Dragons – Ice and Fury

By the time Whit arrived at the entrance to Bramford Manor, he had forgotten to ask if one of the household staff could unlock the gate for him. The large swinging driveway doors were firmly closed, a thick length of timber set in brackets reenforcing the exterior locks, but the side door designed for pedestrian egress swung easily open. He stepped across the threshold onto Clifton Road, the door locking itself behind him as it closed.

Whit could have followed Clifton to Templeton Street, the most direct route to the village and his home, but he decided to retrace his earlier steps and began walking along the line of hedges just above the drainage ditch that had concealed his approach to the estate several hours before. With the rapidly falling light, the opacity lend by the towering hedges was magnified, but the cries and laughter arising from the ongoing croquet match reached him unimpeded. Those sounds undoubtedly came principally from Gordon and his sister Miriam, a girl who, home schooled or not, he decided, would have been as much at home on a rugby pitch as he and her brother, and in his own case, at least, even more so. The younger brother Bearworth must have contributed to the cacophony they emitted but not to the same degree as his more clamorous siblings. And in that characteristic, he felt a trace of kinship with the quieter of the three St. Martins children. To others, especially to adults, the two of them, both Whit and Bearworth, probably seemed shy and reticent, but it was more a case of preferring the quiet to the nose, he thought, than contrasting introvert and extrovert. In fact, he appreciated the company of his mates as much as anyone, but he never accepted the maxim, as many of his acquaintances evidently had, that a person must proceed behind a barrage of sound announcing his every step. Instead, he found it so much more pleasurable to listen to others rather than spew forth his own vocal accompaniment. He was making superficial judgements about his newly made friends, he knew, but was that not the natural order of things, to reach conclusions hastily upon the flimsiest of evidence, questions of validity throw to the winds, so to speak. And now he paused and complimented himself on the wisdom he had seized for himself, no matter how temporarily. He also took note, strikingly so, that he had omitted Elise from his pontifications about the others; he had most assuredly assigned her to a very special category, indeed.

Was it so improbable, he wondered, that she would spring forth from her cocoon-like shelter beneath the protection of a beach umbrella and participate in a croquet contest with her brethren, adding her cries of joy and laughter to theirs? Or had he assigned her an overabundance of dignity that would preclude such behavior, or at least permit behavior undertaken with less exuberance? Then he remember the delicacy of her touch and felt the heat of embarrassment.

Before he could examine his feelings in more depth about the oldest St. Martins daughter, his thoughts were interrupted by the slam of a heavy wooden gate and the grinding of gravel against rubber tires from beyond the wall of privet hedges. That must be the father, he assumed, Avram St. Martin retuning home from the factory in his shining black Austin motorcar. A brief moment later, his assumptions were verified as the sounds he had associated with the croquet match were replaced by the loud chatter of several people vociferously competing to be heard: a reunion of family members, he further surmised, sharing the latest happening amongst themselves. How different an experience would be awaiting him upon his own return home. He speculated whether the topic of his own intrusion into their sequestered family life would be part of their conversion or whether it had already been forgotten, discarded like the crumbled papers of Elise’s poems, an inferior version she would improve upon in time.

§

After leaving the perimeter of Bramford Manor, Whit followed a worn path through the bitch and maple forest, a serpentine route, twisting in one direction and then in another, before emerging onto Collegiate Way, the main thoroughfare of Wakefield Village. Inwardly, he expressed gratitude, as he invariably did upon returning home, that the elders of their village had refrained from the unimaginative temptation taken by so many of naming the main artery through their town either Main Street or Broadway It was a meager blessing to be sure, but one gratefully accepted nevertheless; words and names were important, not labels to be applied indiscriminately.

He continued along Collegiate, peering in shop windows as he proceeded, nodding to a few schoolmates he encountered, then turned onto Evergreen Drive. The Downes resident was the fifth building from the corner. Marika, the Maori housekeeper they employed, greeted him as he entered.

“Good evening to you, Master Whitaker. You’re late for dinner, again. As usual. Go to the table before Mrs. Connelly throws a tantrum.

Whit hung his torn, stained jacket on the coatrack in the foyer, took note of the frown expressed by Marika assessing its condition, and entered the dinning room. Both his parents and younger brother Walton were already seated, picking their way through the first course, a mixed salad of nuts, greens, and iceberg lettuce. He nodded to everyone and took his seat, purposely ignoring his father’s disapproval, judgments never expressed verbally, always displayed visually. His mother for her part acknowledged his presence by calling to the cook, “He’s here, Brianna. Please bring another plate.”

Brianna Connelly, the other member of their household staff, pushed her way through the swinging door to the kitchen, bearing a filled salad bowl which she unceremoniously deposited in front of the seated Whit, all the while murmuring under her breath a stream of Gallic profanity that not even a renowned professor of semantics like Dr. Henry Downes could comprehend.

Like her distinguished husband, Doctor Olivia Downes (nee Prescott) was an academician, a highly regarded professor of mathematics who was presently teaching two classes of complex variables and one class of abstract algebra at Christchurch Technical College, a new institution founded two years previously. It was a temporary arrangement. Olivia had been promised a position more in alignment with her research accomplishments teaching graduate students at Canterbury, as soon as the next vacancy occurred. Expectations were that this would happen momentarily, before the start of the coming academic year. It was actually a condition of Henry accepting the chair in linguistics.

Henry and Olivia had met while graduate students at the University of Vienna. Coming from such divergent fields of study as mathematics and linguistics, their union initially seemed an unlikely one, but Olivia’s research interests lie in the foundational structure of mathematics, a rapidly growing speciality, while Henry’s studies focused on formal linguistic systems, especially semantic relationships, about which he was always going on about “structure” this and “structure” that. In general, then, it might be said that both his parents were structuralists of one order or another, and in any case, they had managed to find common ground intellectually and perhaps romantically as well, at least after a fashion.

Within the Downes domesticity, soup invariably followed salad, and tonight’s marquee feature was tomato soup, overly salted in accordance with Brianne’s dubious beliefs about the concomitant health benefits of sodium, each bowl awash with floating and submerged oyster crackers. During this secondary course, Whit glanced at his parents and brother Walton. His father Henry was below average height but otherwise slim and fit; he was an avert swimmer and walker, solitary activities he practiced every morning and evening before taking meals. His appearance was every bit as distinguished as his academic achievements. He dressed practically, never spending too much or too little on the three piece worsted suits he favored, always a white shirt and solid colored bow tie, his trim, pointed goatee beard, always neatly kept.

Olivia was several inches taller than her husband, her body thin with long extremities. Most singular was the length of her neck and nose on which metal spectacles were usually precariously merged, as they were tonight, threatening to disappear with a swan-like dive into her tomato soup. Whit had overheard one of his father’s brothers refer to her unkindly as resembling an ostrich. It was true, he supposed, that his mother was not an overly attractive woman, but her intellect was sharp and incisive, and her warm smile could disarm the severest critic.

His parents, then, were well matched for all their physical and intellectual discrepancies. The same qualities of compatibility could not be claimed for their children. Neither he nor Walton resembled each other or either of their parents. Among his classmates, Whit was average in weight and stature, not a resounding weakling perhaps but falling far short of attaining Gordo’s impressive athletic skills and physical strength. His appearance strongly suggested personal carelessness: his hair was usually askew, his clothing often soiled and required mending—a button here, a threadbare elbow there. He loved literature and writing, reading historical accounts and novels, keeping a random journal for thoughts and events he decided worth preserving. In other fields of endeavor, athletic or scholastic, he was entirely indifferent. In class, he did enough work to get by, never more; any additional efforts he would have considered wasteful of his time and energy. As far as his father was concerned, Whit was adrift, lacking both direction and the ambition to find one. Olivia was more patient with her older son; he would discover his own path eventually, she insisted; it was all a matter of time and experience. What neither one of them realized was that Whit had already chosen a future: he planned to become a novelist and take his place within the pantheon of authors he worshiped: Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, Clements, Turgenev, Gogol, and many others, American and European. For now, he kept those goals to himself; his parents, if they knew his aspirations, would lecture him ceaselessly about the impracticality of writing fiction; and among his acquaintances, he had thus far failed to find anyone in whom he might comfortably confine, no one at school, and decidedly not his younger brother Walton.

§

Walton was only two years younger than Whit, but no two brothers so close in age could have been more different. He was born immaturely, five weeks before his appointed time, and was never expected to survive infancy; nevertheless, in spite of the lugubrious prognosis, he clung to life and survived, only to undergo more trials: a succession of childhood illnesses, the usual ones naturally but others, too, some of them serious enough to kill most of their victims. Rubella, chicken pox, scarlet fever, mumps, whooping cough, allergies, cardiac irregularity, all came and went, all leaving permanent traces of their stays; yet he survived, in spite of all. He was the shortest child in his class, shorter than the shortest girl and so thin in body that Whit, not incapable of occasional displays of malicious humor, suggested that he resembled a skeleton covered with a taut, shallow layer of skin and called him “drumskin,” once even directly, a transgression for which he was still being punished with periodic reminders of parental opprobrium.

In complexion he was pale, a shade almost spectral in quality, but the harsh southern sun paid him little mind, perhaps deciding that better prey lay elsewhere. Unlike Bearworth St. Martin, who was quiet by inclination, Walton was quiet by self-inflicted banishment; he was, essentially, a recluse within his own body. He still visited doctors’ offices frequently, and once or twice a year, it became necessary that he be hospitalized; in collated form, the copious history of his sundry ailments could be mistaken by its bulk for a continental novel.

Life, then, had chosen to burden Walton with severe physical and emotion deficits before he had barely undertaken living one, but he had also been granted a few compensations to balance the scale. What he lacked in good health and social facilities, was replaced with imposing intellectual gifts. He was, by any academic measure, the brightest student in Hallerman School, regardless of class grade; he was the brightest member of his family, whatever distinctions his parents had earned; indeed, he had yet to meet an intellectual rival who could provide him with meaningful competition. He was learning algebra, topology, and analysis from his mother; he could parse the most complex of sentences; while Whit enjoyed reading translations of Cato, Archimedes, Lermontov, and Goethe, Walton read the same authors in their original Latin, Greek, Russian, and German. He was an extraordinary child prodigy, and in comparison to his younger brother, Whit was a mental pauper.

A budding genius he may have been, but the shadow of death seemed to linger just behind him, waiting its time to pounce, and Whit was expected to prevent that happenstance, to protect his weaker brother from any threats, even sacrifice himself if necessary. His parents had appointed him Walton’s guardian without consulting him or asking for his permission, and he resented the assignment. Outside their home, Whit avoided Walton, especially at school, apprehensive that someone might notice they were related. It was not that Whit disliked his younger brother; he was ashamed of his weaknesses, and for that reason he was even more ashamed of himself.

§

Presently, the main course was served: braised chicken breasts, garlic mashed potatoes, stalks of asparagus. Olivia and Henry poured red wine; the children drank milk. Thus dinner proceeded according to custom, in relative silence; conversation was never a feature of family gatherings. It was not, as in some families, a matter of preference that speaking might interfere with nourishment; food, within the Downes’s residence, much to the indignation of their cook, Brianna Connelly, was never highly regarded. Food was necessary for life, nothing more. Whatever enjoyment the taste of their meals might bring was incidental. The quiet preserved at their meals was practiced in most other locations as well, in the parlor, the garden, the bedroom. Each of them was wandering through the wilderness of personal thoughts; it would never have occurred to anyone that an inner life could be shared with another.

It was not that the children were neglected or avoided; most of their primary care had been undertaken by household help. Beyond the essentials of food, shelter, and clothing they were largely left to their own devices, providing their own entertainment, making their own decisions. Parental intervention in everyday matters was infrequent and only initiated when absolutely required. Olivia and Henry were too busy, you see, in their academic pursuits, their teaching and research, to provide traditional parenting; the utilitarian, spartan character of their lives precluded much interaction with their children. So these four personages, two parents and two children, went their separate ways, immersed in their separate lives, moving together in silence. Was it indifference they felt for each other? No, and it was less a matter of poorly chosen priorities, or inappropriate choices taken; these people loved each other; they just were unable to show it.

Hence, silence prevailed this evening, as usual, until Whit decided to end it.

“I made some new friends today.”

“Oh, that’s a very positive accomplishment, I’m sure,” Olivia said. “It’s good that you’re getting past last year’s awkwardness when you were the new boy in school. Are they classmates?”

“One of them is, Gordon St. Martins. After school, we went to his home, and I met most of his family. I left before Mr. St. Martins arrived.”

“You visited Bramford Manor?” Henry asked, his interest piqued.

“Yes, do you know them, Dad?”

“Not personally, no. They immigrated earlier this year from somewhere in the United Kingdom, England, I believe. Wealthy people, apparently, with a large estate at Bramford. Ball bearings as I recall.”

“Ball bearings?” Walton asked.

“Ball bearings, yes. St. Martins senior owns a manufacturing plant in Christchurch. Apparently, he’s been awarded an enormous government contract to provide ball bearings for the railroad and in various other applications. They’re used extensively in many industries. I suppose they came here to supervise the process more closely than from abroad. Good people to know. Mind your manners when they’re about.”

“Oh, I will. The grounds around their home was impressive.”

“Whom did you meet today, Dear?”

“Well, there’s a younger brother Bearworth. Everyone calls him ‘Bear.’ You might know him, Walton.”

“Yes. I’ve seen him at school, but he’s in a lower grade.”

Whit paused for a moment, digesting that information, uncertain of its import. “And then there’s two sisters, Miriam and Elise—she’s thirteen, the oldest, very pretty, I would say.”

Olivia smiled at his assessment. In a few years, she thought, those were qualities that would completely occupy his mind.

“The mother’s first name is Rebecca, and Gentry is one of their footmen.”

“Had you lingered long enough, you probably would have encountered Avram St. Martins as well, master of all, factory and home,” Henry remarked, then turned back to his meal, his verbal supply evidently exhausted.

“Will you see them again?” Olivia asked.

“Perhaps. I was invited to visit again tomorrow, but I might be busy after school.”

“Rebecca and Avram. Gordon, Bearworth, and Elise. What a peculiar combination of names,” Walton observed.

“I doubt very much if any of them are truly English,” Henry added.