by Irene Hunt
“What do you mean—‘impeccable’?” I demanded, getting ready to defend Father.
“Without defect. Faultless. Don’t worry; Adam is so charmed by middle-class values that he will accept ‘impeccable’ as a proper tribute. At least, I think so. And if he doesn’t—” Uncle Haskell spread his beautiful, well-kept hands before him and took time to admire for a second the shining ovals of his nails. “It’s strange,” he added after a little, “that both of my sisters should have fallen in love with high-minded, irreproachable gentlemen, so different from their brother—and so immeasurably more pedestrian.”
“Did Aunt Cordelia actually fall in love at one time?” I asked incredulously.
“My dear child, do you mean that a generation is growing up without having heard of Jonathan Eltwing? Certainly, your aunt Cordelia fell in love—I am not sure that she has ever pulled herself out of it.”
Jonathan Eltwing held no interest for me, nor did Aunt Cordelia’s love life; however, new words held a fascination for me, and I was drawn to the word “impeccable.” It had a good sound; moreover it meant without defect. Well, good. I did a quick bit of generalization based upon what I had heard of Uncle Haskell’s heavy drinking and the ultimate ravages it was bound to bring to his system.
“Is your liver impeccable?” I asked pointedly.
Another man with his weakness might have been angered, but not Uncle Haskell. His laughter rang through the woods.
“My liver is in an enviable state of health and well-being, dear niece,” he chortled. “Much to the consternation of all the prophets, my general health, including the condition of my liver is—yes, impeccable.”
I felt that I had, perhaps, been a little rude. “I’m glad,” I told him politely. “I hoped that your liver was impeccable.”
“I’ll just bet you did.” He looked at me goodhumoredly. “You evidently weren’t as solicitous about young Trevort’s health an hour ago as you are about mine. Are you quite sure that you didn’t knock some teeth out?”
“I don’t think so. Just his eye. Not out, but I made it black.”
Uncle Haskell shook his head. “What Mama would have done to any brat who might have messed me up like that.” He smiled to himself. “Dear Mama,” he said, “dear, dear Mama.”
I got the impression that he wasn’t nearly as fond of Grandmother as the many “dears” might have indicated.
“If I ever have a boy, I’m going to see that he gets the blame for the things he does just as much as the girls do,” I said.
“You’re never going to get the chance to have a boy if you don’t do something about that truculent little chin of yours.” He got to his feet, hoisted the golf bag to his shoulder, and stooped to tweak my nose. “Accept the fact that this is a man’s world and learn how to play the game gracefully, my sweet.”
I watched him as he strode off with his characteristically buoyant step into the shadows. It occurred to me that there was no golf course within five miles, and that if there were, it would be too dark at that hour for a game; moreover, I suddenly realized that there were no clubs in the brown bag over Uncle Haskell’s shoulder.
When I went back to the house at twilight, Aunt Cordelia looked at me thoughtfully, and her voice was kinder than it had been when she passed judgment on me earlier.
“The boys certainly have their share of blame for this unfortunate episode, Julia,” she said. “I feel that I erred when I placed all the blame on you this afternoon.”
My heart warmed to her in a sudden rush of love. I wondered if she had remembered how her mother always favored Uncle Haskell; I had a feeling that she would not have wanted to be like her mother if she could help it. Whatever it was, she had made me happy.
“That’s all right, Aunt Cordelia,” I said, smiling at her. “I forgive you.”
3
Christopher and I discovered the secret of Uncle Haskell’s nocturnal golfing before the summer was over. About once a month we would see him step buoyantly into the shadowy woods some fine evening, often with a beret set jauntily upon his head, a golf bag without visible clubs slung over his shoulder.
One night we trailed him with what we thought was perfect stealth, keeping clumps of trees and underbrush between us and him, moving slowly step by step until the three of us were at the banks of a creek that flowed between the woods and one of the wide fields that Mr. Peters cultivated for our aunt and uncle.
Down at the creek, Uncle Haskell crossed the bridge to the south bank, where the growth of underbrush was heavier, and removed a spade from his golf bag. My heart flopped in sudden terror. A grave, I thought; Uncle Haskell was a monster who dug graves in the moist soil under the bushes, and buried Heaven knew what in the grim depths. Chris took my hand, and I could see the same horror in his face that must have been in mine.
I don’t know whether it was our gasps that betrayed us or whether Uncle Haskell had been playing a cat-and-mouse game all along; at any rate when he removed the spade, he stuck it in the ground, leaned upon it a moment, and then chuckled as at some private joke.
“Scat, you little devils,” he said pleasantly enough, and we did not wait for further words. We ran breathlessly back through the woods and spent the rest of the evening speculating.
When Uncle Haskell drove into town the next day, presumably for a replenishment of Le Vieux Corbeau, we took advantage of his absence to do some further sleuthing.
We got Danny to join us that afternoon, and the three of us raced down to the creek to find what Uncle Haskell had been up to. It didn’t take long. The “graves” were quite shallow—Uncle Haskell would not be one to expend a great deal of energy in digging—and we were not long in unearthing what he had buried: empty bottles of Le Vieux Corbeau.
It didn’t seem sad to us that day. The boys lay on the ground kicking their heels and shrieking, and I joined them, kicking almost as high and shrieking quite as lustily.
During the months of vacation Aunt Cordelia, somewhat against her principles, allowed me to wear my brother’s outgrown blue jeans in order to save wear and tear upon my school dresses. I loved that. There was a freedom in blue jeans that delighted me and brought me into closer relationship with Chris and Danny. Now I could straddle a horse with the same ease that the boys did when we rode over the country roads together. The three of us climbed trees and ran races and helped Mr. Peters cut weeds out of the corn. Mr. Peters called us his “three boys,” and I couldn’t understand how any girl would want a frilly dress when the joy of blue jeans was available. And so that afternoon when we discovered Uncle Haskell’s secret, I was able to kick and roll in the grass with the same abandon enjoyed by Chris and Danny.
But Chris didn’t approve of my behavior. He had always felt a certain responsibility toward me, and on that afternoon he suddenly stopped laughing and looked at me sternly.
“You oughtn’t to roll on the grass and kick like a boy, Julie; Laura wouldn’t like for you to act like that.”
“Oh, slurp, slurp,” I answered airily, but I sat up all the same, partly because of the reference to Laura, partly because I had a feeling that Danny agreed with my brother.
But I had Chris to look after me for only a few weeks longer that summer. We had told Father about Uncle Haskell’s cemetery of empty bottles, and I think that our obvious delight in our find set Father to thinking about the advisability of sending Chris away to boarding school. Aunt Cordelia reluctantly seconded the proposal, agreeing with Father that Uncle Haskell was hardly the proper father-figure for a growing boy. And so Chris had to leave for boarding school that fall and both of us were desolate for many weeks. I begged Father to take me home with him after Chris left, but Aunt Cordelia intervened. I was too young, she told Father, too undisciplined to be on my own in town where both Father and Laura were away from home most of the day. I overheard her use the words strong-willed and adventurous in talking about me. She persuaded Father that I should remain with her until I was ready for high school.
Once again, both Chris and
I were manipulated like small puppets in our world of adults. We didn’t like it, and we suffered, but the tall ones around us said that we would soon get over our sadness, that we would “adapt” in a matter of weeks.
Poor Chris had only strangers around him, which made his life hard that autumn; I still had Danny and the big horse, Peter the Great, that I claimed as my own. I still had the woods with my cathedral hidden in them and I had Aunt Cordelia, who in her reserved way was especially kind to me during the days of my sharpest loneliness. And strangely enough, I found that I had a source of comfort in Uncle Haskell. He came up to the house to eat with us a bit more often that fall, and Aunt Cordelia, true to her mother’s upbringing, made these meals very special ones with the best silver and Grandmother’s china laid out upon the table. Uncle Haskell was always a gracious guest, gay and serene in his belief that he was doing us an honor in dining with us, but an honor which he was bestowing cheerfully.
There were times when it was good to escape from the quiet austerity of Aunt Cordelia to the gay, never-never land of Uncle Haskell. I was always welcomed to his neat, well-kept living room with its many wall shelves filled about equally with books and bottles. In spite of the fact that I knew the truth wasn’t in him, I gave myself up to the delight of listening to accounts of the mythical years when he had roamed the capitals of Europe, loved and courted by the intelligentsia for his wit, for the books he had written (unfortunately all out of print by my day), for his never-failing charm and erudition. He had been quite a man, had Uncle Haskell, and he was about to emerge into a second blooming when his new book appeared, his magnum opus which was carefully kept out of sight in his rooms. It seemed strange, I thought, that I never happened to call on Uncle Haskell when there was a sheet of paper in his typewriter, but I wouldn’t have considered it polite to mention the matter. I heard about long-distance telephone calls from his publishers, patient gentlemen it seemed, who urged him to take his time; a magnum opus, they agreed, does not spring into being overnight.
For all my quite justifiable suspicions of his integrity, I liked Uncle Haskell, and he recognized that fact.
“It is no credit either to your discrimination or to your character, my dear child,” he told me lightly. “Adam and your sister will have you carted off to a nunnery if you’re not very careful to disown me.”
It was true that neither Father nor Laura cared for Uncle Haskell. They came out quite often to see me or to take me into town for a holiday in my old home, but on such occasions they did not go back to Uncle Haskell’s quarters at all, or if they chanced to meet him, they were pointedly cool. Father was fond of Aunt Cordelia and felt that she had suffered unduly at the hands of an egotistical parasite; Laura mirrored Father’s feelings as she had all the years of her life.
How I loved Laura! It was a time of perfect happiness when she came out for the weekend, when we rode together or hiked or swam or skated; most particularly was it perfect for me when we slept together in my room upstairs that had been Mother’s when she was a child.
It was Laura who helped me to rid myself of the memory of the gray old woman and the cackling laugh that had frightened me in one of those rooms upstairs; it was also Laura who pointed out the beauty of the changing scene outside my bedroom window, the green and gold and crimson of the woods from spring through autumn, the soft white stillness of winter with the trunks of half a hundred trees standing in penciled darkness against a pale sky.
I would lie close to her, and she would tell me stories or repeat poetry until I went to sleep with the heavenly security of being with someone who was almost Mother.
“You really love me, don’t you, Laura?” I asked her.
“I do, indeed, Julie. Very much.”
“And we’ll always be like this together. You’ll never change, will you?”
“Never, Julie,” she promised, a little rashly, for she was still quite young.
She did change though. Not much. She still loved me after she was wearing Bill Strohmer’s ring, but her eyes were full of dreams, and sometimes she would say, “Let’s not talk now, Julie; let’s just lie quietly and think for a while.”
There was a little change in Laura, but it was still not great enough to alarm me. Sometimes when her eyes were closed, I would prop myself on my elbow to look at the thick lashes against her cheek, at the waves of bright hair that fell back from her forehead. I loved beauty, and I ached with the consciousness that I would never have the blonde beauty of my sister. I was dark, more like Father, or as some people said, like my mother’s dour, dark father who had married a golden flibbertigibbet.
Laura and Bill were married the summer I was ten. Chris was home for the wedding, very straight and tall; both he and I were in the wedding party and so excited over the swarm of activities that I had no time to brood over the fact that life was again making a big change for me.
Uncle Haskell sent Laura a silver coffee server, which was charged to Aunt Cordelia’s account at one of the local stores, but he was not able to attend the wedding. He sent her a note explaining that a deadline set by one of his publishers prevented his being with his beloved niece on the day of her great happiness. Laura was not crushed.
One very special guest at the wedding was Alicia Allison, one of Laura’s high school teachers, of whom she was very fond. Miss Allison was a very attractive woman, I thought, crisp and slender in her coral linen dress, very youthful looking in spite of her thirty-eight or forty years and the few lines of glistening white in her dark hair. Father was especially attentive to Miss Allison, I noticed; he smiled at me when I very carefully served her wedding cake and hurried away to bring her fresh coffee.
I liked Miss Allison, and I thought her name was lovely. I was beginning to write stories in the privacy of my room at that time, and for the next several weeks after Laura’s wedding my heroines, most of them characters who bloomed on paper for several pages and then faded suddenly, were named “Alicia.”
I had a nice note from Laura when she was on her honeymoon and a line or two from Bill at the bottom of the sheet. They wanted me to visit them in their new home, but not for a while, not until all the new curtains were hung and all the new furniture was in place. When all that was done, the three of us would have a wonderful time together. They were both looking forward to it. Eagerly.
It was a year, however, before I got to visit them. I missed Laura sharply for a long time, and my daydreams were all centered around her, how happy she would be to see me, how we would lie in bed and talk until dawn, how she would perhaps say that I should come to live with her and Bill instead of staying with Aunt Cordelia until I was ready for high school. Bill, I had rather forgotten. He was a pleasant young man, friendly and kind, but of no particular consequence so far as I was concerned. I had something of Uncle Haskell’s way of dismissing all persons for whom I felt no personal need.
Then during the summer of my eleventh year the three-hundred-mile train ride was behind me, and Bill was there at the station ready to drive me to their home and Laura.
She was so terribly changed; she didn’t look like my Laura at all, and for a minute I was dismayed. I had known that she was going to have a baby; Father had told me that, but I was not prepared to see her swollen grotesquely, her bright hair a little dulled, all the fresh radiance changed to a kind of pallid weariness. But I was reassured when she kissed me and joined Bill in laughing at my look of disbelief.
“Don’t be shocked, darling; babies do this to their mamas, you know. Two months from now when you’re Aunt Julie, you’ll have a slender sister again—at least, I hope so,” she added with a wry smile at Bill.
“You’ll be svelte and the most elegant young mother in town,” Bill assured her. “Won’t she, Julie?” he added, smiling at me.
Then I kissed her again and followed them around as they showed me all the details of their pretty cottage, told me of the picnic they had planned for the next day, spoke of some girls they had invited over to entertain me on the days w
hen Laura would be busy with some work she was doing for Bill. He was completing his doctorate that summer, and Laura was typing his thesis as well as doing some spots of last-minute research and an occasional bit of rewriting. They were both deeply involved in his work, very close and happy, very much like two people welded into a single unit. I didn’t quite like it; I felt a nameless fear beginning to grow inside me.
My fear did not become a reality, however, until about ten that evening when Bill ruffled my hair and said, “Well, Laura, hadn’t we better let Aunt Julie get her beauty sleep now? She must be a little tired after her long train ride.” And Laura said, “Yes, darling, come along. I’ll show you the room you’re to have.”
She would show me the room I was to have, not the one we would share. There was a single bed in that room with a blue dust ruffle around it and a lacy white spread on top. It was a very pretty room and a pretty bed, but it was not a room to be shared by two sisters, not a bed where they could lie close together, where they could talk girl-talk until their eyes grew heavy and they drifted off to sleep, almost as secure as in the days when a mother had been alive.
Laura wouldn’t look at me. I tried to force her to look into my eyes. If she would do that, I knew she would see there my agony and she would say, “Yes, Julie, I’m going to stay here with you.” That Bill doesn’t much matter. But she wouldn’t look at me; she kept chattering about the paper they had picked out with me in mind, about how I could sleep as long as I pleased the next morning, and would I like for her to make blueberry muffins for our breakfast. But she wouldn’t look at me, and when she kissed me good-night, there was still the pretense that she didn’t know I was sick with disappointment.
I cried on the white pillow that night and, switching on the bedside lamp, I was impressed by the sad stain my tears had made. Then I thought how Laura would never notice and would send the slip out to some laundry and impersonal hands would wash away the marks of grief, never knowing, never caring that part of a little girl had died with those tears. Then I cried again at that thought, and I felt the great loneliness I had felt that day of Mother’s funeral. But this time my loneliness was mixed with resentment and an unreasoning jealousy.
