The View from Castle Rock

saw that it was old Mr. Foley, still in his party outfit of white trousers and yachting cap and blazer. He had stayed for a couple of drinks and explained to everybody that Mrs. Foley was not up to the strain of seeing so many people but sent her best wishes to all.
    He was moving things around on the tool shelf. Soon he either found what he wanted or put back what he had intended to put back, and he switched off the light and left. He never knew that I was there.
    I pulled up my bathing suit and got out of the water and went up the stairs. My body seemed such a weight to me that I was out of breath when I got to the top.
    The sound of the cocktail party went on and on. I had to do something to hold my own against it, so I started to write a letter to Dawna, who was my best friend at that time. I described the cocktail party in lurid terms-people vomited over the deck railing and a woman passed out, falling down on the sofa in such a way that part of her dress slid off and exposed a purple-nippled old breast (I called it a bezoom). I spoke of Mr. Hammond as a letch, though I added that he was very good-looking. I said that he had fondled me in the kitchen while my hands were busy with the meatballs and that later he had followed me to the boathouse and grabbed me on the stairs. But I had kicked him where he wouldn’t forget and he had retreated.
Scurried away,
I said.
    “So hold your breath for the next installment,” I wrote. “Entitled, ’Sordid Adventures of a Kitchen Maid.’ Or ’Ravaged on the Rocks of Georgian Bay.’“

    When I saw that I had written “ravaged” instead of “ravished,” I thought I could let it go, because Dawna would never know the difference. But I realized that the part about Mr. Hammond was overdone, even for that sort of letter, and then the whole thing filled me with shame and a sense of my own failure and loneliness. I crumpled it up. There had not been any point in writing this letter except to assure myself that I had some contact with the world and that exciting things-sexual things-happened to me. And I hadn’t. They didn’t.

    “Mrs. Foley asked me where Jane was,” I had said, when Mrs. Montjoy and I were doing the silver-or when she was keeping an eye on me doing the silver. “Was Jane one of the other girls who worked here in the summer?”
    I thought for a moment that she might not answer, but she did.
    “Jane was my other daughter,” she said. “She was Mary Anne’s sister. She died.”
    I said, “Oh. I didn’t know.” I said, “Oh. I’m sorry.
    “Did she die of polio?” I said, because I did not have the sense, or you might say the decency, not to go on. And in those days children still died of polio, every summer.
    “No,” said Mrs. Montjoy. “She was killed when my husband moved the dresser in our bedroom. He was looking for something he thought he might have dropped behind it. He didn’t realize she was in the way. One of the casters caught on the rug and the whole thing toppled over on her.”
    I knew every bit of this, of course. Mary Anne had already told me. She had told me even before Mrs. Foley asked me where Jane was and clawed at my breast.
    “How awful,” I said.

    “Well. It was just one of those things.”
    My deception made me feel queasy. I dropped a fork on the floor.
    Mrs. Montjoy picked it up.
    “Remember to wash this again.”
    How strange that I did not question my right to pry, to barge in and bring this to the surface. Part of the reason must have been that in the society I came from, things like that were never buried for good, but ritualistically resurrected, and that such horrors were like a badge people wore-or, mostly, that women wore-throughout their lives.
    Also it may have been because I would never quite give up when it came to demanding intimacy, or at least some kind of equality, even with a person I did not like.
    Cruelty was a thing I could not recognize in myself. I thought I was blameless here, and in any dealings with this family. All because of being young, and poor, and knowing about Nausicaa.
    I did not have the grace or fortitude to be a servant.

    On my last Sunday I was alone in the boathouse, packing up my things in the suitcase I had brought-the same suitcase that had gone with my mother and father on their wedding trip and the only one we had in the house. When I pulled it out from under my cot and opened it up, it smelled of home-of the closet at the end of the upstairs hall where it usually