The Eleventh Year (3 page)

C
incinnati was
a city of German immigrants, mostly Catholic. The Reverend Stewart felt them around him all the time.
His
people were those who had come from the farms, west, in the flatlands. Thin, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a pronounced Adam's apple, John Stewart always sensed his own difference, his own “foreignness” in this city where he had come as a young man, to help civilize it and render it more godly. He had been born and reared in Scotland, and had left when the spirit had moved him, when he'd thought it was time to leave his village and spread the gospel. His father, a tanner, had laughed at him, but John had come nevertheless, with his small earnings and his minister's education. He had come to New York and left at once, horrified: a city in which to drown, in which to give into perdition! And so he had arrived in Cincinnati. But still, he did not like it. He had stayed because he'd felt needed, and because of Margaret, the milliner's daughter, plump and friendly and shy, whom he had met at church and married not long after. He'd married her to stave off loneliness and to make roots. She'd kept the loneliness away but had not succeeded in turning the angular Scotsman into a regular American Midwesterner. She'd given up trying, but she liked her life, liked her city. She also liked her husband but could not understand him. A rare bird….

John Stewart liked to read. The house smelled of beeswax, of lemon oil, and his study smelled of old books, even of the old people who came there to see him. They always brought their own scent of unrinsed soap, of dry saliva. Margaret accepted their intrusion into her neat parlor because she had no choice: John was as he was, he was a quiet philosopher, and the old people were drawn to him because he seemed more mature than his years. He'd been that way as a young man too: twenty-three going on fifty!

Margaret spoke to her neighbors and baked cakes and helped set up the Women's Auxiliary at the church. She didn't believe in this nonsense of the suffragettes. It was better to leave the thinking, the serious ponderings of state, to the menfolk. But it was lonely sometimes when John was in the study, writing his sermons, and she was the only one in the parlor, except for the girl, Emma, who came in two hours a day to help with the cleaning. John had found her: a German Catholic, if you please! But he'd given her the job in spite of this, because she'd needed it, he'd said. Needed it for that child of hers, the one who had no father who sometimes hung around the kitchen. Three years old and still a mess….

It wasn't that way with her own daughter, Jamie. Jamie Lynne, clean and well scrubbed, plump and rosy like her mother. Jamie Lynne, named for Margaret's parents, the Jamisons. She was a joy, but too quiet, like her father. One could learn to overcome timidity, as she herself had; one could never overcome innate quietness. It was in the disposition.

But Jamie befuddled her mother: She read. She found her father's old, gilt-edged Bible in his study. She read of Isaac and Jacob, of Ruth and Esther. What marvelous stories! She didn't like Sundays in the gloomy old church, musty and brown. She liked to walk in the park, or to climb in and out of ditches near the university. Some day, she thought, she would see what really went on in a university. She was so small and didn't understand. But as she grew, the fascination remained. Sundays were like boiled cabbage: One had to swallow them. Papa behind the pulpit, describing things that only she, Jamie, could understand. For the farmers he was a saintly man, because he was good, in his reserved, unsmiling way, helping where he could. But they did not know, nor did they care, that he was also a poet. Jamie cared. She cared about the cadences of Papa's phrases, about his choice of images. One day he told the people that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and she thought that was wonderful. Later he showed her where it had been written in the Bible. The Bible was beautiful, as beautiful as the church itself, with its rancid smells, was an eyesore and a depressant. Why had Papa become a minister? He should have written poetry, like Wordsworth, about the scenery and feelings and ideas. In her own little room, before going to have her hair washed and braided, Jamie sometimes wrote lines of images that came to her in the afternoon: “golden mirror of the sun,” “small slender leaves of fall,” “red and green cabbage like the rose and its leaf.” Simple things. She was only ten or twelve then. Papa was over forty and should have done better. His farmers wouldn't have missed him. Half of them didn't even understand his accent!

She was sent to public school, with Emma's son, Willy. Willy was a year and a half older than Jamie and, really, a lot prettier. Nobody knew anything about Willy's father; Emma had always pursed her lips proudly and refused to reveal a single thing. The church women wondered. He must have been part Irish, with his dark hair and blue eyes and his white skin. Not at all German, like Emma. Willy was skinny and she, Jamie, was always round. Her eyes were blue too, but of a different shade. His reminded her of the depths of the ocean and hers, of a spring sky. They went to school hand in hand, the quiet little girl with her neat brown braids and the tallish, skinny boy with his black curls. He spoke all the time, the words tumbling out rapidly. Maybe he spoke so much because in the house it was gloomy and his mother felt embarrassed; or maybe it was because
her
mother, Margaret, never paid him the slightest attention and treated him as if he'd been an object to be stepped over on the carpet.

Jamie listened to Willy. He talked to her of his dreams, of his crazy ideas. He wanted to go to China and kill dragons. He wanted to go up in the sky in those funny air balloons. He would skip and jump and his dark eyes would sparkle, and small points of scarlet would rise to his high cheekbones—and Jamie, her face amazed, would look up at him, bewitched. How unlike anyone she knew Willy was! He was not like her quiet, bookish father; he was not like his own illiterate, hard-pressed mother; and he certainly was the opposite of Mama, her mama, who took her ideas from readers' suggestions in the brightly illustrated
Good Housekeeping
magazine. He was quick and voluble and very sensitive. Jamie could feel his sensitivity as though it were an integral part of her own: How he bristled when people looked oddly at him, because he had no father. How he almost never smiled, except when they were alone. Sometimes, as they grew into their early teens, she would gently tease him and call him Heathcliff.

Margaret and Emma did not approve of their being friends. Margaret did not approve of him at all—of his existence. Emma worked for other families besides the Stewarts, and surely, some must have paid her better wages. Sometimes Jamie would hear Willy repeating, in angry German, to his mother that she had no pride, remaining where she wasn't respected. Jamie didn't speak much German, but one could not help but understand a good bit of the language, growing up in Cincinnati. Emma would do that special thing with her lips, tightening them, and toss her head at her son and reply: “But the reverend is a good man. The reverend needs me as I once needed work, and he gave it to me.” But she too felt uncomfortable that her son spent his free time with Jamie Lynne.

When she was fourteen and Willy nearly sixteen, Jamie decided that she held the key to the enigma: Willy must be her own brother. John, her strict, austere father, must have “done something” with Emma before he'd married Mama. The notion set her mind and heart on fire: how absolutely romantic, and how dramatic for her and Willy! Brother and sister, with only the silent John and the proud Emma as witnesses. Brother and sister, growing up as daughter of the master and son of the housemaid. It would explain the poetry of Willy's thinking and the hostility between their mothers. It would explain her own mother's disdain and literal ignoring of Willy. It would explain why Emma stubbornly remained their servant. How wonderful! She told Willy, her face aglow and her wide-set eyes a sky of shimmering stars. She did not anticipate his reaction.

They had been walking near the university, where the city merged into the hills. Suddenly he stopped, facing her, his young body taut from head to toe. She knew then that she had made a terrible mistake, telling him. He frightened her. “Don't you understand anything?” he merely said, a spiteful statement, not a question. She shook her head: No, she really didn't understand, not this, not this look of such rage and compressed hatred. He
hated
her!

Very quietly, his voice shaking, he said, not looking at her: “If it's what you think, then he simply used my mother and kept her around for years to torture her, to humiliate her. A married man can fall in love with another woman. But if a free man allows a child of his to be born without claiming it and then marries someone else, that's criminal, Jamie. It's an
insult!
My mother isn't a piece of used clothing that can simply be put away when the fashion passes! No man can exchange her so casually—especially not for someone like Miss Margaret, who thinks she's better than we are because she was born here!”

A deep flush passed over Jamie, and her eyes filled with tears. “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “And my papa isn't that way either. I was wrong.”

Willy shrugged. He chewed on his lower lip, looked over the curve of the hills at the city below. “It's all right. You're just a girl.” And then he allowed his restless eyes to come to her, and she could not look away. “A girl. It's okay, Jamie.”

“I just so wished for you to be my brother.”

“I know. But it will never be. Nothing good will ever come to me, Jamie. I'm a bastard. That's an ugly word—they don't allow it in your father's church. As for me—I don't really have a church. My mother can't go in to light a votive candle without somebody's bad thoughts coming toward her. How do you think it makes us feel?”

“But I love you,” she said quietly, her firm young body still and strong, not moving away. “I love you, and you and your mother love each other. My father loves you too—I know it.”

“Your father loves only his books. Not even you.”

Jamie bit her lip. “Yes, of course he loves me.”

Willy laughed then, a mirthless sound that made Jamie feel goosebumps growing over her arms. “Nobody loves anybody,” Willy finally said. “I care for my mother; I respect her, for bringing me up in a rotten world. But how can I love her for allowing me to have been born this way? And how can she love me, for having brought her the stares and smirks of a whole town of busybodies?”

She could not answer him. She could hardly see for the mist of tears, and so she simply laid her hand on his elbow and held it there as they resumed their walk. A beautiful dream had been splintered into glass shards, and it was difficult to avoid stepping on them.

Afterward they did not spend so much time together. Jamie read a lot in her father's study and Willy took an after-school job in a bakery. Margaret seemed relieved. Jamie was developing into a beautiful girl, in that understated way of hers: curves, softness, and yet those direct blue eyes, brown hair that had hints of gold. Her mother dreamed of sending her to finishing school, but a minister did not earn enough to put money aside for an education. Jamie, meanwhile, dreamed of a
real
education, not her mother's kind. She was the brightest student in her school. All the others were the sons and daughters of German immigrants. Willy was bright too, but where would he go after he graduated? She tried not to care. It was his life, and he'd made it clear that she was no longer to meddle in it.

In the fall of her senior year, when she was seventeen, Jamie was summoned to the principal's office. “If you are interested,” Mr. Hoffmann said, “we could arrange for you to obtain a scholarship to a college or university. This would be a most serious step for you, Jamie. But think what it could mean! With your excellent standing, you could enter any good school.”

Jamie could feel the breath stopping in her, the ecstasy— the fear. “What do I need to do?” she asked.

“Fill in some forms. And take a competitive examination for an honors place. Tell me—the thought had occurred to you before, hadn't it?”

She nodded. “Yes. I'd thought of Vassar, Bryn Mawr. Maybe Barnard.”

“Good choices. But it would mean hard work, my dear.”

“I'm not afraid of any intellectual work. Of any sort of work. I don't want to be like my mother—” She caught herself, suddenly ashamed. “I didn't mean—”

But, tactfully, Mr. Hoffmann was dismissing her. She floated on air. College! Like the envied girls whose families could afford to send them. Learning…. Papa would be pleased, so pleased. Mama would be horrified. But…who could turn down the offer of a scholarship from an exclusive institution? Mama would have to give in, she'd
have
to!

And Willy? Suddenly she felt sad. Willy had graduated two years before and refused to take any of the competitive examinations. She'd so hoped he would be admitted to the University of Cincinnati. Instead he had increased his job hours at the bakery to full time. She hardly ever saw him anymore. People said he'd taken up with a German girl, a pretty little blonde. She was angry, then, and resentful. Willy had disappointed her. He had done everything to prove that what people said was right; that he would indeed amount to nothing. He had turned away his best friend, Jamie Lynne. Well, if that was how he was going to be, then she would certainly not tell him of her own glorious plans. They were too good to be shared with someone who had lost all his own dreams. One afternoon, after school, she stopped in the park with a book of medieval romances. She had never been in love and imagined it ardent, overpowering, tempestuous—a revolution. And then she saw the shadowed form of someone above her, and hastily, almost guiltily, she set her book down, looking up. Of course it was Willy. It had to be. She was moved and thrilled and then angry again. He had intruded.