The Mulberry Bush by Helen Topping Miller Page A

path.
    â€œInevitably,” Bruce said, “all this will be cut into streets and built up with suburban houses, but we are postponing the evil day as long as possible. But if the tax assessments keep on rising, we may have to give it up.”
    â€œYou own this?” Virginia looked into the high, quiet, naked boughs, etched into individual angles by the clear light that follows a rain. “It seems a pity to spoil it.”
    â€œOnce this was a farm—the old Meredith place. My mother was born in the old house where she still lives. Then the city came out and surrounded it. My mother made money, selling lots when the fields were cut up, but the improvements were expensive—paving and other things. We’ve hung on to this piece of woodland up to now. I hope we can manage to hold it as long as Mother lives—and till Merry grows up.”
    They emerged from the grove into an orchard, gnarled and old, and beyond that was a garden with grapevines on a trellis, a chicken yard to one side, and in the middle a stone-walled well with a great sweep.
    â€œIt’s lovely.” Virginia saw the mossy roof of the low, white house through the bare, lifting boughs of a row of pear trees. “No wonder you want to keep it.”
    â€œIt’s distinctly un-American to cling to what is old,” Bruce said. “The English do it, and Americans spend money to go over there and see their lanes and hedges and the cottages where four or five generations have grown up. Then they come home and tear down places like this to build modernistic white houses with glass walls, or awful Spanish affairs with one cactus and one red olla for atmosphere, and wonder why in this country there’s a feeling of restlessness and temporariness.”
    â€œAnd why their children have no special affection for the old home,” Virginia added, feeling somehow disloyal to Mike, who had not lived in a house since he could remember, and who had thought the idea of owning a place of his own slightly amusing. But this was the day she was not going to think about Mike. She shut her heart up tight like a fist, untied the scarf and shook her head to free her bright hair, as Bruce Gamble opened a gate that entered upon a sunken brick walk.
    Pinks and day lilies, frost-browned now, bordered the path, and at the end of it was the old, white house with a narrow porch on two sides and old-fashioned dormer windows in the roof. Wood-smoke drifted from the chimney, and there was a smell of rainwater and of decaying wood—old, old smells, the smells of home.
    A Negro man, white-haired, stooped, and voluble, opened the door, limped about eagerly helping them with their raincoats, insisted on kneeling and removing Virginia’s overshoes, though his ancient knee creaked and he had difficulty in rising again.
    â€œMiss Sally—she’s sittin’ by the fire,” he announced “You-all go right in.”
    â€œShe’s so tiny!” was Virginia’s first thought, as she met Bruce’s mother. So little and frail to be the mother of tall Bruce and big-boned Avis, and the grandmother of husky Meredith.
    But though Mrs. Gamble was small, she was very erect and her back was straight as a ramrod, her white head held very high. And though she sat in a low rocker, surrounded by comfortably shabby Victorian furniture, with yellowing portraits framed in walnut on the walls, she wore a well-cut blue frock and she marked her place in one of the more modern novels, as she rose to greet them.
    â€œNice of you to come on this soggy day,” she said. “I was resigned to spending the afternoon with this book. I was not feeling sorry for myself. Have this chair, Miss Warfield. Bruce, that one squeaks—push it back and pull up another. Bruce tells me you are a businesswoman?”
    â€œI’m with a tour bureau. It’s quite interesting. We haven’t expanded yet as much as Teresa Harrison hopes to.