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Ailsa is in a hectic mood partly because she has been up two nights in a row, cleaning. Not that the house wasn’t decently clean before. Nevertheless she felt the need to wash every dish, pot, and ornament, polish the glass on every picture, pull out the fridge and scrub behind it, wash the cellar steps off, and pour bleach in the garbage can. The very lighting fixture overhead, over the dining-room table, had to be taken apart, and every piece on it dunked in soapy water, rinsed, and rubbed dry and reassembled. And because of her work at the Post Office Ailsa couldn’t start this till after supper. She is the postmistress now, she could have given herself a day off, but being Ailsa she would never do that.
Now she’s hot under her rouge, twitchy in her dark-blue lace-collared crepe dress. She can’t stay still. She refills the serving plates and passes them around, deplores the fact that people’s tea may have got cold, hurries to make a fresh pot. Mindful of her guests’ comfort, asking after their rheumatism or minor ailments, smiling in the face of her tragedy, repeating over and over again that hers is a common loss, that she must not complain when so many others are in the same boat, that George would not want his friends to grieve but to be thankful that all together we have ended the war. All in a high and emphatic voice of cheerful reproof that people are used to from the Post Office. So that they are left with an uncertain feeling of perhaps having said the wrong thing, just as in the Post Office they may be made to understand that their handwriting ca
Ailsa is aware that her voice is too high and that she is smiling too much and that she has poured out tea for people who said they didn’t want any more. In the kitchen, while warming the teapot, she says, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m all wound up.”
The person she says this to is Dr. Shantz, her neighbor across the backyard.
“It’ll soon be over,” he says. “Would you like a bromide?”
His voice undergoes a change as the door from the dining room opens. The word “bromide” comes out firm and professional.
Ailsa’s voice changes too, from forlorn to valiant. She says, “Oh, no thank you. I’ll just try and keep going on my own.”
Iona’s job is supposed to be to watch over their mother, to see that she doesn’t spill her tea-which she may do not out of clumsiness but forgetfulness-and that she is taken away if she starts to sniffle and cry. But in fact Mrs. Kirkham’s ma
Then passing from room to room or guest to guest, she forgets entirely, she looks around her own house and says, “Why are we here? What a lot of people-what are we celebrating? “And catching on to the fact that it all has something to do with George, she says, “Is it George’s wedding?” Along with her up-to-date information she has lost some of her mild discretion. “It’s not your wedding, is it?” she says to Iona. “No. I didn’t think so. You never had a boyfriend, did you?” A let’s-face-facts, devil-take-the-hindmost note has come into her voice. When she spots Jill she laughs.
“That’s not the bride, is it? Oh-oh. Now we understand.”
But the truth comes back to her as suddenly as it went away.
“Is there news?” she says. “News about George?” And it’s then that the weeping starts that Ailsa was afraid of.
“Get her out of the way if she starts making a spectacle,” Ailsa had said.
Iona isn’t able to get her mother out of the way-she has never been able to exert authority over anybody in her life-but Dr. Shantz’s wife catches the old woman’s arm.
“George is dead?” says Mrs. Kirkham fearfully, and Mrs. Shantz says, “Yes he is. But you know his wife is having a baby.”
Mrs. Kirkham leans against her; she crumples and says softly, “Could I have my tea?”
Everywhere my mother turns in that house, it seems she sees a picture of my father. The last and official one, of him in his uniform, sits on an embroidered ru
The hand-tinted studio photo over the buffet shows him at the age of three, a blurred blond tot dragging a rag doll by one leg. Ailsa thought of taking that down because it might seem tear-jerking, but she left it up rather than show a bright patch on the wallpaper. And no one said anything about it but Mrs. Shantz, who paused and said what she had said sometimes before, and not tearfully but with a faintly amused appreciation.
“Ah-Christopher Robin.”
People were used to not paying much attention to what Mrs. Shantz said.
In all of his pictures George looks bright as a dollar. There’s always a su
What was Jill to make of such a lover? She was nineteen when she met him, and nobody had ever claimed her before. She couldn’t understand what attracted him, and she could see that nobody else could understand it, either. She was a puzzle to most people of her own age, but a dull puzzle. A girl whose life was given over to the study of the violin and who had no other interests.
That was not quite true. She would snuggle under her shabby quilts and imagine a lover. But he was never a shining cutup like George. She thought of some warm and bearlike fellow, or of a musician a decade older than herself and already legendary, with a fierce potency. Her notions of love were operatic, though that was not the sort of music she most admired. But George made jokes when he made love; he pranced around her room when he had finished; he made rude and infantile noises. His brisk performances brought her little of the pleasure she knew from her assaults on herself, but she was not exactly disappointed.