“Yes,” I said. My father had once found bear tracks and droppings in the bush, and the apples had all been torn off a wild apple tree. That was years ago, when he was a young man.
Beryl moaned and giggled. “Think if Mr. Florence had to go out in the night and he ran into a bear!”
NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. Beryl and Mr. Florence drove my brothers and me to Sunday school in the Chrysler. That was at ten o’clock in the morning. They came back at eleven to bring my parents to church.
“Hop in,” Beryl said to me. “You too,” she said to the boys. “We’re going for a drive.”
Beryl was dressed up in a satiny ivory dress with red dots, and a red-lined frill over the hips, and red high- heeled shoes. Mr. Florence wore a pale-blue summer suit.
“Aren’t you going to church?” I said. That was what people dressed up for, in my experience.
Beryl laughed. “Honey, this isn’t Mr. Florence’s kind of religion.”
I was used to going straight from Sunday school into church, and sitting for another hour and a half. In summer, the open windows let in the cedary smell of the graveyard and the occasional, almost sacrilegious sound of a car swooshing by on the road. Today we spent this time driving through country I had never seen before. I had never seen it, though it was less than twenty miles from home. Our truck went to the cheese factory, to church, and to town on Saturday nights. The nearest thing to a drive was when it went to the dump. I had seen the near end of Bell’s Lake, because that was where my father cut the ice in winter. You couldn’t get close to it in summer; the shoreline was all choked up with bulrushes. I had thought that the other end of the lake would look pretty much the same, but when we drove there today, I saw cottages, docks and boats, dark water reflecting the trees. All this and I hadn’t known about it. This too was Bell’s Lake. I was glad to have seen it at last, but in some way not altogether glad of the surprise.
Finally, a white frame building appeared, with verandas and potted flowers, and some twinkling poplar trees in front. The Wildwood Inn. Today the same building is covered with stucco and done up with Tudor beams and called the Hideaway. The poplar trees have been cut down for a parking lot.
On the way back to the church to pick up my parents, Mr. Florence turned in to the farm next to ours, which belonged to the McAllisters. The McAllisters were Catholics. Our two families were neighborly but not close.
“Come on, boys, out you get,” said Beryl to my brothers. “Not you,” she said to me. “You stay put.” She herded the little boys up to the porch, where some McAllisters were watching. They were in their raggedy home clothes, because their church, or Mass, or whatever it was, got out early. Mrs. McAllister came out and stood listening, rather dumbfounded, to Beryl’s laughing talk.
Beryl came back to the car by herself. “There,” she said. “They’re going to play with the neighbor children.”
Play with McAllisters? Besides being Catholics, all but the baby were girls.
“They’ve still got their good clothes on,” I said.
“So what? Can’t they have a good time with their good clothes on? I do!”
My parents were taken by surprise as well. Beryl got out and told my father he was to ride in the front seat, for the legroom. She got into the back, with my mother and me. Mr. Florence turned again onto the Bell’s Lake road, and Beryl announced that we were all going to the Wildwood Inn for dinner.
“You’re all dressed up, why not take advantage?” she said. “We dropped the boys off with your neighbors. I thought they might be too young to appreciate it. The neighbors were happy to have them.” She said with a further emphasis that it was to be their treat. Hers and Mr. Florence’s.
“Well, now,” said my father. He probably didn’t have five dollars in his pocket. “Well, now. I wonder do they let the farmers in?”
He made various jokes along this line. In the hotel dining room, which was all in white — white tablecloths, white painted chairs — with sweating glass water pitchers and high, whirring fans, he picked up a table napkin the size of a diaper and spoke to me in a loud whisper, “Can you tell me what to do with this thing? Can I put it on my head to keep the draft off?”
Of course he had eaten in hotel dining rooms before. He knew about table napkins and pie forks. And my mother knew — she wasn’t even a country woman, to begin with. Nevertheless this was a huge event. Not exactly a pleasure — as Beryl must have meant it to be — but a huge, unsettling event. Eating a meal in public, only a few miles from home, eating in a big room full of people you didn’t know, the food served by a stranger, a snippy- looking girl who was probably a college student working at a summer job.
“I’d like the rooster,” my father said. “How long has he been in the pot?” It was only good manners, as he knew it, to joke with people who waited on him.
“Beg your pardon?” the girl said.
“Roast chicken,” said Beryl. “Is that okay for everybody?”
Mr. Florence was looking gloomy. Perhaps he didn’t care for jokes when it was his money that was being spent. Perhaps he had counted on something better than ice water to fill up the glasses.
The waitress put down a dish of celery and olives, and my mother said, “Just a minute while I give thanks.” She bowed her head and said quietly but audibly, “Lord, bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service, for Christ’s sake. Amen.” Refreshed, she sat up straight and passed the dish to me, saying, “Mind the olives. There’s stones in them.”
Beryl was smiling around at the room.
The waitress came back with a basket of rolls.
“Parker House!” Beryl leaned over and breathed in their smell. “Eat them while they’re hot enough to melt the butter!”
Mr. Florence twitched, and peered into the butter dish. “Is that what this is — butter? I thought it was Shirley Temple’s curls.”
His face was hardly less gloomy than before, but it was a joke, and his making it seemed to convey to us something of the very thing that had just been publicly asked for — a blessing.
“When he says something funny,” said Beryl — who often referred to Mr. Florence as “he” even when he was right there — “you notice how he always keeps a straight face? That reminds me of Mama. I mean of our mama, Marietta’s and mine. Daddy, when he made a joke you could see it coming a mile away — he couldn’t keep it off his face — but Mama was another story. She could look so sour. But she could joke on her deathbed. In fact, she did that very thing. Marietta, remember when she was in bed in the front room the spring before she died?”
“I remember she was in bed in that room,” my mother said. “Yes.”
“Well, Daddy came in and she was lying there in her clean nightgown, with the covers off, because the German lady from next door had just been helping her take a wash, and she was still there tidying up the bed. So Daddy wanted to be cheerful, and he said, ‘Spring must be coming. I saw a crow today.’ This must have been in March. And Mama said quick as a shot, ‘Well, you better cover me up then, before it looks in that window and gets any ideas!’ The German lady — Daddy said she just about dropped the basin. Because it was true, Mama was skin and bones; she was dying. But she could joke.”
Mr. Florence said, “Might as well when there’s no use to cry.”
“But she could carry a joke too far, Mama could. One time, one time, she wanted to give Daddy a scare. He was supposed to be interested in some girl that kept coming around to the works. Well, he was a big good-looking man. So Mama said, ‘Well, I’ll just do away with myself, and you can get on with her and see how you like it when I come back and haunt you.’ He told her not to be so stupid, and he went off downtown. And Mama went out to the barn and climbed on a chair and put a rope around her neck. Didn’t she, Marietta? Marietta went looking for her and she found her like that!”
My mother bent her head and put her hands in her lap, almost as if she was getting ready to say another grace.
“Daddy told me all about it, but I can remember anyway. I remember Marietta tearing off down the hill in her nightie, and I guess the German lady saw her go, and she came out and was looking for Mama, and somehow we all ended up in the barn — me too, and some kids I was playing with — and there was Mama up on a chair preparing to give Daddy the fright of his life. She’d sent Marietta after him. And the German lady starts wailing, ‘Oh, missus, come down missus, think of your little
