The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  All looked away from her, as if that was what a lie deserved. She was trying to remember if there was a female violinist. What if they should ask her name?

  The driver let her off in front of a long two-story wooden building with peeling paint.

  “I guess you could go in the sunporch, there at the end. That’s where the bus picks them up, anyway.”

  In the sunporch there was a pool table. Nobody was playing. Some old men were playing checkers; others watched. Rose thought of explaining herself to them but decided not to; they seemed mercifully uninterested. She was worn out by her explanations in the limousine.

  It was ten past four by the sunporch clock. She thought she could put in the time till five by walking around the town.

  As soon as she went outside she noticed a bad smell, and became worried, thinking it might come from herself. She got out the stick cologne she had bought in the Vancouver airport—spending money she could not afford—and rubbed it on her wrists and neck. The smell persisted, and at last she realized it came from the pulp mills. The town was difficult to walk around in because the streets were so steep, and in many places there was no sidewalk. There was no place to loiter. She thought people stared at her, recognizing a stranger. Some men in a car yelled at her. She saw her own reflection in store windows and understood that she looked as if she wanted to be stared at and yelled at. She was wearing black velvet toreador pants, a tight-fitting high-necked black sweater and a beige jacket which she slung over her shoulder, though there was a chilly wind. She who had once chosen full skirts and soft colors, babyish angora sweaters, scalloped necklines, had now taken to wearing dramatic sexually advertising clothes. The new underwear she had on at this moment was black lace and pink nylon. In the waiting room at the Vancouver airport she had done her eyes with heavy mascara, black eyeliner, and silver eyeshadow; her lipstick was almost white. All this was a fashion of those years and so looked less bizarre than it would seem later, but it was alarming enough. The assurance with which she carried such a disguise fluetuated considerably. She would not have dared parade it in front of Patrick or Jocelyn. When she went to see Jocelyn she always wore her baggiest slacks and sweaters. Nevertheless when she opened the door Jocelyn would say, “Hello, Sexy,” in a tone of friendly scorn. Jocelyn herself had become spectacularly unkempt. She dressed exclusively in old clothes of Clifford’s. Old pants that didn’t quite zip up on her because her stomach had never flattened out after Adam, and frayed white shirts Clifford had once worn for performances. Apparently Jocelyn thought the whole business of keeping your figure and wearing makeup and trying to look in any way seductive was sourly amusing, beneath contempt; it was like vacuuming the curtains. She said that Clifford felt the same way. Clifford, reported Jocelyn, was attracted by the very absence of female artifice and trappings; he liked unshaved legs and hairy armpits and natural smells. Rose wondered if Clifford had really said this, and why. Out of pity, or comradeliness; or as a joke?

  Rose found a public library and went in and looked at the titles of the books, but she could not pay attention. There was a fairly incapacitating though not unpleasant buzzing throughout her head and body. At twenty to five she was back in the sunporch, waiting.

  She was still waiting at ten past six. She had counted the money in her purse. A dollar and sixty-three cents. She could not go to a hotel. She did not think they would let her stay in the sunporch all night. There was nothing at all that she could do except pray that Clifford might still arrive. She did not believe he would. The schedule had been changed; he had been summoned home because one of the children was sick; he had broken his wrist and couldn’t play the violin; Powell River was not a real place at all but a bad-smelling mirage where guilty travelers were trapped for punishment. She wasn’t really surprised. She had made the jump that wasn’t to be made, and this was how she had landed.

  Before the old men went in to supper she asked them if they knew of a concert being given that night in the high school auditorium. They answered grudgingly, no.

  “Never heard of them giving no concerts here.”

  She said that her husband was playing in the orchestra, it was on tour from Vancouver, she had flown up to meet him; she was supposed to meet him here.

  Here?

  “Maybe got lost,” said one of the old men in what seemed to her a spiteful, knowing way. “Maybe your husband got lost, heh? Husbands always getting lost!”

  It was nearly dark out. This was October, and farther north than Vancouver. She tried to think what to do. The only thing that occurred to her was to pretend to pass out, then claim loss of memory. Would Patrick ever believe that? She would have to say she had no idea what she was doing in Powell River. She would have to say she didn’t remember anything she had said in the limousine, didn’t know anything about the orchestra. She would have to convince policemen and doctors, be written about in the newspapers. Oh, where was Clifford, why had he abandoned her, could there have been an accident on the road? She thought she should destroy the piece of paper in her purse, on which she had written his instructions. She thought that she had better get rid of her diaphragm as well.

  She was going through her purse when a van parked outside. She thought it must be a police van; she thought the old men must have phoned up and reported her as a suspicious character.

  Clifford got out and came running up the sunporch steps. It took her a moment to recognize him.

  They had beer and hamburgers in one of the hotels, a different hotel from the one where the orchestra was staying. Rose’s hands were shaking so that she slopped the beer. There had been a rehearsal he hadn’t counted on, Clifford said. Then he had been about half an hour looking for the bus depot.

  “I guess it wasn’t such a bright idea, the bus depot.”

  Her hand was lying on the table. He wiped the beer off with a napkin, then put his own hand over hers. She thought of this often, afterward.

  “We better get you checked in here.”

  “Don’t we check in together?”

  “Better if it’s just you.”

  “Ever since I got here,” Rose said, “it has been so peculiar. It has been so sinister. I felt everybody knew.” She started telling him, in what she hoped was an entertaining way, about the limousine driver, the other passengers, the old men in the Loggers’ Home. “It was such a relief when you showed up, such a terrible relief. That’s why I’m shaking.” She told him about her plan to fake amnesia and the realization that she had better throw her diaphragm away. He laughed, but without delight, she thought. It seemed to her that when she spoke of the diaphragm his lips tightened, in reproof or distaste.

  “But it’s lovely now,” she said hastily. This was the longest conversation they had ever had, face to face.

  “It was just your guilt feelings,” he said. “Which are natural.”

  He stroked her hand. She tried to rub her finger on his pulse, as they used to do. He let go.

  Half an hour later, she was saying, “Is it all right if I still go to the concert?”

  “Do you still want to?”

  “What else is there to do?”

  She shrugged as she said this. Her eyelids were lowered, her lips full and brooding. She was doing some sort of imitation, of Barbara Stanwyck perhaps, in similar circumstances. She didn’t intend to do an imitation, of course. She was trying to find some way to be so enticing, so aloof and enticing, that she would make him change his mind.

  “The thing is, I have to get the van back. I have to pick up the other guys.”

  “I can walk. Tell me where it is.”

  “Uphill from here, I’m afraid.”

  “That won’t hurt me.”

  “Rose. It’s much better this way, Rose. It really is.”

  “If you say so.” She couldn’t manage another shrug. She still thought there must be some way to turn things around and start again. Start again; set right whatever she had said or done wrong; make none of this true. She had already made the mistake
of asking what she had said or done wrong and he had said, nothing. Nothing. She had nothing to do with it, he said. It was being away from home for a month that had made him see everything differently. Jocelyn. The children. The damage.

  “It’s only mischief,” he said.

  He had got his hair cut shorter than she had ever seen it. His tan had faded. Indeed, indeed, he looked as if he had shed a skin, and it was the skin that had hankered after hers. He was again the pale, and rather irritable, but dutiful, young husband she had observed paying visits to Jocelyn in the maternity ward.

  “What is?”

  “What we’re doing. It’s not some big necessary thing. It’s ordinary mischief.”

  “You called me from Prince George.” Barbara Stanwyck had vanished, Rose heard herself begin to whine.

  “I know I did.” He spoke like a nagged husband.

  “Did you feel like this then?”

  “Yes and no. We’d made all the plans. Wouldn’t it have been worse if I’d told you on the phone?”

  “What do you mean, mischief?”

  “Oh, Rose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. If we went ahead with this, what good do you think it would do anybody? Rose? Really?”

  “Us,” Rose said. “It would do us good.”

  “No it wouldn’t. It would end up in one big mess.”

  “Just once.”

  “No.”

  “You said just once. You said we would have a memory instead of a dream.”

  “Jesus. I said a lot of puke.”

  He had said her tongue was like a little warm-blooded snake, a pretty snake, and her nipples like berries. He would not care to be reminded.

  Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla: Glinka

  Serenade for Strings: Tchaikovsky

  Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral: First Movement

  The Moldau: Smetana

  William Tell Overture: Rossini

  She could not hear any of this music for a long time without a specific attack of shame, that was like a whole wall crumbling in on her, rubble choking her.

  Just before Clifford left on tour, Jocelyn had phoned Rose and said that her baby-sitter could not come. It was the day she went to see her psychiatrist. Rose offered to come and look after Adam and Jerome. She had done this before. She made the long trip on three buses, taking Anna with her.

  Jocelyn’s house was heated by an oil stove in the kitchen, and an enormous stone fireplace in the small living room. The oil stove was covered with spill marks; orange peel and coffee grounds and charred wood and ashes tumbled out of the fireplace. There was no basement and no clothes dryer. The weather was rainy, and the ceiling-racks and stand-up racks were draped with damp graying sheets and diapers, hardening towels. There was no washing machine either. Jocelyn had washed those sheets in the bathtub.

  “No washer or dryer but she’s going to a psychiatrist,” said Patrick, to whom Rose sometimes disloyally reported what she knew he would like to hear.

  “She must be crazy,” Rose said. She made him laugh.

  But Patrick didn’t like her going to baby-sit.

  “You’re certainly at her beck and call,” he said. “It’s a wonder you don’t go and scrub her floors for her.”

  As a matter of fact, Rose did.

  When Jocelyn was there, the disorder of the house had a certain willed and impressive quality. When she was gone, it became unbearable. Rose would go to work with a knife, scraping at ancient crusts of Pablum on the kitchen chairs, scouring the coffee pot, wiping the floor. She did spare some time for investigation. She went into the bedroom—she had to watch out for Jerome, a precocious and irritating child—and looked at Clifford’s socks and underwear, all crumpled in with Jocelyn’s old nursing brassieres and torn garter belts. She looked to see if he had a record on the turntable, wondering if it would be something that would make him think of her.

  Telemann. Not likely. But she played it, to hear what he had been hearing. She drank coffee from what she believed to be his dirty breakfast cup. She covered the casserole of Spanish rice from which he had taken his supper the night before. She sought out traces of his presence (he didn’t use an electric razor, he used old-fashioned shaving soap in a wooden bowl), but she believed that his life in that house, Jocelyn’s house, was all pretense, and waiting, like her own life in Patrick’s house.

  When Jocelyn came home Rose felt she ought to apologize for the cleaning she had done, and Jocelyn, really wanting to talk about her fight with the psychiatrist who reminded her of her mother, agreed that it certainly was a cowardly mania, this thing Rose had about housecleaning, and she had better go to a psych herself, if she ever wanted to get rid of it. She was joking; but going home on the bus, with Anna cranky and no preparations made for Patrick’s supper, Rose did wonder why she always seemed to be on the wrong end of things, disapproved of by her own neighbors because she didn’t pay enough attention to housework, and reproved by Jocelyn for being insufficiently tolerant of the natural chaos and refuse of life. She thought of love, to reconcile herself. She was loved, not in a dutiful, husbandly way but crazily, adulterously, as Jocelyn and her neighbors were not. She used that to reconcile herself to all sorts of things: to Patrick, for instance, turning over in bed with an indulgent little clucking noise that meant she was absolved of all her failings for the moment, they were to make love.

  The sane and decent things Clifford had said cut no ice with Rose at all. She saw that he had betrayed her. Sanity and decency were never what she had asked of him. She watched him, in the auditorium of the Powell River High School. She watched him playing his violin, with a somber and attentive expression she had once seen directed toward herself. She did not see how she could do without him.

  In the middle of the night she phoned him, from her hotel to his.

  “Please talk to me.”

  “That’s okay,” said Clifford, after a moment’s silence. “That’s okay, Joss.”

  He must have a roommate, whom the phone might have wakened. He was pretending to talk to Jocelyn. Or else he was so sleepy he really thought she was Jocelyn.

  “Clifford, it’s me.”

  “That’s okay,” Clifford said. “Take it easy. Go to sleep.”

  He hung up the phone.

  Jocelyn and Clifford are living in Toronto. They are not poor anymore. Clifford is successful. His name is seen on record jackets, heard on the radio. His face and more frequently his hands have appeared on television as he labors at his violin. Jocelyn has dieted and become slender, has had her hair cut and styled; it is parted in the middle and curves away from her face, with a wing of pure white rising from each temple.

  They live in a large brick house on the edge of a ravine. There are bird-feeders in the backyard. They have installed a sauna. Clifford spends a good deal of time sitting there. He thinks that will keep him from becoming arthritic, like his father. Arthritis is his greatest fear.

  Rose used to go to see them sometimes. She was living in the country, by herself. She taught at a community college and liked to have a place to stay overnight when she came in to Toronto. They seemed glad to have her. They said she was their oldest friend.

  One time when Rose was visiting them Jocelyn told a story about Adam. Adam had an apartment in the basement of the house. Jerome lived downtown, with his girl friend. Adam brought his girls here.

  “I was reading in the den,” said Jocelyn, “when Clifford was out. I heard this girl, down in Adam’s apartment, saying no, no! The noise from his apartment comes straight up into the den. We warned him about that, we thought he’d be embarrassed—”

  “I didn’t think he’d be embarrassed,” said Clifford.

  “But he just said, we should put on the record player. So, I kept hearing the poor unknown girl bleating and protesting, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought these situations are really new, there are no precedents, are you supposed to stop your son from raping some girl if that�
��s what he’s doing, right under your nose or at least under your feet? I went downstairs eventually and I started getting all the family skis out of the closet that backs on his bedroom, I stayed there slamming those skis around, thinking I’d say I was going to polish them. It was July. Adam never said anything to me. I wish he’d move out.”

  Rose told about how much money Patrick had and how he had married a sensible woman even richer than he was, who had made a dazzling living room with mirrors and pale velvet and a wire sculpture like blasted bird cages. Patrick did not mind Modern Art anymore.

  “Of course it isn’t the same,” said Rose to Jocelyn, “it isn’t the same house. I wonder what she has done with the Wedgwood vases.”

  “Maybe she has a campy laundry room. She keeps the bleach in one and the detergent in the other.”

  “They sit perfectly symmetrically on the shelf.”

  But Rose had her old, old, twinge of guilt.

  “Just the same, I like Patrick.”

  Jocelyn said, “Why?”

  “He’s nicer than most people.”

  “Silly rot,” said Jocelyn. “And I bet he doesn’t like you.”

  “That’s right,” Rose said. She started to tell them about her trip down on the bus. It was one of the times when she was not driving her car, because too many things were wrong with it and she could not afford to get it fixed.

  “The man in the seat across from me was telling me about how he used to drive big trucks. He said we never seen trucks in this country like they got in the States.” She put on her country accent. “In the Yewnited States they got these special roads what they call turnpikes, and only trucks is allowed to go on them. They get serviced on these roads from one end of the country to the other and so most people never sees them at all. They’re so big the cab is half the size of a bus and they got a driver in there and an assistant driver and another driver and another assistant driver havin a sleep. Toilet and kitchen and beds and all. They go eighty, ninety miles an hour, because there is never no speed limit on them turnpikes.”

  “You are getting very weird,” said Clifford. “Living up there.”