Father looked strained as he always did when Uncle Haskell put in an appearance; Jonathan Eltwing’s eyes had a preoccupied, brooding look; Aunt Cordelia did not move a muscle. Only Mrs. Eltwing looked pleased, even radiant. She did not say a word, but she looked at Uncle Haskell as if she had never seen a person so beautiful or so charming. When he turned to greet Dr. Eltwing, she continued to look at him, her eyes shining.
Uncle Haskell greeted Mr. Eltwing brusquely. “So good, Jonathan,” he said, and our guest replied with a brusque greeting that matched the one he had received. Father and Uncle Haskell shook hands, nodded, and murmured something, nothing very cordial; then Aunt Cordelia invited her brother to sit down with us.
“Sorry, Cordelia, darling, I think I must get back to work. Deadline to meet by next week,” he said, smiling at Mrs. Eltwing. “I’ll have to be in New York for a conference with my publishers at the end of the week—events are crowding in on me a bit.”
“Your book is coming out soon then?” Jonathan Eltwing asked politely.
“By spring, we hope,” Uncle Haskell said airily. I was amazed at him. He knew that Father, Aunt Cordelia, and I knew positively that he was lying, that Jonathan Eltwing was pretty well convinced of it, but these facts seemed not to affect him in the least. He had an audience of one person who believed him; sometimes I wondered if he didn’t vaguely believe himself. He was not in the least embarrassed, but the rest of us were. I wondered how Aunt Cordelia had managed to stand it all through the years. I had had much less of Uncle Haskell than she had, and even I felt a little sick as I watched him.
“You will be staying in New York for some time, I suppose?” Jonathan Eltwing asked, mostly, I think, because it seemed necessary to say something when the silence became awkward.
“Only a week or ten days—at least I hope not any longer. I can’t leave my girls alone too long, you know.” He rumpled my hair, and I grinned inwardly. Aunt Cordelia and I could have been robbed, stabbed, drawn and quartered and Uncle Haskell would have known nothing about it. I wasn’t too sure that he would have been greatly concerned, if he had known.
He went back to Mrs. Eltwing. “Thank you, thank you for a moment of pure delight, dear lady,” he murmured. Then he bowed slightly to Dr. Eltwing. “So good, Jonathan,” he said again. “Adam.” He nodded at Father. “Until this evening, Cordelia—Julie, my sweetheart.” Then he was gone, a flash of glory we were all relieved to see ended.
All but Mrs. Eltwing. She stood beside the piano looking after him, her face full of bewilderment and disappointment.
“Who was that man, Jonathan?” she asked her husband in a low voice, and we were all chagrined. Uncle Haskell’s dramatic entrance had made us forget an introduction.
“That was Cordelia’s brother, darling. Haskell Bishop.”
“So beautiful,” she said as if she were alone. “Such a beautiful and good man.”
“Yes, Katy,” Dr. Eltwing said gently. Then he turned to us, speaking quietly of other things.
The next hour was one of pleasant conversation in which everyone joined except Mrs. Eltwing. She sat close to her husband, leaning lightly against his shoulder, smiling a little to herself. I loved her somehow, and I really hadn’t intended to, because she was the woman who had married the man my aunt had loved and I felt a certain loyalty to Aunt Cordelia. I loved Mrs. Eltwing, however, in spite of myself, mostly I think, because she was so tiny and delicate, so tragic. I believe that Dr. Eltwing saw the feeling in my eyes for he suddenly smiled at me, told me how fond he had been of my mother, hoped that I would visit him and his wife when they were settled in their new home. I was greatly flattered and pleased; it seemed to me something very special that I was a friend of Jonathan Eltwing.
But I spoiled it all as they were leaving. I smashed my hopes of a fine friendship as suddenly as I had smashed many a cup and plate in Aunt Cordelia’s kitchen.
It happened as we stood on the wide porch saying good-bye. Dr. Eltwing held out his hand to me after he had shaken hands with Aunt Cordelia, and he said, “Good-bye, Julie, dear child. You know it’s amazing how much you look like your aunt Cordelia.”
His words roused a quick fury inside me. I would have agreed with him that Aunt Cordelia looked rather nice that afternoon in her new golden-colored wool with the brown velvet bow at her throat. But she looked only nice for Aunt Cordelia, and I was not flattered that I was compared to her, even when she looked her best. I hadn’t Laura’s beauty, of course, and that was a sore spot which had always rankled, but I knew that I was prettier than Aunt Cordelia. My cheeks were not thin and flat, my mouth was not a thin, straight line, and my neck did not have a strange, flabby fold running down the center. I hated Dr. Eltwing at that minute. To humiliate me—me, Julie Trelling, in my new scarlet wool with a scarlet velvet ribbon holding back my hair!
They were all looking at me, they were all seeing the furious anger in my face. Father’s face was red, and his mouth looked hard; Aunt Cordelia was calm with just the shadow of a smile on her lips; Mrs. Eltwing looked wistful, wondering. It was Jonathan Eltwing’s face that hurt me most. It had suddenly become cold, severe. He dropped my hand and nodded briefly. Then he turned to Aunt Cordelia and did not look at me again.
I was completely miserable when Aunt Cordelia and I came back into the living room. The cups with small quantities of cold coffee in some of them did not look so sparkling as they had that morning; the whole room seemed cluttered; even the flowers I had arranged so proudly looked a little weary.
If Aunt Cordelia had given me the scolding of my life I wouldn’t have been either surprised or resentful. I knew that I deserved one; I felt as if a few good lashes would help me to live with myself. But she didn’t scold; she just sighed and shook her head as she looked at the cups and plates.
“Somehow I don’t quite feel up to washing them right now.” She smiled apologetically. Aunt Cordelia did not hold with people getting too tired to put a room to rights.
“I’ll do them for you if you’ll trust me,” I said in a small voice. “I’ll be terribly careful.”
She looked at me absently for a moment and then nodded. “Yes, I know that you’ll be careful. And if you should have an accident—maybe I have put too much value on a piece of china. Your wish to help me has value, too.” She went to the closet, and took out an old sweater. “I think that I’ll rake leaves for a while, Julia; the air smells so fresh. Maybe the exercise will do me good.”
I changed my dress quickly and carried the dishes into the kitchen, lifting only one piece at a time into the soapy water, rinsing, wiping, and setting it on the cupboard shelf before I picked up another. Then I swept up the crumbs and pushed the chairs back into their places, put more wood on the fire and carried the silver coffee service out to its place in the dining room. All during this time the tears were slipping over my cheeks; every so often I had to stop my work and use a handkerchief.
It was an empty, shamed, and remorseful evening, terrible really. I stood at the window for a long time when my work was done and watched Aunt Cordelia as she raked up great piles of leaves and pushed them into a deep ditch that ran on one side of our woodsy lawn. It was so foolish to be raking leaves at that time, a completely futile gesture, for the trees were still full of leaves, and as quickly as Aunt Cordelia raked one section of the lawn, it was again covered with the bright rain from the boughs above. It was a foolish expenditure of energy—that is what Aunt Cordelia would ordinarily have said to me had I been occupied by this pointless task.
Another thing struck me: Aunt Cordelia had not changed her best dress before going out to work among the dusty leaves. It was unprecedented behavior on her part. Not on mine. I often forgot, and I had been reprimanded many a time for my negligence. And now, there was Aunt Cordelia hard at work in her best dress, her fragile stockings and high heels. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.
Darkness came to our house sooner than it did elsewhere because of the many trees surrounding us. I watched the
sunset, hardly brighter than the leaves had been that afternoon, and I thought that surely Aunt Cordelia would soon come inside. I started a kettle of water heating slowly for tea and I planned to make hot buttered toast and scrambled eggs when I saw her putting her rake in the toolshed. But I waited and waited, and when she set fire to the great piles of leaves she had raked together and the blue-gray coils of smoke started rolling, I knew that she would stay outside until every leaf in the ditch was burned and every ember carefully extinguished.
It was quite dark when Aunt Cordelia came inside, her hair disarranged and her face and dress grimed lightly with the smoke. If I had been in a different mood, I might have gloated over the fact that it was her carelessness, not mine, that was going to cost us a cleaning bill the next week. But I was not in a mood for gloating; my spirit was too much abased.
“You have made tea, Julia? Good. I’ll be down as soon as I’ve changed and freshened up a little.” She glanced at her smudged skirt and then looked at me with a wry little smile. “I’ve been very foolish, Julia. Somehow I forgot to change. I must remember this before I scold you when you forget.”
I wanted to say, “Don’t be kind to me. Hit me; scream at me. It will make me feel better.” But, of course, she did no such thing. She went upstairs, quick and light of step, and I prepared our little snack, which I carried into the living room and set in front of the fire. I then turned on two shaded lamps and sat down to wait for her.
She came down soon, wearing the long rose-colored robe that was her favorite, and carrying a large manila envelope which meant, I supposed, that she was going to spend the evening working on her household bills. When she had seated herself in an armchair before the fire, she drew a long breath and reached for a piece of toast.
“This is very nice,” she said quietly, “I didn’t realize that I was hungry, but I am.”
I tried to begin the little apology I had been working on all evening. I cleared my throat and began shakily, “Aunt Cordelia, I want to say—”
Then she did an amazing thing: she interrupted me. Interrupting another’s speech was almost as horrendous an act in Aunt Cordelia’s code as neglecting one’s homework or calling Jane Austen a bore.
“Mrs. Eltwing is a pathetic little woman, isn’t she, Julia? So lovely, so gifted—and so lost. Did you notice how exceptionally kind and understanding Jonathan is? But he was always like that—the gentlest and best person I have ever known.”
I felt that for some reason she did not want me to voice an apology, and so I sat beside her, feeling very wretched and awkward, trying to eat a little of the food for which I had no appetite.
Aunt Cordelia took her time over the meal, sipping her tea slowly and helping herself to a second piece of toast. When she had finally finished she wiped her fingers carefully on her napkin, and getting up, she reached for the envelope on the mantel.
“I’ve had this in my bureau drawer, Julia. I should have shown it to you before. It would have helped you to understand this afternoon.”
She drew out a sepia-colored photograph, rather faded but still clear, of a young man and woman and a younger child. I knew in a flash who it was. The blond, graceful young man standing in the rear with his face turned carefully, no doubt in order to give posterity the full benefit of his beautiful profile, could be no one other than Uncle Haskell. And the child, leaning against the young woman’s knee and smiling directly into the camera, looked like a miniature Laura, but was, of course, my mother.
However, it was the young woman seated on the photographer’s velvet-covered bench who held my attention. The other two I would have recognized, but not the lovely girl in the center. Her head was thrown back a little as if some word that had brought the smile to her pretty lips had also brought the small oval chin up in a mood of gaiety. Her cheeks were full and rounded, her dark hair was brushed back but little curls had sneaked out at her temples. And the neck—that girlish neck was smooth and firm; there was a thin black ribbon tied around it and a small heart rested in the hollow of her throat.
“This was taken the first year I taught,” Aunt Cordelia said in a matter-of-fact voice. “That was the year that Jonathan and I worked together to prepare him for his entrance examinations.”
Of course. That was the year. And no doubt the photographer had said coyly, “Now think of someone you love, and let’s have a big smile.” And she had thought of Jonathan Eltwing; you could almost see his image in her large, dark eyes.
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.
6
My 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 qu
ietly 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.