by Alice Munro
His fever went down again and he slept more calmly. She dragged in an armchair she had found in one of the other rooms and she slept too, in snatches, waking and wondering where she was, then remembering and getting up and touching him—his fever seemed to be staying down—and tucking in the blanket. For her own cover she used the everlasting old tweed coat that she had Mrs. Willets to thank for.
He woke. It was full morning. “What are you doing here?” he said, in a hoarse, weak voice.
“I came yesterday,” she said. “I brought your furniture. It isn’t here yet, but it’s on its way. You were sick when I got here and you were sick most of the night. How do you feel now?”
He said, “Better,” and began to cough. She didn’t have to lift him, he sat up on his own, but she went to the bed and pounded his back. When he finished, he said, “Thank you.”
His skin now felt as cool as her own. And smooth—no rough moles, no fat on him. She could feel his ribs. He was like a delicate, stricken boy. He smelled like corn.
“You swallowed the phlegm,” she said. “Don’t do that, it’s not good for you. Here’s the toilet paper, you have to spit it out. You could get trouble with your kidneys, swallowing it.”
“I never knew that,” he said. “Could you find the coffee?”
The percolator was black on the inside. She washed it as well as she could and put the coffee on. Then she washed and tidied herself, wondering what kind of food she should give him. In the pantry there was a box of biscuit mix. At first she thought she would have to mix it with water, but she found a can of milk powder as well. When the coffee was ready she had a pan of biscuits in the oven.
As soon as he heard her busy in the kitchen, he got up to go to the toilet. He was weaker than he’d thought—he had to lean over and put one hand on the tank. Then he found some underwear on the floor of the hall closet where he kept clean clothes. He had figured out by now who this woman was. She had said she came to bring him his furniture, though he hadn’t asked her or anybody to do that—hadn’t asked for the furniture at all, just the money. He should know her name, but he couldn’t remember it. That was why he opened her purse, which was on the floor of the hall beside her suitcase. There was a name tag sewn to the lining.
Johanna Parry, and the address of his father-in-law, on Exhibition Road.
Some other things. A cloth bag with a few bills in it. Twenty-seven dollars. Another bag with change, which he didn’t bother to count. A bright blue bankbook. He opened it up automatically, without expectations of anything unusual.
A couple of weeks ago Johanna had been able to transfer the whole of her inheritance from Mrs. Willets into her bank account, adding it to the amount of money she had saved. She had explained to the bank manager that she did not know when she might need it.
The sum was not dazzling, but it was impressive. It gave her substance. In Ken Boudreau’s mind, it added a sleek upholstery to the name Johanna Parry.
“Were you wearing a brown dress?” he said, when she came up with the coffee.
“Yes, I was. When I first got here.”
“I thought it was a dream. It was you.”
“Like in your other dream,” Johanna said, her speckled forehead turning fiery. He didn’t know what that was all about and hadn’t the energy to inquire. Possibly a dream he’d wakened from when she was here in the night—one he couldn’t now remember. He coughed again in a more reasonable way, with her handing him some toilet paper.
“Now,” she said, “where are you going to set your coffee?” She pushed up the wooden chair that she had moved to get at him more easily. “There,” she said. She lifted him under the arms and wedged the pillow in behind him. A dirty pillow, without a case, but she had covered it last night with a towel.
“Could you see if there’s any cigarettes downstairs?”
She shook her head, but said, “I’ll look. I’ve got biscuits in the oven.”
Ken Boudreau was in the habit of lending money, as well as borrowing it. Much of the trouble that had come upon him—or that he had got into, to put it another way—had to do with not being able to say no to a friend. Loyalty. He had not been drummed out of the peacetime Air Force, but had resigned out of loyalty to the friend who had been hauled up for offering insults to the C.O. at a mess party. At a mess party, where everything was supposed to be a joke and no offense taken—it was not fair. And he had lost the job with the fertilizer company because he took a company truck across the American border without permission, on a Sunday, to pick up a buddy who had got into a fight and was afraid of being caught and charged.
Part and parcel of the loyalty to friends was the difficulty with bosses. He would confess that he found it hard to knuckle under. “Yes, sir” and “no, sir” were not ready words in his vocabulary. He had not been fired from the insurance company, but he had been passed over so many times that it seemed they were daring him to quit, and eventually he did.
Drink had played a part, you had to admit that. And the idea that life should be a more heroic enterprise than it ever seemed to be nowadays.
He liked to tell people he’d won the hotel in a poker game. He was not really much of a gambler, but women liked the sound of that. He didn’t want to admit that he’d taken it sight unseen in payment of a debt. And even after he saw it, he told himself it could be salvaged. The idea of being his own boss did appeal to him. He did not see it as a place where people would stay—except perhaps hunters, in the fall. He saw it as a drinking establishment and a restaurant. If he could get a good cook. But before anything much could happen money would have to be spent. Work had to be done—more than he could possibly do himself though he was not unhandy. If he could live through the winter doing what he could by himself, proving his good intentions, he thought maybe he could get a loan from the bank. But he needed a smaller loan just to get through the winter, and that was where his father-in-law came into the picture. He would rather have tried somebody else, but nobody else could so easily spare it.
He had thought it a good idea to put the request in the form of a proposal to sell the furniture, which he knew the old man would never bestir himself enough to do. He was aware, not very specifically, of loans still outstanding from the past—but he was able to think of those as sums he’d been entitled to, for supporting Marcelle during a period of bad behavior (hers, at a time when his own hadn’t started) and for accepting Sabitha as his child when he had his doubts. Also, the McCauleys were the only people he knew who had money that nobody now alive had earned.
I brought your furniture.
He was unable to figure out what that could mean for him, at present. He was too tired. He wanted to sleep more than he wanted to eat when she came with the biscuits (and no cigarettes). To satisfy her he ate half of one. Then he fell dead asleep. He came only half awake when she rolled him on one side, then the other, getting the dirty sheet out from under him, then spreading the clean one and rolling him onto that, all without making him get out of bed or really wake up.
“I found a clean sheet, but it’s thin as a rag,” she said. “It didn’t smell too good, so I hung it on the line awhile.”
Later he realized that a sound he’d been hearing for a long time in a dream was really the sound of the washing machine. He wondered how that could be—the hot-water tank was defunct. She must have heated tubs of water on the stove. Later still, he heard the unmistakable sound of his own car starting up and driving away. She would have got the keys from his pants pocket.
She might be driving away in his only worthwhile possession, deserting him, and he could not even phone the police to nab her. The phone was cut off, even if he’d been able to get to it.
That was always a possibility—theft and desertion—yet he turned over on the fresh sheet, which smelled of prairie wind and grass, and went back to sleep, knowing for certain that she had only gone to buy milk and eggs and butter and bread and other supplies—even cigarettes—that were necessary for a decent life, and that she
would come back and be busy downstairs and that the sound of her activity would be like a net beneath him, heaven-sent, a bounty not to be questioned.
There was a woman problem in his life right now. Two women, actually, a young one and an older one (that is, one of about his own age) who knew about each other and were ready to tear each other’s hair out. All he had got from them recently was howling and complaining, punctuated with their angry assertions that they loved him.
Perhaps a solution had arrived for that, as well.
When she was buying groceries in the store, Johanna heard a train, and driving back to the hotel, she saw a car parked at the railway station. Before she had even stopped Ken Boudreau’s car she saw the furniture crates piled up on the platform. She talked to the agent—it was his car there—and he was very surprised and irritated by the arrival of all these big crates. When she had got out of him the name of a man with a truck—a clean truck, she insisted—who lived twenty miles away and sometimes did hauling, she used the station phone to call the man and half bribed, half ordered him to come right away. Then she impressed upon the agent that he must stay with the crates till the truck arrived. By suppertime the truck had come, and the man and his son had unloaded all the furniture and carried it into the main room of the hotel.
The next day she took a good look around. She was making up her mind.
The day after that she judged Ken Boudreau to be able to sit up and listen to her, and she said, “This place is a sinkhole for money. The town is on its last legs. What should be done is to take out everything that can bring in any cash and sell it. I don’t mean the furniture that was shipped in, I mean things like the pool table and the kitchen range. Then we ought to sell the building to somebody who’ll strip the tin off it for junk. There’s always a bit to be made off stuff you’d never think had any value. Then—What was it you had in mind to do before you got hold of the hotel?”
He said that he had some idea of going to British Columbia, to Salmon Arm, where he had a friend who had told him one time he could have a job managing orchards. But he couldn’t go because the car needed new tires and work done on it before he could undertake a long trip, and he was spending all he had just to live. Then the hotel had fallen into his lap.
“Like a ton of bricks,” she said. “Tires and fixing the car would be a better investment than sinking anything into this place. It would be a good idea to get out there before the snow comes. And ship the furniture by rail again, to make use of it when we get there. We have got all we need to furnish a home.”
“It’s maybe not all that firm of an offer.”
She said, “I know. But it’ll be all right.”
He understood that she did know, and that it was, it would be, all right. You could say that a case like his was right up her alley.
Not that he wouldn’t be grateful. He’d get to a point where gratitude wasn’t a burden, where it was natural—especially when it wasn’t demanded.
Thoughts of regeneration were starting. This is the change I need. He had said that before, but surely there was one time when it would be true. The mild winters, the smell of the evergreen forests and the ripe apples. All we need to make a home.
He has his pride, she thought. That would have to be taken account of. It might be better never to mention the letters in which he had laid himself open to her. Before she came away, she had destroyed them. In fact she had destroyed each one as soon as she’d read it over well enough to know it by heart, and that didn’t take long. One thing she surely didn’t want was for them ever to fall into the hands of young Sabitha and her shifty friend. Especially the part in the last letter, about her nightgown, and being in bed. It wasn’t that such things wouldn’t go on, but it might be thought vulgar or sappy or asking for ridicule, to put them on paper.
She doubted they’d see much of Sabitha. But she would never thwart him, if that was what he wanted.
This wasn’t really a new experience, this brisk sense of expansion and responsibility. She’d felt something the same for Mrs. Willets—another fine-looking, flighty person in need of care and management. Ken Boudreau had turned out to be a bit more that way than she was prepared for, and there were the differences you had to expect with a man, but surely there was nothing in him that she couldn’t handle.
After Mrs. Willets her heart had been dry, and she had considered it might always be so. And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Mr. McCauley died about two years after Johanna’s departure. His funeral was the last one held in the Anglican church. There was a good turnout for it. Sabitha—who came with her mother’s cousin, the Toronto woman—was now self-contained and pretty and remarkably, unexpectedly slim. She wore a sophisticated black hat and did not speak to anybody unless they spoke to her first. Even then, she did not seem to remember them.
The death notice in the paper said that Mr. McCauley was survived by his granddaughter Sabitha Boudreau and his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, and Mr. Boudreau’s wife Johanna, and their infant son Omar, of Salmon Arm, B.C.
Edith’s mother read this out—Edith herself never looked at the local paper. Of course, the marriage was not news to either of them—or to Edith’s father, who was around the corner in the front room, watching television. Word had got back. The only news was Omar.
“Her with a baby,” Edith’s mother said.
Edith was doing her Latin translation at the kitchen table. Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi—
In the church she had taken the precaution of not speaking to Sabitha first, before Sabitha could not speak to her.
She was not really afraid, anymore, of being found out—though she still could not understand why they hadn’t been. And in a way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self—let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her. It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?
Ignoring her mother, she wrote, “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know—”
She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, “—what fate has in store for me, or for you—”
VINTAGE BOOKS BY ALICE MUNRO
The Beggar Maid
In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73271-3
Dance of the Happy Shades And Other Stories
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past. A married woman tries to release her homebound sister after the death of their mother. The audience at a piano recital gets a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform. In these early stories Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-78151-X
Friend of My Youth
A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past. The ten miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72957-7
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship
, Loveship, Marriage
In the nine breathtaking stories that make up her celebrated tenth collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-72743-4
Lives of Girls and Women
The only novel by Alice Munro, this book chronicles a young girl’s growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, her mother’s boarder, and her best friend, Naomi. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70749-2
The Love of a Good Woman
Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these eight tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest of individuals. A stroke victim exposes his deepest secret to a young bride. A daughter confronts her father with the open secret of his life. And in the riveting title story, a selfless nurse tending a dying patient discovers the social utility of lies.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70363-2
The Moons of Jupiter
In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen: There are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate to us with electrifying force.