Chapter 5 #2
As he began to come toward her she turned and fled from him, her velvet slippers striking hard on the coarse gravel path, her heart banging in her chest as she wove between grouping families and the dull-green stacks of shrubbery that squatted like trolls under the elms.
For once, her size helped. Quickly he was lost in the tall crowds, and when she came to a break in the line of spectators, she gripped the iron railing that lined the Battery and kicked her legs over, one at a time.
The political societies were passing in review, and Merry dove through a herd of Republicans, with their buck’s tails dangling forward from their hats. Some laughed drunkenly and tried to reach for her as she passed frantically among them.
When her feet found the neat ocher bricks of the sidewalk, for the first time in her life she lifted her narrow white skirt and ran full out over the busy pavement toward the house five blocks up Pearl Street, where Aunt April would be waiting with, she prayed, a denial of Sir Michael’s words.
The house of the Austrian trade commissioner was ruddy brick, tastefully decorated in bluestone with eyelet window curtains in the upper stories that lent the home a friendly and feminine look.
It was not the place, surely, where one would hear grim news.
Merry nearly collided with a cake vendor as she swung through the white picket gate into the small cobbled front yard, and the sweet odor of hot spiced gingerbread swirled around her as she stopped to lean dizzily against the cistern that caught soft water from the rain roof.
Then she climbed the stoop, knocked, and was admitted almost immediately by a pretty Austrian maidservant, who looked curiously at Merry’s pale cheeks and glittering eyes.
The rooms within were narrow rectangles with low ceilings, eerily quiet at this time of day while their elderly host and his wife napped, nicely insulated from the street noise.
Everywhere beautiful imported furniture in the French taste gleamed sleepily in the hazed sunlight, and walking soft-footed through the corridors, it was hard to believe that not many days’ journey away American settlers lived in rough cottages and feared Indian attacks.
Willing temperance to her breathing, Merry laid her hand on the door and entered quietly into the cream-and-copper suite that her aunt had enjoyed these last seven days.
Merry’s aunt, protector, and guardian was on her knees laying tissue-wrapped nightgowns in a cedar chest. Her gaze flew like a startled pigeon to her niece. She couldn’t have looked more guilty if she’d been hiding a corpse.
“Aunt April, it’s not true. Is it?” asked Merry tightly.
Aunt April stood, her face raw with worry. Beseechingly she offered her hand. “Merry—forgive me, Merry.”
They were like mother and daughter. Between them there was no need for accusation, for evasion, or for lies.
Merry saw confirmation of Granville’s words in her aunt’s fearful eyes, in the set of her chin; no spoken words could have announced the truth more unmistakably.
Anger, love, and pity met between them and remained unspoken also, clashing and mingling like great waves, which broke in lonely desolation into helpless undercurrents.
Compassion fought the keen smart of betrayal within Merry; moving clumsily, like a machine that needed oil, she took her aunt’s hand.
And when she could force herself to speak, the words came out like a sigh.
“Aunt April, we can’t do it. We simply can’t do it.”
“There are papers of transit—Sir Michael has arranged them.”
“My father will never allow me to leave this country,” Merry said faintly, still hardly able to believe that this was really happening.
Aunt April looked as though she were experiencing physical pain.
“But it doesn’t make any difference. Not formally.
Because, you know, your father put you legally into my care.
” April paused, and then her words came out in a flood.
“Merry, an old friend of mine has offered to cover our fares. In fact, she has commissioned Sir Michael—well, perhaps not commissioned, but asked him—Merry, he is to escort us back to England.”
“No.” Unimaginable that Merry should say that word to her aunt. “I won’t go, Aunt April. I can’t go. I’m an American.”
“You’re not; you’re British. Half-British. And from one of the first families of the country.”
As gently as she could, Merry said, “A name disgraced. The name of a family that had to flee the country in debt.”
April’s gray eyes snapped. “A name is a name. Our connections were of the highest!”
Connections who never answer your letters, Aunt, thought Merry. Why in the name of heaven had one of them decided to invite April back now?
“Aunt April, I don’t want to go.”
“Oh, Merry.” April put her hands on Merry’s shoulders and drew her close, her embrace intensely loving.
“What have you here? We live like nuns in a cloister, in a farming village full of bigots. You should be mingling with people your own age, your own class—you should have beaux and dances and nosegays and rides in the park. How are you going to be married here? Do you think your father’s ever going to trouble himself with the matter?
Every time I’ve written to him about it, he’s replied that it will sort itself out.
But it won’t, Merry. We’ll both of us only get older, lonelier, and more eccentric.
People aren’t like us here, Merry. They’re too interested in superficial change, and not interested enough in the things that last, and that have lasted.
” She drew Merry away from her and gazed into her eyes, her hands pressing into Merry’s shoulders.
“Don’t expect Carl to find you a husband!
There’ll always be something that interests him above you.
Now there’s the war. Then there’ll be the business of reconstructing the country after the war, and then he’ll take a wife and he’ll have a family of his own to think about.
Do you want to live on the fringe all your life, Merry?
I’ve never said this to you before… but you’re a beautiful girl, far too special for this rough backwater of a country. ”
Merry took her aunt’s hands from her shoulders and held them in her own and repeated, “I’m not going to go, Aunt April. I don’t want to go.”
April slid her hands from Merry’s, and she crossed her arms in front of her and walked slowly to sit on the edge of the bed, her thin shoulders slumping.
As the cloudy tears slid down the pale cheek Merry suddenly saw the crumpled figure in a new way.
Why, she’s not old, Merry thought. She’s only forty. I always thought she was old.
“I shan’t go either, then,” said April softly.
“I can’t leave you here with the country at war.
…” One of the pins slipped from her tired bun, and the freckled bird-boned hands replaced it.
April walked to the window, looking out with the same look that Merry had often seen when she observed her gazing out of the drawing-room window at home—but, she realized, the hope that had been in the gaze was replaced by desolation.
“I’m sorry, Merry. I wanted just one time to see my home again. ”
Merry went to stand behind her. “Go without me—please, Aunt April.”
April shook her head in a definite way, and Merry knew she would never talk her into that.
For one human being to cause a tragedy in the life of another is a responsibility that not many would choose to shoulder.
Adult resolution, patriotism, fear, and even common sense were seared to ash by love.
Two days ago, if someone had asked her, she might have said that there was very little she would not do for her aunt, but now she realized there was nothing she would not do for her.