The View from Castle Rock

got to ask Henrietta what was confided, what was said, because she died in a car accident-she was always a foolhardy driver-sometime before my grandmother died. And very likely she would not have told me anyway.

    This is the
story,
or as much as I know
of
it.
    My grandmother, the man she loved-Leo-and the man she married-my grandfather-all lived within a few miles of each other. She would have gone to school with Leo, who was only three or four years older than she was. But not with my grandfather, who was ten years older. The two men were cousins and bore the same surname. They did not look alike-though both were good-looking, as far as 1 can tell. My grandfather in his wedding picture stands erect-he is only a little taller than my grandmother, who has got her waist down to twenty-four inches for the occasion, and in her flounced white dress looks chastened and demure. He is broad-shouldered, sturdy, unsmiling, with a look of being seriously intelligent, proud, committed to whatever is required of him. And he has not changed much in the enlarged snapshot I have of him, taken when he was in his fifties or early sixties. A man who still has his strength, his competence, a necessary amount of geniality and a large reserve, a man who is respected for good reason and no more disappointed than a person can expect to be, at his age.
    My memories of him come from the year he spent in bed, the year before he died, or as you might say, the year when he was dying. He was seventy-five and his heart was failing, little by little. My father, at the same age, and in the same condition, chose to have an operation, and died a few days afterwards without regaining consciousness. My grandfather had not that option.
    I remember that his bed was downstairs, in the dining room, that he kept a bag of peppermints under his pillow-supposedly a secret from my grandmother-and offered them to me when she was busy elsewhere. He had a pleasant smell of shaving soap and tobacco (I was wary about the way old people smelled, and relieved when it was inoffensive), and his manner with me was kindly but not intrusive.
    Then he was dead, and I went to his funeral with my mother and father. I did not want to look at him so I did not have to. My grandmother’s eyes were red, with the skin wrinkled up all around them. The attention she paid to me was scanty, so I went outside and rolled down the grassy hill between the house and the sidewalk. This had been a favorite thing for me to do when I stayed there and nobody had ever objected to it. But this time my mother called me in and shook bits of grass out of my dress. She was in the state of exasperation that meant I was behaving in a way that she would get the blame for.
    What did my grandfather as a young man think of the fact that my grandmother as a young girl was in love with his cousin Leo? Did he have his eye on her then? Was he hopeful, were his hopes dashed by the fiery courtship going on before his eyes? For it was fiery-a notable romance carried on with spats and reconciliations that he and practically everybody in the community was bound to be aware of. How could a romance be carried on in those days except publicly, if the girl was respectable? Walks to the woods were out
of
the question, as was ducking out of dances. Visits to the girl’s house involved the whole family, at least until the couple became engaged. Rides in an open buggy were eyed from every kitchen window along the road, and if a ride after dark was ever contrived it was within a discouraging time limit.
    Nevertheless, intimacies were managed. My grandmother’s younger sisters, Charlie and Marian, were sent along as her chaperones, but were sometimes tricked and bribed.
    “They were as crazy about each other as a pair can be,” Aunt Charlie said, when she told me about this. “They were devils.”
    This conversation took place during that fall before my marriage, the time of the trunk-packing. My grandmother had been forced to take time out from the work, she was upstairs in bed, suffering from her phlebitis. For years she had worn elastic bandages to support her bulging varicose veins. So ugly in her opinion-both bandages and veins-that she hated anybody to see them. Aunt Charlie told me confidentially that the veins were wrapped around her legs like big black snakes. Every dozen years or so a vein became inflamed, and then she had to lie still, lest a blood clot should break loose and find its way to her heart.
    For