Pinky Pye (2 page)

"Probably Fire Island was named Fire Island because when the earth broke away from the sun, probably that part cooled last," he said to Rachel, who nodded understandingly and admired this display of scientific knowledge. She secretly vowed to read
Popular Mechanics
from A to Z as her brother did so she would know
something.

"It's probably all just plain hot rock, cold now though," she suggested, hoping the latter was the case.

Papa had been too excited and happy to stay up in his study and work. After all, this was the first all-summer-long vacation he had ever taken his family on, and naturally he was pleased. He joined Jerry and Rachel on the little square porch.

"I suppose we'll have to take Ginger somehow or another," he said.

"Ginger," said Jerry, "did you know that you are going on a trip?"

Ginger wagged his tail and leaped up ready to go.

Ginger was known throughout Cranbury as "the intellectual dog" because once he had found one of Jerry's pencils, tracked Jerry to school, and gone up the fire escape with it to Jerry's very classroom. Of course they had to take him. Moreover, he had been lost from Thanksgiving Day until the twenty-ninth of May! Rachel and Jerry had only just been reunited with him. They couldn't part with him again, leave him behind. Someone might steal him again, such a smart dog. The Pyes could not take a chance like that. And besides, imagine Ginger's eyes when he saw that he was being left, the awful look in his sad eyes!

"Yes," said Papa. "Bring Ginger, of course. But not Gracie. Gracie cannot come."

"What!" exclaimed Mama, who was running the mop around the upstairs hall and hearing every word they said. "What! Not bring Gracie!"

"No," said Papa. "I can't have that cat chasing away the few birds there are on that island. She can stay with Gramma."

Mama shook her head firmly and banged the mop against the banister. "She's got to come," she said. Gracie had been a wedding present to Mama and Papa, and she was known all over town as "the New York cat."

"Gracie would pine away," said Mama. "She would miss me so. I've heard of cats just pining away." The way she said "pining" brought tears to Rachel's eyes, though she was not very fond of the fabulous New York cat, who had an unpleasant habit of fixing her eyes on Rachel with a green and glassy stare.

"I'll keep Gracie away from you and your birds," said Mama. "After all, with that bell around her neck she doesn't even try to bother the birds here, so why should she bother the birds there? She won't. She can't. In fact, she is a good spotter, and she may lead you to some bird whose existence there you would not otherwise suspect. Not another puffin perhaps, but some bird equally unique."

So Papa said all right, let Gracie come too. Gracie was sitting on the high banister and she surveyed them all coldly and indifferently. "And let Uncle Bennie come too if he can," said Papa.

At first Uncle Bennie's mother did not want him to go. A whole summer seemed like such an awfully long time to be parted from him. But since he was looking pale, having just had the chicken pox, she finally said, "All right."

After all, Uncle Bennie would be with Mrs. Pye, who was his own big sister, which made him the uncle of Jerry and Rachel, though he was not half as old. He was only three, and he had been born an uncle. Some people are never uncles, but he had been one from the start, ever since he was a minute old; a minute-old uncle is what he had once been.

Since his mother still looked sad at the idea of the long separation, Uncle Bennie said to her, "If the fire's too hot on that island that's on fire, I'll come back. I'll swim back. I can swim, you know," he said indignantly, though so far no one had said he couldn't. "On the bottom of the bath tub, I swim."

It was fortunate that Uncle Bennie had no large pets to bring with him, for how to transport Gracie and Ginger was going to be a great problem. But all Uncle Bennie had in the way of pets was a dead locust on a string. This dead locust slept on a little bed Uncle Bennie had patted down for him of pieces of cloth in a light yellow Coats' thread box. He had punched holes in the lid of the box for his pet. "What are those for?" asked Jerry.

"For him to breathe. Some dead things do breathe, you know," said Uncle Bennie.

Then the packing in both houses had begun.

"We might as well take every piece of clothing we own, being gone that long," said Mama.

"Even leggin's?" asked Rachel.

"Well ... I suppose not leggings," said Mama hesitantly, for leggings were a tempting idea. The island sounded hot, but should one judge by names? Consider Iceland and Greenland, each one being just the opposite of what it sounded like, according to the geographies.

Mama would pack a valise and then unpack it again, thinking some garment was at the bottom that should be at the top. Sweaters should certainly be at the top, where they could be reached in a hurry. The children might start off thinly clad for a hot day and then the weather might suddenly turn cold. What is worse than being cold and shivering and having everyone start the summer with a cold? And no doctors there. Perhaps not even a drugstore there with a wonderful druggist like their own Dr. Sheppard, who could tell you what the doctor was likely to prescribe, thus saving you a great deal of money.

No. Packing had not been as simple as it sounded, especially with Miss Lamb at the library urging Rachel and Jerry to take eight more books every time they went in. There were so many books by authors whose names began with an
A
or a
B
they had to be piled on the floor and on the windowsills. "Here's a good book," she'd say because it wouldn't fit in the
As
or
Bs.
And they'd take it.

"If only," the Pyes thought over and over again as the hard job of packing went on, "we were either there
on
Fire Island or here and all nicely unpacked and things put away and us settled in our lives as we used to be!"

Fortunately their important High School Senior friend, Sam Doody, the captain of the team and the greatest Boy Scout in Cranbury (he had once saved a life), had offered to drive the family and their pets dead and alive to the town on Long Island from which the boat sailed to Fire Island. Mama had been delighted, and it no longer mattered what she put on top in the suitcases or on the bottom or whether things stuck out of the sides. Nothing mattered since they were not going by train, and she had got out still more things to take,
War and Peace,
for instance, which she hoped this summer to finish. Last summer she had got up to page thirty-nine.

None of them had been in Sam Doody's present car. It was an old car but new to Sam. It was a touring car, a Model-T Ford touring car, and the black canvas top rolled back. Think of the air and sunshine in that, if you want!

At first Rachel had been disappointed not to be going on the train. She had really hoped to sleep on the train, look out of the window in the morning early, view the passing scene while eating a piece of toast. Suppose she saw the reservoir like that, they whizzing by it, she with a piece of toast!

But when she'd heard they would go by way of the Boston Post Road, she was not as disappointed. She had never been on this famous road, and she thought she'd see horses posting along delivering the post. "Giddyap-giddyap," she murmured.

"And now I can take more dolls," she had said happily, "since we are going in a car on the Boston Post Road." And she had tucked in another old doll, named Lydia, and a bagful of Lydia's clothes.

Right now then, as the family stood waiting for the boat to come, Lydia, with eyes as liquid as the blue sky above the bay, looked up expectantly at Rachel from the crate on which she lay sprawling.

Rachel stooped down and whispered in Lydia's ear. "Are you glad you came? We're about to set sail. Isn't that wonderful?"

So there they stood then, all the Pyes, Ginger, rasping and gasping on his leash, Gracie, meowing inside her cardboard carton, Lydia, the blue-eyed doll, gazing happily up at the blue sky, all of them on the little wharf looking out over the Great South Bay, its ripples smooth and serene, a soothing balm to the tired nerves of the travelers. Packing was behind them, the Boston Post Road was behind them. Rachel had not even known they were on the Boston Post Road until they were off it. Not a horse came posting by. No coaches. One ice wagon and several moving vans drawn by horses—that was all there was in the horse line. It was an ugly road with thousands of signs on it. ENNA JETTICK, said many of these signs. Enna Jettick was not a lady, it was a shoe.

Behind them, too, were countless flat tires. Fortunately some of these had occurred in pleasant spots. One had occurred near the Southport Railroad Station, where, longingly, the children watched the trains streak by as Sam and Papa changed the tire of their Model-T Ford. You might think that Papa, being mainly a bird man, would not be handy with a jack and a wrench. But he was handy, and he could, moreover, crank up the car and make it heave and shake and get ready to go.

And behind them was the wearying but extraordinary ride through New York City, where the children hoped for a glimpse at least—if not a run up it too—of the famous escalator where once, running up the down one, Papa had bumped into Mama. And finally, behind them was the speedy journey, hitting sometimes thirty-two miles an hour ("Don't go so fast! Don't go so fast!" Mama would beg, for she hated speed), out of the city and down the island to this little wharf.

Now. Ahead lay the Great South Bay cupped in the golden arms of sunset, a ride across it in a boat, and then—Fire Island! Fire Island and a whole long summer in a little cottage called The Eyrie.

Rachel and Jerry thought that it was an exceptional happening for Papa not only to have a study at home called the Eyrie, but also to have rented a cottage with the same identical name. How many eyries are there in the world that the Pyes should be connected with two of them?

They turned from the bay a moment to wave to Sam Doody, who gave them a last cheerful wave with his pipe and a toot of his horn as he drove off the dock and started on his long and lonesome ride home. How empty his car was now! He swung one long lanky leg over the door.
That Sam!
they thought fondly.
Showing off!
Then, shielding their eyes from the crimson setting sun, they peered across the bay for their boat, which, they had learned from a man with a can full of worms, was called the
Maid of the Bay.
They supposed this boat would at least be as big as the
Richard Peck,
a boat that sailed back and forth from New Haven to New York that they had all been on once.

Right below them a little launch was moored. "Glub, glub," it said complacently as it bobbed in the waves. Looking down at it for the first time, they saw its name. "The
Maid of the Bay!
" they exclaimed.

Though it was little, it was a sturdy boat. A man in faded blue pants was sitting in the stern, smoking a pipe and looking up at them. It was rather disconcerting for the Pyes to realize that somebody had been observing them without their being aware of it, and they hoped they had said nothing stupid. They were going to a new place and did not want to start off seeming stupid.

The man said, not giving a sign as to whether he thought they were stupid or not, "Don't you want to load up?"

"Yes, yes," they all said. They answered quickly, the way people answer in New York, where the quickest and least stupid people in the world live, according to Mama. They hoped to counteract the bad impression they may have made on the man by looking for the
Maid of the Bay
out at sea when here she had been all along right under their noses. Rachel wished she had said, "Aye, aye, sir," for she knew it was correct to say "Aye, aye, sir" to sailors and "Ah, men" to God.

"I wonder if we are the only people going over there," said Mama. And, "Is this boat safe?" she whispered to Papa.

"Very," he answered.

"I like land that is joined to land, not separated," said Mama, but she said it to herself, not to cast a gloom. Really the only islands she liked were the little ones in the sound that they waded to when the tide was low, ate their picnics on, and then waded away from and back to the mainland before the tide came in again.
Well,
she thought.
This island is not
very
far, though too far for wading.
And out loud she said, "Well, come on, let's get in the boat."

It was lucky there were no other passengers. The Pyes and their luggage took up most of the space. Mama let Gracie out of her box to take in the situation and to stretch her legs. She looked over the side of the boat in astonishment, drew back, and then looked again, long-neckedly, fascinated though terrified. Ginger was leaning over the side so far that his nose got wet in the salt spray, and he kept licking it eagerly. Papa picked up a newspaper that someone had left on the boat, and he tucked it in his pocket to read later.

Looking toward their destination, Uncle Bennie said, "Is that the island we're going to?"