Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Just before lunch and just before dinner, one of us would be sent to the garden or orchards to pick whatever Mother needed. The garden was put in for us and tended by an old resident caretaker, Mr. Wheeler, who lived in the original house with bullet holes in the porch where the owner had been gunned down in revenge for the death of his Indian or for his treasure. The orchards dated back to his time and went largely untended, to my mother’s distress. She always pulled out deadwood while we picked prunes, plums, peaches, apples, figs and pears in their seasons.

  The enforced rest after lunch would have been more tolerable for me if I had been, like Arthur, a reader. I fidgeted on my already-too-short cot in my parents’ bedroom and called out every ten minutes or so until it was at last time to put on a bathing suit and go to the river.

  Mother Packer was fearful of sunstroke. We all had to wear ancient, floor-length dusters and large straw hats for the walk, through the vineyard, vegetable garden and the first orchard—I, trying not to eat so much on the way or we’d not be allowed in the water—before we came to the path through a fringe of great trees out onto the riverbank.

  Our stretch of the Eel was a gentle river in summer, rarely more than twenty feet wide or deep, large calm swimming holes alternating with riffles. The banks were rocky, difficult and satisfying to walk along around clumps of willow and boulders. I had a particular nest among the willows, altered in some way each year by the spring floods. There in hiding or sitting on a large boulder in view of the highway, I could spend hours, the sound of the summer traffic faint above the sound of the river, reminder rather than disturber of solitude.

  We were not taught to swim. We had inner tubes. When Dad was with us, we’d hang on to the straps of his old-fashioned bathing suit and he’d take us to the bottom for a handful of rocks to prove we’d been all the way. He had been a champion swimmer at Annapolis, and playing with him and watching him were all the instruction we needed to become strong swimmers ourselves.

  Sometimes we had a rowboat, sometimes a raft, but we preferred, as we grew older and more independent, to walk along the shore, wading or swimming across the river when we came to impenetrable forest or cliff. Arthur almost always carried a rod, as he carried a rifle if we went into the woods. Very young, I set aside these excuses for a hike and went empty-handed, sometimes with him, increasingly often alone.

  There was no electricity in the early days. We played cards by kerosene lamps, listened to old records, ragtime and Harry Lauder, and Mother Packer told us stories, sometimes real ones about her own childhood visits to South Fork, sometimes ones she made up. Arthur always asked for frightening ghost stories, I for magical forests where candy grew on trees and rivers ran full of lemonade.

  For me, the real landscape of summer could hardly have been more magical. Just sitting on the porch steps, I could watch lizards, toads, butterflies, dragonflies and chipmunks. In the early morning and at dusk, deer fed in the orchards. Wildcat and boar occasionally appeared at the edge of the deep forest. One summer, skunks lived uncomfortably near, under the house. I never felt the lack of human companionship, except in the estrangement from my brother, for the ghosts of my grandmother and mother as children happily haunted my days, the past and present losing their distinction.

  At least once in the summer, I would go back with Aunt Etta and Charlie to Carlotta for a week by myself. Charlie drove particularly carefully along the twisting road because I was prone to carsickness. Aunt Etta distracted me by asking me to sing, which I was only too happy to do until I was hoarse, sitting between them watching patches of hot road flicker out into the deep shade of the trees. Too tired to sing, I’d name the familiar signposts, the straight several miles of road called “the crooked road to Pepperwood,” the Scotia mill and hotel where Mother as a child had spit tomato juice on a white tablecloth. Mornings I gardened with Etta, allowed to cut deadheads off the roses in my great-grandmother’s garden, then allowed to find my own way around Etta’s garden, where formal paths radiated out from a circle in the centre. At the edge nearest the redwoods, she had planted a garden of miniatures. There minutely grew the smallest rose in the world against a backdrop of trees over a thousand years old. I could also explore the kitchen where the cook was baking donuts or cookies or pies or cakes, depending on the day of the week, great pans of milk on the back of the wood stove being made into cottage cheese. I could stand on the landing of the stairs and look out the different-coloured panes of the stained-glass window onto the world below. In the afternoon, Charlie would take me down the hill, past the fruit orchard, past his vegetable garden which was larger and much more various than our own since it was to supply needs all year round, to the great barns, around the pasture where the bull was kept, to pick hazelnuts or loganberries. At night, instead of choosing any one of five empty bedrooms, I slept in Aunt Etta’s large bed with her, or tried to. She snored, and, when she stopped, I could hear the cook snoring in her bedroom down below, but that irritant was a small price for the delicious safety of summer nights, in my parents’ room at South Fork, in Etta’s bed at Carlotta. I remember weeping only once at Carlotta. I was kneeling beside Aunt Etta saying night prayers when I peeked out and saw her poor bare feet, distorted with bunions and corns. I could not confess to her the source of my tears. Mother Packer told me later, “Oh, it’s just that Etta’s always been so vain about her feet that she wears shoes that are too narrow and too short.” They were close, but not kind, those sisters.

  Usually the whole family would come to fetch me, and that was always an occasion for a grand picnic. Etta had a summer kitchen out under the trees, next to which was a huge picnic table. While the cook did the ordinary preparations, I helped Aunt Etta with fancy, to me inedible salads, but I was never forced to eat anything I didn’t want, and there was always plenty to choose from. When Arthur arrived, we’d go together to the more dangerous places, the garbage dump, which was like a diving board built out over a ravine above which buzzards circled and crows scolded. Or we’d walk down the front-door lane to the locked gate, climb over it and buy penny candy at the country store, just the journey my mother was never allowed to take for fear of kidnapping.

  Evenings with everyone there at Carlotta were often occasions for the neighbours to drop by. The women all had handwork, not mending for such social occasions, but embroidery or needlepoint or even a quilt on a frame for everyone to work on together. While they reminisced and gossiped, the men talked crops and swapped fishing and hunting stories, country conversation, and, if we were quiet enough, it might be quite late before anyone remembered it was long past time for us to be in bed.

  I remember the family house in Eureka where Aunt Etta spent the winter much less well, but its third-floor ballroom, turned storage room, with a turret seat that looked out over the harbour became one of the settings in my novel Against the Season, though the characters who lived there are not even a ghostly echo of the real inhabitants of the house, a sheltered, narrow family, my grandmother the only one ever to escape loving and possessive parents.

  She married the first man who offered to take her away from Eureka, Lester Hink, a young merchant from San Francisco who managed a branch of his father’s department store, J.F. Hink and Son, in Berkeley, California.

  It was on the porch at South Fork—though I was older then, perhaps in my early teens—that Mother Packer read out a bit from the paper, a habit of hers we ignored, preoccupied with our own reading: “Frigid women are the victims of violent fathers.” She paused and then said, “Mine never laid a hand on me.”

  She was the youngest of the family, named Carlotta, but called Tot into her old age. Sheltered and spoiled, she was obviously not prepared to deal with her husband’s sexual demands. Nor was she prepared for the submission he expected in all areas of their living. When he shouted that the gravy should be dark brown, the colour of his shoe, she put his shoe alongside the gravy the next time it was served. When he wanted her money to invest in the store to make him more independent
of his dictatorial and hated father, she refused. Giving birth to my mother was an experience Mother Packer never quite recovered from, the physical horror of it perhaps underlined by her older sister’s death in childbirth. When Lester took a mistress, she divorced him, deposited my four-year-old mother at Eureka and went on a long holiday. She met Gouvenier Packer, whose first wife had died in childbirth, and married him before Lester married his mistress.

  Carlotta Mae Vance, Lester William Hink, Ida Vance Hauk

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  In papers I found after Mother Packer’s death, there is the opening of a letter she intended to write for her grandchildren, half apology, half justification, claiming that the three wives Lester Hink had taken after her proved he had never been able to find anyone to take her place. The letter goes on to recount a couple of amusing incidents in her childhood. Her first day in school, when she was told she was not allowed to talk, she sang whatever she had to say. Perhaps the impetus to go on with that letter failed because she had already shared her childhood and girlhood with us, in fact, there at South Fork and Carlotta. We played in the places of her childhood, picked from the same bushes and trees, listened to the same records, looked at issues of Godey’s Lady’s Book and dressed up in the clothes and hats packed away in the attic. It was my mother’s childhood as well, for she’d spent every summer at Carlotta. But for her, it became a prison rather than an escape once her beloved grandmother was dead.

  I was named for my great-grandmother, Jane Vance. I don’t remember her, but I have looked at pictures of us together when I was about sixteen months old, of her standing alone in a rowboat, wearing long skirts and a hat, holding her beloved fishing rod. I could not miss her as my mother did, sensed her presence rather in the domestic routines of Carlotta, in the Indian baskets that hung on the walls of South Fork. I learned to fish with one of her rods.

  Even as a child, I sensed that this way of life, like the way of life at the Gatehouse in Westfield, was receding into the past, would not be there for yet another generation of children to play their timeless games in the shadow and warmth of friendly ghosts. One winter, a heavy snow caved in the roof of the barn at South Fork, and it was not repaired, housing nothing but an old buckboard and carriage, used only for our imaginative games. Honeysuckle pulled down the vineyard fence, and that, too, lay where it was since the grapes were never seriously harvested. One summer, when we opened up the rat-proof storeroom at the original house to get out extra mattresses, we found that grapevines had pried their way in, inviting not only rats but birds. The door was simply closed again, for old Mr. Wheeler had died, and the house stood empty of a caretaker.

  Carlotta was not so derelict while Aunt Etta lived, but, even when we were all there, it had an empty feeling, Etta, more caretaker than mistress, with no children and grandchildren of her own to call those musty-smelling bedrooms back to the present. Even the clutter of the house was two generations old.

  Summers were so long for us, I forgot the life of school and town. One fall, when we had to stay in the President Hotel in Palo Alto for a couple of nights before our summer tenants moved out, I followed the bellboy into the room and said, as he flipped the switch, “Oh look, electric lights and everything.” I hadn’t lost my habit of embarrassing as much as amusing my parents and brother.

  At seven, I was trying to learn to be tactful. Sitting at the dining-room table busy at some project or other, I watched my mother walk through the room.

  “Gosh, Mom, you’re getting fat,” I said and then braced myself, recognizing that I’d made too personal a remark.

  “Am I?” she asked mildly.

  I don’t remember how long after that she told us she was pregnant. I remember how full of self-importance I was when I announced the fact to my second-grade teacher, how deflated when she replied that she already knew. I hated being caught out by adult superiority, a secret or a discovery turned to nothing in its light.

  Mother was the only grown-up I knew who never wrecked a surprise or triumph in that way. Only years later, when I heard my much-younger sister telling her a joke I’d told in my time and Mother’s gratifyingly surprised laughter did I have a sudden qualm. “You already knew that joke,” I accused her later. “I’d forgotten it,” Mother said, protecting the genuine wonder I needed to be to her every day, protecting my sister’s right as well.

  Carlotta Mae Vance Hink

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  Mother sheltered us the more with her loving attention because she could not protect us from the critical and civilizing influence of our grandparents, often harder on her than on us. Sunday midday dinner every week at 1111 Hamilton was a test of our table manners, at which I usually failed, but I could go out and play in the garden while Mother heard about it and Dad slept on the living-room floor. Once sure she’d made Mother miserable, Mother Packer was ready for a game of cards, a pastime her own mother wouldn’t have allowed on Sunday, though she saw nothing wrong with playing mah-jong. At home for Sunday supper, we always had something delicious, waffles with maple syrup or cottage pudding with chocolate sauce and large glasses of cold milk, just the four of us, like children together.

  My parents were young, Mother, nineteen, and Dad, twenty-three, when they married. Arthur was born thirteen months later. Living first in the house of Dad’s parents, then in the same town, first beneficiaries and then victims of Grandfather Rule’s financial circumstances, they achieved only a minimal independence when they moved west, for Dad’s salary as a junior salesman was modest. Though they lived much more simply than they had, they still needed the financial help Mother Packer could provide, not only free summer holidays but all the luxuries for us, clothes, peddle cars, bicycles, music and dancing lessons. My parents were the more vulnerable, therefore, to any criticism about us or themselves. Neither of them much admired their parents as parents, nor did they think much of the relationships between their parents. But often their own judgment had to give way to the more formal and conventional requirements of their parents’ worlds.

  Arthur and I were, for all our fallings from grace, politer children than our friends, better spoken and better dressed. When we went downtown together, Arthur walked on the outside even when there was no grown-up to tell him to. We both said “please” and “thank you” without being reminded, and, though I felt like a spastic orphan at my grandmother’s table, I was a model of good manners, for my friends’ parents.

  Let out of the requiring grandparental world, we all relaxed. Dad taught us risqué songs, gave us whole quarts of ice cream to eat out of cartons. Mother let us run barefoot (not allowed all summer at South Fork) and occasionally forgot to brush our teeth. Arthur was not stopped from telling us the same joke at the dinner table every night for weeks (“Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” …). We could turn over the furniture, put on plays, get dirty, even torn, if only we’d please behave as we should with our grandparents.

  It was not always difficult. A couple of times a year I went to San Francisco on a shopping trip with Mother Packer. The mornings were a bit of a trial, trying on clothes that sometimes puckered under the arms or were scratchy or were too babyish. But patience meant lunch at the Palace Hotel. I always ordered waffles and asparagus, and the head waiter poured melted butter into each of the waffle squares, then onto the asparagus, which I was allowed to eat with my fingers, asking advice about how to keep the butter from running down my elbows. The Palace Hotel dining room had great chandeliers. Mother Packer told me about an uncle of hers who had ridden into that very dining room on a horse and swung from one of the chandeliers. It was a much more sedate place in my time, but I loved it just the same because at one side of the room a forest grew with a real little waterfall and stream. After lunch we went to Chinatown. I was given a dollar to spend, but Mother Packer paid for everything I picked out, tiny ivory monkeys (“hear, see and speak no evil”), a parrot i
n a birdcage two inches high. I loved miniatures and was creating a park with a zoo on a bookcase shelf in my room. I had begged all the pocket mirrors from Mother’s and Mother Packer’s handbags to make a lake for tiny ducks and swans to swim on. When I was exhausted, we’d go to Mother Packer’s hat shop. While she tried on the hat being made for her, I’d be given a small hat box in which to pack all my treasures.

  On the ride home on the train, I could ask any questions I wanted to, like why the head waiter was so particularly nice to us.

  “I tip him,” Mother Packer explained, “so that we can get good service and let you sit near the forest.”

  The cab driver who took us home to 1111 Hamilton saw how nearly asleep I was and carried me, as well as the packages, all the way to the front door.

  “You must have tipped him an awful lot,” I said before the front door had closed, my only faux pas of the day, and Mother Packer decided to be amused by it.

  The dancing lessons she insisted I take are as bleak in my memory as those San Francisco trips are bright. I had taken ballet lessons without trauma in Westfield when I was three or four years old. Even the public performance during which I angrily shot my parasol at the laughing audience ended happily with ice-cream sodas and a drive home in the amazing darkness. Tap dancing—I only now realize it was probably all Shirley Temple’s fault—simply embarrassed me. I was no good at it. At seven, I was a fair swimmer and a crudely accomplished soccer player. I had begun to ride. Aside from the noise I could make with my taps when I wasn’t trying to dance, I hated it, facing for the first time the possibility that my height was not a natural superiority, but a fault. Wilful as I always was about my dignity, I would have refused that weekly humiliation if it hadn’t been a trade-off for riding lessons. Mother Packer said no tap dancing, no horseback riding. A child obsessive about promptness—it was a matter of honour, never to be late to school—I was always late for dancing lessons, and I was late getting home because I had to sit on the curb for a bit and cry before I could face anyone.