The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

in back, all sewn with tiny stitches. To make such a dress was detailed labor, and most every girl could sew one by age ten. Mostly the sleeves were puffed at the shoulders and tight-fitting at the wrists. We had muddy and dusty roads, and women had to lift their skirts while walking. As a boy I recall washing and polishing my mother’s shoes nearly every day from the spring mud and summer dust. In summer, women generally wore “winseys,” lighter, more ruffled dresses, except when doing outdoor work—salting, potato scraping, gardening, and the like—when they wore housedresses covered with rough burlap aprons, or aprons made of burny cloth.
    Some of the time my mother wore such local clothing, as she called it. But deep down she had another way of thinking. “You may not realize it,” she said to me, “but when I stroll into Gillette’s store, or to church, or anywhere, I feel that I have the soul of a world traveler. I’ve just stepped off a schooner, and lo and behold, look at this odd little village we blew off course to! You may laugh, but I cannot begin to count how many days this lie to myself has got me through, Fabian.” She sighed and shook her head at her own invention. But I knew, too, that there were more nights than I could count when my mother had stayed up until morning light, working on one new dress or waistcoat or other.
    As for her manner of dress, I had the impression that she as much organized clothes on her person as merely wore
them. She was an expert seamstress. She made most of her own dresses, shawls, and vests. She preferred somewhat odd combinations of color. This, to me, was less an eye for fashion—there was only the fashion of Witless Bay, and the occasional magazine—than a composition of thought that wore her inside. She would spend a ritual half hour or so standing in front of her closet, riffling through dresses, greatly amused. “How do I look?” she would ask, whirling, modeling a familiar dress combined with an equally familiar vest or shawl. “If you say ‘interesting,’ I’ll know I’ve failed.”
    She spent a good deal of time alone. I thought of her as someone who knew how to do that. I did most of the grocery shopping, errands. Even in summer she had an indoor pallor. Coming home from the dry dock, I would see her crouched in her garden and think, My mother’s outside—though this tends toward exaggeration, because in fact she did go on long walks, some days more than one. And she would row a dinghy out into the harbor. She would pack a lunch and row out, staying all afternoon. She did that two or three times a summer.
    I cannot say she had one close friend in Witless Bay, no one she called that, at least. People were, as I have mentioned, friendly to her. Romeo Gillette was flirtatious, which my mother took in good humor. Otherwise, she would be matter-of-fact in her visits to his store, unfailingly polite, measured in her inquiry as to his health, and so on. She was pretty much that way with everyone. By the summer route—a horse path through the meadow, then through Giles LaCotte’s apple orchard—it was less than a mile to
the store. Yet my mother’s appearances on the store porch or in its cluttered aisles were few and far between.
    She was in 1911 still a very pretty woman, I thought, though perhaps the accumulation of estrangements from my father and from family life, combined with her storm-in-a-bottle emotions toward Botho August, or a hundred other factors had begun to tighten her features. Crow’s-feet webbed out at the corners of her eyes. She had bouts of arthritis that no liniment seemed to relieve at all; then, quite suddenly, the pain would disappear.
    She used skin creams from France. She kept them in a separate cabinet in the pantry. Her skin was a forthright vanity, though she would take only a few moments each evening to massage cream in around her eyes,