by Alice Munro
Nancy and her mother had gone to live in an apartment that belonged to my father, on the Square. There in the bright early fall morning Nancy’s mother had come upon her daughter, in the bathroom, using a razor blade to slice into her cheek. There was blood on the floor and in the sink and here and there on Nancy. But she had not given up on her purpose or made a sound of pain.
How did my mother know all this? I can only suppose it was a town drama, supposed to be hushed up but too gory—and that in the literal sense of the word—not to be related in detail.
Nancy’s mother wrapped a towel around her and somehow got her to the hospital. There was no ambulance at that time. She probably flagged a car on the Square. Why did she not phone my father? No matter—she didn’t. The cuts were not deep and the blood loss was not so great in spite of the splatters—there was no cut to any major blood vessel. Nancy’s mother kept berating the child that whole time and asking was she right in the head.
“You’re just my luck,” she kept saying. “A kid like you.”
“If there had been social workers around at that time,” said my mother, “no doubt that poor little thing would have been made a ward of the Children’s Aid.
“It was the same cheek,” she said. “Like yours.”
I tried to keep silent, pretending not to know what she was talking about. But I had to speak.
“The paint was over her whole face,” I said.
“Yes. But she was doing it more carefully this time, she cut open just that one cheek, trying the best she could to make herself look like you.”
This time I did manage to keep quiet.
“If she had been a boy it would have been different. But what an awful thing for a girl.”
“Plastic surgeons can do remarkable things nowadays.”
“Oh, maybe they can.”
After a moment she said, “Such deep feelings. Children have.”
“They get over that.”
She said she did not know what had become of them, the child or her mother. She said she was glad I had never asked, because she would have hated to tell me anything so distressing, when I was still young.
I don’t know what bearing it has on anything, but I have to say that my mother changed completely in extreme old age, becoming ribald and fanciful. She claimed that my father had been a magnificent lover and that she herself had been “a pretty bad girl.” She announced that I should have married “that girl who sliced up her face” because neither one of us would be able to crow over the other about doing a good deed. One of us, she cackled, would be just as much a mess as the other.
I agreed. I liked her then quite a bit.
· · ·
A few days ago I was stung by a wasp while clearing out some rotten apples under one of the old trees. The sting was on my eyelid, which rapidly closed. I drove myself to the hospital, using the other eye (the swollen one was on the “good” side of my face), and was surprised to be told I must stay overnight. The reason was that once I was given an injection, both eyes had to be bandaged, thus avoiding strain on the one that could see. I had what they call a restless night, waking often. Of course it is never really quiet in a hospital, and just in that short time without my sight it seemed that my hearing grew more acute. When certain footsteps came into my room I knew that they were those of a woman, and I had the feeling that she was not a nurse.
But when she said, “Good. You’re awake. I’m your reader,” I thought that I must have been mistaken, she was a nurse after all. I stretched out an arm, believing she had come to read what are known as the vital signs.
“No, no,” she said, in her small persistent voice. “I’ve come to read to you, if that’s what you would like. Sometimes people like it; they get bored lying there with their eyes closed.”
“Do they choose, or do you?”
“They do, but sometimes I sort of remind them. Sometimes I try and remind them of some Bible story, some part of the Bible they remember. Or a story from when they were children. I carry a whole batch of things around with me.”
“I like poetry,” I said.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
I realized that this was true, and I knew why. I have some experience of reading poetry aloud, over the radio, and of listening to other trained voices read, and there are some styles of reading I find comfortable, and some I abhor.
“Then we could have a game,” she said, just as if I had explained this, when I hadn’t. “I could read you a line or two, then I stop and see if you can do the next line. Okay?”
It struck me that she might be quite a young person, anxious to get some takers, to be a success on this job.
I said okay. But nothing in Old English, I told her.
“‘The king sat in Dunfermline town—’” she began in a questioning voice.
“‘Drinking the blood-red wine—’” I chimed in, and we proceeded in good humor. She read well enough, though at a rather childlike, show-off speed. I began to like the sound of my own voice, now and then falling into a bit of an actorly flourish.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“‘And show you where the lilies grow, / On the banks of Italie—’”
“Is it ‘grow’ or ‘blow’?” she said. “I don’t actually have a book with that in it. I should remember, though. Never mind, it’s lovely. I always liked your voice on the radio.”
“Really? Did you listen?”
“Of course. Lots of people did.”
She stopped feeding me lines and just let me go ahead. You can imagine. “Dover Beach” and “Kubla Khan” and “West Wind” and “Wild Swans” and “Doomed Youth.” Well, maybe not all of them, and maybe not right through to the end.
“You’re getting short of breath,” she said. Her little quick hand was laid on my mouth. And then her face or the side of her face, laid on mine. “I have to go. Here’s another just before I go. I’ll make it harder because I won’t start at the beginning.
“‘None will long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you / Your place left vacant—’”
“I’ve never heard that,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Sure. You win.”
By now I suspected something. She seemed distracted, slightly cross. I heard the geese calling as they flew over the hospital. They take practice runs at this time of year, and then the runs get longer and one day they’re gone. I was waking up, in that state of surprise, indignation, that follows a convincing dream. I wanted to go back and have her lay her face on mine. Her cheek, on mine. But dreams are not so obliging.
When I got my eyesight back, and was at home, I looked for those lines she had left me with in my dream. I went through a couple of anthologies and did not find them there. I began to suspect that the lines did not belong to a real poem at all, but had just been devised in the dream, to confound me.
Devised by whom?
But later in the fall, when I was getting some old books ready to donate to a charity bazaar, a piece of brownish paper fell out, with lines on it written in pencil. It was not my mother’s writing, and I can hardly think it would be my father’s. Whose, then? Whoever it was had written the author’s name at the end. Walter de la Mare. No title. Not a writer whose works I have any particular knowledge of. But I must have seen the poem at some time, maybe not in this copy, maybe in a textbook. I must have buried the words in a deep cubbyhole of my mind. And why? Just so that I could be teased by them, or teased by a determined girl-child phantom, in a dream?
There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share.
See the sweet sun shines
The shower is over;
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love,
on duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.
The poem didn’t depress me. In some peculiar way it seemed to back up the decision I had made by that time, not to sell the property, but to stay.
Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
Of course I know that if I had spotted Nancy—on the subway, for instance, in Toronto—both of us bearing our recognizable marks, we would in all probability have managed only one of those embarrassed and meaningless conversations, hurriedly listing useless autobiographical facts. I would have noted the mended nearly normal cheek or the still obvious wound, but it would probably not have come into the conversation. Children might have been mentioned. Not that unlikely, whether she was mended or not. Grandchildren. Jobs. I might not have had to tell her mine. We would have been shocked, hearty, dying to get away.
You think that would have changed things?
The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
Some Women
I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukemia went to bed, and after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died.
It was because of such a case that I got my first job, in the summer holidays when I was thirteen. Young Mr. Crozier (Bruce) had come safely home from the war, where he had been a fighter pilot, had gone to college and studied history, and graduated, and got married, and now he had leukemia. He and his wife had come back to stay with his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. Young Mrs. Crozier (Sylvia) was going off two afternoons a week to teach summer school at that same college where they had met, about forty miles away. I was hired to look after Young Mr. Crozier while she was away. He was in bed in the front corner bedroom upstairs, and he could still get to the bathroom by himself. All I had to do was to bring him fresh water and pull the shades up or down and see what he wanted when he rang the little bell on his bedside table.
Usually what he wanted was to have the fan moved. He liked the breeze it created but he was disturbed by the noise. So he wanted the fan in the room for a while and then he wanted it out in the hall, but close to his open door.
When my mother heard about this she wondered why they hadn’t put him in a bed downstairs, where they surely had high ceilings and he would be cooler.
I told her that they did not have any bedrooms downstairs.
“Well, my heavens, couldn’t they fix one up? Temporarily?”
That showed how little she knew about the Crozier household or the rule of Old Mrs. Crozier. Old Mrs. Crozier walked with a cane. She made one ominous-sounding progress up the stairs to see her stepson on the afternoons I was there, and I suppose no more than that on the afternoons when I was not there. Then another, as necessary, when she went to bed. But the idea of a bedroom downstairs would have outraged her as much as the notion of a toilet in the parlor. Fortunately there was already a toilet downstairs, behind the kitchen, but I was sure that if the only one had been upstairs she would have made the climb as often and as laboriously as necessary, rather than see a change so radical and unnerving.
My mother had an idea of going into the antique business, so she was very interested in the inside of that house. She did get in, once, during my very first afternoon. I was in the kitchen, and I stood petrified, hearing her “yoo-hoo” and my own merrily called name. Then her perfunctory knock, her steps on the kitchen stairs. And Old Mrs. Crozier stumping out from the sunroom.
My mother said that she had just dropped in to see how her daughter was getting along.
“She’s all right,” said Old Mrs. Crozier, who stood in the hall doorway, blocking the view of antiques.
My mother made a few more mortifying remarks and took herself off. That night she said that Old Mrs. Crozier had no manners because she was only a second wife picked up on a business trip to Detroit, which was why she smoked and dyed her hair black as tar and put on lipstick like a smear of jam. She was not even the mother of the invalid upstairs. She did not have the brains to be.
(We were having one of our fights then, this one relating to her visit, but that is neither here nor there.)
The way Old Mrs. Crozier saw it, I must have seemed just as intrusive as my mother, just as cheerily self-regarding. On my very first afternoon I had gone into the back parlor and opened the bookcase and stood there taking stock of the Harvard Classics set out in their perfect row. Most of them discouraged me, but I took one out that might be fiction, in spite of its title in a foreign language, I Promessi Sposi. It appeared to be fiction all right, and it was in English.
I must have had the idea then that all books came free, wherever you found them. Like water from a public tap.
When Old Mrs. Crozier saw me with the book she asked where I had got it and what I was doing with it. From the bookcase, I said, and I had brought it upstairs to read. The thing that most perplexed her seemed to be that I had got it downstairs, but brought it upstairs. The reading part she appeared to let go, as if such an activity was too foreign for her contemplation. Finally she said that if I wanted a book I should bring one from home.
I Promessi Sposi was heavy going anyway. I did not mind putting it back in the bookcase.
Of course there were books in the sickroom. Reading seemed to be acceptable there. But they were mostly open and facedown, as if Mr. Crozier just read a little here and there and put them aside. And their titles did not tempt me. Civilization on Trial. The Great Conspiracy Against Russia.
And my grandmother had warned me that if I could help it I should not touch anything the patient had touched, because of germs, and I should always keep a cloth between my fingers and his water glass.
My mother said leukemia did not come from germs.
“So what does it come from?” said my grandmother.
“The medical men don’t know.”
“Hunh.”
It was Young Mrs. Crozier who picked me up and drove me home, though the distance was no more than from one side of the town to the other. She was a tall, thin, fair-haired woman with a variable complexion. Sometimes there were patches of red on her cheeks as if she had scratched them. Word had been passed that she was older than her husband, that he had been her student at college. My mother said that nobody seemed to have got around to figuring out that since he was a war veteran, he could easily have been her student without that making her older. People were just down on her because she had got an education.
Another thing they said was that she could have stayed home and looked after him now, as promised in the marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach. My mother again defended her, saying it was only two afternoons a week and she had to keep up her profession, seeing she would be on her own soon enough. And if she didn’t get out of the old lady’s way once in a while, wouldn’t you think she’d go crazy? My mother always defended women who were working on their own, and my grandmother always got after her for it.
One day I tried a conversation with Young Mrs. Crozier, or Sylvia. She was the only college graduate I knew, let alone being a teacher. Except for her husband, of course, and he had stopped counting.
“Did Toynbee write history books?”
“Beg pardon? Oh. Yes.”
None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.
What Old Mrs. Crozier cared about really was her flower garden. Sh
e had a man who came and helped her, someone about as old but more limber than she was. He lived on our street and in fact it was through him that she heard about me as a possible employee. At home he only gossiped and grew weeds, but here he plucked and mulched and fussed, while she followed him around, leaning on her stick and shaded by her big straw hat. Sometimes she sat on her bench, still commenting and giving orders, and smoking a cigarette. Early on, I dared to go between the perfect hedges to ask if she or her helper would like a glass of water, and she cried out, “Mind my borders,” before saying no.
There were no flowers brought into the house. Some poppies had escaped and were growing wild beyond the hedge, almost on the road, so I asked if I could pick a bouquet to brighten the sickroom.
“They’d only die,” she said, not seeming to realize that this remark had a double edge to it, in the circumstances.
Certain suggestions, or notions, would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there was a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thornbush.
The two days I worked were not consecutive. Let us say they were Tuesdays and Thursdays. The first day I was alone with the sick man and Old Mrs. Crozier. The second day somebody arrived whom I had not been told about. I heard the car in the driveway, and some brisk running up the back steps and a person entering the kitchen without knocking. Then somebody called “Dorothy,” which I had not known was Old Mrs. Crozier’s name. The voice was a woman’s or girl’s, and it was bold and teasing all at once, so that you could almost feel this person was tickling you.
I ran down the back stairs saying, “I think she’s in the sunroom.”
“Holy Toledo. Who are you?”
I told her who I was and what I was doing there, and this young woman said her name was Roxanne.
“I’m the masseuse.”
I didn’t like being caught by a word I didn’t know. I didn’t say anything but she saw how things were.
“Got you stumped, eh? I give massages. You ever heard of that?”