by Alice Munro
Aunt Dawn wore a dress that was modestly cut, made of flesh-colored crepe. It was the sort of dress an older woman might have worn and made look proper in a fussy way, but my aunt could not help looking as if she were taking part in some slightly risqué celebration. The neighbor wife was also dressed up, a bit more perhaps than the occasion warranted. The short, thick man who played the cello wore a black suit that was saved by a bow tie from making him look like an undertaker, and the pianist, who was his wife, wore a black dress that was too frilly for her wide figure. But Mona Cassel was shining like the moon, in a straight-cut gown of some silvery material. She was large-boned, with a big nose, like her brother’s.
Aunt Dawn must have had the piano tuned, or they wouldn’t have stuck with it. (And if it seems odd that there was a piano in the house at all, given my uncle’s soon-to-be-revealed opinions on the subject of music, I can say only that every house of a certain style and period used to have one.)
The neighbor wife asked for Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and I seconded her, showing off. The fact was I didn’t know the music but only the title, from studying German at my old city school.
Then the neighbor husband asked for something, and it was played, and when it was finished he begged pardon from Aunt Dawn for having been so rude, jumping in with his favorite before the hostess had had a chance to ask for hers.
Aunt Dawn said, Oh no, not to bother about her, she liked everything. Then she disappeared in a towering blush. I don’t know if she cared about the music at all, but it certainly looked as if she were excited about something. Perhaps just about being personally responsible for these moments, this spread of delight?
Could she have forgotten—how could she have forgotten? The meeting of the County Physicians, the Annual Dinner and the Election of Officers was normally over by ten thirty. It was now eleven o’clock.
Too late, too late, we both noticed the time.
The storm door is opening now, then the door into the front hall and, without the usual pause there to remove boots and winter coat or scarf, my uncle strides into the living room.
The musicians, in the middle of a piece, do not stop. The neighbors greet my uncle cheerfully but with voices lowered in deference to the playing. He looks twice his size with his coat unbuttoned and his scarf loose and his boots on. He glares, but not at anybody in particular, not even at his wife.
And she isn’t looking at him. She has begun to gather up the plates on the table beside her, placing them one on top of the other and not even noticing that some still have the little cakes on them, which will be squashed to pieces.
Without haste and without halting, he walks through the double living room, then through the dining room and the swinging doors into the kitchen.
The pianist is sitting with her hands quiet on the keys, and the cello player has stopped. The violinist continues alone. I have no idea, even now, if that was the way the piece was supposed to go or if she was flouting him on purpose. She never looked up, as far as I can remember, to face this scowling man. Her large white head, similar to his but more weathered, trembles a little but may have been trembling all along.
He is back, with a plateful of pork and beans. He must have just opened a can and slopped the contents out cold on the plate. He hasn’t bothered to take off his winter coat. And still without looking at anybody, but making a great clatter with his fork, he is eating as if alone, and hungry. You might think there had not been a bite of food offered at the Annual Meeting and Dinner.
I have never seen him eat like this. His table manners have always been lordly, but decent.
The music his sister is playing comes to an end, presumably at its own proper time. It’s a little ahead of the pork and beans. The neighbors have got themselves into the front hall and wrapped themselves in their outdoor clothes and stuck their heads in once to express their profuse thanks, in the middle of their desperation to be out of here.
And now the musicians are leaving, though not in quite such a hurry. Instruments have to be properly packed up, after all; you don’t just thrust them into their cases. The musicians manage things in what must be their usual way, methodically, and then they, too, disappear. I can’t remember anything that was said, or whether Aunt Dawn pulled herself together enough to thank them or follow them to the door. I can’t pay attention to them because Uncle Jasper has taken to talking, in a very loud voice, and the person he is talking to is me. I think I remember the violinist taking one look at him, just as he begins to talk. A look that he completely ignores or maybe doesn’t even see. It’s not an angry look, as you might expect, or even an amazed one. She is just terribly tired, and her face whiter perhaps than any you could imagine.
“Now, tell me,” my uncle is saying, addressing me as if nobody else were there, “tell me, do your parents go in for this sort of thing? What I mean is, this kind of music? Concerts and the like? They ever pay money to sit down for a couple of hours and wear their bottoms out listening to something they wouldn’t recognize half a day later? Pay money simply to perpetrate a fraud? You ever know them to do that?”
I said no, and it was the truth. I had never known them to go to a concert, though they were in favor of concerts in general.
“See? They’ve got too much sense, your parents. Too much sense to join all these people who are fussing and clapping and carrying on like it’s just the wonder of the world. You know the kind of people I mean? They’re lying. A load of horse manure. All in the hope of appearing high-class. Or more likely giving in to their wives’ hope to appear high-class. Remember that when you get out in the world. Okay?”
I agreed to remember. I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people thought that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra—I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it.
But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
When I came down in the morning, Uncle Jasper had already left the house. Bernice was washing dishes in the kitchen and Aunt Dawn was putting away the crystal glasses in the china cabinet. She smiled at me, but her hands were not quite steady, so that the glasses gave a little warning clink.
“A man’s home is his castle,” she said.
“That’s a pun,” I said, to cheer her up. “Cassel.”
She smiled again, but I don’t think she even knew what I was talking about.
“When you write to your mother, in Ghana—” she said, “when you write to her, I don’t think you should mention—I mean, I wonder if you should mention the little upset we had here last night. When she sees so many real troubles and people starving and that sort of thing, I mean, it would seem pretty trivial and self-centered of us.”
I understood. I did not bother to say that so far there had been no reports of starvation in Ghana.
It was only in the first month, anyway, that I had sent my parents letters full of sarcastic descriptions and complaints. Now everything had become much too complicated to explain.
After our conversation about music, Uncle Jasper’s attention to me became more respectful. He listened to my views on socialized health care as if they were my own and not derived from those of my parents. Once, he said that it was a pleasure to have an intelligent person to talk to across the table. My aunt said yes it was. She had said this only to be agreeable, and when my uncle laughed in a particular way she turned red. Life was hard for her, but by Valentine’s Day she was forgiven, receiving a bloodstone pendant that made her smile and turn aside to shed a few tears of relief all at the same time.
Mona’s candlelight pallor, her sharp bones, not quite softened by the silver dress, may have been signs of illness. Her death was noted in the local paper, that spring, along with a mention of the Town Hall concert. An obituary from a Toronto paper was reprinted, with a brief outline of
a career that seemed to have been adequate to support her, if not brilliant. Uncle Jasper expressed surprise—not at her death but at the fact that she was not going to be buried in Toronto. The funeral and interment were to be at the Church of the Hosannas, which was a few miles north of this town, out in the country. It had been the family church when Uncle Jasper and Mona / Maud were small and it was Anglican. Uncle Jasper and Aunt Dawn went to the United Church now, as most well-to-do people in town did. United Church people were firm in their faith but did not think that you had to turn up every Sunday, and did not believe that God objected to your having a drink now and then. (Bernice, the maid, attended another church, and played the organ there. Its congregation was small and strange—they left pamphlets on doorsteps around town, with lists of people who were going to Hell. Not local people, but well-known ones, like Pierre Trudeau.)
“The Church of the Hosannas isn’t even open for services anymore,” Uncle Jasper said. “What is the sense of bringing her way up here? I wouldn’t think it would even be allowed.”
But it turned out that the church was opened regularly. People who had known it in their youth liked to use it for funerals, and sometimes their children got married there. It was well kept up inside, owing to a sizable bequest, and the heating was up-to-date.
Aunt Dawn and I drove there in her car. Uncle Jasper was busy until the last minute.
I had never been to a funeral. My parents would not have thought that a child needed to experience such a thing, even though in their circle—as I seem to remember—it was referred to as a celebration of life.
Aunt Dawn was not dressed in black, as I’d expected. She was wearing a suit of a soft lilac color and a Persian lamb jacket with a matching Persian lamb pillbox hat. She looked very pretty and seemed to be in good spirits that she could hardly subdue.
A thorn had been removed. A thorn had been removed from Uncle Jasper’s side, and that could not help but make her happy.
Some of my ideas had changed during the time I had been living with my aunt and uncle. For instance, I was no longer so uncritical about people like Mona. Or about Mona herself, and her music and her career. I did not believe that she was—or had been—a freak, but I could understand how some people might think so. It wasn’t just her big bones and her big white nose, and the violin and the somewhat silly way you had to hold it—it was the music itself and her devotion to it. Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.
I don’t mean that I was won over to Uncle Jasper’s way of thinking entirely—just that it did not seem so alien to me as it once had. Creeping past my aunt and uncle’s closed bedroom door early on a Sunday morning, on my way to help myself to one of the cinnamon scones Aunt Dawn made every Saturday night, I had heard sounds such as I had never heard from my parents or from anyone else—a sort of pleasurable growling and squealing in which there was a complicity and an abandonment that disturbed and darkly undermined me.
“I wouldn’t think many Toronto people would drive way up here,” Aunt Dawn said. “The Gibsons aren’t going to be able to make it, even. He’s got a meeting and she can’t reschedule her students.”
The Gibsons were the people next door. Their friendship had continued but in a lower key, one that didn’t include visits to each other’s houses.
A girl at school had said to me, “Wait till they make you do the Last Look. I had to look at my grandma and I fainted.”
I had not heard about the Last Look, but I figured out what it must be. I decided that I would slit my eyes and just pretend.
“As long as the church doesn’t have that musty smell,” Aunt Dawn said. “That gets into your uncle’s sinuses.”
No musty smell. No dispiriting damp seeping out of the stone walls and floor. Someone must have got up early in the morning and come to turn the heat on.
The pews were almost full.
“Quite a few of your uncle’s patients have made it out here,” Aunt Dawn said softly. “That’s nice. There isn’t any other doctor in town they would do this for.”
The organist was playing a piece I knew quite well. A girl who was a friend of mine, in Vancouver, had played it for an Easter concert. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
The woman at the organ was the pianist who had played in the abortive little concert at the house. The cellist was sitting in one of the choir seats close by. Probably he would be playing later.
After we had been settled listening for a bit there was a discreet commotion at the back of the church. I did not turn to look because I had just noticed the dark polished wooden box sitting crossways just below the altar. The coffin. Some people called it the casket. It was closed. Unless they opened it up at some point, I did not have to worry about the Last Look. Even so, I pictured Mona inside it. Her big bony nose sticking up, her flesh fallen away, her eyes stuck shut. I made myself fix that image uppermost in my mind, until I felt strong enough for it not to make me sick.
Aunt Dawn, like me, did not turn to see what was happening behind us.
The source of the mild disturbance was coming up the aisle and it revealed itself to be Uncle Jasper. He did not stop at the pew where Aunt Dawn and I had kept a seat for him. He went right by, at a respectful yet businesslike pace, and he had somebody with him.
The maid, Bernice. She was dressed up. A navy blue suit and a matching hat with a little nest of flowers in it. She wasn’t looking at us or at anybody. Her face was flushed and her lips tight.
Neither was Aunt Dawn looking at anybody. She had busied herself, at this moment, with leafing through the hymnbook that she had taken out of the pocket of the seat in front of her.
Uncle Jasper didn’t stop at the coffin; he was leading Bernice to the organ. There was a strange surprised sort of thump in the music. Then a drone, a loss, a silence, except for people in the pews shuffling and straining to see what was going on.
Now the pianist who had presided at the organ and the cellist were gone. There must have been a side door up there for them to escape through. Uncle Jasper had seated Bernice in the woman’s place.
As Bernice began to play, my uncle moved forward and made a gesture to the congregation. Rise and sing, this gesture said, and a few people did. Then more. Then all.
They rustled around in their hymnbooks, but most of them were able to start singing even before they could find the words: “The Old Rugged Cross.”
Uncle Jasper’s job is done. He can come back and occupy the place we have kept for him.
Except for one problem. A thing he has not reckoned on.
This is an Anglican church. In the United Church that Uncle Jasper is used to, the members of the choir enter through a door behind the pulpit, and settle themselves before the minister appears, so that they can look out at the congregation in a comfortable here-we-are-all-together sort of way. Then comes the minister, a signal that things can get started. But in the Anglican church the choir members come up the aisle from the back of the church, singing and making a serious but anonymous show of themselves. They lift their eyes from their books only to gaze ahead at the altar and they appear slightly transformed, removed from their everyday identities and not quite aware of their relatives or neighbors or anybody else in the congregation.
They are coming up the aisle now, singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” just like everybody else—Uncle Jasper must have talked to them before things started. Possibly he made it out to be a favorite of the deceased.
The problem is one of space and bodies. With the choir in the aisle, there is no way for Uncle Jasper to get back to our pew. He is stranded.
There is one thing to be done and done quickly, so he does it. The choir has not yet reached the very front pew, so he squeezes in there. The people standing with him are surprised but they make room for him. That is, they make what room they can. By chance, they are heavy people and he is a broad, though lean, man.
I will cherish the Old Rugged Cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the Old Rugged Cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
That is what my uncle sings, as heartily as he can in the space he’s been given. He cannot turn to face the altar but has to face outward into the profiles of the moving choir. He can’t help looking a little trapped there. Everything has gone okay but, just the same, not quite as he imagined it. Even after the singing is over, he stays in that spot, sitting squeezed in as tightly as he can be with those people. Perhaps he thinks it would be anticlimactic now to get up and walk back down the aisle to join us.
Aunt Dawn has not participated in the singing, because she never found the right place in the hymnbook. It seems that she could not just trail along, the way I did.
Or perhaps she caught the shadow of disappointment on Uncle Jasper’s face before he was even aware of it himself.
Or perhaps she realized that, for the first time, she didn’t care. For the life of her, couldn’t care.
“Let us pray,” says the minister.
PRIDE
SOME people get everything wrong. How can I explain? I mean, there are those who can have everything against them—three strikes, twenty strikes, for that matter—and they turn out fine. Make mistakes early on—dirty their pants in grade two, for instance—and then live out their lives in a town like ours where nothing is forgotten (any town, that is, any town is a place like that) and they manage, they prove themselves hearty and jovial, claiming and meaning that they would not for the world want to live in any place but this.
With other people, it’s different. They don’t move away but you wish they had. For their own sake, you could say. Whatever hole they started digging for themselves when they were young—not by any means as obvious as the dirty pants either—they keep right on at it, digging away, even exaggerating if there is a chance that it might not be noticed.