Her wrath was formidable; mine was rather intense too, for I felt that I might have been instructed to clean my room with considerably less sermonizing. Our clash was brief and bitter, and Aunt Cordelia was the victor. I spent the next hour converting the energy of rage into a zest for cleaning which resulted in an immaculate state that would have satisfied any top sergeant.
Aunt Cordelia inspected my work and nodded approvingly. “I should think now that after a shower and a brief apology for your impertinence you might feel very much better, Julia.”
“I am very sorry that I was impertinent, Aunt Cordelia,” I managed to say, and then fled for the bathroom and a shower. I wished as I stood under the cooling, cleansing flood of water that I were as fortunate as Uncle Haskell, living apart in the old carriage house, working on a magnum opus and communicating with Aunt Cordelia only infrequently.
That was the afternoon that Carlotta Berry called, asking me to go driving with her. To receive an invitation to go driving with Lottie that summer was a coveted honor. Being an only child of unusually indulgent parents, Lottie had a great deal more in the way of clothes and expensive toys than most of us, and for her birthday that year she had received a gift that was the envy of all her classmates. The gift was a pony, a snowy, dainty-hoofed little creature, a wonderful gift in itself, but this one was harnessed to a wicker and patent leather cart. Carlotta had power in the possession of that pony cart: those who pleased her might share it, but there were no rides for those who did not.
I supposed no favors would be granted me that afternoon, but Aunt Cordelia was a much fairer person than I sometimes believed her to be.
“I see no reason why you shouldn’t go,” she said pleasantly. “You have fulfilled your duties and are entitled to some recreation.”
“I can go!” I told Lottie joyfully, and when she arrived, cool and pretty in blue and white organdy, Aunt Cordelia looked at me thoughtfully and suggested that I might wear the dress from Laura’s wardrobe which she had altered to fit me, a fine white linen embroidered with tiny wreaths of rosy flowers and tied with a gay sash. It was plain that Aunt Cordelia wanted me to look no less well-dressed than the darling of the Berry household.
Our gladiolas were in full bloom that week and while I dressed, Aunt Cordelia cut a great armful of the bright flowers and then sat in the porch swing waiting for Carlotta and me to come downstairs.
“Since you’re going to be driving all around the neighborhood, I think it would be nice of you girls to take this bouquet to Agnes. You won’t mind doing that, will you?” she asked.
Aunt Cordelia was too much the voice of authority for either Carlotta or me to resist her suggestion. We didn’t want to think of Aggie, much less to visit her, but a sense of decency, prodded by the determination which we knew was behind my aunt’s quiet suggestion, led us to accept the errand.
“Isn’t it just like her?” Carlotta sputtered when we were out of hearing. “She spoils your party on account of Aggie, and now, she spoils our afternoon by making us stop at the dirty Kilpins’. Sometimes I can’t stand Miss Cordelia; I mean it—I just can’t stand her.”
I had been annoyed too, but at that speech I turned loyal niece and remarked that if Lottie didn’t like my aunt, she might well have invited someone other than a relative of Aunt Cordelia’s to go riding with her, and Lottie replied that since the pony and cart were hers, she might rescind her invitation.
I wanted the ride enough to tolerate Carlotta’s airs. Both of us were conscious that we made a pretty picture on the country road, our gay dresses and the bright flowers filling the little cart with color, Lottie’s blonde hair and my black shining as brightly as the pony’s silver coat. Uncle Haskell took off his hat and made us a sweeping bow when we met him driving home from town, and a mile or so farther on, Danny Trevort and Jimmy Ferris chased us on their bicycles, scorning our elegance although we were pretty sure that they secretly envied us.
“O, ki-tinka, ka-tonka,” they shrilled in pained mockery. Then, riding close to the cart and holding on to the sides, they gave us the benefit of their supreme contempt. “Slurp, slurp,” they added as if the sight of us was a little more than either of them could bear.
Their behavior bothered me a little. Danny was still as close to me as in the days when he and Chris and I rode and swam and skated together. Danny was often at Aunt Cordelia’s, and I was just as often at his home where gentle Mrs. Trevort always made me welcome. Now, in the presence of Carlotta and Jimmy, he was scornful of me, and I found myself acting as haughtily toward him as if we were foes of long standing.
There is something wrong with this world, I thought. And then, a few minutes later, I found a world in which there was a greater wrong than I had ever known.
Carlotta refused to go inside when we reached the Kilpin house.
“I don’t have to mind Miss Cordelia while it’s summer vacation, Julie,” she said, and I had to respect her point of view. “I guess you’ll just have to take the flowers in yourself—since you can’t help being her niece.” She glanced back down the road, obviously hoping the boys would soon appear again.
I climbed out of the elegant cart and crossed the road in some trepidation. I had heard stories of the Kilpins; they were trash, and vicious trash at that. The cluttered dooryard and the sagging front steps added to the ominous look of the place; I rather hoped that no one would hear my light knock on the half-open screen door.
But Mrs. Kilpin had seen my approach, and she came to the door as soon as I knocked. She was a withered, bent woman with a narrow strip of forehead wrinkling above close-set, sullen eyes. She motioned me to come in, but she didn’t speak; when I offered her the flowers and told her they were for Aggie, she nodded toward a table where I laid them, pretty sure that they wouldn’t be touched until they were thrown away.
Aggie was lying on a bed in the corner of the room. It was a filthy bed, sheetless and sagging in the middle, and Aggie rolled restlessly upon it, her mouth parched with fever and her eyes glazed and unseeing. The heat, the stench, and the closeness of death made the place so unbearable that I wanted nothing so much as to break away and run from it. Somehow, however, I managed to walk closer to the bed and speak to the girl who lay there.
I really think that I half expected to see Aggie grin again, to hear her call me “Kid” and declare that we were friends. But Aggie was another person that day; she was a part of the dignity of a solemn drama, no longer the phony “queen” seated in the center of a mocking circle of her subjects. Aggie was as indifferent to my presence as if I’d been one of the houseflies crawling along the edge of a spoon that lay on the table beside a bottle of medicine.
I was awed and unsure of what I should do. “Is she going to get well?” I finally whispered to the shadowy woman who stood beside me.
“No, she ain’t a-goin’ to git well. She’s a-goin’ to die,” the woman said without emotion.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and Mrs. Kilpin answered in the same dead voice.
“No, you ain’t. You ain’t sorry. Nobody’s sorry that my girl’s a-goin’ to die. Not even her pa’s sorry. Nobody.”
I couldn’t answer that. “I guess I must go, Mrs. Kilpin,” I said miserably. “I guess I’ll have to go.”
“Yes, you go,” she said, and I saw her eyes studying me from head to foot. “Them clothes is too fine for this place. You go ’long.”
I turned toward the bed with agony in my throat. If I could have kept Aggie from dying by ignoring the stench and the ugliness, it would have been such an easy thing to do; it would have been a privilege to put my cheek next to hers and to tell her that yes, I was her friend. But Aggie would not look at me, and her mother’s look held only sullen hatred for me.
“I know that sometimes I’ve been mean to Aggie. I’m sorry, Mrs. Kilpin; I wish that you’d believe me. I’m really sorry.”
“I said that you’d best be gittin’ on,” Mrs. Kilpin said, without looking at me. She pointed toward the door.
> When I was out of the house, I ran to the cart where Carlotta was waiting. “Hurry, Julie,” she said, her doll-like face pink with anticipation. “We’re going to go north at the corner. The boys just went that way, and I almost know they’re hiding to surprise us. We won’t even speak to them,” she added, the instincts of the born coquette asserting themselves more strongly by the minute.
“Take me home, Lottie,” I said desperately, as I climbed into the seat beside her. “Please. Just take me home—then you can do whatever you like.”
“Don’t be silly, Julie. For goodness sake, was it that bad? I didn’t know you liked Aggie so much.”
“Will you take me home?” I asked her once again, my voice sharp because of the tumult inside me.
“No, I won’t. Your old aunt had to spoil things by making us come up here. My mother didn’t say that I had to come and see Aggie, but I just brought you up here because I supposed that Miss Cordelia would have a fit if I didn’t. Now, I’m going to go wherever I please, and I just don’t please to take you home.”
It wasn’t the first time we had quarreled. Lottie and I were at swords’ points as often as we were bound together in friendship. And beside the fact that our friendship was not very deep, the day was ghastly hot and beyond the discomfort of heat I was sickened by the glimpse I’d had of “something terribly wrong in this world.” I jumped from the seat into the dusty road.
“Go right ahead,” I told her. “I’ll walk.”
“Very well, Miss Trelling,” Carlotta said loftily, and off she drove, her pony and cart, her blonde curls and organdy dress as beautiful as a picture.
There were two miles before me, and I was already tired. The thick yellow dust felt hot through my thin slippers, and the half-burned weeds stung when they swished about my bare ankles. It would have been a long and wretched walk if Danny hadn’t rescued me, but he did, and there wasn’t a trace of the taunts he had yelled at Carlotta and me hardly a half hour earlier.
“What’s the matter, Julie?” he asked as he stopped his bicycle at my side. “What did Lottie do to you?”
“Nothing. She just won’t take me home.” I looked at Danny bleakly. “I think Aggie is going to die, Danny, and her mother almost hates me. I can’t ride around the country in a pony cart after I’ve seen Aggie and her mother.”
Danny looked down at the ground. Somehow the subject of death embarrassed us both. I wondered about it later.
I rode for the remainder of the two miles home on the handlebars of Danny’s bicycle. We didn’t talk much, and Aunt Cordelia didn’t say much either when I told her briefly what had happened. Some grease from the spokes of a wheel had soiled my white dress, but she didn’t scold; she made cold lemonade for Danny and me and the three of us sat together on the wide porch, all of us grave and thoughtful.
Mrs. Kilpin had been right; we heard of Aggie’s death the next morning, and Aunt Cordelia again drove up to the bare, wretched home where she and Mrs. Trevort and Mrs. Peters got Aggie ready for a decent burial.
The three women looked pale and tired when they came back from the Kilpins’ that night. Aunt Cordelia and I sat together in the high-ceilinged library where a crosscurrent of air made the room cool and pleasant.
“She’s clean, at last, poor little creature.” Aunt Cordelia shuddered involuntarily when she spoke. “I washed her hair. It was a task the like of which I hope never to have to do again. But do you know, Julia, the child had pretty hair. When it was clean I was able to press two big waves in it above her forehead, and when it dried it was a deep brown color with bright lights in it.”
Aggie’s hair clean. Not only clean, but pretty. It seemed impossible, but I knew that it was true or Aunt Cordelia would not have said so. I wished that Aggie could have known. It seemed such a terrible waste—ugliness all one’s life, and something pretty discovered only after one was dead.
I had never attended a funeral; Aunt Cordelia had always excused me from going with her for one reason or another. But four of us, Elsie Devers, Margaret Moore, Carlotta, and I, were pressed into attending Aggie’s funeral. We carried big armfuls of flowers and followed Aggie’s casket to the altar of the little country church.
When I looked at Aggie lying in her coffin that afternoon, I was filled with wonder as I saw that she was gently, almost gracefully pretty in death. She was clean, so beautifully clean in the soft ivory-colored dress that my aunt and other neighbors had bought for her, a dress that would have sent Aggie into ecstasies if she could have had it while she lived. I noticed that her hair was, indeed, bright with copper lights in it, lights that sparkled when the afternoon sunlight, channeled in through the church windows, touched Aggie’s head and face. It had been the filth and the stench and the silly grimaces, the garbled speech and the stupid responses that had made Aggie revolting. And now she was pretty.
But it was a prettiness touched with a cold aloofness that reproached and tormented me. I knew with a terrible certainty that I might beg her forgiveness until I was exhausted, that I might kneel before her as we had done in mockery when we first made her queen of the lunch hour, and that she would remain as coldly indifferent to me as I had once been to her.
There was a poem of Sara Teasdale’s that I had heard Aunt Cordelia read many times. It hadn’t meant much to me until that afternoon when I found, to my surprise, that I was able to recall every word of it. I whispered the lines to myself:“When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as lofty trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough;
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.”
When we walked home after the funeral, Carlotta said, “You were saying poetry to yourself in the church, Julie. I think that’s very bad manners, with poor Aggie lying there dead—and all that.”
At twilight that evening I wandered out to the carriage house, where Uncle Haskell sat on his porch enjoying the light breeze that stirred the leaves of our surrounding wooded acres. He laughed lightly as I seated myself on the steps at his feet.
“Your face, my treasure, has a funereal aspect this evening. Are you responding to our popular stereotype—the proper mourner who must tense his muscles for the correct number of days before he can cheerfully thank Heaven that it was the other fellow and not he who had succumbed?”
I didn’t answer immediately. Sometimes Uncle Haskell seemed like a bad-mannered child, someone who deserved to be ignored.
“Do you know what it means to feel guilty, Uncle Haskell?” I asked after a minute.
“No. I thank whatever gods may be that no such emotion has ever disrupted my equanimity.” He toyed for a while with the pipe which he always carried but never smoked. “Now, why should you feel guilty, my little Julie? You know very well that if this Kilpin girl could approach you again, as moronic and distasteful as she was a month ago, that you’d feel the same revulsion for her. You couldn’t help it.”
He was right, of course. I thought how awkward it would be to have to say, “Oh, Aggie, you were so nice when you were dead, and now here you are—the same old mess again.” That wouldn’t do, naturally; one couldn’t say that, even to Aggie.
Uncle Haskell was speaking again. “Hadn’t you rather thank Heaven that she has escaped what life had to offer her? And isn’t it a blessing that society escaped a multiplication of her kind? Come, Julie, death may be the great equalizer; let’s not give in to the hypocrisy that it is the great glorifier.”
We sat in silence after that, and I listened to the sounds of night around us. Uncle Haskell’s words beat in upon me as I sat there; I knew that he expressed something that was true, but I knew as well that he was missing something. In Aggie’s life and death there was something more than a distasteful little unfortunate’s few barren years and her fever-driven death. But what it w
as I could not put into words; it was strange that I should have sought out a cynic such as Uncle Haskell with the hope of finding an answer.
Finally I rose, the need for action of some sort strong within me. “I think I’ll saddle Peter the Great and ride for a while,” I said.
Then, for some reason, I suddenly felt very sorry for Uncle Haskell. Obeying an impulse which I did not understand, I mounted the five steps up to the porch, and standing beside his chair, I bent and kissed him on his forehead. It was the first time in my life that I had ever done anything of the kind.
He didn’t move. He muttered, “Don’t ride too far,” and that was all. I ran out to the barn, saddled the big old horse who was much gentler than his namesake, and rode away through the woods, pondering for the first time over the mysteries of life and death.
Uncle Haskell’s light was on when I returned, and I could see that he was working at his typewriter. That was unusual. His writings never seemed to reach his typewriter; one supposed, innocently at first and then in mocking derision, that his magnum opus was being done in longhand.
I slept rather late the next morning and when I opened my eyes, I saw the folded white paper which had been slipped underneath my door. I jumped out of bed to pick it up and then propped myself comfortably against the pillows in order to enjoy whatever it was that I was about to read.
The letter read as follows:Dear Julie:
What you were seeking tonight was a good, gray uncle, full of wisdom, and you came to an uncle who is neither good nor gray nor very wise.