The View from Castle Rock (20 page)

“Now my lovely young ladies,” he said. “I am going to bring you some champagne.”

He brought a pitcher of lemonade, and filled our glasses. I was alarmed, until I tasted it—I knew that champagne was an alcoholic drink. We never had such drinks in our house and neither did anybody I knew. Mr. Wainwright watched me taste it and seemed to guess my feelings.

“Is that all right? Not worried now?” he said. “All satisfactory to your ladyship?”

He made a bow.

“Now,” he said. “What would you care for, to eat?” He reeled off a list of unfamiliar things—all I recognized was venison, which I certainly had never tasted. The list ended up with sweetbreads. Frances giggled and said, “We’ll have sweetbreads, please. And potatoes.”

I expected the sweetbreads to be like their name—some sort of bun with jam or brown sugar, but couldn’t see why that would come with potatoes. What arrived, however, were small pads of meat wrapped in crisp bacon, and little potatoes with their skins on, that had been rolled in hot butter and crisped in the pan. Also carrots cut in thin sticks and having a slightly candied flavor. The carrots I could have done without, but I had never tasted potatoes so delicious or meat so tender. All I wished was for Mr. Wainwright to stay in the kitchen instead of hovering around us pouring out lemonade and asking if everything was to our liking.

Dessert was another wonder—a satin vanilla pudding with a sort of lid on it of golden-brown baked sugar. Tiny cakes to go with it, iced on all sides with very dark, rich chocolate.

I sat replete, when not a lick nor a crumb was left. I looked at the fairy-tale tree with the ornaments that could have been miniature castles, or angels. Drafts came in around the window and moved the branches a little, causing the showers of tinsel to wave and the ornaments to turn slightly to show new points of light. Full of this rich and delicate food, I seemed to have entered a dream in which everything I saw was potent and benign.

One of the things I saw was the firelight, a dull rusty glow up in the pipe. I said to Frances, without alarm, “I think your pipe’s on fire.”

She called out in a spirit of party excitement, “Pipe’s on fire,” and in came Mr. Wainwright, who had finally retired to the kitchen, and Mrs. Wainwright close behind him.

Mrs. Wainwright said, “Oh God, Billy. What do we do?”

Mr. Wainwright said, “Close off the draft, I guess.” His voice was squeaky and scared, unfatherly.

He did that, then yelped and shook his hand, which must have got burnt. Now they both stood and looked at the red pipe, and she said shakily, “There’s something you’re supposed to put on it. What is it?—
baking soda.
” She ran to the kitchen and came back with the box of baking soda, half weeping. “Right on the flames!” she cried. Mr. Wainwright was still rubbing his hand on his trousers so she wrapped her apron round her own hand and used the stove lifter and scattered the powder on the flames. There was a spitting sound as they began to die down and smoke rose into the room.

“Girls,” she said. “Girls. Maybe you better run outside.” She was really crying now.

I remembered something from a similar crisis at home.

“You could wrap wet towels round the pipe,” I said.

“Wet towels,” she said. “That sounds like a good idea. Yes.”

She ran to the kitchen, where we heard her pumping water. Mr. Wainwright followed her, shaking his burned hand in front of him, and both returned with towels dripping. The towels were wrapped around the pipe, and as soon as they began to heat up and dry others were put in their place. The room began to fill up more and more with smoke. Frances started coughing.

“Get some air,” said Mr. Wainwright. It took him a while, with his good hand, to wrench open the unused front door, letting fly the bits of old newspapers and rotten rags that had been stuffed around it. There was a snowdrift outside, a white wave lapping at the room.

“Throw snow on the fire,” said Frances, still sounding jubilant between coughs, and she and I picked up armfuls of snow and threw them at the stove. Some hit what was left of the fire and some missed and melted and ran into the puddles that the drip from the towels had already made on the floor. I would never have been allowed to make such a mess at home.

In the midst of these puddles, the danger over and the room growing frigid, stood Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright with their arms around each other, laughing and commiserating.

“Oh your poor hand,” said Mrs. Wainwright. “And I wasn’t the least bit sympathetic about it. I was so afraid the house was going to burn down.” She tried to kiss the hand, and he said, “Ouch, ouch.” He too had tears in his eyes, from the smoke or the pain.

She patted him on the arms and shoulders and down lower, even on his buttocks, saying, “Poor poor baby,” and things of that sort, while he made a pouty face and kissed her with a great smack on the mouth. Then with his good hand he squeezed her behind.

It looked as if this fondling could go on for some time.

“Shut the door, it’s freezing,” cried Frances, all red from coughing and happy excitement. If she meant for her parents to do this, they took no notice but went on with the appalling behavior that did not seem to embarrass her or even to be worth her notice. She and I got hold of the door and pushed it against the wind that was whipping up over the drift and blowing more snow into the house.

I did not tell about any of this at home, though the food and the ornaments and the fire were so interesting. There were the other things I could not describe and that made me feel off-balance, slightly sick, so that somehow I did not like to mention any of it. The way the two adults put themselves at the service of two children. The charade of Mr. Wainwright as the waiter, his thick soapy-white hands and pale face and wings of fine glistening light-brown hair. The insistence—the too-closeness—of his soft footsteps in fat plaid slippers. Then the laughing, so inappropriate for adults, following a near disaster. The shameless hands and the smacking kiss. There was a creepy menace about all of this, starting with the falsity of corralling me to play the role of little friend—both of them had called me that—when I was nothing of the kind. To treat me as good and guileless, when I was not that either.

What was this menace? Was it just that of love, or of lovingness? If that was what it was, then you would have to say that I had made its acquaintance too late. Such slopping-over of attention made me feel cornered and humiliated, almost as if somebody had taken a peep into my pants. Even the wonderful unfamiliar food was suspect in my memory. The movie magazines alone escaped the taint.

By the end of the Christmas holidays, the Wainwrights’ house was empty. The snow was so heavy that year that the kitchen roof caved in. Even after that nobody bothered to pull the house down or to put up a
NO TRESPASSING
sign, and for years children—I was among them—poked around in the risky ruins just to see what they could find. Nobody seemed to worry then about injuries or liability.

No movie magazines came to light.

I did tell about Dahlia. By then I was an entirely different person, to my own way of thinking, than the girl who had been in the Wainwrights’ house. In my early teens I had become the entertainer around home. I don’t mean that I was always trying to make the family laugh—though I did that too—but that I relayed news and gossip. I told about things that had happened at school but also about things that had happened in town. Or I just described the looks or speech of somebody I had seen on the street. I had learned how to do this in a way that would not get me rebuked for being sarcastic or vulgar or told that I was too smart for my own good. I had mastered a deadpan, even demure style that could make people laugh even when they thought they shouldn’t and that made it hard to tell whether I was innocent or malicious.

That was the way I told about Dahlia’s creeping around in the sumacs spying on her father, about her hatred of him and her mention of murder. And that was the way any story about the Newcombes had to be told, not just the way it had to be told by me. Any story about them ought to confirm, to everybody’s satisfaction, just how thoroughly and faithfully they played out their roles. And now Dahlia, as well, was seen to belong to this picture. The spying, the threats, the melodrama. His coming after her with the shovel. Her thoughts that if he had killed her, he would have been hanged. And that she couldn’t be, if she killed him while she was still a juvenile.

My father agreed.

“Hard to get a court around here to convict her.”

My mother said that it was a shame, what a man like that had made of his daughter.

It seems strange to me now that we could conduct this conversation so easily, without its seeming ever to enter our heads that my father had beaten me, at times, and that I had screamed out not that I wanted to kill him, but that I wanted to die. And that this had happened not so long ago—three or four times, I would think, in the years when I was around eleven or twelve. It happened in between my knowing Frances and my knowing Dahlia. I was being punished at those times for some falling-out with my mother, some back talk or smart talk or intransigence. She would fetch my father from his outside work to deal with me, and I would await his arrival, first in balked fury, and then in a sickening despair. I felt as if it must be my very self that they were after, and in a way I think it was. The self-important disputatious part of my self that had to be beaten out of me. When my father began to remove his belt—that was what he beat me with—I would begin to scream
No, No,
and plead my case incoherently, in a way that seemed to make him despise me. And indeed my behavior then would arouse contempt, it did not show a proud or even a self-respecting nature. I did not care. And when the belt was raised—in the second before it descended—there was a moment of terrible revelation. Injustice ruled. I could never tell my side of things, my father’s detestation of me was supreme. How could I not find myself howling at such perversion in nature?

If he were alive now I am sure my father would say that I exaggerate, that the humiliation he meant to inflict was not so great, and that my offenses were perplexing and whatever other way is there to handle children? I was causing trouble for him and grief for my mother and I had to be convinced to change my ways.

And I did. I grew older. I became useful around the house. I learned not to give lip. I found ways to make myself agreeable.

And when I was with Dahlia, listening to her, when I was walking home by myself, when I was telling the story to my family, I never once thought to compare my situation with hers. Of course not. We were decent people. My mother, though sometimes grieved by the behavior of her family, did not go into town with snaggly hair, or wear floppy rubber galoshes. My father did not swear. He was a man of honor and competence and humor, and he was the parent I sorely wanted to please. I did not hate him, could not consider hating him. Instead, I saw what he hated in me. A shaky arrogance in my nature, something brazen yet cowardly, that woke in him this fury.

Shame. The shame of being beaten, and the shame of cringing from the beating. Perpetual shame. Exposure. And something connects this, as I feel it now, with the shame, the queasiness, that crept up on me when I heard the padding of Mr. Wainwright’s slippered feet, and his breathing. There were demands that seemed indecent, there were horrid invasions, both sneaky and straightforward. Some that I could tighten my skin against, others that left it raw. All in the hazards of life as a child.

And as the saying goes, about this matter of what molds or warps us, if it’s not one thing it will be another. At least that was a saying of my elders in those days. Mysterious, uncomforting, unaccusing.

On Friday morning last Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Township, lost his life due to electrocution. He was the beloved husband of Dorothy (Morris) Newcombe, and he leaves to mourn his passing his daughters Mrs. Joseph (April) McConachie, of Sarnia, Mrs. Evan (Corinne) Wilson of Kaslo, British Columbia, Mrs. Hugh (Gloria) Whitehead of town, Misses Susannah and Dahlia, also of town, and one son Raymond, at home, also seven grandchildren. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father’s accident. It happened when he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging metal socket, while standing on a wet floor in a neighbor’s stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull, and he was arguing at that moment about the fee. For some reason that nobody could understand, he was not wearing his rubber boots, which everybody said might have saved his life.

Lying Under the Apple Tree

Over on the other side of town lived a woman named Miriam McAlpin, who kept horses. These were not horses that belonged to her—she boarded them and exercised them for their owners, who were harness-racing people. She lived in a house that had been the original farmhouse, close to the horse barns, with her old parents, who seldom came outside. Beyond the house and the barns was an oval track on which Miriam or her stable boy, or sometimes the owners themselves, could be seen now and then on the low seat of a flimsy-looking sulky, flying along and beating up the dust.

In one of the pasture fields for the horses, next to the town street, there were three apple trees, the remains of an old orchard. Two of them were small and bent and one was quite large, like a nearly grown maple. They were never pruned or sprayed and the apples were scabby, not worth stealing, but most years there was an abundant flowering, apple blossoms hanging on everywhere, so that the branches looked from a little way off to be absolutely clotted with snow.

I had inherited a bicycle, or at least I had the use of one left behind by our part-time hired man when he went away to work in an aircraft factory. It was a man’s bike, of course, high-seated and lightweight, of some odd-looking make long discontinued.

“You’re not going to ride that to school, are you?” my sister said, when I had started practice rides up and down our lane. My sister was younger than I was, but she sometimes suffered anxiety on my behalf, understanding perhaps before I did the various ways in which I could risk making a fool of myself. She was thinking not just of the look of the bike but of the fact that I was thirteen and in my first year at high school, and that this was a watershed year as far as girls riding bikes to school was concerned. All girls who wanted to establish their femininity had to quit riding them. Girls who continued to ride either lived too far out in the country to walk—and had parents who could not afford to board them in town—or were simply eccentric and unable to take account of certain unstated but far-reaching rules. We lived just beyond the town limits, so if I showed up riding a bicycle—and particularly this bicycle—it would put me in the category of such girls. Those who wore women’s oxford shoes and lisle stockings and rolled their hair.

“Not to school,” I said. But I did start making use of the bike, riding it out to the country along the back roads on Sunday afternoons. There was hardly a chance then of meeting anybody I knew, and sometimes I met nobody at all.

I liked to do this because I was secretly devoted to Nature. The feeling came from books, at first. It came from the girls’ stories by the writer L. M. Montgomery, who often inserted some sentences describing a snowy field in moonlight or a pine forest or a still pond mirroring the evening sky. Then it had merged with another private passion I had, which was for lines of poetry. I went rampaging through my school texts to uncover them before they could be read and despised in class.

To betray either of these addictions, at home or at school, would have put me into a condition of permanent vulnerability. Which I felt that I was in already, to some extent. All someone had to say, in a certain voice, was
you would,
or
how like you,
and I felt the taunt, the chastening air, the lines drawn. But now that I had the bike, I could ride on Sunday afternoons into territory that seemed waiting for the kind of homage I ached to offer. Here were the sheets of water from the flooded creeks flashing over the land, and here were the banks of trillium under the red-budded trees. And the chokecherries, the pin cherries, in the fencerows, breaking into tender bits of bloom before there was a leaf on them.

The cherry blossoms got me thinking about the trees in Miriam McAlpin’s field. I wanted to look at them when they flowered. And not just to look at them—as you could do from the street—but to get underneath those branches, to lie down on my back with my head against the trunk of the tree and to see how it rose, as if out of my own skull, rose up and lost itself in an upside-down sea of blossom. Also to see if there were bits of sky showing through, so that I could screw up my eyes to make them foreground not background, bright-blue fragments on that puffy white sea. There was a formality about this idea that I longed for. It was almost like kneeling down in church, which in our church we didn’t do. I had done it once, when I was friends with Delia Cavanaugh and her mother took us to the Catholic church on a Saturday to arrange the flowers. I crossed myself and knelt in a pew and Delia said—not even whispering—“What are you doing that for? You’re not supposed to do that. Just us.”

I left the bike lying in the grass. It was evening, I had ridden through town on back streets. There was nobody in the stable yard or around the house. I got myself over the fence. I tried to go as quickly as possible, without running, over the ground where the horses had been cropping the early grass. I ducked under the branches of the big tree and went on stooping and stumbling, sometimes hit in the face by the blossoms, till I reached the trunk and could do what I’d come to do.

I lay down flat on my back. There was a root of the tree making a hard ridge under me, so I had to shift around. And there were last year’s apples, dark as chunks of dried meat, that I had to get out of the way before I could settle. Even then, when I composed myself, I was aware of my body’s being in an odd and unnatural situation. And when I looked up at all the dangling pearly petals with their faint rosy smear, all the prearranged nosegays, I was not quite swept into the state of mind, of worship, that I had been hoping for. The sky was thinly clouded, and what I could see of it reminded me of dingy bits of china.

Not that this wasn’t worth doing. At least—as I began to understand as I got to my feet and scrambled out of there—it was worth having done. It was along the lines of an acknowledgment, rather than an experience. I hurried across the field and over the fence, retrieved my bicycle, and was in fact starting to ride away when I heard a loud whistle, and my name.

“Hey. You. Yeah. You.”

It was Miriam McAlpin.

“You come on over here for a minute.”

I wheeled around. There in the driveway between the old house and the horse barns, Miriam was talking to two men, who must have driven up in the car parked beside the road. They were wearing white shirts, suit vests, and trousers—just the same thing any man who worked at a desk or behind a counter in those days would be wearing from the time he got dressed in the morning till he got undressed to go to bed. Next to them, Miriam in her work pants and loose checked shirt looked like a cocky twelve-year-old boy, though she was a woman of between twenty-five and thirty. Either that, or she looked like a jockey. Cropped hair, hunched shoulders, raw skin. She gave me a look that was threatening and derisive.

“I saw you,” she said. “Over in our field.”

I said nothing. I knew what the next question would be and I was trying to think of an answer.

“So. What were you doing there?”

“Looking for something,” I said.

“Looking for something. Yeah. What?”

“A bracelet.”

I had never owned a bracelet in my life.

“So. Why did you think it was in there?”

“I thought I’d lost it.”

“Yeah. In there. How come?”

“Because I was in there the other day looking for morels,” I floundered. “I had it on then and I thought it could have slipped off.”

It was true enough that people looked for morels under old apple trees in the spring. Though I don’t suppose they wore bracelets while they were at it.

“Unh-hunh,” said Miriam. “Did you find any? Whatchamacallums? Morels?”

I said no.

“That’s good. ’Cause they would’ve been mine.”

She looked me up and down and said what she’d been wanting to say all along. “You’re starting early, aren’t you?”

One of the men was looking at the ground, but I thought he was smiling. The other looked straight at me, raising his eyebrows slightly in droll reproach. Men who knew who I was, men who knew my father, would probably not have let their looks say so much.

I understood. She thought—they all thought—that I had been under the tree, yesterday evening or some other evening, with a man or a boy.

“You go on home,” Miriam said. “You and your bracelets go on home and don’t ever come back monkeying around on my property in the future. Go on.”

Miriam McAlpin was well known for her tendency to bawl people out. I had once heard her in the grocery store, carrying on at the top of her voice about some bruised peaches. The way she was treating me was predictable, and the suspicions she had of me seemed to rouse an unambiguous feeling in her—pure disgust—which did not surprise me.

It was the men who made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads.

The stable boy had come out while this was going on. He was leading a horse belonging to one or both of the men. He halted in the yard, did not come closer. He seemed not to be looking at his boss, or the horse owners, or at me, not to take any interest in the scene. He would be used to Miriam’s way of telling people off.

People’s thoughts about me—not just the kind of thoughts the men or Miriam might be having, each kind rather dangerous in its own way—but any thoughts at all, seemed to me a mysterious threat, a gross impertinence. I hated even to hear a person say something relatively harmless.

“I seen you walking down the street the other day. Looked like you were off in the clouds.”

Judgments and speculations all like a swarm of bugs trying to get into my mouth and eyes. I could have swatted them, I could have spat.

“Dirt,” my sister whispered to me when I got home. “Dirt on the back of your blouse.”

She watched me take it off in the bathroom, and scrub at it with a hard bar of soap. We didn’t have running hot water except in the winter, so she offered to get me some from the kettle. She didn’t ask me how the dirt had got there, she was only hoping to get rid of the evidence, keep me out of trouble.

On Saturday nights there was always a crowd on the main street. At that time there wasn’t such a thing as a mall anywhere in the county, and it wasn’t until several years after the war that the big shopping night would shift to Friday. The year I’m talking about is 1944, when we still had ration books and there were a lot of things you couldn’t buy—like new cars and silk stockings—but the farmers came into town with some money in their pockets and the stores had brightened up after the Depression doldrums and everything stayed open till ten o’clock.

Most town people did their shopping during the week and in the daytime. Unless they worked in the stores or restaurants they stayed out of the way on Saturday evenings, playing cards with their neighbors or listening to the radio. Newly married couples, engaged couples, couples who were “going out,” cuddled in the movie house or drove, if they could get the gas coupons, to one of the dance halls on the lakeshore. It was the country people who took over the street and the country men and girls on the loose who went into Neddy’s Night Owl, where the platform was raised above a dirt floor and every dance cost ten cents.

I stood close to the platform with some friends of my own age. Nobody came along to pay ten cents for any of us. No wonder. We laughed loudly, we criticized the dancing, the haircuts, the clothes. We sometimes spoke of a girl as a slut, or a man as a fairy, though we did not have a precise definition of either of these words.

Neddy himself, who sold the tickets, was apt to turn to us and say, “Don’t you think you girls need some fresh air?” And we would swagger off. Or else we would get bored and leave on our own initiative. We bought ice-cream cones and gave each other licks to try the different flavors, and walked along the street in a haughty style, swinging around the knots of talkers and through the swarms of children squirting water at each other from the drinking fountain. Nobody was worth our notice.

The girls who took part in this parade were not out of the top drawer—as my mother would have said, with a wistful and lightly sarcastic edge to her voice. Not one of them had a sunroom on their house or a father who wore a suit on any day but Sunday. Girls of that sort were at home now, or in each other’s houses, playing Monopoly or making fudge or trying out hairstyles. My mother was sorry not to see me accepted into that crowd.

But it was all right with me. This way, I could be a ringleader and a loudmouth. If that was a disguise it was one that I managed easily. Or it might not have been a disguise, but just one of the entirely disjointed and dissimilar personalities I seemed to be made up of.

On a vacant lot at the north end of town some members of the Salvation Army had set up their post. There was a preacher and a small choir to sing the hymns and a fat boy on the drum. Also a tall boy to play the trombone, a girl playing the clarinet, some half-grown children equipped with tambourines.

Salvation Army people were even less top drawer than the girls I was with. The man who was doing the preaching was the drayman who delivered coal. No doubt he had washed himself clean, but his face still had a gray shadow. Sweat was running down it from the exertion of his preaching and it seemed as if his sweat must be gray too. Some cars would honk to drown him out as they passed. (In spite of the waste of gas, there were certain cars driven, by young men, up the street to the north end, and down the street to the south end, over and over again.) Most people walked past with uneasy but respectful faces, but some halted to watch. As we did, waiting for something to laugh at.

The instruments were raised for a hymn, and I saw that the boy who lifted the trombone was the same stable boy who had stood in the yard while Miriam McAlpin was giving me the dressing-down. He smiled at me with his eyes as he began to play, and he seemed to be smiling not to recall my humiliation but with irrepressible pleasure, as if the sight of me woke the memory of something quite different from that scene, a natural happiness.