Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

  Murray says that his is a common story. Does it deserve to be called a classic? “My great-grandfather got the business going. My grandfather established it in all its glory. My father preserved it. And I lost it.”

  He doesn’t mind telling people. Not that he waylays them and unburdens himself immediately. Guests are used to seeing him always at work. Repairing the dock, painting the rowboat, hauling in groceries, digging up drains, he looks so competent and unfrazzled, so cheerfully committed to whatever job he’s doing, that they take him for a farmer turned to resort-keeping. He has the kind of patience and uninquisitive friendliness, the unathletic but toughened and serviceable body, the sunburned face, the graying boyishness that they might expect of a country man. But the same guests come back year after year, and sometimes they become friends who are invited on their last night to eat dinner at the family table. (It is considered an achievement, among the regulars, to become friends with stately Barbara. Some never manage it.) Then they may get to hear Murray’s story.

  “My grandfather used to go up on the roof of our building in Walley,” Murray says. “He went up on the roof and he threw down money. Every Saturday afternoon. Quarters, dimes, nickels—five-cent pieces, I guess you called them then. It drew the crowds. The men who started Walley were flashy fellows. They weren’t well educated. They weren’t genteel. They thought they were building Chicago.”

  Then something different happened, he says. In came the ladies and the rectors and the grammar school. Out with the saloons and in with the garden parties. Murray’s father was an elder of St. Andrew’s; he stood for the Conservative Party.

  “Funny—we used to say ‘stood for’ instead of ‘ran for.’ The store was an institution by that time. Nothing changed for decades. The old display cases with curved glass tops, and the change zinging overhead in those metal cylinders. The whole town was like that, into the fifties. The elm trees weren’t dead yet. They’d started. In the summer there were the old cloth awnings all around the square.”

  When Murray decided to modernize, he went all out. It was 1965. He had the whole building covered in white stucco, the windows blocked in. Just little, classy, eye-level windows left along the street, as if intended to display the Crown jewels. The name Zeigler’s—just that—written across the stucco in flowing script, pink neon. He chucked the waist-high counters and carpeted the varnished floors and put in indirect lighting and lots of mirrors. A great skylight over the staircase. (It leaked, had to be repaired, was taken out before the second winter.) Indoor trees and bits of pools and a kind of fountain in the ladies’ room.

  Insanity.

  Meanwhile the mall had opened south of town. Should Murray have gone out there? He was too mired in debt to move. Also, he had become a downtown promoter. He had not only changed the image of Zeigler’s, he had changed himself, becoming a busy loudmouth on the municipal scene. He served on committees. He was on the building committee. That was how he discovered that a man from Logan, a dealer and developer, was getting government money for restoring old buildings when the fact of the matter was that he was tearing the old buildings down and preserving only a remnant of the foundation to incorporate into his new, ugly, badly built, profitable apartment blocks.

  “Aha—corruption,” says Murray when he recalls this. “Let the people know! I ranted to the newspaper. I practically ranted on the street corners. What did I think? Did I think the people didn’t know? It must have been a death wish. It was a death wish. I got to be such a ranter and public entertainment that I was turfed off the committee. I’d lost credibility. They said so. I’d also lost the store. I’d lost it to the bank. Plus the big house my grandfather built and the little house on the same lot, where Barbara and I and the kids were living. The bank couldn’t get at them, but I sold them off, to get square—that was the way I wanted to do it. Lucky thing my mother died before the crash came.”

  Sometimes Barbara excuses herself while Murray is talking. She could be going to get more coffee, she might come back in a moment. Or she might take the dog, Sadie, and go for a walk down to the pond, in among the pale trunks of the birch and poplar trees and under the droopy hemlocks. Murray doesn’t bother explaining, though he listens, without appearing to do so, to hear her come back. Anybody who becomes their friend has to understand how Barbara balances contact with absences, just as they have to understand that Barbara doesn’t want to do anything. She does plenty, of course. She does the cooking, she manages the resort. But when people find out how much she has read, and that she’s never been to college, they sometimes suggest that she should go, she should get a degree.

  “What for?” says Barbara.

  And it turns out that she doesn’t want to be a teacher, or a scholar, or a librarian, or an editor, or to make television documentaries, or review books, or write articles. The list of things that Barbara doesn’t want to do is as long as your arm. Apparently she wants to do what she does—read, and go for walks, eat and drink with pleasure, tolerate some company. And unless people can value this about her—her withdrawals, her severe indolence (she has an air of indolence even when she’s cooking an excellent dinner for thirty people)—they don’t remain among the company she tolerates.

  When Murray was busy renovating and borrowing money and involving himself in municipal life, Barbara was reading. She had always read, but now she let it take up more and more of her time. The children had started to school. Some days Barbara never left the house. There was always a coffee cup by her chair, and a pile of fat dusty books from the library, Remembrance of Things Past, Joseph and His Brothers, books by lesser Russians whom Murray had never heard of. Barbara has a real mania for reading, his mother said—isn’t she worried about bringing all those books from the library into the house? You never know who has been handling them.

  Reading such heavy books, Barbara grew heavier herself. She did not get really fat, but she put on twenty or twenty-five pounds, well distributed over her tall, never delicate frame. Her face changed, too—flesh blurred its firm lines, making her look softer and in a way younger. Her cheeks puffed out and her mouth looked more secretive. Sometimes she had—she still has—the expression of a self-absorbed and rather willful little girl. Nowadays she reads skimpy-looking books by Czechs or Japanese or Rumanians, but she is still heavy. Her hair is still long, too, and black, except around the face, where it has gone white, as if a piece of veiling had been thrown over it.

  Murray and Barbara are driving down out of the hills, from twisting, hilly roads to the flat, straight grid of the farmland. They are driving to Walley, for a special reason. Two weeks ago Barbara discovered a lump in the flesh of one of her buttocks. She was drying herself after coming out of the pond—it was the last swim, the last spurt of warm weather of the year. The lump was about the size of a marble. “If I wasn’t so fat, I’d probably have found it sooner,” she said, without particular regret or alarm. She and Murray spoke of the lump as they would of a bad tooth—a nuisance that had to be dealt with. She had it removed in the hospital in Walley. Then there had to be a biopsy.

  “Is it possible to have cancer of the buttock?” she asked the doctor. “What an undignified thing!”

  The doctor said that the lump could be a floater—malignant cells that had their origin somewhere else in the body. A sealed message. And they could remain a mystery—bad cells whose home base could never be found. If indeed they proved to be bad cells at all. “The future is unclear till we know,” said the doctor.

  Yesterday the doctor’s receptionist phoned and said that the results were in. She made an appointment for Barbara to see the doctor in his office in Walley that afternoon.

  “Is that all?” Murray said.

  “All what?”

  “Is that all she said?”

  “She’s just the receptionist. That’s all she’s supposed to say.”

  They are driving between walls of corn. The stalks are eight or nine feet high. Any day now the farmers will start to cut them. The sun
is low enough even by midafternoon to shine through the cornstalks and turn them to coppery gold. They drive through an orderly radiance, mile after mile.

  Last night they stayed up late; they watched an old, old movie, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Murray had seen it when he was a child, in the Roxy Theatre, in Walley. All he had remembered was the part about Buddy getting killed and Henry Fonda chipping out the pine-tree coffin.

  Thinking about that, he starts to sing. “ ‘Oh, they cut down the old pine tree, and they hauled it away to the mill.’ I always thought,” he says, interrupting himself, “that that song came from that movie.”

  Barbara continues singing. “ ‘To make a coffin of pine, for that sweetheart of mine.’ ” Then she says, “Don’t be squeamish.”

  “I wasn’t,” says Murray. “I forgot what came next.”

  “Don’t come and sit in the waiting room. It’s awful. Go down to the beach and wait for me. I’ll come down the Sunset Steps.”

  They have to drive past the farm where Beatrice Sawicky used to keep horses. At one time she had a riding school. That didn’t last very long. She boarded horses then, and she must have made a living out of that, because she kept at it, she stayed there, until four or five years ago, when she sold out and, presumably, moved away. They didn’t know where she would go; they had seen her a few times in town but never talked to her. When they used to drive past, and saw the horses in the fields, one or the other of them would say, “I wonder what happened to Victor.” Not every time they passed, but about once a year, one of them would say that, and the other would answer, “God knows,” or something of the sort. But they haven’t bothered saying it since Beatrice and the horses left.

  The first time that Victor Sawicky came into the store, he scattered the clerks—so Murray said to Barbara—like a cat among the pigeons. And, in fact, many of the clerks whom Murray had inherited with the store did look like pigeons—they were gray-haired maiden ladies whom maidenhood had not kept from growing stout and bosomy. It was easy to imagine a clammy dew of alarm between those bosoms at the sight of Victor. One of the women came pattering up the ramp to Murray’s little office to tell him that there was a foreigner and that none of them could make out what it was he wanted.

  He wanted work clothes. It wasn’t so difficult to tell what he was saying. (After all, he had lived for several years in England.) It was not the Polish accent that dismayed the clerks in Zeigler’s store, it was Victor’s looks. Murray put Victor immediately into the same class of human beings as Barbara, but of the two he found Victor far the more splendid and disturbing. He had been able to look at Barbara and think, That is a rare girl. But she was still a girl, and he wanted to sleep with her. (He had been married to her now for seven years.) Victor drew his attention as a sleek and princely animal might—say, a golden palomino, bold but high-strung, shy about the stir he created. You’d try to say something soothing but deferential and stroke his shining neck, if he’d let you.

  Murray said, “Work clothes.”

  Victor was tall and light-boned and looked polished. In the coffee shop of the British Exchange Hotel, where he and Murray got in the habit of going, a waitress said to him one day, “You mind telling me? Because we kind of have a bet going on? How tall are you?”

  “I am six feet and five inches,” said Victor.

  “Is that all? We had you going up as high as seven feet.”

  His skin was a pale-olive color, his hair a dark blond, his eyes a light, bright blue. The eyes protruded a little, and the eyelids never lifted quite all the way. His teeth were large and stained, like his fingers, from nicotine. He smoked all the time. He was smoking while he gave his puzzled consideration to the overalls in Zeigler’s store. They were all too short in the legs.

  He said that he and his wife, who was English, had bought a farm just on the edge of town. Murray wanted to talk to him without the clerks hanging around in amazement, so he took him along the street, for the first time, to the British Exchange. He knew the farm Victor was talking about, and he didn’t think much of it. But Victor said that they were not intending to farm it. They were going to keep horses and run a riding school. Victor asked Murray’s opinion about whether or not this would be a success. Were there enough little rich girls around? “I think if you have a riding school you must have the little rich girls. They are the ones for the horse riding.”

  “You could advertise in the city papers, and they could come in the summers,” Murray said.

  “Of course. To the camp. To the horse camp. Here and in the United States they always go in summer to the camp, isn’t that so?”

  Victor seemed delighted with this idea. Everything was absurd to him, everything acceptable. The winters—is it true that there is frost from October to May? Does the snow actually reach to the windowsills? Can one drink the well water without boiling, or is there a danger of catching typhoid fever? What kind of trees, cut down, will provide the best heat in the stove?

  Murray could not remember afterward which questions came the first day, or if there was ever a boundary between the practical questions and the more general or personal. He didn’t think there was—they came all mixed up together. When Victor wondered about anything, he asked. When were those buildings put up? What is the people’s main religion and are they very serious about it? Who is that important-looking man, that sad-looking woman? What do the people work at? Are there agitators, freethinkers, very rich people, Communists? What sort of crimes are committed, when was the last time there was a murder, is there a certain amount of adultery? Did Murray play golf, did he own a pleasure boat, did his employees call him sir? (Not much, and no, and no.) Victor’s blue eyes continued to shine with pleasure, whatever the question, whatever the answer. He stretched his long legs out of the coffee-shop booth and clasped his hands behind his head. He luxuriated, taking everything in. Soon Murray was telling him about how his grandfather threw coins down into the street, and about his father’s dark suits and silk-backed vests, and his own notions of becoming a minister.

  “But you did not?”

  “I lost my faith.” Murray always felt he had to grin when he said this. “That is—”

  “I know what it is.”

  When he came to find Murray at the store, Victor would not ask any of the clerks if he could see him but would go straight up to the office, up the ramp to the little cage. It had wrought-iron walls around it, about as high as Murray was—about five-nine. Victor would try to come up stealthily, but of course his presence would have already disturbed the store, stirring up ripples of attention, misgiving, excitement. Murray usually knew when he was coming but pretended not to. Then Victor, for a surprise, would rest his gleaming head on the top of the wall, his neck held between two of the pointed, decorative spikes. He grinned at the idiotic effect.

  Murray found this inexpressibly flattering.

  Victor had a history of his own, of course. He was ten years older than Murray; he had been nineteen when the war broke out. He was a student then, in Warsaw. He had been taking flying lessons, but did not yet have his pilot’s license. Nevertheless he went out to the airstrip where the planes of the Polish Air Force were sitting—he and some of his friends went out there almost as a prank, on the morning of the German invasion, and almost as a prank they took some of the planes into the air, and then they flew them to Sweden. After that, he got to England and joined the Polish Air Force, which was attached to the Royal Air Force. He flew on many raids, and was shot down over France. He bailed out; he hid in the woods, he ate raw potatoes from the fields, he was helped by the French Underground and made his way to the Spanish border. He got back to England. And he found to his great disappointment that he was not to be allowed to fly again. He knew too much. If he should be shot down again and captured and interrogated, he knew too much. He was so disappointed, so restless, he made such a nuisance of himself, that he was given another job—he was sent to Turkey, on a more or less secret mission, to be part of a network that he
lped Poles, and others, who were escaping through the Balkans.

  That was what he had been doing while Murray and his friends had been building model airplanes and fixing up a kind of cockpit in the bicycle shed at school, so that they could pretend to be bombing Germany.

  “But do you believe all that stuff, really?” Barbara said.

  “They did fly Polish planes to Sweden before the Germans could get them,” Murray said stubbornly. “And people did get shot down over France and escape.”

  “Do you think anybody as conspicuous as Victor could escape? Do you think anybody that conspicuous would ever get sent on a secret mission? You have to look more like Alec Guinness to get sent on a secret mission.”

  “Maybe he’s so conspicuous he looks innocent,” Murray said. “Maybe he’d look like the last person on earth to be sent on a secret mission and that would be the very reason nobody would suspect.”

  Perhaps for the first time, he thought that Barbara’s cynicism was automatic and irritating. It was like a quirk she had, a tic.

  They had this conversation after Victor and Beatrice had come to dinner. Murray had been anxious for Victor and Barbara to meet. He wanted to present them to each other, almost to show them off to each other. But when the opportunity arrived they were not at their best. Each seemed standoffish, lukewarm, nervous, ironical.