Vintage Munro (13 page)

“Life can’t be brought to a standstill all the same,” he said. “You did the right thing, keeping the Library open.”

This was in the early winter of 1919, when there had been a fresh outbreak of flu after the danger was supposed to be past. They seemed to be all alone in the hotel. It was only about nine o’clock but the hotelkeeper had gone to bed. His wife was in the hospital with the flu. Jim Frarey had brought the bottle of whisky from the bar, which was closed for fear of contagion—and they sat at a table beside the window, in the dining room. A winter fog had collected outside and was pressing
against the window. You could barely see the streetlights or the few cars that trundled cautiously over the bridge.

“Oh, it was not a matter of principle,” Louisa said. “That I kept the Library open. It was a more personal reason than you think.”

Then she laughed and promised him a peculiar story. “Oh, the whisky must have loosened my tongue,” she said.

“I am not a gossip,” said Jim Frarey.

She gave him a hard laughing look and said that when a person announced they weren’t a gossip, they almost invariably were. The same when they promised never to tell a soul.

“You can tell this where and when you like just as long as you leave out the real names and don’t tell it around here,” she said. “That I hope I can trust you not to do. Though at the moment I don’t feel as if I cared. I’ll probably feel otherwise when the drink wears off. It’s a lesson, this story. It’s a lesson in what fools women can make of themselves. So, you say, what’s new about that, you can learn it every day!”

She began to tell him about a soldier who had started writing letters to her from overseas. The soldier remembered her from when he used to go into the Library. But she didn’t remember him. However, she replied in a friendly way to his first letter and a correspondence sprang up between them. He told her where he had lived in the town and she walked past the house so that she could tell him how things looked there. He told her what books he’d read and she gave some of the same kind of information. In short, they both revealed something of themselves and feelings warmed up on either side. On his side first, as far as any declarations went. She was not one to rush in like a fool. At first, she thought she was simply being kind. Even later, she didn’t want to reject and embarrass him. He asked for a picture. She had one taken, it was not to her liking, but she sent it. He asked if she had a sweetheart and she
replied truthfully that she did not. He did not send any picture of himself nor did she ask for one, though of course she was curious as to what he looked like. It would be no easy matter for him to have a picture taken in the middle of a war. Furthermore, she did not want to seem like the sort of woman who would withdraw kindness if looks did not come up to scratch.

He wrote that he did not expect to come home. He said he was not so afraid of dying as he was of ending up like some of the men he had seen when he was in the hospital, wounded. He did not elaborate, but she supposed he meant the cases they were just getting to know about now—the stumps of men, the blinded, the ones made monstrous with burns. He was not whining about his fate, she did not mean to imply that. It was just that he expected to die and picked death over some other options and he thought about her and wrote to her as men do to a sweetheart in such a situation.

When the war ended, it was a while since she had heard from him. She went on expecting a letter every day and nothing came. Nothing came. She was afraid that he might have been one of those unluckiest of soldiers in the whole war—one of those killed in the last week, or on the last day, or even in the last hour. She searched the local paper every week, and the names of new casualties were still being printed there till after New Year’s but his was not among them. Now the paper began to list as well the names of those returning home, often printing a photo with the name, and a little account of rejoicing. When the soldiers were returning thick and fast there was less room for these additions. And then she saw his name, another name on the list. He had not been killed, he had not been wounded—he was coming home to Carstairs, perhaps was already there.

It was then that she decided to keep the Library open, though the flu was raging. Every day she was sure he would
come, every day she was prepared for him. Sundays were a torment. When she entered the Town Hall she always felt he might be there before her, leaning up against the wall awaiting her arrival. Sometimes she felt it so strongly she saw a shadow that she mistook for a man. She understood now how people believed they had seen ghosts. Whenever the door opened she expected to look up into his face. Sometimes she made a pact with herself not to look up till she had counted to ten. Few people came in, because of the flu. She set herself jobs of rearranging things, else she would have gone mad. She never locked up until five or ten minutes after closing time. And then she fancied that he might be across the street on the Post Office steps, watching her, being too shy to make a move. She worried of course that he might be ill, she always sought in conversation for news of the latest cases. No one spoke his name.

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 sanitorium. Now she told about being in love with a doctor there. The sanitorium 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 somber 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.”