Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

by Alice Munro

  And this time, because they were alone together, he didn’t touch her. He simply began to talk. Don’t worry about all that. I’ll take care of it. Right away. I’ll see that it goes all right. I understand. Cremation.

  “Breathe,” he said. “Breathe in. Now hold it. Now out.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter.”

  “The shock,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “I’m not like this.”

  “Look at the horizon. That helps too.”

  He was taking something out of his pocket. A handkerchief? But she didn’t need a handkerchief. She had no tears. All she had was the shakes.

  It was a tightly folded piece of paper.

  “I put this away for you,” he said. “It was in his pajama pocket.”

  She put the paper in her purse, carefully and without excitement, as if it was a prescription. Then she realized all of what he was telling her.

  “You were there when he was brought in.”

  “I looked after him. Bruce called me up. There was the car accident and he had a bit more than he could handle.”

  She didn’t even say, What accident? She didn’t care. All she wanted now was to be alone to read her message.

  The pajama pocket. The only place she hadn’t looked. She hadn’t touched his body.

  She drove her own car home, after Ed had returned her to it. As soon as he had waved her out of sight she pulled over to the curb.

  One hand had been working the paper out of her purse even while she drove. She read what was written on it, with the engine running, then proceeded.

  On the sidewalk in front of her house there was another message.

  The Will of God.

  Hasty, spidery writing, in chalk. It would be easy to wipe off.

  What Lewis had written and left for her to find was a poem.

  Several verses of scathing doggerel. It had a title—“The Battle of the Genesisites and the Sons of Darwin for the Soul of the Flabby Generation.”

  There was a Temple of Learning sat

  Right on Lake Huron shore

  Where many a dull-eyed Dunce did come

  To listen to many a Bore.

  And the King of the Bores was a Right Fine Chap

  Did Grin from Ear to Ear

  A Jerk with One Big Thought in his Head—

  Tell’em All What They’d Like to Hear!

  One winter Margaret had got the idea of organizing a series of evenings at which people would talk—at not too great length—on whatever subject they knew and cared most about. She thought of it being for teachers (“Teachers are always the ones standing up blabbing away at a captive audience,” she said. “They need to sit down and listen to somebody else telling them something, for a change”), but then it was decided that it would be more interesting if nonteachers were invited as well. There would be a potluck dinner and wine, first, at Margaret’s house.

  That was how, on a clear cold night, Nina found herself standing outside Margaret’s kitchen door in the dark entry way packed with the coats and schoolbags and hockey sticks of Margaret’s sons—it was back when they were all still at home. In the living room—from which no sound could reach Nina anymore—Kitty Shore was going on about her chosen subject, which was saints. Kitty and Ed Shore were among the “real people” invited into the group—they were also Margaret’s neighbors. Ed had spoken on another night, about mountain climbing. He had done some himself, in the Rockies, but mostly he talked of the perilous and tragic expeditions he liked to read about. (Margaret had said to Nina, when they were getting the coffee that night, “I was a little worried he might talk about embalming,” and Nina had giggled and said, “But that’s not his favorite thing. It’s not an amateur thing. I don’t suppose you get too many amateur embalmers.”)

  Ed and Kitty were a good-looking couple. Margaret and Nina had agreed, confidentially, that Ed would have been a notable turn-on if it weren’t for his profession. The scrubbed pallor of his long, capable hands was extraordinary and made you think, Where have those hands been? Curvy Kitty was often referred to as a darling—she was a short, busty, warm-eyed brunette with a voice full of breathy enthusiasm. Enthusiasm about her marriage, her children, the seasons, the town, and especially about her religion. In the Anglican church, which she belonged to, enthusiasts like her were uncommon, and there were reports that she was a trial, with her strictness and fanciness and penchant for arcane ceremonies such as the Churching of Women. Nina and Margaret, also, found her hard to take, and Lewis thought she was poison. But most people were smitten.

  This evening she wore a dark-red wool dress and the earrings that one of her children had made for her for Christmas. She sat in a corner of the sofa with her legs tucked under her. As long as she stuck to the historical and geographical incidence of saints it was all right—that is, all right for Nina, who was hoping that Lewis might not find it necessary to go on the attack.

  Kitty said that she was compelled to leave out all the saints of Eastern Europe and concentrate mostly on the saints of the British Isles, particularly those of Cornwall and Wales and Ireland, the Celtic saints with the wonderful names, who were her favorites. When she got into the cures, the miracles, and especially as her voice became more joyous and confiding and her earrings tinkled, Nina grew apprehensive. She knew that people might think her frivolous, Kitty said, to talk to some saint when she had a cooking disaster, but that was what she really believed the saints were there for. They were not too high and mighty to take an interest in all those trials and tribulations, the details of our lives that we would feel shy about bothering the God of the Universe with. With the help of the saints, you could stay partly inside a child’s world, with a child’s hope of help and consolation. Ye must become as little children. And it was the small miracles—surely it was the small miracles that helped prepare us for the great ones?

  Now. Were there any questions?

  Somebody asked about the status of saints in an Anglican church. In a Protestant church.

  “Well, strictly speaking I don’t think the Anglican is a Protestant church,” said Kitty. “But I don’t want to get into that.When we say in the creed, ‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,’ I just take it to mean the whole big universal Christian church. And then we say, ‘I believe in the Communion of Saints.’ Of course we don’t have statues in the church, though personally I think it would be lovely if we did.”

  Margaret said, “Coffee?” and it was understood that the formal part of the evening was over. But Lewis shifted his chair closer to Kitty and said almost genially, “So? Are we to understand that you believe in these miracles?”

  Kitty laughed. “Absolutely. I couldn’t exist if I didn’t believe in miracles.”

  Then Nina knew what had to follow. Lewis moving in quietly and relentlessly, Kitty countering with merry conviction and what she might think of as charming and feminine inconsistencies. Her faith was in that, surely—in her own charm. But Lewis would not be charmed. He would want to know, What form do these saints take at the present moment? In Heaven, do they occupy the same territory as the merely dead, the virtuous ancestors? And how are they chosen? Isn’t it by the attested miracles, the proven miracles? And how are you going to prove the miracles of someone who lived fifteen centuries ago? How prove miracles, anyway? In the case of the loaves and fishes, counting. But is that real counting, or is it perception? Faith? Ah, yes. So it all comes down to faith. In daily matters, in her whole life, Kitty lives by faith?

  She does.

  She doesn’t rely on science in any way? Surely not. When her children are sick she doesn’t give them medicine. She doesn’t bother about gas in her car, she has faith—

  A dozen conversations have sprung up around them and yet, because of its intensity and its danger—Kitty’s voice now hopping about like a bird on a wire, saying don’t be silly, and do you think I’m an absolute nutcase? and Lewis’s te
asing growing ever more contemptuous, more deadly—this conversation will be heard through the others, at all times, everywhere in the room.

  Nina has a bitter taste in her mouth. She goes out to the kitchen to help Margaret. They pass each other, Margaret carrying in the coffee. Nina goes straight on through the kitchen and out into the passage. Through the little pane in the back door she peers at the moonless night, the snowbanks along the street, the stars. She lays her hot cheek against the glass.

  She straightens up at once when the door from the kitchen opens, she turns and smiles and is about to say, “I just came out to check on the weather.” But when she sees Ed Shore’s face against the light, in the minute before he closes the door, she thinks that she doesn’t have to say that. They greet each other with an abbreviated, sociable, slightly apologetic and disclaiming laugh, by which it seems many things are conveyed and understood.

  They are deserting Kitty and Lewis. Just for a little while—

  Kitty and Lewis won’t notice. Lewis won’t run out of steam and Kitty will find some way—being sorry for Lewis could be one—out of the dilemma of being devoured. Kitty and Lewis won’t get sick of themselves.

  Is that how Ed and Nina feel? Sick of those others, or at least sick of argument and conviction. Tired of the never-letting-up of those striving personalities.

  They wouldn’t quite say so. They would only say they’re tired.

  Ed Shore puts an arm around Nina. He kisses her—not on the mouth, not on her face, but on her throat. The place where an agitated pulse might be beating, in her throat.

  He is a man who has to bend to do that. With a lot of men, it might be the natural place to kiss Nina, when she’s standing up. But he is tall enough to bend and so deliberately kiss her in that exposed and tender place.

  “You’ll get cold out here,” he said.

  “I know. I’m going in.”

  Nina has never to this day had sex with any man but Lewis. Never come near it.

  Had sex. Have sex with. For a long time she could not say that. She said make love. Lewis did not say anything. He was an athletic and inventive partner and in a physical sense, not unaware of her. Not inconsiderate. But he was on guard against anything that verged on sentimentality, and from his point of view, much did. She came to be very sensitive to this distaste, almost to share it.

  Her memory of Ed Shore’s kiss outside the kitchen door did, however, become a treasure. When Ed sang the tenor solos in the Choral Society’s performance of the Messiah every Christmas, that moment would return to her. “Comfort Ye My People” pierced her throat with starry needles. As if everything about her was recognized then, and honored and set alight.

  Paul Gibbings had not expected trouble from Nina. He had always thought that she was a warm person, in her reserved way. Not caustic like Lewis. But smart.

  “No,” she said. “He wouldn’t have wanted it.”

  “Nina. Teaching was his life. He gave a lot. There are so many people, I don’t know if you understand how many people, who remember just sitting spellbound in his classroom. They probably don’t remember another thing about high school like they remember Lewis. He had a presence, Nina. You either have it or you don’t. Lewis had it in spades.”

  “I’m not arguing that.”

  “So you’ve got all these people wanting somehow to say goodbye. We all need to say goodbye. Also to honor him. You know what I’m saying? After all this stuff. Closure.”

  “Yes. I hear. Closure.”

  A nasty tone there, he thought. But he ignored it. “There doesn’t need to be a hint of religiosity about it. No prayers. No mention. I know as well as you do how he would hate that.”

  “He would.”

  “I know. I can sort of master-of-ceremony the whole thing, if that doesn’t seem like the wrong word. I have a pretty good idea of the right sort of people to ask just to do a little appreciation. Maybe half a dozen, ending up with a bit by me. ‘Eulogies,’ I think that’s the word, but I prefer ‘appreciation’—”

  “Lewis would prefer nothing.”

  “And we can have your participation at whatever level you would choose—”

  “Paul. Listen. Listen to me now.”

  “Of course. I’m listening.”

  “If you go ahead with this I will participate.”

  “Well. Good.”

  “When Lewis died he left a—he left a poem, actually. If you go ahead with this I will read it.”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean I’ll read it there, out loud. I’ll read a bit of it to you now.”

  “Right. Go ahead.”

  “There was a Temple of Learning sat

  Right on Lake Huron shore

  Where many a dull-eyed Dunce did come

  To listen to many a Bore.”

  “Sounds like Lewis all right.”

  “And the King of the Bores was a Right Fine Chap

  Did Grin from Ear to Ear—“

  “Nina. Okay. Okay. I got you. So this is what you want, is it?

  Harper Valley P.T.A.?”

  “There’s more.”

  “I’m sure there is. I think you’re very upset, Nina. I don’t think you’d act this way if you weren’t very upset. And when you’re feeling better you’re going to regret it.”

  “No.”

  “I think you’re going to regret it. I’m going to hang up now. I’m going to have to say goodbye.”

  ‘Wow,” said Margaret. “How did he take that?”

  “He said he was going to have to say goodbye.”

  “Do you want me to come over? I could just be company.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “You don’t want company?”

  “I guess not. Not right now.”

  “You’re sure? You’re okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  She was really not so pleased with herself, about that performance on the phone. Lewis had said to her, “Be sure you scotch it if they want to bugger around with any memorial stuff. That candy-ass is capable of it.” So it had been necessary to stop Paul somehow, but the way she had done it seemed crudely theatrical. Outrage was what had been left up to Lewis, retaliation his specialty—all she had managed to do was quote him.

  It was beyond her to think how she could live, with only her old pacific habits. Cold and muted, stripped of him.

  Some time after dark Ed Shore knocked on her back door. He held a box of ashes and a bouquet of white roses.

  He gave her the ashes first.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s done.”

  She felt a warmth through the heavy cardboard. It came not immediately but gradually, like the blood’s warmth through the skin.

  Where was she to set this down? Not on the kitchen table, beside her late, hardly touched supper. Scrambled eggs and salsa, a combination that she’d always looked forward to on nights when Lewis was kept late for some reason and was eating with the other teachers at Tim Horton’s or the pub. Tonight it had proved a bad choice.

  Not on the counter either. It would look like a bulky grocery item. And not on the floor, where it could more easily be disregarded but would seem to be relegated to a lowly position—as if it held something like kitty litter or garden fertilizer, something that should not come too close to dishes and food.

  She wanted, really, to take it into another room, to set it down somewhere in the unlighted front rooms of the house. Better still, in a shelf in a closet. But it was somehow too soon for that banishment. Also, considering that Ed Shore was watching her, it might look like a brisk and brutal clearing of the decks, a vulgar invitation.

  She finally set the box down on the low phone table.

  “I didn’t mean to keep you standing,” she said. “Sit down. Please do.”

  “I’ve interrupted your meal.”

  “I didn’t feel like finishing it.”

  He was still holding the flowers. She said, “Those are for me?” The image of him with the bouquet, the image of him with the box of
ashes and the bouquet, when she opened the door—that seemed grotesque, now that she thought of it, and horribly funny. It was the sort of thing she could get hysterical about, telling somebody. Telling Margaret. She hoped she never would.

  Those are for me?

  They could as easily be for the dead. Flowers for the house of the dead. She started to look for a vase, then filled the kettle, saying, “I was just going to make some tea,” went back to hunting for the vase and found it, filled it with water, found the scissors she needed to clip the stems, and finally relieved him of the flowers. Then she noticed that she hadn’t turned on the burner under the kettle. She was barely in control. She felt as if she could easily throw the roses on the floor, smash the vase, squash the congealed mess in her supper plate between her fingers. But why? She wasn’t angry. It was just such a crazy effort, to keep doing one thing after another. Now she would have to warm the pot, she would have to measure the tea.

  She said, “Did you read what you took out of Lewis’s pocket?”

  He shook his head, not looking at her. She knew he was lying. He was lying, he was shaken, how far into her life did he mean to go? What if she broke down and told him about the astonishment she had felt—why not say it, the chill around her heart—when she saw what Lewis had written? When she saw that that was all that he had written.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It was just some verses.”

  They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy. What had been between them, all these years, had been kept in balance because of their two marriages. Their marriages were the real content of their lives—her marriage to Lewis, the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life. This other thing depended on those marriages, for its sweetness, its consoling promise. It was not likely to be something that could hold up on its own, even if they were both free. Yet it was not nothing. The danger was in trying it, and seeing it fall apart and then thinking that it had been nothing.