by Alice Munro
That was in fact what I seemed to be hoping for. I was never altogether sorry to hear it. Sometimes I would get to my destination and stand on the sidewalk, looking at the Ladies’ Dress Shop, with its mirrors and pale carpeting, or watch the girls tripping downstairs on their lunch break from the office that needed a filing clerk. I would not even go inside, knowing how my hair and fingernails and flat scuffed shoes would tell against me. And I was just as daunted by the factories—I could hear the noise of the machines going in the buildings where soft drinks were bottled or Christmas decorations put together, and I could see the bare light-bulbs hanging down from the barnlike ceilings. My fingernails and flat heels might not matter there, but my clumsiness and mechanical stupidity would get me sworn at, shouted at (I could also hear the shouted orders above the noise of the machines). I would be disgraced and fired. I didn’t think myself capable even of learning to operate a cash register. I told the manager of a restaurant that, when he actually seemed to be thinking of hiring me. “Do you think you could pick it up?” he said, and I said no. He looked as if he had never heard anybody admit to such a thing before. But I spoke the truth. I didn’t think I could pick things up, not in a hurry and out in public. I would freeze. The only things that I could pick up easily were things like the convolutions of the Thirty Years’ War.
The truth is, of course, that I didn’t have to. Chess was supporting me, at our very basic level. I didn’t have to push myself out into the world because he had done it. Men had to.
I thought that maybe I could manage the work in the library, so I asked there, though they hadn’t advertised. A woman put my name on a list. She was polite but not encouraging. Then I went into bookstores, choosing the ones that looked as if they wouldn’t have a cash register. The emptier and untidier the better. The owners would be smoking or dozing at the desk, and in the secondhand stores there was often a smell of cat.
“We’re not busy enough in the winter,” they said.
One woman said I might come back in the spring.
“Though we’re not usually very busy then, either.”
WINTER in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known. No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind. In the middle of the day, downtown, I could smell something like burned sugar—I think it had to do with the trolley wires. I walked along Hastings Street, where there wouldn’t be another woman walking—just drunks, tramps, poor old men, shuffling Chinese. Nobody spoke an ill word to me. I walked past warehouses, weedy lots where there wouldn’t be even a man in sight. Or through Kitsilano, with its high wooden houses crammed with people living tight, as we were, to the tidy Dunbar district, with its stucco bungalows and pollarded trees. And through Kerrisdale, where the classier trees appeared, birches on the lawns. Tudor beams, Georgian symmetry, Snow White fantasies with imitation thatched roofs. Or maybe real thatched roofs, how could I tell?
In all these places where people lived, the lights came on around four in the afternoon, and then the streetlights came on, the lights in the trolley buses came on, and often, too, the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun’ setting—and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight. People who had been shopping were going home, people at work were thinking about going home, people who had been in the houses all day came out to take a little walk that would make home more appealing. I met women with baby carriages and complaining toddlers and never thought that so soon I’d be in the same shoes. I met old people with their dogs, and other old people, slow moving or in wheelchairs, being propelled by their mates or keepers. I met Mrs. Gorrie pushing Mr. Gorrie. She wore a cape and beret of soft purple wool (I knew by now that she made most of her own clothes) and a lot of rosy face coloring. Mr. Gorrie wore a low cap and a thick scarf wrapped around his neck. Her greeting to me was shrill and proprietary, his nonexistent. He did not look as if he was enjoying the ride. But people in wheelchairs rarely did look anything more than resigned. Some looked affronted or downright mean.
“Now, when we saw you out in the park the other day,” Mrs. Gorrie said, “you weren’t on your way back from looking for a job then, were you?”
“No,” I said, lying. My instinct was to lie to her about anything.
“Oh, good. Because I was just going to say, you know, that if you were out looking for a job you really should fix yourself up a little bit. Well, you know that.”
Yes, I said.
“I can’t understand the way some women go out nowadays. I’d never go out in my flat shoes and no makeup on, even if I was just going to the grocery store. Let alone if I was going to ask somebody to give me a job.”
She knew I was lying. She knew I froze on the other side of the basement door, not answering her knock. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she went through our garbage and discovered and read the messy, crumpled pages on which were spread out my prolix disasters. Why didn’t she give up on me? She couldn’t. I was a job set out for her—maybe my peculiarities, my ineptitude, were in a class with Mr. Gorrie’s damages, and what couldn’t be righted had to be borne.
She came down the stairs one day when I was in the main part of the basement doing our washing. I was allowed to use her wringer-washer and laundry tubs every Tuesday.
“So is there any chance of a job yet?” she said, and on the spur of the moment I said that the library had told me they might have something for me in the future. I thought that I could pretend to be going to work there—I could go and sit there every day at one of the long tables, reading or even trying my writing, as I had done occasionally in the past. Of course, the cat would be out of the bag if Mrs. Gorrie ever went into the library, but she wouldn’t be able to push Mr. Gorrie that far, uphill. Or if she ever mentioned my job to Chess—but I didn’t think that would happen either. She said she was sometimes afraid to say hello to him, he looked so cross.
“Well, maybe in the meantime …,” she said. “It just occurred to me that maybe in the meantime you would like to have a little job sitting in the afternoons with Mr. Gorrie.”
She said that she had been offered a job helping out in the gift shop at St. Paul’s Hospital three or four afternoons a week. “It’s not a paid job or I’d have sent you to ask about it,” she said. “It’s just volunteer work. But the doctor says it’d do me good to get out of the house. ‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ he said. It’s not that I need the money, Ray is so good to us, but just a little volunteer job, I thought—” She looked into the rinse tub and saw Chess’s shirts in the same clear water as my flowered nightgown and our pale-blue sheets.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “You didn’t put the whites and the coloreds in together?”
“Just the light coloreds,” I said. “They don’t run.”
“Light coloreds are still coloreds,” she said. “You might think the shirts are white that way, but they won’t be as white as they could be.”
I said I would remember next time.
“It’s just the way you take care of your man,” she said, with her little scandalized laugh.
“Chess doesn’t mind,” I said, not realizing how this would become less and less true in the years ahead and how all these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.
I TOOK the job, sitting with Mr. Gorrie in the afternoons. On one little table beside the green recliner there was spread a hand towel—to catch spills—and on top of it were his pill bottles and liquid medicines and a small clock to tell him the time. The table on the other side was stacked with reading material. The morning paper, last evening’s paper, copies of Life and Look and Maclean’s, which were all big floppy magazines then. On the lower shelf of this table was a pile of scrapbooks—the kind that children use at school, with heavy brownish paper and rough edges. There were bits of newsprint and photographs sticking out of them. These were scrapbooks that Mr. Go
rrie had kept over the years, until he had his stroke and couldn’t cut things out anymore. There was a bookcase in the room, but all it held was more magazines and more scrapbooks and a half shelf of high-school textbooks, probably Ray’s.
“I always read him the paper,” Mrs. Gorrie said. “He hasn’t lost his ability, but he can’t manage to hold it up with both hands, and his eyes get tired out.”
So I read to Mr. Gorrie while Mrs. Gorrie, under her flowered umbrella, stepped lightly off to the bus stop. I read him the sports page and the municipal news and the world news and all about murders and robberies and bad weather. I read the letters to the editor and the letters to a doctor who gave medical advice and the letters to Ann Landers, and her replies. It seemed that the sports news and Ann Landers roused his interest the most. I would sometimes mispronounce a player’s name or mix up the terminology, so that what I read made no sense, and he would direct me with dissatisfied grunts to try again. When I read the sports page he was always on edge, intent and frowning. But when I read Ann Landers his face relaxed and he made noises that I took to be appreciative—a kind of gurgling and deep snorting. He made these noises particularly when the letters touched on some especially feminine or trivial concern (a woman wrote that her sister-in-law always pretended that she had baked a cake herself, even though the paper doily from the bakeshop was still under it when it was served) or when they referred—in the careful manner of that time—to sex.
During the reading of the editorial page or of some long rigmarole about what the Russians said and what the Americans said at the United Nations, his eyelids would droop—or, rather, the eyelid over his better eye would droop almost all the way and the one over his bad, darkened eye would droop slightly—and the movements of his chest would become more noticeable, so that I might pause for a moment to see if he had gone to sleep. And then he would make another sort of noise—a curt and reproving one. As I got used to him, and he got used to me, this noise began to seem less like reproof and more like reassurance. And the reassurance was not just about his not being asleep but about the fact that he was not at that moment dying.
His dying in front of my eyes had been at first a horrible consideration. Why should he not die, when he seemed at least half dead already? His bad eye like a stone under dark water, and that side of his mouth pulled open, showing his original, wicked teeth (most old people then had false teeth) with their dark fillings glowering through the damp enamel. His being alive and in the world seemed to me an error that could be wiped out at any moment. But then, as I said, I got used to him. He was on a grand scale, with his big noble head and wide laboring chest and his powerless right hand lying on his long trousered thigh, invading my sight as I read. Like a relic, he was, an old warrior from barbarous times. Eric Blood-Axe. King Knut.
My strength is failing fast, said the sea king to his men.
I will never sail the seas, like a conqueror again.
That was what he was like. His half-wrecked hulk of a body endangering the furniture and battering the walls as he made his momentous progress to the bathroom. His smell, which was not rank but not reduced to infantile soap-and-talcum cleanliness, either—a smell of thick clothing with its residue of tobacco (though he didn’t smoke anymore) and of the enclosed skin that I thought of as thick and leathery, with its lordly excretions and animal heat. A slight but persistent smell of urine, in fact, which would have disgusted me on a woman but which seemed in his case not just forgivable but somehow an expression of ancient privilege. When I went into the bathroom after he had been there, it was like the lair of some mangy, still powerful beast.
Chess said I was wasting my time baby-sitting Mr. Gorrie. The weather was clearing now, and the days were getting longer. The shops were putting up new displays, stirring out of their winter torpor. Everybody was more apt to be thinking of hiring. So I ought to be out now, seriously looking for a job. Mrs. Gorrie was paying me only forty cents an hour.
“But I promised her,” I said.
One day he said he had seen her getting off a bus. He saw her from his office window. And it wasn’t anywhere near St. Paul’s Hospital.
I said, “She might have been on a break.”
Chess said, “I never saw her out in the full light of day before. Jesus.”
I suggested taking Mr. Gorrie for a walk in his wheelchair, now that the weather had improved. But he rejected the idea with some noises that made me certain there was something distasteful to him about being wheeled about in public—or maybe about being taken out by somebody like me, obviously hired to do the job.
I had interrupted my reading of the paper to ask him this, and when I tried to continue he made a gesture and another noise, telling me he was tired of listening. I laid the paper down. He waved the good hand toward the pile of scrapbooks on the lower shelf of the table beside him. He made more noises. I can only describe these noises as grunts, snorts, hawkings, barks, mumbles. But by this time they sounded to me almost like words. They did sound like words. I heard them not only as peremptory statements and demands (“Don’t want to,” “Help me up,” “Let me see the time,” “I need a drink”) but as more complicated pronouncements: “Christ, why doesn’t that dog shut up?” or “Lot of hot air” (this after I’d read some speech or editorial in the paper).
What I heard now was “Let’s see if there’s anything in here better than what’s in the paper.”
I pulled the stack of scrapbooks off the shelf and settled with them on the floor by his feet. On the front covers were written, in large black crayoned letters, the dates of recent years. I flipped through 1952 and saw the cutout newspaper account of George VI’s funeral. Above it the crayon lettering. “Albert Frederick George. Born 1885. Died 1952.” The picture of the three queens in their mourning veils.
On the next page a story about the Alaska Highway.
“This is an interesting record,” I said. “Do you want me to help you start another book? You could choose what things you want me to cut out and paste in, and I’d do it.”
His noise meant “Too much trouble” or “Why bother now?” or even “What a stupid idea.” He brushed aside King George VI, wished to see the dates on the other books. They weren’t what he wanted. He motioned toward the bookcase. I brought out another pile of scrapbooks. I understood that it was the book for one particular year that he was looking for, and I held each book up so that he could see the cover. Occasionally I flipped the pages open in spite of his rejection. I saw an article about the cougars on Vancouver Island and one about the death of a trapeze artist and another about a child who had lived though trapped in an avalanche. Back through the war years we went, back through the thirties, through the year I was born in, nearly a decade beyond that before he was satisfied. And gave the order. Look at this one. 1923.
I started going through that one from the beginning.
“January snowfall buries villages in—”
That’s not it. Hurry up. Get on with it.
I began to flip the pages.
Slow down. Go easy. Slow down.
I lifted the pages one by one without stopping to read anything till we reached the one he wanted.
There. Read that.
There was no picture or headline. The crayoned letters said, “Vancouver Sun, April 17, 1923.”
“Cortes Island,” I read. “Okay?”
Read it. Go on.
CORTES ISLAND. Early Sunday morning or sometime late Saturday night the home of Anson James Wild at the south end of the island was totally destroyed by fire. The house was at a long distance from any other dwelling or habitation and as a result the flames were not noticed by anyone living on the island. There are reports that a fire was spotted early Sunday morning by a fishing boat going towards Desolation Sound but those on board thought somebody was burning brush. Knowing that brush fire posed no danger due to the wet condition of the woods at present they proceeded on their way.
Mr. Wild was the proprietor of Wildfruit Orchards and h
ad been a resident on the island for about fifteen years. He was a solitary man whose previous history had been in the military service but he was cordial to those he met. He was married some time ago and had one son. It is believed he was born in the Atlantic Provinces.
The house was reduced to ruin by the blaze and the beams had fallen in. The body of Mr. Wild was found amongst the charred remains burnt almost beyond recognition.
A blackened tin thought to have contained kerosene was discovered within the ruins.
Mr. Wild’s wife was away from home at the time, having on the previous Wednesday accepted a ride on a boat that was picking up a load of apples to be transported from her husband’s orchard to Comox. She was intending to return the same day but remained away for three days and four nights due to engine trouble with the boat. On Sunday morning she returned with the friend who had offered her the ride and together they discovered the tragedy.
Fears were entertained for the Wilds’ young son who was not in the house when it burned. A search was started as soon as possible and before dark on Sunday evening the child was located in the woods less than a mile from his home. He was wet and cold from being in the underbrush for several hours but otherwise unharmed. It appears that he took some food with him when leaving the house as he had some pieces of bread with him when found.
An inquest will be held in Courtenay into the cause of the fire which destroyed the Wilds’ home and resulted in the loss of Mr. Wild’s life.
“Did you know these people?” I said.
Turn the page.
August 4, 1923. An inquest held in Courtenay on Vancouver Island into the fire that caused the death of Anson James Wild of Cortes Island in April of this year found that suspicion of arson by the deceased man or by person or persons unknown cannot be substantiated. The presence of an empty kerosene can at the site of the fire has not been accepted as sufficient evidence. Mr. Wild regularly purchased and made use of kerosene, according to Mr. Percy Kemper, storekeeper, Manson’s Landing, Cortes Island.
