Read Online Where We Are Now by Carolyn Osborn - Free Book Online

although her arthritis didn’t allow her to climb the stairs to our second story apartment often. My mother saw her whenever she went to Franklin to ride horseback with Marguerite.
    Uncle George, judged 4-F at the war’s beginning, kept serving his country his own way by continuing his business and looking after Miss Kate’s rental property. Mother, after our long period of mourning, began confiding in me.
    â€œI suppose you know George is involved with Marguerite.”
    By then I knew she meant Uncle George spent his nights in Marguerite’s bed.
    â€œIs he going to marry her?”
    â€œI doubt it. Your grandmother is against it.”
    Marguerite had been around, according to Mother, longer than George’s other women. When I was nine she had given a birthday party for me. Marguerite’s party was on a grander scale than any I’d ever known, especially during the war. Other people hardly made cakes because of sugar rationing; Marguerite’s cook Ada provided a three-layerchocolate cake with my name written in white on it. She served it where I sat at the head of a long dining table with a bell hidden underneath the carpet to call the cook. My only problem was that children, dying to press it, had to be fended off by my equally hidden kicks. Marguerite’s house, a large old one with white pillars and a long paved brick front porch, was near enough to Franklin for Uncle George to get there quickly. There was a small bar downstairs near the pantry, a larger one upstairs. I’d never seen a bar inside or out of a house. The upstairs one had three tall stools and on one wall, a Mexican sombrero. I climbed on one of the stools, put my elbows on the bar’s shiny surface, and studied the sombrero. Multi-colored straw, its colors looped in bands spiraling bright green, yellow, purple, pink to a conical top. What would it look like on someone’s head?
    â€œNobody would wear that hat,” said Mother.
    I also liked Marguerite’s canopied guest bed, the balcony over-looking the porch, a library walled with books, and Ada’s family who lived nearby. Her husband farmed the place and their children, Doug and Emily, and I took turns swinging each other in a big hammock between two trees in the front yard. They were the only black children my age I had ever been around in a casual, friendly way. Everything seemed easy at that house. I was in favor of Marguerite. How could Grandmother keep Uncle George from marrying her?
    â€œI don’t think he really wants to marry. Besides … Marguerite drinks, and she’s Catholic. Your grandmother is Church of Christ, don’t forget.”
    I didn’t understand the Protestant-Catholic clash, but I knew Miss Kate was a great believer in her own form of religion. And I did understand drink. Both my grandfather and my father drank. The way Mother weighted the word, I knew she wasn’t talking about cocktails before dinner or party drinking; she meant that Marguerite got drunk onsome uncertain personal schedule. And no one could change her. Mother and Miss Kate took a fatal attitude toward alcoholism—they never used the word. Miss Kate would take a glass of sherry, and Mother enjoyed an occasional drink. Getting drunk was reserved for men and, I supposed, a few women like Marguerite.

    Even when the war was over, the Red Cross wanted Mother to leave town to make speeches; there was a lot of refugee work to be done. I was sent to spend a week with Marguerite. One afternoon she sat out on the front porch, Tom Collins in hand, watching the rainfall. It was a summer when rain drizzled steadily for days.
    We rocked in two vast chairs. There were four others, just as large, on the porch. Marguerite frequented springs, those spas where people drank and also soaked in curative waters. Afterward they rocked in the same sort of chairs on hotel porches. Miss Kate, who liked the hot baths at various springs for her arthritis, had