Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (30 page)

My grandmother's marriage had been another matter. The story was that she had married my grandfather while still in love with, though very angry at, another man. My mother told me this. She loved stories, particularly those full of tragedy and renunciation and queer turns of fate. Aunt Madge and my grandmother, of course, never mentioned anything about it. But as I grew up I found that everybody seemed to know it. The other man remained in the district, as most people did. He farmed, and married three times. He was a cousin of both my grandfather and my grandmother, and so was often in their house, as they were in his. Before he proposed to his third wife—this was what my mother told me—he came to see my grandmother. She came out of her kitchen and rode up and down the lane in his buggy with him, for anybody to see. Did he ask her advice? Her permission? My mother strongly believed that he had asked her to run away with him. I wonder. They would both have been around fifty years old at that time. Where could they have run to? Besides, they were Presbyterians. No one ever accused them of misbehavior. Proximity, impossibility, renunciation. That does make for an enduring kind of love. And I believe that would be my grandmother's choice, that self-glorifying dangerous self-denying passion, never satisfied, never risked, to last a lifetime. Not admitted to, either, except perhaps that one time, one or two times, under circumstances of great stress.
We must never speak of this again
.

My grandfather was not a man to complain. He had a taste for solitude, he had married rather late, he had chosen another man's offended sweetheart, for reasons he did not divulge to anybody. In the wintertime he finished his chores early, doing everything thoroughly and efficiently. Then he read. He read books on economics and history. He studied Esperanto. He read his way several times through solid shelves of Victorian novels. He did not discuss what he read. His opinions, unlike his brother-in-law's, were not made
public. His demands on life, his expectations of other people, seemed to be so slight there was never any possibility of disappointing him. Whether my grandmother had disappointed him, privately, and so thoroughly that any offers he might have made had been withdrawn, nobody could know.

And how is anybody to know, I think as I put this down, how am I to know what I claim to know? I have used these people, not all of them, but some of them, before. I have tricked them out and altered them and shaped them any way at all, to suit my purposes. I am not doing that now, I am being as careful as I can, but I stop and wonder, I feel compunction. Though I am only doing in a large and public way what has always been done, what my mother did, and other people did, who mentioned to me my grandmother's story. Even in that close-mouthed place, stories were being made. People carried their stories around with them. My grandmother carried hers, and nobody ever spoke of it to her face.

But that only takes care of the facts. I have said other things. I have said that my grandmother would choose a certain kind of love. I have implied that she would be stubbornly, secretly, destructively romantic. Nothing she ever said to me, or in my hearing, would bear this out. Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on.

This turned out to be a wild heavy storm, lasting a week. But on the third afternoon, sitting in school, I looked out and saw that the wind had apparently died, there was no snow blowing any more, there was even a break in the clouds. I thought at once, and with relief, that I would be able to go home that night. Home always looked a great
deal better, after a couple of nights at my grandmother's. It was a place where I did not have to watch too closely what I said and did. My mother objected to things, but in a way I had the upper hand of her. After all, it was I who heated tubs of water on the stove and hauled the washing machine from the porch and did the washing, once a week; I who scrubbed the floor, and with an ill grace made her endless cups of tea. So I could say
shit
when I emptied the dustpan into the stove and some dirt went on the lid; I could say that I meant to have lovers and use birth control and never have any children (actually I wanted to make an enviable marriage, both safe and passionate, and I had pictured the nightgown I would wear when my lover-husband came to visit me for the first time in the maternity word); I could say that there was nothing wrong with writing about sex in books and also that there was no such thing as a dirty word. The loud argumentative scandalous person I was at home had not much more to do with my real self than the discreet unrevealing person I was in my grandmother's house, but judging both as roles it can be seen that the first had more scope. I did not get tired of it so easily, in fact I did not get tired of it at all.

And comfort palls. The ironed sheets, the lovely eiderdown, the jasmine soap. I would give it all up for the moment in order to able to drop my coat where I chose, leave the room without having to say where I was going, read with my feet in the oven, if I liked.

After school I went around to my grandmother's house to tell them that I was going home. By this time the wind had begun to blow again. I knew the roads would be drifted, the storm was not really over. But I wanted more than ever to go home. When I opened the door and smelled the pies baking—winter apples—and heard the two old voices greet me (Aunt Madge would always call out, “Now, whoever can
this
be?” as she had done when I was a little girl), I
thought that I could not bear any more of it—the tidiness, the courtesies, the waiting. All their time was waiting time. Wait for the mail, wait for supper, wait for bed. You might imagine that my mother's time was waiting time, but it was not. Lying on the couch, sick and crippled, she was still full of outrageous plans and fantasies, demands that could not be met, fights that could be picked; she kept herself going. At home there was always confusion and necessity. Eggs to be cleaned, wood to be brought in, the fire to be kept going, food to be prepared, mess to be cleaned away. I was always hurrying and remembering and forgetting, and then I would sit down after supper in the middle of everything, waiting for the dishwater to heat on the stove, and get lost in my library book.

There was a difference too in books read at home and at my grandmother's. At my grandmother's, books could not quite get out. Some atmosphere of the place pushed them back, contained them, dimmed them. There was not room. At home, in spite of all that was going on, there was room for everything.

“I won't be here for supper,” I said. “I'm going home.”

I had taken off my things and sat down to have tea. My grandmother was making it.

“You can't ever set out in this,” she said confidently. “Are you worrying about the work? Are you afraid they can't get on without you?”

“No, but I better get home. It's not blowing hard. The plows have been out.”

“On the highway, maybe. I never heard yet of a plow getting down your road.”

The place where we lived, like so much else, was a mistake.

“She's afraid of my pie crust, that's what it is,” cried Aunt Madge in mock distress. “She's just plain running away from my pie.”

“That may be it,” I said.

“You eat a piece before you go. It won't take long to cool.”

“She isn't going,” my grandmother said, still lightly. “She isn't walking out into that storm.”

“It isn't a
storm
,” I said, looking for help towards the window, which showed solid white.

My grandmother put her cup down, rattling it on the saucer. “All right. Go then. Just go. Go if you want to. Go and get frozen to death.”

I had never heard my grandmother lose control before. I had never imagined that she could. It seems strange to me now, but the fact is that I had never heard anything like plain hurt or anger in her voice, or seen it on her face. Everything had been indirect, calmly expressed. Her judgments had seemed remote, full of traditional authority, not personal. The abdication here was what amazed me. There were tears in her voice, and when I looked at her there were tears in her eyes and then pouring down her face. She was weeping, she was furious and weeping.

“Never mind then. You just go. Go and get yourself frozen to death like what happened to poor Susie Heferman.”

“Oh, dear,” said Aunt Madge. “That's true. That's true.”

“Poor Susan living all alone,” my grandmother said, addressing me as if that were my fault.

“It was out on our old line, dear,” said Aunt Madge comfortingly. “You wouldn't know who we mean. Susie Heferman that was married to Gershom Bell. Mrs. Gershom Bell. Susie Heferman to us. We went to school with her.”

“And Gershom died last year and both her daughters are married and away,” my grandmother said, wiping her eyes and her nose with a fresh handkerchief from her sleeve, composing herself somewhat, but not ceasing to look at me angrily. “Poor Susan had to go out by herself to milk the cows. She would keep on her cows and go on by herself.
She went out last night and she should have tied the clothesline to the door but she didn't, and on the way back she lost her path, and they found her this noon.”

“Alex Beattie phoned us,” Aunt Madge said. “He was one of the ones found her. He was upset.”

“Was she dead?” I said foolishly.

“They cannot thaw you back to life,” my grandmother said, “after you have been lying in a snowbank overnight in this weather.” She had stopped crying.

“And think of poor Susie there just trying to get from the stable to the house,” Aunt Madge said. “She shouldn't have hung on to her cows. She thought she could manage. And she had the bad leg. I bet that give out on her.”

“That's terrible,” I said. “I won't go home.”

“You go if you like,” my grandmother said at once.

“No. I'll stay.”

“You never know what can happen to a person,” said Aunt Madge. She wept too, but more naturally than my grandmother. With her it was just a comfortable bit of leakage round the eyes, it seemed to do good. “Who would have thought that would be the end of Susie, she was more my age than your grandmother's and what a girl for dances, she used to say she'd ride twenty miles in an open cutter for a good dance. We traded dresses once, we did it for a joke. If we had ever known then what would happen now!”

“Nobody knows. What would be the use of it?” my grandmother said.

I ate a large supper. No more mention was made of Susie Heferman.

I understand various things now, though my understanding them is not of much use to anybody. I understand that Aunt Madge could feel sympathy for my mother because Aunt Madge must have seen my mother, even before
her illness, as an afflicted person. Anything that was exceptional she could see, simply, as affliction. But my grandmother would have to see an example. My grandmother had schooled herself, watched herself, learned what to do and say; she had understood the importance of acceptance, had yearned for it, had achieved it, had known there was a possibility of not achieving it. Aunt Madge had never known that. My grandmother could feel endangered by my mother, could perhaps even understand—at some level she would always have to deny—those efforts of my mother's that she so successfully, and never quite openly, ridiculed and blamed.

I understand that my grandmother wept angrily for Susie Heferman and also for herself, that she knew how I longed for home, and why. She knew and did not understand how this had happened or how it could have been different or how she herself, once so baffled and struggling, had become another old woman whom people deceived and placated and were anxious to get away from.

Memorial