Whenever we could, we would steal away from Avilion and roam the town, despite Reenie's belief that the world was full of criminals and anarchists and sinister Orientals with opium pipes, thin moustaches like twisted rope and long pointed fingernails, and dope fiends and white slavers, waiting to snatch us away and hold us to ransom for Father's money.
One of Reenie's many brothers had something to do with cheap magazines, the pulpy, trashy kind you could buy in drugstores, and the worse ones you could get only under the counter. What was his job? Distribution, Reenie called it. Smuggling them into the country, I now believe. In any case he would sometimes give the leftovers to Reenie, and despite her efforts to conceal them from us we would get our hands on them sooner or later. Some of them were about romance, and although Reenie devoured these we had little use for them. We preferred-or I preferred, and Laura tagged along-those with stories about other lands or even other planets. Spaceships from the future, where women would wear very short skirts made of shiny fabric and everything would gleam; asteroids where the plants could talk, roamed by monsters with enormous eyes and fangs; long-ago countries inhabited by lithe girls with topaz eyes and opaline skin, dressed in cheesecloth trousers and little metal brassieres like two funnels joined by a chain. Heroes in harsh costumes, their winged helmets bristling with spikes.
Silly, Reenie called these. Like nothing on earth. But that's what I liked about them.
The criminals and white, slavers were in the detective magazines, with their pistol-strewn, blood-drenched covers. In these, the wide-eyed heiresses to great fortunes were always being conked out with ether and tied up with clothesline-much more than was needed-and locked into yacht cabins or abandoned church crypts, or the dank cellars of castles. Laura and I believed in the existence of such men, but we weren't too afraid of them, because we knew what to expect. They would have large, dark motor cars, and would be wearing overcoats and thick gloves and black fedoras, and we would be able to spot them immediately and run away.
But we never saw any. The only hostile forces we encountered were the factory workers' children, the younger ones, who didn't yet know that we were supposed to be untouchable. They would follow us in twos and threes, silent and curious or calling names; once in a while they'd throw stones, although they never hit us. We were most vulner able to them when poking along the narrow path down beside the Louveteau, with the cliff overhead-things could be dropped on us there-or in back alleyways, which we learned to avoid.
We would go along Erie Street, examining the store windows: the five and dime was our favourite. Or we would peer in through the chain-link fence at the primary school, which was for ordinary children-workers' children-with its cinder playground and its high carved doorways marked Boys and Girls. At recess there was a lot of screaming, and the children were not clean, especially after they'd been fighting or had been pushed down onto the cinders. We were thankful that we didn't have to attend this school. (Were we indeed thankful? Or, on the other hand, did we feel excluded? Perhaps both.)
We wore hats for these excursions. We had the idea that they were a protection; that they made us, in a way, invisible. A lady never went out without her hat, said Reenie. She also saidgloves, but we didn't always bother with those. Straw hats are what I remember, from that time: not pale straw, a burnt colour. And the damp heat of June, the air drowsy with pollen. The blue glare of the sky. The indolence, the loitering.
How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons-the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. And I do have them back, in a way; except now there won't be much of whatever happens next.
The tutor we had by this time had lasted longer than most. She was a forty-year-old woman with a wardrobe of faded cashmere cardigans that hinted at an earlier, more prosperous existence, and a roll of mouse-hair pinned to the back of her head. Her name was Miss Goreham-Miss Violet Goreham. I nicknamed her Miss Violence behind her back, because I thought it was such an unlikely combination, and after that I could scarcely look at her without giggling. The name stuck, though; I taught it to Laura, and then of course Reenie found out about it. She told us we were naughty to make fun of Miss Goreham in this way; the poor thing had come down in the world and deserved our pity, because she was an old maid. What was that? A woman with no husband. Miss Goreham had been doomed to a life of single blessedness, said Reenie with a trace of contempt.
"But you don't have a husband either," said Laura.
"That's different," said Reenie. "I never yet saw a man I'd stoop to blow my nose on, but I've turned away my share. I've had my offers."
"Maybe Miss Violence has too," I said, just to be contradictory. I was approaching that age.
"No," said Reenie, "she hasn't."
"How do you know?" said Laura.
"You can tell by the look of her," said Reenie. "Anyway if she'd had any offer at all, even if the man had three heads and a tail, she'd of grabbed him quick as a snake."
We got along with Miss Violence because she let us do what we liked. She realised early on that she lacked the forcefulness to control us, and had wisely decided not to bother trying. We took our lessons in the mornings, in the library, which had once been Grandfather Benjamin's and was now Father's, and Miss Violence simply gave us the run of it. The shelves were full of heavy leather-backed books with the titles stamped in dim gold, and I doubt that Grandfather Benjamin ever read them: they were only Grandmother Adelia's idea of what he ought to have read.
I'd pick out books that interested me: A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens; Macaulay's histories; The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, illustrated. I read poetry, as well, and Miss Violence occasionally made a half-hearted attempt at teaching by having me read it out loud. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree. In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.
"Don't jog along," said Miss Violence. "The lines shouldflow, dear. Pretend you're a fountain." Although she herself was lumpy and inelegant, she had high standards of delicacy and a long list of things she wanted us to pretend to be: flowering trees, butterflies, the gentle breezes. Anything but little girls with dirty knees and their fingers up their noses: about matters of personal hygiene she was fastidious.
"Don't chew your coloured pencils, dear," said Miss Violence to Laura. "You aren't a rodent. Look, your mouth is all green. It's bad for your teeth.
"
I read Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. "Beautiful," sighed Miss Violence. She was gushy, or as gushy as her dejected nature would allow, on the subject of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; also E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess.
And oh, the river runs swifter now;
The eddies circle about my bow.
Swirl, swirl!
How the ripples curl
In many a dangerous pool awhirl!
"Stirring, dear," said Miss Violence.
Or I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a man whose majesty was second only to God's, in the opinion of Miss Violence.
With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all: The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable-wall… She only said, "My life is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!"
"Why did she wish that?" said Laura, who did not usually show much interest in my recitations. "It was love, dear," said Miss Violence. "It was boundless love. But it was unrequited."
"Why?"
Miss Violence sighed. "It's a poem, dear," she said. "Lord Tennyson wrote it and I suppose he knew best. A poem does not reason why. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"
Laura looked at her with scorn, and went back to her colouring. I turned the page: I'd already skimmed the whole poem, and found that nothing else happened in it.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
"Lovely, dear," said Miss Violence. She was fond of boundless love, but she was equally fond of hopeless melancholy.
There was a thin book bound in snuff-coloured leather, which had belonged to Grandmother Adelia: The Rub ¥iy ¥t of Omar Khayy ¥m, by Edward Fitzgerald. (Edward Fitzgerald hadn't really written it, and yet he was said to be the author. How to account for it? I didn't try to.) Miss Violence would sometimes read from this book, to show me how poetry ought to be pronounced: A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness-Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
She gasped out the Oh as if someone had kicked her in the chest; similarly the Thou. I thought it was a lot of fuss to make about a picnic, and wondered what they'd had on the bread. "Of course it wasn't real wine, dear," said Miss Violence. "It refers to the Communion Service."
Would but some wing ¨d Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise Enregister, or quite obliterate!
Ah, Love! Could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits-and then Remould it nearer to the heart's Desire!
"So true," said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well-into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.
Laura didn't read much. Instead she would copy pictures, or else she'd colour in the black-and-white illustrations in thick, erudite books of travel and history with her coloured pencils. (Miss Violence let her do this, on the assumption that no one else would notice.) Laura had strange but very definite ideas about which colours were required: she'd make a tree blue or red, she'd make the sky pink or green. If there was a picture of someone she disapproved she'd do the face purple or dark grey to obliterate the features.
She liked to draw the pyramids, from a book on Egypt; she liked to colour in the Egyptian idols. Also Assyrian statues with the bodies of winged lions and the heads of eagles or men. That was from a book by Sir Henry Layard, who'd discovered the statues in the ruins of Nineveh and had them shipped to England; they were said to be illustrations of the angels described in the Book of Ezekiel. Miss Violence did not consider these pictures very nice-the statues looked pagan, and also bloodthirsty-but Laura was not to be deterred. In the face of criticism she would just crouch further over the page and colour away as if her life depended on it.
"Back straight, dear," Miss Violence would say. "Pretend your spine is a tree, growing up towards the sun." But Laura was not interested in this kind of pretending.
"I don't want to be a tree," she would say.
"Better a tree than a hunchback, dear," Miss Violence would sigh, "and if you don't pay attention to your posture, that's what you'll turn into."
Much of the time Miss Violence sat by the window and read romantic novels from the lending library. She also liked to leaf through my Grandmother Adelia's tooled-leather scrapbooks, with their dainty embossed invitations carefully glued in, their menus printed up at the newspaper office, and the subsequent newspaper clippings-the charity teas, the improving lectures illustrated by lantern slides-the hardy, amiable travellers to Paris and Greece and even India, the Sweden-borgians, the Fabians, the Vegetarians, all the various promoters of self-improvement, with once in a while something truly outr ©-a missionary to Africa, or the Sahara, or New Guinea, describing how the natives practised witchcraft or hid their women behind elaborate wooden masks or decorated the skulls of their ancestors with red paint and cowrie shells. All the yellowing paper evidence of that luxurious, ambitious, relentless vanished life, which Miss Violence pored over inch by inch, as if remembering it, smiling with gentle vicarious pleasure.
She had a packet of tinsel stars, gold and silver, which she would stick onto things we'd done. Sometimes she took us out to collect wildflowers, which we pressed between two sheets of blotting paper, with a heavy book on top. We grew fond of her, although we didn't cry when she left. She cried, however-wetly, inelegantly, the way she did everything.
I became thirteen. I'd been growing, in ways that were not my fault, although they seemed to annoy Father as much as if they had been. He began to take an interest in my posture, in my speech, in my deportment generally. My clothing should be simple and plain, with white blouses and dark pleated skirts, and dark velvet dresses for church. Clothes that looked like uniforms-that looked like sailor suits, but were not. My shoulders should be straight, with no slouching. I should not sprawl, chew gum, fidget, or chatter.