Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

he was not sure why. No doubt soon after the moment he remembered, some neighbor had come in to look after him while Aunt Harriet went out, perhaps some neighbor he disliked. His aunt’s hind end, on the dressing-table bench, was to his child eye, in some inexpressible way, mysterious. Even now, in the memory, the lines of her hind end were as mysterious as some blurred old legend or inexplicable ruin. He’d been looking at that part of her the instant before he met her eyes. “Gerald!” she’d cried, startled, then had blushed at having jumped, and had laughed her feathery little laugh. What charged the memory, needless to say, was not the slightly blurry recollection of his aunt, but his own long-forgotten anguish—love and shame. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” he’d said, or something of the sort, and she’d said, smiling eagerly, as if in terrible panic, “Of course not, dear!” and then, in quite a different tone, “Hmm,” and she’d studied him narrowly.

Craine shook his head, whether to make the picture clearer or to drive it away he could hardly have said. They had not been close, though she’d made cookies for him—they’d be waiting in the yellow and white cookie crock when he got home, two hours before she did, from school—and whenever they went downtown she’d taken him to tea rooms, where he sat, among blue-haired old ladies and ate cucumber and watercress sandwiches. “Isn’t this fun, Gerald?” his aunt would say (she’d been slightly buck-toothed, it came to him now) and her shy, affected-sounding laugh would float lightly above the table. His aunt had had no idea what to do with him, this knee-splitting, sneaker-wrecking legacy from her younger sister. When his grades were bad—and they were always bad, though she knew he wasn’t stupid, or so she’d told him—she could only say, “Gerald, what are we to do with you, dear?” When he’d quit school and joined the navy she had cried half the night out of guilt and relief. In her letters she implored him to please not do anything dangerous. The letters were full of clippings about people from his high school, usually people he’d never met. “Evelyn Kelley has asked to be remembered to you,” she’d write. He could remember no one named Kelley.

The second set of images that came into his mind began with his aunt at the polished mahogany table, staring down as if at her reflection, her hand, white and thin, around her forehead. He couldn’t recall what it was that had drained all color from behind the rouge, though he remembered clearly, or perhaps supplied now by some mental trick, the dry lace curtains on the window behind her, the parakeets in their cage, the silver-gray flowers on the wallpaper, the blue china cup. He was older in this memory, eleven or twelve, and this time the charge of the memory was guilt and dread. Whether or not there was any real connection, he remembered she’d fired the maid, because he, little Gerald, had told on her. The maid was sixteen, a girl named Delores, from the orphanage. He could recall her face only dimly. She’d been more than just a maid, more like an all-round handmaiden. She’d taken him to movies, washed dishes while he dried, and told him—shyly, both of them blushing, avoiding each other’s eyes—her erotic dreams. Once unfortunately she’d told him something that had not been a dream, or so she’d claimed. She had a boyfriend named Frank, some years older than she was, a brakeman on the Illinois Central. He’d persuaded her to let him put his thing inside her, because they wanted to be married and it would be wrong if the two of them didn’t fit. The revelation had distressed Craine immensely, for some reason, and though he’d known it was a secret, the darkest in the world, he’d told his aunt. He had no idea now how he’d managed to bring it up, though certainly he’d known it was treachery. His aunt, ashen-faced, trembling in her fury and cold as winter, had fired the girl at once. “After all I’ve done for you!” she’d whispered. She had the tone of an outraged conspirator. “Unspeakable!” she hissed, “unspeakable!” The girl had backed away from her, her close-together eyes welling tears like a child’s (Craine had seen it all through the crack in the warped bedroom door.) Her door stood wide open when he looked the next morning—the room where she’d taught him to kiss, one night. A cunning business. She’d told him stories about boys who’d lost girlfriends by not knowing the right way to kiss—“and things like that.” She’d taught him in the dark. She’d be embarrassed, she said, to teach someone to kiss with the lights on. What kind of girl did he think she was? He’d gotten stiff as a tree, and when she’d accidentally touched him—touched his trousers, that is—she hadn’t realized and had let her hand linger there a moment. She kissed him harder, making her mouth more wet and soft, and then suddenly his aunt was home, calling up the stairs. They’d both of them nearly had heart attacks.

Afterward, Delores would never let him kiss her, always teasing him, sliding her eyes at him, letting out, shyly, the details of what she did, or more often almost did, with Frank. Gerald had stolen a pair of her panties and had hidden them in his bed, between the slats and the mattress. So now, the day after he’d told on her, her door stood open, the room full of dust-specked light, stark and empty as a crypt. And so in this later now of Gerald Craine, in the image that had triggered these embarrassing recollections, his aunt sat, drained, at the table; and like the gloomy vaults in the museums where they sometimes went on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, the room was full of serpent coils and wings. “The Babylonians,” his aunt had said