by Alice Munro
“But I take delight in THE WATER OF THE BARLEY.”
WE GOT to church early, so that we could go and look at the graves. St. John’s was a white wooden church on the highway, with the graveyard behind it. We stopped at two stones, on which were written the words Mother and Father. Underneath in much smaller letters the names and dates of my mother’s parents. Two flat stones, not very big, lying like paving stones in the clipped grass. I went off to look at things more interesting—urns and praying hands and angels in profile.
Soon my mother and Aunt Dodie came too.
“Who needs all this fancy folderol?” said Aunt Dodie, waving.
My sister, who was just learning to read, tried reading the inscriptions.
“Until the Day Break”
“He is not Dead but Sleepeth”
“In Pacem”
“What is pacem?”
“Latin,” said my mother approvingly.
“A lot of these people put up these fancy stones and it is all show, they are still paying for them. Some of them still trying to pay for the plots and not even started on the stones. Look at that, for instance.” Aunt Dodie pointed to a large cube of dark-blue granite, flecked white like a cooking pot, balanced on one corner.
“How modern,” said my mother absently.
“That is Dave McColl’s. Look at the size of it. And I know for a fact they told her if she didn’t hurry up and pay something on the plot, they were going to dig him up and pitch him out on the highway.”
“Is that Christian?” my mother wondered.
“Some people don’t deserve Christian.”
I felt something slithering down from my waist and realized that the elastic of my underpants had broken. I caught my hands to my sides in time—I had no hips then to hold anything up—and said to my mother in an angry whisper, “I have to have a safety pin.”
“What do you want a safety pin for?” said my mother, in a normal or louder-than-normal voice. She could always be relied upon to be obtuse at such moments.
I would not answer, but glared at her beseechingly, threateningly.
“I bet her panties bust.” Aunt Dodie laughed.
“Did they?” said my mother sternly, still not lowering her voice.
“Yes.”
“Well, take them off then,” said my mother.
“Not right here, though,” said Aunt Dodie. “There is the Ladies.”
Behind St. John’s Church, as behind a country school, were two wooden toilets.
“Then I wouldn’t have anything on,” I said to my mother, scandalized. I couldn’t imagine walking into church in a blue taffeta dress and no pants. Rising to sing the hymns, sitting down, in no pants. The smooth cool boards of the pew and no pants.
Aunt Dodie was looking through her purse. “I wish I had one to give you but I haven’t. You just run and take them off and nobody’s going to know the difference. Lucky there’s no wind.”
I didn’t move.
“Well, I do have one pin,” said my mother doubtfully. “But I can’t take it out. My slip strap broke this morning when I was getting dressed and I put a pin in to hold it. But I can’t take that out.”
My mother was wearing a soft gray dress covered with little flowers which looked as if they had been embroidered on, and a gray slip to match, because you could see through the material. Her hat was a dull rose color, matching the color of some of the flowers. Her gloves were almost the same rose and her shoes were white, with open toes. She had brought this whole outfit with her, had assembled it, probably, especially to wear when she walked into St. John’s Church. She might have imagined a sunny morning, with St. John’s bell ringing, just as it was ringing now. She must have planned this and visualized it just as I now plan and visualize, sometimes, what I will wear to a party.
“I can’t take it out for you or my slip will show.”
“People going in,” Aunt Dodie said.
“Go to the Ladies and take them off. If you won’t do that, go sit in the car.”
I started for the car. I was halfway to the cemetery gate when my mother called my name. She marched ahead of me to the ladies’ toilet, where without a word she reached inside the neck of her dress and brought out the pin. Turning my back—and not saying thank-you, because I was too deep in my own misfortune and too sure of my own rights—I fastened together the waistband of my pants. Then my mother walked ahead of me up the toilet path and around the side of the church. We were late, everybody had gone in. We had to wait while the choir, with the minister trailing, got themselves up the aisle at their religious pace.
“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”
When the choir was in place and the minister had turned to face the congregation, my mother set out boldly to join Aunt Dodie and my sister in a pew near the front. I could see that the gray slip had slid down half an inch and was showing in a slovenly way at one side.
After the service my mother turned in the pew and spoke to people. People wanted to know my name and my sister’s name and then they said, “She does look like you”; “No, maybe this one looks more like you”; or, “I see your own mother in this one.” They asked how old we were and what grade I was in at school and whether my sister was going to school. They asked her when she was going to start and she said, “I’m not,” which was laughed at and repeated. (My sister often made people laugh without meaning to; she had such a firm way of publicizing her misunderstandings. In this case it turned out that she really did think she was not going to school because the primary school near where we lived was being torn down, and nobody had told her she would go on a bus.)
Two or three people said to me, “Guess who taught me when I went to school? Your momma!”
“She never learned me much,” said a sweaty man, whose hand I could tell she did not want to shake, “but she was the best-lookin’ one I ever had!”
“DID my slip show?”
“How could it? You were standing in the pew.”
“When I was walking down the aisle, I wonder?”
“Nobody could see. They were still standing for the hymn.”
“They could have seen, though.”
“Only one thing surprises me. Why didn’t Allen Durrand come over and say hello?”
“Was he there?”
“Didn’t you see him? Over in the Wests’ pew, under the window they put in for the father and mother.”
“I didn’t see him. Was his wife?”
“Ah, you must have seen her! All in blue with a hat like a buggy wheel. She’s very dressy. But not to be compared to you, today.”
Aunt Dodie herself was wearing a navy-blue straw hat with some droopy cloth flowers, and a button-down-the-front slub rayon dress.
“Maybe he didn’t know me. Or didn’t see me.”
“He couldn’t very well not have seen you.”
“Well.”
“And he’s turned out such a good-looking man. That counts if you go into politics. And the height. You very seldom see a short man get elected.”
“What about Mackenzie King?”
“I meant around here. We wouldn’t’ve elected him, from around here.”
“YOUR mother’s had a little stroke. She says not, but I’ve seen too many like her.
“She’s had a little one, and she might have another little one, and another, and another. Then someday she might have the big one. You’ll have to learn to be the mother then.
“Like me. My mother took sick when I was only ten. She died when I was fifteen. In between, what a time I had with her! She was all swollen up; what she had was dropsy. They came one time and took it out of her by the pailful.”
“Took what out?”
“Fluid.
“She sat up in her chair till she couldn’t anymore, she had to go to bed. She had to lie on her right side all the time to keep the fluid pressure
off her heart. What a life. She developed bedsores, she was in misery. So one day she said to me, ‘Dodie, please, just turn me onto my other side for just a little while, just for the relief.’ She begged me. I got hold of her and turned her—she was a weight! I turned her on her heart side, and the minute I did, she died.
“What are you crying about? I never meant to make you cry! Well, you are a big baby, if you can’t stand to hear about Life.”
Aunt Dodie laughed at me, to cheer me up. In her thin brown face her eyes were large and hot. She had a scarf around her head that day and looked like a gypsy woman, flashing malice and kindness at me, threatening to let out more secrets than I could stand.
“DID you have a stroke?” I said sullenly.
“What?”
“Aunt Dodie said you had a stroke.”
“Well, I didn’t. I told her I didn’t. The doctor says I didn’t. She thinks she knows everything, Dodie does. She thinks she knows better than a doctor.”
“Are you going to have a stroke?”
“No. I have low blood pressure. That is just the opposite of what gives you strokes.”
“So, are you not going to get sick at all?” I said, pushing further. I was very much relieved that she had decided against strokes, and that I would not have to be the mother, and wash and wipe and feed her lying in bed, as Aunt Dodie had had to do with her mother. For I did feel it was she who decided, she gave her consent. As long as she lived, and through all the changes that happened to her, and after I had received the medical explanations of what was happening, I still felt secretly that she had given her consent. For her own purposes, I felt she did it: display, of a sort; revenge of a sort as well. More, that nobody could ever understand.
She did not answer me, but walked on ahead. We were going from Aunt Dodie’s place to Uncle James’, following a path through the humpy cow pasture that made the trip shorter than going by the road.
“Is your arm going to stop shaking?” I pursued recklessly, stubbornly.
I demanded of her now, that she turn and promise me what I needed.
But she did not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on as if she had not heard, her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange, indifferent. She withdrew, she darkened in front of me, though all she did in fact was keep on walking along the path that she and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other; it was still there.
ONE NIGHT my mother and Aunt Dodie sat on the porch and recited poetry. How this started I forget; with one of them thinking of a quotation, likely, and the other one matching it. Uncle James was leaning against the railing, smoking. Because we were visiting, he had permitted himself to come.
“How can a man die better,” cried Aunt Dodie cheerfully,
“Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?”
“And all day long the noise of battle rolled,” my mother declared,
“Among the mountains by the winter sea.
“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried.…
“For I am going a long way
To the island-valley of Avalon
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.…”
My mother’s voice had taken on an embarrassing tremor, so I was glad when Aunt Dodie interrupted.
“Heavens, wasn’t it all sad, the stuff they put in the old readers?”
“I don’t remember a bit of it,” said Uncle James. “Except—” and he recited without a break:
“Along the line of smoky hills
The crimson forest stands
And all day long the bluejay calls
Throughout the autumn lands.”
“Good for you,” said Aunt Dodie, and she and my mother joined in, so they were all reciting together, and laughing at each other:
“Now by great marshes wrapped in mist,
Or past some river’s mouth,
Throughout the long still autumn day
Wild birds are flying south.”
“Though when you come to think of it, even that has kind of a sad ring,” Aunt Dodie said.
IF I HAD been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children, who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.
Material
I DON’T KEEP up with Hugo’s writing. Sometimes I see his name, in the library, on the cover of some literary journal that I don’t open—I haven’t opened a literary journal in a dozen years, praise God. Or I read in the paper or see on a poster—this would be in the library too, or in a bookstore—an announcement of a panel discussion at the university, with Hugo flown in to discuss the state of the novel today, or the contemporary short story, or the new nationalism in our literature. Then I think, Will people really go, will people who could be swimming or drinking or going for a walk really take themselves out to the campus to find the room and sit in rows listening to those vain quarrelsome men? Bloated, opinionated, untidy men, that is how I see them, cosseted by the academic life, the literary life, by women. People will go to hear them say that such and such a writer is not worth reading anymore, and that some writer must be read; to hear them dismiss and glorify and argue and chuckle and shock. People, I say, but I mean women, middle-aged women like me, alert and trembling, hoping to ask intelligent questions and not be ridiculous; soft-haired young girls awash in adoration, hoping to lock eyes with one of the men on the platform. Girls, and women too, fall in love with such men; they imagine there is power in them.
The wives of the men on the platform are not in that audience.
They are buying groceries or cleaning up messes or having a drink. Their lives are concerned with food and mess and houses and cars and money. They have to remember to get the snow tires on and go to the bank and take back the beer bottles, because their husbands are such brilliant, such talented incapable men, who must be looked after for the sake of the words that will come from them. The women in the audience are married to engineers or doctors or businessmen. I know them, they are my friends. Some of them have turned to literature frivolously, it is true, but most come shyly, and with enormous transitory hope. They absorb the contempt of the men on the platform as if they deserved it; they half-believe they do deserve it!, because of their houses and expensive shoes, and their husbands who read Arthur Hailey.
I am married to an engineer myself. His name is Gabriel, but he prefers the name Gabe. In this country he prefers the name Gabe. He was born in Romania; he lived there until the end of the war, when he was sixteen. He has forgotten how to speak Romanian. How can you forget, how can you forget the language of your childhood? I used to think he was pretending to forget, because the things he had seen and lived through when he spoke that language were too terrible to remember. He told me this was not so. He told me his experi
ence of the war was not so bad. He described the holiday uproar at school when the air-raid sirens sounded. I did not quite believe him. I required him to be an ambassador from bad times as well as distant countries. Then I thought he might not be Romanian at all, but an impostor.
This was before we were married, when he used to come and see me in the apartment on Clark Road where I lived with my little daughter, Clea. Hugo’s daughter too, of course, but he had to let go of her. Hugo had grants, he travelled, he married again and his wife had three children; he divorced and married again, and his next wife, who had been his student, had three more children, the first born to her while he was still living with his second wife. In such circumstances a man can’t hang on to everything. Gabriel used to stay all night sometimes on the pullout couch I had for a bed in this tiny, shabby apartment; and I would look at him sleeping and think that for all I knew he might be a German or a Russian or even of all things a Canadian faking a past and an accent to make himself interesting. He was mysterious to me. Long after he became my lover and after he became my husband he remained, remains, mysterious to me. In spite of all the things I know about him, daily and physical things. His face curves out smoothly and his eyes, set shallowly in his head, curve out too under the smooth pink lids. The wrinkles he has are traced on top of this smoothness, this impenetrable surface; they are of no consequence. His body is substantial, calm. He used to be a fine, rather lazy-looking skater. I cannot describe him without a familiar sense of capitulation. I cannot describe him. I could describe Hugo, if anybody asked me, in great detail—Hugo as he was eighteen, twenty years ago, crew-cut and skinny, with the bones of his body and even of his skull casually, precariously, joined and knitted together, so that there was something uncoordinated, unexpected about the shifting planes of his face as well as the movements, often dangerous, of his limbs. “He’s held together by nerves,” a friend of mine at college said when I first brought him around, and it was true; after that I could almost see the fiery strings.