OF all those times next door during my childhood, there are only four distinct memories. Two of them take place on the Donalds’ front porch, in the summertime. It is almost dark, and my father is smoking a cigar, and the women are fanning themselves, and suddenly all this serenity vanishes because of a change in the color of the sky. The sunset is long past, and yet the sky above the houses on the other side of the street is growing pink. There is only one thing it could be. Aunty goes indoors and finds out from the telephone operator where the fire is, but they do not jump in the car, because there is no car, and if you are in your right mind you don’t drive to a fire in a horse and buggy. Instead, my mother and Aunty Donald sit taking the catastrophe in from the porch swing. The whole sky is a frightening red now, and in their voices I hear something I have never heard before. It occurs to me that we might be witnessing The End of the World, so often mentioned in the Presbyterian Sunday school. In simple fact, it is the Orphans’ Home burning down.
No. 2: One of the things that Aunty Donald held against her husband was that he spoke with a Scottish accent. He had every right to. (He always referred to Scotland as “the old country,” and I thought as a child that it was the only place so called.) In the dusk, sitting on the porch steps, he suddenly exclaimed, “Pe’ll, Pe’ll, there’s a speeder on you!” And though she had been married to him for I don’t know how long — ten or fifteen years, I would guess — she affected not to understand that a “speeder” was a spider. She was from a little town nearby — Dover, Illinois — and according to the executor’s report owned property there at the time of her death, a house that was sold for $1,600, for which somebody had been paying $22 a month rent.
The two other set pieces both happen upstairs. We — my mother and I — are in Aunty’s bedroom, and on the big brass double bed there are a great many Christmas presents, wrapped either in white paper with red ribbon or red paper with white ribbon. They are of all shapes and sizes, and interest me very much. Aunty is showing my mother something that still has to be wrapped — a bottle of cologne or some crocheted doilies, that sort of thing — and my mother is admiring whatever it is, and as I stand there, it is borne in on me, by intuition, that in all this collection of presents there is nothing for me.
The final memory is of a nightmare that I had when I was wide awake. I am in bed, in the Donalds’ spare room, and the door is open, and I can see out into the hall. At the head of the stairs there is a large picture of a man in a nightshirt on a tumbled bed, by a brook, over which red-coated huntsmen are jumping their horses. The man is asleep and doesn’t know the danger he is in. The horses’ hoofs are going to come down on him and kill him, and there is nothing I can do to save him. Though it does not take very much to make me cry, this time I do not. I know that Aunty is just down the hall and would hear me and get up out of bed and come to me, and still I do not make a sound. I stare at the picture until I fall asleep and dream about it. What I was doing there I do not know. I had been left with Aunty for the night. My mother and father must have been away, and perhaps they took my brother with them.
Twenty-five or thirty years later, I spoke of the picture to Aunty Donald, and asked if I could see it. By that time, my mother was dead and we had moved away, like the Kings, and there was a layer of dust over everything. She was no longer the housekeeper that she used to be, but apart from this there was no change in her house, which pleased me, because there was nothing but change everywhere else. Our house, next door, had been sold to strangers and the furniture scattered. The house is still standing, but I have never been inside it since the day the moving men emptied it room by room. To come to see Dr. and Aunty Donald was to walk straight into the past. Ninth Street was lined with handsome shade trees that kept the houses from seeming ordinary, which they were, Aunty Donald’s house no less than the others. But the inside of her house was not ordinary, it was amazing. When she was a young woman nobody thought her taste peculiar, for the simple reason that everyone else’s taste was peculiar, too. It was an age that admired individuality, and in most cases individuality was arrived at through the marriage of Grand Rapids and art nouveau. Accident and sentiment also played a part. The total effect was usually homelike and comfortable, once the eye got over the shock. But a whole generation after all the other beaded portieres in Lincoln had been taken down, Aunty Donald’s continued to divide the sitting room from the dark, gloomy dining room, and when you pushed your way through, it made an agreeable rattle. Along with the portiere, all sorts of things survived their period. For example, two long peacock feathers in a hand-painted vase on the upright piano that was never tuned and never played on. In an old snapshot that I came upon recently, I saw, to my surprise and pleasure, that most of my mother’s friends were, as young women, beautiful. Some of them went on being beautiful, but Aunty Donald did not. The Donalds had no children. She lost both her parents. And Dr. Donald lost a good deal of money in a business venture that I never understood. Add to this those grotesque but common deprivations that people don’t like to talk about, such as false teeth and bifocals and the fear of falling. Aunty Donald was sufficiently aware of all that she had lost, and did not want to add to it by throwing things away — even such things as the evening paper and second-class mail. Also clothes that were worn out or long out of fashion. Cups that had lost their handle, saucers that had no cup. The wallpaper had not even been changed, but was allowed to go on fading. In the sitting room, up next to the ceiling, at repeated intervals the same three knights rode up to the same castle that they used to ride up to when I was a small child. So it was reasonable to assume that the picture of the man sprawled out on the tumbled bed by a brook was still hanging at the head of the stairs, but it turned out that the picture was not there. Dr. Donald had taken it to Chicago, and it was hanging in a club near the stockyards. He had loaned it to them, Aunty said, but she would get it back. From that time on, she nagged him to bring the picture home so I could have it, and he promised to. Each time I went to see them he would say, “Billie, I haven’t forgotten about your picture.” And one night the club burned down, and then she had something else to blame him for. One more thing. The truth is, he — The truth is I have no idea what the truth is. Perhaps he gave the picture to the club, and would have been embarrassed to ask for it back, and so pretended that he kept forgetting to ask for it. Anyway, it is preserved forever, the way all lost things are. It is quite safe, from mildew and from the burning pile (Nov. 19 Virgil Edmonds, George Colby, Roy Miller, Clarence Sylvester, labor for cleaning decedent’s residence, $12, $16, $16, and what a bonfire it must have been).
Whatever the picture was like, it wasn’t the picture I remember; I know this much about pictures looked at in childhood. It was in color, perhaps hand-colored but more likely a lithograph. The man on the bed was not being trampled to death but dreaming of the hunt or steeplechase or whatever it was that was going on in the air above his bed. And I am glad I do not have it, because I cannot throw things away, either, and the attic is full of souvenirs of the past from which the magic has long since evaporated. The playhouse, strangely, I still regret. I find myself wondering if it is still there. The executor’s report does not list it.
I ASSUMED that Aunty loved me, because of the way her face would light up when she opened the front door and saw me standing there. I know she loved my mother and father. And everybody loved my brother Edward, who was called “Happy.” They loved him with a special love because when he was five years old he got his left leg caught in the wheel of a buggy and it had to be cut off above the knee. But they loved him before that, because he was a beautiful little boy, and because he was a handful. Being good, being well-behaved, simply didn’t interest him. He did what he felt like doing, and spankings had no effect. Anything you didn’t want him to investigate you had to keep locked up or on a shelf too high for him to reach. He gave up cigars when he was five. In the space of five minutes one afternoon, he turned the hose on my mother and my Aunt Edith and my father. The w
omen retired shrieking into the house but my father walked right through the stream of water to the outside faucet and cut it off at the source. My Aunt Annette and Dr. Donald both worshiped the ground my brother walked on. The look in their eyes when they spoke to him or about him, the pleasure they took in telling stories about things he did when he was little, the way they said his name made this quite plain. As it happened, they were also devoted to each other. From the beginning of Time all these friendships were; from before I was born. And they lasted out the lifetime of all the people involved, and most of them lived to be very old. Dr. Donald was a small, compact man, in appearance and in character totally unlike anyone else in Lincoln. He was a horse dealer as well as a veterinary, and at one time he had a livery stable on the east side of the courthouse square. During the First World War, he supplied horses to the American Expeditionary Force. There is a picture of my brother in a pony cart alone and holding the reins. My father was earning a modest salary, and he was not extravagant by nature, and I rather think that the pony cart and the succession of ponies must have come from Dr. Donald’s stable and were eventually returned to it. I was under the impression that I, too, would have a pony, when I was old enough. Perhaps I would have, except for the fact that the world was changing. My father sold the carriage horse when I was six years old, and bought a seven-passenger Chalmers. Where the barn had stood there was now a garage. The change from horses to cars cannot have made Dr. Donald any happier than it made me. It didn’t affect Aunty Donald one way or the other, because she never went anywhere except to our house, and she didn’t come there often. If you wanted to see her, you had to go to her house. She went to my mother’s funeral, I have no doubt. And then, just before her own, she went to the hospital and to a nursing home. In between, for forty-one years, she never went out of her front door except to sweep the leaves off the front porch or to open the mailbox, or to pick up the Evening Star. The reason she gave for not going anywhere was that it was not suitable for the wife of a horse doctor to accept invitations. The horse doctor was universally loved and admired. People went to him for advice about financial matters and they also went to him when the time had come for them to open their hearts to somebody. In short, it was all in her head.
He lived to be almost ninety, and during his last illness, which went on for months, she took care of him herself. Often she was up all night with him. After he died, the change set in. She looked older, of course, but then she was old. In order to sit down, when you went to see her, you had to remove a pile of newspapers or a party hat with tired-looking cloth roses on it or a box of old letters or, sometimes, it was hard to say exactly what — an object. She would be pleased to see you, but you had the feeling as you were leaving that when the front door closed she would pick up the conversation with herself where it had left off and forget that you’d been there until she got a card from you at Christmastime. A cousin of mine who took care of her legal affairs for a time found that if he wanted to get her signature on a paper it was a good idea to telephone first, because she had stopped answering the door. She was deaf, but not that deaf; she just let the doorbell ring. I have tried this myself. In a little while, sometimes in a surprisingly little while, it stops ringing, leaving instead a silence that is full of obscure satisfaction. The same thing was true for the man who came to read the gas and electric-light meter, and for the salesman who was trying to interest her in a life-insurance policy, and for the minister who was concerned about her soul, and for the neighbors who wanted to bring some warm food over to her in a covered dish — they all took to telephoning first. Sometimes she let the telephone ring and ring.
A young woman turned up who had known Dr. Donald. I don’t know her name or where she came from, but she was a businesswoman, energetic and capable, and with an understanding of financial affairs that most women did not have, and the patience to explain them. Her first visit was followed by others. It is easy to deduce from what happened what must have led up to it. The pleasure of finding a letter in the mailbox instead of the usual circulars, and of putting fresh sheets on the bed in the spare room because someone was coming on the six-fifteen train. What could it have been like except having the child, the affectionate daughter, that she had wanted and been denied? At last, someone was concerned about her. All sorts of people who actually were concerned about her — her husband’s friends, the men at the bank, and the neighbors on Ninth Street — were satisfied that she was being taken care of and that they needn’t worry about her anymore. So they weren’t worried about her, until somebody gossiping over the back fence said that Mrs. Donald had said that the young woman wanted her to sign over to her everything she owned, with the understanding that she would take care of Mrs. Donald as long as she lived. In a small place, word always gets around — rather quickly, in fact. And small-town people are not in the habit of shrugging off responsibility. Two of Dr. Donald’s friends — much younger men than he was, but he had a gift for friendship and it was not limited to his contemporaries — went to see Aunty Donald, and shortly afterward the young woman retired from the field.
Unfortunately, though they could protect her from being taken advantage of, they could not protect her from loneliness. She started feeding a stray cat, and then she let the cat into the house one cold night, and the cat had kittens. The dilemma is classical, and how you solve it depends on what kind of person you are. Between five-fifteen and five-thirty every morning, the back door opened and out came the cats. The smell of coffee drifted through the house, and another day was added to the long chain that went back, past the First World War and the Spanish-American War and the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, to the eighteen-seventies, when things were so much pleasanter and quieter than they are now. The chain is not as strong as it seems: The beaded portiere fell down. All by itself. For no reason. In the middle of the night, she told me. It couldn’t have been caused by a sudden stirring of air, because the windows were closed. When she came downstairs in the morning, the first thing she saw was the empty doorway, and then she saw the glass beads all over the sitting-room floor.
THE rest I know only from hearsay. I never saw her again after this visit. She fell and broke her hip. Out of the kindness of her heart, the woman who lived next door put food out for the cats, but no one expected Aunty Donald to come home from the hospital. She did come home, looking a lot thinner and older, and she went on as before, except that the experience had taught her something. If an accident could befall her, it could befall her cats. She found it harder and harder to let them out into a world full of vicious dogs, poisoned meat, boys with slingshots and BB guns, and people who don’t like cats. She put down some shredded newspaper in a roasting pan in the back hall and showed it to the cats, and they quickly got the idea, and after that she didn’t have to let them out of the house at all. At her age one doesn’t go around opening windows recklessly in all kinds of weather, and so the house — to put it bluntly — smelled. Since she never went out of it, she had no idea how strong the smell really was. Sometimes when she had neglected to put down fresh paper, the cats retired to a corner somewhere, and this added to the unpleasantness. For she was half blind and could not be expected to go around on her hands and knees searching for the source of the smell. And if she had someone in to clean, as people often urged her to do, what was to prevent the cleaning woman from lifting the piano scarf or the corner of the bedroom rug and finding who knows how much money and putting it quietly in her apron pocket? No thank you.
One day she heard the doorbell ring, and this time it didn’t stop ringing. It went on and on until finally, against her better judgment, she opened the door. The caller was not Death, but it might just as well have been. My brother is a forceful, decisive man, with a big heart and a loud, cheerful voice and enough courage for three people, but he had to excuse himself after five minutes and go to the front door for a breath of fresh air. By nightfall she was in bed in a nursing home. She lived on a few weeks, expecting that this time, too,
she would go home, and instead she died in her sleep.
THE Donalds’ house had too many trees around it, and so the grass was thin. The house was heated by hot-air registers, and had its own smell, as all houses did in those days. I don’t remember ever having a meal in the dark dining room, though I must have, and I don’t remember any flowers, inside or out, unless possibly iris around the foundations. No, I’m sure there weren’t any. The flowers were on our side of the fence. Flower beds around a birdbath in the backyard, flower beds all along one side of the house, and vines on trellises — a trumpet vine, clematis, a grape arbor. What I remember cannot be true, if only because the climate of Illinois is not right for it, but the effect is of a full-blown lushness that I associate with Lake Como, which I have never seen, and old-fashioned vaudeville curtains. What can my mother and Aunty Donald have seen in each other? Something; otherwise the names of my older and younger brothers and my name would not have appeared in her will as beneficiaries — one-seventeenth of the estate each: $1,182.55, less Illinois inheritance tax amounting to $108.72. Or about twice her annual income. How did she live in the nineteen-fifties on $55 a month? On air; she must have subsisted on air and old memories and fear — the fear of something happening to her cats.