by Alice Munro
On Monday Ted was called into the principal’s office. What had happened was that Greta’s sister Kartrud had got to know the women of Hanratty better in five days than Greta had in eighteen months, and that someone had told her about Ted and Frances. Frances thought afterward that it would have been Adelaide who told, it must have been Adelaide, but she was wrong. Adelaide presented herself at the Makkavala house, but she was not the one who told; somebody else had got there before her. In a rage already from the struggle over the funeral, and her loss there, Kartrud went to visit both the principal of the high school and the minister of the United Church. She inquired of them what steps they meant to take. Neither the minister nor the principal wanted to take any. Both of them had known about the affair, and been nervous about it, and hoped it would blow over. Ted and Frances were both valuable to them. Both of them said to Kartrud that surely now, after the death of the child, husband and wife would draw together and this other business would be forgotten. A pity to make a fuss now, they said, when the family had suffered such a loss and the damage could be mended, with the wife none the wiser. But Kartrud promised she would be the wiser. She meant to tell Greta, she said, before she left for home, she meant to persuade Greta to go with her, if something had not been done to stop this. She was a powerful woman, physically and vocally. Both men were cowed by her.
The principal said to Ted that an unfortunate matter had come to his attention, been brought to his attention. He apologized for bringing it up so soon after the bereavement but said he had no choice. He said that he hoped Ted could guess the matter he had in mind, which concerned a lady of this town who had previously had everyone’s respect and he hoped would have it again. He said he imagined that Ted himself might have already decided to put an end to things. He was expecting that Ted would make some embarrassed ambiguous statement to the effect that he had, or would, put an end to things, and no matter how convincing or unconvincing this statement sounded, the principal was prepared to accept it. He was only carrying out his promise; so that Kartrud would get out of town without starting more trouble.
Ted jumped up, to the principal’s amazement, and said this was harassment, and he would not put up with it. He said he knew who was behind it. He said that he would brook no interference, his relationships were entirely his own affair, and marriage was nothing anyway but an antiquated custom promoted by the authorities of the church, just like everything else they rammed down people’s throats. Rather inconsistently, he followed this up by stating that he was leaving Greta anyway, he was leaving the school, his job, Hanratty; he was going to marry Frances.
No, no, the principal kept saying, have a drink of water. You don’t mean that, what nonsense. You can’t make up your mind when you’re in a state like this.
“My mind was made up long ago,” said Ted. He believed that was true.
“I COULD AT LEAST have asked you first,” said Ted to Frances. They were sitting in the living room of the apartment, in the late afternoon. Frances had not gone to the high school that Monday; she had ordered the glee club to meet at the Town Hall, so that she could rehearse them there, get them used to the stage. She came home rather late and her mother said, “There’s a man waiting for you in the front room. He said his name but I forget.” Her mother also forgot to say that the minister had phoned and wanted Frances to call him back. Frances never did know that.
She thought it was probably the insurance agent. There was some problem about the fire insurance for the building. The agent had called last week and asked if he could come to see her when he was next in town. Going through the hall, she tried to clear her mind to talk to him, wondering if she would have to find another place to live. Then she saw Ted sitting by the window, with his overcoat on. He had not turned on the lights. But some light from the street came in, some red and green Christmas rainbows played on him.
She knew as soon as she saw him what had happened. She knew not in detail but in substance. How else could he be sitting here in her mother’s living room in front of the old ferny wallpaper and The Angelus?
“This is an old-fashioned room,” he said gently, as if picking up her thoughts. He had run down, he was in the strange, weakened, dreamy state that follows terrible rows or irrevocable decisions. “It’s not a bit like you.”
“It’s my mother’s room,” said Frances, wanting to ask—but it wasn’t the time—what sort of room would have been like her. What did she seem like, to him, how much had he really noticed about her? She drew the curtains and turned on two wall bracket lights.
“Is that your corner?” said Ted politely, as she closed the music on the piano. She closed it so it wouldn’t bother him, or to protect it from him; he had no interest in music.
“It is sort of. That’s Mozart,” she said hurriedly, touching the cheap bust on a side table. “My favorite composer.”
What an idiotic, schoolgirl sort of thing to say. She felt her apologies should not be to Ted, but to this corner of her life, the piano and Mozart and the dark print of A View of Toledo, which she was very fond of, and was now ready to expose and betray.
Ted began to tell her of the day’s events, what the principal had said, what he had said, as well as he could remember. In the telling, his replies were somewhat cooler, more controlled and thoughtful, than they had been in fact.
“So, I said I was going to marry you, and then I thought, of all the presumption. What if she says no?”
“Oh, well. You knew I wouldn’t,” said Frances. “Say no.”
Of course he had known that. They were going through with it, nothing could stop them. Not Frances’ mother, who sat in the kitchen reading and not knowing she was under sentence of death (for that was what it amounted to; she would go to Clark and Adelaide and the confusion in their house would finish her; they would forget about her library books and she would go to bed and die). Not Ted’s young daughters, who were skating this afternoon at the outdoor rink, to the blurry music “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and enjoying, in a subdued and guilty way, the attention their brother’s death was bringing to them.
“Would you like coffee?” said Frances. “Oh, I don’t know if we have any. We save all the ration coupons for tea. Would you like tea?”
“We save all ours for coffee. No. It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t really want anything.”
“We’re stunned,” said Frances. “We’re both stunned.”
“It would have happened anyway. Sooner or later we would have decided.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Ted impatiently. “Of course we would.” But it didn’t seem so to Frances, and she wondered if he said it just because he could not bear the thought of anything being set in motion outside his control—and so wastefully, so cruelly—and because he felt bound to conceal from her how small a part she herself had played in all this. No, not a small part; an ambiguous part. There was a long chain of things, many of them hidden from her, that brought him here to propose to her in the most proper place, her mother’s living room. She had been made necessary. And it was quite useless to think, would anyone else have done as well, would it have happened if the chain had not been linked exactly as it was? Because it was linked as it was, and it was not anybody else. It was Frances, who had always believed something was going to happen to her, some clearly dividing moment would come, and she would be presented with her future. She had foreseen that, and she could have foreseen some scandal; but not the weight, the disturbance, the possibility of despair, that was at the heart of it.
“We will have to be careful,” she said.
He thought that she meant they must not have children, at least for a while, and he agreed, though he thought she picked an odd time to mention it. She did not mean anything like that.
Frances is greeting people, standing near her brother Clark and the coffin of her sister-in-law Adelaide in the Hanratty Funeral Home, nearly thirty years later
. The Hanratty Funeral Home is a new extension of the furniture store which was next to the old hardware store. The hardware store burned down. So Frances is standing underneath where she used to live, if that can be imagined. Frances doesn’t imagine it.
Her hair is an odd color. The dark hairs have gone gray but not the red, resulting in such a grizzled mixture that her daughters have persuaded her to dye it. But the shade they chose for her is a mistake. The wrong shade of hair, however, like the dashed-on lipstick, the plaid tailored suit, the enduring leanness and distracted, energetic manner, only makes her seem more like herself, and many people are glad to see her.
She has been back before this, of course, but not often. She never brought Ted with her. She brought her children, who thought Hanratty was a quaint, ridiculous place, an absurd place for their parents to have lived in. She has two daughters. Ted has four daughters altogether, but no son. On each occasion, in the delivery room, Frances felt relief.
She continued to believe that Adelaide informed on her, and she continued to be angry about it, though she saw that she might just as easily have been grateful. Now Adelaide is dead. She got very fat; she developed heart trouble.
People at the funeral home don’t ask Frances about Ted but she feels this is due to old embarrassment, not ill-feeling. They ask about her children. Then Frances herself is able to bring up Ted’s name, saying that the younger girl has come home from Montreal, where she is studying, to spend a few days near her father while her mother is away. Ted is in a hospital, he has emphysema. He goes into the hospital when there is a crisis, is relieved, comes home again. This will go on for a while.
Then people start talking about Ted, recalling his classroom antics, saying there had never been anyone like him, there ought to be more teachers like that, what a different kind of place school would have been. Frances laughs, agrees, thinks how she must report all this to Ted, but in a casual way, so he won’t think it is being done to cheer him up. He never taught again, after Hanratty. He got a job in Ottawa, working for the government, as a biologist. It was possible to get such a job in wartime, without having advanced degrees. Frances worked as a music teacher, so that they could send money to Greta, who went back to Northern Ontario, to her family. She believes Ted has liked his job. He has been involved in great feuds and battles and talked cynically but this as far as she could see was the way of civil servants. But he has come to look on teaching as his real vocation. He talks of his teaching days more and more, as he gets older, making them into a kind of serial adventure, with mad principals, preposterous school boards, recalcitrant but finally vanquished pupils, interest sparked in most unlikely places. He is going to be glad to hear how his pupils’ memories accord with his own.
She also means to tell him about Helen, Adelaide’s daughter, a blocky woman in her thirties. She took Frances up for a close look at Adelaide, who is looking pinch-mouthed and reticent as she never did in life.
“See what they done, they wired her jaws shut. That’s the way they do it now, they wire their jaws and it never looks natural. They used to put the little pads in and fill their lips out but they don’t any more, it’s too much trouble.”
A pale, fat man, using two canes, comes up to Frances.
“I don’t know if you remember me. I used to be Clark’s and Adelaide’s neighbor. Fred Beecher.”
“Yes I do, I remember you,” says Frances, though she cannot think for a moment how she remembers him. It comes back to her as they talk. He gives her neighborly memories of Adelaide and tells her about his own treatments for arthritis. She remembers Adelaide saying that he vomited in the snow. She says she is sorry about the pain he has, and his trouble walking, but she really wants to say she is sorry about the accident. If he had not gone out in the snow that day to take a baby carriage across town, Frances would not live in Ottawa now, she would not have her two children, she would not have her life, not the same life. That is true. She is sure of it, but it is too ugly to think about. The angle from which she has to see that can never be admitted to; it would seem monstrous. And if he hadn’t gone out that day—Frances is thinking as she talks to him—where would we all be now? Bobby would be about forty years old, perhaps he would be an engineer—his childish interests, recalled now more often by Ted, made that seem likely—he would have a good job, maybe even an interesting job, a wife and children. Greta would be going to see Ted in the hospital, looking after his emphysema. Frances might still be here, in Hanratty, teaching music; or she might be elsewhere. She might have recovered, fallen in love with someone else, or she might have grown hard and solitary around her wound.
What difference, thinks Frances. She doesn’t know where that thought comes from or what it means, for of course there is a difference, anybody can see that, a life’s difference. She’s had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.
Not altogether the same, surely.
The same.
I’ll be as bad as Mother when I get old, she thinks, turning eagerly to greet somebody. Never mind. She has a way to go yet.
Bardon Bus
I think of being an old maid, in another generation. There were plenty of old maids in my family. I come of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way. A piece of Chinese silk folded in a drawer, worn by the touch of fingers in the dark. Or the one letter, hidden under maid-enly garments, never needing to be opened or read because every word is known by heart, and a touch communicates the whole. Perhaps nothing so tangible, nothing but the memory of an ambiguous word, an intimate, casual tone of voice, a hard, helpless look. That could do. With no more than that I could manage, year after year as I scoured the milk pails, spit on the iron, followed the cows along the rough path among the alder and the black-eyed Susans, spread the clean wet overalls to dry on the fence, and the tea towels on the bushes. Who would the man be? He could be anybody. A soldier killed at the Somme or a farmer down the road with a rough-tongued wife and a crowd of children; a boy who went to Saskatchewan and promised to send for me, but never did, or the preacher who rouses me every Sunday with lashings of fear and promises of torment. No matter. I could fasten on any of them, in secret. A lifelong secret, lifelong dream-life. I could go round singing in the kitchen, polishing the stove, wiping the lamp chimneys, dipping water for the tea from the drinking-pail. The faintly sour smell of the scrubbed tin, the worn scrub-cloths. Upstairs my bed with the high headboard, the crocheted spread, and the rough, friendly-smelling flannelette sheets, the hot-water bottle to ease my cramps or be clenched between my legs. There I come back again and again to the center of my fantasy, to the moment when you give yourself up, give yourself over, to the assault which is guaranteed to finish off everything you’ve been before. A stubborn virgin’s belief, this belief in perfect mastery; any broken-down wife could tell you there is no such thing.
Dipping the dipper in the pail, lapped in my harmless craziness, I’d sing hymns, and nobody would wonder.
“He’s the Lily of the Valley,
The Bright and Morning Star.
He’s the Fairest of Ten Thousand to my Soul.”
2
This summer I’m living in Toronto, in my friend Kay’s apartment, finishing a book of family history which some rich people are paying me to write. Last spring, in connection with this book, I had to spend some time in Australia. There I met an anthropologist whom I had known slightly, years before, in Vancouver. He was then married to his first wife (he is now married to his third) and I was married to my first husband (I am now divorced). We both lived in Fort Camp, which was the married students’ quarters, at the university.
The anthropologist had been investigating language groups in northern Queensland. He was going to spend a few weeks in the city, at a university, before joining his wife in India. She was there on a grant, studying Indian music. She is the new sort of wife with se
rious interests of her own. His first wife had been a girl with a job, who would help him get through the university, then stay home and have children.
We met at lunch on Saturday, and on Sunday we went up the river on an excursion boat, full of noisy families, to an animal preserve. There we looked at wombats curled up like blood puddings, and disgruntled, shoddy emus, and walked under an arbor of brilliant unfamiliar flowers and had our pictures taken with koala bears. We brought each other up-to-date on our lives, with jokes, sombre passages, buoyant sympathy. On the way back we drank gin from the bar on the boat, and kissed, and made a mild spectacle of ourselves. It was almost impossible to talk because of the noise of the engines, the crying babies, the children shrieking and chasing each other, but he said, “Please come and see my house. I’ve got a borrowed house. You’ll like it. Please, I can’t wait to ask you, please come and live with me in my house.”
“Should I?”
“I’ll get down on my knees,” he said, and did.
“Get up, behave!” I said. “We’re in a foreign country.”
“That means we can do anything we like.”
Some of the children had stopped their game to stare at us. They looked shocked and solemn.
3
I call him X, as if he were a character in an old-fashioned novel, that pretends to be true. X is a letter in his name, but I chose it also because it seems to suit him. The letter X seems to me expansive and secretive. And using just the letter, not needing a name, is in line with a system I often employ these days. I say to myself, “Bardon Bus, No. 144,” and I see a whole succession of scenes. I see them in detail; streets and houses. LaTrobe Terrace, Paddington. Schools like large, pleasant bungalows, betting shops, frangipani trees dropping their waxy, easily bruised, and highly scented flowers. It was on this bus that we rode downtown, four or five times in all, carrying our string bags, to shop for groceries at Woolworths, meat at Coles, licorice and chocolate ginger at the candy store. Much of the city is built on ridges between gullies, so there was a sense of coming down through populous but half-wild hill villages into the central part of town, with its muddy river and pleasant colonial shabbiness. In such a short time everything seemed remarkably familiar and yet not to be confused with anything we had known in the past. We felt we knew the lives of the housewives in sun-hats riding with us on the bus, we knew the insides of the shuttered, sun-blistered houses set up on wooden posts over the gullies, we knew the streets we couldn’t see. This familiarity was not oppressive but delightful, and there was a slight strangeness to it, as if we had come by it in a way we didn’t understand. We moved through a leisurely domesticity with a feeling of perfect security—a security we hadn’t felt, or so we told each other, in any of our legal domestic arrangements, or in any of the places where we more properly belonged. We had a holiday of lightness of spirit without the holiday feeling of being at loose ends. Every day X went off to the university and I went downtown to the research library, to look at old newspapers on the microfilm reader.
