by Alice Munro
Somebody was calling Rose’s name; she had to go back to the scene. The girl didn’t throw herself into the sea. They didn’t have things like that happening in the series. Such things always threatened to happen but they didn’t happen, except now and then to peripheral and unappealing characters. People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery.
Simon’s dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement. It was preposterous, it was unfair, that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power.
Chaddeleys and Flemings
I
CONNECTION
COUSIN IRIS from Philadelphia. She was a nurse. Cousin Isabel from Des Moines. She owned a florist shop. Cousin Flora from Winnipeg, a teacher; Cousin Winifred from Edmonton, a lady accountant. Maiden ladies, they were called. Old maids was too thin a term, it would not cover them. Their bosoms were heavy and intimidating—a single, armored bundle—and their stomachs and behinds full and corseted as those of any married woman. In those days it seemed to be the thing for women’s bodies to swell and ripen to a good size 20, if they were getting anything out of life at all; then, according to class and aspirations, they would either sag and loosen, go wobbly as custard under pale print dresses and damp aprons, or be girded into shapes whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with rights and power.
My mother and her cousins were the second sort of women. They wore corsets that did up the side with dozens of hooks and eyes, stockings that hissed and rasped when they crossed their legs, silk jersey dresses for the afternoon (my mother’s being a cousin’s hand-me-down), face powder (rachel), dry rouge, eau de cologne, tortoiseshell or imitation tortoiseshell combs in their hair. They were not imaginable without such getups, unless bundled to the chin in quilted-satin dressing gowns. For my mother this style was hard to keep up; it required ingenuity, dedication, fierce effort. And who appreciated it? She did.
They all came to stay with us one summer. They came to our house because my mother was the only married one, with a house big enough to accommodate everybody, and because she was too poor to go to see them. We lived in Dalgleish in Huron County in Western Ontario. The population, 2,000, was announced on a sign at the town limits. “Now there’s two thousand and four,” cried Cousin Iris, heaving herself out of the driver’s seat. She drove a 1939 Oldsmobile She had driven to Winnipeg to collect Flora, and Winifred, who had come down from Edmonton by train. Then they all drove to Toronto and picked up Isabel.
“And the four of us are bound to be more trouble than the whole two thousand put together,” said Isabel. “Where was it—Orangeville—we laughed so hard Iris had to stop the car? She was afraid she’d drive into the ditch!”
The steps creaked under their feet.
“Breathe that air! Oh, you can’t beat the country air. Is that the pump where you get your drinking water? Wouldn’t that be lovely right now? A drink of well water!”
My mother told me to get a glass, but they insisted on drinking out of the tin mug.
They told how Iris had gone into a field to answer Nature’s call and had looked up to find herself surrounded by a ring of interested cows.
“Cows baloney!” said Iris. “They were steers.”
“Bulls, for all you’d know,” said Winifred, letting herself down into a wicker chair. She was the fattest.
“Bulls! I’d know!” said Iris. “I hope their furniture can stand the strain, Winifred. I tell you it was a drag on the rear end of my poor car. Bulls! What a shock, it’s a wonder I got my pants up!”
They told about the wild-looking town in Northern Ontario where Iris wouldn’t stop the car even to let them buy a Coke. She took one look at the lumberjacks and cried, “We’d all be raped!”
“What is raped?” said my little sister.
“Oh-oh,” said Iris. “It means you get your pocketbook stolen.”
Pocketbook: an American word. My sister and I didn’t know what that meant either, but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn’t what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty.
“Purse. Purse stolen,” said my mother, in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
Now came the unpacking of presents. Tins of coffee, nuts-and-date pudding, oysters, olives, ready-made cigarettes for my father. They all smoked too, except for Flora, the Winnipeg schoolteacher. A sign of worldliness then; in Dalgleish, a sign of possible loose morals. They made it a respectable luxury.
Stockings, scarves emerged as well, a voile blouse for my mother, a pair of stiff white organdie pinafores for me and my sister (the latest thing, maybe, in Des Moines or Philadelphia but a mistake in Dalgleish, where people asked us why we hadn’t taken our aprons off). And finally, a five-pound box of chocolates. Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate box in the linen drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions on the map provided on the inside of the box-top: hazelnut, creamy nougat, Turkish delight, golden toffee, peppermint cream.
THE COUSINS slept in the downstairs bedroom and on the pulled-out daybed in the front room. If the night was hot they thought nothing of dragging a mattress onto the veranda, or even into the yard. They drew lots for the hammock. Winifred was not allowed to draw. Far into the night you could hear them giggling, shushing each other, crying, “What was that?” We were beyond the streetlights of Dalgleish, and they were amazed at the darkness, the large number of stars.
Once they decided to sing a round.
“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”
They didn’t think Dalgleish was real. They drove uptown and reported on the oddity of the shopkeepers; they imitated things they had overheard on the street. Every morning the coffee they had brought filled the house with its unfamiliar, American fragrance, and they sat around asking who had an inspiration for the day. One inspiration was to drive out into the country and pick berries. They got scratched and overheated and at one point Winifred was completely penned in, immobilized, by thorny branches, bellowing for a rescue party; nevertheless they said they had mightily enjoyed themselves. Another inspiration was to take my father’s fishing rods and go down to the river. They came home with a catch of rock bass, a fish we generally threw back. They organized picnics. They dressed up in old clothes, in old straw hats and my father’s overalls, and took pictures of each other. They made layer cakes, and marvellous molded salads which were shaped like temples and colored like jewels.
One afternoon they put on a concert. Iris was an opera singer. She took the cloth off the dining-room table to drape herself in, and sent me out to collect hen feathers to put in her hair. She sang “The Indian Love Call,” and “Women Are Fickle.” Winifred was a bank robber, with a water pistol she had bought at the five-and-ten. Everybody had to do something. My sister and I sang, two songs: “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and the Doxology. My mother, most amazingly, put on a pair of my father’s trousers and stood on her head.
Audience and performers, the cousins were for each other, every waking moment. And sometimes asleep. Flora was the one who talked in her sleep. Since she was also the most ladylike and careful, the others stayed awake to ask her questions, trying to make her say something that would embarrass her. They told her she swore. They said she sat bolt upright and demanded, “
Why is there no damned chalk?”
She was the one I liked least because she attempted to sharpen our minds—my sister’s and mine—by throwing out mental-arithmetic questions. “If it took seven minutes to walk seven blocks, and five blocks were the same length but the other two blocks were double the length—”
“Oh, go soak your head, Flora!” said Iris, who was the rudest.
If they didn’t get any inspiration, or it was too hot to do anything, they sat on the veranda drinking lemonade, fruit punch, ginger ale, iced tea, with maraschino cherries and chunks of ice chipped from the big chunk in the icebox. Sometimes my mother prettied up the glasses by dipping the rims in beaten egg whites, then in sugar. The cousins would say they were prostrated, they were good for nothing; but their complaints had a gratified sound, as if the heat of summer itself had been created to add drama to their lives.
DRAMA enough already.
In the larger world, things had happened to them. Accidents, proposals, encounters with lunatics and enemies. Iris could have been rich. A millionaire’s widow, a crazy old woman with a wig like a haystack, had been wheeled into the hospital one day, clutching a carpetbag. And what was in the carpetbag but jewels, real jewels, emeralds and diamonds and pearls as big as pullet eggs. Nobody but Iris could do a thing with her. It was Iris who persuaded her at last to throw the wig into the garbage (it was crawling with fleas), and let the jewels go into the bank vault. So attached did this old woman become to Iris that she wanted to remake her will, she wanted to leave Iris the jewels and the stocks and the money and the apartment houses. Iris would not allow it. Professional ethics ruled it out.
“You are in a position of trust. A nurse is in a position of trust.”
Then she told how she had been proposed to by an actor, dying from a life of dissipation. She allowed him to swig from a Listerine bottle because she didn’t see what difference it would make. He was a stage actor, so we wouldn’t recognize the name even if she told us, which she wouldn’t.
She had seen other big names too, celebrities, the top society of Philadelphia. Not at their best.
Winifred said that she had seen things too. The real truth, the real horrible truth about some of those big wheels and socialites, came out when you got a look at their finances.
WE LIVED at the end of a road running west from Dalgleish over some scrubby land where there were small wooden houses and flocks of chickens and children. The land rose to a decent height where we were and then sloped in wide fields and pastures, decorated with elm trees, down to the curve of the river. Our house was decent too, an old brick house of a fair size, but it was drafty and laid out in an inconvenient way and the trim needed paint. My mother planned to fix it up and change it all around, as soon as we got some money.
My mother did not think much of the town of Dalgleish. She was often harking back to the town of Fork Mills, in the Ottawa Valley, where she and the cousins had gone to high school, the town their grandfather had come to from England; and to England itself, which of course she had never seen. She praised Fork Mills for its stone houses, its handsome and restrained public buildings (quite different, she said, from Huron County’s, where the idea had been to throw up some brick monstrosity and stick a tower on it), for its paved streets, the service in its stores, the better quality of things for sale, and the better class of people. The people who thought so highly of themselves in Dalgleish would be laughable to the leading families of Fork Mills. But then, the leading families of Fork Mills would themselves be humbled if they came into contact with certain families of England, to whom my mother was connected.
Connection. That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world. They knew how to get on in it, they had made it take notice. They could command a classroom, a maternity ward, the public; they knew how to deal with taxi drivers and train conductors.
The other connection they provided, and my mother provided as well, was to England and history. It is a fact that Canadians of Scottish—which in Huron County we called Scotch—and Irish descent will tell you quite freely that their ancestors came out during the potato famine, with only the rags on their backs, or that they were shepherds, agricultural laborers, poor landless people. But anyone whose ancestors came from England will have some story of black sheep or younger sons, financial reverses, lost inheritances, elopements with unsuitable partners. There may be some amount of truth in this; conditions in Scotland and Ireland were such as to force wholesale emigration, while Englishmen may have chosen to leave home for more colorful, personal reasons.
This was the case with the Chaddeley family, my mother’s family. Isabel and Iris were not Chaddeleys by name, but their mother had been a Chaddeley; my mother had been a Chaddeley, though she was now a Fleming; Flora and Winifred were Chaddeleys still. All were descended from a grandfather who left England as a young man for reasons they did not quite agree on. My mother believed that he had been a student at Oxford, but had lost all the money his family sent him, and had been ashamed to go home. He lost it by gambling. No, said Isabel, that was just the story; what really happened was that he got a servant girl in trouble and was compelled to marry her, and take her to Canada. The family estates were near Canterbury, said my mother. (Canterbury pilgrims, Canterbury bells.) The others were not sure of that. Flora said that they were in the West of England, and that the name Chaddeley was said to be related to Cholmondeley; there was a Lord Cholmondeley, the Chaddeleys could be a branch of that family. But there was also the possibility, she said, that it was French, it was originally Champ de Laiche, which means field of sedge. In that case the family had probably come to England with William the Conqueror.
Isabel said she was not an intellectual and the only person she knew from English history was Mary, Queen of Scots. She wanted somebody to tell her if William the Conqueror came before Mary, Queen of Scots, or after?
“Sedge fields,” said my father agreeably. “That wouldn’t exactly make them a fortune.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know sedge from oats,” said Iris. “But they were prosperous enough in England; according to Grandpa, they were gentry there.”
“Before,” said Flora, “and Mary, Queen of Scots, wasn’t even English.”
“I knew that from the name,” said Isabel. “So ha-ha.”
Every one of them believed, whatever the details, that there had been a great comedown, a dim catastrophe, and that beyond them, behind them, in England, lay lands and houses and ease and honor. How could they think otherwise, remembering their grandfather?
He had worked as a postal clerk in Fork Mills. His wife, whether she was a seduced servant or not, bore him eight children, then died. As soon as the older children were out to work and contributing money to the household—there was no nonsense about educating them—the father quit work. A fight with the Postmaster was the immediate reason, but he really had no intention of working any longer; he had made up his mind to stay at home, supported by his children. He had the air of a gentleman, was widely read, and full of rhetoric and self-esteem. His children did not balk at supporting him; they sank into their commonplace jobs, but pushed their own children—they limited themselves to one or two apiece, mostly daughters—out to Business School, to Normal School, to Nurses Training. My mother and her cousins, who were these children, talked often about their selfish and willful grandfather, hardly ever about their decent, hard-working parents. What an old snob he was, they said, but how handsome, even as an old man, what a carriage. What ready and appropriate insults he had for people, what scathing judgments he could make. Once, in faraway Toronto, on the main floor of Eaton’s as a matter of fact, he was accosted by the harness-maker’s wife from Fork Mills, a harmless, brainless woman who cried, “Well, ain’t it nice to meet a friend so far from home?”
“Madam,” said Grandfather Chaddeley, “you are no friend of mine.”
Wasn’t he the l
imit, they said. Madam, you are no friend of mine! The old snob. He paraded around with his head in the air like a prize gander. Another lower-class lady—lower-class according to him—was kind enough to bring him some soup when he had caught cold. Sitting in his daughter’s kitchen, not even his own roof over his head, soaking his feet, an ailing and in fact a dying man, he still had the gall to turn his back, let his daughter do the thanking. He despised the woman, whose grammar was terrible, and who had no teeth.
“But he didn’t either! By that time he had no teeth whatever!”
“Pretentious old coot.”
“And a leech on his children.”
“Just pride and vanity. That’s the sum total of him.”
But telling these stories, laughing, they were billowing with pride themselves, they were crowing. They were proud of having such a grandfather. They believed that refusing to speak to inferior people was outrageous and mean, that preserving a sense of distinction was ridiculous, particularly when your teeth were gone, but in a way they still admired him. They did. They admired his invective, which was lost on his boss, the plodding Postmaster, and his prideful behavior, which was lost on his neighbors, the democratic citizens of Canada. (Oh, what a shame, said the toothless neighbor, the poor old fellow, he don’t even reckinize me.) They might even have admired his decision to let others do the work. A gentleman, they called him. They spoke ironically, but the possession of such a grandfather continued to delight them.
