by Alice Munro
She thought of some absurdly discreet and conservative New England paper with a fusty prose style.
“Oh. Which paper?” she said, then realized her inquisitiveness must seem quite rude, to anyone so circumspect.
“Not a paper you would have heard of. Just the daily paper of an industrial town. Other papers in the earlier years. That was my life.”
“And now, would you like to do a book on Willa Cather?” This question seemed not so out of place to her, because she was always talking to people who wanted to do books about something.
“No,” he said austerely. “My eyes do not permit me to do any reading or writing beyond what is necessary.”
That was why he was so deliberate about his eating.
“No,” he went on, “I don’t say that at one time I might not have thought of that, doing a book on Willa. I would have written something just about her life here on the island. Biographies have been done, but not so much on that phase of her life. Now I have given up the idea. I do my investigating just for my own pleasure. I take a camp chair up there, so I can sit underneath the window where she wrote and looked at the sea. There is never anybody there.”
“It isn’t being kept up? It isn’t any sort of memorial?”
“Oh, no indeed. It isn’t kept up at all. The people here, you know, while they were very impressed with Willa, and some of them recognized her genius—I mean the genius of her personality, for they would not be able to recognize the genius of her work— others of them thought her unfriendly and did not like her. They took offense because she was unsociable, as she had to be, to do her writing.”
“It could be a project,” Lydia said. “Perhaps they could get some money from the government. The Canadian government and the Americans too. They could preserve the house.”
“Well, that isn’t for me to say.” He smiled; he shook his head. “I don’t think so. No.”
He did not want any other worshippers coming to disturb him in his camp chair. She should have known that. What would this private pilgrimage of his be worth if other people got into the act, and signs were put up, leaflets printed; if this guest-house, which was now called Sea View, had to be renamed Shadows on the Rock? He would let the house fall down and the grass grow over it, sooner than see that.
AFTER LYDIA’S LAST ATTEMPT to call Duncan, the man she had been living with in Kingston, she had walked along the street in Toronto, knowing that she had to get to the bank, she had to buy some food, she had to get on the subway. She had to remember directions, and the order in which to do things: to open her checkbook, to move forward when it was her turn in line, to choose one kind of bread over another, to drop a token in the slot. These seemed to be the most difficult things she had ever done. She had immense difficulty reading the names of the subway stations, and getting off at the right one, so that she could go to the apartment where she was staying. She would have found it hard to describe this difficulty. She knew perfectly well which was the right stop, she knew which stop it came after; she knew where she was. But she could not make the connection between herself and things outside herself, so that getting up and leaving the car, going up the steps, going along the street, all seemed to involve a bizarre effort. She thought afterwards that she had been seized up, as machines are said to be. Even at the time she had an image of herself. She saw herself as something like an egg carton, hollowed out in back.
When she reached the apartment she sat down on a chair in the hall. She sat for an hour or so, then she went to the bathroom, undressed, put on her nightgown, and got into bed. In bed she felt triumph and relief, that she had managed all the difficulties and got herself to where she was supposed to be and would not have to remember anything more.
She didn’t feel at all like committing suicide. She couldn’t have managed the implements, or aids, she couldn’t even have thought which to use. It amazed her to think that she had chosen the loaf of bread and the cheese, which were now lying on the floor in the hall. How had she imagined she was going to chew and swallow them?
AFTER DINNER Lydia sat out on the verandah with the woman who had cooked the meal. The woman’s husband did the cleaning up.
“Well, of course we have a dishwasher,” the woman said. “We have two freezers and an oversize refrigerator. You have to make an investment. You get the crews staying with you, you have to feed them. This place soaks up money like a sponge. We’re going to put in a swimming pool next year. We need more attractions. You have to run to stay in the same place. People think what an easy nice life. Boy.”
She had a strong, lined face, and long straight hair. She wore jeans and an embroidered smock and a man’s sweater.
“Ten years ago I was living in a commune in the States. Now I’m here. I work sometimes eighteen hours a day. I have to pack the crew’s lunch yet tonight. I cook and bake, cook and bake. John does the rest.”
“Do you have someone to clean?”
“We can’t afford to hire anybody. John does it. He does the laundry—everything. We had to buy a mangle for the sheets. We had to put in a new furnace. We got a bank loan. I thought that was funny, because I used to be married to a bank manager. I left him.”
“I’m on my own now, too.”
“Are you? You can’t be on your own forever. I met John, and he was in the same boat.”
“I was living with a man in Kingston, in Ontario.”
“Were you? John and I are extremely happy. He used to be a minister. But when I met him he was doing carpentry. We both had sort of dropped out. Did you talk to Mr. Stanley?”
“Yes.”
“Had you ever heard of Willa Cather?”
“Yes.”
“That’d make him happy. I don’t read hardly at all, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m a visual person. But I think he’s a wonderful character, old Mr. Stanley. He’s a real old scholar.”
“Has he been coming here for a long time?”
“No, he hasn’t. This is just his third year. He says he’s wanted to come here all his life. But he couldn’t. He had to wait till some relative died, that he was looking after. Not a wife. A brother maybe. Anyway he had to wait. How old do you think he is?”
“Seventy? Seventy-five?”
“That man is eighty-one. Isn’t that amazing? I really admire people like that. I really do. I admire people that keep going.”
“THE MAN I was living with—that is, the man I used to live with, in Kingston,” said Lydia, “was putting some boxes of papers in the trunk of his car once, this was out in the country, at an old farmhouse, and he felt something nudge him and he glanced down. It was about dusk, on a pretty dark day. So he thought this was a big friendly dog, a big black dog giving him a nudge, and he didn’t pay much attention. He just said go on, now, boy, go away now, good boy. Then when he got the boxes arranged he turned around. And he saw it was a bear. It was a black bear.”
She was telling this later that same evening, in the kitchen.
“So what did he do then?” said Lawrence, who was the boss of the telephone work crew. Lawrence and Lydia and Eugene and Vincent were playing cards.
Lydia laughed. “He said, excuse me. That’s what he claims he said.” “Papers all he had in the boxes? Nothing to eat?”
“He’s a writer. He writes historical books. This was some material he needed for his work. Sometimes he has to go and scout out material from people who are very strange. That bear hadn’t come out of the bush. It was a pet, actually, that had been let off its chain, for a joke. There were two old brothers there, that he got the papers from, and they just let it off its chain to give him a scare.”
“That’s what he does, collects old stuff and writes about it?” Lawrence said. “I guess that’s interesting.”
She immediately regretted having told this story. She had brought it up because the men were talking about bears. But there wasn’t much point to it unless Duncan told it. He could show you himself, large and benign and civilized, with his courtly apologi
es to the bear. He could make you see the devilish old men behind their tattered curtains.
“You’d have to know Duncan,” was what she almost said. And hadn’t she told this simply to establish that she had known Duncan—that she had recently had a man, and an interesting man, an amusing and adventurous man? She wanted to assure them that she was not always alone, going on her aimless travels. She had to show herself attached. A mistake. They were not likely to think a man adventurous who collected old papers from misers and eccentrics, so that he could write books about things that had happened a hundred years ago. She shouldn’t even have said that Duncan was a man she had lived with. All that could mean, to them, was that she was a woman who had slept with a man she was not married to.
Lawrence the boss was not yet forty, but he was successful. He was glad to tell about himself. He was a free-lance labor contractor and owned two houses in St. Stephen. He had two cars and a truck and a boat. His wife taught school. Lawrence was getting a thick waist, a trucker’s belly, but he still looked alert and vigorous. You could see that he would be shrewd enough, in most situations, for his purposes; sure enough, ruthless enough. Dressed up, he might turn flashy. And certain places and people might be capable of making him gloomy, uncertain, contentious.
Lawrence said it wasn’t all true—all the stuff they wrote about the Maritimes. He said there was plenty of work for people who weren’t afraid to work. Men or women. He said he was not against women’s lib, but the fact was, and always would be, that there was work men did better than women and work women did better than men, and if they would both settle down and realize that they’d be happier.
His kids were cheeky, he said. They had it too soft. They got everything—that was the way nowadays, what could you do? The other kids got everything, too. Clothes, bikes, education, records. He hadn’t had anything handed to him. He had got out and worked, driven trucks. He had got to Ontario, got as far as Saskatchewan. He had only got to grade ten in school but he hadn’t let that hold him back. Sometimes he wished, though, that he did have more of an education.
Eugene and Vincent, who worked for Lawrence, said they had never got past grade eight, when that was as far as you could go in the country schools. Eugene was twenty-five and Vincent was fifty-two. Eugene was French-Canadian from northern New Brunswick. He looked younger than his age. He had a rosy color, a downy, dreamy, look—a masculine beauty that was nevertheless soft-edged, sweet-tempered, bashful. Hardly any men or boys have that look nowadays. Sometimes you see it in an old photograph—of a bridegroom, a basketball player: the thick water-combed hair, the blooming boy’s face on the new man’s body. Eugene was not very bright, or perhaps not very competitive. He lost money at the game they were playing. It was a card game that the men called Skat. Lydia remembered playing it when she was a child, and calling it Thirty-one. They played for a quarter a game.
Eugene permitted Vincent and Lawrence to tease him about losing at cards, about getting lost in Saint John, about women he liked, and about being French-Canadian. Lawrence’s teasing amounted to bullying. Lawrence wore a carefully good-natured expression, but he looked as if something hard and heavy had settled inside him—a load of self-esteem that weighed him down instead of buoying him up. Vincent had no such extra weight, and though he too was relentless in his teasing—he teased Lawrence as well as Eugene—there was no sense of cruelty or danger. You could see that his natural tone was one of rumbling, easy mockery. He was sharp and sly but not insistent; he would always be able to say the most pessimistic things and not sound unhappy.
Vincent had a farm—it was his family’s farm, where he had grown up, near St. Stephen. He said you couldn’t make enough to keep you nowadays, just from farming. Last year he put in a potato crop. There was frost in June, snow in September. Too short a season by a long shot. You never knew, he said, when you might get it like that. And the market is all controlled now, it is all run by the big fellows, the big interests. Everybody does what he can, rather than trust to farming. Vincent’s wife works too. She took a course and learned to do hair. His sons are not hardworking like their parents. All they want to do is roar around in cars. They get married and the first thing their wives want is a new stove. They want a stove that practically cooks the dinner by itself and puts it on the table.
It didn’t use to be that way. The first time Vincent ever had boots of his own—new boots that hadn’t been worn by anybody before him—was when he joined the army. He was so pleased he walked backwards in the dirt to see the prints they made, fresh and whole. Later on, after the war, he went to Saint John to look for work. He had been working at home on the farm for a while and he had worn out his army clothes—he had just one pair of decent pants left. In a beer parlor in Saint John a man said to him, “You want to pick up a good pair of pants cheap?” Vincent said yes, and the man said, “Follow me.” So Vincent did. And where did they end up? At the undertaker’s! For the fact was that the family of a dead man usually brings in a suit of clothes to dress him in, and he only needs to be dressed from the waist up, that’s all that shows in the coffin. The undertaker sold the pants. That was true. The army gave Vince his first pair of new boots and a corpse donated the best pair of pants he ever wore, up to that time.
Vincent had no teeth. This was immediately apparent, but it did not make him look unattractive; it simply deepened his look of secrecy and humor. His face was long and his chin tucked in, his glance unchallenging but unfooled. He was a lean man, with useful muscles, and graying black hair. You could see all the years of hard work on him, and some years of it ahead, and the body just equal to it, until he turned into a ropy-armed old man, shrunken, uncomplaining, hanging on to a few jokes.
While they played Skat the talk was boisterous and interrupted all the time by exclamations, joking threats to do with the game, laughter. Afterwards it became more serious and personal. They had been drinking a local beer called Moose, but when the game was over Lawrence went out to the truck and brought in some Ontario beer, thought to be better. They called it “the imported stuff.” The couple who owned the guest-house had long ago gone to bed, but the workmen and Lydia sat on in the kitchen, just as if it belonged to one of them, drinking beer and eating dulse, which Vincent had brought down from his room. Dulse was a kind of seaweed, greenish-brown, salty and fishy-tasting. Vincent said it was what he ate last thing at night and first thing in the morning—nothing could beat it. Now that they had found out it was so good for you, they sold it in the stores, done up in little wee packages at a criminal price.
The next day was Friday, and the men would be leaving the island for the mainland. They talked about trying to get the two-thirty boat instead of the one they usually caught, at five-thirty, because the forecast was for rough weather; the tail end of one of the tropical hurricanes was due to hit the Bay of Fundy before night.
“But the ferries won’t run if it’s too rough, will they?” said Lydia. “They won’t run if it’s dangerous?” She thought that she would not mind being cut off, she wouldn’t mind not having to travel again in the morning.
“Well, there’s a lot of fellows waiting to get off the island on a Friday night,” Vincent said.
“Wanting to get home to their wives,” said Lawrence sardonically. “There’s always crews working over here, always men away from home.” Then he began to talk in an unhurried but insistent way about sex. He talked about what he called the immorality on the island. He said that at one time the authorities had been going to put a quarantine around the whole island, on account of the V. D. Crews came over here to work and stayed at the motel, the Ocean Wave, and there’d be parties there all night every night, with drinking and young girls turning up offering themselves for sale. Girls fourteen and fifteen—oh, thirteen years of age. On the island, he said, it was getting so a woman of twenty-five could practically be a grandmother. The place was famous. Those girls would do anything for a price, sometimes for a beer.
“And sometimes for nothing,” said
Lawrence. He luxuriated in the telling.
They heard the front door open.
“Your old boyfriend,” Lawrence said to Lydia.
She was bewildered for a moment, thinking of Duncan.
“The old fellow at the table,” said Vincent.
Mr. Stanley did not come into the kitchen. He crossed the living room and climbed the stairs.
“Hey? Been down to the Ocean Wave?” said Lawrence softly, raising his head as if to call through the ceiling. “Old bugger wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he said. “Wouldn’t’ve known fifty years ago any better than now. I don’t let any of my crews go near that place. Do I, Eugene?”
Eugene blushed. He put on a solemn expression, as if he was being badgered by a teacher at school.
“Eugene, now, he don’t have to,” Vincent said.
“Isn’t it true what I’m saying?” said Lawrence urgently, as if some body had been disputing with him. “It’s true, isn’t it?”
He looked at Vincent, and Vincent said, “Yeah. Yeah.” He did not seem to relish the subject as much as Lawrence did.
“You’d think it was all so innocent here,” said Lawrence to Lydia. “Innocent! Oh, boy!”
Lydia went upstairs to get a quarter that she owed Lawrence from the last game. When she came out of her room into the dark hall, Eugene was standing there, looking out the window.
“I hope it don’t storm too bad,” he said.
Lydia stood beside him, looking out. The moon was visible, but misty.
“You didn’t grow up near the water?” she said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“But if you get the two-thirty boat it’ll be all right, won’t it?”
“I sure hope so.” He was quite childlike and unembarrassed about his fear. “One thing I don’t like the idea of is getting drownded.”
Lydia remembered that as a child she had said “drownded.” Most of the adults and all the children she knew then said that.
“You won’t,” she said, in a firm, maternal way. She went downstairs and paid her quarter.
