by Alice Munro
I thought that was all she was going to say but in a moment she continued, in a voice that had actually brightened up a bit, as if she was preparing for a laugh.
“I yelled and yelled my fool head off that I wanted to see her. I carried on and carried on, and finally when they couldn’t shut me up your grandmother said to me, ‘You’re just better off not to see her. You would not want to see her, if you knew what she looks like now. You wouldn’t want to remember her this way.’
“But you know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me.”
Then she really did laugh, or make a snorting sound that was evasive and scornful.
“I must’ve thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I? She would want to see me.”
This was a part of the story I had never heard.
And the minute that I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself,
She would want to see me.
The story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written till years later, not until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the idea into my head in the first place.
I thanked Alfrida and said that I had to go. Alfrida went to call Bill to say good-bye to me, but came back to report that he had fallen asleep.
“He’ll be kicking himself when he wakes up,” she said. “He enjoyed meeting you.”
She took off her apron and accompanied me all the way down the outside steps. At the bottom of the steps was a gravel path leading around to the sidewalk. The gravel crunched under our feet and she stumbled in her thin-soled house shoes.
She said, “Ouch! Goldarn it,” and caught hold of my shoulder.
“How’s your dad?” she said.
“He’s all right.”
“He works too hard.”
I said, “He has to.”
“Oh, I know. And how’s your mother?”
“She’s about the same.”
She turned aside towards the shop window.
“Who do they think is ever going to buy this junk? Look at that honey pail. Your dad and I used to take our lunch to school in pails just like that.”
“So did I,” I said.
“Did you?” She squeezed me. “You tell your folks I’m thinking about them, will you do that?”
Alfrida did not come to my father’s funeral. I wondered if that was because she did not want to meet me. As far as I knew she had never made public what she held against me; nobody else would know about it. But my father had known. When I was home visiting him and learned that Alfrida was living not far away— in my grandmother’s house, in fact, which she had finally inherited —I had suggested that we go to see her. This was in the flurry between my two marriages, when I was in an expansive mood, newly released and able to make contact with anyone I chose.
My father said, “Well, you know, Alfrida was a bit upset.”
He was calling her Alfrida now. When had that started?
I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her.
“It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.”
But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child.
“Well,” my father said. He was in general quite pleased that I had become a writer, but there were reservations he had about what might be called my character. About the fact that I had ended my marriage for personal—that is, wanton—reasons, and the way I went around justifying myself—or perhaps, as he would have said, weaseling out of things. He would not say so—it was not his business anymore.
I asked him how he knew that Alfrida felt this way.
He said, “A letter.”
A letter, though they lived not far apart. I did feel sorry to think that he had had to bear the brunt of what could be taken as my thoughtlessness, or even my wrongdoing. Also that he and Alfrida seemed now to be on such formal terms. I wondered what he was leaving out. Had he felt compelled to defend me to Alfrida, as he had to defend my writing to other people? He would do that now, though it was never easy for him. In his uneasy defense he might have said something harsh.
Through me, peculiar difficulties had developed for him.
There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.
Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s?
My father had said that Alfrida was living alone now. I asked him what had become of Bill. He said that all of that was outside of his jurisdiction. But he believed there had been a bit of a rescue operation.
“Of Bill? How come? Who by?”
“Well, I believe there was a wife.”
“I met him at Alfrida’s once. I liked him.”
“People did. Women.”
I had to consider that the rupture might have had nothing to do with me. My stepmother had urged my father into a new sort of life. They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton’s. She had been a widow for a long time before she married him, and she had many friends from those days who became new friends for him. What had happened with him and Alfrida might have been simply one of the changes, the wearing-out of old attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in the lives of older people—particularly, as I would have said, in the lives of people at home.
My stepmother died just a little while before my father. After their short, happy marriage they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners. Before either of those deaths Alfrida had moved back to the city. She didn’t sell the house, she just went away and left it. My father wrote to me, “That’s a pretty funny way of doing things.”
There were a lot of people at my father’s funeral, a lot of people I didn’t know. A woman came across the grass in the cemetery to speak to me—I thought at first she must be a friend of my stepmother’s. Then I saw that the woman was only a few years past my own age. The stocky figure and crown of gray-blond curls and floral-patterned jacket made her look older.
“I recognized you by your picture,” she said. “Alfrida used to always be bragging about you.”
I said, “Alfrida’s not dead?”
“Oh, no,” the woman said, and went on to tell me that Alfrida was in a nursing home in a town just north of Toronto.
“I moved her down there so’s I could keep an eye on her.”
Now it was easy to tell—even by her voice—that she was somebody of my own generation, and it came to me that she must be one of the other family, a half sister of Alfrida’s, born when Alfrida was almost grown up.
She told me her name, and it was of course not the same as Alfrida’s—she must have married. And I couldn’t recall Alfrida’s ever mentioning any of her half family by their first names.
I asked how Alfrida was, and the woman said her own eyesight was so bad that she was legally blind. And she had a serious kidney problem, which meant that she had to be on dialysis twice a week.
“Other than that—?” she said, and laughed. I thought, yes, a sister, because I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh.
“So she doesn’t
travel too good,” she said. “Or else I would’ve brought her. She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes. That’s where I saw about your dad.”
I wondered out loud, impulsively, if I should go to visit, at the nursing home. The emotions of the funeral—all the warm and relieved and reconciled feelings opened up in me by the death of my father at a reasonable age—prompted this suggestion. It would have been hard to carry out. My husband—my second husband— and I had only two days here before we were flying to Europe on an already delayed holiday.
“I don’t know if you’d get so much out of it,” the woman said. “She has her good days. Then she has her bad days. You never know. Sometimes I think she’s putting it on. Like, she’ll sit there all day and whatever anybody says to her, she’ll just say the same thing. Fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That’s what she’ll say all day long. Fit-as-a-fiddle-and-ready-for-love. She’ll drive you crazy. Then other days she can answer all right.”
Again, her voice and laugh—this time half submerged— reminded me of Alfrida, and I said, “You know I must have met you, I remember once when Alfrida’s stepmother and her father dropped in, or maybe it was only her father and some of the children—”
“Oh, that’s not who I am,” the woman said. “You thought I was Alfrida’s sister? Glory. I must be looking my age.”
I started to say that I could not see her very well, and it was true. In October the afternoon sun was low, and it was coming straight into my eyes. The woman was standing against the light, so that it was hard to make out her features or her expression.
She twitched her shoulders nervously and importantly. She said, “Alfrida was my birth mom.”
Mawm. Mother.
Then she told me, at not too great length, the story that she must have told often, because it was about an emphatic event in her life and an adventure she had embarked on alone. She had been adopted by a family in eastern Ontario; they were the only family she had ever known (“and I love them dearly”), and she had married and had her children, who were grown up before she got the urge to find out who her own mother was. It wasn’t too easy, because of the way records used to be kept, and the secrecy (“It was kept one hundred percent secret that she had me”), but a few years ago she had tracked down Alfrida.
“Just in time too,” she said. “I mean, it was time somebody came along to look after her. As much as I can.”
I said, “I never knew.”
“No. Those days, I don’t suppose too many did. They warn you, when you start out to do this, it could be a shock when you show up. Older people, it’s still heavy-duty. However. I don’t think she minded. Earlier on, maybe she would have.”
There was some sense of triumph about her, which wasn’t hard to understand. If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power. In this case it was so complete that she felt a need to apologize.
“Excuse me talking all about myself and not saying how sorry I am about your dad.”
I thanked her.
“You know Alfrida told me that your dad and her were walking home from school one day, this was in high school. They couldn’t walk all the way together because, you know, in those days, a boy and a girl, they would just get teased something terrible. So if he got out first he’d wait just where their road went off the main road, outside of town, and if she got out first she would do the same, wait for him. And one day they were walking together and they heard all the bells starting to ring and you know what that was? It was the end of the First World War.”
I said that I had heard that story too.
“Only I thought they were just children.”
“Then how could they be coming home from high school, if they were just children?”
I said that I had thought they were out playing in the fields. “They had my father’s dog with them. He was called Mack.”
“Maybe they had the dog all right. Maybe he came to meet them. I wouldn’t think she’d get mixed up on what she was telling me. She was pretty good on remembering anything involved your dad.”
Now I was aware of two things. First, that my father was born in 1902, and that Alfrida was close to the same age. So it was much more likely that they were walking home from high school than that they were playing in the fields, and it was odd that I had never thought of that before. Maybe they had said they were in the fields, that is, walking home across the fields. Maybe they had never said “playing.”
Also, that the feeling of apology or friendliness, the harmless-ness that I had felt in this woman a little while before, was not there now.
I said, “Things get changed around.”
“That’s right,” the woman said. “People change things around. You want to know what Alfrida said about you?”
Now. I knew it was coming now.
“What?”
“She said you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were.”
I made myself keep looking into the dark face against the light. Smart, too smart, not smart enough.
I said, “Is that all?”
“She said you were kind of a cold fish. That’s her talking, not me. I haven’t got anything against you.”
That Sunday, after the noon dinner at Alfrida’s, I set out to walk all the way back to my rooming house. If I walked both ways, I reckoned that I would have covered about ten miles, which ought to offset the effects of the meal I had eaten. I felt overfull, not just of food but of everything that I had seen and sensed in the apartment. The crowded, old-fashioned furnishings. Bill’s silences. Alfrida’s love, stubborn as sludge, and inappropriate, and hopeless—as far as I could see—on the grounds of age alone.
After I had walked for a while, my stomach did not feel so heavy. I made a vow not to eat anything for the next twenty-four hours. I walked north and west, north and west, on the streets of the tidily rectangular small city. On a Sunday afternoon there was hardly any traffic, except on the main thoroughfares. Sometimes my route coincided with a bus route for a few blocks. A bus might go by with only two or three people in it. People I did not know and who did not know me. What a blessing.
I had lied, I was not meeting any friends. My friends had mostly all gone home to wherever they lived. My fiancé would be away until the next day—he was visiting his parents, in Cobourg, on the way home from Ottawa. There would be nobody in the rooming house when I got there—nobody I had to bother talking to or listening to. I had nothing to do.
When I had walked for over an hour, I saw a drugstore that was open. I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter—its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows. To hear from the back of the shop the sounds of the ball game that the man who had served me was listening to on the radio. I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.
This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.
Comfort
Nina had been playing tennis in the late afternoon, on the high-school courts. After Lewis had left his job at the school she had boycotted the courts for a while, but that was nearly a year ago, and her friend Margaret—another retired teacher, whose departure had been routine and ceremonious, unlike Lewis’s—had talked her into playing there again.
“Better get out a bit while you still can.”
Margaret had already been gone when Lewis’s trouble occurred. She had written a l
etter from Scotland in support of him. But she was a person of such wide sympathies, such open understanding and far-reaching friendships, that the letter perhaps did not carry much weight. More of Margaret’s good-heartedness.
“How is Lewis?” she said, when Nina drove her home that afternoon.
Nina said, “Coasting.”
The sun had already dropped nearly to the rim of the lake. Some trees that still held their leaves were flares of gold, but the summer warmth of the afternoon had been snatched away. The shrubs in front of Margaret’s house were all bundled up in sacking like mummies.
This moment of the day made Nina think of the walks she and Lewis used to take after school and before supper. Short walks, of necessity as the days got dark, along out-of-town lanes and old railway embankments. But crowded with all that specific observation, spoken or not spoken, that she had learned or absorbed from Lewis. Bugs, grubs, snails, mosses, reeds in the ditch and shaggy-manes in the grass, animal tracks, nannyberries, cranberries—a deep mix stirred up a little differently every day. And every day a new step towards winter, an increased frugality, a withering.
The house Nina and Lewis lived in had been built in the 1840s, close up to the sidewalk in the style of that time. If you were in the living room or dining room you could hear not only footsteps but conversations outside. Nina expected that Lewis would have heard the car door close.
She entered whistling, as well as she could. See the conquering hero comes.