by Alice Munro
I teased him sourly: “Suppose after we have the baby the house is on fire and the baby and the play are both in there, which would you save?”
“Both.”
“But supposing you can just save one? Never mind the baby, suppose I am in there, no, suppose I am drowning here and you are here and cannot possibly reach us both—”
“You’re making it tough for me.”
“I know I am. I know I am. Don’t you hate me?”
“Of course I hate you.” After this we might go to bed, playful, squealing, mock-fighting, excited. All our life together, the successful part of our life together, was games. We made up conversations to startle people on the bus. Once we sat in a beer parlor and he berated me for going out with other men and leaving the children alone while he was off in the bush working to support us. He pleaded with me to remember my duty as a wife and as a mother. I blew smoke in his face. People around us were looking stern and gratified. When we got outside we laughed till we had to hold each other up, against the wall. We played in bed that I was Lady Chatterley and he was Mellors.
“Where be that little rascal John Thomas?” he said thickly. “I canna find John Thomas!”
“Frightfully sorry, I think I must have swallowed him,” I said, ladylike.
THERE WAS a water pump in the basement. It made a steady, thumping noise. The house was on fairly low-lying ground not far from the Fraser River, and during the rainy weather the pump had to work most of the time to keep the basement from being flooded. We had a dark rainy January, as is usual in Vancouver, and this was followed by a dark rainy February. Hugo and I felt gloomy. I slept a lot of the time. Hugo couldn’t sleep. He claimed it was the pump that kept him awake. He couldn’t work because of it in the daytime and he couldn’t sleep because of it at night. The pump had replaced Dotty’s piano-playing as the thing that most enraged and depressed him in our house. Not only because of its noise, but because of the money it was costing us. Its entire cost went onto our electricity bill, though it was Dotty who lived in the basement and reaped the benefits of not being flooded. He said I should speak to Dotty and I said Dotty could not pay the expenses she already had. He said she could turn more tricks. I told him to shut up. As I became more pregnant, slower and heavier and more confined to the house, I got fonder of Dotty, used to her, less likely to store up and repeat what she said. I felt more at home with her than I did sometimes with Hugo and our friends.
All right, Hugo said, I ought to phone the landlady. I said he ought. He said he had far too much to do. The truth was we both shrank from a confrontation with the landlady, knowing in advance how she would confuse and defeat us with shrill evasive prattle.
In the middle of the night in the middle of a rainy week I woke up and wondered what had wakened me. It was the silence.
“Hugo, wake up. The pump’s broken. I can’t hear the pump.”
“I am awake,” Hugo said.
“It’s still raining and the pump isn’t going. It must be broken.” “No, it isn’t. It’s shut off. I shut it off.”
I sat up and turned on the light. He was lying on his back, squinting and trying to give me a hard look at the same time.
“You didn’t turn it off.”
“All right, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“I could not stand the goddamn expense anymore. I could not stand thinking about it. I could not stand the noise either. I haven’t had any sleep in a week.”
“The basement will flood.”
“I’ll turn it on in the morning. A few hours’ peace is all I want.”
“That’ll be too late, it’s raining torrents.”
“It is not.”
“You go to the window.”
“It’s raining. It’s not raining torrents.”
I turned out the light and lay down and said in a calm stern voice, “Listen to me, Hugo, you have to go and turn it on, Dotty will be flooded out.”
“In the morning.”
“You have to go and turn it on now.”
“Well I’m not.”
“If you’re not, I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.”
But I didn’t move.
“Don’t be such an alarmist.”
“Hugo.”
“Don’t cry.”
“Her stuff will be ruined.”
“Best thing could happen to it. Anyway, it won’t.” He lay beside me stiff and wary, waiting, I suppose, for me to get out of bed, go down to the basement, and figure out how to turn the pump on. Then what would he have done? He could not have hit me, I was too pregnant. He never did hit me, unless I hit him first. He could have gone and turned it off again, and I could have turned it on, and so on, how long could that last? He could have held me down, but if I struggled he would have been afraid of hurting me. He could have sworn at me and left the house, but we had no car, and it was raining too hard for him to stay out very long. He would probably have just raged! and sulked, alternately, and I could have taken a blanket and gone to sleep on the living-room couch for the rest of the night. I think that is what a woman of firm character would have done. I think that is what a woman who wanted that marriage to last would have done. But I did not do it. Instead, I said to myself that I did not know how the pump worked, I did not know where to turn it on. I said to myself that I was afraid of Hugo. I entertained the possibility that Hugo might be right, nothing would happen. But I wanted something to happen, I wanted Hugo to crash.
When I woke up, Hugo was gone and the pump was thumping as usual. Dotty was pounding on the door at the top of the basement stairs.
“You won’t believe your eyes what’s down here. I’m up to my knees in water. I just put my feet out of bed and up to my knees in water. What happened? You hear the pump go off?”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t know what could’ve gone wrong, I guess it could’ve got overworked. I had a couple of beers before I went to bed elst I would’ve known there was something wrong. I usually sleep light. But I was sleeping like the dead and I put my feet out of bed and Jesus, it’s a good thing I didn’t pull on the light switch at the same time, I would have been electrocuted. Everything’s floating.”
Nothing was floating and the water would not have come to any grown person’s knees. It was about five inches deep in some places, only one or two in others, the floor being so uneven. It had soaked and stained the bottom of her chesterfield and chairs and got into the bottom of her piano. The floor tiles were loosened, the rugs soggy, the edges of her bedspread dripping, her floor heater ruined.
I got dressed and put on a pair of Hugo’s boots and took a broom downstairs. I started sweeping the water towards the drain outside the door. Dotty made herself a cup of coffee in my kitchen and sat for a while on the top step watching me, going over the same monologue about having a couple of beers and sleeping more soundly than usual, not hearing the pump go off, not understanding why it should go off, if it had gone off, not knowing how she was going to explain to her mother, who would certainly make it out to be her fault and charge her. We were in luck, I saw. (We were?) Dotty’s expectation and thrifty relish of misfortune made her less likely than almost anyone else would have been to investigate just what had gone wrong. After the water level went down a bit, she went into her bedroom, put on some clothes and some boots which she had to drain first, got her broom, and helped me.
“The things that don’t happen to me, eh? I never get my fortune told. I’ve got these girlfriends that are always getting their fortune told and I say, never mind me, there’s one thing I know and I know it ain’t good.”
I went upstairs and phoned the university, trying to get Hugo. I told them it was an emergency and they found him in the library.
“It did flood.”
“What?”
“It did flood. Dotty’s place is underwater.”
“I turned the pump on.”
“Like hell you did. This morning you
turned it on.”
“This morning there was a downpour and the pump couldn’t handle it. That was after I turned it on.”
“The pump couldn’t handle it last night because the pump wasn’t on last night and don’t talk to me about any downpour.”
“Well there was one. You were asleep.”
“You have no idea what you’ve done, do you? You don’t even stick around to look at it. I have to look. I have to cope. I have to listen to that poor woman.”
“Plug your ears.”
“Shut up, you filthy moral idiot.”
“I’m sorry. I was kidding. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry. You’re bloody sorry. This is the mess you made and I told you you’d make and you’re bloody sorry.”
“I have to go to a seminar. I am sorry. I can’t talk now, it’s no good talking to you now, I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to say.”
“I’m just trying to get you to realize.”
“All right, I realize. Though I still think it happened this morning.”
“You don’t realize. You never realize.”
“You dramatize.”
“I dramatize!”
Our luck held. Dotty’s mother was not so likely as Dotty to do without explanations and it was, after all, her floor tiles and wall-board that were ruined. But Dotty’s mother was sick, the cold wet weather had undermined her too, and she was taken to hospital with pneumonia that very morning. Dotty went to live in her mother’s house, to look after the boarders. The basement had a disgusting, moldy smell. We moved out too, a short time later. Just before Clea was born we took over a house in North Vancouver, belonging to some friends who had gone to England. The quarrel between us subsided in the excitement of moving; it was never really resolved. We did not move much from the positions we had taken on the phone. I said you don’t realize, you never realize, and he said, what do you want me to say? Why do you make such a fuss over this, he asked reasonably. Anybody might wonder. Long after I was away from him, I wondered too. I could have turned on the pump, as I have said, taking responsibility for both of us, as a patient realistic woman, a really married woman, would have done, as I am sure Mary Frances would have done, did, many times, during the ten years she lasted. Or I could have told Dotty the truth, though she was not a very good choice to receive such information. I could have told somebody, if I thought it was that important, pushed Hugo out into the unpleasant world and let him taste trouble. But I didn’t, I was not able fully to protect or expose him, only to flog him with blame, desperate sometimes, feeling I would claw his head open to pour my vision into it, my notion of what had to be understood. What presumptuousness, what cowardice, what bad faith. Unavoidable. “You have a problem of incompatibility,” the marriage counsellor said to us a while later. We laughed till we cried in the dreary municipal hall of the building in North Vancouver where the marriage counselling was dispensed. That is our problem, we said to each other, what a relief to know it, incompatibility.
I DID NOT read Hugo’s story that night. I left it with Clea and she as it turned out did not read it either. I read it the next afternoon. I got home about two o’clock from the girls’ private school where I have a part-time job teaching history. I made tea as I usually do and sat down in the kitchen to enjoy the hour before the boys, Gabriel’s sons, get home from school. I saw the book still lying on top of the refrigerator and I took it down and read Hugo’s story.
The story is about Dotty. Of course, she has been changed in some unimportant ways and the main incident concerning her has been invented, or grafted on from some other reality. But the lamp is there, and the pink chenille dressing gown. And something about Dotty that I had forgotten: When you were talking she would listen with her mouth slightly open, nodding, then she would chime in on the last word of your sentence with you. A touching and irritating habit. She was in such a hurry to agree, she hoped to understand. Hugo has remembered this, and when did Hugo ever talk to Dotty?
That doesn’t matter. What matters is that this story of Hugo’s is a very good story, as far as I can tell, and I think I can tell. How honest this is and how lovely, I had to say as I read. I had to admit. I was moved by Hugo’s story; I was, I am, glad of it, and I am not moved by tricks. Or if I am, they have to be good tricks. Lovely tricks, honest tricks. There is Dotty, lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvellous clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic, there is no getting around it; it is an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. A fine and lucky benevolence. Dotty was a lucky person, people who understand and value this act might say (not everybody, of course, does understand and value this act); she was lucky to live in that basement for a few months and eventually to have this done to her, though she doesn’t know what has been done and wouldn’t care for it, probably, if she did know. She has passed into Art. It doesn’t happen to everybody.
Don’t be offended. Ironical objections are a habit with me. I am half-ashamed of them. I respect what has been done. I respect the intention and the effort and the result. Accept my thanks.
I did think that I would write a letter to Hugo. All the time I was preparing dinner, and eating it, and talking to Gabriel and the children, I was thinking of a letter. I was thinking I would tell him how strange it was for me to realize that we shared, still shared, the same bank of memory, and that what was all scraps and oddments, useless baggage, for me, was ripe and usable, a paying investment, for him. Also I wanted to apologize, in some not-outright way, for not having believed he would be a writer. Acknowledgment, not apology; that was what I owed him. A few graceful, a few grateful, phrases.
At the same time, at dinner, looking at my husband Gabriel, I decided that he and Hugo are not really so unalike. Both of them have managed something. Both of them have decided what to do about everything they run across in this world, what attitude to take, how to ignore or use things. In their limited and precarious ways they both have authority. They are not at the mercy. Or think they are not. I can’t blame them for making whatever arrangements they can make.
After the boys had gone to bed and Gabriel and Clea had settled to watch television, I found a pen and got the paper in front of me, to write my letter, and my hand jumped. I began to write short jabbing sentences that I had never planned:
This is not enough, Hugo. You think it is, but it isn’t. You are mistaken, Hugo.
That is not an argument to send through the mail.
I do blame them. I envy and despise.
Gabriel came into the kitchen before he went to bed, and saw me sitting with a pile of test papers and my marking pencils. He might have meant to talk to me, to ask me to have coffee, or a drink, with him, but he respected my unhappiness as he always does; he respected the pretense that I was not unhappy but preoccupied, burdened with these test papers; he left me alone to get over it.
Royal Beatings
Royal Beating. That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.
The word Royal lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking this threat to heart she pondered: How is a beating royal? She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the blood came leaping out like banners. An occasion both savage and splendid. In real life they didn’t approach such dignity, and it was only Flo who tried to supply the event with some high air of necessity and regret. Rose and her father soon got beyond anything presentable.
Her father was king of the royal beatings. Those Flo gave never amounted to much; they were quick cuffs and slaps dashed off while her attention remained elsewhere. You get out of my road, she would say. You mind your own business. You take that look off your face.
They lived behind a store in Hanratty, Ontario. There were four of them: Rose, her father, Flo, R
ose’s young half brother, Brian. The store was really a house, bought by Rose’s father and mother when they married and set up here in the furniture- and upholstery-repair business. Her mother could do upholstery. From both parents Rose should have inherited clever hands, a quick sympathy with materials, an eye for the nicest turns of mending, but she hadn’t. She was clumsy, and when something broke she couldn’t wait to sweep it up and throw it away.
Her mother had died. She said to Rose’s father during the afternoon, “I have a feeling that is so hard to describe. It’s like a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on.” She died before night, she had a blood clot on her lung. Rose was a baby in a basket at the time, so of course could not remember any of this. She heard it from Flo, who must have heard it from her father. Flo came along soon afterward, to take over Rose in the basket, marry her father, open up the front room to make a grocery store. Rose, who had known the house only as a store, who had known only Flo for a mother, looked back on the sixteen or so months her parents spent here as an orderly, far gentler and more ceremonious time, with little touches of affluence. She had nothing to go on but some eggcups her mother had bought, with a pattern of vines and birds on them, delicately drawn as if with red ink; the pattern was beginning to wear away. No books or clothes or pictures of her mother remained. Her father must have got rid of them, or else Flo would. Flo’s only story about her mother, the one about her death, was oddly grudging. Flo liked the details of a death: the things people said, the way they protested or tried to get out of bed or swore or laughed (some did those things), but when she said that Rose’s mother mentioned a hard-boiled egg in her chest she made the comparison sound slightly foolish, as if her mother really was the kind of person who might think you could swallow an egg whole.
Her father had a shed out behind the store, where he worked at his furniture repairing and restoring. He caned chair seats and backs, mended wickerwork, filled cracks, put legs back on, all most admirably and skillfully and cheaply. That was his pride: to startle people with such fine work, such moderate, even ridiculous charges. During the Depression people could not afford to pay more, perhaps, but he continued the practice through the war, through the years of prosperity after the war, until he died. He never discussed with Flo what he charged or what was owing. After he died she had to go out and unlock the shed and take all sorts of scraps of paper and torn envelopes from the big wicked-looking hooks that were his files. Many of these she found were not accounts or receipts at all but records of the weather, bits of information about the garden, things he had been moved to write down.
