by Alice Munro
Iona comes out of the living room empty-handed.
Jill says, “What did you do with the baby?”
“Hid it,” Iona says saucily, and makes a face at her—the kind of face a terminally frightened person can make, pretending to be vicious.
“Dr. Shantz is going to give you a needle,” Ailsa says. “That’ll put paid to you.”
Now there is an absurd scene of Iona running around, throwing herself at the front door—Ailsa jumps to block her—and then at the stairs, which is where Dr. Shantz gets hold of her and straddles her, pinning her arms and saying, “Now, now, now, Iona. Take it easy. You’ll be okay in a little while.” And Iona yells and whimpers and subsides. The noises she makes, and her darting about, her efforts at escape, all seem like playacting. As if—in spite of being quite literally at her wit’s end—she finds the effort of standing up to Ailsa and Dr. Shantz so nearly impossible that she can only try to manage it by this sort of parody. Which makes it clear—and maybe this is what she really intends—that she is not standing up to them at all but falling apart. Falling apart as embarrassingly and inconveniently as possible with Ailsa shouting at her, “You ought to be disgusted with yourself.”
Administering the needle, Dr. Shantz says, “That-a-girl Iona. There now.”
Over his shoulder he says to Ailsa, “Look after your mother. Get her to sit down.”
Mrs. Kirkham is wiping tears with her fingers. “I’m all right dear,” she says to Ailsa. “I just wish you girls wouldn’t fight. You should have told me Iona had a baby. You should have let her keep it.”
Mrs. Shantz, wearing a Japanese kimono over her summer pajamas, comes into the house by the kitchen door.
“Is everybody all right?” she calls.
She sees the knife lying on the kitchen counter and thinks it prudent to pick it up and put it in a drawer. When people are making a scene the last thing you want is a knife ready to hand.
In the midst of this Jill thinks she has heard a faint cry. She has climbed clumsily over the banister to get around Iona and Dr. Shantz—she ran partway up the stairs again when Iona came running in that direction—and has lowered herself to the floor. She goes through the double doors into the living room where at first she sees no sign of me. But the faint cry comes again and she follows the sound to the sofa and looks underneath it.
That’s where I am, pushed in beside the violin.
During that short trip from the hall to the living room, Jill has remembered everything, and it seems as if her breath stops and horror crowds in at her mouth, then a flash of joy sets her life going again, when just as in the dream she comes upon a live baby, not a little desiccated nutmeg-headed corpse. She holds me. I don’t stiffen or kick or arch my back. I am still pretty sleepy from the sedative in my milk which knocked me out for the night and half a day and which, in a larger quantity—maybe not so much larger, at that—would have really finished me off.
—
IT WASN’T THE BLANKET AT ALL. Anybody who took a serious look at that blanket could see that it was so light and loosely woven that it could not prevent my getting all the air I needed. You could breathe through it just as easily as through a fishnet.
Exhaustion might have played a part. A whole day’s howling, such a furious feat of self-expression, might have worn me out. That, and the white dust that fell on my milk, had knocked me into a deep and steadfast sleep with breathing so slight that Iona had not been able to detect it. You would think she would notice that I was not cold and you would think that all that moaning and crying out and running around would have brought me up to consciousness in a hurry. I don’t know why that didn’t happen. I think she didn’t notice because of her panic and the state she was in even before she found me, but I don’t know why I didn’t cry sooner. Or maybe I did cry and in the commotion nobody heard me. Or maybe Iona did hear me and took a look at me and stuffed me under the sofa because by that time everything had been spoiled.
Then Jill heard. Jill was the one.
Iona was carried to that same sofa. Ailsa slipped off her shoes to save the brocade, and Mrs. Shantz went upstairs to get a light quilt to put over her.
“I know she doesn’t need it for warmth,” she said. “But I think when she wakes up she’ll feel better to have a quilt over her.”
Before this, of course, everybody had gathered round to take note of my being alive. Ailsa was blaming herself for not having discovered that right away. She hated to admit that she had been afraid to look at a dead baby.
“Iona’s nerves must be contagious,” she said. “I absolutely should have known.”
She looked at Jill as if she was going to tell her to go and put a blouse on over her halter. Then she recalled how roughly she had spoken to her, and for no reason as it turned out, so she didn’t say anything. She did not even try to convince her mother that Iona had not had a baby, though she said in an undertone, to Mrs. Shantz, “Well, that could start the rumor of the century.”
“I’m so glad nothing terrible happened,” Mrs. Kirkham said. “I thought for a minute Iona had done away with it. Ailsa, you must try not to blame your sister.”
“No Momma,” said Ailsa. “Let’s go sit down in the kitchen.”
There was one bottle of formula made up that by rights I should have demanded and drunk earlier that morning. Jill put it on to warm, holding me in the crook of her arm all the time.
She had looked at once for the knife, when she came into the kitchen, and seen in wonderment that it wasn’t there. But she could make out the faintest dust on the counter—or she thought she could. She wiped it with her free hand before she turned the tap on to get the water to heat the bottle.
Mrs. Shantz busied herself making coffee. While it was perking she put the sterilizer on the stove and washed out yesterday’s bottles. She was being tactful and competent, just managing to hide the fact that there was something about this whole debacle and disarray of feelings that buoyed her up.
“I guess Iona did have an obsession about the baby,” she said. “Something like this was bound to happen.”
Turning from the stove to address the last of these words to her husband and Ailsa, she saw that Dr. Shantz was pulling Ailsa’s hands down from where she held them, on either side of her head. Too speedily and guiltily he took his own hands away. If he had not done that, it would have looked like ordinary comfort he was administering. As a doctor is certainly entitled to do.
“You know Ailsa, I think your mother ought to lie down too,” said Mrs. Shantz thoughtfully and without a break. “I think I’ll go and persuade her. If she can get to sleep this may all pass right out of her head. Out of Iona’s too, if we’re lucky.”
Mrs. Kirkham had wandered out of the kitchen almost as soon as she got there. Mrs. Shantz found her in the living room looking at Iona, and fiddling with the quilt to make sure she was well covered. Mrs. Kirkham did not really want to lie down. She wanted to have things explained to her—she knew that her own explanations were somehow out of kilter. And she wanted to have people talk to her as they used to do, not in the peculiarly gentle and self-satisfied way they did now. But because of her customary politeness and her knowledge that the power she had in the household was negligible, she allowed Mrs. Shantz to take her upstairs.
Jill was reading the instructions for making baby formula. They were printed on the side of the corn syrup tin. When she heard the footsteps going up the stairs she thought that there was something she had better do while she had the chance. She carried me into the living room and laid me down on a chair.
“There now,” she whispered confidentially. “You stay still.”
She knelt down and nudged and gently tugged the violin out of its hiding place. She found its cover and case and got it properly stowed away. I stayed still—not yet being quite able to turn over—and I stayed quiet.
Left alone by themselves, alone in the kitchen, Dr. Shantz and Ailsa probably did not seize this chance to embrace, but only looked at each other. With their knowl
edge, and without promises or despair.
—
IONA ADMITTED that she hadn’t felt for a pulse. And she never claimed that I was cold. She said I felt stiff. Then she said not stiff but heavy. So heavy, she said, she instantly thought I could not be alive. A lump, a dead weight.
I think there is something to this. I don’t believe that I was dead, or that I came back from the dead, but I do think that I was at a distance, from which I might or might not have come back. I think that the outcome was not certain and that will was involved. It was up to me, I mean, to go one way or the other.
And Iona’s love, which was certainly the most wholehearted love I will ever receive, didn’t decide me. Her cries and her crushing me into her body didn’t work, were not finally persuasive. Because it wasn’t Iona I had to settle for. (Could I have known that—could I even have known that it wasn’t Iona, in the end, who would do me the most good?) It was Jill. I had to settle for Jill and for what I could get from her, even if it might look like half a loaf.
To me it seems that it was only then that I became female. I know that the matter was decided long before I was born and was plain to everybody else since the beginning of my life, but I believe that it was only at the moment when I decided to come back, when I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for something like her total surrender) and when in fact I chose survival over victory (death would have been victory), that I took on my female nature.
And to some extent Jill took on hers. Sobered and grateful, not even able to risk thinking about what she’d just escaped, she took on loving me, because the alternative to loving was disaster.
—
DR. SHANTZ suspected something, but he let it go. He asked Jill how I had been the day before. Fussy? She said yes, very fussy. He said that premature babies, even slightly premature babies, were susceptible to shocks and you had to be careful with them. He recommended that I always be put to sleep on my back.
Iona did not have to have shock treatment. Dr. Shantz gave her pills. He said that she had overstrained herself looking after me. The woman who had taken over her job at the bakery wanted to give it up—she did not like working nights. So Iona went back there.
—
THAT’S WHAT I REMEMBER BEST about my summer visits to my aunts, when I was six or seven years old. Being taken down to the bakery at the strange, usually forbidden hour of midnight and watching Iona put on her white hat and apron, watching her knead the great white mass of dough that shifted and bubbled like something alive. Then cutting out cookies and feeding me the leftover bits and on special occasions sculpting a wedding cake. How bright and white that big kitchen was, with night filling every window. I scraped the wedding icing from the bowl—the melting stabbing irresistible sugar.
Ailsa thought I should not be up so late, or eat so much sweet stuff. But she didn’t do anything about it. She said she wondered what my mother would say—as if Jill was the person who swung the weight, not herself. Ailsa had some rules that I didn’t have to observe at home—hang up that jacket, rinse that glass before you dry it, else it’ll have spots—but I never saw the harsh, hounding person Jill remembered.
Nothing slighting was ever said then, about Jill’s music. After all, she made our living at it. She had not been finally defeated by the Mendelssohn. She got her diploma; she graduated from the Conservatory. She cut her hair and got thin. She was able to rent a duplex near High Park in Toronto, and hire a woman to look after me part of the time, because she had her war widow’s pension. And then she found a job with a radio orchestra. She was to be proud that all her working life she was employed as a musician and never had to fall back on teaching. She said that she knew that she was not a great violinist, she had no marvellous gift or destiny, but at least she could make her living doing what she wanted to do. Even after she married my stepfather, after we moved with him to Edmonton (he was a geologist), she went on playing in the symphony orchestra there. She played up until a week before each of my half sisters was born. She was lucky, she said—her husband never objected.
Iona did have a couple of further setbacks, the more serious one when I was about twelve. She was taken to Morrisville for several weeks. I think she was given insulin there—she returned fat and loquacious. I came back to visit while she was away, and Jill came with me, bringing my first little sister who had been born shortly before. I understood from the talk between my mother and Ailsa that it would not have been advisable to bring a baby into the house if Iona was there; it might have “set her off.” I don’t know if the episode that sent her to Morrisville had anything to do with a baby.
I felt left out of things on that visit. Both Jill and Ailsa had taken up smoking, and they would sit up late at night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, while they waited for the baby’s one o’clock feeding. (My mother fed this baby from her breasts—I was glad to hear that no such intimate body-heated meals had been served to me.) I remember coming downstairs sulkily because Icouldn’t sleep, then turning talkative, full of giddy bravado, trying to break into their conversation. Iunderstood that they were talking over things they didn’t want me to hear about. They had become, unaccountably, good friends.
I grabbed for a cigarette, and my mother said, “Go on now, leave those alone. We’re talking.” Ailsa told me to get something to drink out of the fridge, a Coke or a ginger ale. So I did, and instead of taking it upstairs I went outside.
I sat on the back step, but the women’s voices immediately went too low for me to make out any of their soft regretting or reassuring. So I went prowling around the backyard, beyond the patch of light thrown through the screen door.
The long white house with the glass-brick corners was occupied by new people now. The Shantzes had moved away, to live year-round in Florida. They sent my aunts oranges, which Ailsa said would make you forever disgusted with the kind of oranges you could buy in Canada. The new people had put in a swimming pool, which was used mostly by the two pretty teenage daughters—girls who would look right through me when they met me on the street—and by the daughters’ boyfriends. Some bushes had grown up fairly high between my aunts’ yard and theirs, but it was still possible for me to watch them running around the pool and pushing each other in, with great shrieks and splashes. Idespised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same. I would have liked for one of them to see my pale pajamas moving in the dark, and to scream out in earnest, thinking that I was a ghost.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
YEARS AGO, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture.
The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.
“Furniture?” he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. “Well. Now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?”
A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet.
“Whoa there. You mean a houseful.”
“It shouldn’t count as that much,” she said. “There’s no kitchen things and only enough for one bedroom.”
Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.
“You’ll be needing the truck,” he said.
“No. I want to send it on the train. It’s going out west, to Saskatchewan.”
She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words. An accent. He thought of Dutch—the Dutch were moving in around here—but she didn’t have the heft of the Dutch women or the nice pink skin or the fair hair. She might have been under forty, but what did it matter? N
o beauty queen, ever.
He turned all business.
“First you’ll need the truck to get it to here from wherever you got it. And we better see if it’s a place in Saskatchewan where the train goes through. Otherways you’d have to arrange to get it picked up, say, in Regina.”
“It’s Gdynia,” she said. “The train goes through.”
He took down a greasy-covered directory that was hanging from a nail and asked how she would spell that. She helped herself to the pencil that was also on a string and wrote on a piece of paper from her purse: G D Y N I A.
“What kind of nationality would that be?”
She said she didn’t know.
He took back the pencil to follow from line to line.
“A lot of places out there it’s all Czechs or Hungarians or Ukrainians,” he said. It came to him as he said this that she might be one of those. But so what, he was only stating a fact.
“Here it is, all right, it’s on the line.”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to ship it Friday—can you do that?”
“We can ship it, but I can’t promise what day it’ll get there,” he said. “It all depends on the priorities. Somebody going to be on the lookout for it when it comes in?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a mixed train Friday, two-eighteen p.m. Truck picks it up Friday morning. You live here in town?”
She nodded, writing down the address. 106 Exhibition Road.
It was only recently that the houses in town had been numbered, and he couldn’t picture the place, though he knew where Exhibition Road was. If she’d said the name McCauley at that time he might have taken more of an interest, and things might have turned out differently. There were new houses out there, built since the war, though they were called “wartime houses.” He supposed it must be one of those.
“Pay when you ship,” he told her.
“Also, I want a ticket for myself on the same train. Friday afternoon.”
“Going same place?”
