The front rooms have been repapered-a white paper with a cheerful but formal red embossed design-and wall-to-wall moss-green carpeting has been put down. And because my father and Irlma both grew up and lived through part of their adult lives in houses lit by coal-oil lamps, there is light everywhere-ceiling lights and plug-in lights, long blazing tubes and hundred-watt bulbs.
Even the outside of the house, the red brick whose crumbling mortar was particularly penetrable by an east wind, is going to be covered up with white metal siding. My father is thinking of putting it on himself. So it seems that this peculiar house-the kitchen part of it built in the eighteen-sixties-can be dissolved, in a way, and lost, inside an ordinary comfortable house of the present time.
I do not lament this loss as I would once have done. I do say that the red brick has a beautiful, soft color, and that I’ve heard of people {city people) paying a big price for just such old bricks, but I say this mostly because I think my father expects it. I am now a city person in his eyes, and when was I ever practical? (This is not accounted such a fault as it used to be, because I have made my way, against expectations, among people who are probably as impractical as myself.) And he is pleased to explain again about the east wind and the cost of fuel and the difficulty of repairs. I know that he speaks the truth, and I know that the house being lost was not a fine or handsome one in any way. A poor man’s house, always, with the stairs going up between walls, and bedrooms opening out of one another. A house where people have lived close to the bone for over a hundred years. So if my father and Irlma wish to be comfortable combining their old-age pensions, which make them richer than they’ve ever been in their lives, if they wish to be (they use this word without quotation marks, quite simply and positively) modern, who am I to complain about the loss of some rosy bricks, a crumbling wall?
But it’s also true that in a way my father wants some objections, some foolishness from me. And I feel obliged to hide from him the fact that the house does not mean as much to me as it once did, and that it really does not matter to me now how he changes it.
“I know how you love this place,” he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself that I loved here-some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.
I don’t go into the front room now, to rummage in the piano bench for old photographs and sheet music. I don’t go looking for my old high-school texts, my Latin poetry, Maria Chapde-laine. Or for the best sellers of some year in the nineteen-forties when my mother belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club-a great year for novels about the wives of Henry the Eighth, and for three-name women writers, and understanding books about the Soviet Union. I don’t open the “classics” bound in limp imitation leather, bought by my mother before she was married, just to see her maiden name written in graceful, conventional schoolteacher’s handwriting on the marbled endpaper, after the publisher’s pledge: Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.
Reminders of my mother in this house are not so easy to locate, although she dominated it for so long with what seemed to us her embarrassing ambitions, and then with her just as embarrassing though justified complaints. The disease she had was so little known then, and so bizarre in its effects, that it did seem to be just the sort of thing she might have contrived, out of perversity and her true need for attention, for bigger dimensions in her life. Attention that her family came to give her out of necessity, not quite grudgingly, but so routinely that it seemed-it sometimes was-cold, impatient, untender. Never enough for her, never enough.
The books that used to lie under beds and on tables all over the house have been corralled by Irlma, chased and squeezed into this front-room bookcase, glass doors shut upon them. My father, loyal to his wife, reports that he hardly reads at all anymore, he has too much to do. (Though he does like to look at the Historical Atlas that I sent him.) Irlma doesn’t care for the sight of people reading because it is not sociable and at the end of it all what has been accomplished? She thinks people are better off playing cards, or making things. Men can do woodworking, women can quilt and hook rugs or crochet or do embroidery. There is always plenty to do.
Contrarily, Irlma honors the writing that my father has taken up in his old age. “His writing is very good excepting when he gets too tired,” she has said to me. “Anyway it’s better than yours.”
It took me a moment to figure out that she was talking about handwriting. That’s what “writing” has always meant around here. The other business was or is called “making things up.” For her they’re joined together somehow and she does not raise objections. Not to any of it.
“It keeps his head working,” she says.
Playing cards, she believes, would do the same. But she doesn’t always have the time to sit down to that in the middle of the day.
My father talks to me about putting siding on the house. “I need a job like that to get me back to the shape I was in a couple of years ago.”
About fifteen months ago he had a serious heart attack.
Irlma sets out coffee mugs, a plate of soda crackers and graham crackers, cheese and butter, bran muffins, baking-powder biscuits, squares of spice cake with boiled icing.
“It’s not a lot,” she says. “I’m getting lazy in my old age.”
I say that will never happen, she’ll never get lazy.
“The cake’s even a mix, I’m shamed to tell you. Next thing you know it’ll be boughten.”
“It’s good,” I say. “Some mixes are really good.”
“That’s a fact,” says Irlma.
Harry Crofton-who works part-time at the turkey barn where my father used to work-drops in at dinnertime the next day and after some necessary and expected protests is persuaded to stay. Dinnertime is at noon. We are having round steak pounded and floured and cooked in the oven, mashed potatoes with gravy, boiled parsnips, cabbage salad, biscuits, raisin cookies, crab-apple preserves, pumpkin pie with marsh-mallow topping. Also bread and butter, various relishes, instant coffee, tea.
Harry passes on the message that Joe Thorns, who lives up the river in a trailer, with no telephone, would be obliged if my father would drop by with a sack of potatoes. He would pay for them, of course. He would come and pick them up if he could, but he can’t.
“Bet he can’t,” says Irlma.
My father covers this taunt by saying to me, “He’s next thing to blind, these days.”
“Barely find his way to the liquor store,” Harry says.
All laugh.
“He could find his way there by his nose,” Irlma says. And repeats herself, with relish, as she often does. “Find his way there by his nose!”
Irlma is a stout and rosy woman, with tinted butterscotch curls, brown eyes in which there is still a sparkle, a look of emotional readiness, of being always on the brink of hilarity. Or on the brink of impatience flaring into outrage. She likes to make people laugh, and to laugh herself. At other times she will put her hands on her hips and thrust her head forward and make some harsh statement, as if she hoped to provoke a fight. She connects this behavior with being Irish and with being born on a train.
“I’m Irish, you know. I’m fighting Irish. And I was born on a moving train. I couldn’t wait. Kicking Horse Railway, what do you think of that? Born on a kicking horse you know how to stick up for yourself, and that’s a fact.” Then, whether her listeners reply in kind or shrink back in disconcerted silence, she will throw out a challenging laugh.