August, they went to a place called Chautauqua in western New York State. I had never heard of people who went on vacation so that they could attend lectures on current events, go to Bible study and listen to the symphony at night. I went along with them three times and always had a good time, but when I returned home and had to explain what this place was to my friends or their parents, I realized how odd it sounded. It was as though Tom and Melita lived life under a belljar, cut off from other humans. The people in their church treated them that way. The preacher and his wife constituted their own social circle.
I never heard anyone speak unkindly of my aunt, except my mother, and she only ever complained of how saintly her sister was. Aunt Melita was a quiet, sweet-tempered woman who lived in her husband’s shadow—lived to make him happy however she could: by cooking what he liked to eat, by deferring to his opinions and tolerating his impatience and his habit of always seeming in a hurry. I thought of her—I believe everyone did—as having no life of her own, unless one can be said to have a life that is led in continual subservience to another. Part of this was occupational hazard: a preacher’s wife in that time and place was defined by what her husband did for a living, although neither my aunt nor my uncle would have called what he did a job. They would have said it was a calling, and she was part of that.
My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, after their one daughter died in infancy back in the twenties. Wherever I went with them, I was mistaken for their grandson. Aunt Melita was fifteen years older than my mother, and by the time I knew her, her hair was already turning gray. She never bothered to color it, much to my mother’s annoyance: “I don’t see why you don’t try a little rinse, Melita. You know, a man likes to have his wife look young.” I thought of my mother as the modern member of her family. She kept up with current fashion trends, drove her own car, bought her vegetables in the frozen section of the supermarket and got her hair done every week. More than that, she moved at what I considered a modern pace. She was always in a rush. Aunt Melita, in contrast, never did anything in a hurry,cooked from scratch and never got a permanent until she was in her seventies. It impressed me that someone who was born before the airplane was invented, when everyone cooked over a woodstove and almost no one had electricity, a telephone or a car, could handle all the changes of the century through which she lived with such grace. But my aunt, however diffident she may have seemed, had a very clear notion of who she was, and changes beyond her doorstep seemed to affect her not at all, perhaps because she had seen so much of it.
It was from my aunt that I first learned the lesson that the people you know best, or think you know best, can with the turn of a phrase or a trick of the light seem altogether mysterious, leaving you to wonder if anything you thought you knew is true. When I spent the night at my uncle and aunt’s house, I was usually asleep long before my aunt turned in, but on those rare occasions when for some reason I couldn’t sleep, she would let me watch her take her hair down and comb it out. She wore it long, halfway down her back, but during the day she kept it tucked into a neat bun until it was time for bed. Watching her take out the comb and the pins that held everything in place and then watching her hair fall like smoke around her face was like watching a magic trick, because with her hair down, she looked quite different: younger, less sharply defined, but more present somehow, more vulnerable, enough to make it seem as though the version of herself that she showed the world for most of her waking life were nothing more than a screen, a way of putting distance between herself and that world. Seeing her at her mirror with the brush moving through her hair always made me
I never heard anyone speak unkindly of my aunt, except my mother, and she only ever complained of how saintly her sister was. Aunt Melita was a quiet, sweet-tempered woman who lived in her husband’s shadow—lived to make him happy however she could: by cooking what he liked to eat, by deferring to his opinions and tolerating his impatience and his habit of always seeming in a hurry. I thought of her—I believe everyone did—as having no life of her own, unless one can be said to have a life that is led in continual subservience to another. Part of this was occupational hazard: a preacher’s wife in that time and place was defined by what her husband did for a living, although neither my aunt nor my uncle would have called what he did a job. They would have said it was a calling, and she was part of that.
My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, after their one daughter died in infancy back in the twenties. Wherever I went with them, I was mistaken for their grandson. Aunt Melita was fifteen years older than my mother, and by the time I knew her, her hair was already turning gray. She never bothered to color it, much to my mother’s annoyance: “I don’t see why you don’t try a little rinse, Melita. You know, a man likes to have his wife look young.” I thought of my mother as the modern member of her family. She kept up with current fashion trends, drove her own car, bought her vegetables in the frozen section of the supermarket and got her hair done every week. More than that, she moved at what I considered a modern pace. She was always in a rush. Aunt Melita, in contrast, never did anything in a hurry,cooked from scratch and never got a permanent until she was in her seventies. It impressed me that someone who was born before the airplane was invented, when everyone cooked over a woodstove and almost no one had electricity, a telephone or a car, could handle all the changes of the century through which she lived with such grace. But my aunt, however diffident she may have seemed, had a very clear notion of who she was, and changes beyond her doorstep seemed to affect her not at all, perhaps because she had seen so much of it.
It was from my aunt that I first learned the lesson that the people you know best, or think you know best, can with the turn of a phrase or a trick of the light seem altogether mysterious, leaving you to wonder if anything you thought you knew is true. When I spent the night at my uncle and aunt’s house, I was usually asleep long before my aunt turned in, but on those rare occasions when for some reason I couldn’t sleep, she would let me watch her take her hair down and comb it out. She wore it long, halfway down her back, but during the day she kept it tucked into a neat bun until it was time for bed. Watching her take out the comb and the pins that held everything in place and then watching her hair fall like smoke around her face was like watching a magic trick, because with her hair down, she looked quite different: younger, less sharply defined, but more present somehow, more vulnerable, enough to make it seem as though the version of herself that she showed the world for most of her waking life were nothing more than a screen, a way of putting distance between herself and that world. Seeing her at her mirror with the brush moving through her hair always made me
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