EXCERPT FROM THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY


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FROM CHAPTER TWO

.......... The house we lived in was built in 1908, although of course I knew this only long after we had left it.

..........Our side of the house was larger than our neighbors' and extended farther back than theirs, so that there was one place in the house where we had windows on both east and west. The narrow side room at the back that served as pantry and also as a passage from the dining room into the kitchen was where we had the one west window. Its walls were wainscoted with tongue-and-groove strips. Possibly they had been varnished once, but by the time we lived there, everything from the baseboard up was painted the same light yellow as the kitchen. It was here, looking through the kitchen door with the west window just behind me, that I saw my father lift Ingie up to the ceiling.



..........When we were outdoors, as I've mentioned, we spent most of our time in the side yard, or on the porch, or in the "front" yard, by which we meant that part of the lawn running along Fourth Street rather than Maple. I do remember going around the corner onto the other leg of the front yard, although rarely, since it was thought of as properly belonging to our neighbors.

..........An enormous elm stood near the porch steps on their side of the yard, a tree large enough that the very earth sloped up toward its trunk from a considerable distance all around. Because of the deep shade there, the grass on this side of the house was thinner and more fine than on our lawns. Our neighbors' side had actually once been the front of the house. Not only did they have a pair of large windows in their living room facing west onto the porch, and a stained-glass transom over their front door, but at the curb on Maple Street stood an old iron hitching post once intended for the convenience of visitors arriving by horse and buggy.

..........The hitching post was painted black and had a ring at its tip that I enjoyed lifting up in order to let it fall down again with a clink against one side of the iron post or the other. My first memory of my great aunts Marie and Lutie is from a summer afternoon when I was standing by the hitching post as they walked past on their way to visit my mother. The grass underfoot was burned and dry. My father was still away, I'm certain. The feeling of great antiquity that lingers in the memory makes me place it in late July or early August of 1945.

..........Marie and Lutie approached from the north, walking on Maple Street from Third. In the memory I didn't become unaware of them until they were little more than ten or twelve arm-lengths away. I stood there looking at them. As always, they walked side by side. As always, they wore dresses of a thin dark material, open at the neck, belted loosely at the waist, the hems coming down halfway below their knees. As always, they walked in near-unison, with a hint of industry in their steps that fell just short of haste but had about it an air of something greater than ordinary determination. They walked with their heads bent forward slightly, as if they were engaged in a conversation with each other, although a conversation in which neither of them was saying anything, but both instead were listening attentively.

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..........I have no other memory of Marie and Lutie ever being at our house on Fourth Street. I learned later, though, that during the war they made a point, every third or fourth week, of walking across town to call on my mother.

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..........By the time of this memory, Marie was already sixty-eight, Lutie already sixty-one. They stopped in front of me and bent down where I stood in the sunlight, on the dry grass, beside the hitching post that, I remember, felt warm from the sun when I touched it.

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..........I don't remember what they said, or how long they stood there, leaning with their large faces bent down toward mine. But I remember watching them walk away from me, in an image that I understand now was a glimpse through a hole in time.

..........Having thought back on it countless times, I suppose that a certain kind of perfected or ideal version of that moment may have emerged. But whether this is so or not, I swear that I am faithful to the concrete truth and detail of what I saw that afternoon.

..........I stood by the hitching post and watched them move away from me to the corner, make the left turn onto Fourth Street, then continue toward the walkway that would take them up onto the porch and then to the front door of our house.

..........In the memory, as their twin figures move away from me, there is no sound. The afternoon is quiet, the air warm, sunlight falling in leaf-shadow patterns on the cracked squares of the old sidewalk.

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.....Not until years later was I to understand what actually happened that moment or how profoundly it would shape and nurture the rest of my life: the fact that one summer afternoon when the world was on the edge of changing forever, my great-aunts passed by, side by side, in long dark dresses, their heads bent slightly forward, one of them-it was Lutie, I'm certain-carrying a cloth-covered basket on her arm. ..........

.......... I know now that at that moment they were not simply my two great-aunts, but a window for me to see through-with the result that, for a brief moment in the summer of 1945, when I was almost four years old, standing near the curb, on the grass, by the hitching post, I looked back through them into the nineteenth century, and was changed forever.




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