A Prologue To Love (9 page)

Caroline Ames loved the autumn of the year. She knew that many people preferred the spring and spoke of it as being hopeful. But she was never so hopeful as in the autumn, and she could not explain it to anyone. She had read somewhere: ‘The seed is the prophecy of the tree’. Seeds came only at this time of the year. When Beth Knowles complained that autumn was only ‘the beginning of those awful winters’, Caroline thought of it as the busiest time of all the months. Under the warm brown silence of the days she sometimes believed she could hear the bustlings of seeds settling down in the earth, the hurrying of nature to prepare plants and flowers for the next year. She watched squirrels scuttling to bury nuts, half of which they would never remember; she thought of the trees that would arise from the buried treasure of life, the first tiny saplings that would appear in the spring. There was a secret excitement in the quiet air, a kind of authoritarian housekeeping filled with competent voices directing how each thing must be prepared, how each ordered. Without autumn, there would be no more springs.

It was early October. There would be a note for her from Tom Sheldon discreetly enclosed in a letter to ‘my dear friend, Mrs. Knowles’. The girl did not understand or even know of this discretion, but it had been arranged by Tom and Beth five years ago. “You never know about Mr. Ames,” Beth had told Tom. “He doesn’t want poor Carrie ever to have any friends. He thinks they’re a waste of time.”

As there was no preparatory school in Lyndon, which was an old and very poor outlying town near Boston and engaged only in industries, mainly textile, in which young children and men and women were employed, Caroline now attended a drab private school in an ancient house occupied by an elderly woman in reduced circumstances. Miss Brownley taught girls, some twenty-five of them ranging from fourteen to seventeen, and it was her positive opinion that young ladies needed to know nothing more than how to walk properly, how to play the piano with
é
lan, how to engage in ‘edifying conversation’, how to greet and how to depart, how to conduct oneself in the drawing room, how to adjust to something she ominously called necessity, how to dance with propriety, how not to dress ‘to attract vulgar attention’, how to modulate one’s voice, how not to offend anyone under any circumstances, and how to write the most elegant copperplate. Her young ladies were drawn from the families of rising factory managers, rather unsuccessful lawyers and doctors practicing in Lyndon, and daughters of ‘old’ families as ‘reduced’ as she was herself. She maintained quite a delicate but firm distinction between the girls of ‘new people’ and those with ‘background’. This made for cliques, backbiting, snubs and coldness, and the cruel rivalries which only women understand. Caroline was aware of cliques and inner circles; she was part of neither and rejected by all. She had accepted this as one of the peculiar aspects of her existence and bore no malice.

She was known to be the daughter of the ambiguous John Ames, who was rarely in Lyndon. He was reputed to be very wealthy. None of the girls believed it. Caroline’s clothing was certainly not that of a rich man’s daughter. Her shabbiness aroused laughter among her schoolmates, who did not fail to point out to her that the elbows of her drooping wool frocks and her meager coats were obviously darned and patched, that her shoes were cheap and that she wore, at fifteen, heavy cotton stockings instead of lisle or even silk. But more than all else, it was less than tactfully called to her attention that she had no beauty, no presence, no grace. None of this depressed Caroline, for so far as she was concerned the girls were only frivolous annoyances. Her realities were her father, Beth Knowles, Tom Sheldon, and the moldering library of the house in Lyndon. These were her life, not tossing curls, not dances, not gay trippings in the narrow halls of the house of her teacher, not fluttering dresses and dainty slippers, not fashion and style, not rings and bracelets, not secrets whispered in class and the exchange of notes. Above all, not carriages bringing the other girls to school. She walked the four miles to Miss Brownley’s house and walked them home, and the weather was of no physical concern to her. Walking was an adventure. The girls declared she skulked and was ashamed of her wretched state and pretended to pity her.

Caroline believed herself ugly and was not disturbed by it. Tom Sheldon liked her. He did more than like her; he loved her. He was nearly eighteen now, and he wrote her of ‘the day when we’ll be married’. He never failed to write of her beautiful eyes. ‘A lady on one of the canal ships had a big topaz ring on her finger, and it was just like your eyes, Carrie, all full of brown light and twinkles. I sure wanted to see you again right away when I saw that ring.’ And Beth had told her roundly, “If men married only pretty and beautiful girls, the world wouldn’t have many people in it, believe me! You have to have something else, and I call it spirit.”

Caroline was not sure what spirit was. Was it what poor old dead Kate had called character? Was it intelligence? The girls at school, whom she hardly noticed, possessed neither of these things. Caroline often wondered if she did, and she would reread all of Tom’s letters, looking for enlightenment. Tom loved her, though she was stocky and clumsy and could never talk very well and there was no curl in the long hair as black and fine as straight silk and her clothes were coarse and mended. Therefore, she must have ‘spirit’. She was surprised to find that she was not entirely satisfied. Her Aunt Cynthia had recently adopted a little girl, and Melinda was very beautiful, almost as beautiful as Cynthia, for all she had been taken from an orphanage and had no family. Melinda was now four, a grave little girl who was nearly as silent as Caroline. But sometimes she would laugh, and the laugh tinkled and her gray eyes shone.

The Ames house in Lyndon stood on five acres of wooded land, wild and unkempt, for old Jim would do only sporadic gardening. He did keep an area about the house free of tall grass and fallen branches, but he never bothered with flowers; the family was away at the seashore from early June to the first of October. As he never planted seed, obstinately insisting that was Nature’s job, the cleared grass was coarse, heavy, and full of pigweed with thick branching leaves. He took care of the rig and the elderly horse and used it only when Beth went on shopping errands or he was to meet ‘the master’ at the station. Occasionally, with languor, he would wash windows grown dull with summer dust and rain or winter sleet, leaving, as Beth said irascibly, a worse smudge than before. But he was an old man; he helped Beth inside the house and complained constantly about the amount of wood she used in the ancient black iron stove and in the living-room fireplace. He liked the stable best, where he could talk to the horse and congratulate him that he was used so seldom and needed very little currying. Then he would swipe at the old rig with a dirty cloth, sit down in a rocking chair, and sleep. He disliked everyone except Caroline, whom he would entertain with hoary but fascinating stories. He was part Negro; his stories often had the richness of rain forests dripping in green dusk under a hot equatorial sun or the mystery of those who lived half of their conscious lives in a state of awed wonder. He had been a slave.

Jim called the Ames house a mansion, which it was not and which it had never been. It was not in a good section of town; beyond the wooden fence, which was the only article Jim kept in perfect order and strength, stood shacks, working people’s little homes, full of children and noise and fury and drunken shouts on Saturday nights, and gloomy factories constantly increasing. But the house lay in a kind of somber enchantment of its own among its old and rotting trees, hidden from the sight and sound of neighbors. It had been built long ago, and no one knew who had been its original owner. Of dull red brick overgrown with glossy green ivy, it stood tall and thin, three stories high, with a widow’s walk on the top story, though the house was far from the sea. It had long windows as thin as splinters, and brown shutters and brown doors, all moldering. A path led from the locked gate and served as both walk and drive and was narrow and dusty and without gravel or stone, the earth hard-packed in summer and greasy with sliding brown mud in the winter. Once Jim had caught three little boys climbing the cronelike apple trees in the autumn and devouring the wormy fruit. They had evidently bolted over the high gate with its sharp points. He drove them off savagely and reinspected the gate and tested its bolts. Sometimes John Ames wondered acridly at this. A slave, of all people, should detest both fences and gates after he was free.

Caroline pushed open the well-oiled iron gate, for it was always unlocked for her near the time of her return from school. Carefully she locked it behind her. She liked to walk alone to the house, especially on warm brown-and-golden autumn days like this. It was always damp under the arching trees, now yellow, ocher, and umbrous, with a flare now and again of some scarlet maple, like the beginning of a conflagration in this moldy and silent place. Caroline could smell the poignant and atavistic heaps of rotting leaves, the primeval earth sweating in its darkness, the sharp breath of an occasional spruce. Sometimes she would sit on a flat stone and watch squirrels and birds, or catch the flash of a skunk’s tail or the white fluff of a rabbit or the blur of a mouse rushing from one pile of leaves to another. It was so quiet here; the rumble of factories in the distance only increased the stillness, like thunder over a closed landscape.

Sitting on the stone today, Caroline sighed and smiled a little. A soft wind, heavy with the pungent scent of decay and loneliness, brushed her face; her hands, lying on her knees, were dappled thinly by the leaves remaining on the trees which arched over her. Her solid feet rested on the dark and oily earth. She let herself luxuriate in the thought of the letter waiting for her in the house. Though she could not as yet see the house, she could smell the burning of wood.

Poor Beth; it was warm today, but Beth, who was so fearful of the coming winter, had defiantly started fires. “You never know when the weather will change,” she would say with a challenge in her blue eyes. She was approaching fifty; her crisp and curling hair was almost gray, and, though plump, she shivered in a cool wind. Old Kate was dead, and Beth knew that only she would stay in this lonely and sifting house with all the dull and inexplicable echoes in the narrow halls, the tall and half-empty rooms and bedrooms, the brick-walled and brick-floored kitchen, the black iron fireplaces, the cracked and warped doors, the primitive facilities, the ceilings broken and yellowed, the walls papered with paper so old that the original patterns had gone, leaving only spidery tracings and no color except what age had given it, the floors carpeted with rugs that no amount of sweeping would clean, and all of the carpeting of a dim brownish tint as rough to a bare foot as gravel. So Beth had her fires sulkily, even when John Ames was at home, which was increasingly at longer intervals. She had even moved some of the furniture from several of the eight uninhabited bedrooms (Jim, by choice, slept in the loft in the barn) into the rooms used by Caroline and herself, and had shaken her head over chairs slippery with age and worn of fabric, and beds with towering carved headboards that reached to the ceilings. With Jim’s grumbling help she had tugged at marble-topped tables to move them into the two bedrooms and had looked with discouragement at stone cracked and filled with ancient dirt. But there were no ornaments anywhere. Eventually, out of her own money, Beth had bought two cheap green vases ‘in town’, one for herself and one for Caroline’s room, and she kept them filled with cattails, which she gilded or painted, or wild spring or autumn flowers she found on the land. When all but the cattails, which Caroline loathed, failed, Beth would make artificial flowers of coarse colored paper and dip them in paraffin to last through the dark winter. She thought it made matters cozy; Caroline would look at them and shudder, but she never told Beth, who had gone to such trouble for her.

Beth had bullied John Ames into permitting her to buy clean cheap muslin for her bedroom windows and Caroline’s. These she had tinted pink, which Caroline also loathed. But all of the other windows were hung with decaying brown velveteen draperies, dejected and dusty and tattered. Finally Beth stopped her desperate work of mending them; let them rot, she would say grimly, then
he’ll
notice. But John Ames apparently did not notice, and no guests ever came to make invidious remarks. The house stood in its ugh’ decay, its breathless isolation, its silence, its utter abandonment. It was in this horrible place, Beth would reflect, that the young Ann Ames had died, far from family and friends, far from the beautiful house in which she had been born and in which she had lived for twenty years. How could she have endured it? Beth would ask herself.

Beth could not understand Caroline’s love for the house and its snarled acres, and Caroline, who could never express herself well, could not tell her only confidante what this silent isolation meant to her and what relief and surcease there were among the desolate trees. For here, where no one came but her dreams and the remembrances of Jim’s eerie stories, she could be free, no longer stiff with awkwardness as she was in school, no longer frightened as she was on the streets of Lyndon. Here she could think of herself as beautiful and beloved, surrounded by creatures as shy as herself.

“It’s bad for a young girl to have no friends,” Beth would say crossly. Caroline would not reply but would touch Beth’s plump arm quickly. She could not tell Beth that she had multitudes of companions in the small woods and endless multitudes of dreams.

After a while Caroline left the stone and absently brushed some dried fragments of leaves from her coarse brown woolen frock and went toward the house on the winding and overgrown path. Dust followed her in a golden cloud; she looked back at it with delight. A blue jay, like an azure arrow, flashed across her way and perched on a tree limb and squawked at her. She nodded and spoke to him as to an old friend, and he yawned and began to groom himself, unafraid of this human creature who never shouted or threatened. Caroline stopped to look; the red of the maple leaves behind that quiveringly alive blue being enchanted her. He was bluer than the autumn sky shining through the leaves. He and his companions would remain here during the winter, a cerulean visitation flitting above the incandescent snow, calling attention to a rare fox with an outcry that strangely increased the cold fire of the immaculate day.