Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Alice Munro
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Chaddeleys and Flemings:
1. Connection
2. The Stone in the Field
Dulse
The Turkey Season
Accident
Bardon Bus
Prue
Labor Day Dinner
Mrs Cross and Mrs Kidd
Hard-Luck Stories
Visitors
The Moons of Jupiter
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, fears, loves and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact.
**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**
Alice Munro was born in 1931 and is the author of twelve collections of stories, most recently Dear Life, and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Beggar Maid, and has been awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives with her husband in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron in Canada.
Dance of the Happy Shades
Lives of Girls and Women
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
The Beggar Maid
The Progress of Love
Friend of My Youth
Open Secrets
Selected Stories
The Love of a Good Woman
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Runaway
The View from Castle Rock
FOR BOB WEAVER
I FIND IT very hard to talk about, or look at — let alone read — any work of mine, after it is published, shut away in its book. Why is this? Part of it is simple misgiving. Couldn’t I have done it better, found some way to make the words serve me better? Idle to think so — there they are on the cold page. But that’s not all of it. The story is a kind of extension of myself, something once attached to me and growing out of me, now lopped off, exposed and abandoned. What I feel isn’t shame or regret exactly — it would be quite hypocritical to say I felt that, when exposure, publication, was surely what I had in mind all along — rather it’s a queasiness, an unwillingness to look or examine. I try to master this, feeling that it’s primitive and childish. I will try now.
Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think. The title story has something to do with my father’s death. It has something to do with a visit I made, the summer following his death, to the McLaughlin Planetarium. But if I were to write, even for my own satisfaction, an account of my father’s death, or of the trip to the Planetarium with my youngest daughter and her step-brother, the result would be quite different, not just in factual detail, in incident, but in feeling. When you start out to write a story many things come from distant parts of your mind and attach themselves to it. Some things you thought would be part of it fall away; others expand. So with hope and trepidation and frequent surprise you put the whole thing together. And if it’s a certain sort of story — first-person, seemingly artless and straight-forward — people imagine that just about all you did was write down everything that happened on a certain day.
And it’s good, when they think that. It means that the story works.
All the stories, really, were made in the same way. Some come from personal experience — like “The Moons of Jupiter” or “The Stone in the Field” — others much more from observation — like “Visitors” or “Mrs Cross and Mrs Kidd.” This difference becomes blurred in the making, or it should. The stories that are personal are carried inexorably away from the real. And the observed stories lose their anecdotal edges, being invaded by familiar shapes and voices.
So one hopes, anyway.
The making of “The Turkey Season,” if I can get it straight, may throw some light on the process. I had been trying off and on for years to write a story about the hotel where I worked as a waitress, when I was nineteen. This was a second-rate summer hotel in Muskoka. I wanted to write something about the Second Cook, a mysterious, admirable man, and the sulky Third Cook who may or may not have been his lover, and the Pastry Chef, who was compulsively obscene. Also about a ladylike, rather musty woman, who arrived in pursuit of the Second Cook — and about the effect of all this on that familiar, clumsy, curious, brash and timid, young girl. I never got very far with this story. Then one day I found, in my father’s papers, a photograph of the seasonal workers at the Turkey Barn he had managed. I think the picture was taken on Christmas Eve. There is a medieval look about it — the smocks and turbans and aprons, the tired faces, which seem both genial and suspicious, mocking and obedient, shrewd and resigned. The picture made me think about certain kinds of hard work, about the satisfaction and the fellowship as well as the brutal effort of it. I found that the characters from my hotel story had got into this story. The Second Cook was the foreman, the Third Cook and the Pastry Chef were combined into Brian, the temporary and unsatisfactory young worker. The dowdy, determined woman in pursuit of the cook-foreman became Gladys. I got to know about Marjorie and Lily from stories I had heard from relatives, and at the hairdresser’s. It was very important to me to understand the actual process of turkey-gutting, and I was lucky enough to get a fine description of it from my brother-in-law, to whom “The Turkey Season” is dedicated. But now that I have unravelled that story, do we know any better what it is about? Is it about sexuality or work, or turkeys, or the accommodations of middle-aged women or the discoveries of the young girl? When I think of the story, I think of the moment when Marjorie and Lily and the girl come out of the turkey barn, and the snow is falling, and they link arms, and sing. I think there should be a queer bright moment like that in every story, and somehow that is what the story is about.
“Accident” was the first of these stories to be written, in the winter of 1977. I was working then mostly on stories for another book. “Bardon Bus” was the last story, written in the fall of 1981. They were all written while I was living in Clinton, Ontario. During those years I went to Australia, and to China, and to Reno and Salt Lake City and many other places, but I can’t see that travel ever has much effect on me, as a writer. “Bardon Bus,” for instance, is partly set in Australia, but it’s much more particularly set in a few strange, grubby, hectic blocks on Queen Street in Toronto, where I often live in the summers.
I have to make an effort, now, to remember what’s in these stories. That’s a strange thing. I make them with such energy and devotion and secret pains, and then I wiggle out and leave them, to harden and settle in their place. I feel free. Next thing I know I’ve started assembling the makings; I’m getting ready to do the whole thing over again.
Alice Munro
Clinton, Ontario, 1985
COUSIN IRIS FROM Philadelphia. She was a nurse. Cousin Isabel from Des Moines. She owned a florist shop. Cousin Flora from Winnipeg, a teacher; Cousin Winifred from Edmonton, a lady accountant. Maiden ladies, they were called. Old maids was too thin a term, it would not cover them. Their bosoms were heavy and intimidating — a single, armored bundle — and their stomachs and behinds full and corseted as those of any married woman. In those days it seemed to be the thing for women’s bodies to swell and ripen to a good size twenty, if they were getting anything out of life at all; then, according to class and aspirations, they would either sag and loosen, go wobbly as custard under pale print dresses and damp aprons, or be girded into shapes whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with rights and power.
My mother and her cousins were the second sort of women. They wore corsets that did up the side with dozens of hooks and eyes, stockings that hissed and rasped when they crossed their legs, silk jersey dresses for the afternoon (my mother’s being a cousin’s hand-me-down), face powder (rachel), dry rouge, eau de cologne, tortoise-shell, or imitation tortoise-shell, combs in their hair. They were not imaginable without such getups, unless bundled to the chin in quilted satin dressing-gowns. For my mother this style was hard to keep up; it required ingenuity, dedication, fierce effort. And who appreciated it? She did.
They all came to stay with us one summer. They came to our house because my mother was the only married one, with a house big enough to accommodate everybody, and because she was too poor to go to see them. We lived in Dalgleish in Huron County in Western Ontario. The population, 2,000, was announced on a sign at the town limits. “Now there’s two thousand and four,” cried Cousin Iris, heaving herself out of the driver’s seat. She drove a 1939 Oldsmobile. She had driven to Winnipeg to collect Flora, and Winifred, who had come down from Edmonton by train. Then they all drove to Toronto and picked up Isabel.
“And the four of us are bound to be more trouble than the whole two thousand put together,” said Isabel. “Where was it — Orangeville — we laughed so hard Iris had to stop the car? She was afraid she’d drive into the ditch!”
The steps creaked under their feet.
“Breathe that air! Oh, you can’t beat the country air. Is that the pump where you get your drinking water? Wouldn’t that be lovely right now? A drink of well water!”
My mother told me to get a glass, but they insisted on drinking out of the tin mug.
They told how Iris had gone into a field to answer nature’s call and had looked up to find herself surrounded by a ring of interested cows.
“Cows baloney!” said Iris. “They were steers.”
“Bulls for all you’d know,” said Winifred, letting herself down into a wicker chair. She was the fattest.
“Bulls! I’d know!” said Iris. “I hope their furniture can stand the strain, Winifred. I tell you it was a drag on the rear end of my poor car. Bulls! What a shock, it’s a wonder I got my pants up!”
They told about the wild-looking town in Northern Ontario where Iris wouldn’t stop the car even to let them buy a Coke. She took one look at the lumberjacks and cried, “We’d all be raped!”
“What is raped?” said my little sister.
“Oh-oh,” said Iris. “It means you get your pocketbook stolen.”
Pocketbook: an American word. My sister and I didn’t know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn’t what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty.
“Purse. Purse stolen,” said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
Now came the unpacking of presents. Tins of coffee, nuts and date pudding, oysters, olives, ready-made cigarettes for my father. They all smoked, too, except for Flora, the Winnipeg schoolteacher. A sign of worldliness then; in Dalgleish, a sign of possible loose morals. They made it a respectable luxury.
Stockings, scarves emerged as well, a voile blouse for my mother, a pair of stiff white organdy pinafores for me and my sister (the latest thing, maybe, in Des Moines or Philadelphia but a mistake in Dalgleish, where people asked us why we hadn’t taken our aprons off). And finally, a five-pound box of chocolates. Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate-box in the linen-drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions on the map provided on the inside of the box-top: hazelnut, creamy nougat, Turkish delight, golden toffee, peppermint cream.
The cousins slept in the downstairs bedroom and on the pulled-out daybed in the front room. If the night was hot they thought nothing of dragging a mattress on to the verandah, or even into the yard. They drew lots for the hammock. Winifred was not allowed to draw. Far into the night you could hear them giggling, shushing each other, crying, “What was that?” We were beyond the street-lights of Dalgleish, and they were amazed at the darkness, the large number of stars.
Once they decided to sing a round.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
They didn’t think Dalgleish was real. They drove uptown and reported on the oddity of the shopkeepers; they imitated things they had overheard on the street. Every morning the coffee they had brought filled the house with its unfamiliar, American fragrance, and they sat around asking who had an inspiration for the day. One inspiration was to drive out into the country and pick berries. They got scratched and overheated and at one point Winifred was completely penned in, immobilized, by thorny branches, bellowing for a rescue party; nevertheless they said they had mightily enjoyed themselves. Another inspiration was to take my father’s fishing-rods and go down to the river. They came home with a catch of rock bass, a fish we generally threw back. They organized picnics. They dressed up in old clothes, in old straw hats and my father’s overalls, and took pictures of each other. They made layer cakes, and marvelous molded salads which were shaped like temples and colored like jewels.
One afternoon they put on a concert. Iris was an opera singer. She took the cloth off the dining-room table to drape herself in, and sent me out to collect hen feathers to put in her hair. She sang “The Indian Love Call,” and “Women Are Fickle.” Winifred was a bank-robber, with a water-pistol she had bought at the five-and-ten. Everybody had to do something. My sister and I sang, two songs: “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and the Doxology. My mother, most amazingly, put on a pair of my father’s trousers and stood on her head.
Audience and performers, the cousins were for each other, every waking moment. And sometimes asleep. Flora was the one who talked in her sleep. Since she was also the most ladylike and careful, the others stayed awake to ask her questions, trying to make her say something that would embarrass her. They told her she swore. They said she sat bolt upright and demanded, “Why is there no damned chalk?”
She was the one I liked least because she attempted to sharpen our minds — my sister’s and mine — by throwing out mental-arithmetic questions. “If it took seven minutes to walk seven blocks, and five blocks were the same length but the other two blocks were double the length —”
“Oh, go soak your head, Flora!” said Iris, who was the rudest.
If they didn’t get any inspiration, or it was too hot to do anything, they sat on the verandah drinking lemonade, fruit punch, ginger ale, iced tea, with maraschino cherries and chunks of ice chipped from the big chunk in the icebox. Sometimes my mother prettied up the glasses by dipping the rims in beaten egg whites, then in sugar. The cousins would say they were prostrated, they were good for nothing; but their complaints had a gratified sound, as if the heat of summer itself had been created to add drama to their lives.
Drama enough already.
In the larger world, things had happened to them. Accidents, proposals, encounters with lunatics and enemies. Iris could have been rich. A millionaire’s widow, a crazy old woman with a wig like a haystack, had been wheeled into the hospital one day, clutching a carpetbag. And what was in the carpetbag but jewels, real jewels, emeralds and diamonds and pearls as big as pullet eggs. Nobody but Iris could do a thing with her. It was Iris who persuaded her at last to throw the wig into the garbage (it was crawling with fleas), and let the jewels go into the bank vault. So attached did this old woman become to Iris that she wanted to remake her will, she wanted to leave Iris the jewels and the stocks and the money and the apartment houses. Iris would not allow it. Professional ethics ruled it out.
“You are in a position of trust. A nurse is in a position of trust.”
Then she told how she had been proposed to by an actor, dying from a life of dissipation. She allowed him to swig from a Listerine bottle because she didn’t see what difference it would make. He was a stage actor, so we wouldn’t recognize the name even if she told us, which she wouldn’t.
She had seen other big names, too, celebrities, the top society of Philadelphia. Not at their best.
Winifred said that she had seen things too. The real truth, the real horrible truth about some of those big wheels and socialites came out when you got a look at their finances.
We lived at the end of a road running west from Dalgleish over some scrubby land where there were small wooden houses and flocks of chickens and children. The land rose to a decent height where we were and then sloped in wide fields and pastures, decorated with elm trees, down to the curve of the river. Our house was decent too, an old brick house of a fair size, but it was drafty and laid out in an inconvenient way and the trim needed paint. My mother planned to fix it up and change it all around, as soon as we got some money.
My mother did not think much of the town of Dalgleish. She was often harking back, to the town of Fork Mills, in the Ottawa Valley, where she and the cousins had gone to high school, the town their grandfather had come to from England; and to England itself, which of course she had never seen. She praised Fork Mills for its stone houses, its handsome and restrained public buildings (quite different, she said, from Huron County’s, where the idea had been to throw up some brick monstrosity and stick a tower on it), for its paved streets, the service in its stores, the better quality of things for sale and the better class of people. The people who thought so highly of themselves in Dalgleish would be laughable to the leading families of Fork Mills. But then, the leading families of Fork Mills would themselves be humbled if they came into contact with certain families of England, to whom my mother was connected.
Connection. That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world. They knew how to get on in it, they had made it take notice. They could command a classroom, a maternity ward, the public; they knew how to deal with taxi drivers and train conductors.
The other connection they provided, and my mother provided as well, was to England and history. It is a fact that Canadians of Scottish — which in Huron County we called Scotch — and Irish descent will tell you quite freely that their ancestors came out during the potato famine, with only the rags on their backs, or that they were shepherds, agricultural laborers, poor landless people. But anyone whose ancestors came from England will have some story of black sheep or younger sons, financial reverses, lost inheritances, elopements with unsuitable partners. There may be some amount of truth in this; conditions in Scotland and Ireland were such as to force wholesale emigration, while Englishmen may have chosen to leave home for more colorful, personal reasons.
This was the case with the Chaddeley family, my mother’s family. Isabel and Iris were not Chaddeleys by name, but their mother had been a Chaddeley; my mother had been a Chaddeley, though she was now a Fleming; Flora and Winifred were Chaddeleys still. All were descended from a grandfather who left England as a young man for reasons they did not quite agree on. My mother believed that he had been a student at Oxford, but had lost all the money his family sent him, and had been ashamed to go home. He lost it by gambling. No, said Isabel, that was just the story; what really happened was that he got a servant girl in trouble and was compelled to marry her, and take her to Canada. The family estates were near Canterbury, said my mother. (Canterbury pilgrims, Canterbury bells.) The others were not sure of that. Flora said that they were in the west of England, and that the name Chaddeley was said to be related to Cholmondeley; there was a Lord Cholmondeley, the Chaddeleys could be a branch of that family. But there was also the possibility, she said, that it was French, it was originally Champ de laiche, which means field of sedge. In that case the family had probably come to England with William the Conqueror.
Isabel said she was not an intellectual and the only person she knew from English history was Mary Queen of Scots. She wanted somebody to tell her if William the Conqueror came before Mary Queen of Scots, or after?
“Sedge fields,” said my father agreeably. “That wouldn’t exactly make them a fortune.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know sedge from oats,” said Iris. “But they were prosperous enough in England, according to Grandpa, they were gentry there.”
“Before,” said Flora, “and Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t even English.”
“I knew that from the name,” said Isabel. “So ha-ha.”
Every one of them believed, whatever the details, that there had been a great comedown, a dim catastrophe, and that beyond them, behind them, in England, lay lands and houses and ease and honor. How could they think otherwise, remembering their grandfather?
He had worked as a postal clerk, in Fork Mills. His wife, whether she was a seduced servant or not, bore him eight children, then died. As soon as the older children were out to work and contributing money to the household — there was no nonsense about educating them — the father quit work. A fight with the Postmaster was the immediate reason, but he really had no intention of working any longer; he had made up his mind to stay at home, supported by his children. He had the air of a gentleman, was widely read, and full of rhetoric and self-esteem. His children did not balk at supporting him; they sank into their commonplace jobs, but pushed their own children — they limited themselves to one or two apiece, mostly daughters — out to Business School, to Normal School, to Nurses Training. My mother and her cousins, who were these children, talked often about their selfish and wilful grandfather, hardly ever about their decent, hard-working parents. What an old snob he was, they said, but how handsome, even as an old man, what a carriage. What ready and appropriate insults he had for people, what scathing judgements he could make. Once, in faraway Toronto, on the main floor of Eaton’s as a matter of fact, he was accosted by the harnessmaker’s wife from Fork Mills, a harmless, brainless woman who cried, “Well, ain’t it nice to meet a friend so far from home?”
“Madam,” said Grandfather Chaddeley, “you are no friend of mine.”
Wasn’t he the limit, they said. Madam, you are no friend of mine! The old snob. He paraded around with his head in the air like a prize gander. Another lower-class lady — lower-class according to him — was kind enough to bring him some soup, when he had caught cold. Sitting in his daughter’s kitchen, not even his own roof over his head, soaking his feet, an ailing and in fact a dying man, he still had the gall to turn his back, let his daughter do the thanking. He despised the woman, whose grammar was terrible, and who had no teeth.
“But he didn’t either! By that time he had no teeth whatever!”
“Pretentious old coot.”
“And a leech on his children.”
“Just pride and vanity. That’s the sum total of him.”
But telling these stories, laughing, they were billowing with pride themselves, they were crowing. They were proud of having such a grandfather. They believed that refusing to speak to inferior people was outrageous and mean, that preserving a sense of distinction was ridiculous, particularly when your teeth were gone, but in a way they still admired him. They did. They admired his invective, which was lost on his boss, the plodding Postmaster, and his prideful behavior, which was lost on his neighbors, the democratic citizens of Canada. (Oh what a shame, said the toothless neighbor, the poor old fellow, he don’t even reckinize me.) They might even have admired his decision to let others do the work. A gentleman, they called him. They spoke ironically, but the possession of such a grandfather continued to delight them.
I couldn’t understand this, at the time or later. I had too much Scottish blood in me, too much of my father. My father would never have admitted there were inferior people, or superior people either. He was scrupulously egalitarian, making it a point not to “snivel,” as he said, to anybody, not to kowtow, and not to high-hat anybody, either, to behave as if there were no differences. I took the same tack. There were times, later, when I wondered if it was a paralyzing prudence that urged this stand, as much as any finer sentiment, when I wondered if my father and I didn’t harbor, in our hearts, intact and unassailable notions of superiority, which my mother and her cousins with their innocent snobbishness could never match.
It was not of much importance to me, years later, to receive a letter from the Chaddeley family, in England. It was from an elderly lady who was working on a family tree. The family did exist, in England, after all, and they did not spurn their overseas branches, they were seeking us out. My great-grandfather was known to them. There was his name on the family tree: Joseph Ellington Chaddeley. The marriage register gave his occupation as butcher’s apprentice. He had married Helena Rose Armour, a servant, in 1859. So it was true that he had married a servant. But probably not true about the gaming debts at Oxford. Did gentlemen who were embarrassed at Oxford go and apprentice themselves to butchers?
It occurred to me that if he had stayed with butchering, his children might have gone to high school. He might have been a prosperous man in Fork Mills. The letter-writer did not mention the Cholmondeley connection, or the fields of sedge, or William the Conqueror. It was a decent family we belonged to, of servants and artisans, the occasional tradesman or farmer. At one time I would have been shocked to discover this, and would hardly have believed it. At another, later, time, when I was dedicated to tearing away all false notions, all illusions, I would have been triumphant. By the time the revelation came I did not care, one way or the other. I had almost forgotten about Canterbury and Oxford and Cholmondeley, and that first England I had heard of from my mother, that ancient land of harmony and chivalry, of people on horseback, and good manners (though surely my grandfather’s had broken, under the strain of a cruder life), of Simon de Montfort and Lorna Doone and hounds and castles and the New Forest, all fresh and rural, ceremonious, civilized, eternally desirable.
And I had already had my eyes opened to some other things, by the visit of Cousin Iris.
That happened when I was living in Vancouver. I was married to Richard then. I had two small children. On a Saturday evening Richard answered the phone and came to get me.
“Be careful,” he said. “It sounds like Dalgleish.”
Richard always said the name of my native town as if it were a clot of something unpleasant, which he had to get out of his mouth in a hurry.
I went to the phone and found my relief that it was nobody from Dalgleish at all. It was Cousin Iris. There was a bit of the Ottawa Valley accent still in her speech, something rural — she would not have suspected that herself and would not have been pleased — and something loud and jolly, which had made Richard think of the voices of Dalgleish. She said that she was in Vancouver, she was retired now and she was taking a trip, and she was dying to see me. I asked her to come to dinner the next day.
“Now, by dinner, you mean the evening meal, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to get it straight. Because when we visited at your place, remember, your folks always had dinner at noon. You called the noon meal dinner. I didn’t think you still would but I wanted to get it straight.”
I told Richard that a cousin of my mother’s was coming to dinner. I said she was, or had been, a nurse, and that she lived in Philadelphia.
“She’s all right,” I said. I meant decently educated, well enough spoken, moderately well-bred. “She’s travelled all over. She’s really quite interesting. Being a nurse she’s met all sorts of people —” I told about the millionaire’s widow and the jewels in the carpetbag. And the more I talked, the more Richard discerned of my doubts and my need for reassurance, and the more noncommittal and unreassuring he became. He knew he had an advantage, and we had reached the point in our marriage where no advantage was given up easily.
I longed for the visit to go well. I wanted this for my own sake. My motives were not such as would do me credit. I wanted Cousin Iris to shine forth as a relative nobody need be ashamed of, and I wanted Richard and his money and our house to lift me forever, in Cousin Iris’s eyes, out of the category of poor relation. I wanted all this accomplished with a decent subtlety and restraint and the result to be a pleasant recognition of my own value, from both sides.
I used to think that if I could produce one rich and well-behaved and important relative, Richard’s attitude to me would change. A judge, a surgeon, would have done very well. I was not sure at all how Iris would serve, as a substitute. I was worried about the way Richard had said Dalgleish, and that vestige of the Ottawa Valley — Richard was stern about rural accents, having had so much trouble with mine — and something else in Iris’s voice which I could not identify. Was she too eager? Did she assume some proprietary family claim I no longer believed was justified?
Never mind. I started thawing a leg of lamb and made a lemon meringue pie. Lemon meringue pie was what my mother made when the cousins were coming. She polished the dessert forks, she ironed the table napkins. For we owned dessert forks (I wanted to say to Richard); yes, and we had table napkins, even though the toilet was in the basement and there was no running water until after the war. I used to carry hot water to the front bedroom in the morning, so that the cousins could wash. I poured it into a jug like those I now see in antique stores, or on hall tables, full of ornamental grasses.
But surely none of this mattered to me, none of this nonsense about dessert forks? Was I, am I, the sort of person who thinks that to possess such objects is to have a civilized attitude to life? No, not at all; not exactly; yes and no. Yes and no. Background was Richard’s word. Your background. A drop in his voice, a warning. Or was that what I heard, not what he meant? When he said Dalgleish, even when he wordlessly handed me a letter from home, I felt ashamed, as if there was something growing over me; mold, something nasty and dreary and inescapable. Poverty, to Richard’s family, was like bad breath or running sores, an affliction for which the afflicted must bear one part of the blame. But it was not good manners to notice. If ever I said anything about my childhood or my family in their company there would be a slight drawing-back, as at a low-level obscenity. But it is possible that I was a bit strident and self-conscious, like the underbred character in Virginia Woolf who makes a point of not having been taken to the circus. Perhaps that was what embarrassed them. They were tactful with me. Richard could not afford to be so tactful, since he had put himself in a chancy position, marrying me. He wanted me amputated from that past which seemed to him such shabby baggage; he was on the lookout for signs that the amputation was not complete; and of course it wasn’t.
My mother’s cousins had never visited us again, en masse. Winifred died suddenly one winter, not more than three or four years after that memorable visit. Iris wrote to my mother that the circle was broken now and that she had suspected Winifred was diabetic, but Winifred did not want to find that out because of her love of food. My mother herself was not well. The remaining cousins visited her, but they did so separately, and of course not often, because of distances. Nearly every one of their letters referred to the grand time they had all had, that summer, and near the end of her life my mother said, “Oh, Lord, do you know what I was thinking of? The water-pistol. Remember that concert? Winifred with the water-pistol! Everybody did their stunt. What did I do?”
“You stood on your head.”
“Ah yes I did.”
Cousin Iris was stouter than ever, and rosy under her powder. She was breathless from her climb up the street. I had not wanted to ask Richard to go to the hotel for her. I would not say I was afraid to ask him; I simply wanted to keep things from starting off on the wrong foot, by making him do what he hadn’t offered to do. I had told myself that she would take a cab. But she had come on the bus.
“Richard was busy,” I said to her, lying. “It’s my fault. I don’t drive.”
“Never mind,” said Iris staunchly. “I’m all out of puff just now but I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s carrying the lard that does it. Serves me right.”
As soon as she said all out of puff, and carrying the lard, I knew how things were going to go, with Richard. It hadn’t even taken that. I knew as soon as I saw her on my doorstep, her hair, which I remembered as gray-brown, now gilt and sprayed into a foamy pile, her sumptuous peacock-blue dress decorated at one shoulder with a sort of fountain of gold spray. Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
“Well, now,” she said jubilantly. “Haven’t you done all right for yourself!” She looked at me, and the rock garden and the ornamental shrubs and the expanse of windows. Our house was in Capilano Heights on the side of Grouse Mountain. “I’ll say. It’s a grand place, dear.”
I took her in and introduced her to Richard and she said, “Oh-ho, so you’re the husband. Well, I won’t ask you how’s business because I can see it’s good.”
Richard was a lawyer. The men in his family were either lawyers or stockbrokers. They never referred to what they did at work as any kind of business. They never referred to what they did at work at all. Talking about what you did at work was slightly vulgar; talking about how you did was unforgivably so. If I had not been still so vulnerable to Richard it might have been a pleasure to see him met like this, head on.
I offered drinks at once, hoping to build up a bit of insulation in myself. I had got out a bottle of sherry, thinking that was what you offered older ladies, people who didn’t usually drink. But Iris laughed and said, “Why, I’d love a gin and tonic, just like you folks.”
“Remember that time we all went to visit you in Dalgleish?” she said. “It was so dry! Your mother was still a small-town girl, she wouldn’t have liquor in the house. Though I always thought your father would take a drink, if you got him off. Flora was Temperance, too. But that Winifred was a devil. You know she had a bottle in her suitcase? We’d sneak into the bedroom and take a nip, then gargle with cologne. She called your place the Sahara. Here we are crossing the Sahara. Not that we didn’t get enough lemonade and iced tea to float a battleship. Float four battleships, eh?”
Perhaps she had seen something when I opened the door — some surprise, or failure of welcome. Perhaps she was daunted, though at the same time immensely pleased by the house and the furnishings, which were elegant and dull and not all chosen by Richard, either. Whatever the reason, her tone when she spoke of Dalgleish and my parents was condescending. I don’t think she wanted to remind me of home, and put me in my place; I think she wanted to establish herself, to let me know that she belonged here, more than there.
“Oh, this is a treat, sitting here and looking at your gorgeous view! Is that Vancouver Island?”
“Point Grey,” said Richard unencouragingly.
“Oh, I should have known. We went out there on the bus yesterday. We saw the University. I’m with a tour, dear, did I tell you? Nine old maids and seven widows and three widowers. Not one married couple. But as I say, you never know, the trip’s not over yet.”
I smiled, and Richard said he had to move the sprinkler.
“We go to Vancouver Island tomorrow, then we’re taking the boat to Alaska. Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I’ve never been there, isn’t that a good enough reason? No bachelors on the tour, and do you know why? They don’t live to be this old! That’s a medical fact. You tell your hubby. Tell him he did the right thing. But I’m not going to talk shop. Every time I go on a trip they find out I’m a nurse and they show me their spines and their tonsils and their whatnots. They want me to poke their livers. Free diagnosis. I say enough of that. I’m retired now and I mean to enjoy life. This beats the iced tea a mile, doesn’t it? But she used to go to such a lot of trouble. The poor thing. She used to frost the glasses with egg white, remember?”
I tried to get her to talk about my mother’s illness, new treatments, her hospital experiences, not only because that was interesting to me, but because I thought it might calm her down and make her sound more intelligent. I knew Richard hadn’t gone out at all but was lurking in the kitchen.
But she said, no shop.
“Beaten egg white, then sugar. Oh, dear. You had to drink through straws. But the fun we had there. The john in the basement and all. We did have fun.”
Iris’s lipstick, her bright teased hair, her iridescent dress and oversized brooch, her voice and conversation, were all part of a policy which was not a bad one: she was in favor of movement, noise, change, flashiness, hilarity, and courage. Fun. She thought other people should be in favor of these things too, and told about her efforts on the tour.
“I’m the person to get the ball rolling. Some people get downhearted on a trip. They get indigestion. They talk about their constipation. I always get their minds off it. You can always joke. You can start a singsong. Every morning I can practically hear them thinking, what crazy thing is that Chaddeley going to come up with today?”
Nothing fazed her, she said. She told about other trips. Ireland. The other women had been afraid to get down and kiss the Blarney Stone, but she said, “I’ve come this far and I’m going to kiss the damn thing!” and did so, while a blasphemous Irishman hung on to her ankles.
We drank; we ate; the children came in and were praised. Richard came and went. Nothing fazed her; she was right. Nothing deflected her from her stories of herself; the amount of time she could spend not talking was limited. She told about the carpetbag and the millionaire’s widow all over again. She told about the dissolute actor. How many conversations she must have ridden through like this — laughing, insisting, rambling, recollecting. I wondered if this evening was something she would describe as fun. She would describe it. The house, the rugs, the dishes, the signs of money. It might not matter to her that Richard snubbed her. Perhaps she would rather be snubbed by a rich relative than welcomed by a poor one. But had she always been like this, always brash and greedy and scared; decent, maybe even admirable, but still somebody you hope you will not have to sit too long beside, on a bus or at a party? I was dishonest when I said that I wished we had met elsewhere, that I wished I had appreciated her, when I implied that Richard’s judgements were all that stood in the way. Perhaps I could have appreciated her more, but I couldn’t have stayed with her long.
I had to wonder if this was all it amounted to, the gaiety I remembered; the gaiety and generosity, the worldliness. It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better. Unsympathetic places and people might have made us harsh, in efforts and opinions. I used to love to look at magazine advertisements showing ladies in chiffon dresses with capes and floating panels, resting their elbows on a ship’s rail, or drinking tea beside a potted palm. I used to apprehend a life of elegance and sensibility, through them. They were a window I had on the world, and the cousins were another. In fact the cousins’ flowery dresses used to remind me of them, though the cousins were so much stouter, and not pretty. Well, now that I think of it, what were those ladies talking about, in the balloons over their heads? They were discussing underarm odor, or thanking their lucky stars they were no longer chafed, because they used Kotex.
Iris collected herself, finally, and asked when the last bus ran. Richard had disappeared again, but I said that I would take her back to her hotel in a cab. She said no, she would enjoy the bus ride, truly she would, she always got into a conversation with somebody. I got out my schedule and walked her to the bus stop. She said she hoped she hadn’t talked Richard’s and my ears off and asked if Richard was shy. She said I had a lovely home, a lovely family, it made her feel grand to see that I had done so well in my life. Tears filled her eyes when she hugged me good-bye.
“What a pathetic old tart,” said Richard, coming into the living room as I was gathering up the coffee cups. He followed me into the kitchen, recalling things she had said, pretentious things, bits of bragging. He pointed out grammatical mistakes she had made, of the would-be genteel variety. He pretended incredulity. Maybe he really felt it. Or maybe he thought it would be a good idea to start the attack immediately, before I took him to task for leaving the room, being rude, not offering a ride to the hotel.
He was still talking as I threw the Pyrex plate at his head. There was a piece of lemon meringue pie in it. The plate missed, and hit the refrigerator, but the pie flew out and caught him on the side of the face just as in the old movies or an I Love Lucy show. There was the same moment of amazement as there is on the screen, the sudden innocence, for him; his speech stopped, his mouth open. For me, too, amazement, that something people invariably thought funny in those instances should be so shocking a verdict in real life.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise — for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of rounds — the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream.
MY MOTHER WAS not a person who spent all her time frosting the rims of glasses and fancying herself descended from the aristocracy. She was a businesswoman really, a trader and dealer. Our house was full of things that had not been paid for with money, but taken in some complicated trade, and that might not be ours to keep. For a while we could play a piano, consult an Encyclopaedia Britannica, eat off an oak table. But one day I would come home from school and find that each of these things had moved on. A mirror off the wall could go as easily, a cruet stand, a horsehair loveseat that had replaced a sofa that had replaced a daybed. We were living in a warehouse.
My mother worked for, or with, a man named Poppy Cullender. He was a dealer in antiques. He did not have a shop: He too had a house full of furniture. What we had was just his overflow. He had dressers back-to-back and bedsprings upended against the wall. He bought things — furniture, dishes, bedspreads, doorknobs, pump handles, churns, flatirons, anything — from people living on farms or in little villages in the country, then sold what he had bought to antique stores in Toronto. The heyday of antiques had not yet arrived. It was a time when people were covering old woodwork with white or pastel paint as fast as they were able, throwing out spool beds and putting in blond maple bedroom suites, covering patchwork quilts with chenille bedspreads. It was not hard to buy things, to pick them up for next to nothing, but it was a slow business selling them, which was why they might become part of our lives for a season. Just the same, Poppy and my mother were on the right track. If they had lasted, they might have become rich and justified. As it was, Poppy kept his head above water and my mother made next to nothing, and everybody thought them deluded.
They didn’t last. My mother got sick, and Poppy went to jail, for making advances on a train.
There were farmhouses where Poppy was not a welcome sight. Children hooted and wives bolted the door, as he came toiling through the yard in his greasy black clothes, rolling his eyes in an uncontrollably lewd or silly way he had and calling in a soft, pleading voice, “Ith anybody h-home?” To add to his other problems he had both a lisp and a stammer. My father could imitate him very well. There were places where Poppy found doors barred and others, usually less respectable, where he was greeted and cheered and fed, just as if he had been a harmless weird bird dropped out of the sky, valued for its very oddity. When he had experienced no welcome he did not go back; instead, he sent my mother. He must have had in his head a map of the surrounding country with every house in it, and just as some maps have dots to show you where the mineral resources are, or the places of historical interest, Poppy’s map would have marked the location of every known and suspected rocking chair, pine sideboard, piece of milk glass, moustache cup. “Why don’t you run out and take a look at it?” I would hear him say to my mother when they were huddled in the dining room looking at something like the maker’s mark on an old pickle crock. He didn’t stammer when he talked to her, when he talked business; his voice though soft was not humble and indicated that he had his own satisfactions, maybe his own revenge. If I had a friend with me, coming in from school, she would say, “Is that Poppy Cullender?” She would be amazed to hear him talking like an ordinary person and amazed to find him inside somebody’s house. I disliked his connection with us so much that I wanted to say no.
Not much was made, really, of Poppy’s sexual tendencies. People may have thought he didn’t have any. When they said he was queer, they just meant queer; odd, freakish, disturbing. His stammer and his rolling eyes and his fat bum and his house full of throwaways were all rolled up into that one word. I don’t know if he was very courageous, trying to make a life for himself in a place like Dalgleish where random insults and misplaced pity would be what was always coming at him, or whether he was just not very realistic. Certainly it was not realistic to make such suggestions to a couple of baseball players on the Stratford train.
Male companion