The Glass Village

It was eleven o’clock when Judge Shinn had walked him up Shinn Road past the church to turn into the Adams gate and through a garden fragrant with pansies and roses and dogwood trees to the simple stone step and the gracious door overhung by the second story and the steep-pitched roof; and there she had been, this wonderful old woman, receiving her neighbors with dry hospitality, a word for everyone, and a special sharp one for the Judge.

Her house was like herself — clean, old, and filled with beauty. Color ran everywhere, the same bright colors that flamed on her canvases. And the Shinn Corners folk who crowded her parlor seemed freshened by them, simplified and renewed. There was a great deal of laughter and joking; the parlor was filled with nasal good-fellowship. Johnny gathered that Aunt Fanny Adams’s “open house” occasions were highlights in the dull life of the village.

The old lady had prepared pitchers of milk and great platters of cookies and heaps of ice cream for the children. Johnny tasted blueberry muffins and johnnycake, crabapple jelly and cranberry conserve and grape butter. There was coffee and tea and punch. She kept feeding him as if he were a child.

He had very little time with her. She sat beside him in her long black dress with its high collar, without ornament except for an oldfashioned cameo locket-watch which she wore on a thin gold chain about her neck — talking of the long ago when she had been a girl in Shinn Corners, how things had been in those days, and how looking backward was a folly reserved for the very old.

“The young ones can’t live in their kinsmen’s past,” she said, smiling. “Life is tryin’ to upset applecarts. Death is pushin’ a handplow in a tractor age. There’s nothin’ wicked about change. In the end the same good things — what I s’pose ye’d call ‘values’ — survive. But I like keepin’ up to date.”

“Yet,” Johnny smiled back, “your house is full of the most wonderful antiques.” Death, he thought, is standing still in a hurricane. But he did not say it.

The lively eyes sparkled. “But I’ve also got me a Deepfreeze, and modern plumbin’, and an electric range. The furniture’s for memories. The range is for tellin’ me I’m alive.”

“I’ve read a very similar remark, Mrs. Adams,” said Johnny, “about your painting.”

“Do they say that?” The old lady chuckled. “Then they’re a sight sma’ter than I give ’em credit for. Most times seems like they talk Chinese... You take Grandma Moses. Now she’s a mighty fine painter. Only most of her paintin’s what she remembers of the way things used to be. I like rememberin’, too — I can talk your ear off ’bout the way life was when I was a girl in this village. But that’s talkin’. When I find a paintbrush in my hand, rememberin’ and talkin’ just don’t seem to satisfy me. I like to paint what I see. If it all comes out funny-lookin’ — what Prue Plummer’s friends call ‘art’ — why, I expect it’s ’cause of how I see the colors, the way things set to me... and mostly what I don’t know ’bout paintin’!”

Johnny said earnestly, “Do you really believe that what you see is worth looking at, Mrs. Adams?”

But that was a question she never got to answer. Because at that moment Millie Pangman waddled over to whisper in Aunt Fanny’s ear, and the old lady jumped up and exclaimed, “My land! There’s lots more in the freezer, Millie,” and excused herself to him with a sharp look and went away. And by the time she got back with more ice cream for the children, Johnny had been boarded and seized by Prue Plummer.

Prue Plummer was a thin vibrant lady of valorous middle age with a liverish face coming to a point and lips which she kept preening with a tireless tongue. She was dressed in a smart summer suit of lavender linen which looked as outrageously out of place in that Colonial roomful of plainly dressed farm women as a Mondrian would have looked on the wall. Two big copper hoops dangled from her ears and a batik scarf, bound round her gray hair, trailed coquettisly over one shoulder.

“May I, Mr. Shinn?” said Prue Plummer, digging her bloody talons into his arm. “I’ve been watching for my chance to monopolize you. I could hug Millie Pangman for luring dear old Aunt Fanny away. Such a darling! Of course, she doesn’t know beans about art, and brags about it, which is such a delightful part of her quaintness, because of course she really doesn’t—”

“I understand,” said Johnny rather abruptly, “you sell antiques, Miss Plummer.”

“Oh, I dabble at it. I do have some good rock crystal and old Dresden, and rather an amusing collection of miniature lamps, and a few old Colonial and Early American pieces when I can persuade my neighbors to let me market them—”

“I should think,” said Johnny, not without malice, “that this house of Mrs. Adams’s would be a gold strike for you.”