Up a Road Slowly (19 page)

“Yes, but I'll have time to walk down to the creek with you.” The look of suffering on his face hurt me. “Don't you want me to come along just this once?”

He made an effort to regain his old gaiety. “I do not. I reserve the right to invite guests to accompany me on my evening strolls. Tonight, you are not invited.” He kissed me lightly on the forehead. “Congratulations, my sweet; your name looked very fine in print. I have felt quite proud of you all day.” I stood watching him as he went down the winding path through the woods. He turned and waved just before he disappeared among the trees.

It was rather late when I came in that night. I had thought that if Uncle Haskell's light were still on, I might run over and see him for a few minutes. But his place was dark and so I prepared for the night, setting my alarm a few minutes early so that I would have time to see him before I went to school the next morning. The white suffering in his face had bothered me from time to time all evening.

My bed felt warm and safe that night as I listened to the rain falling steadily on the roof and splashing in little puddles below my window. It had been a beautiful day, full of love and encouragement. I smiled as I thought of Dr. Adam Trelling, behaving like any foolish father over a very simple story; I thought again of Danny's good-night kiss and his whisper of how happy he was at my success. Just before I slept I thought of Uncle Haskell.

Our telephone rang very early the next morning. There are people who say that what I am about to tell must be in error; that I have imagined it this way. But I know. I know very well that when the ringing of the telephone awakened me, I lay stiffly in my bed and thought: “Aunt Cordelia will answer that ring. Then there will be a time of silence. After that, she will come up the stairs, knock at my door, and she will say, ‘Julia, Uncle Haskell is dead.'”

And it happened almost that way. Aunt Cordelia knocked at my door after the short silence, and she said, “Julia, wake up, dear. Some men have found Uncle Haskell's body in the creek. They think he fell from the old bridge last night.”

For several days I wouldn't go near the old carriage-house apartment, but there finally came an afternoon when Aunt Cordelia and I had to face the task of going through Uncle Haskell's few possessions, discarding what we must, putting away for no particular reason the things we could not bear to discard.

I folded the old velvet smoking jacket and the white silk shirt which he had worn the afternoon that he became the “good golden-haired man” for little Katy Eltwing. We packed his books and with them two unopened packages containing bottles such as the one that had once reminded me of bowling pins. We found a few papers with the opening paragraphs of a story or an article neatly typed, but never completed. The
College Quarterly
was lying on his desk, opened at the page where my story began. In the margin I read, “Sharp imagery; good plot; some tendency toward overwriting. B+.”

We worked in silence for a long time, but at last I sat down at the desk and turned toward my aunt. “What happened, Aunt Cordelia? What distorted him?”

She pressed both hands against her temples for a minute; then she sat down at the desk and looked at me without seeming to see me.

“I'm not sure, Julia; no one can ever be sure of the forces that have shaped a character. I think, though, that our parents—” She paused, frowning, and then went on. “I'm not one of the school that holds parents responsible for all the weaknesses of their children, but I must say this: we had an odd pair of parents. I loved one of them, but not the other; Haskell loved neither of them.”

“I thought that Grandmother Bishop adored him.”

“She did. She smothered him with adoration and turned his father against him. Haskell resented her bitterly.”

“You loved your father?”

“Yes. Father always seemed old to me. He was nearly twenty years older than Mama, a stern, undemonstrative man, but kind. Kind, that is, to most people, not to Haskell, nor to Mama in his later years. I think he felt that she had robbed him of his first child, his only boy. When he saw Haskell overindulged and spoiled by Mama, he rejected him completely. He loved your mother and me; he had no use whatever for his son. With Mama, it was the reverse.

“There are plenty of children who could have risen above such a situation. Not Haskell. Whether there was some basic weakness of character or whether he was, as you say, distorted, we can't know. In my heart I hold my parents responsible.”

We sat there thinking. I ran my hand across the smooth velvet of Uncle Haskell's jacket; I remembered his hair. There was, indeed, something of velvet and gold about him, something that Katy Eltwing's troubled mind had glimpsed. It was shoddy velvet and tarnished gold, and there lay the tragedy, for the shoddiness and the tarnish might have been prevented.

We set things to rights and packed and stored all that had value; the rest, we burned. Before we left, we drew the shades; then Aunt Cordelia locked the door and for a long time we tried to avoid looking at the place.

 

 

 

“
I
think, Julia,” Aunt Cordelia said one morning as we stood at the kitchen table cleaning silver, “that it's time you were pushed out of the nest. I think you had better plan to attend the state university next winter.”

“But I don't want to leave here, Aunt Cordelia. I want to stay with you for the next four years. Danny and I have it all planned. I don't think that I could bear to leave.”

“Four more years with me and you'll be as dogmatic and opinionated as I am.” She actually grinned at me. I was amazed; Aunt Cordelia often smiled primly, but I couldn't remember ever seeing her grin as though she were sharing a joke with me. “Spinster aunts serve a need, but they should know when the time comes to push young nieces out on their own.”

“But you would be all alone if I left you; anyway, this is my home.”

She shook her head. “You must have new experiences, be exposed to new ideas, Julia. You've fallen into a pattern here; if you stay on, you'll be another Cordelia Bishop. I won't have it.”

“I don't want to leave Danny,” I said, near tears.

“It would be a good thing if Danny were pushed out of his comfortable little niche too. Jonathan agrees with me. I may even speak to Helen and Charles Trevort about it.”

It seemed to me that she was disposing of other people on a grand scale that morning. “I thought that you were happy about Danny and me. Now, it seems you really want to see us separated.”

“I
am
happy, Julia. However,” she stressed the word strongly, “both you and Danny need to get out into life and give your love a test.”

I felt weak inside. “If Danny would ‘get out into life' as you put it, and find that he loved someone else, I would die. I know it. I would just give up and die.”

“No, you wouldn't, dear. You'd go on living. It would be hard, but if your interests were wide and your life full, you would get over the pain and find a new life.” She laid her hand on my arm. “Don't look so tragic. I have great confidence that four years from now I'll be getting this old place ready for your wedding—yours and Danny's.”

“It's beginning to sound like an awful gamble.” We finished the silver without saying anything more; when we were through I went away to walk in the woods. It was a cool day, and Aunt Cordelia made me wear a woolen stole that Jonathan had given her for Christmas; it was the color of ripe strawberries, and I couldn't help but be cheered by its beauty.

 

 

 

I was still reeling from Aunt Cordelia's firm line when word came that Danny had received a scholarship from the eastern university that Chris was attending. The professors in Danny's department were pleased; so were both our fathers and Aunt Cordelia. They seemed pretty callous to us during those first weeks; then we pulled ourselves together and commenced making our plans all over again.

It had been so simple before the new developments. I would stay with Aunt Cordelia in my familiar old room; Danny would continue living at home; we would drive into college together, home together, to all the college activities together. Everything together. Just Danny and Julie for at least three years; then there would have to be one year of separation while Danny did graduate work and I finished college, but when that year was finished we would be married. Now the plans called for four long years apart, both of us among strangers, a whole new way of life. It was frightening.

“Don't fall in love with someone else, Danny,” I said. I tried to make it sound gay, but I was terribly in earnest.

“I'm not worried about
me
; it's you losing your head if some poet barges in on my territory,” Danny said glumly.

Little by little, however, we became less fearful of the change, more aware of the fact that we
were
living in a narrow, comfortable world, and like some little old couple of eighty or so, highly apprehensive about branching off the beaten track. By the time Chris got home for summer vacation, Danny and I were ready to join him in plans for the coming year, plans that involved several trips back and forth across half the continent for holidays and special occasions together.

I wondered sometimes when I was alone what Aunt Cordelia had meant about my becoming another Cordelia Bishop. I knew that I must look a little like the girl in the picture, at least Jonathan Eltwing thought so, but I believed the resemblance ended there. I was quite sure of it until one evening when Chris and I were talking with Father and Alicia and the subject of Jane Austen came up. Father was telling us about a paper written by a girl in one of his classes, a paper bitterly critical of any and all of Austen's writings.

“I certainly think such an attitude indicates immaturity,” I said severely. I had once been intensely bored by Jane Austen myself, but I supposed that all people who had lived seventeen years had progressed in their powers of discrimination.

I saw Alicia's lips twitch when she glanced at Father; neither of them would probably have said anything, but Chris never missed an opportunity to tease.

“And, by Jove, we just don't hold with the anti-Austen clique, do we, Aunt Cordelia?”

I laughed with them that evening, but the incident set me to thinking. And when, a few days later, I was caught again in an unconscious mimicry of Aunt Cordelia, I began to agree that it was time that I got out into a wider world.

It happened when Mrs. Peters brought her two small grandchildren over to visit us. They were a beautiful, winsome little pair, a girl of five and a little boy of about three. I was delighted with their large solemn eyes and their baby voices.

When I asked them their names, the little girl answered for both. “I am Peggy, and my little brother is Bobby,” she told me.

I amused them with a few old toys for a time; then when they grew restless, I suggested that perhaps they would like to go out to the stable and watch me feed a lump of sugar to old Peter the Great. I lifted the small boy into his wagon, and offered my hand to the little girl.

“We'll let Robert ride, and you and I can pull him, can't we, Margaret?”

The little girl smiled at me, almost as if she understood that here was a young woman who was showing the effects of living ten years with an aunt of decided opinions.

“You didn't listen to our names,” she said in gentle reproach. “I am Peggy, and my little brother is Bobby.”

I glanced at Aunt Cordelia and Mrs. Peters, who sat watching us. “Another four years, Julia, and you wouldn't be able to leave unwashed dishes in the sink overnight,” Aunt Cordelia remarked.

“Worse things could happen to her, Cordelia,” Mrs. Peters said.

“Much worse,” Aunt Cordelia agreed, “but Laura's young Julie might feel someday that her aunt was a highly inflexible person. We don't want another generation of inflexibility,” she added.

She was laughing at herself as well as at me, I thought. Perhaps Aunt Cordelia was not quite so inflexible as I had once believed her to be.

Whether or not they approved of the attitudes and opinions I had picked up from Aunt Cordelia, all the members of my family were pleased that I was named valedictorian of my class that year. Laura and Bill and young Julie would be coming a few days before graduation; Father and Alicia would stay at the old house too, in order to be close to all of us. Aunt Cordelia and I planned a supper to be served after the graduation exercises; besides the family there would be Jonathan, Danny's parents, and Mr. and Mrs. Peters. Chris and Danny and I took over the task of getting things ready.

There were no half-measures with Aunt Cordelia. Long stored bedding had to be taken out and aired, curtains had to be laundered, walls must be wiped down, windows washed, and floors waxed. The house was in a state of cheerful hubbub for several days as the boys and I carried out Aunt Cordelia's orders and were refreshed by the most appetizing meals she could dream up for us. We were reminded of the days when we had swept and dusted the schoolhouse for her, but we agreed that times were happier now; let people who have forgotten their childhood say that the early years are the happiest, I thought. For me, it was good to be over that stretch of the road which was beset by half-formed anxieties and resentments. I could now watch Aunt Cordelia glow over the two young men whom she loved devotedly, and I could catch her eye and know with complete confidence that I was just as close to her. No Grandmother Bishop denied the girl of my generation.

One bright afternoon Jonathan Eltwing came in, ostensibly for only a brief call in order to return one of Aunt Cordelia's books, but his face glowed with pleasure when we insisted that he stay. I tied an apron around his generous middle, and the boys led our venerable professor into the living room and pointed out the windows that had not yet been washed. He must have been the Jonathan of other years that afternoon, for he laughed and teased as lightly as did Chris or Danny, and in the evening when we had eaten the fried chicken and fresh cornbread Aunt Cordelia prepared for us, he led the singing that continued for over an hour as the five of us sat around the table. That afternoon and evening would be a picture to remember, I thought; something precious to hold when I would be out in the world viewing the new horizons and wider vistas that Aunt Cordelia felt that I must experience.