Gay's year on Sunset Island

If you have lived all your life in a sleepy little New England village like Braeburn, you get so you just don’t expect exciting, story-book sort of things to happen. I know that I, Gay Annersley, fifteen years old and an orphan, but living with the nicest aunt, uncle and cousins in the world--isn’t that the proper way to begin an autobiography?--certainly never expected anything like Sunset Island to happen to me.

Perhaps now, having written that much, I’d better go back and explain how it all came about, only I somehow simply had to put Sunset Island into the first paragraph.

Ever since I was a baby I’ve lived with Aunt Mollie and Uncle Charles, because my own mother, who was Aunt Mollie’s twin sister, died when I wasn’t quite a week old, and of course my father, being just a man, couldn’t be expected to know how to bring up all by himself a daughter as young as that. Besides, Aunt Mollie had a baby of her own then, Dan, who was two, and she declared she had plenty of room in her big old-fashioned Braeburn house, and still more in her heart, for another, especially when that poor red, crying, motherless mite that was Gay Annersley in those days, was her twin sister’s only child.

So that’s how I came to be one of Aunt Mollie’s flock, and for quite a long time I didn’t even know she wasn’t my own mother. For she has never once in all those years made any difference in the love she gives us, between Andrée, who is her real daughter, and me.

She never made any difference, either, between another adopted child she found room for later in her big family and her still bigger heart. This was Sydney Ross, just my age, and the son of Uncle Charles’ old business partner. Syd’s mother and father had died in a dreadful typhoid epidemic when the little fellow wasn’t more than five or six, and Uncle Charles and Aunt Mollie had taken him in promptly, as they had me.

Andrée’s the one girl cousin I possess, but there’s still another boy besides Dan and Sydney--the baby of the family, named Joe for a sea-captain uncle of ours, but because of the color of his hair, never called anything except Reddy. Reddy’s a darling, and just ten; not a bit spoiled, either, in spite of being the youngest.

I wish I could say the same thing for my cousin Andrée, but I can’t. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that she and I, being the only girls, would be chums and like the same things, and the same people. Well, we’re not, and we don’t.

Andrée liked dolls, and silly, girly sort of books, and tea parties--that kind of thing, and I loathed them. I always wanted to play ball with Dan and Sydney, when they’d let me tag round after them, and climb trees, and swim in the lake, and go on cross-country hikes. When I was ten I could beat both the boys at sprinting, though they could tire me on long distance runs.

I still like tramping better than parties and dancing, which Andrée is crazy over. But then Andrée’s pretty, in a really lovely pink and cream and golden fashion, and sure to be popular wherever she goes, and I’m not. I’m little and skinny, and have half a million freckles, and a turn-up nose, though I have nice eyes--hazel, with long lashes. I can say that without being vain, because Aunt Mollie says I’ve got my mother’s eyes, and everyone admits she was a beauty. I’m like my daddy, and what can be all right in a man, you know, can be quite plain in a little girl.

However, I’ve never cared much about it one way or the other. I’ve been too busy, I guess. And I remember my father a little--he died when I was six--but I know how wonderful he was, and I’d rather look like him than be pretty like Andrée. Honestly I would. Because Daddy was the bravest and finest man I’ve ever heard of, even counting in the famous heroes in books and histories.

He was a sea captain, just as Uncle Joe is, and lost his life in a dreadful storm at sea, saving one of his sailors who had been washed overboard. Daddy dove right into that raging sea, Uncle Joe wrote Aunt Mollie--Uncle Joe was his first mate at the time--and reached the man, and held him up safely till a boat could be lowered away. But a heavy crate that had been washed overboard, too, struck Daddy’s head just as he was being lifted into the lifeboat. He never recovered consciousness again, and died the next morning, and they had to bury him at sea.

So maybe you can understand why I’m proud of looking like him, and always will be. A girl with a father like that has got something big to live up to all the rest of her life. And I’m certainly going to do it if I can.

Up to six months ago, we’d all been just about as happy in the old-fashioned grey and white house on State Street, as any family could ask to be. Uncle Charles wasn’t a rich man, but he was president of the First National Bank in Braeburn, and his salary must have been a pretty nice one, for we children had everything we wanted in the way of clothes and toys, and Aunt Mollie had a car of her own. Andrée and I went to Miss Porter’s private school on Elm Street, instead of to the public school, and Dan was expecting to go to Andover that fall.

And then, the spring before, Uncle Charles had what the doctors called a nervous break-down, and had to give up his position at the bank. Aunt Mollie told me a little about it--you see, she’d gotten in the way of treating me almost like an older person, and talking things over with me that she never told Andrée.

It seems Uncle Charles had been working awfully hard at the bank, which was going through some kind of crisis. I didn’t quite understand that part, but I know it had something to do with someone’s bad judgment in investments, and that, though the fault really wasn’t his, Uncle Charles had insisted on giving up all his own fortune so the bank’s depositors shouldn’t lose a penny. Aunt Mollie was so proud of him for doing it that she never seemed to realize it meant we would have to sell the old house on State Street we loved so much and be quite, quite poor people.

But I guess Uncle Charles realized it all right, and probably he blamed himself for not somehow knowing what the other man was doing. Anyhow, there we were, all at once, with no money except a few hundred dollars of Aunt Mollie’s in the savings bank, the house having to be sold just as soon as we could find a buyer who would pay a fair price, and poor Uncle Charles so ill and nervous and unlike his usual jolly self that Dr. West began to talk about the possibility of his having to go to a sanitarium.

Of course there was Syd’s little income that his own father had left him, but neither Aunt Mollie nor Uncle Charles would touch a penny of that, though Sydney begged and begged them. Anyhow it wasn’t much, just enough to send him to boarding school later, and college, with a bit left over to start him in some good business afterwards.

Aunt Mollie put her arms around me the night after Dr. West first hinted at the sanitarium, and for the first time in my life I saw her give way and cry as if her heart were broken.

“Oh, Gay, darling, what are we going to do?” she asked in a trembly sort of voice that made a big lump come in my own throat to hear. “I’d do anything, anything to make your uncle well. But where are we going to find the money to pay for a sanitarium?”

“Maybe it won’t be necessary after all,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “I thought he seemed a little better today, didn’t you?”

Aunt Mollie’s never been the kind to look on the dark side of things, but though she tried to cheer up and smile, I could see she hadn’t much heart in it.

“Wel-ll, perhaps so, dear,” she replied with a little sigh she tried to smother. “But he’s been ill for over six months now. I can’t seem to see any real improvement.”

“And perhaps a nice rich buyer will come along soon,” I hurried on, “who’ll want this house so badly he’ll give a whacking big price for it--oh, lots more than we’re asking. Then we’d have money enough to live on for the next few years, while Dan and Sydney and I are growing up and learning to support the family.”

She kissed me then, and called me her blessed little comfort, and blamed herself for being, as she put it, “cowardly and lacking in faith.” And we didn’t talk about it again for several days. But I thought and thought, trying to think up a way out, until my head felt actually dizzy.

Only, when you’re just fifteen, and a girl, what can you possibly do in a situation like that? It looked pretty hopeless, but I knew it wouldn’t help matters any if I gave in and cried, too, so I set my teeth hard, and Syd and Dan and I talked and talked and talked, though none of it seemed to get us any nearer the edge of our Slough of Despond.

And then, tumbling on each other’s heels, as you might say, right out of a blue sky, two wonderful things happened. We found a buyer for the house, at a fairly good price, though not quite what Aunt Mollie had hoped for. And Uncle Joe’s ship, the Myra, came into New York after five years up and down the South Seas and the Indian Ocean, and Uncle Joe, without waiting to send a telegram, took the first train out to Braeburn and walked in on us just as we were sitting down to supper.

I don’t think I would have remembered him, because I wasn’t quite ten the last time I’d seen him, but of course the minute Aunt Mollie jumped up from the table, crying, “Joe, Joe!” in that excited, breathless way, I knew who our unexpected visitor was.

He was a big man, with broad shoulders, and a sort of squarish, red face with a grey mustache, and the twinklingest, jolliest grey eyes I’ve ever seen. I knew right off that I was going to like my Uncle Joe, even before we’d had a chance to speak a word to each other.

Aunt Mollie was hanging on to his arm with both hands as if she never meant to let him go again, and I guessed she was not far from tears, too, though, as I said before, I’d never seen her cry but once in my life. She kept repeating, softly, almost as if she were saying a prayer in church, “Joe, I’ve needed you so! I’ve needed you so!” And he just patted her shoulder and cleared his throat two or three times.

The boys and I hung back a little, at first--I don’t know exactly why--probably shyness, for I could see by their expressions that Dan and Syd were as excited as I was over his arrival. In fact I was so excited that my knees suddenly felt so weak and shaky under me, I couldn’t have moved if I’d tried. It was the queerest feeling.

You see, it came to me the minute I heard Aunt Mollie call him Joe, and I looked up and saw him beaming at us all with that nice smile of his, that he’d been the last person to see my daddy alive, and that he could tell me, if he only would, so many things I’d always simply ached to know about the part of his life he’d spent at sea. I made up my mind then and there that when we got to know each other better, I was going to take Uncle Joe off alone somewhere and ask him about a thousand questions.

But Andrée apparently wasn’t the least bit shy. She went up and kissed him as calmly as if she’d known him all her life, and said, “Welcome home, Uncle Joe! I’m your niece, Andrée. Don’t you remember me?”