There Was a Time by Caldwell Taylor;

Author:Caldwell, Taylor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 38

Miss Woods, breathing stertorously, climbed up the stairs to the third floor. Her fat old thighs ached with the effort, and her great jowls were soon bedewed. She could feel her enormous flesh trying to burst through the armored stays she wore, and the thumping of her heart. None of this caused her any apprehension. She knew she was old, and she had no desire for youth. There was too much in her childhood and young womanhood which had been intolerably ugly and revolting, and she had known happiness only in her old age. She thought youth the most dreadful period of life, not pathetic, not amusing, except to obtuse and sentimental adults, not bright and gay, as the novelists believed, not filled with stars and shining marble towers and a light on silver seas.

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come—from God, who is our home.” Miss Woods paused on the second landing to wipe her jowls, to adjust a lock of her white hair, to pull down her corsets. The storm-locked old house creaked and snapped in the late afternoon gloom of this Sunday. She could hear the hissing of the snow against the spectral windows, the onslaught of the wind against the walls. There was no other sound. The roomers were either asleep or reading. She had seen yellow light under doors.

She thought absently: March is always the worst month of the year in this climate. She opened her large fat mouth in order to steady her heart. She disliked pain, either in herself, or in others. It was a humiliation, a reminder that no matter how the mind might soar, or philosophize, or meditate, or dwell upon the possibility of God, the body could always drag it back, like a flying hawk on a string, to huddle on the offal heap which was flesh. There was the indignity, that the mounting soul, fixed upon the sun, must be tumbled from its ascension by a hive, a gallstone, an itchy ear, or, as her generation delicately put it, by “a call of nature.” If there was a soul and it survived the decay of the mortifying flesh, how happy it must be when it was released and could flee not only the dark miseries of the world, but the secret ignominy of the body. The world was all wrong for mankind, because mankind could think. The world was all wrong for the young, because the young could remember a time before the soul had put on flesh.

Miss Woods, hearing rumblings in herself, patted her large, protuberant belly. “I’ll be rid of you soon,” she informed it, with satisfaction. “I don’t know if I’ll know anything about it, but at least I shan’t be aware of you, you swollen humiliation.”

On Sunday afternoons, though no one else in her house knew it, it was her custom to climb the stairs to visit Irving Schultz. There they would sit together, in the small room under the roof, with only the snow to see in the winter and the trees in summer.

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