Alice Munro's Best (36 page)

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

She had to be forgiven, didn't she, she had to be forgiven for thinking, after such letters, that the one thing that could never happen was that he wouldn't approach her, wouldn't get in touch with her at all? Never cross her threshold, after such avowals? Funerals passed by her window and she gave no thought to them, as long as they were not his. Even when she was sick in the hospital her only thought was that she must get back, she must get out of bed, the door must not stay locked against him. She staggered to her feet and back to work. On a hot afternoon she was arranging fresh newspapers on the racks and his name jumped out at her like something in her feverish dreams.

She read a short notice of his marriage to a Miss Grace Horne. Not a girl she knew. Not a Library user.

The bride wore fawn silk crêpe with brown-and-cream piping, and a beige straw hat with brown velvet streamers.

There was no picture. Brown-and-cream piping. Such was the end, and had to be, to her romance.

But on her desk at the Library, a matter of a few weeks ago, on a Saturday night after everybody had gone and she had locked the door and was turning out the lights, she discovered a scrap of paper. A few words written on it.
I was engaged before I went overseas.
No name, not his or hers. And there was her photograph, partly shoved under the blotter.

He had been in the Library that very evening. It had been a busy time, she had often left the desk to find a book for somebody or to straighten up the papers or to put some books on the shelves. He had been in the same room with her, watched her, and taken his chance. But never made himself known.

I was engaged before I went overseas.

“Do you think it was all a joke on me?” Louisa said. “Do you think a man could be so diabolical?”

“In my experience, tricks like that are far more often indulged in by the women. No, no. Don't you think such a thing. Far more likely he was sincere. He got a little carried away. It's all just the way it looks on the surface. He was engaged before he went overseas, he never expected to get back in one piece but he did. And when he did, there is the fiancée waiting – what else could he do?”

“What indeed?” said Louisa.

“He bit off more than he could chew.”

“Ah, that's so, that's so!” Louisa said. “And what was it in my case but vanity, which deserves to get slapped down!” Her eyes were glassy and her expression roguish. “You don't think he'd had a good look at me any one time and thought the original was even worse than that poor picture, so he backed off?”

“I do not!” said Jim Frarey. “And don't you so belittle yourself.”

“I don't want you to think I am stupid,” she said. “I am not so stupid and inexperienced as that story makes me sound.”

“Indeed I don't think you are stupid at all.”

“But perhaps you think I am inexperienced?”

This was it, he thought – the usual. Women after they have told one story on themselves cannot stop from telling another. Drink upsets them in a radical way, prudence is out the window.

She had confided in him once before that she had been a patient in a sanatorium. Now she told about being in love with a doctor there. The sanatorium was on beautiful grounds up on Hamilton Mountain, and they used to meet there along the hedged walks. Shelves of limestone formed the steps and in sheltered spots there were such plants as you do not commonly see in Ontario – azaleas, rhododendrons, magnolias. The doctor knew something about botany and he told her this was the Carolinian vegetation. Very different from here, lusher, and there were little bits of woodland too, wonderful trees, paths worn under the trees. Tulip trees.

“Tulips!” said Jim Frarey. “Tulips on the trees!”

“No, no, it is the shape of their leaves!”

She laughed at him challengingly, then bit her lip. He saw fit to continue the dialogue, saying, “Tulips on the trees!” while she said no, it is the leaves that are shaped like tulips, no, I never said that, stop! So they passed into a state of gingerly evaluation – which he knew well and could only hope she did – full of small pleasant surprises, half-sardonic signals, a welling-up of impudent hopes, and a fateful sort of kindness.

“All to ourselves,” Jim Frarey said. “Never happened before, did it? Maybe it never will again.”

She let him take her hands, half lift her from her chair. He turned out the dining-room lights as they went out. Up the stairs they went, that they had so often climbed separately. Past the picture of the dog on his master's grave, and Highland Mary singing in the field, and the old King with his bulgy eyes, his look of indulgence and repletion.

“It's a foggy, foggy night, and my heart is in a fright,” Jim Frarey was half singing, half humming as they climbed. He kept an assured hand on Louisa's back. “All's well, all's well,” he said as he steered her round the turn of the stairs. And when they took the narrow flight of steps to the third floor he said, “Never climbed so close to Heaven in this place before!”

But later in the night Jim Frarey gave a concluding groan and roused himself to deliver a sleepy scolding. “Louisa, Louisa, why didn't you tell me that was the way it was?”

“I told you everything,” said Louisa in a faint and drifting voice.

“I got a wrong impression, then,” he said. “I never intended for this to make a difference to you.”

She said that it hadn't. Now without him pinning her down and steadying her, she felt herself whirling around in an irresistible way, as if the mattress had turned into a child's top and was carrying her off. She tried to explain that the traces of blood on the sheets could be credited to her period, but her words came out with a luxurious nonchalance and could not be fitted together.

WHEN ARTHUR CAME
home from the factory a little before noon he shouted, “Stay out of my way till I wash! There's been an accident over
at the works!” Nobody answered. Mrs. Feare, the housekeeper, was talking on the kitchen telephone so loudly that she could not hear him, and his daughter was of course at school. He washed, and stuffed everything he had been wearing into the hamper, and scrubbed up the bathroom, like a murderer. He started out clean, with even his hair slicked and patted, to drive to the man's house. He had had to ask where it was. He thought it was up Vinegar Hill but they said no, that was the father – the young fellow and his wife live on the other side of town, past where the Apple Evaporator used to be, before the war.

He found the two brick cottages side by side, and picked the left-hand one, as he'd been told. It wouldn't have been hard to pick which house, anyway. News had come before him. The door to the house was open, and children too young to be in school yet hung about in the yard. A small girl sat on a kiddie car, not going anywhere, just blocking his path. He stepped around her. As he did so an older girl spoke to him in a formal way – a warning.

“Her dad's dead. Hers!”

A woman came out of the front room carrying an armload of curtains, which she gave to another woman standing in the hall. The woman who received the curtains was gray-haired, with a pleading face. She had no upper teeth. She probably took her plate out, for comfort, at home. The woman who passed the curtains to her was stout but young, with fresh skin.

“You tell her not to get up on that stepladder,” the gray-haired woman said to Arthur. “She's going to break her neck taking down curtains. She thinks we need to get everything washed. Are you the undertaker? Oh, no, excuse me! You're Mr. Doud. Grace, come out here! Grace! It's Mr. Doud!”

“Don't trouble her,” Arthur said.

“She thinks she's going to get the curtains all down and washed and up again by tomorrow, because he's going to have to go in the front room. She's my daughter. I can't tell her anything.”

“She'll quiet down presently,” said a sombre but comfortable-looking man in a clerical collar, coming through from the back of the house. Their minister. But not from one of the churches Arthur knew. Baptist? Pentecostal? Plymouth Brethren? He was drinking tea.
Some other woman came and briskly removed the curtains.

“We got the machine filled and going,” she said. “A day like this, they'll dry like nobody's business. Just keep the kids out of here.”

The minister had to stand aside and lift his teacup high, to avoid her and her bundle. He said, “Aren't any of you ladies going to offer Mr. Doud a cup of tea?”

Arthur said, “No, no, don't trouble.”

“The funeral expenses,” he said to the gray-haired woman. “If you could let her know–”

“Lillian wet her pants!” said a triumphant child at the door. “Mrs. Agnew! Lillian peed her pants!”

“Yes. Yes,” said the minister. “They will be very grateful.”

“The plot and the stone, everything,” Arthur said. “You'll make sure they understand that. Whatever they want on the stone.”

The gray-haired woman had gone out into the yard. She came back with a squalling child in her arms. “Poor lamb,” she said. “They told her she wasn't supposed to come in the house so where could she go? What could she do but have an accident!”

The young woman came out of the front room dragging a rug.

“I want this put on the line and beat,” she said.

“Grace, here is Mr. Doud come to offer his condolences,” the minister said.

“And to ask if there is anything I can do,” said Arthur.

The gray-haired woman started upstairs with the wet child in her arms and a couple of others following.

Grace spotted them.

“Oh, no, you don't! You get back outside!”

“My mom's in here.”

“Yes and your mom's good and busy, she don't need to be bothered with you. She's here helping me out. Don't you know Lillian's dad's dead?”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Arthur said, meaning to clear out.

Grace stared at him with her mouth open. Sounds of the washing machine filled the house.

“Yes, there is,” she said. “You wait here.”

“She's overwhelmed,” the minister said. “It's not that she means to be rude.”

Grace came back with a load of books.

“These here,” she said. “He had them out of the Library. I don't want to have to pay fines on them. He went every Saturday night so I guess they are due back tomorrow. I don't want to get in trouble about them.”

“I'll look after them,” Arthur said. “I'd be glad to.”

“I just don't want to get in any trouble about them.”

“Mr. Doud was saying about taking care of the funeral,” the minister said to her, gently admonishing. “Everything including the stone. Whatever you want on the stone.”

“Oh, I don't want anything fancy,” Grace said.

This account was reprinted in the paper a week later for those who might have missed it or who wished to have an extra copy to send to friends or relations out of town (particularly to people who used to live in Carstairs and did not anymore). The misspelling
of flange
was corrected. There was a note apologizing for the mistake. There was also a description of a very large funeral, attended even by people from neighboring towns and as far away as Walley. They came by car and train, and some by horse and buggy. They had not known Jack Agnew when he was alive, but, as the paper said, they wished to pay tribute to the sensational and tragic manner of his death. All the stores in Carstairs were
closed for two hours that afternoon. The hotel did not close its doors but that was because all the visitors needed somewhere to eat and drink.

The survivors were a wife, Grace, and a four-year-old daughter, Lillian. The victim had fought bravely in the Great War and had only been wounded once, not seriously. Many had commented on this irony.

The paper's failure to mention a surviving father was not deliberate. The editor of the paper was not a native of Carstairs, and people forgot to tell him about the father until it was too late.

The father himself did not complain about the omission. On the day of the funeral, which was very fine, he headed out of town as he would have done ordinarily on a day he had decided not to spend at Douds. He was wearing a felt hat and a long coat that would do for a rug if he wanted to take a nap. His overshoes were neatly held on his feet with the rubber rings from sealing jars. He was going out to fish for suckers. The season hadn't opened yet, but he always managed to be a bit ahead of it. He fished through the spring and early summer and cooked and ate what he caught. He had a frying pan and a pot hidden out on the riverbank. The pot was for boiling corn that he snatched out of the fields later in the year, when he was also eating the fruit of wild apple trees and grapevines. He was quite sane but abhorred conversation. He could not altogether avoid it in the weeks following his son's death, but he had a way of cutting it short.

“Should've watched out what he was doing.”