The Progress of Love

busy.
    Her little timid-looking fat son, who had the odd name of Dane, came up and clung to her legs. He usually liked Violet, but today he made strange.
    Violet drove away. She didn’t know, of course, that in a year Dawn Rose would be dead of a blood clot resulting from chronic phlebitis. It wasn’t Dawn Rose she was thinking of, but herself, as she drove along a low stretch of road with trees and thick brush on either side and heard a voice say, “Her life is tragic.”
    “Her life is tragic,” the voice said clearly and without any special emotion, and Violet, as if blinded, ran the car right off the road. There wasn’t much of a ditch at all, but the ground there was boggy and she couldn’t get the car out of it. She walked around and looked at where her wheels were, then stood by the car waiting for somebody to come along and give her a shove.
    But when she did hear a car coming, she knew she didn’t want to be found. She couldn’t bear to be. She ran from the road into the woods, into the brush, and she was caught. She was caught then by berry bushes, little hawthorns. Held fast. Hiding because she didn’t want to be seen, if her life was tragic.
II . Possession
    Dane believes that he has one memory of Violet—his mother’s sister—from a time before his mother died. He remembers very little from that far back. He hardly remembers his mother. He has one picture of his mother standing in front of the mirror at thekitchen sink, tucking her red hair under a navy-blue straw hat. He remembers a bright red ribbon on the hat. She must have been getting ready to go to church. And he can see a swollen leg, of a dull-brown color, that he associates with her last sickness. But he doubts if he ever saw that. Why would her leg be such a color? He must have heard people talking about it. He heard them say that her leg was as big as a barrel.
    He thinks he remembers Violet coming for supper, as she sometimes did, bringing with her a pudding, which she set outside in the snow to keep cool. (None of the farmhouses had a refrigerator in those days.) Then it snowed, and the snow covered the pudding dish, which sank from sight. Dane remembers Violet tramping around in the snowy yard after dark, calling, “Pudding, pudding, here pudding!” as if it was a dog. Himself laughing immoderately, and his mother and father laughing in the doorway, and Violet elaborating the performance, stopping to whistle.
    Not long after his mother died, his grandmother died—the one who lived with Violet, and wore a black hat, and called the hens in what sounded exactly like their own language, a tireless crooning and clucking. Then Violet sold the farm and moved to town, where she got a job with Bell Telephone. That was during the Second World War, when there was a shortage of men, and Violet soon became manager. There was some feeling that she should have stepped down when the war was over, given the job back to some man who had a family to support. Dane recalls hearing somebody say that—a woman, maybe one of his father’s sisters, saying that it would have been the gracious thing to do. But his father said no, Violet did right. He said Violet had spunk.
    Instead of the dull, draped, beaded dresses that married women—mothers—wore, Violet wore skirts and blouses. She wore pleated skirts of lively plaid, navy-blue or gray gabardine, with wonderful blouses of ivory satin, ruffled white georgette, pink or yellow or silvery rayon crepe. The color of her good coat was royal purple, and it had a silver-fox collar. Her hair was not finger-waved, or permanented, but done up in a thick, dark, regal-looking roll. Her complexion was powdered, delicately pink, like the large seashellshe owned and would let Dane listen to. Dane knows now that she dressed, and looked, like a certain kind of businesswoman, professional woman, of those days. Stylish but ladylike, shapely though not exactly slender, neither matronly nor girlish. What he took to be so remarkable and unique was not really so. This was the truth he discovered about most things as he got older. Just the same, his memory protects Violet from any sense of repetition, or classification, there’s no way that long-ago Violet can be diminished.
    In town, Violet lived in an apartment over the Royal Bank. You had to go up a long, closed-in flight of stairs. The long windows in the living room were called French doors. They opened out onto two tiny balconies with waist-high railings of