The View from Castle Rock (26 page)

Also it may have been because I would never quite give up when it came to demanding intimacy, or at least some kind of equality, even with a person I did not like.

Cruelty was a thing I could not recognize in myself. I thought I was blameless here, and in any dealings with this family. All because of being young, and poor, and knowing about Nausicaa.

I did not have the grace or fortitude to be a servant.

On my last Sunday I was alone in the boathouse, packing up my things in the suitcase I had brought—the same suitcase that had gone with my mother and father on their wedding trip and the only one we had in the house. When I pulled it out from under my cot and opened it up, it smelled of home—of the closet at the end of the upstairs hall where it usually sat, close to the mothballed winter coats and the rubber sheet once used on children’s beds. But when you got it out at home it always smelled faintly of trains and coal fires and cities—of travel.

I heard steps on the path, a stumbling step into the boathouse, a rapping on the wall. It was Mr. Montjoy.

“Are you up there? Are you up there?”

His voice was boisterous, jovial, as I had heard it before when he had been drinking. As of course he had been drinking—for once again there were people visiting, celebrating the end of summer. I came to the top of the stairs. He had a hand against the wall to steady himself—a boat had gone by out in the channel and sent its waves into the boathouse.

“See here,” said Mr. Montjoy, looking up at me with frowning concentration. “See here—I thought I might as well bring this down and give it to you while I thought of it.

“This book,” he said.

He was holding
Seven Gothic Tales.

“Because I saw you were looking in it that day,” he said. “It seemed to me you were interested. So now I finished it and I thought I might as well pass it along to you. It occurred to me to pass it along to you. I thought, maybe you might enjoy it.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m probably not going to read it again though I thought it was very interesting. Very unusual.”

“Thank you very much.”

“That’s all right. I thought you might enjoy it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well then. I hope you will.”

“Thank you.”

“Well then,” he said. “Good-bye.”

I said, “Thank you. Good-bye.”

Why were we saying good-bye when we were certain to see each other again before we left the island, and before I got on the train? It might have meant that this incident, of his giving me the book, was to be closed, and I was not to reveal or refer to it. Which I didn’t. Or it might have been just that he was drunk and did not realize that he would see me later. Drunk or not, I see him now as pure of motive, leaning against the boathouse wall. A person who could think me worthy of this gift. Of this book.

At the moment, though, I didn’t feel particularly pleased, or grateful, in spite of my repeated thank-yous. I was too startled, and in some way embarrassed. The thought of having a little corner of myself come to light, and be truly understood, stirred up alarm, just as much as being taken no notice of stirred up resentment. And Mr. Mountjoy was probably the person who interested me least, whose regard meant the least to me, of all the people I had met that summer.

He left the boathouse and I heard him stumping along the path, back to his wife and his guests. I pushed the suitcase aside and sat down on the cot. I opened the book just anywhere, as I had done the first time, and began to read.

The walls of the room had once been painted crimson, but with time the colour had faded into a richness of hues, like a glassful of dying roses…Some potpourri was being burned on the tall stove, on the sides of which Neptune, with a trident, steered his team of horses through high waves…

I forgot Mr. Mountjoy almost immediately. In hardly any time at all I came to believe that this gift had always belonged to me.

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
trunk
?” 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 bedsheets, 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 I 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 I had nothing else to write about and because I 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, I ought to be longing to scrape the home-dirt off my shoes. Concentrating on the life, the home, that we would make together.

I 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. I 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. I had not given up reading, though it seemed that the books I read now were not so harsh or demanding as the books I had been reading a year before. I 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 Sharples 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 Henrietta’s 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.