The Centaurus

“Where’s my father?” I asked. “I don’t know exactly, Peter,” she said. “Which would you prefer-Wheaties or Rice Krispies or an egg some way?”

“Rice Krispies.” An oval ivory-colored clock below the lacquered cabinets said 11:10. I asked, “What happened to school?”

“Have you looked outdoors?”

“Sort of. It’s stopped.”

“Sixteen inches, the radio said. All the schools in the county have cancelled. Even the parochial schools in Alton.”

“I wonder if they’re going to have swimming practice to night.”

“I’m sure not. You must be dying to get to your home.”

“I suppose so. It seems forever since I was home.”

“Your father was very fu

“Oh, gee. Sure, if you have it.” That surely was the difference between these Olinger homes and my own; they were able to keep bananas on hand. In Firetown, on the rare times my father thought to buy them, they went from green to rotten without a skip. The banana she set beside my bowl was perfect. Its golden skin was flecked evenly all over just as in the four-color magazine ads. As I sliced it with my spoon, each segment in dropping into the cereal displayed that ideal little star of seeds at the center.

“Do you drink coffee?”

“I try to every morning but there’s never any time. I’m being an awful lot of trouble.”

“Hush. You sound like your father.”

Her “hush,” emerging from an intimacy that someone else had created for me, evoked a curious sense of past time, of the few mysterious hours ago when, while I was sound asleep in my great-aunt Ha

I made bold to ask, “Where is Mr. Hummel?”

“He’s out with the plow. Poor Al, he’s been up since five. He has a contract with the town to help clear the streets after a storm.” I “Oh. I wonder how our poor car is. We abandoned it last night at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill.”

“Your father said. When Al comes home, he’ll drive you out in the truck to it.”

“These Rice Krispies are awfully good.”

She looked around from the sink in surprise and smiled. “They’re just the ones that come out of the box.” Her kitchen seemed to bring out a Dutchness in her intonation. I had always vaguely associated Mrs. Hummel with sophistication, New York, and the rest of it, she shone to such advantage among the other teachers, and sometimes wore mascara. But in her house she was, plainly, of this county.

“How did you like the game last night?” I asked her. I felt awkwardly constrained to keep a conversation up. My father’s absence challenged me to put into practice my notions of civilized behavior, which he customarily frustrated. I kept tugging up the wrists of my shirt to keep spots from showing. She brought me two slices of glinting toast and a dopple of amber crabapple jelly on a black plate.

“I didn’t pay that much attention.” She laughed in memory. “Really, that Reverend March amuses me so. He’s half a boy and half an old man and you never know which you’re talking to.”

“He has some medals, doesn’t he?”

“I suppose. He went all up through Italy.”

“It’s interesting, I think, that after all that he could return to the ministry.”

Her eyebrows arched. Did she pluck them? Seeing them close, I doubted it. They were naturally fine. “I think it’s good; don’t you?”

“Oh, it’s good, sure. I mean, after all the horrors he must have seen.”

“Well-they say there’s some fighting even in the Bible.”

Not knowing what she wanted, I laughed nevertheless. It seemed to please her. She asked me playfully, “How much attention did you pay to the game? Didn’t I see you sitting with the little Fogleman girl?”

I shrugged. “I had to sit next to somebody.”

“Now, Peter, you watch out. She has the look in her eye.”

“Ha. I doubt if I’m much of a catch.”

She held up a finger, gay-making in the county fashion. “Ahhh. You have the possibilities.”

The interposed “the” was so like my grandfather’s ma

The next two hours were unlike any previous in my life. I shared a house with a woman, a woman tall in time, so tall I could not estimate her height in years, which at the least was twice mine. A woman of overarching fame; legends concerning her lovelife circulated like dirty coins in the student underworld. A woman fully grown and extended in terms of property and authority; her presence branched into every corner of the house. Her touch on the thermostat stirred the furnace under me. Her footsteps above me tripped the vacuum cleaner into a throaty, swarming hum. Here and there in the house she laughed to herself, or made a piece of furniture cry as she moved it; sounds of her flitted across the upstairs floor as a bird flits unseen and sporadic through the high reaches of a forest. Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.

I heavily sat in the dark front parlor reading from a little varnished rack Reader’s Digests one after another. I read until I felt sick from reading. I eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: “Miracle Cure For Cancer?” and “Ten Proofs That There Is a God.” I read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed-for the pang of hope roused fears that had been lulled. The demons of dread injected their iron into my blood. It was clear, clear for all the smart rattle of the prose and the encyclopedic pretense of the trim double columns, that there were no proofs, there was no miracle cure. In my terror of words I experienced a panicked hunger for things and I took up, from the center of the lace doily on the small table by my elbow, and squeezed in my hand a painted china figurine of a smiling elf with chunky polka-dot wings. The quick blue slippers sounded on the carpeted stairs and Mrs. Hummel made lunch for the two of us. In the brightness of the kitchen I was embarrassed for my complexion. I wondered if it would be ma

My father returned a little after one. Mrs. Hummel and I were still in the kitchen. We had been talking about a wing, an L with a screened porch, which she wanted to have built onto the back of her house; here in the summers she could sit overlooking her yard away from the traffic and noise of the pike. It would be a bower and I believed I would share it with her.

My father looked in his bullet-head cap and snow-drenched overcoat like a man just shot from a ca

“Where have you been?” I asked. My voice ignobly stumbled on a threat of tears.

He looked at me as if he had forgotten I existed. “Out and around,” he said. “Over at the school. I would have gotten you up, Peter, but I figured you needed the sleep. You were begi