The Age of Reason

By Marian Birch

The Worcester tornado of June 1953 is just the beginning of the turbulent eighth year of Edith's life.

Edith has always had a rich imagination, filled with fairies, adventures and storybook characters. She escapes to it when she is buffeted by strains in her parents' marriage or when she is scared by the news - about nuclear bo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639886289

Book preview

the

age of

reason

A NOVEL

MARIAN BIRCH

atmosphere press

© 2022 Marian Birch

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Matthew Fielder

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

atmospherepress.com

For my beloved husband, Bronson West

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One A Mighty Wind

Chapter Two  Life After Birth

Chapter Three  The Crying Rock

Chapter Four Birthday Party

Chapter Five Hunting Season

Chapter Six Nativity

Chapter Seven Armistice

Chapter Eight Harvest

Chapter Nine First Snow

Chapter Ten Advent

Chapter Eleven I Do Believe in Fairies

Chapter Twelve Easter in New York

Chapter Thirteen Dies Irae

CHAPTER ONE

A MIGHTY WIND

On the last day of school, Edith got off the bus at the foot of her own driveway. Every other day of first grade, she’d gone to Granny and Pop’s house after school.

She marched straight up the gravel drive. If she had turned her head, she might have seen the old blue car parked thirty yards up the road. She smelled the lilacs that lined the drive. As she passed underneath the branches of an old ash tree, two ravens squawked overhead. She felt her bones tingle with their cries. Her house, covered in weathered gray clapboard the exact color of a paper wasps’ nest, stood on a little hill. The meadow behind it was covered with apple trees that Granny had told her were almost as old as the house. That would make them three hundred years old. But Kitt, as she called her mother, said that no apple tree could possibly be that old. Kitt said that Granny meant that they had already been there when she was a little girl. Today the trees were covered with pink-and-white blossoms and the buzzing of bees.

When she pushed open the sliding glass door into the new kitchen, the quiet of the old house surrounded her. To Edith the kitchen didn’t seem new at all, because it had always been there as long as she could remember, but she knew everyone called it that because it had been added on to the house in the 1930s. It had been new ages before she was born. Pop had built it to give Granny Gladys a modern kitchen to cook in. That was before Pop and Gladys moved to the house up the road where, right now, they were minding her little brother.

The icebox purred softly and the big clock on top of it ticked loudly. Everything else was hushed. Edith found herself walking as lightly as she could, like an Indian brave in the woods, trying not to make a sound, as she crossed the fake-brick linoleum and put her schoolbooks down on the kitchen table. She opened the icebox, excited and proud that she had permission to eat whatever she liked. Although what she would have really liked was chocolate milk, her parents never bought the Bosco syrup you needed to make it, like the DeMelos, across the road, did. She made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and washed it down with ordinary milk. Then she headed up to her room.

She had gone up and down the narrow and uneven stairs to her small room at the top of the house so many times, often two at a time, that she didn’t need to turn on the light to know which steps were shorter or taller than the others. Her bedroom was the only room on the third floor, under the eaves. Kitt referred to it as a garret. She once told Edith that Raskolnikov had a similar room. Edith had no idea who Raskolnikov was. Just a crazy Russian teenager, Kitt explained. Edith’s garret had no door. The ceiling sloped and the room was almost completely filled by Edith’s ivory-painted wooden bed and the sagging jam cabinet with screened doors where she kept her dolls and clothes. The single mullioned casement window, glazed with six small panes of ancient, wavery glass, was propped open with a stick so the room wouldn’t be stuffy. A very gentle breeze blew in. Edith rummaged through the wicker laundry basket where she kept her dress-up things. She pulled out a threadbare black velvet circle skirt that used to be her mother’s, a big ivory shawl of fine wool, some phony gold bangles and chain necklaces from Kitt’s college theater days, and finally an old, yellowed napkin edged with dingy lace that smelled faintly of camphor.

Then she extracted her blue leather missal from its hiding place under her mattress and leafed through it, looking for the Sacrament of Baptism. The book had to be kept a secret because her parents didn’t like praying. Besides, she had stolen it from the Church of the Holy Innocents a few weeks before, when she went to Mass with her best friend Daniel DeMelo and his family so that Kitt and Arthur, her father, could sleep late. Today Edith was playing a nun who was baptizing her congregation of dolls and stuffed animals. Her friendship with Daniel DeMelo and his siblings, especially the knowledgeable nine-year-old Betsy, had made her well-informed about Church matters. She knew that nuns aren’t supposed to baptize and can’t be bishops, but she also knew that, if necessary, in an emergency, anyone can baptize as long as they say the right words and put some drops of holy water on the person they want to baptize. Daniel had learned this in catechism class. When the DeMelos’ youngest, baby Peter, was born last winter, Betsy had told her all about his baptism, so Edith knew just what to do. However, whenever she played Baptism with Daniel she had to let him be the bishop since he was a boy. Now she pretended, I, Mother Edith, must perform the sacrament because it is the middle of a war and there aren’t any bishops here behind enemy lines. In her imagination she could hear bombs exploding not very far away.

Despite the open window in the gable end of her little room, it was still warm and stuffy up here on the third floor. Ignoring her own comfort like a good nun, Edith draped the ivory shawl over her head. On top of it she arranged the velvet skirt and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t have a mirror, so she touched her forehead to be sure the white wimple showed beneath the black veil. Then she put the gold chains around her neck and spread the lace napkin on a footstool. She had brought up a drinking glass filled with water and a shot glass filled with Wesson Oil to be the holy water and the chrism. She liked the sound of chrism. Solemnly she made the sign of the cross and muttered in something she hoped resembled Latin.

In hominy patrice,

Filly-hoo et speary too sank toe.

At the same time, she waved her hands over the two glasses just like Mickey Mouse waving over the mop in Fantasia. This was to make the water and oil be holy. Her dolls and her two teddy bears were lined up solemnly on the chair behind the footstool. They were orphans whose parents had been killed by bombs before they could be baptized. She knew the orphans would go straight to Hell if something happened to them before they received the sacrament. Using two brushes from her painting set, she planned to sprinkle the blessed oil and water on the expectant Cat-a-cue-mens. Wet brush raised above her waiting flock, missal open to the correct page, Edith was distracted by a funny smell. It tickled her nose and the back of her throat. She looked up and saw that outside the window, the sky was now a sulfurous yellow-green that she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, a color sort of like the week-old black-and-blue mark on her arm from when she had walked into the bathroom doorknob. Just a little while earlier, when she’d come home from school, it had been a soft, warm late-spring day, smelling of apple blossoms and lilac, and the sky had been baby blue. Now instead of the quiet of a spring afternoon, she heard a swelling of sound like the train coming into the Worcester station when her mother would take her to New York. But the Worcester station was thirty miles away and there were no trains here in Whitby. There were hardly even any trucks bigger than a farmer’s flatbed truck hauling hay bales on her road. But now she definitely heard a train ... or something like a train. Could it be Pop using his chainsaw in the woods?

Suddenly, in less than the time it took her to gasp, Edith was sucked—whooshed—by what felt like an enormous vacuum cleaner out the open window into the air above her favorite apple tree, the one she liked to climb. Alongside her flew the glass of water and the glass of oil, the footstool, the neatly seated dolls and animals, and the napkin. Her heart startled straight upward, as if a small bird nesting inside her fluttered, squawked, and soared. Edith’s mind was swamped by her sensations. She felt her skin and her hair and her clothes all being sucked by the warm strong wind. Her whole body felt like her bare feet did when the waves were sucking the sand underneath them at Ocean Beach last summer, but this ocean was warm like a bath. This sucking wind was almost hot, like the air coming out of the back of the Hoover and, though it was very strong and smelled like ammonia, it was also oddly gentle.

Edith floated through the air, her small mouth forming a big O. She floated so very, very slowly that she could see everything below her and around her in remarkably vivid detail, much sharper than ordinary seeing. Usually, things were a little bit blurry for her, because she didn’t have very sharp eyes except for things right under her nose, like words on a page or blueberries on a bush. But now everything was sharply etched and clear. Her doll Teddy (the one whose hair she had cut off so she would have a boy), as well as one of her bears, was floating alongside her. They all sailed together over the yard and above the very same apple trees whose flowering she’d admired coming home from school earlier in the afternoon, now stripped of every dainty pink-and-white blossom. She floated over the gravel driveway, over the woods, just above the trees, over the pond. Then, very gently, the air dropped her to the northeast of the barn into a small grassy hollow surrounded by blackberry briars. She descended as gently as if she had a parachute. This is just the way, she thought, that Uncle Teddy floated down into a field in France in the war. She landed softly on the long, wet grass. No one shot a machine gun at her like she’d been told they shot at Uncle Teddy. She landed on her bottom. Seconds later, her bedroom window, unbroken, landed upright beside her. She thought, It will fall over, but despite a slight wobble, it remained standing. She scurried on hands and knees like a crab, under an enormous root ball from a fallen maple. Has the wind just knocked that tree over or has it always been here? She found that the ground under the maple’s twisted roots was soft and warm, a comfortable light-brown dirt. She had lost her black velvet cape and her ivory wimple, as well as her shoes and socks and the red-and-brown plaid skirt Kitt had told her to take off that morning. Kitt had said scathingly, It swears with that shirt. Edith now wore only her white Lollipop underpants and her pink knit T-shirt. Through the tangled roots and bittersweet vines above her head she could see that all sorts of things were still flying by overhead: a chair, a wheelbarrow, a bird’s nest, lots of branches; some quilts and laundry were tumbling and flapping in the sulfurous sky. Is that a lady on a bicycle flying by? Or…? The roar of the storm was so very loud that she could hear no other sounds, and yet somehow it was also distant and hollow. She crouched over her bent knees and put her hands behind her head the way Mrs. McKay had shown them to duck and cover for the grade school’s weekly air-raid drills. Then she looked through her bent elbow across her little shelter hollow and saw her Teddy and her two best bears sitting in the soft duff, looking expectantly at her, as if they were still waiting for her to complete their baptism. Kitty, her Madame Alexander doll, was there too but upside down with her skirts over her head. When she’d gotten Kitty for Christmas, the doll had a tag that said she was meant to be Jo March from Little Women, but Edith had renamed her after her mother because of her brown hair. She didn’t see her blue leather missal anywhere. Did God take it back because I stole it? Was there an A-bomb? Edith looked at the skin on her leg to see if the plaid pattern from her skirt had been etched onto it by the blast. Arthur had been reading her a book called Hiroshima, at bedtime, about the A-bomb, and it had one story about some Japanese ladies. When the bomb dropped on them, it burned the pattern of their kimonos into their skin. There was another war now, in a place called Korea, that the grown-ups talked about. They worried if there would be more A-bombs, but she’d also heard them talk about something they called the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of dust in her hollow, so she softly hummed a Woody Guthrie song about the Dust Bowl that Arthur sang to her sometimes.

"I been doing some hard travelin’

I thought you knowed

I been doing some hard travelin’

Way down the road…"

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the roaring of the storm fell silent and the air was perfectly still.…

q

Fifteen miles to the north, on the green wooded campus of Reese College, Mrs. Katerina P.M. Brynn sat in the tiny office she shared with Brian Cahill, who taught German. He wasn’t in today but she could still smell his revolting cigars. Kitt was not entitled to be called Professor because she was merely an instructor. She was wishing, as she often did, that she weren’t so relentlessly irritable and critical of everything that everyone else said or did. Just a moment before, Beth Frost, the sweet, earnest departmental secretary, had come in and offered her a freshly baked loaf of her homemade bread. It smelled heavenly. Beth and her husband, Arnold, were followers of Scott and Helen Nearing, the pacifists and communists who lived on a farm in Vermont making maple syrup. Beth and Arnold did everything the difficult, time-consuming but natural way. They didn’t exploit anyone’s labor or extract any surplus value, so Arthur thought they were the salt of the earth. Beth and Arnold not only baked their own bread, they had probably milled the flour from their own wheat. Just like the Little Red Hen, Kitt thought, remembering the story she had read to Marcus last night. Kitt had reflexively hefted the heavy loaf that Beth offered her, tossed it back and forth between her hands. Acidly she’d commented, Just the thing to fling at dangerous assailants!

Irony and sarcasm were lost on Beth, whose blue eyes had filled with tears. Always a little red-rimmed, her eyes had grown redder still, her cheeks flushed. Kitt noted unkindly that Beth didn’t blush attractively pink but blotchily red. Beth had tucked a wisp of the blond hair she wore in a modest bun behind her ear, then without another word had beaten a hasty retreat to her typewriter in the adjoining room, leaving Kitt holding the leaden loaf.

Kitt knew that she was always saying unkind things like this, things that hurt people’s feelings for no particular reason. She’d done it all her life, even (especially) to her own mother. She passionately believed in being kind to others and would have liked to be able to act accordingly, but often she couldn’t. She didn’t seem to have the knack of it. If she saw a spray of lilacs through the window, she was more likely to remark on the streaks and smudges on the window glass than on the beauty of the flowers. That morning, she recalled, she had made a gratuitous comment about her little Edith’s last-day-of-school choice of outfit. It looked, she had told her daughter, like the get-up of a circus clown. The pink shirt, she’d added, swore like a sailor at the red-and-brown plaid skirt. To distract herself from the uncomfortable memory of Edith’s pleasant little face shutting down, Kitt concentrated on the headache she felt coming on. She pressed her thumbs and forefingers against her temples. It had been ten weeks since her last menstrual period and she hadn’t told Arthur yet that she was late. The truth is, I seriously wonder if this is Arthur’s baby anyway. Their sex life had been all but nil since Marcus was born almost three years ago. Something about diapers and bottles and lack of sleep had drained all the fun out of it for her, at least with Arthur. Arthur had never been the most skillful of her lovers, though she still enjoyed his vigor and his unbridled enthusiasm. Most likely this baby’s father was her brother-in-law Edwin, with whom she’d been sneaking clandestine trysts since the previous February. That first time it happened, on Edith’s birthday, they had both been quite drunk, though that didn’t explain why they’d kept at it since.

Well, she thought, at least it’s the right gene pool. No one need ever know. Now she’d slept with all three of the handsome Brynn brothers—Dead Teddy, her husband Arthur, and Baby Edwin. Gladys would be appalled, she reflected. More accurately, my mother-in-law probably is appalled, since she’s a very keen observer. She probably won’t put this story into her Bradstreets of Whitby book, though. Edwin was much more imaginative as a lover than his brother, and anyway, the secrecy and the treachery made the sex terribly exciting. Kitt scrolled a clean sheet of onionskin paper into the typewriter and opened up the folder with the Akhmatova poems she’d been working on. Translation was so difficult to do well. So far the results of her efforts either sounded like her own not-so-good poetry that had little to do with the Russian original, or else they said, mechanically, in English, what Akhmatova said beautifully, without strain, in Russian. She didn’t know which was worse. As to the amazing little tricks of sound and meaning that studded the Russian poems like cloves in a ham, those were nearly impossible to make anything of in English. She shrugged and typed:

There is in every mortal closeness

A cut-off limit you cannot cross.

The English sounded like a traffic manual. She tried again.

There is a sacred boundary…

No, sacred was wrong. Earl Pipher, who worked at the United States mission to the UN. Earl (a man whom Kitt thought she would like to seduce) was the New York delegate of the executive committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress was a group of artists and thinkers who believed in democracy and freedom for artists to express themselves. That was what Earl said, at any rate. Arthur thought the Congress was an anti-Communist front. Earl had given the poems to her to translate. He had a friend in the Cultural Affairs branch of the Soviet United Nations delegation to whom Madame Akhmatova had whispered her poems, in clandestine meetings at Moscow subway stations, line by line, while he memorized them. Later, stationed in New York, he had transcribed, from memory, the verses Kitt was now trying to translate. Harrowing stuff, that poetry. Kitt had quit the Party years before, almost as soon as she’d joined, indignant at the nonaggression pact with Hitler, but this poetry would have made her do so now if she hadn’t already.

She pulled the sheet out of the typewriter, crumpled it, and tossed it on the floor, then scrolled in another. My dear Nancy, she wrote,

Oh how I wish you were here—no, far far better, that I were there sharing the pleasures of a Paris spring with you and sipping pernod in a warm café. Massachusetts just now is still cold and damp, though new grass, crocuses, and daffodils offer faint hope of impending warmth. But really, as I seem to say each time I write, perhaps to discourage you from following in my (staggering) footsteps, no one in her right mind would ever marry or have children. The children are good-enough sorts, viewed from a distance, I think. Edith is grave and wise beyond her years and has always been able to entertain herself since she played with her fingers and toes as a baby. She has quite an independent spirit and a manner I can only call imperious. She reads so much, I fear for her eyesight and her posture. And when she’s not tyrannizing or torturing him, she helps to keep Marcus cheerful and out of danger. Marcus is sturdy, lively (!! as in dervish!) and he is finally starting to talk comprehensibly. But oh, my lord, the upkeep they require, and the attention they crave, are enough to drive one mad, which for moi,as you know, is not a long way off at best. Why don’t I have a wife? Which brings me to the second part of my warning. I can distinctly recall finding Arthur terribly attractive, even before Big Brother Teddy’s death thrust me suddenly into his arms. But now the unending whirl of laundry, cooking, bedtime-story reading, nose-and-bottom-wiping, etc. is scarcely aphrodisiac, as you can (or perhaps—I hope—you can’t) imagine. And although I think he’s more helpful than most men, and thinks he ought to be (he, not I, managed to plow through The Second Sex when the Parshley translation came out this year), there’s so much, being a man, he simply doesn’t notice, or else thinks is unimportant.

That’s enough complaining. I’ve become one of those women who talk about nothing but their domestic affairs, something I always loathed and despised. I love to think of you in your little garret on the Ile St. Louis, or meandering over medieval bridges and cobblestoned streets to your lectures. Maybe seeing Camus, De Beauvoir, or Sartre as you go. I’m so glad the Sorbonne no longer makes students sit on bales of hay for lectures as they did in Aquinas’ day. And speaking of Sartre, does it feel to you as if you’ve reached the age of reason yet? I feel as if I’ve skipped right over it to what the brother character (forgot his name) calls the age of resignation.

Our little college here is buzzing with intrigue this spring—the usual love affairs, drinking