window. She didn't want to think her mother and her aunt were alike in any way. She didn't want to feel sorry for Aunt Bea at all.

The road they were following cut through immense furrowed fields. “Potato farms,” Uncle Crispin said, glancing back at Emma. At the edge of the fields, as though dropped in clumps from the sky, stood empty-looking new houses with large, shadeless windows. There was a pearly glow at the horizon as though the sea sent its own light up into the sky. Every few miles, ramps led off the road to shopping malls filled with cars.

“Stop!” Aunt Bea shrieked. “I want to go in there!”

There, Emma saw, was a tumbled-down little farmhouse at the edge of a graveled apron with a sign over the door that read:
Nice Things.

“You won't be long, will you?” asked Uncle Crispin as he parked.

“One minute,” Aunt Bea said. “Perhaps two.” She scrambled out of the car, and picking up her long black cotton skirt, ran to the door and disappeared inside. It was the first time Emma had seen her move fast.

“It's the kind of thrift shop she likes,” Uncle Crispin explained. “She doesn't get out of the house often. But I'll fetch her in a few moments.” He sounded apologetic.

Emma sank back in the seat. It was so hot in the back of the car; she felt sleepy and jumpy at the same time. Since the phone call from her mother, her worry about her father had lessened. But she had to think about the time ahead until she could go home. She longed to be by herself.

“She has lucky hands,” Uncle Crispin was saying. “She always manages to find lovely things in piles of absolute junk.”

How could Uncle Crispin think Aunt Bea's hands were lucky? Emma made no comment. They sat for what seemed an hour without speaking. Another car drove onto the gravel. An elderly woman got out of it and walked to the thrift shop. The younger woman in the car held a laughing baby, lifting it up so its round head nearly touched the car roof, and then bringing it back to her lap. Aunt Bea appeared at last carrying two stuffed pillowcases, her expression triumphant. She opened the back door. “Move over,” she ordered Emma roughly as she heaved the cases onto the back seat.

“You found some nice things in
Nice Things
?” asked Uncle Crispin.

“Tons!” she said. “Three perfectly good cotton bathrobes and real cotton sheets for a dollar each. Just tons! Look!” She pulled out a sheet on which Emma saw a pale gray smudge as though the person who had once used it had left a part of his shadow behind. “Just wonderful!” Aunt Bea congratulated herself.

The baby let out a shriek of laughter.

Aunt Bea was settling herself into her seat. She glanced over at the other car. She started to giggle. “Look at that baby! Did you ever see anything so wizened? It looks a hundred years old!”

“It's a perfectly nice baby,” Uncle Crispin said. “Really, Bea. How can you make fun—”

“Oh, Crispin, never mind! I have to go home. I've got a pain in my side. I shouldn't have carried that load of stuff. You might have helped me!”

“Bea, don't do this,” he said.

“I'm not doing anything! I really don't feel well. I'll tell you what I will do though. We'll stop at the market—I'll pick up some food and I'll make us a divine little supper.”

Uncle Crispin gripped the steering wheel as though he were drowning and it was a life saver.

“Please, Crispin,” Aunt Bea said. “You know how I hate long drives. You knew that all along. You shouldn't have insisted that I come. Am I right?”

Uncle Crispin sighed. Aunt Bea turned around in her seat to gaze at the pillowcases. She smiled vaguely. Without removing her gaze from her purchases, she said, “Emma, you and Crispin simply must go to Montauk some other time. You'll love the old lighthouse.”

It occurred to Emma at that moment that half the time, Aunt Bea didn't know what she was saying.

“You are the limit,” Uncle Crispin said. But he turned the car around and they headed back the way they had come. Emma wasn't sorry.

Inside the joy she had felt at the news that her father had come through the operation was a sorrowful awareness that he might not have.

It was almost funny that Uncle Crispin's celebration had ended up with her crowded into a corner of the back seat next to the bulging pillowcases. Aunt Bea was humming loudly, tunelessly. Her shopping must have made her happy.

Just before Uncle Crispin drew up in front of a supermarket, Aunt Bea startled Emma by turning to her and saying, “I expect you're feeling let down. Oh, I don't mean this silly drive—though I must say, it turned out nicely for me—I mean, knowing the operation is over … the waiting …”

Her voice wasn't especially friendly. But she smiled and said, “You'll get over that, too. Everything passes.…” And clutching her great pink hat, she got out of the car and went into the store.

It had been a very good supper. Even though Aunt Bea—who had somehow gotten bits of parsley in her hair—giggled and boasted as she explained how she had cooked the meal, Emma liked all of it. Her aunt wanted praise for everything, she had thought, for her cooking, her cream-colored stationery, her silver pen, especially her Monet poster. Praise, praise, until stuffed with it, she toppled over into sleep, or into the sofa in front of the television set.

Now, finally, Emma was alone at the top of the cliff stairway, the guide to seashore life in her hand. There might be another hour of light, though the bay was already streaked with a reddish glow from the westering sun. A delicate breeze lifted her hair from her neck. She went slowly down, stopping to touch the blades of tall, bright green grass that grew through the cracks of the weathered steps.

At the foot of the steps, a long curling strand of black seaweed lay upon the sand like a thick snake. Along the edge of the water, its head cocked as though it listened to the soft shifting of pebbles moved back and forth by the tide, a shorebird ran on thin legs. Emma sank to her knees and leaned toward it. At once, it lifted into the air and circled out over the bay. Where light did not touch it, the water was the color of dark metal.

Tonight she would cross off another day on the calendar she had drawn. Twelve days left. It didn't sound nearly as bad as two weeks. She got up shivering a little—she could feel the night gathering itself around her, flowing from the dark green pines above, the darkening water, the sooty eastern sky—and wandered down the beach, picking up shells and small stones. When she had all she could carry, she sat down and opened the book. From the pile of shells, she chose one that resembled a tiny ram's horn, and found an illustration of it at once. It was a
limacina.

It pleased her to find a name and a drawing of something she had picked up without thought. Did everything in the world have a name? Or were there things that were still secrets, waiting to be revealed by words?

Also in the pile were an angel's wing, a razor clam, a pale yellow lamp shell, nearly transparent, and a large winkle that for some reason reminded her of Aunt Bea's pink straw hat.

“Hey!” said a voice nearby.

She looked up. A tall, slender girl, a year or so older than she was, she guessed, stood in front of her. She was wearing tan shorts and a blue sweatshirt. Her braided hair was the color of butter. She was smiling broadly. A ray from the setting sun touched her left ear. It was like a little flame at the side of her head.

“Hello,” Emma said, getting to her feet.

“You here for the summer?” asked the girl.

“For twelve more days exactly,” Emma answered. “Up there.” She gestured toward the stairs that led to the log house.

“Oh-ho!” the girl exclaimed. “So you're staying with Lady Bonkers.”

“She's my aunt,” Emma said a little stiffly.

“Sorry about that. It's what my granny calls her. She's known her a long time. The whole family … the first wife who died, and the second wife. Granny says that one was pretty nice.”

“The second one was my grandmother. She died before I was born. I thought she and my grandfather moved to Connecticut a hundred years ago,” Emma said.

“Well, my granny isn't that old. She used to sail one of your grandfather's boats. But she had to stop. When your aunt would come home from boarding school to visit her father, it would make her mad to see old Granny out there on the bay in a sailboat, tacking and coming about and hoisting the sails like an America's Cup winner.” The girl threw back her head and laughed. Emma had to smile, too.

“You must be Alberta,” she said.

“Call me Bertie,” said the girl.

“My aunt said you have a blazing talent with watercolors,” Emma said.

“Wow!” cried Bertie. “I can't paint the side of a barn.” She stooped to sift through Emma's collection of shells and stones. “I used to make little heaps of things when I first came out here,” she said. “Let's go down the beach.”

As she walked alongside of Bertie, Emma felt that, at last, her spirit was rising. She imagined it was the way you felt when the sailboat you were in caught the wind.

“Granny and your Aunt Bea don't see each other these days,” Bertie told her. “The last time, Granny made her supper because your uncle had to go somewhere. Your aunt never stopped talking about a friend of hers who, she said, was the world's greatest cook. It makes you feel grim, Granny said. You know she's trying to make you feel bad. Like telling you I was so good at painting. Did you show her a watercolor you'd done? That would have set her off. What's that book?”

“I didn't show her anything,” said Emma.

She held out the book and Bertie took it quickly but with a gentle hand. Emma liked that. Most kids grabbed things from you. “Pretty interesting,” Bertie commented, looking through the pages. “I might have gone on collecting if I'd had this.”

“How long do you stay out here?” asked Emma.

“Until school starts,” Bertie replied. “My mother and father go to Denmark most summers to visit our relatives. I've never wanted to go with them. But I guess I'll have to next summer. I love it out here with Granny. We have a good time together.”

“Look at the sun,” Emma said. Both girls halted. The great red ball of fire was sinking behind a line of low hills in the west.

“Are you coming down to the beach tomorrow?” Bertie asked.

“I'm coming down every day, early, even if there's a storm,” Emma said. “I like to get out of that house.”

“Yeah,” Bertie said softly.

7

The Village by the Sea

When had the idea struck Emma and Bertie? Was it there all the time they roamed the beach, searching for shells they could match up with illustrations in Emma's book? It must have grown slowly, the way light comes at dawn, and gradually reveals an island or a hill, a forest, that has been hidden by the dark.

They picked up other things beside shells; blue and green beach glass roughened by tide and wind and the abrasion of the sand, bits of wood as smooth as satin, a buckle from a belt, corks, a few glass bottles, stones of many shapes, and seaweed dry as paper, green sea lettuce and rockweed and Irish moss. There were egg capsules, too, devil's purse black as ink, and the hard little collars where moon snails had lived. There were the shells of worm snails, spirals and corkscrews white as chalk, and sponges which were gray or yellow and crumbly, and the ghostly amber shells of crabs. Some of these things reminded Emma of old musical instruments her father had showed her in a music encyclopedia.