The View from Castle Rock (28 page)

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 grandmother 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 farmhouse 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 be
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.

My brother snickered.

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.