Free Duet for Three by Joan Barfoot Page B

women would cook and serve and eat, and after June had gone to bed in the small dark room that had once belonged to the sisters, she’d hear them talking below in the kitchen. There was a stovepipe hole in the floor of the bedroom, and up through it floated odd words, and occasionally laughter.
    There was always far too much food there, heavy and bloating. During the day, June’s cousins would race through the fields. They dared her to leap the creek, but she shied like a horse at the idea of landing in the cold rushing water with the nasty sharp pebbles beneath. She couldn’t possibly climb those ladders into the hay mows, going straight up and so high, with round wooden rungs that a foot could so easily slip on. Nor did she like rolling in the straw; bits of it got into her hair and down her neck, and she’d be forever picking it out, while it scratched. She always went home injured in some small way.
    On the other side, on the other hand, was a family she never met, but with whom she feels perfectly familiar. Her father’s parents, about whom he told stories and of whom he showed pictures, lived in England, just outside London, and there he had left them to come here to a hard, raw country, where somehow he found her hard, raw mother. Then there was neither time nor money to go back even for a visit, and he never saw them again, and June never saw them at all.
    But there is something peaceful just about the idea of them. Partly it’s England, old and experienced, with a certain overview, a perspective of centuries of making and observing history, so that June feels the country itself must move more slowly and gracefully.
    Also, there’s a picture of his mother that June’s father kept on his bedside table, and that is now on June’s own bureau. It shows her standing in the rose trellis of a garden, with her hand resting lightly on a bloom. It’s just the way she would have touched June, if that had been possible: lightly and with affection. And that’s how her voice would have sounded, too, speaking to her only grandchild.
    What her father described of the three of them remains June’s picture of the ideal English life: a little cottage, with a little green property, and roses, dozens of roses. His mother won prizes with them. He recommended her to June as an example she might follow. “She’s a lady,” he always said, “a real lady.” Dainty, and wearing white gloves, June imagined.
    June pictured her father: a sweet little boy in the gardens, his mother nearby, squatting, working in the earth around the roses, clipping, weeding. They would talk gaily back and forth, quietly, no irritation in their voices. He’d be wearing short pants and a white blouse, maybe knee socks, and his fine blond hair would be a little long, with a wavy bit slipping over his forehead. His mother would be wearing a long white dress with a matching broad-brimmed hat, a picture hat. This is the picture June has in her head, although she knows, of course, that no one tends roses in a long white dress.
    Of her grandfather, the picture is less clear. He was a haberdasher’s clerk who went off each morning to work and returned home at night, as fathers do. “She’s the one who sacrificed so that I could get an education,” June’s father said. “She scrimped and saved and did without things, clothes and travel, she always said she’d like to see the continent, but it all went for me and my education.” They must have loved each other very much, to have given up such a lot.
    â€œShe was also the one who said I should leave, start over in a new country and make something of myself,” he told her. “It was hard.” Well, June could hear how hard it must have been. Why was it for her he saved his stories and not for her mother, who was, after all, a grown-up and his wife?
    But he was teaching June what is important: duty and a sense of