Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

  She went for a walk up the steep lane behind the guesthouse. She occupied herself by naming shrubs and weeds. The goldenrod and wild aster were in bloom, and Japanese boxwood, a rarity in Ontario, seemed commonplace here. The grass was long and coarse and the trees were small. The Atlantic coast, which she had never seen before, was just as she had expected it to be. The bending grass; the bare houses; the sea light. She started wondering what it would be like to live there, whether the houses were still cheap or if people from the outside had started to buy them up. Often on this trip she had busied herself with calculations of this kind, and also with ideas of how she could make a living in some new way, cut off from everything she had done before. She did not think of making a living writing poetry, not only because the income would be so low but because she thought, as she had thought innumerable times in her life, that probably she would not write any more poems. She was thinking that she could not cook well enough to do it for pay but she could clean. There was at least one other guesthouse besides the one where she was staying, and she had seen a sign advertising a motel. How many hours’ cleaning could she get if she cleaned all three places, and how much an hour did cleaning pay?

  There were four small tables in the dining room, but only one man was sitting there, drinking tomato juice. He did not look at her. A man who was probably the husband of the woman she had met earlier came in from the kitchen. He had a grayish-blond beard, and a downcast look. He asked Lydia’s name and took her to the table where the man was sitting. The man stood up, stiffly, and Lydia was introduced. The man’s name was Mr. Stanley and Lydia took him to be about sixty. Politely, he asked her to sit down.

  Three men in work clothes came in and sat down at another table. They were not noisy in any self-important or offensive way, but just coming in and disposing themselves around the table, they created an enjoyable commotion. That is, they enjoyed it, and looked as if they expected others to. Mr. Stanley bowed in their direction. It really was a little bow, not just a nod of the head. He said good evening. They asked him what there was for supper, and he said he believed it was scallops, with pumpkin pie for dessert.

  “These gentlemen work for the New Brunswick Telephone Company,” he said to Lydia. “They are laying a cable to one of the smaller islands, and they stay here during the week.”

  He was older than she had thought at first. It did not show in his voice, which was precise and American, or in the movements of his hands, but in his small, separate, brownish teeth, and in his eyes, which had a delicate milky skin over the light-brown iris.

  The husband brought their food, and spoke to the workmen. He was an efficient waiter, but rather stiff and remote, rather like a sleepwalker, in fact, as if he did not perform this job in his real life. The vegetables were served in large bowls, from which they helped themselves. Lydia was glad to see so much food: broccoli, mashed turnips, potatoes, corn. The American took small helpings of everything and began to eat in a very deliberate way, giving the impression that the order in which he lifted forkfuls of food to his mouth was not haphazard, that there was a reason for the turnip to follow the potatoes, and for the deep-fried scallops, which were not large, to be cut neatly in half. He looked up a couple of times as if he thought of saying something, but he did not do it. The workmen were quiet now too, laying into the food.

  Mr. Stanley spoke at last. He said, “Are you familiar with the writer Willa Cather?”

  “Yes.” Lydia was startled, because she had not seen anybody reading a book for the past two weeks; she had not even noticed any paperback racks.

  “Do you know, then, that she spent every summer here?”

  “Here?”

  “On this island. She had her summer home here. Not more than a mile away from where we are sitting now. She came here for eighteen years, and she wrote many of her books here. She wrote in a room that had a view of the sea, but now the trees have grown up and blocked it. She was with her great friend, Edith Lewis. Have you read A Lost Lady?”

  Lydia said that she had.

  “It is my favorite of all her books. She wrote it here. At least, she wrote a great part of it here.”

  Lydia was aware of the workmen listening, although they did not glance up from their food. She felt that even without looking at Mr. Stanley or each other they might manage to communicate an indulgent contempt. She thought she did not care whether or not she was included in this contempt, but perhaps it was for that reason that she did not find anything much to say about Willa Cather, or tell Mr. Stanley that she worked for a publisher, let alone that she was any sort of writer herself. Or it could have been just that Mr. Stanley did not give her much of a chance.

  “I have been her admirer for over sixty years,” he said. He paused, holding his knife and fork over his plate. “I read and reread her, and my admiration grows. It simply grows. There are people here who remember her. Tonight, I am going to see a woman, a woman who knew Willa, and had conversations with her. She is eighty-eight years old but they say she has not forgotten. The people here are beginning to learn of my interest and they will remember someone like this and put me in touch.

  “It is a great delight to me,” he said solemnly.

  All the time he was talking, Lydia was trying to think what his conversational style reminded her of. It didn’t remind her of any special person, though she might have had one or two teachers at college who talked like that. What it made her think of was a time when a few people, just a few people, had never concerned themselves with being democratic, or ingratiating, in their speech; they spoke in formal, well-thought-out, slightly self-congratulating sentences, though they lived in a country where their formality, their pedantry, could bring them nothing but mockery. No, that was not the whole truth. It brought mockery, and an uncomfortable admiration. What he made Lydia think of, really, was the old-fashioned culture of provincial cities long ago (something she of course had never known, but sensed from books); the high-mindedness, the propriety; hard plush concert seats and hushed libraries. And his adoration of the chosen writer was of a piece with this; it was just as out-of-date as his speech. She thought that he could not be a teacher; such worship was not in style for teachers, even of his age.

  “Do you teach literature?”

  “No. Oh, no. I have not had that privilege. No. I have not even studied literature. I went to work when I was sixteen. In my day there was not so much choice. I have worked on newspapers.”

  She thought of some absurdly discreet and conservative New England paper with a fusty prose style.

  “Oh. Which paper?” she said, then realized her inquisitiveness must seem quite rude, to anyone so circumspect.

  “Not a paper you would have heard of. Just the daily paper of an industrial town. Other papers in the earlier years. That was my life.”

  “And now, would you like to do a book on Willa Cather?” This question seemed not so out of place to her, because she was always talking to people who wanted to do books about something.

  “No,” he said austerely. “My eyes do not permit me to do any reading or writing beyond what is necessary.”

  That was why he was so deliberate about his eating.

  “No,” he went on, “I don’t say that at one time I might not have thought of that, doing a book on Willa. I would have written something just about her life here on the island. Biographies have been done, but not so much on that phase of her life. Now I have given up the idea. I do my investigating just for my own pleasure. I take a camp chair up there, so I can sit underneath the window where she wrote and looked at the sea. There is never anybody there.”

  “It isn’t being kept up? It isn’t any sort of memorial?”

  “Oh, no indeed. It isn’t kept up at all. The people here, you know, while they were very impressed with Willa, and some of them recognized her genius—I mean the genius of her personality, for they would not be able to recognize the genius of her work—others of them thought her unfriendly and did not like her. They took offe
nse because she was unsociable, as she had to be, to do her writing.”

  “It could be a project,” Lydia said. “Perhaps they could get some money from the government. The Canadian government and the Americans too. They could preserve the house.”

  “Well, that isn’t for me to say.” He smiled; he shook his head. “I don’t think so. No.”

  He did not want any other worshippers coming to disturb him in his camp chair. She should have known that. What would this private pilgrimage of his be worth if other people got into the act, and signs were put up, leaflets printed; if this guesthouse, which was now called Sea View, had to be renamed Shadows on the Rock? He would let the house fall down and the grass grow over it sooner than see that.

  AFTER LYDIA’S last attempt to call Duncan, the man she had been living with in Kingston, she had walked along the street in Toronto, knowing that she had to get to the bank, she had to buy some food, she had to get on the subway. She had to remember directions, and the order in which to do things: to open her checkbook, to move forward when it was her turn in line, to choose one kind of bread over another, to drop a token in the slot. These seemed to be the most difficult things she had ever done. She had immense difficulty reading the names of the subway stations, and getting off at the right one, so that she could go to the apartment where she was staying. She would have found it hard to describe this difficulty. She knew perfectly well which was the right stop, she knew which stop it came after; she knew where she was. But she could not make the connection between herself and things outside herself, so that getting up and leaving the car, going up the steps, going along the street all seemed to involve a bizarre effort. She thought afterwards that she had been seized up, as machines are said to be. Even at the time she had an image of herself. She saw herself as something like an egg carton, hollowed out in back.

  When she reached the apartment she sat down on a chair in the hall. She sat for an hour or so; then she went to the bathroom, undressed, put on her nightgown, and got into bed. In bed she felt triumph and relief, that she had managed all the difficulties and got herself to where she was supposed to be and would not have to remember anything more.

  She didn’t feel at all like committing suicide. She couldn’t have managed the implements, or aids, she couldn’t even have thought which to use. It amazed her to think that she had chosen the loaf of bread and the cheese, which were now lying on the floor in the hall. How had she imagined she was going to chew and swallow them?

  AFTER DINNER Lydia sat out on the veranda with the woman who had cooked the meal. The woman’s husband did the cleaning up.

  “Well, of course we have a dishwasher,” the woman said. “We have two freezers and an oversized refrigerator. You have to make an investment. You get the crews staying with you, you have to feed them. This place soaks up money like a sponge. We’re going to put in a swimming pool next year. We need more attractions. You have to run to stay in the same place. People think what an easy nice life. Boy.”

  She had a strong, lined face, and long straight hair. She wore jeans and an embroidered smock and a man’s sweater.

  “Ten years ago I was living in a commune in the States. Now I’m here. I work sometimes eighteen hours a day. I have to pack the crew’s lunch yet tonight. I cook and bake, cook and bake. John does the rest.”

  “Do you have someone to clean?”

  “We can’t afford to hire anybody. John does it. He does the laundry—everything. We had to buy a mangle for the sheets. We had to put in a new furnace. We got a bank loan. I thought that was funny, because I used to be married to a bank manager. I left him.”

  “I’m on my own now too.”

  “Are you? You can’t be on your own forever. I met John, and he was in the same boat.”

  “I was living with a man in Kingston, in Ontario.”

  “Were you? John and I are extremely happy. He used to be a minister. But when I met him he was doing carpentry. We both had sort of dropped out. Did you talk to Mr. Stanley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you ever heard of Willa Cather?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’d make him happy. I don’t read hardly at all, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m a visual person. But I think he’s a wonderful character, old Mr. Stanley. He’s a real old scholar.”

  “Has he been coming here for a long time?”

  “No, he hasn’t. This is just his third year. He says he’s wanted to come here all his life. But he couldn’t. He had to wait till some relative died, that he was looking after. Not a wife. A brother, maybe. Anyway he had to wait. How old do you think he is?”

  “Seventy? Seventy-five?”

  “That man is eighty-one. Isn’t that amazing? I really admire people like that. I really do. I admire people that keep going.”

  “THE MAN I was living with—that is, the man I used to live with, in Kingston,” said Lydia, “was putting some boxes of papers in the trunk of his car once, this was out in the country, at an old farmhouse, and he felt something nudge him and he glanced down. It was about dusk, on a pretty dark day. So he thought this was a big friendly dog, a big black dog giving him a nudge, and he didn’t pay much attention. He just said go on, now, boy, go away now, good boy. Then when he got the boxes arranged he turned around. And he saw it was a bear. It was a black bear.”

  She was telling this later that same evening, in the kitchen.

  “So what did he do then?” said Lawrence, who was the boss of the telephone work crew. Lawrence and Lydia and Eugene and Vincent were playing cards.

  Lydia laughed. “He said, Excuse me. That’s what he claims he said.”

  “Papers all he had in the boxes? Nothing to eat?”

  “He’s a writer. He writes historical books. This was some material he needed for his work. Sometimes he has to go and scout out material from people who are very strange. That bear hadn’t come out of the bush. It was a pet, actually, that had been let off its chain, for a joke. There were two old brothers there, that he got the papers from, and they just let it off its chain to give him a scare.”

  “That’s what he does, collects old stuff and writes about it?” Lawrence said. “I guess that’s interesting.”

  She immediately regretted having told this story. She had brought it up because the men were talking about bears. But there wasn’t much point to it unless Duncan told it. He could show you himself, large and benign and civilized, with his courtly apologies to the bear. He could make you see the devilish old men behind their tattered curtains.

  “You’d have to know Duncan” was what she almost said. And hadn’t she told this simply to establish that she had known Duncan—that she had recently had a man, and an interesting man, an amusing and adventurous man? She wanted to assure them that she was not always alone, going on her aimless travels. She had to show herself attached. A mistake. They were not likely to think a man adventurous who collected old papers from misers and eccentrics, so that he could write books about things that had happened a hundred years ago. She shouldn’t even have said that Duncan was a man she had lived with. All that could mean, to them, was that she was a woman who had slept with a man she was not married to.

  Lawrence the boss was not yet forty, but he was successful. He was glad to tell about himself. He was a freelance labor contractor and owned two houses in St. Stephen. He had two cars and a truck and a boat. His wife taught school. Lawrence was getting a thick waist, a trucker’s belly, but he still looked alert and vigorous. You could see that he would be shrewd enough, in most situations, for his purposes; sure enough, ruthless enough. Dressed up, he might turn flashy. And certain places and people might be capable of making him gloomy, uncertain, contentious.

  Lawrence said it wasn’t all true—all the stuff they wrote about the Maritimes. He said there was plenty of work for people who weren’t afraid to work. Men or women. He said he was not against women’s lib, but the fact was, and always would be, that there was work men did better than women and w
ork women did better than men, and if they would both settle down and realize that they’d be happier.

  His kids were cheeky, he said. They had it too soft. They got everything—that was the way nowadays, what could you do? The other kids got everything too. Clothes, bikes, education, records. He hadn’t had anything handed to him. He had got out and worked, driven trucks. He had got to Ontario, got as far as Saskatchewan. He had only got to Grade 10 in school but he hadn’t let that hold him back. Sometimes he wished, though, that he did have more of an education.

  Eugene and Vincent, who worked for Lawrence, said they had never got past Grade 8, when that was as far as you could go in the country schools. Eugene was twenty-five and Vincent was fifty-two. Eugene was French-Canadian from northern New Brunswick. He looked younger than his age. He had a rosy color, a downy, dreamy look—a masculine beauty that was nevertheless soft-edged, sweet-tempered, bashful. Hardly any men or boys have that look nowadays. Sometimes you see it in an old photograph—of a bridegroom, a basketball player: the thick water-combed hair, the blooming boy’s face on the new man’s body. Eugene was not very bright, or perhaps not very competitive. He lost money at the game they were playing. It was a card game that the men called Skat. Lydia remembered playing it when she was a child, and calling it Thirty-one. They played for a quarter a game.

  Eugene permitted Vincent and Lawrence to tease him about losing at cards, about getting lost in St. John, about women he liked, and about being French-Canadian. Lawrence’s teasing amounted to bullying. Lawrence wore a carefully good-natured expression, but he looked as if something hard and heavy had settled inside him—a load of self-esteem that weighed him down instead of buoying him up. Vincent had no such extra weight, and though he too was relentless in his teasing—he teased Lawrence as well as Eugene—there was no sense of cruelty or danger. You could see that his natural tone was one of rumbling, easy mockery. He was sharp and sly but not insistent; he would always be able to say the most pessimistic things and not sound unhappy.