Housekeeping: A Novel (5 page)

Lily and Nona considered our prospects, and were baffled. Their appetites suffered, and so did their sleep. That particular evening a blizzard of remarkable ferocity blew up while we were eating our supper, and continued for four days. Lily was ladling stewed chicken over our biscuits when a limb from the apple orchard flew against the side of the house, and not ten minutes
later a cable snapped somewhere, or a pole fell, and all of Fingerbone was plunged in darkness. It was not an unusual thing. Every pantry in town had in it a box of thick candles, the color of homemade soap, for use at such times. But my aunts grew silent, and watched each other. That night when we went to bed (with Vicks on strips of flannel pinned round our throats) they sat by the stove, turning over and over the fact that the Hartwick Hotel had never been known to accept a child, even for a single night.

“It would be lovely to take them home.”

“They’d be safer.”

“Warmer.”

They clicked their tongues.

“We’d all be more comfortable.”

“So near the hospital.”

“That’s an advantage, with children.”

“I’m sure they’d be quiet.”

“They’re very quiet.”

“Girls always are.”

“Sylvia’s were.”

“Yes, they were.”

After a moment, someone poked up the fire.

“We’d have help.”

“Some advice.”

“That Lottie Donahue could help. Her children are all right.”

“I met the son once.”

“Yes, so you said.”

“He had an odd look. Always blinking. His nails were chewed down past the quick.”

“Oh, I remember. He was awaiting trial for something.”

“I don’t remember just what.”

“His mother never said.”

Someone filled the teapot.

“Children are hard.”

“For anybody.”

“The Hartwick has always kept them out.”

“And I understand that.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“No.”

“No.”

They were quiet, stirring their tea.

“If we were Helen’s age . . .”

“. . . or Sylvie’s.”

“Or Sylvie’s.”

Again they were quiet.

“Young people understand them better.”

“They don’t worry so much.”

“They’re still almost children themselves.”

“That’s the truth. They haven’t seen enough to worry like we do.”

“It’s as well.”

“It’s better.”

“I think it
is
better.”

“They enjoy children, I think.”

“That’s better for the children.”

“In the short run.”

“We think too much about the long run.”

“And for all we know the house could fall tonight.”

They were silent.

“I wish we would hear from Sylvie.”

“Or at least hear
about
her.”

“No one has seen her for years.”

“Not in Fingerbone.”

“She might have changed.”

“No doubt she has.”

“Improved.”

“It’s possible. People do.”

“It’s possible.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps some attention from her family . . .”

“A family can help.”

“Responsibility might help.”

The spoons went round and round in the cups until someone finally said, “. . . a sense of home.”

“It would be home to her.”

“Yes, it would.”

“It would.”

So it must have seemed like providence when a note arrived from Sylvie herself. It was written in a large, elegant hand on a piece of pulpy tablet paper, torn neatly down one side and across the bottom, perhaps to correct the disproportion between the paper and the message, for she said only:

Dear Mother, I may still be reached c/o Lost Hills Hotel, Billings, Montana. Write soon. I hope you are well. S
.

Lily and Nona had composed a message to the effect that anyone knowing where Sylvia Fisher could be reached was asked to send the information to . . . and my grandmother’s address. All other versions of the message amounted to announcements of my grandmother’s death, and my aunts could not allow Sylvie to learn such a thing from the personal-ads section of a newspaper.
They disliked newspapers, and were chagrined that anything touching themselves or their family should appear in them. It disturbed them enough that the actual obituary had already been bunched, no doubt, to cushion Christmas ornaments for storage, and spindled to start kitchen fires, though it was quite impressive and much admired. For my grandmother’s passing had brought to mind the disaster that had widowed her. The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized. Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered. Therefore, my grandmother’s death occasioned a black-bordered page in the
Dispatch
, featuring photos of the train taken the day it was added to the line, and of workers hanging the bridge with crepe and wreaths, and of, in a row of gentlemen, a man identified as my grandfather. All the men in the photo wore high collars and hair combed flat across their brows. My grandfather had his lips a little parted and looked at the camera a little sidelong, and his expression seemed to be one of astonishment. There was no picture of my grandmother. For that matter, the time of the funeral was not mentioned. Nona and Lily speculated that if some vagary of wind should carry this black-bordered page under Sylvie’s eyes, she might not know that her own mother’s death had occasioned this opening of the town’s slender archives, though the page might itself seem portentous, like an opening of graves.

Despite the omission of even essential information about my grandmother (“They wouldn’t want to mention Helen,” Lily speculated
sotto voce
, as she judged
such things), it was considered an impressive tribute to her and was expected to be a source of pride to us. I was simply alarmed. It suggested to me that the earth had opened. In fact, I dreamed that I was walking across the ice on the lake, which was breaking up as it does in the spring, softening and shifting and pulling itself apart. But in the dream the surface that I walked on proved to be knit up of hands and arms and upturned faces that shifted and quickened as I stepped, sinking only for a moment into lower relief under my weight. The dream and the obituary together created in my mind the conviction that my grandmother had entered into some other element upon which our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water. So she was borne to the depths, my grandmother, into the undifferentiated past, and her comb had no more of the warmth of a hand about it than Helen of Troy’s would have.

Even before Sylvie’s note arrived, Lily and Nona had begun to compose a letter to inform her of her loss, and to invite her home to discuss the disposition and management of her mother’s estate. My grandmother’s will did not mention Sylvie. Her provisions for us did not include her in any way. This began to seem strange to Lily and Nona—if not unreasonable, then certainly unkind. They agreed that the forgiveness of the parent should always be extended to the erring child, even posthumously. So Lucille and I began to anticipate the appearance of our mother’s sister with all the guilty hope that swelled our guardians’ talcy bosoms. She would be our mother’s age, and might amaze us with her resemblance to our mother. She would have grown up with
our mother in this very house, and in the care of our grandmother. No doubt we had eaten the same casseroles, heard the same songs, and had our failings berated in the same terms. We began to hope, if unawares, that a substantial restitution was about to be made. And we overheard Lily and Nona in the kitchen at night, embroidering their hopes. Sylvie would be happy here. She knew the town—the dangerous places, the unsavory people—and could watch us, and warn us, as they could not. They began to consider it a failure of judgment, which they were reluctant to account for in terms of my grandmother’s age, to prefer them over Sylvie. And we felt they must be right. All that could be said against Sylvie was that her mother omitted her name from virtually all conversation, and from her will. And while this was damaging, it gave neither us nor our great-aunts anything in particular to fear. Her itinerancy might be simple banishment. Her drifting, properly considered, might be no more than a preference for the single life, made awkward in her case by lack of money. Nona and Lily had stayed with their mother until she died, and then moved west to be near their brother, and had lived many years independently and alone on the money that came from the sale of their mother’s farm. If they had been cast out and disinherited—they clucked their tongues—“We’d have been riding around in freight cars, too.” They chortled in their bosoms and their chairs shifted. “It’s only the truth,” one said, “that her mother had very little patience with people who chose not to marry.”

“She’d say as much.”

“Before our faces.”

“Many a time.”

“God rest her.”

We knew enough about Sylvie to know that she had simply chosen not to act married, though she had a marriage of sufficient legal standing to have changed her name. No word had ever indicated who or what this Fisher might have been. Lily and Nona chose not to bother about him. Increasingly they saw in Sylvie a maiden lady, unlike themselves only because she had been cast out unprovided for. If they could find out where she was, they would invite her. “Then we’ll use our own judgment.” After the note arrived, they began to put their letter in final form, being careful to suggest but not to promise that she might take her mother’s place in the household if she wished. Once the letter was mailed, we all lived in a state of anticipation. Lucille and I argued about whether her hair would be brown or red. Lucille would say, “I know it’ll be brown like Mother’s,” and I’d reply, “Hers wasn’t brown. It was red.”

Lily and Nona conferred together and decided that they
must
leave (for they had their health to consider, and they longed to return to their basement room in the red-brick and upright Hartwick Hotel, with its stiff linens and its bright silver, where the arthritic bellhop and the two old chambermaids deferred so pleasantly to their age and their solitude and their poverty) and that Sylvie must come.

It was still late winter when they sent for her and it was not yet spring when she came. They had urged her to consider before she replied, and they had assured her at length and in the kindliest language (the letter was some days in composition) that there was no urgency in their request and that she must take all the time she needed to set her affairs in order before she came, if she should do so. And then one day as we sat at supper in the kitchen, and they worried between them about her not writing back, and remembered her as too dreaming and self-absorbed to be ordinarily considerate, and hoped she was not ill, Sylvie knocked at the door.

Nona went down to the door (the hall from the kitchen to the front door sloped rather sharply, though the angle was eased somewhat by a single step midway), rustling with all the slippery frictions of her old woman’s clothing and underclothing. We heard her murmuring, “My dear! So cold! You walked? Come in the kitchen!”
and then her rustling and her heavy shoes coming back up the hallway and not a sound more.

Sylvie came into the kitchen behind her, with a quiet that seemed compounded of gentleness and stealth and self-effacement. Sylvie was about thirty-five, tall, and narrowly built. She had wavy brown hair fastened behind her ears with pins, and as she stood there, she smoothed the stray hairs back, making herself neat for us. Her hair was wet, her hands were red and withered from the cold, her feet were bare except for loafers. Her raincoat was so shapeless and oversized that she must have found it on a bench. Lily and Nona glanced at each other, eyebrows raised. There was a little silence, and then Sylvie hesitantly put her icy hand on my head and said, “You’re Ruthie. And you’re Lucille. Lucille has the lovely red hair.”

Lily stood up then and took both of Sylvie’s hands, and Sylvie stooped to be kissed. “Here, sit here by the heater,” she said, pushing a chair. Sylvie sat down.