Then There Were Five (18 page)

“And I'm going to be a famous actress with lots of flowers in my dressing room. I'll live in a hotel too.”

“We won't ever have to cook anything.”

“Or can anything.”

“It was fun, though.”

“Yes, thanks to Mr. Titus. Won't Cuffy be pleased?”

“And surprised?”

“Absolutely thunderstruck. Oh, dear,” said Mona, “I wish I weren't so scared of the vacuum cleaner. I hate the way it swells up and roars the second I press the button.”

“I know. And the way it sort of insists on going where it wants to. I'll take turns with you, though.”

The house hadn't been swept or dusted for a week. Mona and Randy rushed about feverishly, dusting the same surfaces twice, sweeping little heaps of lint into corners and forgetting about them, misplacing cleaning cloths, and repeatedly allowing brooms and mops to fall with sharp clatters to the floor. The vacuum cleaner buzzed all morning like a mighty bee, and Randy and Mona called to each other above it, like people in a multitude.

At noon Mark, Oliver, Rush, and Willy trooped into the kitchen with expectant faces. Smiles dying as they looked, they saw only a lifeless stove, devoid of pots and pans, and a bare table with no signs of the preparation of food. The floor was clean and empty except for Mona's two shoes, one a little in front of the other, exactly as she had stepped out of them hours ago.

“This is too much,” said Rush. “This is too much!” He leaped like a maddened Mohawk through the door toward the sounds of buzzing and shouting which were issuing from upstairs.

“—
WITH CURLS ON TOP
,” Randy was braying loudly.

“
I LIKE IT LONG
,” Mona brayed back. “
SORT OF TURNED UNDER AT THE ENDS. PAGE BOY, THEY CALL IT
.”

“Page boy,” repeated Rush in disgust as Mona turned off the vacuum cleaner. “Page boy! Why not bellboy, or busboy, for heaven's sake? And
where's our dinner?
”

“Oh, my,” said Mona, letting the vacuum cleaner fall beside the prone broom and mop. Rush really did look pretty mad. “Is it noon already?”

“Noon! It's half past twelve, and you have four dangerously hungry men on your hands. We could forgive scarce meals while you were canning, but now there is no excuse!”

“Scrambled eggs,” hissed Randy, “they're easy, and I'll make a salad.”

“Eggs,” groaned Rush. “You're always falling back on eggs. I've eaten so many since Cuffy's been away that I'm beginning to grow pin feathers.”

After a hastily assembled meal they all went back to work. Gradually the house regained its normal expression: a look of reasonable order, and unprosperous but homely comfort. Rush had brought in flowers and Mona arranged them; great armfuls of zinnias, petunias, marigolds, and coreopsis. Willy was even prevailed upon to cut some of the lesser sunflowers.

“What am I ever going to put them in?” pondered Mona. “They're so huge.”

In the end the only container large enough to hold them proved to be a small aluminum garbage can. Mona hid it tactfully behind a leather tuffet, and above it, against the living-room wall, the sunflowers blazed in a fiery constellation.

Cuffy's room was a regular bower. Oliver contributed to it an arrangement of his own: wild flowers stuffed into a kitchen tumbler, vervain and clover and black-eyed Susans, all picked too short and rather wilted from the firm grasp with which he had held them.

“Those flowers say Oliver all over. I'll put them on the table by her bed,” Mona said, and removed her own tasteful bouquet of late moss roses and forget-me-nots in a little white vase.

Through the open windows came a sound of lawn mowers. Rush had borrowed Mr. Titus's and Willy was using the Melendy one, and they were performing a sort of double concerto on the grass. Every time they met, pushing and rolling, Rush would say, “Ships that pass in the night,” or “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” or “There's a lawn, lawn trail a-winding,” or some other silly remark. Isaac gamboled about Rush and barked frantically at the mower, which kept spraying grass at him. John Doe gamboled and barked about Willy's mower. It was noisy, rather pleasant work.

Oliver was cultivating the vegetable garden. He hoed and raked, hoed and raked, and now and then pulled up a fat purslane plant, first killing it with an imaginary machine pistol. “D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- Pow-oo. Pow-oo. Got him!”

Drops of perspiration flew out from under Oliver's hat, but the song of the crickets cheered him on, and the tall, stout sunflowers stood about him like a gathering of friends.

Randy had washed all the week's canning-stained dish towels, and they flapped mildly on the clothesline, adding an odor of Clorox to the summer air. She had also scrubbed out both the bathtubs, and was now frantically trying to bring order out of the chaos that was Rush's room. It was a masterly confusion of bird's nests, snakeskins, books left open facedown, sheets of music, symphony scores, war posters, disbanded chemical sets, microscope lenses, fishing tackle, old letters and postal cards, and odd stamps which had escaped from his stamp album. A hammer and saw, some nails, a bottle of varnish, and an empty Coca-Cola bottle with a straw in it were among the articles on the bureau, and on the bed were two old comic books, a model airplane, and a volume of the life of Beethoven. As Cuffy had predicted, shoes and articles of clothing were draped about the floor. Rush no more had the instinct to hang up his discarded clothes than a snake has the instinct to hang up its shed skin. It nearly drove Cuffy mad.

Among the shoes and clothes were scattered pages of lined music composition paper. At the top of each was written “Opus III: Sonata in E Flat”; underneath in smaller letters were the words “by Rush Melendy,” and at the left, still smaller, the words “Largo Maestoso.”

“Goody,” said Randy, seeing this. Largo Maestoso was her favorite tempo. It was the tempo of funeral marches, which she enjoyed, and also it was easier to play than things like scherzo and allegro. You had time, between chords, to think what you were going to do next.

All the music sheets contained notes. Some only a few, some a great many, but none of the pages was completed. The notes scampered frantically up and down their lines like black pollywogs, and across one of the sheets there was an angry scribble, and the words “This stinks” written in red pencil.

Randy did what she could with the room, which, since time was getting short, consisted largely of stuffing things into drawers and closets. When she got fed up she leaned out the window and yelled at Rush.

“I don't care if you're a genius or not, you'll just have to clean the rest of your room yourself!”

Then she went up to the Office and painted a big poster saying
WELCOME CUFFY
. Around these words she painted angels with harps. All the angels looked like movie stars, it was only by the wings that you could tell.

Heavenly smells came from the kitchen. A kettle of leek and potato soup was simmering on the stove, and in the oven a cake was performing its fragrant mystery. Mona had mopped the floor, the quart jars of preserves glowed like somber jewels on the windowsill, and the alarm clock ticked with that sure, contented sound that one hears only in well-ordered kitchens.

The Melendys were pleased with their day's work. They had a right to be.

“Now all we have to do is to get clean ourselves,” Mona said. “I'm going to wear my new white dress.”

At five o'clock Willy hitched Lorna Doone to the surrey, stuck two red zinnias into her bridle, and drove her around to the front door.

“Come on, all,” called Willy. “Time t' go meet Cuffy.”

Randy climbed down from the railing. She had been pinning the welcome sign up over the front door. She had on a clean yellow dress and was wearing shoes and socks for a change. The other children appeared, one by one, all unusually well-groomed.

“I wish Mark could have come with us,” Randy said.

“Well, he has to milk,” Mona told her. “And anyway I think he felt kind of—you know—delicate about it.”

They piled into the surrey. Isaac and John Doe wanted to go, too, but they were not allowed. They sat side by side on the doormat under the welcome sign and stared reproachfully at the departing surrey. Isaac's lip was tucked in sulkily: he thought for a moment or two of running away again and giving everybody a good scare, but then he remembered the skunk episode, and abandoned the idea. He lay down flat with a thump, gave a sigh like the air going out of a blacksmith's bellows, and glared at the world. He would have nothing to do with John Doe, who sat upright beside him tongue hanging rakishly out of the side of his mouth; his eyes, nose, and ears joyfully alert to possibilities.

Lorna Doone clip-clopped along the highway, her mane blowing in the summer wind; the whip glittered in its holster, the fringes tossed. No one talked. They had all worked hard and were comfortably tired. Autumn was coming soon, all right. The air was full of thistledown and milkweed floss, high in the sky, low, skimming the grass, all flying, all traveling: shimmering in the sunny air like phoenix feathers.

The mullein had finished blooming, and stood up out of the pastures like dusty candelabra. The flowers of Queen Ann's lace had curled up into birds' nests, and the bee balm was covered with little crown-shaped pods. In another month—no, two maybe—would come the season of the skeletons, when all that was left of the weeds was their brittle architecture. But the time was not yet. The air was warm and bright, the grass was green, and the leaves, and the lazy monarch butterflies were everywhere.

“I wonder if she's changed,” mused Oliver.

“Who?” said Rush.

“Cuffy. I wonder if she's changed.”

“In two weeks? I doubt it.”

“Heavens, is it only two weeks?” cried Mona. “It feels like months or years. Think of everything that's happened. The fire, and—Oren, and having Mark with us, and learning to can, and all. I feel years older.”

“I wonder if Cuffy'll think
we've
changed,” said Rush, rather taking to the idea.

“I doubt it,” Willy said. “Look 'bout the same to me, all of you. Course Oliver's lost a tooth. And maybe you're a mite thinner, Rush—”

“It's the meals I've been getting,” Rush sighed. “No, but I mean in our characters.”

“Oh, characters,” Willy said. “Well, time'll tell, time'll tell. When you're a kid your character's kinda quick an' easy, bendin' this way, that way, changin' itself overnight. 'Tain't set yet. When you're old it's set, all right, and there ain't nothin' to be done. You got it like you got the shape of your bones. Maybe you've lost all your hair, and then again maybe you mighta lost your nerve. Maybe you're farsighted when you look at the paper, and kinda nearsighted when you look at the truth—”

“Maybe you have flat feet, or a flat sense of humor,” interrupted Rush. “Maybe hardening of the arteries, or hardening of the heart. And then you could have either a false set of teeth or a false set of values, or both. Gee, I could keep this up for hours. Willy, you should have been a preacher. That was quite a sermon.”

“Aw, quit,” Willy said. “Remember you ain't got no character at all yet. It's still just growin', bendin' this way an' that way. Nothin' but a little jellyfish still.”

“Jellyfish! Listen, I've got a strong character! Why, listen, I—”

“Nothin' but a jellyfish,” repeated Willy peacefully. “All of you. Just a lot of little jellyfish.”

“Some jellyfish sting, don't forget,” said Rush.

He stared at Lorna Doone's tail and wondered about his character. He was sure he had a strong character but when he began to think hard about it there didn't seem to be anything to take hold of. Am I generous? wondered Rush. I guess so. But only when I want to be, so I guess I'm not. Have I a good disposition? Yes, except when I'm mad and then it's fierce. Gee, remember the time I threw the tapioca at Mona and she had to have her hair washed; remember the time I socked fat, old Floyd Laramy; remember the time I—but no, better not think about disposition. Am I talented? Rush brightened a little. Sure, he was talented. He played the piano better than any kid he'd ever heard, he earned money giving lessons, didn't he? And he composed music, what's more. He began to think about Opus III: Sonata in E Flat. He kept getting stuck in the middle of it. Stuck and still stucker; he couldn't seem to pull out of the bog. He thought of the sheet on which he had scribbled, “This stinks.” Oh, nuts to character.

“Oh, nuts to character!” Rush said out loud.

“Well, at least you're a good athlete,” said Mona. “And you understand a lot about music.”

“Yes, and you know how to make people laugh. I wish I did,” said Randy, and Rush realized that he was not the only one who had been analyzing his own character.

In fact Oliver was the only person who hadn't been. He was sitting contentedly squashed between Rush and Willy, smelling Lorna Doone's lovely smell and dreamily imagining himself in the act of catching a twelve-pound catfish, just like Mr. Titus.