The Village by the Sea by Paula Fox Page B

days.”
    There wasn’t any patience in his voice now.
    â€œI have friends who are dying to hear from me,” Aunt Bea said sulkily.
    â€œI’m sure they can wait a few more hours,” he said.
    Aunt Bea looked at him suspiciously. “I hope you’re not being sarcastic, Crispin,” she said.
    It was so hard for Emma to write letters. I did this—I did that. But Aunt Bea didn’t do anything. She could write: I had eighty cups of tea today. A dreadful young person has come to stay with us, and Crispin must cook and slave for her. What kind of friends would she have? Would she write them at the same time she was watching television?
    â€œBea—do make an effort! I’m sure Emma would like a little distraction after what she’s been through waiting to hear about Philip.”
    â€œShe hasn’t been through anything—yet,” Aunt Bea said ominously.
    They weren’t looking at Emma. She knew they weren’t thinking about her either. Whatever it was that was going on was between them.
    Aunt Bea sighed hugely and heaved herself out of the chair. It seemed to take a long time before she was on her feet.
    â€œFor heaven’s sakes!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go then! I don’t want to stand here forever!”
    In the car, Emma stared at Uncle Crispin’s white hair. He was inclined forward, and, she could see in the rearview mirror, he was squinting against the sunlight. His face was strained; he looked as though the drive they were to take was a difficult chore. Emma would have been just as glad not to have come. She had hoped the trip to Montauk would help her not think about her father. But she seemed to be thinking about him more every minute.
    Hospital corridors were silent. Emma remembered that, and the hard narrow bed she had lain upon, holding her mother’s hand, as the bed moved along on rubber wheels pushed by an attendant she couldn’t see. Nurses had passed them carrying paper cups of medicine or little trays with something worse, a needle for one of the patients behind the half-open doors.
    Her father moved so lightly on his feet. He would be lying still now in a bed with iron bars around it, a grown-up’s crib.
    â€œLook at that,” Aunt Bea said from the front seat. “Isn’t that new, Crispin? The trailer camp? Why do people want to live in such hideous things? I suppose a trailer has its convenience. You turn off the ignition and you’re home. And look at that fat tub in a guard’s uniform at the gate!” She laughed loudly. “Don’t tell me they’re afraid of a crime wave in there! What do they have that’s worth stealing?”
    â€œTrailers don’t cost as much as houses,” said Uncle Crispin. “A lot of people can’t afford the kind of homes you’d approve of, Bea.”
    â€œBoo-hoo …” said Aunt Bea.
    She was wearing a large pink straw hat that hid her hair. Now and then she touched the brim of it with her fingers. Red and scored with scratching, her hands looked as though she’d plunged them into a thorny thicket. Emma tried not to look at them. Yet the upward movement of her aunt’s arm, her wounded fingers slipping across the rosy pink straw, stirred a reluctant pity in her.
    In these last months, her mother, too, had begun to do something strange to herself. Often, when she was reading a book or cooking a meal, Emma had seen her suddenly grip her arms and press them fiercely across her chest as though the apartment air had grown bitterly cold. She had known her mother’s thought at those moments had been about her father’s sickness.
    What was Aunt Bea’s thought when she tore at the flesh of her fingers?
    Emma stared out the car window. She didn’t want to think her mother and her aunt were alike in any way. She didn’t want to feel sorry for Aunt Bea at all.
    The road they were following cut through immense