by Irene Hunt
I had visited Father frequently during my years with Aunt Cordelia, and the visits were nearly always a delight, a foretaste of the life we’d lead when I was in high school and also Father’s “hostess” as Laura had been. We often went out to eat, because Father liked to take advantage of any excuse to get away from the food served by his housekeeper, Mrs. Coffers, who was certainly a wretched cook, but so old and so unskilled that she couldn’t find another job. She thus escaped being dismissed, because Father was unable to hurt anyone unfortunate and helpless.
“I really must take my little girl out for a celebration, Mrs. Coffers,” he would say, and the old woman would give us a gimlet-eyed look that made me suspect she knew the real reason behind our visit to an expensive restaurant. She didn’t believe in squandering money on “high living,” she grunted, and wondered since when professors in small state colleges earned salaries that allowed them to go out and buy lobster when fried steak and canned peas in white sauce made a meal good enough for anyone.
But Father and I dined out often all the same, and I felt very proud to follow the head waiter along a thickly carpeted dining room with my well-dressed and distinguished-looking father close behind me. When we were seated, I studied the menu with what I hoped was a slightly bored air, although I nearly always grew excited over the strange, delicious dishes and it was difficult to hide my enthusiasm. Then as Father gave our orders, I daintily drew off my gloves, one finger at a time and wondered if people around us thought that I was sixteen—possibly older—and was dining with some elderly admirer. Father was always amused, and I greatly enjoyed my acting until one night a sudden realization of what I was doing struck me.
“Father, am I like Uncle Haskell?” I asked him in consternation.
He patted my hand reassuringly. “Acting is rather good fun, Julie, if it isn’t carried too far; Uncle Haskell went overboard with his acting a very long time ago, but I don’t think you need to worry. Your reasons for it are quite different from his.” Then he frowned at me slightly. “Still, I’m glad that you’ve recognized a pattern; think about it if you ever feel yourself getting carried away.”
Often he read to me when we sat before the fire in his study, and we discussed the books that I had read, and I tingled with delight at his pleasure in my understanding. Once he took me to a faculty reception where he danced with me and some of his male graduate students made quite a fuss over me. Aunt Cordelia had a bit of a time getting my head out of the clouds after that experience.
I always slept in Laura’s old room. It was the prettiest room upstairs, where I had often gone late at night when I was little, pretending that I’d had a bad dream so that Laura would take me into her bed and kiss me and comfort me. Now, when I visited Father I would sleep in Laura’s room and I would pretend that my hair, scattered across the pillow, was thick, rippling gold like my sister’s. I’d pretend that Mother was still alive and that I, being much the oldest daughter, was Mother’s confidante; that I had a younger brother and sister, whom I loved very much.
Quite often on these visits Alicia Allison was invited to be with us. She was as pretty as when I first knew her, and always beautifully dressed; there was a gaiety about Alicia that made her seem almost as young as Laura. It was obvious that Father liked her, and I noticed that she now called him “Adam”; when she had talked to him at Laura’s wedding, she had called him “Dr. Trelling.”
I was long past the pettishness I had shown when Laura suggested that it was about time Father married Alicia and got me away from Uncle Haskell’s influence. I liked her; furthermore, I thought that it might be advantageous for me to claim the highly popular Miss Allison for my stepmother when I entered high school. I certainly was not jealous of her; actually I rather looked forward to the day when the three of us would live together.
We went ice-skating during the winter, Alicia, Father, and I, or we took long tramps through the snowy woods and then came back to her small cottage where we drank spiced cider and munched the pleasant little pastries she had prepared for us. On a few occasions I spent the night with her, and we talked of frivolous things like face creams and the weight one should be for her height, and once she let me do her hair a new way and seemed really pleased with the effect. They were the kind of evenings one would never spend with Aunt Cordelia.
Then, finally, the spring before I was to enter high school, Alicia and Father were married. It was a quiet wedding, but a very lovely one. Laura and Bill were there with little Julie; Danny escorted Aunt Cordelia, and besides these, Dr. and Mrs. Eltwing, Mr. and Mrs. Trevort, and a few faculty couples made up the guest list. Chris was Father’s best man, and I was Alicia’s one attendant. It was very nice of Alicia to ask me; the honor might well have gone to Laura, because Alicia and my sister had been close friends since Laura’s high school days. But she chose me, and Laura seemed pleased; I had the feeling that the two of them had talked it over. Anyway I was happy in my important role, and much impressed with the ankle-length dress which Alicia had bought for me.
We had fun that summer. I was to move in with them at the beginning of school when the redecorating of our old house was completed; until then I often visited them for the weekend, and it was a delight. Mostly. It wasn’t quite as much fun to go to a restaurant with Alicia and Father as it had been to go with him alone. There was no longer any doubt but that I was just some outsized kid tagging along and that she was Father’s dinner companion. She and Father could have wine together and touch their glasses over some private little toast; they offered to buy me a carbonated drink so that I could join them, but I refused. It seemed rather artificial; too much like Uncle Haskell’s Le Vieux Corbeau.
Most of the time, however, everything was perfect. Like one night when we had come home late from a movie, and Father had declared that he was starved and Alicia and I were suddenly ravenous too. We had cooked hamburgers and coffee, and Alicia had whirled up a milkshake for me. Then we had talked until we were half dead with sleepiness and Alicia had said, “Oh, bother with the dishes,” and we had put them in the sink to wait until morning. That might not have been a thing of any importance to many girls, but it impressed me, because never, in all the years that I had been with Aunt Cordelia, had we fixed a snack late at night; most certainly, we had never left a dish unwashed in the sink. “What if illness should strike in the night?” Aunt Cordelia had said to me once when I wanted to leave the very few dishes we had used at supper until the next morning. “What if strangers came into our home and saw evidences of such slothful habits?”
I told Aunt Cordelia of the fun we had had with our midnight meal and our unconcern with evidence of slothful habits.
“You mean, Julia, that you enjoy coming down to a disheveled kitchen when you get up of a morning?” she asked.
“It isn’t that, Aunt Cordelia, it isn’t the cooking at midnight or leaving the dishes. It’s just—” I tried to find the right words. “It’s just the flexibility of a way of living.”
Aunt Cordelia raised her brows. I had used the word inflexible a time or two when we had had an altercation. She understood me perfectly—but we still washed the dishes every night!
But little things happened at the house in town that summer, things of no special importance, but the sum of them began to bother me. One thing was the mirror. It really was of little moment, but it made me realize that there were adjustments which I would have to make now that there was a new mistress in our home.
The mirror had hung in the living room for as long as I could remember, a beautifully cut glass just above the back of the davenport; Chris and I used to stand there when we were little and play with our reflections in the faintly blue depths that made us look a little strange, a little like children in some softly illustrated fairy tale. Alicia decided to move the mirror; she thought it would look better over the buffet in the dining room.
“But Mother always—” I began in a rather severe tone, and then stopped myself.
Alicia smiled at me.
“I know, Julie, I know very well how you feel. But your mother and I were very good friends. She would want me to arrange the house to my taste, I feel quite sure.”
Well, I wondered! But it was a little thing. Later I told Alicia that the mirror did, indeed, look nice in the dining room and she seemed pleased.
After we had removed the mirror, it was plain that the walls needed redecorating, and when they were done in a beautiful French gray, Alicia confided in me that she was going to be profligate and buy the outrageously expensive draperies that she had long wanted. We had a wonderful time selecting them together, and it was pleasant to find that our tastes were quite similar. We bought a heavy tapestry the color of the walls but brightened by great irregular splashes of cerise, a bold color that delighted both of us.
We were all quite pleased with the effect in the living room, but when the kitchen was done over, and the old dining table under which Chris and I used to hide and pinch Father’s ankles while he dined was discarded in favor of one very smart and modern, I felt as if this were no longer my home. I got a lonely feeling in it, although I had to admit that it was beautiful.
But it was Laura’s room that mattered most. Somehow, it had never entered my mind that this room would be other than mine. It had belonged to me in every dream that I’d had of coming home; later I thought how strange it is that your dreams can be so real as to make you sure that other people are aware of them too.
I seemed to feel faint warnings of a deeper shock to come when, on one weekend visit, I found that Alicia had had Mother’s old flower garden put to sod so that it stretched out as a continuation of the green lawn.
“Don’t you think it makes the lawn lovelier, Julie?” Alicia asked, apparently certain that I would agree with her. “The garden hasn’t really been carefully tended for so long and was actually getting very shabby. If either your father or I had green thumbs—but we don’t. Neither green thumbs, nor time for gardening, if we’re to get term papers and final examinations graded.”
“Yes, I think it’s an improvement—I do, really, Alicia.” I tried to make my voice enthusiastic, but my dream was beginning to be upset. The view of the flower garden from Laura’s window was part of the memory I wanted back.
Later, Alicia wanted to show me what she had been doing to the rooms upstairs. That’s when I saw Laura’s room.
The white curtains were gone, and draperies of coarsely woven cloth in blue and copper were at the windows. The shell-pink walls had become beige and gold, and a thick beige carpet covered the floor which Laura had always left bare with fluffy white throw-rugs here and there. The pink and white bed was gone too, and the only furnishings in the room were a massive walnut desk with a special niche for a typewriter, a few straight chairs, and several bookshelves against the walls.
“My home office,” Alicia said with a pleased sigh. “Your father has the library—I insisted that he keep it to himself; up here I’ll wield my red pencil over high school themes and when I finally explode, at least I’ll do it in privacy. I’d hate for you or your father to see me when I begin pulling my hair—”
I couldn’t keep from wailing, “Oh, Alicia, what have you done?”
She was amazed. “But, Julie, your father told me that this was Laura’s room—not yours. I’m having your own little room all done over with a matching desk and bookcase and draperies that I think are the loveliest. I thought I’d be making you so happy—I didn’t dream—”
Well, there were reassurances and apologies and more reassurances until finally I convinced Alicia that I was, of course, delighted with my old room and that she should never think of my outburst again. Everything was settled, but that night we were a little quieter than usual at our meal, and Alicia and Father glanced at one another as if they were thinking that it certainly was too much of a chore for Aunt Cordelia to look after a girl of my age; that they saw it as being something of a problem even for themselves.
During the next few weeks everything went smoothly; then one morning I came downstairs in my house slippers and walked into the breakfast nook without their hearing me. It really wasn’t anything—just a recently married husband and wife giving one another an exceptionally warm embrace and good-morning kiss. Nothing wrong with that, but it was their surprise, their sudden standing apart with a half-embarrassed, half-irritated look that struck me full force. I said, “Oh, excuse me,” and they said, “Not at all, dear,” and we all laughed a little, and they poked a bit of fun at themselves for romancing before breakfast.
But the experience left a strange feeling inside me; it wasn’t the jealousy I had felt at Laura’s, for I certainly wasn’t trying to stand in the Number One place with either Alicia or Father. It was, rather, the feeling that I didn’t belong anywhere—not in a house that was no longer my old home but a beautiful, strange place where I might at any moment invade the privacy of two people very much in love; not at Aunt Cordelia’s if it was true that I had become a burden to her.
I went out from town on the rickety old bus that passed within a mile of home that afternoon. It seemed strange that I should think of Aunt Cordelia’s place as “home”; always before it was the house in town that had been closest in my affection. But as I walked the dusty mile from the bus-stop to the old house in the woods I thought about my room at Aunt Cordelia’s with more warmth than I ever had before. It was twice as large as my old one in town, and while the furnishings were old, they were mellow and held more significance for me than did the desk and bookcase that Alicia had selected for me. Aunt Cordelia and I had worked together refinishing my bureau, a walnut one that had been old even when she was a child; I knew how much sanding and rubbing and polishing had been necessary to bring out the beauty of the fine wood. It suddenly seemed to me that I couldn’t bear to give up my beautiful old furniture for the glossy new things that should have been giving me so much happiness.
I wondered, too, how it would seem waking up of a morning and being unable to look out at the woods, my beloved woods that were hardly the same two days in succession. There would be a veil of fog one morning, and bright sunlight or gray rain the next; there would be snowy branches, or little, tender, new leaves, or colorful autumn ones—always a new picture to put away in my memory. I wanted my woods as I wanted my big room and my old bureau. I wanted, too, the freedom of the old house where I could run through the many rambling, high-ceilinged rooms singing if I cared to sing, exploring some ancient trunk or nook or closet that I had missed, never wondering if I were going to startle two persons burdened with someone like me in too small a house. For the first time, I was conscious of Aunt Cordelia’s home as a haven, and I wanted desperately to know that I was welcome there.
Uncle Haskell called to me as I walked up the long driveway. “Well, Julie, my sweet, are you happy at the prospect of shaking the dust of this estate from your little feet?”
I linked my arm in his, and we walked on up the path without my answering. Uncle Haskell seldom noticed whether one replied to his remarks or not; he was interested only in his own voice.
“And how are the impeccable Adam and his beautiful bride?” he asked maliciously.
“Quite well. Not wholly impeccable, but they’re both very nice people,” I answered.
He bent down suddenly and looked into my face. “Come to think of it, you look a bit drawn, my pet. What is it? Were you pushed a little backstage away from the footlights?”
I thought, “That is your idea of pain, isn’t it, dear Uncle?” But I said, “There’s not a thing wrong except for that old bus and the ghastly heat.” And then I changed the subject. “How is the magnum opus coming along?”
“Beautifully,” he answered, smiling blandly and without the slightest embarrassment or anger. “Magnificently, really. I’m very pleased—so much so that I think I’ll go out for a spot of twilight golf this evening. One must relax a bit, you know.”
“Of course,” I agreed, going along with the time-honored hokum. “Have a good game.” We smiled at
one another and parted at the end of the lane. Uncle Haskell and I had a tepid sort of liking for one another.
The drawn look that he had noticed in my face must very well have been evident, for as Aunt Cordelia and I sat in the living room that evening, she looked at me in her direct way and plunged into my anxiety bluntly.
“Tell me all about it, Julia,” she said without prelude.
I had not told her about the little things that had bothered me, the mirror and especially Laura’s room. They seemed to show up a childishness in me that I didn’t like. But the breakfast-nook incident was different; it pointed up their discomfiture as well as mine. I tried to show in my telling of it that I held no rancor, only a sense of insecurity, of loneliness.
Aunt Cordelia nodded when I was through. “I think I understand how you feel, though I believe that you have misinterpreted Adam and Alicia. It’s unfortunate that in our culture, where the accent is so much upon youth, that people of middle age feel awkward and absurd if they demonstrate their love. They feel that they’re playing a role that belongs to nobody over thirty. I’d guess that is how your parents felt this morning—a kind of embarrassment rather than annoyance.”
I thought for a while. “I’m egotistical, isn’t that it, Aunt Cordelia? And egotistical people are supersensitive, aren’t they?”
Aunt Cordelia smiled. “In a few years you’ll love someone, Julia, and it will make a great difference in you. You’ll see. A woman is never completely developed until she has loved a man; when that happens in the right way she is happy in other people’s love as well as her own; she is more generous and understanding about the feelings of others. You might say that she knows completeness.”
Then I asked a question that I shouldn’t have, one that might well have brought me a rebuff, although it didn’t.
