"See," she said. "We better feed her."
"I"ll warm the bottle. Have to brush up on being a father." He nudged his way through the opening. She heard him rummaging in a carton, then the clinking of a pot.
She opened the lid of the piano and struck the A, waiting until the tone had died away inside her, then struck a few more notes. The middle register had flattened first, as it always did. Sitting down on the stool, she looked into her lap as if it belonged to someone else. What was the piano doing here, this opulent shape of sound, five hundred miles from where it was the day before yesterday; what was she doing here, sitting in the lopped-off house, in the dress that had been her wedding dress, listening to the tinkle of a bottle against a pan? What was the mystery of distance-that it was not only geographical but clove through the map, into the heart?
She began to play, barely flexing her fingers, hearing the nails she had let grow slip and click on the keys. Then, thinking of the ent.i.ties on the other side of the wall, she began to play softly, placating, as if she would woo them, the town, providence. She played a Beethoven andante with variations, then an adagio, seeing the Von Bulow footnotes before her: "... the ascending diminished fifth may be phrased, as it were, like a question, to which the succeeding ba.s.s figure may be regarded as the answer."
The movement finished but she did not go on to the scherzo. Closing the lid, she put her head down on her crossed arms. Often, on the fringes of concerts, there were little haunting crones of women who ran up afterward to horn in on the congratulatory shoptalk of the players. She could see one of them now, batting her stiff claws together among her fluttering draperies, nodding eagerly for notice: "I studied ... I played too, you know ... years ago ... with De Pachmann!"
So many variants of the same theme, she thought, so many of them-the shriveled, talented women. Distance has nothing to do with it; be honest-they are everywhere. Fifty-seventh Street is full of them. The women who were once "at the League," who cannot keep themselves from hanging the paintings, the promising juvenilia, on their walls, but who flinch, deprecating, when one notices. The quondam writers, chary of ridicule, who sometimes, over wine, let themselves be persuaded into bringing out a faded typescript, and to whom there is never anything to say, because it is so surprisingly good, so fragmentary, and was written-how long ago? She could still hear the light insistent note of the A, thrumming unresolved, for herself, and for all the other girls. A man, she thought jealously, can be reasonably certain it was his talent which failed him, but the women, for whom there are still so many excuses, can never be so sure.
"You"re tired." Dan returned, stood behind her.
She shook her head, staring into the shining case of the piano, wishing that she could retreat into it somehow and stay there huddled over its strings, like those recalcitrant nymphs whom legend immured in their native wood or water, but saved.
"I have to be back at the plant at eleven." He was smiling uncertainly, balancing the baby and the bottle.
She put a finger against his cheek, traced the hollows under his eyes. "I"ll soon fatten you up," she murmured, and held out her arms to receive the baby and the long, coping day.
"Won"t you crush your dress? I can wait till you change."
"No." She heard her own voice, sugared viciously with wistfulness. "Once I change I"ll be settled. As long as I keep it on ... I"m still a visitor."
Silenced, he pa.s.sed her the baby and the bottle.
This will have to stop, she thought. Or will the denied half of me persist, venomously arranging for the ruin of the other? She wanted to warn him standing there, trusting, in the devious shadow of her resentment.
The baby began to pedal its feet and cry, a long nagging ululation. She sprinkled a few warm drops of milk from the bottle on the back of her own hand. It was just right, the milk, but she sat on, holding the baby in her lap, while the drops cooled. Flexing the hand, she suddenly held it out gracefully, airily, regarding it.
"This one is still "the rabbi"s daughter,"" she said. Dan looked down at her, puzzled. She shook her head, smiling back at him, quizzical and false, and bending, pushed the nipple in the baby"s mouth. At once it began to suck greedily, gazing back at her with the intent, agate eyes of satisfaction.
The Middle Drawer.
THE DRAWER WAS ALWAYS kept locked. In a household where the tangled rubbish of existence had collected on surfaces like a scurf, which was forever being cleared away by her mother and the maid, then by her mother, and, finally, hardly at all, it had been a permanent cell-rather like, Hester thought wryly, the gene that is carried over from one generation to the other. Now, holding the small, square, indelibly known key in her hand, she shrank before it, reluctant to perform the blasphemy that the living must inevitably perpetrate on the possessions of the dead. There were no revelations to be expected when she opened the drawer, only the painful reiteration of her mother"s personality and the power it had held over her own, which would rise-an emanation, a mist, that she herself had long since shredded away, parted, and escaped.
She repeated to herself, like an incantation, "I am married. I have a child of my own, a home of my own five hundred miles away. I have not even lived in this house-my parents" house-for over seven years." Stepping back, she sat on the bed where her mother had died the week before, slowly, from cancer, where Hester had held the large, long-fingered, competent hand for a whole night, watching the asphyxiating action of the fluid mounting in the lungs until it had extinguished the breath. She sat facing the drawer.
It had taken her all her own lifetime to get to know its full contents, starting from the first glimpses, when she was just able to lean her chin on the side and have her hand pushed away from the packets and j.a.panned boxes, to the last weeks, when she had made a careful show of not noticing while she got out the necessary bankbooks and safe-deposit keys. Many times during her childhood, when she had lain blandly ill herself, elevated to the honor of the parental bed while she suffered from the "autointoxication" that must have been 1918"s euphemism for plain piggishness, the drawer had been opened. Then she had been allowed to play with the two pairs of pearled opera gla.s.ses or the long string of graduated white china beads, each with its oval sides flushed like cheeks. Over these she had sometimes spent the whole afternoon, pencilling two eyes and a pursed mouth on each bead, until she had achieved an incredible string of minute, doll-like heads that made even her mother laugh.
Once while Hester was in college, the drawer had been opened for the replacement of her grandmother"s great sunburst pin, which she had never before seen and which had been in p.a.w.n, and doggedly reclaimed over a long period by her mother. And for Hester"s wedding her mother had taken out the delicate diamond chain-the "lavaliere" of the Gibson-girl era-that had been her father"s wedding gift to her mother, and the ugly, expensive bar pin that had been his gift to his wife on the birth of her son. Hester had never before seen either of them, for the fashion of wearing diamonds indiscriminately had never been her mother"s, who was contemptuous of other women"s display, although she might spend minutes in front of the mirror debating a choice between two relatively gimcrack pieces of costume jewelry. Hester had never known why this was until recently, when the separation of the last few years had relaxed the tension between her mother and herself-not enough to prevent explosions when they met but enough for her to see obscurely, the long motivations of her mother"s life. In the European sense, family jewelry was Property, and with all her faultless English and New World poise, her mother had never exorcised her European core.
In the back of the middle drawer, there was a small square of brown-toned photograph that had never escaped into the large, ramshackle portfolio of family pictures kept in the drawer of the old breakfront bookcase, open to any hand. Seated on a bench, Hedwig Licht, aged two, brows knitted under ragged hair, stared mournfully into the camera with the huge, heavy-lidded eyes that had continued to brood in her face as a woman, the eyes that she had transmitted to Hester, along with the high cheekbones that she had deplored. Fat, wrinkled stockings were bowed into arcs that almost met at the high-stretched boots, which did not touch the floor; to hold up the stockings, strips of calico matching the dumpy little dress were bound around the knees.
Long ago, Hester, in her teens, staring tenaciously into the drawer under her mother"s impatient glance, had found the little square and exclaimed over it, and her mother, s.n.a.t.c.hing it away from her, had muttered, "If that isn"t Dutchy!" But she had looked at it long and ruefully before she had pushed it back into a corner. Hester had added the picture to the legend of her mother"s childhood built up from the bitter little anecdotes that her mother had let drop casually over the years.
She saw the small Hedwig, as clearly as if it had been herself, haunting the stiff rooms of the house in the townlet of Oberelsbach, motherless since birth and almost immediately stepmothered by a woman who had been unloving, if not unkind, and had soon borne the stern, Haustyrann father a son. The small figure she saw had no connection with the all-powerful figure of her mother but, rather, seemed akin to the legion of lonely children who were a constant motif in the literature that had been her own drug-the Sara Crewes and Little Dorrits, all those children who inhabited the familiar terror-struck dark that crouched under the lash of the adult. She saw Hedwig receiving from her dead mother"s mother-the Grandmother Rosenberg, warm and loving but, alas, too far away to be of help-the beautiful, satin-incrusted bisque doll, and she saw the bad stepmother taking it away from Hedwig and putting it in the drawing room, because "it is too beautiful for a child to play with." She saw all this as if it had happened to her and she had never forgotten.
Years later, when this woman, Hester"s step-grandmother, had come to the United States in the long train of refugees from Hitler, her mother had urged the grown Hester to visit her, and she had refused, knowing her own childishness but feeling the resentment rise in her as if she were six, saying, "I won"t go. She wouldn"t let you have your doll." Her mother had smiled at her sadly and had shrugged her shoulders resignedly. "You wouldn"t say that if you could see her. She"s an old woman. She has no teeth." Looking at her mother, Hester had wondered what her feelings were after forty years, but her mother, private as always in her emotions, had given no sign.
There had been no sign for Hester-never an open demonstration of love or an appeal-until the telephone call of a few months before, when she had heard her mother say quietly, over the distance, "I think you"d better come," and she had turned away from the phone saying bitterly, almost in awe, "If she asks me to come, she must be dying!"
Turning the key over in her hand, Hester looked back at the composite figure of her mother-that far-off figure of the legendary child, the nearer object of her own dependence, love, and hate-looked at it from behind the safe, dry wall of her own "American" education. We are told, she thought, that people who do not experience love in their earliest years cannot open up; they cannot give it to others; but by the time we have learned this from books or dredged it out of reminiscence, they have long since left upon us their chill, irremediable stain.
If Hester searched in her memory for moments of animal maternal warmth, like those she self-consciously gave her own child (as if her own childhood prodded her from behind), she thought always of the blue-shot twilight of one New York evening, the winter she was eight, when she and her mother were returning from a shopping expedition, gay and united in the shared guilt of being late for supper. In her mind, now, their arrested figures stood like two silhouettes caught in the spotlight of time. They had paused under the brightly agitated bulbs of a movie-theatre marquee, behind them the broad, rose-red sign of a Happiness candy store. Her mother, suddenly leaning down to her, had encircled her with her arm and nuzzled her, saying almost anxiously, "We do have fun together, don"t we?" Hester had stared back stolidly, almost suspiciously, into the looming, pleading eyes, but she had rested against the encircling arm, and warmth had trickled through her as from a closed wound reopening.
After this, her mother"s part in the years that followed seemed blurred with the recriminations from which Hester had retreated ever farther, always seeking the remote corners of the household-the sofa-fortressed alcoves, the store closet, the servants" bathroom-always bearing her amulet, a book. It seemed to her now, wincing, that the barrier of her mother"s dissatisfaction with her had risen imperceptibly, like a coral cliff built inexorably from the slow accretion of carelessly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed criticisms that had grown into solid being in the heavy fullness of time. Meanwhile, her father"s uncritical affection, his open caresses, had been steadiness under her feet after the shifting waters of her mother"s personality, but he had been away from home on business for long periods, and when at home he, too, was increasingly a target for her mother"s deep-burning rage against life. Adored member of a large family that was almost tribal in its affections and unity, he could not cope with this smoldering force and never tried to understand it, but the shield of his adulthood gave him a protection that Hester did not have. He stood on equal ground.
Hester"s parents had met at Saratoga, at the races. So dissimilar were their backgrounds that it was improbable that they would ever have met elsewhere than in the somewhat easy social flux of a spa, although their brownstone homes in New York were not many blocks apart, his in the gentility of upper Madison Avenue, hers in the solid, Germanic comfort of Yorkville. By this time, Hedwig had been in America ten years.
All Hester knew of her mother"s coming to America was that she had arrived when she was sixteen. Now that she knew how old her mother had been at death, knew the birth date so zealously guarded during a lifetime of evasion and so quickly exposed by the noncommittal nakedness of funeral routine, she realized that her mother must have arrived in 1900. She had come to the home of an aunt, a sister of her own dead mother. What family drama had preceded her coming, whose decision it had been, Hester did not know. Her mother"s one reply to a direct question had been a shrugging "There was nothing for me there."
Hester had a vivid picture of her mother"s arrival and first years in New York, although this was drawn from only two clues. Her great-aunt, remarking once on Hester"s looks in the dispa.s.sionate way of near relations, had nodded over Hester"s head to her mother. "She is dark, like the father, no? Not like you were." And Hester, with a naive glance of surprise at her mother"s sedate pompadour, had eagerly interposed, "What was she like, Tante?"
"Ach, when she came off the boat, war sie hubsch!" Tante had said, lapsing into German with unusual warmth, "Such a color! Pink and cream!"
"Yes, a real Bavarian Madchen," said her mother with a trace of contempt. "Too pink for the fashion here. I guess they thought it wasn"t real."
Another time, her mother had said, in one of her rare bursts of anecdote, "When I came, I brought enough linen and underclothing to supply two brides. At the convent school where I was sent, the nuns didn"t teach you much besides embroidery, so I had plenty to bring, plenty. They were nice, though. Good, simple women. Kind. I remember I brought four dozen handkerchiefs, beautiful heavy linen that you don"t get in America. But they were large, bigger than the size of a man"s handkerchief over here, and the first time I unfolded one, everybody laughed, so I threw them away." She had sighed, perhaps for the linen. "And underdrawers! Long red flannel, and I had spent months embroidering them with yards of white eyelet work on the ruffles. I remember Tante"s maid came in from the back yard quite angry and refused to hang them on the line any more. She said the other maids, from the houses around, teased her for belonging to a family who would wear things like that."
Until Hester was in her teens, her mother had always employed young German or Czech girls fresh from "the other side"-Teenies and Josies of long braided hair, broad cotton ankles and queer, blunt shoes, who had clacked deferentially to her mother in German and had gone off to marry their waiter"s and baker"s apprentices at just about the time they learned to wear silk stockings and "just as soon as you"ve taught them how to serve a dinner," returning regularly to show off their square, acrid babies. "Greenhorns!" her mother had always called them, a veil of something indefinable about her lips. But in the middle drawer there was a long rope of blond hair, sacrificed, like the handkerchiefs, but not wholly discarded.
There was no pa.s.sport in the drawer. Perhaps it had been destroyed during the years of the first World War, when her mother, long since a citizen by virtue of her marriage, had felt the contemporary pressure to excise everything Teutonic. "If that nosy Mrs. Cahn asks you when I came over, just say I came over as a child," she had said to Hester. And how easy it had been to nettle her by pretending that one could discern a trace of accent in her speech! Once, when the family had teased her by affecting to hear an echo of "public" in her p.r.o.nunciation of "public," Hester had come upon her, hours after, standing before a mirror, color and nose high, watching herself say, over and over again, "Public! Public!"
Was it this, thought Hester, her straining toward perfection, that made her so intolerant of me, almost as if she were castigating in her child the imperfections that were her own? "Big feet, big hands, like mine," her mother had grumbled. "Why? Why? When every woman in your father"s family wears size one! But their nice, large ears-you must have those!" And dressing Hester for Sunday school she would withdraw a few feet to look at the finished product, saying slowly, with dreamy cruelty, "I don"t know why I let you wear those white gloves. They make your hands look clumsy, just like a policeman"s."
It was over books that the rift between Hester and her mother had become complete. To her mother, marrying into a family whose bookish traditions she had never ceased trying to undermine with the sneer of the practical, it was as if the stigmata of that tradition, appearing upon the girl, had forever made them alien to one another.
"Your eyes don"t look like a girl"s, they look like an old woman"s! Reading! Forever reading!" she had stormed, chasing Hester from room to room, flushing her out of doors, and on one remote, terrible afternoon, whipping the book out of Hester"s hand, she had leaned over her, glaring, and had torn the book in two.
Hester shivered now, remembering the cold sense of triumph that had welled up in her as she had faced her mother, rejoicing in the enormity of what her mother had done.
Her mother had faltered before her. "Do you want to be a dreamer all your life?" she had muttered.
Hester had been unable to think of anything to say for a moment. Then she had stuttered, "All you think of in life is money!", and had made her grand exit. But huddling miserably in her room afterward she had known even then that it was not as simple as that, that her mother, too, was whipped and driven by some ungovernable dream she could not express, which had left her, like the book, torn in two.
Was it this, perhaps, that had sent her across an ocean, that had impelled her to perfect her dress and manner, and to reject the humdrum suitors of her aunt"s circle for a Virginia bachelor twenty-two years older than herself? Had she, perhaps, married him not only for his money and his seasoned male charm but also for his standards and traditions, against which her railings had been a confession of envy and defeat?
So Hester and her mother had continued to pit their implacable difference against each other in a struggle that was complicated out of all reason by their undeniable likeness-each pursuing in her own orbit the warmth that had been denied. Gauche and surly as Hester was in her mother"s presence, away from it she had striven successfully for the very falsities of standard that she despised in her mother, and it was her misery that she was forever impelled to earn her mother"s approval at the expense of her own. Always, she knew now, there had been the lurking, buried wish that someday she would find the final barb, the homing shaft, that would maim her mother once and for all, as she felt herself to have been maimed.
A few months before, the barb had been placed in her hand. In answer to the telephone call, she had come to visit the family a short time after her mother"s sudden operation for cancer of the breast. She had found her father and brother in an anguish of helplessness, fear, and male distaste at the thought of the illness, and her mother a prima donna of fort.i.tude, moving unbowed toward the unspoken idea of her death but with the signs on her face of a pitiful tension that went beyond the disease. She had taken to using separate utensils and to sleeping alone, although the medical opinion that cancer was not transferable by contact was well known to her. It was clear that she was suffering from a horror of what had been done to her and from a fear of the revulsion of others. It was clear to Hester, also, that her father and brother had such a revulsion and had not been wholly successful in concealing it.
One night she and her mother had been together in her mother"s bedroom. Hester, in a shabby housegown, stretched out on the bed luxuriously, thinking of how there was always a certain equivocal ease, a letting down of pretense, an illusory return to the irresponsibility of childhood, in the house of one"s birth. Her mother, back turned, had been standing unnecessarily long at the bureau, fumbling with the articles upon it. She turned slowly.
"They"ve been giving me X-ray twice a week," she said, not looking at Hester, "to stop any involvement of the glands."
"Oh," said Hester, carefully smoothing down a wrinkle on the bedspread. "It"s very wise to have that done."
Suddenly, her mother had put out her hand in a gesture almost of appeal. Half in a whisper, she asked, "Would you like to see it? No one has seen it since I left the hospital."
"Yes," Hester said, keeping her tone cool, even, full only of polite interest. "I"d like very much to see it." Frozen there on the bed, she had reverted to childhood in reality, remembering, as if they had all been crammed into one slot in time, the thousands of incidents when she had been the one to stand before her mother, vulnerable and bare, helplessly awaiting the cruel exact.i.tude of her displeasure. "I know how she feels as if I were standing there myself," thought Hester. "How well she taught me to know!"
Slowly her mother undid her housegown and bared her breast. She stood there for a long moment, on her face the looming, pleading look of twenty years before, the look it had once shown under the theatre marquee.
Hester half rose from the bed. There was a hurt in her own breast that she did not recognize. She spoke with difficulty.
"Why ... it"s a beautiful job, Mother," she said, distilling the carefully natural tone of her voice. "Neat as can be. I had no idea ... I thought it would be ugly." With a step toward her mother, she looked, as if casually, at the dreadful neatness of the cicatrix, at the twisted, foreshortened tendon of the upper arm.
"I can"t raise my arm yet," whispered her mother. "They had to cut deep. ... Your father won"t look at it."
In an eternity of slowness, Hester stretched out her hand. Trembling, she touched a tentative finger to her mother"s chest, where the breast had been. Then, with rising sureness, with infinite delicacy, she drew her fingertips along the length of the scar in a light, affirmative caress, and they stood eye to eye for an immeasurable second, on equal ground at last.
In the cold, darkening room, Hester unclenched herself from remembrance. She was always vulnerable, Hester thought. As we all are. What she bequeathed me unwittingly, ironically, was fort.i.tude-the fort.i.tude of those who have had to live under the blow. But pity-that I found for myself.
She knew now that the tangents of her mother and herself would never have fully met, even if her mother had lived. Holding her mother"s hand through the long night as she retreated over the border line of narcosis and coma into death, she had felt the giddy sense of conquering, the heady euphoria of being still alive, which comes to the watcher in the night. Nevertheless, she had known with sureness, even then, that she would go on all her life trying to "show" her mother, in an unsatisfied effort to earn her approval-and unconditional love.
As a child, she had slapped at her mother once in a frenzy of rebellion, and her mother, in reproof, had told her the tale of the peasant girl who had struck her mother and had later fallen ill and died and been buried in the village cemetery. When the mourners came to tend the mound, they found that the corpse"s offending hand had grown out of the grave. They cut it off and reburied it, but when they came again in the morning, the hand had grown again. So, too, thought Hester, even though I might learn-have learned in some ways-to escape my mother"s hand, all my life I will have to push it down; all my life my mother"s hand will grow again out of the unquiet grave of the past.
It was her own life that was in the middle drawer. She was the person she was not only because of her mother but because, fifty-eight years before, in the little town of Oberelsbach, another woman, whose qualities she would never know, had died too soon. Death, she thought, absolves equally the bungler, the evildoer, the unloving, and the unloved-but never the living. In the end, the cicatrix that she had, in the smallest of ways, helped her mother to bear had eaten its way in and killed. The living carry, she thought, perhaps not one tangible wound but the burden of the innumerable small cicatrices imposed on us by our beginnings; we carry them with us always, and from these, from this agony, we are not absolved.
She turned the key and opened the drawer.
III.
The Summer Rebellion.
THE SINISTER THING ABOUT Hillsborough, since I come back, is that the soda parlors are gone. You have to know the place why. Since I came back-O.K. I could talk that way even before I left for the Agricultural; why else did my Aunt Mary bring me up to read every old book in the shop, and hang my junior excellence medal in the parlor-though she never hung the one for sharpshooting-and sell off, to the summer people to build a house of, that last old cypress-colored barn we had at the edge of where the acreage once was? They were going to use it to build a house. But if I like to talk that way at my convenience, it"s like putting on jeans again after Sunday dinner and church-or it used to be. The whole trouble must have begun, I think, when the summer people started wearing our jeans. But that was way back; I don"t go that far back personally. Our family goes eight generations in Hillsborough, but I only go as far back as when it began for us, when those two come to buy the barn. That"s as far back as I like to go.
"Cedar," says the man, and the woman whispers Did you ever see such weathering!, and I"m standing by, about fourteen years old, and I start to say, "Why, that ain"t cedar, it"s bir-," when my aunt"s fingers, steelhard from sanding old trestle tables to the pine again and emerying off the chipped places on flint gla.s.s, grabs me at the neck. "Don"t say "ain"t," Johnny One-you know how to talk right!" So I do; isn"t she always jabbing at me "Talk like the summer people-you don"t have to pay any attention to what they say!"
She"s still holding me. "This boy has got hisself a medal," she says. She can say "himself" just as well, too. But this way, the pair will think the old shack-which isn"t birch but isn"t cedar either-is just what they want for front trim.
"Why do you call him Johnny One?" the woman says, curious.
This is the first time I date too that my aunt speaks the way she then does-vague-even for all that energy she"s putting out, getting rid of all our junk first and then all she can find in the neighborhood. And how she looks; I notice that too. Faded. "Why do I call him Johnny One?" she says, the way people do, bidding for time, and when they"ve never noticed themselves before. "Why, my sister-what was her name?-she only left one." She smartened then-why she used to be so smart, smarter than me! "Why, I guess I call him Johnny One cause I haven"t got two!" And then she and I, my neck free now, looked back triumphantly; from our ways lately, that explanation seemed clear enough.
They bought the barn-which wasn"t a barn. But on their way off, I snaked through the woods alongside of the path they took back to their car-I used to like to watch summer people the way any boy, all of us children liked to watch the doings of ghosts who never intended or did anything mean to us except bring gifts and then in the fall fade away again-and I heard them talking, different than they talk to us, the way they talk to each other. ""My sister, what was her name?"" said the woman. "Can you imagine!" When I went off to the A., I found out of course what she meant. Our town sure had been dragging its feet-though it wasn"t the only hill town in New Hampshire to do it, not by a longshot, I found.
But at the moment I was more interested in what the man said. "You pipe the boy?" They don"t always talk so fine themselves.
"Did I!" she said. "Whew."
"Quite an Apollo, wasn"t he."
"If there were two," she said giggling, "who could bear it?" She sighed. "What a waste. Such a beautiful kid."
"Think that barn is birch?" said the man.
"Of course not. Let her think she"s putting something over on us, poor thing, if she wants. But you and I know what it would cost at a lumberman"s, aside from the color. To buy all that oak."
That was the way it always turned out between Hillsborough and the summer people, from the very first, when we sold off the land by the lakesh.o.r.e that was no good for farmland if they only knew, and woods that didn"t have nothing in them, anything in them but birch. Until I came home this June, I didn"t know who was to blame. I found that out at the college. Let me tell you about Hillsborough, first.
When you come north by the state road, on your way to the White Mountains, the road goes straight for a while, past a few houses; then all of a sudden it humps up very sharp, through a few stores at the hilltop, with a side road going east over the hill and down out of sight. If you continue on, there"s a garage and some empty stores at the bottom again, then whoosh, the town is gone. If you park your car at the top and stay a while-that"s us. Or if you"ve been there forever.
In the summertime, with the summer people all here, used to be such a big bottleneck in that ring of stores, on a Friday shopping especially, that the town board had the hump all divided in those slanted, white-painted parking lines. Still is a bottleneck, but if you look hard and knowing enough, it"s mostly all tourists, of a bright summer afternoon. As they drive up the hill, on their left side, first comes a few old mashed-together buildings every town here has, n.o.body knows much what they were, then comes the closed-up church, then the store where the number one soda parlor always was, and then the supermarket, once the barbershop and the corner shoe. It came the last few years ago, for the summer people, but it may be too late for them. Has a c.o.ke machine out front. Next to it is The Service Shop, still there. That"s for sewing wools and stuffs, the kind of thing women call "notions," and seems to last, no matter what. Or old Mrs. Hupper who keeps it does. "Shut up shop, or hang herself," she says, before she"ll go to selling junk as antiques. Still has a few customer ladies from the lakesh.o.r.e, so old and pinkfaded they still look to us like all the lakeside houses and inhabitants used to, just a summer vision that would soon fade.
On the other side of the crest of our hill, hung over the steep road that goes off it down and east, is a numb little grocery, just the sort you"d think we"d shop in ourselves-washed-out cardboard signs in windows under the old house eaves, and packaged bread. But in the fall, you"d be surprised how bright it is, when the fishing talk is over, and the gun talk begins. Fellow who owns it, used to have his gun collection hung on the wall right over the milk-and-cheese counter, until he sold it, all but one deer rifle, last year. And nowadays he stocks frozen food and all that, like for the summer people, and we eat it, hoping for health. But it may be too late for that too.
Next to him, just before you get to the crest, used to be the second soda place, just a home restaurant but where we kids could go for ice cream; now it sells sandwiches in booths meant for tourists, but it has no beer and looks like it would have the crummy coffee we do have, so they don"t go in. And neither do we. And back down the hill, next to that, used to be a stationery and male notions sort of place; he had a malted-milk machine we could hang around too-but he was no Hupper, he"s gone too, though not far. Most any afternoon until dusk, you can see him sitting there on his front lawn behind the tables with anything from hubcaps to kitchenware to framed saints"-pictures on them; often he"s there with a light, after dark. Or in the morning, if he"s not, the tables are, and anybody takes the trouble to knock, he"s out in a jiffy. "Just shavin". What vase? Be one dollar, that vase." Anybody takes the trouble to go down any of our side roads, will find any of us with our things all set out, sitting back of the tables, or in a rocking chair if we"re old, or inside. We"re a town on a hill, so we can"t stretch the business out straight like some can, and catch it all in one trough. And we haven"t got the knowhow like FitzWilliam, where the professionals are. Or the houses and granges and live churches to look at, like Hanc.o.c.k. Houses and hardware both, we run closer to junk than antiques. But you"ll find us. Behind that hillside everywhere, is us. We"re still there.
On the grocery"s eave, pointing down the east road, there"s a marker says Aunt Marietta"s Antiques. That"s us in particular, I and Aunt Mary, and her husband, my uncle Andy-in our family there"s only one of each of us. Before you come to our house, there"s the mill-the standard, red brick, New England, New Hampshire knitting mill, with its sluices and iron gone to rust, and what seems like a hundred gross of spidered windowpanes, not half enough of them knocked in. Those Victorian windowpanes stay orderly looking until the end, and good red brick don"t ever seem to fall, or get haunted. Those greenery things, sumac and ailanthus, that always take over, look feathery nice around it. It could start up again in a minute, you think, pa.s.sing by. Opposite it though, is what, after the church of course, used to be our real pride.
It"s a chocolate-and-tan frame structure of some seven stories high, built in the seventies, with balconies and fretwork running even and complete around every story; if it leaned just a little, or was skinny and not square, it would look like a monument. As it is, it is supposed to be one of the last specimens of that architecture, and when we first had Aunt Mary"s shop, she used to take picture postcards of it, which sold very well. I don"t know why she hasn"t the get-up to, anymore. Or I"m beginning to think I do. Anyway, the Geracis, who now own it, you sometimes hear one of them tell a tourist it was a hotel, but it never was; it was a kind of high-cla.s.s rabbit warren for the mill workers to live in, with enough railing and banisters to match those factory windows across the way. To give the Geracis credit, they keep it painted. They"re Italians, Hillsborough"s only, and they still have the energy for a place like that, and the relatives; Italians can always take in each other"s washing from all the other onlies in the towns roundabout, and keep separate that way; in the bas.e.m.e.nt they even have a store none of us sets foot in, unless ours runs out of something and we haven"t got the gall to sneak in opposite to the supermarket, which is what we would like best. The Geraci children still have separate names, too-saints" names, but separate.
And after Geraci"s, down the road that leads straight to the lake sh.o.r.e and to all the summer people, that"s us in particular. Our house is one of the larger old white ones, an old Apollo of a house, you might say, and we are accustomed to hearing, in summer, how beautiful it-could become. In winter we are inclined to think how comfortable it could be-to keep. But we still have it, and we"re the only house out that way, with our back garden-or that once was-on a little rise too, and pointed straight toward the lake that is really a huge, circular "pond" as we call it-Willard"s Pond-and toward them. We"re the only family on the way to them, and that is our peculiar distinction-though we have another. Between them and us, is our woods, or what used to be ours, where, last year, I used to make out with one of their Barbaras. From our back windows we can see them, in all their homes they"ve made out of our houses and our barns-stretching on and on in a half-circle, but even bright with upkeep though they are, a mirage.
In summer, what with boats and docks and waterskiers this year and all that gradual growth of plastic, they tend to seem brighter, and it"s true every year they seem healthier, staying on longer each year. They like to keep up what they call their relationship with us; that helps to keep them healthy too. "That"s their upkeep," my aunt once said tartly. Truth was, she thought some of their ladies liked to keep it up with my uncle, who at thirty-nine years old is blonder and taller than I am, a retired Marine with muscles that last year he used to maintain, too, with a set of barbells my aunt swapped somewhere.
The swap shop was no distinction, only what my aunt got into years ago out of sheer energy and not liking to embroider, starting it out as a gift shop with a line of dollclothes, and those new gilt memento cups-none stamped for Hillsborough, we were too small for that, but Portsmouth and so forth-when the new people came. If they started her on the antiques, always being so wistful after our chipped b.u.t.tercrocks and old end-of-day vases, who was to blame? Meanwhile, it didn"t say we weren"t just as healthy as ever, only rightfully lazier-if now and then we swapped a bit of land. Or woods that were mostly only birch. White birch is good sure enough for those new-style kitchen cabinets. But the sawmill over at Nuba.n.u.sit is all ailanthus too.
And meanwhile, there they were, only the summer people, that mirage across Willard Pond. We took care of their houses, shut off their waterpipes and promised to turn them on again come "the season," and to mow their first lawn. Come Labor Day, they began to go. Come October, they were gone. With their extra keys jingled away in our dresser drawer, we forgot them, or sometimes, just to check up of course, in the performance of duty, we toured their houses and habits from top to bottom, fingered their linen and the quilts they"d bought from us, laughed at that other junk, the cobalt gla.s.s bottles and a Stafford pitcher in the window and somebody from Antrim"s greatgranny on the wall-and remembered to remind ourselves how faded, like the new owners, all this was. Come November, when gun talk was all over the grocery, bright as apples and the huntsmen"s china teeth, we had forgotten them altogether. Mrs. Hupper took the needlepoint wool out of her window and hung there a glorious pink-and-purple afghan, with a sign saying it was to be raffled for the church, and chances could be bought right there. The church itself came open, with a visiting preacher every third Sunday. And then at last, our real mirages took over again all the way, from the woman in white you could see on one of the balconies at Geraci"s on a moonlit evening, to the sea monster that was supposed to be in the Pond.
This was all the change I noticed until I went away and came home from college, but that"s supposed to be natural, isn"t it?-even though college wasn"t the real state university I like to say. It was a state-run one, sure enough, but the old two-year Agricultural and Manual-training unit, switched off now from Guernseys, and onto economics and business courses-gone to that kind of gra.s.s. There were a lot of dopes there who would do well at these, plus a few hopelessly smart ones, still on the agriculture, like me. We quickly discovered who we were-there was usually about one of us from a particular town.
We were the aristocrats of the upkeepers, all of us, and many of us were the Apollos, too, who some summer person had stuck the idea of a scholarship in the mind of, or had even written away for to help him, all the way back from "Ooo, Aunt Mary, what a beautiful little boy you have, and so smart." And keep him away from my Barbara. We knew who we were, and began pooling our information right away. We were the elite.
And we were the ones (though we learned to hide it except among one another) who came from the towns where people"s names had gone back to gra.s.s too. The way we found out about each other was-there were so many Johnnies. There are always a lot of people named John anywhere, I understand that. But were there ever so many boys who answered-unless they were quick enough-to the names of Johnny One, Johnny Two, Johnny Three and so on? We even had one Johnny Ten, but he was unusual. Our families weren"t so big anymore.
"Sometimes even the summer people do better," said the boy in whose room we were, a skinny Johnny One from over to Contoocook, but still with a lot of tawny gumption in his cheek-he didn"t eat their frozen, and his folk had a pig littered every spring; wouldn"t let them eat her, wouldn"t let them sell her either.
"Over our way," another said proudly, "we"ve still got Buddy names as well; my best friend is a Buddy Four"-but he wasn"t much. And there were a few other reports of the old original names, the tombstone ones-Lukes and Patiences and so forth-though there would still be only two names to a family, for the girls and for the boys. But mostly, the families were running to Mary One, Two, and Three and so forth for the girls, and Johnnies of the same.
"Why is it do you suppose it"s happening?" said Johnny Ten, not the brightest of us, only there because if a Ten wasn"t eligible, who was?
n.o.body liked to say, even among us though there wasn"t a boy didn"t have an inkling.