As Bright as Heaven(11)

My classmates allow me to keep to myself now that they all know where I live and what the family business is. There is a girl named Irene whose last name sounds German and who stays on the fringe like I do, but she and I have no interest in aligning ourselves with each other just because we are both apparently outsiders.

I like my new teachers. They are smart and they don’t care what kind of work pays my tuition. Mr. Galway is especially brilliant. He is the teacher for social sciences and philosophy. He sees the other girls twittering like ducklings when I stand up to answer a question in class. He told me once, in front of all of them, that he is impressed with how thorough my answers are. If I didn’t want to be a doctor, I’d want to be a philosophy teacher like Mr. Galway.

There is one boy named Gilbert Keane who is different than the rest. He told me in art class on the first day to pay the gossiping girls no mind when they had speculated among themselves if I would paint a cadaver instead of fruit in a bowl. Gilbert is handsome and well-liked at the school, and those girls were perplexed that he spoke to me so kindly. Their surprise at it occupied their whispers for the rest of the afternoon. The following day they all wanted to be my friend.

Gilbert’s father expects him to go to law school and become an attorney, just like he is. But Gilbert wants to live in Manhattan and be a playwright. He showed me a few pages from one of his plays the other day. It’s about a young man who buys an old house and then finds letters from a hundred years ago hidden in the attic. The man falls in love with the young woman who wrote them.

“But that woman is long since dead,” I’d said. “It must be a very sad play.”

He winked at me and said the dead woman has a beautiful great-granddaughter who is very much alive.

“But he will have to stop loving the one to love the other,” I pointed out.

“With all great loves there is first a great struggle,” Gilbert said, smiling as if he was quite happy with this cosmic arrangement.

I’m not sure I completely agree with him, and yet I can’t stop thinking about what he said. Or him. Gilbert unsettles me. But in a nice way.

As for our new house, it is quite lovely from the outside. The inside is nice, too, but rather dull and lifeless, and I don’t mean that as a comical reference to what Uncle Fred and Papa do in the rooms past the kitchen. My bedroom furniture is new and of exceptional quality, but it’s plain. All the furniture downstairs is plainly functional, too, and at least thirty years old. The trouble with exceptional quality is that it takes a long time for it to wear out. We’ll clearly live with these things forever.

The rugs and curtains are a bit faded. There’s hardly any art on the walls. It all adds to the drab appearance of the house. But Uncle Fred does have a good selection of books, and not just on the art and science of embalming. On our second day here, I asked if I would be allowed to read them, and he seemed quite pleased that I wanted to, but then he cautioned me on the care and handling of his books, as if it were my current habit to lick my fingers and then dip them into the cocoa tin before turning a page. He found out soon enough that I love books and treat them with the respect they deserve. He’d come upstairs a week after we’d been there, to take a box of ledgers up to the attic storage room, and he’d seen the shelves of books just inside my bedroom door as he started to pass it.

He had stopped, the box of ledgers in his arms, and stared at them. “That’s quite a collection of books you have,” he’d said a second later, and I could tell it had suddenly made sense to him why I had been so interested in his bookshelves. We were both lovers of knowledge.

Uncle Fred had cocked his head as he looked at the spines, and it seemed to me he was looking at some of my books the way I had been looking at his.

“You’re welcome to look at one anytime you want,” I’d said, and he’d smiled. It was the kind of smile a father gives a child or an instructor gives a pupil. There was a measure of pride to it, as though he was happy that he was my great-uncle and I was his niece.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said. “I just may do that.”

Today, when I was sitting at the little table in his office and looking at one of his books on anthropology, he came into the room, saw me there, and pulled out an enormous volume all about the human body. Gray’s Anatomy.

“It’s a marvel, what your body can do when it’s alive,” he said, running his hand over the front of the book. Then he leaned closer to me. “I, like you, wanted to be a doctor once.” He whispered this like it was a secret just between us.

“What happened?” I asked.

He shrugged as though he didn’t know what had come between him and his dreams. Or maybe he knew but it saddened him to talk about it. “It wasn’t to be, for me. For a host of reasons. But you? You’re smart. And you’re young. And you’re more than just the son of a poor tobacco farmer.”

I hadn’t considered too much to that point that Uncle Fred had been born and raised in Quakertown just like me. He was my grandad’s older brother. He had grown up picking blossoms off tobacco plants and rolling cigars just like I had. But he’d come to the city decades before I had been born, and he’d come with a dream that had somehow been taken from him.

This was no doubt the reason why Uncle Fred was so willing to pay for me to enroll at the private school. I have the aspirations he’d once had. I wanted to say something then that communicated that I understood this, and that I was going to work very hard to accomplish my goal, but I couldn’t think of how to say it without it sounding like I was going to succeed where he had failed.