Dear Life

by Alice Munro

  He was able to be out of the office because the owner was in there checking some rents.

  There was a light touch on the front doorbell. Jackson was ready to haul himself up, cleaning his brush, because he thought the owner in the midst of figures might not care to be disturbed. But it was all right, he heard the door being opened, a woman’s voice. A voice on the edge of exhaustion, yet able to maintain something of its charm, its absolute assurance that whatever it said would win over anybody who came within listening range.

  She would probably have got that from her father the preacher. Jackson was thinking this before the whole impact hit him.

  This was the last address she had, she said, for her daughter. She was looking for her daughter. Candace, her daughter. Who might have been travelling with a friend. She, the mother, had come here from British Columbia. From Kelowna where she and the girl’s father lived.

  Ileane. Jackson knew her voice without a doubt. That woman was Ileane.

  He heard her ask if it was possible for her to sit down. Then the owner pulling out his—Jackson’s—chair.

  Toronto so much hotter than she had expected, though she knew Ontario, had grown up there.

  She wondered if she could possibly ask for a glass of water.

  She must have put her head down in her hands as her voice grew muffled. The owner came out into the hall and dropped some change into the machine to get a 7UP. He might have thought that more ladylike than a Coke.

  Around the corner he saw Jackson listening, and he made a gesture that he—Jackson—should take over, being perhaps more used to distraught tenants. But Jackson shook his head violently.

  No.

  She did not stay distraught long.

  She begged the owner’s pardon and he said the heat could play those tricks today.

  Now about Candace. They had left within the month, it could be three weeks ago. No forwarding address.

  “In such cases there usually isn’t.”

  She got the hint.

  “Oh of course I can settle—”

  There was some muttering and rustling while this was done.

  Then, “I don’t suppose you could let me see where they were living—”

  “The tenant isn’t in now. But even if he was I don’t think he’d agree to it.”

  “Of course. That’s silly.”

  “Was there anything you were particularly interested in?”

  “Oh no. No. You’ve been kind. I’ve taken your time.”

  She had got up now, and they were moving. Out of the office, down the couple of steps to the front door. Then the door was opened and street noises swallowed up her further farewells if there were any.

  However she had been disappointed, she would get herself through it with a good grace.

  Jackson came out of hiding as the owner returned to the office.

  “Surprise,” was all the owner said. “We got our money.”

  He was a man who was basically incurious, at least about personal matters. A thing which Jackson valued in him.

  Of course Jackson would like to have seen her. Now that she was gone he almost regretted his chance. He would never stoop so low as to ask the owner was her hair still dark, black almost, her body tall and slim and with very little bosom to it. He hadn’t got much of an impression of the daughter. Her hair was blond but very likely dyed. No more than twenty years old though it was sometimes hard to tell nowadays. Very much under the thumb of the boyfriend. Run away from home, run away from your bills, break your parents’ hearts, all for a sulky piece of business like the boyfriend.

  Where was Kelowna? In the west somewhere. Alberta, British Columbia. A long way to come looking. Of course that mother was a persistent woman. An optimist. Probably that was true of her still. She had married. Unless the girl was born out of wedlock and that struck him as very unlikely. She’d be sure, sure of herself the next time, she wouldn’t be one for tragedy. The girl wouldn’t be, either. She’d come home when she’d had enough. She might bring along a baby but that was all the style nowadays.

  Shortly before Christmas in the year 1940 there had been an uproar in the high school. It had even reached the third floor where the clamor of typewriters and adding machines usually kept all the downstairs noises at bay. The oldest girls in the school were up there—girls who last year had been learning Latin and biology and European history and were now learning to type.

  One of these was Ileane Bishop, who oddly enough was a minister’s daughter, although there were no bishops in her father’s United Church. Ileane had arrived with her family when she was in grade nine and for five years, due to the custom of alphabetical seating, she had sat behind Jackson Adams. By that time Jackson’s phenomenal shyness and silence had been accepted by everybody else in the class, but it was new to her, and during the next five years, by not acknowledging it she had produced a thaw. She borrowed erasers and pen nibs and geometry tools from him, not so much to break the ice as because she was naturally scatterbrained. They exchanged answers to problems and marked each other’s tests. When they met on the street they said hello, and to her his hello was actually more than a mumble—it had two syllables and an emphasis to it. Nothing much was presumed beyond that, except that they had certain jokes. Ileane was not a shy girl but she was clever and aloof and not particularly popular, and that might have suited him.

  From her position on the stairs, when everybody came out to watch the ruckus, Ileane was surprised to see that one of the two boys causing it was Jackson. The other was Billy Watts. Boys who only a year ago had sat hunched over books and shuffled dutifully between one classroom and another were now transformed. In army uniforms they looked twice the size they had been, and their boots made a powerful racket as they galloped around. They were shouting out that school was cancelled for the day, because everybody had to join the war. They were distributing cigarettes everywhere, tossing them on the floor where they could be picked up by boys who didn’t even shave.

  Careless warriors, whooping invaders. Drunk up to their eyeballs.

  “I’m no piker,” was what they were yelling.

  The principal was trying to order them out. But because this was still early in the war and there was as yet some awe and special respect concerning the boys who had signed up, he was not able to show the ruthlessness he would have called upon a year later.

  “Now now,” he said.

  “I’m no piker,” Billy Watts told him.

  Jackson had his mouth open probably to say the same, but at that moment his eyes met the eyes of Ileane Bishop and a certain piece of knowledge passed between them.

  Ileane Bishop understood that Jackson was truly drunk but that the effect of this was to enable him to play drunk, therefore the drunkenness displayed could be managed. (Billy Watts was just drunk, through and through.) With this understanding Ileane walked down the stairs, smiling, and accepted a cigarette which she held unlit between her fingers. She linked arms with both heroes and marched them out of the school.

  Once outside they lit up their cigarettes.

  There was a conflict of opinion about this later, in Ileane’s father’s congregation. Some said Ileane had not actually smoked hers, just pretended, to pacify the boys, while others said she certainly had. Smoked. Their minister’s daughter. Smoked.

  Billy did put his arms around Ileane and tried to kiss her, but he stumbled and sat down on the school steps and crowed like a rooster.

  Within two years he would be dead.

  Meanwhile he had to be got home, and Jackson pulled him so that they could get his arms over their shoulders and drag him along. Fortunately his house was not far from the school. They left him there, passed out on the steps. Then they entered into a conversation.

  Jackson did not want to go home. Why not? Because his stepmother was there, he said. He hated his stepmother. Why? No reason.

  Ileane knew that his mother had died in a car accident when he was very small—this was sometimes mentioned to account
for his shyness. She thought that the drink was probably making him exaggerate, but she didn’t try to make him talk about it any further.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can stay at my place.”

  It just happened that Ileane’s mother was away, looking after Ileane’s sick grandmother. Ileane was at the time keeping house in a haphazard style for her father and her two younger brothers. This was unfortunate in some opinions. Not that her mother would have made a fuss, but she would have wanted to know the ins and outs, and who was this boy? At the very least she would have made Ileane go to school as usual.

  A soldier and a girl, suddenly so close. Where there had been nothing all this time but logarithms and declensions.

  Ileane’s father didn’t pay attention to them. He was more interested in the war than some of his parishioners thought a minister should be, and this made him proud to have a soldier in the house. Also he was unhappy not to be able to send his daughter to college. He had to save up to send her brothers there some day, they would have to earn a living. That made him go easy on Ileane whatever she did.

  Jackson and Ileane didn’t go to the movies. They didn’t go to the dance hall. They went for walks, in any weather and often after dark. Sometimes they went into the restaurant and drank coffee, but did not try to be friendly to anybody. What was the matter with them, were they falling in love? When they were walking they might brush hands, and he made himself get used to that. Then when she changed the accidental to the deliberate, he found that he could get used to that also, overcoming a slight dismay.

  He grew calmer, and was even prepared for kissing.

  Ileane went by herself to Jackson’s house to collect his bag. His stepmother showed her bright false teeth and tried to look as if she was ready for some fun.

  She asked what they were up to.

  “You better watch that stuff,” she said.

  She had a reputation for being a loudmouth. A dirty mouth, actually.

  “Ask him if he remembers I used to wash his bottom,” she said.

  Ileane, reporting this, said that she herself had been especially courteous, even snooty, because she could not stand the woman.

  But Jackson went red, cornered and desperate, the way he used to when asked a question in school.

  “I shouldn’t even have mentioned her,” Ileane said. “You get in the habit of caricaturing people, living in a parsonage.”

  He said it was okay.

  That time turned out to be Jackson’s last leave. They wrote to each other. Ileane wrote about finishing her typing and shorthand and getting a job in the office of the Town Clerk. She was determinedly satirical about everything, more than she had been in school. Maybe she thought that someone at war needed joking. And she insisted on being in the know. When hurry-up marriages had to be arranged through the clerk’s office, she would refer to the Virgin Bride.

  And when she mentioned some minister visiting the parsonage and sleeping in the spare room, she said she wondered if the mattress would induce Peculiar Dreams.

  He wrote about the crowds on the Île de France and the ducking around to avoid U-boats. When he got to England he bought a bicycle and he told her about places he had biked around to see, if they were not out of bounds.

  These letters though more prosaic than hers were always signed “With Love.” When D-day did come there was what she called an agonizing silence but she understood the reason for it, and when he wrote again all was well, though details were not permitted.

  In this letter he spoke as she had been doing, about marriage.

  And at last VE-day and the voyage home. There were showers of summer stars, he said, all overhead.

  Ileane had learned to sew. She was making a new summer dress in honor of his homecoming, a dress of lime-green rayon silk with a full skirt and cap sleeves, worn with a narrow belt of gold imitation leather. She meant to wind a ribbon of the same green material around the crown of her summer hat.

  “All this is being described to you so you will notice me and know it’s me and not go running off with some other beautiful woman who happens to be at the train station.”

  He mailed his letter to her from Halifax, telling her that he would be on the evening train on Saturday. He said that he remembered her very well and there was no danger of getting her mixed up with another woman even if the train station happened to be swarming with them that evening.

  On their last evening before he left, they had sat up late in the parsonage kitchen where there was the picture of King George VI you saw everywhere that year. And the words beneath it.

  And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

  And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

  Then they went upstairs very quietly and he went to bed in the spare room. Her coming to him must have been by mutual agreement but perhaps he had not quite understood what for.

  It was a disaster. But by the way she behaved, she might not even have known that. The more disaster, the more frantically she carried on. There was no way he could stop her trying, or explain. Was it possible a girl could know so little? They parted finally as if all had gone well. And the next morning said good-bye in the presence of her father and brothers. In a short while the letters began.

  He got drunk and tried once more, in Southampton. But the woman said, “That’s enough, sonny boy, you’re down and out.”

  A thing he didn’t like was women or girls dressing up. Gloves, hats, swishy skirts, all some demand and bother about it. But how could she know that? Lime green. He wasn’t sure he knew the color. It sounded like acid.

  Then it came to him quite easily, that a person could just not be there.

  Would she tell herself or tell anybody else, that she must have mistaken the date? He could make himself believe that she would find some lie, surely. She was resourceful, after all.

  Now that she is gone out onto the street, Jackson does feel a wish to see her. He could never ask the owner what she looked like, whether her hair was dark or gray, and she herself still skinny or gone stout. Her voice even in distress had been marvellously unchanged. Drawing all importance to itself, to its musical levels, and at the same time setting up its so-sorries.

  She had come a long way, but she was a persistent woman. You could say so.

  And the daughter would come back. Too spoiled to stay away. Any daughter of Ileane’s would be spoiled, arranging the world and the truth to suit herself, as if nothing could foil her for long.

  If she had seen him, would she have known him? He thought so. No matter what the changes. And she’d have forgiven him, yes, right on the spot. To keep up her notion of herself, always.

  The next day whatever ease he had felt about Ileane passing from his life was gone. She knew this place, she might come back. She might settle herself in for a while, walking up and down these streets, trying to find where the trail was warm. Humbly but not really humbly making inquiries of people, in that pleading but spoiled voice. It was possible he would run into her right outside this door. Surprised only for a moment, as if she had always expected him. Holding out the possibilities of life, the way she thought she could.

  Things could be locked up, it only took some determination. When he was as young as six or seven he had locked up his stepmother’s fooling, what she called her fooling or her teasing. He had run out into the street after dark and she got him in but she saw there’d be some real running away if she didn’t stop so she stopped. And said that he was no fun because she could never say that anybody hated her.

  He spent three more nights in the building called Bonnie Dundee. He wrote an account for the owner of every apartment and when upkeep was due and what it would consist of. He said that he had been called away, without indicating why or where to. He emptied his bank account and packed the few things belonging to him. In the evening,
late in the evening, he got on the train.

  He slept off and on during the night and in one of those snatches he saw the little Mennonite boys go by in their cart. He heard their small voices singing.

  In the morning he got off in Kapuskasing. He could smell the mills, and was encouraged by the cooler air. Work there, sure to be work in a lumbering town.

  IN SIGHT OF THE LAKE

  A WOMAN goes to her doctor to have a prescription renewed. But the doctor is not there. It’s her day off. In fact the woman has got the day wrong, she has mixed up Monday with Tuesday.

  This is the very thing she wanted to talk to the doctor about, as well as renewing the prescription. She has wondered if her mind is slipping a bit.

  “What a laugh,” she has expected the doctor to say. “Your mind. You of all people.”

  (It isn’t that the doctor knows her all that well, but they do have friends in common.)

  Instead, the doctor’s assistant phones a day later to say that the prescription is ready and that an appointment has been made for the woman—her name is Nancy—to be examined by a specialist about this mind problem.

  It isn’t mind. It’s just memory.

  Whatever. The specialist deals with elderly patients.

  Indeed. Elderly patients who are off their nut.

  The girl laughs. Finally, somebody laughs.

  She says that the specialist’s office is located in a village called Hymen, twenty or so miles away from where Nancy lives.

  “Oh dear, a marriage specialist,” says Nancy.

  The girl doesn’t get it, begs her pardon.

  “Never mind, I’ll be there.”

  What has happened in the last few years is that specialists are located all over the place. Your CAT scan is in one town and your cancer person in another, pulmonary problems in a third, and so on. This is so you won’t have to travel to the city hospital, but it can take about as long, since not all these towns have hospitals and you have to ferret out where the doctor is once you get there.