Alice Munro
Page 9
Munro describes her high school years, 1944 to 1949: “We were just very, very poor as far as cash flow went. But we had some nice furniture and we had a lot of books and we had magazines Dad brought home from the foundry. So it was always a culturally rich life.” By this time they had an indoor toilet and running water too. The Laidlaws ate from their garden and they had milk; they kept a cow that Munro milked from the time she was twelve – to get out of the house – until it wandered off and drowned in the river when she was fifteen. Munro continues,
We had eggs. But we’d heat the house with sawdust, which was the cheapest fuel you could buy. A horrible smell, but it was cheaper than wood, so we did that. I never had a boughten dress, or clothes. But then a lot of kids I went to high school with didn’t have either. Many of us were in the same boat except for that thin upper crust of people, whose fathers were doctors and dentists and merchants, and they were in a different class altogether. So that was a terrible sort of time in our family, though I didn’t take it too seriously at the time. Because the business failed, Dad had to go to work at the foundry job, which they had never anticipated.
Although she felt separate from the family circumstances, Munro could also see their downward direction and recognized her position as the oldest daughter.
Thinking her thoughts, imagining her stories, self-protected, walking back and forth from school, beginning her writing, Munro says she “took over the housework and I was very proud of keeping the house clean, keeping our standard of living from sinking, when Mother couldn’t do it. I ironed all the clothes, I ironed everybody’s pajamas … it amazes me now that I was so … but it was part of keeping our respectability – of living up to a middle-class level, that was important to me.”31 As this comment suggests, Anne Laidlaw’s ambitions were not lost on her eldest daughter, who acted on them during her high school years.
After the death of her great-uncle Alex Porterfield in January 1944, her great-aunt Maud and her grandmother Sadie Laidlaw bought a house on Leopold Street in Wingham and moved there to be close to, and to help, the Laidlaw family. The two sisters became a regular part of Munro’s high school years and, as she remembered them later in her writing, became figures in “The Peace of Utrecht” and “Winter Wind.” The latter story offers, Munro says, her most precise characterization of the two women living in Wingham during her high school years.
“Red Dress – 1946”: High School
The April 6, 1944, issue of the Wingham Advance-Times carried a headline reading “Capacity Crowd at School Concert,” “Three Act Operetta Well Presented” over a story that describes the two performances of the annual town hall concert given by the pupils of the Wingham Public School: “A capacity house enjoyed the entertainment which seems to be better each year.” The school “presented ‘The Operetta,’ ‘The Magic Piper’ … based on the old familiar story of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, where the piper comes to the rescue of the citizens of Hamelin, who are plagued with rats and with his ‘Magic Pipe’ takes the rats to the river where they are all drowned.” The story continues and, in the way of small towns and local papers, details the production and names all the performers. Toward the end of the story, just after the listing of the clown rat and his accompanying rats are the “Town’s Folk Dancers,” two of whom are Mary Ross and Alice Laidlaw, then in Grade 8. When Munro came to detail this experience herself in Lives of Girls and Women – there the operetta is The Pied Piper and Del Jordan, though initially passed over, is eventually cast as a peasant dancer – she writes that “the operetta was the only thing at school, now. Just as during the war you could not imagine what people thought about, worried about, what the news was about, before the war, so now it was impossible to remember what school had been like before the excitement, the disruption and tension, of the operetta.”32
Between 1944 and 1949, the Advance-Times includes regular mentions of Alice Munro’s public life as a high school student in Wingham. A few months after the account of the operetta, her name is listed among those students from Wingham who had passed the high school Entrance; though students from other towns are listed there as having passed the test with honours, no student from Wingham is so designated. In March of 1945, when Munro was in Grade 9, she is listed as having participated in the high school’s “Easter Literary.” O Canada! was sung, two students sang a duet entitled “Marching to the Rhythm of the Boogie Woogie Beat,” and “Alice Laidlaw then gave a reading of ‘Civilization Smashes Up’ by the American humorist, Ellis Parker Butler.” There were other performances, Mary Ross was a member of the cast in a “French playlet entitled ‘Pour Acheter un Chapeau,’ ” there were “critics remarks” given by one of the teachers, and the “meeting closed with the singing of God Save the King.”33 Remembering this, Munro said that she “once gave a reading and nearly died of fear, my heart was just really pounding. I was sick with nerves, and I was like that all through my adolescence.” Her reactions were such that this was her last appearance in a literary event. Nor was she elected a society officer. Part of this was her shyness, though her long walk home and her responsibilities there made after-school obligations difficult for her.
Instead, Alice Laidlaw is listed in the paper as among the highest-scoring students in the Wingham High School. Reflecting the work ethic Munro has written about and spoken of as characteristic of the Scots-Irish of Huron County, and an accepted journalistic practice at the time, each student’s final test grades were printed each term in the Advance-Times. At the end of Grade 9, for instance, Munro was promoted to Grade 10 with the second-highest score, 80.7 per cent, with Mary Ross at 84.4 per cent. They were the only students to score above 80 (June 28, 1945). The next year, they were listed along with another student obtaining “Class I (75% and over)” ranking as they were promoted to Grade 11 (June 27, 1946). Munro slipped slightly as the students were promoted to Grade 12 – Ross scored over 75 per cent on all of her subjects, Donna Henry, another good friend, was just behind with first-class marks save a second-class in English, while Alice Laidlaw had all firsts but for a third-class mark in algebra (June 26, 1947). Munro regained her second-place standing as the students were passed to Grade 13, although mathematics remained her bane – she obtained a third-class mark in geometry along with firsts in everything else. Ross, for her part, continued to earn all firsts (June 23, 1948).
In “Red Dress – 1946” – the year in the title biographically precise to the year Munro was in Grade 11, since its dance is on a Christmas theme – Munro draws on her high school experiences to recreate what certainly look like her own feelings of being “sick with nerves.” In a long paragraph in which the narrator explains why she hates each subject she is taking, hating them because of her feelings of inadequacy or ineptitude, Munro offers characteristically funny and appalling description. The narrator hates English, for example,
because the boys played bingo in the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. The boys then made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter – oh, mine too – pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.
But what was really going on in the school was not Business Practice and Science and English, there was something else that gave life its urgency and brightness. That old building, with its rock-walled clammy basements and black cloakroom and pictures of dead royalties and lost explorers, was full of the tension and excitement of sexual competition, and in this, in spite of daydreams of vast successes, I had premonitions of total defeat. Something had to happen, to keep me from that dance.
“Red Dress – 1946�
� begins “My mother was making me a dress.” While its prime focus is on the dynamic of the dance and how the narrator navigates it, the story also treats the narrator’s mother’s expectations for her daughter. The mother, who is “not really a good sewer,” “liked to make things. That is different.” Unlike the narrator’s aunt and grandmother, who were proficient in “the fine points of tailoring,” the narrator’s mother “started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill.” Munro then details a succession of outfits the mother had made for her daughter, variously garish, that the narrator had worn when she “was unaware of the world’s opinion.” One teacher – who probably chaperoned the dance on which this story is based, since she taught dancing in her physical education classes – remembers Munro in a red velvet dress very like the one described in the story. When the dance is over and the narrator has succeeded in it – even being walked home the considerable distance out from the town by a boy who bestowed a kiss “with the air of one who knew his job when he saw it” – she looks in the kitchen window of the house and sees her mother “sitting with her feet on the open oven door, drinking tea out of a cup without a saucer. She was just sitting and waiting for me to come home and tell her everything that had happened.” When the narrator saw her mother there, she remembers, “with her sleepy but doggedly expectant face, I understood what a mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time, and she would not know.”34 So the story ends.
“Red Dress – 1946” was first published in 1965 in the Montrealer, so it was written after Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death in February 1959. Mrs. Laidlaw’s illness is not present in “Red Dress – 1946,” yet her dressmaking abilities – such as they were, in contrast with those of Aunt Maud, who was a professional seamstress before she married, and Sadie Laidlaw – and some of her personal history are evident. Her expectations for her daughter’s social success, and the daughter’s “oppressive obligation” to be happy, are the quite usual ones, irrespective of traceable biographical facts. “Red Dress – 1946,” really, is a mother-daughter story untouched by the effects of disease; Munro imagined her mother, as well she might wish to, without it.
Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s illness and her gradual decline coloured all of her daughter’s high school years. Learning of Mrs. Laidlaw’s condition, the people of Wingham generally rallied with awareness and sympathy, although it was soon recognized that there was not a great deal anyone could do. A major effect of the Parkinsonism was that Anne Laidlaw gradually lost her ability to speak clearly, although her mind was fine. The doctors were not able to give her anything to help control the tremors. As the condition advanced, when Mrs. Laidlaw called people on the telephone, she had difficulty making herself understood. Still, she continued to go out; sometimes she would spend a night or two with Donna Henry’s mother in town both for the company and to give Bob Laidlaw a break. To those who knew the Laidlaws, it was evident that being isolated in Lower Town away from Wingham proper was very difficult for her as an interested, active, gregarious woman. That had always been the case, but once she became sick her need for social contact became more pronounced.
For Munro, the overall social situation of her high school years seems to be accurately presented in “Red Dress – 1946.” The high school in Wingham was farther east, and up a hill, from the public school – so Munro’s already long walk to and from home was slightly extended. In another draft of “Changes and Ceremonies” from Lives of Girls and Women, this one called “I Am the Daughter of a River God,” Munro details the route as she walked from Wingham to Lower Town:
Lonnie and I walked home together, always the same way, down the hill from the High School, along two blocks of the main street, and out Victoria Street past the glove factory, the junkyard, some deteriorating houses, in one of which bad women had lived, when we were young and the war was on, but we never saw them, only the dark-green blinds and geraniums growing in their windows. We crossed the narrow silver bridge, hung like a cage over the Wawanash river. Here was the end of town, no more street-lights, and the sidewalk turned into a plain dirt path. There was a grocery-store, Agnew’s, covered with haphazard signs and insubstantial looking as a cardboard box stood on end, then the Flats Road running past the old fair-grounds and the widely separated houses, small, commonplace, covered with sheets of painted tin or, since the wartime prosperity, with imitation brick, with their yards, henhouses, apple trees, small barns and broken-down trucks. Every house we called by name, Miller’s, Beggs’, Castle’s, and so on, and each had a look of the people who lived in them, Miller’s having the tightly shut-up, evil look of a bootlegger’s, and Boyd’s, where two children died in accidents, one falling into the wash-water and one shot by Denny Boyd practicing with a hunting rifle, had a look of falling-apart hopelessness and carelessness turning hopelessly into disaster.
Munro’s geography here traces her exact route, one she walked twice each school day for ten years, but for the one winter spent in town. She did so observing and understanding the people and conditions she saw along the way, she recognized the social differences between Wingham and Lower Town. Given such a route, and given Munro’s sharp familiarity with the people she saw along the way, she came to know and understand both parts of her town. In 1994, when Peter Gzowski asked her how she could create the interior of a bootlegger’s place so realistically in “Spaceships Have Landed,” she replied that she had been in one before she was eighteen. She might also have said that she had been walking by one twice a day since she was eight.
During the winter Munro would sometimes be caught in town by bad weather – Wingham, close to Lake Huron, is prone to massive lake-effect snows – and would have to stay overnight there at her grandmother and aunt’s house on Leopold Street or with the Beecrofts, the United Church minister and his wife. She once wrote that “the storms that come on this country are momentous productions, they bury the roads and fences, and curl drifts up to the porch eaves, and whip the bare trees around and howl across the open fields; they will rattle and blind you.” During the spring, too, there would be floods, so Munro would sometimes be cut off by water, or unable to get into town because of the high water surrounding the Laidlaws’ place. (The 1947 and 1948 floods when Munro was in Grades 11 and 12 remain legendary – publications that chronicle the town’s history are filled with pictures of “The Flood.” Munro has recalled those years: “I remember seeing people out in their boats to feed their chickens that were roosting on top of the hen house. It was quite dramatic.”) When the way home was clear, Munro always had work to do to maintain the household – when she was in high school her brother and sister were still young, so basic housework was her responsibility. Mary Ross has observed that she and their friends were aware that Alice Ann had to do things at home that they did not but that Alice Ann never talked about it, either out of embarrassment or a certain secretiveness owing to Mrs. Laidlaw’s situation.
Given this, Munro did not much participate in the dances held at the high school and, on special occasions, at the Wingham Armory, where the high school held its gym classes. The circumstances detailed in “Red Dress – 1946” – everyone getting dressed up, girls going to the dance with other girls, boys with boys, the pairing up – were just as the dances were conducted then. Mary Ross remembers regularly encouraging Alice Ann to plan to stay at her house in town, to go together to the dance, but says that Munro did so only a few times.
Generally, social life among the students did not involve much dating. Munro was included in a mixed social group at the high school – though because of distance and responsibilities at home she was on its fringes – that regularly did things together: movies, skating parties, and the like. In any case, Munro was not involved in any dating during these years. When she published Dance of the Happy Shades her father commented to one of Munro’s high school teachers that he had not been aware that she had even had
a boyfriend. The story that led to his observation may well have been “Red Dress – 1946,” although “An Ounce of Cure” would also qualify. Munro did have a boyfriend the summer she was sixteen, in 1947, but that was in the Ottawa Valley; she won a prize at school that gave her some money and she used it to visit her relatives in Scotch Corners. There she connected with and spent time with the hired man (really a boy a few years older) from the farm across the road from the Chamneys.
During the summer of 1948, the year Munro turned seventeen, she worked away from home as a maid for a well-to-do family that had a home in Forest Hill, in Toronto, and a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay, near Pointe au Baril. This experience occasioned her first visit to downtown Toronto, on a day off from the family’s home, and inspired two stories: “Sunday Afternoon,” which first appeared in the Canadian Forum in 1957 and subsequently in Dance of the Happy Shades; and “Hired Girl,” which was in the New Yorker in 1994 and has not been reprinted.
The latter story offers the circumstances of Munro’s employment, pretty much as it occurred; her employer, Mrs. Montjoy, “had picked me up at the station in Pointe au Baril and brought me to the island. I had got the job through the woman in the Pointe au Baril store, an old friend of my mother’s – they had taught school together. Mrs. Montjoy had asked this woman if she knew of a country girl who would take a summer job, and the woman thought I would be about the right age, and trained to do housework.” The real-life woman who had made the connection did run a store in Pointe au Baril, and she had taught at the Lower Town school; she had relatives in Wingham. In “Sunday Afternoon,” Munro creates the circumstances of the home in Forest Hill. (“There was a guy who made a pass at me in the kitchen,” she recalled, and also said, “It was time I found out” about such things.) In that story a cousin “took hold of” Alva, the maid, “lightly, and spent some time kissing her mouth.” This leaves Alva, as the story ends, with “a tender spot, a new and still mysterious humiliation.”