THE SNOW MELTED QUICKLY. After all, it was nearly April now, and spring must come sometime. Along the fence in front of the Potters’ house, small heads of crocuses could be seen: purple, yellow, lavender. They didn’t wait for the drifts to melt. They grew presumptuously through the snow, and bloomed.
“Crocuses are independent plants,” Mrs. Potter told Heidi and Roo. “They come and go as they please. They don’t like to wait on the weather.”
“Like Elsie,” Roo said. Heidi giggled.
They were out in the yard together for a sniff of fresh air, wearing their winter coats. Mrs. Potter was pushing the last of the drifts away from the fragile blooms. It was an act of charity that pleased her.
“There!” she said, straightening up at the end of the row. “Doesn’t that look better?”
“Let’s go in,” said Heidi. “I’m freezing.”
“And I must cut the cheese and make a dip,” Mrs. Potter remembered. “What time is it?” Good heavens! They’ll be here in an hour.”
They trooped up the back steps into the kitchen.
“Who’s coming to your party?” asked Roo, when she had unzipped her jacket.
“Everybody!” sang out Mrs. Potter proudly. “Everybody on the street who knows Miss Fitch, and all her students, and all their parents. I invited everyone I could think of, and mostly everyone accepted. They didn’t mind at all that it’s so last minute. And Miss Fitch is coming, of course.”
“Can I pass the hors d’oeuvres?” asked Heidi.
“Yes, you may, and put on something pretty because Miss Fitch will be watching you.”
“She will?”
“She’s going to see if you’re ready for violin lessons yet. We’ve been talking about it.”
“Who says I want violin lessons?” demanded Heidi. “Why does every person in this house have to play a violin? I want to play soccer.”
“Soccer!” said Mrs. Potter.
“On the town team. You can try out if you’re eight. I asked.”
“I want to play soccer, too!” shrieked Roo.
“You’re too little,” declared Heidi. “And, by the way, your stupid blocks are all over my side of the room. I can’t even breathe in there with all your …”
“Well, all your dresses are hanging up in my closet!” Roo cut in.
“Those aren’t my dresses anymore. They’re yours! Mother put them there.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want them. If you want me to pick up my blocks, you’ll have to take out those dresses first.”
“But I didn’t put them there!”
“So what?”
“Mother!”
“I want to pass hors d’oeuvres, too!” screeched Roo.
“Mother!”
But Mrs. Potter had her head in the refrigerator.
“Soccer!” she was muttering to herself.
Miss Fitch was the first to arrive, fittingly, for she was the guest of honor. She came in a blaze of finery, in red silk and perfume and the highest of high-heeled shoes. Around her head was wrapped, with fascinating twists, a silvery scarf, and long, silver earrings hung from her ears and her eyelids were molten with silver. Her cast was hidden discreetly beneath a shawl.
She was beautiful, radiant, and did not look at all like a person who “needed cheering up” as Mrs. Potter had said when she told Mary and Elsie about her idea for the party. Miss Fitch swept into the cluttered Potter living room as if she were a bird just flown in from Paradise. She shook Roo’s little fist with solemn dignity. She accepted a potato chip from Heidi and plunged it obediently into the dripping bowl of onion-soup-mix dip. She exclaimed over a pair of dusty figurines on the mantel and asked to see where “the girls” practiced their music: “Good light is so important!” she announced.
Next, Mary and Elsie came down from upstairs, rather shy in their party dresses. (For it seemed so odd to have Miss Fitch there. Would she notice the discolored patch on the rug? Did she care about the burnt-bread smell rolling out of the kitchen?)
“Oh! My little toasts!” cried Mrs. Potter, springing across the hall for the oven.
Miss Fitch turned to Elsie.
“Dear one,” she said, and kissed her on the cheek. “But, how fine you smell!” she added, smiling. “Is it perfume? Yes? You are dressed to perfection!”
“We tried just a little of Mothers cologne,” put in Mary, who was standing a bit to one side.
“And Mary!” Miss Fitch wrapped her around with a hug. “My defender! My warm and steady one. You look grown up today. It can happen to a girl in a moment, don’t you think? I remember it myself: one minute I was little—no bigger than Heidi over there—and the next, wild! I looked into my mirror and a young woman looked back!”
Elsie gave a snort and stared at the floor.
“Oh, it’s probably just this dress,” murmured Mary, her cheeks flaming.
“Well, perhaps I’ve forgotten,” said Miss Fitch in a voice that told she had forgotten nothing. “Perhaps there is more to it than looking into a mirror. Nevertheless, I congratulate you. Both of you! You are visions to behold.”
The other guests began to come then. In twos and threes, they were escorted by Roo into the living room, and relieved of their coats and pushed firmly toward Miss Fitch. Not that they needed pushing. (This was Roo’s idea of hospitality.) Everyone was pleased to see Miss Fitch. Everyone loved her. What a reputation she had made for herself in Millport And which student was it that had gotten into Juilliard last year?
“Nobody yet,” Miss Fitch replied sweetly. “But I have some promising ones coming up.” She glanced meaningfully at Elsie, but as Mrs. Mott had just arrived in a mountainous white fur coat that blocked everyone’s view, there was some question whether Elsie received the message.
Yes, they were all there. Mrs. Cruikshank was heaving satisfied sighs over having gotten inside, at last, the disgraceful house that Mrs. Mott had talked about for so long.
“It doesn’t look so bad in here as I thought it would,” she whispered to Mrs. Mott under cover of the chatter. “I guess they cleaned up for company.”
Mrs. Cornelle had her eagle-beagle eyes out for drunks, drug addicts and escaped convicts. Alas! Everybody looked quite respectable.
“Silver eye shadow!” she tittered to Mrs. Landsbury. “Imagine!”
“Does Miss Fitch come from New York City, too?” asked Mrs. Landsbury.
“And where’s your better half?” mewed Mrs. Mott when Mrs. Potter came by with a tray of sardines on toast.
“Traveling, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Potter. “This came up so quickly we didn’t have time to plan around him.”
“Well, it’s a fine party. Such a pleasant idea after all Miss Fitch has been through. She looks pretty good for someone who just stepped out of a hospital bed. How long did you say she’d been home. Two weeks?”
“Yes, and have you met my mother, who lives with us?” said Mrs. Potter. She had just caught sight of Granny Colie standing hesitantly at the crowd’s edge in her bedroom slippers.
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Mott. “She lives here?”
“Mother!” called Mrs. Potter. “Over here!” She lowered the sardines to a table and went to fetch her.
“Very pleased to meet you,” Mrs. Mott intoned suspiciously, for Granny Colie had not seen fit to dress, and was in fact wearing her most venerable bathrobe.
Granny Colie eyed Mrs. Mott from head to foot.
“Do I know this woman?” she inquired presently.
“No, I was just about to introduce you. This is …”
“Then, I’d rather not!” snapped Granny, and she turned her back and shuffled off toward the kitchen.
Behind their tall glasses of fruit punch, Mary and Elsie glanced at each other and smiled. They were standing together in front of the fireplace. Really, there was nowhere else to stand. The crowding was terrible.
“Somehow, Granny always knows what’s up,” whispered Elsie. “Just when you think she’s off in outer space for good—bingo!—she zeroes in for the kill.”
“Did you see what she ordered Mother to get her last week?” asked Mary.
“What?”
“One of those headphones that plugs into radios. She listens to rock music up in her room at night. She says it keeps her blood moving.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“It’s a great idea,” said Mary. “But the good ones are expensive.”
“Have you got any money?”
“A little.”
Elsie rattled the ice in her glass.
“Actually,” she said, as if it were a small matter, “actually, I’ve been thinking of selling my desk set.”
“You have?”
“Well, it takes up a lot of space on my desk. Who needs a stamp box, for instance? And the pen is so big. It’s really not made for writing, more for signing things.”
“But it’s so beautiful.”
“I guess so. I’ll have to think about it.”
A whoop of laughter erupted suddenly from across the room, and the girls looked up to see Miss Fitch in the middle of a throng of guests. She was telling a story, and from the reproachful look on her face, it seemed the joke was, as usual, on her. It was part of her charm, this ability to tell on herself. Mary sighed deeply.
“She’s more beautiful than ever,” she told Elsie. “I guess she’s well again.”
“Or she’s got herself made up to look that way.”
“You know,” said Mary. “Miss Fitch is a fraud in some ways.”
“I know,” Elsie said.
“I mean, how can she just cover up everything that happened to her during the war? How can she get all dressed up and pretend there isn’t one dark thought in her head? Where do all those feelings go?”
“I don’t know.”
“And she came to America to get away,” Mary said. “I’m sure that’s part of it.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And maybe she even has lovers.”
“She’s an actress, all right,” said Elsie. “Look at her. There’s probably a whole lot of other stuff we don’t even know, that we’ll never find out.”
“Like why she came to Millport at all. This is a strange place for someone like her.”
“And why she’s sitting around teaching violin if she’s so good, supposedly. Why she stopped performing herself”
“I never thought of that,” said Mary.
“She’s a mystery,” remarked Elsie. “One of those people who, the closer you get, the more you can’t figure them out.”
Mary glanced at her sister. “Like somebody else I know,” she said softly.
“And maybe you don’t want to figure them out,” Elsie went on. “Maybe there are better things to do than worry about it.”
“Maybe.” Mary gulped the last of her punch and caught sight of her mother across the room. She was juggling a tray of cheese in one hand and a box of crackers in the other.
“Help!” she cried to her daughters. She nodded violently in the direction of the kitchen, where another cloud of black smoke hung just inside the door.
“It’s the cheese puffs,” Elsie said stoically. “I knew they’d never make it.”
“I’ll get them!” cried Mary.
“No, I’ll go,” Elsie said. “I’ve had about enough of this, anyway.” And off she went with her chin held high and her small, determined shoulders slicing through the crowd.