The View from Castle Rock (24 page)

“Pardon my not having put my stockings on,” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m feeling rather lazy today. But aren’t you the remarkable girl. Coming all that way by yourself. Did Henry help you carry the groceries up from the dock?”

Mrs. Montjoy waved to us. She was on her way to the tennis court, to give Mary Anne her lesson. Every morning she gave Mary Anne a lesson, and at lunch they discussed what Mary Anne had done wrong.

“There’s that woman who comes to play tennis,” Mrs. Foley said of her daughter. “She comes every day, so I suppose it’s all right. She may as well use it if she hasn’t a court of her own.”

Mrs. Montjoy said to me later, “Did Mrs. Foley ask you to come over and sit on the grass?”

I said yes. “She thought I was somebody who’d brought the groceries.”

“I believe there was a grocery girl who used to run a boat. There hasn’t been any grocery delivery in years. Mrs. Foley does get her wires crossed now and then.”

“She said you were a woman who came to play tennis.”

“Did she really?” Mrs. Montjoy said.

The work that I had to do here was not hard for me. I knew how to bake, and iron, and clean an oven. Nobody tracked barnyard mud into this kitchen and there were no heavy men’s work clothes to wrestle through the wringer. There was just the business of putting everything perfectly in place and doing quite a bit of polishing. Polish the rims of the burners of the stove after every use, polish the taps, polish the glass door to the deck till the glass disappears and people are in danger of smashing their faces against it.

The Montjoys’ house was modern, with a flat roof and a deck extending over the water and a great many windows, which Mrs. Montjoy would have liked to see become as invisible as the glass door.

“But I have to be realistic,” she said. “I know if you did that you’d hardly have time for anything else.” She was not by any means a slave driver. Her tone with me was firm and slightly irritable, but that was the way it was with everybody. She was always on the lookout for inattention or incompetence, which she detested.
Sloppy
was a favorite word of condemnation. Others were
wishy-washy
and
unnecessary.
A lot of things that people did were unnecessary, and some of these were also wishy-washy. Other people might have used the words
arty
or
intellectual
or
permissive.
Mrs. Montjoy swept all those distinctions out of the way.

I ate my meals alone, between serving whoever was eating on the deck or in the dining room. I had almost made a horrible mistake about that. When Mrs. Montjoy caught me heading out to the deck with three plates—held in a show-off waitress-style—for the first lunch, she said, “Three plates there? Oh, yes, two out on the deck and yours in here. Right?”

I read as I ate. I had found a stack of old magazines—
Life
and
Look
and
Time
and
Collier’s
—at the back of the broom closet. I could tell that Mrs. Montjoy did not like the idea of my sitting reading these magazines as I ate my lunch, but I did not quite know why. Was it because it was bad manners to eat as you read, or because I had not asked permission? More likely she saw my interest in things that had nothing to do with my work as a subtle kind of impudence. Unnecessary.

All she said was, “Those old magazines must be dreadfully dusty.”

I said that I always wiped them off.

Sometimes there was a guest for lunch, a woman friend who had come over from one of the nearby islands. I heard Mrs. Montjoy say “…have to keep your girls happy or they’ll be off to the hotel, off to the port. They can get jobs there so easily. It’s not the way it used to be.”

The other woman said, “That’s so true.”

“So you just make allowances,” said Mrs. Montjoy. “You do the best with them you can.” It took me a moment to realize who they were talking about. Me. “Girls” meant girls like me. I wondered, then, how I was being kept happy. By being taken along on the occasional alarming boat ride when Mrs. Montjoy went to get supplies? By being allowed to wear shorts and a blouse, or even a halter, instead of a uniform with a white collar and cuffs?

And what hotel was this? What port?

“What are you best at?” Mary Anne said. “What sports?”

After a moment’s consideration, I said, “Volleyball.” We had to play volleyball at school. I wasn’t very good at it, but it was my best sport because it was the only one.

“Oh, I don’t mean team sports,” said Mary Anne. “I mean, what are you
best
at. Such as tennis. Or swimming or riding or what? My really best thing is riding, because that doesn’t depend so much on your eyesight. Aunt Margaret’s best used to be tennis and Nana’s used to be tennis too, and Grandad’s was always sailing, and Daddy’s is swimming I guess and Uncle Stewart’s is golf and sailing and Mother’s is golf and swimming and sailing and tennis and everything, but maybe tennis a little bit the best of all. If my sister Jane hadn’t died I don’t know what hers would have been, but it might have been swimming because she could swim already and she was only three.”

I had never been on a tennis court and the idea of going out in a sailboat or getting up on a horse terrified me. I could swim, but not very well. Golf to me was something that silly-looking men did in cartoons. The adults I knew never played any games that involved physical action. They sat down and rested when they were not working, which wasn’t often. Though on winter evenings they might play cards. Euchre. Lost Heir. Not the kind of cards Mrs. Montjoy ever played.

“Everybody I know works too hard to do any sports,” I said. “We don’t even have a tennis court in our town and there isn’t any golf course either.” (Actually we had once had both these things, but there hadn’t been the money to keep them up during the Depression and they had not been restored since.) “Nobody I know has a sailboat.”

I did not mention that my town did have a hockey rink and a baseball park.

“Really?” said Mary Anne thoughtfully. “What do they do then?”

“
Work.
And they never have any money, all of their lives.”

Then I told her that most people I knew had never seen a flush toilet unless it was in a public building and that sometimes old people (that is, people too old to work) had to stay in bed all winter in order to keep warm. Children walked barefoot until the frost came in order to save on shoe leather, and died of stomach aches that were really appendicitis because their parents had no money for a doctor. Sometimes people had eaten dandelion leaves, nothing else, for supper.

Not one of these statements—even the one about dandelion leaves—was completely a lie. I had heard of such things. The one about flush toilets perhaps came closest to the truth, but it applied to country people, not town people, and most of those it applied to would be of a generation before mine. But as I talked to Mary Anne all the isolated incidents and bizarre stories I had heard spread out in my mind, so that I could almost believe that I myself had walked with bare blue feet on cold mud—I who had benefited from cod liver oil and inoculations and been bundled up for school within an inch of my life, and had gone to bed hungry only because I refused to eat such things as junket or bread pudding or fried liver. And this false impression I was giving seemed justified, as if my exaggerations or near lies were substitutes for something I could not make clear.

How to make clear, for instance, the difference between the Montjoys’ kitchen and our kitchen at home. You could not do that simply by mentioning the perfectly fresh and shining floor surfaces of one and the worn-out linoleum of the other, or the fact of soft water being pumped from a cistern into the sink contrasted with hot and cold water coming out of taps. You would have to say that you had in one case a kitchen that followed with absolute correctness a current notion of what a kitchen ought to be, and in the other a kitchen that changed occasionally with use and improvisation, but in many ways never changed at all, and belonged entirely to one family and to the years and decades of that family’s life. And when I thought of that kitchen, with the combination wood and electric stove that I polished with waxed-paper bread wrappers, the dark old spice tins with their rusty rims kept from year to year in the cupboards, the barn clothes hanging by the door, it seemed as if I had to protect it from contempt—as if I had to protect a whole precious and intimate though hardly pleasant way of life from contempt. Contempt was what I imagined to be always waiting, swinging along on live wires, just under the skin and just behind the perceptions of people like the Montjoys.

“That isn’t fair,” said Mary Anne. “That’s awful. I didn’t know people could eat dandelion leaves.” But then she brightened. “Why don’t they go and catch some fish?”

“People who don’t need the fish have come and caught them all already. Rich people. For fun.”

Of course some of the people at home did catch fish when they had time, though others, including me, found the fish from our river too bony. But I thought that would keep Mary Anne quiet, especially since I knew that Mr. Montjoy went on fishing trips with his friends.

She could not stop mulling over the problem. “Couldn’t they go to the Salvation Army?”

“They’re too proud.”

“Well I feel sorry for them,” she said. “I feel really sorry for them, but I think that’s stupid. What about the little babies and the children? They ought to think about them. Are the children too proud too?”

“Everybody’s proud.”

When Mr. Montjoy came to the island on weekends, there was always a great deal of noise and activity. Some of that was because there were visitors who came by boat to swim and have drinks and watch sailing races. But a lot of it was generated by Mr. Montjoy himself. He had a loud blustery voice and a thick body with a skin that would never take a tan. Every weekend he turned red from the sun, and during the week the burned skin peeled away and left him pink and muddy with freckles, ready to be burned again. When he took off his glasses you could see that one eye was quick and squinty and the other boldly blue but helpless-looking, as if caught in a trap.

His blustering was often about things that he had misplaced, or dropped, or bumped into. “Where the hell is the—?” he would say, or “You didn’t happen to see the—?” So it seemed that he had also misplaced, or failed to grasp in the first place, even the name of the thing he was looking for. To console himself he might grab up a handful of peanuts or pretzels or whatever was nearby, and eat handful after handful until they were all gone. Then he would stare at the empty bowl as if that too astounded him.

One morning I heard him say, “Now where in hell is that—?” He was crashing around out on the deck.

“Your book?” said Mrs. Montjoy, in a tone of bright control. She was having her midmorning coffee.

“I thought I had it out here,” he said. “I was reading it.”

“The Book-of-the-Month one?” she said. “I think you left it in the living room.”

She was right. I was vacuuming the living room, and a few moments before I had picked up a book pushed partway under the sofa. Its title was
Seven Gothic Tales.
The title made me want to open it, and even as I overheard the Montjoys’ conversation I was reading, holding the book open in one hand and guiding the vacuum cleaner with the other. They couldn’t see me from the deck.

“Nay, I speak from the heart,” said Mira. “I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.”

“There it is,” said Mr. Montjoy, who for a wonder had come into the room without his usual bumping and banging—or none at least that I had heard. “Good girl, you found my book. Now I remember. Last night I was reading it on the sofa.”

“It was on the floor,” I said. “I just picked it up.”

He must have seen me reading it. He said, “It’s a queer kind of book, but sometimes you want to read a book that isn’t like all the others.”

“I couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mrs. Montjoy, coming in with the coffee tray. “We’ll have to get out of the way here and let her get on with the vacuuming.”

Mr. Montjoy went back to the mainland, and to the city, that evening. He was a bank director. That did not mean, apparently, that he worked in a bank. The day after he had gone I looked everywhere. I looked under the chairs and behind the curtains, in case he might have left that book behind. But I could not find it.

“I always thought it would be nice to live up here all the year round, the way you people do,” said Mrs. Foley. She must have cast me again as the girl who brought the groceries. Some days she said, “I know who you are now. You’re the new girl helping the Dutch woman in the kitchen. But I’m sorry, I just can’t recall your name.” And other days she let me walk by without giving any greeting or showing the least interest.

“We used to come up here in the winter,” she said. “The bay would be frozen over and there would be a road across the ice. We used to go snowshoeing. Now that’s something people don’t do anymore. Do they? Snowshoeing?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer. She leaned towards me. “Can you tell me something?” she said with embarrassment, speaking almost in a whisper. “Can you tell me where Jane is? I haven’t seen her running around here for the longest time.”

I said that I didn’t know. She smiled as if I was teasing her, and reached out a hand to touch my face. I had been stooping down to listen to her, but now I straightened up, and her hand grazed my chest instead. It was a hot day and I was wearing my halter, so it happened that she touched my skin. Her hand was light and dry as a wood shaving, but the nail scraped me.

“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said.

After that I simply waved if she spoke to me and hurried on my way.

On a Saturday afternoon towards the end of August, the Montjoys gave a cocktail party. The party was given in honor of the friends they had staying with them that weekend—Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. A good many small silver forks and spoons had to be polished in preparation for this event, so Mrs. Montjoy decided that all the silver might as well be done at the same time. I did the polishing and she stood beside me, inspecting it.