by Alice Munro
Daisy said, “What does mean ‘pearly’?”
Philip said, “Bar-ley.”
“‘Only reapers, reaping early,’” Eve said. She tried to remember. “‘Save the reapers, reaping early—’” “Save” was what sounded best. Save the reapers.
SOPHIE and Ian had bought corn at a roadside stand. It was for dinner. Plans had changed—they weren’t leaving till morning. And they had bought a bottle of gin and some tonic and limes. Ian made the drinks while Eve and Sophie sat husking the corn. Eve said, “Two dozen. That’s crazy.”
“Wait and see,” said Sophie. “Ian loves corn.”
Ian bowed when he presented Eve with her drink, and after she had tasted it she said, “This is most heavenly.”
Ian wasn’t much as she had remembered or pictured him. He was not tall, Teutonic, humorless. He was a slim fair-haired man of medium height, quick moving, companionable. Sophie was less assured, more tentative in all she said and did, than she had seemed since she’d been here. But happier, too.
Eve told her story. She began with the checkerboard on the beach, the vanished hotel, the drives into the country. It included her mother’s city-lady outfits, her sheer dresses and matching slips, but not the young Eve’s feelings of repugnance. Then the things they went to see—the dwarf orchard, the shelf of old dolls, the marvellous pictures made of colored glass.
“They were a little like Chagall?” Eve said.
Ian said, “Yep. Even us urban geographers know about Chagall.”
Eve said, “Sor-ry.” Both laughed.
Now the gateposts, the sudden memory, the dark lane and ruined barn and rusted machinery, the house a shambles.
“The owner was in there playing cards with his friends,” Eve said. “He didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t know or didn’t care. And my God, it could have been nearly sixty years ago I was there—think of that.”
Sophie said, “Oh, Mom. What a shame.” She was glowing with relief to see Ian and Eve getting on so well together.
“Are you sure it was even the right place?” she said.
“Maybe not,” said Eve. “Maybe not.”
She would not mention the fragment of wall she had seen beyond the bushes. Why bother, when there were so many things she thought best not to mention? First, the game that she had got Philip playing, overexciting him. And nearly everything about Harold and his companions. Everything, every single thing about the girl who had jumped into the car.
There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can’t tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present graciousness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.
She could say that the house smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked altogether boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she herself was afraid. And never what she was afraid of.
Philip was in charge of gathering up the corn husks and carrying them outside to throw them along the edge of the field. Occasionally Daisy picked up a few on her own, and took them off to be distributed around the house. Philip had added nothing to Eve’s story and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it. But once it was told, and Ian (interested in bringing this local anecdote into line with his professional studies) was asking Eve what she knew about the breakup of older patterns of village and rural life, about the spread of what was called agribusiness, Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work around the adults’ feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.
What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future.
IF the girl came looking for her, they would all still be here. Then Eve’s carefulness would go for nothing.
The girl wouldn’t come. Much better offers would turn up before she’d stood ten minutes by the highway. More dangerous offers perhaps, but more interesting, likely to be more profitable.
The girl wouldn’t come. Unless she found some homeless, heartless wastrel of her own age. (I know where there’s a place we can stay, if we can get rid of the old lady.)
Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would lie down in this hollowed-out house, its board walls like a paper shell around her, willing herself to grow light, relieved of consequence, with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark.
THE CHILDREN STAY
THIRTY years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband’s parents.
What perfect weather. Every morning, every morning it’s like this, the first pure sunlight falling through the high branches, burning away the mist over the still water of Georgia Strait. The tide out, a great empty stretch of sand still damp but easy to walk on, like cement in its very last stage of drying. The tide is actually less far out; every morning, the pavilion of sand is shrinking, but it still seems ample enough. The changes in the tide are a matter of great interest to the grandfather, not so much to anyone else.
Pauline, the young mother, doesn’t really like the beach as well as she likes the road that runs behind the cottages for a mile or so north till it stops at the bank of the little river that runs into the sea.
If it wasn’t for the tide, it would be hard to remember that this is the sea. You look across the water to the mountains on the mainland, the ranges that are the western wall of the continent of North America. These humps and peaks coming clear now through the mist and glimpsed here and there through the trees, by Pauline as she pushes her daughter’s stroller along the road, are also of interest to the grandfather. And to his son Brian, who is Pauline’s husband. The two men are continually trying to decide which is what. Which of these shapes are actual continental mountains and which are improbable heights of the islands that ride in front of the shore? It’s hard to sort things out when the array is so complicated and parts of it shift their distance in the day’s changing light.
But there is a map, set up under glass, between the cottages and the beach. You can stand there looking at the map, then looking at what’s in front of you, looking back at the map again, until you get things sorted out. The grandfather and Brian do this every day, usually getting into an argument—though you’d think there would not be much room for disagreement with the map right there. Brian chooses to see the map as inexact. But his father will not hear a word of criticism about any aspect of this place, which was his choice for the holiday. The map, like the accommodation and the weather, is perfect.
Brian’s mother won’t look at the map. She says it boggles her mind. The men laugh at her, they accept that her mind is boggled. Her husband believes that this is because she is a female. Brian believes that it’s because she’s his mother. Her concern is always about whether anybody is hungry yet, or thirsty, whether the children have their sun hats on and have been rubbed with protective lotion. And what is the strange bite on Caitlin’s arm that doesn’t look like the bite of a mosquito? She makes her husband wear a floppy cotton hat and thinks that Brian should wear one too—she reminds him of how sick he got from the sun, that summer they went to the Okanagan, when he was a child. Sometimes Brian says to her, “Oh, dry up, Mother.” His tone is mostly affectionate, but his father may ask him if that’s the way he thinks he can talk to his mother nowada
ys.
“She doesn’t mind,” says Brian.
“How do you know?” says his father.
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” says his mother.
PAULINE slides out of bed as soon as she’s awake every morning, slides out of reach of Brian’s long, sleepily searching arms and legs. What wakes her are the first squeaks and mutters of the baby, Mara, in the children’s room, then the creak of the crib as Mara—sixteen months old now, getting to the end of babyhood—pulls herself up to stand hanging on to the railing. She continues her soft amiable talk as Pauline lifts her out—Caitlin, nearly five, shifting about but not waking, in her nearby bed—and as she is carried into the kitchen to be changed, on the floor. Then she is settled into her stroller, with a biscuit and a bottle of apple juice, while Pauline gets into her sundress and sandals, goes to the bathroom, combs out her hair—all as quickly and quietly as possible. They leave the cottage; they head past some other cottages for the bumpy unpaved road that is still mostly in deep morning shadow, the floor of a tunnel under fir and cedar trees.
The grandfather, also an early riser, sees them from the porch of his cottage, and Pauline sees him. But all that is necessary is a wave. He and Pauline never have much to say to each other (though sometimes there’s an affinity they feel, in the midst of some long-drawn-out antics of Brian’s or some apologetic but insistent fuss made by the grandmother; there’s an awareness of not looking at each other, lest their look should reveal a bleakness that would discredit others).
On this holiday Pauline steals time to be by herself—being with Mara is still almost the same thing as being by herself. Early morning walks, the late-morning hour when she washes and hangs out the diapers. She could have had another hour or so in the afternoons, while Mara is napping. But Brian has fixed up a shelter on the beach, and he carries the playpen down every day, so that Mara can nap there and Pauline won’t have to absent herself. He says his parents may be offended if she’s always sneaking off. He agrees though that she does need some time to go over her lines for the play she’s going to be in, back in Victoria, this September.
Pauline is not an actress. This is an amateur production, but she is not even an amateur actress. She didn’t try out for the role, though it happened that she had already read the play. Eurydice by Jean Anouilh. But then, Pauline has read all sorts of things.
She was asked if she would like to be in this play by a man she met at a barbecue, in June. The people at the barbecue were mostly teachers and their wives or husbands—it was held at the house of the principal of the high school where Brian teaches. The woman who taught French was a widow—she had brought her grown son who was staying for the summer with her and working as a night clerk in a downtown hotel. She told everybody that he had got a job teaching at a college in western Washington State and would be going there in the fall.
Jeffrey Toom was his name. “Without the B,” he said, as if the staleness of the joke wounded him. It was a different name from his mother’s, because she had been widowed twice, and he was the son of her first husband. About the job he said, “No guarantee it’ll last, it’s a one-year appointment.”
What was he going to teach?
“Dram-ah,” he said, drawing the word out in a mocking way.
He spoke of his present job disparagingly, as well.
“It’s a pretty sordid place,” he said. “Maybe you heard—a hooker was killed there last winter. And then we get the usual losers checking in to OD or bump themselves off.”
People did not quite know what to make of this way of talking and drifted away from him. Except for Pauline.
“I’m thinking about putting on a play,” he said. “Would you like to be in it?” He asked her if she had ever heard of a play called Eurydice.
Pauline said, “You mean Anouilh’s?” and he was unflatteringly surprised. He immediately said he didn’t know if it would ever work out. “I just thought it might be interesting to see if you could do something different here in the land of Noel Coward.”
Pauline did not remember when there had been a play by Noel Coward put on in Victoria, though she supposed there had been several. She said, “We saw The Duchess of Malfi last winter at the college. And the little theater did A Resounding Tinkle, but we didn’t see it.”
“Yeah. Well,” he said, flushing. She had thought he was older than she was, at least as old as Brian (who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn’t act it), but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he’d like to appear. Now with that flush she was sure of it.
As it turned out, he was a year younger than she was. Twenty-five.
She said that she couldn’t be Eurydice; she couldn’t act. But Brian came over to see what the conversation was about and said at once that she must try it.
“She just needs a kick in the behind,” Brian said to Jeffrey. “She’s like a little mule, it’s hard to get her started. No, seriously, she’s too self-effacing, I tell her that all the time. She’s very smart. She’s actually a lot smarter than I am.”
At that Jeffrey did look directly into Pauline’s eyes—impertinently and searchingly—and she was the one who was flushing.
He had chosen her immediately as his Eurydice because of the way she looked. But it was not because she was beautiful. “I’d never put a beautiful girl in that part,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d ever put a beautiful girl on stage in anything. It’s too much. It’s distracting.”
So what did he mean about the way she looked? He said it was her hair, which was long and dark and rather bushy (not in style at that time), and her pale skin (“Stay out of the sun this summer”) and most of all her eyebrows.
“I never liked them,” said Pauline, not quite sincerely. Her eyebrows were level, dark, luxuriant. They dominated her face. Like her hair, they were not in style. But if she had really disliked them, wouldn’t she have plucked them?
Jeffrey seemed not to have heard her. “They give you a sulky look and that’s disturbing,” he said. “Also your jaw’s a little heavy and that’s sort of Greek. It would be better in a movie where I could get you close up. The routine thing for Eurydice would be a girl who looked ethereal. I don’t want ethereal.”
As she walked Mara along the road, Pauline did work at the lines. There was a speech at the end that was giving her trouble. She bumped the stroller along and repeated to herself, “‘You are terrible, you know, you are terrible like the angels. You think everybody’s going forward, as brave and bright as you are—oh, don’t look at me, please, darling, don’t look at me—perhaps I’m not what you wish I was, but I’m here, and I’m warm, I’m kind, and I love you. I’ll give you all the happiness I can. Don’t look at me. Don’t look. Let me live.’”
She had left something out. “‘Perhaps I’m not what you wish I was, but you feel me here, don’t you? I’m warm and I’m kind—’”
She had told Jeffrey that she thought the play was beautiful.
He said, “Really?” What she’d said didn’t please or surprise him—he seemed to feel it was predictable, superfluous. He would never describe a play in that way. He spoke of it more as a hurdle to be got over. Also a challenge to be flung at various enemies. At the academic snots—as he called them—who had done The Duchess of Malfi. And at the social twits—as he called them—in the little theater. He saw himself as an outsider heaving his weight against these people, putting on his play—he called it his—in the teeth of their contempt and opposition. In the beginning Pauline thought that this must be all in his imagination and that it was more likely these people knew nothing about him. Then something would happen that could be, but might not be, a coincidence. Repairs had to be done on the church hall where the play was to be performed, making it unobtainable. There was an unexpected increase in the cost of printing advertising posters. She found herself seeing it his way. If you were going to be around him much, you almost had to see i
t his way—arguing was dangerous and exhausting.
“Sons of bitches,” said Jeffrey between his teeth, but with some satisfaction. “I’m not surprised.”
The rehearsals were held upstairs in an old building on Fisgard Street. Sunday afternoon was the only time that everybody could get there, though there were fragmentary rehearsals during the week. The retired harbor pilot who played Monsieur Henri was able to attend every rehearsal, and got to have an irritating familiarity with everybody else’s lines. But the hairdresser—who had experience only with Gilbert and Sullivan but now found herself playing Eurydice’s mother—could not leave her shop for long at any other time. The bus driver who played her lover had his daily employment as well, and so had the waiter who played Orphée (he was the only one of them who hoped to be a real actor). Pauline had to depend on sometimes undependable high-school baby sitters—for the first six weeks of the summer Brian was busy teaching summer school—and Jeffrey himself had to be at his hotel job by eight o’clock in the evenings. But on Sunday afternoons they were all there. While other people swam at Thetis Lake, or thronged Beacon Hill Park to walk under the trees and feed the ducks, or drove far out of town to the Pacific beaches, Jeffrey and his crew labored in the dusty high-ceilinged room on Fisgard Street. The windows were rounded at the top as in some plain and dignified church, and propped open in the heat with whatever objects could be found—ledger books from the 1920s belonging to the hat shop that had once operated downstairs, or pieces of wood left over from the picture frames made by the artist whose canvases were now stacked against one wall and apparently abandoned. The glass was grimy, but outside the sunlight bounced off the sidewalks, the empty gravelled parking lots, the low stuccoed buildings, with what seemed a special Sunday brightness. Hardly anybody moved through these downtown streets. Nothing was open except the occasional hole-in-the-wall coffee shop or fly-specked convenience store.
