by Alice Munro
Their car—hers and Brian’s—was still sitting in the motel parking lot. Brian would have to ask his father or his mother to drive him up here today to get it. She had the keys in her purse. There were spare keys—he would surely bring them. She unlocked the car door and threw her keys on the seat and locked the door on the inside and shut it.
Now she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t get into the car and drive back and say that she’d been insane. If she did that he would forgive her, but he’d never get over it and neither would she. They’d go on, though, as people did.
She walked out of the parking lot, she walked along the sidewalk, into town.
The weight of Mara on her hip, yesterday. The sight of Caitlin’s footprints on the floor.
Paw. Paw.
She doesn’t need the keys to get back to them, she doesn’t need the car. She could beg a ride on the highway. Give in, give in, get back to them any way at all, how can she not do that?
A sack over her head.
A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
—
THIS IS ACUTE PAIN. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage, who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world. Say to yourself, You lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has.
And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and not any possible present.
—
HER CHILDREN HAVE GROWN UP. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.
Caitlin remembers a little about the summer at the lodge, Mara nothing. One day Caitlin mentions it to Pauline, calling it “that place Grandma and Grandpa stayed at.
“The place we were at when you went away,” she says. “Only we didn’t know till later you went away with Orphée.”
Pauline says, “It wasn’t Orphée.”
“It wasn’t Orphée? Dad used to say it was. He’d say, ‘And then your mother ran away with Orphée.’ ”
“Then he was joking,” says Pauline.
“I always thought it was Orphée. It was somebody else then.”
“It was somebody else connected with the play. That I lived with for a while.”
“Not Orphée.”
“No. Never him.”
My Mother’s Dream
DURING THE NIGHT—or during the time she had been asleep—there had been a heavy fall of snow.
My mother looked out from a big arched window such as you find in a mansion or an old-fashioned public building. She looked down on lawns and shrubs, hedges, flower gardens, trees, all covered by snow that lay in heaps and cushions, not levelled or disturbed by wind. The white of it did not hurt your eyes as it does in sunlight. The white was the white of snow under a clear sky just before dawn. Everything was still; it was like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” except that the stars had gone out.
Yet something was wrong. There was a mistake in this scene. All the trees, all the shrubs and plants, were out in full summer leaf. The grass that showed underneath them, in spots sheltered from the snow, was fresh and green. Snow had settled overnight on the luxury of summer. A change of season unexplainable, unexpected. Also, everybody had gone away—though she couldn’t think who “everybody” was—and my mother was alone in the high spacious house amongst its rather formal trees and gardens.
She thought that whatever had happened would soon be made known to her. Nobody came, however. The telephone did not ring; the latch of the garden gate was not lifted. She could not hear any traffic, and she did not even know which way the street was—or the road, if she was out in the country. She had to get out of the house, where the air was so heavy and settled.
When she got outside she remembered. She remembered that she had left a baby out there somewhere, before the snow had fallen. Quite a while before the snow had fallen. This memory, this certainty, came over her with horror. It was as if she was awakening from a dream. Within her dream she awakened from a dream, to a knowledge of her responsibility and mistake. She had left her baby out overnight, she had forgotten about it. Left it exposed somewhere as if it was a doll she tired of. And perhaps it was not last night but a week or a month ago that she had done this. For a whole season or for many seasons she had left her baby out. She had been occupied in other ways. She might even have travelled away from here and just returned, forgetting what she was returning to.
She went around looking under hedges and broad-leaved plants. She foresaw how the baby would be shrivelled up. It would be dead, shrivelled and brown, its head like a nut, and on its tiny shut-up face there would be an expression not of distress but of bereavement, an old patient grief. There would not be any accusation of her, its mother—just the look of patience and helplessness with which it waited for its rescue or its fate.
The sorrow that came to my mother was the sorrow of the baby’s waiting and not knowing it waited for her, its only hope, when she had forgotten all about it. So small and new a baby that could not even turn away from the snow. She could hardly breathe for her sorrow. There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
What a reprieve, then, to find her baby lying in its crib. Lying on its stomach, its head turned to one side, its skin pale and sweet as snowdrops and the down on its head reddish like the dawn. Red hair like her own, on her perfectly safe and unmistakable baby. The joy to find herself forgiven.
The snow and the leafy gardens and the strange house had all withdrawn. The only remnant of the whiteness was the blanket in the crib. A baby blanket of light white wool, crumpled halfway down the baby’s back. In the heat, the real summer heat, the baby was wearing only a diaper and a pair of plastic pants to keep the sheet dry. The plastic pants had a pattern of butterflies.
My mother, still thinking no doubt about the snow and the cold that usually accompanies snow, pulled the blanket up to cover the baby’s bare back and shoulders, its red-downed head.
—
IT IS EARLY MORNING when this happens in the real world. The world of July 1945. At a time when, on any other morning, it would be demanding its first feeding of the day, the baby sleeps on. The mother, though standing on her feet and with her eyes open, is still too far deep in sleep in her head to wonder about this. Baby and mother are worn out by a long battle, and the mother has forgotten even that at the moment. Some circuits are closed down; the most unrelenting quiet has settled on her brain and her baby’s. The mother—my mother—makes no sense of the daylight which is increasing every moment. She doesn’t understand that the sun is coming up as she stands there. No memory of the day before, or of what happened around midnight, comes up to jolt her. She pulls the blanket up over her baby’s head, over its mild, satisfied, sleeping profile. She pads back to her own room and falls down on the bed and is again, at once, unconscious.
The house in which this happens is nothing like the house in the dream. It is a one-and-a-half-story white wooden house, cramped but respectable, with a porch that comes to within a few feet of the sidewalk, and a bay window in the dining room looking out on a small hedged yard. It is on a backstreet in a small town that is indistinguishable—to an outsider—from a lot of other small towns to be found ten or fifteen miles apart in the
once thickly populated farmland near Lake Huron. My father and his sisters grew up in this house, and the sisters and mother were still living here when my mother joined them—and I joined them too, being large and lively inside her—after my father was killed in the final weeks of the war in Europe.
—
MY MOTHER—Jill—is standing beside the dining-room table in the bright late afternoon. The house is full of people who have been invited back there after the memorial service in the church. They are drinking tea or coffee and managing to hold in their fingers the dinky sandwiches, or slices of banana bread, nut loaf, pound cake. The custard tarts or raisin tarts with their crumbly pastry are supposed to be eaten with a dessert fork off one of the small china plates that were painted with violets by Jill’s mother-in-law when she was a bride. Jill picks everything up with her fingers. Pastry crumbs have fallen, a raisin has fallen, and been smeared into the green velvet of her dress. It’s too hot a dress for the day, and it’s not a maternity dress at all but a loose sort of robe made for recitals, occasions when she plays her violin in public. The hem rides up in front, due to me. But it’s the only thing she owns that is large enough and good enough for her to wear at her husband’s memorial service.
What is this eating all about? People can’t help but notice. “Eating for two,” Ailsa says to a group of her guests, so that they won’t get the better of her by anything they say or don’t say about her sister-in-law.
Jill has been queasy all day, until suddenly in the church, when she was thinking how bad the organ was, she realized that she was, all of a sudden, as hungry as a wolf. All through “O Valiant Hearts” she was thinking of a fat hamburger dripping with meat juice and melted mayonnaise, and now she is trying to find what concoction of walnuts and raisins and brown sugar, what tooth-jabbing sweetness of coconut icing or soothing mouthful of banana bread or dollop of custard, will do as a substitute. Nothing will, of course, but she keeps on going. When her real hunger is satisfied her imaginary hunger is still working, and even more an irritability amounting almost to panic that makes her stuff into her mouth what she can hardly taste any longer. She couldn’t describe this irritability except to say it has something to do with furriness and tightness. The barberry hedge outside the window, thick and bristling in the sunlight, the feel of the velvet dress clinging to her damp armpits, the nosegays of curls—the same color as the raisins in the tarts—bunched on her sister-in-law Ailsa’s head, even the painted violets that look like scabs you could pick off the plate, all these things seem particularly horrid and oppressive to her though she knows they are quite ordinary. They seem to carry some message about her new and unexpected life.
Why unexpected? She has known for some time about me and she also knew that George Kirkham might be killed. He was in the air force, after all. (And around her in the Kirkhams’ house this afternoon people are saying—though not to her, his widow, or to his sisters—that he was just the sort you always knew would be killed. They mean because he was good-looking and high-spirited and the pride of his family, the one on whom all the hopes had been pinned.) She knew this, but she went ahead with her ordinary life, lugging her violin onto the streetcar on dark winter mornings, riding to the Conservatory where she practiced hour after hour within sound of others but alone in a dingy room with the radiator racket for company, the skin of her hands blotchy at first with the cold, then parched in the dry indoor heat. She went on living in a rented room with an ill-fitting window that let in flies in summer and a windowsill sprinkle of snow in winter, and dreaming—when she wasn’t sick—of sausages and meat pies and dark chunks of chocolate. At the Conservatory people treated her pregnancy tactfully, as if it was a tumor. It didn’t show for a long time anyway, as first pregnancies generally don’t on a big girl with a broad pelvis. Even with me turning somersaults she played in public. Majestically thickened, with her long red hair lying in a bush around her shoulders, her face broad and glowing, her expression full of somber concentration, she played a solo in her most important recital so far. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
She paid some attention to the world—she knew the war was ending. She thought that George might be back soon after I was born. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to go on living in her room then—she’d have to live somewhere with him. And she knew that I’d be there, but she thought of my birth as bringing something to an end rather than starting something. It would bring an end to the kicking in the permanent sore spot on one side of her belly and the ache in her genitals when she stands up and the blood rushes into them (as if she’d had a burning poultice laid there). Her nipples will no longer be large and dark and nubbly, and she won’t have to wind bandages around her legs with their swollen veins before she gets out of bed every morning. She won’t have to urinate every half hour or so, and her feet will shrink back into their ordinary shoes. She thinks that once I’m out I won’t give her so much trouble.
After she knew that George would not be coming back she thought about keeping me for a while in that same room. She got a book about babies. She bought the basic things that I would need. There was an old woman in the building who could look after me while she practiced. She would get a war widow’s pension and in six more months she would graduate from the Conservatory.
Then Ailsa came down on the train and collected her. Ailsa said, “We couldn’t leave you stuck down here all by yourself. Everybody wonders why you didn’t come up when George went overseas. It’s time you came now.”
—
“MY FAMILY’S CRACKERS,” George had told Jill. “Iona’s a nervous wreck and Ailsa should have been a sergeant major. And my mother’s senile.”
He also said, “Ailsa got the brains, but she had to quit school and go and work in the Post Office when my dad died. I got the looks and there wasn’t anything left for poor old Iona but the bad skin and the bad nerves.”
Jill met his sisters for the first time when they came to Toronto to see George off. They hadn’t been at the wedding, which had taken place two weeks before. Nobody was there but George and Jill and the minister and the minister’s wife and a neighbor called in to be the second witness. I was there as well, already tucked up inside Jill, but I was not the reason for the wedding and at the time nobody knew of my existence. Afterwards George insisted that he and Jill take some poker-faced wedding pictures of themselves in one of those do-it-yourself picture booths. He was in relentless high spirits. “That’ll fix them,” he said, when he looked at the pictures. Jill wondered if there was anybody special he meant to fix. Ailsa? Or the pretty girls, the cute and perky girls, who had run after him, writing him sentimental letters and knitting him argyle socks? He wore the socks when he could, he pocketed the presents, and he read the letters out in bars for a joke.
Jill had not had any breakfast before the wedding, and in the midst of it she was thinking of pancakes and bacon.
—
THE TWO SISTERS were more normal-looking than she had expected. Though it was true about George getting the looks. He had a silky wave to his dark-blond hair and a hard gleeful glint in his eyes and a clean-cut enviable set of features. His only drawback was that he was not very tall. Just tall enough to look Jill in the eye. And to be an air force pilot.
“They don’t want tall guys for pilots,” he said. “I beat them out there. The beanpole bastards. Lots of guys in the movies are short. They stand on boxes for the kissing.”
(At the movies, George could be boisterous. He might hiss the kissing. He didn’t go in for it much in real life either. Let’s get to the action, he said.)
The sisters were short, too. They were named after places in Scotland, where their parents had gone on their honeymoon before the family lost its money. Ailsa was twelve years older than George, and Iona was nine years older. In the crowd at Union Station they looked dumpy and bewildered. Both of them wore new hats and suits, as if they were the ones who had recently been married. And both were upset because Iona had left her good gloves on the train.
It was true that Iona had bad skin, though it wasn’t broken out at present and perhaps her acne days were over. It was lumpy with old scars and dingy under the pink powder. Her hair slipped out in droopy tendrils from under her hat and her eyes were teary, either because of Ailsa’s scolding or because her brother was going away to war. Ailsa’s hair was arranged in bunches of tight permanented curls, with her hat riding on top. She had shrewd pale eyes behind sparkle-rimmed glasses, and round pink cheeks, and a dimpled chin. Both she and Iona had tidy figures—high breasts and small waists and flaring hips—but on Iona this figure looked like something she had picked up by mistake and was trying to hide by stooping her shoulders and crossing her arms. Ailsa managed her curves assertively not provocatively, as if she was made of some sturdy ceramic. And both of them had George’s dark-blond coloring, but without his gleam. They didn’t seem to share his sense of humor either.
“Well I’m off,” George said. “I’m off to die a hero on the field at Passchendaele.” And Iona said, “Oh don’t say that. Don’t talk like that.” Ailsa twitched her raspberry mouth.
“I can see the lost-and-found sign from here,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s just for things you lose in the station or is it for things that they find in the trains? Passchendaele was in the First World War.”
“Was it? You sure? I’m too late?” said George, beating his hand on his chest.
And he was burned up a few months later in a training flight over the Irish Sea.
—
AILSA SMILES all the time. She says, “Well of course I am proud. I am. But I’m not the only one to lose somebody. He did what he had to do.” Some people find her briskness a bit shocking. But others say, “Poor Ailsa.” All that concentrating on George, and saving to send him to law school, and then he flouted her—he signed up; he went off and got himself killed. He couldn’t wait.