The View from Castle Rock (27 page)

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 Sharples 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 Henrietta’s 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 I 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.