The first sentence of the book is very carefully and deliberately that old war-horse:
It was a dark and stormy night.
Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph.
The English edition begins, “It was a dark and stormy night in a small village in the United States.”
I was naturally delighted when Penguin Publications decided to make a Puffin Book out of it. But lo, the Puffin copy editor took the periods out after Mr. and Mrs. Murry, too.
Ah, well.
TWO
1
How did we come to spend almost a decade year round at Crosswicks?
We bought the house a few months after we were married, for the astounding sum—astounding even a quarter of a century ago—of sixty-three hundred dollars. Sic. It was where we were going to sink our roots deep into the ground; it was our piece of land. I think it meant something unique to me because I had never before lived in a house. I was born in New York; we lived in an apartment. In Europe we lived in hotels, or pensions, or some kind of rented place which was not our own. When I got out of college I shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with three other girls, then moved to my own. Hugh and I started our married life in an apartment. But Crosswicks was a house, a real house. We planted trees, trees which would take an entire lifetime to mature. The great elms in front of the house, the bridal elms, had been planted as each of the original daughters of the house was married. Our trees, too, were an affirmation. This was where we wanted to raise our family—we hoped for six children.
Hugh was doing well in the theatre, but Crosswicks was too far to commute, and he loved Crosswicks. The spring before his thirty-fifth birthday—we had spent only summers in Crosswicks for the first years—he said that if he were ever to earn a living outside the theatre it would have to be at once, before he was too old. Within a month of that pronouncement I was pregnant with our son, Bion, and this seemed to be the moment to make the decision. But, we discovered, thirty-five is already too old. Hugh had a degree in speech from Northwestern University, but he had no training or degree in engineering or business, which knocked out the possibility of a white-collar job.
So he decided he’d get a blue-collar job and applied at several of the “shops” in Clovenford, the nearest town. When he was given the routine tests he came out as a genius; he was told that he couldn’t possibly be put on a machine with that kind of rating. For a while we were near despair. But suddenly we found ourselves the owners of the General Store, a run-down store in the center of the village, the only store. The post office was in it, and people used to pick up a loaf of bread when they got their mail in the morning, or a pack of cigarettes when they got the evening paper. But it had lots of potential. At first Hugh had visions of an old-fashioned general store, with a cracker barrel and jars of licorice sticks. But we aren’t on the tourist route. What was needed in the village was a plain, honest-to-goodness grocery store, and if we were to make any kind of a living for ourselves and our children, that was what we had to provide.
We did. Hugh, with no background whatsoever in this area—an actor, from a family of lawyers—built up a splendid business; he wrote and mimeographed a weekly newspaper, giving town news, meetings, birthdays, anniversaries, along with the week’s specials. The husband of the soprano with the most beautiful voice in the choir needed a job, and they were talking of leaving town: I couldn’t bear losing that voice, so we took Chuck on part-time, very shortly full-time, and within a year he became our butcher, friend, and general uncle; we couldn’t have managed without him.
While the store was a-building, Hugh was happy. It was like a Double-Crostic for him. But a business gets to a plateau; it reaches its peak, and there is no way to go further except to start another store. A chain of stores was hardly what Hugh really wanted. He’d made a success of one store, and that was enough. Our children were out of diapers, and we couldn’t have any more babies, so one night I said, “Are you really still happy with the store?” “No. Not now.” “Then sell it.”
He had left the theatre forever. Forever lasted nine years. We learned a lot in those nine years, and we made friends who are definitely forever.
How to tell a little about those growing years? As I tell my students, one must particularize; show, do not tell. Perhaps if I remember the particular story of the Brechsteins, it will set, a little more clearly, the scene in which Grandma offered me her life.
Whenever anybody moves into a village as small as ours, it’s a big event. We all live so close together, we know each other so well, that each new family can actively affect the climate of the town.
I was one of the first to see the Brechsteins. I was at the store as usual during the noon hour, and Wilberforce Smith came in for some teat dilators for his cows and asked if I’d seen the new people who’d bought the old Taylor house. And about an hour later Mrs. Brechstein came in.
She had on tight-fitting orange slacks in a day when women wore slacks because they were convenient to work in, not for chic: it was a little immoral to wear slacks for chic; Mrs. Brechstein’s slacks were anything but practical. She wore them with a chartreuse shirt and dangly bronze earrings. Her two little boys had on shabby blue jeans and one of them had a hole in his T-shirt. It wasn’t the kind of shabbiness we’re used to in this village, where nobody has very much money but neither is anybody destitute. It was ostentatious. It was as much a costume as Mrs. Brechstein’s orange pants.
All right, let’s be honest. I didn’t like her right from the start. There was the way she and the children were dressed—I dress oddly enough; I have a feeling I’m referred to in the village as “Poor Hugh Franklin’s wife.” There was the way she made me feel a failure; I had a book making the forlorn rounds of many publishing houses, and she managed to rub the rejections in, simply by constantly asking me about something I considered my own business. There was even the way she asked me if our eggs were fresh.
She went back to the meat department that first day, and I could hear her saying that she could get a certain cut of meat cheaper at the A & P. (How can any store with the glorious name of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company call itself the A & P?) As I was checking her out and putting her purchases in a bag I asked her how they were getting on, if they were getting settled, and if there was anything we could do to help them.
She smiled at me condescendingly and said that if she decided to pick up odds and ends at the store, it might be simpler for her to have a charge account. “The name is Brechstein, you know,” she drawled, “and of course we’re so often confused with the Chosen People, but I assure you that our credit rating is impeccable.”
I told her, with what I thought was creditable mildness, that so was the credit of all our Jewish customers.
“But we don’t happen to be Jewish,” she said, smiling at me tolerantly, as though I hadn’t been able to understand her in the first place.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured absently as I rang up the cash register.
As she left, Wilberforce Smith came in again, this time for cigars for himself, and bag balm for his cows, and accompanied by the second selectman, Harry Nottingham. “Seen the Jews who bought the old Taylor house?” Harry asked him.
“Ayeh.”
“Putting in two new bathrooms,” Harry said. “Must be mighty full of piss.”
Well, you see, that’s all part of it. I don’t mean the Brechsteins. When Hugh and I first took over the General Store there weren’t many people around who hadn’t been born within ten miles of the Center. And we, like almost all the young couples who moved in shortly after the war, had a naïve idea, as we filled our houses with furniture and furnaces and families, joined the church and the P.T.A., that after a year or so we would no longer be considered newcomers but would be accepted as belonging to the village.
But there’s a story, and I doubt if it’s apocryphal, of the young couple who moved into a New England village with their infant son. The baby grew up there, lived and worked there
, and died in his nineties. He had no immediate family, so the villagers gave him a splendid funeral and erected a monument to him on which they had inscribed: DEARLY BELOVED THOUGH A STRANGER AMONG US.
One day Mrs. Brechstein came into the store and said accusingly, “I hear there was a Republican caucus last night.”
“Yes, I believe there was.”
“Why weren’t we told about it?”
“I suppose for the same reason that we weren’t. They didn’t want us to know.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t they want us to know?” It was obvious that she thought newcomers were a lot better qualified than the old Yankees to handle town government. I wasn’t sure of that, being an apolitical creature, but I did want the opportunity to know what was going on.
Wilberforce Smith came in then to get his paper. “Ask Mr. Smith,” I said. “He used to be a state senator.”
So Mrs. Brechstein bustled up to him.
“It was posted on the door of the Town Hall,” he growled.
“But who goes and looks at the door of the Town Hall?”
She had a point. When people want anything spread around the village, they don’t post a minuscule sign on the door of the Town Hall, hidden by the shadows of the elms. They make three signs, one for the filling station, one for the firehouse, one for the store. I’d offered time and time again to make the signs for town meetings or caucuses.
When I wasn’t asked, and blustered to Hugh about the comparative cleanness of Tammany Hall, he said, “Look at it their way. They don’t want newcomers butting in and telling them how to run things. You can’t blame them. Everybody hates change.”
“I don’t.”
“Sure you do. Remember looking at the baby tonight and saying you hated having him change so quickly? Same difference. And around here everything had been going on peacefully for years and years, and suddenly after the war a lot of people move in who promptly have quantities of small children, and suddenly everybody has to shell out a lot of money for a new school, and taxes go up, and naturally everybody yaps.”
He was tactful enough not to mention that his clumsy, five-foot-ten-inch wife, trying unsuccessfully in the store to learn to say “to-may-to” instead of “to-mah-to,” reading Schopenhauer behind the counter, or writing in a journal between customers, must have seemed a very peculiar bird to the people who came in to our store.
“I think it’s un-American,” Mrs. Brechstein was saying to Wilberforce Smith. “Positively un-American.”
Wilberforce Smith chewed on his cigar and narrowed his eyes. I thought maybe I was going to enjoy a good fight between the two of them, but Wilberforce shrugged and went out.
“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Brechstein said. “I don’t understand it at all.”
I was really on her side, though I wasn’t about to admit it. I tried to explain, sounding like a record of Hugh when he talks reasonably to me—something which is necessary far too often. “Well, you can’t blame them for resenting it when people like us come along and buy up the big old houses for our families and then splash on fresh coats of white paint a lot of the old people can’t afford, and put in flush toilets when they’ve struggled with outhouses, and buy automatic washing machines and dryers and dishwashers. And now a family has put in a swimming pool. There’s been a lot of talk about that swimming pool.”
“I don’t see why there should be,” Mrs. Brechstein said coldly, and I could see she didn’t like being included in the “us.”
It bothered me as much as it did Mrs. Brechstein. Because we heard plenty in the store. We got it from both sides. We heard people say to us in a perfectly friendly way that everything would be all right if it weren’t for the newcomers; but they hadn’t forgotten we were newcomers ourselves (my actor husband was a lot better at the role of country storekeeper than I was; he refers to it now as his “longest run”). In a store, of course, the customer is always right, and it was my husband’s displeasure I had to live with if I lost my temper there, and not the person whose remarks rankled.
One weekend when the Brechsteins had been in their house for a little over a month, we were invited to dinner by the people with the pool. They lived quite near the Brechsteins, and my hostess told me she’d invited them too. “Aren’t they just fascinating?” she asked me. “We’re so lucky to have cultured people like that move into town.”
Maybe I just see Mrs. Brechstein from the wrong side of the counter.
But that was the night that Mrs. Brechstein made the first of her famous remarks. We’d all been for a swim, and in spite of the warmth of the June evening a cool night breeze had come up, and all of us women congregated in the Pools’ lovely bedroom were shivering as we rubbed ourselves down and dressed. We all knew each other pretty well, having moved into town at more or less the same time, and having served together on innumerable church and school committees. I don’t think any of us is particularly prudish, but there was something a little too deliberate about the way Mrs. Brechstein walked around stark staring naked and then leaned her elbows on Mrs. Pool’s bureau, looking at the pictures of the little Pools, and of Mr. Pool, most handsome in his navy lieutenant’s uniform.
Mrs. Brechstein remarked to Mrs. Pool, “For a man who’s spent most of his life selling insurance, your husband has quite an interesting mind.” But that, though not exactly the epitome of tact, was not the famous remark. I finished dressing and turned to see Mrs. Brechstein, still naked, sitting on Mrs. Pool’s bed and pulling one sheer stocking up onto one gloriously tanned leg. Her leg was not the only tanned part of her, and her body did not have the usual white areas.
“Of course every intelligent woman,” she was saying, “should have at least one affair after she’s married. How else can she possibly continue to interest her husband?”
The words fell like stones into troubled waters.
“Well!” Mrs. Pool exclaimed brightly. “Let’s all go downstairs and have some dinner, shall we?”
The next day, almost everyone who was at the party happened to drop in at the store.
“Of course she didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, yes, she did, she meant every word.”
“She was drunk, then.”
“No, she wasn’t. She was stone-cold sober.”
“She drank like a fish.”
“She can certainly hold it, you have to say that for her.”
“I’m out of luck if that’s the only way I can manage to hold on to my husband.”
I got an earful.
A few days later I got a different kind of earful.
The Brechsteins, like everybody else in the village, new and old (except the Pools) took their children swimming in the pond. Sometimes the mothers swam, too, but most of the time they sat around and kept an eye on the kids and gossiped. If it didn’t seem too unfriendly, I sat on a rock a few feet out in the pond and tried to write. And we all tried to welcome the Brechsteins and their two skinny little boys. When the boys threw stones, nobody liked it, but in all honesty the Brechsteins were not the only people around who did not believe in disciplining their kids. Even so, permissive upbringing, much as I disapprove of it, and allowing the tots to express themselves at all costs, seemed to sit even less well on the Brechsteins than on anybody else. However, the thing that stuck most in the craw was their response to such well-intentioned questions as:
“How are you enjoying life in the country?”
“Isn’t it much pleasanter than life in the city?”
“Isn’t it wonderful for the children here?”
The answers ran something like, “No, we much prefer the city to the country. The children have no cultural opportunities here. There are so few people one can talk with.”
Naturally the next thing that happened was someone leaning across the counter saying, “So-and-so is sure the Brechsteins are Communists.”
I suppose the same thing happens in many communities; I know it does. But our village is where I’ve witnessed it happening. The mi
nute Wilberforce Smith and any of his friends and relatives don’t like anything a new resident does, out comes the Communist label. Well: Hugh and I had had our share of this kind of gratuitous slander, and it made me feel for the Brechsteins, though it couldn’t make me like them.
In the autumn with the start of the school year the Brechstein boys went to the village school; there were quite a few sharp comments about the Brechsteins’ actually condescending to send their children to our public school; wouldn’t have thought it would be good enough for them. Mrs. Brechstein spoke loudly on all matters at P.T.A. meetings, and Mr. Brechstein joined the volunteer firemen, though he wasn’t wanted, which must have been unfortunately obvious. One of the most tactless things he did was to win enormously at the regular weekly firemen’s poker game.
One evening about six-thirty, as I was waiting for Hugh to come home, and the children were setting the table, we heard the sickening wail of the fire siren. It was, fortunately, only a chimney fire, but the next morning it was all over town that Mr. Brechstein had been telling the firemen how to do everything. The worst thing about it, Mr. Pool reported, was that the man had some sensible ideas. The firemen had grudgingly followed them and hated him all the more for being right. But Wilberforce Smith leaned over the counter, talking to two of the farmers who happened to be in the store, and said, “Damn’ interfering fool doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. I wouldn’t raise a finger to help if his house burned down. Serve him right. We don’t want newcomers telling us to do things we can do in our sleep.”
The Brechsteins were, of course, atheists, but the little boys wanted to go to Sunday School with their friends, so the parents, after too many too public conversations on the subject, decided it wouldn’t contaminate them permanently, and let them go. The next thing we knew, the Brechsteins were single-handedly going from door to door trying to raise money for the fire escape.
A Circle of Quiet Page 7
