Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [94]
“It was schizzy,” David said, “and obviously, my allegiances were torn. My parents were pleased I was being educated, but it broke their hearts. And Sally wanted total control over my life. She wanted me to advance so far, but no farther. She was such an old snob, yet very unusual.”
Even in her eighties, he said, Sally Morrot had walked a portion of the irrigated groves every evening, sometimes with David’s father, or Dora, or Albert, her amanuensis. Other nights she kept her own company, or singled out one of the local teenagers she’d taken under wing. David was sixteen the first time she asked him to “do water” with her. “You don’t begin to know something profoundly until you’ve observed it for at least a year,” she told him. “And after fifty years …” She’d point a trembling finger at a tree, and for the briefest instant David could see the singularity of this one tree, as if it had been created new and whole in that exact moment.
They tramped in knee-high rubber boots and carried hoes to plug up gopher holes with mud. Sally lectured him urgently on her own ideas for social reform, a peculiar system she’d developed based on her reading about Thomas Jefferson and the Shakers. She admired the Shakers’ business acumen, their ambisexual God and distaste for sexual intercourse. Like the Shakers, she advocated adoption over procreation and repeatedly expounded a theory, which David never quite grasped, having to do with redistributing the world’s children sensibly, granting them to whoever had the resources to properly raise them. With Jefferson she shared the belief that America was meant to be a nation of farmers augmented by whatever simple manufacturing was unavoidable. The evils of industrialization, urbanization, and corporate inhumanity arose when the country deviated from its agricultural base.
Sally confused him, David said, and bored him, and often seemed off her nut. Yet she was also devoted to him, and staunchly supported him when he resolved to go to medical school. “I won’t brook law school,” she told him. “My brothers and their families have been ruined in the courts. But you’ll make a good doctor; you can come back here to care for your people.”
David enrolled in premed at Cal-Berkeley. When he came home for Christmas his freshman year, Sally sent for him. Dora, she told him, had gone to visit her sisters in Hong Kong, suffered an aneurysm, and died. “I can’t stay here alone,” she said crisply. “I’m too old for this life, this big old house. If I stay on, I’ll do nothing but ache for Dora.” She was going to live with her nephew in Oxnard. After consulting with David’s father and her accountants, and with the help of the University of California, she had set up the ranch in such a way that it could run itself more or less indefinitely. Since none of her younger relatives were agriculturally inclined, she thought this the best plan. “I’ll close down the house for a while, in case I want to come back. Eventually somebody will have to live here.”
She assured David his status would not change. “Even if something should betake me, you will be able to complete your education.” That was the last time he saw her, although she faithfully wrote him once a month, a few large, painfully crumpled words on ecru stationery: “The best doctors, I am told, major in English as undergraduates….” “Being widely read will serve you well. I am rereading James and can recommend The Ambassadors. …” “First-class essay, but do not use contractions, please.”
Her generosity so resembled a set of rules, it would be decades before David identified love among the snarled strands of duty, resentment, fear, loyalty, and inferiority he felt at every mention of her name. In college lit classes, he discovered her in assorted dowagers in the work of Dickens, Wharton, and, of course, James. Later, after traveling the world and living on the East Coast, he understood that Sally and Dora were lesbians as well as members of that well-established minority, of the