Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [61]
But I’m not sure of this. My mother had arranged things so that most of the time I seem to have been quite unaware of my condition. She claimed that she was teaching me at home because of a bronchial ailment and the need to protect me from the onslaught of germs that occurs in the first couple of years at school. Whether anybody believed her I don’t know. And as to my father’s hostility, that had spread so wide in our house that I really don’t believe I felt singled out by it.
And here at the cost of repeating myself I must say that I think my mother did right. The emphasis on one notable flaw, the goading and ganging up, would have caught me too young and with nowhere to hide. Things are different now, and the danger to a child afflicted as I was would be of too much fuss and showy kindness, not of taunts and isolation. Or so it seems to me. The life of those times took much of its liveliness, its wit and folklore, as my mother may have known, from pure viciousness.
Until a couple of decades ago—maybe more—there was another building on our property. I knew it as a small barn or large wooden she’d where Pete stored his tools and where various things once of use to us were put out of the way until there was some decision about what to do with them. It was torn down shortly after Pete was replaced by an energetic young couple, Ginny and Franz, who brought their own up-to-date equipment in their own truck. Later they were not available, having gone into market gardening, but by that time they were able to supply their teenage children to cut the grass, and my mother had lost interest in doing anything else.
“I’ve just let it go,” she said. “It’s surprising how easy it is, just to let things go.”
To get back to the building—how I circle and dither around this subject—there was a time, before it became just a storage shed, when people lived in it. There was a couple named the Bells, who were cook-housekeeper and gardener-chauffeur to my grandparents. My grandfather owned a Packard which he never learned to drive. Both the Bells and the Packard were gone in my time, but the place was still referred to as Bells’ Cottage.
For a few years in my childhood Bells’ Cottage was rented to a woman named Sharon Suttles. She lived there with her daughter, Nancy. She had come to town with her husband, a doctor who was setting up his first practice, and within a year or so he died, of blood poisoning. She remained in town with her baby, having no money and, as was said, no people. This must have meant no people who could help her or who had offered to take her in. At some time she got a job in my father’s insurance office, and came to live in Bells’ Cottage. I am not certain about when all this happened. I have no memory of them moving in, or of the cottage when it was empty. It was painted, at that time, a dusty pink, and I always thought of that as Mrs. Suttles’s choice, as if she could not have lived in a house of any other color.
I called her Mrs. Suttles, of course. But I was aware of her first name, as I seldom was of any other grown-up woman’s. Sharon was an unusual name in those days. And it had a connection with a hymn I knew from Sunday school, which my mother allowed me to attend because there was close monitoring and no recess. We sang hymns whose words were flashed on a screen, and I think that most of us even before we learned to read got some idea of the verses from their shape in front of us.
By cool Siloam’s shady rill
How sweet the lily grows.
How sweet the breath, beneath the hill,
Of Sharon’s dewy rose.
I can’t believe that there was actually a rose in a corner of the screen and yet I saw one, I see one, of a faded pink, whose aura was transferred to the name Sharon.
I don’t mean to say that I fell in love with Sharon