The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  It was not your purpose to marry him.

  It was not the purpose of your life.

  Not to marry Trevor. Not the purpose of your life.

  Your life has a purpose, and you know what it is.

  To look after them. All of them, all of your family, and Dawn Rose in particular. To look after all of them, and Dawn Rose in particular.

  She was looking out the window, understanding this. The sun shone on the feathery June grass and the buttercups and toadflax and the old smooth rocks, on all the ragged countryside that she would never care for, and the word that came into her mind was “golden.”

  A golden opportunity.

  What for?

  You know what for. To give in. To give up. Care for them. Live for others.

  That was the way Violet saw to leave her pain behind. A weight gone off her. If she would bow down and leave her old self behind as well, and all her ideas of what her life should be, the weight, the pain, the humiliation would all go magically. And she could still be chosen. She could be like the June grass that the morning light passed through, and lit up like pink feathers or streaks of sunrise cloud. If she prayed enough and tried enough, that would be possible.

  People said that King Billy was never the same after his scare. Never really. They said that he got old, withered visibly. But he had been old, fairly old, when it all happened. He was a man who hadn’t married till he was over forty. He went on milking the cows, getting back and forth to the barn through a few more hard winters, then died of pneumonia.

  Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope had gone to live in town by that time. They didn’t go to high school. They got jobs in the shoe factory. Bonnie Hope became reasonably pretty and sociable, and she caught the eye of a salesman named Collard. They were married, and moved to Edmonton. Bonnie Hope had three daughters. She wrote proper letters home.

  Dawn Rose’s looks and manners improved, too. She was known in the shoe factory as a hard worker, a person not to be crossed, and one who could tell some good jokes if she was in the mood for it. She married, too—a farmer named Kemp, from the southern part of the county. No strange behavior or queerness or craziness ever surfaced in her again. She was said to have a blunt way with her—that was all. She had a son.

  Violet went on living with Aunt Ivie on the farm. She had a job in the municipal telephone office. She bought a car, so that she could drive back and forth to work. Couldn’t she have managed to write her teacher’s examinations another year? Perhaps so. Perhaps not. When she gave up, she gave up. She didn’t believe in trying to get back. She was good at her job.

  Aunt Ivie still prowled the yard and the orchard, looking for where some hens might have hidden their eggs. She wore her hat and her boots. She tried to remember to scrape her boots off at the door, so that Violet wouldn’t throw a tantrum.

  But Violet never did that anymore.

  • • •

  One afternoon when she was off work, Violet drove over to see Dawn Rose. They were friendly—Dawn Rose’s husband liked Violet—there was no reason not to arrive unexpectedly.

  She found the doors of the house open. It was a warm summer day. Dawn Rose, who was very stout now, came out on the porch and said that it wasn’t a good day for visiting, she was varnishing the floors. And indeed this was so—Violet could smell the varnish. Dawn Rose didn’t offer lemonade or ask Violet to sit down on the porch. Just that day she was too busy.

  Her little timid-looking fat son, who had the odd name of Dane, came up and clung to her legs. He usually liked Violet, but today he made strange.

  Violet drove away. She didn’t know, of course, that in a year Dawn Rose would be dead of a blood clot resulting from chronic phlebitis. It wasn’t Dawn Rose she was thinking of, but herself, as she drove along a low stretch of road with trees and thick brush on either side and heard a voice say, “Her life is tragic.”

  “Her life is tragic,” the voice said clearly and without any special emotion, and Violet, as if blinded, ran the car right off the road. There wasn’t much of a ditch at all, but the ground there was boggy and she couldn’t get the car out of it. She walked around and looked at where her wheels were, then stood by the car waiting for somebody to come along and give her a shove.

  But when she did hear a car coming, she knew she didn’t want to be found. She couldn’t bear to be. She ran from the road into the woods, into the brush, and she was caught. She was caught then by berry bushes, little hawthorns. Held fast. Hiding because she didn’t want to be seen, if her life was tragic.

  II . Possession

  Dane believes that he has one memory of Violet—his mother’s sister—from a time before his mother died. He remembers very little from that far back. He hardly remembers his mother. He has one picture of his mother standing in front of the mirror at the kitchen sink, tucking her red hair under a navy-blue straw hat. He remembers a bright red ribbon on the hat. She must have been getting ready to go to church. And he can see a swollen leg, of a dull-brown color, that he associates with her last sickness. But he doubts if he ever saw that. Why would her leg be such a color? He must have heard people talking about it. He heard them say that her leg was as big as a barrel.

  He thinks he remembers Violet coming for supper, as she sometimes did, bringing with her a pudding, which she set outside in the snow to keep cool. (None of the farmhouses had a refrigerator in those days.) Then it snowed, and the snow covered the pudding dish, which sank from sight. Dane remembers Violet tramping around in the snowy yard after dark, calling, “Pudding, pudding, here pudding!” as if it was a dog. Himself laughing immoderately, and his mother and father laughing in the doorway, and Violet elaborating the performance, stopping to whistle.

  Not long after his mother died, his grandmother died—the one who lived with Violet, and wore a black hat, and called the hens in what sounded exactly like their own language, a tireless crooning and clucking. Then Violet sold the farm and moved to town, where she got a job with Bell Telephone. That was during the Second World War, when there was a shortage of men, and Violet soon became manager. There was some feeling that she should have stepped down when the war was over, given the job back to some man who had a family to support. Dane recalls hearing somebody say that—a woman, maybe one of his father’s sisters, saying that it would have been the gracious thing to do. But his father said no, Violet did right. He said Violet had spunk.

  Instead of the dull, draped, beaded dresses that married women—mothers—wore, Violet wore skirts and blouses. She wore pleated skirts of lively plaid, navy-blue or gray gabardine, with wonderful blouses of ivory satin, ruffled white georgette, pink or yellow or silvery rayon crepe. The color of her good coat was royal purple, and it had a silver-fox collar. Her hair was not finger-waved, or permanented, but done up in a thick, dark, regal-looking roll. Her complexion was powdered, delicately pink, like the large seashell she owned and would let Dane listen to. Dane knows now that she dressed, and looked, like a certain kind of businesswoman, professional woman, of those days. Stylish but ladylike, shapely though not exactly slender, neither matronly nor girlish. What he took to be so remarkable and unique was not really so. This was the truth he discovered about most things as he got older. Just the same, his memory protects Violet from any sense of repetition, or classification, there’s no way that long-ago Violet can be diminished.

  In town, Violet lived in an apartment over the Royal Bank. You had to go up a long, closed-in flight of stairs. The long windows in the living room were called French doors. They opened out onto two tiny balconies with waist-high railings of wrought iron. The walls were painted, not papered. They were a pale green. Violet bought a new sofa and chair upholstered in a rich moss-green fabric, and a coffee table with a glass tray that fitted over the wooden top. The curtains were called drapes, and had pull cords. As they closed over the windows, a pattern of shiny cream-colored leaves rippled out across the dull cream background. There was no ceiling light—just floor lamps. In the kitchen there were knotty-pine cu
pboards and a knotty-pine breakfast nook. Another flight of steps—these were open and steep—led down to a little hedged-in back yard, which only Violet had the use of. It was as tidily enclosed, as susceptible to arrangement and decoration, as any living room.

  During the first two years he went to high school in town, Dane visited Violet fairly often. He stayed overnight in the apartment when the weather was stormy. Violet made him up a bed on the moss-green sofa. He was a skinny, ravenous, redheaded boy in those days—nobody can credit the skinniness now—and Violet fed him well. She made him hot chocolate with whipped cream to drink at bedtime. She served him creamed chicken in tart shells, and layer cakes, and something called gravel pie, which was made with maple syrup. She ate one piece, and he ate the rest. This was a great change from the rough-and-ready meals at home with his father and the hired man. Violet told him stories about her own childhood on the farm, with his mother and the other sister, who lived out in Edmonton now, and their mother and father, whom she called “characters.” Everybody was a character in those stories; everything was shaped to be funny.

  She had bought a record player, and she played records for him, asking him to choose his favorite. His favorite was the record she got as a bonus when she joined a record club that would introduce her to classical music. It was The Birds, by Respighi. Her favorite was Kenneth McKellar Singing Sacred and Secular Songs.

  She didn’t come out to the farm anymore. Dane’s father, when he stopped to pick Dane up, never had time for a cup of coffee. Perhaps he was afraid to sit down in such an elegant apartment in his farm clothes. Perhaps he still held a little grudge against Violet for what she had done at church.

  Violet had made a choice there, right at the beginning of her town life. The church had two doors. One door was used by country people—the reason for this originally being that it was nearer to the drive shed—and the other by town people. Inside, the pattern was maintained: town people on one side of the church, country people on the other. There was no definable feeling of superiority or inferiority involved; that was just the way it was. Even country people who had retired and moved to town made a point of not using the town door, though that might mean going out of their way, walking right past it, to the country door.

  Violet’s move, and her job, certainly made her a town person. But when she first came to that church, Dane and his father were the only people in it that she knew. Choosing the country side would have shown loyalty, and a certain kind of pride, a forgoing of privilege. (For it was true that most of the elders and ushers and Sunday-school teachers were chosen from the town side, just as most of the fancy hats and fashionable ladies’ outfits appeared over there.) Choosing the town side, which was what Violet did, showed an acceptance of status, perhaps even a wish for more.

  Dane’s father teased her on the sidewalk afterward. “You like the company over there?”

  “It just seemed handier,” Violet said, pretending not to know what he was talking about. “I don’t know about the company. I think some fellow had a dead cigar in his pocket.”

  Dane wished so much that Violet hadn’t done that. It wasn’t that he wanted anything serious to happen between Violet and his father—for instance, marriage. He couldn’t imagine that. He just wanted them to be on the same side, so that could be his side.

  On an afternoon in June, when he had finished writing one of his exams, Dane went around to Violet’s apartment to get a book he had left there. He was allowed to use the apartment to study in while she was at work. He would open the French doors and let in the smell of the countryside just freed of snow, with its full creeks and leaky swamps and yellowing willow trees and steaming furrows. Dust came in, too, but he always thought he could wipe that up before she got home. He walked around and around in the pale bright living room, tamping down chunks of information, feeling lordly. Everything in the room got bits of whatever he was learning attached to it. There was a dark picture of a dead king and some stately ladies that he would always look at when he was memorizing poetry. The ladies reminded him in a strange way of Violet.

  He hadn’t known whether Violet would be home, because her afternoon off varied from week to week. But he heard her voice as he came up the stairs.

  “It’s me,” he called, and waited for her to come out of the kitchen and ask about his exam.

  Instead she called back to him, “Dane! Dane, I wasn’t expecting you! Come and have coffee with us!”

  She introduced him to the two people in the kitchen, a man and wife. The Tebbutts. The man was standing by the counter and the woman was sitting in the breakfast nook. Dane knew the man by sight. Wyck Tebbutt, who sold insurance. He was supposed to have been a professional baseball player, but that would have been a long time ago. He was a trim, small, courteous man, always rather nattily dressed, with a deft athlete’s modest confidence.

  Violet didn’t ask Dane anything about his exam, but went on fussing about getting the coffee ready. First she got out breakfast cups, then rejected them and got down her good china. She spread a cloth on the breakfast-nook table. There was a faint scorch mark on it from the iron.

  “Well, I’m mortified!” said Violet laughing.

  Wyck Tebbutt laughed, too. “So you should be, so you should be!” he said.

  Violet’s nervous laugh, and her ignoring him, displeased Dane considerably. She had been in town for several years now, and she had made several changes in herself, which he seemed to be just now noticing all together. Her hair was not done up in a roll anymore; it was short and curled. And its dark-brown color was not the same as it used to be. Now it had a rich, dull look, like chocolate fudge. Her lipstick was too heavy, too bright a red, and the grain of her skin had coarsened. Also, she had put on a lot of weight, especially around the hips. The harmony of her figure was spoiled—it almost looked as if she was wearing some kind of cage or contraption under her skirt.

  As soon as his coffee was poured, Wyck Tebbutt said that he would just take his cup down into the yard, because he wanted to see how those new rosebushes were getting on.

  “Oh, I think they’ve got some kind of a bug!” said Violet, as if the fact delighted her. “I’m afraid they have, Wyck!”

  All this time, the wife was talking, and she went right on, hardly noticing that her husband had left. She talked to Violet and even to Dane, but she was really just talking into the air. She talked about her appointments with the doctor, and the chiropractor. She said that she had a headache that was like red-hot irons being clamped on her temples. And she had another kind of shooting pain down the side of her neck that was like hundreds of needles being driven into her flesh. She wouldn’t allow a break; she was like a helpless little talking machine set up in a corner of the breakfast nook, her large sad eyes going blank as soon as they fixed on you.

  This was the sort of person, this was the sort of talk, that Violet was so good at imitating.

  And now she was deferring. She was listening, or pretending to listen, to this woman with an interest the woman didn’t even notice or need. Was it because the husband had walked out? Was Violet feeling a concern about his rudeness to his wife? She did keep glancing down into the back yard.

  “I just have to see what Wyck thinks about that bug,” she said, and she was off, down the back steps, at what seemed like a heavy and undignified trot.

  “All they are interested in is their money,” the wife said.

  Dane got up to get himself more coffee. He stood at the stove and lifted the coffeepot inquiringly while she talked.

  “I shouldn’t have drunk the amount I already have,” she said. “Ninety percent of my stomach is scar tissue.”

  Dane looked down at her husband and Violet, who were leaning together over the young rosebushes. No doubt they were talking about the roses, and bugs, and bug killer and blight. Nothing so crude as a touch would occur. Wyck, holding his coffee cup, delicately lifted one leaf, then another, with his foot. Violet’s look travelled down obediently to the leaf held ag
ainst his polished shoe.

  It would be wrong to say that Dane understood anything right then. But he forgot the woman who was talking and the coffeepot he was holding. He felt a secret, a breath of others’ intimacy. Something he didn’t want to know about, but would have to.

  Not so long afterward, he was with his father on the street, and he saw Wyck coming toward them. His father said, “Hello, Wyck,” in a certain calm, respectful voice men use to greet other men they don’t know—or perhaps don’t want to know—too well. Dane had veered off to look into the hardware store window.

  “Don’t you know Wyck Tebbutt?” his father said. “I thought you might’ve run into him at Violet’s.”

  Then Dane felt it again—the breath he hated. He hated it more now, because it was all around him. It was all around him if even his father knew.

  He didn’t want to understand the extent of Violet’s treachery. He already knew that he would never forgive her.

  Now Dane is a broad-shouldered ruddy man with the worn outlines of a teddy bear and a beard that is almost entirely gray. He has grown to look more and more like his mother. He is an architect. He went away from home to college, and for a long time he lived and worked in other places, but he came back several years ago, and is kept busy now restoring the churches and town halls and business blocks and houses that were considered eyesores at the time he left. He lives in the house he grew up in, the house his father was born and died in, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old stone house that he and Theo have gradually brought back to something like its original style.

  He lives with Theo, who is a social worker.

  When Dane first told Wyck and Violet (he has forgiven her—them—long ago) that somebody named Theo was moving in with him, Wyck said, “I take that to mean you finally turned up a serious girlfriend.”

  Violet didn’t say anything.

  “A man friend,” Dane said gently. “It isn’t easy to tell, from the name.”