The Progress of Love

high rooms, with dark-green blinds on the windows. When the blinds were pulled down against the sun, I used to like to move my head and catch the light flashing through the holes and cracks. Another thing I liked looking at was chimney stains, old or fresh, which I could turn into animals, people’s faces, even distant cities. I told my own two boys about that, and their father, Dan Casey, said, “See, your mom’s folks were so poor, they couldn’t afford TV, so they got these stains on the ceiling—your mom had to watch the stains on the ceiling!” He always liked to kid me about thinking poor was anything great.
    When my father was very old, I figured out that he didn’t mind people doing new sorts of things—for instance, my getting divorced—as much as he minded them having new sorts of reasons for doing them.
    Thank God he never had to know about the commune.
    “The Lord never intended,” he used to say. Sitting around with the other old men in the Home, in the long, dim porch behind the spirea bushes, he talked about how the Lord never intended for people to tear around the country on motorbikes and snowmobiles.And how the Lord never intended for nurses’ uniforms to be pants. The nurses didn’t mind at all. They called him “Handsome,” and told me he was a real old sweetheart, a real old religious gentleman. They marvelled at his thick black hair, which he kept until he died. They washed and combed it beautifully, wet-waved it with their fingers.
    Sometimes, with all their care, he was a little unhappy. He wanted to go home. He worried about the cows, the fences, about who was getting up to light the fire. A few flashes of meanness—very few. Once, he gave me a sneaky, unfriendly look when I went in; he said, “I’m surprised you haven’t worn all the skin off your knees by now.”
    I laughed. I said, “What doing? Scrubbing floors?”
    “Praying!” he said, in a voice like spitting.
    He didn’t know who he was talking to.
    I don’t remember my mother’s hair being anything but white. My mother went white in her twenties, and never saved any of her young hair, which had been brown. I used to try to get her to tell what color brown.
    “Dark.”
    “Like Brent, or like Dolly?” Those were two workhorses we had, a team.
    “I don’t know. It wasn’t horsehair.”
    “Was it like chocolate?”
    “Something like.”
    “Weren’t you sad when it went white?”
    “No. I was glad.”
    “Why?”
    “I was glad that I wouldn’t have hair anymore that was the same color as my father’s.”
    Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
• • •
    All these things I remember. All the things I know, or have been told, about people I never even saw. I was named Euphemia, after my mother’s mother. A terrible name, such as nobody has nowadays. At home they called me Phemie, but when I started to work, I called myself Fame. My husband, Dan Casey, called me Fame. Then in the bar of the Shamrock Hotel, years later, after my divorce, when I was going out, a man said to me, “Fame, I’ve been meaning to ask you, just what is it you are famous for?”
    “I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know, unless it’s for wasting my time talking to jerks like you.”
    After that I thought of changing it altogether, to something like Joan, but unless I moved away from here, how could I do that?
    In the summer of 1947, when I was twelve, I helped my mother paper the downstairs bedroom, the spare room. My mother’s sister, Beryl, was coming to visit us. These two sisters hadn’t seen each other for years. Very soon after their mother died, their father married again. He went to live in Minneapolis, then in Seattle, with his new wife and his younger daughter, Beryl. My mother wouldn’t go with them. She stayed on in the town of Ramsay, where they had been living. She was boarded with a childless couple who had been neighbors. She and Beryl had met only once or twice since they were grown up. Beryl lived in California.
    The paper had a design of cornflowers on a white ground. My mother had got it at a reduced price, because it was the end of a lot. This meant we had trouble matching the pattern, and behind the door we had to do some tricky fitting with scraps and strips. This was before the days