by Alice Munro
Averill said, “That’s the only hymn I know.”
“But is that all?” Jeanine said. “There wasn’t any family fortune involved, or they weren’t both in love with the same man? No? I guess it wasn’t TV.”
The captain said no, it wasn’t TV.
Averill believed that she knew the rest of it. How could she help knowing? It was her story. She knew that after the woman sang the hymn, the captain took her hand off the rail. He held her hand to his mouth and kissed it. He kissed the back of it, then the palm-to-rhyme-with-lamb. Her hand that had lately done its service to the dead.
In some versions of the story, that was all he did, that was enough. In other versions, he was not so easily satisfied. Nor was she. She went with him inside, along the corridor into the lighted cabin, and there he made love to her on the very bed that according to him they had just stripped and cleaned, sending its occupant and one of its sheets to the bottom of the ocean. They landed on that bed because they couldn’t wait to get to the other bed under the window, they couldn’t wait to hurtle into the lovemaking that they kept up till daybreak and that would have to last them the rest of their lives.
Sometimes they turned the light off, sometimes they didn’t care.
The captain had told it as if the mother and daughter were sisters and he had transported the boat to the South Atlantic and he had left off the finale—as well as supplying various details of his own—but Averill believed that it was her story he had told. It was the story that she had been telling herself night after night on the deck, her perfectly secret story, delivered back to her. She had made it, and he had taken it and told it, safely.
Believing that such a thing could happen made her feel weightless and distinct and glowing, like a fish lit up in the water.
Bugs did not die that night. She died two weeks later, in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. She had managed to get that far, on the train.
Averill was not with her when she died. She was a couple of blocks away, eating a baked potato from a takeout shop.
Bugs made one of her last coherent remarks about the Royal Infirmary. She said, “Doesn’t it sound Old World?”
Averill, coming out to eat after having been in the hospital room all day, had been surprised to find that there was still so much light in the sky, and that so many lively, brightly dressed people were in the streets, speaking French and German, and probably lots of other languages that she couldn’t recognize. Every year at this time, the captain’s home town held a festival.
Averill brought Bugs’ body home on a plane, to a funeral with fine music, in Toronto. She found herself sitting beside another Canadian returning from Scotland—a young man who had played in a famous amateur golf tournament and had not done as well as he had expected. Failure and loss made these two kind to each other, and they were easily charmed by the other’s ignorance of the world of sport and of music. Since he lived in Toronto, it was easy for the young man to show up at the funeral. In a short time he and Averill were married. After a while they were less kind and less charmed, and Averill began to think that she had chosen her husband chiefly because Bugs would have thought the choice preposterous. They were divorced.
But Averill met another man, a good deal older than herself, a high-school drama teacher and play director. His talent was more reliable than his good will—he had an offhand, unsettlingly flippant and ironical manner. He either charmed people or aroused their considerable dislike. He had tried to keep himself free of entanglements.
Averill’s pregnancy, however, persuaded them to marry. Both of them hoped for a daughter.
Averill never saw again, or heard from, any of the people who were on the boat.
Averill accepts the captain’s offering. She is absolved and fortunate. She glides like the spangled fish, inside her dark silk dress.
She and the captain bid each other good night. They touch hands ceremoniously. The skin of their hands is flickering in the touch.
Oh, What Avails
I—Deadeye Dick
They are in the dining room. The varnished floor is bare except for the rug in front of the china cabinet. There is not much furniture—a long table, some chairs, the piano, the china cabinet. On the inside of the windows, all the wooden shutters are closed. These shutters are painted a dull blue, a grayish blue. Some of the paint on them, and on the window frames, has flaked away. Some of it Joan has encouraged to flake away, using her fingernails.
This is a very hot day in Logan. The world beyond the shutters is swimming in white light; the distant trees and hills have turned transparent; dogs seek the vicinity of pumps and the puddles round the drinking fountains.
Some woman friend of their mother’s is there. Is it the schoolteacher Gussie Toll, or the station agent’s wife? Their mother’s friends are lively women, often transient—adrift and independent in attitude if not in fact.
* * *
On the table, under the fan, the two women have spread out cards and are telling their fortunes. They talk and laugh in a way that Joan finds tantalizing, conspiratorial. Morris is lying on the floor, writing in a notebook. He is writing down how many copies of New Liberty magazine he sold that week, and who has paid and who still owes money. He is a solid-looking boy of about fifteen, jovial but reserved, wearing glasses with one dark lens.
When Morris was four years old, he was roaming around in the long grass at the foot of the yard, near the creek, and he tripped over a rake that had been left lying there, prongs up. He tripped, he fell on the prongs, his brow and eyelid were badly cut and his eyeball was grazed. As long as Joan can remember—she was a baby when it happened—he has had a scar, and been blind in one eye, and worn glasses with a smoky lens.
A tramp left the rake there. So their mother said. She told the tramp she would give him a sandwich if he raked up the leaves under the walnut trees. She gave him the rake, and the next time she looked he was gone. He got tired of raking, she guessed, or he was mad at her for asking him to work first. She forgot to go and look for the rake. She had no man to help her with anything. Within a little more than half a year, she had to sustain these three things: Joan’s birth, the death of her husband in a car accident (he had been drinking, she believed, but he wasn’t drunk), and Morris’s falling on the rake.
She never took Morris to a Toronto doctor, a specialist, to have a better job done fixing up the scar or to get advice about the eye. She had no money. But couldn’t she have borrowed some (Joan, once she was grown up, wondered this), couldn’t she have gone to the Lions Club and asked them to help her, as they sometimes did help poor people in an emergency? No. No, she couldn’t. She did not believe that she and her children were poor in the way that people helped by the Lions Club were poor. They lived in a large house. They were landlords, collecting rent from three small houses across the street. They still owned the lumberyard, though they were sometimes down to one employee. (Their mother liked to call herself Ma Fordyce, after a widow on a radio soap opera, Ma Perkins, who also owned a lumberyard.) They had not the leeway of people who were properly poor.
What is harder for Joan to understand is why Morris himself has never done anything. Morris has plenty of money now. And it wouldn’t even be a question of money anymore. Morris pays his premiums on the government health-insurance plan, just the way everybody else does. He has what seem to Joan very right-wing notions about mollycoddling and individual responsibility and the impropriety of most taxes, but he pays. Wouldn’t it make sense to him to try to get something back? A neater job on the eyelid? One of those new, realistic artificial eyes, whose magic sensitivity enables them to move in unison with the other, real eye? All that would entail is a trip to a clinic, a bit of inconvenience, some fussing and fiddling.
All it would entail is Morris’s admission that he’d like a change. That it isn’t shameful, to try to turn in the badge misfortune has hung on you.
Their mother and her friend are drinking rum-and-Coke. There is a laxity in the house that mig
ht surprise most people Joan and Morris go to school with. Their mother smokes, and drinks rum-and-Coke on hot summer days, and she allows Morris to smoke and to drive the car by the time he’s twelve years old. (He doesn’t like rum.) Their mother doesn’t mention misfortune. She tells about the tramp and the rake, but Morris’s eye now might as well be some special decoration. She does give them the idea of being part of something special. Not because their grandfather started the lumberyard—she laughs at that, she says he was just a woodcutter who got lucky, and she herself was nobody, she came to town as a bank clerk—and not because of their large, cold, unmanageable house, but because of something private, enclosed, in their small family. It has to do with the way they joke, and talk about people. They have private names—their mother has made up most of them—for almost everybody in town. And she knows a lot of poetry, from school or somewhere. She will fix a couple of lines on somebody, summing them up in an absurd and unforgettable way. She looks out the window and says a bit of poetry and they know who has gone by. Sometimes she comes out with it as she stirs the porridge they eat now and then for supper as well as for breakfast, because it is cheap.
Morris’s jokes are puns. He is dogged and sly-faced about this, and their mother pretends to be driven crazy. Once, she told him that if he didn’t stop she would empty the sugar bowl over his mashed potatoes. He didn’t, and she did.
There is a smell in the Fordyce house, and it comes from the plaster and wallpaper in the rooms that have been shut off, and the dead birds in the unused chimneys, or the mice whose seed-like turds they find in the linen cupboard. The wooden doors in the archway between the dining room and living room are closed, and only the dining room is used. A cheap partition shuts off the side hall from the front hall. They don’t buy coal or repair the ailing furnace. They heat the rooms they live in with two stoves, burning ends from the lumberyard. None of this is important, none of their privations and difficulties and economies are important. What is important? Jokes and luck. They are lucky to be the products of a marriage whose happiness lasted for five years and proclaimed itself at parties and dances and on wonderful escapades. Reminders are all around—gramophone records, and fragile, shapeless dresses made of such materials as apricot georgette and emerald silk moiré, and a picnic hamper with a silver flask. Such happiness was not of the quiet kind; it entailed lots of drinking, and dressing up, with friends—mostly from other places, even from Toronto—who have now faded away, many of them, too, smitten by tragedy, the sudden poverty of those years, the complications.
They hear the knocker banging on the front door, the way no caller with decent manners would bang it.
“I know, I know who that’ll be,” says their mother. “It’ll be Mrs. Loony Buttler, what do you want to bet?” She slips out of her canvas shoes and slides the archway doors open carefully, without a creak. She tiptoes to the front window of the no longer used living room, from which she can squint through the shutters and see the front veranda. “Oh, shoot,” she says. “It is.”
Mrs. Buttler lives in one of the three cement-block houses across the road. She is a tenant. She has white hair, but she pushes it up under a turban made of different-colored pieces of velvet. She wears a long black coat. She has a habit of stopping children on the street and asking them things. Are you just getting home from school now—did you have to stay in? Does your mother know you chew gum? Did you throw bottle caps in my yard?
“Oh, shoot,” their mother says. “There isn’t anybody I’d sooner not see.”
Mrs. Buttler isn’t a constant visitor. She arrives irregularly, with some long rigmarole of complaint, some urgent awful news. Many lies. Then, for the next several weeks, she passes the house without a glance, with the long quick strides and forward-thrust head that take away all the dignity of her black outfit. She is preoccupied and affronted, muttering to herself.
The knocker sounds again, and their mother walks softly to the doorway into the front hall. There she stops. On one side of the big front door is a pane of colored glass with a design so intricate that it’s hard to see through, and on the other, where a pane of colored glass has been broken (one night when we partied a bit too hard, their mother has said), is a sheet of wood. Their mother stands in the doorway barking. Yap-yap-yap, she barks, like an angry little dog shut up alone in the house. Mrs. Buttler’s turbanned head presses against the glass as she tries to see in. She can’t. The little dog barks louder. A frenzy of barking—angry excitement—into which their mother works the words go away, go away, go away. And loony lady, loony lady, loony lady. Go away, loony lady, go away.
Mrs. Buttler stands outside for some time in the white heat. She blocks the light through the glass.
On her next visit she says, “I never knew you had a dog.”
“We don’t,” their mother says. “We’ve never had a dog. Often I think I’d like a dog. But we’ve never had one.”
“Well, I came over here one day, and there was nobody home. Nobody came to the door, and, I could swear to it, I heard a dog barking.”
“It may be a disturbance in your inner ear, Mrs. Buttler,” their mother says next. “You should ask the doctor.”
“I think I could turn into a dog quite easily,” their mother says later. “I think my name would be Skippy.”
They got a name for Mrs. Buttler. Mrs. Buncler, Mrs. Buncle, and finally Mrs. Carbuncle. It suited. Without knowing exactly what a carbuncle was, Joan understood how the name fitted, attaching itself memorably to something knobby, deadened, awkward, intractable in their neighbor’s face and character.
Mrs. Carbuncle had a daughter, Matilda. No husband, just this daughter. When the Fordyces sat out on the side veranda after supper—their mother smoking and Morris smoking, too, like the man of the house—they might see Matilda going around the corner, on her way to the confectionery that stayed open late, or to get a book out of the library before it closed. She never had a friend with her. Who would bring a friend to a house ruled by Mrs. Carbuncle? But Matilda didn’t seem lonely or shy or unhappy. She was beautifully dressed. Mrs. Carbuncle could sew—in fact, that was how she made what money she made, doing tailoring and alterations for Gillespie’s Ladies’ and Men’s Wear. She dressed Matilda in pale colors, often with long white stockings.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy gold hair,” their mother says softly, seeing Matilda pass by. “How can she be Mrs. Carbuncle’s daughter? You tell me!”
Their mother says there is something fishy. She wouldn’t be at all surprised—she wouldn’t be at all surprised—to find out that Matilda is really some rich girl’s child, or the child of some adulterous passion, whom Mrs. Carbuncle is being paid to raise. Perhaps, on the other hand, Matilda was kidnapped as a baby, and knows nothing about it. “Such things happen,” their mother says.
The beauty of Matilda, which prompted this talk, was truly of the captive-princess kind. It was the beauty of storybook illustrations. Long, waving, floating light-brown hair with golden lights in it, which was called blond hair in the days before there were any but the most brazen artificial blondes. Pink-and-white skin, large, mild blue eyes. “The milk of human kindness” was an expression that came mysteriously into Joan’s head when she thought of Matilda. And there was something milky about the blue of Matilda’s eyes, and her skin, and her looks altogether. Something milky and cool and kind—something stupid, possibly. Don’t all those storybook princesses have a tender blur, a veil of stupidity over their blond beauty, an air of unwitting sacrifice, helpless benevolence? All this appeared in Matilda at the age of twelve or thirteen. Morris’s age, in Morris’s room at school. But she did quite well there, so it seemed she wasn’t stupid at all. She was known as a champion speller.
Joan collected every piece of information about Matilda that she could find and became familiar with every outfit that Matilda wore. She schemed to meet her, and because they lived in the same block she often did. Faint with love, Joan noted every variation in Matilda’s appearance. D
id her hair fall forward over her shoulders today or was it pushed back from her cheeks? Had she put a clear polish on her fingernails? Was she wearing the pale-blue rayon blouse with the tiny edging of lace around the collar, which gave her a soft and whimsical look, or the starched white cotton shirt, which turned her into a dedicated student? Matilda owned a string of glass beads, clear pink, the sight of which, on Matilda’s white neck, caused a delicate sweat to break out along the insides of Joan’s arms.
At one time Joan invented other names for her. “Matilda” brought to mind dingy curtains, gray tent flaps, a slack-skinned old woman. How about Sharon? Lilliane? Elizabeth? Then, Joan didn’t know how, the name Matilda became transformed. It started shining like silver. The “il” in it was silver. But not metallic. In Joan’s mind the name gleamed now like a fold of satin.
The matter of greetings was intensely important, and a pulse fluttered in Joan’s neck as she waited. Matilda of course must speak first. She might say “Hi,” which was lighthearted, comradely, or “Hello,” which was gentler and more personal. Once in a while she said “Hello, Joan,” which indicated such special notice and teasing regard that it immediately filled Joan’s eyes with tears and laid on her a shameful, exquisite burden of happiness.
This love dwindled, of course. Like other trials and excitements, it passed away, and Joan’s interest in Matilda Buttler returned to normal. Matilda changed, too. By the time Joan was in high school, Matilda was already working. She got a job in a lawyer’s office; she was a junior clerk. Now that she was making her own money, and was partway out of her mother’s control—only partway, because she still lived at home—she changed her style. It seemed that she wanted to be much less of a princess and much more like everybody else. She got her hair cut short, and wore it in the trim fashion of the time. She started wearing makeup, bright-red lipstick that hardened the shape of her mouth. She dressed the way other girls did—in long, tight slit skirts, and blouses with floppy bows at the neck, and ballerina shoes. She lost her pallor and aloofness. Joan, who was planning to get a scholarship and study art and archeology at the University of Toronto, greeted this Matilda with composure. And the last shred of her worship vanished when Matilda began appearing with a boyfriend.
