The Road Taken Read Free Page B

inconceivable to talk about it with their father. Rose would rather have cut out her tongue than ask her stepmother such a personal question, particularly since it had something to do with Celia and her father.
    Rose still missed her own mother, although her father seemed to have forgotten all about her. It was as if her mother’s existence was drifting farther and farther away, just as her brownish photograph, which Rose hid in her dresser drawer under her ribbons, was slowly fading. Ever since his remarriage her father had unaccountably stopped mentioning her mother, not a word. Didn’t he care anymore? It was as if Adelaide Smith, the departed, belonged in her own compartment, her own era, and that era was gone. Celia liked to say life went on.
    Rose never learned what her mother died of. Many years later, when she had children of her own and the world had changed a great deal, and everyone knew about things like tuberculosis, cancer, emphysema, coronary artery disease, she realized her daughters thought it very strange that she had lived docilely with such a mystery, but that was the way things were when it happened. Everyone had only wanted to protect her.
    What good did it do for a young child to know the name of something so terrible that there was no cure for it?

Chapter Two
    Growing up in a household where the women outnumbered the men, in a society where men were considered better than women, and where everyone loved him, Hugh had always felt special, chosen. After his beloved but distant mother died, his older sisters took care of him, trying to make him feel safe. And his father, Hugh knew, would protect him too. For a time after Hugh lost Mama, he had nightmares in which he was chasing her through an ominous wood full of lowering trees, choking with anxiety and never able to catch up to her, but after a while the dreams went away, and by then his father had married Celia and Celia had brought into the family his stepbrother and new best friend, Alfred.
    Hugh could hardly believe his luck that this popular boy, who had ignored him and sometimes even made fun of him when they were only neighbors, now shared his actual bedroom, and his table, and his house. While Alfred never actually defended him, in the neighborhood and later in the school yard, Alfred didn’t take sides against him anymore either, and because they were now brothers Hugh was treated with a little more respect from the bullies, just in case Alfred did decide to hit them. . . . To Hugh, Alfred was perfect. Alfred was confident about everything, he treated his mother as politely as if he were an adult, and he usually treated Hugh (quite rightly, Hugh thought), as if he were backward. And as if this were not enough to impress Hugh, he also liked Alfred’s clothes.
    Hugh could sense right away that they were more fashionable than his own, because Alfred’s mother, Celia, cared about clothes a great deal. The fact was, Hugh liked her clothes even more than he did her son’s. She was often at the dressmaker, and even her two pregnancies didn’t stop her from looking
à la mode,
a French phrase Celia often used. As a small child Hugh had not paid much attention to Celia, the baker’s wife, except to think of her as a kind woman who gave him cookies; but when she became his stepmother and moved into his house, he began to see that not only was her son different from him but that she was very different from the women he had always known.
    Because his mother so often was sick, Hugh had not been allowed to spend much time in her bedroom, but Celia was frequently away from hers on all kinds of household errands, so he was able to sneak around and ferret out the secrets of this strange newcomer, and also through her the mysteries of adult women in general.
    Celia Kisler Smith was extremely neat: Her silk stockings, in small rolls, were laid in rows in her dresser drawer, and her bloomers, petticoats, and camisoles were folded into large, flowered,