by Alice Munro
III—Rose Matilda
Ruth Ann Leatherby is going with Joan and Morris to the cemetery. Joan is a little surprised about this, but Morris and Ruth Ann seem to take it for granted. Ruth Ann is Morris’s bookkeeper. Joan has known of her for years, and may even have met her before. Ruth Ann is the sort of pleasant-looking, middle-sized, middle-aged woman whose looks you don’t remember. She lives now in one of the bachelor apartments in the basement of Morris’s building. She is married, but her husband hasn’t been around for a long time. She is a Catholic, so has not thought about getting a divorce. There is some tragedy in her background—a house fire, a child?—but it has been thoroughly absorbed and is not mentioned.
It is Ruth Ann who got the hyacinth bulbs to plant on their parents’ graves. She had heard Morris say it would be nice to have something growing there, and when she saw the bulbs on sale at the supermarket she bought some. A wife-woman, thinks Joan, observing her. Wife-women are attentive yet self-possessed, they are dedicated but cool. What is it that they are dedicated to?
Joan lives in Toronto now. She has been divorced for twelve years. She has a job managing a bookstore that specializes in art books. It’s a pleasant job, though it doesn’t pay much; she has been lucky. She is also lucky (she knows that people say she is lucky, for a woman of her age) in having a lover, a friend-lover—Geoffrey. They don’t live together; they see each other on weekends and two or three times during the week. Geoffrey is an actor. He is talented, cheerful, adaptable, poor. One weekend a month he spends in Montreal with a woman he used to live with and their child. On these weekends, Joan goes to see her children, who are grown up and have forgiven her. Her son, too, is an actor—in fact, that’s how she met Geoffrey. Her daughter is a journalist, like her father. And what is there to forgive? Many parents got divorced, most of them shipwrecked by affairs, at about the same time. It seems that all sorts of marriages begun in the fifties without misgivings, or without misgivings that anybody could know about, blew up in the early seventies, with a lot of spectacular—and, it seems now, unnecessary, extravagant—complications. Joan thinks of her own history of love with no regret but some amazement. It’s as if she had once gone in for skydiving.
And sometimes she comes to see Morris. Sometimes she gets Morris to talk about the very things that used to seem incomprehensible and boring and sad to her. The peculiar structure of earnings and pensions and mortgages and loans and investments and legacies that Morris sees underlying every human life—that interests her. It’s still more or less incomprehensible to her, but its existence no longer seems to be a sorry delusion. It reassures her in some way. She’s curious about how people believe in it.
This lucky woman, Joan, with her job and her lover and her striking looks—more remarked upon now than ever before in her life (she is as thin as she was at fourteen and has a wing, a foxtail, of silver white in her very short hair)—is aware of a new danger, a threat that she could not have imagined when she was younger. She couldn’t have imagined it even if somebody described it to her. And it’s hard to describe. The threat is of a change, but it’s not the sort of change one has been warned about. It’s just this—that suddenly, without warning, Joan is apt to think: Rubble. Rubble. You can look down a street, and you can see the shadows, the light, the brick walls, the truck parked under a tree, the dog lying on the sidewalk, the dark summer awning, or the grayed snowdrift—you can see all these things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way. Or you can see rubble. Passing states, a useless variety of passing states. Rubble.
Joan wants to keep this idea of rubble at bay. She pays attention now to all the ways in which people seem to do that. Acting is an excellent way—she has learned that from being with Geoffrey. Though there are gaps in acting. In Morris’s sort of life or way of looking at things, there seems to be less chance of gaps.
As they drive through the streets, she notices that many of the old houses are reëmerging; doors and porches that were sensible modern alterations fifteen or twenty years ago are giving way to traditional verandas and fanlights. A good thing, surely. Ruth Ann points out this feature and that, and Joan approves but thinks there is something here that is strained, meticulous.
Morris stops the car at an intersection. An old woman crosses the street in the middle of the block ahead of them. She strides across the street diagonally, not looking to see if there’s anything coming. A determined, oblivious, even contemptuous stride, in some way familiar. The old woman is not in any danger; there is not another car on the street, and nobody else walking, just a couple of young girls on bicycles. The old woman is not so old, really. Joan is constantly revising her impressions these days of whether people are old or not so old. This woman has white hair down to her shoulders and is wearing a loose shirt and gray slacks. Hardly enough for the day, which is bright but cold.
“There goes Matilda,” says Ruth Ann. The way that she says “Matilda”—without a surname, in a tolerant, amused, and distant tone—announces that Matilda is a character.
“Matilda!” says Joan, turning toward Morris. “Is that Matilda? What ever happened to her?”
It’s Ruth Ann who answers, from the back seat. “She just started getting weird. When was it? A couple of years ago? She started dressing sloppy, and she thought people were taking things off her desk at work, and you’d say something perfectly decent to her and she’d be rude back. It could have been in her makeup.”
“Her makeup?” says Joan.
“Heredity,” Morris says, and they laugh.
“That’s what I meant,” says Ruth Ann. “Her mother was across the street in the nursing home for years before she died—she was completely out of it. And even before she went in there, you’d see her lurking around the yard—she looked like Halloween. Anyway, Matilda got a little pension when they let her go at the courthouse. She just walks around. Sometimes she talks to you as friendly as anything, other times not a word. And she never fixes up. She used to look so nice.”
Joan shouldn’t be so surprised, so taken aback. People change. They disappear, and they don’t all die to do it. Some die—John Brolier has died. When Joan heard that, several months after the fact, she felt a pang, but not so sharp a pang as when she once heard a woman say at a party, “Oh, John Brolier, yes. Wasn’t he the one who was always trying to seduce you by dragging you out to look at some natural marvel? God, it was uncomfortable!”
“She owns her house,” Morris says. “I sold it to her about five years ago. And she’s got that bit of pension. If she can hold on till she’s sixty-five, she’ll be O.K.”
Morris digs up the earth in front of the headstone; Joan and Ruth Ann plant the bulbs. The earth is cold, but there hasn’t been a frost. Long bars of sunlight fall between the clipped cedar trees and the rustling poplars, which still hold many gold leaves, on the rich green grass.
“Listen to that,” says Joan, looking up at the leaves. “It’s like water.”
“People like it,” says Morris. “Very pop’lar sound.”
Joan and Ruth Ann groan together, and Joan says, “I didn’t know you still did that, Morris.”
Ruth Ann says, “He never stops.”
They wash their hands at an outdoor tap and read a few names on the stones.
“Rose Matilda,” Morris says.
For a moment Joan thinks that’s another name he’s read; then she realizes he’s still thinking of Matilda Buttler.
“That poem Mother used to say about her,” he says. “Rose Matilda.”
“Rapunzel,” Joan says. “That was what Mother used to call her. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy gold hair.’ ”
“I know she used to say that. She said ‘Rose Matilda,’ too. It was the start of a poem.”
“It sounds like a lotion,” Ruth Ann says. “Isn’t that a skin lotion? Rose Emulsion?”
“ ‘Oh, what avails,’ ” says Morris firmly. “That was the start of it. ‘Oh
, what avails.’ ”
“Of course, I don’t know hardly any poems,” says Ruth Ann, versatile and unabashed. She says to Joan, “Does it ring a bell with you?”
She has really pretty eyes, Joan thinks—brown eyes that can look soft and shrewd at once.
“It does,” says Joan. “But I can’t think what comes next.”
Morris has cheated them all a little bit, these three women. Joan, Ruth Ann, Matilda. Morris isn’t habitually dishonest—he’s not foolish that way—but he will cut a corner now and then. He cheated Joan a long time ago, when the house was sold. She got about a thousand dollars less out of that than she should have. He thought she would make it up in the things she chose to take back to her house in Ottawa. Then she didn’t choose anything. Later on, when she and her husband had parted, and she was on her own, Morris considered sending her a check, with an explanation that there had been a mistake. But she got a job, she didn’t seem short of money. She has very little idea of what to do with money anyway—how to make it work. He let the idea drop.
The way he cheated Ruth Ann was more complicated, and had to do with persuading her to declare herself a part-time employee of his when she wasn’t. This got him out of paying certain benefits to her. He wouldn’t be surprised if she had figured all that out, and had made a few little adjustments of her own. That was what she would do—never say anything, never argue, but quietly get her own back. And as long as she just got her own back—he’d soon notice if it was any more—he wouldn’t say anything, either. She and he both believe that if people don’t look out for themselves what they lose is their own fault. He means to take care of Ruth Ann eventually anyway.
If Joan found out what he had done, she probably wouldn’t say anything, either. The interesting part, to her, would not be the money. She has some instinct lacking in that regard. The interesting part would be: why? She’d worry that around and get her curious pleasure out of it. This fact about her brother would lodge in her mind like a hard crystal—a strange, small, light-refracting object, a bit of alien treasure.
He didn’t cheat Matilda when he sold her the house. She got that at a very good price. But he told her that the hot-water heater he had put in a year or so before was new, and of course it wasn’t. He never bought new appliances or new materials when he was fixing up the places he owned. And three years ago last June, at a dinner dance in the Valhalla Inn, Matilda said to him, “My hot-water heater gave out. I had to replace it.”
They were not dancing at the time. They were sitting at a round table, with some other people, under a canopy of floating balloons. They were drinking whiskey.
“It shouldn’t have done that,” Morris said.
“Not after you’d put it in new,” said Matilda, smiling. “You know what I think?”
He kept looking at her, waiting.
“I think we should have another dance before we have anything more to drink!”
They danced. They had always danced easily together, and often with some special flourish. But this time Morris felt that Matilda’s body was heavier and stiffer than it had been—her responses were tardy, then overdone. It was odd that her body should seem unwilling when she was smiling and talking to him with such animation, and moving her head and shoulders with every sign of flirtatious charm. This, too, was new—not at all what he was used to from her. Year after year she had danced with him with a dreamy pliancy and a serious face, hardly talking at all. Then, after she had had a few drinks, she would speak to him about her secret concerns. Her concern. Which was always the same. It was Ron, the Englishman. She hoped to hear from him. She stayed here, she had come back here, so that he would know where to find her. She hoped, she doubted, that he would divorce his wife. He had promised, but she had no faith in him. She heard from him eventually. He said he was on the move, he would write again. And he did. He said that he was going to look her up. The letters were posted in Canada, from different, distant cities. Then she didn’t hear. She wondered if he was alive; she thought of detective agencies. She said she didn’t speak of this to anybody but Morris. Her love was her affliction, which nobody else was permitted to see.
Morris never offered advice; he never laid a comforting hand on her except as was proper, in dancing. He knew exactly how he must absorb what she said. He didn’t pity her, either. He had respect for all the choices she had made.
It was true that the tone had changed before the night at the Valhalla Inn. It had taken on a tartness, a sarcastic edge, which pained him and didn’t suit her. But this was the night he felt it all broken—their long complicity, the settled harmony of their dancing. They were like some other middle-aged couple, pretending to move lightly and with pleasure, anxious not to let the moment sag. She didn’t mention Ron, and Morris, of course, did not ask. A thought started forming in his mind that she had seen him finally. She had seen Ron or heard that he was dead. Seen him, more likely.
“I know how you could pay me back for that heater,” she teased him. “You could put in a lawn for me! When has that lawn of mine ever been seeded? It looks terrible; it’s riddled with creeping Charlie. I wouldn’t mind having a decent lawn. I’m thinking of fixing up the house. I’d like to put burgundy shutters on it to counter the effect of all that gray. I’d like a big window in the side. I’m sick of looking out at the nursing home. Oh, Morris, do you know they’ve cut down your walnut trees! They’ve levelled out the yard, they’ve fenced off the creek!”
She was wearing a long, rustling peacock-blue dress. Blue stones in silver disks hung from her ears. Her hair was stiff and pale, like spun taffy. There were dents in the flesh of her upper arms; her breath smelled of whiskey. Her perfume and her makeup and her smile all spoke to him of falsehood, determination, and misery. She had lost interest in her affliction. She had lost her nerve to continue as she was. And in her simple, dazzling folly, she had lost his love.
“If you come around next week with some grass seed and show me how to do it, I’ll give you a drink,” she said. “I’ll even make you supper. It embarrasses me to think that all these years you’ve never sat down at my table.”
“You’d have to plow it all up and start fresh.”
“Plow it all up, then! Why don’t you come Wednesday? Or is that your evening with Ruth Ann Leatherby?”
She was drunk. Her head dropped against his shoulder, and he felt the hard lump of her earring pressing through his jacket and shirt into his flesh.
The next week, he sent one of his workmen to plow up and seed Matilda’s lawn, for nothing. The man didn’t stay long. According to him, Matilda came out and yelled at him to get off her property, what did he think he was doing there, she could take care of her own yard. You better scram, she said to him.
“Scram.” That was a word Morris could remember his own mother using. And Matilda’s mother had used it, too, in her old days of vigor and ill will. Mrs. Buttler, Mrs. Carbuncle. Scram out of here. Deadeye Dick.
He did not see Matilda for some time after that. He didn’t run into her. If some business had to be done at the courthouse, he sent Ruth Ann. He got word of changes that were happening, and they were not in the direction of burgundy shutters or house renovation.
“Oh, what avails the sceptred race!” says Joan suddenly when they are driving back to the apartment. And as soon as they get there she goes to the bookcase—it’s the same old glass-fronted bookcase. Morris didn’t sell that, though it’s almost too high for this living room. She finds their mother’s Anthology of English Verse.
“First lines,” she says, going to the back of the book.
“Sit down and be comfortable, why don’t you?” says Ruth Ann, coming in with the late-afternoon drinks. Morris gets whiskey-and-water, Joan and Ruth Ann white-rum-and-soda. A liking for this drink has become a joke, a hopeful bond, between the two women, who understand that they are going to need something.
Joan sits and drinks, pleased. She runs her finger down the page. “Oh what, oh what—” she murmurs.
&
nbsp; “Oh, what the form divine!” says Morris, with a great sigh of retrieval and satisfaction.
They were taught specialness, Joan thinks, without particular regret. The tag of poetry, the first sip of alcohol, the late light of an October afternoon may be what’s making her feel peaceful, indulgent. They were taught a delicate, special regard for themselves, which made them go out and grab what they wanted, whether love or money. But that’s not altogether true, is it? Morris has been quite disciplined about love, and abstemious. So has she been about money—in money matters she has remained clumsy, virginal.
There’s a problem, though, a hitch in her unexpected pleasure. She can’t find the line. “It’s not in here,” she says. “How can it not be in here? Everything Mother knew was in here.” She takes another, businesslike drink and stares at the page. Then she says, “I know! I know!” And in a few moments she has it; she is reading to them, in a voice full of playful emotion:
“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace,
Rose Aylmer—Rose Matilda—all
were thine!”
Morris has taken off his glasses. He’ll do that now in front of Joan. Maybe he started doing it sooner in front of Ruth Ann. He rubs at the scar as if it were itchy. His eye is dark, veined with gray. It isn’t hard to look at. Under its wrapping of scar tissue it’s as harmless as a prune or a stone.