by Alice Munro
A print of St. Giles Church recalls the year she and her husband spent in Britain—her own embarrassing postgraduate homesickness and transatlantic affection. And here on the glass tray on top of the coffee table, politely and prominently displayed, is a book she sent to Morris. It’s a history of machinery. There are sketches of machines in it, and plans of machines, from the days before photography, from Greek and Egyptian times. Then photographs from the nineteenth century to the present day—road machines, farm machines, factory machines, sometimes shot from a distance, sometimes on the horizon, sometimes seen from close up and low down. Some photographs stress the workings of the machines, both minute and prodigious; others strive to make machines look as splendid as castles or as thrilling as monsters. “What a wonderful book for my brother!” Joan remembers saying to the friend who was with her in the bookstore. “My brother is crazy about machinery.” Crazy about machinery—that was what she said.
Now she wonders what Morris really thought of this book. Would he like it at all? He wouldn’t actually dislike it. He might be puzzled by it, he might discount it. For it wasn’t true that he was crazy about machinery. He used machinery—that was what machinery was for.
Morris takes her on drives in the long spring evenings. He takes her around town and out into the countryside, where she can see what enormous fields, what vistas of corn or beans or wheat or clover, those machines have enabled the farmers to create, what vast and parklike lawns the power mowers have brought into being. Clumps of lilacs bloom over the cellars of abandoned farmhouses. Farms have been consolidated, Morris tells her. He knows the value. Not just houses and buildings but fields and trees, woodlots and hills appear in his mind with a cash value and a history of cash value attached to them, just as every person he mentions is defined as someone who has got ahead or has not got ahead. Such a way of looking at things is not at all in favor at this time—it is thought to be unimaginative and old-fashioned and callous and destructive. Morris is not aware of this, and his talk of money rambles on with a calm enjoyment. He throws in a pun here and there. He chuckles as he tells of certain chancy transactions or extravagant debacles.
While Joan listens to Morris, and talks a little, her thoughts drift on a familiar, irresistible underground stream. She thinks about John Brolier. He is a geologist, who once worked for an oil company, and now teaches (science and drama) at what is called an alternate school. He used to be a person who was getting ahead, and now he is not getting ahead. Joan met him at a dinner party in Ottawa a couple of months ago. He was visiting friends who were also friends of hers. He was not accompanied by his wife, but he had brought two of his children. He told Joan that if she got up early enough the next morning he would take her to see something called “frazil ice” on the Ottawa River.
She thinks of his face and his voice and wonders what could compel her at this time to want this man. It does not seem to have much to do with her marriage. Her marriage seems to her commodious enough—she and her husband have twined together, developing a language, a history, a way of looking at things. They talk all the time. But they leave each other alone, too. The miseries and nastiness that surfaced during the early years have eased or diminished.
What she wants from John Brolier appears to be something that a person not heard from in her marriage, and perhaps not previously heard from in her life, might want. What is it about him? She doesn’t think that he is particularly intelligent and she isn’t sure that he is trustworthy. (Her husband is both intelligent and trustworthy.) He is not as good-looking as her husband, not as “attractive” a man. Yet he attracts Joan, and she already has a suspicion that he has attracted other women. Because of his intensity, a kind of severity, a deep seriousness—all focussed on sex. His interest won’t be too quickly satisfied, too lightly turned aside. She feels this, feels the promise of it, though so far she is not sure of anything.
Her husband was included in the invitation to look at the frazil ice. But it was only Joan who got up and drove to the riverbank. There she met John Brolier and his two children and his hosts’ two children in the freezing, pink, snowbound winter dawn. And he really did tell her about frazil ice, about how it forms over the rapids without ever quite getting a chance to freeze solid, and how when it is swept over a deep spot it mounds up immediately, magnificently. He said that this was how they had discovered where the deep holes were in the riverbed. And he said, “Look, if you can ever get away—if it’s possible—will you let me know? I really want to see you. You know I do. I want to, very much.”
He gave her a piece of paper that he must have had ready. A box number written on it, of a postal station in Toronto. He didn’t even touch her fingers. His children were capering around, trying to get his attention. When can we go skating? Can we go to the warplanes museum? Can we go and see the Lancaster Bomber? (Joan saved this up to tell her husband, who would enjoy it, in view of John Brolier’s pacifism.)
She did tell her husband, and he teased her. “I think that jerk with the monk’s haircut has taken a shine to you,” he said. How could her husband believe that she could fall in love with a man who wore a fringe of thinning hair combed down over his forehead, who had rather narrow shoulders and a gap between his front teeth, five children from two wives, an inadequate income, an excitable and pedantic way of talking, and a proclaimed interest in the writings of Alan Watts? (Even when the time came when he had to believe it, he couldn’t.)
When she wrote, she mentioned lunch, a drink, or coffee. She did not tell him how much time she had left open. Perhaps that was all that would happen, she thinks. She would go to see her woman friend after all. She has put herself, though cautiously, at this man’s disposal. Walking to the post office, checking her looks in shopwindows, she feels herself loosed, in jeopardy. She has done this, she hardly knows why. She only knows that she cannot go back to the life she was living or to the person she was before she went out that Sunday morning to the river. Her life of shopping and housekeeping and married lovemaking and part-time work in the art-gallery bookstore, and dinner parties and holidays and ski outings at Camp Fortune—she cannot accept that as her only life, she cannot continue it without her sustaining secret. She believes that she does mean to continue it, and in order to continue it she must have this other. This other what? This investigation—to herself she still thinks of it as an investigation.
Put like that, what she was up to might sound coldhearted indeed. But how can a person be called coldhearted who walks to the post office every morning in such a fainthearted condition, who trembles and holds her breath as she turns the key in the lock, and walks back to Morris’s apartment feeling so drained, bewildered, deserted? Unless this, too, is part of what she is investigating?
Of course she has to stop and talk to people about her son and daughter and her husband and her life in Ottawa. She has to recognize high-school friends and recall her childhood, and all this seems tedious and irritating to her. The houses themselves, as she walks past—their tidy yards and bright poppies and peonies in bloom—seem tedious to the point of being disgusting. The voices of people who talk to her strike her as harsh and stupid and self-satisfied. She feels as if she had been shunted off to some corner of the world where the real life and thoughts, the uproar and energy of the last few years have not penetrated at all. They have not very effectively penetrated Ottawa, either, but there, at least, people have heard rumors, they have tried imitations, they have got wind of what might be called profound, as well as trivial, changes of fashion. (Joan and her husband, in fact, make fun of some of these people—those who showily take up trends, go to encounter groups and holistic healers, and give up drink for dope.) Here even the trivial changes have hardly been heard of. Back in Ottawa next week, and feeling especially benevolent toward her husband, eager to fill up their time together with chat, Joan will say, “I’d have given thanks if somebody had even handed me an alfalfa-sprout sandwich. Really. It was that bad.”
“No, I haven’t room” is
what Joan keeps saying as she and Morris go through the boxes. There are things here she would have thought she’d want, but she doesn’t. “No. I can’t think where I’d put it.” No, she says, to their mother’s dance dresses, the fragile silk and cobwebby georgette. They’d fall apart the first time anybody put them on, and Claire, her daughter, will never be interested in that kind of thing—she wants to be a horse trainer. No to the five wineglasses that didn’t get broken, and no to the leatherette-bound copies of Lever and Lover, George Borrow, A. S. M. Hutchinson. “I have too much stuff now,” she says sadly as Morris adds all this to the pile to go to the auction rooms. He shakes out the little rug that used to lie on the floor in front of the china cabinet, out of the sun, and that they were not supposed to walk on because it was valuable.
“I saw one exactly like that a couple of months ago,” she says. “It was in a secondhand store, not even an antique store. I was in there looking for old comics and posters for Rob’s birthday. I saw one just the same. At first I didn’t even know where I’d seen it before. Then I felt quite shocked. As if there were only supposed to be one of them in the world.”
“How much did they want for it?” says Morris.
“I don’t know. It was in better condition.”
She doesn’t understand yet that she doesn’t want to take anything back to Ottawa because she herself won’t be staying in the house there for much longer. The time of accumulation, of acquiring and arranging, of padding up the corners of her life, has come to an end. (It will return years later, and she will wish she had saved at least the wineglasses.) In Ottawa, in September, her husband will ask her if she still wants to buy wicker furniture for the sunroom, and if she would like to go to the wicker store, where they’re having a sale on summer stock. A thrill of distaste will go through her then—at the very thought of looking for chairs and tables, paying for them, arranging them in the room—and she will finally know what is the matter.
On Friday morning there is a letter in the box with Joan’s name typed on it. She doesn’t look at the postmark; she tears the envelope open gratefully, runs her eyes over it greedily, reads without understanding. It seems to be a chain letter. A parody of a chain letter, a joke. If she breaks the chain, it says, DIRE CALAMITY will befall her. Her fingernails will rot and her teeth will grow moss. Warts as big as cauliflowers will sprout on her chin, and her friends will avoid her. What can this be, thinks Joan. A code in which John Brolier has seen fit to write to her? Then it occurs to her to look at the postmark, and she does, and she sees that the letter comes from Ottawa. It comes from her son, obviously. Rob loves this sort of joke. His father would have typed the envelope for him.
She thinks of her child’s delight when he sealed up the envelope and her own state of mind when she tore it open.
Treachery and confusion.
Late that afternoon, she and Morris open the trunk, which they have left till the last. She takes out a suit of evening clothes—a man’s evening clothes, still in a plastic sheath, as if they had not been worn since being cleaned. “This must be Father’s,” she says. “Look, Father’s old evening clothes.”
“No, that’s mine,” says Morris. He takes the suit from her, shakes down the plastic, stands holding it out in front of him over both arms. “That’s my old soup-and-fish—it ought to be hanging up in the closet.”
“What did you get it for?” Joan says. “A wedding?” Some of Morris’s workmen lead lives much more showy and ceremonious than his, and they invite him to elaborate weddings.
“That, and some things I have to go to with Matilda,” Morris says. “Dinner dances, big dress-up kinds of things.”
“With Matilda?” says Joan. “Matilda Buttler?”
“That’s right. She doesn’t use her married name.” Morris seems to be answering a slightly different question, not the one Joan meant to ask. “Strictly speaking, I guess she doesn’t have a married name.”
Joan hears again the story she just now remembers having heard before—or read before, in their mother’s long, lively letters. Matilda Buttler ran off to marry her boyfriend. The expression “ran off” is their mother’s, and Morris seems to use it with unconscious emphasis, a son’s respect—it’s as if the only way he can properly talk about this, or have the right to talk about it, were in his mother’s language. Matilda ran off and married that man with the mustache, and it turned out that her mother’s suspicions, her extravagant accusations had for once some grounds. The boyfriend turned out to be a bigamist. He had a wife in England, which was where he came from. After he had been with Matilda three or four years—fortunately, there were no children—the other wife, the real wife, tracked him down. The marriage to Matilda was annulled; Matilda came back to Logan, came back to live with her mother, and got a job in the courthouse.
“How could she?” says Joan. “Of all the stupid things to do.”
“Well. She was young,” says Morris, with a trace of stubbornness or discomfort in his voice.
“I don’t mean that. I mean coming back.”
“Well, she had her mother,” Morris says, apparently without irony. “I guess she didn’t have anybody else.”
Looming above Joan, with his dark-lensed eye, and the suit laid like a body over his arms, he looks gloomy and troubled. His face and neck are unevenly flushed, mottled. His chin trembles slightly and he bites down on his lower lip. Does he know how his looks give him away? When he starts to talk again, it’s in a reasonable, explanatory tone. He says that he guesses it didn’t much matter to Matilda where she lived. In a way, according to her, her life was over. And that was where he, Morris, came into the picture. Because every once in a while Matilda had to go to functions. Political banquets. Retirement banquets. Functions. It was a part of her job, and it would be awkward if she didn’t go. But it was also awkward for her to go alone—she needed an escort. And she couldn’t go with a man who might get ideas, not understanding how things stood. Not understanding that Matilda’s life, or a certain part of Matilda’s life, was over. She needed somebody who understood the whole business and didn’t need explanations. “Which is me,” says Morris.
“Why does she think that way?” says Joan. “She’s not so old. I bet she’s still good-looking. It wasn’t her fault. Is she still in love with him?”
“I don’t think it’s my place to ask her any questions.”
“Oh, Morris!” Joan says, in a fond dismissive voice that surprises her, it sounds so much like her mother’s. “I bet she is. In love with him still.”
Morris goes off to hang his evening clothes in a closet in the apartment, where they can wait for his next summons to be Matilda’s escort.
In bed that night, lying awake, looking out at the street light shining through the fresh leaves on the square, squat tower of the Baptist church, Joan has something to think about besides her own plight. (She thinks of that, too, of course.) She thinks of Morris and Matilda dancing. She sees them in Holiday Inn ballrooms, on golf-club dance floors, wherever it is that the functions are held. In their unfashionable formal clothes, Matilda’s hair in a perfect sprayed bouffant, Morris’s face glistening with the sweat of courteous effort. But it probably isn’t an effort; they probably dance very well together. They are so terribly, perfectly balanced, each with stubbornly preserved and wholeheartedly accepted flaws. Flaws they could quite easily disregard or repair. But they would never do that. Morris in love with Matilda—in that stern, unfulfilled, lifelong way—and she in love with her bigamist, stubbornly obsessed with her own mistake and disgrace. They dance in Joan’s mind’s eye—sedate and absurd, romantic. Who but Morris after all, with his head full of mortgages and contracts, could turn out to be such a romantic?
She envies him. She envies them.
She has been in the habit of putting herself to sleep with a memory of John Brolier’s voice—his hasty, lowered voice when he said, “I want to, very much.” Or she pictured his face; it was a medieval face, she thought—long and pale and bony, with
the smile she dismissed as tactical, the sober, glowing, not dismissible dark eyes. Her imagining won’t work tonight; it won’t open the gates for her into foggy, tender territory. She isn’t able to place herself anywhere but here, on the hard single bed in Morris’s apartment—in her real and apparent life. And nothing that works for Morris and Matilda is going to work for her. Not self-denial, the exaltation of balked desires, no kind of high-flown helplessness. She is not to be so satisfied.
She knows that, and she knows what she will have to do. She casts her mind ahead—inadmissibly, shamefully, she casts her mind ahead, fumbling for the shape of the next lover.
That won’t be necessary.
What Joan has forgotten altogether is that mail comes to small-town post offices on Saturday. Saturday isn’t a mailless day here. Morris has gone to see what’s in his box; he hands her the letter. The letter sets up a time and place. It is very brief, and signed only with John Brolier’s initials. This is wise, of course. Such brevity, such caution, is not altogether pleasing to Joan, but in her relief, her transformation, she doesn’t dwell on it.
She tells Morris the story she meant to tell him had the letter come earlier. She has been summoned by her college friend, who got word that she was here. While she washes her hair and packs her things, Morris takes her car to the cut-rate gas bar north of town and fills up the tank.
Waving goodbye to Morris, she doesn’t see any suspicion on his face. But perhaps a little disappointment. He has two days less to be with someone now, two days more to be alone. He wouldn’t admit to such a feeling. Maybe she imagines it. She imagines it because she has a feeling that she’s waving to her husband and her children as well, to everybody who knows her, except the man she’s going to meet. All so easily, flawlessly deceived. And she feels compunction, certainly. She is smitten by their innocence; she recognizes an irreparable tear in her life. This is genuine—her grief and guilt at this moment are genuine, and they’ll never altogether vanish. But they won’t get in her way, either. She is more than glad; she feels that she has no choice but to be going.
