In an eternity of slowness, Hester stretched out her hand. Trembling, she touched a tentative finger to her mother’s chest, where the breast had been. Then, with rising sureness, with infinite delicacy, she drew her fingertips along the length of the scar in a light, affirmative caress, and they stood eye to eye for an immeasurable second, on equal ground at last.
In the cold, darkening room, Hester unclenched herself from remembrance. She was always vulnerable, Hester thought. As we all are. What she bequeathed me unwittingly, ironically, was fortitude—the fortitude of those who have had to live under the blow. But pity—that I found for myself.
She knew now that the tangents of her mother and herself would never have fully met, even if her mother had lived. Holding her mother’s hand through the long night as she retreated over the border line of narcosis and coma into death, she had felt the giddy sense of conquering, the heady euphoria of being still alive, which comes to the watcher in the night. Nevertheless, she had known with sureness, even then, that she would go on all her life trying to “show” her mother, in an unsatisfied effort to earn her approval—and unconditional love.
As a child, she had slapped at her mother once in a frenzy of rebellion, and her mother, in reproof, had told her the tale of the peasant girl who had struck her mother and had later fallen ill and died and been buried in the village cemetery. When the mourners came to tend the mound, they found that the corpse’s offending hand had grown out of the grave. They cut it off and reburied it, but when they came again in the morning, the hand had grown again. So, too, thought Hester, even though I might learn—have learned in some ways—to escape my mother’s hand, all my life I will have to push it down; all my life my mother’s hand will grow again out of the unquiet grave of the past.
It was her own life that was in the middle drawer. She was the person she was not only because of her mother but because, fifty-eight years before, in the little town of Oberelsbach, another woman, whose qualities she would never know, had died too soon. Death, she thought, absolves equally the bungler, the evildoer, the unloving, and the unloved—but never the living. In the end, the cicatrix that she had, in the smallest of ways, helped her mother to bear had eaten its way in and killed. The living carry, she thought, perhaps not one tangible wound but the burden of the innumerable small cicatrices imposed on us by our beginnings; we carry them with us always, and from these, from this agony, we are not absolved.
She turned the key and opened the drawer.
III
The Summer Rebellion
THE SINISTER THING ABOUT Hillsborough, since I come back, is that the soda parlors are gone. You have to know the place why. Since I came back—O.K. I could talk that way even before I left for the Agricultural; why else did my Aunt Mary bring me up to read every old book in the shop, and hang my junior excellence medal in the parlor—though she never hung the one for sharpshooting—and sell off, to the summer people to build a house of, that last old cypress-colored barn we had at the edge of where the acreage once was? They were going to use it to build a house. But if I like to talk that way at my convenience, it’s like putting on jeans again after Sunday dinner and church—or it used to be. The whole trouble must have begun, I think, when the summer people started wearing our jeans. But that was way back; I don’t go that far back personally. Our family goes eight generations in Hillsborough, but I only go as far back as when it began for us, when those two come to buy the barn. That’s as far back as I like to go.
“Cedar,” says the man, and the woman whispers Did you ever see such weathering!, and I’m standing by, about fourteen years old, and I start to say, “Why, that ain’t cedar, it’s bir—,” when my aunt’s fingers, steelhard from sanding old trestle tables to the pine again and emerying off the chipped places on flint glass, grabs me at the neck. “Don’t say ‘ain’t,’ Johnny One—you know how to talk right!” So I do; isn’t she always jabbing at me “Talk like the summer people—you don’t have to pay any attention to what they say!”
She’s still holding me. “This boy has got hisself a medal,” she says. She can say “himself” just as well, too. But this way, the pair will think the old shack—which isn’t birch but isn’t cedar either—is just what they want for front trim.
“Why do you call him Johnny One?” the woman says, curious.
This is the first time I date too that my aunt speaks the way she then does—vague—even for all that energy she’s putting out, getting rid of all our junk first and then all she can find in the neighborhood. And how she looks; I notice that too. Faded. “Why do I call him Johnny One?” she says, the way people do, bidding for time, and when they’ve never noticed themselves before. “Why, my sister—what was her name?—she only left one.” She smartened then—why she used to be so smart, smarter than me! “Why, I guess I call him Johnny One cause I haven’t got two!” And then she and I, my neck free now, looked back triumphantly; from our ways lately, that explanation seemed clear enough.
They bought the barn—which wasn’t a barn. But on their way off, I snaked through the woods alongside of the path they took back to their car—I used to like to watch summer people the way any boy, all of us children liked to watch the doings of ghosts who never intended or did anything mean to us except bring gifts and then in the fall fade away again—and I heard them talking, different than they talk to us, the way they talk to each other. “‘My sister, what was her name?’” said the woman. “Can you imagine!” When I went off to the A., I found out of course what she meant. Our town sure had been dragging its feet—though it wasn’t the only hill town in New Hampshire to do it, not by a longshot, I found.
But at the moment I was more interested in what the man said. “You pipe the boy?” They don’t always talk so fine themselves.
“Did I!” she said. “Whew.”
“Quite an Apollo, wasn’t he.”
“If there were two,” she said giggling, “who could bear it?” She sighed. “What a waste. Such a beautiful kid.”
“Think that barn is birch?” said the man.
“Of course not. Let her think she’s putting something over on us, poor thing, if she wants. But you and I know what it would cost at a lumberman’s, aside from the color. To buy all that oak.”
That was the way it always turned out between Hillsborough and the summer people, from the very first, when we sold off the land by the lakeshore that was no good for farmland if they only knew, and woods that didn’t have nothing in them, anything in them but birch. Until I came home this June, I didn’t know who was to blame. I found that out at the college. Let me tell you about Hillsborough, first.
When you come north by the state road, on your way to the White Mountains, the road goes straight for a while, past a few houses; then all of a sudden it humps up very sharp, through a few stores at the hilltop, with a side road going east over the hill and down out of sight. If you continue on, there’s a garage and some empty stores at the bottom again, then whoosh, the town is gone. If you park your car at the top and stay a while—that’s us. Or if you’ve been there forever.
In the summertime, with the summer people all here, used to be such a big bottleneck in that ring of stores, on a Friday shopping especially, that the town board had the hump all divided in those slanted, white-painted parking lines. Still is a bottleneck, but if you look hard and knowing enough, it’s mostly all tourists, of a bright summer afternoon. As they drive up the hill, on their left side, first comes a few old mashed-together buildings every town here has, nobody knows much what they were, then comes the closed-up church, then the store where the number one soda parlor always was, and then the supermarket, once the barbershop and the corner shoe. It came the last few years ago, for the summer people, but it may be too late for them. Has a coke machine out front. Next to it is The Service Shop, still there. That’s for sewing wools and stuffs, the kind of thing women call “notions,” and seems to last, no matter what. Or old Mrs. Hupper who keeps it does. “Shut up shop, or hang
herself,” she says, before she’ll go to selling junk as antiques. Still has a few customer ladies from the lakeshore, so old and pinkfaded they still look to us like all the lakeside houses and inhabitants used to, just a summer vision that would soon fade.
On the other side of the crest of our hill, hung over the steep road that goes off it down and east, is a numb little grocery, just the sort you’d think we’d shop in ourselves—washed-out cardboard signs in windows under the old house eaves, and packaged bread. But in the fall, you’d be surprised how bright it is, when the fishing talk is over, and the gun talk begins. Fellow who owns it, used to have his gun collection hung on the wall right over the milk-and-cheese counter, until he sold it, all but one deer rifle, last year. And nowadays he stocks frozen food and all that, like for the summer people, and we eat it, hoping for health. But it may be too late for that too.
Next to him, just before you get to the crest, used to be the second soda place, just a home restaurant but where we kids could go for ice cream; now it sells sandwiches in booths meant for tourists, but it has no beer and looks like it would have the crummy coffee we do have, so they don’t go in. And neither do we. And back down the hill, next to that, used to be a stationery and male notions sort of place; he had a malted-milk machine we could hang around too—but he was no Hupper, he’s gone too, though not far. Most any afternoon until dusk, you can see him sitting there on his front lawn behind the tables with anything from hubcaps to kitchenware to framed saints’-pictures on them; often he’s there with a light, after dark. Or in the morning, if he’s not, the tables are, and anybody takes the trouble to knock, he’s out in a jiffy. “Just shavin’. What vase? Be one dollar, that vase.” Anybody takes the trouble to go down any of our side roads, will find any of us with our things all set out, sitting back of the tables, or in a rocking chair if we’re old, or inside. We’re a town on a hill, so we can’t stretch the business out straight like some can, and catch it all in one trough. And we haven’t got the knowhow like FitzWilliam, where the professionals are. Or the houses and granges and live churches to look at, like Hancock. Houses and hardware both, we run closer to junk than antiques. But you’ll find us. Behind that hillside everywhere, is us. We’re still there.
On the grocery’s eave, pointing down the east road, there’s a marker says Aunt Marietta’s Antiques. That’s us in particular, I and Aunt Mary, and her husband, my uncle Andy—in our family there’s only one of each of us. Before you come to our house, there’s the mill—the standard, red brick, New England, New Hampshire knitting mill, with its sluices and iron gone to rust, and what seems like a hundred gross of spidered windowpanes, not half enough of them knocked in. Those Victorian windowpanes stay orderly looking until the end, and good red brick don’t ever seem to fall, or get haunted. Those greenery things, sumac and ailanthus, that always take over, look feathery nice around it. It could start up again in a minute, you think, passing by. Opposite it though, is what, after the church of course, used to be our real pride.
It’s a chocolate-and-tan frame structure of some seven stories high, built in the seventies, with balconies and fretwork running even and complete around every story; if it leaned just a little, or was skinny and not square, it would look like a monument. As it is, it is supposed to be one of the last specimens of that architecture, and when we first had Aunt Mary’s shop, she used to take picture postcards of it, which sold very well. I don’t know why she hasn’t the get-up to, anymore. Or I’m beginning to think I do. Anyway, the Geracis, who now own it, you sometimes hear one of them tell a tourist it was a hotel, but it never was; it was a kind of high-class rabbit warren for the mill workers to live in, with enough railing and banisters to match those factory windows across the way. To give the Geracis credit, they keep it painted. They’re Italians, Hillsborough’s only, and they still have the energy for a place like that, and the relatives; Italians can always take in each other’s washing from all the other onlies in the towns roundabout, and keep separate that way; in the basement they even have a store none of us sets foot in, unless ours runs out of something and we haven’t got the gall to sneak in opposite to the supermarket, which is what we would like best. The Geraci children still have separate names, too—saints’ names, but separate.
And after Geraci’s, down the road that leads straight to the lake shore and to all the summer people, that’s us in particular. Our house is one of the larger old white ones, an old Apollo of a house, you might say, and we are accustomed to hearing, in summer, how beautiful it—could become. In winter we are inclined to think how comfortable it could be—to keep. But we still have it, and we’re the only house out that way, with our back garden—or that once was—on a little rise too, and pointed straight toward the lake that is really a huge, circular “pond” as we call it—Willard’s Pond—and toward them. We’re the only family on the way to them, and that is our peculiar distinction—though we have another. Between them and us, is our woods, or what used to be ours, where, last year, I used to make out with one of their Barbaras. From our back windows we can see them, in all their homes they’ve made out of our houses and our barns—stretching on and on in a half-circle, but even bright with upkeep though they are, a mirage.
In summer, what with boats and docks and waterskiers this year and all that gradual growth of plastic, they tend to seem brighter, and it’s true every year they seem healthier, staying on longer each year. They like to keep up what they call their relationship with us; that helps to keep them healthy too. “That’s their upkeep,” my aunt once said tartly. Truth was, she thought some of their ladies liked to keep it up with my uncle, who at thirty-nine years old is blonder and taller than I am, a retired Marine with muscles that last year he used to maintain, too, with a set of barbells my aunt swapped somewhere.
The swap shop was no distinction, only what my aunt got into years ago out of sheer energy and not liking to embroider, starting it out as a gift shop with a line of dollclothes, and those new gilt memento cups—none stamped for Hillsborough, we were too small for that, but Portsmouth and so forth—when the new people came. If they started her on the antiques, always being so wistful after our chipped buttercrocks and old end-of-day vases, who was to blame? Meanwhile, it didn’t say we weren’t just as healthy as ever, only rightfully lazier—if now and then we swapped a bit of land. Or woods that were mostly only birch. White birch is good sure enough for those new-style kitchen cabinets. But the sawmill over at Nubanusit is all ailanthus too.
And meanwhile, there they were, only the summer people, that mirage across Willard Pond. We took care of their houses, shut off their waterpipes and promised to turn them on again come “the season,” and to mow their first lawn. Come Labor Day, they began to go. Come October, they were gone. With their extra keys jingled away in our dresser drawer, we forgot them, or sometimes, just to check up of course, in the performance of duty, we toured their houses and habits from top to bottom, fingered their linen and the quilts they’d bought from us, laughed at that other junk, the cobalt glass bottles and a Stafford pitcher in the window and somebody from Antrim’s greatgranny on the wall—and remembered to remind ourselves how faded, like the new owners, all this was. Come November, when gun talk was all over the grocery, bright as apples and the huntsmen’s china teeth, we had forgotten them altogether. Mrs. Hupper took the needlepoint wool out of her window and hung there a glorious pink-and-purple afghan, with a sign saying it was to be raffled for the church, and chances could be bought right there. The church itself came open, with a visiting preacher every third Sunday. And then at last, our real mirages took over again all the way, from the woman in white you could see on one of the balconies at Geraci’s on a moonlit evening, to the sea monster that was supposed to be in the Pond.
This was all the change I noticed until I went away and came home from college, but that’s supposed to be natural, isn’t it?—even though college wasn’t the real state university I like to say. It was a state-run one, sure enough, but the ol
d two-year Agricultural and Manual-training unit, switched off now from Guernseys, and onto economics and business courses—gone to that kind of grass. There were a lot of dopes there who would do well at these, plus a few hopelessly smart ones, still on the agriculture, like me. We quickly discovered who we were—there was usually about one of us from a particular town.
We were the aristocrats of the upkeepers, all of us, and many of us were the Apollos, too, who some summer person had stuck the idea of a scholarship in the mind of, or had even written away for to help him, all the way back from “Ooo, Aunt Mary, what a beautiful little boy you have, and so smart.” And keep him away from my Barbara. We knew who we were, and began pooling our information right away. We were the elite.
And we were the ones (though we learned to hide it except among one another) who came from the towns where people’s names had gone back to grass too. The way we found out about each other was—there were so many Johnnies. There are always a lot of people named John anywhere, I understand that. But were there ever so many boys who answered—unless they were quick enough—to the names of Johnny One, Johnny Two, Johnny Three and so on? We even had one Johnny Ten, but he was unusual. Our families weren’t so big anymore.
“Sometimes even the summer people do better,” said the boy in whose room we were, a skinny Johnny One from over to Contoocook, but still with a lot of tawny gumption in his cheek—he didn’t eat their frozen, and his folk had a pig littered every spring; wouldn’t let them eat her, wouldn’t let them sell her either.
“Over our way,” another said proudly, “we’ve still got Buddy names as well; my best friend is a Buddy Four”—but he wasn’t much. And there were a few other reports of the old original names, the tombstone ones—Lukes and Patiences and so forth—though there would still be only two names to a family, for the girls and for the boys. But mostly, the families were running to Mary One, Two, and Three and so forth for the girls, and Johnnies of the same.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 36
