Magic Elizabeth (10 page)

She went back into the garden and called. She stood beneath Emily’s window and called. But there was no answer. The shade had been drawn down over the window again. Just as if she had been a little garden spirit, Emily had disappeared.

Somehow it didn’t seem so good to be staying here after all. Maybe she should have asked her mother to come. Maybe she should call her back.

But there was still Elizabeth.

“Yes, I want to find Elizabeth,” she told herself. “And I will, somehow.”

D
inner that evening
was a rather festive occasion, eaten at the big round dining-room table, with a lace place mat for each of them.

“A celebration,” said Aunt Sarah, as she lit the tall white candles she had placed on the table.

“What are we celebrating?” asked Sally, who was still feeling unhappy about Emily.

“Perhaps we’re celebrating your visit here,” said Aunt Sarah. “We haven’t really done it properly yet, you know. I think Shadow’s very happy to have you in the house. He’s never had a child around, you know. That’s why he was so unfriendly at first, I suppose. I believe he’s sorry. I think he feels it’s a happier house with you here.”

Sally looked down at Shadow, who was sitting on the floor next to her chair, looking expectantly up at her. “Poor Shadow, he looks hungry,” she said. Her hand hovered over the meat upon her plate. “May I?” she asked, looking at her aunt through the wavering light of the candles.

“Oh Sally,” said her aunt sharply, “we don’t — ” But then Aunt Sarah stopped, her face softened, and a smile started somewhere about her eyes, though it was hard to tell in the flickering light of the candles. “I think you may,” she said. “I think Shadow would like that.”

“Thank you,” said Sally, and gave Shadow a piece of her meat. He flicked a grateful look at her as he took it.

How funny Aunt Sarah was, always talking about Shadow and how he felt. Did she mean
she
was happy to have Sally here too? Sally looked across the table at her aunt through her eyelashes. Aunt Sarah was touching her napkin to her lips and looking quite stern again. No, she probably was just glad that Shadow was happy. That was all she had said, after all.

“I wonder if it looked like this when the other Sally lived here?” Sally said, watching the reflected candle flames dancing on the tabletop.

“I imagine it did,” said Aunt Sarah. “The other
Sally did her homework at this very table. At least, I suppose she did.”

Sally looked down at the table. She looked closer. Just faintly, she could see something that looked like letters, pressed into the wood near the edge of the lace mat. Sally knew what this was. Someone, sometime, had done homework here and had forgotten to put something under the paper to protect the table, just as Sally herself had quite often forgotten at home. She ran her fingers over the letters. Yes, it was just the merest whisper from the past, but the letters spelled “Sally.” She smiled. She felt very close to the other Sally, as if the years that had gone by did not matter at all.

Her aunt was standing up. She looked very tall. Her movement disturbed the candle flames, and they wavered and then grew taller for a moment, lighting up Aunt Sarah’s face from beneath and giving her a rather forbidding look. With a lurching of her stomach, Sally remembered how Aunt Sarah had looked like a witch to her at first.

But she didn’t any more, she thought. She still looked stern, but not like a witch. All her old fears seemed to have vanished that afternoon in the garden. Yes, she guessed she was getting used to her.

“We’re getting quite used to having you around,” said Aunt Sarah, as if she had read Sally’s mind. She began to clear the table. Sally jumped to
her feet to help her. It was rather fun, handling the old blue-and-white dishes and wondering if the other Sally had perhaps carried these very same dishes from this very table.

They had chocolate cake and pink ice cream for dessert, and after they had done the dishes, Sally was looking so tired that her aunt suggested she go right off to bed.

She did so gratefully. When she had gotten into bed, her aunt said, looking down at her, “Well, good night, Sally,” in her abrupt way, and left. “My mother always kisses me good night,” thought Sally, but she did not say it. She lay there in the dark, missing her mother, and wondering at all the things that had happened that day.

She had not dared to ask again about going to the attic, and she was not at all sure that Aunt Sarah would let her. “Oh, I hope she will,” she whispered to the darkness. “I hope she will.”

The faces of the other Sally and Elizabeth in the picture above the fireplace showed in the moonlight more than the darker areas of the painting. Sally felt that the two of them were watching over her as she fell asleep.

I
t was a dreary morning she woke to
. Rain was pouring down in earnest, drumming upon the roof, dripping from the treetops, and gurgling in the gutters in a most depressing and dismal way. The entire house creaked as if it were a ship in a stormy sea.

Sally wondered as she woke why she was feeling so unhappy. Then she remembered — Emily — Emily had been scared away. Her only real friend in this whole place was gone forever. She sighed deeply and shifted her feet. Her throat was hurting again.

Shadow’s head appeared suddenly over the humped-up blankets. His ears were back and his eyes were narrowed. He looked very cranky.

“Sorry, Shadow,” she said wearily, “but you’ve been sleeping on my feet all night, and they’re stiff.”

Shadow grumbled something and lowered his head, curling up again at her feet, as if he too found it hard to face the day.

“And as for Elizabeth,” thought Sally, “what makes me think that after all these years I can find her?”

She lay there, staring gloomily up at the picture of the other Sally, who seemed to be looking sad too, until Aunt Sarah called to her from the bottom of the stairs that breakfast was ready.

Down in the kitchen, Aunt Sarah was standing at the stove, stirring an enormous kettle of what seemed to be porridge. Sally could hear the bubbles bursting as they rose to the top of the kettle. It seemed to her that there was not a sadder, grayer sound in the world than the sluggish bursting of porridge bubbles.

“I hate porridge,” thought Sally, sitting down dispiritedly at the table and staring out at the gray rain.

Aunt Sarah’s back was to her, and she was standing,
one hand pressed against her back, in a bent-over position, just as she had been when Sally first saw her in the doorway, in the rain. A long strand of hair had escaped from the bun at the back of her neck, and was dangling over her shoulder. Sally looked at it and thought that she’d like to tuck it back where it belonged.

Aunt Sarah groaned. “Arthritis,” she said. “Always bothers me when it rains. Getting old.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sally.

“Sorry!” snapped Aunt Sarah, turning around to glare at her. “Sorry doesn’t set the table!” She turned back to the stove and began to stir the porridge furiously.

Sally, feeling hurt, got up and began to take dishes from the cupboard to set the table. She was feeling extremely sorry for herself. Even the merry ticking of the little church clock could not raise her spirits.

“You can get some prune juice from the refrigerator and pour it out,” said Aunt Sarah.

Prune juice! thought Sally. If that wasn’t just like this day! A prune-juice-and-porridge day exactly!

They sat down and ate their dismal meal in silence. Sally decided that after breakfast she’d call her mother. Yes, that’s just what she would do.

“I’m sorry, Sally,” said her aunt.

Sally looked up in surprise to see that Aunt Sarah was gazing anxiously at her.

“That’s all right,” Sally said, looking down at the grayish remains of her porridge floating sluggishly in the blue milk. “Drip, drip,” whispered the rain.

Her aunt sighed. “It’s a dreary day,” she said, staring bleakly out the window. “And I got up feeling just miserable. I’m afraid I took it out on you.”

“I felt awful too when I got up,” Sally confessed. “All sort of gray.”

“Well, you’re not as gray as I am, at any rate,” said Aunt Sarah, indicating her own hair.

Sally looked uncertainly at her aunt. But when Aunt Sarah gave a surprising snort that was a sort of laugh, Sally began to smile, and then she laughed too.

This really was a queer day, Sally thought. She never expected she’d be laughing with Aunt Sarah.

They did the dishes together in better spirits. “Why, Sally, I believe you’ve made my arthritis better already,” said Aunt Sarah. Then she said, “How would you like to spend a rainy morning playing in the attic?”

Sally grinned at her aunt. “Oh, could I?” she cried.

“Run along,” said her aunt. “Run along.”

And off Sally went to the attic with Shadow following
after her. He seemed quite revived by his breakfast, which he had eaten beneath the sink.

This time she made a systematic search of the attic. First, the trunk. But there was nothing there she hadn’t seen before. Then she looked in other trunks, and in drawers and boxes. She turned up all sorts of finery, glittering beads and earrings, feather fans, old lace, ancient dresses with pearls or jet beads stitched into flower and butterfly patterns on their skirts. There were, besides, a man’s high silk hat, a black satin shawl with a lining of rainbow silk, old paper-lace valentines, Christmas cards, yellowed letters tied into bundles with faded bits of ribbon, broken and battered Christmas-tree ornaments, and a plush rabbit lacking one pink eye. At last she was so tired that she simply sat down wearily on the floor and closed her eyes. Shadow was playing his usual game of pushing things into the space between the roof and the floor. She could hear some of the smaller things — beads perhaps, or marbles — falling down through the walls of the house. “The house must be stuffed with all sorts of things,” she thought.

“Oh, Shadow,” she sighed, “what’s the use?” She opened her eyes and looked into the mirror in front of her. There was still a clear space on its dusty surface where she had rubbed at it the day before.

“Hello,” she said to her reflection.

The lips of the girl in the mirror moved.

Sally smoothed her skirt.

The girl in the mirror smoothed hers.

“But
I’m
not wearing the blue dress!” Sally said. For the girl in the mirror was! She was wearing the blue ruffled dress and the yellow bonnet, and as Sally watched, she reached down, picked up a pink parasol which lay closed beside her in the grass (“Grass!” whispered Sally), opened it, and lifted it over her head. As she did so, Sally felt the shadow cast by the parasol spread over her. She felt the cool, slender handle in her fingers. She reached out and touched the grass next to her.

“You can sit here under the parasol with me, if you like, Patience,” she said, and a very little girl in a pink pinafore, who looked a little like Emily except that she wore long corkscrew curls rather than braids, moved over and sat next to her. She clasped her hands demurely together and looked straight ahead.

The air over the garden was perfectly still. The bright flowers stood as motionless as the sea shells that lined the graveled paths winding about the garden. From time to time, an apple tree sang with the voices of the birds hidden among its leaves.

On a blanket near the two girls, in the shade of
an apple tree, Bub lay sleeping on his side, one fist held tight against a closed eye. Soft bubbling sounds were rising from his mouth.

Mrs. Niminy Piminy’s children, so much bigger now that they could not really be called kittens, were sleeping too, heads tucked into their curled paws. The gray one and the orange one were not far from Mrs. Niminy Piminy herself, who snoozed sedately beneath a gooseberry bush. But Tom was sleeping with his head and front paws in Elizabeth’s lap, where she sat propped up against the trunk of an apple tree. For of course he was her cat, and even slept curled up on her feet at night in the little canopied doll bed next to the fireplace in Sally’s room.

Sally sighed and blew at a strand of hair that had plastered itself over her eyes. She was wearing a number of starched and scratchy petticoats, and she wished that she didn’t have to entertain this shy little girl and take care of Bub besides. But her mother had asked her please to do it, so here she was, sitting in the garden, feeling hot and uncomfortable, and wondering what they could do.

It seemed to Sally that all the coolness left in the world must be contained in the forest at the end of the garden. How she longed to be sitting in there on the mossy ground, with Elizabeth beside her. She
would sit there and do nothing but scoop up pine needles, let them run like rain through her fingers, and listen to the ticking of the forest. She wished that at least a little of the piney coolness would blow out of the forest into the garden.

She looked at Elizabeth sitting beneath the tree, cool and unruffled, while Tom purred in her lap. Elizabeth smiled serenely back at her, as if she understood everything in the world.