Walking home from school the next day, worrying about telling, worrying about the English exam on Friday and about the ink stain on her skirt, she smelled something funny. Ever since she was little she didn’t like going past that big old tree in front of the grocery store, because it had a knob on it that looked for all the world like somebody hiding, waiting to jump out and grab her. This time when she hurried past it, there was an odour, vaguely bitter, wrongly sweet, and then a man was walking beside her.
Libby did her best to edge away. The man said in a pleasant voice, ‘I won’t hurt you, Libby,’ which made her even more afraid.
‘How do you know my name?’
He was nicely dressed. His hands were in his pockets. That bittersweet smell seemed to be coming from him, although it was so faint she couldn’t be sure. ‘You know,’ he said in a tone so friendly it was threatening, ‘if you tell your father what you’ve been doing with Uncle Clyde you’ll cause a great deal of trouble in the family. Your father is suffering already because of your mother’s death.’
Tears hurt Libby’s throat at the mention of her mother. Confused, she found herself puzzling over how this stranger knew about that, rather than, she realized later, the greater mystery of how he could know about Uncle Clyde and that she’d decided to tell. Maybe he was a family friend. Maybe he’d been at the funeral. She thought his voice did sound familiar.
‘Your father cries at night.’ From the angle of his voice he might have been looking gently down at her, although she could hardly see him beside her. ‘Did you know that, Libby?’ The thought of Papa’s sorrow was worse than her own. ‘If you tell him, you will only give him more to cry about.’
Libby didn’t know what to think. She stayed silent.
‘You don’t have to say anything. You’re almost grown up now. Uncle Clyde won’t bother you any more. He doesn’t like grown-up women.’
‘My sisters—’
‘Helen can take care of herself. She’s growing up, too. And you don’t know he’ll start with Maureen. You don’t know that.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘You’re a good girl, Libby. I trust you to do the right thing.’
He was gone, the after-image of too-bright light fading away, and Libby was left to ponder, fist to her throat, whether what he’d said was wholly or partially true or not true at all.
* * * *
Aunt Maureen didn’t seem especially aware of the procession below them. ‘Can you imagine?’ Her voice was crisp and controlled; Cecelia had never heard it otherwise. But she was hugging herself. ‘You’d think Libby had lived on this earth an entire lifetime and never made a difference to anybody.’
‘She made a difference to Frances,’ Cecelia protested. A cousin fully a generation older, Aunt Libby’s only child, Frances had died a long time ago, Cecelia thought from complications of morbid obesity. Cecelia had hardly known her; it was difficult to comprehend what connection there’d ever been between them, other than the blood-arch, mostly abstract, of their mothers’ sisterhood. ‘Anyway, do you think that’s possible? Not to make a difference to anybody?’
Aunt Maureen shot her a look. Cecelia didn’t want to seem rude, but she did want to understand what Aunt Maureen was saying. Such questions - whether or not people made a difference as they passed through this world; how to tell whether that was so - had lately come to be of considerable importance to her.
Twenty-five years old that autumn, she was feeling less and less substantial. She and Ray, whom she supposed she would marry when he came home from the war, had seemed scarcely to touch even when they were seeing each other every Saturday night, and her weekly letters to him now might have been written to anyone; if he did not come home, perish the thought, she would mourn what might have been between them more than what was, and she feared she might live to mourn that anyway. Her job with the insurance company, though she was skilled at it, sustained her in no way other than financial. No one with whom she came into contact in the course of a day was likely to remember her once their specific business with each other was done, nor would she remember them. Certainly, if she were to die today, none of them would come to her funeral.
Aunt Maureen, gazing off over the gilt vista through which Cecelia was still watching the funeral procession move like a model train through a toy landscape, proceeded deliberately. At this point, Cecelia dimly understood that the story was in some way hers, too, if only because she was here, in this place and time, with this purposeful woman who had something to tell her.
The story became more and more hers, too, because it wasn’t given to her all of a piece. She had to work for it, put forth something of herself in order to receive it; she could not simply listen passively. As parts of the tale emerged, tales unto themselves, Cecelia was required to interpret, to fill in spaces, to arrange and rearrange incidents and the interstices among incidents so they made sense and then, given more, made sense again.
Later, she would not be sure what Aunt Maureen had actually told her or in what order, what context. Now and then throughout her long life, images and information from that day would present themselves to her - the light’s particular glint; the yearning (and it was to be the last of it, really) for Aunt Maureen to tell her what she knew, give her what she had, love her; the chill of unease as imagination played over what might be underground in this place, what the embedded grave markers might be taken to signify. Each time these things would seem to mean something slightly different, something cumulative or stripped down or newly nuanced.
On the train ride home, for instance, she would puzzle over the relative position of the embroidered pink sweater in her own life, the movement of it and the truncation of movement as its wearer repeatedly pulled it snug. The realization would descend on her, stopping her breath for a moment, that it must not have been Helen she remembered doing that but Libby.
* * * *
William Bradley was earnest, decent, rather dull-witted. He loved her, he insisted gamely; he could love her. Libby did not believe that, though it was kind of him to say so, and it would not have persuaded her if she had. ‘I can’t marry you,’ she said to him. ‘I’m crazy. Everybody knows that. Don’t you know that?’
‘I have a duty to our child.’ The words were resolute, but clearly he was appalled to be saying ‘our’ to her about anything, let alone a child, and already grateful that he would not be bound to say it much longer.
‘I’ll do what’s right,’ Libby promised. ‘Send money.’
‘Kill the child.’
It was not, of course, William Bradley who suggested such a thing. There was an actual voice but no visible source for it, and, more than hearing it, Libby felt the voice in her hollow bones. There was a bittersweet fragrance, too, that clung to the skin between the bones of her fingers as they stretched around the baby’s tiny neck. She clenched her fists in refusal. ‘No.’
‘What sort of life will this child have?’ She had to admit it was a reasonable question. ‘You sent young Mr Bradley away. You’re crazy. You said so yourself. You barely managed to raise Frances, and look at her.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘It would be easier on everybody. On you, too.’
‘No.’ Libby took a deep, steadying, bittersweet breath, and freed her hands from her baby’s throat to push his voice and his insinuating odour away.
* * * *
On that melancholy golden October afternoon in 1942 - soon to be grey and doleful November, another season altogether - Aunt Maureen asserted, as though satisfied that she’d worked it all out in her head, that Frances had died soon after Libby because she hadn’t known how to live without her mother. ‘A grown woman, you’d have thought she was an orphan,’ which prompted Cecelia to ask about Frances’s father. Who was he? What had happened to him? It amazed her that she’d apparently never wondered about him before; she thought that could not be true, but she had no memory either of her own curiosity in this regard or of any answers forthcoming or withheld.
It also caused
her to think about her own father, but her thoughts, having nothing much to snag on to, didn’t stay long with him. Cecelia believed her relationship with her father to be uncomplicated. Easily, they loved each other. She supposed they could be considered neither close nor distant. He mourned her mother now, as did she, but simply, cleanly.
‘I don’t know,’ Aunt Maureen said evenly. ‘As far as I could ever tell, almost nobody in the family knew who Frances’s father was. Including Frances. Papa didn’t know.’
The funeral procession below them gave the strong overall impression of coming closer, while its component parts - dark figures except for one swatch of pink; dark motion - appeared no bigger or clearer than ever. Distracted by this contradictory perspective, Cecelia at first merely nodded in response to the last statement. Then, suddenly disoriented among the tangles of the family tree, she chanced a quick look at her aunt. Aunt Maureen was watching her, and, when Cecelia’s glance swung her way, she nodded emphatically.
‘But I believe it was Uncle Clyde. Our father’s brother. I believe he was Frances’s father. Libby and Helen always behaved strangely when his name came up, and he never came to our house, although I heard he used to live there. Libby was fourteen when Frances was born.’
Cecelia pulled her gaze away, not wanting to stare. For a while when she was the age Aunt Maureen was now, she would find herself flashing back to this moment, this secret told first and smallest among many, as a point at which her life had veered off one course and on to another. Eventually, though, she would cease thinking of life in terms of courses and veerings at all.
‘Our mother had died giving birth to me.’ Self-consciously, Cecelia waited for some sort of signal as to what her reaction ought to be. This she’d known already, presumably from her mother, although she remembered no time or place she’d been told, no specific conversation, no gift or complaint or instructive intent personally to her.
It was the first time, though, that Aunt Maureen, the infant in question, had spoken of it to her, and she fretted that she should offer reassurance or condolence. There was no hint of a request for such a thing; she’d not have guessed at any particular emotional underlay at all if Aunt Maureen hadn’t added, in the same flat declarative tone, ‘It wasn’t uncommon in those days, you know, for women to die in childbirth.’
‘I know,’ Cecelia breathed.
Aunt Maureen nodded, allowed her sweater to fall loose, then pulled it around her again. ‘Libby raised us both. Frances and me. We grew up more like sisters than aunt and niece. Dad worked a lot to support us and most of the rest of his time he spent looking for a suitable stepmother, which he never found. Helen went off and had adventures. And misadventures.’ Aunt Maureen gave a quick smile, then repeated, ‘Libby raised us.’
‘My mother never talked much about her past,’ Cecelia ventured. It was a sad thing to admit. ‘She almost never told me stories.’
‘I’ll tell you.’
There was something ominous about the pledge. Hastily, Cecelia asked, ‘Was Aunt Libby a good mother?’ It was, truly, something she wanted to know, but the fact that it was also a diversionary tactic made her feel dishonest. Perhaps, then, self-justification was the source of her upsurge of interest in Aunt Maureen’s childhood. ‘What was it like,’ she asked, too eagerly, ‘growing up with your sister for a mother and your cousin for a sister and your father never home? Was it confusing? Was it awful?’
‘Libby,’ said Aunt Maureen grimly, ‘did the best she could. She could have said no.’
In the silence that followed, the funeral ascended the hill, though the perspective was still skewed. The hearse in the lead had its headlights on. Two figures, the one in pink and one of the handful of dark-dressed ones, had broken away from the formal procession leaving it paltry indeed, and, as Aunt Maureen resumed talking, Cecelia watched them against the mown gold and brown cemetery grass. Shadows fell everywhere, and in the thin low light theirs were indistinguishable. They seemed, she saw with something like shock, to be cavorting, and they were holding hands.
* * * *
Libby said, ‘Papa,’ and couldn’t believe what she was about to do. How could she tell him? How could she speak of such things to her father?
Maybe she would not. Maybe she didn’t have to. Almost, she looked away and pretended she hadn’t spoken. Most likely, her father wouldn’t have pressed, wouldn’t have even noticed or would have been glad for one less thing to worry about.
But she thought of Helen, and her fists clenched in her lap. She thought of Maureen, who wouldn’t even remember their mother; Maureen, whom Mama had said to take care of. She made herself say again, ‘Papa. I have to talk to you.’
He was on his way out, not an unusual circumstance. He had on his big grey coat and was fitting his grey hat over his bald spot, rolling the rim just so, the tiny maroon feather slightly off to the right. He glanced down at her. ‘Not now, Libby. I’m late.’
‘When? I have to talk to you.’
‘Later.’
Later, then, very late, she was waiting for him when he came home. She’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table. She woke up, abruptly and fully, at the click of the door and his quiet despairing sigh before he came in and saw her there. ‘Papa. Please. I have to tell you something.’
When he took off his hat, his head was so bare she had to look away. When he took off his coat, she saw that his shoulders were shaking. ‘I’m exhausted, Libby. Not tonight.’
He was already out of the room, and she was hearing his dogged, hasty footsteps rounding the corner of the living room towards the stairs, when she said, just loud enough for him to hear if he would, ‘Uncle Clyde touches me.’ The footsteps didn’t stop immediately, but they did stop. ‘He touches Helen, too. Next he’ll start on Maureen, because we’ll be too old.’
Her father came back, a large sad man, and Libby was so sorry and ashamed, but her little sister Maureen hadn’t done anything wrong, had she? If Uncle Clyde started on her, would it be her fault? It would be Libby’s fault if she didn’t tell.
Her sad father with his sad footsteps and his uncovered head came back into the kitchen, and Libby could hardly breathe in the face of his sadness, to which she was adding. He pulled out the chair opposite her, scraping its two back legs across the old wooden floor, and heavily lowered himself into it. She locked her gaze on him and said what she had to say, every dirty word.
* * * *
Cecelia took a breath and said, although she knew Aunt Maureen had no need of permission or encouragement, ‘I know only a handful of things about our family’s history. I’d like to know more.’
Later, at various times in her life when secrets from the past seemed especially vital or especially irrelevant to her, she would consider with a certain wonderment what she had thus invited in. Sometimes almost idly, occasionally with an urgency that was utterly impractical, she would wonder what difference it might have made in the lives of her children -particularly of Virginia, who would seem to have the most to gain and to lose - if she hadn’t invited Aunt Maureen to tell her this story, or if she’d pressed for more.
Aunt Maureen began by fixing things in place: ‘The year was 1916.’ For the same reason, Cecelia’s attention was momentarily occupied by the fact that she herself would be born the next year. Contemplating time before her birth or after her death always evoked in her a disquieting sense of continuity and insignificance, of being one small bead on an infinitely long and infinitely splitting string. She felt much the same way when she looked up at stars on a clear night, or lay flat in a mountain meadow, or on the one occasion when, on vacation with her parents in Maine, she’d walked along an ocean beach. It was somehow the same feeling, too, that made her back away from cliff rims - for fear not of falling but of jumping.
Aunt Maureen had gone on, oblivious to or, more likely, contemptuous of Cecelia’s momentary inattention. ‘Libby had another child. I was at the Normal, away from home for the first time, and no one had told me of her condition
for fear of disturbing my studies, I suppose, or out of shame, or for some other reason. She and the baby came on the bus. I didn’t know she was coming. I understood right away what she wanted.’
For a moment or two, Cecelia puzzled as if over a riddle. Then she shook her head and asked, as she knew she was intended to do, ‘What did she want?’
‘Why,’ said Aunt Maureen, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, ‘she thought I should just give up everything and raise her child. I was young. Your Uncle Everett and I were already engaged. Here she was, a middle-aged woman alone with a grown child, and not well. She never came right out and asked, and I never came right out and refused, but we both understood what was going on between us. For ever after, it was between us.’
The wind had picked up. The navy blue sweater was obviously providing as much warmtb as it was going to, and Aunt Maureen’s hands were hidden under her upper arms. Cecelia’s cheeks, stiff from the cold, were wet already from the wet wind, although rain wasn’t actually falling yet. The mass of clouds descending overhead like a lid didn’t yet cover the entire sky, and the gold light skimming in under their edges and through their gradually closing fissures glinted like ore in granite.
The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05] Page 9