Terrible, Horrible Edie Read online

  TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE EDIE

  E. C. SPYKMAN

  The New York Review Children’s Collection

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1960 by E.C. Spykman, copyright renewed

  © 1988 by Patricia S. Winer and Angelica M. Harter

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spykman, E. C. (Elizabeth Choate), 1896–

  Terrible, horrible Edie / by E. C. Spykman.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books children’s collection)

  Summary: The exploits of mischievous ten-year-old Edie

  spending the summer on the Massachusetts seashore in the

  1910s with her siblings and step-siblings while their father

  and stepmother are in Europe.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-353-4 (alk. paper)

  [1. Seashore—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3.

  Vacations—Fiction. 4. Family life—Massachusetts—Fiction.

  5. Massachusetts—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S77Te 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009049191

  ISBN 978-1-59017-353-4

  Cover design by Louise Fili Ltd.

  Cover illustration by Eric Hanson

  ebook ISBN 978-1-59017-567-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  To Kath who has made it possible for

  me to write my books

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  1. The Trip

  2. Terrible, Horrible Edie

  3. Millard’s Cove

  4. The Weather

  5. The Enemy

  6. The Jewels

  7. Lou

  Biographical Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Trip

  “Everything will go in but the bird,” Hubert Cares said, standing in front of his stepmother with his hands on his hips.

  “The bird has to go, Hubert.”

  The John Cares family, which usually lived in The Red House in Summerton, Massachusetts, was trying to move to the beach. Whenever Aunt Louise decided to go to Europe, and that was quite often, Father borrowed her house at Mount Harbor, so that all of them, Theodore who was now eighteen, Jane who was one year younger, Hubert who was just sixteen, and Edie who was ten, knew about beaches, boats, swimming, eelgrass, and things like hermit crabs and tides. Even Madam, their stepmother, and her two little children, The Fair Christine who was five and Lou who was three, had paddled and sat in salt water. This year it was a great event because Hubert had been asked by Father to drive Edie down to the beach in the Ford, taking also the leftovers that had not gone into the hampers—like a few loaves of bread, a box of kitchen matches discovered at the last minute, some egg beaters, the salad bowl that never fitted anywhere, and the ice-cream freezer. Also there was the livestock—Madam’s troupial, a fierce black bird called Laza, Edie’s goat, Theodore’s spider monkey, and Father’s beagle, Sport. All the livestock was enclosed in something, but still, as Hubert pointed out, it had to breathe now and then. Space had to be kept, for instance, between Jocko de Monk and the tremendous box full of milk, butter, and eggs on which the family would have to live for the first few hours after they arrived. The goat would want to be able to look out through his bars and enjoy the ride. It was much too small a goat to take traveling in Hubert’s opinion, worse than Lou, who at least did not have to have a bottle every few hours. But Edie could keep on asking “Why?” or “Why not?” until nobody could think of any better reasons than her own, so there the goat was, baaing its objections to everything that was put on top of it. And now the Ford was piled so high there was not room for the troupial and his cage. Hubert would just as leave have left him at home too. He was a wicked bird, as you could tell by looking into his eyes, and he tried to bite everyone but Madam.

  “If he got out,” he had said to Edie when he was bringing the cage out, “he could easily put our eyes out before I could stop the car.”

  “Could he?” Edie asked anxiously as he had meant her to. “Do you think he could?”

  But Madam would not give in. “There won’t be anybody here to take care of him,” she said. She was in the front hall standing in front of the big gold mirror with a pin in her mouth ready to put on her veil because Father liked to drive fast with the top down. They were going in the big Packard and taking everybody from the kitchen in the back seat. The kitchen department was already ready, sitting up very stiffly in the car right now—Gander the parlormaid, who had been in the family since anyone could remember, Cook, who came and went, and a girl no one knew the name of yet because she had come only yesterday. Probably she was to help the others when they felt lazy. They were dressed for the North Pole, although it was a perfectly good day in June with just a few clouds on the horizon. Besides their own clothes, they each had on a kind of yachting cap and veil and long white coats that Madam had bought them so they would not be settled on by a speck of dust. In between them somehow were stuffed The Fair Christine and Lou, unable to move or hardly to be seen on account of so many high elbows.

  “Why can’t the cage go on the floor of your car?” Hubert asked reasonably.

  Madam looked at him, laughing over the pin. “He might peck their ankles,” she said.

  It made Hubert laugh too, but just the same he had to go back to the Ford, unpack everything, and fit it all together again as fast as he could, tucking the small things in nooks and crannies, to make more room. It would not do any harm, he decided, for the goat to look through a couple of sieves, or for Laza to have a few dish towels on top of his cage. The matches he stuck in a nice little hole at the bottom, out of the way of Jocko’s long fingers. He was just about finished when Edie came round the corner of the barn with her dog, Widgy.

  “I was just trying to catch a pigeon,” she said. “We could send a message back to Grandfather.”

  “No!” said Hubert.

  “Why not?”

  Hubert was not going to be caught this time. Besides, somebody had given her a doughnut and she was eating it right under his face.

  “Go get me one!”

  “There aren’t any more. Cook was cleaning out the cupboard. Here.” She shoved the last bit into his mouth.

  “It’s not enough,” said Hubert grumpily.

  But it was time to go, and they went back to the hall to say good-by to Madam. Theodore and Jane had gone long ago on the train, conducting the wicker hampers with the linen in them to the place where they had to change trains in Charlottesville and getting them started off again in the right direction, and then waiting around the station to meet an unknown person by the name of Miss Jeananne Black to get her started in the right direction too. Miss Black, whoever she was, was to spend the summer with them at Aunt Louise’s, because this time Father and Madam, as soon as their family was settled at the beach, had decided to go to Europe too. Life at the moment was very congested, Hubert felt, and would be even worse this evening when they all arrived at Aunt Louise’s in a kind of torrent. He supposed sadly that it would take quite a while at that time for anybody to produce anything to eat. Butter and eggs at the moment seemed a flimsy sort of diet.

  “And I’m hungry already,” he said, getting behind the wheel.

  “Let’s stop at the drugstore then,” said Edie,
“and put in some supplies.”

  Their supplies were a box of marshmallows, two licorice whips, five sticks of one-cent gum, and some chocolate creams.

  “Not very filling, I must say,” said Hubert. “I should have gone in myself.”

  So he stopped again at the end of the village. Father, when Nurse had got too old to take care of them, had set her up in a store, and besides papers of pins and threads and needles, she sold sausages in homemade buns, real sausages that came from the Home Farm and were spiced and had almost no skins, and real vanilla ice cream, not the thin foamy kind, with fresh-crushed strawberries. And also Father had given Hubert quite a fortune to take on the trip for gas, tires, and what he called “other eventualities.” This was certainly one of them. Hubert had worked so hard that he needed a few of the comforts of life.

  “Besides,” said Edie, “they always say you shouldn’t do things on an empty stomach.”

  “Or a full one,” said Hubert, rubbing his. “It could be,” he added brightly, “that you’re not meant to work at all.”

  It all delayed them a little. They had to talk to Nurse and tell her the news. They didn’t get started again for almost twenty minutes, but Hubert felt better.

  “I must say, though, you do feel sleepy on a hot day after you’ve had a little something to eat.”

  “If you start going to sleep,” said Edie, “I’m going to pinch you.”

  She kept her hand ready, watching Hubert and the road carefully, but after some terribly wide yawns and giving himself a few slaps in the face he seemed all right.

  “The smell in here,” he said, rubbing his nose finally instead of his eyes, “would keep anybody awake.”

  They had had to put on the side curtains and fasten them, even on this June day, because they had been strictly told by their owners that birds and monkeys did not like drafts. No one would mind about Laza particularly, they agreed, no matter what happened to him, but if Jocko got sick, they would be sorry. He had a really good-looking face for a monkey and as good manners as—well, Lou anyway—so they bowled along the back country roads with Hubert making the Ford go a little extra fast in order, he said, to keep the smell going backwards.

  “This is not a bad little car,” said Hubert, leaning back casually as they came out of a town called Broughton and giving the accelerator a twitch with his finger.

  “If I were you, I would look out for hens, just the same,” said Edie.

  “I am not going to hit a single hen,” said Hubert.

  Edie was as much against scaring horses. The ones they met did not like it at all. They stood on their hind legs, or, if not that, began backing into the ditches or whacking their carts to pieces. People shouted after them angrily as they were swallowed up in a cloud of the Ford’s dust. Edie felt sorry for them and said so.

  “They’ll have to get used to it in this life,” said Hubert hardheartedly.

  What he loved for the moment was the Ford and the way it leaped ahead the minute he touched the lever. He felt very responsible too, of course, with all these animals in the car. And, naturally, Edie. He meant to take care of everything, but he saw no reason why they shouldn’t have a little fun too. Women—who could know better, with four sisters —were always nervous and he had no intention of letting it get him down.

  It was the heat that began gradually to get them both down. It was always the same way. It might be fairly cool in Summerton, and at the beach it was never very hot—you could feel the wonderful coolness coming a long way away —but in the middle country between, although there were lots of big trees and sometimes even shady alleys in the little towns, it was always as hot as an oven. Hubert decided to distract himself as they raced along by seeing if he could hit and scatter the little piles of dirt the road men had piled up at the side of the road. Everything in the car was jerked and joggled, but that was probably a good thing, as it would settle things down and make them ride better.

  Edie tried to forget the heat by looking at the daisy fields. It was a kind of forbidden pleasure. Nobody on the family dairy farms could possibly approve of them; it meant the land had gone sour, and daisies were weeds. Just the same, she thought disloyally, they were wonderful to look at. The whole middle country must have gone sour because it was full of them. She tried to open her eyes more than naturally so that she could see better. She wanted to remember how fat the trees were in this part of the world and she did not want to miss the farmhouse that somebody had painted pink—on the family dairy farms they would never have done such a thing as that either. There were lots of good things on this road. There was a dog hospital where the dogs were sometimes out in their yards in bandages; there was a cottage roof done with thatch, and a barn where they had the best bred bull in America who looked as if he could kill you any time. Maybe the best of all, in the dustiest, hottest, longest part, when there didn’t seem to be a hope of anything for miles and miles, there might be a gipsy camp. She squinted as hard as she could through the blurry windows. Yup, they were coming to it. Caravans were gathered in a field with their horses tethered to them, there were little fires going, with pots hung over their tops, and all the women had costumes on and colored handkerchiefs round their heads. Her body followed the sight as it sped by and she tried hard to sniff the fires. She thought she could, but they did not seem to smell as good as usual. The old car itself was too hot and Widgy on her lap was like forty hot-water bottles. Hubert gave her a look. “Are you going to explode in a minute?” he said. “You look it.”

  “So do you,” said Edie quickly.

  Hubert slowed up. “We’re going to get some air in here if all the monkeys in Christendom catch cold,” he said, struggling with his window curtain. “Take yours off too; go on, turn the knobs and pull it off. Phew! That’s a relief.”

  While they were going so slowly, Edie thought the smell from the gipsy fires was lasting a long time, or maybe the middle country was burning its leaves. She remembered at once, however, with a tiny shock that you didn’t burn leaves in summer, or fields; it must be rubbish.

  “Hubert,” she said, “do you smell smoke?”

  “Sure,” he said calmly, “there must be a factory round here.”

  That was just what it smelled like. Anyway as soon as they began to go fast again, it went away and she almost went to sleep herself. She was woken up just as they were getting into a little town called Grampham, which was a whole mass of factories, by Jocko de Monk putting his hand through the cage bars and pulling her braid.

  “Hey, stop it,” said Edie, pulling it away.

  She did not look round. Having a bird and monkey in the car, which could be plainly seen now that the curtains were off, made people on the sidewalks stare, and she did not want to encourage them. You could never tell what they would do. Theodore had told them that once when he was taking Jock somewhere a man had tried to open the cage and let him out. It was cruelty to animals, he had said. When, in the middle of Grampham, Hubert had to wait for a car ahead and people began pointing, she put on a face of being blind and deaf and looked straight ahead. She didn’t see why they couldn’t mind their own businesses.

  “Gosh,” said Hubert, rubbing his nose round and round with the palm of his hand, “don’t those factories stink.”

  Just after he had said it, a man on the sidewalk called to them.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Hubert. “He’s trying to get fresh with you.”

  The man was fresher even than usual because he followed them half running. Edie tried not to, but for one minute she turned her eyes and ears toward him to see what he was like. She saw him put his hands to his mouth like a megaphone, and she listened. “Ye’re afire,” he called.

  “What!” said Edie, leaning forward and squinching her face up.

  “Ye’re car’s afire,” said the man, “and if yer don’t do somethin’ about it pretty quick, ye’re’ll be afire yerselves.”

  Edie scrambled round to her knees in a flash. A thin solid piece of
smoke was coming up from the floor between the ice-cream freezer and the eggs, right into Jocko’s face.

  “We are on fire, Hubert. What’ll we do?”

  Hubert looked back himself with a quick glance. “Hallelujah!” he said. “Let us be perfectly calm,” he added as he pulled to the curb. “I hope the beagle’s all right.” Father’s beagle was the farthest down because beagles never object to anything. “Look, see that drugstore. Go in and ask for a big glass of water. We can pour it down the hole. I’m not going to unload unless I have to. No, leave Widgy here. NO!” roared Hubert as Edie started to say something. “He’ll get lost. Get a move on. But don’t make yourself conspicuous.” The car had stopped and Edie started to run before her feet touched the ground, but she stopped them right away and with dignified long strides crossed the sidewalk. It was terrible to know what to do, she thought, as she went. Men had no sense. She ought to be getting the fire department or all the animals would be fried to a cinder. What was the use of a glass of water? That would hardly put out a match! But how did you get the fire department in a town like Grampham?

  Edie could not remember that she had ever had any prayers answered even when she had prayed them in the direst circumstances, but just after she said “God, please send the fire department,” and had her foot on the drug-store step, she saw the red box on the corner. It took her one second to reach it and pull down the handle inside as she had often read in Charlottesville was the thing to do. Then she went into the store and asked for the water. When the glass was full, she picked it up carefully and made for the door with her dignified stride.

  “Hey,” said the druggist, “where you goin’?”

  Edie didn’t answer, but if she had, he couldn’t have heard, because suddenly there was a long-drawn-out wail that sounded like a foghorn. “Say, ain’t that the fire whistle?” said the druggist. Edie heard it too, but in one more second, carrying her glass steadily, she had edged through the crowd to Hubert’s side. “Here,” she said.