Alice Munro's Best

by Alice Munro

  The house was full of a feeling of callous desertion, of deceit. He and his wife had surely been kind parents, driven to the wall by Marcelle. When she had eloped with an airman, they had hoped that she would be all right, at last. They had been generous to the two of them as to the most proper young couple. But it all fell apart. To Johanna Parry he had likewise been generous, and look how she too had gone against him.

  He walked to town and went into the hotel for his breakfast. The waitress said, “You’re bright and early this morning.”

  And while she was still pouring out his coffee he began to tell her about how his housekeeper had walked out on him without any warning or provocation, not only left her job with no notice but taken a load of furniture that had belonged to his daughter, that now was supposed to belong to his son-in-law but didn’t really, having been bought with his daughter’s wedding money. He told her how his daughter had married an airman, a good-looking, plausible fellow who wasn’t to be trusted around the corner.

  “Excuse me,” the waitress said. “I’d love to chat, but I got people waiting on their breakfast. Excuse me –”

  He climbed the stairs to his office, and there, spread out on his desk, were the old maps he had been studying yesterday in an effort to locate exactly the very first burying ground in the county (abandoned, he believed, in 1839). He turned on the light and sat down, but he found he could not concentrate. After the waitress’s reproof – or what he took for a reproof – he hadn’t been able to eat his breakfast or enjoy his coffee. He decided to go out for a walk to calm himself down.

  But instead of walking along in his usual way, greeting people and passing a few words with them, he found himself bursting into speech. The minute anybody asked him how he was this morning he began in a most uncharacteristic, even shameful way to blurt out his woes, and like the waitress, these people had business to attend to and they nodded and shuffled and made excuses to get away. The morning didn’t seem to be warming up in the way foggy fall mornings usually did; his jacket wasn’t warm enough, so he sought the comfort of the shops.

  People who had known him the longest were the most dismayed. He had never been anything but reticent – the well-mannered gentleman, his mind on other times, his courtesy a deft apology for privilege (which was a bit of a joke, because the privilege was mostly in his recollections and not apparent to others). He should have been the last person to air wrongs or ask for sympathy – he hadn’t when his wife died, or even when his daughter died – yet here he was, pulling out some letter, asking if it wasn’t a shame the way this fellow had taken him for money over and over again, and even now when he’d taken pity on him once more the fellow had connived with his housekeeper to steal the furniture. Some thought it was his own furniture he was talking about – they believed the old man had been left without a bed or a chair in his house. They advised him to go to the police.

  “That’s no good, that’s no good,” he said. “How can you get blood from a stone?”

  He went into the Shoe Repair shop and greeted Herman Shultz.

  “Do you remember those boots you resoled for me, the ones I got in England? You resoled them four or five years ago.”

  The shop was like a cave, with shaded bulbs hanging down over various workplaces. It was abominably ventilated, but its manly smells – of glue and leather and shoe-blacking and fresh-cut felt soles and rotted old ones – were comfortable to Mr. McCauley. Here his neighbor Herman Shultz, a sallow, expert, spectacled workman, bent-shouldered, was occupied in all seasons – driving in iron nails and clinch nails and, with a wicked hooked knife, cutting the desired shapes out of leather. The felt was cut by something like a miniature circular saw. The buffers made a scuffing noise and the sandpaper wheel made a rasp and the emery stone on a tool’s edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. All the sounds and smells and precise activities of the place had been familiar to Mr. McCauley for years but never identified or reflected upon before. Now Herman, in his blackened leather apron with a boot on one hand, straightened up, smiled, nodded, and Mr. McCauley saw the man’s whole life in this cave. He wished to express sympathy or admiration or something more that he didn’t understand.

  “Yes, I do,” Herman said. “They were nice boots.”

  “Fine boots. You know I got them on my wedding trip. I got them in England. I can’t remember now where, but it wasn’t in London.”

  “I remember you telling me.”

  “You did a fine job on them. They’re still doing well. Fine job, Herman. You do a good job here. You do honest work.”

  “That’s good.” Herman took a quick look at the boot on his hand. Mr. McCauley knew that the man wanted to get back to his work, but he couldn’t let him.

  “I’ve just had an eye-opener. A shock.”

  “Have you?”

  The old man pulled out the letter and began to read bits of it aloud, with interjections of dismal laughter.

  “Bronchitis. He says he’s sick with bronchitis. He doesn’t know where to turn. I don’t know who to turn to. Well he always knows who to turn to. When he’s run through everything else, turn to me. A few hundred just till I get on my feet. Begging and pleading with me and all the time he’s conniving with my housekeeper. Did you know that? She stole a load of furniture and went off out west with it. They were hand in glove. This is a man I’ve saved the skin of, time and time again. And never a penny back. No, no, I have to be honest and say fifty dollars. Fifty out of hundreds and hundreds. Thousands. He was in the Air Force in the war, you know. Those shortish fellows, they were often in the Air Force. Strutting around thinking they were war heroes. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that, but I think the war spoiled some of those fellows, they never could adjust to life afterwards. But that’s not enough of an excuse. Is it? I can’t excuse him forever because of the war.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “I knew he wasn’t to be trusted the first time I met him. That’s the extraordinary thing. I knew it and I let him rook me all the same. There are people like that. You take pity on them just for being the crooks they are. I got him his insurance job out there, I had some connections. Of course he mucked it up. A bad egg. Some just are.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  Mrs. Shultz was not in the store that day. Usually she was the one at the counter, taking in the shoes and showing them to her husband and reporting back what he said, making out the slips, and taking the payment when the restored shoes were handed back. Mr. McCauley remembered that she had had some kind of operation during the summer.

  “Your wife isn’t in today? Is she well?”

  “She thought she’d better take it easy today. I’ve got my girl in.”

  Herman Shultz nodded towards the shelves to the right of the counter, where the finished shoes were displayed. Mr. McCauley turned his head and saw Edith, the daughter, whom he hadn’t noticed when he came in. A childishly thin girl with straight black hair, who kept her back to him, rearranging the shoes. That was just the way she had seemed to slide in and out of sight when she came to his house as Sabitha’s friend. You never got a good look at her face.

  “You’re going to help your father out now?” Mr. McCauley said. “You’re through with school?”

  “It’s Saturday,” said Edith, half turning, faintly smiling.

  “So it is. Well, it’s a good thing to help your father, anyway. You must take care of your parents. They’ve worked hard and they’re good people.” With a slight air of apology, as if he knew he was being sententious, Mr. McCauley said, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the –”

  Edith said something not for him to hear. She said, “Shoe Repair shop.”

  “I’m taking up your time, I’m imposing on you,” said Mr. McCauley sadly. “You have work to do.”

  “There’s no need for you to be sarcastic,” said Edith’s father when the old man had gone.

&n
bsp; HE TOLD EDITH’S mother all about Mr. McCauley at supper.

  “He’s not himself,” he said. “Something’s come over him.”

  “Maybe a little stroke,” she said. Since her own operation – for gallstones – she spoke knowledgeably and with a placid satisfaction about the afflictions of other people.

  Now that Sabitha had gone, vanished into another sort of life that had, it seemed, always been waiting for her, Edith had reverted to being the person she had been before Sabitha came here. “Old for her age,” diligent, critical. After three weeks at high school she knew that she was going to be very good at all the new subjects – Latin, Algebra, English Literature. She believed that her cleverness was going to be recognized and acclaimed and an important future would open out for her. The past year’s silliness with Sabitha was slipping out of sight.

  Yet when she thought about Johanna’s going off out west she felt a chill from her past, an invasive alarm. She tried to bang a lid down on that, but it wouldn’t stay.

  As soon as she had finished washing the dishes she went off to her room with the book they had been assigned for literature class. David Copperfield.

  She was a child who had never received more than tepid reproofs from her parents – old parents to have a child of her age, which was said to account for her being the way she was – but she felt in perfect accord with David in his unhappy situation. She felt that she was one like him, one who might as well have been an orphan, because she would probably have to run away, go into hiding, fend for herself, when the truth became known and her past shut off her future.

  IT HAD ALL BEGUN with Sabitha saying, on the way to school, “We have to go by the Post Office. I have to send a letter to my dad.”

  They walked to and from school together every day. Sometimes they walked with their eyes closed, or backwards. Sometimes when they met people they gabbled away softly in a nonsense language, to cause confusion. Most of their good ideas were Edith’s. The only idea Sabitha introduced was the writing down of a boy’s name and your own, and the stroking out of all letters that were duplicated and the counting of the remainder. Then you ticked off the counted number on your fingers, saying, Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage, till you got the verdict on what could happen between you and that boy.

  “That’s a fat letter,” said Edith. She noticed everything, and she remembered everything, quickly memorizing whole pages of the textbooks in a way the other children found sinister. “Did you have a lot of things to write to your dad?” she said, surprised, because she could not credit this – or at least could not credit that Sabitha would get them on paper.

  “I only wrote on one page,” Sabitha said, feeling the letter.

  “A-ha,” said Edith. “Ah. Ha.”

  “Aha what?”

  “I bet she put something else in. Johanna did.”

  The upshot of this was that they did not take the letter directly to the Post Office, but saved it and steamed it open at Edith’s house after school. They could do such things at Edith’s house because her mother worked all day at the Shoe Repair shop.

  Dear Mr. Ken Boudreau,

  I just thought I would write and send my thanks to you for the nice things you said about me in your letter to your daughter. You do not need to worry about me leaving. You say that I am a person you can trust. That is the meaning I take and as far as I know it is true. I am grateful to you for saying that, since some people feel that a person like me that they do not know the background of is Beyond the Pale. So I thought I would tell you something about myself. I was born in Glasgow, but my mother had to give me up when she got married. I was taken to the Home at the age of five. I looked for her to come back, but she didn’t and I got used to it there and they weren’t Bad. At the age of eleven I was brought to Canada on a Plan and lived with the Dixons, working on their Market Gardens. School was in the Plan, but I didn’t see much of it. In winter I worked in the house for the Mrs. but circumstances made me think of leaving, and being big and strong for my age got taken on at a Nursing Home looking after the old people. I did not mind the work, but for better money went and worked in a Broom Factory. Mr. Willets that owned it had an old mother that came in to see how things were going, and she and I took to each other some way. The atmosphere was giving me breathing troubles so she said I should come and work for her and I did. I lived with her 12 yrs. on a lake called Mourning Dove Lake up north. There was only the two of us, but I could take care of everything outside and in, even running the motorboat and driving the car. I learned to read properly because her eyes were going bad and she liked me to read to her. She died at the age of 96. You might say what a life for a young person, but I was happy. We ate together every meal and I slept in her room the last year and a half. But after she died the family gave me one wk. to pack up. She had left me some money and I guess they did not like that. She wanted me to use it for Education but I would have to go in with kids. So when I saw the ad Mr. McCauley put in the Globe and Mail I came to see about it. I needed work to get over missing Mrs. Willets. So I guess I have bored you long enough with my History and you’ll be relieved I have got up to the Present. Thank you for your good opinion and for taking me along to the Fair. I am not one for the rides or for eating the stuff but it was still certainly a pleasure to be included.

  Your friend, Johanna Parry.

  Edith read Johanna’s words aloud, in an imploring voice and with a woebegone expression.

  “I was born in Glasgow, but my mother had to give me up when she took one look at me –”

  “Stop,” said Sabitha. “I’m laughing so hard I’ll be sick.”

  “How did she get her letter in with yours without you knowing?”

  “She just takes it from me and puts it in an envelope and writes on the outside because she doesn’t think my writing is good enough.”

  Edith had to put Scotch tape on the flap of the envelope to make it stick, since there wasn’t enough sticky stuff left. “She’s in love with him,” she said.

  “Oh, puke-puke,” said Sabitha, holding her stomach. “She can’t be. Old Johanna.”

  “What did he say about her, anyway?”

  “Just about how I was supposed to respect her and it would be too bad if she left because we were lucky to have her and he didn’t have a home for me and Grandpa couldn’t raise a girl by himself and blah-blah. He said she was a lady. He said he could tell.”

  “So then she falls in lo-ove.”

  The letter remained with Edith overnight, lest Johanna discover that it hadn’t been posted and was sealed with Scotch tape. They took it to the Post Office the next morning.

  “Now we’ll see what he writes back. Watch out,” said Edith.

  NO LETTER CAME for a long time. And when it did, it was a disappointment. They steamed it open at Edith’s house, but found nothing inside for Johanna.

  Dear Sabitha,

  Christmas finds me a bit short this year, sorry I don’t have more than a two-dollar bill to send you. But I hope you are in good health and have a Merry Christmas and keep up your schoolwork. I have not been feeling so well myself, having got Bronchitis, which I seem to do every winter, but this is the first time it landed me in bed before Christmas. As you see by the address I am in a new place. The apartment was in a very noisy location and too many people dropping in hoping for a party. This is a boardinghouse, which suits me fine as I was never good at the shopping and the cooking.

  Merry Christmas and love, Dad.

  “Poor Johanna,” said Edith. “Her heart will be broken.”

  Sabitha said, “Who cares?”

  “Unless we do it,” Edith said.

  “What?”

  “Answer her.”

  They would have to type their letter, because Johanna would notice that it was not in Sabitha’s father’s handwriting. But the typing was not difficult. There was a typewriter in Edith’s house, on a card table in the front room. Her mother had worked in an office before she was married and s
he sometimes earned a little money still by writing the sort of letters that people wanted to look official. She had taught Edith the basics of typing, in the hope that Edith too might get an office job someday.

  “Dear Johanna,” said Sabitha, “I am sorry I cannot be in love with you because you have got those ugly spots all over your face.”

  “I’m going to be serious,” said Edith. “So shut up.”

  She typed, “I was so glad to get the letter –” speaking the words of her composition aloud, pausing while she thought up more, her voice becoming increasingly solemn and tender. Sabitha sprawled on the couch, giggling. At one point she turned on the television, but Edith said, “Pul-eeze. How can I concentrate on my e-motions with all that shit going on?”

  Edith and Sabitha used the words “shit” and “bitch” and “Jesus Christ” when they were alone together.

  Dear Johanna,

  I was so glad to get the letter you put in with Sabitha’s and to find out about your life. It must often have been a sad and lonely one though Mrs. Willets sounds like a lucky person for you to find. You have remained industrious and uncomplaining and I must say that I admire you very much. My own life has been a checkered one and I have never exactly settled down. I do not know why I have this inner restlessness and loneliness, it just seems to be my fate. I am always meeting people and talking to people but sometimes I ask myself, Who is my friend? Then comes your letter and you write at the end of it, Your friend. So I think, Does she really mean that? And what a very nice Christmas present it would be for me if Johanna would tell me that she is my friend. Maybe you just thought it was a nice way to end a letter and you don’t really know me well enough. Merry Christmas anyway.

  Your friend, Ken Boudreau.

  The letter went home to Johanna. The one to Sabitha had ended up being typed as well because why would one be typed and not the other? They had been sparing with the steam this time and opened the envelope very carefully so there would be no telltale Scotch tape.