The Progress of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

noticed it. But I just spoke up and said, ‘Mama, how are you going to manage to hang yourself without that rope tied around the beam?’ ”
    Mr. Florence said, “That’d be a tough one.”
    “I spoiled her game. The German lady made coffee and we went over there and had a few treats, and, Marietta, you couldn’t find Daddy after all, could you? You could hear Marietta howling, coming up the hill, a block away.”
    “Natural for her to be upset,” my father said.
    “Sure it was. Mama went too far.”
    “She meant it,” my mother said. “She meant it more than you give her credit for.”
    “She meant to get a rise out of Daddy. That was their whole life together. He always said she was a hard woman to live with, but she had a lot of character. I believe he missed that, with Gladys.”
    “I wouldn’t know,” my mother said, in that particularly steady voice with which she always spoke of her father. “What he did say or didn’t say.”
    “People are dead now,” said my father. “It isn’t up to us to judge.”
    “I know,” said Beryl. “I know Marietta’s always had a different view.”
    My mother looked at Mr. Florence and smiled quite easily and radiantly. “I’m sure you don’t know what to make of all these family matters.”
    The one time that I visited Beryl, when Beryl was an old woman, all knobby and twisted up with arthritis, Beryl said, “Marietta got all Daddy’s looks. And she never did a thing with herself.Remember her wearing that old navy-blue crêpe dress when we went to the hotel that time? Of course, I know it was probably all she had, but did it have to be all she had? You know, I was scared of her somehow. I couldn’t stay in a room alone with her. But she had outstanding looks.” Trying to remember an occasion when I had noticed my mother’s looks, I thought of the time in the hotel, my mother’s pale-olive skin against the heavy white, coiled hair, her open, handsome face smiling at Mr. Florence—as if he was the one to be forgiven.
    I didn’t have a problem right away with Beryl’s story. For one thing, I was hungry and greedy, and a lot of my attention went to the roast chicken and gravy and mashed potatoes laid on the plate with an ice-cream scoop and the bright diced vegetables out of a can, which I thought much superior to those fresh from the garden. For dessert, I had a butterscotch sundae, an agonizing choice over chocolate. The others had plain vanilla ice cream.
    Why shouldn’t Beryl’s version of the same event be different from my mother’s? Beryl was strange in every way—everything about her was slanted, seen from a new angle. It was my mother’s version that held, for a time. It absorbed Beryl’s story, closed over it. But Beryl’s story didn’t vanish; it stayed sealed off for years, but it wasn’t gone. It was like the knowledge of that hotel and dining room. I knew about it now, though I didn’t think of it as a place to go back to. And indeed, without Beryl’s or Mr. Florence’s money, I couldn’t. But I knew it was there.
    The next time I was in the Wildwood Inn, in fact, was after I was married. The Lions Club had a banquet and dance there. The man I had married, Dan Casey, was a Lion. You could get a drink there by that time. Dan Casey wouldn’t have gone anywhere you couldn’t. Then the place was remodelled into the Hideaway, and now they have strippers every night but Sunday. On Thursday nights, they have a male stripper. I go there with people from the real-estate office to celebrate birthdays or other big events.
    The farm was sold for five thousand dollars in 1965. A man from Toronto bought it, for a hobby farm or just an investment. Aftera couple of years, he rented it to a commune. They stayed there, different people drifting on and off, for a dozen years or so. They raised goats and sold the milk to the health-food store that had opened up in town. They painted a rainbow across the side of the barn that faced the road. They