Living with Snakes

Reflections in the Ice

Reflections in the Ice veryone knew about my father's two wives. Some said he married my mother and then the other one. Some said he married the other one first and then my mother. One day, standing beside a hole in the ice where he was seining for shiners, Robert Martin described to me in great detail a wedding with two brides and my father in the middle. But Robert Martin smelled of vanilla extract that day like all other days and was probably confused in his attempt to express his admiration for my father, whose personal atmosphere was Scotch whiskey and who knew how to take Robert's shiners and catch even bigger pickerel than Robert himself. I had, after all, a sort of right to be out on the ice with Robert. This about my father's two wives may sound very much like bigamy, but, unless I am mistaken, someone has to file a complaint for a charge to be brought, and who would complain of my father? Who could complain of him? He was a successful businessman and politician. His households were models of propriety. He drank good whiskey. He caught big fish. He went to mass at eight o'clock on Sunday morning and to Unitarian services at eleven. When my mother and I walked out with him of an evening , the other one, if we met her, would bow to the eminently respectable hardware merchant and he would lift his hat to her. When my mother did her shopping in the mornE Reflections in the Ice 59 ing, she bowed if she met the right respectable member of the school board out for a walk with the other one. He was a goodly, godly, respectable man. And my mother was a respectable woman. She was straight and tall, and her ways were immaculate. She kept her house and her garden and her poultry and me in immaculate order. She had been a schoolteacher, and she kept his books for him and looked after his business correspondence . She was everything a wife and mother should be— and yet I had a sense of being shortchanged each time she offered that cool cheek just barely scented with the good soap she used, her soap. Fortunately for my health of mind there was the other one. She was not at all like my mother. A glance was enough to show that she didn't come from our town, for she was dark and plump. We always believed she had been a shopgirl in the city, although Robert Martin once told me, for whatever it was worth, that she had been on the stage. However that may be, it is her kisses I remember. Her lips were very full and soft. I am tempted, in spite of knowing better, to say that I have never felt anything softer—I do say it—I have said it before now. Why she should have been kissing me, I can't imagine. It seems highly unlikely that my mother would have selected her as baby-sitter—there are limits even to civilized behavior . But I was with her sometimes. I am sure ofthat. Sometimes when neither my mother nor father was there. As if, perhaps, my father had gone off on a trip and taken my mother with him. And there were other times, in the night, when she would come into my room. I think now she might have been at a party at our house. Very unlikely, of course. Perhaps I dreamed it. But the kisses are very real. In addition to supplying my father with shiners, Robert Martin also helped out in the store whenever he happened to need cash or the weather was too bad for fishing. It 6o Living with Snakes would be a mistake, however, to conclude that my father was his patron. If any patronizing was done in that twoman democracy, Robert did it. He worked only when he wanted and as long as he wanted. He came and went as he liked, and my father, a doubly responsible man, stayed in the store summer and winter, rain and shine. On fine days when Robert happened to be working in response to some need of his own—usually vanilla extract—my father would often invent a delivery at the lake and would send him off and then settle himself down to...