Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

  That’s rich. Then he asked Phil’s opinion of his clothes.

  “Do you think they’re going to laugh when they see me coming in Hawaii?”

  Karin heard about this when she went into the doughnut place to drink a cup of coffee after finishing her afternoon stint as a crossing guard. She sat at the counter and heard the men talking at a table behind her. She swung around on the stool and said, “Listen, I could have told you, he’s changed. I see him every day and I could have told you.”

  Karin is a tall, thin woman with a rough skin and a hoarse voice and long blond hair dark for a couple of inches at the roots. She’s letting it grow out dark and it’s got to where she could cut it short, but she doesn’t. She used to be a lanky blond girl, shy and pretty, riding around on the back of her husband’s motorcycle. She has gone a little strange—not too much or she wouldn’t be a crossing guard, even with Austin Cobbett’s recommendation. She interrupts conversations. She never seems to wear anything but her jeans and an old navy-blue duffel coat. She has a hard and suspicious expression and she has a public grudge against her ex-husband. She will write things on his car, with her finger: Fake Christian. Kiss arse Phony. Brent Duprey is a snake. Nobody knows that she wrote Lazarus Sucks, because she went back (she does this at night) and rubbed it off with her sleeve. Why? It seemed dangerous, something that might get her into trouble—the trouble being of a vaguely supernatural kind, not a talk with the Chief of Police—and she has nothing against Lazarus in the Bible, only against Lazarus House, which is the place Brent runs, and where he lives now.

  Karin lives where she and Brent lived together for the last few months—upstairs over the hardware store, at the back, a big room with an alcove (the baby’s) and a kitchen at one end. She spends a lot of her time over at Austin’s, cleaning out his house, getting everything ready for his departure to Hawaii. The house he lives in, still, is the old parsonage, on Pondicherry Street. The church has built the new minister a new house, quite nice, with a patio and a double garage—ministers’ wives often work now; it’s a big help if they can get jobs as nurses or teachers, and in that case you need two cars. The old parsonage is a grayish-white brick house with blue-painted trim on the veranda and the gables. It needs a lot of work. Insulating, sandblasting, new paint, new window frames, new tiles in the bathroom. Walking back to her own place at night, Karin sometimes occupies her mind thinking what she’d do to that place if it was hers and she had the money.

  Austin shows her a picture of Sheila Brothers, the woman he is to marry. Actually, it’s a picture of the three of them—Austin, his wife, and Sheila Brothers, in front of a log building and some pine trees. A Retreat, where he—they—first met Sheila. Austin has on his minister’s black shirt and turned collar; he looks shifty, with his apologetic, ministerial smile. His wife is looking away from him, but the big bow of her flowered scarf flutters against his neck. Fluffy white hair, trim figure. Chic. Sheila Brothers—Mrs. Brothers, a widow—is looking straight ahead, and she is the only one who seems really cheerful. Short fair hair combed around her face in a businesslike way, brown slacks, white sweatshirt, with the fairly large bumps of her breasts and stomach plain to see, she meets the camera head-on and doesn’t seem worried about what it will make of her.

  “She looks happy,” Karin says.

  “Well. She didn’t know she was going to marry me, at the time.”

  He shows her a postcard picture of the town where Sheila lives. The town where he will live in Hawaii. Also a photograph of her house. The town’s main street has a row of palm trees down the middle, it has low white or pinkish buildings, lampposts with brimming flower baskets, and over all a sky of deep turquoise in which the town’s name—a Hawaiian name there is no hope of pronouncing or remembering—is written in flowing letters like silk ribbon. The name floating in the sky looked as possible as anything else about it. As for the house, you could hardly make it out at all—just a bit of balcony among the red and pink and gold flowering trees and bushes. But there was the beach in front of it, the sand pure as cream and the jewel-bright waves breaking. Where Austin Cobbett would walk with friendly Sheila. No wonder he needed all new clothes.

  What Austin wants Karin to do is clear everything out. Even his books, his old typewriter, the pictures of his wife and children. His son lives in Denver, his daughter in Montreal. He has written to them, he has talked to them on the phone, he has asked them to claim anything they want. His son wants the dining-room furniture, which a moving-truck will pick up next week. His daughter said she didn’t want anything. (Karin think she’s apt to reconsider; people always want something.) All the furniture, books, pictures, curtains, rugs, dishes, pots, and pans are to go to the Auction Barn. Austin’s car will be auctioned as well, and his power mower and the snowblower his son gave him last Christmas. These will be sold after Austin leaves for Hawaii, and the money is to go to Lazarus House. Austin started Lazarus House when he was a minister. Only he didn’t call it that; he called it Turnaround House. But now they have decided—Brent Duprey has decided—it would be better to have a name that is more religious, more Christian.

  At first Austin was just going to give them all these things to use in or around the House. Then he thought that it would be showing more respect to give them the money, to let them spend it as they liked, buying things they liked, instead of using his wife’s dishes and sitting on his wife’s chintz sofa.

  “What if they take the money and buy lottery tickets with it?” Karin asks him. “Don’t you think it’ll be a big temptation to them?”

  “You don’t get anywhere in life without temptations,” Austin says, with his maddening little smile. “What if they won the lottery?”

  “Brent Duprey is a snake.”

  Brent has taken over the whole control of Lazarus House, which Austin started. It was a place for people to stay who wanted to stop drinking or some other way of life they were in; now it’s a born-again sort of place, with nightlong sessions of praying and singing and groaning and confessing. That’s how Brent got hold of it—by becoming more religious than Austin. Austin got Brent to stop drinking; he pulled and pulled on Brent until he pulled him right out of the life he was leading and into a new life of running this House with money from the church, the government, and so on, and he made a big mistake, Austin did, in thinking he could hold Brent there. Brent once started on the holy road went shooting on past; he got past Austin’s careful quiet kind of religion in no time and cut Austin out with the people in his own church who wanted a stricter, more ferocious kind of Christianity. Austin was shifted out of Lazarus House and the church at about the same time, and Brent bossed the new minister around without difficulty. And in spite of this, or because of it, Austin wants to give Lazarus House the money.

  “Who’s to say whether Brent’s way isn’t closer to God than mine is, after all?” he says.

  Karin says just about anything to anybody now. She says to Austin, “Don’t make me puke.”

  Austin says she must be sure to keep a record of her time, so she will be paid for all this work, and also, if there is anything here that she would particularly like, to tell him, so they can discuss it.

  “Within reason,” he says. “If you said you’d like the car or the snowblower, I guess I’d be obliged to say no, because that would be cheating the folks over at Lazarus House. How about the vacuum cleaner?”

  Is that how he sees her—as somebody who’s always thinking about cleaning houses? The vacuum cleaner is practically an antique, anyway.

  “I bet I know what Brent said when you told him I was going to be in charge of all this,” she says. “I bet he said, ‘Are you going to get a lawyer to check up on her?’ He did! Didn’t he?”

  Instead of answering that, Austin says, “Why would I trust a lawyer any more than I trust you?”

  “Is that what you said to him?”

  “I’m saying it to you. You either trust or you don’t trust, in my opinion. When you decide you’re going to trus
t, you have to start where you are.”

  Austin rarely mentions God. Nevertheless you feel the mention of God hovering on the edge of sentences like these, and it makes you so uneasy—Karin gets a crumbly feeling along her spine—that you wish he’d say it and get it over with.

  Four years ago Karin and Brent were still married, and they hadn’t had the baby yet or moved to their place above the hardware store. They were living in the old slaughterhouse. That was a cheap apartment building belonging to Morris Fordyce, but it really had at one time been a slaughterhouse. In wet weather Karin could smell pig, and always she smelled another smell that she thought was blood. Brent sniffed around the walls and got down and sniffed the floor, but he couldn’t smell what she was smelling. How could he smell anything but the clouds of boozy breath that rose from his own gut? Brent was a drunk then, but not a sodden drunk. He played hockey on the O. T. (over thirty, old-timers) hockey team—he was quite a bit older than Karin—and he claimed that he had never played sober. He worked for Fordyce Construction for a while, and then he worked for the town, cutting up trees. He drank on the job when he could, and after work he drank at the Fish and Game Club or at the Green Haven Motel Bar, called the Greasy Heaven. One night he got a bulldozer going, which was sitting outside the Greasy Heaven, and he drove it across town to the Fish and Game Club. Of course he was caught, and charged with impaired driving of a bulldozer, a big joke all over town. Nobody who laughed at the joke came around to pay the fine. And Brent just kept getting wilder. Another night he took down the stairs that led to their apartment. He didn’t bash the steps out in a fit of temper; he removed them thoughtfully and methodically, steps and uprights one by one, backing downstairs as he did so and leaving Karin cursing at the top. First she was laughing at him—she had had a few beers herself by that time—then, when she realized he was in earnest, and she was being marooned there, she started cursing. Coward neighbors peeped out of the doors behind him.

  Brent came home the next afternoon and was amazed, or pretended to be. “What happened to the steps?” he yelled. He stomped around the hall, his lined, exhausted, excited face working, his blue eyes snapping, his smile innocent and conniving. “God damn that Morris! God-damn steps caved in. I’m going to sue the shit out of him. God damn fuck!” Karin was upstairs with nothing to eat but half a package of Rice Krispies with no milk, and a can of yellow beans. She had thought of phoning somebody to come with a ladder, but she was too mad and stubborn. If Brent wanted to starve her, she would show him. She would starve.

  That time was really the beginning of the end, the change. Brent went around to see Morris Fordyce to beat him up and tell him about how he was going to have the shit sued out of him, and Morris talked to him in a reasonable, sobering way until Brent decided not to sue or beat up Morris but to commit suicide instead. Morris called Austin Cobbett then, because Austin had a reputation for knowing how to deal with people who were in a desperate way. Austin didn’t talk Brent out of drinking then, or into the church, but he talked him out of suicide. Then, a couple of years later when the baby died, Austin was the only minister they knew to call. By the time he came to see them, to talk about the funeral, Brent had drunk everything in the house and gone out looking for more. Austin went after him and spent the next five days—with a brief time out for burying the baby—just staying with him on a bender. Then he spent the next week nursing him out of it, and the next month talking to him or sitting with him until Brent decided he would not drink anymore, he had been put in touch with God. Austin said that Brent meant by that that he had been put in touch with the fullness of his own life and the power of his innermost self. Brent said it was not for one minute himself; it was God.

  Karin went to Austin’s church with Brent for a while; she didn’t mind that. She could see, though, that it wasn’t going to be enough to hold Brent. She saw him bouncing up to sing the hymns, swinging his arms and clenching his fists, his whole body primed up. It was the same as he was after three or four beers when there was no way he could stop himself going for more. He was bursting. And soon enough he burst out of Austin’s hold and took a good part of the church with him. A lot of people had wanted that loosening, more noise and praying and singing and not so much quiet persuading talking; they’d been wanting it for a long while.

  None of it surprised her. It didn’t surprise her that Brent learned to fill out papers and make the right impression and get government money; that he took over Turnaround House, which Austin had got him into, and kicked Austin out. He’d always been full of possibilities. It didn’t really surprise her that he got as mad at her now for drinking one beer and smoking one cigarette as he used to do when she wanted to stop partying and go to bed at two o’clock. He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking, no more smoking, Christ as her Saviour. One week. Karin said don’t bother with the week. After Brent was gone, she quit smoking, she almost quit drinking, she also quit going to Austin’s church. She gave up on nearly everything but a slow, smoldering grudge against Brent, which grew and grew. One day Austin stopped her on the street and she thought he was going to say some gentle, personal, condemning thing to her, for her grudge or her quitting church, but all he did was ask her to come and help him look after his wife, who was getting home from the hospital that week.

  Austin is talking on the phone to his daughter in Montreal. Her name is Megan. She is around thirty, unmarried, a television producer.

  “Life has a lot of surprises up its sleeve,” Austin says. “You know this has nothing to do with your mother. This is a new life entirely. But I regret … No, no. I just mean there’s more than one way to love God, and taking pleasure in the world is surely one of them. That’s a revelation that’s come on me rather late. Too late to be of any use to your mother.… No. Guilt is a sin and a seduction. I’ve said that to many a poor soul that liked to wallow in it. Regret’s another matter. How could you get through a long life and escape it?”

  I was right, Karin is thinking; Megan does want something. But after a little more talk—Austin says that he might take up golf, don’t laugh, and that Sheila belongs to a play-reading club, he expects he’ll be a star at that, after all his pulpit haranguing—the conversation comes to an end. Austin comes out to the kitchen—the phone is in the front hall; this is an old-fashioned house—and looks up at Karin, who is cleaning out the high cupboards.

  “Parents and children, Karin,” he says, sighing, sighing, looking humorous. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we—have children. Then they always want us to be the same, they want us to be parents—it shakes them up dreadfully if we should do anything they didn’t think we’d do. Dreadfully.”

  “I guess she’ll get used to it,” Karin says, without much sympathy.

  “Oh, she will, she will. Poor Megan.”

  Then he says he’s going uptown to have his hair cut. He doesn’t want to leave it any longer, because he always looks and feels so foolish with a fresh haircut. His mouth turns down as he smiles—first up, then down. That downward slide is what’s noticeable on him everywhere—face slipping down into neck wattles, chest emptied out and mounded into that abrupt, queer little belly. The flow has left dry channels, deep lines. Yet Austin speaks—it’s his perversity to speak—as if out of a body that is light and ready and a pleasure to carry around.

  In a short time the phone rings again and Karin has to climb down and answer it.

  “Karin? Is that you, Karin? It’s Megan!”

  “Your father’s just gone up to get a haircut.”

  “Good. Good. I’m glad. It gives me a chance to talk to you. I’ve been hoping I’d get a chance to talk to you.”

  “Oh,” says Karin.

  “Karin. Now, listen. I know I’m behaving just the way adult children are supposed to behave in this situation. I don’t like it. I don’t like that in myself. But I can’t help it. I’m suspicious. I wonder what’s going on. Is he all right? What do you think of it? What do you think of this woman h
e’s going to marry?”

  “All I ever saw of her is her picture,” Karin says.

  “I am terribly busy right now and I can’t just drop everything and come home and have a real heart-to-heart with him. Anyway, he’s very difficult to talk to. He makes all the right noises, he seems so open, but in reality he’s very closed. He’s never been at all a personal kind of person, do you know what I mean? He’s never done anything before for a personal kind of reason. He always did things for somebody. He always liked to find people who needed things done for them, a lot. Well, you know that. Even bringing you into the house, you know, to look after Mother—it wasn’t exactly for Mother’s sake or his sake he did that.”

  Karin can picture Megan—the long, dark, smooth hair, parted in the middle and combed over her shoulders, the heavily made-up eyes and tanned skin and pale-pink lipsticked mouth, the handsomely clothed plump body. Wouldn’t her voice bring such looks to mind even if you’d never seen her? Such smoothness, such rich sincerity. A fine gloss on every word and little appreciative spaces in between. She talks as if listening to herself. A little too much that way, really. Could she be drunk?

  “Let’s face it, Karin. Mother was a snob.” (Yes, she is drunk.) “Well, she had to have something. Dragged around from one dump to another, always doing good. Doing good wasn’t her thing at all. So now, now, he gives it all up, he’s off to the easy life. In Hawaii! Isn’t it bizarre?”

  “Bizarre.” Karin has heard that word on television and heard people, mostly teen-agers, say it, and she knows it is not the church bazaar Megan’s talking about. Nevertheless that’s what the word makes her think of—the church bazaars that Megan’s mother used to organize, always trying to give them some style and make things different. Striped umbrellas and a sidewalk café one year, Devonshire teas and a rose arbor the next. Then she thinks of Megan’s mother on the chintz-covered sofa in the living room, weak and yellow after her chemotherapy, one of those padded, perky kerchiefs around her nearly bald head. Still, she could look up at Karin with a faint, formal surprise when Karin came into the room. “Was there something you wanted, Karin?” The thing that Karin was supposed to ask her, she would ask Karin.