by Alice Munro
Mrs. Barrie opened the door saying, “Ought to get a broom out there—” Then she cried out, “What are you doing sitting there? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the man’s dead?”
He wasn’t dead. He was in fact breathing as noisily as ever and perhaps more so. What she had seen and what I would have seen, even against the light, if I had not been avoiding looking at him whilst I told my tale, was that he had suffered a blinding and paralyzing stroke. He sat slightly tilted forward, the table pressing into the firm curve of his stomach. When we tried to move him from his chair, we managed only to jar him so that his head came down on the table, with a majestic reluctance. His hat stayed on. And his coffee cup stayed in place a couple of inches from his unseeing eye. It was still about half full.
I said we couldn’t do anything with him; he was too heavy. I went to the phone and called the hospital, to get one of the other doctors to drive out. There’s no ambulance yet in this town. Mrs. B. paid no attention to what I said and kept pulling at my father’s clothes, undoing buttons and yanking at the overcoat and grunting and whimpering with the exertion. I ran out to the lane, leaving the door open. I ran back, and got a broom, and set it outside by the door. I went and put a hand on Mrs. B.’s arm and said, “You can’t—” or something like that, and she gave me the look of a spitting cat.
A doctor came. He and I together were able to pull my father out to the car and get him into the backseat. I got in beside him to hold on to him and keep him from toppling over. The sound of his breathing was more peremptory than ever and seemed to be criticizing whatever we did. But the fact was that you could take hold of him now, and shove him around, and manage his body as you had to, and this seemed very odd.
Mrs. B. had fallen back and quieted down as soon as she saw the other doctor. She didn’t even follow us out of the house to see my father loaded into the car.
This afternoon he died. At about five o’clock. I was told it was very lucky for all concerned.
I WAS full of other things to say, just when Mrs. Barrie came in. I was going to say to my father, What if the law should change? The law might change soon, I was going to say. Maybe not, but it might. He’d be out of business then. Or out of one part of his business. Would that make a great difference to him?
What could I expect him to answer?
Speaking of business, that is none of yours.
Or, I’d still make a living.
No, I would say. I didn’t mean the money. I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power.
Change the law, change what a person does, change what a person is?
Or would he find some other risk, some other knot to make in his life, some other underground and problematic act of mercy?
And if that law can change, other things can change. I’m thinking about you now, how it could happen that you wouldn’t be ashamed to marry a pregnant woman. There’d be no shame to it. Move ahead a few years, just a few years, and it could be a celebration. The pregnant bride is garlanded and led to the altar, even in the chapel of the Theological College.
If that happened, though, there’d likely be something else to be ashamed or afraid of, there’d be other errors to be avoided.
So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.
Change the person. We all say we hope it can be done.
Change the law, change the person. Yet we don’t want every thing—not the whole story—to be dictated from outside. We don’t want what we are, all we are, to be concocted that way.
Who is this “we” I’m talking about?
R. My father’s lawyer says,”It’s very unusual.” I realize that for him this is quite a strong, and sufficient, word.
There is enough money in my father’s bank account to cover his funeral expenses. Enough to bury him, as they say. (Not the lawyer—he doesn’t talk like that.) But there isn’t much more. There are no stock certificates in his safety deposit box; there is no record of investments. Nothing. No bequest to the hospital, or to his church, or to the high school to establish a scholarship. Most shocking of all, there is no money left to Mrs. Barrie. The house and its contents are mine. And that’s all there is. I have my five thousand dollars.
The lawyer seems embarrassed, painfully embarrassed, and worried about this state of affairs. Perhaps he thinks I might suspect him of misconduct. Try to blacken his name. He wants to know if there’s a safe in my (my father’s) house, any hiding place at all for a large amount of cash. I say there isn’t. He tries to suggest to me—in such a discreet and roundabout way that I don’t know at first what he’s talking about—that there might be reasons for my father’s wanting to keep the amount of his earnings a secret. A large amount of cash holed away somewhere is therefore a possibility.
I tell him I’m not terribly concerned about the money.
What a thing to say. He can hardly look me in the eye.
“Perhaps you could go home and take a very good look,” he says. “Don’t neglect the obvious places. It could be in a cookie tin. Or in a box under the bed. Surprising the places people can pick. Even the most sensible and intelligent people.
“Or in a pillow slip,” he’s saying as I go out the door.
• • •
A WOMAN on the phone wants to speak to the doctor.
“I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
“Dr. Strachan. Have I got the right doctor?”
“Yes but I’m sorry, he’s dead.”
“Is there anyone—does he by any chance have a partner I could talk to? Is there anybody else there?”
“No. No partner.”
“Could you give me any other number I could call? Isn’t there some other doctor that can—”
“No. I haven’t any number. There isn’t anybody that I know of.”
“You must know what this is about. It’s very crucial. There are very special circumstances—”
“I’m sorry.”
“There isn’t any problem about money.”
“No.”
“Please try to think of somebody. If you do think of somebody later on, could you give me a call? I’ll leave you my number.”
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t care. I trust you. Anyway it’s not for myself. I know everybody must say that but really it’s not. It’s for my daughter who’s in a very bad condition. Mentally she’s in a very bad condition.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If you knew what I went through to get this number you would try to help me.”
“Sorry.”
“Please.”
“I’m sorry.”
• • •
MADELEINE was the last one of his specials. I saw her at the funeral. She hadn’t got to Kenora. Or else she’d come back. I didn’t recognize her at first because she was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with a horizontal feather. She must have borrowed it—she wasn’t used to the feather which came drooping down over her eye. She spoke to me in the lineup at the reception in the church hall. I said to her just the same thing I said to everybody.
“So good of you to come.”
Then I realized what an odd thing she’d said to me.
“I was just counting on you to have a sweet tooth.”
“PERHAPS he didn’t always charge,” I say to the lawyer. “Perhaps he worked for nothing sometimes. Some people do things out of charity.”
The lawyer is getting used to me now. He says, “Perhaps.”
“Or possibly an actual charity,” I say. “A charity he supported without keeping any record of it.”
The lawyer holds my eyes for a moment.
“A charity,” he says.
“Well I haven’t dug up the cellar floor yet,” I say, and he smiles wincingly at this levity.
MRS. BARRIE hasn’t given her notice. She just hasn’t shown up. There was nothing in particular for her to do, since the funeral was in the ch
urch and the reception was in the church hall. She didn’t come to the funeral. None of her family came. So many people were there that I would not have noticed that if someone hadn’t said to me, “I didn’t see any of the Barrie connection, did you?”
I phoned her several days afterwards and she said, “I never went to the church because I had too bad a cold.”
I said that that wasn’t why I’d called. I said I could manage quite well but wondered what she planned to do.
“Oh I don’t see no need for me to come back there now.”
I said that she should come and get something from the house, a keepsake. By this time I knew about the money and I wanted to tell her I felt bad about it. But I didn’t know how to say that.
She said, “I got some stuff I left there. I’ll be out when I can.”
She came out the next morning. The things she had to collect were mops and pails and scrub brushes and a clothes basket. It was hard to believe she would care about retrieving articles like these. And hard to believe she wanted them for sentimental reasons, but maybe she did. They were things she had used for years—during all her years in this house, where she had spent more waking hours than she had spent at home.
“Isn’t there anything else?” I said. “For a keepsake?”
She looked around the kitchen, chewing on her bottom lip. She might have been chewing back a smile.
“I don’t think there’s nothing here I’d have much use for,” she said.
I had a check ready for her. I just needed to write in the amount. I hadn’t been able to decide how much of the five thousand dollars to share with her. A thousand? I had been thinking. Now that seemed shameful. I thought I’d better double it.
I got out the checks that I had hidden in a drawer. I found a pen. I made it out for four thousand dollars.
“This is for you,” I said. “And thank you for everything.”
She took the check in her hand and glanced at it and stuffed it in her pocket. I thought maybe she hadn’t been able to read how much it was for. Then I saw the darkening flush, the tide of embarrassment, the difficulty of being grateful.
She managed to pick up all the things she was taking, using her one good arm. I opened the door for her. I was so anxious for her to say something more that I almost said, Sorry that’s all.
Instead I said, “Your elbow’s not better yet?”
“It’ll never be better,” she said. She ducked her head as if she was afraid of another of my kisses. She said, “Well-thanks-very-much-goodbye.”
I watched her making her way to the car. I had assumed her nephew’s wife had driven her out here.
But it was not the usual car that the nephew’s wife drove. The thought crossed my mind that she might have a new employer. Bad arm or not. A new and rich employer. That would account for her haste, her cranky embarrassment.
It was the nephew’s wife, after all, who got out to help with the load. I waved, but she was too busy stowing the mops and pails.
“Gorgeous car,” I called out, because I thought that was a compliment both women would appreciate. I didn’t know what make the car was, but it was shining new and large and glamorous. A silvery lilac color.
The nephew’s wife called out, “Oh yeah,” and Mrs. Barrie ducked her head in acknowledgment.
Shivering in my indoor clothes, but compelled by my feelings of apology and bewilderment, I stood there and waved the car out of sight.
I couldn’t settle down to do anything after that. I made myself coffee and sat in the kitchen. I got Madeleine’s chocolates out of the drawer and ate a couple, though I really did not have enough of a sweet tooth for their chemically colored orange and yellow centers. I wished I had thanked her. I didn’t see how I could now—I didn’t even know her last name.
I decided to go out skiing. There are gravel pits that I believe I told you about at the back of our property. I put on the old wooden skis that my father used to wear in the days when the back roads were not plowed out in winter, and he might have to go across the fields to deliver a baby or take out an appendix. There were only cross straps to hold your feet in place.
I skied back to the gravel pits whose slopes have been padded with grass over the years and are now additionally covered with snow. There were dog tracks, bird tracks, the faint circles that the skittering voles make, but no sign of humans. I went up and down, up and down, first choosing a cautious diagonal and then going on to steeper descents. I fell now and then, but easily on the fresh plentiful snow, and between one moment of falling and the next of getting to my feet I found out that I knew something.
I knew where the money had gone.
Perhaps a charity.
Gorgeous car.
And four thousand dollars out of five.
SINCE that moment I have been happy.
I’ve been given the feeling of seeing money thrown over a bridge or high up into the air. Money, hopes, love letters—all such things can be tossed off into the air and come down changed, come down all light and free of context.
The thing I can’t imagine is my father caving in to blackmail. Particularly not to people who wouldn’t be very credible or clever. Not when the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence.
What I can imagine, though, is a grand perverse gesture. To forestall demand, maybe, or just to show he didn’t care. Looking forward to the lawyer’s shock, and to my trying even harder to figure him out, now that he’s dead.
No. I don’t think he’d be thinking of that. I don’t think I’d have come into his thoughts so much. Never so much as I’d like to believe.
What I’ve been shying away from is that it could have been done for love.
For love, then. Never rule that out.
I CLIMBED out of the gravel pit and as soon as I came out on the fields the wind hit me. Wind was blowing snow over the dog tracks and the fine chain traces of the vole and the trail that will likely be the last ever to be broken by my father’s skis.
Dear R., Robin—what should be the last thing I say to you?
Goodbye and good luck.
I send you my love.
(What if people really did that—sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkeys’ eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.)
Take care of yourself.
Remember—the present King of France is bald.
MY MOTHER’S DREAM
DURING the night—or during the time she had been asleep—there had been a heavy fall of snow.
My mother looked out from a big arched window such as you find in a mansion or an old-fashioned public building. She looked down on lawns and shrubs, hedges, flower gardens, trees, all covered by snow that lay in heaps and cushions, not levelled or disturbed by wind. The white of it did not hurt your eyes as it does in sunlight. The white was the white of snow under a clear sky just before dawn. Everything was still; it was like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” except that the stars had gone out.
Yet something was wrong. There was a mistake in this scene. All the trees, all the shrubs and plants, were out in full summer leaf. The grass that showed underneath them, in spots sheltered from the snow, was fresh and green. Snow had settled overnight on the luxury of summer. A change of season un-explainable, unexpected. Also, everybody had gone away—though she couldn’t think who “everybody” was—and my mother was alone in the high spacious house amongst its rather formal trees and gardens.
She thought that whatever had happened would soon be made known to her. Nobody came, however. The telephone did not ring; the latch of the garden gate was not lifted. She could not hear any traffic, and she did not even know which way the street was—or the road, if she was out in the country. She had to get out of the house, where the air was so heavy and settled.
When she got o
utside she remembered. She remembered that she had left a baby out there somewhere, before the snow had fallen. Quite a while before the snow had fallen. This memory, this certainty, came over her with horror. It was as if she was awakening from a dream. Within her dream she awakened from a dream, to a knowledge of her responsibility and mistake. She had left her baby out overnight, she had forgotten about it. Left it exposed somewhere as if it was a doll she tired of. And perhaps it was not last night but a week or a month ago that she had done this. For a whole season or for many seasons she had left her baby out. She had been occupied in other ways. She might even have travelled away from here and just returned, forgetting what she was returning to.
She went around looking under hedges and broad-leaved plants. She foresaw how the baby would be shrivelled up. It would be dead, shrivelled and brown, its head like a nut, and on its tiny shut-up face there would be an expression not of distress but of bereavement, an old patient grief. There would not be any accusation of her, its mother—just the look of patience and helplessness with which it waited for its rescue or its fate.
The sorrow that came to my mother was the sorrow of the baby’s waiting and not knowing it waited for her, its only hope, when she had forgotten all about it. So small and new a baby that could not even turn away from the snow. She could hardly breathe for her sorrow. There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
What a reprieve, then, to find her baby lying in its crib. Lying on its stomach, its head turned to one side, its skin pale and sweet as snowdrops and the down on its head reddish like the dawn. Red hair like her own, on her perfectly safe and unmistakable baby. The joy to find herself forgiven.
The snow and the leafy gardens and the strange house had all withdrawn. The only remnant of the whiteness was the blanket in the crib. A baby blanket of light white wool, crumpled halfway down the baby’s back. In the heat, the real summer heat, the baby was wearing only a diaper and a pair of plastic pants to keep the sheet dry. The plastic pants had a pattern of butterflies.
