Up a Road Slowly

Table of Contents

 

ACROSS FIVE APRILS

THE LOTTERY ROSE

NO PROMISES IN THE WIND

UP A ROAD SLOWLY

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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.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-14394-0

 

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T
hree 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 mannerisms 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.