The funeral procession below them gave the strong overall impression of coming closer, while its component parts — dark figures except for one swatch of pink; dark motion — appeared no bigger or clearer than ever. Distracted by this contradictory perspective, Cecelia at first merely nodded in response to the last statement. Then, suddenly disoriented among the tangles of the family tree, she chanced a quick look at her aunt. Aunt Maureen was watching her, and, when Cecelia’s glance swung her way, she nodded emphatically.
‘But I believe it was Uncle Clyde. Our father’s brother. I believe he was Frances’s father. Libby and Helen always behaved strangely when his name came up, and he never came to our house, although I heard he used to live there. Libby was fourteen when Frances was born.’
Cecelia pulled her gaze away, not wanting to stare. For a while when she was the age Aunt Maureen was now, she would find herself flashing back to this moment, this secret told first and smallest among many, as a point at which her life had veered off one course and on to another. Eventually, though, she would cease thinking of life in terms of courses and veerings at all.
‘Our mother had died giving birth to me.’ Self-consciously, Cecelia waited for some sort of signal as to what her reaction ought to be. This she’d known already, presumably from her mother, although she remembered no time or place she’d been told, no specific conversation, no gift or complaint or instructive intent personally to her.
It was the first time, though, that Aunt Maureen, the infant in question, had spoken of it to her, and she fretted that she should offer reassurance or condolence. There was no hint of a request for such a thing; she’d not have guessed at any particular emotional underlay at all if Aunt Maureen hadn’t added, in the same flat declarative tone, ‘It wasn’t uncommon in those days, you know, for women to die in childbirth.’
‘I know,’ Cecelia breathed.
Aunt Maureen nodded, allowed her sweater to fall loose, then pulled it around her again. ‘Libby raised us both. Frances and me. We grew up more like sisters than aunt and niece. Dad worked a lot to support us and most of the rest of his time he spent looking for a suitable stepmother, which he never found. Helen went off and had adventures. And misadventures.’ Aunt Maureen gave a quick smile, then repeated, ‘Libby raised us.’
‘My mother never talked much about her past,’ Cecelia ventured. It was a sad thing to admit. ‘She almost never told me stories.’
‘I’ll tell you.’
There was something ominous about the pledge. Hastily, Cecelia asked, ‘Was Aunt Libby a good mother?’ It was, truly, something she wanted to know, but the fact that it was also a diversionary tactic made her feel dishonest. Perhaps, then, self-justification was the source of her upsurge of interest in Aunt Maureen’s childhood. ‘What was it like,’ she asked, too eagerly, ‘growing up with your sister for a mother and your cousin for a sister and your father never home? Was it confusing? Was it awful?’
‘Libby,’ said Aunt Maureen grimly, ‘did the best she could. She could have said no.’
In the silence that followed, the funeral ascended the hill, though the perspective was still skewed. The hearse in the lead had its headlights on. Two figures, the one in pink and one of the handful of dark-dressed ones, had broken away from the formal procession leaving it paltry indeed, and, as Aunt Maureen resumed talking, Cecelia watched them against the mown gold and brown cemetery grass. Shadows fell everywhere, and in the thin low light theirs were indistinguishable. They seemed, she saw with something like shock, to be cavorting, and they were holding hands.
Libby said, ‘Papa,’ and couldn’t believe what she was about to do. How could she tell him? How could she speak of such things to her father?
Maybe she would not. Maybe she didn’t have to. Almost, she looked away and pretended she hadn’t spoken. Most likely, her father wouldn’t have pressed, wouldn’t have even noticed or would have been glad for one less thing to worry about.
But she thought of Helen, and her fists clenched in her lap. She thought of Maureen, who wouldn’t even remember their mother; Maureen, whom Mama had said to take care of. She made herself say again, ‘Papa. I have to talk to you.’
He was on his way out, not an unusual circumstance. He had on his big grey coat and was fitting his grey hat over his bald spot, rolling the rim just so, the tiny maroon feather slightly off to the right. He glanced down at her. ‘Not now, Libby. I’m late.’
‘When? I have to talk to you.’
‘Later.’
Later, then, very late, she was waiting for him when he came home. She’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table. She woke up, abruptly and fully, at the click of the door and his quiet despairing sigh before he came in and saw her there. ‘Papa. Please. I have to tell you something.’
When he took off his hat, his head was so bare she had to look away. When he took off his coat, she saw that his shoulders were shaking. ‘I’m exhausted, Libby. Not tonight.’
He was already out of the room, and she was hearing his dogged, hasty footsteps rounding the corner of the living room towards the stairs, when she said, just loud enough for him to hear if he would, ‘Uncle Clyde touches me.’ The footsteps didn’t stop immediately, but they did stop. ‘He touches Helen, too. Next he’ll start on Maureen, because we’ll be too old.’
Her father came back, a large sad man, and Libby was so sorry and ashamed, but her little sister Maureen hadn’t done anything wrong, had she? If Uncle Clyde started on her, would it be her fault? It would be Libby’s fault if she didn’t tell.
Her sad father with his sad footsteps and his uncovered head came back into the kitchen, and Libby could hardly breathe in the face of his sadness, to which she was adding. He pulled out the chair opposite her, scraping its two back legs across the old wooden floor, and heavily lowered himself into it. She locked her gaze on him and said what she had to say, every dirty word.
Cecelia took a breath and said, although she knew Aunt Maureen had no need of permission or encouragement, ‘I know only a handful of things about our family’s history. I’d like to know more.’
Later, at various times in her life when secrets from the past seemed especially vital or especially irrelevant to her, she would consider with a certain wonderment what she had thus invited in. Sometimes almost idly, occasionally with an urgency that was utterly impractical, she would wonder what difference it might have made in the lives of her children — particularly of Virginia, who would seem to have the most to gain and to lose — if she hadn’t invited Aunt Maureen to tell her this story, or if she’d pressed for more.
Aunt Maureen began by fixing things in place: ‘The year was 1916.’ For the same reason, Cecelia’s attention was momentarily occupied by the fact that she herself would be born the next year. Contemplating time before her birth or after her death always evoked in her a disquieting sense of continuity and insignificance, of being one small bead on an infinitely long and infinitely splitting string. She felt much the same way when she looked up at stars on a clear night, or lay flat in a mountain meadow, or on the one occasion when, on vacation with her parents in Maine, she’d walked along an ocean beach. It was somehow the same feeling, too, that made her back away from cliff rims — for fear not of falling but of jumping.
Aunt Maureen had gone on, oblivious to or, more likely, contemptuous of Cecelia’s momentary inattention. ‘Libby had another child. I was at the Normal, away from home for the first time, and no one had told me of her condition for fear of disturbing my studies, I suppose, or out of shame, or for some other reason. She and the baby came on the bus. I didn’t know she was coming. I understood right away what she wanted.’