Free The Choiring Of The Trees by Donald Harington Page B

was almost as delicate as her mother, and in fact she began at the age of twelve to accompany her mother on the regular cures to Hot Springs. What social life existed at all within the confines of the Queen Anne house was that of the three sons Matthew, Dallas, and Henry, who frequently invited their classmates to come and visit, to explore the countless cupboards and crannies of the endless house, to play croquet or badminton on the lawns, to shoot billiards on the third floor, to climb even higher into the fifth floor of the domed turret and shoot pigeons on the roof.
    “I remember the house as being overrun by males,” Viridis said to me. “When my mother and sister were gone to Hot Springs for long stretches, and my three brothers had three or more of their friends spending the night or longer, I had no one to talk to except my father, and he had very little time to listen to me, although we did spend much time together, evenings especially.”
    (It is hard for me to get out of the habit of thinking of “evening” as meaning “afternoon,” as it always did in Stay More and the Ozarks. Evening was the time before supper, night was the time after supper, but to say that Viridis and her father spent their nights together is misleading…somewhat.)
    Days, when she had any time free from managing the household, from meeting with the tutors who came regularly to give private lessons in voice, piano, French, and Spanish to her and her sister, from planning the lunches for her brothers and their friends, from dusting the spots that Ruby had missed, from shopping in the markets along lower Main, Viridis would climb the smaller north turret, not the south one the boys used as a pigeon blind, to the room that was her studio, which she had created at the age of eleven when one of the books she’d got from her Grandmother Monday at Christmas was The Young People’s Concise Doorway to the Fine Arts, wherein she had learned what an easel is, a palette, a mahlstick, and the names of such colors as madder, alizarin, ocher, umber, sienna, and, her delightful discovery, viridian. “Neither my father nor my mother, who hadn’t known it themselves, had ever told me the meaning of my given name, which had been bestowed upon me, my mother had said, because she had ‘found it in a novel’ and had thought it ‘was pretty and unusual.’ My mother had not been able to remember which novel, and once I searched their library without finding it. My father couldn’t even pronounce the name, or, if he could, he chose to mispronounce it roguishly to rhyme with ‘paradise.’” She was destined to endure from other people its mispronunciations and misspellings (Viridas, Viredes, Vyradis, Veredis, etc.) all of her life.
    She spelled it for me, and she told me it was pronounced properly Vera Dis, although she didn’t mind that I had been saying it Verdus, which was the way Nail Chism had pronounced it too.
    “I have too many eyes,” I thought she said, but she was saying that she had a surplus of the letter i in her name, three of them, and I jokingly called her Three-Eyes when I was irritated with her, which was not often: she was fourteen years older than I, and I loved her dearly.
    Sometimes I’ve wondered if she couldn’t tell this whole story of her growing up and becoming a woman much better than I could do it. What follows I have put into her words, pretending it’s what she spoke to me, but it wasn’t then, that year I first met her, and it wasn’t even over the many years following that I knew her and we would sit endless hours together rocking away on the porch while she told me the whole story of her life. No, what follows is a kind of combination of bits and pieces she told me over the years, and some other things I learned from other people who knew her, and parts of it, perhaps the best parts of it, not from what she or they said but from what she wrote, in her private diaries, which came into my hands after her death