The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  “On your legs?” said Jocelyn. “You strap them on your legs? Oh, false calves! False calves! I thought you were talking about false calves! False baby cows!”

  Anything like that could set them off.

  “False baby cows!”

  “False tits, false bums, false baby cows!”

  The vacuum-cleaning woman said they were always butting in and spoiling other people’s conversations and she didn’t see what was so funny about dirty language. She said if they didn’t stop the way they carried on they would sour their milk.

  “I’ve been wondering if maybe mine is sour,” Jocelyn said. “It’s an awfully disgusting color.”

  “What color?” Rose asked.

  “Well. Sort of blue.”

  “Good God, maybe it’s ink!”

  The vacuum-cleaning woman said she was going to tell the nurse they were swearing. She said she was no prude, but. She asked if they were fit to be mothers. How was Jocelyn going to manage to wash diapers, when anybody could see she never washed her dressing gown?

  Jocelyn said she planned to use moss, she was an Indian.

  “I can believe it,” the woman said.

  After this Jocelyn and Rose prefaced many remarks with: I’m no prude, but.

  “I’m no prude but would you look at this pudding!”

  “I’m no prude but it feels like this kid has a full set of teeth.”

  The nurse said, wasn’t it time for them to grow up?

  Walking in the halls, Jocelyn told Rose that she was twenty-five, that her baby was to be called Adam, that she had a two-year-old boy at home, named Jerome, that her husband’s name was Clifford and that he played the violin for a living. He played in the Vancouver Symphony. They were poor. Jocelyn came from Massachusetts and had gone to Wellesley College. Her father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a pediatrician. Rose told Jocelyn that she came from a small town in Ontario and that Patrick came from Vancouver Island and that his parents did not approve of the marriage.

  “In the town I come from,” Rose said, exaggerating, “everybody says yez. What’ll yez have? How’re yez doin?”

  “Yez?”

  “Youse. It’s the plural of you.”

  “Oh. Like Brooklyn. And James Joyce. Who does Patrick work for?”

  “His family’s store. His family has a department store.”

  “So aren’t you rich now? Aren’t you too rich to be in the ward?”

  “We just spent all our money on a house Patrick wanted.”

  “Didn’t you want it?”

  “Not so much as he did.”

  That was something Rose had never said before.

  They plunged into more random revelations.

  Jocelyn hated her mother. Her mother had made her sleep in a room with white organdy curtains and had encouraged her to collect ducks. By the time she was thirteen Jocelyn had probably the largest collection in the world of rubber ducks, ceramic ducks, wooden ducks, pictures of ducks, embroidered ducks. She had also written what she described as a hideously precocious story called “The Marvelous Great Adventures of Oliver the Grand Duck,” which her mother actually got printed and distributed to friends and relatives at Christmas time.

  “She is the sort of person who just covers everything with a kind of rotten smarminess. She sort of oozes over everything. She never talks in a normal voice, never. She’s coy. She’s just so filthy coy. Naturally she’s a great success as a pediatrician. She has these rotten coy little names for all the parts of your body.”

  Rose, who would have been delighted with organdy curtains, perceived the fine lines, the ways of giving offense, that existed in Jocelyn’s world. It seemed a much less crude and provisional world than her own. She doubted if she could tell Jocelyn about Hanratty but she began to try. She delivered Flo and the store in broad strokes. She played up the poverty. She didn’t really have to. The true facts of her childhood were exotic enough to Jocelyn, and of all things, enviable.

  “It seems more real,” Jocelyn said. “I know that’s a romantic notion.”

  They talked of their youthful ambitions. (They really believed their youth to be past.) Rose said she had wanted to be an actress though she was too much of a coward ever to walk on a stage. Jocelyn had wanted to be a writer but was shamed out of it by memories of the Grand Duck.

  “Then I met Clifford,” she said. “When I saw what real talent was, I knew that I would probably just be fooling around, trying to write, and I’d be better off nurturing him, or whatever the hell it is I do for him. He is really gifted. Sometimes he’s a squalid sort of person. He gets away with it because he is really gifted.”

  “I think that is a romantic notion,” Rose said firmly and jealously. “That gifted people ought to get away with things.”

  “Do you? But great artists always have.”

  “Not women.”

  “But women usually aren’t great artists, not in the same way.”

  These were the ideas of most well-educated, thoughtful, even unconventional or politically radical young women of the time. One of the reasons Rose did not share them was that she had not been well educated. Jocelyn said to her, much later in their friendship, that one of the reasons she found it so interesting to talk to Rose, from the start, was that Rose had ideas but was uneducated. Rose was surprised at this, and mentioned the college she had attended in Western Ontario. Then she saw by an embarrassed withdrawal or regret, a sudden lack of frankness in Jocelyn’s face—very unusual with her—that that was exactly what Jocelyn had meant.

  After the difference of opinion about artists, and about men and women artists, Rose took a good look at Clifford when he came visiting in the evening. She thought him wan, self-indulgent, and neurotic-looking. Further discoveries concerning the tact, the effort, the sheer physical energy Jocelyn expended on this marriage (it was she who fixed the leaky taps and dug up the clogged drains) made Rose certain that Jocelyn was wasting herself, she was mistaken. She had a feeling that Jocelyn did not see much point in marriage with Patrick, either.

  At first the party was easier than Rose had expected. She had been afraid that she would be too dressed-up; she would have liked to wear her toreador pants but Patrick would never have stood for it. But only a few of the girls were in slacks. The rest wore stockings, earrings, outfits much like her own. As at any gathering of young women at that time, three or four were noticeably pregnant. And most of the men were in suits and shirts and ties, like Patrick. Rose was relieved. Not only did she want Patrick to fit into the party; she wanted him to accept the people there, to be convinced they were not all freaks. When Patrick was a student he had taken her to concerts and plays and did not seem overly suspicious of the people who participated in them; indeed he rather favored these things, because they were detested by his family, and at that time—the time he chose Rose—he was having a brief rebellion against his family. Once he and Rose had gone to Toronto and sat in the Chinese temple room at the Museum, looking at the frescoes. Patrick told her how they were brought in small pieces from Shansi province; he seemed quite proud of his knowledge, and at the same time disarmingly, uncharacteristically humble, admitting he had got it all on a tour. It was since he had gone to work that he had developed harsh opinions and delivered wholesale condemnations. Modern Art was a Hoax. Avant-garde plays were filthy. Patrick had a special, mincing, spitting way of saying avant-garde, making the words seem disgustingly pretentious. And so they were, Rose thought. In a way, she could see what he meant. She could see too many sides of things; Patrick did not have that problem.

  Except for some great periodic fights she was very docile with Patrick, she tried to keep in favor. It was not easy to do so. Even before they were married he had a habit of delivering reproving lectures, in response to a simple question or observation. Sometimes in those days she would ask him a question in the hope that he would show off some superior knowledge that she could admire him for, but she was usually sorry she had asked, the answer was so long and had
such a scolding tone, and the knowledge wouldn’t be so superior, either. She did want to admire him, and respect him; it seemed that was a leap she was always on the edge of taking.

  Later she thought that she did respect Patrick, but not in the way he wanted to be respected, and she did love him, not in the way he wanted to be loved. She didn’t know it then. She thought she knew something about him, she thought she knew that he didn’t really want to be whatever he was zealously making himself into. That arrogance might be called respect; that high-handedness, love. It didn’t do anything to make him happy.

  A few men wore jeans and turtlenecks or sweatshirts. Clifford was one of them, all in black. It was the time of the beatniks in San Francisco. Jocelyn had called Rose up on the phone and read her Howl. Clifford’s skin looked very tanned, against the black, his hair was long for the time and almost as light a color as unbleached cotton; his eyes too were very light in color, a bright gray-blue. He looked small and catlike to Rose, rather effeminate; she hoped Patrick wouldn’t be too put off by him.

  There was beer to drink, and a wine punch. Jocelyn, who was a splendid cook, was stirring a pot of jambalaya. Rose make a trip to the bathroom to remove herself from Patrick, who seemed to want to stick close to her (she thought he was being a watchdog; she forgot that he might be shy). When she came out he had moved on. She drank three cups of punch in quick succession and was introduced to the woman who had written the play. To Rose’s surprise this woman was one of the drabbest, least confident-looking people in the room.

  “I liked your play,” Rose told her. As a matter of fact she had found it mystifying, and Patrick had thought it was revolting. It seemed to be about a woman who ate her own children. Rose knew that was symbolic, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was symbolic of.

  “Oh, but the production was terrible!” the woman said. In her embarrassment, her excitement and eagerness to talk about her play, she sprayed Rose with punch. “They made it so literal. I was afraid it would just come across as gruesome and I meant it to be delicate, I meant it to be so different from the way they made it.” She started telling Rose everything that had gone wrong, the miscasting, the chopping of the most important—the crucial—lines. Rose felt flattered, listening to these details, and tried inconspicuously to wipe away the spray.

  “But you did see what I meant?” the woman said.

  “Oh, yes!”

  Clifford poured Rose another cup of punch and smiled at her.

  “Rose, you look delicious.”

  Delicious seemed an odd word for Clifford to use. Perhaps he was drunk. Or perhaps, hating parties altogether as Jocelyn said he did, he had taken on a role; he was the sort of man who told a girl she looked delicious. He might be adept at disguises, as Rose thought she herself was getting to be. She went on talking to the writer and a man who taught English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. She too might have been poor and clever, radical and irreverent, for all anybody could tell.

  A man and a girl were embracing passionately in the narrow hall. Whenever anybody wanted to get through, this couple had to separate, but they continued looking at each other, and did not even close their mouths. The sight of those wet open mouths made Rose shiver. She had never been embraced like that in her life, never had her mouth opened like that. Patrick thought French-kissing was disgusting.

  A little bald man named Cyril had stationed himself outside the bathroom door, and was kissing any girl who came out, saying, “Welcome, sweetheart, so glad you could come, so glad you went.”

  “Cyril is awful,” the woman writer said. “Cyril thinks he has to try to act like a poet. He can’t think of anything to do but hang around the john and upset people. He thinks he’s outrageous.”

  “Is he a poet?” Rose said.

  The lecturer in English Literature said, “He told me he had burned all his poems.”

  “How flamboyant of him,” Rose said. She was delighted with herself for saying this, and with them for laughing.

  The lecturer began to think of Tom Swifties.

  “I can never think of any of those things,” said the writer mournfully, “I care too much about language.”

  Loud voices were coming from the living room. Rose recognized Patrick’s voice, soaring over and subduing everyone else’s. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to cover him up—she knew some disaster was on the way—but just then a tall, curly-haired, elated-looking man came through the hall, pushing the passionate couple unceremoniously apart, holding up his hands for attention.

  “Listen to this,” he said to the whole kitchen. “There’s this guy in the living room you wouldn’t believe him. Listen.”

  There must have been a conversation about Indians going on in the living room. Now Patrick had taken it over.

  “Take them away,” said Patrick. “Take them away from their parents as soon as they’re born and put them in a civilized environment and educate them and they will turn out just as good as whites any day.” No doubt he thought he was expressing liberal views. If they thought this was amazing, they should have got him on the execution of the Rosenbergs or the trial of Alger Hiss or the necessity for nuclear testing.

  Some girl said mildly, “Well, you know, there is their own culture.”

  “Their culture is done for,” said Patrick. “Kaput.” This was a word he was using a good deal right now. He could use some words, clichés, editorial phrases—massive reappraisal was one of them—with such relish and numbing authority that you would think he was their originator, or at least that the very fact of his using them gave them weight and luster.

  “They want to be civilized,” he said. “The smarter ones do.”

  “Well, perhaps they don’t consider they’re exactly uncivilized,” said the girl with an icy demureness that was lost on Patrick.

  “Some people need a push.”

  The self-congratulatory tones, the ripe admonishment, caused the man in the kitchen to throw up his hands, and wag his head in delight and disbelief. “This has got to be a Socred politician.”

  As a matter of fact Patrick did vote Social Credit.

  “Yes, well, like it or not,” he was saying, “they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.”

  “Kicking and screaming?” someone repeated.

  “Kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,” said Patrick, who never minded saying anything again.

  “What an interesting expression. So human as well.”

  Wouldn’t he understand now, that he was being cornered, being baited and laughed at? But Patrick, being cornered, could only grow more thunderous. Rose could not listen any longer. She headed for the back passage, which was full of all the boots, coats, bottles, tubs, toys, that Jocelyn and Clifford had pitched out of the way for the party. Thank God it was empty of people. She went out of the back door and stood burning and shivering in the cool wet night. Her feelings were as confused as anybody’s can get. She was humiliated, she was ashamed of Patrick. But she knew that it was his style that most humiliated her, and that made her suspect something corrupt and frivolous in herself. She was angry at those other people who were cleverer, or at least far quicker, than he was. She wanted to think badly of them. What did they care about Indians, really? Given a chance to behave decently to an Indian, Patrick might just come out ahead of them. This was a long shot, but she had to believe it. Patrick was a good person. His opinions were not good, but he was. The core of Patrick, Rose believed, was simple, pure and trustworthy. But how was she to get at it, to reassure herself, much less reveal it to others?

  She heard the back door close and was afraid that Jocelyn had come out looking for her. Jocelyn was not someone who could believe in Patrick’s core. She thought him stiff-necked, thick-skulled, and essentially silly.

  It was not Jocelyn. It was Clifford. Rose didn’t want to have to say anything to him. Slightly drunk as she was, woebegone, wet-faced from the rain, she looked at him without welcome. But he
put his arms around her and rocked her.

  “Oh Rose. Rose baby. Never mind. Rose.”

  So this was Clifford.

  For five minutes or so they were kissing, murmuring, shivering, pressing, touching. They returned to the party by the front door. Cyril was there. He said, “Hey, wow, where have you two been?”

  “Walking in the rain,” said Clifford coolly. The same light possibly hostile voice in which he had told Rose she looked delicious. The Patrick-baiting had stopped. Conversation had become looser, drunker, more irresponsible. Jocelyn was serving jambalaya. She went to the bathroom to dry her hair and put lipstick on her rubbed-bare mouth. She was transformed, invulnerable. The first person she met coming out was Patrick. She had a wish to make him happy. She didn’t care now what he had said, or would say.

  “I don’t think we’ve met, sir,” she said, in the tiny flirtatious voice she used with him sometimes, when they were feeling easy together. “But you may kiss my hand.”

  “For crying out loud,” said Patrick heartily, and he did squeeze her and kiss her, with a loud smacking noise, on the cheek. He always smacked when he kissed. And his elbows always managed to dig in somewhere and hurt her.

  “Enjoying yourself?” Rose said.

  “Not bad, not bad.”

  During the rest of the evening, of course, she played the game of watching Clifford while pretending not to watch him, and it seemed to her he was doing the same, and their eyes met, a few times, without expression, sending a perfectly clear message that rocked her on her feet. She saw him quite differently now. His body that had seemed small and tame now appeared to her light and slippery and full of energy; he was like a lynx or a bobcat. He had his tan from skiing. He went up Seymour Mountain and skied. An expensive hobby, but one which Jocelyn felt could not be denied him, because of the problems he had with his image. His masculine image, as a violinist, in this society. So Jocelyn said. Jocelyn had told Rose all about Clifford’s background: the arthritic father, the small grocery store in a town in upstate New York, the poor tough neighborhood. She had talked about his problems as a child; the inappropriate talent, the grudging parents, the jeering schoolmates. His childhood left him bitter, Jocelyn said. But Rose no longer believed that Jocelyn had the last word on Clifford.