The Eyes of the Amaryllis by Natalie Babbitt

Author:Natalie Babbitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 1977-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

The rest of that day, and the next and the next, were as confused and cloudy as the first days had been calm and bright. Outside, the sky hung low, clouds drifting over clouds, and the rain fell softly, continuously, turning the sea and beach into a blur. Inside, Gran was feverish. She would talk, excitedly, and then lapse into silence, drop off to sleep for a moment, and wake to talk again. Jenny did not know what to do with her, and a vague alarm moved in to tremble in her stomach. The head from the Amaryllis lay on the table beside Gran’s chair in the parlor, and the calm smile on its carved face was more like the Gran Jenny knew than this agitated woman who sat, stood, stumped about, sat again, dozed exhausted, doing none of these for more than five minutes at a time, it seemed.

Jenny took over the cooking, producing from Gran’s unfamiliar stores peculiar meals whose inharmonious parts were never ready at the same moment, never ready to the same degree of doneness; and she carried them in to the parlor on a tray, but Gran would scarcely touch them. “Geneva,” she would say, “did I ever tell you the story of how—” and would begin a tale told once so far that hour and twice the hour before, of her life in the old days with the Captain. For she called him “the Captain” now, not “your grandfather,” and she talked of nothing, no one, else, putting out her hand again and again to touch the wooden head. And then, in the middle of the story, her voice would fade and she would fall asleep, her head bowed down on her chest.

It was clear from the brightness of her eyes and the flush on her cheeks that she was ill. But Jenny did not know how to find the doctor and was in any case afraid to leave her grandmother alone while she went out to look, for she feared that now, in addition to the fever, Gran might really be going mad. The building in Springfield, the one with the dark, barred windows, was never far from her thoughts. “If the doctor comes,” she worried, “he’ll see how it is with her. He’ll send for my father and they’ll take her away.” And so she waited, helplessly.

But at the end of the third day, late in the afternoon, she tiptoed in to the parlor from the kitchen and found that Gran was truly asleep at last, her breathing deep and regular. The flush was gone from her face, and her hands lay relaxed in her lap. The fever, at least, had passed. Weak with relief, Jenny smoothed the quilt over her grandmother’s knees, tucking it under, and sank down on a footstool near the window. Outside, the rain still fell, the swells still spilled across the sodden beach, and Jenny realized that she had not left the house since the day of the discovery.

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