by Alice Munro
Millicent had to take a chance, though it embarrassed her.
“If you are thinking about what I think you may be thinking about, then it could be that you are worried over nothing. A lot of time when they get older, they don’t even want to bother.”
“Oh, it isn’t that! I know all about that.”
Oh, do you, thought Millicent, and if so, how? Dorrie might imagine she knew, from animals. Millicent had sometimes thought that if she really knew, no woman would get married.
Nevertheless she said, “Marriage takes you out of yourself and gives you a real life.”
“I have a life,” Dorrie said.
“All right then,” said Millicent, as if she had given up arguing. She sat and drank her poisonous tea. She was getting an inspiration. She let time pass and then she said, “It’s up to you, it certainly is. But there is a problem about where you will live. You can’t live here. When Porter and I found out you were getting married, we put this place on the market, and we sold it.”
Dorrie said instantly, “You are lying.”
“We didn’t want it standing empty to make a haven for tramps. We went ahead and sold it.”
“You would never do such a trick on me.”
“What kind of a trick would it be when you were getting married?”
Millicent was already believing what she said. Soon it could come true. They could offer the place at a low enough price, and somebody would buy it. It could still be fixed up. Or it could be torn down, for the bricks and the woodwork. Porter would be glad to be rid of it.
Dorrie said, “You would not put me out of my house.”
Millicent kept quiet.
“You are lying, aren’t you?” said Dorrie.
“Give me your Bible,” Millicent said. “I will swear on it.”
Dorrie actually looked around. She said, “I don’t know where it is.”
“Dorrie, listen. All of this is for your own good. It may seem like I am pushing you out, Dorrie, but all it is is making you do what you are not quite up to doing on your own.”
“Oh,” said Dorrie. “Why?”
Because the wedding cake is made, thought Millicent, and the satin dress is made, and the luncheon has been ordered and the invitations have been sent. All this trouble that has been gone to. People might say that was a silly reason, but those who said that would not be the people who had gone to the trouble. It was not fair to have your best efforts squandered.
But it was more than that, for she believed what she had said, telling Dorrie that this was how she could have a life. And what did Dorrie mean by “here”? If she meant that she would be homesick, let her be! Homesickness was never anything you couldn’t get over. Millicent was not going to pay any attention to that “here.” Nobody had any business living a life out “here” if they had been offered what Dorrie had. It was a kind of sin to refuse such an offer. Out of mulishness, out of fearfulness, and idiocy.
She had begun to get the feeling that Dorrie was cornered. Dorrie might be giving up, or letting the idea of giving up seep through her. Perhaps. She sat as still as a stump, but there was a chance such a stump might be pulpy within.
But it was Millicent who began suddenly to weep. “Oh, Dorrie,” she said. “Don’t be stupid!” They both got up, and grabbed hold of each other, and then Dorrie had to do the comforting, patting and soothing in a magisterial way, while Millicent wept and repeated some words that did not hang together. Happy. Help. Ridiculous.
“I will look after Albert,” she said, when she had calmed down somewhat. “I’ll put flowers. And I won’t mention this to Muriel Snow. Or to Porter. Nobody needs to know.”
Dorrie said nothing. She seemed a little lost, absentminded, as if she was busy turning something over and over, resigning herself to the weight and strangeness of it.
“That tea is awful,” said Millicent. “Can’t we make some that’s fit to drink?” She went to throw the contents of her cup into the slop pail.
There stood Dorrie in the dim window light—mulish, obedient, childish, female—a most mysterious and maddening person whom Millicent seemed now to have conquered, to be sending away. At greater cost to herself, Millicent was thinking—greater cost than she had understood. She tried to engage Dorrie in a sombre but encouraging look, cancelling her fit of tears. She said, “The die is cast.”
Dorrie walked to her wedding.
Nobody had known that she intended to do that. When Porter and Millicent stopped the car in front of her house to pick her up, Millicent was still anxious.
“Honk the horn,” she said. “She better be ready now.”
Porter said, “Isn’t that her down ahead?”
It was. She was wearing a light gray coat of Albert’s over her satin dress, and was carrying her picture hat in one hand, a bunch of lilacs in the other. They stopped the car and she said, “No, I want the exercise. It will clear out my head.”
They had no choice but to drive on and wait at the church and see her approaching down the street, people coming out of shops to look, a few cars honking sportively, people waving and calling out, “Here comes the bride!” As she got closer to the church, she stopped and removed Albert’s coat, and then she was gleaming, miraculous, like the Pillar of Salt in the Bible.
Muriel was inside the church playing the organ, so she did not have to realize, at this last moment, that they had forgotten all about gloves and that Dorrie clutched the woody stems of the lilac in her bare hands. Mr. Speirs had been in the church, too, but he had come out, breaking all rules, leaving the minister to stand there on his own. He was as lean and yellow and wolfish as Millicent remembered, but when he saw Dorrie fling the old coat into the back of Porter’s car, and settle the hat on her head—Millicent had to run up and fix it right—he appeared nobly satisfied. Millicent had a picture of him and Dorrie mounted high, mounted on elephants, panoplied, borne cumbrously forward, adventuring. A vision. She was filled with optimism and relief and she whispered to Dorrie, “He’ll take you everywhere! He’ll make you a Queen!”
“I have grown as fat as the Queen of Tonga,” wrote Dorrie from Australia, some years on. A photograph showed that she was not exaggerating. Her hair was white, her skin brown, as if all her freckles had got loose and run together. She wore a vast garment, colored like tropical flowers. The war had come and put an end to any idea of travelling, and then when it was over, Wilkie was dying. Dorrie stayed on, in Queensland, on a great property where she grew sugarcane and pineapples, cotton, peanuts, tobacco. She rode horses, in spite of her size, and had learned to fly an airplane. She took up some travels of her own in that part of the world. She had shot crocodiles. She died in the fifties, in New Zealand, climbing up to look at a volcano.
Millicent told everybody what she had said she would not mention. She took credit, naturally. She recalled her inspiration, her stratagem, with no apologies. “Somebody had to take the bull by the horns,” she said. She felt that she was the creator of a life—more effectively, in Dorrie’s case, than in the case of her own children. She had created happiness, or something close. She forgot the way she had wept, not knowing why.
The wedding had its effect on Muriel. She handed in her resignation, she went off to Alberta. “I’ll give it a year,” she said. And within a year she had found a husband—not the sort of man she had ever had anything to do with in the past. A widower with two small children. A Christian minister. Millicent wondered at Muriel’s describing him that way. Weren’t all ministers Christian? When they came back for a visit—by this time there were two more children, their own—she saw the point of the description. Smoking and drinking and swearing were out, and so was wearing makeup, and the kind of music that Muriel used to play. She played hymns now, of the sort she had once made fun of. She wore any color at all and had a bad permanent—her hair, going gray, stood up from her forehead in frizzy bunches. “A lot of my former life turns my stomach just to think about it,” she said, and Millicent got the impression that she and Porte
r were seen mostly as belonging to those stomach-turning times.
The house was not sold or rented. It was not torn down, either, and its construction was so sound that it did not readily give way. It was capable of standing for years and years and presenting a plausible appearance. A tree of cracks can branch out among the bricks, but the wall does not fall down. Window sashes settle at an angle, but the window does not fall out. The doors were locked, but it was probable that children got in, to write things on the walls and break up the crockery that Dorrie had left behind. Millicent never went in to see.
There was a thing that Dorrie and Albert used to do, and then Dorrie did alone. It must have started when they were children. Every year, in the fall, they—and then, she—collected up all the walnuts that had fallen off the trees. They kept going, collecting fewer and fewer walnuts, until they were reasonably sure that they had got the last, or the next-to-last, one. Then they counted them, and they wrote the final total on the cellar wall. The date, the year, the total. The walnuts were not used for anything once they were collected. They were just dumped along the edge of the field and allowed to rot.
Millicent did not continue this useless chore. She had plenty of other chores to do, and plenty for her children to do. But at the time of year when the walnuts would be lying in the long grass, she would think of that custom, and how Dorrie must have expected to keep it up until she died. A life of customs, of seasons. The walnuts drop, the muskrats swim in the creek. Dorrie must have believed that she was meant to live so, in her reasonable eccentricity, her manageable loneliness. Probably she would have got another dog.
But I would not allow that, thinks Millicent. She would not allow it, and surely she was right. She has lived to be an old lady, she is living yet, though Porter has been dead for decades. She doesn’t often notice the house. It is just there. But once in a while she does see its cracked face and the blank, slanted windows. The walnut trees behind, losing again, again, their delicate canopy of leaves.
I ought to knock that down and sell the bricks, she says, and seems puzzled that she has not already done so.
THE
ALBANIAN
VIRGIN
In the mountains, in Maltsia e madhe, she must have tried to tell them her name, and “Lottar” was what they made of it. She had a wound in her leg, from a fall on sharp rocks when her guide was shot. She had a fever. How long it took them to carry her through the mountains, bound up in a rug and strapped to a horse’s back, she had no idea. They gave her water to drink now and then, and sometimes raki, which was a kind of brandy, very strong. She could smell pines. At one time they were on a boat and she woke up and saw the stars, brightening and fading and changing places—unstable clusters that made her sick. Later she understood that they must have been on the lake. Lake Scutari, or Sckhoder, or Skodra. They pulled up among the reeds. The rug was full of vermin, which got under the rag tied around her leg.
At the end of her journey, though she did not know it was the end, she was lying in a small stone hut that was an outbuilding of the big house, called the kula. It was the hut of the sick and dying. Not of giving birth, which these women did in the cornfields, or beside the path when they were carrying a load to market.
She was lying, perhaps for weeks, on a heaped-up bed of ferns. It was comfortable, and had the advantage of being easily changed when fouled or bloodied. The old woman named Tima looked after her. She plugged up the wound with a paste made of beeswax and olive oil and pine resin. Several times a day the dressing was removed, the wound washed out with raki. Lottar could see black lace curtains hanging from the rafters, and she thought she was in her room at home, with her mother (who was dead) looking after her. “Why have you hung up those curtains?” she said. “They look horrible.”
She was really seeing cobwebs, all thick and furry with smoke—ancient cobwebs, never disturbed from year to year.
Also, in her delirium, she had the sensation of some wide board being pushed against her face—something like a coffin plank. But when she came to her senses she learned that it was nothing but a crucifix, a wooden crucifix that a man was trying to get her to kiss. The man was a priest, a Franciscan. He was a tall, fierce-looking man with black eyebrows and mustache and a rank smell, and he carried, besides the crucifix, a gun that she learned later was a Browning revolver. He knew by the look of her that she was a giaour—not a Muslim—but he did not understand that she might be a heretic. He knew a little English but pronounced it in a way that she could not make out. And she did not then know any of the language of the Ghegs. But after her fever subsided, when he tried a few words of Italian on her, they were able to talk, because she had learned Italian at school and had been travelling for six months in Italy. He understood so much more than anyone else around her that she expected him, at first, to understand everything. What is the nearest city? she asked him, and he said, Skodra. So go there, please, she said—go and find the British Consulate, if there is one. I belong to the British Empire. Tell them I am here. Or if there is no British Consul, go to the police.
She did not understand that under no circumstances would anybody go to the police. She didn’t know that she belonged now to this tribe, this kula, even though taking her prisoner had not been their intention and was an embarrassing mistake.
It is shameful beyond belief to attack a woman. When they had shot and killed her guide, they had thought that she would turn her horse around and fly back down the mountain road, back to Bar. But her horse took fright at the shot and stumbled among the boulders and she fell, and her leg was injured. Then they had no choice but to carry her with them, back across the border between the Crna Gora (which means Black Rock, or Montenegro) and Maltsia e madhe.
“But why rob the guide and not me?” she said, naturally thinking robbery to be the motive. She thought of how starved they looked, the man and his horse, and of the fluttering white rags of his headdress.
“Oh, they are not robbers!” said the Franciscan, shocked. “They are honest men. They shot him because they were in blood with him. With his house. It is their law.”
He told her that the man who had been shot, her guide, had killed a man of this kula. He had done that because the man he had killed had killed a man of his kula. This would go on, it had been going on for a long time now, there were always more sons being born. They think they have more sons than other people in the world, and it is to serve this necessity.
“Well, it is terrible,” the Franciscan concluded. “But it is for their honor, the honor of their family. They are always ready to die for their honor.”
She said that her guide did not seem to be so ready, if he had fled to Crna Gora.
“But it did not make any difference, did it?” said the Franciscan. “Even if he had gone to America, it would not have made any difference.”
At Trieste she had boarded a steamer, to travel down the Dalmatian Coast. She was with her friends Mr. and Mrs. Cozzens, whom she had met in Italy, and their friend Dr. Lamb, who had joined them from England. They put in at the little port of Bar, which the Italians call Antivari, and stayed the night at the European Hotel. After dinner they walked on the terrace, but Mrs. Cozzens was afraid of a chill, so they went indoors and played cards. There was rain in the night. She woke up and listened to the rain and was full of disappointment, which gave rise to a loathing for these middle-aged people, particularly for Dr. Lamb, whom she believed the Cozzenses had summoned from England to meet her. They probably thought she was rich. A transatlantic heiress whose accent they could almost forgive. These people ate too much and then they had to take pills. And they worried about being in strange places—what had they come for? In the morning she would have to get back on the boat with them or they would make a fuss. She would never take the road over the mountains to Cetinge, Montenegro’s capital city—they had been told that it was not wise. She would never see the bell tower where the heads of Turks used to hang, or the plane tree under which the Poet-Prince held audience with
the people. She could not get back to sleep, so she decided to go downstairs with the first light, and, even if it was still raining, to go a little way up the road behind the town, just to see the ruins that she knew were there, among the olive trees, and the Austrian fortress on its rock and the dark face of Mount Lovchen.
The weather obliged her, and so did the man at the hotel desk, producing almost at once a tattered but cheerful guide and his underfed horse. They set out—she on the horse, the man walking ahead. The road was steep and twisting and full of boulders, the sun increasingly hot and the intervening shade cold and black. She became hungry and thought she must turn back soon. She would have breakfast with her companions, who got up late.
No doubt there was some sort of search for her, after the guide’s body was found. The authorities must have been notified—whoever the authorities were. The boat must have sailed on time, her friends must have gone with it. The hotel had not taken their passports. Nobody back in Canada would think of investigating. She was not writing regularly to anyone, she had had a falling-out with her brother, her parents were dead. You won’t come home till all your inheritance is spent, her brother had said, and then who will look after you?
When she was being carried through the pine forest, she awoke and found herself suspended, lulled—in spite of the pain and perhaps because of the raki—into a disbelieving surrender. She fastened her eyes on the bundle that was hanging from the saddle of the man ahead of her and knocking against the horse’s back. It was something about the size of a cabbage, wrapped in a stiff and rusty-looking cloth.
I heard this story in the old St. Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria from Charlotte, who was the sort of friend I had in my early days there. My friendships then seemed both intimate and uncertain. I never knew why people told me things, or what they meant me to believe.
I had come to the hospital with flowers and chocolates. Charlotte lifted her head, with its clipped and feathery white hair, toward the roses. “Bah!” she said. “They have no smell! Not to me, anyway. They are beautiful, of course.