The Age of Reason. Marian Birch
CHAPTER 1
A MIGHTY WIND
On the last day of school, Edith got off the bus at the foot of her own driveway, not at Granny and Pop’s house, where she’d gone after school for every other day of first grade.
She marched straight up the gravel drive, never turning to see the old blue car parked thirty yards up the road. She inhaled the fragrance of the lilacs that hung over the drive in thick panicles. Two ravens squawked, soaring up from the branches of an old ash tree as she passed underneath. She felt her bones resonate with their cries. Her house, covered in weathered gray clapboard the exact color of a paper-wasps' nest, stood on a little hill. The meadow behind the old house was covered with apple trees that Granny had told her were almost as old as the house which was three hundred years old. But Kitt, her mother, said that no apple tree could possibly live that long. She said that Granny meant that they had already been there when she was a little girl. Today the trees were covered with pink-and-white blossoms and the buzzing of bees.
When she pushed open the sliding glass door into the “new” kitchen, the quiet of the old house surrounded her. To Edith the kitchen didn’t seem new at all, because it had always been there as long as she could remember, but she knew everyone called it that because it had been added on to the house in the 1930s. It was new ages before she was born. Pop had built it to give Granny Gladys a modern kitchen to cook in. That was before Pop and Gladys moved to the house up the road.
The icebox was purring softly and the big clock on top of it ticked loudly and everything else was hushed. Edith found herself walking lightly, like Indian braves do in the woods, trying not to make a sound, as she crossed the fake-brick linoleum and put her schoolbooks down on the kitchen table. She was hungry. She opened the icebox, excited and proud that she had permission to eat whatever she liked. Although she would have really liked chocolate milk, her parents never bought the Bosco syrup to make it, like the DeMelos, her neighbors, did. She made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and washed it down with ordinary milk. Then she headed up to her room.
She had gone up and down the narrow and uneven stairs to her small room at the top of the house so many times, often two at a time, that she didn’t need to turn on the light to know which steps were shorter or taller than the others. Her bedroom was the only room on the third floor under the eaves. Kitt referred to it as a garret. She once told Edith that Raskolnikov had a similar room, though Edith had no idea who Raskolnikov was. “Just a crazy Russian teenager,” Kitt explained. Edith’s garret had no door. The ceiling sloped and the room was almost completely filled by Edith’s ivory-painted wooden bed and the sagging jam cabinet with screened doors where she kept her dolls and clothes. The single mullioned casement window, glazed with six small panes of ancient, wavery glass, was propped open with a stick so the room wouldn’t be stuffy. A very gentle breeze blew in.
Edith rummaged through the wicker laundry basket where she kept her dress-up things. She pulled out a threadbare black-velvet circle skirt that used to be her mother’s, a big ivory shawl of fine wool, some phony gold bangles and chain necklaces from Kitt’s college theater days, and finally an old yellowed napkin edged with dingy lace that smelled faintly of camphor.
Edith extracted her blue leather missal from its hiding place under her mattress and leafed through it, looking for the Sacrament of Baptism. The book had to be a secret because her parents didn’t like praying. Besides, she had stolen it from the Church of the Holy Innocents a few weeks before. Sometimes she would go to Mass with her best friend Daniel DeMelo and his family so that Kitt and her father, Arthur, could sleep late.
Today Edith was a bishop-cum-nun who was baptizing her congregation of dolls and stuffed animals. Her friendship with Daniel DeMelo and his siblings, especially the knowledgeable nine-year-old Betsy, had made her well-informed about Church matters, so she knew that nuns aren’t supposed to baptize and can’t be bishops, but she also knew that, if necessary, in an emergency, anyone can baptize as long as they say the right words and put some drops of holy water on the person they want to baptize. Daniel had learned this in catechism class. When the DeMelos’ youngest, baby Peter, was born last winter, Betsy had told her all about his baptism, so Edith knew just what to do. However, when she played 'Baptism' with Daniel she had to let him be the bishop since he was a boy. Now she pretended, I, Mother Edith, must perform the sacrament because it is the middle of a war and there aren’t any bishops here behind enemy lines. In her imagination she could hear bombs exploding not very far away.
Despite the open window in the gable end of her little room, it was still warm and stuffy up here on the third floor. Ignoring her own comfort like a good nun, Edith draped the ivory shawl over her head. On top of it she arranged the velvet skirt and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t have a mirror, so she touched her forehead to be sure the white wimple showed beneath the black veil. Then she put the gold chains around her neck and spread the lace napkin on a footstool. She had brought up a drinking glass filled with water and a shot glass filled with Wesson Oil to be the holy water and the chrism. She liked the sound of chrism. Solemnly she made the sign of the cross and muttered in something she hoped resembled Latin.
In hominy patrice,
Filly-hoo et speary too sank toe.
At the same time she waved her hands over the two glasses just like Mickey Mouse waving over the mop in Fantasia.This was to make the water and oil be holy. Her dolls and her two teddy bears were lined up solemnly on the chair behind the footstool. They were orphans whose parents had been killed by bombs before they could have their children baptized. She knew the orphans would go to straight to Hell if something happened to them before they received the sacrament. Using two brushes from her painting set, she planned to sprinkle the blessed oil and water on the expectant Cat-a-cue-mens. Wet brush raised above her waiting flock, missal open to the correct page, Edith was distracted by a funny smell. It tickled her nose and the back of her throat. She looked up and saw that outside the window, the sky was now a sulfurous yellow-green that she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, a color sort of like the week-old black-and-blue mark on her arm from when she had walked into the bathroom doorknob. Just a little while earlier, when she’d come home from school, it had been a soft, warm late-spring day, smelling of apple blossoms and lilac, and the sky had been baby blue. Now instead of the quiet of a spring afternoon, she heard a swelling of sound like the train coming into the Worcester station when her mother took her to New York to see her other grandparents, the Russian ones. But the Worcester station was thirty miles away and there were no trains here in Whitby. There were hardly even any vehicle bigger than a farmer’s flatbed truck hauling hay bales on her road. But now she definitely heard a train . . . or something like a train. Could it be Pop using his chainsaw in the woods? she wondered.
Suddenly, in less than the time it took her to gasp, Edith was sucked—whooshed—by what felt like an enormous vacuum cleaner out the open window into the air above her favorite apple tree, the one she liked to climb. Alongside her flew the glass of water and the glass of oil, the footstool, the neatly seated dolls and animals, and the napkin. Her heart startled straight upward, as if a small bird nesting inside her fluttered, squawked, and soared. Edith’s mind was swamped by her feelingss. She felt her skin and her hair and her clothes all being sucked by the warm strong wind. Her whole body felt the way her feet had when the waves were sucking the sand underneath them at Ocean Beach last summer, if the ocean had been warm like a bath. Today’s sucking wind was almost hot, like the air coming out of the back of the Hoover and, though it was very strong and smelled like ammonia, it was oddly gentle.
Edith floated through the air, her small mouth forming a big O. She floated so very, very slowly that she could see everything below her and around her in remarkably vivid detail, much sharper than ordinary seeing. Usually things were a little bit blurry for her because she didn’t have very sharp eyes except for things that were right under her nose like words on a page or blueberries on a bush. But now everything was sharply etched and clear. Her doll Teddy (the one whose hair she had cut off so she would have a boy and who was named for her uncle who was killed in the war before she was born) as well as one of her bears were floating alongside her. They all sailed together over the yard and above the very same apple trees whose flowering she’d admired coming home from school earlier in the afternoon,