by Alice Munro
She proceeds from the “Turkish March” to a try at “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Roberta, listening to the piano at the same time she’s listening to Valerie talking humorously and despairingly about her fear of Kimberly, her dislike of intruders, her indefensible reluctance to relinquish her children, thinks, No, it wasn’t a mistake. What does she mean by that? She means it wasn’t a mistake to leave her husband. Whatever happens, it wasn’t a mistake. It was necessary. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known.
“This is a bad time for you,” Valerie says judiciously. “There is just a spectacular lot of strain.”
“That’s what I say to myself,” says Roberta. “But sometimes I think that’s not it. It’s not the house, it’s not the children. It’s just something black that rises.”
“Oh, there’s always something black,” says Valerie, grumbling.
“I think about Andrew—what was I doing to him? Setting things up to find the failure in him, railing at him, then getting cold feet and making up. Gradually the need to get rid of him would build again, but I was always sure it was his fault—if he’d just do this or that I could love him. So horrible for him that he turned into—remember what you said he was? A stick.”
“He was a stick,” says Valerie. “He always was. You’re not responsible for everything.”
“I think about it, because I wonder if that’s what George is doing to me. He wants to be rid of me, then he doesn’t, then he does, then he can’t admit that, even to himself; he has to set up failures. I feel I know what Andrew went through. Not that I’d go back. Never. But I see it.”
“I doubt if things happen so symmetrically.”
“I don’t think so, either, really. I don’t think you get your punishment in such a simple way. Isn’t it funny how you’re attracted—I am—to the idea of a pattern like that? I mean, the idea is attractive, of there being that balance. But not the experience. I’d like to avoid them.”
“You forget how happy you are when you’re happy.” “And vice versa. It’s like childbirth.”
GEORGE HAS FINISHED scything and is cleaning the blade. He can hear the piano through the open windows of Valerie’s house, and erratic streams of sweet, cold air are coming up from the river. He feels much better now, either because of the simple exercise or from the relief of feeling unobserved; perhaps it’s just good to get away from the mountainous demands of his own place. He wonders if it’s Roberta playing. The music fits in nicely with what he’s doing: first the cheerful, workaday “Turkish March,” to go along with the scything; now, as he stands cleaning the blade and smelling the cut grass, the subtle congratulations—even if a bit uncertainly delivered—of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” As always, when his mood truly lifts, when the dawn breaks, he wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure her—assure himself—that no real damage has been done. He hoped to be able to do that last night when they went drinking, but he couldn’t; something still held him back.
He recalls Roberta’s first visit to his house. That was in late August or early September, about a year ago now. They staged an indecorous sort of picnic, cooking feasts and playing records, hauling a mattress out into the yard. Clear nights, with Roberta pointing out to him the unlikely ways the stars tie up into their constellations, and every day pure gold. Roberta saying he must get it all straight now: she is forty-three years old, which is six years too old for him; she has left her husband because everything between them seemed artificial; but she hates saying that, because it may be just cant, she isn’t sure what she means, and above all, she doesn’t know what she’s capable of. She seemed to him courageous, truthful, without vanity. How out of this could come such touchiness, tearfulness, weariness, such a threat of collapse he cannot imagine.
But the first impression is worth respecting, he thinks.
EVA AND RUTH are decorating the dinner table on the veranda. Ruth is wearing a white shirt belonging to her brother, his striped pajama bottoms, and a monumental black turban. She looks like a proud but good-natured Sikh.
“I think the table ought to be strewn,” says Ruth. “Subtlety is out, Eva.”
At intervals they set orange and gold dahlias and beautifully striped pepper squash, zucchini, yellow gourds, Indian corn.
Under cover of the music Eva says, “Angela has more problems living here than I do. She thinks that whenever they fight it’s about her.”
“Do they fight?” says Ruth softly. Then she says, “It’s none of my business.” She was in love with George when she was thirteen or fourteen. It was when her mother first became friends with him. She used to hate his wife, and was glad when they separated. She remembers that the wife was the daughter of a gynecologist, and that this was cited by her mother as a reason George and his wife could never get on. It was probably the father’s prosperity her mother was talking about, or the way the daughter had been brought up. But to Ruth the word “gynecologist” seemed sharp and appalling, and she saw the gynecologist’s daughter dressed in an outfit of cold, jagged metal.
“They have silent fights. We can tell. Angela is so self-interested she thinks everything revolves around her. That’s what happens when you become an adolescent. I don’t want it to happen to me.”
There is a pause in Angela’s playing, and Eva says sharply, “Oh, I don’t want to leave! I hate leaving.”
“Do you?”
“I hate to leave Diana. I don’t know what will happen to her. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. I don’t think I’ll ever see the deer again. I hate having to leave things.”
Now that the piano is silent, Eva can be heard outside, where Valerie and Roberta are sitting. Roberta hears what Eva says, and waits, expecting to hear her say something about next summer. She braces herself to hear it.
Instead, Eva says, “You know, I understand George. I don’t mind about him the way Angela does. I know how to be jokey. I understand him.”
Roberta and Valerie look at each other, and Roberta smiles, shakes her head, and shivers. She has been afraid, sometimes, that George would hurt her children, not physically but by some turnabout, some revelation of dislike, that they could never forget. It seems to her that she has instructed them, by example, that he is to be accommodated, his silences respected, his joking responded to. What if he should turn, within this safety, and deal them a memorable blow? If it happened, it would be she who would have betrayed them into it. And she can feel a danger. For instance, when George was pruning the apple trees she heard Angela say, “My father’s got an apple tree and a cherry tree now.”
(That was information. Would he take it as competition?)
“I suppose he has some minions come and prune them for him?”
George said.
“He has hundreds,” said Angela cheerfully. “Dwarfs. He makes them all wear little Navy uniforms.”
Angela was on thin ice at that moment. But Roberta thinks now that the real danger is not to Angela, who would find a way to welcome insult, would be ready to reap some advantage. (Roberta has read parts of the journal.) It is Eva, with her claims of understanding, her hopes of all-round conciliation, who could be smashed and stranded.
OVER COLD APPLE-AND-WATERCRESS SOUP Eva has switched back to her enfant terrible style to tell the table, “They went out and got drunk last night. They were polluted.”
David says he hasn’t heard that expression in a long time. Valerie says, “How awful for you little ones.”
“We considered phoning the Children’s Aid,” says Angela, looking very unchildlike in the candlelight—looking like a queen, in fact— and aware that David is watching her, though with David it’s hard to say whether he’s watching with approval or with reservations. It seems as if it might be approval. Kimberly has taken over his reservations.
“Did you have a dissolute time?” said Valerie. “Roberta, you never told me. Where did you go?”
“It was highly respectable,” says Roberta. “We went to the Queen’s Hotel in Logan. To the Lounge—that
’s what they call it. The posh place to drink.”
“George wouldn’t take you out to any old beer parlor,” says Ruth. “George is a closet conservative.”
“It’s true,” says Valerie. “George believes you should take ladies only to nice places.”
“And children should be seen and not heard,” says Angela.
“Not seen, either,” says George.
“Which is confusing to everyone, because he comes on like a raving radical,” says Ruth.
“This is a treat,” says George, “getting a free analysis. Actually, it was quite dissolute, and Roberta probably doesn’t remember, on account of being so polluted, as Eva says. She bewitched a fellow who did toothpick tricks.”
Roberta says it was a game where you made a word out of toothpicks, then took a toothpick away or rearranged what was there and made another word, and so on.
“I hope not dirty words?” says Eva.
“I never talked like that when I was her age,” Angela says. “I was your pre-permissive child.”
“And after we got tired of the game, or after he did, because I was tired of it quite soon, he showed me pictures of his wife and himself on their Mediterranean cruise. He was with another lady last night, because his wife is dead now, and if he forgot where the pictures were taken this lady reminded him. She said she didn’t think he’d ever get over it.”
“The cruise or his wife?” says Ruth, while George is saying that he had a conversation with a couple of Dutch farmers who wanted to take him for a ride in their plane.
“I don’t think I went,” George adds.
“I dissuaded you,” says Roberta, not looking at him. “‘Dissuaded’ sounds so lovely,” says Ruth. “It’s so smooth. I must be thinking of suède.”
Eva asks what it means.
“Persuaded not to,” says Roberta. “I persuaded George not to go for a plane ride at one o’clock in the morning with the rich Dutch farmers. Instead, we all had an adventure getting the man from the Mediterranean cruise into his car so his girlfriend could drive him home.”
Ruth and Kimberly get up to remove the soup bowls, and David goes to put on a record of Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. This is his mother’s request. David says it’s syrupy.
They are quiet, waiting for the music to start. Eva says, “How did you guys fall in love anyway? Was it a physical attraction?”
Ruth knocks her gently on the head with a soup bowl. “You ought to have your jaws wired shut,” she says. “Don’t forget I’m learning how to cope with disturbed children.”
“Didn’t it bother you, Mom being so much older?”
“You see what I mean about her?” Angela says.
“What do you know about love?” says George grandly. “Love suffereth long, and is kind. Similar to myself in that respect. Love is not puffed up …”
“I think that is a particular kind of love,” says Kimberly, setting down the vegetables. “If you’re quoting.”
Under cover of a conversation about translation and the meanings of words (a subject of which George knows little but about which he is soon making sweeping, provocative statements, true to his classroom technique), Roberta says to Valerie, “The man’s girlfriend said that the wonderful thing was that his wife had done the whole Mediterranean cruise with a front-end loader.”
“A what?”
“Front-end loader. I looked blank, too, so she said, ‘You know, his wife had one of those operations and she had to wear one of those bag things.’”
“Oh, God help us.”
“She had big fat arms and a sprayed blonde hairdo. The wife did, in the pictures. The girlfriend was something the same, but trimmer. The wife had such a lewd, happy look. A good-times look.”
“And a front-end loader.”
So you see against what odds, and with what unpromising-looking persons, love takes root and flourishes, and I myself have no front-end loader, merely some wrinkles and slackness and sallowness and subtle withering. This is what Roberta is saying to herself. It’s not my fault, she says to herself, as she has said so often before. Usually when she says it it’s a whine, a plea, a whimper. Now it says itself matter-of-factly in her head; the tone in which it is stated is bored and tired. It seems as if this could be the truth.
BY DESSERT the conversation has shifted to architecture. The only light on the veranda is from the candles on the table. Ruth has taken the big candles away and set in front of each place a single small candle in a black metal holder with a handle, like the candle in the nursery rhyme. Valerie and Roberta say it together: “‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”
Neither of them taught that rhyme to her children, and their children have never heard it before.
“I’ve heard it,” says Kimberly.
“The pointed arch, for instance—that was just a fad,” George is saying. “It was an architectural fashion, very like fashions today.”
“Well, it wasn’t only that,” says David, temporizing. “It was more than a fashion. The people who built the cathedrals were not entirely like us.”
“They were very unlike us,” Kimberly says.
“I’m sure I was always taught, if I was taught at all in those far-off days,” says Valerie, “that the pointed arch was a development of the Romanesque arch. It suddenly occurred to them to carry it further. And it looked more religious.”
“Bull,” says George happily. “Beggin’ your pardon. I know that’s what they used to say, but in fact the pointed arch is the most primitive. It’s the easiest arch; it’s not a development from the round arch at all—how could it be? They had pointed arches in Egypt. The round arch, the keystone arch, is the most sophisticated arch you can build. The whole thing has been reported ass backwards to favor Christianity.”
“Well, it may be sophisticated, but I think it’s depressing,” says Ruth. “I think they’re very depressing, those round arches. They’re monotonous; they just go along blah-blah-blah—they don’t exactly make your spirits soar.”
“It must have expressed something the people deeply wanted,” Kimberly says. “You can hardly call that a fad. They built those cathedrals, the people did; the plan wasn’t dictated by some architect.”
“A misconception. They did have architects. In some cases we even know who they were.”
“Nevertheless, I think Kimberly’s right,” says Valerie. “In those cathedrals you feel so much of the aspirations of those people; you feel the Christian emotion in the architecture—”
“Never mind what you feel. The fact is, the Crusaders brought the pointed arch back from the Arab world. Just as they brought back a taste for spicy food. It wasn’t dreamed up by the collective unconscious to honor Jesus any more than I was. It was the latest style. The earliest examples you can see are in Italy, and then it worked north.”
Kimberly is very pink in the face but is benignly, tightly smiling. Valerie, just because she so much dislikes Kimberly, is feeling a need to say anything at all to come to her rescue. Valerie never minds if she sounds silly; she will throw herself headlong into any conversation to turn it off its contentious course, to make people laugh and calm down. Ruth also has a knack for lightening things, though in her case it seems to be done not so deliberately but serenely and almost inadvertently, as a result of her faithful following of her own line of thought. What about David? At this moment David is caught up by Angela and not paying as much attention as he might be. Angela is trying out her powers; she will try them out even on a cousin she has known since she was child. Kimberly is endangered on two sides, Roberta thinks. But she will manage. She is strong enough to hold on to David through any number of Angelas, and strong enough to hold her smile in the face of George’s attack on her faith. Does her smile foresee how he will burn? Not likely. She foresees, instead, how all of them will stumble and wander around and tie themselves in knots; what does it matter who wins the argument? For Kimberly all the arguments have already been wo
n.
Thinking this, pinning them all down this way, Roberta feels competent, relieved. Indifference has rescued her. The main thing is to be indifferent to George—that’s the great boon. But her indifference flows past him; it’s generous, it touches everybody. She is drunk enough to feel like reporting some findings. “Sexual abdication is not enough,” she might say to Valerie. She is sober enough to keep quiet.
Valerie has got George talking about Italy. Ruth and David and Kimberly and Angela have started talking about something else. Roberta hears Angela’s voice speaking with impatience and authority, and with an eagerness, a shyness, only she can detect.
“Acid rain …” Angela is saying.
Eva flicks her fingers against Roberta’s arm. “What are you thinking?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t not know. What are you thinking?”
“About life.”
“What about life?”
“About people.”
“What about people?”
“About the dessert.”
Eva flicks harder, giggling. “What about the dessert?”
“I thought it was O.K.”
Sometime later Valerie has occasion to say that she was not born in the nineteenth century, in spite of what David may think. David says that everybody born in this country before the Second World War was to all intents and purposes brought up in the nineteenth century, and that their thinking is archaic.
“We are more than products of our upbringing,” Valerie says. “As you yourself must hope, David.” She says that she has been listening to all this talk about overpopulation, ecological disaster, nuclear disaster, this and that disaster, destroying the ozone layer—it’s been going on and on, on and on for years, talk of disaster—but here they sit, all healthy, relatively sane, with a lovely dinner and lovely wine inside them, in the beautiful, undestroyed countryside.
