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English
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Yuletide 2012
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Published:
2012-12-18
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1,197
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1/1
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A library burning

Summary:

"What do I know, I wonder?"

Notes:

"Quand un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle." When an old man dies, it is a library burning.

Work Text:

When Portia and Julian eventually go to college, they choose the same state school, large enough to make Uncle Pin whistle and Aunt Minnehaha go so far as to consider calling on Jove herself. Julian sails in on an athletic scholarship and makes a beeline for the biology department and its minor in Entomology.

(Lucy finds out which school Portia has decided on the day Portia picks, and promptly picks it herself.)

A year later Portia, rather surprising herself, winds up with a scholarship for English because of the essay she writes about the day she and Julian discovered Uncle Pin and Aunt Minnehaha. She also gets a phone call from the dean of the history department.

Next time Portia walks over to Aunt Minnehaha's, she lugs a backpack full of tapes, extra batteries, and two of the new Phillips tape recorders that just came out last year. "For you and Uncle Pin," she explains, setting them down. "To tell stories to, if you want."

"My gracious," Aunt Minnehaha remarks, touching the microphone gently, her voice still sweet even if the rest of her looks frailer. Loyally, Portia declares to herself that it just makes her prettier -- her hands look almost transparent now, like very thin porcelain.

It's not the first time Portia's wished they were younger, but with a sudden clench of her heart she's grateful to the history department for sending her the tape recorders. At least now they won't be -- gone, when they die.

***

'When they die' haunts Portia for the first two semesters. Aunt Minnehaha can't climb the attic stairs at all now, no matter how carefully. Joe and Tom had, a few years after Amberside was officially the Blake house, quietly hammered and sawed and nailed together ramps for both little houses; Foster and Davy spend a few hours after school in Uncle Pin's garden and making sure Aunt Minnehaha's chickens and ducks (two now, descendants of that lone duck they'd first met) are fed and watered. But Portia isn't there herself, and letters every week aren't enough to stop her from worrying.

Portia goes home for fall break and winter and summer break and every time Uncle Pin meets her at the train station in the Machine, lofty and airy and still less dear than its distinguished driver. Eventually Portia begins to get used to being away and stops worrying quite so much. (Julian tells her later he'd cried once, his first year; Portia confesses she'd cried for a week, and they mutually agree to never speak of it again.)

Instead she starts frantically fretting over what in heaven's name she's going to do with the rest of her life. Julian, lofty junior he, is absorbed in his biology major; Lucy and her sudden plan to be an English teacher ("Whoever heard of an English teacher who liked sports?" "I'll be unique.") leaves no time for fretting; and Portia looks at all the things she loves and throws her hands up in despair, plunking down for more history classes because they look more interesting than anything else except a few of the poetry offerings for fall semester.

She's the most startled one when she winds up majoring in history. Portia could get a thesis out of Gone-Away, could get a *career* out of the Victoriana slice-of-life, but it feels obscurely like cheating. She winds up focusing on Uncle Pin's friends Fat Lo and Wing Pin and the experience of Chinese immigrants in New York.

She also winds up begging Aunt Minnehaha for everything that doesn't fit and everything she doesn't like that her mother and sisters left behind. When Portia was ten, Aunt Minnehaha's chests had been the best dress-up box any girl could have. Portia would have gone up against princesses for the title then, but now she isn't ten. Now she knows what kind of treasure trove she and Julian had really walked into, and thinking of everything that hasn't been preserved, the chewed-up letters (3 March 1894, holding what kind of information a family researcher would kill for?), makes her feel a little sick.

Portia spends her senior year being an unpaid intern helping to catalogue Mrs. Brace-Gideon's party dresses and the famed Roman sash and all the dresses she'd worn when she and Lucy were short enough to fit into them. When she graduates, she discovers that for the past eight months the museum staff have been scraping together the budget to be able to hire her part-time, and between the coffee shop and the museum and the Chippendale highboy she can afford to live in town.

She still comes back to the Blake house for holidays and nearly every weekend, of course, and she's almost prostrate for three days when Uncle Pin and Aunt Minnehaha do die (he called her Minnie at the last, and a red-eyed Julian swears she died just so she could tell him not to call her Minnie).

She spends months listening to the tapes they'd made, and between them the Philosophers and the Fangs had inherited everything they'd thought worth having, and it all has to be sorted, and every time anything goes in a box Portia starts crying again.

She can't stand the thought of all the things they loved being in boxes like they are, but she can't stand the thought of everything fading, every beautiful graceful dress going moth-eaten and every paper Uncle Pin loved to read disintegrating into dust, falling like the Castle Castle.

Years later, she won't be able to tell you how she managed to get Living History started up in town. She won't be able to tell you how it works, either, but she'll invite you to come watch. You'll see a young woman, sort of tan all over (she did wind up growing into it, for the curious), in a strange sort of high-necked dress of scarlet wool with leg-of-mutton sleeves, straight-backed and perhaps a little bigger around than she would have been in the Gay Nineties, and she'll tell you about a lake she found once, with her cousin, and if you chose to come on an alternate Tuesday she'll demonstrate how to make Anti-Pest Decoction (bottles five dollars at the door, all profits to the museum) and lecture on the uses of kitchen herbalism in the Victorian period.

If you didn't come on an alternate Tuesday, well, all I can say is that you should have, and instead you can wander through the exhibit once Portia has put away her character for the day and is gently tucking that day's clothing away ("Better you should have them than the moths"), and listen to the gentle well-bred voice of an old woman in your ears telling you about Tarrigo and Baby-Belle Tuckertown, or the well-mannered tones of an old man telling you about Tarrigo and turtles in the summer of 1891, and perhaps you'll come on an alternate Tuesday next time.

There always is a next time, you know. Perhaps it won’t be with Portia Blake (she is still Blake, if you were wondering), but with someone else, clever and curious, who doesn’t know what she knows yet. She’ll figure it out.