by Alice Munro
Clare was probably a favourite with old ladies from the time he could walk. To them he was still a nice fat boy, so mannerly, not stuck-up in spite of being a MacQuarrie, and with a way of teasing that perked them up and turned them pink. They had a dozen games going, Momma and Clare, that I could never keep up with. One was him knocking at the door and saying something like, “Good-evening, ma’am, I just wondered if I could interest you in a course in body development I’m selling to put myself through college.” And Momma would swallow and put on a stern face and say, “Look here, young man do I look like I need a course in body development?” Or he would look doleful and say, “Ma’am, I’m here because I’m concerned about your soul.” Momma would roar laughing. “You be concerned about your own,” she said, and fed him chicken dumplings and lemon meringue pie, all his favourites. He told her jokes at the table I never thought she’d listen to. “Did you hear about this old gentleman married a young wife and he went to the doctor? Doctor he says I’m having a bit of trouble—” “Stop it,” Momma said—but she waited till he was through—“you are just embarrassing Helen Louise.” I have got rid of the Louise on the end of my name everywhere but at home. Clare picked it up from Momma and I told him I didn’t care for it but he went right on. Sometimes I felt like their child, sitting between him and Momma with both of them joking and enjoying their food and telling me I smoked too much and if I didn’t straighten up I’d get permanent round shoulders. Clare was—is—twelve years older than I am and I don’t ever remember him except as a grown-up man.
I used to see him on the street and he seemed old to me then, at least old the way almost everybody grown-up did. He is one of those people who look older than they are when they’re young and younger than they are when they’re old. He was always around the Queen’s Hotel. Being a MacQuarrie he never had to work too hard and he had a little office and did some work as a notary public and a bit of insurance and real estate. He still has the same place, and the front window is always bleary and dusty and there’s a light burning in the back, winter and summer, where a lady about eighty years old, Miss Maitland, does his typing or whatever he gives her to do. If he’s not in the Queen’s Hotel he has one or two of his friends sitting around the space heater doing a little card playing, a little quiet drinking, mostly just talking. There’s a certain kind of men in Jubilee and I guess every small town that you might call public men. I don’t mean public figures, important enough to run for Parliament or even for mayor (though Clare could do that if he wanted to be serious), just men who are always around on the main street and you get to know their faces. Clare and those friends of his are like that.
“He down there with his sister?” Momma said, as if I hadn’t told her. A lot of my conversations with Momma are replays. “What is that name they call her?”
“Porky,” I said.
“Yes, I remember thinking, that’s some name for a grown woman. And I remember her being baptized and her name was Isabelle. Way back before I was married, I was still singing in the choir. They had one of these long, fangle-dangle christening robes on her, you know them.” Momma had a soft spot for Clare but not for the MacQuarrie family. She thought they were being stuck-up when they just breathed. I remember a year or two ago, us going past their place, and she said something about being careful not to step on the grass of the Mansion, and I told her, “Momma, in a few years’ time I am going to be living here, this is going to be my house, so you better stop calling it the Mansion in that tone of voice.” She and I both looked up at the house with all its dark green awnings decorated with big, white, old-English Ms, and all the verandahs and the stained-glass window set in the side wall, like in a church. No sign of life, but upstairs old Mrs. MacQuarrie was lying, and is still, paralyzed down one side and not able to speak, Willa Montgomery tending her by day and Clare by night. Strange voices in the house upset her, and every time Clare took me in we could only whisper so she wouldn’t hear me and throw some kind of paralytic fit. After her long look Momma said, “It’s a funny thing but I can’t imagine your name MacQuarrie.”
“I thought you were so fond of Clare.”
“Well I am, but I just think of him coming to get you Saturday night, him coming to dinner Sunday night, I don’t think of you and him married.”
“You wait and see what happens when the old lady passes on.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“It’s understood.”
“Well imagine,” Momma said.
“You don’t need to act like he’s doing me a favour because I can tell you there are plenty of people would consider it the other way round.”
“Can’t I open my mouth without you taking offense?” said Momma mildly.
Clare and I used to slip in the side door on Saturday nights and make coffee and something to eat in the high, old-fashioned kitchen, being as quiet and sneaky about it as two kids after school. Then we’d tiptoe up the back stairs to Clare’s room and turn on the television so she’d think he was by himself, watching that. If she called him I’d lie alone in the big bed watching the programme or looking at the old pictures on the wall—him on the high-school hockey team playing goalie, Porky in her graduation outfit, him and Porky and friends I didn’t know on holidays. If she kept him a long time and I got bored I would get downstairs under cover of the television and have more coffee. (I never drank anything stronger, left that to Clare.) With just the kitchen light to see by I’d go into the dining room and pull out the drawers and look at her linen and open the china cabinet and the silver chest and feel like a thief. But I’d think, why shouldn’t I have the enjoyment of this and the name MacQuarrie since I wouldn’t have to do anything I’m not doing anyway? Clare said, “Marry me,” soon after we started going out together and I said, “Don’t bother me, I don’t want to think about getting married,” and he quit. When I brought it up myself, these years later, he seemed pleased. He said, “Well, there’s not many old buffaloes like me hear a pretty girl like you say she wants to marry them.” I thought, wait till I get married and go into King’s Department Store and send Hawes scurrying around waiting on me, the old horse’s neck. Wouldn’t I like to give him a bad time, but I’d restrain myself, out of good taste.
“I’m going to take that postcard now and put it in my box,” I said to Momma. “And I can’t think of a better way for us to spend this afternoon than for us both to take naps.” I went upstairs and put on my dressing gown (Chinese-embroidered, and Clare’s present). I creamed my face and got out the box I keep postcards and letters and other mementoes in, and I put it with the Florida postcards from other years and some from Banff and Jasper and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. Then just idling away the time I looked at my school pictures and report cards and the programme for H.M.S. Pinafore, put on by the high school, in which I was the heroine, what’s-her-name, the captain’s daughter. I remember Clare meeting me on the street and congratulating me on my singing and how pretty I looked and me flirting with him a bit just because he seemed so old and safe and I would as soon flirt as turn around, I was so pleased with myself. Wouldn’t I have been surprised if I had seen all of what was going to happen? I hadn’t even met Ted Forgie, then.
I knew his letter just from looking at the outside, and I never read it anymore, but just out of curiousity I opened it up and started off. I usually hate to write a typewritten letter because it lacks the personal touch but I am so worn out tonight with all the unfamiliar pressures here that I hope you will forgive me. Typewritten or not it used to be that just looking at that letter I would get a feeling of love, if that is what you want to call it, strong enough to pretty near crumple me up and knock me over. Ted Forgie was an announcer at the Jubilee radio station for six months, around the time I was finishing high school. Momma said he was too old for me—she never said that about Clare—but all he was was twenty-four. He had spent two years in a San with T.B. and that had made him old for his years. We used to go up on Sullivan’s Hill and he talked a
bout how he had lived with death staring him in the face and he knew the value of being close to one human being, but all he had found was loneliness. He said he wanted to put his head down in my lap and weep, but all the time what he was doing was something else. When he went away I just turned into a sleepwalker. I only woke up in the afternoons when I went to the post office and opened the box with my knees going hollow, to see if I had a letter. And I never did, after that one. Places bothered me. Sullivan’s Hill, the radio station, the coffee shop of the Queen’s Hotel. I don’t know how many hours I spent in that coffee shop, reciting in my head every conversation we ever had and visualizing every look on his face, not really comprehending yet that wishing wasn’t going to drag him through that door again. I got friendly with Clare in there. He said I looked like I needed cheering up and he told me some of his stories. I never let on to him what my trouble was but when we started going out I explained to him that friendship was all I could offer. He said he appreciated that and he would bide his time. And he did.
I read the letter all the way through and I thought, not for the first time, well reading this letter any fool can see there is not going to be another. I want you to know how grateful I am far all your sweetness and understanding. Sweetness was the only word stuck in my mind then, to give me hope. I thought, when Clare and I get married I am just going to throw this letter away. So why not do it now? I tore it across and across and it was easy like tearing up notes when school is over. Then because I didn’t want Momma commenting on what was in my wastepaper basket I wadded it up and put it in my purse. That being over I lay down on my bed and thought about several things. For instance, if I hadn’t been in a stupor over Ted Forgie, would I have taken a different view of Clare? Not likely. If I hadn’t been in that stupor I might have never bothered with Clare at all, I’d have gone off and done something different; but no use thinking about that now. The fuss he made at first made me sorry for him. I used to look down at his round balding head and listen to all his groaning and commotion and think, what can I do now except be polite? He didn’t expect anything more of me, never expected anything, but just to lie there and let him, and I got used to that. I looked back and thought am I a heartless person, just to lie there and let him grab me and love me and moan around my neck and say the things he did, and never say one loving word back to him? I never wanted to be a heartless person and I was never mean to Clare, and I did let him, didn’t I, nine times out of ten?
I heard Momma get up from her nap and go and put the kettle on so she could have a cup of tea and read her paper. Then some little time later she gave a yell and I thought somebody had died so I jumped off the bed and ran into the hall, but she was there underneath saying, “Goon back to your nap, I’m sorry I scared you. I made a mistake.” I did go back and I heard her using the phone, probably calling one of her old cronies about some news in the paper, and then I guess I fell asleep.
What woke me was a car stopping, somebody getting out and coming up the front walk. I thought, is it Clare back early? And then, confused and half-asleep, I thought, I already tore up the letter, that’s good. But it wasn’t his step. Momma opened the door before the bell got a chance to ring and I heard Alma Stonehouse, who teaches at the Jubilee Public School and is my best friend. I went out in the hall and leaned over and called down, “Hey Alma are you eating here again?” She boards at Bailey’s where the food has its ups and downs and when she smells their Shepherd’s Pie she sometimes heads over to our place without an invitation.
Alma started upstairs without taking her coat off, her thin dark face just blazing with excitement so I knew something had happened. I thought it must have to do with her husband, because they are separated and he writes her terrible letters. She said, “Helen, hi, how are you feeling? Did you just wake up?”
“I heard your car,” I said. “I thought for a minute maybe it was Clare but I’m not expecting him for another couple of days.”
“Helen. Can you sit down? Come in your room where you can sit down. Are you prepared to get a shock? I wish I wasn’t the one had to tell you. Hold yourself steady.”
I saw Momma right behind her and I said, “Momma, is this some joke?”
Alma said, “Clare MacQuarrie has gotten married.”
“What are you two up to?” I said. “Clare MacQuarrie is in Florida and I just today got a postcard from him as Momma well knows.”
“He got married in Florida. Helen, be calm.”
“How could he get married in Florida, he’s on his holidays?”
“They’re on their way to Jubilee right now and they’re going to live here.”
“Alma, wherever you heard that its a lot of garbage. I just had a postcard from him. Momma—”
Then I saw that Momma was looking at me like I was eight years old and had the measles and a temperature of a hundred and five degrees. She was holding the paper and she spread it out for me to read. “It’s in there,” she said, probably not realizing she was whispering. “It’s written up in the Bugle-Herald.”
“I don’t believe it any more than fly,” I said, and I started to read and read all the way through as if the names were ones I’d never heard of before, and some of them were. A quiet ceremony in Coral Gables, Florida, uniting in marriage Clare Alexander MacQuarrie, of Jubilee, son of Mrs. James MacQuarrie of this town and the late Mr. James MacQuarrie, prominent local businessman and long-time Member of Parliament, and Mrs. Margaret Thora Leeson, daughter of the late Mrs. and Mrs. Clive Tibbutt of Lincoln, Nebraska. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Johnson, sister and brother-in-law of the bridegroom, were the only attendants. The bride wore a sage green dressmaker suit with dark brown accessories and a corsage of bronze orchids. Mrs. Johnson wore a beige suit with black accessories and green orchids. The couple were at present travelling by automobile to their future home in Jubilee.
“Do you still think its garbage?” Alma said severely.
I said I didn’t know.
“Are you feeling all right?”
All right.
Momma said we would all feel better if we went downstairs and had a cup of tea and something to eat, instead of staying cooped up in this little bedroom. It was about supper time, anyway. So we all trooped down, me still in my dressing gown, and Momma and Alma together prepared the sort of meal you might eat to keep your strength up when there is sickness in the house and you can’t really bother too much about food. Cold meat sandwiches and little dishes of different pickles and sliced cheese and date squares. “Smoke a cigarette if you want to,” Momma said to me—the first time she ever said that in her life. So I did, and Alma did, and Alma said, “I brought some tranquillizers along in my purse, they’re not very strong and you’re welcome to one or two.” I said no thanks, not yet, anyway. I said I couldn’t seem to take it in yet.
“He goes to Florida every year, right?”
I said yes.
“Well what I think is this, that he’s met this woman before—widow or divorcee or whatever she is—and they have been corresponding and planning this all along.”
Momma said it was awfully hard to think that of Clare.
“I’m only saying how it looks to me. And she’s his sister’s friend, I’ll bet. The sister engineered it. They were the attendants, the sister and her husband. She wasn’t any friend of yours, Helen, I remember you telling me.”
“I didn’t hardly know her.”
“Helen Louise you told me you and him were just waiting for the old lady to pass on,” Momma said. “Isn’t that what he said to you? Clare?”
“Using her for an excuse,” Alma said briskly.
“Oh, he wouldn’t,” Momma said. “Oh, it’s so hard to understand it—Clare!”
“Men are always out for what they can get,” Alma said. There was a pause, both of them looking at me. I couldn’t tell them anything. I couldn’t tell them what I was thinking, which was about the last Saturday night up at his place, before he went away, him naked as a baby pulling my hair across his face a
nd through his teeth and pretending he was going to bite it off. I didn’t relish anybody’s saliva in my hair but I let him, just warning him that if he did bite it off he would have to pay for me going to the hairdresser’s to get it evened. He didn’t act that night like anybody that is going off to be married.
Momma and Alma went on talking and speculating and I got sleepier and sleepier. I heard Alma say, “Worse things could happen. I had four years of living hell.” And Momma say, “He was always the soul of kindness and he doted on that girl.” I wondered how I could possibly be so sleepy, this early in the evening and after having a nap in the afternoon. Alma said, “Its very good you’re sleepy, its nature’s way. Nature’s way, just like an anaesthetic.” They both got me upstairs and into bed and I never heard them go down.
I didn’t wake up early, either. I got up when I usually did and got my own breakfast. I could hear Momma stirring but I yelled to her to stay put, like any other morning. She called down, “Are you sure you want to go to work? I could phone Mr. Hawes you’re sick.” I said, “Why should I give any of them the satisfaction?” I did my makeup at the hall mirror without a light and went out and walked the two and a half blocks to King’s, not noticing what kind of a morning it was, beyond the fact that it hadn’t turned into spring overnight. Inside the store they were waiting, oh, how nice, good morning Helen, good morning Helen, such quiet kind hopeful voices waiting to see if I’m going to fall flat on the floor and start having hysterics. Mrs. McCool, Beryl Allen with her engagement ring, Mrs. Kress that got jilted herself twenty-five years ago and then took up with somebody else—Kress—and he vanished. What’s she looking at me for? Old Hawes chewing his tongue when he smiles. I said good morning perfectly cheerfully and went on upstairs thanking God I have my own washroom and thinking, I bet this will be a big day for Children’s Wear. It was, too. I never had a morning with so many mothers in to buy a hair ribbon or a little pair of socks, willing to climb that stairs for it.