by Alice Munro
This is the kind of fond but exasperated mother-talk she finds it easy to slip into (Juliet is an expert at reassuring responses), but the truth is that Penelope has scarcely ever given her cause for complaint, and if she wanted to be totally honest, at this point she would say that one day without some contact with her daughter is hard to bear, let alone six months. Penelope has worked at Banff, as a summer chambermaid, and she has gone on bus trips to Mexico, a hitchhiking trip to Newfoundland. But she has always lived with Juliet, and there has never been a six-month break.
She gives me delight, Juliet could have said. Not that she is one of those song-and-dance purveyors of sunshine and cheer and looking-on-the-bright-side. I hope I’ve brought her up better than that. She has grace and compassion and she is as wise as if she’d been on this earth for eighty years. Her nature is reflective, not all over the map like mine. Somewhat reticent, like her father’s. She is also angelically pretty, she’s like my mother, blond like my mother but not so frail. Strong and noble. Molded, I should say, like a caryatid. And contrary to popular notions I am not even faintly jealous. All this time without her—and with no word from her, because Spiritual Balance does not allow letters or phone calls—all this time I’ve been in a sort of desert, and when her message came I was like an old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain.
—
Hope to see you Sunday afternoon. It’s time.
Time to go home, was what Juliet hoped this meant, but of course she would leave that up to Penelope.
—
Penelope had drawn a rudimentary map, and Juliet shortly found herself parked in front of an old church—that is, a church building seventy-five or eighty years old, covered with stucco, not as old or anything like as impressive as churches usually were in the part of Canada where Juliet had grown up. Behind it was a more recent building, with a slanting roof and windows all across its front, also a simple stage and some seating benches and what looked like a volleyball court with a sagging net. Everything was shabby, and the once-cleared patch of land was being reclaimed by juniper and poplars.
A couple of people—she could not tell whether men or women—were doing some carpentry work on the stage, and others sat on the benches in separate small groups. All wore ordinary clothes, not yellow robes or anything of that sort. For a few minutes no notice was taken of Juliet’s car. Then one of the people on the benches rose and walked unhurriedly towards her. A short, middle-aged man wearing glasses.
She got out of the car and greeted him and asked for Penelope. He did not speak—perhaps there was a rule of silence—but nodded and turned away and went into the church. From which there shortly appeared, not Penelope, but a heavy, slow-moving woman with white hair, wearing jeans and a baggy sweater.
“What an honor to meet you,” she said. “Do come inside. I’ve asked Donny to make us some tea.”
She had a broad fresh face, a smile both roguish and tender, and what Juliet supposed must be called twinkling eyes. “My name is Joan,” she said. Juliet had been expecting an assumed name like Serenity, or something with an Eastern flavor, nothing so plain and familiar as Joan. Later, of course, she thought of Pope Joan.
“I’ve got the right place, have I? I’m a stranger on Denman,” she said disarmingly. “You know I’ve come to see Penelope?”
“Of course. Penelope.” Joan prolonged the name, with a certain tone of celebration.
The inside of the church was darkened with purple cloth hung over the high windows. The pews and other church furnishings had been removed, and plain white curtains had been strung up to form private cubicles, as in a hospital ward. The cubicle into which Juliet was directed had, however, no bed, just a small table and a couple of plastic chairs, and some open shelves piled untidily with loose papers.
“I’m afraid we’re still in the process of getting things fixed up in here,” Joan said. “Juliet. May I call you Juliet?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m not used to talking to a celebrity.” Joan held her hands together in a prayer pose beneath her chin. “I don’t know whether to be informal or not.”
“I’m not much of a celebrity.”
“Oh, you are. Now don’t say things like that. And I’ll just get it off my chest right away, how I admire you for the work you do. It’s a beam in the darkness. The only television worth watching.”
“Thank you,” said Juliet. “I had a note from Penelope—”
“I know. But I’m sorry to have to tell you, Juliet, I’m very sorry and I don’t want you to be too disappointed—Penelope is not here.”
The woman says those words—Penelope is not here—as lightly as possible. You would think that Penelope’s absence could be turned into a matter for amused contemplation, even for their mutual delight.
Juliet has to take a deep breath. For a moment she cannot speak. Dread pours through her. Foreknowledge. Then she pulls herself back to reasonable consideration of this fact. She fishes around in her bag.
“She said she hoped—”
“I know. I know,” says Joan. “She did intend to be here, but the fact was, she could not—”
“Where is she? Where did she go?”
“I cannot tell you that.”
“You mean you can’t or you won’t?”
“I can’t. I don’t know. But I can tell you one thing that may put your mind at rest. Wherever she has gone, whatever she has decided, it will be the right thing for her. It will be the right thing for her spirituality and her growth.”
Juliet decides to let this pass. She gags on the word spirituality, which seems to take in—as she often says—everything from prayer wheels to High Mass. She never expected that Penelope, with her intelligence, would be mixed up in anything like this.
“I just thought I should know,” she says, “in case she wanted me to send on any of her things.”
“Her possessions?” Joan seems unable to suppress a wide smile, though she modifies it at once with an expression of tenderness. “Penelope is not very concerned right now about her possessions.”
Sometimes Juliet has felt, in the middle of an interview, that the person she faces has reserves of hostility that were not apparent before the cameras started rolling. A person whom Juliet has underestimated, whom she has thought rather stupid, may have strength of that sort. Playful but deadly hostility. The thing then is never to show that you are taken aback, never to display any hint of hostility in return.
“What I mean by growth is our inward growth, of course,” Joan says.
“I understand,” says Juliet, looking her in the eye.
“Penelope has had such a wonderful opportunity in her life to meet interesting people—goodness, she hasn’t needed to meet interesting people, she’s grown up with an interesting person, you’re her mother—but you know, sometimes there’s a dimension that is missing, grown-up children feel that they’ve missed out on something—”
“Oh yes,” says Juliet. “I know that grown-up children can have all sorts of complaints.”
Joan has decided to come down hard.
“The spiritual dimension—I have to say this—was it not altogether lacking in Penelope’s life? I take it she did not grow up in a faith-based home.”
“Religion was not a banned subject. We could talk about it.”
“But perhaps it was the way you talked about it. Your intellectual way? If you know what I mean. You are so clever,” she adds, kindly.
“So you say.”
Juliet is aware that any control of the interview, and of herself, is faltering, and may be lost.
“Not so I say, Juliet. So Penelope says. Penelope is a dear fine girl, but she has come to us here in great hunger. Hunger for the things that were not available to her in her home. There you were, with your wonderful busy successful life—but Juliet, I must tell you that your daughter has known loneliness. She has known unhappiness.”
“Don’t most people feel that, one time or another? Loneliness and un
happiness?”
“It’s not for me to say. Oh, Juliet. You are a woman of marvellous insights. I’ve often watched you on television and I’ve thought, how does she get right to the heart of things like that, and all the time being so nice and polite to people? I never thought I’d be sitting talking to you face-to-face. And what’s more, that I’d be in a position to help you—”
“I think that maybe you’re mistaken about that.”
“You feel hurt. It’s natural that you should feel hurt.”
“It’s also my own business.”
“Ah well. Perhaps she’ll get in touch with you. After all.”
—
Penelope did get in touch with Juliet, a couple of weeks later. A birthday card arrived on her own—Penelope’s—birthday, the 19th of June. Her twenty-first birthday. It was the sort of card you send to an acquaintance whose tastes you cannot guess. Not a crude jokey card or a truly witty card or a sentimental card. On the front of it was a small bouquet of pansies tied by a thin purple ribbon whose tail spelled out the words Happy Birthday. These words were repeated inside, with the words Wishing you a very added in gold letters above them.
And there was no signature. Juliet thought at first that someone had sent this card to Penelope, and forgotten to sign it, and that she, Juliet, had opened it by mistake. Someone who had Penelope’s name and the date of her birth on file. Her dentist, maybe, or her driving teacher. But when she checked the writing on the envelope she saw that there had been no mistake—there was her own name, indeed, written in Penelope’s own handwriting.
Postmarks gave you no clue anymore. They all said Canada Post. Juliet had some idea that there were ways of telling at least which province a letter came from, but for that you would have to consult the Post Office, go there with the letter and very likely be called upon to prove your case, your right to the information. And somebody would be sure to recognize her.
—
She went to see her old friend Christa, who had lived in Whale Bay when she herself lived there, even before Penelope was born. Christa was in Kitsilano, in an assisted-living facility. She had multiple sclerosis. Her room was on the ground floor, with a small private patio, and Juliet sat with her there, looking out at a sunny bit of lawn, and the wisteria all in bloom along the fence that concealed the garbage bins.
Juliet told Christa the whole story of the trip to Denman Island. She had told nobody else, and had hoped perhaps not to have to tell anybody. Every day when she was on her way home from work she had wondered if perhaps Penelope would be waiting in the apartment. Or at least that there would be a letter. And then there had been—that unkind card—and she had torn it open with her hands shaking.
“It means something,” Christa said. “It lets you know she’s okay. Something will follow. It will. Be patient.”
Juliet talked bitterly for a while about Mother Shipton. That was what she finally decided to call her, having toyed with and become dissatisfied with Pope Joan. What bloody chicanery, she said. What creepiness, nastiness, behind the second-rate, sweetly religious facade. It was impossible to imagine Penelope’s having been taken in by her.
Christa suggested that perhaps Penelope had visited the place because she had considered writing something about it. Some sort of investigative journalism. Fieldwork. The personal angle—the long-winded personal stuff that was so popular nowadays.
Investigating for six months? said Juliet. Penelope could have figured out Mother Shipton in ten minutes.
“It’s weird,” admitted Christa.
“You don’t know more than you’re letting on, do you?” said Juliet. “I hate to even ask that. I feel so at sea. I feel stupid. That woman intended me to feel stupid, of course. Like the character who blurts out something in a play and everybody turns away because they all know something she doesn’t know—”
“They don’t do that kind of play anymore,” Christa said. “Now nobody knows anything. No—Penelope didn’t take me into her confidence any more than she did you. Why should she? She’d know I’d end up telling you.”
Juliet was quiet for a moment, then she muttered sulkily, “There have been things you didn’t tell me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Christa, but without any animosity. “Not that again.”
“Not that again,” Juliet agreed. “I’m in a lousy mood, that’s all.”
“Just hold on. One of the trials of parenthood. She hasn’t given you many, after all. In a year this will all be ancient history.”
Juliet didn’t tell her that in the end she had not been able to walk away with dignity. She had turned and cried out beseechingly, furiously.
“What did she tell you?”
And Mother Shipton was standing there watching her, as if she had expected this. A fat pitying smile had stretched her closed lips as she shook her head.
—
During the next year Juliet would get phone calls, now and then, from people who had been friendly with Penelope. Her reply to their inquiries was always the same. Penelope had decided to take a year off. She was travelling. Her travelling agenda was by no means fixed, and Juliet had no way of contacting her, nor any address she could supply.
She did not hear from anybody who had been a close friend. This might mean that people who had been close to Penelope knew quite well where she was. Or it might be that they too were off on trips to foreign countries, had found jobs in other provinces, were embarked on new lives, too crowded or chancy at present to allow them to wonder about old friends.
(Old friends, at that stage in life, meaning somebody you had not seen for half a year.)
Whenever she came in, the first thing Juliet did was to look for the light flashing on her answering machine—the very thing she used to avoid, thinking there would be someone pestering her about her public utterances. She tried various silly tricks, to do with how many steps she took to the phone, how she picked it up, how she breathed. Let it be her.
Nothing worked. After a while the world seemed emptied of the people Penelope had known, the boyfriends she had dropped and the ones who had dropped her, the girls she had gossiped with and probably confided in. She had gone to a private girls’ boarding school—Torrance House—rather than to a public high school, and this meant that most of her longtime friends—even those who were still her friends at college—had come from places out of town. Some from Alaska or Prince George or Peru.
There was no message at Christmas. But in June, another card, very much in the style of the first, not a word written inside. Juliet had a drink of wine before she opened it, then threw it away at once. She had spurts of weeping, once in a while of uncontrollable shaking, but she came out of these in quick fits of fury, walking around the house and slapping one fist into her palm. The fury was directed at Mother Shipton, but the image of that woman had faded, and finally Juliet had to recognize that she was really only a convenience.
All pictures of Penelope were banished to her bedroom, with sheaves of drawings and crayonings she had done before they left Whale Bay, her books, and the European one-cup coffeemaker with the plunger that she had bought as a present for Juliet with the first money she had made in her summer job at McDonald’s. Also such whimsical gifts for the apartment as a tiny plastic fan to stick on the refrigerator, a wind-up toy tractor, a curtain of glass beads to hang in the bathroom window. The door of that bedroom was shut and in time could be passed without disturbance.
—
Juliet gave a great deal of thought to getting out of this apartment, giving herself the benefit of new surroundings. But she said to Christa that she could not do that, because that was the address Penelope had, and mail could be forwarded for only three months, so there would be no place then where her daughter could find her.
“She could always get to you at work,” said Christa.
“Who knows how long I’ll be there?” Juliet said. “She’s probably in some commune where they’re not allowed to communicate. With some guru who sleeps wit
h all the women and sends them out to beg on the streets. If I’d sent her to Sunday school and taught her to say her prayers this probably wouldn’t have happened. I should have. I should have. It would have been like an inoculation. I neglected her spirituality. Mother Shipton said so.”
—
When Penelope was barely thirteen years old, she had gone away on a camping trip to the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia, with a friend from Torrance House, and the friend’s family. Juliet was in favor of this. Penelope had been at Torrance House for only one year (accepted on favorable financial terms because of her mother’s once having taught there), and it pleased Juliet that she had already made so firm a friend and been accepted readily by the friend’s family. Also that she was going camping—something that regular children did and that Juliet, as a child, had never had the chance to do. Not that she would have wanted to, being already buried in books—but she welcomed signs that Penelope was turning out to be a more normal sort of girl than she herself had been.
Eric was apprehensive about the whole idea. He thought Penelope was too young. He didn’t like her going on a holiday with people he knew so little about. And now that she went to boarding school they saw too little of her as it was—so why should that time be shortened?
Juliet had another reason—she simply wanted Penelope out of the way for the first couple of weeks of the summer holidays, because the air was not clear between herself and Eric. She wanted things resolved, and they were not resolved. She did not want to have to pretend that all was well, for the sake of the child.
Eric, on the other hand, would have liked nothing better than to see their trouble smoothed over, hidden out of the way. To Eric’s way of thinking, civility would restore good feeling, the semblance of love would be enough to get by on until love itself might be rediscovered. And if there was never anything more than a semblance—well, that would have to do. Eric could manage with that.
Indeed he could, thought Juliet, despondently.
