Dear Life

forgotten? The meeting of the County Physicians, the Annual Dinner and the Election of Officers was normally over by ten thirty. It was now eleven o’clock.
    Too late, too late, we both noticed the time.
    The storm door is opening now, then the door into the front hall and, without the usual pause there to remove boots and winter coat or scarf, my uncle strides into the living room.
    The musicians, in the middle of a piece, do not stop. The neighbors greet my uncle cheerfully but with voices lowered in deference to the playing. He looks twice his size with his coat unbuttoned and his scarf loose and his boots on. He glares, but not at anybody in particular, not even at his wife.
    And she isn’t looking at him. She has begun to gather up the plates on the table beside her, placing them one on top of the other and not even noticing that some still have the little cakes on them, which will be squashed to pieces.
    Without haste and without halting, he walks through the double living room, then through the dining room and the swinging doors into the kitchen.
    The pianist is sitting with her hands quiet on the keys, and the cello player has stopped. The violinist continues alone. I have no idea, even now, if that was the way the piece was supposed to go or if she was flouting him on purpose. She never looked up, as far as I can remember, to face this scowling man. Her large white head, similar to his but more weathered, trembles a little but may have been trembling all along.
    He is back, with a plateful of pork and beans. He must have just opened a can and slopped the contents out cold onthe plate. He hasn’t bothered to take off his winter coat. And still without looking at anybody, but making a great clatter with his fork, he is eating as if alone, and hungry. You might think there had not been a bite of food offered at the Annual Meeting and Dinner.
    I have never seen him eat like this. His table manners have always been lordly, but decent.
    The music his sister is playing comes to an end, presumably at its own proper time. It’s a little ahead of the pork and beans. The neighbors have got themselves into the front hall and wrapped themselves in their outdoor clothes and stuck their heads in once to express their profuse thanks, in the middle of their desperation to be out of here.
    And now the musicians are leaving, though not in quite such a hurry. Instruments have to be properly packed up, after all; you don’t just thrust them into their cases. The musicians manage things in what must be their usual way, methodically, and then they, too, disappear. I can’t remember anything that was said, or whether Aunt Dawn pulled herself together enough to thank them or follow them to the door. I can’t pay attention to them because Uncle Jasper has taken to talking, in a very loud voice, and the person he is talking to is me. I think I remember the violinist taking one look at him, just as he begins to talk. A look that he completely ignores or maybe doesn’t even see. It’s not an angry look, as you might expect, or even an amazed one. She is just terribly tired, and her face whiter perhaps than any you could imagine.
    “Now, tell me,” my uncle is saying, addressing me as if nobody else were there, “tell me, do your parents go in for this sort of thing? What I mean is, this kind of music? Concerts and the like? They ever pay money to sit downfor a couple of hours and wear their bottoms out listening to something they wouldn’t recognize half a day later? Pay money simply to perpetrate a fraud? You ever know them to do that?”
    I said no, and it was the truth. I had never known them to go to a concert, though they were in favor of concerts in general.
    “See? They’ve got too much sense, your parents. Too much sense to join all these people who are fussing and clapping and carrying on like it’s just the wonder of the world. You know the kind of people I mean? They’re lying. A load of horse manure. All in the hope of appearing high-class. Or more likely giving in to their wives’ hope to appear high-class. Remember that when you get out in the world. Okay?”
    I agreed to remember. I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people thought that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra—I doubted very much that I