Kate Wilhelm - Somerset Dreams

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Somerset Dreams by Kate Wilhelm

First published in Orbit 5, ed. Damon Knight, 1969

I AM ALONE in my mother's house, listening to the ghosts who live here now, studying the shadowed

features of the moon that is incredibly white in a milky sky. It is easier to believe that it is a face lined

with care than to accept mountains and craters. There a nose, long and beaked, there a mouth, dark,

partially open. A broad creased forehead... They say that children believe the sun and moon follow them

about. Not only children... Why just a face? Where is the rest of the body? Submerged in an ethereal

fluid that deceives one into believing it does not exist? Only when this captive body comes into view,

stirring the waters, clouding them, does one realize that space is not empty at all. When the moon

passes, and the sky clears once more, the other lights are still there. Other faces at incredible distances?

I wonder what the bodies of such brilliant swimmers must be like. But I turn my gaze from the moon,

feeling now the hypnotic spell, wrenching free of it.

The yard has turned silvery and lovely although it is not a lovely place any more. Below the rustlings in

the house I hear the water of Cobb's Run rippling softly, breaking on the remains of an old dam. It will

be cool by the flowing water, I think, and I pull on shorts and a blouse. I wonder how many others are

out in the moonlight. I know there are some. Does anyone sleep peacefully in Somerset now? I would

like to wander out by the brook with nothing on, but even to think of it makes me smile. Someone would

see me, and by morning there would be stories of a young naked woman, and by noon the naked

woman would be a ghost pointing here and there. By evening old Mr. Larson, or Miss Louise, would be

dead. Each is waiting only for the sign that it is time.

I anoint myself with insect repellent. It is guaranteed to be odorless, but I can smell it anyway, and can

feel it, greaseless and very wet, on my arms and legs.

I slip from the house where my mother and father are sleeping. The night is still hot, our house doesn't

cool off until almost morning, and there is no wind at all, only the moon that fills the sky. Someone is

giggling in the yard and I shush her, too close to the house, to Mother's windows on the second floor.

We race down the path to the pool made by damming the run and we jump into the silver-sheened

water. Someone grabs my ankle and I hold my breath and wrestle under the surface with one of the

boys. I can't tell which one it is. Now and then someone lets a shriek escape and we are motionless,

afraid Father will appear and order us out. We play in the water at least an hour, until the wind starts and

blows the mosquitoes away, and then we stumble over the rocks and out to the grass where now the

night is cool and we are pleasantly tired and ready for sleep. When I get back to the house I see the

door closing and I stop, holding my breath. I listen as hard as I can, and finally hear the tread on the

steps: Father, going back to bed.

I slip on sandals and pick up my cigarettes and lighter without turning on the light. The moonlight is

enough. In the hall I pause outside the door of my parents' room, and then go down the stairs. I don't

need a light in this house, even after a year's absence. The whole downstairs is wide open, the kitchen

door, the front door, all the windows. Only the screens are between me and the world. I think of the

barred windows of my 87th Street apartment and smile again, and think how good to be free and home

once more. The night air is still and warm, perfumed with grass and phlox and the rambling rose on the

garage trellis. I had forgotten how much stronger the fragrance is at night. The mosquitoes are whining

about my face, but they don't land on me. The path has grown up now with weeds and volunteer

columbines and snapdragons. By day it is an unruly strip with splashes of brilliant colors, now it is silver

and gray and dark red.

At the creek I find a smooth rock and sit on it, not thinking, watching the light change on the moving

water, and when the wind starts to blow, I think it must be three in the morning. I return to the unquiet

house and go to bed, and this time I am able to fall asleep.

I walk to town, remembering how I used to skip, or ride my bike on the sidewalks that were large

limestone slabs, as stick as polished marble when they were wet. I am bemused by the tilted slabs,

thinking of the ground below shoving and trying to rid itself of their weight. I am more bemused by

myself; I detest people who assign anthropomorphic concepts to nature. I don't do it anywhere but here

in Somerset. I wear a shift to town, observing the customs even now. After high school, girls no longer

wore shorts, or pants, in town.

I have been counting: seven closed-up houses on First Street. Our house is at the far end of First Street,

one ninth of a mile from the other end of town where Magnolia Avenue starts up the mountain as

Highway 590. All the side streets are named for flowers. I pass Wisteria Avenue and see that the wicker

furniture is still on the porch of Sagamore House. The apple trees are still there, gnarled, like the hands

of men so old that they are curling in on themselves, no longer able to reach for the world, no longer

desiring the world. I come back every year, and every year I am surprised to see that some things are

unchanged. The four apple trees in the yard of the Sagamore House are important to me; I am always

afraid that this year they will have been cut down or felled by one of the tornadoes that now and again

roar like express trains from the southwest, to die in the mountains beyond the town.

How matter-of-factly we accepted the long, hot, dry summers, the soul-killing winters, the droughts, the

tornadoes, the blizzards. The worst weather in any part of the country is equaled in Somerset. We

accept it as normal.

I am not certain why the apple trees are so important. In the early spring, tempted by a hot sun into folly,

they bloom prematurely year after year, and are like torches of white light. There is always a late frost

that turns them black, and then they are just trees, growing more and more crooked, producing scant

fruit, lovely to climb, however.

In Mr. Larson's store, where I buy my groceries when I am home, I learn from Agnes McCombs that a

station wagon and two cars have arrived early this morning with students and a doctor from Harvard.

Agnes leaves and I say goodbye absently. I am thinking of yet another rite of passage that took place

here, in old Mr. Larson's store when I was thirteen. He always handed out chunks of "homemade

baloney" to the children while their mothers shopped, but that day, with the tidbit extended, he regarded

me with twinkling eyes and withdrew the meat impaled on a two-pronged fork. "Mebbe you'd like a

Coke, Miss Janet?"

He is so old, eighty, ninety. I used to think he was a hundred then, and he changes little. His hands are

like the apple trees. I ask him, "Why are they here? What are they doing?"

"Didn't say. Good to see you home again, Janet. The old house need any repairs?"

"Everything's fine. Why'd Miss Dorothea let them in?"

"Money. Been six, seven years since anyone's put up at the Sagamore. Taxes don't go down much, you

know."

I can't explain the fury that is threatening to explode within me, erupting to the surface as tears, or a

fishwife's scolding. Mr. Larson nods. "We figured that mebbe you could sidle up to 'em. Find out what

they're up to." He rummages under the counter and brings out a letter. "From your dad," he says, peering

at the return address. "He still thriving?"

"About the same. I visited him last month. I guess he thought of things he forgot to tell me and put them

in a letter."

Mr. Larson shakes his head sadly. "A fine man, your dad." After a moment, he adds, "Could be for the

best, I reckon."

I know what he means, that without Mother, with the town like it is, with his only child a woman nearing

thirty... But he doesn't know what Father is like or he couldn't say that. I finish my shopping and greet

Poor Haddie, who is back with the truck. He's been making his delivery to the Sagamore House. He will

bring my things later. Leaving, I try to say to myself Haddie without the Poor and the word sounds

naked, the name of a stranger, not of the lumbering delivery "boy" I have known all my life.

I have other visits to make. Dr. Warren's shingle needs a bit of paint, I note as I enter his house. He

doesn't really practice now, although people talk to him about their sore throats and their aches and

pains, and now and again he suggests that this or that might help. If they get really ill, they go to Hawley,

twenty-eight miles away, over the mountain. Dr. Warren never fails to warn me that the world isn't ready

for a lady doctor, and I still try to tell him that I am probably one of the highest-paid anesthesiologists in

the world, but he forgets in the intervening year. I always end up listening to advice about sticking with

nursing where a woman is really accepted. Dr. Warren delivered me back there at the house in the

upstairs bedroom, with my father assisting gravely, although later he broke down and cried like a baby

himself, or so Dr. Warren said. I suspect he did.

Dr. Warren and his wife, Norma, make a fuss over me and tears are standing in my eyes as they serve

me coffee with cream so thick that it has to be scooped up in a spoon. They too seem to think I will find

out what the flatland foreigners want with our town.

Sagamore House. I try to see it again with the eyes of my childhood: romantic, forbidding, magnificent,

with heavy drapes and massive, ornately carved furniture. I have a snapshot memory of crawling among

the clawed feet, staring eye to eye at the lions and gargoyles and sticking out my tongue at them. The

hotel has shrunk, the magic paled and the castle become merely a three-storied wooden building, with

cupolas and many chimneys and gables, gray, like everything else in the town. Only the apple trees on

the wide velvety lawn are still magic. I enter by the back door and surprise Miss Dorothea and Miss

Annie, who are bustling about with an air of frantic haste.

There are cries and real tears and many pats and kisses, and the inevitable coffee, and then I am seated

at the long work table with a colander of unshelled peas in my lap, and a pan for them.

"... and they said it wasn't possible to send the bus any more. Not twenty-eight miles each way twice a

day. And you can't argue with that since no one's done a thing about the road in four years and it's

getting so dangerous that..."

A cul-de-sac, I am thinking, listening first to Dorothea and then to Annie, and sometimes both together.

Somerset used to be the link between Hawley and Jefferson, but a dam was built on the river and the

bridge was inundated, and now Somerset lies dying in a cul-de-sac. I say the word again and again to

myself, liking it very much, thinking what a wonderful word it is, so mysterious, so full of meanings, layers

and layers of meanings....

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Kate Wilhelm - Somerset Dreams

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