The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  Alice Munro’s

  The Beggar Maid

  “Munro has combined the form of the short story with the narrative interest of the novel to provide an unusual kind of literary pleasure. Each of these ten stories is a contemplative and aesthetic whole; each contains a world of complication and suggestion, with its own particular emphasis and texture. Yet moving through each world and in our affections rising clear of all of them is a single novelistic destiny.”

  —New Republic

  “An ingratiating narrative voice immediately whispers confidences, brimful of precise physical and psychological observations. The two main characters, Flo and Rose, come to vivid life.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Alice Munro captures a kaleidoscope of lights and depths. Through the lens of Rose’s eye, she manages to reproduce the vibrant prance of life while scrutinizing the workings of her own narrative art. This is an exhilarating collection.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The rich texture of its narrative and the author’s graceful style make it a considerable accomplishment.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates, Ms.

  “This book … deserves the Canadian Governor General’s Award it took. The book’s strongpoint is the depth of characterization Ms. Munro achieves. I heartily recommend this book to all readers.”

  —Columbus Dispatch

  “It is a spare, astringent, beautiful and, above all, true book. Beggar Maid gets at the heart of our ways with one another.”

  —Dallas News

  “How does one know when one is in the grip of art—of a major talent? One feels it in the assurance, the sensibility behind every line of work; one knows its presence as much from what is withheld as from what is given, or explained. It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  BOOKS BY ALICE MUNRO

  The View from Castle Rock

  Carried Away

  Runaway

  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

  The Love of a Good Woman

  Selected Stories

  Open Secrets

  Friend of My Youth

  The Progress of Love

  The Moons of Jupiter

  The Beggar Maid

  Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

  Lives of Girls and Women

  Dance of the Happy Shades

  First Vintage International Edition, May 1991

  Copyright © 1977, 1978 by Alice Munro

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Canada in 1978 by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited under the title Who Do You Think You Are? First published in the United States under the title The Beggar Maid by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1979.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Some of these stories have been published previously: “Privilege” in Ms., September 1978 (under the title “The Honeyman’s Daughter”); “Simon’s Luck” in Viva, August 1978 (under the title “Emily”); “Spelling” in Weekend, June 1978; “Half a Grapefruit” in Redbook, May 1978; “Mischief” in Viva, April 1978; “Wild Swans” in Toronto Life, March 1978; “Providence” in Redbook, August 1977; “The Beggar Maid” in The New Yorker, June 1977; and “Royal Beatings” in The New Yorker, March 1977.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Munro, Alice.

  [Who do you think you are?]

  The beggar maid : stories of Flo and Rose / by Alice Munro.

  —1st Vintage ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published as: Who do you think you are? 1978.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81458-6

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.M8W47 1991

  813′.54—dc20 90-50492

  v3.1

  To G. Fn.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Royal Beatings

  Privilege

  Half a Grapefruit

  Wild Swans

  The Beggar Maid

  Mischief

  Providence

  Simon’s Luck

  Spelling

  Who Do You Think You Are?

  About the Author

  Royal Beatings

  Royal Beating. That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.

  The word Royal lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking this threat to heart she pondered: how is a beating royal? She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the blood came leaping out like banners. An occasion both savage and splendid. In real life they didn’t approach such dignity, and it was only Flo who tried to supply the event with some high air of necessity and regret. Rose and her father soon got beyond anything presentable.

  Her father was king of the royal beatings. Those Flo gave never amounted to much; they were quick cuffs and slaps dashed off while her attention remained elsewhere. You get out of my road, she would say. You mind your own business. You take that look off your face.

  They lived behind a store in Hanratty, Ontario. There were four of them: Rose, her father, Flo, Rose’s young half brother Brian. The store was really a house, bought by Rose’s father and mother when they married and set up here in the furniture and upholstery repair business. Her mother could do upholstery. From both parents Rose should have inherited clever hands, a quick sympathy with materials, an eye for the nicest turns of mending, but she hadn’t. She was clumsy, and when something broke she couldn’t wait to sweep it up and throw it away.

  Her mother had died. She said to Rose’s father during the afternoon, “I have a feeling that is so hard to describe. It’s like a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on.” She died before night, she had a blood clot on her lung. Rose was a baby in a basket at the time, so of course could not remember any of this. She heard it from Flo, who must have heard it from her father. Flo came along soon afterward, to take over Rose in the basket, marry her father, open up the front room to make a grocery store. Rose, who had known the house only as a store, who had known only Flo for a mother, looked back on the sixteen or so months her parents spent here as an orderly, far gentler and more ceremonious time, with little touches of affluence. She had nothing to go on but some egg cups her mother had bought, with a pattern of vines and birds on them, delicately drawn as if with red ink; the pattern was beginning to wear away. No books or clothes or pictures of her mother remained. Her father must have got rid of them, or else Flo would. Flo’s only story about her mother, the one about her death, was oddly grudging. Flo liked the details of a death: the things people said, the way they protested or tried to get out of bed or swore or laughed (some did those things), but when she said that Rose’s mother mentioned a hard-boiled egg in her chest she made the comparison sound slightly foolish, as if her mother really was the kind of person who might think you could swallow an egg whole.

  Her father had a shed out behind the store, where he worked at his furniture repairing and restoring. He caned chair seats and backs, mended wickerwork, filled cracks, put legs back on, all most admirably and skillfully and cheaply. That was his pride: to startle people with such fine work, such moderate, even ridiculous charges. During the Depression people could not afford to pay more, perhaps, but he continued t
he practice through the war, through the years of prosperity after the war, until he died. He never discussed with Flo what he charged or what was owing. After he died she had to go out and unlock the shed and take all sorts of scraps of paper and torn envelopes from the big wicked-looking hooks that were his files. Many of these she found were not accounts or receipts at all but records of the weather, bits of information about the garden, things he had been moved to write down.

  Ate new potatoes 25th June. Record.

  Dark Day, 1880’s, nothing supernatural. Clouds of ash from forest fires.

  Aug 16, 1938. Giant thunderstorm in evng. Lightning str. Pres. Church, Turberry Twp. Will of God?

  Scald strawberries to remove acid.

  All things are alive. Spinoza.

  Flo thought Spinoza must be some new vegetable he planned to grow, like broccoli or eggplant. He would often try some new thing. She showed the scrap of paper to Rose and asked, did she know what Spinoza was? Rose did know, or had an idea—she was in her teens by that time—but she replied that she did not. She had reached an age where she thought she could not stand to know any more, about her father, or about Flo; she pushed any discovery aside with embarrassment and dread.

  There was a stove in the shed, and many rough shelves covered with cans of paint and varnish, shellac and turpentine, jars of soaking brushes and also some dark sticky bottles of cough medicine. Why should a man who coughed constantly, whose lungs took in a whiff of gas in the War (called, in Rose’s earliest childhood, not the First, but the Last, War) spend all his days breathing fumes of paint and turpentine? At the time, such questions were not asked as often as they are now. On the bench outside Flo’s store several old men from the neighborhood sat gossiping, drowsing, in the warm weather, and some of these old men coughed all the time too. The fact is they were dying, slowly and discreetly, of what was called, without any particular sense of grievance, “the foundry disease.” They had worked all their lives at the foundry in town, and now they sat still, with their wasted yellow faces, coughing, chuckling, drifting into aimless obscenity on the subject of women walking by, or any young girl on a bicycle.

  From the shed came not only coughing, but speech, a continual muttering, reproachful or encouraging, usually just below the level at which separate words could be made out. Slowing down when her father was at a tricky piece of work, taking on a cheerful speed when he was doing something less demanding, sandpapering or painting. Now and then some words would break through and hang clear and nonsensical on the air. When he realized they were out, there would be a quick bit of cover-up coughing, a swallowing, an alert, unusual silence.

  “Macaroni, pepperoni, Botticelli, beans—”

  What could that mean? Rose used to repeat such things to herself. She could never ask him. The person who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space. It would be the worst sort of taste to acknowledge the person who was not supposed to be there; it would not be forgiven. Just the same, she loitered and listened.

  The cloud-capped towers, she heard him say once.

  “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces.”

  That was like a hand clapped against Rose’s chest, not to hurt, but astonish her, to take her breath away. She had to run then, she had to get away. She knew that was enough to hear, and besides, what if he caught her? It would be terrible.

  This was something the same as bathroom noises. Flo had saved up, and had a bathroom put in, but there was no place to put it except in a corner of the kitchen. The door did not fit, the walls were only beaverboard. The result was that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. They were all familiar with each other’s nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in their intimate sighs and growls and pleas and statements. And they were all most prudish people. So no one ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out.

  They lived in a poor part of town. There was Hanratty and West Hanratty, with the river flowing between them. This was West Hanratty. In Hanratty the social structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry workers and factory workers and draymen; in West Hanratty it ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves. Rose thought of her own family as straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. West Hanratty was where the store was and they were, on the straggling tail end of the main street. Across the road from them was a blacksmith shop, boarded up about the time the war started, and a house that had been another store at one time. The Salada Tea sign had never been taken out of the front window; it remained as a proud and interesting decoration though there was no Salada Tea for sale inside. There was just a bit of sidewalk, too cracked and tilted for roller-skating, though Rose longed for roller skates and often pictured herself whizzing along in a plaid skirt, agile and fashionable. There was one street light, a tin flower; then the amenities gave up and there were dirt roads and boggy places, front-yard dumps and strange-looking houses. What made the houses strange-looking were the attempts to keep them from going completely to ruin. With some the attempt had never been made. These were gray and rotted and leaning over, falling into a landscape of scrub hollows, frog ponds, cattails and nettles. Most houses, however, had been patched up with tarpaper, a few fresh shingles, sheets of tin, hammered-out stovepipes, even cardboard. This was, of course, in the days before the war, days of what would later be legendary poverty, from which Rose would remember mostly low-down things—serious-looking anthills and wooden steps, and a cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.

  There was a long truce between Flo and Rose in the beginning. Rose’s nature was growing like a prickly pineapple, but slowly, and secretly, hard pride and skepticism overlapping, to make something surprising even to herself. Before she was old enough to go to school, and while Brian was still in the baby carriage, Rose stayed in the store with both of them—Flo sitting on the high stool behind the counter, Brian asleep by the window; Rose knelt or lay on the wide creaky floorboards working with crayons on pieces of brown paper too torn or irregular to be used for wrapping.

  People who came to the store were mostly from the houses around. Some country people came too, on their way home from town, and a few people from Hanratty, who walked across the bridge. Some people were always on the main street, in and out of stores, as if it was their duty to be always on display and their right to be welcomed. For instance, Becky Tyde.

  Becky Tyde climbed up on Flo’s counter, made room for herself beside an open tin of crumbly jam-filled cookies.

  “Are these any good?” she said to Flo, and boldly began to eat one. “When are you going to give us a job, Flo?”

  “You could go and work in the butcher shop,” said Flo innocently. “You could go and work for your brother.”

  “Roberta?” said Becky with a stagey sort of contempt. “You think I’d work for him?” Her brother who ran the butcher shop was named Robert but often called Roberta, because of his meek and nervous ways. Becky Tyde laughed. Her laugh was loud and noisy like an engine bearing down on you.

  She was a big-headed loud-voiced dwarf, with a mascot’s sexless swagger, a red velvet tam, a twisted neck that forced her to hold her head on one side, always looking up and sideways. She wore little polished high-heeled shoes, real lady’s shoes. Rose watched her shoes, being scared of the rest of her, of her laugh and her neck. She knew from Flo that Becky Tyde had been sick with polio as a child, that was why her neck was twisted and why she had not grown any taller. It was hard to believe that she had started out differently, that she had ever been normal. Flo said she was not cracked, she had as much brains as anybody, but she knew she could get away with anything.


  “You know I used to live out here?” Becky said, noticing Rose. “Hey! What’s-your-name! Didn’t I used to live out here, Flo?”

  “If you did it was before my time,” said Flo, as if she didn’t know anything.

  “That was before the neighborhood got so downhill. Excuse me saying so. My father built his house out here and he built his slaughterhouse and we had half an acre of orchard.”

  “Is that so?” said Flo, using her humoring voice, full of false geniality, humility even. “Then why did you ever move away?”

  “I told you, it got to be such a downhill neighborhood,” said Becky. She would put a whole cookie in her mouth if she felt like it, let her cheeks puff out like a frog’s. She never told any more.

  Flo knew anyway, and who didn’t. Everyone knew the house, red brick with the veranda pulled off and the orchard, what was left of it, full of the usual outflow—car seats and washing machines and bedsprings and junk. The house would never look sinister, in spite of what had happened in it, because there was so much wreckage and confusion all around.

  Becky’s old father was a different kind of butcher from her brother according to Flo. A bad-tempered Englishman. And different from Becky in the matter of mouthiness. His was never open. A skinflint, a family tyrant. After Becky had polio he wouldn’t let her go back to school. She was seldom seen outside the house, never outside the yard. He didn’t want people gloating. That was what Becky said, at the trial. Her mother was dead by that time and her sisters married. Just Becky and Robert at home. People would stop Robert on the road and ask him, “How about your sister, Robert? Is she altogether better now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she do the housework? Does she get your supper?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is your father good to her, Robert?”

  The story being that the father beat them, had beaten all his children and beaten his wife as well, beat Becky more now because of her deformity, which some people believed he had caused (they did not understand about polio). The stories persisted and got added to. The reason that Becky was kept out of sight was now supposed to be her pregnancy, and the father of the child was supposed to be her own father. Then people said it had been born, and disposed of.