by Alice Munro
One night before the captain appeared, Averill heard singing. She heard Bugs singing. She heard Bugs wake and resettle herself and start singing.
Sometimes in the last months Bugs had sung a phrase during a lesson, she had sung under her breath, with great caution, and out of necessity, to demonstrate something. She did not sing like that now. She sang lightly, as she used to do in practice, saving her strength for the performance. But she sang truly and adequately, with unimpaired—or almost unimpaired—sweetness.
“Vedrai carino,” Bugs sang, just as she used to sing when setting the table or looking out the rainy window of the apartment, making a light sketch that could be richly filled in if she chose. She might have been waiting for somebody at those times, or wooing an improbable happiness, or just limbering up for a concert.
“Vedrai carino,
Se sei buonino,
Che bel remedio.
Ti voglio dar.”
Averill’s head had pulled up when the singing started, her body had tightened, as at a crisis. But there was no call for her; she stayed where she was. After the first moment’s alarm, she felt just the same thing, the same thing she always felt, when her mother sang. The doors flew open, effortlessly, there was the lighted space beyond, a revelation of kindness and seriousness. Desirable, blessed joy, and seriousness, a play of kindness that asked nothing of you. Nothing but to accept this bright order. That altered everything, and then the moment Bugs stopped singing it was gone. Gone. It seemed that Bugs herself had taken it away. Bugs could imply that it was just a trick, nothing more. She could imply that you were a bit of a fool to take such notice of it. It was a gift that Bugs was obliged to offer, to everybody.
There. That’s all. You’re welcome.
Nothing special.
Bugs had that secret, which she openly displayed, then absolutely protected—from Averill, just as from everybody else.
Averill is not particularly musical, thank God.
The captain came on deck just as Bugs finished singing. He might have caught the tail end of it or been waiting decently in the shadows until it was over. He walked, and Averill watched, as usual.
Averill could sing in her head. But even in her head she never sang the songs that she associated with Bugs. None of Zerlina’s songs, or the soprano parts of the oratorios, not even “Farewell to Nova Scotia” or any of the folk songs that Bugs mocked for their sappy sentiments though she sang them angelically. Averill had a hymn that she sang. She hardly knew where it came from. She couldn’t have learned it from Bugs. Bugs disliked hymns, generally speaking. Averill must have picked it up at church, when she was a child, and had to go along with Bugs when Bugs was doing a solo.
It was the hymn that starts out, “The Lord’s my Shepherd.” Averill did not know that it came from a psalm—she had not been to church often enough to know about psalms. She did know all the words in the hymn, which she had to admit were full of strenuous egotism, and straightforward triumph, and, particularly in one verse, a childish sort of gloating:
My table Thou hast furnished,
In Presence of my Foes
How blithely and securely and irrationally Averill’s head-voice sang these words, while she watched the captain pace in front of her, and later, when she herself walked safely down to the rail:
Goodness and Mercy all my Life
Shall surely follow me;
And in God’s House forevermore
My dwelling place shall be.
Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories—the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars, the black mirror of the North Atlantic.
Bugs stopped going down to lunch. She still went to breakfast, and was lively then, and for an hour or so afterward. She said she didn’t feel any worse, she was tired of listening and talking. She didn’t sing again, at least not when Averill could hear her.
On the ninth night, which was the last night out, before they were to dock at Tilbury, Jeanine gave a party in her cabin. Jeanine had the largest and best cabin on the boat deck. She provided champagne, which she had brought on board for this purpose, and whiskey and wine, along with caviar, grapes, heaps of smoked salmon and steak tartare and cheese and flatbread, from the unsuspected resources of the kitchen. “I’m squandering,” she said. “I’m flying high. I’ll be wandering around Europe with a knapsack on my back stealing eggs out of henhouses. I don’t care. I’ll take all your addresses and when I’m utterly broke I’ll come and stay with you. Don’t laugh!”
Bugs had meant to go to the party. She had stayed in bed all day, not even going to breakfast, in order to save her strength. She got up and washed, then propped herself back against the pillows to do her makeup. She did it beautifully, eyes and all. She brushed out and teased and sprayed her hair. She put on her grand soloist’s dress, which Averill had made—an almost straight-cut but ample long dress of dark-purple silk, its wide sleeves lined with more silk, of iridescent pink and silver.
“Aubergine,” said Bugs. She turned to make the dress flare out at the hem. The turn made her unsteady, and she had to sit down.
“I should do my nails,” she said. “I’ll wait a little, though. I’m too jittery.”
“I could do them,” Averill said. She was pinning up her hair.
“Could you? But I don’t think. I don’t think I’ll go. After all. I think I’d rather just stay here and rest. Tomorrow I have to be in good shape. Landing.”
Averill helped her take off the dress and wash her face and put her nightgown back on. She helped her into bed.
“It’s a crime about the dress,” Bugs said. “Not to go. It deserves to get out. You should wear it. You wear it. Please.”
Averill did not think that purple suited her, but she ended up discarding her own green dress and putting on Bugs’. She went down the hall to the party, feeling strange, defiant, and absurd. It was all right—everybody had dressed up, some to a remarkable extent. Even the men had decked themselves out somehow. The artist wore an old tuxedo jacket with his jeans, and the professor appeared in a white suit of rather floppy cut, looking like a plantation dandy. Jeanine’s dress was black and skimpy, worn with seamed black stockings and big chunks of gold jewelry. Leslie was swathed in taffeta, with red and pink roses on a creamy ground. Over her curvy bum the material was bunched out into one huge rose, whose petals the professor kept patting and tweaking and arranging to best advantage. It would seem that he was newly entranced with her. She was relieved and proud, shyly blooming.
“Your mother is not coming to the party?” said the professor to Averill.
“Parties bore her,” Averill said.
“I get the impression that many things bore her,” the professor said. “I have noticed that with performing artists, and it is understandable. They have to concentrate so much on themselves.”
“Who is this—the Statue of Liberty?” said the artist, brushing the silk of Averill’s dress. “Is there a woman inside there at all?”
Averill had heard that he had been discussing her with Jeanine lately, wondering if she was possibly a lesbian, and Bugs was not her mother but her rich and jealous lover.
“Is there a woman or a hunk of concrete?” he said, molding the silk to her hip.
Averill didn’t care. This was the last night that she would have to see him. And she was drinking. She liked to drink. She liked especially to drink champagne. It made her feel not excited but blurry and forgiving.
She talked to the first mate, who was engaged to a girl from the mountains and showed an agreeable lack of love interest in herself.
She talked to the cook, a handsome woman who had formerly taught English in Norwegian high schools and was now intent on a more adventurous life. Jeanine had told Averill that the cook and the artist were bel
ieved to be sleeping together, and a certain challenging, ironic edge to the cook’s friendliness made Averill think that this might be true.
She talked to Leslie, who said that she had once been a harpist. She had been a young harpist playing dinner music in a hotel, and the professor had spotted her behind the ferns. She had not been a student, as people thought. It was after they became involved that the professor had her enroll in some courses, to develop her mind. She giggled over her champagne and said that it had not worked. She had resisted mind development but had given up the harp.
Jeanine spoke to Averill in a voice as low and confidential as she could make it. “How will you manage with her?” she said. “What will you do in England? How can you take her on a train? This is serious.”
“Don’t worry,” Averill said.
“I have not been open with you,” said Jeanine. “I have to go to the bathroom, but I want to tell you something when I come out.”
Averill hoped that Jeanine did not intend to make more disclosures about the artist or give more advice about Bugs. She didn’t. When she came out of the bathroom, she began to talk about herself. She said that she was not on a little vacation, as she had claimed. She had been turfed out. By her husband, who had left her for a sexpot moron who worked as a receptionist at the station. Being a receptionist involved doing her nails and occasionally answering the telephone. The husband considered that he and Jeanine should still be friends, and he would come to visit, helping himself to the wine and describing the pretty ways of his paramour. How she sat up in bed, naked, doing—what else?—her fingernails. He wanted Jeanine to laugh with him and commiserate with him over his ill-judged and besotted love. And she did—Jeanine did. Time and again she fell in with what he wanted and listened to his tales and watched her wine disappear. He said he loved her—Jeanine—as if she were the sister he’d never had. But now Jeanine meant to pull him out of her life by the roots. She was up and away. She meant to live.
She still had her eye on the captain, though it was the eleventh hour. He had turned down champagne and was drinking whiskey.
The cook had brought up a coffee tray for those who did not drink or who wished to sober up early. When somebody finally tried a cup, the cream proved to be on the turn—probably from sitting for a while in the warm room. Unflustered, the cook took it away, promising to bring back fresh. “It will be good on the pancakes in the morning,” she said. “With brown sugar, on the pancakes.”
Jeanine said that somebody had told her once that when the milk was sour you could suspect that there was a dead body on the ship.
“I thought it was a kind of superstition,” Jeanine said. “But he said no, there’s a reason. The ice. They have used all the ice to keep the body, so the milk goes sour. He said he had known it to happen, on a ship in the tropics.”
The captain was asked, laughingly, if there was any such problem on board this ship.
He said not that he knew of, no. “And we have plenty of refrigerator space,” he said.
“Anyway, you bury them at sea, don’t you?” said Jeanine. “You can marry or bury at sea, can’t you? Or do you really refrigerate them and send them home?”
“We do as the case dictates,” said the captain.
But had it happened with him, he was asked—were there bodies kept, had there been burials at sea?
“A young chap once, one of the crew, died of appendicitis. He hadn’t any family we knew of; we buried him at sea.”
“That’s a funny expression, when you think of it,” said Leslie, who was giggling at everything. “Buried at sea.”
“Another time—” said the captain. “Another time, it was a lady.”
Then he told Jeanine and Averill, and a few others who were standing around, a story. (Not Leslie—her husband took her away.)
One time on this ship, the captain said, there were two sisters travelling together. This was on a different run, a few years ago, in the South Atlantic. The sisters looked twenty years apart in age, but that was only because one of them was very sick. She might not have been so much the elder—perhaps she was not the elder at all. Probably they were both in their thirties. Neither one was married. The one who was not sick was very beautiful.
“The most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life,” said the captain, speaking solemnly, as if describing a view or a building.
She was very beautiful, but she did not pay attention to anybody except her sister, who was laid up in the cabin with what was probably a heart condition. The other one used to go out at night and sit on the bench outside the window of their cabin. She might walk to the rail and back, but she never stirred far from the window. The captain supposed that she was staying within hearing distance, in case her sister needed her. (There was no medical person on board at that time.) He could see her sitting there when he went out for his late-night walk, but he pretended not to see her, because it seemed to him she didn’t want to be seen, or to have to say hello.
But there was a night when he was walking past and he heard her call to him. She called so softly he barely heard her. He went over to the bench, and she said, Captain, I’m sorry, my sister has just died.
I’m sorry, my sister has just died.
She led him into the cabin, and she was absolutely right. Her sister was lying on the bed next to the door. Her eyes were half open, she had just died.
“Things were in a bit of a mess, the way they sometimes are on such occasions,” the captain said. “And by the way she reacted to that I knew she hadn’t been in the cabin when it happened, she’d been outside.”
Neither the captain nor the woman said a word. They set to work together to get things cleaned up, and they washed the body off and straightened it out and closed the eyes. When they were finished, the captain asked whom he should notify. Nobody, the woman said. Nobody. There is nobody but the two of us, she said. Then will you have the body buried at sea, the captain asked her, and she said yes. Tomorrow, he said—tomorrow morning—and she said, Why do we have to wait, couldn’t we do it now?
Of course that was a good idea, though the captain wouldn’t have urged it on her himself. The less the other passengers, and even the crew, have to be aware of a death on board, the better. And it was hot weather, summer in the South Atlantic. They wrapped the body up in one of the sheets, and between them they put it out through the window, which was wide open for air. The dead sister was light—wasted. They carried her to the rail. Then the captain said that he would just go and get some rope and tie the body up in the sheet so that it wouldn’t fall out when they dropped it over. Couldn’t we use scarves, she said, and she ran back to the cabin and came out with an assortment of scarves and sashes, very pretty stuff. He bound the body up in the sheet with those and said that he would now go and get his book, to read the service for the dead. The woman laughed and said, What good is your book to you here? It’s too dark to read. He saw that she dreaded being left alone with the body. She was right, too, about its being too dark to read. He could have got a flashlight. He didn’t know whether he had even thought of that. He really did not want to leave her; he did not like the state she was in.
He asked her what he should say, then. Some prayers? Say whatever you like, she said, and he said the Lord’s Prayer—he did not recall if she joined in—then something like, Lord Jesus Christ, in Thy name we commit this woman to the deep; have mercy on her soul. Something like that. They picked up the body and rolled it over the rail. It hardly made a splash.
She asked if that was all, and he told her yes. He would just have to fill out some papers and make up the death certificate. What did she die of, he asked. Was it a heart attack? He wondered what kind of spell he had been under not to have asked that before.
Oh, she said, I killed her.
“I knew it!” Jeanine cried. “I knew it was murder!”
The captain walked the woman back to the bench under the window of the cabin—all lit up now like Christmas—and asked her what she meant
. She said she had been sitting here, where she was now, and she heard her sister call. She knew her sister was in trouble. She knew what it was—her sister needed an injection. She never moved. She tried to move—that is, she kept thinking of moving; she saw herself going into the cabin and getting out the needle, she saw herself doing that, but she wasn’t moving. She strained herself to do it but she didn’t. She sat like stone. She could no more move than you can move out of some danger’s way in a dream. She sat and listened until she knew that her sister was dead. Then the captain came and she called to him.
The captain told her that she had not killed her sister.
Wouldn’t her sister have died anyway, he said. Wouldn’t she have died very soon? If not tonight, very soon? Oh, yes, she said. Probably. Not probably, the captain said. Certainly. Not probably—certainly. He would put heart attack on the death certificate, and that would be all there was to it. So now you must calm down, he said. Now you know it will be all right.
He pronounced “calm” in the Scottish way, to rhyme with “lamb.”
Yes, the woman said, she knew that part of it would be all right. I’m not sorry, she said. But I think you have to remember what you have done.
“Then she went over to the rail,” the captain said, “and of course I went along with her, because I couldn’t be sure what she meant to do, and she sang a hymn. That was all. I guess it was her contribution to the service. She sang so you could hardly hear her, but the hymn was one I knew. I can’t recall it, but I knew it perfectly well.”
“Goodness and Mercy all my Life,” Averill sang then, lightly but surely, so that Jeanine squeezed her around the waist and exclaimed, “Well, Champagne Sally!”
The captain showed a moment’s surprise. Then he said, “I believe that may have been it.” He might have been relinquishing something—a corner of his story—to Averill. “That may have been it.”
