Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  I dared to lift myself partly out of the water, holding with one hand to the dock. I bobbed up and down and rose into the air like a mermaid. Gleaming, with nobody to see.

  Now I heard steps. I heard somebody coming. I sank down into the water and held still.

  For a moment I believed that it was Mr. Hammond, and that I had actually entered the world of secret signals, abrupt and wordless forays of desire. I did not cover myself but shrank against the dock, in a paralyzed moment of horror and submission.

  The boathouse light was switched on, and I turned around noiselessly in the water and saw that it was old Mr. Foley, still in his party outfit of white trousers and yachting cap and blazer. He had stayed for a couple of drinks and explained to everybody that Mrs. Foley was not up to the strain of seeing so many people but sent her best wishes to all.

  He was moving things around on the tool shelf. Soon he either found what he wanted or put back what he had intended to put back, and he switched off the light and left. He never knew that I was there.

  I pulled up my bathing suit and got out of the water and went up the stairs. My body seemed such a weight to me that I was out of breath when I got to the top.

  The sound of the cocktail party went on and on. I had to do something to hold my own against it, so I started to write a letter to Dawna, who was my best friend at that time. I described the cocktail party in lurid terms—people vomited over the deck railing and a woman passed out, falling down on the sofa in such a way that part of her dress slid off and exposed a purple-nippled old breast (I called it a bezoom). I spoke of Mr. Hammond as a letch, though I added that he was very good-looking. I said that he had fondled me in the kitchen while my hands were busy with the meatballs and that later he had followed me to the boathouse and grabbed me on the stairs. But I had kicked him where he wouldn’t forget and he had retreated. Scurried away, I said.

  “So hold your breath for the next installment,” I wrote. “Entitled, ‘Sordid Adventures of a Kitchen Maid.’ Or ‘Ravaged on the Rocks of Georgian Bay.’ ”

  When I saw that I had written “ravaged” instead of “ravished,” I thought I could let it go, because Dawna would never know the difference. But I realized that the part about Mr. Hammond was overdone, even for that sort of letter, and then the whole thing filled me with shame and a sense of my own failure and loneliness. I crumpled it up. There had not been any point in writing this letter except to assure myself that I had some contact with the world and that exciting things—sexual things—happened to me. And I hadn’t. They didn’t.

  —

  “MRS. FOLEY ASKED ME where Jane was,” I had said, when Mrs. Montjoy and I were doing the silver—or when she was keeping an eye on me doing the silver. “Was Jane one of the other girls who worked here in the summer?”

  I thought for a moment that she might not answer, but she did.

  “Jane was my other daughter,” she said. “She was Mary Anne’s sister. She died.”

  I said, “Oh. I didn’t know.” I said, “Oh. I’m sorry.

  “Did she die of polio?” I said, because I did not have the sense, or you might say the decency, not to go on. And in those days children still died of polio, every summer.

  “No,” said Mrs. Montjoy. “She was killed when my husband moved the dresser in our bedroom. He was looking for something he thought he might have dropped behind it. He didn’t realize she was in the way. One of the casters caught on the rug and the whole thing toppled over on her.”

  I knew every bit of this, of course. Mary Anne had already told me. She had told me even before Mrs. Foley asked me where Jane was and clawed at my breast.

  “How awful,” I said.

  “Well. It was just one of those things.”

  My deception made me feel queasy. I dropped a fork on the floor.

  Mrs. Montjoy picked it up.

  “Remember to wash this again.”

  How strange that I did not question my right to pry, to barge in and bring this to the surface. Part of the reason must have been that in the society I came from, things like that were never buried for good, but ritualistically resurrected, and that such horrors were like a badge people wore—or, mostly, that women wore—throughout their lives.

  Also it may have been because I would never quite give up when it came to demanding intimacy, or at least some kind of equality, even with a person I did not like.

  Cruelty was a thing I could not recognize in myself. I thought I was blameless here, and in any dealings with this family. All because of being young, and poor, and knowing about Nausicaa.

  I did not have the grace or fortitude to be a servant.

  —

  ON MY LAST SUNDAY I was alone in the boathouse, packing up my things in the suitcase I had brought—the same suitcase that had gone with my mother and father on their wedding trip and the only one we had in the house. When I pulled it out from under my cot and opened it up, it smelled of home—of the closet at the end of the upstairs hall where it usually sat, close to the mothballed winter coats and the rubber sheet once used on children’s beds. But when you got it out at home it always smelled faintly of trains and coal fires and cities—of travel.

  I heard steps on the path, a stumbling step into the boathouse, a rapping on the wall. It was Mr. Montjoy.

  “Are you up there? Are you up there?”

  His voice was boisterous, jovial, as I had heard it before when he had been drinking. As of course he had been drinking—for once again there were people visiting, celebrating the end of summer. I came to the top of the stairs. He had a hand against the wall to steady himself—a boat had gone by out in the channel and sent its waves into the boathouse.

  “See here,” said Mr. Montjoy, looking up at me with frowning concentration. “See here—I thought I might as well bring this down and give it to you while I thought of it.

  “This book,” he said.

  He was holding Seven Gothic Tales.

  “Because I saw you were looking in it that day,” he said. “It seemed to me you were interested. So now I finished it and I thought I might as well pass it along to you. It occurred to me to pass it along to you. I thought, maybe you might enjoy it.”

  I said, “Thank you.”

  “I’m probably not going to read it again though I thought it was very interesting. Very unusual.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “That’s all right. I thought you might enjoy it.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well then. I hope you will.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well then,” he said. “Good-bye.”

  I said, “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  Why were we saying good-bye when we were certain to see each other again before we left the island, and before I got on the train? It might have meant that this incident, of his giving me the book, was to be closed, and I was not to reveal or refer to it. Which I didn’t. Or it might have been just that he was drunk and did not realize that he would see me later. Drunk or not, I see him now as pure of motive, leaning against the boathouse wall. A person who could think me worthy of this gift. Of this book.

  At the moment, though, I didn’t feel particularly pleased, or grateful, in spite of my repeated thank-yous. I was too startled, and in some way embarrassed. The thought of having a little corner of myself come to light, and be truly understood, stirred up alarm, just as much as being taken no notice of stirred up resentment. And Mr. Montjoy was probably the person who interested me least, whose regard meant the least to me, of all the people I had met that summer.

  He left the boathouse and I heard him stumping along the path, back to his wife and his guests. I pushed the suitcase aside and sat down on the cot. I opened the book just anywhere, as I had done the first time, and began to read.

  The walls of the room had once been painted crimson, but with time the colour had faded into a richness of hues, like a glassful of dying red roses…Some potpourri was being burned on the tall stove, on the sides
of which Neptune, with a trident, steered his team of horses through high waves…

  I forgot Mr. Montjoy almost immediately. In hardly any time at all I came to believe that this gift had always belonged to me.

  Home

  I COME HOMe as I have done several times in the past year, travelling on three buses. The first bus is large, air-conditioned, fast, and comfortable. People on it pay little attention to each other. They look out at the highway traffic, which the bus negotiates with superior ease. We travel west then north from the city, and after fifty miles or so reach a large, prosperous market-and-manufacturing town. Here with those passengers who are going in my direction, I switch to a smaller bus. It is already fairly full of people whose journey home starts in this town—farmers too old to drive anymore, and farmers’ wives of all ages; nursing students and agricultural college students going home for the weekend; children being transferred between parents and grandparents. This is an area with a heavy population of German and Dutch settlers, and some of the older people are speaking in one or another of those languages. On this leg of the trip you may see the bus stop to deliver a basket or a parcel to somebody waiting at a farm gate.

  —

  THE THIRTY-MILE TRIP to the town where the last change is made takes as long as, or longer than, the fifty-mile lap from the city. By the time we reach that town the large good-humored descendants of Germans, and the more recent Dutch, have all got off, the evening has grown darker and chillier and the farms less tended and rolling. I walk across the road with one or two survivors from the first bus, two or three from the second—here we smile at each other, acknowledging a comradeship or even a similarity that would not have been apparent to us in the places we started from. We climb onto the small bus waiting in front of a gas station. No bus depot here.

  This is an old school bus, with very uncomfortable seats which cannot be adjusted in any way, and windows cut by horizontal metal frames. That makes it necessary to slump down or to sit up very straight and crane your neck, in order to get an unobstructed view. I find this irritating, because the countryside here is what I most want to see—the reddening fall woods and the dry fields of stubble and the cows crowding the barn porches. Such unremarkable scenes, in this part of the country, are what I have always thought would be the last thing I would care to see in my life.

  And it does strike me that this might turn out to be true, and sooner than I had expected, as the bus is driven at what seems a reckless speed, bouncing and swerving, over the remaining twenty miles of roughly paved road.

  This is great country for accidents. Boys too young to have a license will come to grief driving at ninety miles an hour over gravel roads with blind hills. Celebrating drivers will roar through villages late at night without their lights on, and most grown males seem to have survived at least one smashed telephone pole and one roll in the ditch.

  —

  MY FATHER AND STEPMOTHER may tell me of these casualties when I get home. My father simply speaks of a terrible accident. My stepmother takes it further. Decapitation, a steering-wheel stove into the chest, the bottle somebody was drinking from pulping the face.

  “Idiots,” I say shortly. It’s not just that I have no sympathy with the gravel-runners, the blind drunks. It’s that I think this conversation, my stepmother’s expansion and relish, may be embarrassing my father. Later I’ll understand that this probably isn’t so.

  “That’s the very word for them,” says my stepmother. “Idiots. They have nobody but themself to blame.”

  I sit with my father and my stepmother—whose name is Irlma—at the kitchen table, drinking whiskey. Their dog Buster lies at Irlma’s feet. My father pours rye into three juice glasses until they are about three-quarters full, then fills them up with water. While my mother was alive there was never a bottle of liquor in this house, or even a bottle of beer or wine. She had made my father promise, before they were married, that he would never take a drink. This was not because she had suffered from men’s drinking in her own home—it was just the promise that many self-respecting women required before they would bestow themselves on a man in those days.

  The wooden kitchen table that we always ate from, and the chairs we sat on, have been taken to the barn. The chairs did not match. They were very old, and a couple of them were supposed to have come from what was called the chair factory—it was probably just a workshop—at Sunshine, a village that had passed out of existence by the end of the nineteenth century. My father is ready to sell them for next to nothing, or give them away, if anybody wants them. He can never understand an admiration for what he calls old junk, and thinks that people who profess it are being pretentious. He and Irlma have bought a new table with a plastic surface that looks something like wood and will not mark, and four chairs with plastic-covered cushions that have a pattern of yellow flowers and are, to tell the truth, much more comfortable than the old wooden chairs to sit on.

  Now that I am living only a hundred miles away I come home every couple of months or so. Before this, for a long time, I lived more than a thousand miles away and would go for years without seeing this house. I thought of it then as a place I might never see again and I was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind. All those rooms are small, and as is usual in old farmhouses, they are not designed to take advantage of the out-of-doors but, if possible, to ignore it. People may not have wanted to spend their time of rest or shelter looking out at the fields they had to work in, or at the snowdrifts they had to shovel their way through in order to feed their stock. People who openly admired nature—or who even went so far as to use that word, Nature—were often taken to be slightly soft in the head.

  In my mind, when I was far away, I would also see the kitchen ceiling, made of narrow, smoke-stained, tongue-in-groove boards, and the frame of the kitchen window gnawed by some dog that had been locked in before my time. The wallpaper was palely splotched by a leaking chimney, and the linoleum was repainted by my mother every spring, as long as she was able. She painted it a dark color—brown or green or navy—then, using a sponge, she made a design on it, with bright speckles of yellow or red.

  That ceiling is hidden now behind squares of white tiles, and a new metal window frame has replaced the gnawed wooden one. The window glass is new as well, and doesn’t contribute any odd whorls or waves to what there is to see through it. And what there is to see, anyway, is not the bush of golden glow that was seldom cut back and that covered both bottom panes, or the orchard with the scabby apple trees and the two pear trees that never bore much fruit, being too far north. There is now only a long, gray, windowless turkey barn and a turkey yard, for which my father sold off a strip of land.

  The front rooms have been repapered—a white paper with a cheerful but formal red embossed design—and wall-to-wall moss-green carpeting has been put down. And because my father and Irlma both grew up and lived through part of their adult lives in houses lit by coal-oil lamps, there is light everywhere—ceiling lights and plug-in lights, long blazing tubes and hundred-watt bulbs.

  Even the outside of the house, the red brick whose crumbling mortar was particularly penetrable by an east wind, is going to be covered up with white metal siding. My father is thinking of putting it on himself. So it seems that this peculiar house—the kitchen part of it built in the 1860s—can be dissolved, in a way, and lost, inside an ordinary comfortable house of the present time.

  I do not lament this loss as I would once have done. I do say that the red brick has a beautiful, soft color, and that I’ve heard of people (city people) paying a big price for just such old bricks, but I say this mostly because I think my father expects it. I am now a city person in his eyes, and when was I ever practical? (This is not accounted such a fault as it used to be, because I have made my way, against expectations, among people who are probably as impractical as myself.) And he is pleased to explain again about the east wind and the cost of fuel and the difficulty of repairs. I know that he sp
eaks the truth, and I know that the house being lost was not a fine or handsome one in any way. A poor man’s house, always, with the stairs going up between walls, and bedrooms opening out of one another. A house where people have lived close to the bone for over a hundred years. So if my father and Irlma wish to be comfortable combining their old-age pensions, which make them richer than they’ve ever been in their lives, if they wish to be (they use this word without quotation marks, quite simply and positively) modern, who am I to complain about the loss of some rosy bricks, a crumbling wall?

  But it’s also true that in a way my father wants some objections, some foolishness from me. And I feel obliged to hide from him the fact that the house does not mean as much to me as it once did, and that it really does not matter to me now how he changes it.

  “I know how you love this place,” he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself that I loved here—some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.

  I don’t go into the front room now, to rummage in the piano bench for old photographs and sheet music. I don’t go looking for my old high-school texts, my Latin poetry, Maria Chapdelaine. Or for the best sellers of some year in the 1940s when my mother belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club—a great year for novels about the wives of Henry the Eighth, and for three-name women writers, and understanding books about the Soviet Union. I don’t open the “classics” bound in limp imitation leather, bought by my mother before she was married, just to see her maiden name written in graceful, conventional schoolteacher’s handwriting on the marbled endpaper, after the publisher’s pledge: Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.