The Love of a Good Woman

by Alice Munro

  “Iona, don’t wear yourself out.”

  And yet a wonderful change had taken place. Iona was pale but her skin glowed, as if she had finally passed out of adolescence. She could look anybody in the eye. And there was no more trembling, hardly any giggling, no sly cringing in her voice, which had grown as bossy as Ailsa’s and more joyful. (Never more joyful than when she was scolding me for my attitude to Jill.)

  “Iona’s in seventh heaven—she just adores that baby,” Ailsa told people. But in fact Iona’s behavior seemed too brisk for adoration. She did not care how much noise she made, quelling mine. She tore up the stairs calling breathlessly, “I’m coming, I’m coming, hold your horses.” She would walk around with me carelessly plastered to her shoulder, held with one hand, while the other hand accomplished some task connected with my maintenance. She ruled in the kitchen, commandeering the stove for the sterilizer, the table for the mixing of the formula, the sink for the baby wash. She swore cheerfully, even in Ailsa’s presence, when she had misplaced or spilled something.

  She knew herself to be the only person who didn’t wince, who didn’t feel the distant threat of annihilation, when I sent up my first signal wail. Instead, she was the one whose heart jumped into double time, who felt like dancing, just from the sense of power she had, and gratitude.

  Once her bindings were off and she’d seen the flatness of her stomach, Jill took a look at her hands. The puffiness seemed to be all gone. She went downstairs and got her violin out of the closet and took off its cover. She was ready to try some scales.

  This was on a Sunday afternoon. Iona had lain down for a nap, one ear always open to hear my cry. Mrs. Kirkham too was lying down. Ailsa was painting her fingernails in the kitchen. Jill began to tune the violin.

  My father and my father’s family had no real interest in music. They didn’t quite know this. They thought that the intolerance or even hostility they felt towards a certain type of music (this showed even in the way they pronounced the word “classical”) was based on a simple strength of character, an integrity and a determination not to be fooled. As if music that departed from a simple tune was trying to put something over on you, and everybody knew this, deep down, but some people—out of pretentiousness, from want of simplicity and honesty—would never admit that it was so. And out of this artificiality and spineless tolerance came the whole world of symphony orchestras, opera, and ballet, concerts that put people to sleep.

  Most of the people in this town felt the same way. But because she hadn’t grown up here Jill did not understand the depth of this feeling, the taken-for-granted extent of it. My father had never made a parade of it, or a virtue of it, because he didn’t go in for virtues. He had liked the idea of Jill’s being a musician—not because of the music but because it made her an odd choice, as did her clothes and her way of living and her wild hair. Choosing her, he showed people what he thought of them. Showed those girls who had hoped to get their hooks in him. Showed Ailsa.

  Jill had closed the curtained glass doors of the living room and she tuned up quite softly. Perhaps no sound escaped. Or if Ailsa heard something in the kitchen, she might have thought it was a sound from outdoors, a radio in the neighborhood.

  Now Jill began to play her scales. It was true that her fingers were no longer puffy, but they felt stiff. Her whole body felt stiff, her stance was not quite natural, she felt the instrument clamped onto her in a distrustful way. But no matter, she would get into her scales. She was sure that she had felt this way before, after she’d had flu, or when she was very tired, having overstrained herself practicing, or even for no reason at all.

  I woke without a whimper of discontent. No warning, no buildup. Just a shriek, a waterfall of shrieks descended on the house, a cry unlike any cry I’d managed before. The letting loose of a new flood of unsuspected anguish, a grief that punished the world with its waves full of stones, the volley of woe sent down from the windows of the torture chamber.

  Iona was up at once, alarmed for the first time at any noise made by me, crying, “What is it, what is it?”

  And Ailsa, rushing around to shut the windows, was calling out, “It’s the fiddle, it’s the fiddle.” She threw open the doors of the living room.

  “Jill. Jill. This is awful. This is just awful. Don’t you hear your baby?”

  She had to wrench out the screen under the living-room window, so that she could get it down. She had been sitting in her kimono to do her nails, and now a boy going by on a bicycle looked in and saw her kimono open over her slip.

  “My God,” she said. She hardly ever lost control of herself to this extent. “Will you put that thing away.”

  Jill set her violin down.

  Ailsa ran out into the hall and called up to Iona.

  “It’s Sunday. Can’t you get it to stop?”

  Jill walked speechlessly and deliberately out to the kitchen, and there was Mrs. Kirkham in her stocking feet, clinging to the counter.

  “What’s the matter with Ailsa?” she said. “What did Iona do?”

  Jill went out and sat down on the back step. She looked across at the glaring, sunlit back wall of the Shantzes’ white house. All around were other hot backyards and hot walls of other houses. Inside them people well known to each other by sight and by name and by history. And if you walked three blocks east from here or five blocks west, six blocks south or ten blocks north, you would come to walls of summer crops already sprung high out of the earth, fenced fields of hay and wheat and corn. The fullness of the country. Nowhere to breathe for the reek of thrusting crops and barnyards and jostling munching animals. Woodlots at a distance beckoning like pools of shade, of peace and shelter, but in reality they were boiling up with bugs.

  How can I describe what music is to Jill? Forget about landscapes and visions and dialogues. It is more of a problem, I would say, that she has to work out strictly and daringly, and that she has taken on as her responsibility in life. Suppose then that the tools that serve her for working on this problem are taken away. The problem is still there in its grandeur and other people sustain it, but it is removed from her. For her, just the back step and the glaring wall and my crying. My crying is a knife to cut out of her life all that isn’t useful. To me.

  “Come in,” says Ailsa through the screen door. “Come on in. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. Come in, people will see.”

  By evening the whole episode could be passed off lightly. “You must’ve heard the caterwauling over here today,” said Ailsa to the Shantzes. They had asked her over to sit on their patio, while Iona settled me to sleep.

  “Baby isn’t a fan of the fiddle apparently. Doesn’t take after Mommy.”

  Even Mrs. Shantz laughed.

  “An acquired taste.”

  Jill heard them. At least she heard the laughing, and guessed what it was about. She was lying on her bed reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which she had helped herself to from the bookcase, without understanding that she should ask Ailsa’s permission. Every so often the story blanked out on her and she heard those laughing voices over in the Shantzes’ yard, then the next-door patter of Iona’s adoration, and she broke out in a sullen sweat. In a fairy tale she would have risen off the bed with the strength of a young giantess and gone through the house breaking furniture and necks.

  WHEN I was almost six weeks old, Ailsa and Iona were supposed to take their mother on an annual overnight visit to Guelph, to stay with some cousins. Iona wanted to take me along. But Ailsa brought in Dr. Shantz to convince her that it was not a good idea to take a small baby on such a trip in hot weather. Then Iona wanted to stay at home.

  “I can’t drive and look after Mother both,” said Ailsa.

  She said that Iona was getting too wrapped up in me, and that a day and a half looking after her own baby was not going to be too much for Jill.

  “Is it, Jill?”

  Jill said no.

  Iona tried to pretend it wasn’t that she wanted to stay with me. She said that driving
on a hot day made her carsick.

  “You don’t drive, you just have to sit there,” Ailsa said. “What about me? I’m not doing it for fun. I’m doing it because they expect us.”

  Iona had to sit in the back, which she said made her carsickness worse. Ailsa said it wouldn’t look right to put their mother there. Mrs. Kirkham said she didn’t mind. Ailsa said no. Iona rolled down the window as Ailsa started the car. She fixed her eyes on the window of the upstairs room where she had put me down to sleep after my morning bath and bottle. Ailsa waved to Jill, who stood at the front door.

  “Goodbye little mother,” she called, in a cheerful, challenging voice that reminded Jill somehow of George. The prospect of getting away from the house and the new threat of disruption that was lodged in it seemed to have lifted Ailsa’s spirits. And perhaps it also felt good to her—felt reassuring—to have Iona back in her proper place.

  IT was about ten o’clock in the morning when they left, and the day ahead was to be the longest and the worst in Jill’s experience. Not even the day of my birth, her nightmare labor, could compare to it. Before the car could have reached the next town, I woke in distress, as if I could feel Iona’s being removed from me. Iona had fed me such a short time before that Jill did not think I could possibly be hungry. But she discovered that I was wet, and though she had read that babies did not need to be changed every time they were found wet and that wasn’t usually what made them cry, she decided to change me. It wasn’t the first time she had done this, but she had never done it easily, and in fact Iona had taken over more often than not and got the job finished. I made it as hard as I could—I flailed my arms and legs, arched my back, tried my best to turn over, and of course kept up my noise. Jill’s hands shook, she had trouble driving the pins through the cloth. She pretended to be calm, she tried talking to me, trying to imitate Iona’s baby talk and fond cajoling, but it was no use, such stumbling insincerity enraged me further. She picked me up once she had my diaper pinned, she tried to mold me to her chest and shoulder, but I stiffened as if her body was made of red-hot needles. She sat down, she rocked me. She stood up, she bounced me. She sang to me the sweet words of a lullaby that were filled and trembling with her exasperation, her anger, and something that could readily define itself as loathing.

  We were monsters to each other. Jill and I.

  At last she put me down, more gently than she would have liked to do, and I quieted, in my relief it seemed at getting away from her. She tiptoed from the room. And it wasn’t long before I started up again.

  So it continued. I didn’t cry nonstop. I would take breaks of two or five or ten or twenty minutes. When the time came for her to offer me the bottle I accepted it, I lay in her arm stiffly and snuffled warningly as I drank. Once half the milk was down I returned to the assault. I finished the bottle eventually, almost absent-mindedly, between wails. I dropped off to sleep and she put me down. She crept down the stairs; she stood in the hall as if she had to judge a safe way to go. She was sweating from her ordeal and from the heat of the day. She moved through the precious brittle silence into the kitchen and dared to put the coffeepot on the stove.

  Before the coffee was perked I sent a meat cleaver cry down on her head.

  She realized that she had forgotten something. She hadn’t burped me after the bottle. She went determinedly upstairs and picked me up and walked with me patting and rubbing my angry back, and in a while I burped, but I didn’t stop crying and she gave up; she laid me down.

  What is it about an infant’s crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm—insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating—it comes out of a rage that can’t be dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your brains inside your skull.

  All Jill can do is walk around. Up and down the living-room rug, round and round the dining-room table, out to the kitchen where the clock tells her how slowly, slowly time is passing. She can’t stay still to take more than a sip of her coffee. When she gets hungry she can’t stop to make a sandwich but eats cornflakes out of her hands, leaving a trail all over the house. Eating and drinking, doing any ordinary thing at all, seem as risky as doing such things in a little boat out in the middle of a tempest or in a house whose beams are buckling in an awful wind. You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try for sanity’s sake to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind’s cries—my cries—are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass. I don’t allow escape.

  The house is shut up like a box. Some of Ailsa’s sense of shame has rubbed off on Jill, or else she’s been able to manufacture some shame of her own. A mother who can’t appease her own baby—what is more shameful? She keeps the doors and windows shut. And she doesn’t turn the portable floor fan on because in fact she’s forgotten about it. She doesn’t think anymore in terms of practical relief. She doesn’t think that this Sunday is one of the hottest days of the summer and maybe that is what is the matter with me. An experienced or instinctive mother would surely have given me an airing instead of granting me the powers of a demon. Prickly heat would have been what came to her mind, instead of rank despair.

  Sometime in the afternoon, Jill makes a stupid or just desperate decision. She doesn’t walk out of the house and leave me. Stuck in the prison of my making, she thinks of a space of her own, an escape within. She gets out her violin, which she has not touched since the day of the scales, the attempt that Ailsa and Iona have turned into a family joke. Her playing can’t wake me up because I’m wide awake already, and how can it make me any angrier than I am?

  In a way she does me honor. No more counterfeit soothing, no more pretend lullabies or concern for tummy-ache, no petsy- wetsy whatsamatter. Instead she will play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the piece she played at her recital and must play again at her examination to get her graduating diploma.

  The Mendelssohn is her choice—rather than the Beethoven Violin Concerto which she more passionately admires—because she believes the Mendelssohn will get her higher marks. She thinks she can master—has mastered—it more fully; she is confident that she can show off and impress the examiners without the least fear of catastrophe. This is not a work that will trouble her all her life, she has decided; it is not something she will struggle with and try to prove herself at forever.

  She will just play it.

  She tunes up, she does a few scales, she attempts to banish me from her hearing. She knows she’s stiff, but this time she’s prepared for that. She expects her problems to lessen as she gets into the music.

  She starts to play it, she goes on playing, she goes on and on, she plays right through to the end. And her playing is terrible. It’s a torment. She hangs on, she thinks this must change, she can change it, but she can’t. Everything is off, she plays as badly as Jack Benny does in one of his resolute parodies. The violin is bewitched, it hates her. It gives her back a stubborn distortion of everything she intends. Nothing could be worse than this—it’s worse than if she looked in the mirror and saw her reliable face caved in, sick and leering. A trick played on her that she couldn’t believe, and would try to disprove by looking away and looking back, away and back, over and over again. That is how she goes on playing, trying to undo the trick. But not succeeding. She gets worse, if anything; sweat pours down her face and arms and the sides of her body, and her hand slips—there is simply no bottom to how badly she can play.

  Finished. She is finished altogether. The piece that she mastered months ago and perfected since, so that nothing in it remained formidable or even tricky, has completely defeated her. It has shown her to herself as somebody emptied out, vandalized. Robbed overnight.

  She doesn’t give up. She does the worst thing. In this state of desperation she starts in again; she will try the Beethoven. And
of course it’s no good, it’s worse and worse, and she seems to be howling, heaving inside. She sets the bow and the violin down on the living-room sofa, then picks them up and shoves them underneath it, getting them out of sight because she has a picture of herself smashing and wrecking them against a chair back, in a sickening dramatic display.

  I haven’t given up in all this time. Naturally I wouldn’t, against such competition.

  Jill lies down on the hard sky-blue brocade sofa where nobody ever lies or even sits, unless there’s company, and she actually falls asleep. She wakes up after who knows how long with her hot face pushed down into the brocade, its pattern marked on her cheek, her mouth drooling a little and staining the sky-blue material. My racket still or again going on rising and falling like a hammering headache. And she has got a headache, too. She gets up and pushes her way—that’s what it feels like—through the hot air to the kitchen cupboard where Ailsa keeps the 222’s. The thick air makes her think of sewage. And why not? While she slept I dirtied my diaper, and its ripe smell has had time to fill the house.

  222’s. Warm another bottle. Climb the stairs. She changes the diaper without lifting me from the crib. The sheet as well as the diaper is a mess. The 222’s are not working yet and her headache increases in fierceness as she bends over. Haul the mess out, wash off my scalded parts, pin on a clean diaper, and take the dirty diaper and sheet into the bathroom to be scrubbed off in the toilet. Put them in the pail of disinfectant which is already full to the brim because the usual baby wash has not been done today. Then get to me with the bottle. I quiet again enough to suck. It’s a wonder I have the energy left to do that, but I do. The feeding is more than an hour late, and I have real hunger to add to—but maybe also subvert—my store of grievance. I suck away, I finish the bottle, and then worn out I go to sleep, and this time actually stay asleep.