The View from Castle Rock

The Ticket

Sometimes I dream about my grandmother and her sister, my Aunt Charlie-who was of course not my aunt but my great-aunt. I dream that they are still living in the house where they lived for twenty years or so, until my grandmother’s death and Aunt Charlie’s removal to a nursing home, which happened soon afterwards. I am shocked to find that they are alive and I am amazed, ashamed, to think that I have not visited them, have not gone near them in all this time. Forty years or more. Their house is just the same, though full of twilight, and they themselves are pretty much the same-they wear the same sort of dresses and aprons and hairstyles as they always did. Coiled and drooping hair unacquainted with the hairdresser, dresses of dark rayon or cotton printed with small flowers or geometric shapes-no pantsuits or snappy slogans or turquoise or buttercup or peony-pink materials.

But they seem to be flattened out, to move hardly at all, to use their voices with difficulty. I ask them how they manage. How do they get their groceries, for instance? Do they watch television? Do they keep up with the world? They say that they do all right. Don’t worry. But every day they have been waiting, waiting to see if I would come.

God help us. Every day. And even now I’m in a hurry, I can’t stay. I tell them that I have so much to do, but I’ll be back soon. They say yes, yes, that will be fine. Soon.

At Christmastime I was to be married, and after that I was going to live in Vancouver. The year was 1951. My grandmother and Aunt Charlie-one younger, one older, than I am now-were packing the trunks I would take with me. One was a sturdy old humpbacked trunk that had been in the family for a long time. I wondered out loud if it had come across the Atlantic Ocean with them.

Who knows, said my grandmother.

A hunger for history, even family history, did not rate highly with her. All that sort of thing was an indulgence, a waste of time-like reading the continued story in the daily paper. Which she did herself, but still deplored.

The other trunk was new, with metal corners, bought for the purpose. It was Aunt Charlie’s gift-her income was larger than my grandmother’s, though that did not mean it was very large. Just enough so that it could stretch to occasional unplanned purchases. An armchair for the living room, upholstered in salmon-colored brocade (protected, unless company was coming, by a plastic cover). A reading lamp (its shade also wrapped in plastic). My marriage trunk.

“That’s her wedding present?” my husband would say, later. “A trunkV Because in his family something like a trunk was what you went out and bought, when you needed it. No passing it off as a present.

The things in the humpbacked trunk were breakable, wrapped in things that were not breakable. Dishes, glasses, pitchers, vases, wrapped in newspaper and further protected by dishtowels, bath towels, crocheted doilies and afghans, embroidered table mats. The big flat truck was mostly full of bed-sheets, tablecloths (one of them, too, was crocheted), quilts, pillowcases, also some large flat breakable things like a framed picture painted by Marian, the sister of my grandmother and Aunt Charlie, who had died young. It was a picture of an eagle on a lone branch, with a blue sea and feathery trees far below. Marian at the age of fourteen had copied it from a calendar, and the next summer she had died of typhoid fever.

Some of those things were wedding presents, from members of my family, arriving early, but most were things that had been made for me to start housekeeping with. The quilts, the afghans, the crocheted articles, the pillowcases with their cheek-scratching embroidery. I had not prepared a thing, but my grandmother and Aunt Charlie had been busy, even if my prospects had seemed bleak for quite a while. And my mother had put away a few fancy water goblets, some teaspoons, a willow platter, from the brief heady period when she had dealt in antiques, before the stiffness and trembling of her limbs made any business-and driving, walking, finally even talking-too difficult.

The presents from my husband’s family were packed in the shops where they were purchased, and shipped to Vancouver. Silver serving dishes, heavy table linen, half a dozen crystal wineglasses. The sort of household goods that my in-laws and their friends were used to having around them.

Nothing in my trunks, as it happened, came up to scratch. My mother’s goblets were pressed glass and the willow platter was heavy kitchen china. Such things did not come into vogue until years later, and for some people, never. The six teaspoons dating from the nineteenth century were not sterling. The quilts were for an old-fashioned bed, narrower than the bed my husband had bought for us. The afghans and the doilies and the cushion covers and-needless to say-the picture copied from a calendar were next thing to a joke.

But my husband did concede that a good job had been done with the packing, not a thing was broken. He was embarrassed but attempting to be kind. Afterwards when I tried putting some of those things where they could be seen by anybody coming into our place, he had to speak plainly. And I myself saw the point.

I was nineteen years old when I became engaged, twenty on my wedding day. My husband was the first boyfriend I had ever had. The outlook had not been promising. During that same autumn, my father and my brother were repairing the cover on the well in our side yard, and my brother said, “We better do a good job here. Because if this guy falls in she’ll never get another.”

And that became a favorite joke in the family. Of course I laughed too. But what those around me had worried about had also been a worry of mine, at least intermittently. What was wrong with me? It wasn’t a matter of looks. Something else. Something else, clear as a warning bell, scattered the possible boyfriends and potential husbands out of my path. I did have faith, though, that whatever it was would die down, once I got away from home, and from this town.

And that had happened. Suddenly, overwhelmingly. Michael had fallen in love with me and was set on marrying me. A tall, good-looking, strong, black-haired, intelligent, ambitious young man had pinned his hopes on me. He had bought me a diamond ring. He had found a job in Vancouver that was certain to lead to better things, and had bound himself to support me and our children, for the rest of his life. Nothing would make him happier.

He said so, and I believed it was true.

Most of the time I could hardly credit my luck. He wrote that he loved me, and I wrote back that I loved him. I thought about how handsome he was, and smart and trustworthy. Just before he left we had slept together-no, had sex together, on the bumpy ground under a willow tree by a river’s edge-and we believed that this was as serious as a marriage ceremony, because we could not possibly, now, do the same thing with anybody else.

This was the first fall since I was five years old in which I was not spending my weekdays at school. I stayed at home and did housework. I was very much needed there. My mother was no longer able to grasp the handle of a broom or pull the covers up on a bed. There would have to be somebody found to help, after I went away, but for now I took it all on myself.

The routine enveloped me, and soon it was hard to believe that a year ago I had sat at a library table on Monday mornings, instead of getting up early to heat water on the stove to fill the washing machine and later on feeding the wet clothes through the wringer and finally hanging them on the line. Or that I had eaten my supper at drugstore counters, a sandwich prepared by somebody else.

I waxed the worn linoleum. I ironed the dishtowels and pyjamas as well as the shirts and blouses, I scoured the battered pots and pans and took steel wool to the blackened metal shelves behind the stove. These were the things that counted then, in the homes of the poor. Nobody thought of replacing what was there, just of keeping everything decent, for as long as possible, and then some. Such efforts kept a line in place, between respectable striving and raggedy defeat. And 1 cared the more for this the closer I came to being a deserter.

Reports of housekeeping found their way into letters to Michael and he was irritated. During the brief visit he had made to my home he had seen much that surprised him in an unpleasant way and that made him all the more resolute about rescuing me. And now because 1 had nothing else to write about and because 1 wanted to explain why my letters had to be short, he was forced to read about how I was immersing myself in daily chores in the very place, the very life, that I ought to be hastening to leave.

To his way of thinking, 1 ought to be longing to scrape the home-dirt off my shoes. Concentrating on the life, the home, that we would make together.

1 did take a couple of hours off some afternoons, but what I did then, if I had written about it, would not have satisfied him much better. 1 would tuck my mother in for her second nap of the day and give the kitchen counters their final wipe and walk from our house on the far edge of town to the main street, where I did a bit of shopping and went to the library to return one book and take out another. 1 had not given up reading, though it seemed that the books 1 read now were not so harsh or demanding as the books I had been reading a year before. 1 read the short stories of A. E. Coppard-one of them had a title I found permanently seductive, though I can’t remember anything else about it. “Dusky Ruth.” And I read a short novel by John Galsworthy, which had a line on the title page that beguiled me.

The apple tree, the singing and the gold…

My business on the main street finished, I went to visit my grandmother and Aunt Charlie. Sometimes-most times-I would rather have walked around alone, but I felt I could not neglect them, when they were doing so much to help me. I could not walk around here in a reverie, anyway, as I could have done in the city where I went to college. In those days nobody in town went for walks, except for some proprietary old men who strode around observing and criticizing any municipal projects. People were sure to spot you if you were noticed in a part of town where you had no particular reason to be. Then somebody would say, we seen you the other day-and you were supposed to explain.

And yet the town was enticing to me, it was dreamy in these autumn days. It was spellbound, with a melancholy light on the gray or yellow brick walls, and a peculiar stillness, now that the birds had flown south and the reaping machines in the country round about were silent. One day as I walked up the hill on Christena Street, towards my grandmother’s house, I heard some lines in my head, the beginning of a story.

All over the town the leaves fell. Softly, silently the yellow leaves fell-it was autumn.

And I actually did write a story, then or sometime later, beginning with these sentences-I can’t remember what it was about. Except that somebody pointed out that naturally it was autumn, and that it was foolish and self-consciously poetic to say so. Why else would the leaves be falling, unless the trees in the town had developed some sort of leaf plague?

My grandmother had a horse named after her, when she was young. This was meant to be an honor. The horse’s name, and my grandmother’s name, was Selina. The horse-a mare, naturally-was said to be a high stepper, which meant that she was lively, energetic, and apt to prance about in her own style. So my grandmother herself must have been a high stepper. There were a lot of dances then in which this tendency could be displayed-square dances, polkas, schottisches. And my grandmother was a noticeable young woman anyway-she was tall, busty, slim-waisted, with long strong legs and dark-red, wildly curly hair. And that audacious patch of sky blue in one of the irises of her hazel eyes.

All these things would add up, and be added to, by something in her personality, and surely that was what the man would be trying to comment on, when he paid her the compliment of giving her name to his mare.

This man was not the one who was believed to be in love with her (and whom she was believed to be in love with). Just an admiring neighbor.

The man she was in love with was not the man she married, either. He was not my grandfather. But he was someone she knew all her life, and in fact I met him once. Maybe more than once, when I was a child, but once that I can remember.

It was when I was staying with my grandmother, in her house in Downey. And it was after she became a widow but before Aunt Charlie became one too. When they had both become widows they moved together to the town outside which we lived.

Usually it was summer when I stayed in Downey, but this was on a wintry day, with a light snow falling. Early winter, because there was hardly any snow on the ground. I would have been five or six years old. My parents must have left me there for the day. Perhaps they had to go to a funeral, or take my little sister, who was frail and mildly diabetic, to see a city doctor.

In the afternoon we walked across the road, to enter the grounds of the house where Henrietta Sharpies lived. It was the largest house I had ever been in and its property ran right from one street to another. I looked forward to going there, because I was allowed to run free and look at anything I liked, and Henrietta always kept a bowl full of toffees wrapped in glistening red or green or gold or violet paper. As far as Henrietta was concerned I could have eaten all of them, but my grandmother kept an eye on me and fixed a limit.

Today we made a detour. Instead of going to Henriettas back door we turned towards a cottage on her grounds, to the side of her house. The woman who opened the door had a puff of white hair, glowing pink skin, and a great breadth of stomach, swathed in the sort of bib apron most women wore then, indoors. I was told to call her Aunt Mabel. We sat in her kitchen, which was very hot, but we did not take off our coats because it was to be just a short call. My grandmother had brought something in a bowl under a napkin which she gave to Aunt Mabel-it might have been fresh muffins, or tea biscuits, or some warm applesauce. And the fact that we had brought it did not mean that Aunt Mabel needed any special charity. If a woman had been baking or cooking she often took an offering along when she went to her neighbor’s house. Very likely Aunt Mabel protested against such generosity, as was the custom, and then, accepting, made a great fuss about how good it smelled and how good whatever it was would taste.

Then she probably got busy offering something of her own, insisting on at least making a cup of tea, and I seem to hear my grandmother saying no, no, we had just dropped in for a moment. She could have explained further that we were on our way to the Sharpies house. Perhaps she wouldn’t say the name, or that we were going for a proper visit. She might just say that we couldn’t stop, we were going to drop in across the way. As if we were on a series of errands. She always spoke of going to visit Henrietta as going across the way, so that she would never seem to be flaunting the friendship. Never bragging.

There was a noise in the woodshed attached to the cottage, and then a man came in, flushed from the cold or exercise, and said hello to my grandmother and shook hands with me. I hated the way old men might greet me with a poke in the stomach or a tickle under the arms, but this handshake seemed cordial and proper.

That was all I really noticed about him, except that he was tall and not large around the stomach like Aunt Mabel, though like her he had thick white hair. His name was Uncle Leo. His hand was cold, probably from splitting wood for Henriettas fireplaces, or putting bags around her bushes to protect them from the frost.

It was later, though, that I learned about his doing such chores for Henrietta. He did her outdoor winter work-shovelling snow and knocking down icicles and keeping up the wood supply. And trimming the hedges and cutting the grass in the summer. In return he and Aunt Mabel had the cottage rent-free, and maybe he was paid something as well. He did this for a couple of years, until he died. He died of pneumonia, or a failure of the heart, the sort of thing you expected people of his age to die of.

I was told to call him Uncle, just as I had been told to call his wife Aunt, and I didn’t question this or wonder how they were related to me. It wasn’t the first time I had taken on board an aunt or an uncle who was mysterious and marginal.

Uncle Leo and Aunt Mabel could not have been living there very long, with Uncle Leo employed in this way, before my grandmother and I made our call. We had never taken any notice of the cottage, or of the people living there, on previous visits to Henrietta. So it seems likely that my grandmother had suggested the arrangement to Henrietta. Put a word in, as people would have said. Put a word in because Uncle Leo was on his uppers?

I don’t know. I never asked anybody. Soon the call was over, and my grandmother and I were crossing the gravelled drive and knocking on the back door and Henrietta was calling through the keyhole, “Go away, I can see you, what are you peddling today?” Then she threw open the door and squeezed me in her bony arms and exclaimed, “You little rascal-why didn’t you say it was you? Who’s this old gypsy woman you brought along?”

My grandmother did not approve of women smoking or of anybody drinking.

Henrietta smoked and drank.

My grandmother thought that slacks on women were abominable and sunglasses an affectation. Henrietta wore both.

My grandmother played euchre but thought it was snooty to play bridge. Henrietta played bridge.

The list could go on. Henrietta was not an unusual woman of her time but she was an unusual woman in that town.

She and my grandmother sat in front of the fire in the back living room and talked and laughed through the afternoon while I roamed about, free to examine the blue-flowered toilet in the bathroom or look through the ruby glass of the china-cabinet door. Henrietta’s voice was loud and it was mostly her talk I could hear. It was punctuated by hoots of laughter-very much the kind of laughter I would recognize now as accompanying a woman’s confession of gigantic folly or some tale of perfidy (male perfidy?) beyond belief.

Later on I was to hear stories about Henrietta, about the man she had jilted and the man she was in love with-a married man she continued to see all her life-and I don’t doubt that she talked about that, and about other things which I don’t know, and probably my grandmother talked about her own life, not so freely perhaps, or raucously, but still in the same vein, as a story that amazed her, that she could hardly believe was her own. For it seems to me that my grandmother talked in that house as she did not do-or no longer did-anywhere else. But I never got to ask Henrietta what was confided, what was said, because she died in a car accident-she was always a foolhardy driver-sometime before my grandmother died. And very likely she would not have told me anyway.

This is the story, or as much as I know of it.

My grandmother, the man she loved-Leo-and the man she married-my grandfather-all lived within a few miles of each other. She would have gone to school with Leo, who was only three or four years older than she was. But not with my grandfather, who was ten years older. The two men were cousins and bore the same surname. They did not look alike-though both were good-looking, as far as 1 can tell. My grandfather in his wedding picture stands erect-he is only a little taller than my grandmother, who has got her waist down to twenty-four inches for the occasion, and in her flounced white dress looks chastened and demure. He is broad-shouldered, sturdy, unsmiling, with a look of being seriously intelligent, proud, committed to whatever is required of him. And he has not changed much in the enlarged snapshot I have of him, taken when he was in his fifties or early sixties. A man who still has his strength, his competence, a necessary amount of geniality and a large reserve, a man who is respected for good reason and no more disappointed than a person can expect to be, at his age.

My memories of him come from the year he spent in bed, the year before he died, or as you might say, the year when he was dying. He was seventy-five and his heart was failing, little by little. My father, at the same age, and in the same condition, chose to have an operation, and died a few days afterwards without regaining consciousness. My grandfather had not that option.

I remember that his bed was downstairs, in the dining room, that he kept a bag of peppermints under his pillow-supposedly a secret from my grandmother-and offered them to me when she was busy elsewhere. He had a pleasant smell of shaving soap and tobacco (I was wary about the way old people smelled, and relieved when it was inoffensive), and his manner with me was kindly but not intrusive.

Then he was dead, and I went to his funeral with my mother and father. I did not want to look at him so I did not have to. My grandmother’s eyes were red, with the skin wrinkled up all around them. The attention she paid to me was scanty, so I went outside and rolled down the grassy hill between the house and the sidewalk. This had been a favorite thing for me to do when I stayed there and nobody had ever objected to it. But this time my mother called me in and shook bits of grass out of my dress. She was in the state of exasperation that meant I was behaving in a way that she would get the blame for.

What did my grandfather as a young man think of the fact that my grandmother as a young girl was in love with his cousin Leo? Did he have his eye on her then? Was he hopeful, were his hopes dashed by the fiery courtship going on before his eyes? For it was fiery-a notable romance carried on with spats and reconciliations that he and practically everybody in the community was bound to be aware of. How could a romance be carried on in those days except publicly, if the girl was respectable? Walks to the woods were out of the question, as was ducking out of dances. Visits to the girl’s house involved the whole family, at least until the couple became engaged. Rides in an open buggy were eyed from every kitchen window along the road, and if a ride after dark was ever contrived it was within a discouraging time limit.

Nevertheless, intimacies were managed. My grandmother’s younger sisters, Charlie and Marian, were sent along as her chaperones, but were sometimes tricked and bribed.

“They were as crazy about each other as a pair can be,” Aunt Charlie said, when she told me about this. “They were devils.”

This conversation took place during that fall before my marriage, the time of the trunk-packing. My grandmother had been forced to take time out from the work, she was upstairs in bed, suffering from her phlebitis. For years she had worn elastic bandages to support her bulging varicose veins. So ugly in her opinion-both bandages and veins-that she hated anybody to see them. Aunt Charlie told me confidentially that the veins were wrapped around her legs like big black snakes. Every dozen years or so a vein became inflamed, and then she had to lie still, lest a blood clot should break loose and find its way to her heart.

For the three or four days that my grandmother stayed in bed, Aunt Charlie did not get on well with the packing. She was used to my grandmother’s making the decisions.

“Selina’s the boss,” she said without resentment. “I don’t know where I’m at without Selina.” (And this proved to be true-after my grandmother died, Aunt Charlie’s grasp on daily life immediately faltered, and she had to be taken away to the nursing home, where she died at the age of ninety-eight, after a long silence.)

Instead of tackling the job together she and I sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee and talked. Or whispered. Aunt Charlie had a way of whispering. In this case there might have been a reason-my grandmother with her unimpaired hearing was just over our heads-but often there was none. Her whispering seemed merely to exercise her charm-nearly everybody found her charming-to draw you in to a cozier, more significant sort of conversation, even if the words she was saying were only something about the weather, not-as now-about the stormy young life of my grandmother.

What happened? I was half-hoping and half-afraid to discover that my grandmother, in those days when she had never dreamt of becoming my grandmother, had found herself pregnant.

Wild as she was and cunning as love makes you, she did not.

But another girl did. Another woman, you might say, because she was eight years older than the accused father.

Leo.

The woman worked in a dry-goods store in town.

“And her reputation was not what you might call Simon-pure,” Aunt Charlie said, as if this was a sad reluctant revelation.

There had often been other girls, other women. That was what the spats had been about. That was what had caused my grandmother to kick her suitor in the shins and shove him out of his own buggy and drive home by herself with his horse.

That was why she had thrown a box of chocolates in his face. And then stamped on them, so they couldn’t be picked up and enjoyed, if he should be so nonchalant and greedy as to try.

But this time she was calm as an iceberg.

What she said was, “Well, you’ll have to go and marry her, won’t you just?”

He said he wasn’t all that sure it was his.

And she said, “But you’re not sure it isn’t.”

He said that it could all be fixed up if he agreed to pay for the support. He said he was pretty sure that was all that she was after.

“But it’s not all I’m after,” Selina said. Then she said that what she was after was for him to do what was right.

And she won. In a very short time he and the woman from the dry-goods store were married. And not so long after that, my grandmother-Selina-was also married, to my grandfather. She chose the same time as I had done-dead of winter-for her wedding.

Leo’s baby-if it was his, and it probably was-was born in late spring and by the time it was delivered it was dead. Its mother did not last more than an hour longer.

Soon a letter came, addressed to Charlie. But it wasn’t for her at all. Inside was another letter, that she was to take to Selina.

Selina read it and laughed. “Tell him I’m as big as a barn,” she said. Though she was hardly showing at all, and that was the first Charlie knew that she was pregnant.

“And tell him the last thing I need is any more fool letters from anybody like him.”

The baby that she was carrying then was my father, born ten months after the wedding with considerable difficulty for the mother. He was the only child that she and my grandfather would ever have. I asked Aunt Charlie why. Was there some injury to my grandmother, or some inherent problem that made childbirth too risky? Obviously it wasn’t that she had difficulty conceiving, I said, since my father must have been started a month after the wedding.

A silence, and then Aunt Charlie said, “I wouldn’t know about that.” She did not whisper but spoke in a normally raised, and slightly distant, slightly wounded or reproachful voice.

Why this withdrawal? What had wounded her? I think it was my clinical question, my use of a word like conceiving. It might be 1951 and I was soon to be married, and she had just been telling me a story about passion and unlucky conception. But still it would not do, it did not do, for a young woman-for any woman-to speak so coolly, knowledgeably, shamelessly, about those things. Conceiving, indeed.

There might have been another reason for Aunt Charlie’s response, which I did not think of at the time. Aunt Charlie and Uncle Cyril had never had children. As far as I know there was never even a pregnancy. So I could have stumbled into sensitive territory.

It looked for a moment as if Aunt Charlie was not going to go on with her story. She seemed to have decided that I was not deserving of it. But after a moment she could not help herself.

Leo took off, then, he went places. He worked with a lumbering crew in Northern Ontario. He went with a harvesters’ excursion and became a hired man out west. When he came back, years later, he had a wife with him and somewhere he had learned house carpentry and roofing, so he did that. The wife was a nice person, she had been a schoolteacher. Somewhere along the line she had a baby, but it died, like the other. She and Leo lived in town, and did not go to a local church – she belonged to some freak religion of the sort they had out west. So nobody got to know her very well. Nobody even knew that she had leukemia until shortly before she died of it. It was the first case of leukemia that people had heard of in this part of the country.

Leo stayed on, he got work. He began to visit more with his relatives. He got a car, and would drive out to see them. The word got around that he was planning to marry for a third time, and that she was a widow from somewhere down near Stratford.

But before this he showed up at my grandmother’s house one weekday afternoon. It was the time of year-after frost but before heavy snow-when my grandfather and my father, who was through with school by that time, were hauling firewood from the bush. They must have seen the car but they went on with what they were doing. My grandfather didn’t come up to the house to greet his cousin.

And anyway, Leo and my grandmother didn’t stay in the house, which they could have had all to themselves. My grand mother saw fit to put on her coat and they went out to the car. And did not stay sitting there either, but drove down the lane and then along the road to the highway, where they turned around and drove back. They did this several times, in full view of anybody who looked out the windows of any farm house along the road. And by this time everybody along the road knew Leo’s car.

During this drive Leo asked my grandmother to come away with him. He told her that he was still a free agent, not yet committed to the widow. And presumably he mentioned that he was still in love. With her. My grandmother. Selina.

My grandmother reminded him that she herself was not free, whatever he might be, and so the state of her feelings did not come into it.

“And the sharper she spoke,” said Aunt Charlie, with one or two choppy little nods of her head, “why, the sharper she spoke to him, the more her heart cracked open. Surely it did.”

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 Institute 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 document, 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 massive by thick curly hair. He wore glasses, with one lens of dark amber glass, 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 Saturday, 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 embarrassed.

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 assertive 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 sex, the one matter on which I believed I was in no need of instruction or reassurance.

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 passed 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.”