The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  Simon’s Luck

  Rose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations. She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night family suppers. It’s no good telling herself she wouldn’t be long inside there, chattering and getting drunk, or spooning up the gravy, before she’d wish she was walking the streets. She thinks she could take on any hospitality. She could go to parties in rooms hung with posters, lit by lamps with Coca-Cola shades, everything crumbly and askew; or else in warm professional rooms with lots of books, and brass rubbings, and maybe a skull or two; even in the recreation rooms she can just see the tops of, through the basement windows: rows of beer steins, hunting horns, drinking horns, guns. She could go and sit on Lurex-threaded sofas under hangings of black velvet displaying mountains, galleons, polar bears executed in brushed wool. She would like very much to be dishing up a costly cabinet de diplomate out of a cut-glass bowl in a rich dining room with a big gleaming belly of sideboard behind her, and a dim picture of horses feeding, cows feeding, sheep feeding, on badly painted purple grass. Or she could do as well with batter pudding in the eating nook of a kitchen in a little stucco house by the bus stop, plaster pears and peaches decorating the wall, ivy curling out of little brass pots. Rose is an actress; she can fit in anywhere.

  She does get asked to parties. About two years ago, she was at a party in a high-rise apartment building in Kingston. The windows looked out on Lake Ontario and Wolfe Island. Rose didn’t live in Kingston. She lived up-country; she had been teaching drama for two years at a community college. Some people were surprised that she would do this. They did not know how little money an actress might make; they thought that being well-known automatically meant being well-off.

  She had driven down to Kingston just for this party, a fact which slightly shamed her. She had not met the hostess before. She had known the host last year, when he was teaching at the community college and living with another girl.

  The hostess, whose name was Shelley, took Rose into the bedroom to put down her coat. Shelley was a thin, solemn-looking girl, a true blonde, with nearly white eyebrows, hair long and thick and straight as if cut from a block of wood. It seemed that she took her waif style seriously. Her voice was low and mournful, making Rose’s own voice, her greeting of a moment ago, sound altogether too sprightly in her own ears.

  In a basket at the foot of the bed a tortoiseshell cat was suckling four tiny, blind kittens.

  “That’s Tasha,” the hostess said. “We can look at her kittens but we can’t touch them, else she wouldn’t feed them anymore.”

  She knelt down by the basket, crooning, talking to the mother cat with an intense devotion that Rose thought affected. The shawl around her shoulders was black, rimmed with jet beads. Some beads were crooked, some were missing. It was a genuine old shawl, not an imitation. Her limp, slightly yellowed, eyelet-embroidered dress was genuine too, though probably a petticoat in the first place. Such clothes took looking for.

  On the other side of the spool bed was a large mirror, hung suspiciously high, and tilted. Rose tried to get a look at herself when the girl was bent over the basket. It is very hard to look in the mirror when there is another, and particularly a younger, woman in the room. Rose was wearing a flowered cotton dress, a long dress with a tucked bodice and puffed sleeves, which was too short in the waist and too tight in the bust to be comfortable. There was something wrongly youthful or theatrical about it; perhaps she was not slim enough to wear that style. Her reddish-brown hair was dyed at home. Lines ran both ways under her eyes, trapping little diamonds of darkened skin.

  Rose knew by now that when she found people affected, as she did this girl, and their rooms coyly decorated, their manner of living irritating (that mirror, the patchwork quilt, the Japanese erotic drawings over the bed, the African music coming from the living room), it was usually because she, Rose, hadn’t received and was afraid she wouldn’t receive the attention she wanted, hadn’t penetrated the party, felt that she might be doomed to hang around on the fringes of things, making judgments.

  She felt better in the living room, where there were some people she knew, and some faces as old as her own. She drank quickly at first, and before long was using the newborn kittens as a springboard for her own story. She said that something dreadful had happened to her cat that very day.

  “And the worst of it is,” she said, “I never liked my cat much. It wasn’t my idea to have a cat. It was his. He followed me home one day and insisted on being taken in. He was just like some big sneering hulk of an unemployable, set on convincing me I owed him a living. Well, he always had a fondness for the clothes dryer. He liked to jump in when it was warm, as soon as I’d taken the clothes out. Usually I just have one load but today I had two, and when I reached in to take the second load out, I thought I felt something. I thought, what do I have that’s fur?”

  People moaned or laughed, in a sympathetically horrified way. Rose looked around at them appealingly. She felt much better. The living room, with its lake view, its careful decor (a jukebox, barbershop mirrors, turn-of-the-century advertisements—Smoke, for your throat’s sake—old silk lampshades, farmhouse bowls and jugs, primitive masks and sculptures), no longer seemed so hostile. She took another drink of her gin and knew there was a limited time coming now when she would feel light and welcome as a hummingbird, convinced that many people in the room were witty and many were kind, and some were both together.

  “Oh, no, I thought. But it was. It was. Death in the dryer.”

  “A warning to all pleasure seekers,” said a little sharp-faced man at her elbow, a man she had known slightly for years. He taught in the English department of the university, where the host taught now, and the hostess was a graduate student.

  “That’s terrible,” said the hostess, with her cold, fixed look of sensitivity. Those who had laughed looked a bit abashed, as if they thought they might have seemed heartless. “Your cat. That’s terrible. How could you come tonight?”

  As a matter of fact the incident had not happened today at all; it had happened last week. Rose wondered if the girl meant to put her at a disadvantage. She said sincerely and regretfully that she hadn’t been very fond of the cat and that had made it seem worse, somehow. That’s what she was trying to explain, she said.

  “I felt as if maybe it was my fault. Maybe if I’d been fonder, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t,” said the man beside her. “It was warmth he was seeking in the dryer. It was love. Ah, Rose!”

  “Now you won’t be able to fuck the cat anymore,” said a tall boy Rose hadn’t noticed before. He seemed to have sprung up, right in front of her. “Fuck the dog, fuck the cat, I don’t know what you do, Rose.”

  She was searching for his name. She had recognized him as a student, or former student.

  “David,” she said. “Hello, David.” She was so pleased at coming up with the name that she was slow in registering what he had said.

  “Fuck the dog, fuck the cat,” he repeated, swaying over her.

  “I beg your pardon,” Rose said, and put on a quizzical, indulgent, charming expression. The people around her were finding it as hard to adjust to what the boy said as she was. The mood of sociability, sympathy, expectation of goodwill was not easy to halt; it rolled on in spite of signs that there was plenty here it wasn’t going to be able to absorb. Almost everyone was still smiling, as if the boy was telling an anecdote or playing a part, the point of which would be made clear in a moment. The hostess cast down her eyes and slipped away.

  “Beg yours,” said the boy in a very ugly tone. “Up yours, Rose.” He was white and brittle-looking, desperately drunk. He had probably been brought up in a gentle home, where people talked about answering Nature’s call and blessed each other for sneezing.

  A short, strong man with black curly hair took hold of the boy’s arm just below the shoulder.

  “Move it along
,” he said, almost maternally. He spoke with a muddled European accent, mostly French, Rose thought, though she was not good about accents. She did tend to think, in spite of knowing better, that such accents spring from a richer and more complicated masculinity than the masculinity to be found in North America and in places like Hanratty, where she had grown up. Such an accent promised masculinity tinged with suffering, tenderness, and guile.

  The host appeared in a velvet jumpsuit and took hold of the other arm, more or less symbolically, at the same time kissing Rose’s cheek, because he hadn’t seen her when she came in. “Must talk to you,” he murmured, meaning he hoped he wouldn’t have to, because there was so much tricky territory; the girl he had lived with last year, for one thing, and a night he had spent with Rose toward the end of term, when there had been a lot of drinking and bragging and lamenting about faithlessness, as well as some curiously insulting though pleasurable sex. He was looking very brushed and tended, thinner but softened, with his flowing hair and suit of bottle-green velvet. Only three years younger than Rose, but look at him. He had shed a wife, a family, a house, a discouraging future, set himself up with new clothes and new furniture and a succession of student mistresses. Men can do it.

  “My, my,” Rose said and leaned against the wall. “What was that all about?”

  The man beside her, who had smiled all the time and looked into his glass, said, “Ah, the sensitive youth of our time! Their grace of language, their depth of feeling! We must bow before them.”

  The man with the black curly hair came back, didn’t say a word, but handed Rose a fresh drink and took her glass.

  The host came back too.

  “Rose baby. I don’t know how he got in. I said no bloody students. There’s got to be some place safe from them.”

  “He was in one of my classes last year,” Rose said. That really was all she could remember. She supposed they were thinking there must be more to it.

  “Did he want to be an actor?” said the man beside her. “I’ll bet he did. Remember the good old days when they all wanted to be lawyers and engineers and business executives? They tell me that’s coming back. I hope so. I devoutly hope so. Rose, I bet you listened to his problems. You must never do that. I bet that’s what you did.”

  “Oh, I suppose.”

  “They come along looking for a parent-substitute. It’s banal as can be. They trail around worshiping you and bothering you and then bam! It’s parent-substitute rejecting time!”

  Rose drank, and leaned against the wall, and heard them take up the theme of what students expected nowadays, how they broke down your door to tell you about their abortions, their suicide attempts, their creativity crises, their weight problems. Always using the same words: personhood, values, rejection.

  “I’m not rejecting you, you silly bugger, I’m flunking you!” said the little sharp man, recalling a triumphant confrontation he had had with one such student. They laughed at that and at the young woman who said, “God, the difference when I was at university! You wouldn’t have mentioned an abortion in a professor’s office any more than you would have shit on the floor. Shat on the floor.”

  Rose was laughing too, but felt smashed, under the skin. It would be better, in a way, if there were something behind this such as they suspected. If she had slept with that boy. If she had promised him something, if she had betrayed him, humiliated him. She could not remember anything. He had sprung out of the floor to accuse her. She must have done something, and she could not remember it. She could not remember anything to do with her students; that was the truth. She was solicitous and charming, all warmth and acceptance; she listened and advised; then she could not get their names straight. She could not remember a thing she had said to them.

  A woman touched her arm. “Wake up,” she said, in a tone of sly intimacy that made Rose think she must know her. Another student? But no, the woman introduced herself.

  “I’m doing a paper on female suicide,” she said. “I mean the suicide of female artists.” She said she had seen Rose on television and was longing to talk to her. She mentioned Diane Arbus, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Christiane Pflug. She was well informed. She looked like a prime candidate herself, Rose thought: emaciated, bloodless, obsessed. Rose said she was hungry, and the woman followed her out to the kitchen.

  “And too many actresses to count—” the woman said. “Margaret Sullavan—”

  “I’m just a teacher now.”

  “Oh, nonsense. I’m sure you are an actress to the marrow of your bones.”

  The hostess had made bread: glazed and braided and decorated loaves. Rose wondered at the pains taken here. The bread, the pâté, the hanging plants, the kittens, all on behalf of a most precarious and temporary domesticity. She wished, she often wished, that she could take such pains, that she could make ceremonies, impose herself, make bread.

  She noticed a group of younger members of the faculty—she would have thought them students, except for what the host had said about students not being let in—who were sitting on the counters and standing in front of the sink. They were talking in low, serious voices. One of them looked at her. She smiled. Her smile was not returned. A couple of others looked at her, and went on talking. She was sure they were talking about her, about what had happened in the living room. She urged the woman to try some bread and pâté. Presumably that would keep her quiet, so that Rose could overhear what was being said.

  “I never eat at parties.”

  The woman’s manner toward her was turning dark and vaguely accusing. Rose had learned that this was a department wife. Perhaps it had been a political move, inviting her. And promising her Rose; had that been part of the move?

  “Are you always so hungry?” the woman said. “Are you never ill?”

  “I am when there’s something this good to eat,” Rose said. She was only trying to set an example, and could hardly chew or swallow, in her anxiety to hear what was being said of her. “No, I’m not often ill,” she said. It surprised her to realize that was true. She used to get sick with colds and flu and cramps and headaches; those definite ailments had now disappeared, simmered down into a low, steady hum of uneasiness, fatigue, apprehension.

  Fucked-up jealous establishment.

  Rose heard that, or thought she heard it. They were giving her quick, despising looks. Or so she thought; she could not look directly at them. Establishment. That was Rose. Was it? Was that Rose? Was that Rose who had taken a teaching job because she wasn’t getting enough acting jobs to support herself, was granted the teaching job because of her experience on stage and television, but had to accept a cut in pay because she lacked degrees? She wanted to go over and tell them that. She wanted to state her case. The years of work, the exhaustion, the traveling, the high school auditoriums, the nerves, the boredom, the never knowing where your next pay was coming from. She wanted to plead with them, so they would forgive her and love her and take her on their side. It was their side she wanted to be on, not the side of the people in the living room who had taken up her cause. But that was a choice made because of fear, not on principle. She feared them. She feared their hardhearted virtue, their cool despising faces, their secrets, their laughter, their obscenities.

  She thought of Anna, her own daughter. Anna was seventeen. She had long fair hair and wore a fine gold chain around her throat. It was so fine you had to look closely to make sure it was a chain, not just a glinting of her smooth bright skin. She was not like these young people but she was equally remote. She practiced ballet and rode her horse every day, but she didn’t plan to ride in competitions or be a ballerina. Why not?

  “Because it would be silly.”

  Something about Anna’s style, the fine chain, her silences, made Rose think of her grandmother, Patrick’s mother. But then, she thought, Anna might not be so silent, so fastidious, so unforthcoming, with anybody but her mother.

  The man with the black curly hair stood in the kitchen doorway giving her an im
pudent and ironic look.

  “Do you know who that is?” Rose said to the suicide woman. “The man who took the drunk away?”

  “That’s Simon. I don’t think the boy was drunk, I think he’s on drugs.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Well, I expect he’s a student of sorts.”

  “No,” said Rose. “That man—Simon?”

  “Oh, Simon. He’s in the classics department. I don’t think he’s always been a teacher.”

  “Like me,” Rose said, and turned the smile she had tried on the young people on Simon. Tired and adrift and witless as she was, she was beginning to feel familiar twinges, tidal promises.

  If he smiles back, things will start to be all right.

  He did smile, and the suicide woman spoke sharply.

  “Look, do you come to a party just to meet men?”

  When Simon was fourteen, he and his older sister and another boy, a friend of theirs, were hidden in a freight car, traveling from occupied to unoccupied France. They were on their way to Lyons, where they would be looked after, redirected to safe places, by members of an organization that was trying to save Jewish children. Simon and his sister had already been sent out of Poland, at the beginning of the war, to stay with French relatives. Now they had to be sent away again.

  The freight car stopped. The train was standing still, at night somewhere out in the country. They could hear French and German voices. There was some commotion in the cars ahead. They heard the doors grinding open, heard and felt the boots striking on the bare floors of those cars. An inspection of the train. They lay down under some sacks, but did not even try to cover their faces; they thought there was no hope. The voices were getting closer and they heard the boots on the gravel beside the track. Then the train began to move. It moved so slowly that they did not notice for a moment or so, and even then thought it was just a shunting of the cars. They expected it to stop, so that the inspection could continue. But the train kept moving. It moved a little faster, then faster; it picked up its ordinary speed, which was nothing very great. They were moving, they were free of the inspection, they were being carried away. Simon never knew what had happened. The danger was past.