by Irene Hunt
Then Aunt Cordelia’s voice, low and very calm. “No, Cora, you did right. I am grateful to you for staying with her, very grateful.” She paused and then got down on her knees preparatory to crawling back into the closet toward me. “I’ll see to her. You can go fix coffee for the others if you will be so kind.”
I was afraid of Aunt Cordelia Bishop, not that she had ever been unkind, but there was an aloofness about her that had always made her keep a considerable distance between us. Chris liked her, and he was obviously her favorite, a fact that didn’t interest me especially, for with me Aunt Cordelia simply didn’t count. I had once overheard Father telling someone that “Cordelia and the little one bristle at one another in almost exactly the same manner.” Perhaps we did. I hadn’t been aware of it, but on that October afternoon she was the last person in the world I wanted to see crawling toward me in the depths of the dark closet.
When she was near me she spoke the name by which she, alone, called me. I had been baptized “Julie,” but Aunt Cordelia felt that certain feminine names ending in “ie” or “y” indicated a frivolity of which she disapproved. Thus, among her pupils, a small Elsie became “Elsa,” and a Betty had to answer to a stern “Elizabeth.” She had told Mother that “Julie” was simply a sloppy pronunciation of that fine old Roman name which their paternal grandmother had borne. And so Aunt Cordelia called me “Julia.”
“Yes, Aunt Cordelia,” I answered, just a little above a whisper. Mother had seen to it that I was always polite to Aunt Cordelia whether I liked her or not.
She came a little nearer to me, and leaning forward, put her arms around me and drew me to her lap. My head was against her cheek, and when I sobbed, I could feel the trembling of Aunt Cordelia’s body, and I knew that her face was wet with tears as mine was.
That was the one time I have ever known her to cry, and it was the first time I remember her holding me in her arms. We sat in the dark closet together for a long time; then when there were no more tears left, we crawled out and began our decade together.
2
To be suddenly catapulted into a new way of life at seven is very hard. I envied Laura; she, at least, had our old home, her own rose-and-cream-colored room, the closets full of Mother’s dresses. She had Father, too, and the good smell of his cigar in his study; she ate her meals in the same old dining room with him, went to school with the young people she had always known. I thought that life was much kinder to Laura than to Christopher and me.
What I didn’t realize was that at seventeen, Laura did not have the adaptability, the readiness to forget, that Christopher and I had at seven and nine. We thought of Mother often in the early days of our new life; sometimes we cried when we were homesick for times that were gone, for the old sense of security within our family. But the days slipped by and the memory of Mother grew fainter, the rooms of the old house that had once been awesome and fearful became familiar and pleasant; school had its compensations, Uncle Haskell was a huge joke, and Aunt Cordelia was a challenge.
Aunt Cordelia was our teacher as well as our guardian. At the small white schoolhouse where she had taught since she was a young girl, she was only our teacher; she gave no sign of knowing us any better than the other children. We called her “Miss Cordelia” as the others did, and when she stood behind her desk, slender and erect in her plain tailored suit with her rich brown and gray hair coiled in braids about her head, we looked at her with the proper respect she expected of us. She demanded obedience, but she was not a grim teacher; if we read a gay story that brought laughter to us, we could count on Aunt Cordelia’s appreciation too. She read aloud to us on Friday afternoons, and she read beautifully; I came very close to loving Aunt Cordelia during those long afternoons when I rested my arms upon the desk in front of me and became acquainted with Jim Hawkins and Huck Finn, with little David and Goliath, with Robinson Crusoe on his island, and with the foolish gods and their kinfolk somewhere above the clouds on Mount Olympus. She could be very stern about some misdemeanor in the classroom, but when her point had been made, she seemed to forget the matter entirely and became a pleasant, forgiving friend. Sometimes it was a gambling matter to predict Aunt Cordelia’s reactions.
Ordinarily, Chris and I walked the mile and a half to school with our aunt, shoulders pushed well back, every breath employing the use of our diaphragms, our minds fixed, at Aunt Cordelia’s suggestion, on the beauty of Nature and the glory of the firmament. On especially inclement mornings Aunt Cordelia would drive her precious car, which was almost as shining and beautiful as it had been ten years earlier. We loved driving to school in style, but our pleasure soon became dimmed a little by the fact that we knew we must spend an hour or so that evening in washing and polishing the car before it was put away for Sunday and holiday driving.
Aunt Cordelia didn’t really have to teach for a livelihood; the income from the farm was sufficient for her needs, and the modest salary she received for each month of the school year was not the incentive that brought her back to her desk year after year. Her reason for teaching was actually the belief that no one else would do the work quite so well, would understand the backgrounds of these children whose parents she had taught when she was young. There was never a doubt in Aunt Cordelia’s mind but that her teaching was the best to be had, and she would have felt that she was denying something beyond price to the handful of country children who sat in her classroom, if she allowed a younger or a less dedicated woman to take over.
And so she went back year after year, teaching from nine until four o’clock, then sweeping and dusting the room after school, carrying in great buckets of coal to bank the fire for the night, arriving at school an hour early on Monday mornings during the winter months in order to get the fire started and the room warm before the children arrived.
Twice a year, in the fall and again in spring, we got a half holiday during which time we helped Aunt Cordelia wash and polish the windows, scrub the floor, wash and wax the desks. By the time Danny Trevort and Chris were ten, they had, of their own accord, taken over the task of carrying in the coal of an evening. Often the three of us stayed after school and did the sweeping and dusting for her, I with a big apron protecting my school dress and one of Aunt Cordelia’s round dust caps protecting my hair. She never failed to thank us for our help, and now and then, as a special treat, Danny would be asked to spend the evening with us and there would be a weiner roast or a fried chicken dinner in payment for our janitorial services.
Aunt Cordelia did pretty well at treating all her pupils with the same impersonal detachment, but sometimes she was hard put to hide a particular warmth which she felt toward both Danny Trevort and my brother, Chris. They were both rosy, smooth-cheeked little boys, mischievous at times, but frank and honest, sharing a respect for Aunt Cordelia which I did not always feel. Sometimes at night, when Chris was bent over his homework, Aunt Cordelia would let her hand rest for a second on his head and when he looked up, they would smile at one another. I felt very alone and lost when they did that; sometimes I felt very angry too. As for Danny, he was the one child in school whom Aunt Cordelia addressed by his diminutive name. It is true that he had been baptized “Daniel,” and Aunt Cordelia had as little patience with pet names as she had for most feminine names ending in “ie” or “y”; still, for some unaccountable reason she broke with her principles in his case: he was always “Danny” Trevort.
Most of us carried our lunches in tin pails. Carlotta Berry had a basket with daisies painted all over the lid, which set her apart socially. We ate out under the trees when it was at all possible; in all the years I never became quite reconciled to eating inside with the smell of dust and winter garments and many kinds of food.
The problem of eating lunch with Aggie Kilpin was one of sharp annoyance to me for a long time, but by the end of my first year in the new school, I had found the solution.
Aggie was a mistreated, undernourished, and retarded girl, the youngest child of a shiftless, vicious father and a m
other who had been beaten down by the cruelties of her life. Aggie must have been ten or eleven the first winter that I knew her and even then, she hardly recognized a dozen words in the primer from which Aunt Cordelia tried to teach her. She would stand beside my aunt’s desk floundering through a page that the youngest child in the room could have read with ease, and after each mistake, looking around the room to grin and smirk as if her failures were evidences of some bit of cleverness on her part. It was dreadful to watch her; I averted my eyes from Aggie whenever possible.
But it was not Aggie’s retardedness that made her a pariah among us; it was the fact that she stank to high Heaven. Aunt Cordelia had pled with the girl for years to treat herself to an occasional tub of soapy water, to shampoo her hair, to wash just once in a while the shabby dress which she wore every day of the year. Aggie would grimace and mouth some half-intelligible garble, but she never lost any of her overripe fragrance. Aunt Cordelia stopped trying to do anything about it after a while; as a matter of fact, she thought it quite possible that Aggie’s family might have turned upon her if the girl had shown any disposition to be different.
I loathed poor Aggie, who seemed to have a perfect gift for making herself repulsive. She stood at the blackboard one day, I remember, and before the entire school used a word that all of us had been brought up to consider dirty. It was a slip of the tongue with poor Aggie, but I was shocked. Some of the big boys laughed. Danny didn’t, and neither did my brother; they sat side by side studying the pages of their geography with frowning intensity and very red faces. None of the girls laughed except Carlotta, who didn’t want to, but became hysterical and had to go outside to the pump and wash her face until she got hold of herself.
Then Aunt Cordelia demanded “Silence,” whereupon silence descended upon the room. Everybody was ashamed except Aggie; she was not accustomed to being the center of attention, and she threw sly glances at the boys who had laughed, preening herself a little at the success of something she had done, a something of which she was completely unconscious.
I used this incident to convince Aunt Cordelia that Aggie was no proper companion for the rest of us, who were considerably younger, that we had every right to shun her company. But Aunt Cordelia was not convinced. She saw to it that Aggie was included in all of our games, and what was hardest for us to bear, that Aggie was invited to join our little circle at lunchtime. Sometimes we would try sneaking away hurriedly at noon; inevitably we would hear a stern, “Julia—Elsa—Carlotta, I believe that you girls have forgotten to invite Agnes to go with you.”
And so we would have to ask her, and Aggie would come galloping eagerly, usually to my side because I was Aunt Cordelia’s niece, and she seemed to know that I was under special pressure to be a decently behaving classmate. She called me “kid,” and she would throw her arm around my neck until I learned to dodge. Then when we were seated under the trees she would take out unappetizing-looking food, which usually smelled strongly of onion, and would eat noisily, laughing at everything that was said and inching nearer to my side each time I inched away from hers.
Finally I organized a seating arrangement and did not hesitate to use my prestige as Aunt Cordelia’s niece in enforcing the rules.
“We will sit in a big circle,” I explained, “and the Queen will sit in the middle. Aggie is the oldest so she gets to be the Queen. The rest of us are subjects, and we are not allowed to look at the Queen while she eats, so of course, we will have to sit with our backs to her. Do you know, Aggie, that you could have us beheaded if we dared to look at you while you were eating?”
Aggie didn’t know, and she didn’t much enjoy her royal role after the first day or two. She wanted Lottie or Elsie to be the Queen—not Julie, because she wanted to be a peasant at Julie’s side. But we were adamant. “You are the oldest, Aggie. It wouldn’t be right for one of us to be the Queen.” And again, “Shame on you, Aggie; you ought to be proud that we are letting you be our Queen.”
The circle of peasants grew wider and wider as the days went by until our poor unlovely Queen sat in splendid isolation where she could not offend her subjects.
Aunt Cordelia discovered our game one day. We explained it to her with the same wide-eyed innocence that we had feigned when we explained it to Aggie. For a minute I was unsure; I thought I saw a storm approaching. But Aunt Cordelia was silent. She stood looking at us for a little while and, although I was pretty young, I detected amusement, sadness, and a kind of baffled uncertainty in her look. Finally she turned away without saying anything.
In the months before Danny and Chris and I were old enough to help Aunt Cordelia with her janitorial work, the three of us walked with Carlotta, Elsie Devers, and Jimmy Ferris down the road from school each evening. We ranged in age from seven to ten; Elsie and Jimmy were the two oldest and a little superior in their attitude because they knew about the intricacies of decimal fractions; Lottie was the prettiest, Chris was the tallest, I was the youngest and toughest, and Danny was the sweetest. I loved Danny secretly, or thought I did, but for all my love I didn’t hesitate to hurt him one evening, an act that hurt me to remember for many years.
It started with Jimmy betting a million that Danny wouldn’t dare kiss me, and Danny betting a million that he would, too, dare, all of which led to Chris and Jimmy pinning my arms behind me and Danny giving me a triumphant if unenthusiastic kiss. I was furious at all three of them, not so much because of the kiss as at the indignity of being thus kissed. It was Danny, however, who as soon as my arms were loosed, got the impact of a small hard fist that I had learned to use effectively as Chris could have testified. Danny’s eye was swollen shut and rimmed with green and purple by the time we reached the big house in the grove and found Aunt Cordelia in her kitchen.
She bathed the eye of her favorite in cold water and held a silver spoon against the swollen flesh while she listened to the story of what happened. She said nothing at first, but after a while she quietly gave us her private opinion that a small boy’s kiss was hardly in as poor taste as a small girl’s physical violence. That, at least, was the gist of her remarks; after that she ignored me and asked Chris to go the rest of the way home with Danny and to apologize for his sister’s behavior.
I slunk out to the surrounding woods, disgraced, heavyhearted, and resentful. Public opinion was against me as I could see by the prim looks that Carlotta and Elsie bent upon me. I had hurt someone who was gentle and good, someone I loved, and that brought a heaviness to my throat. Aunt Cordelia, however, had blamed me and not any of the three boys; I resented that so much that it almost overcame my remorse.
There was a cluster of slender birches just beyond a thicket of blackberry vines, four silver-barked trees arranged in a rough semicircle with intertwining branches forming a leafy roof. I called this cluster of trees my cathedral, and I came there often when life’s problems became particularly heavy. It was in this retreat that I found shelter on that spring evening after I punched Danny.
I knelt in what would have been true penitence if Aunt Cordelia’s rebuff had not kindled so much rage, and I gave the Divine Presence all the details. I asked Him to consider the fact that three boys, all bigger than I was, were the ones who had started the trouble, and that a lady who pretended to be so dedicated to fair play had behaved in a way that no one, certainly not He, could call fair.
“Why is it,” I demanded, “that Thou lettest these things always happen to me? Why dost Thou always let me be the one to get into trouble? I’d hate to think that Thou wert as unfair as Aunt Cordelia but it begins to look as if—”
I heard a slight stirring then, from behind one of the trees, and opening my eyes, saw Uncle Haskell, golf bag over his shoulder, leaning nonchalantly against one of the trees, laughter spread all over his face.
“You’re snooping,” I told him angrily. “I was trying to pray, and you have no right to snoop when someone is praying.”
“I am not snooping, my darling niece, nor do I have the slightest interest i
n your prayers.” He laid the golf bag aside and sat down in front of me. “As a matter of fact, however, you weren’t actually praying you know. You were giving Jehovah a penny lecture.”
I felt too depressed for an argument. When he asked me what the trouble was, I went through the story once again. “Aunt Cordelia isn’t fair,” I said finally. “She likes boys better than girls; it’s as plain as anything. She likes Chris and Danny and even Jimmy Ferris better than she likes me.”
Uncle Haskell laughed lightly. “The very trait she most resented in Mama. Ah, Cordelia!”
“You mean that my grandmother liked you better than Aunt Cordelia?”
“Naturally! I was male, beautiful, and brilliant; Cordelia was female, only so-so as to looks, bright enough, but certainly not scintillating.”
“What about my mother?”
“Oh, Ethel was a rather charming child, but by the time she came along, Mama was so wrapped up in me that she was happy to leave Ethel’s upbringing to Cordelia.”
I sat for a time, tongue-tied with resentment. When I was finally able to speak at all, my protest was, even to my own ears, weak and inane.
“And do you really think that was right?” I asked, trying to put my anger into each syllable.
“My dear child, I couldn’t care less as to whether it was right or not. All that concerns me is that I got the best of the bargain.” He looked out at the shadowy woods, his clear blue eyes shining with what appeared to be perfect contentment. Then his brows suddenly shot up in sharp V-shapes. “Or did I?” he asked, still smiling, but somewhat more subdued. “I suppose that’s debatable. Well, you’ll have to ask your aunt Cordelia. Or your father, the impeccable Adam.”