by Alice Munro
“Yes,” said Mrs. Cross encouragingly. “Yes?”
“Anh-anh-anh,” said Jack. He flapped his right hand. Tears came into his eyes.
“Are we playing cards?” said Mrs. Kidd.
“I have to get on with this game,” said Mrs. Cross. “You’re welcome to sit and watch. Were you a card player?”
His right hand came out and grabbed her chair, and he bent his head weeping. He tried to get the left hand up to wipe his face. He could lift it a few inches, then it fell back in his lap.
“Oh, well,” said Mrs. Cross softly. Then she remembered what you do when children cry; how to josh them out of it. “How can I tell what you’re saying if you’re going to cry? You just be patient. I have known people that have had strokes and got their speech back. Yes I have. You mustn’t cry, that won’t accomplish anything. You just take it slow. Boo-hoo-hoo,” she said, bending towards him. “Boo-hoohoo. You’ll have Mrs. Kidd and me crying next.”
That was the beginning of Mrs. Cross’s takeover of Jack. She got him to sit and watch the card game and to dry up, more or less, and make a noise which was a substitute for conversation (an-anh) rather than a desperate attempt at it (anh-anh-anh). Mrs. Cross felt something stretching in her. It was her old managing, watching power, her capacity for strategy, which if properly exercised could never be detected by those it was used on.
Mrs. Kidd could detect it, however.
“This isn’t what I call a card game,” she said.
MRS. CROSS soon found out that Jack could not stay interested in cards and there was no use trying to get him to play; it was conversation he was after. But trying to talk brought on the weeping.
“Crying doesn’t bother me,” she said to him. “I’ve seen tears and tears. But it doesn’t do you any good with a lot of people, to get a reputation for being a cry-baby.”
She started to ask him questions to which he could give yes-and-no answers. That brightened him up and let her test out her information.
Yes, he had worked on a newspaper. No, he was not married. No, the newspaper was not in Sudbury. Mrs. Cross began to reel off the name of every city she could think of but was unable to hit on the right one. He became agitated, tried to speak, and this time the syllables got close to a word, but she couldn’t catch it. She blamed herself, for not knowing enough places. Then, inspired, she ordered him to stay right where he was, not to move, she would be back, and she wheeled herself down the hall to the Library. There she looked for a book with maps in it. To her disgust there was not such a thing, there was nothing but love stories and religion. But she did not give up. She took off down the hall to Mrs. Kidd’s room. Since their card games had lapsed (they still played some days, but not every day), Mrs. Kidd spent many afternoons in her room. She was there now, lying on top of her bed, wearing an elegant purple dressing-gown with a high embroidered neck. She had a headache.
“Have you got one of those, like a geography book?” Mrs. Cross said. “A book with maps in it.” She explained that she wanted it for Jack.
“An atlas, you mean,” said Mrs. Kidd. “I think there may be. I can’t remember. You can look on the bottom shelf. I can’t remember what’s there.”
Mrs. Cross parked by the bookcase and began to lift the heavy books onto her lap one by one, reading the titles at close range. She was out of breath from the speed of her trip.
“You’re wearing yourself out,” said Mrs. Kidd. “You’ll get yourself upset and you’ll get him upset, and what is the point of it?”
“I’m not upset. It just seems a crime to me.”
“What does?”
“Such an intelligent man, what’s he doing in here? They should have put him in one of those places they teach you things, teach you how to talk again. What’s the name of them? You know. Why did they just stick him in here? I want to help him and I don’t know what to do. Well, I just have to try. If it was one of my boys like that and in a place where nobody knew him, I just hope some woman would take the same interest in him.”
“Rehabilitation,” said Mrs. Kidd. “The reason they put him in here is more than likely that the stroke was too bad for them to do anything for him.”
“Everything under the sun but a map-book,” said Mrs. Cross, not choosing to answer this. “He’ll think I’m not coming back.” She wheeled out of Mrs. Kidd’s room without a thank-you or good-bye. She was afraid Jack would think she hadn’t meant to come back, all she intended to do was to get rid of him. Sure enough, when she got to the Recreation Room he was gone. She did not know what to do. She was near tears herself. She didn’t know where his room was. She thought she would go to the office and ask; then she saw that it was five past four and the office would be closed. Lazy, those girls were. Four o’clock, get their coats on and go home, nothing matters to them. She went wheeling slowly along the corridor, wondering what to do. Then in one of the dead-end side corridors she saw Jack.
“There you are, what a relief! I didn’t know where to look for you. Did you think I wasn’t ever coming back? I’ll tell you what I went for. I was going to surprise you. I went to look for one of those books with maps in, what do you call them, so you could show me where you used to live. Atlases!”
He was sitting looking at the pink wall as if it was a window. Against the wall was a whatnot with a vase of plastic daffodils on it, and some figurines, dwarfs and dogs; on the wall were three paint-by-number pictures that had been done in the Craft Room.
“My friend Mrs. Kidd has more books than the Library. She has a book on nothing but bugs. Another nothing but the moon, when they went there, close up. But not such a simple thing as a map.”
Jack was pointing at one of the pictures.
“Which one are you pointing at?” said Mrs. Cross. “The one with the church with the cross? No? The one above that? The pine trees? Yes? What about it? The pine trees and the red deer?” He was smiling, waving his hand. She hoped he wouldn’t get too excited and disappointed this time. “What about it? This is like one of those things on television. Trees? Green? Pine trees? Is it the deer? Three deer? No? Yes. Three red deer?” He flapped his arm up and down and she said, “I don’t know, really. Three—red—deer. Wait a minute. That’s a place. I’ve heard it on the news. Red Deer. Red Deer! That’s the place! That’s the place you lived in! That’s the place where you worked on the newspaper! Red Deer.”
They were both jubilant. He waved his arm around in celebration, as if he was conducting an orchestra, and she leaned forward, laughing, clapping her hands on her knees.
“Oh, if everything was in pictures like that, we could have a lot of fun! You and me could have a lot of fun, couldn’t we?”
MRS. CROSS made an appointment to see the doctor.
“I’ve heard of people that had a very bad stroke and their speech came back, isn’t that so?”
“It can happen. It depends. Are you worrying a lot about this man?”
“It must be a terrible feeling. No wonder he cries.”
“How many children did you have?”
“Six.”
“I’d say you’d done your share of worrying.”
She could see he didn’t mean to tell her anything. Either he didn’t remember much about Jack’s case or he was pretending he didn’t.
“I’m here to take care of people,” the doctor said. “That’s what I’m here for, that’s what the nurses are here for. So you can leave all the worrying to us. That’s what we get paid for. Right?”
And how much worrying do you do? she wanted to ask.
She would have liked to talk to Mrs. Kidd about this visit because she knew Mrs. Kidd thought the doctor was a fool, but once Mrs. Kidd knew Jack was the reason for the visit she would make some impatient remark. Mrs. Cross never talked to her any more about Jack. She talked to other people, but she could see them getting bored. Nobody cares about anybody else’s misfortunes in here, she thought. Even when somebody dies they don’t care, it’s just me, I’m still alive, what’s for dinner? The
selfishness. They’re all just as bad as the ones on the Second Floor, only they don’t show it yet.
She hadn’t been up to the Second Floor, hadn’t visited Lily Barbour, since she took up with Jack.
They liked sitting in the corner with the Red Deer picture, the scene of their first success. That was established as their place, where they could be by themselves. Mrs. Cross brought a pencil and paper, fixed the tray across his chair, tried to see how Jack made out with writing. It was about the same as talking. He would scrawl a bit, push the pencil till he broke it, start to cry. They didn’t make progress, either in writing or talking, it was useless. But she was learning to talk to him by the yes-and-no method, and it seemed sometimes she could pick up what was in his mind.
“If I was smarter I would be more of a help to you,” she said. “Isn’t it the limit? I can get it all out that’s in my head, but there never was so much in it, and you’ve got your head crammed full but you can’t get it out. Never mind. We’ll have a cup of coffee, won’t we? Cup of coffee, that’s what you like. My friend Mrs. Kidd and I used to drink tea all the time, but now I drink coffee. I prefer it too.”
“SO YOU NEVER got married? Never?”
Never.
“Did you have a sweetheart?”
Yes.
“Did you? Did you? Was it long ago? Long ago or recently?”
Yes.
“Long ago or recently? Both. Long ago and recently. Different sweethearts. The same? The same. The same woman. You were in love with the same woman years and years but you didn’t get married to her. Oh, Jack. Why didn’t you? Couldn’t she marry you? She couldn’t. Why not? Was she married already? Was she? Yes. Yes. Oh, my.”
She searched his face to see if this was too painful a subject or if he wanted to go on. She thought he did want to. She was eager to ask where this woman was now, but something warned her not to. Instead she took a light tone.
“I wonder if I can guess her name? Remember Red Deer? Wasn’t that funny? I wonder. I could start with A and work through the alphabet. Anne? Audrey? Annabelle? No. I think I’ll just follow my intuition. Jane? Mary? Louise?”
The name was Pat, Patricia, which she hit on maybe her thirtieth try.
“Now, in my mind a Pat is always fair. Not dark. You know how you have a picture in your mind for a name? Was she fair? Yes? And tall, in my mind a Pat is always tall. Was she? Well! I got it right. Tall and fair. A good-looking woman. A lovely woman.”
Yes.
She felt ashamed of herself, because she had wished for a moment that she had somebody to tell this to.
“That is a secret then. It’s between you and me. Now. If you ever want to write Pat a letter you come to me. Come to me and I’ll make out what you want to say to her and I’ll write it.”
No. No letter. Never.
“Well. I have a secret too. I had a boy I liked, he was killed in the First World War. He walked me home from a skating-party, it was our school skating-party. I was in the Senior Fourth. I was fourteen. That was before the war. I did like him, and I used to think about him, you know, and when I heard he was killed, that was after I was married, I was married at seventeen, well, when I heard he was killed I thought, now I’ve got something to look forward to, I could look forward to meeting him in Heaven. That’s true. That’s how childish I was.
“Marian was at that skating-party too. You know who I mean by Marian. Mrs. Kidd. She was there and she had the most beautiful outfit. It was sky-blue trimmed with white fur and a hood on it. Also she had a muff. She had a white fur muff. I never saw anything I would’ve like to have for myself as much as that muff.”
LYING IN THE DARK at night, before she went to sleep, Mrs. Cross would go over everything that had happened with Jack that day: how he had looked; how his color was; whether he had cried and how long and how often; whether he had been in a bad temper in the dining-room, annoyed with so many people around him or perhaps not liking the food; whether he had said good-night to her sullenly or gratefully.
Meanwhile Mrs. Kidd had taken on a new friend of her own. This was Charlotte, who used to live down near the dining-room but had recently moved in across the hall. Charlotte was a tall, thin, deferential woman in her mid-forties. She had multiple sclerosis. Sometimes her disease was in remission, as it was now; she could have gone home, if she had wanted to, and there had been a place for her. But she was happy where she was. Years of institutional life had made her childlike, affectionate, good-humored. She helped in the hair-dressing shop, she loved doing that, she loved brushing and pinning up Mrs. Kidd’s hair, marvelling at how much black there still was in it. She put an ash-blonde rinse on her own hair and wore it in a bouffant, stiff with spray. Mrs. Kidd could smell the hairspray from her room and she would call out, “Charlotte! Did they move you down here for the purpose of asphyxiating us?”
Charlotte giggled. She brought Mrs. Kidd a present. It was a red felt purse, with an appliquéd design of green leaves and blue and yellow flowers; she had made it in the Craft Room. Mrs. Kidd thought how much it resembled those recipe-holders her children used to bring home from school; a whole cardboard pie-plate and a half pie-plate, stitched together with bright yarn. They didn’t hold enough to be really useful. They were painstakingly created frivolities, like the crocheted potholders through which you could burn yourself; the cut-out wooden horse’s head with a hook not quite big enough to hold a hat.
Charlotte made purses for her daughters, who were married, and for her small granddaughter, and for the woman who lived with her husband and used his name. The husband and this woman came regularly to see Charlotte; they were all good friends. It had been a good arrangement for the husband, for the children, and perhaps for Charlotte herself. Nothing was being put over on Charlotte. Most likely she had given in without a whimper. Glad of the chance.
“What do you expect?” said Mrs. Cross. “Charlotte’s easygoing. Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd had not had any falling-out or any real coolness. They still had some talks and card games. But it was difficult. They no longer sat at the same table in the dining-room because Mrs. Cross had to watch to see if Jack needed help cutting up his meat. He wouldn’t let anyone else cut it; he would just pretend he didn’t want any and miss out on his protein. Then Charlotte moved into the place Mrs. Cross had vacated. Charlotte had no problems cutting her meat. In fact she cut her meat, toast, egg, vegetables, cake, whatever she was eating that would cut, into tiny regular pieces before she started on it. Mrs. Kidd told her that was not good manners. Charlotte was crestfallen but stubborn and continued to do it.
“Neither you nor I would have given up so quickly,” said Mrs. Kidd, still speaking about Charlotte to Mrs. Cross. “We wouldn’t’ve had the choice.”
“That’s true. There weren’t places like this. Not pleasant places. They couldn’t have kept us alive the way they do her. The drugs and so on. Also it may be the drugs makes her silly.”
Mrs. Kidd remained silent, frowning at hearing Charlotte called silly, though that was just the blunt way of putting what she had been trying to say herself. After a moment she spoke lamely.
“I think she has more brains than she shows.”
Mrs. Cross said evenly, “I wouldn’t know.”
Mrs. Kidd sat with her head bent forward, thoughtfully. She could sit that way for half an hour, easily, letting Charlotte brush and tend her hair. Was she turning into one of those old ladies that love to be waited on? Those old ladies also needed somebody to boss. They were the sort who went around the world on cruise ships, she had read about them in novels. They went around the world, and stayed at hotels, or they lived in grand decaying houses, with their companions. It was so easy to boss Charlotte, to make her play Scrabble and tell her when her manners were bad. Charlotte was itching to be somebody’s slave. So why did Mrs. Kidd hope to restrain herself? She did not wish to be such a recognizable sort of old lady. Also, slaves cost more than they were worth. In the end, people’s devotion hung like rocks around your neck.
Expectations. She wanted to float herself clear. Sometimes she could do it by lying on her bed and saying in her head all the poems she knew, or the facts, which got harder and harder to hold in place. Other times she imagined a house on the edge of some dark woods or bog, bright fields in front of it running down to the sea. She imagined she lived there alone, like an old woman in a story.
MRS. CROSS wanted to take Jack on visits. She thought it was time for him to learn to associate with people. He didn’t cry so often now, when they were alone. But sometimes at meals she was ashamed of him and had to tell him so. He would take offense at something, often she didn’t know what, and sometimes his sulk would proceed to the point where he would knock over the sugar-bowl, or sweep all his cutlery on to the floor. She thought that if only he could get used to a few more people as he was to her, he would calm down and behave decently.
The first time she took him to Mrs. Kidd’s’ room, Mrs. Kidd said she and Charlotte were just going out, they were going to the Crafts Room. She didn’t ask them to come along. The next time they came, Mrs. Kidd and Charlotte were sitting there playing Scrabble, so they were caught.
“You don’t mind if we watch you for a little while,” Mrs. Cross said.
“Oh no. But don’t blame me if you get bored. Charlotte takes a week from Wednesday to make up her mind.”
“We’re not in any hurry. We’re not expected anywhere. Are we, Jack?”
She was wondering if she could get Jack playing Scrabble. She didn’t know the extent of his problem when he tried to write. Was it that he couldn’t form the letters, was that all? Or couldn’t he see how they made the words? This might be the very thing for him.
At any rate he was taking an interest. He edged his chair up beside Charlotte, who picked up some letters, put them back, picked them up, looked at them in her hand, and finally made wind, working down from the w in Mrs. Kidd’s word elbow. Jack seemed to understand. He was so pleased that he patted Charlotte’s knee in congratulation. Mrs. Cross hoped Charlotte would realize that was just friendliness and not take offense.