Up a Road Slowly

by Irene Hunt

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Titles by Irene Hunt

  ACROSS FIVE APRILS

  THE LOTTERY ROSE

  NO PROMISES IN THE WIND

  UP A ROAD SLOWLY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  The lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems “Renascence” and “God’s World” are from Collected Poems, Harper & Row. Copyright © 1912, 1913, 1940, 1948 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “I Shall Not Care” is from Collected Poems by Sara Teasdale, Macmillan. Copyright © 1915; copyright renewed 1934 by Mamie Wheless; used by permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  UP A ROAD SLOWLY

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Pearson Education, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  First Berkley mass-market edition / March 1986

  Berkley Jam digest edition / January 2003

  Second Berkley mass-market edition / January 2005

  Up a Road Slowly copyright © 1966 by Irene Hunt. Original edition published by Modern Curriculum Press.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-14394-0

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  To Beulah, Shirley, and Freda

  1

  Three children stood outside our gate in the bright October sunlight, silent and still as figurines in a gift shop window, watching each step I took as I came slowly down the flagstone walk across the lawn. I was still weak from the same sickness that had stricken my mother, and it had been many days since I had played with any of the neighborhood children. There was a strong breeze that afternoon, and I remember how a brown oak leaf floated down and rested upon the red hair of the only boy in the group. It was funny; that shining leaf looked like a girl’s hair-bow on a boy’s head. For a few seconds I almost forgot the feeling of bewilderment and desolation within me, and I wanted to laugh at the silly look of a boy with a huge, flat hair-bow on his red head. I didn’t, though; I remembered quickly that it was not a day for laughter.

  We stared at one another in the blank manner of young children confronted by uncertainty. As late as the hot, dry days of August we had played with one another, but now they saw me touched with a sorrow unknown to them, and I was suddenly a stranger. Their solemn faces reflected the warning of their mothers: “You must be very kind to Julie—very kind—”

  The smallest of the three finally spoke. She was a child of five or so; she had a high, piping voice, and there was a look of determination about her as if she had suddenly decided to get to the bottom of a piece of mysterious gossip. “You’re not going to live here anymore, are you?” It was actually more nearly a statement than a question. “We hear that you’re going to live with your aunt in the country.”

  That is when I began to scream. I knew that there was something terribly wrong inside our house, but I hadn’t known that something was about to drive me from my home. There had been many people in the house for the past two days; my aunt Cordelia was there, our own family doctor and another strange one, many neighbors, all of them with grave, white faces. “Adam hasn’t said a word,” I heard someone whisper. “He only sits and stares.” That was Father they were talking about. There had been another whisper. “The doctor says that Julie is near hysteria; you must watch over your little sister carefully, Laura.”

  There was a stillness all through the house in spite of the activity. I had sat for a long time in Mother’s little sewing room that afternoon, and had watched the wind whip great wrinkles in the white sheets that hung on the line. The wrinkles had come to look strange to me as I watched them; they grinned at me, malicious, hateful grins.

  The child who had spoken to me was frightened. I hated her because I feared that what she said might be true, and so I screamed and would have struck her if I had been able to get beyond the gate. She grasped the hands of the two on either side of her and they scuttled away, frightened and outraged.

  Then my brother, Christopher, who had followed me out to the gate, called loudly for Laura, who was quickly beside me, speaking to me, lifting me in her arms. Laura was seventeen, beautiful, and my idol. It was she, rather than our frail mother or our father, a preoccupied and overworked professor, who was able to control a stubborn, somewhat overindulged little sister; many of my tantrums had been short-lived because of Laura. I would risk losing favor with almost anyone, but not with my sister.

  She carried me up to her room overlooking the flower garden. The windows were open and the dry, bitter scents of autumn were in the air that stirred a curtain near the bed where Laura laid me. I vaguely wished that I could control the screaming, which distressed Laura, but I was completely helpless.

  The doctor came in after a while, I remember, and forced me to swallow a small pill with a little water. After that I went to sleep and while I slept, the prediction of the little five-year-old-at-the-gate came true, for when I awoke the next morning, I was, indeed, at my aunt’s house in the country, five miles out of the small college town where I had lived my first years. All the forebodings seemed to be coming true, and the bottom was surely falling out of my world.

  Aunt Cordelia was not at home that morning, but a gentle, plump woman in blue gingham with a white apron tied at her waist was sitting beside the bed when I opened my eyes. I knew her slightly; she was Mrs. Peters, and I knew that she and her husband had for many years managed the farm that Aunt Cordelia and Uncle Haskell owned jointly. She was a kind woman, but in my anxiety, her manne
risms irritated me; she smiled too continuously, and she avoided the pronoun “I” as if it were taboo.

  “Now Mrs. Peters has a good breakfast ready for our little girl. Let’s get dressed nicely and when our Julie has had a bite to eat she can go outside and play with the children Mrs. Peters has asked up here for the day. That will be lots of fun, now won’t it?”

  “I don’t want to play,” I said stonily, “and I don’t want to eat breakfast.”

  Mrs. Peters did not comment upon that, but she clucked a great deal and made vague little remarks as she helped me to dress. “Now, our little socks and shoes,” she said, “and now our pretty petticoat.”

  The drug in the doctor’s pill had left me limp and somewhat out of touch with reality. I felt unreasonably critical of Mrs. Peters, but too tired for any further protests. We walked together down the curving staircase to the living room, through the dining room and out to Aunt Cordelia’s kitchen where, again, there were children facing me with wide solemn eyes, children who knew something I didn’t quite know, or wouldn’t quite admit.

  The boy was Danny Trevort, and the girl was Carlotta Berry. I liked Danny better, even that morning, although I had little reason for it beyond the fact that he talked less than the little girl.

  “You’re coming to our school, aren’t you?” she asked after a breathless little speech of welcome which I now realize was learned by rote. “My mama says you’ll be in my class because you’re seven same as me—”

  Then the woman was back, clucking softly again. “Now, now,” she said, “let’s think about a game we can play after we have our breakfast. Couldn’t we play hide-and-seek, Danny? Wouldn’t that be a fine game?”

  The boy nodded gravely. “Sure, if the new girl wants to play,” he said.

  “No,” I answered, and turning my back to them, I walked out of the kitchen, silently daring them to follow me. I had a feeling that the three of them watched me, uncertain of what to do next.

  Aunt Cordelia’s house was familiar, but at that time still awesome and forbidding to me. It was a large old house, set well back from the road in a grove of oak and white pine and stately elm; its twelve rooms were spacious and airy, a delight in summer and a monumental heating problem in winter. There was a wide veranda across the front of the house with tall white columns and a half dozen steps leading to a brick-paved walk, which curved in and out among the trees until it reached the big gate at the road.

  There were evidences of prosperous years and tight ones, pressed shoulder to shoulder throughout the house. There were wide marble-topped fireplaces in the library, living room, and dining room, even in some of the bedrooms upstairs, but there was no central heating and in winter the beauty of the rooms downstairs was marred by great coal-burning stoves that too often belched black smoke when a damper was inadequately adjusted. There was a grand piano in the living room, an instrument bought with much sacrifice by my grandmother, who had fancied that her eldest son, my uncle Haskell, was destined for the world of music. The great, gleaming piano deserved a Persian rug or at least a parquet floor beneath it; instead, it stood upon a rag carpet made on a country loom, as simple a bit of tapestry as might have been found in any country home in the years of Aunt Cordelia’s youth. It was my aunt’s grim, reality-facing answer to her mother’s wastefulness.

  The rooms upstairs held fear for me during my early childhood. Half of Aunt Cordelia’s life had been spent in caring for her aged mother and two spinster aunts, and one of these latter, a tiny gray wisp of a woman, I had encountered once when I had wandered upstairs on a tour of exploration. I had opened a door tentatively in order to peek inside, when a woman turned in her chair and smiled toothlessly at me.

  “Whose little girl are you?” she quavered, and I stood there for a few seconds, numb with fear and saying nothing. Then as I fled down the hall I heard a dreadful little cackle of laughter following me, and I nearly fell headlong as my feet raced down the stairs. It was a long time before the small gray presence was exorcised from the otherwise pleasant rooms of Aunt Cordelia’s second floor.

  Uncle Haskell lived in a renovated carriage house out back. There were a number of reasons why he preferred the privacy of his own establishment, one of which may have been the desire to save himself the distress of seeing his sister carry the load of responsibility that he had no intention of sharing. He liked drinking in private, too; it was easier to maintain the myth of a cultivated taste for an occasional glass of fine wine or some exotic beverage from a foreign port, since he did not relish the image of himself as a common drunkard. He once told my brother, Chris, and me that the bottles we found on the shelves of his kitchen held rare wines from the sunny vineyards of France, and we were impressed until Chris, who was able to read, pointed out that the labels bore the blunt English words, “Old Crow.” Naturally, said Uncle Haskell. The French are a very obliging people. They placed the English translation of Le Vieux Corbeau on bottles destined for America.

  He was a handsome man, this uncle who was both an alcoholic and a pathological liar. His face at fifty-five was unlined, and his skin, instead of showing the ravages of alcohol, was youthfully fresh and clear. His blue eyes, large and heavily lashed, were full of innocent good humor, a kind of bland assurance that all the world loved him and believed in him. He had a thick growth of wavy, golden hair which he wore rather longer than did the men who were our neighbors, and he kept it immaculate and shining at all times. He was slender and supple; when he walked it was as if he heard an inner music that delighted him down to his heels.

  Uncle Haskell had had reason to be furious with Chris and me once in our very early years, and at that time he had borne himself with a magnanimity that somehow impressed me. We had found in Aunt Cordelia’s basement a box containing twelve large bottles of a beautifully colored red-gold liquid bearing the English translation of Le Vieux Corbeau, although at that time we were too young to read it. The size and shape of the bottles had suggested bowling pins to me. Chris, to his credit, had said no to the game which I suggested, but after I had kicked a couple of bottles from an inverted washtub onto the concrete floor and we had waded in triumph through pools of richly fragrant liquid and had splashed one another lightly, he could not resist joining me in the demolition of another bottle. By the time we were apprehended, five of Uncle Haskell’s bottles lay broken on the basement floor.

  Mother had been appalled and chagrined. She apologized stiffly to Uncle Haskell, for she was torn between shame at the destructiveness of her children and a conviction that at least a sizable amount of her brother’s whiskey was where it belonged.

  Uncle Haskell, leaning gracefully in the doorway, turned a look of mingled pain and amusement upon the two culprits and then placed a comforting arm around Mother’s shoulders.

  “Don’t fret your pretty head for another minute, little Ethel,” he said, knowing well that Father would repay him for his loss. “No doubt we should feel a certain measure of gratitude at being able to contribute to the innocent pleasures of childhood.” He patted her gently and then added, looking me full in the eye, “Next time, let’s leash your brats, shall we?”

  All that was long ago and far away from the October morning when I first came to live with Aunt Cordelia. The memories came back in little pieces as I walked through the large, high-ceilinged rooms, hurrying through them with only one purpose: to get away from Mrs. Peters and the two children. There was a place I remembered, the closet under the stairs that led from the attic to the second floor. Chris and I had played there once, half afraid, half fascinated by the dimly lighted cavern in which the ceiling followed the line of the descending stairs, becoming so low toward the back that even a young child had not room to sit upright. I found the entrance and hesitated; the place looked grim and forbidding, but for all that, it offered security to a small bewildered animal wanting to lick its wounds in solitude. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled as far back into the musty-smelling shadows as my height would permit. There I res
ted against a pile of neatly packaged bedding, finding little comfort in loneliness, but preferring it to the company of the other children.

  Mrs. Peters discovered me before long and she stood at the door, pleading, cajoling, and finally threatening a little.

  “Now, let’s be a good girl, Julie; come out and let the sun shine on you for a while. Mrs. Peters won’t insist that you play if you don’t want to—just come out and get a breath of good fresh air. This place will give our Julie a bad headache.”

  But I wouldn’t budge, not even when she bribed me with chocolate cake. And when she finally started to crawl into the closet in order to pull me out by force, I screamed in such a way that she must have been frightened. Finally she placed some food at the entrance of the closet and left me for the rest of the morning and early afternoon.

  I lay there in the darkness for hour after hour with no clear-cut understanding of what my sorrow was; there was a sense of helplessness as to what was going to happen to me, a sense of bewilderment, and the aching memory of yesterday’s white faces, the whispers, and the little girl who said, “You’re not going to live here anymore, are you?”

  I must have slept at last and when I wakened there were voices outside my hiding place and shadows of long legs, sweeping dresses. After a while they moved away, and only two were left, two whom I recognized by their voices. They were Mrs. Peters and Aunt Cordelia.

  “I tried half the morning, Cordelia,” I heard Mrs. Peters saying earnestly, and it struck me that she did, after all, know how to use the word “I.” “I coaxed and begged and once I started in to get her, but my lands, she screamed like a child gone daft. I tell you the truth, I was afraid she might go into a spasm. I hope you don’t think I’ve done wrong.”