by Alice Munro
“You don’t look all right, I’ll tell you that,” she said to Frances. “You look like it knocked you silly. You look sick.”
“Go home,” said Frances.
How was she going to have to pay for that?
Two men were putting Christmas lights on the blue spruce trees in front of the post office. Why were they doing it at this hour? They must have got started before the accident, then had to leave it. They must have spent the time off getting drunk, at least one of them must have. Cal Callaghan had got himself tangled up in a string of lights. The other man, Boss Creer, who had got his name because he would never be boss of anything, stood by waiting for Cal to get himself out of his difficulties in his own time. Boss Creer did not know how to read or write, but he knew how to be comfortable. The back of their truck was full of wreaths of artificial holly and ropes of red and green stuff still to be hung. Frances, because of her involvement with concerts and recitals and almost everything in the way of public festivity the town could think up, had got to know where the trappings were kept and she knew that these decorations lay year after year in the attic of the Town Hall, forgotten, then remembered and hauled out when somebody on the town council said, “Well, now. We had better think what we are going to do about Christmas.” Leaving these two fools to get the ropes and lights up somehow, and the wreaths hung, Frances was despising them. The incompetence, the ratty wreaths and ropes, the air of ordinary drudgery, all set in motion by some irrational sense of seasonal obligation. At another time, she might have found it touching, faintly admirable. She might have tried to explain to Ted, who could never understand her feeling of loyalty to Hanratty. He said he could live in a city, or in the woods, in the kind of frontier settlement he came from, but not in a place like this, such a narrow place, crude without the compensations of the wilderness, cramped without any urban variety or life.
But here he was.
She remembered feeling this same disgust with everything last summer. Ted and Greta and the children had gone away, for three weeks, up to Northern Ontario to visit their relatives. For the first two weeks of the three, Frances had gone to a cottage on Lake Huron, the same cottage she always rented. She took her mother, who sat reading under the Balm of Gilead tree. Frances was all right there. In the cottage there was an old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and she read in it, over and over, the out-of-date article on Finland. She lay on the porch of the cottage at night and heard the lake on the shore and thought of Northern Ontario, where she had never been. Wilderness. But when she had to come back to town and he was not there she had a very bad time. Every morning she walked to the post office and there was nothing from him. She would stand looking out the post office window at the Town Hall, where there was a great redand-white thermometer recording the progress of a Victory Bond drive. She could no longer place him in Northern Ontario, in his relatives’ houses, getting drunk and eating enormous meals. He had gone away. He could be anywhere, outside this town; he had stopped existing for her, except in the ridiculous agony of memory. She did hate everybody then; she could hardly bring out a civil answer. She hated the people, the heat, the Town Hall, the Victory Bond thermometer, the sidewalks, the buildings, the voices. She was afraid to think about this afterward, she did not want to think how the decent, inoffensive shapes of houses or the tolerable tone of greetings could depend on the existence of one person, whom she had not known a year before, how his presence in the same town, even when she could not see or hear from him, made the necessary balance for her own.
The first night he got back was the night they got into the school and rubbed against the fresh paint. She thought then that doing without him had been worth it, was only the price to pay. She forgot what it was like, just as they said you forgot the pain of having a baby, from one time to the next.
Now she could remember. That was only a rehearsal; that was something she had concocted, to torture herself. Now it would be real. He would come back to Hanratty but he would not come back to her. Because he was with her when it happened he would hate her; at least, he would hate the thought of her, because it always made him think of the accident. And suppose somehow the child survived, crippled. That would be no better, not for Frances. They would want to get away from here. He had told her Greta did not like it, that was one of the few things he had told her about Greta. Greta was lonely, she didn’t feel at home in Hanratty. How much less was she going to like it now? What Frances had imagined last summer would be the reality this summer. He would be somewhere outside, reunited with his wife whom he probably held in his arms at this minute, comforting her, talking to her in their own language. He said he did not talk to her in Finnish. Frances had asked him. She could tell he did not like her asking. He said that he spoke hardly any Finnish. She did not believe him.
THE ORIGIN OF the Finno-Ugrian tribes is shrouded in mystery, Frances had read. That statement pleased her; she had not thought that an encyclopedia could admit such a thing. The Finns were called the Tavastians and the Karelians, and they had remained pagans until well into the thirteenth century. They believed in a god of the air, a god of the forests, a god of the water. Frances learned the names of these gods and surprised Ted with them. Ukko. Tapio. Ahti. These names were news to him. The ancestors he knew were not those peaceable pagans, the Magyar forest-dwellers, who in some places, according to the encyclopedia, still offered sacrifices to ghosts; they were the nineteenth-century nationalists, socialists, radicals. His family had been banished from Finland. It was not the northern forest, the pines and birch, but the meeting halls and newspaper offices of Helsinki, the lecture rooms and reading rooms, that Ted had been taught to be nostalgic for. No pagan ceremonies lingered in his mind (rubbish, he said, when Frances told him about sacrifices to ghosts), but a time of secret printing presses, after-dark distribution of leaflets, doomed demonstrations and honorable jail sentences. Against the Swedes, they demonstrated and propagandized, against the Russians. But if your family were Communists wouldn’t they be in favor of the Russians, said Frances stupidly, with the dates all wrong; he was talking of a time before the revolution. Not that it was any different now. Russia had invaded Finland; Finland was officially aligned with Germany. Ted’s loyalties had nowhere to turn. They were certainly not going to turn to Canada, where he said he was now considered an enemy alien and was under surveillance by the R.C.M.P. Frances could hardly believe such a thing. And he sounded proud of it.
When they were out walking in the fall, in the dry woods, he had told her plenty of things she should have been ashamed not to know; about the Spanish Civil War, the purges in Russia. She listened, but her attention kept sneaking out, under cover of her reasonable questions and replies, to fasten on a fence post or a groundhog hole. She caught the drift. He believed that a general bankruptcy existed, and that the war, which was generally believed to be an enormous but temporary crisis, was actually just a natural aspect of this condition. Whenever she pointed out any hopeful possibility he explained how she was wrong, why by now all systems were doomed and one cataclysm would follow another until—
“What?”
“Until there’s a total smashup.”
How contented he seemed, saying that. How could she argue against a vision that seemed to yield him such peace and satisfaction?
“You are so dark,” she said, turning his hand over in her own. “I didn’t know any northern Europeans were so dark.”
He told her that there were the two kinds of looks in Finland, the Magyar and the Scandinavian looks, dark and fair, and how they did not seem to mingle but kept themselves distinct, showing up generation after generation unaltered, in the same district, in the same family.
“Greta’s family is a perfect example,” he said. “Greta is absolutely Scandinavian. She has big bones, long bones, she’s dolichocephalic—”
“What?”
“Long-headed. She’s fair-skinned and blue-eyed and fair-haired.
Then her sister Kartrud is olive-skinned
and slightly slant-eyed, very dark. The same thing in our family. Bobby is like Greta. Margaret is like me. Ruth-Ann is like Greta.”
Frances was both chilled and curious to hear him speak of Greta, of our family. She never asked, never spoke of them. In the beginning, he did not speak of them either. Two things he said that stayed with her. One was that he and Greta had been married while he was still at the university, on scholarships; she had stayed up north with her family until he graduated and got a job. That made Frances wonder if Greta had been pregnant; was that why he had married her? The other thing he said—in an unemphatic way, and while he and Frances were talking about places to meet—was that he had never been unfaithful before. Frances had supposed this all along, due to her innocence or conceit; she had never for a moment supposed she could be part of a procession. But the word unfaithful (he did not even say unfaithful to Greta) suggested a bond. It put Greta under a spotlight for them, showed her sitting somewhere waiting; cool and patient, decent, wronged. It did her honor; he did her honor.
At the beginning, that was all. But now in their conversations doors were opening, to swing quickly shut again. Frances caught glimpses, which she shrank from and desired. Greta had to have the car to take Ruth-Ann to the doctor; Ruth-Ann had an earache, she had cried all night. Ted and Greta together were papering the front hall. The whole family had fallen sick after eating some questionable sausages. Frances caught more than glimpses. She caught the Makkavala family’s colds. She began to feel she lived with them in a bizarre and dreamlike intimacy.
She had asked one question.
“What was the wallpaper like? That you and your wife put on the hall?”
He had to think.
“It’s striped. It’s white and silver stripes.”
The choice of wallpaper made Greta seem harder, shrewder, more ambitious, than she seemed on the street or shopping in the Superior Grocery Store, in her soft, dowdy, flowered dresses, her loose checked slacks, a bandana over her hair. A big, fair, freckled housewife, who once bumped Frances’ arm with her grocery basket and said, “Excuse me.” The only words Frances had ever heard her say. A thickly accented, cold and timid voice. The voice Ted heard every day of his life, the body he slept beside every night. Frances’ knees weakened and trembled, there in the Superior Grocery Store in front of the shelves of Kraft Dinner and pork and beans. Just to be so close to this big, mysterious woman, so innocent and powerful, was blurring her mind and making her shake in her shoes.
ON SATURDAY MORNING Frances found a note in her mailbox, asking her to let Ted into the church that night. She was as nervous all day as she had been when waiting to meet him for the first time, in Beattie’s Bush. She waited, in the dark, by the Sunday-schoolroom door. It was a bad night, Saturday, either the minister or the janitor was likely to be there, and both had been, earlier, when Frances was distractedly playing the organ. They had gone home, she hoped for good.
They usually made love here in the dark, but tonight Frances thought they would need a light on, they would need to talk. She led the way at once to a Sunday-school classroom behind the choir loft. It was a long, narrow, stuffy room with no outside windows. The Sunday-school chairs had been stacked in one corner. There was a strange thing on the teacher’s table—an ash tray with two cigarette stubs in it. Frances held it up.
“Somebody else must come here, too.”
She had to talk about something besides the accident, because she was sure she could never say the right thing about that.
“Whole relay of lovers,” said Ted, to her relief. “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He named some possible pairs. The school secretary and the principal. Frances’ sister-in-law and the minister of this church. But he spoke drearily.
“We’ll have to set up a schedule.”
They didn’t bother taking the chairs down, but sat on the floor with their backs against the wall, under a picture of Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee.
“I have never put in such a week in my life,” Ted said. “I don’t know where to start. We came back from London Tuesday, and Wednesday, Greta’s family descended on us. They drove all night, two nights. I don’t know how they did it. They commandeered a snowplow to go ahead of them for about fifty miles in one place. Those women are capable of anything. The father’s just a shadow. The women are terrors. Kartrud is the worst. She has eight children of her own and she’s never stopped running her sisters and her sisters’ families and anybody else who’ll allow her. Greta is just useless against her.”
He said that trouble had started right away, about the funeral. Ted had decided on a nonreligious funeral. He had made up his mind long ago that if any of his family died, he would not call in the church. The undertaker didn’t like it, but agreed. Greta said it was all right. Ted wrote out a few memorial paragraphs he intended to read himself. That would be all. No hymn-singing, no prayers. There was nothing new about this. They all knew how he felt. Greta knew. Her family knew. Nevertheless, they started to carry on as if this was a new and horrifying revelation. They acted as if atheism itself was an unheard-of position. They had tried to tell him a funeral of this sort was illegal, that he could go to jail.
“They’d brought this old fellow with them, who I just assumed was some uncle or cousin or other. I haven’t met them all, it’s an enormous family. So after I told them my plans for the funeral they explained to me that he’s their minister. A Finnish Lutheran minister they carted four hundred miles to intimidate me with. He was in bad shape, too, the poor old bugger. He’d caught cold. They were running around putting mustard plasters on him and soaking his feet and trying to keep him fit to perform. Serve them right if he’d conked out on them.”
Ted was up by this time, walking back and forth in the Sunday-school room. He said there was no way he was going to be intimidated. They could have brought the whole congregation and the Lutheran Church itself on a flatcar. He told them that. He meant to bury his own son in his own way. By this time Greta had caved in, she had gone over to their side. Not that she had an ounce of religious feeling, it was just the weeping and recriminations and the weakness in the face of her family that she always had. Nor was it left to the family. Various Hanratty busybodies got into it. The house was full of them. The United Church minister, the minister of this church, showed up at one point for a consultation with the Lutheran. Ted threw him out. Later on he found out it wasn’t exactly the minister’s fault, he hadn’t come on his own. Kartrud had summoned him, saying there was a desperate situation, her sister was having a nervous breakdown.
“Was she?” said Frances.
“What?”
“Was she—your wife—having a nervous breakdown?” “Anybody would be having a nervous breakdown with that pack of maniacs in the house.”
The funeral was private, Ted said, but that didn’t seem to prevent anybody who wanted from showing up. He himself stood up beside the casket ready to knock down anyone who interfered. His sister-inlaw—with pleasure—or the ailing old minister or even Greta if they pushed her into it.
“Oh, no,” said Frances involuntarily.
“I knew she wouldn’t. But Kartrud might have. Or the old mother.
I didn’t know what was going to happen. I knew I couldn’t show a moment’s hesitation. It was horrible. I started to talk and the old mother started to rock and wail. I had to shout over her. The louder she got in Finnish the louder I got in English. It was insane.”
While he talked he dumped the cigarette stubs from the ash tray into his hand and back, was pitching them back and forth.
Frances said, after a pause, “But Greta was his mother.”
“How do you mean?”
“If she did want an ordinary funeral.”
“Oh, she didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know her. She doesn’t have any opinions one way or the other.
She just caved in in front of Kartrud; she always will.”
He did it all for himself, Frances was
thinking. He wasn’t thinking of Greta for a moment. Or of Bobby. He was thinking of himself and his beliefs and not giving in to his enemies. That was what mattered to him. She could not help seeing this and she did not like it. She could not help seeing how much she did not like it. That did not mean that she had stopped liking him; at least, she had not stopped loving him. But there was a change. When she thought about it later, it seemed to her that up to that point she had been involved in something childish and embarrassing. She had managed it all for her own delight, seeing him as she wanted to, paying attention when she wanted to, not taking him seriously, although she thought she did; she would have said he was the most important thing in her life.
She wasn’t going to be allowed that any more, that indolence and deception.
For the first time, she was surprised when he wanted to make love. She was not ready, she could not comprehend him yet, but he seemed too intent to notice.
THE NEXT DAY, Sunday, when she played for services, was the last time Frances ever played in the United Church.
