Up a Road Slowly (10 page)

I put the photograph on the arm of my chair and then I knelt and buried my head in her lap. I seldom touched Aunt Cordelia; she never invited demonstrative behavior, but that night as I shook with sobs, she patted my shoulder and smoothed my hair back from my forehead.

“I'm a beast, Aunt Cordelia, an ungrateful, bad-mannered beast. I'm cruel and hateful—”

She gave my shoulder a little shake. “Now, now, that's enough. Let's have no more of this.” She lifted my face with her hand under my chin and looked at me with a little smile. “You're neither cruel nor mean; basically, you are a very good child. You're just young,” she added, and it was as if she said the last words to herself.

 

 

 

M
y last year in elementary school was Aunt Cordelia's last year of teaching. The decision to leave her position was not her own; rural schools were being consolidated that year, and children who would have learned under Aunt Cordelia were taken by bus into the town schools. The white schoolhouse where she had taught for forty years was sold at auction and used for the storage of grain.

Aunt Cordelia was very quiet as talk of these changes went through the community. She didn't approve of many things she heard of the teachers in the town schools. They were a permissive lot, and Aunt Cordelia believed that children were happier if the boundaries of their behavior were established early and they knew exactly where they stood with reference to authority; neither did she approve of something called “social studies,” which she felt was a hodgepodge of watered down ideas being substituted for honest and scholarly courses in history and geography.

When she was invited to take a class in town, she refused promptly. “I have taught in my own way, following the dictates of my own judgment for too many years,” she said. “The philosophy and the restrictions of city schools would be too much for me.” So saying she gave up her profession, and no one was ever quite sure just how she felt about it.

She brought home the brass handbell from her desk, the framed pictures of many groups of children with which she had decorated the drab walls of the classroom, and a great stack of old class rosters dating back to the year when Eltwing, Jonathan, was one of the names inscribed. I spent hours going through those lists of names with her.

“Trevort, Charles,” I read. Danny's father. A fine boy, Aunt Cordelia said. One of the younger ones. It had only been a very few years in her reckoning since Trevort, Charles, had helped her with the heavy coal buckets and the Monday morning fires as Danny had done in my time.

Aunt Cordelia read the names with me and commented upon the personalities. “That girl had a way with words when she was no more than six; she's published three volumes of poetry so far. I'm not surprised; I recognized her gift.” Or, “Now that one was bound for trouble from the first. She was boy crazy before she was quite aware that there
were
two sexes.”

She remembered them all; she had indicated the universities to which some of them had gone, the careers many of them had followed, the persons they had married. The word “deceased” was written after many names. “Kilpin, Agnes—deceased,” I read on a late roster.

As autumn approached that year everyone supposed that Aunt Cordelia would be very sad. It was the first September since she was six years old that she had not entered a classroom either as a student or a teacher. “She will be lost,” the family feared. “She will be heartsick and lonely.”

But Aunt Cordelia didn't seem heartsick. “When the first day of school comes this September,” she told me, “I intend to stand quietly in the sunlight and lay my hands on the bark of one of the tallest trees. I'll say to myself, ‘Well, good! Now
that
part of my life is finished. ' And after that I may gather an armful of autumn flowers, and I'll move slowly while I do it and breathe deeply of good, clean air that is free of chalk dust. Maybe I'll make peach preserves in the afternoon or reread a few chapters of
Pride and Prejudice
; I may take a long walk in the woods or call on Helen Trevort or Cora Peters. I may fix a nice dinner for Jonathan and Katy Eltwing. Whatever I do, it will be as I please, and I intend to savor every minute of it.”

Aunt Cordelia didn't talk like that ordinarily. She seemed to be anticipating her freedom in September, and yet I couldn't quite believe it. It struck me uncomfortably that if it
were
true, she might be also anticipating the fact that she was getting rid of me as well as the labor and problems and smells of a country classroom. She hadn't once mentioned my leaving her—no little moan for Julie.

I had overheard remarks that summer. “Being responsible for an adolescent is too much; Cordelia has done her share.” And again, “Julie is a dear child, but—well, you know—temperamental, a bit headstrong, impetuous. And there will be the boy problem before long and all the turmoil of growing up. It's too much to ask of Cordelia now that she is getting old.”

And so, in spite of all the plans I had for the years in high school, I felt a wave of wistfulness. Aunt Cordelia was waiting to be free of me, perhaps was good and tired of me. It hurt. I couldn't help it; it bothered me.

Of course I was eager to go home. In my desk drawers were little calendars that I had made from time to time, with notations of the number of years, months, and days until I would be old enough to be free of Aunt Cordelia's lectures, her stern routine of duties, her authoritarian attitude. I had long looked forward to the day when I would no longer be a “country girl,” when I would be living with a parent rather than an elderly aunt not too much admired by many of my peers, when I would have Laura's old room where I could look out over the flower garden that seemed to evoke Mother's presence.

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.