Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  “I think it is better.”

  “They enjoy children, I think.”

  “That’s better for the children.”

  “In the short run.”

  “We think too much about the long run.”

  “And for all we know the house could fall tonight.”

  They were silent.

  “I wish we would hear from Sylvie.”

  “Or at least hear about her.”

  “No one has seen her for years.”

  “Not in Fingerbone.”

  “She might have changed.”

  “No doubt she has.”

  “Improved.”

  “It’s possible. People do.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps some attention from her family . . .”

  “A family can help.”

  “Responsibility might help.”

  The spoons went round and round in the cups until someone finally said, “. . . a sense of home.”

  “It would be home to her.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “It would.”

  So it must have seemed like providence when a note arrived from Sylvie herself. It was written in a large, elegant hand on a piece of pulpy tablet paper, torn neatly down one side and across the bottom, perhaps to correct the disproportion between the paper and the message, for she said only:

  Dear Mother, I may still be reached c/o Lost Hills Hotel, Billings, Montana. Write soon. I hope you are well. S.

  Lily and Nona had composed a message to the effect that anyone knowing where Sylvia Fisher could be reached was asked to send the information to . . . and my grandmother’s address. All other versions of the message amounted to announcements of my grandmother’s death, and my aunts could not allow Sylvie to learn such a thing from the personal-ads section of a newspaper. They disliked newspapers, and were chagrined that anything touching themselves or their family should appear in them. It disturbed them enough that the actual obituary had already been bunched, no doubt, to cushion Christmas ornaments for storage, and spindled to start kitchen fires, though it was quite impressive and much admired. For my grandmother’s passing had brought to mind the disaster that had widowed her. The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized. Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered. Therefore, my grandmother’s death occasioned a black-bordered page in the Dispatch, featuring photos of the train taken the day it was added to the line, and of workers hanging the bridge with crepe and wreaths, and of, in a row of gentlemen, a man identified as my grandfather. All the men in the photo wore high collars and hair combed flat across their brows. My grandfather had his lips a little parted and looked at the camera a little sidelong, and his expression seemed to be one of astonishment. There was no picture of my grandmother. For that matter, the time of the funeral was not mentioned. Nona and Lily speculated that if some vagary of wind should carry this black-bordered page under Sylvie’s eyes, she might not know that her own mother’s death had occasioned this opening of the town’s slender archives, though the page might itself seem portentous, like an opening of graves.

  Despite the omission of even essential information about my grandmother (“They wouldn’t want to mention Helen,” Lily speculated sotto voce, as she judged such things), it was considered an impressive tribute to her and was expected to be a source of pride to us. I was simply alarmed. It suggested to me that the earth had opened. In fact, I dreamed that I was walking across the ice on the lake, which was breaking up as it does in the spring, softening and shifting and pulling itself apart. But in the dream the surface that I walked on proved to be knit up of hands and arms and upturned faces that shifted and quickened as I stepped, sinking only for a moment into lower relief under my weight. The dream and the obituary together created in my mind the conviction that my grandmother had entered into some other element upon which our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water. So she was borne to the depths, my grandmother, into the undifferentiated past, and her comb had no more of the warmth of a hand about it than Helen of Troy’s would have.

  Even before Sylvie’s note arrived, Lily and Nona had begun to compose a letter to inform her of her loss, and to invite her home to discuss the disposition and management of her mother’s estate. My grandmother’s will did not mention Sylvie. Her provisions for us did not include her in any way. This began to seem strange to Lily and Nona—if not unreasonable, then certainly unkind. They agreed that the forgiveness of the parent should always be extended to the erring child, even posthumously. So Lucille and I began to anticipate the appearance of our mother’s sister with all the guilty hope that swelled our guardians’ talcy bosoms. She would be our mother’s age, and might amaze us with her resemblance to our mother. She would have grown up with our mother in this very house, and in the care of our grandmother. No doubt we had eaten the same casseroles, heard the same songs, and had our failings berated in the same terms. We began to hope, if unawares, that a substantial restitution was about to be made. And we overheard Lily and Nona in the kitchen at night, embroidering their hopes. Sylvie would be happy here. She knew the town—the dangerous places, the unsavory people—and could watch us, and warn us, as they could not. They began to consider it a failure of judgment, which they were reluctant to account for in terms of my grandmother’s age, to prefer them over Sylvie. And we felt they must be right. All that could be said against Sylvie was that her mother omitted her name from virtually all conversation, and from her will. And while this was damaging, it gave neither us nor our great-aunts anything in particular to fear. Her itinerancy might be simple banishment. Her drifting, properly considered, might be no more than a preference for the single life, made awkward in her case by lack of money. Nona and Lily had stayed with their mother until she died, and then moved west to be near their brother, and had lived many years independently and alone on the money that came from the sale of their mother’s farm. If they had been cast out and disinherited—they clucked their tongues—“We’d have been riding around in freight cars, too.” They chortled in their bosoms and their chairs shifted. “It’s only the truth,” one said, “that her mother had very little patience with people who chose not to marry.”

  “She’d say as much.”

  “Before our faces.”

  “Many a time.”

  “God rest her.”

  We knew enough about Sylvie to know that she had simply chosen not to act married, though she had a marriage of sufficient legal standing to have changed her name. No word had ever indicated who or what this Fisher might have been. Lily and Nona chose not to bother about him. Increasingly they saw in Sylvie a maiden lady, unlike themselves only because she had been cast out unprovided for. If they could find out where she was, they would invite her. “Then we’ll use our own judgment.” After the note arrived, they began to put their letter in final form, being careful to suggest but not to promise that she might take her mother’s place in the household if she wished. Once the letter was mailed, we all lived in a state of anticipation. Lucille and I argued about whether her hair would be brown or red. Lucille would say, “I know it’ll be brown like Mother’s,” and I’d reply, “Hers wasn’t brown. It was red.”

  Lily and Nona conferred together and decided that they must leave (for they had their health to consider, and they longed to return to their basement room in the red-brick and upright Hartwick Hotel, with its stiff linens and its bright silver, where the arthritic bellhop and the two old chambermaids deferred so pleasantly to their age and their solitude and their poverty) and that Sylvie must come.

  3

  It was still late winter when they sent for her and it was not yet spring when she came. They had urged her to consider before she replied, and they had assured her at length and in the kindliest language (the letter was
some days in composition) that there was no urgency in their request and that she must take all the time she needed to set her affairs in order before she came, if she should do so. And then one day as we sat at supper in the kitchen, and they worried between them about her not writing back, and remembered her as too dreaming and self-absorbed to be ordinarily considerate, and hoped she was not ill, Sylvie knocked at the door.

  Nona went down to the door (the hall from the kitchen to the front door sloped rather sharply, though the angle was eased somewhat by a single step midway), rustling with all the slippery frictions of her old woman’s clothing and underclothing. We heard her murmuring, “My dear! So cold! You walked? Come in the kitchen!” and then her rustling and her heavy shoes coming back up the hallway and not a sound more.

  Sylvie came into the kitchen behind her, with a quiet that seemed compounded of gentleness and stealth and self-effacement. Sylvie was about thirty-five, tall, and narrowly built. She had wavy brown hair fastened behind her ears with pins, and as she stood there, she smoothed the stray hairs back, making herself neat for us. Her hair was wet, her hands were red and withered from the cold, her feet were bare except for loafers. Her raincoat was so shapeless and oversized that she must have found it on a bench. Lily and Nona glanced at each other, eyebrows raised. There was a little silence, and then Sylvie hesitantly put her icy hand on my head and said, “You’re Ruthie. And you’re Lucille. Lucille has the lovely red hair.”

  Lily stood up then and took both of Sylvie’s hands, and Sylvie stooped to be kissed. “Here, sit here by the heater,” she said, pushing a chair. Sylvie sat down.

  “It’s really warmest by the stove,” said Nona. “Take your coat off, dear. You’ll warm up faster. I’ll poach an egg for you.”

  “Do you like poached eggs?” Lily asked. “I could boil one.”

  “Either way would be fine,” Sylvie said. “A poached egg would be very nice.” She unbuttoned her coat and slipped her arms out of the sleeves. “What a lovely dress!” Lily exclaimed. Sylvie smoothed her skirt with her long hands. The dress was a deep green, with a satiny shine. It had short sleeves and a large round collar on which there was a brooch, a little bunch of lilies of the valley. She looked at us all and looked down at her dress again, clearly pleased that it had made an impression. “Yes, you look very nice, my dear. Very well,” Nona said, rather loudly. She really intended this observation for her sister, just as Lily’s compliment had been intended for her. They shouted, for the sake of the other’s comprehension and because neither of them could gauge her voice very well, and each of them considered her sister’s hearing worse than her own, so each of them spoke a little louder than she had to. And they had lived all their lives together, and felt that they had a special language between them. So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, “What a lovely dress,” it was as if to say, “She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!” And when Nona said, “You look very well,” it was as if to say, “Perhaps she’ll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!” Sylvie sat in the simple kitchen light with her hands in her lap and her eyes on her hands, while Lily and Nona stalked about on their stiff old legs, poaching eggs and dishing up stewed prunes, flushed and elated by their secret understanding.

  “Did you know Mr. Simmons died?” Lily asked.

  “He must have been very old,” Sylvie said.

  “And do you remember a Danny Rappaport?”

  Sylvie shook her head.

  “He was a class behind you in school.”

  “I guess I should remember him.”

  “Well, he died. I don’t know how.”

  Nona said, “The funeral was announced in the paper, but there was no article about it. We thought that was strange. Just a photograph.”

  “Not recent, either,” Lily grumbled. “He looked nineteen. Not a line in his face.”

  “Was Mother’s funeral nice?” Sylvie asked.

  “Lovely.”

  “Oh, yes, very nice.”

  The old sisters looked at each other.

  “Very small, though, of course,” Nona said.

  “Yes, she wanted it small. But you should have seen the flowers! The whole house was full. We sent half of them over to the church.”

  “She didn’t want flowers,” Nona said. “She would have called it a waste.”

  “She didn’t want a service.”

  “I see.”

  There was a silence. Nona buttered a piece of toast and slid the jelled egg onto it and broke it up with a fork as if it were for a child. Sylvie took a chair at the table and ate with her head on her hand. Nona went upstairs, and in a few minutes came down again, carrying a hot-water bottle. “I’ve put you in the hall bedroom. It’s a little close, but that’s better than a draft. There are two heavy blankets on the bed, and one lighter one, and I put a comforter on the chair.” She filled the hot-water bottle with water from the kettle and bundled it in tea towels. Lucille and I each took a suitcase and followed Sylvie upstairs.

  The stairs were wide and polished, with a heavy railing and spindle banisters, dating as they did from a time when my grandfather was growing confident enough of his carpentry to use good materials and to build things that might be considered permanent. But they terminated rather oddly in a hatch or trapdoor, because at the top of the stairs one came face to face with a wall so essential to supporting the roof (which had always sagged somewhat in the middle) that my grandfather could not bring himself to cut another door in it. So instead he had worked out a device with pulleys and window weights that made the trapdoor (which was left over from the time when the second floor was merely a loft with a ladder up to it) rise at the slightest push and then fall shut again of its own accord with a little slam. (This device prevented drafts from sweeping down the polished steps in torrents, flooding the parlor, eddying into the kitchen.) Sylvie’s bedroom was really a sort of narrow dormer with a curtain closing it off from the hallway. There was a cot in it, fattened with pillows and blankets, and a little lamp, which Nona had left burning on a shelf. There was a single round window, small and high as a fully risen moon. The dresser and chair were outside the curtain, one on each side. Sylvie, in the half-dark hallway, turned and kissed each of us. “I’ll get you presents,” she whispered. “Tomorrow, maybe.” She kissed us again and went behind the curtain, into the narrow room.

  I have often wondered what it seemed like to Sylvie to come back to that house, which would have changed since she left it, shifted and settled. I imagine her with her grips in her bare hands, walking down the middle of the road, which was narrowed by the banks of plowed snow on either side, and narrowed more by the slushy pools that were forming at the foot of each bank. Sylvie always walked with her head down, to one side, with an abstracted and considering expression, as if someone were speaking to her in a soft voice. But she would have glanced up sometimes at the snow, which was the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.

  How must it have seemed to step into the narrow hallway which still kept (as it seemed to me) a trace of the rude odor that the funeral flowers had begun to make before Nona could bring herself to throw them away. Her hands and feet must have ached from the warmth. I remember how red and twisted her hands looked, lying in the lap of her green dress, and how she pressed her arms to her sides. I remember that, as she sat there in a wooden chair in the white kitchen, smoothing her borrowed-looking dress and working her feet out of her loafers, sustaining all our stares with the placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived, her happiness was palpable.

  The day after Sylvie arrived, Lucille and I woke up early. It was our custom to prowl the dawn of any significant day. Ordinarily the house would belong to us for an hour or more, but that morning we found Sylvie sitting in the kitchen by the stove, with her coat on, eating oyster crackers from a small cellophane bag. She blinked at us, smiling. “It was nice with the light off,” she suggested,
and Lucille and I collided in our haste to pull the chain. Sylvie’s coat made us think she might be leaving, and we were ready to perform great feats of docility to keep her. “Isn’t that nicer?” In fact, the wind was badgering the house, throwing frozen rain against the windows. We sat down on the rug by her feet and watched her. She handed us each an oyster cracker. “I can hardly believe I’m here,” she said finally. “I was on the train for eleven hours. There’s so much snow in the mountains. We just crept along, for hours and hours and hours.” It was clear from her voice that the trip had been pleasant. “Have you ever been on a train?” We had not. “They have heavy white tablecloths in the dining car, and little silver vases bolted to the window frame, and you get your own little silver pot of hot syrup. I like to travel by train,” Sylvie said. “Especially in the passenger cars. I’ll take you with me sometime.”

  “Take us where?” Lucille asked.

  Sylvie shrugged. “Somewhere. Wherever. Where do you want to go?”

  I saw the three of us posed in all the open doors of an endless train of freight cars—innumerable, rapid, identical images that produced a flickering illusion of both movement and stasis, as the pictures in a kinetoscope do. The hot and dangerous winds of our passing tattered the Queen Anne’s lace, and yet, for all the noise and clatter and headlong speed, we flickered there at the foot of the garden while the train roared on and on. “Spokane,” I said.

  “Oh, somewhere better than that. Farther away. Maybe Seattle.” There was a silence. “But that’s where you used to live.”

  “With our mother,” Lucille said.

  “Yes.” Sylvie had folded the empty cellophane wrapper in quarters and she was creasing the folds between finger and thumb.

  “Would you tell us about her?” Lucille asked. The question was abrupt, and the tone of it was coaxing, because adults did not wish to speak to us about our mother. Our grandmother never spoke of any of her daughters, and when they were mentioned to her, she winced with irritation. We were accustomed to this, but not to the sharp embarrassment with which Lily and Nona and all my grandmother’s friends reacted to our mother’s very name. We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.