Dear Life: Stories

by Alice Munro

  He hadn’t been sure how he would react to the foot, in bed. But in some way it seemed more appealing, more unique, than the rest of her.

  She had told him that she was not a virgin. But that turned out to be a complicated half-truth, owing to the interference of a piano teacher, when she was fifteen. She had gone along with what the piano teacher wanted because she felt sorry for people who wanted things so badly.

  “Don’t take that as an insult,” she said, explaining that she had not continued to feel sorry for people in that way.

  “I should hope not,” he said.

  Then he had things to tell her about himself. The fact that he had produced a condom did not mean that he was a regular seducer. In fact, she was only the second person he had gone to bed with, the first being his wife. He had been brought up in a fiercely religious household and still believed in God, to some extent. He kept that a secret from his wife, who would have made a joke of it, being very left-wing.

  Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing—what they had just done—appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with.

  It wasn’t difficult for them. Howard’s job often required him to travel for a daytime inspection or to see a client. The drive from Kitchener didn’t take long. And Corrie was alone in the house now. Her father had died, and the girl who used to work for her had gone off to find a city job. Corrie had approved of this, even giving her money for typing lessons, so that she could better herself.

  “You’re too smart to mess around doing housework,” she had said. “Let me know how you get along.”

  Whether Lillian Wolfe spent the money on typing lessons or on something else was not known, but she did continue to do housework. This was discovered on an occasion when Howard and his wife were invited to dinner, with others, at the home of some newly important people in Kitchener. There was Lillian waiting on table, coming face-to-face with the man she had seen in Corrie’s house. The man she had seen with his arm around Corrie when she came in to take the plates away or fix the fire. Conversation made plain that this dinner-table wife had been his wife then as she was now.

  Howard said that he had not told Corrie about the dinner party right away, because he hoped it would become unimportant. The host and hostess of the evening were nothing like close friends of his, or of his wife. Certainly not of his wife, who made fun of them on political grounds afterwards. It had been a social business event. And the household wasn’t likely the sort in which the maids gossiped with the mistress.

  Indeed, it wasn’t. Lillian said that she had not gossiped about it at all. She said this in a letter. It was not her mistress whom she had a notion of speaking to, if she had to. It was his own wife. Would his wife be interested in getting this information? was the way she put it. The letter was sent to his office address, which she had been clever enough to find out. But she was also acquainted with his home address. She had been spying. She mentioned that and also referred to his wife’s coat with the silver-fox collar. This coat bothered his wife, and she often felt obliged to tell people that she had inherited, not bought, it. That was the truth. Still, she liked to wear it on certain occasions, like that dinner party, to hold her own, it seemed, even with people whom she had no use for.

  “I would hate to have to break the heart of such a nice lady with a big silver-fox collar on her coat,” Lillian had written.

  “How would Lillian know a silver-fox collar from a hole in the ground?” Corrie said, when he felt that he had to relay the news to her. “Are you sure that’s what she said?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He had burned the letter at once, had felt contaminated by it.

  “She’s learned things, then,” Corrie said. “I always thought she was sly. I guess killing her is not an option?”

  He didn’t even smile, so she said very soberly, “I’m just kidding.”

  It was April, but still cold enough that you would like to have a fire lit. She had planned to ask him to do it, all through supper, but his strange, somber attitude had prevented her.

  He told her that his wife hadn’t wanted to go to that dinner. “It’s all just pure rotten luck.”

  “You should have taken her advice,” she said.

  “It’s the worst,” he said. “It’s the worst that could happen.”

  They were both staring into the black grate. He had touched her only once, to say hello.

  “Well, no,” Corrie said. “Not the worst. No.”

  “No?”

  “No,” she said. “We could give her the money. It’s not a lot, really.”

  “I don’t have—”

  “Not you. I could.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yes.”

  She made herself speak lightly, but she had gone deathly cold. For what if he said no? No, I can’t let you. No, it’s a sign. It’s a sign that we have to stop. She was sure that there’d been something like that in his voice, and in his face. All that old sin stuff. Evil.

  “It’s nothing to me,” she said. “And, even if you could get hold of it easily, you couldn’t do it. You’d feel you were taking it away from your family—how could you?”

  Family. She should never have said that. Never have said that word.

  But his face actually cleared. He said, No, no, but there was doubt in his voice. And then she knew that it would be all right. After a while, he was able to speak practically and he remembered another thing from the letter. It had to be in bills, he said. She had no use for checks.

  He spoke without looking up, as if about a business deal. Bills were best for Corrie, too. They would not implicate her.

  “Fine,” she said. “It’s not an outrageous sum, anyway.”

  “But she is not to know that we see it that way,” he warned.

  A postal box was to be taken, in Lillian’s name. The bills in an envelope addressed to her, left there twice a year. The dates to be set by her. Never a day late. Or, as she had said, she might start to worry.

  He still did not touch Corrie, except for a grateful, almost formal good-bye. This subject must be altogether separate from what is between us, was what he seemed to be saying. We’ll start fresh. We will be able again to feel that we’re not hurting anybody. Not doing any wrong. That was how he would put it in his unspoken language. In her own language she made one half-joke that did not go over.

  “Already we’ve contributed to Lillian’s education—she wasn’t this smart before.”

  “We don’t want her getting any smarter. Asking for more.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Anyway, we could threaten to go to the police. Even now.”

  “But that would be the end of you and me,” he said. He had already said good-bye and turned his head away. They were on the windy porch.

  He said, “I could not stand for there to be an end of you and me.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Corrie said.

  The time came quickly when they did not even speak of it. She handed over the bills already in their envelope. At first he made a small grunt of disgust, but later that turned into a sigh of acquiescence, as if he had been reminded of a chore.

  “How the time goes around.”

  “Doesn’t it just?”

  “Lillian’s ill-gotten gains,” Corrie might say, and though he didn’t care for the expression at first, he got used to saying it himself. In the beginning, she would ask if he’d ever seen Lillian again, if there had been any further dinner parties.

  “They weren’t that kind of friends,” he reminded her. He hardly ever saw them, didn’t know if Lillian was still working for them or not.

  Corrie hadn’t seen her, either. Her people lived out in the country, and if Lillian came to see them they weren’t likely to shop in this town, which had rapidly gone downhill. There was nothing now on the main street but a convenience store, where people went to buy Lotto tickets
and whatever groceries they had run out of, and a furniture store, where the same tables and sofas sat forever in the windows, and the doors seemed never to be open—and maybe wouldn’t be, until the owner died in Florida.

  After Corrie’s father died, the shoe factory had been taken over by a large firm that had promised—so she believed—to keep it running. Within a year, however, the building was empty, such equipment as was wanted moved to another town, nothing left, except a few outmoded tools that had once had to do with making boots and shoes. Corrie got it into her head to establish a quaint little museum to display these things. She herself would set it up and give tours describing how things used to be done. It was surprising how knowledgeable she became, helped by some photographs that her father had had taken to illustrate a talk that perhaps he himself had given—it was badly typed—to the Women’s Institute when they were studying local industries. Already by the end of the summer Corrie had shown a few visitors around. She was sure that things would pick up the next year, after she had put a sign up on the highway and written a piece for a tourist brochure.

  In the early spring, she looked out of her window one morning and saw some strangers starting to tear the building down. It turned out that the contract she’d thought she had to use the building so long as a certain amount of the rent was paid did not allow her to display or appropriate any objects found within the building, no matter how long they had been considered worthless. There was no question of these ancient bits of hardware belonging to her, and, in fact, she was fortunate not to be hauled up in court now that the company—which had once seemed so obliging—had found out what she was up to.

  If Howard had not taken his family to Europe the previous summer, when she embarked on this project, he could have looked at the agreement for her and she would have been saved a lot of trouble.

  Never mind, she said when she had calmed down, and soon she found a new interest.

  It began with her deciding that she was sick of her big and empty house—she wanted to get out, and she set her sights on the public library down the street.

  It was a handsome, manageable redbrick building and, being a Carnegie Library, was not easy to get rid of, even though few people used it anymore—not nearly enough to justify a librarian’s wages.

  Corrie went down there twice a week and unlocked the doors and sat behind the librarian’s desk. She dusted the shelves if she felt like it, and phoned up the people who were shown by the records to have had books out for years. Sometimes the people she reached claimed that they had never heard of the book—it had been checked out by some aunt or grandmother who used to read and was now dead. She spoke then of library property, and sometimes the book actually showed up in the returns bin.

  The only thing not agreeable about sitting in the library was the noise. It was made by Jimmy Cousins, who cut the grass around the library building, starting again practically as soon as he’d finished because he had nothing else to do. So she hired him to do the lawns at her house—something she’d been doing herself for the exercise, but her figure didn’t really need it and it took forever with her lameness.

  Howard was somewhat dismayed by the change in her life. He came more seldom now, but was able to stay longer. He was living in Toronto, though working for the same firm. His children were teenagers or else in college. The girls were doing very well, the boys not quite so well as he might have wished, but that was the way of boys. His wife was working full-time and sometimes more than full-time in the office of a provincial politician. Her pay was next to nothing, but she was happy. Happier than he’d ever known her.

  The past spring he had taken her to Spain, as a birthday surprise. Corrie hadn’t heard from him for some time then. It would have been lacking in taste for him to write to her from the birthday-present holiday. He would never do a thing like that, and she would not have liked him to do it, either.

  “You’d think my place were a shrine, the way you carry on,” Corrie said after he got back, and he said, “Exactly right.” He loved everything about the big rooms now, with their ornate ceilings and dark, gloomy panelling. There was a grand absurdity to them. But he was able to see that it was different for her, that she needed to get out once in a while. They began to take little trips, then somewhat longer trips, staying overnight in motels—though never more than one night—and eating at moderately fancy restaurants.

  They never ran into anyone they knew. Once upon a time they would have done so—they were sure of it. Now things were different, though they didn’t know why. Was it because they weren’t in such danger, even if it did happen? The fact being that the people they might have met, and never did, would not have suspected them of being the sinful pair they still were. He could have introduced her as a cousin without making any impression—a lame relation he had thought to drop in on. He did have relatives whom his wife never wanted to bother with. And who would have gone after a middle-aged mistress with a dragging foot? Nobody would have stored that information up to spill at a dangerous moment.

  We met Howard up at Bruce Beach with his sister, was it? He was looking good. His cousin, maybe. A limp?

  It wouldn’t have seemed worth the trouble.

  They still made love, of course. Sometimes with caution, avoiding a sore shoulder, a touchy knee. They had always been conventional in that way, and remained so, congratulating themselves on not needing any fancy stimulation. That was for married people.

  Sometimes Corrie would fill up with tears, hiding her face against him.

  “It’s just that we’re so lucky,” she said.

  She never asked him whether he was happy, but he indicated in a roundabout way that he was. He said that he had developed more conservative, or maybe just less hopeful, ideas in his work. (She kept to herself the thought that he had always been rather conservative.) He was taking piano lessons, to the surprise of his wife and family. It was good to have that kind of interest of your own, in a marriage.

  “I’m sure,” Corrie said.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.”

  One day—it was in September—Jimmy Cousins came into the library to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to cut her grass that day. He had to go to the cemetery and dig a grave. It was for someone who used to live around here, he said.

  Corrie, with her finger in The Great Gatsby, asked for the person’s name. She said that it was interesting how many people showed up here—or their bodies did—with this last request and bother for their relatives. They might have lived their entire lives in cities nearby or distant, and seemed quite satisfied in those places, but had no wish to stay there when they were dead. Old people got such ideas.

  Jimmy said that it wasn’t such an old person. The name was Wolfe. The first name slipped his mind.

  “Not Lillian? Not Lillian Wolfe?”

  He believed it was.

  And her name proved to be right there, in the library edition of the local paper, which Corrie never read. Lillian had died in Kitchener, at the age of forty-six. She was to be buried from the Church of the Lord’s Anointed, the ceremony at two o’clock.

  Well.

  This was one of the two days a week that the library was supposed to be open. Corrie couldn’t go.

  The Church of the Lord’s Anointed was a new one in town. Nothing flourished here anymore but what her father had called “freak religions.” She could see the building from one of the library windows.

  She was at the window before two o’clock, watching a respectably sized group of people go in.

  Hats didn’t seem to be required nowadays, on women or men.

  How would she tell him? A letter to the office, it would have to be. She could phone there, but then his response would have to be so guarded, so matter-of-fact, that half the wonder of their release would be lost.

  She went back to Gatsby, but she was just reading words, she was too restless. She locked the library and walked around town.

  People were always saying that
this town was like a funeral, but in fact when there was a real funeral it put on its best show of liveliness. She was reminded of that when she saw, from a block away, the funeral-goers coming out of the church doors, stopping to chat and ease themselves out of solemnity. And then, to her surprise, many of them went around the church to a side door, where they reentered.

  Of course. She had forgotten. After the ceremony, after the closed coffin had been put in its place in the hearse, everybody except those close enough to follow the dead and see her put into the ground would head for the after-the-service refreshments. These would be waiting in another part of the church, where there was a Sunday School room and a hospitable kitchen.

  She didn’t see any reason that she shouldn’t join them.

  But at the last moment she would have walked past.

  Too late. A woman called to her in a challenging—or, at least, confidently unfunereal—voice from the door where the other people had gone in.

  This woman said to her, close up, “We missed you at the service.”

  Corrie had no notion who the woman was. She said that she was sorry not to have attended but she’d had to keep the library open.

  “Well, of course,” the woman said, but had already turned to consult with somebody carrying a pie.

  “Is there room in the fridge for this?”

  “I don’t know, honey, you’ll just have to look and see.”

  Corrie had thought from the greeting person’s flowered dress that the women inside would all be wearing something similar. Sunday best if not mourning best. But maybe her ideas of Sunday best were out of date. Some of the women here were just wearing pants, as she herself was.