The View from Castle Rock

the three or four days that my grandmother stayed in bed, Aunt Charlie did not get on well with the packing. She was used to my grandmother’s making the decisions.

    “Selina’s the boss,” she said without resentment. “I don’t know where I’m at without Selina.” (And this proved to be true-after my grandmother died, Aunt Charlie’s grasp on daily life immediately faltered, and she had to be taken away to the nursing home, where she died at the age of ninety-eight, after a long silence.)
    Instead of tackling the job together she and I sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee and talked. Or whispered. Aunt Charlie had a way of whispering. In this case there might have been a reason-my grandmother with her unimpaired hearing was just over our heads-but often there was none. Her whispering seemed merely to exercise her charm-nearly everybody found her charming-to draw you in to a cozier, more significant sort of conversation, even if the words she was saying were only something about the weather, not-as now-about the stormy young life of my grandmother.
    What happened? I was half-hoping and half-afraid to discover that my grandmother, in those days when she had never dreamt of becoming my grandmother, had found herself pregnant.
    Wild as she was and cunning as love makes you, she did not.
    But another girl did. Another woman, you might say, because she was eight years older than the accused father.
    Leo.
    The woman worked in a dry-goods store in town.
    “And her reputation was not what you might call Simon-pure,” Aunt Charlie said, as if this was a sad reluctant revelation.
    There had often been other girls, other women. That was what the spats had been about. That was what had caused my grandmother to kick her suitor in the shins and shove him out of his own buggy and drive home by herself with his horse.

    That was why she had thrown a box of chocolates in his face. And then stamped on them, so they couldn’t be picked up and enjoyed, if he should be so nonchalant and greedy as to try.
    But this time she was calm as an iceberg.
    What she said was, “Well, you’ll have to go and marry her, won’t you just?”
    He said he wasn’t all that sure it was his.
    And she said, “But you’re not sure it isn’t.”
    He said that it could all be fixed up if he agreed to pay for the support. He said he was pretty sure that was all that she was after.
    “But it’s not all I’m after,” Selina said. Then she said that what she was after was for him to do what was right.
    And she won. In a very short time he and the woman from the dry-goods store were married. And not so long after that, my grandmother-Selina-was also married, to my grandfather. She chose the same time as I had done-dead of winter-for her wedding.
    Leo’s baby-if it was his, and it probably was-was born in late spring and by the time it was delivered it was dead. Its mother did not last more than an hour longer.
    Soon a letter came, addressed to Charlie. But it wasn’t for her at all. Inside was another letter, that she was to take to Selina.
    Selina read it and laughed. “Tell him I’m as big as a barn,” she said. Though she was hardly showing at all, and that was the first Charlie knew that she was pregnant.
    “And tell him the last thing I need is any more fool letters from anybody like him.”
    The baby that she was carrying then was my father, born ten months after the wedding with considerable difficulty for the mother. He was the only child that she and my grandfather would ever have. I asked Aunt Charlie why. Was there some injury to my grandmother, or some inherent problem that made childbirth too risky? Obviously it wasn’t that she had difficulty conceiving, I said, since my father must have been started a month after the wedding.
    A silence, and then Aunt Charlie said, “I wouldn’t know about that.” She did not whisper but spoke in a normally raised, and slightly distant, slightly wounded or reproachful voice.
    Why this withdrawal? What had wounded her? I think it was my clinical question, my use of a word like
conceiving.
It might be 1951 and I was soon to be married, and she had just been telling me a story about passion and unlucky conception. But still it would not do, it did not do, for a young woman-for any woman-to speak so coolly, knowledgeably, shamelessly, about those things.
Conceiving,
indeed.
    There might have been another reason for Aunt Charlie’s response, which I did not think of at the time.