Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

it small. But you should have seen the flowers! The whole house was full. We sent half of them over to the church.”
    “She didn’t want flowers,” Nona said. “She would have called it a waste.”
    “She didn’t want a service.”
    “I see.”
    There was a silence. Nona buttered a piece of toast and slid the jelled egg onto it and broke it up with a fork as if it were for a child. Sylvie took a chair at the table and ate with her head on her hand. Nona went upstairs, and in a few minutes came down again, carrying a hot-water bottle. “I’ve put you in the hall bedroom. It’s a little close, but that’s better than a draft. There are two heavy blankets on the bed, and one lighter one, and I put a comforter on the chair.” She filled the hot-water bottle with water from the kettle and bundled it in tea towels. Lucille and I each took a suitcase and followed Sylvie upstairs.
    The stairs were wide and polished, with a heavy railing and spindle banisters, dating as they did from a time when my grandfather was growing confident enough of his carpentry to use good materials and to build things that might be considered permanent. But they terminated rather oddly in a hatch or trapdoor, because at the top of the stairs one came face to face with a wall so essential to supporting the roof (which had alwayssagged somewhat in the middle) that my grandfather could not bring himself to cut another door in it. So instead he had worked out a device with pulleys and window weights that made the trapdoor (which was left over from the time when the second floor was merely a loft with a ladder up to it) rise at the slightest push and then fall shut again of its own accord with a little slam. (This device prevented drafts from sweeping down the polished steps in torrents, flooding the parlor, eddying into the kitchen.) Sylvie’s bedroom was really a sort of narrow dormer with a curtain closing it off from the hallway. There was a cot in it, fattened with pillows and blankets, and a little lamp, which Nona had left burning on a shelf. There was a single round window, small and high as a fully risen moon. The dresser and chair were outside the curtain, one on each side. Sylvie, in the half-dark hallway, turned and kissed each of us. “I’ll get you presents,” she whispered. “Tomorrow, maybe.” She kissed us again and went behind the curtain, into the narrow room.
    I have often wondered what it seemed like to Sylvie to come back to that house, which would have changed since she left it, shifted and settled. I imagine her with her grips in her bare hands, walking down the middle of the road, which was narrowed by the banks of plowed snow on either side, and narrowed more by the slushy pools that were forming at the foot of each bank. Sylvie always walked with her head down, to one side, with an abstracted and considering expression, as if someone were speaking to her in a soft voice. But she would have glanced up sometimes at the snow, whichwas the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.
    How must it have seemed to step into the narrow hallway which still kept (as it seemed to me) a trace of the rude odor that the funeral flowers had begun to make before Nona could bring herself to throw them away. Her hands and feet must have ached from the warmth. I remember how red and twisted her hands looked, lying in the lap of her green dress, and how she pressed her arms to her sides. I remember that, as she sat there in a wooden chair in the white kitchen, smoothing her borrowed-looking dress and working her feet out of her loafers, sustaining all our stares with the placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived, her happiness was palpable.
    The day after Sylvie arrived, Lucille and I woke up early. It was our custom to prowl the dawn of any significant day. Ordinarily the house would belong to us for an hour or more,