loss, and have seen it among some of my kids. But I grew up secure, taking love for granted, as all children should and the fortunate ones do. We had more than enough love to share with Neal.
My father washed the dishes, we dried. We would sit at the kitchen table and do homework after doing the dishes. Later, Neal would walk home down the hill to his house across the river. Even children with watchful parents walked everywhere, alone or with friends, then.
That very first day of school set the pattern for our eight ensuing years at the Common School. We would stay after and help our teacher decorate bulletin boards in the drafty entry hall, marking the season with construction paper leaves which gave way to Pilgrims and then snowflakes, silhouettes of Washington and his cherry tree, Lincoln and his axe. On the way home we would collect walnuts and line them up across the road to enjoy the mess created by passing cars. We lobbed snowballs at each other, and if I managed to hit him first he would drop and howl in mock pain. In spring, we would take off our shoes and socks, hike up our itchy woolen long johns, and go barefoot on tender winter-soft feet.
Kids teased us sometimes about being friends. K-I-S-S-I-N-G! First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. The teasing seemed to roll off Neal. He would just shake his head, shrug, and smile; at ease with himself, truly comfortable in his own skin. I preferred his company to that of girls. Girls were skittish about visiting a jail, and their mothers wary, too.
When I was ten, my father gave me a two wheeler, and let Neal use his bicycle. Neal had started his growth spurt by then, and his legs were long and easily reached the pedals. It took me longer to get the hang of it, to trust the balance, but with Neal’s encouragement and my father’s steadying hand on the bicycle seat, I finally got it. After that, our narrow valley world had no limits for us. We could bike to the Coffee Pot, a round cinder block building with convex windows, painted silver with a decorative red spout and handle. Even the line of rust dripping down the tarpaper beneath the spout was accidentally perfect, as Neal pointed out to me one day as we sat at the picnic table outside sharing a root beer. Or, on longer summer afternoons, we would cycle along Route 220, above the rushing water of Shober’s Run, out to the Bedford Springs Hotel. We’d hide our bikes in the shrubs by Naugel’s Mill on the edge of the resort property and hike in.
The hotel shimmered, magical as the Taj Mahal I’d read about in National Geographic. The main building had a white colonnaded porch and upstairs balconies decorated with gingerbread fretwork like doilies on a valentine. The golf course stretched into infinity down the narrow valley. We speculated about how rich you had to be to stay there.
We sampled the spring water and declared it stinky. Every Bedford school child knew the Indians had discovered the water, eight miraculous mineral springs. We waded in it, to test whether it would work for us. Would it soothe our bug bites, the way it had cured open sores for the Indians and the white settlers? That’s why the first hotel had been built here, after all, in 1805. That’s why presidents stayed here—well, not the famous ones, but Polk and Buchanan. And the first transatlantic telegram from England to America arrived here. People still called Bedford the Jewel of the Alleghenies. “I’m from Bedford, Jewel of the Alleghenies,” Neal would yodel as we hiked the trails. We sneaked in to swim in Lake Caledonia. We sat in a hillside pavilion (I loved that word, pavilion) above the hotel and spied on guests playing croquet on the lawn below. Sometimes, in the last summer before high school, I felt a quickening in the air between us, and would look at him and catch him looking at me. We’d run then, spooked on the darkening path. We hid and ambushed each other—grabbing each other, rough-housing. He was all bone and muscle. Once, by accident, he touched my chest and we broke apart, stunned.
“Boo! I’m John Brown on the lam from Harper’s Ferry!” he shouted.
“Oooo,Oooo,Oooo … I’m the lost pioneer child come to get you!” I retorted.
Our friendship, our kinship, changed in high school. Not uncommon, I know now, for best friends—especially a girl and a boy—to grow apart in puberty. But then it was the end of my world. In the black and white graduation portrait of our eighth grade class, I stand on the third step of the porch outside the Common School. My expression is worried, severe as though I intuit the coming changes. Neal, tallest of all the children, is on the top step, grinning, as though he anticipated his coming popularity, knew that for him the roller coaster was rising.
Neal grew into his raw-boned frame and became handsome, a rising star on the football team. He was such a good athlete; it didn’t matter about his father, or that he came from the other side of the river. He travelled in a pack of admirers, boys and girls. At first he tried to include me, calling me to join them in the cafeteria, but I hung back. So we parted; no rift, just drifted apart, perhaps like twins who need to separate.
I joined the yearbook, the newspaper, the literary magazine. But for me, solitude has always been the best cure for loneliness, and I spent hours in the library, or reading on my window-seat.
“We don’t see much of Neal,” my father observed.
“I see him at school.” Actually, I felt his presence. I didn’t need to see him to feel him nearby. In class I sometimes watched him, covertly, and occasionally caught his eye on me. And at home football games, seated high on the back of the bleachers, I felt a thrill of pride when his teammates carried him around the field. And a stab of jealousy when the girls clustered around.
“I want you to have piano lessons,” my father said. My mother’s piano, a mahogany Chickering upright, had stood in our parlor as just a silent piece of furniture. “With Grace McKee.”
Grace McKee lived alone in her family’s fine Queen Anne house on Juliana Street, just two blocks from the Common School, near the Library. It was hard to judge how old she was. My father’s age, about. She was pretty in a quiet way. Her hair was blond and permanent-waved. She wore cotton shirtwaist dresses she tailored herself on the treadle sewing machine upstairs, and smelled deliciously of lavender cologne. There was a designated room for everything in Grace’s house: music room, library, sewing room, dining room, and parlor. Even a small greenhouse where she grew orchids, and lilies—the conservatory, she called it. And she had attended a different sort of conservatory in Pittsburgh, to study music. I studied her house like a spy, a cultural anthropologist, sniffing the lozenges of sandalwood soap in a china saucer on the washstand, admiring the oil paintings in heavy gold frames, wading across the deep jewel-toned carpets, coveting the doll collection brought home by a missionary grandfather. She let me open the glass-fronted bookcase in the hallway where the dolls lived. My favorite was the Japanese doll with her paper-white porcelain face, four tiny silk kimonos, and four wigs. I was far too old for dolls, and had never cared for them before. But I carefully changed her kimonos, changed her wigs as the seasons passed.
Grace had cool, delicate hands. She showed me how to place my fingers on the ivory keys and how to arch my wrists. Learning to play required my complete concentration. The absorbing focus of the lessons proved an oasis. My father often came, just before the lesson ended. The front door clicked open and Grace sat even a little straighter on the piano bench beside me and touched her hair. He sat behind us in the cane bottomed rocker to listen. I played for him, and then Grace would play. She used the pedal when she played for him, and the piano responded like a different instrument from the one I’d just had my lesson on.
“Stay for dinner,” she would say, and sometimes we did, eating by the light of candles in her formal dining room. Simple meals served on thin china—cold roast chicken, aspic salad—simple meals that required forethought, time and preparation in the earlier part of the day. She poured water from a crystal decanter. I let myself imagine what it might be like, if my father and Grace married, and I had one of the high-ceilinged bedrooms upstairs. She loved him, I believe, but my father was married to his job, and in some quiet way, still married to my mother. I understand how that can be.
The
