Julia and the Art of Practical Travel

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Where are we going? I asked, hoping for the beach at Newport. It was still very hot out and we hadn’t been anywhere that summer, and we never swam in the Hudson River. Every summer somebody went in and got caught in the currents and drowned. Not even Belfry would jump in, and he was brave enough to eat live bees when he was showing off for someone.

  Come sit next to me, said Aunt Constance, and the wicker couch made an extra-crunchy noise when I plopped down next to her. Aunt Constance looked very grave.

  We are going to find your mother, she told me.

  Oh, I said, and then the cloud-over-the-sun feeling came back. And my heart started to beat a little faster, like it does when you drink tea with too much sugar in it. After a moment, I added: But I thought no one knows where she is.

  We don’t, Aunt Constance said, but now we have to find her. There is Lancaster business to be addressed. She needs to be told about Grandmother’s passing. Half of the proceeds from the house sale will belong to her. And if we cannot find her, those proceeds will belong to you instead.

  When I asked what proceeds were, Aunt Constance shuddered and said: Money. Then she told me to follow her up to the attic, where she’d set aside three big travel trunks, a silver tea set, a big case of silver tableware, a set of china, a cuckoo clock, a wind-up phonograph player, and a bunch of other practical-travel things that she said we’d need for our trip:

  We would leave, she said, the moment that someone bought Windy Ridge.

  Once, while we were playing cards, I asked Grandmother what was so bad about my mother.

  We raised her beautifully, but she turned into a dirty hippie, said Grandmother. Then she yelled, Gin! and laid down her cards on the table: she’d won the hand with a straight of spades.

  Later that day, I asked Belfry what a dirty hippie was. He told me that hippies wore flowers in their hair and said things like “groovy” and smoked cigarettes made from green tobacco called grass. I didn’t think that sounded so terrible and wondered why Grandmother hated hippies so much. The only other things she’d hated that much: Communists (whatever they were), bad manners, and that skunk that once crawled under Windy Ridge’s back porch and died.

  My mother has been gone for a long time. Or anyway, since I was eight, which is three whole years ago. She used to live with us at Windy Ridge, where she grew up like all proper Lancasters, but she never liked teatime or playing cards or walking in the gardens with Aunt Constance and Grandmother. Instead she liked sitting alone on the house’s roof and staring at the stars all night and listening to records in her room. She let her hair get long and tangly, like a wild horse’s tail. Sometimes she slept out down by the riverbank. She stopped going into town because people talked about her in stage whispers and stared at her rudely. They talked about me in stage whispers too and said things like my mother never wanted a baby in the first place, and one woman even said once that my mother used to pretend that I wasn’t her daughter at all, just a distant Lancaster cousin who happened to get dropped off at Windy Ridge one day even though we looked just the same and everyone knew that I was hers.

  And one morning my mother was gone, and if there was a note, I was never told about it.

  After my mother went away, Grandmother was suddenly very tired all the time. Before then I had to do all of the Lancaster things that my mother had been taught about too and hated, but once Grandmother had gotten tired, she stopped watching me all the time and making me learn about gardening and elocution and how to introduce people properly to one another. My governess disappeared too—she was let go along with Winifred, our housekeeper, Aunt Constance explained one morning—but she and Grandmother somehow forgot to enroll me in a regular school instead, and by the time they realized they’d forgotten, it was so late in the year that they decided I should just wait and start school next year. And no one said anything about me and Belfry hanging around together, even though before Grandmother got tired she would have sent him packing with one glare. I was very glad to have Belfry, who would always help his dad rake our lawns in the fall and mow the grass in the summer. Belfry never whispered about my mother or the fact that she didn’t even know who my father was and that I’d never been to a real school.

  When there were just three of us left—me, Grandmother, and Aunt Constance—the house felt very echoey and empty. Every night before I went to sleep, I went into my mother’s room and sat at her vanity table and combed my hair with her shiny black Mason Pearson brush:

  We have the same color hair, my mother and I. And I wondered how long her hair was now and whether she thought about me at all, and when I got too sad, I made myself leave the room and not think about her anymore. It was hard not to think about her all the time after she first left Windy Ridge, even though most of the time she’d pretended that I wasn’t there and I wasn’t hers. But it was still hard, and there was an empty space shaped like her in the house, so I had to train myself to think about other things besides that empty space. Soon I got better at it.

  As my governess used to say: Practice makes perfect.

  The day of the house sale arrived, and people covered every inch of our house like locusts. They asked me lots of pesty questions about why we were selling Windy Ridge, and I didn’t want to talk to them so I went under the front porch, which was the only place where you could escape and not be seen. It was cool there too. Belfry came to the house and knew where to find me, of course, and the floorboards over our heads creaked and sighed as the townspeople went in and out of Windy Ridge, carrying armfuls of our Lancaster things back to their station wagons.

  Just then a silver car turned up the long, winding road that led up to our house; it glinted in the sun as it followed the driveway’s curve left and right and then left again. It was the biggest car I’d ever seen, a shining silver monster growling up the road, and when it stopped in front of the porch, a woman popped out and suddenly the air was choked up with her perfume. She marched up the stairs like a queen coming home, and Belfry and I heard her holler out:

  Constance Lancaster! It has been simply years. What—don’t you remember me? It’s Tipsy, darling! Tipsy von Lipp.

  Aunt Constance, who’d been standing in the foyer, must have given her a blank stare, for this woman then said in a lower voice this time:

  You know, Shirley Hicks. From church—remember? But now I go by Tipsy, darling!

  Oh yes, said Aunt Constance slowly. How are you after all these years, Shirley?

  Never better, said the woman, and added: Three husbands later, I’m rich as Onassis. And when I heard that Windy Ridge was for sale, I came up right away to buy it—lock, stock, and barrel. I want everything, darling—absolutely everything!

  Oh Lord, what a beast, said Belfry under his breath.

  Well, from under the porch we could hear pretty much all that happened next: Aunt Constance laughed sort of nervously and said, Please have a look around; there are lots of lovely items to choose from. Then Tipsy Hicks said that no, she meant it, she wanted to buy everything, name your price. So Aunt Constance, who hates talking about money more than anything, said she couldn’t possibly name a price for everything, and then Shirley Hicks said, Here is a blank check; you can even fill it in yourself if you like. And all of the ladies who’d been lurking around and eavesdropping in the bushes and rooms nearby gasped. Belfry and I heard one lady standing near the porch say under her breath to another lady:

  That Shirley Hicks has probably been waiting her whole life for this moment, when she could sail back into town rich after her poor childhood and then buy up the biggest place in town.

  Well, said the other lady, putting on a crown doesn’t make you a queen, you know.

  I sat there quietly under the porch as the Tipsy woman scratched out a check to Aunt Constance, and wondered why these sorts of things were so important to grown-ups.

  Maybe they teach you to be that way at places like Miss Horton’s.

  Later that night, after Tipsy Lipps bought our home, where Lancasters ha
d lived for hundreds of years, and everything in it besides our practical-travel things in the attic, Aunt Constance told me that we would leave on our trip the very next day. We would start our search for my mother, she said, in New York City. She and Grandmother had heard a rumor that my mother had gone off to find other hippies in the Village, so that’s where we’d start looking for her, said Aunt Constance.

  But I thought we were going to the city, not a village, I said.

  The Village is a neighborhood in the city, Aunt Constance told me. Artists live there—lots of them. Poets, painters—even fiddlers, probably.

  And hippies, of course, she added.

  I asked if Belfry could come too, that he seemed to know a lot about hippies and might be useful to us, but Aunt Constance said that no, this was a private family matter. I was to pull together my clothes and remaining possessions, which she would put in one of the travel trunks. So I gave her my photograph collection, which has maybe three hundred pictures in it, my silver treasure box, and my mother’s shiny black Mason Pearson brush, which I’d hidden under my pillow so it wouldn’t get sold.

  Aunt Constance was about to leave the room with these things, but she stopped in the doorway and stood there for a minute; when she turned around, her face was red. There’s one more thing, Aunt Constance said. While we are stopping in the city, we will be the guests of Tipsy von Lipp.

  I really could hardly believe my ears. Lancasters staying under the same roof as Tipsy Shirley Lipps! Grandmother had warned that she would still find ways to be disappointed with us from beyond the grave. Well, I bet that wherever she was, she was horrified now.

  Now, I know what you are thinking, said Aunt Constance. But Mrs. von Lipp very generously offered us a whole wing of her apartment, where we needn’t be disturbed—nor intrude on anyone. And we Lancasters must now learn to be financially prudent.

  But Belfry says that she’s a beast, I told her. And her perfume makes my throat close up.

  Aunt Constance tried very hard to look stern like Grandmother.

  Not everyone got to grow up the way that we did, she told me. And now that Windy Ridge is gone, you will have to get used to all sorts of people.

  It was our last day at Windy Ridge. There was no moon out that night.

  Well, I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to be able to stuff three big travel trunks, the silver tea set, the big case of silver tableware, the china set, cuckoo clock, wind-up phonograph player, and our other practical things into our old Ford station wagon with the wood panels on the sides. But Belfry came to help and so did our neighbor Mr. Hoots, and between all of us, we shoved and crammed it all in. A big trunk got tied to the top of the car and I was worried that it would slide off while we were driving. It looked like it would squash you flat if it fell on you, but Mr. Hoots said, No, it was tied down really good: we’d be lucky to get it off at all.

  When it was time to leave, I told Belfry, I’ll send you postcards and maybe some photos too. But he didn’t say anything back, and he had a funny look on his face and kept swallowing hard like something was caught in his throat, and he looked kind of skinny when we pulled away and the dust swirled up around him. I wondered if he would ever leave our town, and if he did, would he come back rich and show-offy like Tipsy Lipps? Belfry was poor too. I stared at him in the car mirror and tried hard not to look at the house as it disappeared behind us or at Aunt Constance, who was clearing her throat every two seconds and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  We had to go extra-slow on the highway; the car was so heavy that it hovered only a few inches above the ground. Every time we went over a bump, it felt like we’d gone over a boulder, and my legs got pretty dinged up because I had to ride with a jumble of silver candlesticks on the floor in front of me and they kept banging into my knees. To shield her eyes from the sun, Aunt Constance wore a straw hat with a big brim and some orange flowers stuck to it; she also had on her tea-length white gloves. It looked like she was going to a garden party, not on a road trip to find my missing hippie mother. I turned on the radio and wanted to listen to a song called “California Dreamin’,” but Aunt Constance turned it off without saying a word, and we spent the rest of the trip to New York City in silence.

  By the time we got into the city, Aunt Constance had taken off her gloves and her knuckles were white because she was gripping the wheel so hard. Everyone honked at us, and someone even threw an apple at the car, even though it wasn’t her fault that she had to go slow because the trunks were so heavy. Usually Aunt Constance drove only to the grocery store and the flower market to buy begonias for Windy Ridge’s porch, and I thought that she was going to cry. We finally found Tipsy Lipps’s apartment building, which was very tall and fancy—the sort of place where the doormen have to call you ma’am and bow to you even if they secretly don’t like you at all.

  When Tipsy Lipps greeted us at her front door, her hair was piled about three feet high on her head and she wore a gold and orange dress that sort of made my eyes hurt.

  Why, Constance, she hooted. You look like a country bumpkin in that hat. This is the big city, you know—we have to keep up appearances! I think that I have a lovely caftan you can borrow.

  She went on, more to herself than to us: To think that I have Lancasters living under my roof! I never would have dreamed it in a million years! Let me show you to your quarters, darlings.

  We followed Tipsy Lipps through about a hundred hallways that all had wallpaper that looked as gold and shiny as her dress. A small army of yapping little white dogs with drag-on-the-ground fur followed us around.

  When we finally reached the rooms where we’d be living, Tipsy Lipps went off to powder her nose before cocktail hour and Aunt Constance looked very lost standing there with her straw hat and basket purse. Once the doormen brought our trunks upstairs, Aunt Constance opened one and took out a lace tablecloth and spread it down on a table. Then, on top of that, she put out our Windy Ridge silver tea set.

  Now I feel more like myself, she said, and let out a deep breath.

  She might have felt better, but I still felt quavery inside, like a breakfast egg that hasn’t been cooked enough. Only this time there was no Windy Ridge front porch to hide under, and no Belfry to hide there with me.

  When I woke up the next morning, Aunt Constance had on a long flowery dress and her white gloves and pearls around her neck. I asked if we were going to church, and she said that no, we were going downtown to start looking for my mother. She’d laid out a dress and white knee socks for me to wear, even though it was hot again outside.

  It’s important to look presentable at all times, Joooooolia, she told me. People expect it of us, she added.

  Really, Constance, said Tipsy Lipps over breakfast as she fed long strips of bacon to her dogs. I can’t believe that you’re going down to the Village with all of those vile creatures. Do you really think that Rosemary is down there? A Lancaster amidst that riffraff? Artists and hippies. It makes me shudder, darling.

  Not all artists are vile creatures, said Aunt Constance. In fact, our family has known some painters with perfectly lovely manners over the years. I’m sure they’ll all be very gentlemanly and helpful to us.

  They all seem like a bunch of hooligans to me, said Tipsy Lipps, who eyed me and added, Why are you bringing Julia?

  I don’t think there’s any harm in her meeting artists, Aunt Constance said. And peaceable hippies. The Lancasters have been patrons of the arts for generations; it’s in her blood. And besides, I think that Rosemary should see her child. It might help bring her to—

  And then she saw me staring at her and stopped midsentence. Everyone was quiet for the rest of the breakfast; the only sound was Tipsy Lipps slurping down her coffee as she made a great show of holding out her pinky from her cup. Her chokey perfume still stuck to us as we rode the elevator downstairs and the doorman hailed us a taxi. When Aunt Constance told the taxi driver to drop us off in the middle of Greenwich Village, please, he turned around,
looked at her, then looked at me, and asked if she had the right neighborhood. She told him in a sunny voice that yes, she was sure. He shrugged and the taxi lurched forward.

  As the car sped downtown, Aunt Constance opened up her basket purse and pulled out a photograph of my mother wearing her pink pearls and holding a white lily to her chest. I’d seen it before. It was a very old picture, maybe even from before when I was born, and definitely before she let her hair get long and tangled. Aunt Constance sighed and tucked the picture back into the purse. I had my camera dangling from my neck as usual.

  The driver dropped us off at a place called Washington Square Park. It was filled with people and some of them were carrying signs that said things like:

  Put that camera down this instant, Julia, Aunt Constance told me. Don’t encourage these people.

  What’s Vietnam? I asked her.

  It’s a little country on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, she told me distractedly.

  Why is there a war going on there? I wanted to know.

  To fight Communists, she replied.

  I didn’t really know anything about Communists, other than the fact that Grandmother hated them.

  What are Communists? I asked. And why are they so bad that we’re fighting them in a little country across the Pacific Ocean?

  Communists believe that everyone should be equal and that workers should have rights, said Aunt Constance.

  Isn’t that what Americans believe too? I pressed.

  That’s quite enough on this topic, Joooooolia, said Aunt Constance, smoothing down the front of her dress. We have other business to attend to.

  She peered around the park.

  Do not stray from my side, she added, drawing in a deep breath.