Up a Road Slowly Read Online Free PDF Page B

Europe, loved and courted by the intelligentsia for his wit, for the books he had written (unfortunately all out of print by my day), for his never-failing charm and erudition. He had been quite a man, had Uncle Haskell, and he was about to emerge into a second blooming when his new book appeared, his magnum opus which was carefully kept out of sight in his rooms. It seemed strange, I thought, that I never happened to call on Uncle Haskell when there was a sheet of paper in his typewriter, but I wouldn’t have considered it polite to mention the matter. I heard about long-distance telephone calls from his publishers, patient gentlemen it seemed, who urged him to take his time; a magnum opus, they agreed, does not spring into being overnight.
    For all my quite justifiable suspicions of his integrity, I liked Uncle Haskell, and he recognized that fact.
    â€œIt is no credit either to your discrimination or to your character, my dear child,” he told me lightly. “Adam and your sister will have you carted off to a nunnery if you’re not very careful to disown me.”
    It was true that neither Father nor Laura cared for Uncle Haskell. They came out quite often to see me or to take me into town for a holiday in my old home, but on such occasions they did not go back to Uncle Haskell’s quarters at all, or if they chanced to meet him, they were pointedly cool. Father was fond of Aunt Cordelia and felt that she had suffered unduly at the hands of an egotistical parasite; Laura mirrored Father’s feelings as she had all the years of her life.
    How I loved Laura! It was a time of perfect happiness when she came out for the weekend, when we rode together or hiked or swam or skated; most particularly was it perfect for me when we slept together in my room upstairs that had been Mother’s when she was a child.
    It was Laura who helped me to rid myself of the memory of the gray old woman and the cackling laugh that had frightened me in one of those rooms upstairs; it was also Laura who pointed out the beauty of the changing scene outside my bedroom window, the green and gold and crimson of the woods from spring through autumn, the soft white stillness of winter with the trunks of half a hundred trees standing in penciled darkness against a pale sky.
    I would lie close to her, and she would tell me stories or repeat poetry until I went to sleep with the heavenly security of being with someone who was almost Mother.
    â€œYou really love me, don’t you, Laura?” I asked her.
    â€œI do, indeed, Julie. Very much.”
    â€œAnd we’ll always be like this together. You’ll never change, will you?”
    â€œNever, Julie,” she promised, a little rashly, for she was still quite young.
    She did change though. Not much. She still loved me after she was wearing Bill Strohmer’s ring, but her eyes were full of dreams, and sometimes she would say, “Let’s not talk now, Julie; let’s just lie quietly and think for a while.”
    There was a little change in Laura, but it was still not great enough to alarm me. Sometimes when her eyes were closed, I would prop myself on my elbow to look at the thick lashes against her cheek, at the waves of bright hair that fell back from her forehead. I loved beauty, and I ached with the consciousness that I would never have the blonde beauty of my sister. I was dark, more like Father, or as some people said, like my mother’s dour, dark father who had married a golden flibbertigibbet.
    Laura and Bill were married the summer I was ten. Chris was home for the wedding, very straight and tall; both he and I were in the wedding party and so excited over the swarm of activities that I had no time to brood over the fact that life was again making a big change for me.
    Uncle Haskell sent Laura a silver coffee server, which was charged to Aunt Cordelia’s account at one of the local stores, but he was not able to attend the wedding. He sent