by Alice Munro
MY MOTHER—Jill—is standing beside the dining-room table in the bright late afternoon. The house is full of people who have been invited back there after the memorial service in the church. They are drinking tea or coffee and managing to hold in their fingers the dinky sandwiches, or slices of banana bread, nut loaf, pound cake. The custard tarts or raisin tarts with their crumbly pastry are supposed to be eaten with a dessert fork off one of the small china plates that were painted with violets by Jill’s mother-in-law when she was a bride. Jill picks everything up with her fingers. Pastry crumbs have fallen, a raisin has fallen, and been smeared into the green velvet of her dress. It’s too hot a dress for the day, and it’s not a maternity dress at all but a loose sort of robe made for recitals, occasions when she plays her violin in public. The hem rides up in front, due to me. But it’s the only thing she owns that is large enough and good enough for her to wear at her husband’s memorial service.
What is this eating all about? People can’t help but notice. “Eating for two,” Ailsa says to a group of her guests, so that they won’t get the better of her by anything they say or don’t say about her sister-in-law.
Jill has been queasy all day, until suddenly in the church, when she was thinking how bad the organ was, she realized that she was, all of a sudden, as hungry as a wolf. All through “O Valiant Hearts” she was thinking of a fat hamburger dripping with meat juice and melted mayonnaise, and now she is trying to find what concoction of walnuts and raisins and brown sugar, what tooth-jabbing sweetness of coconut icing or soothing mouthful of banana bread or dollop of custard, will do as a substitute. Nothing will, of course, but she keeps on going. When her real hunger is satisfied her imaginary hunger is still working, and even more an irritability amounting almost to panic that makes her stuff into her mouth what she can hardly taste any longer. She couldn’t describe this irritability except to say it has something to do with furriness and tightness. The barberry hedge outside the window, thick and bristling in the sunlight, the feel of the velvet dress clinging to her damp armpits, the nosegays of curls—the same color as the raisins in the tarts—bunched on her sister-in-law Ailsa’s head, even the painted violets that look like scabs you could pick off the plate, all these things seem particularly horrid and oppressive to her though she knows they are quite ordinary. They seem to carry some message about her new and unexpected life.
Why unexpected? She has known for some time about me and she also knew that George Kirkham might be killed. He was in the air force, after all. (And around her in the Kirkhams’ house this afternoon people are saying—though not to her, his widow, or to his sisters—that he was just the sort you always knew would be killed. They mean because he was good-looking and high-spirited and the pride of his family, the one on whom all the hopes had been pinned.) She knew this, but she went ahead with her ordinary life, lugging her violin onto the streetcar on dark winter mornings, riding to the Conservatory where she practiced hour after hour within sound of others but alone in a dingy room with the radiator racket for company, the skin of her hands blotchy at first with the cold, then parched in the dry indoor heat. She went on living in a rented room with an ill-fitting window that let in flies in summer and a windowsill sprinkle of snow in winter, and dreaming—when she wasn’t sick—of sausages and meat pies and dark chunks of chocolate. At the Conservatory people treated her pregnancy tactfully, as if it was a tumor. It didn’t show for a long time anyway, as first pregnancies generally don’t on a big girl with a broad pelvis. Even with me turning somersaults she played in public. Majestically thickened, with her long red hair lying in a bush around her shoulders, her face broad and glowing, her expression full of somber concentration, she played a solo in her most important recital so far. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
She paid some attention to the world—she knew the war was ending. She thought that George might be back soon after I was born. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to go on living in her room then—she’d have to live somewhere with him. And she knew that I’d be there, but she thought of my birth as bringing something to an end rather than starting something. It would bring an end to the kicking in the permanent sore spot on one side of her belly and the ache in her genitals when she stands up and the blood rushes into them (as if she’d had a burning poultice laid there). Her nipples will no longer be large and dark and nubbly, and she won’t have to wind bandages around her legs with their swollen veins before she gets out of bed every morning. She won’t have to urinate every half hour or so, and her feet will shrink back into their ordinary shoes. She thinks that once I’m out I won’t give her so much trouble.
After she knew that George would not be coming back she thought about keeping me for a while in that same room. She got a book about babies. She bought the basic things that I would need. There was an old woman in the building who could look after me while she practiced. She would get a war widow’s pension and in six more months she would graduate from the Conservatory.
Then Ailsa came down on the train and collected her. Ailsa said, “We couldn’t leave you stuck down here all by yourself. Everybody wonders why you didn’t come up when George went overseas. It’s time you came now.”
“MY FAMILY’S crackers,” George had told Jill. “Iona’s a nervous wreck and Ailsa should have been a sergeant major. And my mother’s senile.”
He also said, “Ailsa got the brains, but she had to quit school and go and work in the Post Office when my dad died. I got the looks and there wasn’t anything left for poor old Iona but the bad skin and the bad nerves.”
Jill met his sisters for the first time when they came to Toronto to see George off. They hadn’t been at the wedding, which had taken place two weeks before. Nobody was there but George and Jill and the minister and the minister’s wife and a neighbor called in to be the second witness. I was there as well, already tucked up inside Jill, but I was not the reason for the wedding and at the time nobody knew of my existence. Afterwards George insisted that he and Jill take some poker-faced wedding pictures of themselves in one of those do-it-yourself picture booths. He was in relentless high spirits. “That’ll fix them,” he said, when he looked at the pictures. Jill wondered if there was anybody special he meant to fix. Ailsa? Or the pretty girls, the cute and perky girls, who had run after him, writing him sentimental letters and knitting him argyle socks? He wore the socks when he could, he pocketed the presents, and he read the letters out in bars for a joke.
Jill had not had any breakfast before the wedding, and in the midst of it she was thinking of pancakes and bacon.
THE TWO sisters were more normal-looking than she had expected. Though it was true about George getting the looks. He had a silky wave to his dark-blond hair and a hard gleeful glint in his eyes and a clean-cut enviable set of features. His only drawback was that he was not very tall. Just tall enough to look Jill in the eye. And to be an air force pilot.
“They don’t want tall guys for pilots,” he said. “I beat them out there. The beanpole bastards. Lots of guys in the movies are short. They stand on boxes for the kissing.”
(At the movies, George could be boisterous. He might hiss the kissing. He didn’t go in for it much in real life either. Let’s get to the action, he said.)
The sisters were short, too. They were named after places in Scotland, where their parents had gone on their honeymoon before the family lost its money. Ailsa was twelve years older than George, and Iona was nine years older. In the crowd at Union Station they looked dumpy and bewildered. Both of them wore new hats and suits, as if they were the ones who had recently been married. And both were upset because Iona had left her good gloves on the train. It was true that Iona had bad skin, though it wasn’t broken out at present and perhaps her acne days were over. It was lumpy with old scars and dingy under the pink powder. Her hair slipped out in droopy tendrils from under her hat and her eyes were teary, either because of Ailsa’s scolding or because her brother was going away to war. Ailsa’s hair was arranged in
bunches of tight permanented curls, with her hat riding on top. She had shrewd pale eyes behind sparkle-rimmed glasses, and round pink cheeks, and a dimpled chin. Both she and Iona had tidy figures—high breasts and small waists and flaring hips—but on Iona this figure looked like something she had picked up by mistake and was trying to hide by stooping her shoulders and crossing her arms. Ailsa managed her curves assertively not provocatively, as if she was made of some sturdy ceramic. And both of them had George’s dark-blond coloring, but without his gleam. They didn’t seem to share his sense of humor either.
“Well I’m off,” George said. “I’m off to die a hero on the field at Passchendaele.” And Iona said, “Oh don’t say that. Don’t talk like that.” Ailsa twitched her raspberry mouth.
“I can see the lost-and-found sign from here,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s just for things you lose in the station or is it for things that they find in the trains? Passchendaele was in the First World War.”
“Was it? You sure? I’m too late?” said George, beating his hand on his chest.
And he was burned up a few months later in a training flight over the Irish Sea.
AILSA SMILES all the time. She says, “Well of course I am proud. I am. But I’m not the only one to lose somebody. He did what he had to do.” Some people find her briskness a bit shocking. But others say, “Poor Ailsa.” All that concentrating on George, and saving to send him to law school, and then he flouted her—he signed up; he went off and got himself killed. He couldn’t wait.
His sisters sacrificed their own schooling. Even getting their teeth straightened—they sacrificed that. Iona did go to nursing school, but as it turned out getting her teeth fixed would have served her better. Now she and Ailsa have ended up with a hero. Everybody grants it—a hero. The younger people present think it’s something to have a hero in the family. They think the importance of this moment will last, that it will stay with Ailsa and Iona forever. “O Valiant Hearts” will soar around them forever. Older people, those who remember the previous war, know that all they’ve ended up with is a name on the cenotaph. Because the widow, the girl feeding her face, will get the pension.
Ailsa is in a hectic mood partly because she has been up two nights in a row, cleaning. Not that the house wasn’t decently clean before. Nevertheless she felt the need to wash every dish, pot, and ornament, polish the glass on every picture, pull out the fridge and scrub behind it, wash the cellar steps off, and pour bleach in the garbage can. The very lighting fixture overhead, over the dining-room table, had to be taken apart, and every piece on it dunked in soapy water, rinsed, and rubbed dry and reassembled. And because of her work at the Post Office Ailsa couldn’t start this till after supper. She is the postmistress now, she could have given herself a day off, but being Ailsa she would never do that.
Now she’s hot under her rouge, twitchy in her dark-blue lace-collared crepe dress. She can’t stay still. She refills the serving plates and passes them around, deplores the fact that people’s tea may have got cold, hurries to make a fresh pot. Mindful of her guests’ comfort, asking after their rheumatism or minor ailments, smiling in the face of her tragedy, repeating over and over again that hers is a common loss, that she must not complain when so many others are in the same boat, that George would not want his friends to grieve but to be thankful that all together we have ended the war. All in a high and emphatic voice of cheerful reproof that people are used to from the Post Office. So that they are left with an uncertain feeling of perhaps having said the wrong thing, just as in the Post Office they may be made to understand that their handwriting cannot help but be a trial or their packages are done up sloppily.
Ailsa is aware that her voice is too high and that she is smiling too much and that she has poured out tea for people who said they didn’t want any more. In the kitchen, while warming the teapot, she says, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m all wound up.
The person she says this to is Dr. Shantz, her neighbor across the backyard.
“It’ll soon be over,” he says. “Would you like a bromide?”
His voice undergoes a change as the door from the dining room opens. The word “bromide” comes out firm and professional.
Ailsa’s voice changes too, from forlorn to valiant. She says, “Oh, no thank you. I’ll just try and keep going on my own.”
IONA’S JOB is supposed to be to watch over their mother, to see that she doesn’t spill her tea—which she may do not out of clumsiness but forgetfulness—and that she is taken away if she starts to sniffle and cry. But in fact Mrs. Kirkham’s manners are gracious most of the time and she puts people at ease more readily than Ailsa does. For a quarter of an hour at a time she understands the situation—or she seems to—and she speaks bravely and cogently about how she will always miss her son but is grateful she still has her daughters: Ailsa so efficient and reliable, a wonder as she’s always been, and Iona the soul of kindness. She even remembers to speak of her new daughter-in-law but perhaps gives a hint of being out of line when she mentions what most women of her age don’t mention at a social gathering, and with men listening. Looking at Jill and me, she says, “And we all have a comfort to come.”
Then passing from room to room or guest to guest, she forgets entirely, she looks around her own house and says, “Why are we here? What a lot of people—what are we celebrating?” And catching on to the fact that it all has something to do with George, she says, “Is it George’s wedding?” Along with her up-to-date information she has lost some of her mild discretion. “It’s not your wedding, is it?” she says to Iona. “No. I didn’t think so. You never had a boyfriend, did you?” A let’s-face-facts, devil-take-the-hindmost note has come into her voice. When she spots Jill she laughs.
“That’s not the bride, is it? Oh-oh. Now we understand.”
But the truth comes back to her as suddenly as it went away.
“Is there news?” she says. “News about George?” And it’s then that the weeping starts that Ailsa was afraid of.
“Get her out of the way if she starts making a spectacle,” Ailsa had said.
Iona isn’t able to get her mother out of the way—she has never been able to exert authority over anybody in her life—but Dr. Shantz’s wife catches the old woman’s arm.
“George is dead?” says Mrs. Kirkham fearfully, and Mrs. Shantz says, “Yes he is. But you know his wife is having a baby.”
Mrs. Kirkham leans against her; she crumples and says softly, “Could I have my tea?”
EVERYWHERE MY mother turns in that house, it seems she sees a picture of my father. The last and official one, of him in his uniform, sits on an embroidered runner on the closed sewing machine in the bay of the dining-room window. Iona puts flowers around it, but Ailsa took them away. She said it made him look too much like a Catholic saint. Hanging above the stairs there is one of him at six years old, out on the sidewalk, with his knee in his wagon, and in the room where Jill sleeps there’s one of him beside his bicycle, with his Free Press newspaper sack. Mrs. Kirkham’s room has the one of him dressed for the grade-eight operetta, with a gold cardboard crown on his head. Being unable to carry a tune, he couldn’t have a leading role, but he was of course picked for the best background role, that of the king.
The hand-tinted studio photo over the buffet shows him at the age of three, a blurred blond tot dragging a rag doll by one leg. Ailsa thought of taking that down because it might seem tear-jerking, but she left it up rather than show a bright patch on the wallpaper. And no one said anything about it but Mrs. Shantz, who paused and said what she had said sometimes before, and not tearfully but with a faintly amused appreciation.
“Ah—Christopher Robin.”
People were used to not paying much attention to what Mrs. Shantz said.
In all of his pictures George looks bright as a dollar. There’s always a sunny dip of hair over his brow, unless he’s wearing his officer’s hat or his crown. And even when he was little more than an i
nfant he looked as if he knew himself to be a capering, calculating, charming sort of fellow. The sort who never let people alone, who whipped them up to laugh. At his own expense occasionally, but usually at other people’s. Jill recalls when she looks at him how he drank but never seemed drunk and how he occupied himself getting other drunk people to confess to him their fears, prevarications, virginity, or two-timing, which he would then turn into jokes or humiliating nicknames that his victims pretended to enjoy. For he had legions of followers and friends, who maybe latched on to him out of fear—or maybe just because, as was always said of him, he livened things up. Wherever he was was the center of the room, and the air around him crackled with risk and merriment.
What was Jill to make of such a lover? She was nineteen when she met him, and nobody had ever claimed her before. She couldn’t understand what attracted him, and she could see that nobody else could understand it, either. She was a puzzle to most people of her own age, but a dull puzzle. A girl whose life was given over to the study of the violin and who had no other interests.
That was not quite true. She would snuggle under her shabby quilts and imagine a lover. But he was never a shining cutup like George. She thought of some warm and bearlike fellow, or of a musician a decade older than herself and already legendary, with a fierce potency. Her notions of love were operatic, though that was not the sort of music she most admired. But George made jokes when he made love; he pranced around her room when he had finished; he made rude and infantile noises. His brisk performances brought her little of the pleasure she knew from her assaults on herself, but she was not exactly disappointed.
Dazed at the speed of things was more like it. And expecting to be happy—grateful and happy—when her mind caught up with physical and social reality. George’s attentions, and her marriage—those were all like a brilliant extension of her life. Lighted rooms showing up full of a bewildering sort of splendor. Then came the bomb or the hurricane, the not unlikely stroke of disaster, and the whole extension was gone. Blown up and vanished, leaving her with the same space and options she’d had before. She had lost something, certainly. But not something she had really got hold of, or understood as more than a hypothetical layout of the future.
