Crossroads

Following the edict, her father had undertaken to replace Clem as the person she went on walks with. For Clem, outdoors, everything was an adventure—vines to be swung from, old wells to be sounded with pebbles, terrible centipedes to be discovered under rocks, seed pods to be sniffed and broken open, horses to be lured with an apple. For her father, nature was just a glorious but unspecific thing that God had made. He talked to Becky about Jesus, which made her uncomfortable, and about the hard lives of local farmers, which was more interesting but maybe not so wise of him. The stories she could tell on the playground—the Boylans had a son in an insane asylum, Mrs. Boylan could only take nourishment through a straw, Carl Jackson’s mother was actually his grandmother—had given her an early taste of popularity. Shocking true facts about grownups were at a premium in grade school.

After the family moved to Chicago, her father had continued the “tradition” of taking her on walks on Sunday afternoons, usually a simple loop around Scofield Park. Declining his invitation was seldom worth the guilt trip her mother would have laid on her. Becky already felt guilty enough for caring little about the church and even less about oppressed people, and she did appreciate that her father treated her like a grownup, respected her like that, and kept telling her things he maybe shouldn’t have. She heard a lot about his dreams of a larger life of Christian service, his frustrations at being an associate minister in an affluent and mostly white suburb, and she took what she heard straight to Clem. (“He’s frustrated,” Clem said, “that he has a wife and four kids.” Or, more wickedly: “Mom likes you being the one Dad goes for walks with, because she knows he can’t run off with you.”) In return, despite being prodded, she told her father nothing about her own dreams and frustrations.

She uncapped her pen again with her teeth. The first batch of sugar cookies was baking.

On January 16, it will be one year since my Aunt Shirley passed away.

This was better already. It had gravity and created immediate sympathy for the bereaved college applicant.

She was alone in the world, having lost her one true love in World War II. I had the privilege of knowing her later in life and learning the importance of culture and elegance, belief in oneself, and bravery in the face of solitude and sickness from her. Whatever my mother may think, she didn’t buy my affection. I truly loved her. Every summer, starting when I was ten, I got to go and spend a week in her small but elegantly tastefully furnished apartment in New York City Manhattan.

It was true that Shirley had bought her a lot of stuff over the years. Also true that none of Becky’s brothers ever got anything. True that the new clothes she brought home from New York had to be cleaned before she even wore them, to get the stink of Chesterfields out of them, and that on her first visit, in 1964, she cried every night on her aunt’s sofa bed (Shirley called it a “convertible,” as if it were a car) out of homesickness for Clem and the eye-burning oppression of the smoke in the airless apartment, and that, ironically, it was her mother who insisted that she accept Shirley’s invitation again the next summer, as an act of charity. (Only later, after Becky had come to look forward to her New York trips, did her mother start using words like vain and unrealistic about her sister.)

Even early on, though, Becky had been dazzled by her aunt. On Shirley’s first and last visit to the Indiana farmhouse, she’d taken Becky by her seven-year-old shoulders, looked her seriously in the eye, and informed her that she was destined to be a great beauty. That was something. Unlike her mother, who was only ever a pastor’s wife, Shirley had had a career as a Broadway actress, never as a big star, apparently, but an actual career, and Becky had marveled at how imperiously she sliced through the masses of humanity at the World’s Fair, in 1964, and how, when a waiter or a salesperson referred to Becky as her daughter, she merely winked at Becky, who until then had followed Clem’s example and abhorred dishonesty. The difference between dishonesty and make-believe, Shirley said, was artistic imagination. Though it was obvious that Becky didn’t have this kind of imagination—in New York, she preferred the mummies at the Met to the European painters, the dinosaurs across the park to the mummies, and Macy’s to the dinosaurs—Shirley told her that this was just as well, because the world of art and theater was entirely controlled by cruel men, many of them literally, pardon her French, cocksuckers, and it was better for a woman to be the patron, the appreciator, than patronized and unappreciated. By which, though Shirley never quite spelled it out, Becky understood that she would be better off rich than talented.