A Northern Light(48)

Miss Wilcox led us out of the entry past rooms that looked as if no one ever stepped into them, filled with furniture that looked as if no one ever sat on it, to an enormous, spotless white kitchen that looked like no one ever cooked in it. There, she set about fixing us dainty little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and tiny iced cakes from a box, and tea. I tried to help, but she wouldn't let me.

"Don't no one else live here, Miss Wilcox?" Lou asked looking all around at the spotless stove and the shining floor and the painted cabinets with no fingerprints on them, or broken knobs.

"Lou...," I said, cautioning her.

"No, Lou. Just me. And it's doesn't. Doesn't anyone else five here."

Lou digested this, then said, "Were you bad, Miss Wilcox?"

Miss Wilcox's knife clattered to the counter. She turned to look at my sister. "'Bad'?" she said. "Lou, how ... why do you ask that?"

"When I was bad, my mamma used to make me sit in the parlor by myself. For an hour. With the door closed. It was awful. Are you being punished? Is that why you have to live here all alone?"

Miss Wilcox's hand fluttered to her throat. Her fingers twined themselves in the circlet of amber beads there. "I like living alone, Lou," she said. "I like the quiet and the solitude. I have a lot of reading to do, you see. And lessons to prepare during the school year."

Lou nodded, but she didn't look convinced. "If you ever get lonely, we could bring Barney by. Our dog. He could keep you company. He has gas, but he's still a nice dog. He wouldn't pee on the settee or anything. He don't see well enough to find it—"

"Lou!" I hissed.

"What? Oh, jeezum ... doesn't. Doesn't. Doesn't. Doesn't. He doesn't see well enough."

I could see Miss Wilcox was trying not to laugh, but I didn't find it funny. Not one bit. Lou knows better than to ask personal questions or talk about Barney's gas. She knows what good manners are. Mamma taught her same as she taught all of us. Lou is hungry for attention, though. Any kind. She and Pa used to be inseparable, but now he looks right through her. Through all of us. I know it hurts her, so I try not to be cross, but sometimes she goes too far.

"Shall we take our lunch into the library?" Miss Wilcox asked, her eyes moving from me to Lou and back again.

"Where? On the pickle boat?" Lou asked, looking confused.

I didn't scold her for that because I was wondering the same thing.

This time Miss Wilcox did laugh. "No, right here in the house. Come on."

She put the lunch on a tray, along with some plates and napkins, then led us out of the kitchen, down a different hallway, and through a set of tall pocket doors.

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

"Won't you sit down and have your lunch, Mattie?" Miss Wilcox asked.

But eating was the last thing on my mind. And I didn't see how Miss Wilcox could eat, or teach, or sleep, or ever find any reason to leave this room. Not with all these books in it, just begging to be read.

"Are these all Dr. Foster's books?" I whispered.

"No, they're mine. I had them sent up from the city. They're in a bit of a shambles. I never seem to get around to arranging them properly."

"There are so many, Miss Wilcox."

She laughed. "Not really. I think you and Weaver have read half of them already."

But I hadn't. There were dozens of names I didn't know. Eliot. Zola. Whitman. Wilde. Yeats. Sand. Dickinson. Goethe. And all those were in just one stack! There were lives in those books, and deaths. Families and friends and lovers and enemies. Joy and despair, jealousy, envy, madness, and rage. All there. I reached out and touched the cover of one called The Earth. I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.

"You can borrow anything you like, Mattie," I heard Miss Wilcox say. "Mattie?"

I realized I was being rude, so I made myself stop staring at the books and looked at the rest of the room. There was a large fireplace with two settees in front of it, facing each other across a low table. Lou sat on one of them, stuffing herself with sandwiches and slurping her tea. There was a writing table under a window, with pens and pencils and a stack of good paper. I touched the top sheet. It felt like satin. A few more sheets, covered with handwriting all in lines like a poem, were spread haphazardly across the tabletop. Miss Wilcox came over and shuffled them into a pile.

"I'm sorry," I said, suddenly remembering myself. "I didn't mean to pry."

"That's all right. It's just a lot of scribbling. Won't you eat something?"

I sat down and took a sandwich, and to make conversation, Miss Wilcox said she saw me riding the other day with a tall and handsome boy.

"That's Royal Loomis. Mattie's sweet on him," Lou said.

"No, I'm not," I said quickly. I was, of course. I was as dopey as a calf for him, but I didn't want my teacher to know. I wasn't sure she understood about amber eyes or strong arms or kisses in a boat, and I thought she might be disappointed in me for being swayed by those sorts of things.