One day Mrs. Steer told Tommy that Americans made a serious mistake, marrying for love. “In Denmark,” she said, “marriages are arranged, and they work out better.” Mrs. Steer hadn’t gotten married in Denmark, though. She’d gotten married right in Grande Rivière.
“But Mother,” Amy said, “how could you marry somebody you didn’t love?”
“You learn,” Mrs. Steer replied. “Or you don’t. There are more important things in the world.” Tommy and Amy looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Amy read movie magazines at her friend Ann Rodgers’, had a movie-star coloring book, and thought a lot about love. Mrs. Steer was already embroidering linens for Amy’s wedding. Tommy wondered if she would arrange it, the way they did in Denmark. Mrs. Steer was like that, strange but interesting. Tommy knew that Amy was sometimes embarrassed by her mother, and he supposed that if she were his mother, he’d be embarrassed too, at least sometimes. But she wasn’t his mother, and he liked her a lot.
Mrs. Steer talked to Tommy very seriously about politics, about science, about the genius Albert Einstein whose theories you could only try to understand if you knew a lot of calculus, about her school days in Denmark and at the university, where she got in trouble for smoking, about many things, some of which he didn’t really understand. She talked to him not as if she were instructing him but as if he were interested, which he was. And she listened to him, too, as if what he had to say interested her. Tommy very much liked his conversations with Mrs. Steer. She said what she thought, with less politeness than conviction, and what she thought was often startling. She thought Mr. Sedgwick was an idiot, for instance, and she said so, which was surprising in a grown-up. A rule in Tommy’s house was that you never spoke critically, especially of an adult. It was a rule that applied mostly to Tommy, though certainly he never heard his parents call Mr. Sedgwick an idiot but he was sure they sometimes thought he was boring. Mrs. Steer thought Bob Griswold was a playboy, “and not a very bright one at that.” She liked people who were bright, even if she didn’t agree with them. She thought Dr. Rodgers was bright, but she often disagreed with him. Tommy didn’t know if she thought Daisy Meyer was bright or not, but she thought Daisy was a good golfer. She was the only woman Mrs. Steer wanted to play golf with.
Tommy’s mother remembered when Mr. and Mrs. Steer were engaged. Mrs. Steer was teaching math and French in the high school and she would force Mr. Steer to walk with her through the snow, and when he fell, because of his bad leg, Mrs. Steer would pull him up and then push him back in the snowbank, laughing. Then she would make him get up by himself and Tommy’s mother said that was the only reason Mr. Steer was walking today. Tommy didn’t see why being pushed in the snow made a person walk. Amy told him that her mother had done the same thing just recently, not in the snow but in her bedroom. She shoved Mr. Steer hard against the wall and he fell down, and she stormed out for a walk. Amy had to help him up. That worried her. It worried her a lot. But to Tommy everything seemed normal enough at the Steers’ house, or as normal as it ever had been, since Mr. Steer worked at home and, except for Christmas and Easter, fixed all the meals and did the grocery shopping as well. He had to do the grocery shopping because he didn’t let Mrs. Steer drive his car, although she knew how, and it was too expensive, he said, to call Mr. Lamontagne’s market and have the groceries delivered.
Sometimes Mr. Steer called his wife the Great Dane. “Woof, woof,” he would say, “anybody seen the Great Dane this morning?” when he could easily have looked out the window and seen her working in the garden, which was another thing Mrs. Steer did for a while and better than anybody else. Only Dr. and Mrs. Randolph came close, and they spent a lot of money on theirs and just grew roses. Mr. Steer said that to make Tommy laugh, and Tommy always did. He liked predictable events, just as he liked walking by Mrs. Steer’s garden on his way to school. In the spring it was full of tulips and hyacinth and narcissus and daffodils, and later huge heavy peonies the color of cream, and blue delphinium and pale pink poppies that she raised from special seeds ordered from England. When she started the garden she had truckloads of manure brought in from the country, and the Steers’ whole place, which was fairly large, smelled like a barnyard, and looked like one too, his father said. But the manure was dug into the earth—Mrs. Steer made Vint help her but she really did most of it herself, starting every morning at dawn and working until dark—and when the seeds were planted and the garden began to grow and blossom and the strong colors were weeded out, sweet fragrances drove the barnyard smell away, the honeybees and the hummingbirds came, and the garden began to glow like one of her own rugs, but on a huge scale. In the meantime, Tommy’s mother’s garden continued to grow in its desultory way with the occasional assistance of Jim the Indian and a comment now and then from his mother or, before she got sick, his grandmother, who of course never wore pants or shorts and didn’t dye her hair, either, although she would say “damn” now and then.
“What do you think of that?” Tommy’s grandmother would ask herself, and reply, “I think damn!” Tommy would laugh. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he certainly liked her answer. A while before she died she began calling his father “John,” and she would call Tommy “James,” which was his father’s real name although most people called him “Mac.” “James,” she would cry, rushing onto the porch, thinking the boy she’d spotted on the street was Tommy, “get off that bicycle this minute. You’ll be killed. Damn those bicycles,” she would mutter under her breath. Tommy was, in fact, standing right behind her, giggling. “I’m right here, Grandma, and my name isn’t James, it’s Tommy.” His grandmother’s hands would flutter vaguely in the empty air, touching at her hair and dress, and she would return to the cool of the house, shaking her head, looking distracted, and dropping a hairpin here and there, which Tommy would pick up and hand to her. He liked his grandmother, but she had become a puzzle to him.
The house was filled with people when she died. His Aunt Martha—she was Tommy’s father’s sister—had come from Minneapolis with his Uncle Charles, their three children, and a girl who took care of them. That was when Tommy fell in love with his cousin Charlotte who was five years older and very beautiful. Everyone said she looked like his grandmother. Tommy told his mother that when he grew up he wanted to marry Charlotte, but his mother had said that would be impossible. “Cousins don’t marry each other,” she explained, although Tommy knew that Mr. and Mrs. Sedgwick were cousins and they were married, too. But he wasn’t supposed to talk about that, and besides, they weren’t close cousins. Oh, there were so many things he couldn’t do! He couldn’t marry his cousin, he couldn’t eat with his elbows on the table, he couldn’t stay up after eight o’clock on school nights or eight-thirty in the summer—it was still light then, when he was sent to bed—he couldn’t eat standing up, he couldn’t drink milk from the bottle even if his brother David did, and he couldn’t go to his grandmother’s funeral because children didn’t belong at funerals, although his cousins—Steve was even younger than Tommy—all went. Tommy wasn’t to be allowed to go to the funeral home either, but he coaxed so—he wanted very much to be like his cousins, with the same grown-up privileges—that his father finally relented and took him up in the morning of the funeral when no one would be there. The room was long and filled with banks and banks of flowers which gave the unnaturally cool air a thick, sweet scent. Tommy’s grandmother lay in a long coffin covered with so many roses that they all but concealed its polished wood. The top half of the lid was raised to reveal his grandmother, lying on pale silk, in a lavender dress and the pearls she always wore, the pearls his grandfather had given her when Tommy’s father was born, her hands clasped stiffly around a blood-red rose. Tommy stared at her, shocked by her utter stillness, and wondered what he was supposed to feel. What he did feel, for a brief moment, was a lump in his throat, and then curiosity. So this was what a dead person looked like, almost like a live person but very still and very silent. Tommy looked up toward her face,
at the faint fixed smile on her pink lips, the rouged cheekbones—would his father think there was too much?—and the nostrils like two black cavities leading to the brain. Her hair was neatly done, but there were no bone or tortoise hairpins in it. Somewhere below the waist, beneath the bottom half of the lid, she vanished into the silk of the coffin, and Tommy wondered if she was wearing the black shoes that laced, the kind she always wore. He wanted to touch her hand or her face. He wondered what a dead person felt like. For a second tears came to Tommy’s eyes, but only for a second. He knew it would be right to cry—he had heard how his cousins had sobbed and had to be taken home by the girl; they had told him—and he wondered what was the matter with him that he couldn’t cry and didn’t even feel like it. He composed his face into a somber, serious look that he thought would be appropriate to the occasion, but he was, really, curious. He had never seen a dead person and he wanted it to register on him. It was part of growing up, visiting the funeral home, looking at bodies, and he did want to be grown up and free of the burden of childhood. So he stood there looking respectful, his hands clasped behind him, head slightly bowed, until his father touched his shoulder and said they must leave now.
On their way out, the undertaker told his father that he hoped he was pleased, it was such a beautiful casket and he hadn’t seen so many flowers since Dr. Edwards died. His father asked the undertaker to remove the pearls before the funeral, and in the car he told Tommy that he’d behaved very well. Tommy didn’t know what to say so he didn’t say anything, and they drove home in silence. Later Tommy’s father told his mother that he’d been very brave and had behaved in a much more grown-up way than his cousins. When Tommy heard this he was uncomfortable because he felt that his cousins had cried because they had to whereas he had not because he could not, though he wished he could. He could never force his tears; either they came or they didn’t, and sometimes they came for reasons Tommy did not grasp. He was rarely disturbed by the presence of his feelings, no matter how bad, but he was sometimes bothered by their absence. And sometimes he didn’t know what his feelings were supposed to be, or what they actually were.
2
FOR A LONG time traces of his grandmother’s powdery smell lingered in her bedroom, in her closet even after the clothes had been sorted out and given away, in the dresser scarves, in the lampshade of pale rose silk—the color of her underwear, Tommy always thought, and the thought made him giggle—in those jars and pots and boxes of ivory and tortoise on her dressing table. The warm and yeasty scent seemed locked into the very wallpaper and the plaster and lath behind it. It had a life of its own, independent of his grandmother’s whose life was over. Tommy thought about that, about what it meant, “over.” Her life was over. It was a blessing. He thought of her lying now in her lavender dress on the pale silk of her coffin, alone in the darkness of the earth, the rose grasped in her hand. He thought of the soft skin stretched over her cheekbones, and he imagined her eyes behind their closed lids, fixed and straining toward the surface, her face expressionless, her body still, waiting for what he did not know. He thought of the whole vast population of the dead, of all those bodies lying amidst the roots of the trees in the cemetery by the river, composed, quiet, facing the earth above them and the earth the sky, separated from one another by the limitless, embracing soil and from the crushing weight of the world itself by their solitary wooden cases lined with silk. How lonely it seemed, what flimsy protection. He wondered if his grandmother’s good smell was warming the winter earth, and if she knew when the sun was shining, when the snow falling, and when the grass would grow again.
If no one was upstairs, Tommy would sometimes slip into his grandmother’s room—his mother didn’t like it if she found him there—to look at her orange sticks and nail buffers and hairpins, to graze with his fingers the dishes on her dressing table. Sometimes he would climb onto her bed and lie on the quilt that covered it, pressing the pillow to his nose, gazing at the figure of the old-fashioned lady in a long dress languidly posed on a bench in an imaginary garden, the scene framed in a garland of golden roses on the deep red porcelain lamp the color of his grandmother’s china, which his mother was even then rearranging in the cupboards below. He looked at the rose-colored lampshade and thought of her underwear still neatly folded in one of the drawers of her chiffonier and of the little ribboned sacks of fragrance that she tucked among her garments.
His mother, when she found him in his grandmother’s room one afternoon, told him that it was morbid to lie there daydreaming and he must not be morbid. “We bury the dead,” his mother said, giving him a brisk pat and hurrying him out of the room, “and then we get on with it. We don’t hang the crape in this house,” she said, moving him downstairs and toward the closet. “Grief is something we carry inside us—here, get into your snowsuit—it’s not polite to inflict it on others. Now go play outdoors. You don’t see your father walking around with a long face, do you? He has to work. And you have to go outside for a while. You spend too much time in the house. That’s why you’re looking peaked.” She gave him a hug, kissed him at the door, and closed it behind him.
True, Tommy’s father did not go around with a long face—though sometimes, Tommy thought, his mother looked sad, but only for a moment. Then she got on with it. Tommy’s father rarely even mentioned his grandmother, nor did anyone else. She was gone, and life went on. Sometimes they talked about her lawyer and who was getting what of the things she’d had. Tommy knew that he and his brothers were getting something but, except that John was getting her diamond ring because he was the oldest of all her grandchildren, he didn’t know what and he wasn’t supposed to know, either. He didn’t believe that was grief, nor did he think that what he was doing in his grandmother’s bedroom had anything to do with grief. He was just lying there on her bed, smelling her pillow, looking at the figure on her lamp, and thinking about her in the cemetery, although he was supposed to think of her among the angels in heaven. Protestants went to heaven. Grief was something else. Grief was when Paul Malotte’s father was bitten by a rabbit and died, and the undertaker hung black ribbons on their door. The Malottes cried all the time and prayed for Mr. Malotte who was suffering in purgatory, and Paul couldn’t come out to play marbles and all his crying made his continually leaking nose flow all the more copiously. That was grief, and Tommy didn’t know anything about it. Tommy was more fortunate than Paul Malotte. Maybe the Malottes were crying because they’d been poor before but now they were really poor. They didn’t even have a refrigerator, but an old-fashioned icebox that held cakes of ice delivered in a horse-drawn wagon, like the milk and cream and butter and eggs that were delivered to Tommy’s door by Mr. Matson, who also delivered milk to Mrs. Farnsworth and, very early one morning not long before Tommy’s grandmother died, found her dead in her bed. Frances always heard the bottles rattling and came to the door, Mr. Matson explained, but she didn’t come that morning so he went in and found her. “It was still dark, Mrs. MacAllister,” he said as he was collecting for the milk at Tommy’s house. “It gave me a terrible shock, seeing her like that. It’ll be a long time before I get over that one. She was quite a lady.” “Yes,” his mother replied, “it’s a shame.”
“Well, everyone knows her door was never locked,” Tommy’s father told his mother later in that noncommittal way he sometimes had of speaking, as if he might be making a joke but you were never certain that it was a joke so you didn’t know if you ought to smile or simply nod in agreement. Everybody knew that nobody in town locked their doors when they were home anyway, so Tommy didn’t see what was strange about Mrs. Farnsworth’s being unlocked.
Once Tommy’s father asked his mother, “Did you hear what happened to the woman who wore bloomers?” “No,” his mother replied cautiously, “what?” “Nothing,” his father said. Then, when his mother looked blank, his father said, “Oh, I forgot—you’re English,” as if that explained something, and he would shake his head and chuckle to himself. Tommy thought that was a pr
etty funny joke, although he couldn’t say why except that bloomers were just funny, and he told the story to his brothers, who would get him to repeat it to their friends. “What happened to the woman who wore bloomers, Tommy?” they would ask, setting him up, and Tommy would try to imitate his father’s flat tone: “Nothing.” His brothers and their friends would laugh uproariously. Tommy didn’t think the joke was that funny, but he liked the response it drew and he didn’t have to be coaxed to tell it.
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