With a snapping sound a new log caught fire from the coals and within a few minutes, while Aunt Betty kept up a running commentary on the fire’s progress, hearty flames leapt briskly toward the chimney flue.
Fire.
The last fire Jeffrey had seen had eaten the body of his father. Inside the blaze had been the oblong bundle that abruptly sat erect.
“Jeffrey?”
His aunt had asked him something. He turned, quizzically.
“Are you hungry?” she repeated.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Aunt Betty shook her head with a smile. “Been so long since I heard a young person say ma’am.” She jabbed at the fire with the poker. “Nothing like a fire on a day like this. Makes you cozy, doesn’t it.” Turning, she looked steadily at him. Her lips were trembling. “Was it — difficult for your father?”
“Dad never complained.”
“So you called him ‘Dad.’” The idea seemed to please her. “No, he wouldn’t complain. Not Warren.” Again she stared hard at Jeffrey. “May I ask you something?” Again her lips trembled. “Does he have a marker?”
“Ma’am?”
“A marker, a cross on his grave.”
“No, ma’am.” In answer to his aunt’s frown, Jeffrey added, “He was cremated. In our village, people are.”
“Ah!” She looked surprised. “Cremated.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Well, it’s done here too — for some. Your family, most of it — at least on your father’s side — is buried not ten minutes’ drive from this house.” Again her lips trembled. “But his ashes? Are they in an urn somewhere?”
“I took them to a sacred river.”
“A sacred river?”
“I poured his ashes into the Cauvery River. That’s where he took Mother’s.”
Aunt Betty nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “I see. The two of them there.” She cleared her throat. “Yes, well, I’m going to show you your room and then see about dinner. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving!”
Halfway up the bare-wood, creaking stairway, Aunt Betty halted and said musingly, “A sacred river?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
For the first time since Jeffrey had met his aunt, she really fell silent. There was a long narrow hall at the end of which she turned a doorknob and stood back to let him enter.
“Go on,” she urged with a smile. “It’s your room.”
It wasn’t big, although twice the size of his room in the village. There was a bed that looked soft and comfortable with a thick quilt on it. The desk in front of the window was of dark solid wood and seemed heavy, sturdy, a thing that had stood there ever since the house had been built.
“Your father’s desk,” Aunt Betty said behind him.
A photograph sat on it. As Jeffrey bent to look at a boy who must have been about his own age when the snapshot was taken, his aunt said, “Your father.”
Jeffrey leaned closer for a better look.
“See the resemblance? I wasn’t fooling when I said at the airport you looked like him!”
It was true. Although his own face was not quite so sharp featured — his cheekbones were broad like his mother’s — yet there he was: his own face smiling out of a picture and his body wearing clothes that he had never worn, a leather jacket, corduroy pants, lumberjack boots.
“This was your father’s room. Now it’s yours.”
Jeffrey turned to see her leaving.
“You wash up,” she said, “while I get dinner ready.”
He had not been alone for a moment since leaving Mr. Lowry’s house in Madras for the airport. He heard ticking. On a little table was a bedside clock, its old pendulum moving from side to side. It must be very old. Maybe it had once belonged to the stern-looking old man in the portrait above the downstairs fireplace. Was that his grandfather — or great-grandfather? There were certificates on the walls of this room: he saw his father’s name on them. They were certificates, awards, and diplomas coming out of his father’s past. Father had earned them, just as Father had earned respect by walking with the Swami across the length and breadth of India. But it was too bad that Father had not told him something about this world here, because now he was living in it too.
Jeffrey sat on the bed; it felt as good as it looked. Outside the window more snow was falling, falling steadily and gently, as the light faded, withdrawing itself from the intricate bare limbs of a tree just beyond the pane of glass. The only sound was the clock ticking. The walls were papered with an overall blue pattern of some people sitting under a tree beside a stream and some birds flying overhead. The people were repeated up and down the wall, and the birds flew in endlessly similar formations. The wallpaper and falling snow gave him a sense of peace and drowsiness, so he leaned back until lying flat on the bed. His bed. In another minute Jeffrey might have fallen asleep had he not heard Aunt Betty calling from downstairs.
His first dinner in America awaited Jeffrey Moore.
*
What he saw, sitting on the dining table laid with a white cloth, appalled him: a big, golden brown turkey, the juices seeping through the split skin of its breast.
What he felt must have shown on his face, because Aunt Betty’s smile turned abruptly to a frown of alarm. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing, ma’am. It all is looking good.” He sat down and noticed a heaping pile of mashed potatoes in a dish, some slices of carrots in another. Then he stared at the big turkey.
“Will you carve?” His aunt asked, offering him a carving knife and fork.
“No, thank you, aunty. I don’t know how.”
“Let me do it, then.” She began working on the turkey, glancing curiously at him now and then, where he sat at rigid attention. “You called me ‘aunty.’ Is that what you do in India?”
He didn’t understand the question, so he gave her a puzzled look.
“In India, you say aunty?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I see. In America, boys your age usually say ‘aunt.’ Nothing wrong with aunty,” she said with a shrug, working through the tendons of a turkey leg and skillfully parting it from the carcass. “Except here I suspect boys your age wouldn’t understand your calling me aunty.”
Jeffrey nodded, grateful for her tact. She was trying hard to teach him something without making him look foolish. And she was doing everything she could to make him feel at home. Only, when he stared at the huge leg of turkey, which she slid off the fork onto his plate, Jeffrey felt like running.
“Anything wrong?” she asked. “You prefer white meat?”
He shook his head.
“Take some potatoes and carrots. I hope you like it,” she added anxiously. “I’d have made something special, like Swiss steak, only there just wasn’t time.”
“I like potatoes and carrots very much, thank you, aunt.” Jeffrey spooned liberal helpings onto his plate, but kept them separate from the turkey meat.
“Here is gravy,” Aunt Betty said, thrusting a gravy boat at him.
After a moment of hesitation, he took it from her hand. “Is this sauce being made from the bird?” he asked.
She laughed. “Of course, it is! I don’t use canned gravy or any of that frozen stuff. Best turkey you can get in this town. From Ralston’s Grocery. He has the best butcher — why, Mr. Ralston took care of your grandparents.”
Jeffrey was holding the gravy boat above his plate with both hands. “This sauce is from meat?”
She was looking hard at him. “Jeffrey. Something is wrong.”
He handed back the gravy boat. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Then tell me, boy.”
“I am not eating meat.”
Aunt Betty laid down her fork and finished chewing the piece of turkey in her mouth. Then she said, “Are you some kind of a vegetarian, Jeffrey?”
He nodded, looking down at his plate. “I am not taking meat or eggs or food cooked in animal fat, Aunt Betty.”
“Is this your father’s teachin
g?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When did you become a vegetarian?”
“When I was born.”
“Good Lord.”
“I have never taken meat. If I know there is meat or eggs in something, I am not taking.”
Aunt Betty stopped chewing. “You poor child!”
“No, it’s okay,” he said reassuringly.
“But you’re a healthy, growing boy!”
“No, it’s okay. I am used to it, aunt. It’s my habit.”
She leaned toward him. “You do this from some conviction?”
“My parents were not taking meat, so I am not either.”
“It was their belief?”
Jeffrey nodded.
She had lifted her fork with some potatoes on it, but put it down again. “Was their belief religious?”
Jeffrey nodded.
“Boy, are you a Christian?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Warren raised you this way?”
“Yes, ma’am. Both my parents were Hindus.”
“Hindus,” Aunt Betty repeated, having stopped eating altogether. “They worshiped some kind of idol?”
“Yes, ma’am. More than one. They were also praying to Jesus Christ and Allah. Father said the Lord has different forms but one reality.”
“Well, I must say that sounds like Warren — deep,” Aunt Betty observed with a sigh and picked up her fork again. “Jeffrey,” she said after a long silence, “are you a Hindu?”
“I was.”
“Are you now?”
Jeffrey shook his head. “I don’t know what I am being, aunt.”
“I see,” she replied quietly. “You have been through a lot.”
There was another silence, after which she said, “But whatever you are — Hindu or Christian or whatever — you won’t eat meat.”
“It has not been my habit, aunt.”
“All right then, you’ll eat the way you want to. Only I never did cook vegetarian before, so you’ll have to help me. Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am. I thank you.”
“A vegetarian,” his aunt mused. Then giving him a broad smile, she said, “I guess we never get too old to learn new things.”
“Thank you,” he said, digging into the gravyless potatoes. “These potatoes are okay,” he said, eating them. “Very good. Like that.”
“I’m glad you think they’re okay. Here, let me get that off your plate.” She reached over with her fork and speared the huge turkey leg.
“Carrots are good too,” he said with his mouth full.
“Eat all you want.” For a thoughtful moment she studied the turkey leg, now on her own plate, then, with a sigh of decision, cut off a healthy slice and ate it.
*
For the next few days Jeffrey spent most of his time becoming acquainted with the house. It was like a person, like someone in the family he must get to know. He wandered from room to room, getting a feel for the winter sunshine streaming through the windows and falling upon curtains, tables, carpets. He heard the sounds of different clocks ticking. Some rooms smelled musty, since they were not used. Others smelled of fresh linen and disinfectant — like his own and his aunt’s rooms. Aunt Betty spent most of her time cleaning the large house or going downtown on the bus. He went with her a couple of times, once to buy a warm zippered jacket and once to the grocery. He stood in the middle of a supermarket aisle and gawked at the rows of canned goods, at the frozen food sections, at the bewildering variety of boxed products. In his village the shopping was done in tiny stalls or from vegetables spread out on mats on the ground or set in wooden carts. At the bus stand downtown he surveyed the large shops surrounding the square. All the streets were paved. Every street had its own sidewalk for pedestrians, and houses were set back from it. Cars drove everywhere — not small Indian Ambassadors, but long, powerful cars, and trucks big enough to hold two or three Indian varieties. And there was not a single cow or goat strolling down the middle of a road.
But his main interest continued to be the house and the life that had occupied it for the last century. At dinner — his aunt cooked herself a portion of meat to go along with the vegetables, his own helpings liberally spiced with black pepper — Jeffrey listened intently to stories about the Family Moore. His great-grandfather, the stern man domineering the parlor from above the fireplace, had built this house in time spared from the full practice of law. Once, after dinner, Aunt Betty took Jeffrey upstairs, unlocked a room with one of the myriad keys on a long chain, and took him inside. The room was cold, damp, airless. She turned on the light and pointed to a large bed with a multicolored quilt and a wooden canopy over it draped with a white lace curtain.
“Your father was born right in this bed, Jeffrey,” she told him, touching his shoulder. “So was I. Your great-grandparents both died in this bed. So did your grandmother. Your grandfather wanted to go here, but he died in the hospital. I have regretted not getting him back home, where he belonged, where his wife, my mother, went when it was time, where his parents went too.”
Jeffrey looked at her. Aunt Betty stared so hard at the bed that he wondered if she could see people lying in it.
For a flashing moment he saw fire rising from the bed, flames crackling, a figure jerking upright from the quilt.
“You see?” Aunt Betty said with a wan smile. “This house has memories. Now it is yours too, Jeffrey.”
One afternoon she gave him a tour of the unoccupied third floor, where there were four rooms, all of them used for storage now. His great-grandparents had had six children, therefore a reason for building such a large house. Only one of their children, however — Jeffrey’s grandfather — had remained in this town, the rest having wandered across the face of the earth.
“It was the same restless spirit your father had,” observed Aunt Betty.
Jeffrey strolled through each room, and although they were filled with the mustiness of disuse, he did not feel they were impersonal. Presences filled them. He would not have been surprised if someone had abruptly emerged from one of the closed bathrooms or, for that matter, from a closet — and wearing clothes of a century ago. Each room was individualized by a photograph or an object. One of his great-uncles had a collection of guns in a glass cabinet that he had brought home after forty years in Africa. One of his great-aunts had collected pewter plates from all corners of the world. This house was peopled in such a way that Jeffrey did not seem lonely in it with only his aunt for company. Memories drifted here in the halls, in the rooms: soundless cries of other children, feet scurrying down the gleaming corridors that his aunt now kept polished. Not that Jeffrey felt threatened by this house. He simply knew that it had been thoroughly lived in and some of its life had remained within the walls, giving the house a sense of continuous habitation. In a way it was a village of his own creation now, peopled by his unfamiliar ancestors, who were there to bar from his path any feeling of loneliness that might come along.
The weather became abruptly mild on his fourth day in town. Snow, gleaming in the sunlight, began to melt, to draw away from the base of tree and bush, to recede and shrivel upon the ground like white balloons emptied of air. He went outside and strolled in the yard. Within the sunshine he was warm, but standing in the lee of the house in blue shadow, he felt the thrill of cold on his face and hands. He wished that Rama might be here to share the sensation of such cold. Looking up at the weather vane, he saw the icy clouds scud past the large oblong of land occupied by the house. His house. His house? Aunt Betty told him it belonged to him now — and he to it. Just as Rama belonged to a large family house in the village. He could recall now the stab of envy felt whenever Rama or others in that family had spoken of generations past with such pride and feeling. But how, Jeffrey wondered, could you belong to something that was so unfamiliar to you? Yet he did; he belonged to this house in a strange country in the middle of winter, with snow at his feet. Inside the house, working in the kitchen, a woman would tell him ag
ain and again that this was his place, his heritage.
By the end of his first week in town, strolling in the muddy yard now bereft of snow, Jeffrey experienced a new feeling, one that he had never known before: what surrounded him was wholly his and he was its — each tree, bush, hallway, and table had the mark of his life. Even though he had always felt that he belonged to the village, it was clear now that he had always suspected it might not be true: his sandy hair, his blue eyes, his fair skin had denied him a final sense of comfort. Yet did he truly belong here? Yes, he did. And he did not. Because beyond the front gate lay a cement sidewalk leading outward into a world totally strange to him. Until he was familiar with this town, the new feeling would remain in part counterfeit, suspect, no deeper perhaps than his sense of belonging to the village had once been.
*
On his eighth day in America he went to the local school with his aunt. They spoke to the principal, who agreed to let Jeffrey enter the term late on the basis of an examination. That afternoon in the principal’s office, he took a test that lasted an hour. After waiting another hour, his aunt seated gravely beside him, Jeffrey learned that he could join the class for his own age group, although, understandably, he had done poorly in history. His writing was up to the minimum standard and he had scored well in math.
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