Chapter One

This windy Saturday in October had started with such a gusty happiness. But then all Saturdays in the big Malone home were a hectic, happy hullabaloo with young folks coming and going, with bath water running, with someone standing at the top of the stairs yelling to someone in the kitchen, with the telephone in the back hall ringing - forever ringing.

Sixteen-year-old Catherine Cecelia Malone - known as Beany to family and friends - had started the day with nothing more weighty on her mind than whether they should make chocolate or peppermint-stick ice cream for the party she was putting on this afternoon (and whether the freckle cream she was secretly buying at the drugstore would dim the marching formation of freckles across her nose). She had no idea that she would be a different Beany by the time the day ended. She had no idea that the Malone way which had seemed so right that morning would seem to wrong by nightfall.

Beany was in the kitchen now, making seven-minute icing for the cake her older brother Johnny was watching int he oven. The cake had been delayed by Johnny's frequent dashes to the telephone. On the kitchen table, the drainboards, even the stove's top, was the floury spilled-sugar, egg-shell clutter that always accompanied this creative feat of Johnny's

The sprinkling of freckles across Beany's nose was almost lost int he warm flush of her square-chinned face as she vigorously wihpped the icing in the double boiler. Her stubby brown braids, which she wore pinned up now that she was a high-school sophomore, kept higgling time the egg beater. "They o ught to call this seventeen-minute icing." she grumbled with her eye on the clock, which said five after one; and the party was to be at two.

At first Johnny's Lady Eleanor cake had soared to such beautiful heights. "Look at that," Johnny bragged with the oven door open a crack. "It takes creative genius to make a cake like that. Light as a snowflake in spring."

"It takes fifteen egg whites," Beany reminded him practically.

But on the next peek Lady Eleanor wasn't doing so well. She was falling in the middle, and about that Johnny waxed philosophical. "Just like life. Your hopes lift so high and then somehow there comes a sag...Beany, do you suppose you could fill in that depression with icing?"

"Oh sure," Beany said.

Johnny pulled out a broom straw to test it. Johnny was eighteen. He was tall and thin, with a light-footed grace and a shock of curly black hair. Beany, the most practical of all the Malones, was always scolding him about not getting his hair cut. To which Johnny always retorted, "Beany, my pigeon, a genius is supposed to be long-haired."

But it was Johnny's smile that set him apart from his fellow men. It wasn't only that it revealed such a perfect set of teeth that the Malone dentist said once he'd like to hire Johnny to sit in his waiting room and smile. His smile had that rare and heart-warming quality of making you one with his plans; it was appealing and gently apologetic. At Harkness High, where Beany was a sophomore and Johnny a senior, other students said it was Johnny's smile, as much as his ability for writing, that melted the grumpiest teacher.

Even Mrs. No-complaint Adams, who gave the Malones the last half of every day to "wash, iron and cook them," was never grim about ten minutes extra if she was ironing Johnny's sport shirts. But then Mrs. Adams was partial to the mentolks in the motherless Malone household. Little Martie she referred to fondly as "the little mister." And as for Martie Malone, father of the Malones! Mrs. Adams was sure that if the president at Washington would just read Martie Malone's editorials in the Morning Call, he would be entirely fit to cope with all the world's problems.

This Saturday noon Mrs. Adams' iron thumped rhythmically in what the family called the butler's pantry though, as Johnny said, no butler had ever sanctified it by his presence. They called their housekeeper Mrs. No-complaint Adams because it was her proud boast that she had "worked out" for seventeen years and had never had a complaint. The next-door neighbor to the south was also a Mrs. Adams. The Malones differentiated by calling her Mrs. Socially-prominent Adams. The society page never misised mentioning one of her teas, luncheons, or committee meetings.

Out on the back porch Elizabeth, Beany's oldest sister, was turning the ice-cream freezer. She came in, her hands clammy and cold from working with ice and salt. "Beany, see if it turns hard enough to take out the dasher. Oh, Beany, warm my hands." Beany chafed them between her warm ones....Oh Elizabeth, Beany thought, I wish I could warm your heart that's so empty and waiting for word from Don...

Elizabeth Malone McCallin was a war bride. It was her three-year-old Martie - the little mister - who was hanging on to Johnny's leg as he reached to a high cupboard shelf for the glass cake plate. Little Martie's hair was three shades lighter than his mother's, and curled about his face like an angel's on a Christmas card. Ever so often the Malone family would gird themselves to get those curls cut off. After all, they didn't want to make a sissy out of him! Once Johnny had even got him as far as Charlie's barber shop on the boulevard. But Johnny brought him back, his fair fluff of curls intact. "Charlie, himself, wasn't there," Johnny excused. "And little Martie and I didn't vibrate to those slap-dash helpers."

Before Elizabeth married she had gone a year to the university. She had been strenuously rushed by ever sorority and pledged by the "prominent" Delts. She had been chosen freshman escort for the Homecoming queen. And, before the year was out, she had been married under crossed swords to Lieutenant Donald McCallin. But now the war was over. Soldiers were returning. But Elizabeth was still waiting for Don to return from overseas.

Elizabeth was lovable and loving - and so lovely! Oh, why couldn't I, Beany often thought, have hair that makes a shining aureole about my face (as they say in books)? Why couldn't boys send me violets and say they were pale compared to my eyes? "Beany is so capable," everyone said... But doggonit, when you were a high-school sophomore and your heart's eyes always followed one certain boy down the hall, it wasn't enough to be tagged as capable...

Johnny found the box with the dozen pink candles and the fullblown rose candle holders. "Good thing Jock isn't thirteen," he said, laying them on the table.

"He's twelve," Beany said, "and he never had a birthday party."

"He'll be here any minute, "Johnny said. "Him and Lorna. Bet they've had Miss Hewlitt up since the break of day."

"I know," Beany laughed, and her spirits lifted. What was more fun than all this making ice cream and cake for a little boy, shunted for safekeeping out of his own country to a rheumatic old uncle Charley? A little boy, who had never had a birthday party and who had been counting the days until this first Saturday in October.

Jock and Lorna were two English children who had been sent over to a great-uncle when England's bombing threatened their safety. The great-uncle was the gardener and handy man for Miss Hewlitt, English Lit teacher at Harkness High and long-time friend of the Malones. In their young loneliness Jock and Lorna had made the Malone home their second home - their preferred home. Never a weekend passed without Jock tagging garrulously after Beany, without Lorna bobbing in and out of the house, paying court with carrots and lettuce leaves to Beany's big white rabbit, Frank. Beany had got in the habit of saving every piece of ribbon to tie on Lorna's hair. Great-uncle Charley or the busy Miss Hewlitt thought a rubber band or piece of string was sufficient to hold a little girl's hair in place.

So Beany vigorously beat the icing until it "formed a peak," visualizing as she did Jock's happy swagger when he saw the cake. Beany's capable fingers slivered off the high part on Johnny's cake and filled in the sunken spot. She slid a newspaper under the cake plate to catch any dripping icing. It was the Morning Call for which her father wrote editorials.

As she iced the cake her eyes noted that the paper was open at one of his sizzling editorials about unfit cars, careless drivers, and the mounting rate of traffic injuries and fatalities. Her knife scooped up a dab of icing off a line that read, "When is our safety maanger, N.J. Rhodes, going to waken from his long nap and do something about this?"

Beany knew an unhappy squirming. It was the irony of fate that her crusading father should be nipping at the heels of the lax N.J. Rhodes while Beany was secretly ordering freckl cream for the benefit of his nephew, Norbett Rhodes, who sat next to her in typing. All other classes at Harkness were just classes - but fith hour her typewriter was next to the one on which Norbett's restless fingers pounded. "What is it two of in occasion - two c's or two s's?" he had asked her. Oh, thank goodness, she could spell! Maybe he hadn't noticed the freckles, or her hair, which Beany, in her pessimistic moments, called "roan." Just yesterday he had asked her, "How would you write the possessive of Haas?"

There, the cake was beautifully iced.

Beany reached for the candle holders and discovered a minor tragedy. Little Martie had chewed on four - no, five - of the rose holders until they resembled worm-eaten rosebuds.

It was always surprising that anyone with as beatific an expression as Little Martie's could get in as much trouble as he did. It was always surprising, too, when little Martie spoke. He didn't talk a baby-talk jumble, but with a slow, feeling-his-way accuracy. "I - like - these," he said slowly, reproachfully, when Beany pried the demolished roses out of his fingers.

Johnny offered to run up to Downey's drugstore for more, but Beany said firmly, "Not you. I'll go." As though Johnny could buy a few candle holders. He'd come back with five dozen. Wasn't Beany still using the pint bottle of almond extract he had bought over three years ago when a recipe had called for a few drops of almond extract?

Beany grabbed Johnny's khaki jacked from the back of a chair and started down the back steps for the drugstore, five blocks away. If the freckle cream was there she'd pick it up, too.

She entered the drugstore breathlessly, with her mind entirely on the candle holders, and hoping that if the icing dripped Johnny would knife it up and put it back onto the cake. Then her heart did a hollow hop, skip, and jump. Norbett Rhodes was standing at the magazine rack, thumbing through a magazine.

Instinctively Beany's two hands reached out and caught her short flappy braids under her combs. Oh, why did she have to meet Norbett Rhodes, wearing this messy plaid seersucker under Johnny's faded, shapeless jacket!

Norbett said, "Hi, Beany!" and she said, "Hi, Norbett!" and stood so he wouldn't see the dab of icing on her skirt.

But the fountain mirror, with its pasted-on patches telling of sundaes and sandwiches, showed a girl with cheeks as pink as the peppermint-stick ice cream that she had mixed earlier. Her eyes weren't the violet blue of Elizabeth's, but a gray-blue shadowed by short but very thick eyelashes. Her "roan" hair hadn't the golden high lights of Elizabeth's, but it had a soap-and-water, a well-brushed shine. Beany's prettiness was of the honest, hardy variety.

The druggist, behind the fountain, called out, "Beany, the freckle cream I ordered for you came. Want to take it?"

"No - no -" she faltered. "I just want some pink candle holders." If only Norbett was too preoccupied with his magazine to notice.

Last year, when Norbett Rhodes was a senior and Beany was in Junior High, she had gone to the Harkness Spring Opera in which Norbett sang the lead. A Viking prince in blue velvet cape with a scarlet lining and a clanking sword, always ready to loose the shackles of the oppressed. Beany, in Harkness parlance, had "fallen on her face" for the senior with his reddish hair, his intense hazel eyes, his stirring Nelson Eddy voice.

She always saw him as cape-and-sword Norbett, even when he sat hunched overh is typewriter until Miss Meigs, their typing teacher, reminded him, "Watch your posture, Norbett." And yet her dream of being Norbett's girl was so hopelessly gummed up. For Beany was realist enough to know that Norbett liked her sister, Mary Fred, and yet disliked Mary Fred because she wouldn't date him. And, even worse, she, Beany, was Martie Malone's daughter. And Martie Malone was viciously berating Norbett's uncle - N.J. Rhodes, safety manager - for his indifferent enforcement of traffic laws. It was this uncle and his wife with whom Norbett madeh is home at the big Park Gate Hotel.

Norbett was still at Harkness High and was vindictively bitter and resentful about being there. Norbett's enemies - and unlike Johnny he had a goodly number - said he had been so busy being a big shot his senior year that he had overshot himself and failed to graduate. Norbett was school reporter for the Tribune, rival paper of Martie Malone's Call. During the winter, when he had covered a ski meet and had been overanxious for a good picture shot, he had climbed a high ledge and slipped and torn a ligament in his ankle. He had missed many chemistry classes because the chem lab was on third floor.

But even so, Norbett was a good enough student, so that all the school was startled when the chemistry professor announced two days before graduation that he was failing Norbett Rhodes. Old stand-pat Professor Bagley! Old Baggy, the students said, thought no boy or girl was equipped to enter the wider realm of life until he or she had mastered the "Nitrogen Cycle."

Norbett opened the heavy drugstore door for Beany, held it against the dusty wind, which promptly ballooned out Beany's jacked and tugged at her braids. "How about a lift home?" he asked. "My wagon's got a new paint job. Shade your eyes when you look at it."

The new paint job was as brightly red as Superman's famous cloak as front-paged on the comic books in the store. "Almost hides all the dents in the fenders," Norbett said, as he swung behind the wheel beside Beany. He asked too casually, "What's Mary Fred doing today?"

"She's going to a Delt tea," Beany said. She thought wretchedly, he' s just taking me home, hoping he'll see Mary Fred - or at least show off the new paint job on his car. ("Old show-off Norbett," Mary Fred always said. "Old hot-stuff himself!")

In the drugstore Norbett had been just a moody, studious, too-thin boy of eighteen or nineteen in a loud sport jacket. But in his red flash of car he took on a reckless, man-about-town swagger. He shot out from the curb. He jabbed a perilous fender-grazing course through the traffic headed for the football game.

"Be careful, Norbett," Beany cried out once, as he barely missed an elderly woman, carrying two bulging sacks of groceries.

"Pedestrians have eyes and legs," he said. "What's to hinder them from being careful?"

"Old people and children can't," she argued.

"Listen at her! Martie Malone's daughter. Brake-and-light Malone, we call him. Impound-the-cars Malone! Him, and his screaming editorials. All the young folks in town would like to strangle him. Old Killjoy Malone! He's slowed traffic on the Boulevard here to twenty-five an hour. What does he want - a funeral procession?"

Beany defended, "He wants to cut down accidents."

Norbett swung onto Barberry street. The white-pillared colonial home of Mrs. Socially-prominent Adams occupied a spacious corner. Its snow-white pillars made its red brick even redder. It had a starched and preening dressiness with its shutters, its ruffled curtains looped back from every window, its window-boxes, brightly splotched now with purple asters. Like a woman dressed for a party in necklace, earrings - even a corsage.

On the far corner was the dark-brick, unadorned home of Judge Buell. Its solid front and massive door had a grim, dignified, even judicial facade. Even the ivy, now a copper red, climbed with watchful decorum up the side. The hedge was squarely trimmed in a "thus far and no farther shalt thou go" manner.

In between sat the wide-bosomed, gray stone Malone home, with its winding driveway at the side. Sitting between these two carefully planned, well-tended homes, the Malone home had neither a starched preeningness nor a grim dignity but rather a scuffed, "come in as you are" friendliness. The Malone barberry hedge, given its own way, was bright with red berries. Their ivy had reached the windows in Father's room and spread protectingly across them.

The mother of the Malones had been the enthusiastic gardener of the family, and though she had been dead give years now, each spring brought glad and surprising remembrances of her. A few little crocuses pushing up in an unexpected corner; a flowering almond bursting into pink glory where they thought bridal wreath held sway. "Mary must have set that out," Father would say. And each time it was like an extra warm smile from her.

Folks driving to the Malone home always whirled into the driveway, for the Malone entrance was on the side, the steps flanked by two sentinel conifer trees. But Norbett Rhodes, as though the Malone driveway was too intimate for a Rhodes, stopped in the street outside with a screech and scream of brakes.

"Well, well," he mocked. "Only two children in the Malone yard!"

"Oh, Jock and Lorna are here already! And the candles aren't on the cake yet!"

"Your place used to look like an orphan asylum when I'd drive past."

Beany said flatly, "Those were the three Biddinger children. Their parents were killed at Pearl Harbor and so Father sent them home to us. They lived with us two years and then - then their uncle down in Santa Fe took them. Marcella - she was just ten when she came -" Beany's flushed face clouded, her voiced choked, "I - missed Marcella - so. Our house seemed so - empty after they left."

Norbett's eyes flicked over the woe in her face. He said, "You Malones certainly stick your neck out for trouble. Didn't you know those orphans from Hawaii wouldn't be with you for keeps? You're a funny kid, Beany. You're so doggoned honest. But you care too much about things. Don't you know there's no percentage in that?"

Beany said impulsively, "Look, Norbett, we've got peppermint-stick ice cream and a birthday cake. I wish you'd come to the party."

He looked at her mockingly. "Don't you know I'm the Malone enemy? All up and down the line. Your father is out tooth and nail after my uncle Norbett. Your sister Mary Fred told me once I had a mean disposition - she said I ought to eat more carrots. And Johnny - well, your genius Johnny and I have always locked horns."

"You mean about all those prize essays and class plays at school?"

"I've never once got the best of Johnny Malone. Last year when I was a senior and he was a junior he always outsmarted me. And this year I've got a swell idea for a senior play, but I suppose if Johnny Malone gets up with some half-baked idea of his, he'll have them all eating out of his hand. I lie awake at night, dreaming of the time when I'll have revenge on the Malones. Shakespeare said a mouthful when he said,

If I can catch him once upon the hip
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.

Oh yes, and another thing. If you think my uncle Norbett is easy to live with since Martie Malone started nipping at his heels, you're crazy."

What could Beany say? She was tom between loyalty for the Malones and her own secret longing to reach out to him and say, "I'm not your enemy, Norbett."

Norbett said, "I'm covering the football game for the Tribune this aft. How about you dashing out there with me? We can get in on my Press pass. I might need you on the spelling."

Beany's heart lifted high under Johnny's faded jacket. He was asking her. He wasn't thinking of her as Mary Fred's sister. Mentally she was scurrying up the stairs and squirming into her red slipover sweater - and if Mary Fred hadn't worn her navy-blue Chesterfield with the sheepskin lining she'd wear it. Mentally she was feeling Norbett's hand under her elbow, guiding her through the crowded stadium. All the world would see that she was Norbett's girl.

Lorna came to the gate - a little nine-year-old girl with hair that needed Beany's fingers to straighten the part and anchor with a ribbon the curl that was blowing every which way. Lorna said wistfully, proddingly, "Jock says the candles burn on the cake and you blow at them."

Beany reached reluctantly for the car door. "Oh, I'd love to, Norbett, but I - we promised Jock a party. He's never had a party - or a birthday cake -"

"It won't take all afternoon, will it?" Norbett asked impatiently. "It isn't everybody I'd give a second chance to, but I'll telephone you between halves from the Press box. You get this birthday fiddle-faddle off your hands and I'll run down from the stadium and pick you up. Okay?"

"Okay," Beany said.

His red car went careening down Barberry street. Okay? - Beany questioned herself, tremulously and apprehenslvely. Just like playing with fire is okay.