Ginger Pye

Copyright © 1951 by Eleanor Estes

Copyright renewed 1979 by Eleanor Estes

All rights reserved. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harcourt Children’s Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1951.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Estes, Eleanor, 1906–1988.

Ginger Pye/Eleanor Estes; illustrated by the author.

p. cm.

Summary: The disappearance of a new puppy named Ginger and the appearance of a mysterious man in a mustard yellow hat bring excitement into the lives of the Pye children.

[1. Dogs—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.E749Gi 2000

[Fic]—dc2100-26700

ISBN: 978-0-15-202499-4 hardcover (OSI)

ISBN: 978-0-544-92781-0 paperback

eISBN 978-0-547-53988-1

v4.1119

To Cici and Gretchen

1

The Pyes and Pets

Would Gracie-the-cat be jealous if the Pyes got another pet—​a dog? That was what Jerry Pye wanted to know and what he was dreaming about as he sat with Rachel, his sister, on their little upstairs veranda. Gracie had belonged to the family for eleven years. This was longer than Rachel, aged nine, or even Jerry, aged ten, had. She had been a wedding present to Mama, and she was known in the neighborhood as the New York Cat. Jerry was trying to imagine what Gracie’s feelings would be if the Pyes did get another pet—​a dog.

The one thing that Jerry Pye wanted more than anything else in the world right now was a dog. Ever since he had seen the new puppies over in Speedys’ barn, he was not only more anxious than ever to have a dog, he was most anxious to have one of these Speedy puppies. He had the particular one picked out that he would most like to have as his own. This was not easy to do for they were all wonderful.

Jerry had chosen this certain special puppy because he was convinced he was the smartest of the new puppies. Naturally, he would love any dog he had, but imagine owning such a smart puppy as this one! When he owned him he would teach him to heel, be dead dog, sneeze, scratch his stomach when Jerry scratched his back, beg, and walk on his hind legs. If he had this dog, that is. And he looked speculatively at Gracie-the-cat who had pushed open the screen door and was now lolling with an agreeable expression on the rope mat. He would not want to hurt her feelings and he thought some more whether it would or would not hurt Gracie’s feelings if he brought a puppy into the house.

It was a Friday evening and Jerry and Rachel had been sitting, reading, on the little upstairs veranda of their tall house. Rachel had The Secret Garden from the library, and Jerry had one of the Altsheler books, and neither one of these books was an I book. They both always opened a book eagerly and suspiciously looking first to see whether or not it was an I book. If it were they would put it aside, not reading it until there was absolutely nothing else. Then, at last, they would read it. But, being an I book, it had to be awfully good for them to like it. Only a few, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Swiss Family Robinson, for example, survived the hard I book test. These were among their best beloved in spite of the obvious handicap.

The children had read for a long time, but then it had grown dark. Now they were just sitting quietly, thinking, and watching the bats and bugs hurl themselves against the tall streetlamp which had suddenly come on and was casting a purple glow. Jerry was getting ready to bring up the matter of the dog to discuss with his sister Rachel, but first he liked to sit and dream about the wonderful idea that it was.

Rachel and Jared, called Jerry, Pye were very close companions. Of course they had many friends too; for instance, Dick Badger, who lived next door and who had a huge gray hound that knew how to scratch its stomach when you scratched its back, was Jerry’s best friend.

Rachel’s best friend was a girl over on Bugle Street named Addie Egan. All the boys and girls in Grade Five said Addie Egan had cooties and she really did not have cooties at all. Rachel stuck up for Addie whenever the occasion arose and she said, Let Addie sign your character books. She does not have cooties.

But then Rachel stuck up for everybody who was picked on. There was a little girl named Evvie Powers in the next block and sometimes the older boys and girls picked on her. Police! Come and get Evvie! they would cry, trying to scare the wits out of Evvie. But Rachel, if she heard them, would cry out, Police! Don’t come and get Evvie! And she would run and put her arms around the little girl. Evvie just worshiped Rachel and wanted to be with her every minute. This was a nuisance, for Evvie wasn’t even up to onesies in the game of onesie-twosie and Rachel was up to fivesies! But Evvie had to be protected nevertheless. Rachel would give her a smile and a pat and say, Don’t worry, Evvie. I won’t let the police get you. Then she would run off to find Addie or Jerry and Dick or someone her age, leaving Evvie wiping her eyes and looking after her adoringly.

Rachel was an eager skinny little girl who almost always wore skirts and blouses that didn’t stay tucked in, or sweaters, and her nose was frequently runny, because she had hay fever. Jerry was skinny too, but his nose didn’t run. Jerry had black hair and Rachel’s was reddish gold though, at this moment, sitting under the streetlamp, the hair of both of them looked purple.

To lead up to the subject that was nearest his heart Jerry said, Rache, which is more important—​a dog or a cat?

Rachel and Jerry were in the habit of having discussions as to what was the most important of anything—​the most important, or the prettiest, or the best, or the funniest. For instance, in the dictionary, almost their only picture book except for Mr. Pye’s books of birds, they had excited discussions over which was the prettiest fish on the shiny colored page of fish, or the prettiest bird, or butterfly. One favorite discussion of theirs was the one they had whenever they played train, calling out like conductors, New York to Boston! Which was more important, they asked one another, New York or Boston?

New York, Jerry would say. Because it has the Museum of Natural History in it.

Boston, said Rachel. Because it sounds more important.

Why?

It just does.

Rachel couldn’t explain the reason she thought Boston sounded more important than New York but it probably had something to do with the roundness of the letters, the B and the o’s. For the same reason she thought London sounded more important than Paris, though Paris sounded prettier. Sometimes, since Jerry was one year older than she, she wondered if she, too, should not say, New York. Still, to her, Boston sounded rounder, bigger, more solid—​more important.

Their town, Cranbury, was between these two big cities. The trains went streaking past, running back and forth from Boston to New York, from New York to Boston. Mama was from a little town near New York, and Papa was from Boston. This made it doubly hard to choose the more important. How had Mama met Papa when they were at two different ends of the railroad?

It happened this way. Papa was much older than Mama. He was thirty-five when he met Mama and up till then he had not had a minute to get married because all he thought about was birds, birds, birds. Already, he was a quite famous bird man. Well, one day Papa happened to be standing in a New York subway station. Though he came from Boston he had frequent business in New York. In this particular subway station there was an escalator and all of a sudden Papa decided to see if he could run up the escalator, not the up escalator, the down one. He would have to run pretty fast to beat the stairs that were trying to bring him back downwards. Papa said he had always wanted to try this but naturally he did not want to make a fool of himself in front of other people of whom there were plenty in New York. This time, however, there weren’t any other people around and it was a splendid opportunity. So. Up he flew, several steps at a time, and he did manage to reach the top.

It so happened that when, panting, Papa did reach the top, there was a certain young girl who was about to come down the escalator; and here Papa came racing up it so fast, he couldn’t help it. He knocked the young lady down. Now this girl happened to be Mama who had come to the city for the opera matinee. The opera was Tannhäuser, the first she had ever seen, and she was floating through the air, almost, she was so transported by the magnificent music, when all of a sudden she landed flat on her back, knocked over by this crazy man who was flying up the down escalator.

Well, of course, since Mama was such a young little thing and wore only a size two shoe, and, moreover, ate like a bird, Papa had to marry her. They fell in love at first sight and though she was only seventeen, they got married as soon as all the permissions could be granted.

It was the most interesting way for a mother to meet a father of any that Rachel and Jerry had heard so far. Addie Egan’s mother had met her father at the high school prom, for example. And Dick Badger’s mother had met his father at a Sunday school picnic. And so it went. At any rate this was how it happened that Rachel and Jerry had the youngest mother in the town of Cranbury, and the youngest grandmother, and the youngest uncle, their Uncle Bennie, Mama’s baby brother, who was now only three years old.

Papa and Mama came to Cranbury to live so that Papa could study the birds of the marshes and the woods and the fields, and because Cranbury was in the middle between New York and Boston. Perhaps they, too, could not make up their minds which was more important, New York or Boston, and had to settle halfway.

After a while Gramma and Grampa moved to Cranbury too, so that Uncle Bennie would grow up knowing his niece and nephew, Rachel and Jerry, and none of them be strangers to any of them. Grampa was a piano tuner and he said he’d just as lief tune pianos in Cranbury as where he was and moreover he could have a boat in Cranbury, which he couldn’t in New York. Sometimes Rachel and Jerry asked Grampa which he thought was more important, New York or Boston, and between plinking the piano keys, he’d say, New York. But then, naturally, being from there he could not be a traitor and say, Boston.

After Rachel had been taken to visit both cities, New York and Boston, finding them both wonderful, she didn’t know what to say in the importance game. To keep it interesting, however, she continued to say, Boston. What would be the sense of both her and Jerry saying, New York? There would not have been any game then. And, anyway, the name, Boston, still sounded more important.

It was Papa who had taken Rachel on her first visit to Boston. And it was Mama who had taken her on her first visit to New York. The time she went to Boston with Papa happened to be over the Thanksgiving weekend, just a few years before this story begins. They were to spend the weekend with an old aunt of Papa’s, Auntie Hoyt, who had been the first to steer Papa toward birds. She was a spinster aunt and she was very old and fragile and Papa was very fond of her.

That weekend was a cold, raw, and bleak one. Rachel slept on a small cot in the parlor and she could not get warm the whole night. She didn’t have enough covers and her feet would not warm up. She stayed awake and stayed awake and though she scrunched herself up into a tight ball, she still stayed cold. Since Auntie Hoyt was poor, Rachel imagined she did not have any more covers in the cupboard and she felt she should not embarrass her by asking for more. Anyway she didn’t want to be a nuisance and wake anybody up, so she shivered and shook. Also she didn’t want Papa to think he had such a cold daughter he could not possibly take her on any more trips. Rachel longed to go on bird trips with Papa, to the coldest North and the hottest South and traipse through the swamps of Florida. She had to be stoic. It must have been about three in the morning before she ever fell asleep.

The next night as Rachel got ready for bed she viewed the cold couch of night with horror. She felt she could not stand the cold another minute. Papa was reading The Auk, and Auntie Hoyt a little book of Forget-me-nots. Whispering, so Auntie Hoyt would not hear her, and hoping the question would not fill Papa with such disgust he would never take her to Labrador, she asked Papa where they had hung her overcoat—​she planned to sleep in it. Then he and Auntie Hoyt, who had heard, were sorry and piled a hundred coats on her couch. She was still cold, however, and could not get her feet warm the whole time she was there, in Boston.

In Boston, one day, she had an unusual experience. While Papa and Auntie Hoyt waited out of sight somewhere, she had to go by herself into a large room in a department store and listen to someone dressed up like Santa Claus read a Christmas story and ’Twas the night before Christmas. This seemed odd to her for at Thanksgiving time, she was not ready for Santa Claus. In Cranbury they got through the turkeys and the pumpkins and the Pilgrims before they brought out the Santa Clauses. She was quite relieved when the whole occasion was over and instead of being abandoned she found Papa and Auntie Hoyt waiting, beaming, at the door.

They went on an underground trolley car in Boston which went too fast around corners and it was a wonder it did not bump into the wall. For almost every meal Auntie Hoyt gave them baked beans out of a can and cold boiled ham both of which Rachel was very fond of but for which Auntie Hoyt apologized, saying hard times had hit her. In Boston, she also saw the Common, the old North church, the Bunker Hill monument, and where John Adams was buried. It was all like walking through the pages of the history book. Could New York come up to this?

The following year when Mama took her down to New York, she saw that it could, but in a different way. It is true she had a number of ideas about New York before she got there which came in for quite a reshuffling when she saw how things really were. For instance, she had expected the elevated railway to be a little train running on narrow tracks from pole to pole about a half a mile in the air, really elevated. A sky train, she had thought, reached perhaps by ladder, and she had anticipated riding on it with the greatest delight. On the contrary the elevated was so low down, the trolleys that ran over the viaduct from Cranbury to the city were almost as exciting.

The subway, too, was not as she had expected. She had thought a subway would be a shining thing way way down in the middle of the earth. But there, one had merely to go down a flight of stairs and one beheld the subway; and she did not see the escalator that Papa flew up.

But in New York Rachel tasted the best meal she ever had in her whole life. She and Mama had walked for miles and miles and hours and hours. They had had nothing to eat because on the train Rachel had eaten up the hard-boiled egg sandwiches that were supposed to be eaten in some quiet park with the squirrels and pigeons. Her footsteps lagged; she was hot, hungry, and tired. Finally her mother caught on and took her into a long, narrow store—​she said afterwards it was the five-and-ten-cent store—​and there Rachel was served this delicious dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes and gravy and peas, and not too much, just enough, on a thick little hard white plate. Her dinner cost ten cents, Mama said, and it impressed Rachel that for either five or ten cents, one could buy almost anything in New York.

Even dresses. For after this wonderful little dinner they went into an enormous place and there, for ten cents apiece, Mama bought Rachel two dresses, a blue one and a brown one, and these were the first bought dresses Rachel had ever had. Mama made all her