The View from Castle Rock

even now I’m in a hurry, I can’t stay. I tell them that I have so much to do, but I’ll be back soon. They say yes, yes, that will be fine. Soon.

    At Christmastime I was to be married, and after that I was going to live in Vancouver. The year was 1951. My grandmother and Aunt Charlie-one younger, one older, than I am now-were packing the trunks I would take with me. One was a sturdy old humpbacked trunk that had been in the family for a long time. I wondered out loud if it had come across the Atlantic Ocean with them.
    Who knows, said my grandmother.
    A hunger for history, even family history, did not rate highly with her. All that sort of thing was an indulgence, a waste of time-like reading the continued story in the daily paper. Which she did herself, but still deplored.
    The other trunk was new, with metal corners, bought for the purpose. It was Aunt Charlie’s gift-her income was larger than my grandmother’s, though that did not mean it was very large. Just enough so that it could stretch to occasional unplanned purchases. An armchair for the living room, upholstered in salmon-colored brocade (protected, unless company was coming, by a plastic cover). A reading lamp (its shade also wrapped in plastic). My marriage trunk.
    “That’s her wedding present?” my husband would say, later. “A
trunkV
Because in his family something like a trunk was what you went out and bought, when you needed it. No passing it off as a present.
    The things in the humpbacked trunk were breakable, wrapped in things that were not breakable. Dishes, glasses, pitchers, vases, wrapped in newspaper and further protected by dishtowels, bath towels, crocheted doilies and afghans, embroidered table mats. The big flat truck was mostly full of bed-sheets, tablecloths (one of them, too, was crocheted), quilts, pillowcases, also some large flat breakable things like a framed picture painted by Marian, the sister of my grandmother and Aunt Charlie, who had died young. It was a picture of an eagle on a lone branch, with a blue sea and feathery trees far below. Marian at the age of fourteen had copied it from a calendar, and the next summer she had died of typhoid fever.
    Some of those things were wedding presents, from members of my family, arriving early, but most were things that had been made for me to start housekeeping with. The quilts, the afghans, the crocheted articles, the pillowcases with their cheek-scratching embroidery. I had not prepared a thing, but my grandmother and Aunt Charlie had been busy, even if my prospects had seemed bleak for quite a while. And my mother had put away a few fancy water goblets, some teaspoons, a willow platter, from the brief heady period when she had dealt in antiques, before the stiffness and trembling of her limbs made any business-and driving, walking, finally even talking-too difficult.
    The presents from my husband’s family were packed in the shops where they were purchased, and shipped to Vancouver. Silver serving dishes, heavy table linen, half a dozen crystal wineglasses. The sort of household goods that my in-laws and their friends were used to having around them.
    Nothing in my trunks, as it happened, came up to scratch. My mother’s goblets were pressed glass and the willow platter was heavy kitchen china. Such things did not come into vogue until years later, and for some people, never. The six teaspoons dating from the nineteenth century were not sterling. The quilts were for an old-fashioned bed, narrower than the bed my husband had bought for us. The afghans and the doilies and the cushion covers and-needless to say-the picture copied from a calendar were next thing to a joke.
    But my husband did concede that a good job had been done with the packing, not a thing was broken. He was embarrassed but attempting to be kind. Afterwards when I tried putting some of those things where they could be seen by anybody coming into our place, he had to speak plainly. And I myself saw the point.

    I was nineteen years old when I became engaged, twenty on my wedding day. My husband was the first boyfriend I had ever had. The outlook had not been promising. During that same autumn, my father and my brother were repairing the cover on the well in our side yard, and my brother said, “We better do a good job here. Because if this guy falls in she’ll never get another.”
    And that became a favorite joke in the family. Of course I laughed too. But what those around me had worried about had