by Alice Munro
She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as dinner napkins or as small as cocktail napkins. They were set in overlapping rows so that a corner of each napkin (the corner embroidered with a tiny blue or pink or yellow flower) overlapped the folded corner of its neighbor. No two napkins embroidered with the same color of flower were touching each other. Nobody had disturbed them, or if they had—for she did see a few people around the room holding napkins—they had picked up napkins from the end of the row in a careful way and this order had been maintained.
At the funeral service, the minister had compared Jonas’s life on earth to the life of a baby in the womb. The baby, he said, knows nothing of any other existence and inhabits its warm, dark, watery cave with not an inkling of the great bright world it will soon be thrust into. And we on earth have an inkling, but are really quite unable to imagine the light that we will enter after we have survived the travail of death. If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near future, would it not be incredulous, as well as afraid? And so are we, most of the time, but we should not be, for we have been given assurance. Even so, our blind brains cannot imagine, cannot conceive of, what we will pass into. The baby is lapped in its ignorance, in the faith of its dumb, helpless being. And we who are not entirely ignorant or entirely knowing must take care to wrap ourselves in our faith, in the word of our Lord.
Meriel looked at the minister, who stood in the hall doorway with a glass of sherry in his hand, listening to a vivacious woman with blond puffed hair. It didn’t seem to her that they were talking about the pangs of death and the light ahead. What would he do if she walked over and tackled him on that subject?
Nobody would have the heart to. Or the bad manners.
Instead she looked at Pierre and the bush doctor. Pierre was talking with a boyish liveliness not often seen in him these days. Or not often seen by Meriel. She occupied herself by pretending that she was seeing him for the first time, now. His curly, short-cropped, very dark hair receding at the temples, baring the smooth, gold-tinged ivory skin. His wide, sharp shoulders and long, fine limbs and nicely shaped rather small skull. He smiled enchantingly but never strategically and seemed to distrust smiling altogether since he had become a teacher of boys. Faint lines of permanent fret were set in his forehead.
She thought of a teachers’ party—more than a year ago—when she and he had found themselves, at opposite sides of the room, left out of the nearby conversations. She had circled the room and got close to him without his noticing, and then she had begun to talk to him as if she were a discreetly flirtatious stranger. He smiled as he was smiling now—but with a difference, as was natural when talking to an ensnaring woman—and he took up the charade. They exchanged charged looks and vapid speeches until they both broke down laughing. Someone came up to them and told them that married jokes were not allowed.
“What makes you think we’re really married?” said Pierre, whose behavior at such parties was usually so circumspect.
She crossed the room to him now with no such foolishness in mind. She had to remind him that they must soon go their separate ways. He was driving to Horseshoe Bay to catch the next ferry, and she would have to get across the North Shore to Lynn Valley by bus. She had arranged to take this chance to visit a woman her dead mother had loved and admired, and in fact had named her daughter for, and whom Meriel had always called Aunt, though they were not related by blood. Aunt Muriel. (It was when she went away to college that Meriel had changed the spelling.) This old woman was living in a nursing home in Lynn Valley, and Meriel had not visited her for over a year. It took too much time to get there, on their infrequent family trips to Vancouver, and the children were upset by the atmosphere of the nursing home and the looks of the people who lived there. So was Pierre, though he did not like to say so. Instead, he asked what relation this person was to Meriel, anyway.
It’s not as if she was a real aunt.
So now Meriel was going to see her by herself. She had said that she would feel guilty if she didn’t go when she had the chance. Also, though she didn’t say so, she was looking forward to the time that this would give her to be away from her family.
“Maybe I could drive you,” Pierre said. “God knows how long you’ll have to wait for the bus.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You’d miss the ferry.” She reminded him of their arrangement with the sitter.
He said, “You’re right.”
The man he’d been talking to—the doctor—had not had any choice but to listen to this conversation, and he said unexpectedly, “Let me drive you.”
“I thought you came here in an airplane,” said Meriel, just as Pierre said, “This is my wife, excuse me. Meriel.”
The doctor told her a name which she hardly heard.
“It’s not so easy landing a plane on Hollyburn Mountain,” he said. “So I left it at the airport and rented a car.”
Some slight forcing of courtesy, on his part, made Meriel think that she had sounded obnoxious. She was either too bold or too shy, much of the time.
“Would that really be okay?” Pierre said. “Do you have time?”
The doctor looked directly at Meriel. This was not a disagreeable look—it was not bold or sly, it was not appraising. But it was not socially deferential, either.
He said, “Of course.”
So it was agreed that this was how it would be. They would start saying their good-byes now and Pierre would leave for the ferry and Asher, as his name was—or Dr. Asher—would drive Meriel to Lynn Valley.
What Meriel planned to do, after that, was to visit with Aunt Muriel—possibly even sitting through supper with her, then catch the bus from Lynn Valley to the downtown bus depot (buses to “town” were relatively frequent) and board the late-evening bus which would take her on to the ferry, and home.
The nursing home was called Princess Manor. It was a one-story building with extended wings, covered in pinkish-brown stucco. The street was busy, and there were no grounds to speak of, no hedges or screen-fences to shut out noise or protect the scraps of lawn. On one side there was a Gospel Hall with a joke of a steeple, on the other a gas station.
“The word ‘Manor’ doesn’t mean anything at all anymore, does it?” said Meriel. “It doesn’t even mean there’s an upstairs. It just means that you’re supposed to think that a place is something it doesn’t even pretend to be.”
The doctor said nothing—perhaps what she had said didn’t make any sense to him. Or just wasn’t worth saying even if it was true. All the way from Dundarave she had listened to herself talking and she had been dismayed. It wasn’t so much that she was prattling—saying just anything that came into her head—rather that she was trying to express things which seemed to her interesting, or that might have been interesting if she could get them into shape. But these ideas probably sounded pretentious if not insane, rattled off in the way she was doing. She must seem like one of those women who were determined not to have an ordinary conversation but a real one. And even though she knew nothing was working, that her talk must seem to him an imposition, she was unable to stop herself.
She didn’t know what had started this. Unease, simply because she so seldom talked to a stranger nowadays. The oddity of riding alone in a car with a man who wasn’t her husband.
She had even asked, rashly, what he thought of Pierre’s notion that the motorcycle accident was suicide.
“You could float that idea around about any number of violent accidents,” he had said.
“Don’t bother pulling into the drive,” she said. “I can get out here.” So embarrassed, so eager she was to get away from him and his barely polite indifference, that she put her hand on the door handle as if to open it while they were still moving along the street.
“I was planning to park,” he said, turning in anyway. “I wasn’t going to leave you stranded.”
She said, “I might be quite a while.”
She was about to say that nursing homes can be dreary and unnerving. Then she remembered that he was a doctor and would see nothing here that he had not seen before. And something in the way he said “if you wouldn’t mind that”—some formality, but also an uncertainty in his voice—surprised her. It seemed that he was making an offering of his time and his presence that had little to do with courtesy, but rather something to do with herself. It was an offer made with a touch of frank humility, but it was not a plea. If she had said that she would really rather not take up any more of his time, he would not have tried any further persuasion, he would have said good-bye with an even courtesy and driven away.
As it was, they got out of the car and walked side by side across the parking lot, towards the front entrance.
Several old or disabled people were sitting out on a square of pavement that had a few furry-looking shrubs and pots of petunias around it, to suggest a garden patio. Aunt Muriel was not among them, but Meriel found herself bestowing glad greetings. Something had happened to her. She had a sudden mysterious sense of power and delight, as if with every step she took, a bright message was travelling from her heels to the top of her skull.
When she asked him later, “Why did you come in there with me?” he said, “Because I didn’t want to lose sight of you.”
Aunt Muriel was sitting by herself, in a wheelchair, in the dim corridor just outside her own bedroom door. She was swollen and glimmering—but that was because of being swathed in an asbestos apron so she could smoke a cigarette. Meriel believed that when she had said good-bye to her, months and seasons ago, she had been sitting in the same chair in the same spot—though without the asbestos apron, which must accord with some new rule, or reflect some further decline. Very likely she sat here every day beside the fixed ashtray filled with sand, looking at the liverish painted wall—it was painted pink or mauve but it looked liverish, the corridor being so dim—with the bracket shelf on it supporting a spill of fake ivy.
“Meriel? I thought it was you,” she said. “I could tell by your steps. I could tell by your breathing. My cataracts have got to be bloody hell. All I can see is blobs.”
“It’s me, all right, how are you?” Meriel kissed her temple. “Why aren’t you out in the sunshine?”
“I’m not fond of sunshine,” the old woman said. “I have to think of my complexion.”
She might have been joking, but it was perhaps the truth. Her pale face and hands were covered with large spots—dead-white spots that caught what light there was here, turning silvery. She had been a true blonde, pink-faced, lean, with straight well-cut hair that had gone white in her thirties. Now the hair was ragged, mussed from being rubbed into pillows, and the lobes of her ears hung out of it like flat teats. She used to wear little diamonds in her ears—where had they gone? Diamonds in her ears, real gold chains, real pearls, silk shirts of unusual colors—amber, aubergine—and beautiful narrow shoes.
She smelled of hospital powder and the licorice drops she sucked all day between the rationed cigarettes.
“We need some chairs,” she said. She leaned forward, waved the cigarette hand in the air, tried to whistle. “Service, please. Chairs.”
The doctor said, “I’ll find some.”
The old Muriel and the young one were left alone.
“What’s your husband’s name?”
“Pierre.”
“And you have the two children, don’t you? Jane and David?”
“That’s right. But the man who’s with me—”
“Ah, no,” the old Muriel said. “That’s not your husband.”
Aunt Muriel belonged to Meriel’s grandmother’s generation, rather than her mother’s. She had been Meriel’s mother’s art teacher at school. First an inspiration, then an ally, then a friend. She had painted large abstract pictures, one of which—a present to Meriel’s mother—had hung in the back hall of the house where Meriel grew up and had been moved to the dining room whenever the artist came to visit. Its colors were murky—dark reds and browns (Meriel’s father called it “Manure Pile on Fire”)—but Aunt Muriel’s spirit seemed always bright and dauntless. She had lived in Vancouver when she was young, before she came to teach in this town in the interior. She had been friends with artists whose names were now in the papers. She longed to go back there and eventually did, to live with and manage the affairs of a rich old couple who were friends and patrons of artists. She seemed to have lots of money while she lived with them, but she was left out in the cold when they died. She lived on her pension, took up watercolors because she could not afford oils, starved herself (Meriel’s mother suspected) so that she could take Meriel out to lunch— Meriel being then a university student. On these occasions she talked in a rush of jokes and judgments, mostly pointing out how works and ideas that people raved about were rubbish, but how here and there—in the output of some obscure contemporary or half-forgotten figure from another century—there was something extraordinary. That was her stalwart word of praise—“extraordinary.” A hush in her voice, as if there and then and rather to her own surprise she had come upon a quality in the world that was still to be absolutely honored.
The doctor returned with two chairs and introduced himself, quite naturally, as if there’d been no chance to do it till now.
“Eric Asher.”
“He’s a doctor,” said Meriel. She was about to start explaining about the funeral, the accident, the flight down from Smithers, but the conversation was taken away from her.
“But I’m not here officially, don’t worry,” the doctor said.
“Oh, no,” said Aunt Muriel. “You’re here with her.”
“Yes,” he said.
At this moment he reached across the space between their two chairs and picked up Meriel’s hand, holding it for a moment in a hard grip, then letting it go. And he said to Aunt Muriel, “How could you tell that? By my breathing?”
“I could tell,” she said with some impatience. “I used to be a devil myself.”
Her voice—the quaver or titter in it—was not like any voice of hers that Meriel remembered. She felt as if there was some betrayal stirring, in this suddenly strange old woman. A betrayal of the past, perhaps of Meriel’s mother and the friendship she had treasured with a superior person. Or of those lunches with Meriel herself, the rarefied conversations. Some degradation was in the offing. Meriel was upset by this, remotely excited.
“Oh, I used to have friends,” Aunt Muriel said, and Meriel said, “You had lots of friends.” She mentioned a couple of names.
“Dead,” Aunt Muriel said.
Meriel said no, she had seen something just recently in the paper, a retrospective show or an award.
“Oh? I thought he was dead. Maybe I’m thinking of somebody else—Did you know the Delaneys?”
She spoke directly to the man, not to Meriel.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “No.”
“Some people who had a place where we all used to go, on Bowen Island. The Delaneys. I thought you might have heard of them. Well. There were various goings-on. That’s what I meant when I said I used to be a devil. Adventures. Well. It looked like adventures, but it was all according to script, if you know what I mean. So not so much of an adventure, actually. We all got drunk as skunks, of course. But they always had to have the candles lit in a circle and the music on, of course—more like a ritual. But not altogether. It didn’t mean you mightn’t meet somebody new and let the script go all to hell. Just meet for the first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the dark. You couldn’t get very far. Never mind. Struck down.”
She had started to cough, tried speaking through the cough, gave up and hacked violently. The doctor got up and struck her expertly a couple of times, on her bent back. The coughing ended with a groan.
“Better,” she said. “Oh, you knew what you were doin
g, but you pretended not to. One time they had a blindfold on me. Not out in the woods, this was inside. It was all right, I consented. It didn’t work so well, though—I mean, I did know. There probably wasn’t anybody there that I wouldn’t have recognized, anyway.”
She coughed again, though not so desperately as before. Then she raised her head, breathed deeply and noisily for a few minutes, holding up her hands to stall the conversation, as if she would soon have something more, something important, to say. But all she did, finally, was laugh and say, “Now I’ve got a permanent blindfold. Cataracts. Doesn’t get me taken advantage of now, not in any debauch that I know about.”
“How long have they been growing?” the doctor said with a respectful interest, and to Meriel’s great relief there began an absorbed conversation, an informed discussion about the ripening of cataracts, their removal, the pros and cons of this operation, and Aunt Muriel’s distrust of the eye doctor who was shunted off—as she said—to look after the people in here. Salacious fantasy—that was what Meriel now decided it had been—slid without the smallest difficulty into a medical chat, agreeably pessimistic on Aunt Muriel’s side and carefully reassuring on the doctor’s. The sort of conversation that must take place regularly within these walls.
In a little while there was a glance exchanged between Meriel and the doctor, asking whether the visit had lasted long enough. A stealthy, considering, almost married glance, its masquerade and its bland intimacy arousing to those who were after all not married.
Soon.
Aunt Muriel took the initiative herself. She said, “I’m sorry, it’s rude of me, I have to tell you, I get tired.” No hint in her manner, now, of the person who had launched the first part of the conversation. Distracted, play-acting, and with a vague sense of shame, Meriel bent over and kissed her good-bye. She had a feeling that she would never see Aunt Muriel again, and she never did.
Around a corner, with doors open on rooms where people lay asleep or perhaps watching from their beds, the doctor touched her between her shoulder blades and moved his hand down her back to her waist. She realized that he was picking at the cloth of her dress, which had stuck to her damp skin when she sat pressed against the chairback. The dress was also damp under her arms.