Then There Were Five (23 page)

“Decorations, though,” sighed Mona. “There's nothing but crêpe paper, and not much of that. I even looked when I was in the city. And of course balloons are out of the question, and I suppose Japanese lanterns are unpatriotic, even if we could get them. So what
shall
we do?”

Their solution was given them, however. None of them ever knew who had whispered their problem into the benevolent ear of their old New York friend, Mrs. Oliphant, but one day, about a week before the Fair, a large box arrived for them.

“It's awful light,” said Oliver dubiously, lifting it. “Awful light for anything so big, and it doesn't rattle.”

“I wonder what it can be,” wondered Randy.

“The best way to find out is to open it,” said Rush, and swooped down on the cord with his scout knife.

There was a rapacious pulling and tearing, and a growl of torn cardboard.

“Look, here's a note,” announced Rush, holding it up over his head where nobody could reach it. “No, let me read it out loud. Saves time. ‘Dear Children,' it says. ‘I hear you are in need of decorations and am sending you these. I bought them in San Francisco's Chinatown, years ago, because I knew, intuitively, that the time would come when I would surely need them to beautify a Livestock Auction. I wish I could be present on the momentous day, even though I could not promise to buy a cow or even a pig, since the apartment is crowded already. Much love to you all, including the new member of the family. Gabrielle DeF. Oliphant.'”

“Hooray for Mrs. Oliphant!” shouted Oliver. “Next to Cuffy she's the nicest lady I ever saw.”

“And look at the decorations!” cried Mona.

Almost speechless, they carefully took them from the box. There were great, pleated garlands, and necklaces, and chains, all made of paper. They opened out like fabulous accordions, many feet long, and were most marvelous colors: green, turquoise, yellow, vermilion, magenta, purple. There were dozens and dozens of them, all different shapes and colors, and beautiful beyond the wildest fancy. There were gilded paper dragons, too, and fantastic, scowling fish, and curious masks. These were ornaments fit to fly from the minarets of Aladdin's palace.

“Oh, brother,” said Rush. “This is going to be the prettiest Livestock Auction and Fair that anybody ever saw!”

“It mustn't rain!” said Mona. She looked up at the sky severely. “It must not rain!”

As the day drew near, a sort of quivering excitement seemed to vibrate over the Four-Story Mistake, exactly as intense heat makes the air quiver above a prairie. Dozens of strange bicycles lay dead on their sides in front of the house each afternoon. Children were everywhere. There was a sound of hammering, of laughter, argument, and loud conversation. A smell of baking floated out of doors. Vast preparations were under way in the kitchen, though the cakes themselves had to be made at the very last.

There were difficulties, of course. Rush smashed his thumbnail with the hammer and worried for fear it would affect his playing. They could not agree as to the best place to give the show. Pearl Cotton, Trudy Schaup, and Margaret Anton had a terrible fight about who was going to make the orange layer cake. Mona settled that by saying they could each make one; there was no such thing as too many orange layer cakes. Randy burned up a whole pan of cake-sale hermits, and put too much vinegar in the vinegar candy; Rush said it tasted like congealed French dressing. But on the whole things went well, and it promised to be a memorable fair. They relaxed their restrictions against adults in the case of Mr. Titus who pleaded to be allowed to make some marble cakes, and in the case of Mrs. Wheelwright, of Carthage, who was famous for her jelly doughnuts, and, of course, in the case of Mr. Cutmold, who was the auctioneer.

“Everything is going marvelously,” sighed Mona, on Thursday.

But on Friday it rained. It rained all day. The children were no good in school. They kept staring out the windows, sighing gustily, and not hearing when their teachers called upon them.

Mona met Randy at recess. Her look of a tragedy queen was only slightly marred by the ink on her chin.

“We are ruined!” she said.

“Oh, listen, maybe it'll clear up before morning.”

“No, it won't, we're ruined. Chris Cottrell says this is probably the equinoctial storm, and that it's bound to last three days at least.”

“Well, I won't believe it. Anyway, what is an equinoctial storm?”

“It comes at the times of year when days and nights are equal length; now, in September, and then again in March.”

“Oh.”

They listened to the rain in silence; then Randy said, “We can have the Fair indoors maybe.”

“Yes, certainly, a splendid idea. We'll auction the cattle off in the living room, and the hogs in Father's study. Yes, that's a dandy idea!”

“Well, you don't have to be so mean about it, I was only trying to think of a way,” said Randy, rather hurt.

“Okay, I know. But it's just more than I can bear to think of all those lovely boxes of penuche, and puffed-rice candy, and fudge, going to waste, to say nothing of the dozens of cakes, and the Chinese decorations!”

The bell rang then, and they went back to their classrooms with despair in their hearts. The cakemaking after school lost all its allure, but the girls went through it grimly. Every time a cake was in the oven, and therefore in the hands of destiny, the children rehearsed their parts in the show, and perfected their plans. But all the preparations which should have been joyously festive were gloom-tinged instead. The wet wind sighed strangely in the screens, and the rain drove harder than ever against the windows.

“You ought to hear it up in the cupola,” Mark said. “It sounds like bullets.”

“Oh, I hate it!” cried Mona, half in tears. “Horrible, vile,
pig
weather! Why couldn't it have held off?”

That night she lay in bed and listened to the roaring of the spruces. It's nothing to get so upset about, she tried to tell herself. What's an old fair, after all? It can be postponed. Think if it was Nazi bombers. Think if it was a storm in the South Pacific with only a tent over you. This isn't anything, it's less than anything at all. But, oh, I
wish
it would stop!

The world rocked like a cradle. After a while she fell asleep.

Why do I feel so blue? wondered Mona, when she woke up the next morning. My mind is full of something heavy and sad. What is it? Oh, the rain! She lay very still, listening. Holding her breath. She heard the loud, ruthless jeer of a bluejay; and then something else. A lawn mower! Mona's eyes flew open, and she saw the early-morning sunlight pouring through the windows.

“Oh, thank you!” cried Mona, leaping out of bed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

It was a glorious morning, full of glorious work to do. Willy ambled about with a ladder, pinning up the decorations while Mona directed from below. Mark groomed the cattle, and helped Rush mow the lawn. Randy and Oliver sat among heaps of tissue paper, doing up presents for the grab bag. Children kept coming down the drive bringing their contributions of homemade cake, candy, popcorn balls, cookies. Daphne and Dave arrived earliest of all to set up the tents, and remained for the rest of the day helping with every sort of job. Hammers rang and saws sawed. Dogs barked, cows mooed, pigs squealed or rumbled, according to their size, and above all, shriller than all, were the high-pitched, intense voices of the children.

It was a marvelous day: September at its best. Hot in the sunshine, and cool in the shade, and the sky above was deep, deep azure like a gentian. Here and there, already, a tree had changed its color. There was a maple red as cardinal feathers, and back in the woods the hickories were turning yellow; but everything else was green.

Lunch was a dreamlike meal of sandwiches eaten out of doors, absentmindedly, with work still in progress. Cuffy would allow no one in the kitchen. She was making enough punch to slake the thirst of regiments.

At one o'clock Father arrived in the only Braxton taxi. It was wonderful to see him, they were all delighted, but their embraces were brief, their greetings briefer, and he was pressed into service before he had time to change his clothes. In no time at all he was standing on a kitchen chair tacking cheesecloth up on the summer house.

By two o'clock the transformation was complete. The Four-Story Mistake had become a fairground, and beautiful it was. The Chinese streamers were gorgeously looped from tree to tree, twined about trellises, and draped over branches. The jovial fish and dragons danced in the light September wind, and colored masks were strung in unexpected places. The Addisons' tents had been transformed from ordinary olive-drab backyard affairs to small Bedouin or Arabian shelters. Mona had done this by draping them with anything colorful and handy. A red tablecloth and a green hall rug for one. A yellow bedspread and Father's purple dressing gown, with the sleeves turned in (and not without a certain amount of resistance from Father) for the other. The result was that the tents were hot as Tophet inside, but wonderful to look at.

At two-thirty the people began to arrive. Oliver and a friend of his, Billy Anton, sold tickets at a point halfway up the drive. They had two chairs, a change box, a small table, a beach umbrella and four bottles of pop, and did a thriving business. People arrived in dozens. Farmers came for the sake of the auction, and their children came for the fun.

The Melendys and their friends had provided quite a lot of fun.

The Ten Cent Ride, for instance. Mark had thought that up himself. Most of the children who came to the Fair were farm children; the rest came from such small towns as Carthage and Eldred; a ride on the back of a tame, old mare was nothing new to them. But who had ever ridden on such a horse as this? For Lorna Doone had been decked out like a steed from King Arthur's stables. Above her ears were bouquets of nasturtiums, her mane was braided with scarlet wool, and across her brow was a diadem of large glass beads. She wore a crimson saddlecloth with fringed edges, and little bracelets of bells jingled above her hoofs (they were really only the old elastic garters sewn with bells that Mona and Randy had used for Morris dancing in their city school).… Lorna Doone was a horse of graceful temperament, she submitted serenely to all these trappings, and as Mark led her up and down the drive, and along the path through the woods, each small child upon her back felt that he rode as a king, and remembered long afterward that glittering and chiming journey.

The fortune-teller's booth was popular with people of all ages. The inside of the summer house was draped with blue cheesecloth left over from the show the Melendys had given in the winter, and pinned to it were stars and moons cut out of silver paper. There was a curtain across the door, and in the bluish gloom a table stood, on which were placed a round crystal paperweight, a candlestick, a rather sticky skull made out of plasticene, and a heavy book with an ornate binding which looked exactly like the book of a sorceress, but which once opened proved to be a compendium of the diseases of sheep. Still, nobody needed to know that.

Mona herself, after an inward struggle, had decided to sacrifice beauty for character, and was disguised as a very ugly, ancient soothsayer. She was wearing a wig of grey yarn, a costume which consisted of a long slip to which were pinned all the brightest scraps in Cuffy's piece bag, as many bracelets as she could collect, and a shawl over her head. Her face was crisscrossed with hand-made wrinkles applied with an eyebrow pencil.

She read one palm after another. The customers kept pouring in, and the dimes poured with them. Mona warmed to her work.

“You are going for a long trip across water,” she might say, looking into the work-toughened palm of a farmer. “After the war's over, of course, and I
think
it's going to be Egypt. A trip up the Nile, maybe.” Or, gazing wickedly at the hand of one of her schoolmates, she might say, “A man is about to enter your life. He is dark and handsome, even though his voice
is
changing. It looks like Harold Rauderbusch to me…”

The customers loved it. They giggled self-consciously and shifted their feet, but they hung on to every word.

Randy and Daphne presided at the cake booth. What a lavish display that was! At least at first; it did not last long. There were the three orange layer cakes, and the angel food cakes, the chocolate, mocha, sponge, raisin, and spice; the cupcakes topped with pink, white and chocolate; the trays of hermits, brownies, myriad cookies, and many another delicacy. And, dominating all, were the majestic marble cakes contributed by Mr. Titus. The girls worked like beavers, for the demands were heavy; Daphne was terrible at making change, and Randy was clumsy at tying packages, and from their efforts to keep the flies at bay some of the cakes tasted of Flit, but between them the girls managed pretty well, shortchanging only the minister and a lady from Braxton, and giving out only one really insecure parcel; though that, unfortunately, had contained a dozen of Mrs. Wheelwright's jelly doughnuts.

Punch was dispensed by Chris Cottrell in one of the Bedouin tents, and ice-cream cones by Trudy Schaup in the other. Even the two iron deer had been put to good use. Their antlers were twined with beads, paper streamers, and ribbons, and bound to the back of each were bulging saddlebags of brightly colored cloth. In front of the deer with the proudly raised head was a placard: “F
OR
B
OYS
! G
RAB BAG
! T
EN CENTS A TURN
!” And in front of the grazing deer was a similar proclamation for girls. The Melendys had worked hard over these gifts, and they were really good. In addition to the dime-store whistles, bubble pipes, puzzles, and bags of marbles, Oliver had contributed many of his small, precious, prewar metal planes and automobiles. Rush had surrendered a tiny, cherished flashlight, a harmonica, a pocketknife, and a cowboy belt set with colored stones. Randy had parted with two paintboxes, a set of crayons, and a white china pig. Mona's contribution consisted mainly of ten-cent jewelry: rings and large, flashing pins. She had also generously given four tiny bottles of perfume, and a box of incense.