by Alice Munro
“I sent Hervey down to the bakeshop to get them.”
Hervey was the name of our neighbor, her garden man.
“Okay let Hervey eat them. I’m not kidding, I break out something awful.”
“I thought we’d have a treat, like something special,” said Old Mrs. Crozier. “Seeing it’s the last day we’ve got before—”
“Last day before she parks her butt here permanently, yeah, I know. Doesn’t help me breaking out like a spotted hyena.”
Who was it whose butt was parked permanently?
Sylvia’s. Sylvia.
Old Mrs. Crozier was wearing a beautiful black silk wrapper, with water lilies and geese on it. She said, “No chance of having anything special with her around. You’ll see.”
“So let’s get going and get some time today. Don’t bother about this stuff, it’s not your fault. I know you got it to be nice.”
“I know you got it to be nice,” imitated Old Mrs. Crozier in a mean mincing voice, and then they both looked at me, and Roxanne said, “Pitcher’s where it always is.”
I took Mr. Crozier’s pitcher of water out of the fridge. It occurred to me that they could offer me a golden macaroon out of those sitting in the box, but apparently it did not occur to them.
I expected him to be lying back on the pillows with his eyes closed, but Mr. Crozier was wide awake.
“I’ve been waiting,” he said, and took a breath. “For you to get here,” he said. “I want to ask you—do something for me. Will you?”
I said sure.
“Keep it a secret?”
I had been worried that he might ask me to help him to the commode that had recently appeared in his room, but surely that would not have to be a secret.
Yes.
He told me to go to the bureau across from his bed and open the left-hand little drawer, and see if I could find a key there.
I did so. I found a large heavy old-fashioned key.
He wanted me to go out of this room and shut the door and lock it. Then hide the key in a safe place, perhaps in the pocket of my shorts.
I was not to tell anybody what I had done.
I was not to let anybody know I had the key until his wife came home, and then I was to give it to her. Did I understand?
Okay.
He thanked me.
Okay.
All the time he was talking to me there was a film of sweat on his face and his eyes were bright as if he had a fever.
“Nobody is to get in.”
“Nobody to get in,” I repeated.
“Not my stepmother or—Roxanne. Just my wife.”
I locked the door from the outside and put the key in the pocket of my shorts. But then I was afraid it could be seen through the light cotton material, so I went downstairs and into the back parlor and hid it between the pages of I Promessi Sposi. I knew that Roxanne and Old Mrs. Crozier would not hear me because the massage was going on, and Roxanne was using her professional voice.
“I got my work cut out for me getting these knots out of you today.”
And I heard Old Mrs. Crozier’s voice, full of her new displeasure.
“… punching harder than you normally do.”
“Well I gotta.”
I was headed upstairs when some further thoughts came to me.
If he and not I had locked the door—which was evidently what he wanted the others to think—and I had been sitting on the top step as usual, I would certainly have heard him and called out and roused the others in the house. So I went back down and sat on the bottom step of the front stairs, a place from which it could have been possible for me not to hear a thing.
The massage seemed to be brisk and businesslike today; they were evidently not teasing and making jokes. Pretty soon I could hear Roxanne running up the back stairs.
She stopped. She said, “Hey. Bruce.”
Bruce.
She rattled the knob of the door.
“Bruce.”
Then she must have put her mouth to the keyhole, hoping he could hear but nobody else could. I could not make out exactly what she was saying, but I could tell she was pleading. First teasing, then pleading. In a while she sounded as if she was saying her prayers.
When she gave that up she started pounding up and down on the door with her fists, not too hard but urgently.
After a while she stopped that too.
“Come on,” she said in a firmer voice. “If you got to the door to lock it you can get there to open it up.”
Nothing happened. She came and looked over the bannister and saw me.
“Did you take Mr. Crozier’s water into his room?”
I said yes.
“So his door wasn’t locked or anything then?”
No.
“Did he say anything to you?”
“He just said thanks.”
“Well, he’s got his door locked and I can’t get him to answer.”
I heard Old Mrs. Crozier’s stick pounding to the top of the back stairs.
“What’s the commotion up here?”
“He’s locked hisself in and I can’t get him to answer me.”
“What do you mean locked himself in? Likely the door’s stuck. Wind blew it shut and it stuck.”
There was no wind that day.
“Try it yourself,” said Roxanne. “It’s locked.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a key to this door,” said Old Mrs. Crozier, as if her not being aware could negate the fact. Then, perfunctorily, she tried the knob and said, “Well. It’d appear to be locked.”
He had counted on this, I thought. That they would not suspect me, thinking of his being in charge. And in fact he was.
“We have to get in,” said Roxanne. She gave a kick to the door.
“Stop that,” said Old Mrs. Crozier. “Do you want to wreck the door? You couldn’t get through it anyway; it’s solid oak. Every door in this house is solid oak.”
“Then we have to get the police.”
There was a pause.
“They could get up to the window,” said Roxanne.
Old Mrs. Crozier drew in her breath and spoke decisively.
“You do not know what you are saying. I won’t have the police in this house. I won’t have them climbing all over my walls like caterpillars.”
“We don’t know what he could be doing in there.”
“Well, then, that’s up to him. Isn’t it?”
Another pause.
Now steps—Roxanne’s—retreating to the back staircase.
“Yes, you better,” said Mrs. Crozier. “You better just take yourself away before you forget whose house this is.”
Roxanne was going down the stairs. A couple of stomps of the stick went after her but did not continue down.
“And don’t get the idea you’ll go to the constable behind my back. He’s not going to take his orders from you. Who gives the orders around here anyway? It’s certainly not you. You hear me?”
Very soon I heard the kitchen door slam shut. And then Roxanne’s car start.
I was no more worried about the police than Old Mrs. Crozier was. The police in our town meant Constable McClarty who came to the school to warn us about sledding on the streets in the winter and swimming in the millrace in summer, both of which we continued to do. It was ridiculous to think of him climbing up on a ladder or lecturing Mr. Crozier through a locked door.
He would tell Roxanne to mind her own business and let the Croziers mind theirs.
It was not ridiculous, however, to think of Old Mrs. Crozier giving orders, and I thought she might do so now that Roxanne—whom she apparently did not like anymore—was gone. She might turn on me and demand to know if I had anything to do with this.
But she did not even rattle the knob. She just stood at the locked door and said one thing.
“Stronger than you’d think,” she muttered.
Then made her way downstairs. The usual punishing noises with her steady stick.
I waited
awhile and then I went out to the kitchen. Old Mrs. Crozier wasn’t there. She wasn’t in either parlor or in the dining room or the sunroom. I got up my nerve and knocked on the toilet door, then opened it, and she was not there either. Then I looked out the window over the kitchen sink and I saw her straw hat moving along slowly above the cedar hedge. She was out in the garden in the heat, stumping along between her flower beds.
I was not worried by the thought that had troubled Roxanne. I did not stop to consider it, because I believed that it would be quite absurd for a person with only a short time to live to commit suicide. It could not happen.
All the same, I was nervous. I ate two of the macaroons that were still sitting on the kitchen table. I ate them hoping that pleasure would bring back normalcy, but I barely tasted them. Then I shoved the box into the refrigerator so I would not hope to turn the trick by eating more.
Old Mrs. Crozier was still outside when Sylvia got home. And she didn’t come in then.
I got the key from between the pages of the book as soon as I heard the car and I gave it to Sylvia as soon as she was in the house. I just told her quickly what had happened, leaving out most of the fuss. She would not have waited to listen to that, anyway. She went running upstairs.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs to hear what I could hear.
Nothing. Nothing.
Then Sylvia’s voice, surprised and upset but in no way desperate, and too low for me to make out what she was saying. Within about five minutes she was downstairs, saying it was time to get me home. She was flushed as if the spots in her cheeks had spread all over her face, and she looked shocked but unable to resist her happiness.
Then, “Oh. Where is Mother Crozier?”
“In the flower garden, I think.”
“Well, I suppose I better speak to her, just for a moment.”
After she had done that, she no longer looked quite so happy.
“I suppose you know,” she said as she backed out the car, “I suppose you can imagine Mother Crozier is upset. Not that I am blaming you. It was very good and loyal of you. Doing what Mr. Crozier asked you to do. You weren’t scared of anything happening? With Mr. Crozier? Were you?”
I said no.
Then I said, “I think Roxanne was.”
“Mrs. Hoy? Yes. That’s too bad.”
As we were driving down what was known as Croziers’ Hill she said, “I don’t think he wanted to be mean and frighten them. You know when you’re sick, sick for a long time, you can get not to appreciate other people’s feelings. You can get turned against people even when they’re so good and doing what they can to help you. Mrs. Crozier and Mrs. Hoy were certainly trying their best, but Mr. Crozier just didn’t feel that he wanted them around anymore. He’d just had enough of them. You understand?”
She did not seem to know she was smiling when she said this.
Mrs. Hoy.
Had I ever heard that name before?
And spoken so gently and respectfully, yet with light-years’ condescension.
Did I believe what Sylvia had said?
I believed it was what he had told her.
I did see Roxanne again that day. I saw her at the very time that Sylvia was talking to me and introducing to me this new name. Mrs. Hoy.
She—Roxanne—was in her car and she had stopped at the first cross street at the bottom of Croziers’ Hill to watch us drive by. I didn’t turn to look at her because it was all too confusing, with Sylvia talking to me.
Of course Sylvia would not know whose car that was. She wouldn’t know that Roxanne must have come back to get an idea of what was going on. Or that maybe she had kept driving around the block—could she have done that?—all the time since she had left the Croziers’ house.
Roxanne would recognize Sylvia’s car, probably. She would notice me. She would know that things must be all right, from the kindly, serious, faintly smiling way that Sylvia was talking to me.
She didn’t turn the corner and drive back up the hill to the Croziers’ house. Oh no. She drove across the street—I watched in the rearview mirror—towards the east part of town where the wartime houses had been put up. That was where she lived.
“Feel the breeze,” said Sylvia. “Maybe those clouds are going to bring us rain.”
The clouds were high and white, glaring; they looked nothing like rain clouds; and the breeze was because we were in a moving car with the windows rolled down.
· · ·
I understood pretty well the winning and losing that had taken place, between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier—and to think that he could have had the will to make a decision, even to deprive himself, so late in his life. The carnality at death’s door—or the true love, for that matter—were things I had to shake off with shivers down my spine.
Sylvia took Mr. Crozier away to a rented cottage on the lake, where he died sometime before the leaves were off.
The Hoy family moved on, as mechanics’ families often did.
My mother struggled with a crippling disease, which put an end to all her moneymaking dreams.
Dorothy Crozier had a stroke, but recovered, and famously bought Halloween candy for the children whose older brothers and sisters she had ordered from her door.
I grew up, and old.
Child’s Play
I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards.
How sad, how awful. (My mother.)
There should have been supervision. Where were the counsellors? (My father.)
It is possible that if we ever passed the yellow house my mother said, “Remember? Remember you used to be so scared of her? The poor thing.”
My mother had a habit of hanging on to—even treasuring—the foibles of my distant infantile state.
Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don’t vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there’s a switchback, what’s been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it’s plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.
Marlene and Charlene. People thought we must be twins. There was a fashion in those days for naming twins in rhyme. Bonnie and Connie. Ronald and Donald. And then of course we—Charlene and I—had matching hats. Coolie hats, they were called, wide shallow cones of woven straw with some sort of tie or elastic under the chin. They became familiar later on in the century, from television shots of the war in Vietnam. Men on bicycles riding along a street in Saigon would be wearing them, or women walking in the road against the background of a bombed village.
It was possible at that time—I mean the time when Charlene and I were at camp—to say coolie, without a thought of offense. Or darkie, or to talk about jewing a price down. I was in my teens, I think, before I ever related that verb to the noun.
So we had those names and those hats, and at the first roll call the counsellor—the jolly one we liked, Mavis, though we didn’t like her as well as the pretty one, Pauline—pointed at us and called out, “Hey. Twins,” and went on calling out other names before we had time to deny it.
Even before that we must have noticed the hats and approved of each other. Otherwise one or both of us would have pulled off those brand-new articles, and been ready to shove them under our cots, declaring that our mothers had made us wear them and we hated them, and so on.
I may have approved of Charlene, but I was not sure how to make friends with her. Girls nine or ten years old—that was the general range of this crop, though there were a few a bit older—do not pick friends or pair off as easily as girls do at
six or seven. I simply followed some other girls from my town—none of them my particular friends—to one of the cabins where there were some unclaimed cots, and dumped my things on top of the brown blanket. Then I heard a voice behind me say, “Could I please be next to my twin sister?”
It was Charlene, speaking to somebody I didn’t know. The dormitory cabin held perhaps two dozen girls. The girl she had spoken to said, “Sure,” and moved along.
Charlene had used a special voice. Ingratiating, teasing, self-mocking, and with a seductive merriment in it, like a trill of bells. It was evident right away that she had more confidence than I did. And not simply confidence that the other girl would move, and not say sturdily, “I got here first.” (Or—if she was a roughly brought-up sort of girl—and some were, having their way paid by the Lions Club or the church and not by their parents—she might have said, “Go poop your pants, I’m not moving.”) No. Charlene had confidence that anybody would want to do as she asked, not just agree to do it. With me too she had taken a chance, for could I not have said, “I don’t want to be twins,” and turned back to sort my things. But of course I didn’t. I felt flattered, as she had expected, and I watched her dump out the contents of her suitcase with such an air of celebration that some things fell on the floor.
All I could think of to say was, “You got a tan already.”
“I always tan easy,” she said.
The first of our differences. We applied ourselves to learning them. She tanned, I freckled. We both had brown hair but hers was darker. Hers was wavy, mine bushy. I was half an inch taller, she had thicker wrists and ankles. Her eyes had more green in them, mine more blue. We did not grow tired of inspecting and tabulating even the moles or notable freckles on our backs, length of our second toes (mine longer than the first toe, hers shorter). Or of recounting all the illnesses or accidents that had befallen us so far, as well as the repairs or removals performed on our bodies. Both of us had had our tonsils out—a usual precaution in those days—and both of us had had measles and whooping cough but not mumps. I had had an eyetooth pulled because it was growing in over my other teeth and she had a thumbnail with an imperfect half-moon, because her thumb had been slammed under a window.