Home Place

by Wright Morris

  “It would be nice,’’ I said, “to keep it in the family.”

  “That’s what I had in mind when I wrote to Ivy.”

  “Ivy—?” I said, “but Ivy’s got a farm.”

  “If Ivy was across the road he could farm Ham’s eighty. It ain’t been farmed, now, since the war.”

  My wife had conic to the door. She stood there, twisting the handkerchief I had asked her to get for inc. Before I could shut her up she said, “I don’t suppose it matters if people with children, and on place to go, needed a home?”

  “Peg——” I said, “it’s none of our business what Clara docs with Ed’s farm. There’s other people who need a place to live as well as ourselves.”

  “It may be none of your business,” she said. “But I’m their mother. It’s mine. And I’m not going to pussyfoot around about it.”

  “All right—” I said, “I’m washing my hands.” I washed them. But it wasn’t all right. Aunt Clara looked at me, drawing the blue veined lid over her glass eye. “Aunt Clara,” I said, “I just happened to mention that Harry said Ed’s house would be empty. I suppose you know we’re looking for a house?”

  “I declare,” she said, “but a house isn’t a farm. Do you farm?”

  I’d forgotten about that.

  “He could learn,” Peg said. “All he does is talk about the country. He says the country is the only place in the world for kids.”

  “That still doesn’t make me a farmer,” I said.

  “You mean to say you can’t learn?”

  “A farmer is a farmer,” I said. “You grow it. You don’t learn it.”

  “Peggy Muncy—” Clara said, “you mean you want to live on a farm?”

  “I want to live,” my wife said, “and I don’t care where it is!”

  “Less than an hour ago,” I said, “you were pretty dam particular,” then I shut up, and watched my wife tear up my handkerchief. She tore it, carefully, in five or six strips, squeezed them into a wad, then stepped forward and threw the wad in the pot of beets. I might as well admit that’s why I married her. She didn’t throw them on the floor, where an ordinary female has her tantrum, but she threw them into the beets, the pickled beets, where they belonged. Then she turned on her heel, and before I could tell her the front door was locked, or head her off, she had walked slam-bang right into it.

  Over ten or twelve years you learn whether to interrupt something like that, or to go about what is sometimes described as your own business. I stared at the beet jars, resting upside down on the yellow back copies of Capper’s Weekly, and wondered what it was, in cases like this, Clara had learned. Over fifty years she had learned something. I have an irritating habit of getting upset over nothing to speak of, but being calm as hell when a real crisis comes along. I was calm enough, standing there, watching my Aunt Clara hold her eye as if my wife had leaned over, socked her one. Her teeth were chumping, which is a habit she picked up from Mother Cropper, and didn’t, in some instances, mean anything. In her left hand she still held the poker, and as an example of how calm I was, I took it out of her hand, casually fished out the handkerchief. Hot pickled beet juice makes a pretty good dye. I let the strips drip for a moment, then I dropped them into the cobs, wiped off the poker, and hung it on the wall.

  “When does Ivy plan to move in?” I said.

  I looked right straight at Clara’s good eye, which is blurred and a little faded—not so good, really, as the strain has worn it out. This is the kind of nerve, the kind of calm, the mean in heart have. You get it after ten or twelve years in the city—it’s the kind of spunk that makes good alley rats, Golden Gloves champions, and successful used-car salesman. It doesn’t take much nerve to sell used cars, but I always like to bring in used car salesmen, all of them, when I have reference to something pretty low. With this kind of nerve I stared at Aunt Clara, and after a moment it occurred to me that I—We, that is—had her buffaloed. She had never seen the like of us before. She had never seen a woman, with two children, throw a well rehearsed hankytantrum while her husband looked on, admiringly. Simple folk don’t know how to deal with vulgarity. They’re puzzled by it, as real vulgarity is pretty refined. You don’t come by it naturally. Maybe you can tell me why it is that simple folk are seldom indelicate, while it’s something of a trial for sophisticated people not to be. You can’t put in an evening, with really smart people, without a good deal of truck with what is nothing more nor less than vulgarity. If you get to be good at this sort of thing you can bring it out in the country, like the shell game, and fool the yokels with it. After all, I tell you, these crude looking people are delicate. They’re soft when it comes to real vulgarity. I’d say the whole myth of the city-slicker is built around that softness, and the fear they have of this complicated kind of indecency. They take a man at his face value, as they figure it’s his own face, a fairly private affair, and the only one he has. They don’t roll the eyelids back to peer inside of it. They don’t leer at you with the candid cam era eye. They lead what you call private lives, which is not so much what you know about them, as what you know is none of your dam business. That’s a good deal. A smart city man would make use of it.

  Now I’m not a good city man for nothing, so I said, “You’ve on idea what it’s like to live in a big city, Clara—to try and raise a pair of kids in a place like New York.”

  “I don’t know as I’d want to know,” she said. I looked at her, remembering what my wife had said. You can share their lives, all right, but they don’t give a dam about yours.

  “It might give you some idea,” I said, “why Peg just threw a tantrum. Why it is we’re both, in some ways, just a bundle of nerves.” She waited. “I don’t know whether it interests you,” I went on, “but if you had some idea of how we’ve been living, for the last ten years, we wouldn’t strike you as being so strange.” “Well, you’re that,” she said.

  “I’m a Muncy,” I said, “as much as Uncle Harry. If he’d been wearing my shoes for the last thirty years he would strike you as silly as I do.”

  “I doubt that,” she said. She tipped her head forward to think about it, and stared at the floor. “Take a good deal more than thirty years,” she said.

  “What I’m trying to suggest,” I said, “is that I am a Muncy, my kids are Muncys, but that living in the city is not living on the farm. It does different things to you. But you’re still a Muncy underneath.”

  “You think you have to tell me that?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “what I have to tell you. I’m trying to get my bearings. I’m trying to feel at home out here.” I looked out the window, at the yard, and said, “Something happened out here, in four or five summers, that thirty years of hell and high water, and twenty years of the city, has not changed in me. That’s what I want for my kids. They’re Muncys—” I said, “that’s what they deserve.”

  “They’re nice enough youngsters,” she said.

  I turned back and said, “You think Ivy would rent us a room?”

  “My land, what would you do with a room?”

  “We could put the kids in it.”

  “Why, you know very well they’re all right here.”

  “Maybe I could put Peg in it,” I said.

  Clara straightened and said, “I just wrote to them –they’re not yet in the house.”

  “If you’ve written to him,” I said, “that’s that.”

  “Why, if I know Ivy,” she said, “he wouldn’t think of putting you out. If you asked him you could have it. He’s like that.” “When you’ve got two kids, Clara—” I said, “it makes you pretty selfish. Ivy have any kids?”

  “He’s hopeful—” she said.

  “Maybe Ivy has some idea,” I said, “what it’s like right now in New York. What it’s like to have a pair of kids in a place like that.” I walked to the side window and said, “Ed has a nice little place—too bad Ivy hasn’t any kids to enjoy it.”

  “You’d need a double bed, for one thin
g—” said Clara, “but maybe you could have Viola’s. It’s up in her room. She has one of her own.”

  Another thing hadn’t occurred to me. It hadn’t really occurred to me that no matter what I said, or how I said it, it would be taken for the truth. In the world right at this time there probably weren’t too many people, grown-up people, who would ever know what that was like. You can’t cheat. That’s an odd feeling.

  “Who’d Ivy marry?” I said.

  “Genevieve.”

  “A local girl?”

  She looked at me. “I forget,” she said, “how long you been away.” I pulled out a chair from the table and sat on it. “Warner,” she said, “Genevieve Warner.”

  “Warner?”

  “From Battle Creek.”

  I waited. Then I said, “She’s a good girl for Ivy?”

  “Why, she’s a Warner,” Clara said.

  That’s that. Vital statistics: Genevieve Warner, Female, Battle Creek. But what about Genevieve? Nothing. Not a word. She’s a Warner engraved at the base of the monument. When I ask my wife she says— ‘Fay? Oh, the horsey type, nasal A, Bryn Mawrish. Not too complicated.’ Not too complicated—is that Genevieve?

  “She’s a farm girl?” I said.

  “My land,” said Clara, “she’s a Warner. Didn’t you and Ivy play with the Warners?” I nodded my head. “Well, she’s the stem-wind one of them.”

  To sit on a straight-backed chair I have to lean forward, on my knees, and look at my hands or something on the floor. On the floor was a piece of worn linoleum. The center of the pattern had been worn off, and Clara had daubed on one of her own. Brown and green dabs of the brush. Uneven rows. I looked through the door at the dining room, the dark-wood chairs spaced on the wall, the cabinet in the corner, the harvest-hand table, the single frosted bulb on the fly-cluttered cord. Everything in its place, its own place, with a frame of space around it. Nothing arranged. No minority groups, that is. No refined caste system for the furniture.

  “Ivy was set to marry her,” she said, “then the war came along and they had to put it off. Six more years. That makes twelve years in all.” Twelve years is how long I’ve been married. Ivy is a year younger than I am, so the way I would calculate would be that he had been waiting for eleven years. “That’s a good deal of time, when you’re young,” she said.

  “That’s too long.”

  “Indeed it is, but with a war on what can a man do?” I looked at the floor again and decided that the pattern was part of the floor. It was not decoration. That was why she had daubed one on again.

  “Is Genevieve the one we called Potty?”

  Clara shook her head. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “She was pretty tubby back then,” I said, and saw Potty Warner, pretty well pimpled, holding a grasshopper while he spit at me.

  “During the war she went to business school for a year. She was with Mr. Crile, in Battle Creek.”

  If you wait you can piece it together a little bit. Farm girl, about thirty-two, with a taste for J. C. Penney pumps, McCall’s shirtwaist blouses, rimless glasses, and the Sears & Roebuck Book Club. But no feminine hygiene, lipstick, or cutrate jars of Mum.

  “How long they been married?”

  “Four months Thursday,” she said, and looked at the calendar on the wall behind the Kalamazoo Brilliant. I could see a penciled circle around April 9th.

  “I suppose they would like a family?”

  “Well, I should think,” Clara said.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Now that’s fine.”

  “Harry wouldn’t say a word,” she said, “but the one thing on his mind right now is a boy. Viola has a boy but he’s a Stokes. He’s not a Muncy.”

  “I’ve got a boy,” I said. “He’s a Muncy.”

  “I know—”

  “My name is Muncy,” I said, “and I have a male child named Will Muncy,” which was true enough, but no particular point in my saying so. What kind of Muncy had never heard of croquet?

  “It’s been a long time since we seen you—” Clara said, and took her hands from beneath her apron, put them on the chair arms, let herself down in her rocker. She rocked, her right eye covered, and looked at me. I did not look at her with my camera eye. I looked at the floor and the hole she had worn in the patch of linoleum, and the hole beneath the patch, by rocking and dragging her heel. Every time she rocked forward, the right heel dragged back. Where she walked without her shoes—in the morning and evening—the linoleum had a high shine from her cotton stockings and narrow bare feet. “Viola’s girls are all Muncys,” she said, “in everything but the name.”

  I heard my wife’s powder puff slapping her nose. Before I could get up, or head her off, she came into the room and said, “For one thing, little girls are usually brighter. They’ve made enough tests now to prove it.” That’s the way she is, you bat her down and she’s right back up.

  “I don’t know as they’re smarter,” Clara said, “but they’re different. Viola herself was a good deal different.”

  “All this talk about boys—” my wife said, “you would think little girls were not even human. What’s wrong with little girls carrying the name?”

  “I suppose nothing much,” Clara said, “it just happens they don’t.”

  “Besides—” said my wife, “what is there in a name? I’d just as soon have the name Stokes as the name Muncy.”

  “Seems to me,” Clara said, “you’re neither a Stokes then or a Muncy. If you was either the name would mean something.”

  For a good many years my wife, Peggy, has never been shut off. A man named Plinski once shut her off—a dog meat butcher, on 48th street—and in the course of time I gave him a box of Bering cigars. But that was long ago, and my wife was new to the world. Nothing like that had happened since then so we were both caught off our guard—the only proof I need, if it ever comes up, to make my point. I let her feel what it was like, for ten seconds or so, then I gave her a straight look and said— “I was telling Clara here about Mother Chudder—wasn’t she the one who went out to Ohio?”

  “Hmmmmm—” said my wife, and stood there looking at her nails. That’s precisely what she did the night a big ham named Witherspoon exchanged a dance with me—a Witherspoon for a Muncy? There you have it in a nutshell. I could have hit her with the poker but I said—

  “Peg’s people are all over the east, Clara. I guess Grandma Chudder is up in her eighties now.”

  “Grandma is eighty-six,” said my wife. I like the old lady a good deal better than most of her family, but I wasn’t overcome by the fact that she was still alive. She was one of these Grannies who had maintained a good second rate mind in first class condition, which led people to think she was a good deal brighter than she was.

  “How old is Mother Cropper now, Clara?” I said.

  “Mother’s ninety-seven Friday,” Clara said.

  Well, that settled that.

  “If she keeps on,” I said, “she’ll be in the same class with Grandpa Osborn,” which was true enough, in its way, as the old man was dead. Getting back to the subject, I said, “Peg’s folks have a place near New York, but with two kids you need a house of your own.”

  “It’s the kitchen—” Clara said, “you don’t like another woman messin’ it.” Once you really shut a woman off you can do quite a bit before they recover. But don’t overdo it. Leave well enough alone.

  “We were in one room for two years,” I said, “so a place like Ed’s would be like a mansion.”

  “Maybe you’d like to walk across and look at it?” Clara said.

  I looked at my wife. “I know I’d like it very much,” she said.

  “It’s Ivy—” I said. “If I thought that Ivy—”

  “He wouldn’t think of it with you needin’ a place.” She pushed up from the rocker and took a key from a nail near the stove. “We keep it locked. Ed always had a fear of city prowlers.”

  I took the key and walked out on the back porch.

  “Y
ou’re welcome to stay here—” Clara said, “till we know how it is with Ed. If it’s a turn for the good he can put up with me or Viola.”

  I stepped out in the yard just as a car turned in from the road. The hedge along the drive is six feet high, but I could see a white plume of steam, like a locomotive whistle, all the way to the barn. At the end of the drive it swung into the yard, rattled across the harrow, bounced in the hen pits, then died with a great hiss of steam. Through the mist I could see Ivy, a piece of burlap in his hand, trying to unscrew the cap on the radiator.

  “Why, there’s Ivy now,” Clara said, just as the cap blew off, and a jet of rusty water settled on the windshield, blotting out Genevieve.

  I hadn’t seen Ivy Muncy for twenty-eight years. I said something to this effect as we stood there, shaking hands, and his level gaze roamed about over my head. Ivy’s more of a Cropper than a Muncy, which is Clara’s side of the family, and he has her rangy build and lath-flat frame. I never think very much about accents until I meet somebody I’ve known years ago, and find they sound a little queer. Ivy’s voice was pitched high, for a big man, and though he opened his mouth when he spoke, the sounds seemed to come from some vibration behind his nose. Not through his nose—a noise with which I’m familiar—but behind it, as if his cheek bones were a sounding board. He seemed to feel that himself, as he twanged his nose, like a zither, with a thumb stroke quite a bit like the old man. He was dressed for town, as Clara said, in a blue serge suit, striped cotton shirt, and a pink straw with an enameled artificial look. The straw was new, with that Valspar shine they bake onto cheap hats, and a creaking sound when he honed the brim, tipped it back on his head. In spite of all that, I would have called him a good looking man. I took a glance at my wife, as I favor her in these matters, but she was standing with Clara, looking at Genevieve.

  Potty Warner was still tubby enough. A little woman with a cracked mouth, mousy hair, and denim-blue eyes, she wore the mail order version of the Town and Country bride. She was holding a red plastic bag, which didn’t help her color any, and wearing a small organ-monkey hat, with a tight chin strap. Her weight had shifted a floor, since I knew her, lending an idle look to her arms, but rooting her legs firmly in the ground. My wife was telling her how much she liked her hat.