The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  At the same time, she is listening to Dr. Streeter’s voice, and it says clearly, “You know, that girl’s teeth were probably knocked out. In some brawl.”

  This is Dr. Streeter’s familiar, reasonable voice, asking that some facts, some conditions, should be recognized. But she has put something new into it—a sly and natural satisfaction. He is not just sad, not just accepting; he is satisfied that some things should be so. The satisfaction far back in his voice matches the loosening feeling in her body. She feels a physical shame and aversion, a heat that seems to spread from her stomach. This passes, the wave of it passes, but the aversion remains. Aversion, disgust, dislike spreading out from you can be worse than pain. It would be a worse condition to live in. Once she has thought this, and put some sort of name to what she is feeling, she is a little steadier. It must be the strangeness of being on the flight, and the drink, and the confusion offered by that girl, and perhaps a virus, that she is struggling with. Dr. Streeter’s voice is next thing to a real delusion, but it isn’t a delusion; she knows she manufactured it herself. Manufactured what she could then turn away from, so purely hating him. If such a feeling became real, if a delusion like that got the better of her, she would be in a state too dreary to think about.

  She sets about deliberately to calm herself down. She breathes deeply and pretends that she is going to sleep. She starts telling herself a story in which things work out better. Suppose the girl had followed her to the back of the plane a while ago; suppose they had been able to talk? The story slips ahead, somehow, to the waiting room in Honolulu. Mary Jo sees herself sitting there in a room with stunted, potted palm trees, on a padded bench. The man and the girl walk past her. The girl is walking ahead, carrying the shopping bags. The man has the travelling bag slung over his shoulder and he is carrying the umbrella. With the end of the furled umbrella, he gives the girl a poke. Nothing to hurt her or even surprise her. A joke. The girl scurries and giggles and looks around her with an expression of endless apology, embarrassment, helplessness, good humor. Then Mary Jo catches her eye, without the man’s noticing. Mary Jo gets up and walks across the waiting room and reaches the bright, tiled refuge of the ladies’ washroom.

  And this time the girl does follow her.

  Mary Jo runs the cold water. She splashes it over her own face, in a gesture of encouragement.

  She urges the girl to do the same.

  She speaks to her calmly and irresistibly.

  “That’s right. Cool your face off. Get your head clear. You have to think clearly. You have to think very clearly. Now. What is it? What is it you want? What are you afraid of? Don’t be afraid. He can’t come in here. We’ve got time. You can tell me what you want and I can help you. I can get in touch with the authorities.”

  But the story halts at this point. Mary Jo has hit a dry spot, and her dream—for she is dreaming by now—translates this in its unsubtle way into an irregular, surprising patch of rust where the enamel has worn away at the bottom of the sink.

  What a badly maintained ladies’ room.

  “Is it always like this in the tropics?” says Mary Jo to the woman standing beside her at the next sink, and this woman covers her sink with her hands as if she doesn’t want Mary Jo to look at or use it. (Not that Mary Jo was intending to.) She is a large, white-haired woman in a red sari, and she seems to have some authority in the ladies’ room. Mary Jo looks around for the Eskimo girl and is bewildered to see her lying on the floor. She has shrunk, and has a rubbery look, a crude face like a doll’s. But the real shock is that her head has come loose from her body, though it is still attached by an internal elastic band.

  “You’ll get a chance to choose your own,” says the white-haired woman, and Mary Jo thinks this means your own punishment. She knows she is in no danger of that—she is not responsible, she didn’t hit the girl or push her to the floor. The woman is crazy.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I have to get back to the plane.”

  But this is later, and they are no longer in the ladies’ room. They are back in Dr. Streeter’s office and Mary Jo has a sense of a dim scramble of events she can’t keep track of, of lapses in time she hasn’t noted. She still thinks about getting back on the plane, but how is she to find the waiting room, let alone get to Honolulu?

  A large figure entirely wrapped up in bandages is carried past, and Mary Jo means to find out who it is, what has happened, why they are bringing a victim of burns in here.

  The woman in the red sari is there, too. She says to Mary Jo, in quite a friendly way, “The court is in the garden?”

  This may mean that Mary Jo is still to be accused of something, and that there is a court being conducted in the garden. On the other hand, the word “court” may refer to Dr. Streeter. The woman may mean “count,” being mixed up in her spelling. If that’s so, she intends to mock him. Calling him the count is a joke, and “in the garden” means something else, too, which Mary Jo will have to concentrate hard on to figure out.

  But the woman opens her hand and shows Mary Jo some small blue flowers—like snowdrops, but blue—and explains that these are “court” and that “court” means flowers.

  A ruse, and Mary Jo knows it, but she can’t concentrate because she’s waking up. In a jumbo jet over the Pacific Ocean, with the movie screen furled and the lights mostly out and even the baby asleep. She can’t get back through the various curtains of the dream to the clear part, in the ladies’ room, when the cold water was streaming down their faces and she—Mary Jo—was telling the girl how she could save herself. She can’t get back there. People all around her are sleeping under blankets, with their heads on small orange pillows. Somehow a pillow and a blanket have been provided for her as well. The man and the girl across the aisle are asleep with their mouths open, and Mary Jo is lifted to the surface by their duet of eloquent, innocent snores.

  This is the beginning of her holiday.

  A QUEER STREAK

  I. Anonymous Letters

  Violet’s mother—Aunt Ivie—had three little boys, three baby boys, and she lost them. Then she had the three girls. Perhaps to console herself for the bad luck she had already suffered, in a back corner of South Sherbrooke Township—or perhaps to make up, ahead of time, for a lack of motherly feelings—she gave the girls the fanciest names she could think of: Opal Violet, Dawn Rose, and Bonnie Hope. She may not have thought of those names as anything but temporary decorations. Violet wondered—did her mother ever picture her daughers having to drag such names around sixty or seventy years later, when they were heavy, faded women? She may have thought her girls were going to die, too.

  “Lost” meant that somebody died. “She lost them” meant they died. Violet knew that. Nevertheless she imagined. Aunt Ivie—her mother—wandering into a swampy field, which was the waste ground on the far side of the barn, a twilight place full of coarse grass and alder bushes. There Aunt Ivie, in the mournful light, mislaid her baby children. Violet would slip down the edge of the barnyard to the waste ground, then cautiously enter it. She would stand hidden by the red-stemmed alder and nameless thornbushes (it always seemed to be some damp, desolate time of year when she did this—late fall or early spring), and she would let the cold water cover the toes of her rubber boots. She would contemplate getting lost. Lost babies. The water welled up through the tough grass. Farther in, there were ponds and sinkholes. She had been warned. She shuffled on, watching the water creep up on her boots. She never told them. They never knew where she went. Lost.

  The parlor was the other place that she could sneak to by herself. The window blinds were down to the sills; the air had a weight and thickness, as if it were cut into a block that exactly filled the room. In certain fixed places could be found the flushed, spiky shell with the roar of the sea caught inside it; the figure of the little kilted Scotsman holding a glass of amber liquid that would tilt but never spill; a fan made entirely out of glossy black feathers; a plate that was a souvenir of Niagara Falls and showed the sa
me picture as the Shredded Wheat box. And a framed picture on the wall that affected Violet so intensely that she couldn’t look at it when she first came into the room. She had to work her way around to it, keeping it always in a corner of her vision. It showed a king with his crown on, and three tall, queenly-looking ladies in dark dresses. The king was asleep, or dead. They were all on the shore of the sea, with a boat waiting, and there was something coming out of this picture into the room—a smooth, dark wave of unbearable sweetness and sorrow. That seemed a promise to Violet; it was connected with her future, her own life, in a way she couldn’t explain or think about. She couldn’t even look at the picture if there was anybody else in the room. But in that room there seldom was anybody else.

  Violet’s father was called King Billy, King Billy Thorns, though William was not in his name. There was also a horse called King Billy, a dapple-gray horse that was their driver, hitched to the cutter in wintertime and the buggy in summer. (There was not to be a car on that place until Violet was grown up and bought one in the nineteen-thirties.)

  The name King Billy was usually connected with the parade, the Orange Walk, on the twelfth of July. A man chosen to be King Billy, wearing a cardboard crown and a raggedy purple cloak, would ride at the head of the parade. He was supposed to ride a white horse, but sometimes a dapple-gray was the best that could be found. Violet never knew if the horse or her father, or both, had figured in this parade, either separately or together. Confusion abounded, in the world as she knew it, and adults as often as not resented being asked to set it straight.

  But she did know that her father, at one time in his life, had worked on a train up North that ran through the wild bush where bears were. Loggers would ride this train on the weekends, coming out of the bush to get drunk, and if they got too rambunctious on the way back, King Billy would stop the train and kick them off. No matter where the train was at the time. In the middle of the wilderness—no matter. He kicked them off. He was a fighter. He had got that job because he was a fighter.

  Another story, from further back in his life. He had gone to a dance, when he was a young man, up on the Snow Road, where he came from. Some other young fellows who were there had insulted him, and he had to take their insults because he did not know a thing about fighting. But after that he got some lessons from an old prizefighter, a real one, who was living in Sharbot Lake. Another night, another dance—the same thing as before. The same kind of insults. Except that this time King Billy lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.

  Lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.

  No more insults of that kind anywhere up in that country.

  No more.

  (The insults had to do with being a bastard. He didn’t say so, but Violet figured it out from her mother’s muttering. “Your daddy didn’t have no people,” Aunt Ivie said, in her dark, puzzled, grudging way. “He never did. He just didn’t have no people at all.”)

  Violet was five years older than her sister Dawn Rose, and six years older than Bonnie Hope. Those two were thick as thieves, but mainly docile. They were redheads, like King Billy. Dawn Rose was chubby and ruddy and broad-faced. Bonnie Hope was small-boned and big-headed, with hair that grew at first in wisps and patches, so that she looked like a wobbly young bird. Violet was dark-haired, and tall for her age, and strong like her mother. She had a long, handsome face and dark blue eyes that looked at first to be black. Later on, when Trevor Auston was in love with her, he had some nice things to say about the color of her eyes matching up with her name.

  Violet’s mother, as well as her father, had an odd name, being called Aunt Ivie most of the time even by her own children. That was because she was the youngest of a large family. She had plenty of people, though they didn’t often come to see her. All the old or precious things in the house—those things in the parlor, and a certain humpbacked trunk, and some tarnished spoons—came from Aunt Ivie’s family, who had a farm on the shores of White Lake. Aunt Ivie had stayed there so long, unmarried, that her nieces’ and nephews’ name for her became everybody’s name, and her daughters, too, chose it over Mama.

  Nobody ever thought she would marry. She said so herself. And when she did marry the little bold redheaded man who looked so odd beside her, people said she didn’t seem to stand the change too well. She lost those first boy babies, and she didn’t take too happily to the responsibility of running a house. She liked to work outside, hoeing in the garden or splitting wood, as she had always done at home. She milked the cows and cleaned out the stable and took care of the hens. It was Violet, getting older, who took over the housework.

  By the time she was ten years old, Violet had become quite house-proud and dictatorial, in a sporadic way. She would spend all Saturday scouring and waxing, then yell and throw herself on the couch and grind her teeth in a rage when people tracked in mud and manure.

  “That girl will grow up, and she won’t have nothing but stumps in her mouth, and serve her right for her temper,” Aunt Ivie said, as if she was talking about some neighbor child. Aunt Ivie was usually the one who had tracked in the mud and ruined the floor.

  Another Saturday there would be baking, and making up recipes. One whole summer, Violet was trying to invent a drink like Coca-Cola, which would be famous and delicious and make them a fortune. She tried out on herself and her sisters all sorts of combinations of berry juice, vanilla, bottled fruit essences, and spices. Sometimes they were all off in the long grass in the orchard, throwing up. The younger girls usually did what Violet told them to, and believed what she said. One day, the butcher’s man arrived to buy the young calves, and Violet told Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope that sometimes the butcher’s man was not satisfied with the meat on the calves and went after juicy little children to make them into steaks and chops and sausages. She told this out of the blue and for her own amusement, as far as she could recall later on when she made things into stories. The little girls tried to hide themselves in the haymow and King Billy heard their commotion and chased them out. They told what Violet had said and King Billy said they should be smacked for swallowing such nonsense. He said he was a man with a mule for a wife and a hooligan daughter running his house. Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope ran to confront Violet.

  “Liar! Butchers don’t chop up children! You told a lie, liar!”

  Violet, who was cleaning out the stove at the time, said nothing. She picked up a pan of ashes—warm but, fortunately, not hot—and dumped it on their heads. They knew enough not to tell a second time. They ran outside and rolled in the grass and shook themselves like dogs, trying to get the ashes out of their hair and ears and eyes and underwear. Down in a corner of the orchard, they started their own playhouse, with pulled grass heaped up for seats and bits of broken china for dishes. They vowed not to tell Violet.

  But they couldn’t keep away from her. She put their hair up in rags to curl it; she dressed them in costumes made from old curtains; she painted their faces, using concoctions of berry juice and flour and stove polish. She found out about the playhouse and had ideas for furnishing it that were superior to theirs. Even on the days when she had no time for them at all, they had to watch what she was doing.

  She was painting a design of red roses on the black and worn-out kitchen linoleum.

  She was cutting a scalloped edge on all the old green window blinds for elegance.

  It did seem as if ordinary family life had been turned upside down at their place. At other farms, it would usually be the children you would see first as you came up the lane—children playing, or doing some chore. The mother would be hidden in the house. Here it was Aunt Ivie you would see, hilling up the potatoes or just prowling around the yard or the chicken run, wearing rubber boots and a man’s felt hat and a dingy assortment of sweaters, skirt, droopy slip and apron, and wrinkled, spattered stockings. It was Violet who ruled in the house, Violet who decided when and if to pass out the pieces of bread and butter and corn syrup. It was as if King Billy and Aunt Ivie had not quit
e understood how to go about making an ordinary life, even if they had meant to.

  But the family got along. They milked the cows and sold the milk to the cheese factory and raised the calves for the butcher and cut the hay. They were members of the Anglican church, though they didn’t often attend, owing to the problems of getting Aunt Ivie cleaned up. They did go sometimes to the card parties in the schoolhouse. Aunt Ivie could play cards, and she would remove her apron and felt hat to do so, though she wouldn’t change her boots. King Billy had some reputation as a singer, and after the card-playing, people would try to get him to entertain. He liked to sing songs he had learned from the loggers that were never written down. He sang with his fists clenched and his eyes closed, resolutely:

  “On the Opeongo Line I drove a span of bays,

  One summer once upon a time for Hooligan and Hayes,

  Now that them bays is dead and gone and grim old age is mine,

  I’m dreamin’ that I’m teamin’, on the Opeongo Line.”

  Who was Hooligan? Who was Hayes?

  “Some outfit,” said King Billy, expansive from the singing.

  Violet went to high school in town, and after that to normal school in Ottawa. People wondered where King Billy got the money. If he still had some put by from his railway pay, that meant he had got some money from Aunt Ivie’s family when he took her off their hands and bought the farm. King Billy said he didn’t grudge Violet an education—he thought being a teacher would suit her. But he didn’t have anything extra for her. Before she started at high school, she went across the fields to the next farm, carrying a piece of Roman-striped crepe she had found in the trunk. She wanted to learn to use the sewing machine, so that she could make herself a dress. And so she did, though the neighbor woman said it was the oddest-looking outfit for a schoolgirl that she ever hoped to see.