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Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
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Corinne said.
“This is her real world,” he said. “There’s nothing she needs that she can’t have here. Who wouldn’t love growing up in this place? Nobody’s going to think of her as a blind kid here.”
“She is a blind kid,” Corinne said. “She needs to go through and past that. So do you two. You can’t keep her locked away in a tower all her life. What happens when she wants something she can’t get up here? What happens when she marries and her husband lives somewhere else…if you all ever let anyone near enough to marry her? What happens when you die, or do you plan on not doing that? Did you ever read The Secret Garden ?”
52 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
They came as close to quarreling over Lacey as they ever did over anything. After that talk Joe simply would not speak of her to Corinne. And she stopped bringing the matter up.
Lacey stayed on the Mountain with us, in our little house and walled garden, and was taught Braille and simple coping skills by a young tutor who came each day from off the Mountain. She managed her schoolwork with ease and joy and played contentedly in her nursery or our garden with the children of friends and faculty, who came each afternoon and weekend, and had toys and pets and her radio and phonograph. She loved listening to television.
Joe and I spent virtually all our free time with her; I remember those early years as the years when the Mountain began to come to us. We did not go out, but we did not lack for companionship, and neither did she. She was a pretty, puckish child, small and rounded, like my mother, but with Joe’s thick fair hair. And the beautiful, light-spilling blue eyes were riveting. You literally forgot they saw nothing when she fixed them on you, following the sound of your voice.
Her laughter rang like chimes. Everyone who met her fell in love with her. Somehow, we managed not to spoil her. I really think her own sunniness and enormous curiosity saw to that.
“I forget for hours and sometimes days at a time that she can’t see,” Joe used to say, and I agreed. I was proud and grateful for managing to fashion a world for our child that made sight virtually unnecessary. I was happy in those days, no less happy than I have been in our later ones. It seemed to me that all the value and beauty in the world lay here in microcosm.
I never looked far ahead. For a long time, I saw no need to.
When she was ten, Joe and I began to plan the house HILL TOWNS / 53
we wanted to live in for the rest of our lives. We’d been talking about it for years, and we’d finally bought a lot. It was the back four acres of an old estate on the very lip of the Steep, thick with first-growth hardwoods and dogwood and laurel and rhododendron, sweeping level and sweet up to the granite outcropping that guarded the land from the air. It had belonged to the first patrician general who had retreated to the Mountain after the “late unpleasantness,” to lick his wounds and form a mountain fastness where sons of the Confederacy might learn in their turn the precise things that led their fathers into war. The last of his line had died, and Joe had his bid in to the estate lawyers indecently soon after the service at All Souls. There were much higher bids, but they came from off the Mountain, and I suppose the trustees saw their duty clear. We had an architect friend translate our ideas into drawings, and on the night we sat down with him to review them, Lacey sat with us, her head against Joe’s knee. We paid little heed to her. She often sat like that when we had friends over. She seldom interrupted.
More often than not, she was off in her own world, the one behind her eyes where we could never follow. She stayed there a lot.
Philip talked of how the new rooms would look, and how we might live in them, and how he thought the furniture and artifacts of our lives might fit there. He talked of the air and sun and space and the magnificent panorama of flatland and
“This is her real world,” he said. “There’s nothing she needs that she can’t have here. Who wouldn’t love growing up in this place? Nobody’s going to think of her as a blind kid here.”
“She is a blind kid,” Corinne said. “She needs to go through and past that. So do you two. You can’t keep her locked away in a tower all her life. What happens when she wants something she can’t get up here? What happens when she marries and her husband lives somewhere else…if you all ever let anyone near enough to marry her? What happens when you die, or do you plan on not doing that? Did you ever read The Secret Garden ?”
52 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
They came as close to quarreling over Lacey as they ever did over anything. After that talk Joe simply would not speak of her to Corinne. And she stopped bringing the matter up.
Lacey stayed on the Mountain with us, in our little house and walled garden, and was taught Braille and simple coping skills by a young tutor who came each day from off the Mountain. She managed her schoolwork with ease and joy and played contentedly in her nursery or our garden with the children of friends and faculty, who came each afternoon and weekend, and had toys and pets and her radio and phonograph. She loved listening to television.
Joe and I spent virtually all our free time with her; I remember those early years as the years when the Mountain began to come to us. We did not go out, but we did not lack for companionship, and neither did she. She was a pretty, puckish child, small and rounded, like my mother, but with Joe’s thick fair hair. And the beautiful, light-spilling blue eyes were riveting. You literally forgot they saw nothing when she fixed them on you, following the sound of your voice.
Her laughter rang like chimes. Everyone who met her fell in love with her. Somehow, we managed not to spoil her. I really think her own sunniness and enormous curiosity saw to that.
“I forget for hours and sometimes days at a time that she can’t see,” Joe used to say, and I agreed. I was proud and grateful for managing to fashion a world for our child that made sight virtually unnecessary. I was happy in those days, no less happy than I have been in our later ones. It seemed to me that all the value and beauty in the world lay here in microcosm.
I never looked far ahead. For a long time, I saw no need to.
When she was ten, Joe and I began to plan the house HILL TOWNS / 53
we wanted to live in for the rest of our lives. We’d been talking about it for years, and we’d finally bought a lot. It was the back four acres of an old estate on the very lip of the Steep, thick with first-growth hardwoods and dogwood and laurel and rhododendron, sweeping level and sweet up to the granite outcropping that guarded the land from the air. It had belonged to the first patrician general who had retreated to the Mountain after the “late unpleasantness,” to lick his wounds and form a mountain fastness where sons of the Confederacy might learn in their turn the precise things that led their fathers into war. The last of his line had died, and Joe had his bid in to the estate lawyers indecently soon after the service at All Souls. There were much higher bids, but they came from off the Mountain, and I suppose the trustees saw their duty clear. We had an architect friend translate our ideas into drawings, and on the night we sat down with him to review them, Lacey sat with us, her head against Joe’s knee. We paid little heed to her. She often sat like that when we had friends over. She seldom interrupted.
More often than not, she was off in her own world, the one behind her eyes where we could never follow. She stayed there a lot.
Philip talked of how the new rooms would look, and how we might live in them, and how he thought the furniture and artifacts of our lives might fit there. He talked of the air and sun and space and the magnificent panorama of flatland and
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