Jean Craig Grows Up

1. A Telephone Call

“It does seem to me, kids,” said Kit in exasperation, “that when someone is trying to write, you might be a little quiet.”

The three at the end of the room paid no attention. Tommy was so absorbed in trying to see over Doris’ shoulder that he didn’t realize he was losing his balance. Perched on the back of the chair, he suddenly toppled over and landed squarely in Doris’ lap. With all the dignity of the eleven-year-old that he was, he picked himself up and resumed his perch.

“Cut it out, will you?” protested Doris. “You practically killed me.”

“Aw, I wasn’t doing anything.”



Jean was making plans for a party. The list of names lay before her, and she tapped her pencil on her nose thoughtfully as she eyed it.

“Now, listen, Jean,” Doris proposed. “I’ve got an idea. Why not roll up the living room rug and push the furniture back out of the way, so that we can play records and dance. We can ask all the kids who have records to bring a few with them. That way we won’t have to keep playing our same old records over and over. Don’t you think that would be fun?”

“OK. If we have plenty of cokes, potato chips, and pretzels on hand, we won’t need much else for refreshments, do you think? Or should we have hamburgers later, too?”

“We can get along without hamburgers, although those boys will eat all they can get their hands on,” replied Doris.

“How many do you have on your list?” asked Kit.

“Ten. With the four of us, that should be plenty for a party. I still wonder if it’s really wise to have one with Mother bringing Dad home.” The rest were silent. Kit, sitting at her mother’s desk beside the wide bay window, looked up and frowned at the falling snow that was obscuring the view of the Sound. A pearly grayness seemed to be settling around the big house as if it were being cut off from the rest of the world by a thick, soft curtain.



“Hope Dad’s feeling better by now,” Kit said suddenly, pushing her dark bangs back from her forehead restlessly. “They said they would be leaving the hospital the eighth. Wasn’t it the eighth, Jean?”

“Oh, they’ll be home in plenty of time,” Jean exclaimed. “Here we all sit, looking like small, black storm clouds when he’s better. Mother said positively in her last letter that he had improved wonderfully during the week.”

Doris stared at the long, low couch on one side of the open fireplace. It was over four weeks since her father had lain on it. Early the previous fall he had come home after two and a half years in the Army. During those years Mrs. Craig had managed to hold her family together although it hadn’t been easy with four children. When they had received word that Major Thomas Craig had been wounded in the Pacific, they had all been worried. Later, he was well enough to return to the States, and it was comforting to have him nearer home. Finally, the Army Hospital in Philadelphia had discharged him and he returned to his family at last.



Through the winter there had been a steady decline in his health until it was necessary for him to return to the Army Hospital for possible further treatment.

Somehow Doris could not help wondering whether the future would get any brighter. She rose quickly, shaking her head defiantly at the thought, as any thirteen-year-old girl would.

“Let’s not worry, kids. If we’re all blue when he comes, he’ll have a relapse.”

Then Jean spoke, anxiously, tenderly, her big dark eyes questioning Kit. “What about Mother?”

“We’re all worried about Mother, Jeannie. You’re not the only one,” Kit snapped. “But you can be aching with love inside, and still not go moping around with a long face like that!”

“Like what?” demanded Jean haughtily.

“Quit it, kids, don’t fight,” Tommy said, just as if he were the eldest instead of the youngest. “Gosh, you two argue much more than Doris and I do.”



“Well, I think,” said Doris firmly, “that we ought to remember Mom just as Jean says. She’s almost sick herself worrying over Dad, and there she is, away down in Philadelphia with nobody to share her troubles.”

Jean smiled rather forlornly. She had assumed most of the responsibility since they had been left alone. Rebecca, their cousin, had arrived only a few days before Mrs. Craig had left, and it had not been easy to assume a mother’s place suddenly and run the home.

“Everything seems to be coming at once,” she said. “The party and Kit’s minor masterpiece for Lincoln’s Birthday.”

“Class symposium on ‘Lincoln: The Man—The President—The Liberator’—” Kit ran it off proudly. “Little classics of three hundred words each. You should see Billie Warren’s, Jean. He’s been boiling it down for a week from two thousand words, and every day Barbie King asks him how he’s getting along. And you know how Billie talks. This morning he just glowered and told her, ‘It’s still just sap!’ What a character.”

“Kit, don’t,” laughed Jean in spite of herself. “If you get ink spots on Mother’s desk, you’ll have a nice mess on your hands.”



Kit moved the inkwell farther back as a small concession, and suggested once more that the rest of the family try to keep conversation down to a roar about their old party while she finished her symposium.

“You know,” Doris began with a far-off look in her eyes, “I think we’re awfully selfish, and I mean all of us, not just Kit—”

“That’s nice. I love company,” murmured Kit.

“Here’s Dad coming back home after five weeks’ absence, and we don’t know really whether he’s better or worse—”

“Doris, don’t even let yourself think that he’s anything but better,” pleaded Jean.

“But it’s perfectly true. He needs rest above everything else, so the doctor told Mother. And here we are planning a party for the day he gets home.”

“Dad always insists that we go ahead and not upset our plans. He says he feels better knowing we’re happy,” replied Jean.

Kit stared out of the window again, thinking. At fifteen she was far more energetic than Jean at seventeen. Her agile mind easily found its way in and out of difficulty. With her curly hair cut short, she seemed more like another boy in the family. She, more than the others, even Tommy, resembled their father in many ways, lighthearted, gay, carefree.



Secretly, Kit felt far more able to take the lead than did Jean, now that the family was facing a crisis.

“Anyway, I’ve called all the kids and Mother knows we’re going to have the party because I wrote her all about it. She wrote back that she didn’t mind a bit if Becky didn’t.”

“But did you ask Becky, Jean?”

“You ask her. She’d say yes to anything you asked, Doris.”

Doris thawed at once.

It seemed as if their elderly cousin had come down from her calm and well-ordered seclusion at Elmhurst, Connecticut, just when they needed her most. Usually she contented herself with sending the family useful and proper gifts on birthdays and at Christmas, but they seldom saw her.

She was forty-seven, plump, serene, and still good-looking, with her blonde hair just beginning to look a trifle silvery, and a fine network of wrinkles showing around the corners of her eyes and mouth.



“Land alive, Margaret Ann,” she had told Mrs. Craig happily the moment she set foot inside the wide entrance hall at Sandy Cove, “didn’t I know you needed me?” And she laughed. “I didn’t plan to descend on you so sudden, but it looked as if you needed someone, Tom down sick and you worn out taking care of him. Don’t you worry at all about my being put out. I’ll stay here with the children and take care of things till you get back home.”

And Mrs. Craig had agreed thankfully. After a three months’ siege with her husband through his nervous breakdown, she was glad indeed to welcome the strong assistance of Rebecca.

“Let’s put it up to her right now,” Kit exclaimed. “I’d just as soon ask her if Doris is afraid.”

Before the others could hold her back, she had slipped out of the living room and was racing up the stairs, two at a time, into the large sunny room at the south end of the house where one could look out over Long Island Sound. But at the door Kit stopped short. Over at the window stood Becky, energetically wiping her eyes with a generous-sized plain linen handkerchief, and the end of her nose was red from weeping.



“Come in, my dear, come right in,” she said hastily, as Kit backed away. “I’m glad you happened up. Come here to your old second cousin and comfort her. I feel as if all the waves in the Sound had washed over me.”

Kit hurried over, put her hand on Becky’s arm, and squeezed it reassuringly. “What’s the matter? Anything about Dad?” demanded Kit, swift to catch the connection between her cousin’s tears and words. “Did you get a letter?”

“No,” answered Rebecca, “your mother just telephoned me from Philadelphia. Your father is worse and the doctors think he would be better off at home. They will be home in three days. You know, Kit, they’d never do that if the doctors could do anything more.” There was a break in Rebecca’s voice. “I just wish I had him up home safe in the room he used to have when he was a boy. He had measles the same time I did when my mother was alive. That’s your Aunt Charlotte, Kit, she that was Charlotte Peabody from Boston. But I always seemed to take after the Craig side instead of the Peabody, they said, and Tom was just like my own brother. I wish I had him away from doctors and trained nurses and Army hospitals, and had old Doctor Gallup tending him instead. I’ve seen him march right up to Charon’s ferryboat and haul out somebody he didn’t think was through living.”



Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her head, looking down at the pines, their branches lightly crystalled with snow and ice. Somehow it didn’t seem as if God could let her father slip out of the world after He had allowed him to come home from the war. And just when they all needed him so much. During all the months of illness, the girls and Tommy had not grasped the seriousness of it. He only seemed weak and not himself. They knew he had not gone back to work in his office in New York after he left the Army, but they had taken these things lightly.

Perhaps only Jean had really gleaned the meaning of her mother’s anxious face, the steady daily visits of the nerve specialist, and, last of all, the decision to return to the Army Hospital in Philadelphia.

Kit closed her eyes and wrinkled her face as if with a twinge of sharp pain. “It’s going to be awful,” she said softly, “just awful for Mom.”

Rebecca squared her ample shoulders unconsciously, and lifted her double chin in challenge to the worry that the next few days might hold.



“It’s worse for you children and Tom. We women are given special strength to bear just such trials. We’ve got to be strong,” she said.

But the tears came slowly, miserably to Kit’s brown eyes. She pulled the curtains back, and looked out as the blue waters of the Sound were turning purple and violet in the gathering gloom of the late afternoon. The land looked desolate, and yet it was but a light snowfall. Down close to the water some gulls rose and swept in a big half circle toward the other side of the inlet. Bob Phelps, running along the sidewalk toward home, waved a big bunch of pussy willows at her.

“Spring’s coming, Kit,” he yelled. “Just found some and they’re ’most out!”

Kit waved back mechanically. Of course she must not break down and cry. Even Tommy wouldn’t, and she and Jean must be strong and brace up the two younger ones so they all could help their mother. Still the tears came. What was the use of spring if—

“Kit, aren’t you ever coming down?” called Jean from the foot of the stairs.

“Right now,” Kit answered. “You come too, please, Becky. We need you awfully. To tell us what to do next.”



“No, you don’t,” said Rebecca calmly. “You don’t need me anymore than the earth needs me to tell it this snow’s going away and the flowers will soon be blossoming. The first thing you must do is learn how to meet your father with a smile.”