Leo drove her home. He married the widow. The one I had been told to call Aunt Mabel.
"If Selina knew I told you anything about this, my name would be mud," said Aunt Charlie.
I had three marriages to study, fairly close-up, in this early part of my life. My parents" marriage-I suppose you might say that it was the most close-up, but in a way it was the most mysterious and remote, because of my childish difficulty in thinking of my parents as having any connection but the one they had through myself. My parents, like most other parents I knew, called each other Mother and Daddy. They did this even in conversations that had nothing to do with their children. They seemed to have forgotten each other"s first names. And since there was never any thought of their divorcing or separating-I did not know of any parents, or any couples, who had done that-I did not have to be gauging their feelings or anxiously paying attention to the weather between them, as children often do nowadays. As far as I was concerned they were mostly caretakers-of the house, the farm, the animals, and us children.
When my mother became sick-permanently sick, not just troubled with odd symptoms-the balance was altered. This happened when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. From then on she was weighing the family down on one side, and we-my father and brother and sister and I-were holding it up to a kind of normality on the other. So my father seemed to belong with us more than he did with her. She was three years older than he was, anyway-being born in the nineteenth century while he was born in the twentieth, and as her long siege progressed she began to seem more like his mother than his wife, and for us more like an elderly relative in our charge, than a mother.
I did know that her being older was one of the things that my grandmother had thought unsuitable about my mother from the start. Other things emerged soon enough-the fact that my mother learned to drive the car, that her style of dress verged on the original, that she joined the secular Women"s Inst.i.tute rather than the United Church Missionary Society, worst of all that she began to go about the countryside selling fur scarves and capes made from foxes my father raised, and was branching off into the antique business when her health began to go awry. And unfair as it might be to think so-and she herself knowing that it was unfair-my grandmother still could not help seeing this illness that went undiagnosed for so long, and was rare at my mother"s age, as being somehow another show of willfulness, another grab at attention.
My grandparents" marriage was not one I ever saw in action, but I heard reports. From my mother, who did not care for my grandmother any more than my grandmother cared for her-and as I grew older, from other people as well, who had no axes to grind. Neighbors who had called in on their way home from school when they were children reported on my grandmother"s homemade marshmallows and her teasing and laughing, but said that they had been slightly afraid of my grandfather. Not that he was bad-tempered or mean-just silent. People had great respect for him-he served for years on the township council and he was known as the person to go to whenever you had to have help in filling out a doc.u.ment, or in writing a business letter, or needed to have some new government notion explained. He was an efficient farmer, an excellent manager, but the object of his managing was not to make more money-it was to have more leisure for his reading. His silences made people uneasy, and they thought that he was not much company for a woman like my grandmother. The two of them were said to be as unalike as if they came from the opposite sides of the moon.
My father, growing up in this house of silence, never said that he found it particularly uncomfortable. On a farm there is always so much to do. Getting through the seasonal work was what made up the content of a life-or it did then-and that was what most marriages boiled down to.
He did notice, though, how his mother became a different person, how she burst into gaiety, when company came.
There was a violin in the parlor, and he was nearly grown up before he knew why it was there-that it belonged to his father, and that his father used to play it.
My mother said that her father-in-law had been a fine old gentleman, dignified and clever, and that she didn"t wonder at his silence, because my grandmother was always irritated with him because of some little thing.
If I had asked Aunt Charlie bluntly whether my grandparents had been unhappy together, she would have turned reproachful again. I did ask her what my grandfather was like, besides being silent. I said that I couldn"t remember him, really.
"He was very smart. And very fair. Though you wouldn"t want to cross him."
"Mother said that Grandma was always annoyed with him."
"I wouldn"t know where your mother got that."
If you looked at the family photograph taken when they were young, and before her sister Marian died, you would say that my grandmother had grabbed off most of the looks in the family. Her height, her proud posture, her magnificent hair. She isn"t just smiling for the photographer-she seems to be biting off a laugh. Such vitality, such confidence. And she never lost the posture, or more than a quarter of an inch of the height. But at the time I am remembering (a time, as I have said, when they were both around the age that I am now), Aunt Charlie was the one people spoke of as being such a nice-looking old lady. She had those clear blue eyes, the color of chicory flowers, and a prevailing grace in her movements, a pretty tilt of the head. Winsome, would be the word.
Aunt Charlie"s marriage was the one that I had been best able to observe, because Uncle Cyril had not died till I was twelve.
He was a heavily built man with a large head, made ma.s.sive by thick curly hair. He wore gla.s.ses, with one lens of dark amber gla.s.s, hiding the eye that had been injured when he was a child. I don"t know if this eye was entirely blind. I never saw it, and it made me sick to think of it-I imagined a mound of dark quivering jelly. He was allowed to drive a car, at any rate, and he drove very badly. I remember my mother coming home and saying that she had seen him and Aunt Charlie in town, he had made a U-turn in the middle of the street and she had no idea how he was allowed to get away with it.
"Charlie takes her life in her hands every time she gets into that car."
He was allowed to get away with it, I suppose, because he was an important person locally, well-known and well-liked, sociable and confident. Like my grandfather he was a farmer, but he did not spend much time farming. He was a notary public and the clerk of the township he lived in, and he was a force in the Liberal Party. There was some money that did not come from farming. From mortgages maybe-there was talk of investments. He and Aunt Charlie kept some cows, but no other livestock. I remember seeing him in the stable, turning the cream separator, wearing a shirt and his suit-vest, with his fountain pen and Eversharp pencil clipped to the vest pocket. I don"t remember his actually milking the cows. Did Aunt Charlie do it all, or did they have a hired man?
If Aunt Charlie was alarmed by his driving she never showed it. Their affection was legendary. The word love was not used. They were said to he fond of each other. My father commented to me, some time after Uncle Cyril"s death, that Uncle Cyril and Aunt Charlie had been truly fond of each other. I don"t know what brought this up-we were driving in the car at the time, and maybe there had been some comment-some joke-about Uncle Cyril"s driving. My father emphasized truly, as if to acknowledge that this was how married people were supposed to feel about each other, and that they might even claim to feel so, but that in fact such a condition was rare.
For one thing, Uncle Cyril and Aunt Charlie called each other by their first names. No Mother and Dad. So their being childless set them apart and linked them together not by function, but as their constant selves. (Even my grandfather and grandmother referred to each other, at least in my hearing, as Grandma and Grandpa, moving function one degree further.) Uncle Cyril and Aunt Charlie never used endearments or pet names and I never saw them touch each other. I believe now that there was harmony, a flow of satisfaction, between them, brightening the air around so that even a self-centered child could be aware of it. But perhaps it"s only what I"ve been told, what I think I remember. I"m certain, though, that the other feelings I remember-the sense of obligation and demand that grew monstrously around my father and my mother, and the stale air of irritability, of settled unease, that surrounded my grandparents-were absent from that one marriage, and that this was seen as something to comment on, like a perfect day in an uncertain season.
Neither my grandmother nor Aunt Charlie made much mention of her dead husband. My grandmother now called hers by his name-Will. She spoke without rancor or sadness, as of a school acquaintance. Aunt Charlie might occasionally speak of "your Uncle Cyril" to me alone when my grandmother was not present. What she had to say might be that he would never wear woolen socks, or that his favorite cookies were oatmeal with date filling, or that he liked a cup of tea first thing in the morning. Usually she employed her confidential whisper-there was a suggestion that this was an eminent person we had both known, and that when she said Uncle, she was giving me the honor of being related to him.
Michael phoned me. This was a surprise. He was being careful of his money, mindful of the responsibilities coming his way, and in those days people who were being careful of their money did not make long-distance phone calls unless there was some special, usually solemn, piece of news.
Our phone was in the kitchen. Michael"s call came around noon, on a Sat.u.r.day, when my family was sitting a few feet away, eating their midday meal. Of course it was only nine o"clock in the morning in Vancouver.
"I couldn"t sleep all night," Michael said. "I was so worried that I hadn"t heard from you. What"s the matter?"
"Nothing," I said. I tried to think when I"d last written to him. Surely not more than a week ago.
"I"ve been busy," I said. "There"s been a lot to do around here."
A few days before we had filled up the hopper with sawdust. That was what we burned in our furnace-it was the cheapest fuel you could buy. But when it was first loaded into the hopper it created clouds of very fine dust which settled everywhere, even on the bedclothes. And however you tried not to, you couldn"t help tracking it into the house on your shoes. It had taken a lot of sweeping and shaking to get rid of it.
"So I gathered," he said-though I hadn"t yet written him anything about the sawdust problem. "Why are you doing all the work? Why don"t they get a housekeeper? Won"t they have to once you"re gone?"
"Fine," I said. "I hope you like my dress. I told you Aunt Charlie was making my wedding dress?"
"Can you not talk?"
"Not really."
"Well okay. Just write me."
"I will. Today."
"I"m painting the kitchen."
He had been living in an attic room with a hot plate, but had recently found a one-bedroom apartment where we could begin our life together.
"Aren"t you even interested what color? I"ll tell you anyway.
Yellow with white woodwork. White cupboards. To get as much light in it as I can."
"That sounds really nice," I said.
When I hung up the phone my father said, "Not a lovers" spat, I trust?" He spoke in an affected, teasing way just to break the silence in the room. Nevertheless I was embarra.s.sed.
Again, a silence.
I knew what they thought about Michael. They thought he was too brightly smiling, too nicely shaved and shiny-shoed, too well brought up and heartily polite. Unlikely to have ever mucked out a stable or mended a fence. They had a habit of poor people-perhaps especially of poor people burdened with more intelligence than their status gets them credit for-a habit or necessity of turning their betters, or those whom they suspect of thinking themselves their betters, into such caricatures.
My mother was not like that. She approved of Michael. And he was polite to her, though uneasy around her, because of her thickened desperate speech and shaky limbs and the way her eyes might go out of control and roll upwards. He wasn"t used to sick people. Or poor people. But he had done his best, during a visit that must have seemed to him appalling, a dreary captivity.
From which he longed to rescue me.
These people at the table-except my mother-thought me to some extent a traitor for not staying where I belonged, in this life. Though they really didn"t want me to, either. They were relieved that someone would want me. Maybe sorry or a little ashamed that it was not one of the boys around home, yet understanding how that couldn"t be and this would be better for me, all round. They wanted to tease me sharply about Michael (they would have said it was only teasing), but on the whole, they were of the opinion that I should hang on to him.
I meant to hang on to him. I wished they could understand that he did have a sense of humor, he wasn"t as pompous as they thought, and that he was not afraid of work. Just as I wanted him to understand that my life here was not so sad or squalid as it seemed to him.
I meant to hang on to him and to my family as well. I thought that I would be bound up with them always, as long as I lived, and that he could not shame or argue me away from them.
And I thought I loved him. Love and marriage. That was a lighted and agreeable room you went into, where you were safe. The lovers I had imagined, the bold-plumed predators, had not appeared, perhaps did not exist, and I could hardly think myself a match for them anyway.
He deserved better than me, Michael did. He deserved a whole heart.
That afternoon, I went into town, as usual. The trunks were nearly full. My grandmother, free now of her phlebitis, was just finishing the embroidery on a pillow slip, one of a pair that she meant to add to my collection. Aunt Charlie was now devoting herself to my wedding dress. She had set up the sewing machine in the front half of the living room, which was divided by sliding oak doors from the back half where the trunks were. Dressmaking was the thing she knew about-my grandmother could never equal or interfere with her there.
I was to be married in a knee-length dress of burgundy velvet, with a gathered skirt and tight waist and what was called a sweetheart neckline, and puffed sleeves. I realize now that it looked homemade-not because of any fault in Aunt Charlie"s dressmaking but just because of the pattern, which was quite flattering in its way, but had an artlessness about it, a soft droop, a lack of a.s.sertive style. I was so used to homemade clothes as to be quite unaware of this.
After I had tried on the dress and was putting on my ordinary clothes again my grandmother called to us to come into the kitchen and have coffee. If she and Aunt Charlie had been by themselves they would have been drinking tea, but for my sake they had taken to buying Nescafe. It was Aunt Charlie who had started this, when my grandmother was in bed.
Aunt Charlie told me that she would join us in a moment-she was pulling out some basting.
While I was alone with my grandmother, I asked her how she had felt before her wedding.
"This is too strong," she said, referring to the Nescafe, and she got to her feet with the dutiful slight grunt that now accompanied any sudden movement. She put on the kettle for more hot water. I thought she wasn"t going to answer me, but she said, "I don"t remember feeling any way at all. I remember not eating, because I had to get my waist down to fit in that dress. So I expect I was feeling hungry."
"Didn"t you ever feel scared of-" I wanted to say of living your life with that one person. But before I could say anything more she answered briskly, "That business will sort itself out in time, never mind."
She thought I was talking about s.e.x, the one matter on which I believed I was in no need of instruction or rea.s.surance.
And her tone suggested to me that perhaps there was something distasteful in my having brought the subject up and that she had no intention of providing any fuller answer.
Aunt Charlie"s joining us as she did at that moment would have made further comment unlikely anyway.
"I am still concerned about the sleeves," Aunt Charlie said. "I"m wondering should I shorten them a quarter of an inch?"
After she had her coffee she went back and did so, basting just one sleeve to see how it would look. She called me to come and try the dress on again and when I had done so she surprised me, looking intently into my face instead of at my arm. She had something in her fist, that she was wanting to give to me. I put out my hand and she whispered, "Here."
Four fifty-dollar bills.
"If you change your mind," she said, still in a shaky urgent whisper. "If you don"t want to get married, you"ll need some money to get away."
When she"d said change your mind, I had thought she was teasing me, but when she got to you"ll need some money, I knew she was in earnest. I stood transfixed in my velvet dress, with an ache in my temples, as if I had got a mouthful of something far too cold or too sweet.
Aunt Charlie"s eyes had gone pale with alarm at what she"d just said. And at what she still had to say, with more emphasis, though her lips were trembling.
"It might not be just the right ticket for you."
I had never heard her use the word ticket in that way before-it seemed as if she was trying to speak the way a younger woman would. The way she thought I would, but not to her.
We could hear my grandmother"s heavy oxfords in the hall.
I shook my head and slipped the money under a piece of the wedding cloth lying on the sewing machine. It didn"t even look real to me-I wasn"t used to the sight of fifty-dollar bills.
I couldn"t let a soul see into me, let alone a person as simple as Aunt Charlie.
The ache and the clarity in the room and within my temples receded. The moment of danger pa.s.sed like an attack of hiccoughs.
"Well then," Aunt Charlie said in a cheering-up sort of voice, hastily clutching at the sleeve. "Maybe they"d look better just the way they were."
That was for my grandmother"s ears. For mine, a broken whisper.
"Then you must be-you must promise-you must be a good wife."
"Naturally," I said, as if there was no need to whisper. And my grandmother, coming into the room, put a hand on my arm.
"Get her out of that dress before she ruins it," she said. "She"s all broke out in a sweat."
Home I come home as I have done several times in the past year, travelling on three buses. The first bus is large, air-conditioned, fast, and comfortable. People on it pay little attention to each other. They look out at the highway traffic, which the bus negotiates with superior ease. We travel west then north from the city, and after fifty miles or so reach a large, prosperous market-and-manufacturing town. Here with those pa.s.sengers who are going in my direction, I switch to a smaller bus. It is already fairly full of people whose journey home starts in this town-farmers too old to drive anymore, and farmers" wives of all ages; nursing students and agricultural college students going home for the weekend; children being transferred between parents and grandparents. This is an area with a heavy population of German and Dutch settlers, and some of the older people are speaking in one or another of those languages. On this leg of the trip you may see the bus stop to deliver a basket or a parcel to somebody waiting at a farm gate.
The thirty-mile trip to the town where the last change is made takes as long as, or longer than, the fifty-mile lap from the city. By the time we reach that town the large good-humored descendants of Germans, and the more recent Dutch, have all got off, the evening has grown darker and chillier and the farms less tended and rolling. I walk across the road with one or two survivors from the first bus, two or three from the second-here we smile at each other, acknowledging a comradeship or even a similarity that would not have been apparent to us in the places we started from. We climb onto the small bus waiting in front of a gas station. No bus depot here.
This is an old school bus, with very uncomfortable seats which cannot be adjusted in any way, and windows cut by horizontal metal frames. That makes it necessary to slump down or to sit up very straight and crane your neck, in order to get an un.o.bstructed view. I find this irritating, because the countryside here is what I most want to see-the reddening fall woods and the dry fields of stubble and the cows crowding the barn porches. Such unremarkable scenes, in this part of the country, are what I have always thought would be the last thing I would care to see in my life.
And it does strike me that this might turn out to be true, and sooner than I had expected, as the bus is driven at what seems a reckless speed, bouncing and swerving, over the remaining twenty miles of roughly paved road.
This is great country for accidents. Boys too young to have a license will come to grief driving at ninety miles an hour over gravel roads with blind hills. Celebrating drivers will roar through villages late at night without their lights on, and most grown males seem to have survived at least one smashed telephone pole and one roll in the ditch.
My father and stepmother may tell me of these casualties when I get home. My father simply speaks of a terrible accident. My stepmother takes it further. Decapitation, a steering-wheel stove into the chest, the bottle somebody was drinking from pulping the face.
"Idiots," I say shortly. It"s not just that I have no sympathy with the gravel-runners, the blind drunks. It"s that I think this conversation, my stepmother"s expansion and relish, may be embarra.s.sing my father. Later I"ll understand that this probably isn"t so.
"That"s the very word for them," says my stepmother. "Idiots. They have n.o.body but themself to blame."
I sit with my father and my stepmother-whose name is Irlma-at the kitchen table, drinking whiskey. Their dog Buster lies at Irlma"s feet. My father pours rye into three juice gla.s.ses until they are about three-quarters full, then fills them up with water. While my mother was alive there was never a bottle of liquor in this house, or even a bottle of beer or wine. She had made my father promise, before they were married, that he would never take a drink. This was not because she had suffered from men"s drinking in her own home-it was just the promise that many self-respecting women required before they would bestow themselves on a man in those days.
The wooden kitchen table that we always ate from, and the chairs we sat on, have been taken to the barn. The chairs did not match. They were very old, and a couple of them were supposed to have come from what was called the chair factory-it was probably just a workshop-at Sunshine, a village that had pa.s.sed out of existence by the end of the nineteenth century. My father is ready to sell them for next to nothing, or give them away, if anybody wants them. He can never understand an admiration for what he calls old junk, and thinks that people who profess it are being pretentious. He and Irlma have bought a new table with a plastic surface that looks something like wood and will not mark, and four chairs with plastic- covered cushions that have a pattern of yellow flowers and are, to tell the truth, much more comfortable than the old wooden chairs to sit on.
Now that I am living only a hundred miles away I come home every couple of months or so. Before this, for a long time, I lived more than a thousand miles away and would go for years without seeing this house. I thought of it then as a place I might never see again and I was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind. All those rooms are small, and as is usual in old farmhouses, they are not designed to take advantage of the out-of-doors but, if possible, to ignore it. People may not have wanted to spend their time of rest or shelter looking out at the fields they had to work in, or at the snowdrifts they had to shovel their way through in order to feed their stock. People who openly admired nature-or who even went so far as to use that word, Nature-were often taken to be slightly soft in the head.
In my mind, when I was far away, I would also see the kitchen ceiling, made of narrow, smoke-stained, tongue-in-groove boards, and the frame of the kitchen window gnawed by some dog that had been locked in before my time. The wallpaper was palely splotched by a leaking chimney, and the linoleum was repainted by my mother every spring, as long as she was able. She painted it a dark color-brown or green or navy-then, using a sponge, she made a design on it, with bright speckles of yellow or red.
That ceiling is hidden now behind squares of white tiles, and a new metal window frame has replaced the gnawed wooden one. The window gla.s.s is new as well, and doesn"t contribute any odd whorls or waves to what there is to see through it. And what there is to see, anyway, is not the bush of golden glow that was seldom cut back and that covered both bottom panes, or the orchard with the scabby apple trees and the two pear trees that never bore much fruit, being too far north. There is now only a long, gray, windowless turkey barn and a turkey yard, for which my father sold off a strip of land.
The front rooms have been repapered-a white paper with a cheerful but formal red embossed design-and wall-to-wall moss-green carpeting has been put down. And because my father and Irlma both grew up and lived through part of their adult lives in houses lit by coal-oil lamps, there is light everywhere-ceiling lights and plug-in lights, long blazing tubes and hundred-watt bulbs.
Even the outside of the house, the red brick whose crumbling mortar was particularly penetrable by an east wind, is going to be covered up with white metal siding. My father is thinking of putting it on himself. So it seems that this peculiar house-the kitchen part of it built in the eighteen-sixties-can be dissolved, in a way, and lost, inside an ordinary comfortable house of the present time.
I do not lament this loss as I would once have done. I do say that the red brick has a beautiful, soft color, and that I"ve heard of people {city people) paying a big price for just such old bricks, but I say this mostly because I think my father expects it. I am now a city person in his eyes, and when was I ever practical? (This is not accounted such a fault as it used to be, because I have made my way, against expectations, among people who are probably as impractical as myself.) And he is pleased to explain again about the east wind and the cost of fuel and the difficulty of repairs. I know that he speaks the truth, and I know that the house being lost was not a fine or handsome one in any way. A poor man"s house, always, with the stairs going up between walls, and bedrooms opening out of one another. A house where people have lived close to the bone for over a hundred years. So if my father and Irlma wish to be comfortable combining their old-age pensions, which make them richer than they"ve ever been in their lives, if they wish to be (they use this word without quotation marks, quite simply and positively) modern, who am I to complain about the loss of some rosy bricks, a crumbling wall?
But it"s also true that in a way my father wants some objections, some foolishness from me. And I feel obliged to hide from him the fact that the house does not mean as much to me as it once did, and that it really does not matter to me now how he changes it.
"I know how you love this place," he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don"t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself that I loved here-some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.
I don"t go into the front room now, to rummage in the piano bench for old photographs and sheet music. I don"t go looking for my old high-school texts, my Latin poetry, Maria Chapde-laine. Or for the best sellers of some year in the nineteen-forties when my mother belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club-a great year for novels about the wives of Henry the Eighth, and for three-name women writers, and understanding books about the Soviet Union. I don"t open the "cla.s.sics" bound in limp imitation leather, bought by my mother before she was married, just to see her maiden name written in graceful, conventional schoolteacher"s handwriting on the marbled endpaper, after the publisher"s pledge: Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.
Reminders of my mother in this house are not so easy to locate, although she dominated it for so long with what seemed to us her embarra.s.sing ambitions, and then with her just as embarra.s.sing though justified complaints. The disease she had was so little known then, and so bizarre in its effects, that it did seem to be just the sort of thing she might have contrived, out of perversity and her true need for attention, for bigger dimensions in her life. Attention that her family came to give her out of necessity, not quite grudgingly, but so routinely that it seemed-it sometimes was-cold, impatient, untender. Never enough for her, never enough.
The books that used to lie under beds and on tables all over the house have been corralled by Irlma, chased and squeezed into this front-room bookcase, gla.s.s doors shut upon them. My father, loyal to his wife, reports that he hardly reads at all anymore, he has too much to do. (Though he does like to look at the Historical Atlas that I sent him.) Irlma doesn"t care for the sight of people reading because it is not sociable and at the end of it all what has been accomplished? She thinks people are better off playing cards, or making things. Men can do woodworking, women can quilt and hook rugs or crochet or do embroidery. There is always plenty to do.
Contrarily, Irlma honors the writing that my father has taken up in his old age. "His writing is very good excepting when he gets too tired," she has said to me. "Anyway it"s better than yours."
It took me a moment to figure out that she was talking about handwriting. That"s what "writing" has always meant around here. The other business was or is called "making things up." For her they"re joined together somehow and she does not raise objections. Not to any of it.
"It keeps his head working," she says.