The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [16]
What was to be said? The aunts, like those who engage in a chat with royalty, would venture no remarks of their own, but could answer questions. They offered no refreshments. It was clear that only a great effort of will kept them all from running away and hiding, like Aunt Susan, who never did reappear while we were there. What was felt in that room was the pain of human contact. I was hypnotized by it. The fascinating pain; the humiliating necessity.
My father did have some idea of how to proceed. He started out on the weather. The need for rain, the rain in July that spoiled the hay, last year’s wet spring, floods long past, the prospects or non-prospects of a rainy fall. This talk steadied them, and he asked about the cows, the driving horse whose name was Nelly and the workhorses Prince and Queen, the garden; did the blight get on their tomatoes?
“No it didn’t.”
“How many quarts did you do down?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Did you make any chili sauce? Did you make some juice?” “Juice and chili sauce. Yes.”
“So you won’t starve next winter. You’ll be falling into flesh, next.” Giggles broke from a couple of them and my father took heart, continued teasing. He inquired whether they were doing much dancing these days. He shook his head as he pretended to recall their reputation for running around the country to dances, smoking, cutting up. He said they were a bad lot, they wouldn’t get married because they’d rather flirt; why, he couldn’t hold up his head for the shame of them.
My mother broke in then. She must have meant to rescue them, thinking it cruel to tease them in this way, dwelling on just what they had never had, or been.
“That is a lovely piece of furniture,” she said. “That sideboard. I always have admired it.”
Flappers, my father said, that’s what they were, in their prime. My mother went over to look at the kitchen dresser, which was pine, and very heavy and tall. The knobs on all the doors and drawers were not quite round but slightly irregular, either from the making, or from all the hands that had pulled on them.
“You could have an antique dealer come in here and offer you a hundred dollars for that,” my mother said. “If that ever happens, don’t take it. The table and chairs as well. Don’t let anybody smooth-talk you into selling them before you find out what they’re really worth. I know what I’m talking about.” Without asking permission she examined the dresser, fingered the knobs, looked around at the back. “I can’t tell you what it’s worth myself but if you ever want to sell it I will get it appraised by the best person I can find. That’s not all,” she said, stroking the pine judiciously. “You have a fortune’s worth of furniture in this house. You sit tight on it. You have the old furniture that was made around here, and there’s hardly any of that left. People threw it out, around the turn of the century, they bought Victorian things when they started getting prosperous. The things that didn’t get thrown out are worth money and they’re going to be worth more. I’m telling you.”
So she was. But they could not take such telling. They could no more understand her than if she had been spouting lunacy. Possibly the word antique was not known to them. She was talking about their kitchen dresser but she was talking about it in terms they had no understanding of. If a dealer came into the house and offered them money? Nobody came into their house. Selling the dresser was probably as hard for them to imagine as selling the kitchen wall. None of them would look at anything but their aproned laps.
“So I guess that’s lucky, for the ones that never got prosperous,” my father said, to ease things, but they could not answer him, either. They would know the meaning of prosperous but they would never have used such a word, would never have got their tongues around it, nor their minds around the idea