by Alice Munro
“Well. Dinner. There was lots of wine, and brandy afterwards, and Keith kept fussing, but nobody was easy. Martin was poisonous in an obvious sneering way, trying to get one up on everybody, but Caroline was poisonous in an exquisitely moral way, she’d take every topic and twist it, so that somebody seemed crass. Martin and the man I was with finally got into a filthy argument, it was filthy mean, and Caroline cooed and whimpered. The man I was with got up and said he was going to bed, and Martin wrapped himself up in a big sulk and Caroline all of a sudden started being sweet to Keith, drinking brandy with him, ignoring Martin.
“I went to my room and the man I was with was there, in bed, though we’d been given separate rooms. Caroline was very decorous in spite of all. He stayed the night. He was furious. Before, during, and after making love, he kept on the subject of Martin, what a slimy fraud he was, and I agreed. But he’s their problem, I said. So he said, they’re welcome to him, the posturing shit, and at last he went to sleep and I did too, but in the middle of the night I woke up. I wakened with a revelation. Occasionally you do. I rearranged myself and listened to his breathing, and I thought—he’s in love with Caroline. I knew it. I knew it. I was trying not to know it, not just because it wasn’t encouraging but also because it didn’t seem decent, for me to know it. But once you know something like that you never can really stop. Everything seemed clear to me. For instance Martin. That was an arrangement. She’d arranged to have the old lover and the new lover there together, just to stir things up. There was something so crude about it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. There was something crude about her. All that poetic stuff, the sensibility stuff, it was crudely done; she wasn’t a talented fake, but that didn’t matter. What matters is to want to do it enough. To have the will to disturb. To be a femme fatale you don’t have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.
“And I thought, why should I be surprised? Isn’t this just what you always hear? How love isn’t rational, or in one’s best interests, it doesn’t have anything to do with normal preferences?”
“Where do you always hear that?” Douglas said.
“It’s standard. There’s the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That’s the kind you’re supposed to get married on. Then there’s the kind that’s anything but intelligent, that’s like a possession. And that’s the one, that’s the one, everybody really values. That’s the one nobody wants to have missed out on.”
“Standard,” said Douglas.
“You know what I mean. You know it’s true. All sorts of hackneyed notions are true.”
“Hackneyed,” he said. “That’s a word you don’t often hear.” “That’s a sad story,” Julie said.
“Yours were sad too,” I said.
“Mine were really sort of ridiculous. Did you ask him if he was in love with her?”
“Asking wouldn’t have got me anywhere,” I said. “He’d brought me there to counter her with. I was his sensible choice. I was the woman he liked. I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t stand it. It was so humiliating. I got very touchy and depressed. I told him he didn’t really love me. That was enough. He wouldn’t stand for anybody telling him things about himself.”
WE STOPPED at a country church within sight of the highway.
“Something to soothe the spirit, after all these hard-luck stories, and before the Sunday traffic,” Douglas said.
We walked around the graveyard first, looking at the oldest tomb-stones, reading names and dates aloud.
I read out a verse I found.
“Afflictions sore long time she bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please to give her ease,
And waft her from her Pain.”
“Waft,” I said. “That sounds nice.”
Then I felt something go over me—a shadow, a chastening. I heard the silly sound of my own voice against the truth of the lives laid down here. Lives pressed down, like layers of rotting fabric, disintegrating dark leaves. The old pain and privation. How strange, indulged, and culpable they would find us—three middle-aged people still stirred up about love, or sex.
The church was unlocked. Julie said that was very trusting of them, even Anglican churches which were supposed to be open all the time were usually locked up nowadays, because of vandals. She said she was surprised the diocese let them keep it open.
“How do you know about dioceses?” said Douglas.
“My father was a parson. Couldn’t you guess?”
It was colder inside the church than outside. Julie went ahead, looking at the Roll of Honour, and memorial plaques on the walls. I looked over the back of the last pew at a row of footstools, where people could kneel to pray. Each stool was covered with needlework, in a different design.
Douglas put his hand on my shoulder blade, not around my shoulders. If Julie turned she wouldn’t notice. He brushed his hand down my back and settled at my waist, applying a slight pressure to the ribs before he passed behind me and walked up the outer aisle, ready to explain something to Julie. She was trying to read the Latin on a stained-glass window.
On one footstool was the Cross of St. George, on another the Cross of St. Andrew.
I hadn’t expected there would be any announcement from him, either while I was telling the story, or after it was over. I did not think that he would tell me that I was right, or that I was wrong. I heard him translating, Julie laughing, but I couldn’t attend. I felt that I had been overtaken—stumped by a truth about myself, or at least a fact, that I couldn’t do anything about. A pressure of the hand, with no promise about it, could admonish and comfort me. Something unresolved could become permanent. I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark, about what was important to him, and what was not.
On another footstool there was a dove on a blue ground, with the olive branch in its mouth; on another a lamp, with lines of straight golden stitching to show its munificent rays; on another a white lily. No—it was a trillium. When I made this discovery, I called out for Douglas and Julie to come and see it. I was pleased with this homely emblem, among the more ancient and exotic. I think I became rather boisterous, from then on. In fact all three of us did, as if we had each one, secretly, come upon an unacknowledged spring of hopefulness. When we stopped for gas, Julie and I exclaimed at the sight of Douglas’s credit cards, and declared that we didn’t want to go back to Toronto. We talked of how we would all run away to Nova Scotia, and live off the credit cards. Then when the crackdown came we would go into hiding, change our names, take up humble occupations. Julie and I would work as barmaids. Douglas could set traps for lobsters. Then we could all be happy.
Visitors
Mildred had just come into the kitchen and was looking at the clock, which said five to two. She had thought it might be at least half past. Wilfred came in from the back, through the utility room, and said, “Hadn’t you ought to be out there keeping them company?”
His brother Albert’s wife, Grace, and her sister, Vera, were sitting out in the shade of the carport making lace tablecloths. Albert was out at the back of the house, sitting beside the patch of garden where Wilfred grew beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Every half-hour Wilfred checked to see which tomatoes were ripe enough to pick. He picked them half-ripe and spread them out on the kitchen windowsill, so the bugs wouldn’t get them.
“I was,” said Mildred. She ran a glass of water. “I maybe might take them for a drive,” she said when she had finished drinking it.
“That’s a good idea.”
“How is Albert?”
Albert had spent most of the day before, the first full day of the visit, lying down.
“I can’t figure out.”
“Well surely if he felt sick he’d say so.”
“That’s just it,” said Wilfred. “That’s just what he wouldn’t.”
This was the first time Wilfred had seen his brother in more than thirty years.
Wilfred and Mildred were retired. Their house was small and they weren’t, but they got along fine in the space. They had a kitchen not much wider than a hallway, a bathroom about the usual size, two bedrooms that were pretty well filled up when you got a double bed and a dresser into them, a living room where a large sofa sat five feet in front of a large television set, with a low table about the size of a coffin in between, and a small glassed-in porch.
Mildred had set up a table on the porch to serve meals on. Ordinarily, she and Wilfred ate at the table under the kitchen window. If one of them was up and moving around, the other always stayed sitting down. There was no way five people could have managed there, even when three of them were as skinny as these visitors were.
Fortunately there was a daybed on the porch, and Vera, the sister-in-law, slept on that. The sister-in-law had been a surprise to Mildred and Wilfred. Wilfred had done the talking on the phone (nobody in his family, he said, had ever written a letter); according to him, no sister-in-law had been mentioned, just Albert and his wife. Mildred thought Wilfred might not have heard, because he was so excited. Talking to Albert on the phone, from Logan, Ontario, to Elder, Saskatchewan, taking in the news that his brother proposed to visit him, Wilfred had been in a dither of hospitality, reassurances, amazement.
“You come right ahead,” he yelled over the phone to Saskatchewan. “We can put you up as long as you want to stay. We got plenty of room. We’ll be glad to. Never mind your return tickets. You get on down here and enjoy the summer.” It might have been while he was going on like this that Albert was explaining about the sister-in-law.
“How do you tell them apart?” said Wilfred on first meeting Grace and Vera. “Or do you always bother?” He meant it for a joke.
“They’re not twins,” said Albert, without a glance at either of them. Albert was a short, thin man in dark clothes, who looked as if he might weigh heavy, like dense wood. He wore a string tie and a westerner’s hat, but these did not give him a jaunty appearance. His pale cheeks hung down on either side of his chin.
“You look like sisters, though,” said Mildred genially to the two dried-out, brown-spotted, gray-haired women. Look what the prairie did to a woman’s skin, she was thinking. Mildred was vain of her own skin; it was her compensation for being fat. Also, she put an ash-gold rinse on her hair and wore coordinated pastel pants and tops. Grace and Vera wore dresses with loose pleats over their flat chests, and cardigans in summer. “You look a lot more like sisters than those two look like brothers.”
It was true. Wilfred had a big head as well as a big stomach, and an anxious, eager, changeable face. He looked like a man who put a high value on joking and chatting, and so he did.
“It’s lucky there’s none of you too fleshy,” Wilfred said. “You can all fit into the one bed. Naturally Albert gets the middle.”
“Don’t pay attention to him,” said Mildred. “There’s a good daybed if you don’t mind sleeping on the porch,” she said to Vera. “It’s got blinds on the windows and it gets the best breeze of anywhere.”
God knows if the women even caught on to what Wilfred was joking about.
“That’ll be fine,” said Albert.
With Albert and Grace sleeping in the spare room, which was where Mildred usually slept, Mildred and Wilfred had to share a double bed. They weren’t used to it. In the night, Wilfred had one of his wild dreams, which were the reason Mildred had moved to the spare room in the first place.
“Grab ahold!” yelled Wilfred, in terror. Was he on a lake boat, trying to pull somebody out of the water?
“Wilfred, wake up! Stop hollering and scaring everybody to death.” “I am awake,” said Wilfred. “I wasn’t hollering.”
“Then I’m Her Majesty the Queen.”
They were lying on their backs. They both heaved, and turned to face the outside. Each kept a courteous but firm hold on the top sheet.
“Is it whales that can’t turn over when they get up on the beach?” Mildred said.
“I can still turn over,” said Wilfred. They aligned backsides. “Maybe you think that’s the only thing I can do.”
“Keep still, now, you’ve got them all listening.”
In the morning she said, “Did Wilfred wake you up? He’s a terrible hollerer in his sleep.”
“I hadn’t got to sleep anyway,” Albert said.
SHE WENT OUT and got the two ladies into the car. “We’ll take a little drive and raise a breeze to cool us off,” she said. They sat in the back, because there wasn’t really room left over in the front, even for two such skinnies.
“I’m the chauffeur!” said Mildred merrily. “Where to, your ladyships?”
“Just anyplace you’d like,” said one of them. When she wasn’t looking at them Mildred couldn’t be sure which was talking.
She drove them around Winter Court and Chelsea Drive to look at the new houses with their landscaping and swimming pools. Then she took them to the Fish and Game Club, where they saw the ornamental fowl, the family of deer, the raccoons, and the caged bobcat. She felt as tired as if she had driven to Toronto, and in need of refreshment, so she headed out to the place on the highway to buy ice-cream cones. They both asked for a small vanilla. Mildred had a mixed double: rum-raisin and praline cream. They sat at a picnic table licking their ice-cream cones and looking at a field of corn.
“They grow a lot of corn around here,” Mildred said. Albert had been the manager of a grain elevator before he retired, so she supposed they might be interested in crops. “Do they grow a lot of corn out west?”
They thought about it. Grace said, “Well. Some.”
Vera said, “I was wondering.”
“Wondering what?” said Mildred cheerfully.
“You wouldn’t have a Pentecostal Church here in Logan?”
They set out in the car again, and after some blundering, Mildred found the Pentecostal Church. It was not one of the handsomer churches in town. It was a plain building, of cement blocks, with the doors and the window-trim painted orange. A sign told the minister’s name and the times of service. There was no shade tree near it and no bushes or flowers, just a dry yard. Maybe that would remind them of Saskatchewan.
“Pentecostal Church,” said Mildred, reading the sign. “Is that the church you people go to?”
“Yes.”
“Wilfred and I are not regular churchgoers. If we went, I guess we would go to the United. Do you want to get out and see if it’s unlocked?”
“Oh, no.”
“If it was locked, we could try and locate the minister. I don’t know him, but there’s a lot of Logan people I don’t know yet. I know the ones that bowl and the ones that play euchre at the Legion. Otherwise, I don’t know many. Would you like to call on him?”
They said no. Mildred was thinking about the Pentecostal Church, and it seemed to her that it was the one where people spoke in tongues. She thought she might as well get something out of the afternoon, so she went ahead and asked them: was that true?
“Yes, it’s true.”
“But what are tongues?”
A pause. One said, with difficulty, “It’s the voice of God.” “Heavens,” said Mildred. She wanted to ask more—did they speak in tongues themselves?—but they made her nervous. It was clear that she made them nervous, too. She let them look a few minutes more, then asked if they had seen enough. They said they had, and thanked her.
IF SHE HAD MARRIED Wilfred when they were young, Mildred thought, she would have known something about his family and what to expect of them. Mildred and Wilfred had married in late middle age, after a courtship of only six weeks. Neither of them had been married before. Wilfred had moved around too much, or so he said. He had worked on the lake boats and in lumber camps, he had helped build houses and had pumped gas and had pruned trees; he had worked from California to the Yukon and from the east coast to the west. Mildred had spent most of her life in the town of McGaw, twenty miles from Logan, where she now lived. She had bee
n an only child, and had been given tap-dancing lessons and then sent to business school. From business school she went into the office of the Toll Shoe Factory, in McGaw, and shortly became the sweetheart of Mr. Toll, who owned it. There she stayed.
It was during the last days of Mr. Toll’s life that she met Wilfred. Mr. Toll was in the psychiatric hospital overlooking Lake Huron. Wilfred was working there as a groundsman and guard. Mr. Toll was eighty-two years old and didn’t know who Mildred was, but she visited him anyway. He called her Sadie, that being the name of his wife. His wife was dead now but she had been alive all the time Mr. Toll and Mildred were taking their little trips together, staying at hotels together, staying in the cottage Mr. Toll had bought for Mildred at Amberley Beach. In all the time she had known him, Mildred had never heard him speak of his wife except in a dry, impatient way. Now she had to listen to him tell Sadie he loved her, ask Sadie’s forgiveness. Pretending she was Sadie, Mildred said she forgave him. She dreaded some confession regarding a brassy-headed floozy named Mildred. Nevertheless, she kept on visiting. She hadn’t the heart to deprive him. That had been her trouble all along. But when the sons or daughters or Sadie’s sisters showed up, she had to make herself scarce. Once, taken by surprise, she had to get Wilfred to let her out a back way. She sat down on a cement wall by the back door and had a cigarette, and Wilfred asked her if anything was the matter. Being upset, and having nobody in McGaw to talk to, she told him what was going on, even about the letter she had received from a lawyer telling her she had to get out of the Amberley cottage. She had thought all along it was in her name, but it wasn’t.
