What Is Remembered
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
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Copyright
What Is Remembered
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
Post and Beam 9781448128471
Nettles 9781448128464
Comfort 9781448128372
Alternatively, read the original parent collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 9780099422747.
What Is Remembered
IN A HOTEL room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote—something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.
“Balmain taught me everything. He said, ‘Always wear white gloves. It’s best.’”
It’s best. Why is she smiling at that? It seems so soft a whisper of advice, such absurd and final wisdom. Her gloved hands are formal, but tender-looking as a kitten’s paws.
Pierre asks why she’s smiling and she says, “Nothing,” then tells him.
He says, “Who is Balmain?”
They were getting ready to go to a funeral. They had come over on the ferry last night from their home on Vancouver Island to be sure of being on time for the morning ceremony. It was the first time they’d stayed in a hotel since their wedding night. When they went on a holiday now it was always with their two children, and they looked for inexpensive motels that catered to families.
This was only the second funeral they had been to as a married couple. Pierre’s father was dead, and Meriel’s mother was dead, but these deaths had happened before Pierre and Meriel met. Last year a teacher at Pierre’s school died suddenly, and there was a fine service, with the schoolboy choir and the sixteenth-century words for the Burial of the Dead. The man had been in his mid-sixties, and his death seemed to Meriel and Pierre only a little surprising and hardly sad. It did not make much difference, as they saw it, whether you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five.
The funeral today was another matter. It was Jonas who was being buried. Pierre’s best friend for years and Pierre’s age—twenty-nine. Pierre and Jonas had grown up together in West Vancouver—they could remember it before the Lion’s Gate Bridge was built, when it seemed like a small town. Their parents were friends. When they were eleven or twelve years old they had built a rowboat and launched it at Dundarave Pier. At the university they had parted company for a while—Jonas was studying to be an engineer, while Pierre was enrolled in Classics, and the Arts and Engineering students traditionally despised each other. But in the years since then the friendship had to some extent been revived. Jonas, who was not married, came to visit Pierre and Meriel, and sometimes stayed with them for a week at a time.
Both of these young men were surprised by what had happened in their lives, and they would joke about it. Jonas was the one whose choice of profession had seemed so reassuring to his parents, and had roused a muted envy in Pierre’s parents, yet it was Pierre who had married and got a teaching job and taken on ordinary responsibilities, while Jonas, after university, had never settled down with a girl or a job. He was always on a sort of probation that did not end up in a firm attachment to any company, and the girls—at least to hear him tell it—