Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  His sisters sacrificed their own schooling. Even getting their teeth straightened—they sacrificed that. Iona did go to nursing school, but as it turned out getting her teeth fixed would have served her better. Now she and Ailsa have ended up with a hero. Everybody grants it—a hero. The younger people present think it’s something to have a hero in the family. They think the importance of this moment will last, that it will stay with Ailsa and Iona forever. “O Valiant Hearts” will soar around them forever. Older people, those who remember the previous war, know that all they’ve ended up with is a name on the cenotaph. Because the widow, the girl feeding her face, will get the pension.

  Ailsa is in a hectic mood partly because she has been up two nights in a row, cleaning. Not that the house wasn’t decently clean before. Nevertheless she felt the need to wash every dish, pot, and ornament, polish the glass on every picture, pull out the fridge and scrub behind it, wash the cellar steps off, and pour bleach in the garbage can. The very lighting fixture overhead, over the dining-room table, had to be taken apart, and every piece on it dunked in soapy water, rinsed, and rubbed dry and reassembled. And because of her work at the Post Office Ailsa couldn’t start this till after supper. She is the postmistress now, she could have given herself a day off, but being Ailsa she would never do that.

  Now she’s hot under her rouge, twitchy in her dark-blue lace-collared crepe dress. She can’t stay still. She refills the serving plates and passes them around, deplores the fact that people’s tea may have got cold, hurries to make a fresh pot. Mindful of her guests’ comfort, asking after their rheumatism or minor ailments, smiling in the face of her tragedy, repeating over and over again that hers is a common loss, that she must not complain when so many others are in the same boat, that George would not want his friends to grieve but to be thankful that all together we have ended the war. All in a high and emphatic voice of cheerful reproof that people are used to from the Post Office. So that they are left with an uncertain feeling of perhaps having said the wrong thing, just as in the Post Office they may be made to understand that their handwriting cannot help but be a trial or their packages are done up sloppily.

  Ailsa is aware that her voice is too high and that she is smiling too much and that she has poured out tea for people who said they didn’t want any more. In the kitchen, while warming the teapot, she says, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m all wound up.”

  The person she says this to is Dr. Shantz, her neighbor across the backyard.

  “It’ll soon be over,” he says. “Would you like a bromide?”

  His voice undergoes a change as the door from the dining room opens. The word “bromide” comes out firm and professional.

  Ailsa’s voice changes too, from forlorn to valiant. She says, “Oh, no thank you. I’ll just try and keep going on my own.”

  —

  IONA’S JOB is supposed to be to watch over their mother, to see that she doesn’t spill her tea—which she may do not out of clumsiness but forgetfulness—and that she is taken away if she starts to sniffle and cry. But in fact Mrs. Kirkham’s manners are gracious most of the time and she puts people at ease more readily than Ailsa does. For a quarter of an hour at a time she understands the situation—or she seems to—and she speaks bravely and cogently about how she will always miss her son but is grateful she still has her daughters: Ailsa so efficient and reliable, a wonder as she’s always been, and Iona the soul of kindness. She even remembers to speak of her new daughter-in-law but perhaps gives a hint of being out of line when she mentions what most women of her age don’t mention at a social gathering, and with men listening. Looking at Jill and me, she says, “And we all have a comfort to come.”

  Then passing from room to room or guest to guest, she forgets entirely, she looks around her own house and says, “Why are we here? What a lot of people—what are we celebrating?” And catching on to the fact that it all has something to do with George, she says, “Is it George’s wedding?” Along with her up-to-date information she has lost some of her mild discretion. “It’s not your wedding, is it?” she says to Iona. “No. I didn’t think so. You never had a boyfriend, did you?” A let’s-face-facts, devil-take-the-hindmost note has come into her voice. When she spots Jill she laughs.

  “That’s not the bride, is it? Oh-oh. Now we understand.”

  But the truth comes back to her as suddenly as it went away.

  “Is there news?” she says. “News about George?” And it’s then that the weeping starts that Ailsa was afraid of.

  “Get her out of the way if she starts making a spectacle,” Ailsa had said.

  Iona isn’t able to get her mother out of the way—she has never been able to exert authority over anybody in her life—but Dr. Shantz’s wife catches the old woman’s arm.

  “George is dead?” says Mrs. Kirkham fearfully, and Mrs. Shantz says, “Yes he is. But you know his wife is having a baby.”

  Mrs. Kirkham leans against her; she crumples and says softly, “Could I have my tea?”

  —

  EVERYWHERE my mother turns in that house, it seems she sees a picture of my father. The last and official one, of him in his uniform, sits on an embroidered runner on the closed sewing machine in the bay of the dining-room window. Iona puts flowers around it, but Ailsa took them away. She said it made him look too much like a Catholic saint. Hanging above the stairs there is one of him at six years old, out on the sidewalk, with his knee in his wagon, and in the room where Jill sleeps there’s one of him beside his bicycle, with his Free Press newspaper sack. Mrs. Kirkham’s room has the one of him dressed for the grade-eight operetta, with a gold cardboard crown on his head. Being unable to carry a tune, he couldn’t have a leading role, but he was of course picked for the best background role, that of the king.

  The hand-tinted studio photo over the buffet shows him at the age of three, a blurred blond tot dragging a rag doll by one leg. Ailsa thought of taking that down because it might seem tearjerking, but she left it up rather than show a bright patch on the wallpaper. And no one said anything about it but Mrs. Shantz, who paused and said what she had said sometimes before, and not tearfully but with a faintly amused appreciation.

  “Ah—Christopher Robin.”

  People were used to not paying much attention to what Mrs. Shantz said.

  In all of his pictures George looks bright as a dollar. There’s always a sunny dip of hair over his brow, unless he’s wearing his officer’s hat or his crown. And even when he was little more than an infant he looked as if he knew himself to be a capering, calculating, charming sort of fellow. The sort who never let people alone, who whipped them up to laugh. At his own expense occasionally, but usually at other people’s. Jill recalls when she looks at him how he drank but never seemed drunk and how he occupied himself getting other drunk people to confess to him their fears, prevarications, virginity, or two-timing, which he would then turn into jokes or humiliating nicknames that his victims pretended to enjoy. For he had legions of followers and friends, who maybe latched on to him out of fear—or maybe just because, as was always said of him, he livened things up. Wherever he was was the center of the room, and the air around him crackled with risk and merriment.

  What was Jill to make of such a lover? She was nineteen when she met him, and nobody had ever claimed her before. She couldn’t understand what attracted him, and she could see that nobody else could understand it, either. She was a puzzle to most people of her own age, but a dull puzzle. A girl whose life was given over to the study of the violin and who had no other interests.

  That was not quite true. She would snuggle under her shabby quilts and imagine a lover. But he was never a shining cutup like George. She thought of some warm and bearlike fellow, or of a musician a decade older than herself and already legendary, with a fierce potency. Her notions of love were operatic, though that was not the sort of music she most admired. But George made jokes when he made love; he pranced around her room when he had finished; he m
ade rude and infantile noises. His brisk performances brought her little of the pleasure she knew from her assaults on herself, but she was not exactly disappointed.

  Dazed at the speed of things was more like it. And expecting to be happy—grateful and happy—when her mind caught up with physical and social reality. George’s attentions, and her marriage—those were all like a brilliant extension of her life. Lighted rooms showing up full of a bewildering sort of splendor. Then came the bomb or the hurricane, the not unlikely stroke of disaster, and the whole extension was gone. Blown up and vanished, leaving her with the same space and options she’d had before. She had lost something, certainly. But not something she had really got hold of, or understood as more than a hypothetical layout of the future.

  She has had enough to eat, now. Her legs ache from standing so long. Mrs. Shantz is beside her, saying, “Have you had a chance to meet any of George’s local friends?”

  She means the young people keeping to themselves in the hall doorway. A couple of nice-looking girls, a young man still wearing a naval uniform, others. Looking at them, Jill thinks clearly that no one is really sorry. Ailsa perhaps, but Ailsa has her own reasons. No one is really sorry George is dead. Not even the girl who was crying in church and looks as if she will cry some more. Now that girl can remember that she was in love with George and think that he was in love with her—in spite of all—and never be afraid of what he may do or say to prove her wrong. And none of them will have to wonder, when a group of people clustered around George have started laughing, whom they are laughing at or what George is telling them. Nobody will have to strain to keep up with him or figure out how to stay in his good graces anymore.

  It doesn’t occur to her that if he had lived George might have become a different person, because she doesn’t think of becoming a different person herself.

  She says, “No,” with a lack of enthusiasm that causes Mrs. Shantz to say, “I know. It’s hard meeting new people. Particularly—if I was you I would rather go and lie down.”

  Jill was almost sure she was going to say “go and have a drink.” But there’s nothing being offered here, only tea and coffee. Jill hardly drinks anyway. She can recognize the smell on someone’s breath, though, and she thought she smelled it on Mrs. Shantz.

  “Why don’t you?” says Mrs. Shantz. “These things are a great strain. I’ll tell Ailsa. Go on now.”

  —

  MRS. sHANTZ is a small woman with fine gray hair, bright eyes, and a wrinkled, pointed face. Every winter she spends a month by herself in Florida. She has money. The house that she and her husband built for themselves, behind the Kirkhams’ house, is long and low and blindingly white, with curved corners and expanses of glass bricks. Dr. Shantz is twenty or twenty-five years younger than she is—a thickset, fresh, and amiable-looking man with a high smooth forehead and fair curly hair. They have no children. It is believed that she has some, from a first marriage, but they don’t come to visit her. In fact the story is that Dr. Shantz was her son’s friend, brought home from college, and that he fell in love with his friend’s mother, she fell in love with her son’s friend, there was a divorce, and here they are married, living in luxurious, closemouthed exile.

  Jill did smell whiskey. Mrs. Shantz carries a flask whenever she goes to a gathering of which—as she says—she can have no reasonable hopes. Drink does not make her fall about or garble her words or pick fights or throw her arms about people. The truth may be that she’s always a little bit drunk but never really drunk. She is used to letting the alcohol enter her body in a reasonable, reassuring way, so that her brain cells never get soaked or quite dried out. The only giveaway is the smell (which many people in this dry town attribute to some medicine she has to take or even to an ointment that she has to rub on her chest). That, and perhaps a deliberateness about her speech, the way she seems to clear a space around each word. She says things of course which a woman brought up around here would not say. She tells things on herself. She tells about being mistaken every once in a while for her husband’s mother. She says most people go into a tailspin when they discover their mistake, they’re so embarrassed. But some women—a waitress, maybe—will fasten on Mrs. Shantz quite a dirty look, as if to say, What’s he doing wasted on you?

  And Mrs. Shantz just says to them, “I know. It isn’t fair. But life isn’t fair and you might as well get used to it.”

  There isn’t any way this afternoon that she can space her sips properly. The kitchen and even the poky pantry behind it are places where women can be coming and going at any time. She has to go upstairs to the bathroom, and that not too often. When she does that late in the afternoon, a little while after Jill has disappeared, she finds the bathroom door locked. She thinks of nipping into one of the bedrooms and is wondering which one is empty, which occupied by Jill. Then she hears Jill’s voice coming from the bathroom, saying, “Just a minute,” or something like that. Something quite ordinary, but the tone of voice is strained and frightened.

  Mrs. Shantz takes a quick swallow right there in the hall, seizing the excuse of emergency.

  “Jill? Are you all right? Can you let me in?”

  Jill is on her hands and knees, trying to mop up the puddle on the bathroom floor. She has read about the water breaking—just as she has read about contractions, show, transition stage, placenta—but just the same the escape of warm fluid surprised her. She has to use toilet paper, because Ailsa took all the regular towels away and put out the smooth scraps of embroidered linen called guest towels.

  She holds on to the rim of the tub to pull herself up. She unbolts the door and that’s when the first pain astonishes her. She is not to have a single mild pain, or any harbingers or orchestrated first stage of labor; it’s all to be an unsparing onslaught and ripping headlong delivery.

  “Easy,” says Mrs. Shantz, supporting her as well as she can. “Just tell me which room is yours, we’ll get you lying down.”

  Before they even reach the bed Jill’s fingers dig into Mrs. Shantz’s thin arm to leave it black and blue.

  “Oh, this is fast,” Mrs. Shantz says. “This is a real mover and shaker for a first baby. I’m going to get my husband.”

  In that way I was born right in the house, about ten days early if Jill’s calculations were to be relied on. Ailsa had barely time to get the company cleared out before the place was filled with Jill’s noise, her disbelieving cries and the great shameless grunts that followed.

  Even if a mother had been taken by surprise and had given birth at home, it was usual by that time to move her and the baby into the hospital afterwards. But there was some sort of summer flu in town, and the hospital had filled up with the worst cases, so Dr. Shantz decided that Jill and I would be better off at home. Iona after all had finished part of her nurse’s training, and she could take her two-week holiday now, to look after us.

  —

  JILL REALLY KNEW NOTHING about living in a family. She had grown up in an orphanage. From the age of six to sixteen she had slept in a dormitory. Lights turned on and off at a specified time, furnace never operating before or beyond a specified date. A long oilcloth-covered table where they ate and did their homework, a factory across the street. George had liked the sound of that. It would make a girl tough, he said. It would make her self-possessed, hard and solitary. It would make her the sort who would not expect any romantic nonsense. But the place had not been run in such a heartless way as perhaps he thought, and the people who ran it had not been ungenerous. Jill was taken to a concert, with some others, when she was twelve years old, and there she decided that she must learn to play the violin. She had already fooled around with the piano at the orphanage. Somebody took enough interest to get her a secondhand, very second-rate violin, and a few lessons, and this led, finally, to a scholarship at the Conservatory. There was a recital for patrons and directors, a party with best dresses, fruit punch, speeches, and cakes. Jill had to make a little speech herself, expressing gratitude, but the truth was that she
took all this pretty much for granted. She was sure that she and some violin were naturally, fatefully connected, and would have come together without human help.

  In the dormitory she had friends, but they went off early to factories and offices and she forgot about them. At the high school that the orphans were sent to, a teacher had a talk with her. The words “normal” and “well rounded” came up in the talk. The teacher seemed to think that music was an escape from something or a substitute for something. For sisters and brothers and friends and dates. She suggested that Jill spread her energy around instead of concentrating on one thing. Loosen up, play volleyball, join the school orchestra if music was what she wanted.

  Jill started to avoid that particular teacher, climbing the stairs or going round the block so as not to have to speak to her. Just as she stopped reading any page from which the words “well rounded” or the word “popular” leapt out at her.

  At the Conservatory it was easier. There she met people quite as un–well rounded, as hard driven, as herself. She formed a few rather absentminded and competitive friendships. One of her friends had an older brother who was in the air force, and this brother happened to be a victim and worshipper of George Kirkham’s. He and George dropped in on a family Sunday-night supper, at which Jill was a guest. They were on their way to get drunk somewhere else. And that was how George met Jill. My father met my mother.

  —

  THERE HAD TO BE SOMEBODY at home all the time, to watch Mrs. Kirkham. So Iona worked the night shift at the bakery. She decorated cakes—even the fanciest wedding cakes—and she got the first round of bread loaves in the oven at five o’clock. Her hands, which shook so badly that she could not serve anybody a teacup, were strong and clever and patient, even inspired, at any solitary job.