Post and Beam
This story was first published in the STORYCUTS series by Vintage Digital 2011
Taken from the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
Copyright © Alice Munro 2001
Alice Munro has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Cover
Copyright
Post and Beam
Backmatter
We hope you enjoyed this story. If you want to read more stories by Alice Munro, try her other contributions to the Storycuts series such as
Family Furnishings 9781448128389
Nettles 9781448128464
What Is Remembered 9781448128501
Alternatively, read the original parent collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 9780099422747.
Post and Beam
LIONEL TOLD THEM how his mother had died.
She had asked for her makeup. Lionel held the mirror.
“This will take about an hour,” she said.
Foundation cream, face powder, eyebrow pencil, mascara, lip-liner, lipstick, blusher. She was slow and shaky, but it wasn’t a bad job.
“That didn’t take you an hour,” Lionel said.
She said, no, she hadn’t meant that.
She had meant, to die.
He had asked her if she wanted him to call his father. His father, her husband, her minister.
She said, What for.
She was only about five minutes out, in her prediction.
They were sitting behind the house—Lorna and Brendan’s house—on a little terrace that looked across at Burrard Inlet and the lights of Point Grey. Brendan got up to move the sprinkler to another patch of grass.
Lorna had met Lionel’s mother just a few months ago. A pretty little white-haired woman with a valiant charm, who had come down to Vancouver from a town in the Rocky Mountains, to see the touring Comédie Française. Lionel had asked Lorna to go with them. After the performance, while Lionel was holding open her blue velvet cloak, the mother had said to Lorna, “I am so happy to meet my son’s belle-amie.”
“Let us not overdo it with the French,” said Lionel.
Lorna was not even sure what that meant. Belle-amie. Beautiful friend? Mistress?
Lionel had raised his eyebrows at her, over his mother’s head. As if to say, whatever she’s come up with, it’s no fault of mine.
Lionel had once been Brendan’s student at the university. A raw prodigy, sixteen years old. The brightest mathematical mind Brendan had ever seen. Lorna wondered if Brendan was dramatizing this, in hindsight, because of his unusual generosity towards gifted students. Also because of the way things had turned out. Brendan had turned his back on the whole Irish package—his family and his Church and the sentimental songs—but he had a weakness for a tragic tale. And sure enough, after his blazing start, Lionel had suffered some sort of breakdown, had to be hospitalized, dropped out of sight. Until Brendan had met him in the supermarket and discovered that he was living within a mile of their house, here in North Vancouver. He had given up mathematics entirely and worked in the publishing office of the Anglican Church.
“Come and see us,” Brendan had said. Lionel looked a bit seedy to him, and lonely. “Come and meet my wife.”
He was glad to have a home now, to ask people to.
“So I didn’t know what you’d be like,” Lionel said when he reported this to Lorna. “I considered you might be awful.”
“Oh,” said Lorna. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Wives.”
He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life—the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying about on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic—all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel’s tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face. There had to be a pause then, a shifting back to the level of worthwhile human contact. Once he sang very softly, to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” “O married life, o married life.” He smiled slightly, or Lorna thought he did, in the dark. This smile seemed to her like the smile of her four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, when she whispered some mildly outrageous observation to her mother in a public place. A secret little smile, gratified, somewhat alarmed.
Lionel rode up the hill on his high, old-fashioned bicycle—this at a time when hardly anybody but children rode bicycles. He would not have changed out of his workday outfit. Dark trousers, a white shirt that always looked grubby and worn around the cuffs and collar, a nondescript tie. When they had gone to see the Comédie Française he had added to this a tweed jacket that was too wide across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. Perhaps he did not own any other clothes.
“I labor for a pittance,” he said. “And not even in the vineyards of the Lord. In the Diocese of the Archbishop.”
And, “Sometimes I think I’m in a Dickens novel. And the funny thing is, I don’t even go for Dickens.”
appearing,