The Eleventh Year Read Online Free

be. Probably a painter, or a sculptress.”
    â€œOh, Lesley.”
    â€œHigher education is very much in fashion,” the pregnant Em said, falling back against lace pillows. “You can meet fine fellows there, Mama. Yalies. Mmmmm. . . .”
    â€œEmily. Georgie went to Harvard.” Mothers always remembered.
    â€œYes. I forgot.” Stifling a yawn.
    â€œYou don’t really love him, do you?” Lesley cut in. Her tone of voice was anything but hostile—it was simply curious, as if suddenly she had realized something of import. “Why’d you marry him, Em?”
    Emily smiled. “We were suited to each other. And of course I love him, Les. It isn’t like Romeo and Juliet, but then neither are we. We’re grown-up, sensible people.”
    Something rebelled inside Lesley, something turned over. She could feel the tightness in her throat. Her father said, saving her: “So. You want to go to college. I don’t think that’s at all a bad idea. What does Miss Spence think?”
    â€œShe agrees with my choice: Vassar.”
    â€œSo you’ve already decided?”
    â€œYes.” Lesley waited quietly, her hands folded in her lap. She wasn’t so sure of him anymore, not since that discussion about her need to “connect.” She wasn’t sure of him, and she didn’t really know what her mother thought. Nobody ever knew, for sure. The Lady Priscilla seemed conventional enough, but in her day she’d done a most unusual thing: She’d married an American of dubious family and the Catholic faith. That was why Lesley, although she didn’t want Mama for a friend, still felt, at odd moments, a kind of bond—tenuous at best, but nonetheless existent.
    â€œWell, then,” Ned said brightly, “there’s no more to be discussed.” And he watched as the muscles in Lesley’s arms relaxed, as the scene shifted once again to the boxes of eyelet lace and trimmings that had been set down at his wife’s feet. Lesley turned around, very quietly, and left the room. She didn’t belong there anymore, not anymore.

    C incinnati was a city of German immigrants, mostly Catholic. The Reverend Stewart felt them around him all the time. His people were those who had come from the farms, west, in the flatlands. Thin, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a pronounced Adam’s apple, John Stewart always sensed his own difference, his own “foreignness” in this city where he had come as a young man, to help civilize it and render it more godly. He had been born and reared in Scotland, and had left when the spirit had moved him, when he’d thought it was time to leave his village and spread the gospel. His father, a tanner, had laughed at him, but John had come nevertheless, with his small earnings and his minister’s education. He had come to New York and left at once, horrified: a city in which to drown, in which to give into perdition! And so he had arrived in Cincinnati. But still, he did not like it. He had stayed because he’d felt needed, and because of Margaret, the milliner’s daughter, plump and friendly and shy, whom he had met at church and married not long after. He’d married her to stave off loneliness and to make roots. She’d kept the loneliness away but had not succeeded in turning the angular Scotsman into a regular American Midwesterner. She’d given up trying, but she liked her life, liked her city. She also liked her husband but could not understand him. A rare bird….
    John Stewart liked to read. The house smelled of beeswax, of lemon oil, and his study smelled of old books, even of the old people who came there to see him. They always brought their own scent of unrinsed soap, of dry saliva. Margaret accepted their intrusion into her neat parlor because she had no choice: John was as he was, he was a quiet philosopher, and the old people were drawn to him because he seemed more