I didn’t mind being left with the old maid schoolteacher and her widow-woman
companion on those rare occasions when my parents were called
out of town. Every room of the house the old ladies shared was a treasure pile of
antiquities, so much to fascinate a ten-year-old boy. The past wasn’t real
for me, it was better than real. I would climb the front steps to the door that always
swung open before I pushed the bell—my satchel packed
with pajamas, toothbrush, the next day’s school clothes—and depart this Technicolor
world for one that was hand-tinted and historical,
every curio shelf and end table groaning with relics. A Philco radio that had once
sifted President Roosevelt’s voice from the star-dusted night
lit up when I turned the knob but would lisp only a strange and dated static no matter
where the needle landed, now just another piece of wood
to wipe down with lemon oil, something else dragging a story after it like a length
of broken tow chain sparking on the roadway. Faces in oval portraits
looked out at me with tight-lipped expressions as though they were not yet resigned
to their place under framer’s glass. I filled the house with questions,
those carefully curated rooms that were otherwise as silent as a page out of a three-
decades-old Life magazine. In my own time, every day began for no reason
and ended the same way, worn down minute by minute until it arrived at some
workable compact with the darkness. When I walked to school
the next morning, I would wonder how all the muted past could culminate in a
garish vista of two-tone cars and rayon clothes.
Inside the old ladies’ house it was quiet enough to hear the workings of the self-
adjusting mantle clock complaining that time had to pass at all,
time that would before long be flattened into photographs and landmarked by
what few objects might manage to survive, organized and sortable
like the ribbon-wrapped stack of letters in the writing desk posted with purple
3¢ stamps I coveted. One night after I had finished rereading the captions
in the World War II article and put away Vol. WXYZ of their Encyclopedia
Americana, Miss Ruth gave me some vintage coins to play with
from a box on her dresser. They didn’t look old at all, the zinc pennies still kept a
milky luster, the features of the striding Lady Liberty were sharply carved,
Mercury on the one thin dime was plump-cheeked, beautiful even, and I was
disappointed it would all still spend. I have no recollection
whether it was then or later that she told me these were the coins in her fiancé’s
pocket when a bullet laid him down on the fields of France.