The View from Castle Rock

wife, and for us more like an elderly relative in our charge, than a mother.
    I did know that her being older was one of the things that my grandmother had thought unsuitable about my mother from the start. Other things emerged soon enough-the fact that my mother learned to drive the car, that her style of dress verged on the original, that she joined the secular Women’s Institute rather than the United Church Missionary Society, worst of all that she began to go about the countryside selling fur scarves and capes made from foxes my father raised, and was branching off into the antique business when her health began to go awry. And unfair as it might be to think so-and she herself knowing that it was unfair-my grandmother still could not help seeing this illness that went undiagnosed for so long, and was rare at my mother’s age, as being somehow another show of willfulness, another grab at attention.
    My grandparents’ marriage was not one I ever saw in action, but I heard reports. From my mother, who did not care for my grandmother any more than my grandmother cared for her-and as I grew older, from other people as well, who had no axes to grind. Neighbors who had called in on their way home from school when they were children reported on my grandmother’s homemade marshmallows and her teasing and laughing, but said that they had been slightly afraid of my grandfather. Not that he was bad-tempered or mean-just silent. People had great respect for him-he served for years on the township council and he was known as the person to go to whenever you had to have help in filling out a document, or in writing a business letter, or needed to have some new government notion explained. He was an efficient farmer, an excellent manager, but the object of his managing was not to make more money-it was to have more leisure for his reading. His silences made people uneasy, and they thought that he was not much company for a woman like my grandmother. The two of them were said to be as unalike as if they came from the opposite sides of the moon.
    My father, growing up in this house of silence, never said that he found it particularly uncomfortable. On a farm there is always so much to do. Getting through the seasonal work was what made up the content of a life-or it did then-and that was what most marriages boiled down to.
    He did notice, though, how his mother became a different person, how she burst into gaiety, when company came.
    There was a violin in the parlor, and he was nearly grown up before he knew why it was there-that it belonged to his father, and that his father used to play it.
    My mother said that her father-in-law had been a fine old gentleman, dignified and clever, and that she didn’t wonder at his silence, because my grandmother was always irritated with him because of some little thing.

    If I had asked Aunt Charlie bluntly whether my grandparents had been unhappy together, she would have turned reproachful again. I did ask her what my grandfather was like, besides being silent. I said that I couldn’t remember him, really.
    “He was very smart. And very fair. Though you wouldn’t want to cross him.”

    “Mother said that Grandma was always annoyed with him.”
    “I wouldn’t know where your mother got that.”

    If you looked at the family photograph taken when they were young, and before her sister Marian died, you would say that my grandmother had grabbed off most of the looks in the family. Her height, her proud posture, her magnificent hair. She isn’t just smiling for the photographer-she seems to be biting off a laugh. Such vitality, such confidence. And she never lost the posture, or more than a quarter of an inch of the height. But at the time I am remembering (a time, as I have said, when they were both around the age that I am now), Aunt Charlie was the one people spoke of as being such a nice-looking old lady. She had those clear blue eyes, the color of chicory flowers, and a prevailing grace in her movements, a pretty tilt of the head.
Winsome,
would be the word.
    Aunt Charlie’s marriage was the one that I had been best able to observe, because Uncle Cyril had not died till I was twelve.
    He was a heavily built man with a large head, made massive by thick curly hair. He wore glasses, with one lens of dark amber glass, hiding the eye that had been injured when he was a child. I don’t know if this eye was entirely blind. I never saw it, and it made me sick to think of it-I imagined