The Eleventh Year Read Online Free Page B

been an object to be stepped over on the carpet.
    Jamie listened to Willy. He talked to her of his dreams, of his crazy ideas. He wanted to go to China and kill dragons. He wanted to go up in the sky in those funny air balloons. He would skip and jump and his dark eyes would sparkle, and small points of scarlet would rise to his high cheekbones—and Jamie, her face amazed, would look up at him, bewitched. How unlike anyone she knew Willy was! He was not like her quiet, bookish father; he was not like his own illiterate, hard-pressed mother; and he certainly was the opposite of Mama, her mama, who took her ideas from readers’ suggestions in the brightly illustrated Good Housekeeping magazine. He was quick and voluble and very sensitive. Jamie could feel his sensitivity as though it were an integral part of her own: How he bristled when people looked oddly at him, because he had no father. How he almost never smiled, except when they were alone. Sometimes, as they grew into their early teens, she would gently tease him and call him Heathcliff.
    Margaret and Emma did not approve of their being friends. Margaret did not approve of him at all—of his existence. Emma worked for other families besides the Stewarts, and surely, some must have paid her better wages. Sometimes Jamie would hear Willy repeating, in angry German, to his mother that she had no pride, remaining where she wasn’t respected. Jamie didn’t speak much German, but one could not help but understand a good bit of the language, growing up in Cincinnati. Emma would do that special thing with her lips, tightening them, and toss her head at her son and reply: “But the reverend is a good man. The reverend needs me as I once needed work, and he gave it to me.” But she too felt uncomfortable that her son spent his free time with Jamie Lynne.
    When she was fourteen and Willy nearly sixteen, Jamie decided that she held the key to the enigma: Willy must be her own brother. John, her strict, austere father, must have “done something” with Emma before he’d married Mama. The notion set her mind and heart on fire: how absolutely romantic, and how dramatic for her and Willy! Brother and sister, with only the silent John and the proud Emma as witnesses. Brother and sister, growing up as daughter of the master and son of the housemaid. It would explain the poetry of Willy’s thinking and the hostility between their mothers. It would explain her own mother’s disdain and literal ignoring of Willy. It would explain why Emma stubbornly remained their servant. How wonderful! She told Willy, her face aglow and her wide-set eyes a sky of shimmering stars. She did not anticipate his reaction.
    They had been walking near the university, where the city merged into the hills. Suddenly he stopped, facing her, his young body taut from head to toe. She knew then that she had made a terrible mistake, telling him. He frightened her. “Don’t you understand anything?” he merely said, a spiteful statement, not a question. She shook her head: No, she really didn’t understand, not this, not this look of such rage and compressed hatred. He hated her!
    Very quietly, his voice shaking, he said, not looking at her: “If it’s what you think, then he simply used my mother and kept her around for years to torture her, to humiliate her. A married man can fall in love with another woman. But if a free man allows a child of his to be born without claiming it and then marries someone else, that’s criminal, Jamie. It’s an insult! My mother isn’t a piece of used clothing that can simply be put away when the fashion passes! No man can exchange her so casually—especially not for someone like Miss Margaret, who thinks she’s better than we are because she was born here!”
    A deep flush passed over Jamie, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “And my papa isn’t