Страница 54 из 73
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 unpla
“That’s her wedding present?” my husband would say, later. “A trunkV 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 bed-sheets, 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 pi
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 1 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 1 had nothing else to write about and because 1 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, 1 ought to be longing to scrape the home-dirt off my shoes. Concentrating on the life, the home, that we would make together.
1 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. 1 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. 1 had not given up reading, though it seemed that the books 1 read now were not so harsh or demanding as the books I had been reading a year before. 1 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.