by Alice Munro
She did not go back to Great Books the second year. She signed up for a correspondence course called Great Thinkers of History, from the University of Western Ontario, and she wrote letters to the newspapers.
MY MOTHER HAD NOT let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.
In the beginning, the very beginning of everything, there was that house. It stood at the end of a long lane, with wire fences, sagging windowpanes of wire on either side, in the middle of fields where the rocks—part of the Pre-Cambrian Shield—were poking through the soil like bones through flesh. The house which I had never seen in a photograph—perhaps none had ever been taken—and which I had never heard my mother describe except in an impatient, matter-of-fact way (“it was just an old frame house—it never had been painted”) nevertheless appeared in my mind as plainly as if I had seen it in a newspaper—the barest, darkest, tallest of all old frame houses, simple and familiar yet with something terrible about it, enclosing evil, like a house where a murder has been committed.
And my mother, just a little girl then named Addie Morrison, spindly I should think, with cropped hair because her mother guarded her against vanity, would walk home from school up the long anxious lane, banging against her legs the lard pail that had held her lunch. Wasn’t it always November, the ground hard, ice splintered on the puddles, dead grass floating from the wires? Yes, and the bush near and spooky, with the curious unconnected winds that lift the branches one by one. She would go into the house and find the fire out, the stove cold, the grease from the men’s dinner thickened on the plates and pans.
No sign of her father, or her brothers who were older and through with school. They did not linger around the house. She would go through the front room into her parents’ bedroom and there, more often than not, she would find her mother on her knees, bent down on the bed, praying. Far more clearly than her mother’s face she could picture now that bent back, narrow shoulders in some grey or tan sweater over a dirty kimona or housedress, the back of the head with the thin hair pulled tight from the middle parting, the scalp unhealthily white. It was white as marble, white as soap.
“She was a religious fanatic,” says my mother of this kneeling woman, who at other times is discovered flat on her back and weeping—for reasons my mother does not go into—with a damp cloth pressed to her forehead. Once in the last demented stages of Christianity she wandered down to the barn and tried to hide a little bull calf in the hay, when the butchers’ men were coming. My mother’s voice, telling these things, is hard with her certainty of having been cheated, her undiminished feelings of anger and loss.
“Do you know what she did? I told you what she did? I told you about the money?” She draws a breath to steady herself. “Yes. Well. She inherited some money. Some of her people had money, they lived in New York State. She came into two hundred and fifty dollars, not a lot of money, but more then than now and you know we were poor. You think this is poor. This is nothing to how we were poor. The oilcloth on our table, I remember it, it was worn through so you could see the bare boards. It was hanging in shreds. It was a rag, not an oilcloth. If I ever wore shoes I wore boys’ shoes, hand-downs of my brothers. It was the kind of farm you couldn’t raise chickweed on. For Christmas I got a pair of navy blue bloomers. And let me tell you, I was glad. I knew what it was to be cold.”
“Well. My mother took her money and she ordered a great box of Bibles. They came by express. They were the most expensive kind, maps of the Holy Land and gilt-edged pages and the words of Christ were all marked in red. Blessed are the poor in spirit. What is so remarkable about being poor in spirit? She spent every cent.”
“So then, we had to go out and give them away. She had bought them for distribution to the heathen. I think my brothers hid some in the granary. I know they did. But I was too much of a fool to think of that. I was tramping all over the country at the age of eight, in boys’ shoes and not owning a pair of mittens, giving away Bibles.”
“One thing, it cured me of religion for life.”
Once she ate cucumbers and drank milk because she had heard that this combination was poisonous and she wished to die. She was more curious than depressed. She lay down and hoped to wake in heaven, which she had heard so much about, but opened her eyes instead on another morning. That too had its effect on her faith. She told nobody at the time.
The older brother sometimes brought her candy, from Town. He shaved at the kitchen table, a mirror propped against the lamp. He was vain, she thought, he had a moustache, and he got letters from girls which he never answered, but left lying around where anybody could read them. My mother appeared to hold this against him. “I have no illusions about him,” she said, “though I guess he was no different from most.” He lived in New Westminster now, and worked on a ferryboat. The other brother lived in the States. At Christmas they sent cards, and she sent cards to them. They never wrote letters, nor did she.
It was the younger brother she hated. What did he do? Her answers were not wholly satisfactory. He was evil, bloated, cruel. A cruel fat boy. He fed firecrackers to cats. He tied up a toad and chopped it to pieces. He drowned my mother’s kitten, named Misty, in the cow trough, though he afterwards denied it. Also he caught my mother and tied her up in the barn and tormented her. Tormented her? He tortured her.
What with? But my mother would never go beyond that that word, tortured, which she spat out like blood. So I was left to imagine her tied up in the barn, as at a stake, while her brother a fat Indian yelped and pranced about her. But she had escaped, after all, unscalped, unburnt. Nothing really accounted for her darkened face at this point in the story, for her way of saying tortured. I had not yet learned to recognize the gloom that overcame her in the vicinity of sex.
Her mother died. She went away for an operation but she had large lumps in both breasts and she died, my mother always said, on the table. On the operating table. When I was younger I used to imagine her stretched out dead on an ordinary table among the teacups and ketchup and jam.
“Were you sad?” I said hopefully and my mother said yes, of course she was sad. But she did not linger round this scene. Important things were coming. Soon she was through school, she had passed her Entrance Exams and she wanted to go to High School, in Town. But her father said no, she was to stay home and keep house until she got married. (“Who would I marry in God’s name?” cried my mother angrily every time at this point in the story, “out there at the end of the world with everybody cross-eyed from inbreeding?”) After two years at home, miserable, learning some things on her own from old high school textbooks that had belonged to her mother (a schoolteacher herself before marriage and religion overtook her), she defied her father, she walked a distance of nine miles to Town, hiding in the bushes by the road every time she heard a horse coming, for fear it would be them, with the old wagon, come to take her back home. She knocked on the door of a boarding house she knew from the egg business and asked if she could have her room and board in return for kitchen work and waiting on table. And the woman who ran the house took her in—she was a rough-talking decent old woman that everybody called Grandma Seeley—and kept her from her father till time had passed, even gave her a plaid dress, scratchy wool, too long, which she wore to school that first morning when she stood up in front of a class all two years younger than she was and read Latin, pronouncing it just the way she had taught herself, at home. Naturally, they all laughed.
And my mother could not help, could never help, being thrilled and tender, recalling this; she was full of wonder at her old, young self. Oh, if there could be a moment out of time, a moment when we could choose to be judged, naked as can be, beleaguered, triumphant, then that would have to be the moment for her. Later on comes compromise and error, perhaps; there, she is absurd and unassailable.<
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Then, in the boarding house, begins a whole new chapter in life. Up in the morning dark to peel the vegetables, leave them in cold water for dinner at noon. Clean out the chamber pots, sprinkle them with talcum. No flush-toilets in that town. “I have cleaned chamber pots to get my education!”, she would say, and not mind who was listening. But a nice class of people used them. Bank clerks. The CNR telegraph operator. The teacher, Miss Rush. Miss Rush taught my mother to sew, gave her some beautiful merino wool for a dress, gave her a yellow fringed scarf, (“what became of it?” asked my mother in exasperated grief), gave her some eau de cologne. My mother loved Miss Rush; she cleaned Miss Rush’s room and saved the hair from her tray, cleanings from her comb, and when she had enough she made a little twist of hair which she looped from a string, to wear around her neck. That was how she loved her. Miss Rush taught her how to read music and play on Miss Rush’s own piano, kept in Grandma Seeley’s front room, those songs she could play yet, though she hardly ever did. “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” and “The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls” and “Bonny Mary of Argyle.”
What had happened to Miss Rush, then, with her beauty and her embroidery and her piano-playing? She had married, rather late, and died having a baby. The baby died too and lay in her arm like a wax doll, in a long dress, my mother had seen it.
Stories of the past could go like this, round and round and down to death; I expected it.
Grandma Seeley, for instance, was found dead in bed one summer morning just after my mother had completed four years of high school and Grandma Seeley had promised to let her have the money to go to Normal School, a loan to be paid back when she became a teacher. There was somewhere a piece of paper with writing on it to this effect, but it was never found. Or rather, my mother believed, it was found, by Grandma Seeley’s nephew and his wife, who got her house and her money; they must have destroyed it. The world is full of such people.
So my mother had to go to work, she worked in a large store in Owen Sound where she was soon in charge of dry goods and notions. She became engaged to a young man who remained a shadow—no clear-cut villain, certainly, like her brother, or Grandma Seeley’s nephew, but not luminous and loved, either, not like Miss Rush. For mysterious reasons she was compelled to break her engagement. (“He did not turn out to be the sort of person I had thought he was.”) Later, an indefinite time later, she met my father, who must have turned out to be the sort of person she thought he was, because she married him, though she had always sworn to herself she would never marry a farmer (he was a fox farmer, and at one time had thought he might get rich by it; was that any different?) and his family had already begun to make remarks to her that were not well-meant.
“But you fell in love with him,” I would remind her sternly, anxiously, wanting to get it settled for good. “You fell in love.”
“Well yes of course I did.”
“Why did you fall in love?”
“Your father was always a gentleman.”
Was that all? I was troubled here by a lack of proportion, though it was hard to say what was missing, what was wrong. In the beginning of her story was dark captivity, suffering, then daring and defiance and escape. Struggle, disappointment, more struggle, godmothers and villains. Now I expected as in all momentous satisfying stories—the burst of Glory, the Reward. Marriage to my father? I hoped this was it. I wished she would leave me in no doubt about it.
When I was younger, out at the end of the Flats Road, I would watch her walk across the yard to empty the dishwater, carrying the dishpan high, like a priestess, walking in an unhurried, stately way, and flinging the dishwater with a grand gesture over the fence. Then, I had supposed her powerful, a ruler, also content. She had power still, but not so much as perhaps she thought. And she was in no way content. Nor a priestess. She had a loudly growling stomach, whose messages she laughed at or ignored, but which embarrassed me unbearably. Her hair grew out in little wild grey-brown tufts and thickets; every permanent she got turned to frizz. Had all her stories, after all, to end up with just her, the way she was now, just my mother in Jubilee?
One day she came to the school, representing the encyclopedia company, to present a prize for the best essay on why we should buy Victory Bonds. She had to go to Porterfield, Blue River, Stirling schools and do the same thing; that week was a proud one for her. She wore a terrible mannish navy blue suit, with a single button at the waist, and a maroon-coloured felt hat, her best, on which I agonizingly believed I could see a fine dust. She gave a little speech. I fixed my eyes on the sweater of the girl ahead of me—pale blue, little nubby bits of wool sticking out—as if hanging on to such indifferent straws of fact would keep me from drowning in humiliation. She was so different, that was all, so brisk and hopeful and guileless in her maroon hat, making little jokes, thinking herself a success. For two cents she would have launched into her own educational history, nine miles to Town and the chamber pots. Who else had a mother like that? People gave me sly, and gloating and pitying looks. Suddenly I could not bear anything about her—the tone of her voice, the reckless, hurrying way she moved, her lively absurd gestures (any minute now she might knock the ink bottle off the principal’s desk) and most of all her innocence, her way of not knowing when people were laughing, of thinking she could get away with this.
I hated her selling encyclopedias and making speeches and wearing that hat. I hated her writing letters to the newspapers. Her letters about local problems, or those in which she promoted education and the rights of women and opposed compulsory religious education in the school, would be published in the Jubilee Herald-Advance over her own name. Others appeared on a page in the city paper given over to lady correspondents, and for them she used the nom de plume Princess Ida, taken from a character in Tennyson whom she admired. They were full of long decorative descriptions of the countryside from which she had fled (This morning a marvellous silver frost enraptures the eye on every twig and telephone wire and makes the world a veritable fairy-land—) and even contained references to Owen and me (my daughter, soon-to-be-no-longer-a-child, forgets her new-found dignity to frolic in the snow) that made the roots of my teeth ache with shame. Other people than Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace would say to me, “I seen that letter of your mother’s in the paper,” and I would feel how contemptuous, how superior and silent and enviable they were, those people who all their lives could stay still, with no need to do or say anything remarkable.
I myself was not so different from my mother, but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were.
THAT SECOND WINTER we lived in Jubilee we had visitors. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was shovelling our sidewalk. I saw a big car come nosing along between the snowbanks almost silently, like an impudent fish. American licence plates. I thought it was somebody lost. People did drive out to the end of River Street—which nowhere bothered to have a sign warning that it was a dead end—and by the time they reached our house would have begun to wonder.
A stranger got out. He wore an overcoat, grey felt hat, silk scarf in winter. He was tall and heavy; his face was mournful, proud, sagging. He held out his arms to me alarmingly.
“Come on out here and say hello to me! I know your name but I bet you don’t know mine!”
He came right up to me—standing stock-still with the shovel in my hand—and kissed me on the cheek. A sweetish sour masculine smell; shaving lotion, uneasy stomach, clean starched shirt and some secret hairy foulness. “Was your Momma’s name Addie Morrison? Was it, eh?”
No one ever called my mother Addie any more. It made her sound different—rounder, dowdier, simpler.
“Your Momma’s Addie and you’re Della and I’m your Uncle Bill Morrison. That’s who I am. Hey, I gave you a kiss and you never gave me one. Is that what you call fair up here?”
By this time my mother with a fresh, haphazard streak of lipstick on her mouth was coming out of the house.
“Well, Bill. You don’t believe in advance notice, do
you? Never mind, we’re happy to see you.” She said this with some severity, as if arguing a point.
It really was her brother then, the American, my blood uncle.
He turned and waved at the car. “You can get out now. Nothing here going to bite you.”
The door opened on the other side of the car and a tall lady got out, slowly, with difficulty over her hat. This hat went high on one side of the head and low on the other; green feathers sticking up made it even higher. She wore a three-quarter length silver fox coat and a green dress and green high-heeled shoes, no rubbers.
“That’s your Aunt Nile,” said Uncle Bill to me as if she couldn’t hear, or understand English, as if she was some awesome feature of the landscape, that needed identifying. “You never have seen her before. You have seen me but you were too young to remember. You never have seen her. I never saw her myself before last summer. I was married to your Aunt Callie when I saw you before and now I’m married to your Aunt Nile. I met her in August, I married her in September.”
The sidewalk was not shovelled clear. Aunt Nile stumbled in her high heels and moaned, feeling snow in her shoe. She moaned miserably like a child, she said to Uncle Bill, “I nearly twisted my ankle,” as if there were nobody else around.
