Damon Knight - Orbit 15

Whenever Aunt Claudia came up, it was like an apparition. One minute pillows would be flying, someone would be crying, someone else trying to read with a flashlight, several of the boys playing cards with another flashlight, some of the girls huddled together whispering what had to be delicious secrets, judging by the way they blushed and looked desperate if an adult came upon them suddenly, and then the door would snap open, the light would fall on the disorder, and she would be standing there. Aunt Claudia was very tall and thin, her nose was too big and she was tanned to a permanent old-leather color. She would stand there, immobile and terrible, and the children would creep back into bed without a sound. She would not move until everyone was back where he or she belonged, then she would close the door soundlessly. The silence would drag on and on. The ones nearest the door would hold their breath, trying to hear breathing on the other side. Eventually someone would become brave enough to open the door a crack, and if she was truly gone, the party would resume.

The smells of holidays were fixed in David’s memory. All the usual smells: fruitcakes and turkeys, the vinegar that went in the egg dyes, the greenery, and the thick, creamy smoke of bayberry candles. But what he remembered most vividly was the Fourth of July smell of gunpowder that permeated their hair, their clothes, that lasted on their hands for days and days. Their hands would be stained purple-black from berry picking, and the color and smell were one of the indelible images of his childhood. Mixed in with it was the smell of sulfur that was dusted on them liberally to confound the chiggers.

If it hadn’t been for Celia, his childhood would have been perfect. Celia was his cousin, his mother’s sister’s daughter. She was one year younger than David and by far the prettiest of all his cousins. When they were very young they had promised to marry one day, and when they grew older and it was made abundantly clear that no cousins might ever marry in that family, they had become implacable enemies. He didn’t know how they had been told. He was certain that no one ever put it in words, but they knew. When they could not avoid each other after that, they fought. She pushed him out of the hayloft and broke his arm when he was fifteen, and when he was sixteen they wrestled from the back door of the Wiston farmhouse to the fence fifty or sixty yards away. They tore the clothes off each other and he was bleeding from her fingernails down his back, she from scraping her shoulder on a rock. Then somehow in their rolling and squirming frenzy, his cheek came down on her uncovered chest, and he stopped fighting. He suddenly became a melting, sobbing, incoherent idiot and she hit him on the head with a rock and ended the fight.

Up to that point the battle had been in almost total silence, broken only by gasps for breath and whispered language that would have shocked their parents. But when she hit him and he went limp, not unconscious, but dazed, uncaring, inert, she screamed, abandoning herself to anguish and terror. The family tumbled from the house as if they had been shaken out, and their first thought must have been that he had raped her. His father hustled him to the barn, presumably for a thrashing. But in the barn, his father, belt in hand, looked at him with an expression that was furious and strangely sympathetic. He didn’t touch David, and only after he had turned and left did David realize that tears were still running down his face.

In the family there were farmers, a few lawyers, two doctors, insurance brokers and bankers and millers, hardware merchandisers, other shopkeepers. David’s father owned a large department store that catered to the upper-middle-class clientele of the valley. The valley was rich. David always supposed that the family, except for a few ne’er-do-wells, was rather wealthy. Of all his relatives his favorite was his father’s brother Walt. Dr. Walt, they all called him. He played with the children and taught them grown-up things, like where to hit if you really meant it, where not to hit in a friendly scrap. He seemed to know when to stop treating them as children long before anyone else in the family did. Dr. Walt was the reason David had decided very early to become a scientist.

David was seventeen when he went to Harvard. His birthday was in September and he didn’t go home for it. When he did return at Thanksgiving and the clan had gathered, Grandfather Sumner poured the ritual before-dinner martinis and handed one to him. And Uncle Warner said to him, “What do you think we should do about Bobbie?”

He had arrived at that mysterious crossing that is never delineated clearly enough to be seen in advance. He sipped his martini, not liking it particularly, and knew that childhood had ended, and he felt a profound sadness and loneliness.

The Christmas that David was twenty-three seemed out of focus. The scenario was the same, the attic full of children, the food smells, the powdering of snow, none of that had changed, but he was seeing it from a new position and it was not the wonderland it had been, and he knew with regret that the enchantment had vanished and could never be recaptured. When his parents went home he stayed on at the Wiston farm for a day or two, waiting for Celia. She had missed the Christmas Day celebration, getting ready for her coming trip to Brazil, but she would be there, her mother had assured Grandmother Wiston, and David was waiting for her, not happily, not with any expectation of reward, but with a fury that grew and caused him to stalk the old house like a boy being punished for another’s sin.

When she came home and he saw her standing with her mother and her grandmother, his anger melted. It was like seeing Celia in a time distortion, as she was and would be or had been. Her pale hair would not change much, but her bones would become more prominent, and the almost-emptiness of her face would have written on it a message of concern, of love, of giving, of being decisively herself, of a strength unsuspected in her frail body. Grandmother Wiston was a beautiful old lady, he thought in wonder, amazed that he never had seen her beauty before. Celia’s mother was more beautiful than the girl. And he saw the resemblance to his own mother in the trio. Wordlessly, defeated, he turned and went to the rear of the house and put on one of his grandfather’s heavy jackets because he didn’t want to see her at all now, and his own outdoor clothing was in the front hall closet too near where she was still standing.

He walked a long time in the frosty afternoon, seeing very little, and shaking himself from time to time when he realized that the cold was entering his shoes or making his ears numb. And he found that he was climbing the slope to the antique forest where his grandfather had taken him once, a long time ago. He climbed and became warmer, and at dusk he was under the branches of the tiers of trees that had been there since the beginning of time. They or others that were just like them. Forever wailing for the day when they would reclaim the land and cover the continent once more. Here were the relicts his grandfather had brought him to see. Here was a silverbell grown to the stature of a large tree, while down the slopes, in the lower reaches, it remained always a shrub. Here the white basswood grew alongside the hemlock and the bitternut hickory, and the beeches and sweet buckeyes locked arms.

“David!” He stopped and listened, certain he had imagined it, but the call came again. “David, are you up here?”

He turned then and saw Celia among the massive tree trunks. Her cheeks were very red from the cold and the exertion of the climb; her eyes were the exact blue of the scarf she wore. She stopped six feet from him and started to speak again, but didn’t. Instead she drew off a glove and touched the smooth trunk of a beech. “Grandfather Wiston brought me up here, too, when I was twelve. It was very important to him that we understand this place.”