The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  He thought of himself telling Peg about this—how close he had to get before he saw that what amazed him and bewildered him so was nothing but old wrecks, and how he then felt disappointed, but also like laughing. They needed some new thing to talk about. Now he felt more like going home.

  At noon, when the constable in the diner was giving his account, he had described how the force of the shot threw Walter Weeble backward. “It blasted him partways out of the room. His head was laying out in the hall. What was left of it was laying out in the hall.”

  Not a leg. Not the indicative leg, whole and decent in its trousers, the shod foot. That was not what anybody turning at the top of the stairs would see and would have to step over, step through, in order to go into the bedroom and look at the rest of what was there.

  THE MOON IN THE ORANGE STREET SKATING RINK

  Sam got a surprise, walking into Callie’s variety and confectionery store. He had expected a clutter of groceries, cheap bits and pieces, a stale smell, maybe faded tinsel ropes, old overlooked Christmas decorations. Instead, he found a place mostly taken up with video games. Hand-lettered signs in red and blue crayon warned against alcohol, fighting, loitering, and swearing. The store was full of jittery electronic noise and flashing light and menacing, modern-day, oddly shaved and painted children. But behind the counter sat Callie, quite painted up herself, under a pinkish-blond wig. She was reading a paperback.

  Sam asked for cigarettes, to test her. She laid down the book, and he looked at the title. My Love Where the High Winds Blow, by Veronica Gray. She gave him his change and settled her sweater around her shoulders and picked up her book, all without looking at him. Her sweater was covered with little jiggly balls of pink and white wool, like popcorn. She waited till the last minute to speak to him.

  “You taken up smoking in your old age, Sam?”

  “I thought you didn’t know me.”

  “I’d know your hide in a tannery,” said Callie, pleased with herself. “I knew you the minute you walked in that door.”

  Sam is sixty-nine years old, a widower. He is staying at the Three Little Pigs Motel, out on the highway, for a few days while on his way to visit his married daughter in Pennsylvania. For all he used to tell his wife about Gallagher, he would never bring her back to see it. Instead, they went to Hawaii, to Europe, even to Japan.

  Now he goes for walks in Gallagher. Often he is the only person walking. The traffic is heavy, and not as varied as it used to be. Manufacturing has given way to service industries. Things look to Sam a bit scruffy. But that could be because he lives now in Victoria—in Oak Bay, an expensive and pretty neighborhood full of well-off retired people like himself.

  Kernaghan’s boarding house used to be the last house—last building—on the edge of town. It’s still there, still close to the sidewalk. But the town has spread a little at all its edges. A Petro-Car gas station. A Canadian Tire Store with a big parking lot. Some new, low houses. Kernaghan’s has been painted a pale, wintry blue, but otherwise looks neglected. Instead of the front veranda, where the boarders each had a chair, Sam sees a glassed-in porch entirely filled up with batts of insulating material, an upended mattress, screens, and heavy old storm windows. The house used to be light tan, and the trim was brown. Everything was terribly clean. Dust was a problem, the road being so close and not paved at that time. There were always horses going by, and people on foot, as well as cars and farm trucks. “You simply have to keep after it,” said Miss Kernaghan, in an ominous way, referring to the dust. As a matter of fact, it was Callie who kept after it. Callie Kernaghan was nineteen when Sam and Edgar Grazier first saw her, and she could have passed for twelve. A demon worker. Some people called her a drudge, Miss Kernaghan’s little drudge, or they called her slavey—Slavey Kernaghan. The mistake they made was in thinking that she minded.

  Sometimes a woman coming in from the country, lugging her butter and eggs, would take a rest on the front steps. Or a girl would sit there to take off her rubber boots and put on her town shoes—hiding the boots in the ditch until she put them on again on her way home. Then Miss Kernaghan would call out, from the darkness behind the dining-room window, “This is not a park bench!” Miss Kernaghan was a big, square-shouldered, awkward woman, flat in front and back, with hennaed hair and a looming white-powdered face and a thickly painted, sullenly drooping mouth. Stories of lasciviousness hung around her, dimmer, harder to substantiate than the stories of her amazing avarice and stinginess. Callie, supposedly a foundling, was said by some to be Miss Ker-naghan’s own daughter. But her boarders had to toe the line. No drinking, no smoking, no bad language or bad morals, she told the Grazier boys on their first day. No eating in the bedrooms, she told them later, after Thanksgiving, when they brought a large, greasy box of sweet buns from home. “It attracts mice,” she said.

  Miss Kernaghan said fairly often that she had never had boys before. She sounded as if she was doing them a favor. She had four other boarders. A widow lady, Mrs. Cruze, very old but able to look after herself; a business lady, Miss Verne, who was a bookkeeper in the glove factory; a bachelor, Adam Delahunt, who worked in the bank and taught Sunday school; and a stylish, contemptuous young woman, Alice Peel, who was engaged to a policeman and worked as a telephone operator. These four took up the upstairs bedrooms. Miss Kernaghan herself slept on the couch in the dining room, and Callie slept on the couch in the kitchen. Sam and Edgar got the attic. Two narrow metal-frame beds had been set up on either side of a chest of drawers and a rag rug.

  After they had taken a look around, Sam pushed Edgar into going down and asking if there was any place they could hang their clothes. “I didn’t think boys like you would have a lot of clothes,” Miss Kernaghan said. “I never had boys before. Why can’t you do like Mr. Delahunt? He puts his trousers under the mattress every night, and that keeps the crease in them grand.”

  Edgar thought that was the end of it, but in a little while Callie came with a broom handle and some wire. She stood on the bureau and contrived a clothespole with loops of wire around a beam.

  “We could easy do that,” Sam said. They looked with curiosity but little pleasure at her floppy gray undergarments. She didn’t answer. She had even brought some clothes hangers. Somehow they knew already that this was all her own doing.

  “Thank you, Callie,” said Edgar, a slender boy with a crown of fair curls, turning on her the diffident, sweet-natured smile that had had no success downstairs.

  Callie spoke in the rough voice that she used in the grocery store when demanding good potatoes. “Will that be all right for yez?”

  Sam and Edgar were cousins—not brothers, as most people thought. They were the same age—seventeen—and had been sent to board in Gallagher while they went to business college. They had grown up about ten miles from here, and had gone to the same country school and village continuation school. After a year at business college, they could get jobs in banks or offices or be apprenticed to accountants. They were not going back to the farm.

  What they really wanted to do, and had wanted since they were about ten years old, was to become acrobats. They had practiced for years and put on displays when the continuation school gave its concerts. That school had no gym, but there were some parallel bars and a balancing rail and mats in the basement. At home, they practiced in the barn, and on the grass in fine weather. How do acrobats earn a living? Sam was the one who had begun to ask that question. He could not picture Edgar and himself in a circus. They were not dark enough, for one thing. (He had an idea that the people who worked in circuses were all Gypsies.) He thought there must be acrobats going around on their own, doing stunts at fairs and in church halls. He remembered seeing some when he was younger. Where were they from? How did they get paid? How did you find out about joining them? Such questions troubled Sam more and more and never seemed to bother Edgar at all.

  In the early fall, after supper, while there was still some light in the evenings, they practiced in the vacant lot across the st
reet from Kernaghan’s, where the ground was fairly level. They wore their undershirts and woollen pants. They limbered up by doing cartwheels and handstands and headstands, somersaults and double somersaults, and then welded themselves together. They shaped their bodies into signs—into hieroglyphs—eliminating to an astonishing degree their separateness and making the bumps of heads and shoulders incidental. Sometimes, of course, these creations toppled, everything came apart, arms and legs flew free, and grappling bodies reappeared—just two boys’ bodies, one tall and slight, the other shorter and sturdier. They began again, building jerkily. The balancing bodies swayed. They might topple, they might hold. All depended on whether they could subdue themselves into that pure line, invisibly join themselves, attain the magic balance. Yes. No. Yes. Again.

  They had an audience of boarders sitting on the porch. Alice Peel took no notice. If she was not out with her fiancé, she was in her room attending to the upkeep of her clothes and person—painting her nails, doing up her hair or taking it out, plucking her eyebrows, washing her sweaters and silk stockings, cleaning her shoes. Adam Delahunt was a busy person, too—he had meetings of the Temperance Society and the Gideons to go to, social activities of his Sunday-school class to superintend. But he sat for a while and watched with Mrs. Cruze and Miss Verne and Miss Kernaghan. Mrs. Cruze still had good eyesight and she loved the show. She stamped her cane on the porch floor and yelled, “Get him, boy! Get him!” as if the stunts were some sort of wrestling match.

  Mr. Delahunt told Sam and Edgar about his Sunday-school class, called the Triple-Vs. The Vs stood for Virtue, Vigor, and Victory. He said that if they joined they could get to use the United church gymnasium. But the boys were Coldwater Baptists at home, so they could not accept.

  If Callie watched, it was from behind windows. She always had her work.

  Miss Kernaghan said that so much exercise would give those boys terrible appetites.

  When Sam thought of himself and Edgar practicing in that vacant lot—it was now part of the Canadian Tire parking space—he always seemed to be sitting on the porch, too, looking at the two boys striving and falling and pulling themselves up on the grass—one figure soaring briefly above the other, triumphantly hand-balanced—and then the cheerful separate tumbling. These memories have a certain damp brown shading. Perhaps from the wallpaper in the Kernaghan house. The trees that lined the road at that time were elms, and their leaf color in fall was a brown-spotted gold. The leaves were shaped like a candle flame. These leaves fell in his mind on a windless evening with the sky clear but the sunset veiled and the countryside misty. The town, under leaves and the smoke of burning leaves, was mysterious and difficult, a world on its own, with its church spires and factory whistles, rich houses and row houses, networks, catchwords, vested interests. He had been warned; he had been told town people were snotty. That was not the half of it.

  The exercise did increase the Grazier boys’ appetites, but those would have been terrible anyway. They were used to farm meals and had never imagined people could exist on such portions as were served here. They saw with amazement that Miss Verne left half of what little she got on her plate, and that Alice Peel rejected potatoes, bread, bacon, cocoa as a threat to her figure; turnips, cabbage, beans as a threat to her digestion; and anything with raisins in it simply because she couldn’t stand them. They could not figure out any way to get what Alice Peel turned down or what Miss Verne left on her plate, though it would surely have been fair.

  At ten-thirty in the evening, Miss Kernaghan produced what she called “the evening lunch.” This was a plate of sliced bread, some butter and jam, and cups of cocoa or tea. Coffee was not served in that house. Miss Kernaghan said it was American and corroded your gullet. The butter was cut up beforehand into meager pats, and the dish of jam was set in the middle of the table, where nobody could reach it easily. Miss Kernaghan remarked that sweet things spoiled the taste of bread and butter. The other boarders deferred to her out of long habit, but between them Sam and Edgar cleaned out the dish. Soon the amount of jam dwindled to two separate spoonfuls. The cocoa was made with water, with a little skim milk added to make a skin and to support Miss Kernaghan’s claim that it was made with milk entirely.

  Nobody challenged her. Miss Kernaghan told lies not to fool people but to stump them. If a boarder said, “It was a bit chilly upstairs last night,” Miss Kernaghan would say at once, “I can’t understand that. I had a roaring fire going. The pipes were too hot to lay your hand on them.” The fact of the matter would be that she had let the fire die down or go out altogether. The boarder would know or strongly suspect this, but what was a boarder’s suspicion against Miss Kernaghan’s firm, flashy lie? Mrs. Cruze would actually apologize, Miss Verne would mutter about her chilblains, Mr. Delahunt and Alice Peel would look sulky but would not argue.

  Sam and Edgar had to spend their whole allowance of pocket money, which wasn’t much, on food. At first they got hot dogs at the Cozy Grill. Then Sam figured out that they would be farther ahead buying a package of jam tarts or Fig Newtons at the grocery store. They had to eat the whole package on the way home, because of the rule about no food in the bedrooms, They liked the hot dogs, but they had never felt really comfortable at the Cozy Grill, which was full of noisy high-school students, younger and a lot brassier than they were. Sam felt some possibility of insult, though none ever developed. On the way back to Kernaghan’s from the grocery store, they had to pass the Cozy Grill and then Dixon’s, a drugstore with an ice-cream parlor in the back. That was where their fellow-students from the business college went for cherry Cokes and banana splits after school and in the evenings. Passing Dixon’s windows, they stopped chewing, looked stolidly straight ahead. They would never go inside.

  They were the only farm boys at business college, and their clothes set them apart. They had no light-blue or light-brown V-neck sweaters, no grownup-looking gray trousers, only these stiff woollen breeches, thick home-knit sweaters, old suit jackets worn as sports coats. They wore shirts and ties because it was required, but they had only one tie each and a couple of shirts. Miss Kernaghan allowed only one shirt a week in the washing, so Sam and Edgar often had dirty collars and cuffs, and even stains—probably from jam tarts—that they had unsuccessfully tried to sponge away.

  And there was another problem, related partly to clothes and partly to the bodies inside. There was never much hot water at the boarding house, and Alice Peel used up more than her share. In the sleepy mornings, the boys splashed their hands and faces as they had done at home. They carried around and were used to the settled smell of their bodies and daily-worn clothes, a record of their efforts and exertions. Perhaps this was a lucky thing. Otherwise, girls might have paid more attention to Edgar, whose looks they liked, and not to Sam, with his floppy sandy hair and freckles and his habit of keeping his head down, as if he were thinking of rooting for something. There would have been a wedge between them. Or, to put it another way, the wedge would have been there sooner.

  Winter came and put an end to the acrobatic stunts in the vacant lot. Now Sam and Edgar longed to go skating. The rink was only a couple of blocks away, on Orange Street, and on skating nights, which were Mondays and Thursdays, they could hear the music. They had brought their skates with them to Gallagher. They had skated almost as long as they could remember, on the swamp pond or the outdoor rink in the village. Here skating cost fifteen cents, and the only way for them to afford that was to give up the extra food. But the cold weather was making their appetites fiercer than ever.

  They walked over to the rink on a Sunday night when there was nobody around and again on a Monday night when the evening’s skating was over and there was nobody to keep them from going inside. They went in and mingled with the people leaving the ice and taking off their skates. They had a good look around before the lights were turned off. On their way home, and in their room, they talked quietly. Sam enjoyed figuring out a way that they could get in for nothing, but he did not picture them
actually doing it. Edgar took for granted that they would go from plan to action.

  “We can’t,” said Sam. “Neither of us are small enough.”

  Edgar didn’t answer, and Sam thought that was the end of it. He should have known better.

  The Orange Street Skating Rink, in Sam’s memory, is a long, dark ramshackle shed. A dim, moving light shows through the cracks between the boards. The music comes from gramophone records that are hoarse and scratchy—to listen to them is like reaching for the music through a wavering wall of thorns. “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “The Merry Widow,” “The Gold and Silver Waltz,” “The Sleeping Beauty.” The moving light seen through the cracks comes from a fixture called “the moon.” The moon, which shines from the roof of the rink, is a yellow bulb inside a large tin can, a syrup tin, from which one end has been cut away. The other lights are turned off when the moon is turned on. A system of wires and ropes makes it possible to pull the tin can this way and that, creating an impression of shifting light—the source, the strong yellow bulb, being deeply hidden.

  The rinkie-dinks controlled the moon. Rinkie-dinks were boys from ten or eleven to fifteen or sixteen years old. They cleaned the ice and shovelled the snow out the snow door, which was a snugly fitted flap low in the wall, hooked on the inside. Besides the ropes that controlled the moon, they worked the shutters that covered the openings in the roof—opened for air, closed against driving snow. The rinkie-dinks collected the money and would sometimes shortchange girls who were afraid of them, but they didn’t cheat Blinker. He had somehow fooled them into thinking he had every skater counted. Blinker was the rink manager, a sallow, skinny, and unfriendly man. He and his friends sat in his room, beyond the men’s toilet and changing room. In there was a wood stove, with a tall, blackened conical coffeepot sitting on top, and some straight-backed chairs with rungs missing, and a few old, filthy armchairs. The plank floor, like all the floors and benches and wallboards in the rink, was cut and scarred by fresh and old skate marks and darkened with smoke and dirt. The room where the men sat was hot and smoky and it was assumed they drank liquor in there, though perhaps it was only coffee out of the stained enamel mugs. Of course, there was a story that boys had once got in before the men arrived, and had peed in the coffeepot. Another story was that one of his friends had done that when Blinker went to scoop up the admission money.