As for Me and My House

Set during the Great Depression on the Canadian prairies, the novel takes the form of a year-long diary kept by Mrs. Bentley, the unnamed wife of Philip Bentley, a Protestant minister. The couple has just arrived in Horizon, their fourth small-town posting in twelve years, and Mrs. Bentley's entries record the slow unraveling and tentative rebuilding of their marriage against a backdrop of drought, dust, poverty, and stifling social conformity.

The diary opens on a Saturday evening in April. Philip lies exhausted across the bed after a day of setting up the parsonage, a cramped, musty house pressed against the church. Visitors have already come to size them up, and Mrs. Finley, the president of the Ladies Aid and self-appointed manager of town affairs, has taken controlling stock of the new minister and his wife. On the back of his first sermon notes, Philip has sketched a row of false-fronted stores, one-story buildings with tall facades mimicking a second story that line every prairie Main Street. Mrs. Bentley sees in the drawing the painful gap between Philip the frustrated artist and Philip the small-town preacher who does not believe in what he preaches.

Mrs. Bentley establishes early that Philip entered the ministry not out of faith but as his only escape from the small town where he grew up. His mother was a waitress who died when he was fourteen; his father, a student preacher, died before Philip's birth and never married his mother. Philip discovered his father's books and ambition to paint, made a hero of the absent man, and accepted the Church's offer to educate him, intending to leave as soon as he could support himself as an artist. He never did. Mrs. Bentley met him in college, patiently won his guarded affection, and they married. A baby was stillborn. Philip tried and failed to write a novel. Debts mounted, and the couple drifted from town to town, never collecting the salary arrears Philip felt too guilty to claim. She finds an old pipe hidden in the porch, a relic of years when Philip smoked in secret. The shared conspiracy once drew them closer, but the furtiveness eventually eroded his self-respect, and he destroyed the pipe in a rage. Now hypocrisy in every form wears him down.

Life in Horizon settles into oppressive routine. Paul Kirby, the town's schoolteacher, becomes a regular visitor and accompanies the Bentleys to Partridge Hill, a rural schoolhouse eleven miles south where Philip holds services for drought-stricken farmers. Mrs. Bentley plays the organ and befriends Judith West, a shy young woman with a powerful contralto voice who comes from a poor farm family and works as a domestic for the Wenderbys. Mrs. Bird, the doctor's wife and Mrs. Bentley's closest ally in Horizon, proves a loyal confidante. Philip, meanwhile, begins obsessively sketching Judith's face in his study.

The wind and dust intensify through May. Mrs. Bentley plants a garden as her only reason to be outdoors. Philip grows attached to Steve, a boy of about twelve or thirteen whose mother is dead and whose father, a laborer on the railroad, has abandoned him. Mrs. Bentley offers to take Steve in, motivated less by the boy himself than by the anguished expression on Philip's face. The town reacts with hostility: Steve is Roman Catholic in a bigoted Protestant community, and the congregation resents the minister harboring him. At Sunday School, Steve fights one of Mrs. Finley's twins. Mrs. Finley strikes Steve across the face; Philip confronts her with barely restrained fury. A church board meeting follows, where Mrs. Bentley makes a calm, logical case for keeping Steve. Afterward she regrets intervening, thinking that if Philip had broken with the Church they might finally have been free.

Philip pours himself into Steve, projecting onto the boy his own lost dreams. He spoils him, takes him on country drives without Mrs. Bentley, and fantasizes about making him an artist. Mrs. Bentley watches with growing jealousy and confronts a truth she has long avoided: Philip was never truly hers. Using fifteen dollars from an unexpected check, she secretly orders paints, brushes, and canvases for Philip through Mrs. Bird's address. When he discovers them, he tells her she is a fool, then draws her close. It is one of their rare moments of genuine intimacy.

In July, the family vacations at the ranch of Paul's brother Stanley. Philip struggles intensely with a painting in oils, and the resulting canvas of hills and driftwood logs impresses Paul deeply. That night, sitting beside sleeping Philip in their tent, Mrs. Bentley confronts the reality that she has kept him in the Church all these years and may have wasted his life.

Back in Horizon, Mrs. Bentley resolves to save a thousand dollars to open a secondhand bookstore and escape the Church for good. Two Roman Catholic priests arrive and politely but firmly take Steve away. Steve departs by train, and the Bentleys walk home through what feels like the emptiest street they have ever known. That evening, a massive storm breaks, bringing long-awaited rain, and Philip lets Mrs. Bentley huddle against him as they stand watching it from the doorway.

With Steve gone, Philip grows reckless and distant, saying he has been "a long time growing up" (156) and resolving to expect nothing more from life. Mrs. Bentley falls ill with neuritis, and Philip brings Judith to the house to help care for her. One night Mrs. Bentley wakes to find Philip's side of the bed empty. She tiptoes to the lean-to shed where Judith sleeps and through the closed door hears Judith's soft, half-smothered laugh, the unmistakable laugh of intimacy. Mrs. Bentley returns to bed without opening the door. The next day she sends Judith away, and Philip does not protest. She resolves to go on pretending she does not know, understanding that accusing Philip would destroy whatever remains between them.

The months that follow are an ordeal of silent endurance. Mrs. Bentley practices a Liszt rhapsody in secret, the same piece she played the night Philip proposed fifteen years earlier, hoping to recapture his attention. She performs it at a Ladies Aid event to warm applause, but Philip says nothing. At home he accuses her bitterly, claiming Paul was ready to prostrate himself at her performance. She tells Philip quietly she did all the practicing for him, not Paul. He recognizes the truth but cannot admit it.

Mrs. Bentley learns from Mrs. Bird that Judith is pregnant, with the baby expected in May. Judith has gone home to her family's farm and refuses to identify the father. Philip, told at the supper table, says only that he is sorry. El Greco, the stray dog Steve brought home and Philip named after the artist, is lured out one night by howling coyotes and never returns. The long winter drags on.

Unable to bear the silent misery in Philip's face, Mrs. Bentley sends him to visit Judith with oranges and magazines. Weeks later, she resolves to adopt Judith's baby, reasoning that Philip's own son will force him to leave the Church and become the man he should be. In bed, in the dark so they need not face each other, she tells Philip her plan. He replies evenly that since she will bear most of the responsibility, the decision is hers.

Philip leaves to investigate buying a secondhand bookstore. While he is gone, Judith gives birth a month early and dies. Dr. Bird and Judith's mother bring the tiny baby to Mrs. Bentley. She sends Philip a telegram, letting him learn the news away from her. Philip arrives home unexpectedly during a windstorm and finds Paul helping Mrs. Bentley with the baby. Bitter accusations pour out. Mrs. Bentley flings open the bedroom door and shows him the baby, crying: "Your baby! Yours" (214). Philip stops, white-faced. Mrs. Bentley shouts that Judith never told her, that she always knew, that she wanted the baby so his son would become her son too. She flees into the storm, then hurries home and puts the baby in Philip's arms. He comes to her, tries to speak, takes her hand. She sends him to bed. Later she bends and kisses him as he pretends to sleep.

The final entry records their last Sunday in Horizon. The town holds a farewell supper, revealing that despite everything, the congregation liked them. Mrs. Bentley gives Philip a pipe and tobacco, a gesture that frees him from the furtiveness that plagued their earlier years. Standing over the baby, pressing his cheek against the small hands, Philip seems already changed, showing "a stillness, a freshness, a vacancy of beginning" (216). She names the baby Philip. When the first Philip protests that with two of them she will get confused, she replies: "That's right, Philip. I want it so" (216).