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Picture apple trees, the blossoms coming to an end, and linden trees not yet blooming. It is 1950, a Saturday afternoon in late spring, and we are looking over a pleasant but modest residential neighborhood on Long Island. It is not yet “The Fifties,” if they ever even existed: the cars are late-forties or pre-War models, not big chrome land yachts. The one-and-a-half-story houses went up in the twenties.
Somewhere, a record of Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream is playing.
Hand in hand, Enid and Beth are walking down the street. They are both eight years old. They approach a porch on which a man is reading the newspaper. Except for his legs which are propped up on the porch railing, he is invisible behind headlines about Korea and nuclear tests. Enid and Beth stand on the sidewalk for a while, nudging each other. At last Beth speaks:
“Hello?” The man lowers his newspaper, revealing a rough-hewn, good-natured face and sandy hair greying at the temples. Possibly there is a pipe clenched in the corner of his mouth.
“Hello,” he says to the two girls watching him from the bottom of the porch steps. “What can I do for you?”
"Are you Anna’s daddy?” Now that Beth has opened negotiations, Enid is all business.
“I am,” the man replies gravely, taking his feet off the porch railing. He is also Walter T. Healy, the new owner of this house, according to the lease.
“We want to know if she can come play with us in the woods,” Enid continues. Folding his paper, Walt gets up from his chair.
“Let me check. Who shall I say is calling?”
“Enid Semple and Beth Gratsias,” Enid says. Beth giggles. Walt steps into the front doorway of the house and calls up the stairs:
“Anna! Enid and Beth want to know if you can come out and play?!”
“Wait!” comes Anna’s voice from above. “I just need to get the field glasses!” There follows the sound of a little girl running around opening doors in the upper regions of the house. Her father turns back to Enid and Beth:
“She’ll be down in just a moment. Where exactly did you say you were going?” he adds.
“The woods behind the corner store,” Beth says. “Everyone plays there.” Walt seems satisfied with this answer.
“Anna needs to be back for supper by five.” Anna can still be heard rummaging about upstairs, and Walt realizes he needs to keep the conversation going a bit longer to avoid an awkward silence: “You girls know her from school?” Enid and Beth both nod.
“Her desk is beside mine,” Enid specifies. Anna comes hurtling down the stairs, military field glasses slung around her neck. She, too, is eight years old, a little small for her age but energetic, with her dark hair in two pigtails.
“Don’t lose those,” Walt says cheerfully. “And don’t be late for supper.”
“I won’t,” says Anna to both, giving her father a quick hug around the knees. “‘Bye, Daddy.”
“Bye, Mr. Healy,” Enid and Beth chime in.
“Okey-dokey,” says Walt. The girls wave to him and run off down the street. Watching them go, he shakes his head, smiling, then sits back down with his newspaper.
At three o’clock, an alarm clock rings on the kitchen counter, and Walt goes inside; turns off the alarm; places a dish in the oven; turns on the oven (first checking to make sure the pilot light is lit), setting it to three hundred degrees fahrenheit; gets himself a bottle of beer from the fridge; and returns to his newspaper on the porch.
A few minutes later he is hailed by a voice:
“Howdy neighbor!” Walt lowers his paper to see a short, chubby, moustached man — about his own age, maybe a few years younger— leaning on his porch railing. Giving him a slightly ironic salute, Walt gestures invitationally towards the other porch chair without getting up. He puts away his paper.
“Don’t mind if I do,” says the man, shaking Walt’s hand as he sits down. “Joe Gratsias,” he introduces himself.
“Walt Healy. I think I just met your daughter?” he adds, recalling the name. It occurs to him he probably ought to offer Joe a beer, and he begins to unfold himself from his chair.
“Saw you and your family move in a couple of weeks back,” Joe continues, “only just now got around to saying hello. New in town?
“Just new to the block.” He has lived in Meadowville three years.
“But that’s a touch of the Blarney I hear in your voice, ain’t it?” Joe asks.
“You think so do you?” Walt shrugs and nods in the general direction of New York City. “Brooklyn-born. Took an engineering job out here after I was demobbed. Hilde — my wife— and I were living over the bookshop she runs, but we’ve a little girl now, thought she’d be better off with a bit more room, other kids to play with—” Joe nods, smiling:
“I know, just saw her running with my girl and her friends a few minutes ago. Looks like her mother.” Walt supposes he means that Anna looks like Hilde, and pauses.
“I guess she does at that,” he replies. “Can I get you a beer?”
Viewed through Anna’s field glasses, the woods behind the corner store are extensive and picturesque, but just now her focus is upon Enid, struggling dramatically against the skipping ropes that bind her to the trunk of an apple-tree in blossom. She is wearing an improvised diadem made from a toy sheriff’s star pinned to a ribbon tied around her head. There is also a handkerchief tied around her mouth as a gag.
“I see her,” Anna reports. “The fiends have her bound and gagged.” She and Beth are lying in some long grass. Several other girls are with them. Anna still has the field glasses to her eyes.
“Let’s go!” Beth starts to get up but Anna lays a warning hand on her arm:
“Wait. It could be a trap.” She sweeps around with the field glasses, scanning scrubby bushes and trees on either side of the one to which Enid is tied, stopping on a little girl’s feet, visible in the shadows beneath a low-lying shrub. “Yep,” says Anna, in a matter-of-fact tone she has picked up from Walt, along with the field glasses. “The enemy is lying in ambush to the left and right.” She lowers her glasses and points: “Etta, you take the Holiday girls that way,” she orders, addressing Beth by the name of the character she is playing. “I’ll bring my forces round the other side and we’ll surround them. Then we liberate Diana.”
Beth nods and they take off in opposite directions, each leading a couple of girls. They charge the bushes in which the others are hiding, Anna keeping a firm hold on the field glasses so they don’t swing about as she runs.
The fight that follows is epic, even if the war-cries are higher-pitched than convention dictates. Little girls leap at each other in flying tackles, skirts flailing like pteruges, voices shrieking like eagles. Anna gradually shoves and dodges her way through the melee to the central tree, and Enid, and begins untying her comrade as a breeze shakes the apple-blossoms above to shower over the field of battle.
“You’ve freed me!” gasps a grateful Enid, or rather, Diana. “My strength returns!”
“Ach! Nein!” shouts Lucy, another little girl, in a less-than-accurate German accent. “She ist free!” Enid throws an air-punch at her and she falls dramatically to the ground.
“Take that, Evil Nazi Baroness!”
Lucy rolls about on the grass, groaning defiant curses in fake German. Enid strides about the battlefield, breaking up any fights not yet won by her allies. Suddenly one of Lucy’s side pulls out a dented eggbeater.
“Look out!” Beth exclaims nearby: “She’s still got her mind-control ray!” Lucy begins to cackle:
“You may haff struck me down, Diana, but you cannot resist ze Psychotic Doktor!”
Back at the house, a car pulls up, Hilde at the wheel. She is a woman with a careworn, intelligent face. Like Walt she is somewhere around forty; like Anna she is brunette and small: “five-foot-two of backbone,” her husband once described her, his admiration overriding anatomical accuracy. Walt jumps up as she gets out of the car and goes to help her remove a box of books from the back seat.
"I can get that, hon. Only one box today? Lemme guess- the rest was all dog-eared Farmers’ Almanacs, I'll bet.”
“Even worse—Sears’ catalogues and ordinance maps,” Hilde sighs.
“Who keeps old Sears’ catalogues?”
“The late Farmer Brown, apparently. Most of a room, they filled.” She notices Joe, who’s followed Walt down the steps, and gives him a smile and a nod. Walt introduces Joe to his wife.
“Pleased to meet you,” Joe says, shaking her hand.
“Likewise.” The pleasantries out of the way, she turns back to Walt, nodding at the box he’s carrying: “I did find one or two good things.” He glances down at the box’s contents:
“Expedition not a total loss, then?”
“Far from it.” Hilde looks toward the attic. “Anna still lost in her books?” Her husband has already carried in the box, and he calls back from the hallway:
“Far from it. She’s out making friends and influencing people. And being late for supper,” he adds, glancing at the clock in the kitchen. “I’d better go find her.”
“They’re in the woods,” Joe offers. He’s still on the porch as Walt returns. “I’ll show you, I need to go bring back my own young’un. Nice meeting you, Mrs. Healy.” He sets off down the street, and Walt pauses before following him, bends to kiss Hilde on the cheek.
“Back shortly. I remembered to put the casserole in at three o’clock this time.”
The Healy home is obviously still mired in the process of moving in—cardboard boxes, besides the one Walt brought in for Hilde, are stacked in every corner. All really necessary furniture and objects, however, have been set up. In the kitchen, the casserole is done. Hilde begins to open the cutlery drawer, then pauses to look at the box of books that Walt has left on the counter. She picks out the top book and examines it. (?)
--- (scene here where Walt and Joe retrieve Anna and Beth) ---
The family are at supper. The casserole is tuna and noodles, but it came out well, and Hilde added a few salad greens to the side. Anna swallows, and pauses to speak before lifting another forkful of noodles.
“Lucy tried to set a trap for us, but she couldn’t fool me,” she declares. “Leaving a prisoner unguarded in an open area, surrounded by cover? Obvious ambush.”
“So what did you do?” Walt asks his daughter.
“Surrounded her forces and turned the tables on them. I freed Enid. When Diana’s unbound her powers come back, so she took care of the evil Baroness— that’s Lucy,” the child explains. “She’s not evil in real life.”
“I see,” her mother replies.
“But then Sally got out her mind-control ray!” Anna heaves a sigh. “It’s so hard to do anything against mind-control rays,” she says, “because they attack you inside your head.”
“True enough,” Walt murmurs, attempting to spear a leaf of lettuce on his fork.
“She had most of us under her power by the time you and Bets’ daddy arrived. I don’t know how we’ll get out of it next time we play.” Walt looks up from his plate:
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
Later, after putting their daughter to bed, they look over the books Hilde brought home from the farm auction: nineteenth-century tomes, all in reasonably good condition.
“I never had any sisters,” Walt says to Hilde as she examines bindings. “Is it… usual for them to battle like that?”
“If I could have led an army against a wicked baroness when I was a girl,” she says, “I’d have done so.”
“I’ll bet you would have done. Did you at least play with toy soldiers when you were sick in bed? Like Robert Louis Stevenson?”
Hilde shakes her head.
“I had to stay on my back,” she states. “It wasn’t just bed-rest, I was usually in a cast.” She thinks. “I used to pretend the marks on the ceiling were maps.”
“And the cracks were rivers? Or roads?”
“There weren’t so many cracks. Just one river. With tributaries.” Walt leans forward and kisses the top of her head. He picks up one of the books:
“This Hawthorne’s in pretty good shape.” Hilde tilts her head:
“It’s not a first, though. And readers could just buy a modern copy of the text. Still, the bindings are pretty, someone might want it to decorate their shelves, though it pains me to say so.” She picks up another. “The Melville’s a first.” Walt looks at the title:
“Pierre.” He pronounces it as two syllables. “Not his biggest hit.”
Hilde puts the books back in the box, and her husband puts his arms around her.
“So what did you do today?” she asks him.
“Unpacked some more things. Read the paper. Oh, Joe invited us to come round for drinks at their place next Saturday. What do you think of him, by the way?”
“He’s a bit... “hail-fellow-well-met?” Is that the expression?”
Walt confirms that it is.
“But I think he’s all right,” Hilde continues.
“Anna certainly seems to get along with his daughter.”
“Was she the comic-book heroine with the mystic powers?”
“I think she was the plucky college gal who helped rescue the mystic heroine after the nazis bound and gagged her.”
“Good for her,” says Hilde.
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Date: 2019-06-10 10:16 pm (UTC)From: