Patrons had been bustling all this Sunday morning and Danny was made to wait for his smoke break. There were elderly people who’d known him as a kid and children with their parents. Old Mister rested on the stool behind the cash register, a hefty man everyone called Old Mister as a sign of his professionalism and severity. Old Mister wore a clean shirt with a tie and a big smile for his customers and he’d never smoked a cigarette in his life.
Danny refilled the coffee and changed the tables. All around him was the cacophony of the customer’s demands and crass bellowing from the open kitchen. An old woman who’d been a schoolteacher got snappy, wondering where her food was. Danny raced to the plate for her and made a round with the coffee mug. Then Old Mister said he could go out for a smoke.
The sky was a chalky white and the dry air tasted of approaching snowfall. Danny sat on a crate with his legs crossed. He took a folded square of creased paper from his jacket pocket and pressed it open upon his knees as he lit a cigarette. These papers had been with him for a while, ever since he’d discovered them amongst his mother’s things.
She’d died at the age of eighty-six, and he’d been clearing out the boxes left in the basement of the daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend his mother had made near the end of her life. The woman was a dental hygienist in town who’d sat next to Danny in sophomore biology. She’d approached him at the funeral, telling him how she’d came to own the things. Danny didn’t always have the time, but he’d been going over to the house to look over the old possessions, to decide what needed to be saved or discarded.
One of the boxes held these papers, some memoir writing, both his mother and father had done towards the end of their lives. With it was a note saying how sentimental they’d gotten, and how maybe Danny and their grandchildren would like to know about their lives. His mother must’ve gotten fantastical in her old age, for there weren’t grandchildren. Maybe she’d been lying to herself or had gotten him confused with someone else.
Danny didn’t know. His mother was dreamy and his father hadn’t ever had much to say. Danny had only managed to read his father’s writings once. Even though he’d been drunk when he’d done so, not wanting to face it otherwise, nor knowing how to. Above where his mother’s history began, there was the last paragraph of what his father had written.
With that, I go to the pond most days. There’s something I like in it. The surface is shiny, so I see my own reflection and try to measure it against what it would look like if I’d died as a boy of twenty like the others. It occurred to me recently that I used to tell people I fought in Okinawa. I don’t know why I ever said it. I can’t remember the reason for it. If I’m correct, I was stationed in Hawaii. It was an alright time, safe and very dull.
His father had had too agreeable a life and was bitter on what he hadn’t gotten. He hadn’t been so happy at the end and revulsion undertowed his recollections. He despised his wife and the life he’d made with her. Danny hadn’t been mentioned. There was mention of a daughter, Danny’s elder sister, born without a heartbeat.
His mother had been brisk and active and hadn’t mentioned the dead. She’d always had friends, and people doing things for her. After his father’s death, she liked to reminisce. Danny sat within the nursing facility around the other fading people. Danny jerked his head back to see if Old Mister was calling him and then shrugged and lit another cigarette.
She wrote, I was born in Portland and raised in Kittery. My parents brought me home in an automobile. Mother had my photograph taken. Father was more old-fashioned and wanted my portrait drawn. A boy in town did it, and the boy later became famous in New York City.
I was the first of three children, and my two siblings died before I knew them well. My sister was one year behind me and she was buried in the family plot behind Saint Anne’s Episcopal Church and Parsonage. My brother was a toddler when he fell off the side of a boat crossing Wilson Pond and drowned. There was a photograph of us but I haven’t ever looked at it and when my husband found the photo I told him to burn it.
My childhood was happy. I walked and talked from an early age. But my father said that I needn’t study so hard, though I did so without them knowing. I knew all sorts of things about plants at an early age, and I knew also that I would be a scientist.
People laughed too much that I loved to learn new things, so I stopped at it. When my son, Daniel, was little, I showed him everything that I had once learned and prayed hard that he would be a scientist like I thought I might be. He never was interested in learning. He must’ve taken after his father and I once told my husband that, but my husband was embarrassed. It’s true that my husband became successful because of “luck, friends, and health.”
I got into the habit of not bringing home my report cards because they were too good and I didn’t want to make my parents nervous about me. My mother once told me, after I’d married, that she was worried I might’ve become too independent. She said if I had a sister, then maybe I could’ve done what I wanted. But she was worried that I wouldn’t have gotten married and she wouldn’t have grandchildren, no legacy for the family to live on through. I understand her concern, for we were the descendants of the first settlers of Piscataqua Plantation.
I didn’t bring home my reports and when I was asked at the dinner table how my day was, I talked only of my best friends and of the boys who’d taken an interest in me. This pleased both my father and my mother. My father worked in a bank and made monthly trips to Boston. My mother was slight and nervous. They liked traveling to Europe until my mother became superstitious about the sea and refused to go. Then she took to bed. I took care of her, assisting her with household things and nursing her when she was troubled. Daniel must remember playing with his toys on her bedroom floor.
School was so easy for me, and nobody liked to hear about it! Father certainly didn’t. He was in banking because that’s what he’d been trained in, and he used to delight in telling me how poorly he used to do in school, and how little it mattered. He was always going to be a banker, and that’s why he went to Harvard University. Then he went to work with his older brother and their father. The men always wore fine black suits. They smoked pipes, but they didn’t drink.
My mother was a homemaker and entertained guests when she was well. She liked making sure our house looked “remarkable” (which was her favorite word) and I helped too. I knew that if I helped, then Mother would let me stay with her and her friends. I used to have tea with many old women, and I would tell them about my classes and the boys that liked me and the funny things my friends would tell me. Everyone thought I was “delightful,” and they said that I would soon be a mother and wife like them. That occurred.
When I went to my college, I did as the other girls. Nobody except for the ugly ones were interested in studies. The rest of us threw parties and entertained and they weren’t invited! Sometimes we went dancing in a small “club” on the main street. The club played jazz music. The girls had their own dormitories and no boys were allowed! We went to the fraternity where the older boys were. There, I met my husband.
He was then only a boy studying “dollars and cents.” When I took him home to meet my mother and father, everyone was relieved that he was to be a banker. After the war, Father got him a job at the company. All the men I have ever known worked in business. There were some farmers and clerks in town, but those were people I didn’t care to know. Although they knew me, my husband would come home sometimes and ask me how I got so popular in town. Because I gave parties and always smiled.
I made sure to be kind even though I had to stay home most of the time, taking care of my mother and volunteering at the hospital and seeing my friends. I did whatever I wanted that didn’t make money because that would be low. The only sort of women that made money were the pathetic ones that had lazy husbands or lived alone. Some had children without a husband. They probably thought they would get married again. Of course, men don’t want women with children. I had Daniel when I was young and there weren’t any other children for us.
It was hard enough raising him because I wasn’t any natural “mother,” but I did so because I hated standing out or being different. Father and mother said the same thing. I know my husband would rather stand out in the rain without a jacket then admit he hadn’t interest in working in a bank or fighting in a war. He fought hard in Japan killing people and would’ve gone back over again if President Harry Truman didn’t bomb them all to make the fighting stop. In America people ran in the streets crying with happiness that the bomb got dropped and my husband cried a long time because he didn’t have to go fight anymore.
That was a good thing because Daniel was born by then and he needed his father there to raise him, not be over fighting for America. We settled down on our nice house down the road from where I was raised and my husband went to the office every day and I entertained. When my Mother died, I entertained. I would’ve gone back to school maybe if I got divorced like one of my friends but I’m glad I didn’t. I would’ve probably gone to be a veterinarian. That friend ended up managing a department store and I don’t know what else happened to her.
I never minded making our home and holding parties. I wasn’t a natural cook, but I took classes and worked from my mother’s recipe book. It got better. Daniel must’ve thought so. He was fat from an early age, and his father said that Daniel was eating too much and not getting active. Daniel wasn’t “sporty.” He wasn’t good at school and it was odd watching him grow up and not learn how to do things the way everyone else did.
He went to college in Boston for a year and then he was going to go to the war but they wouldn’t take him. His father and I thought that was a good thing but we wondered why the army wouldn’t take him. There was something wrong with him physically, but I don’t know what it was. And what about school? Daniel simply couldn’t figure out anything about himself but I think he is a good man and lived alright. I guess I don’t know myself.
I know myself my husband would’ve set him up at the company if he’d managed to finish school, but my husband couldn’t bring him in. There were many other opportunities for Daniel. But they weren’t taken up, so we had to move on to ourselves. I made sure to keep myself occupied with charities and parties too. I made watercolor paintings and showed them at the library and the town center. I remember bringing down my paintings from our house, walking down the same old streets I remember from when I was a child. And I would go home to see my husband and tell him all about it and we would laugh and laugh in our sitting room, staring out the window and thinking how wonderful a life we’ve led.
His mother had written more about a sick duck she’d nursed back to health and her interests in birdwatching and a vacation she’d taken through Europe. About his father getting sick with cancer and about the “happiest day of their lives” and a ribbon she got at a summer festival for a baked apple pie and a picture book she’d helped to illustrate.
Danny wanted to read more but he’d finished three cigarettes and Old Mister was shouting at him to mop the front room before lunch service began.
