by Alice Munro
Floris had been married once for a short time, but she did not seem to have derived any sense of importance from it. She worked in the shoe store and went to choir practice and was addicted to jigsaw puzzles, of the kind that take up a whole card table. Though I pestered her for it, she would not give me any satisfactory account of her romance or her marriage or her young husband’s death from blood poisoning—a story I would have liked to use, to counterbalance MaryBeth’s true tragic story of the death of her mother. Floris had large gray-blue eyes set so far apart that they almost seemed to be looking in different directions. There was an estranged, helpless expression in them.
George had not gone past Grade 4 at school. He worked at the piano factory, where he answered to the name of Dumbo without apparent resentment or embarrassment. He was so shy and quiet that he could make Floris with her tired petulance seem spirited. He cut pictures out of magazines and pinned them up around his room—not pictures of half-clothed pretty girls but just of things he liked the look of: an airplane, a chocolate cake, Elsie the Borden cow. He could play Chinese checkers, and sometimes invited me to have a game. Usually I told him I was too busy.
When I brought MaryBeth home to supper, Aunt Ena criticized the noise the bangles made at the table and wondered that a girl of that age was allowed to pluck her eyebrows. She also said—in George’s hearing—that my friend did not seem to be blessed with a lot of brains. I was not surprised. Neither MaryBeth nor I expected anything but the most artificial, painful, formal contact with the world of adults.
The Cryderman house was still called the Steuer house. Until not so long ago, Mrs. Cryderman had been Evangeline Steuer. The house had been built by Dr. Steuer, her father. It was set back from the street on a smooth, built-up terrace, and was unlike any other house in town. In fact, it was unlike any other house I had ever seen, reminding me of a bank or some important public building. It was one story high, and flat-roofed, with low French windows, classical pillars, a balustrade around the roof with an urn at each corner. Urns also flanked the front steps. The urns and the balustrade and the pillars had all been painted a creamy white, and the house itself was covered with pale-pink stucco. By this time, both the paint and the stucco were beginning to flake and look dingy.
I started going there in February. The urns were piled high with snow like dishes full of ice cream, and the various bushes in the yard looked as if polar-bear rugs had been thrown over them. There was just a little meandering path to the front door, instead of the broad neat walkway other people shovelled.
“Mr. Cryderman doesn’t shovel the snow because he doesn’t believe it’s permanent,” Mrs. Cryderman said. “He thinks he’ll wake up some morning and it’ll be all gone. Like fog. He wasn’t prepared for this!”
Mrs. Cryderman talked emphatically, as if everything she said was drastically important, and at the same time she made everything sound like a joke. This way of talking was entirely new to me.
Once inside that house, you never got a view of outside, except through the kitchen window over the sink. The living room was where Mrs. Cryderman spent her days, lying on the sofa, with ashtrays and cups and glasses and magazines and cushions all around her. She wore a Chinese dressing gown, or a long dark-green robe of brushed wool, or a jacket of quilted black satin—quickly ash-sprinkled—and a pair of maternity pants. The jacket would flap open and give me a glimpse of her stomach, already queerly swollen. She had the lamps turned on and the wine-colored curtains drawn across the windows, and sometimes she burned a little cone of incense in a brass dish. I loved those cones, a dusty-pink color, lying snug as bullets in their pretty box, retaining their shape magically as they turned to ash. The room was full of marvels—Chinese furniture of carved black wood, vases of peacock feathers and pampas grass, fans spread against the faded red walls, heaps of velvet cushions, satin cushions with gold tassels.
The first thing I had to do was tidy up. I picked up the city newspapers strewn on the floor, put the cushions back on the chairs and sofas, gathered up the cups with cold tea or coffee in them and the plates with their hardened scraps of food and the glasses in which there might be slices of soggy fruit, dregs of wine—sweet, weakened, but still faintly alcoholic mixtures. In the kitchen, I drank anything that was left and sucked the fruit to get the strange taste of liquor.
Mrs. Cryderman’s baby was expected in late June or early July. The uncertainty of the date was due to the irregularity of her menstrual cycle. (This was the first time I had ever heard anybody say “menstrual.” We said “monthlies” or “the curse” or used more roundabout expressions.) She herself was certain that she got pregnant on the night of Mr. Cryderman’s birthday when she was full of champagne. The twenty-ninth of September. The birthday was Mr. Cryderman’s thirty-third. Mrs. Cryderman was forty. She said she might as well own up to it, she was a cradle robber. And she was paying the price. Forty was too old to have a baby. It was too old to have a first baby. It was a mistake.
She pointed out the damage. First, the pale-brown blotches on her face and neck, which she said were all over her. They made me think of the flesh of pears beginning to go rotten—that soft discoloration, the discouraging faint deep bruises. Next, she showed her varicose veins, which kept her lying on the sofa. Cranberry-colored spiders, greenish lumps all over her legs. They turned black when she stood up. Before she put her feet to the floor, she had to wrap her legs in long, tight, rubbery bandages.
“Take my advice and have your babies while you’re young,” she said. “Go out and get pregnant immediately, if possible. I thought I was above all this. Ha-ha!” She did have a little sense, because she said, “Don’t ever tell your aunt the way I talk to you!”
When Mrs. Cryderman was Evangeline Steuer, she didn’t live in this house, only visited it from time to time, often with friends. Her appearances in town were brief and noteworthy. I had seen her driving her car with the top down, an orange scarf over her dark page-boy hair. I had seen her in the drugstore, wearing shorts and a halter, her legs and midriff sleek and tanned as if bound in brown silk. She was laughing that time, and loudly admitting to a hangover. I had seen her in church wearing a gauzy black hat with pink silk roses, a party hat. She didn’t belong here; she belonged in the world we saw in magazines and movies—a world of glossy triviality, of hard-faced wisecracking comedians, music in public ballrooms, pink neon cocktail glasses tipped over bar doors. She was our link with that world, our proof that it existed, and we existed with it, that its frittering vice and cruel luxury were not entirely unconnected with us. As long as she stayed there, making her whirlwind visits home, she was forgiven, perhaps distantly admired. Even my Aunt Ena, who had to deal with the broken glass in the fireplace, the fried chicken trodden into the rug, the shoe polish on the rim of the bathtub, was able to grant Evangeline Steuer some unholy privilege—though perhaps it was only the privilege of being an example of how money made you shameless, leisure made you useless, self-indulgence marked you out for some showy disaster.
But now what had Evangeline Steuer done? She had become a Mrs., like anybody else. She had bought the local newspaper for her husband to run. She was expecting a baby. She had lost her function, mixed things up. It was one thing to be a smoking, drinking, profane, and glamorous bachelor girl, and quite another thing to be a smoking, drinking, profane, and no longer glamorous expectant mother.
“Don’t pay any attention to me, Jessie. I never had to lie around like this before. I was always in the action before. All that brute of a doctor does is tell me I’ll be worse before I’m better. ‘Whatever goes in has to come out. Five minutes’ pleasure, nine months’ misery.’ I said to him, ‘What do you mean, five minutes?’ ” I did pay attention. I had never got such an earful or eyeful before. I told MaryBeth everything. I described the living room, Mrs. Cryderman’s outfits, the bottles in the buffet with their gold and green and ruby-colored contents, the tins of unfamiliar eatables in the kitchen cupboards—smoked oysters, anchovies, pureed chestnut
s, artichokes, as well as the big tinned hams and fruit puddings. I told about the veins, the bandages and blotches—making these things sound even worse than they were—and about Mrs. Cryderman’s long-distance conversations with her friends. Her friends’ names were Bunt, Pookie, Pug, and Spitty, so you could not tell if they were men or women. Her own name, among them, was Jelly. After she finished talking to them on the phone, she told me about money they had lost or accidents they had had or practical jokes they had played, or very complicated and unusual romances they were having.
Aunt Ena noticed that I was not getting much ironing done. I said that it was not my fault—Mrs. Cryderman kept me in the living room, talking. Aunt Ena said there was nothing to stop me setting up the ironing board in the living room if Mrs. Cryderman insisted on conversation.
“Let her talk,” Aunt Ena said. “You iron. That’s what you’re paid for.”
“I don’t mind you ironing in here, but you’ll have to scram out the minute Mr. Cryderman gets home,” Mrs. Cryderman said. “He hates that—any kind of domestic stuff going on where he’s around.”
She told me that Mr. Cryderman had been born and brought up in Brisbane, Australia, in a big house with banana trees all around, and that his mother had colored maids. I thought this sounded a little mixed up, as if Gone With the Wind had got into Australia, but I thought it might be true. She said that Mr. Cryderman had left Australia and become a journalist in Singapore, and then he was with the British Army in Burma when they were defeated by the Japanese. Mr. Cryderman had walked from Burma into India.
“With a little bunch of British soldiers and some Americans and native girls—nurses. No hanky-panky, though. All those girls did was sing hymns. They’d all been Christianized. ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’! Anyway, they were in no condition to carry on. Sick and wounded, walking day after day in the terrible heat. Charged by wild elephants. He’s going to write a book about it. Mr. Cryderman is. They had to build their own rafts and float downriver. They had malaria. They walked over the Himalayas. They were heroes and nobody has even heard about it.”
I thought that sounded fishy, too. Terrible heat in the Himalayas, which were known to be covered with eternal snow.
“I said to Bunt, ‘Eric fought with the British in Burma,’ and Bunt said, ‘The British didn’t fight in Burma—the Japs wiped their ass on the British in Burma.’ People don’t know a damn thing. Bunt couldn’t walk to the top of Yonge Street.”
Years later, maybe a quarter of a century later, I read about the walk that General Stilwell led out of Burma into India, through the pass above Tamu and down the Chindwin River. In the party were some British commandos, dirty and half starved. Eric Cryderman might have been one of them.
The meeting of Mr. and Mrs. Cryderman took place when he showed up one day to sublet her apartment in Toronto. He was planning to work as a journalist in Canada. She was planning to drive to Mexico with friends. She never made it. As soon as she saw Mr. Cryderman, that was that. Her friends all told her not to marry him. Seven years younger than she was, divorced—with a wife and child somewhere in Australia—and he had no money. Everybody said he was an adventurer. But she was not daunted. She married him within six weeks and didn’t invite any of them to the wedding.
I thought that I should contribute something to the conversation, so I said, “Why were they against him just because he was adventurous?”
“Ha-ha!” said Mrs. Cryderman. “That wasn’t what they meant. They meant he was after my money. Which I can’t even persuade him to live on while he writes a book about his experiences. He has to be independent. He has to write about what the fool bridesmaids wore and the trousseau tea and all the blather at the town council, and it’s driving him crazy. He is the most talented man I ever met, and someday you’ll be bragging that you knew him!”
As soon as we heard Mr. Cryderman at the door, I whisked the ironing basket away into the kitchen, as directed. Mrs. Cryderman would call out, in a new, silly-sweet, mocking, anxious voice, “Is that my honey-boy home? Is that Little Lord Fauntleroy? Is it the Mad Dingo?”
Mr. Cryderman, taking off his boots in the hall, would reply that it was Dick Tracy, or Barnacle Bill the Sailor. Then he would come into the living room and go straight to the sofa, where she lay with arms outstretched. They did smacking kisses, while I beat an awkward retreat with the ironing board.
“He married her for her money,” I said to MaryBeth.
MaryBeth wanted to know what he looked like.
“Like something dug up out of a bog,” I said. But that was Aunt Ena’s description after she first laid eyes on Mr. Cryderman. I repeated it because I liked the sound of it. I didn’t really find it apt. It was true that Mr. Cryderman was thin, tall and thin, and that he had a sallow complexion. But he didn’t have a moldy or sickly look. In fact, he had a kind of light-boned, sharp-featured, crisp good looks, a kind of looks very popular at the time. A pencil-line mustache, cool squinting eyes, a sarcastic half-smile.
“Like a snake in the grass,” I amended. “But she is out of her mind in love with him.” I acted out their daily reunion, smacking my lips and flinging my arms about.
Mrs. Cryderman told Mr. Cryderman that I read like a demon and was a genius at history. This was because I had straightened out some confusion of hers in connection with a historical novel she was trying to read. I had explained how Peter the Great was connected to Catherine the Great.
“Is that so?” said Mr. Cryderman. His accent made him sound both softer and meaner than a Canadian. “Who is your favorite writer?”
“Dostoyevsky,” I said, or thought I said.
“Dostoy-vetsky,” said Mr. Cryderman thoughtfully. “What is your favorite book by him?”
I was too flustered to notice the imitation.
“The Brothers Karamazov,” I said. That was the only book by Dostoyevsky that I had read. I had read it through the night in the cold of the back bedroom, in my haste and greed skipping a lot of the Grand Inquisitor and other parts where I had got bogged down.
“Which is your favorite brother?” said Mr. Cryderman, smiling as if he had got me into a corner.
“Mitya,” I said. By this time, I wasn’t so nervous and would have liked to go on, explaining why this was so—that Alyosha was too angelic and Ivan too intellectual, and so on. On the way home, I imagined that I had done this, and that while I spoke, the expression on Mr. Cryderman’s face had changed to one of respect and delicate chagrin. Then I realized the mistake I had made, in pronunciation.
I didn’t get a chance to go on, because Mrs. Cryderman cried out from the sofa, “Favorites, favorites! Who is everybody’s favorite big old bloated old pregnant lady? That’s what I want to know!”
However much I mocked the Crydermans to MaryBeth, I wanted something from them. Attention. Recognition. I liked Mrs. Cryderman’s saying I was a genius at history, even though I knew it was a silly thing to say. I would have valued what he said more. I thought that he looked down on this town and everybody in it. He didn’t care what they thought of him for not shovelling his walk. I wanted to snip one little hole in his contempt.
Just the same, he had to be called honey-boy, and submit to those kisses.
MaryBeth had new things to tell me, too. Beatrice had a boyfriend, and hoped to be engaged. MaryBeth said they were going at it hot and heavy.
Beatrice’s boyfriend was an apprentice barber. He visited her in the afternoons, when she got home from her shift at the hospital and there was a lull in barbershop business. The other girls who lived in the house were at work then, and MaryBeth and I would not have been there, either, if we had been tactful enough to loiter around the school, or go for Cokes, or spend time looking in store windows. But MaryBeth insisted on making a beeline for the rooming house.
We would find Beatrice making up the bed. She took all the covers off and tucked in the sheet with a professional briskness. Then she laid an absorbent cotton pad across the sheet at a strategic place. I was remi
nded of the days when I used to sleep shamefully over rubber, being an occasional bed wetter.
Now she replaced the top covers, smoothed and tidied them, hiding the secret. She plumped up the pillows, turned a corner of the top sheet down over the quilt. A queasy feeling of childhood lust came back to me, a recollection of bedclothes intimacies. Rough blankets, comforting flannelette sheets, secrets.
Down the hall to the bathroom went Beatrice, having to fix up the appropriate part of herself as she had fixed the bed. She had a serious, dutiful look on her face, a look of housewifely preoccupation. She still had not spoken one word to us.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she went ahead and did it right in front of us,” said MaryBeth loudly as we passed the bathroom door on our way downstairs. The water was running. What exactly did Beatrice do? I thought it involved sponges.
We sat on the veranda steps. The swing had been taken down for the winter and not been put back yet.
“She has no shame,” MaryBeth said. “And I have to sleep in the same bed. She thinks if she puts the pad over the sheet it’s all right. She stole that pad from the hospital. You could never trust her, even when she was little. Once, we had a fight and she said, ‘Let’s make up, shake hands,’ and when I took her hand to shake, she had a baby toad in it and the toad had gone to the bathroom on her.”
The snow was not quite gone; a nippy wind was blowing the smell of swamps and creeks and floodwaters into town. But the barber’s apprentice hadn’t bothered to put on a coat. He came hurrying along the alley in his white smock, head down, purposefully. He wasn’t prepared to see us.
“Hi there!” he said with false assurance, nervous jocularity.
MaryBeth wouldn’t answer him, and I couldn’t, either, out of loyalty. We didn’t get up, but shifted apart, giving him just enough room to go up the steps. I listened for, but couldn’t hear, the opening and closing of the bedroom door.
“They might as well be two dogs,” MaryBeth said. “Two dogs doing it.”
