Pullman

In the spring of 1954 my aunt Vera took a train to Winnipeg to marry a man she had met twice. This was not considered remarkable at the time, or not by her. It was considered remarkable by my mother, who was her younger sister by six years and who had opinions about everything Vera did, and who was still talking about it in 1981, in a kitchen in Owen Sound, with the radio on. “Twice,” my mother said. “Once at a wedding and once at a funeral. That’s the sum total.” “You’ve said.” “A wedding and a funeral. You’d think she’d have noticed the arithmetic.”

The man was named Walter Diebel and he sold farm equipment in a territory that ran from Winnipeg west to the Saskatchewan line. He was thirty-four. He had a sister who kept house for him and who did not want to stop. Vera was twenty-six, which in that family was understood to be the beginning of the end of things. She had been teaching at the school in Hepworth for four years and had been engaged once, briefly, to a man who went into the army and came back and married someone else in Guelph, and about whom nothing further was ever said in my mother’s presence, and a great deal was said out of it. She left on a Tuesday. My mother went to the station. The thing my mother always told, the thing the whole story was built to arrive at, was this: that Vera, standing on the platform, had looked at her and said, “If it’s no good I’ll just come back,” as though it were a dress.

It was no good and she did not come back. Walter Diebel was not cruel. My mother would have preferred it, I think — cruelty would have organized things. He was a man who had arranged his life very carefully before Vera arrived in it and who saw no reason that her arrival should disturb the arrangement. His sister stayed. The sister ran the kitchen and the accounts and the visiting, and Vera was given the front room to do something with, and she did nothing with it, for thirty-one years. She wrote letters. She wrote to my mother every month and the letters were full of weather and the price of things and the health of people my mother had never met, and my mother read them at the kitchen table with her mouth pulled in and then put them in a drawer, and after a while there were four hundred of them in the drawer, and when my mother died I read them all in a weekend and there was nothing in them. That is what I thought then. There was nothing in them.

I went out there in 1986, after Walter died, to help her with the house. She was fifty-eight and looked older and moved through the rooms with a particular efficiency, as though she had worked out the shortest path between any two points and had been using it for decades. The sister had died in 1979. The front room was still empty. There was a chair in it and nothing else. I asked about the chair. “Oh,” she said. “That’s where I sit.” “And do what?” She thought about this seriously, the way she thought about everything, which was one of the things my mother found unbearable in her. “Nothing,” she said. “I sit.” We went through the house. There was very little to go through. In the bottom of a wardrobe there was a hatbox, and in the hatbox there was a train ticket, Winnipeg to Owen Sound, dated the ninth of October, 1954. Unused. I did not ask her about it. I want to say that I was being delicate but I think the truth is I was afraid of the answer, and the fear was not for her.

Here is what I understood, much later, and it took me until I was past the age she was in that kitchen. My mother told the story as a tragedy of stubbornness. Vera had made a bad bargain and had been too proud to unmake it, and the four hundred letters full of weather were the sound of a woman insisting, month after month, that nothing was wrong. But Vera bought that ticket in October. Five months in. She bought it and she kept it and she did not use it, and then she kept it for thirty-two more years in a hatbox in a wardrobe in a house she had never once called hers. You don’t keep a ticket you’ve decided against. You keep one you haven’t. She did not stay because she had made up her mind. She stayed because she had not — not in 1954, not in 1970, not on the morning I found the hatbox. Every day in the chair in the front room was a day she was still deciding. That was what the room was for. That was the nothing she was doing. My mother, who married at twenty-one and stayed forty-four years and never once considered otherwise, had no idea. She thought Vera had been trapped. Vera had been free, every single day, in the most exhausting way a person can be, and had used the freedom exactly once a day, to stay, and then got up the next morning and used it again.

She died in 1991. I have the ticket. I don’t know what to do with it and I have stopped expecting to. Sometimes I think the cruelest thing is that there was no moment. She was never standing at a door with her coat on. There was never a scene. There was only a woman in a chair in an empty room in the middle of a long afternoon, somewhere west of Portage, deciding, deciding, and the light going across the floor the way it does.