Hill Towns (7 page)

50 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Well, she’s not going to have to worry about how she looks, is she?” he said, through almost the only tears I had ever seen in his eyes. “Christ, Cat, you think this isn’t going to cause her pain? You know how the world treats blind people—like retards!”

“Well then, she just won’t go out into the world,” I said savagely. “She’ll stay on the Mountain with us. It’s a wonderful life; she can have everything up here. She’ll hardly know she’s…without sight.”

I could not say “blind” for a long time.

“You’re glad, aren’t you? Now you’ll never have to leave.

She’ll be your anchor to the Mountain.”

I merely looked at him, holding my baby.

“I’m sorry, Cat,” he whispered, his face crumpling. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. It’s just…I wish I could exchange my eyes for hers. I…she’ll never see this beautiful place. She’ll never see your beautiful face….”

I reached out for him over the baby’s head, and he came into my arms, and for a long moment I held them both, trying with all the force of my being to pump some sort of healing into them. Perhaps I succeeded just a bit with Joe.

He did not cry again, not that I saw, at any rate. Not for Lacey.

Lacey needed no healing from me and never has.

We kept her at home. It was Joe’s decision as much as mine, perhaps even more so. I never had the impression that he was humoring me. It was not hard to adapt our small house to a blind child, or at least not to one of Lacey’s nature. She was fearless and pragmatic to a degree that simply astounded me, who am neither. If she fell, she picked herself up and toddled on. If she bumped something, she fussed a little and went about her business. We padded corners and secured rugs and moved bric-a-brac out of reach and tried our best to

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treat her as a normal child. She was light-years ahead of us in that respect.

Because she had never known sight, she did not seem to sense dangers she could not see; we had to watch her there.

Her other senses were awesome. Even before she received special schooling, she could read her way around her world with her ears and nose and fingertips. She talked early and volubly, and her memory was phenomenal. Corinne told us her IQ—“if that idiocy matters to you”—was probably astonishing.

“She doesn’t have to live with limits,” Corinne said, early on. “With her intelligence and temperament, she can probably have almost any sort of life she wants. Do almost anything, go almost anywhere. There are special schools to help her live just about as normally as any other child. I’ve looked into them—”

“She’s going to stay here,” Joe said. “We’re going to teach her. Later on she’ll have tutors for the things she needs. I’ve already been in touch with the National Institute for the Blind; they’ve sent literature. When the time comes, she’ll have everything she needs—”

“She needs the real world, Joe,” Corinne said.

“This is her real world,” he said. “There’s nothing she needs that she can’t have here. Who wouldn’t love growing up in this place? Nobody’s going to think of her as a blind kid here.”

“She
is
a blind kid,” Corinne said. “She needs to go through and past that. So do you two. You can’t keep her locked away in a tower all her life. What happens when she wants something she can’t get up here? What happens when she marries and her husband lives somewhere else…if you all ever let anyone near enough to marry her? What happens when you die, or do you plan on not doing that? Did you ever read
The Secret Garden
?”

52 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

They came as close to quarreling over Lacey as they ever did over anything. After that talk Joe simply would not speak of her to Corinne. And she stopped bringing the matter up.

Lacey stayed on the Mountain with us, in our little house and walled garden, and was taught Braille and simple coping skills by a young tutor who came each day from off the Mountain. She managed her schoolwork with ease and joy and played contentedly in her nursery or our garden with the children of friends and faculty, who came each afternoon and weekend, and had toys and pets and her radio and phonograph. She loved listening to television.

Joe and I spent virtually all our free time with her; I remember those early years as the years when the Mountain began to come to us. We did not go out, but we did not lack for companionship, and neither did she. She was a pretty, puckish child, small and rounded, like my mother, but with Joe’s thick fair hair. And the beautiful, light-spilling blue eyes were riveting. You literally forgot they saw nothing when she fixed them on you, following the sound of your voice.

Her laughter rang like chimes. Everyone who met her fell in love with her. Somehow, we managed not to spoil her. I really think her own sunniness and enormous curiosity saw to that.

“I forget for hours and sometimes days at a time that she can’t see,” Joe used to say, and I agreed. I was proud and grateful for managing to fashion a world for our child that made sight virtually unnecessary. I was happy in those days, no less happy than I have been in our later ones. It seemed to me that all the value and beauty in the world lay here in microcosm.

I never looked far ahead. For a long time, I saw no need to.

When she was ten, Joe and I began to plan the house HILL TOWNS / 53

we wanted to live in for the rest of our lives. We’d been talking about it for years, and we’d finally bought a lot. It was the back four acres of an old estate on the very lip of the Steep, thick with first-growth hardwoods and dogwood and laurel and rhododendron, sweeping level and sweet up to the granite outcropping that guarded the land from the air. It had belonged to the first patrician general who had retreated to the Mountain after the “late unpleasantness,” to lick his wounds and form a mountain fastness where sons of the Confederacy might learn in their turn the precise things that led their fathers into war. The last of his line had died, and Joe had his bid in to the estate lawyers indecently soon after the service at All Souls. There were much higher bids, but they came from off the Mountain, and I suppose the trustees saw their duty clear. We had an architect friend translate our ideas into drawings, and on the night we sat down with him to review them, Lacey sat with us, her head against Joe’s knee. We paid little heed to her. She often sat like that when we had friends over. She seldom interrupted.

More often than not, she was off in her own world, the one behind her eyes where we could never follow. She stayed there a lot.

Philip talked of how the new rooms would look, and how we might live in them, and how he thought the furniture and artifacts of our lives might fit there. He talked of the air and sun and space and the magnificent panorama of flatland and foothills that the site commanded, of how it would come right into the house to be a part of it as the stones and mortar and oak beams were. He talked of how space and air were a design element, how the walls themselves would seem to open endlessly to sun and rain and the turn of the seasons.

“I see it as a house without boundaries,” he said. “As 54 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

a place where you won’t know where you leave off and the woods and sky start. This is a nice starter house, kids, but these little rooms are like living in shoe boxes. Like a little rabbit warren. Tacky. The house I’m going to build for you will be like living in the woods, with the trees for a roof and all the world for a garden.”

Lacey began to scream. Within seconds she was hysterical and so near breathlessness we finally had to call the pediat-rician. It was only after an injection of sedative and much holding and rocking that we got words out of her.

Lacey was afraid she would fall out of her new house into thin air. And Philip’s words about the only house she knew had devastated her.

“That’s not how they are!” she said of the rooms he had described as shoe boxes, rabbit warrens. “It’s not! This house is beautiful! I hate the new house! I won’t live there! I won’t leave here!”

It was the first time I realized that the world Lacey had built for herself behind her eyes was far grander, more beautiful, than anything on the earth could be. That when we said “house,” Lacey saw something wonderful, splendid, unimaginable to us. How not? What had she for comparis-on?

And it was the first time I saw clearly what we were doing to her, Joe and I, by keeping her on the Mountain, away from the rest of the world.

I went to see Corinne Parker the next morning. By that fall, Lacey was enrolled in the long-term children’s rehabilitation program at the Cleveland Sight Center. When she went away in September to learn to live in the world, Joe went with her, of course, not me. Corinne had said that was best, and so had the people at the center.

HILL TOWNS / 55

“She’s already afraid,” Corinne said. “It’s inevitable, with her intuition, that she’ll catch your fear of leaving, and not understand it, and think she’s going into danger out there.

Let Joe take her alone. She understands he has a job and can’t stay with her, and it’ll be easier for her to let him go.

Don’t cry, Cat. This is best and it’s high time. Her real life starts now.”

But I did cry. Not only for my child, my child of the silver eyes who in her blindness saw palaces and unicorns and wonders and now must learn to see only reality, but for Joe, who lived in an agony of love for her and must now leave her to the ministrations of strangers—and for me. I would miss her as I would miss my hands or the beat of my own heart, and I would fear for her each moment that passed.

I hated knowing that no small part of my tears fell in simple gratitude that it had not, after all, been asked of me to leave the Mountain. But I did know it.

It was the right thing, of course. Lacey learned prodi-giously. She ate learning as if it were food and she starving; she embraced the world, with all its stenches and grime and dangers and meannesses and all its simple glories, as she would a lover. She had the tools: the clicker that helped her by its resonances to gauge depths and positions; the white cane; the myriad tricks, such as cooking by sound and positioning food in clock positions around her plate; the computer on which she could access the entire world of words and print out whatever she chose in Braille. And the wonderful dogs, with whom she could walk almost as easily in the world as the sighted. The first, named Luke after Luke Sky-walker, lies now in the garden of the new house that she did, after all, come to love, under her favorite red maple. The next, a loving black Lab named Joe after her father, is with her

56 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

at Berkeley and will go with her through her graduate work in the rehabilitation of other visually impaired people at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo.

Joe teased her about Kalamazoo when she told us her plans for grad school.

“Kalamazoo? Why do you want to go to school in Kalamazoo? It sounds like a bad Borscht Belt routine.”

I knew he had hoped she would come back to the Mountain and Trinity for grad school, though of course he would not say so to her. But he was proud, too, that she wanted to spend her life working with other blind people. Trinity could not help her there.

“Well, so what?” She grinned. “What do we care, Joe and I? I can’t see Kalamazoo and he can’t spell it.”

Joe had stayed with us in the house on the Steep when Lacey went to Europe, and though he was polite and well-mannered and accommodating to Joe and me, I knew his heart was traveling with Lacey. His big head turned often toward the door she had vanished through when she left him, and when he heard, long before I did, the tap of her cane as she made her way up the front walk with Joe after he met her at the Atlanta airport, he gave a great bark as full of joy as any sound I have ever heard. He had never barked before, not for us.

Yes, it was the right thing I did all those years ago. Lacey was all but out in the world, and it was the world of her choosing, and Joe and I were in the house of our dreams in the world of our choosing, he the department head he wanted to be, with a deanship and who knew what waiting beyond that, I with all I had ever wanted already within my grasp and the world off the Mountain, if I chose, at my fingertips.

I reached up and touched the nose of the woman in the mirror.

HILL TOWNS / 57

“Nothing is different, not really,” I said to her. She did not look entirely convinced. Her eyes were shadowy with doubt.

“No, really,” I said to her. “It’s the same world, yours and Joe’s. Absolutely the same one it always has been. Maybe it just doesn’t shine quite so much now; maybe the world off the Mountain has tarnished it a little. But it’s the same. So are you. So is he.”

And I bit my lips to redden them, a trick I had learned reading
Gone With the Wind
when I was eleven, and went back to my party.

Colin Gerard was Joe’s protégé. He had been Joe’s favorite student through all four years as an undergraduate, the star of Joe’s small seminars and survey courses, the chosen one, the heir apparent. Most professors at Trinity have them.

Colin was from an old Richmond family, its lineage thick with bishops and generals and academicians, at least three of whom had been at Trinity before him. He slipped as easily into the world on the Mountain as if he had been born there.

His specialty was the Fugitives, and Joe still talked about his thesis on Allen Tate now, long after Colin had finished grad school and become Joe’s graduate assistant.

I knew Colin planned to stay at Trinity forever, barring some unimaginable unforeseen calamity. He was the sort of young man who, to me, seemed genetically programmed for the Mountain: handsome in a mussed, fine-boned way, graceful with the kind of shambling indolence that goes well with dusty black academic gowns, funny in the mordant self-deprecating way that is so admired up here, a varsity track man, president of his fraternity and coxswain of his crew, an accomplished

58 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

drinker of bourbon, bright to near brilliance. He held almost every office for which he ran, and almost every honor Trinity had to offer, and I think there is a lot of money in his family.