The View from Castle Rock

accepting, made a great fuss about how good it smelled and how good whatever it was would taste.
    Then she probably got busy offering something of her own, insisting on at least making a cup of tea, and I seem to hear my grandmother saying no, no, we had just dropped in for a moment. She could have explained further that we were on our way to the Sharpies house. Perhaps she wouldn’t say the name, or that we were going for a proper visit. She might just say that we couldn’t stop, we were going to drop in across the way. As if we were on a series of errands. She always spoke of going to visit Henrietta as going across the way, so that she would never seem to be flaunting the friendship. Never
bragging.
    There was a noise in the woodshed attached to the cottage, and then a man came in, flushed from the cold or exercise, and said hello to my grandmother and shook hands with me. I hated the way old men might greet me with a poke in the stomach or a tickle under the arms, but this handshake seemed cordial and proper.
    That was all I really noticed about him, except that he was tall and not large around the stomach like Aunt Mabel, though like her he had thick white hair. His name was Uncle Leo. His hand was cold, probably from splitting wood for Henriettas fireplaces, or putting bags around her bushes to protect them from the frost.
    It was later, though, that I learned about his doing such chores for Henrietta. He did her outdoor winter work-shovelling snow and knocking down icicles and keeping up the wood supply. And trimming the hedges and cutting the grass in the summer. In return he and Aunt Mabel had the cottage rent-free, and maybe he was paid something as well. He did this for a couple of years, until he died. He died of pneumonia, or a failure of the heart, the sort of thing you expected people of his age to die of.
    I was told to call him Uncle, just as I had been told to call his wife Aunt, and I didn’t question this or wonder how they were related to me. It wasn’t the first time I had taken on board an aunt or an uncle who was mysterious and marginal.
    Uncle Leo and Aunt Mabel could not have been living there very long, with Uncle Leo employed in this way, before my grandmother and I made our call. We had never taken any notice of the cottage, or of the people living there, on previous visits to Henrietta. So it seems likely that my grandmother had suggested the arrangement to Henrietta.
Put a word in,
as people would have said. Put a word in because Uncle Leo was
on his uppers?
    I don’t know. I never asked anybody. Soon the call was over, and my grandmother and I were crossing the gravelled drive and knocking on the back door and Henrietta was calling through the keyhole, “Go away, I can see you, what are you peddling today?” Then she threw open the door and squeezed me in her bony arms and exclaimed, “You little rascal-why didn’t you say it was you? Who’s this old gypsy woman you brought along?”

    My grandmother did not approve of women smoking or of anybody drinking.
    Henrietta smoked and drank.
    My grandmother thought that slacks on women were abominable and sunglasses an affectation. Henrietta wore both.
    My grandmother played euchre but thought it was snooty to play bridge. Henrietta played bridge.
    The list could go on. Henrietta was not an unusual woman of her time but she was an unusual woman in that town.
    She and my grandmother sat in front of the fire in the back living room and talked and laughed through the afternoon while I roamed about, free to examine the blue-flowered toilet in the bathroom or look through the ruby glass of the china-cabinet door. Henrietta’s voice was loud and it was mostly her talk I could hear. It was punctuated by hoots of laughter-very much the kind of laughter I would recognize now as accompanying a woman’s confession of gigantic folly or some tale of perfidy (male perfidy?) beyond belief.
    Later on I was to hear stories about Henrietta, about the man she had jilted and the man she was in love with-a married man she continued to see all her life-and I don’t doubt that she talked about that, and about other things which I don’t know, and probably my grandmother talked about her own life, not so freely perhaps, or raucously, but still in the same vein, as a story that amazed her, that she could hardly believe was her own. For it seems to me that my grandmother talked in that house as she did not do-or no longer did-anywhere else. But I never