Vintage Munro (7 page)

I didn’t have a problem right away with Beryl’s story. For one thing, I was hungry and greedy, and a lot of my attention went to the roast chicken and gravy and mashed potatoes laid on the plate with an ice-cream scoop and the bright diced vegetables out of a can, which I thought much superior to those fresh from the garden. For dessert, I had a butterscotch sundae, an agonizing choice over chocolate. The others had plain vanilla ice cream.

Why shouldn’t Beryl’s version of the same event be different from my mother’s? Beryl was strange in every way—everything about her was slanted, seen from a new angle. It was my mother’s version that held, for a time. It absorbed Beryl’s story, closed over it. But Beryl’s story didn’t vanish; it stayed sealed off for years, but it wasn’t gone. It was like the knowledge of that hotel and dining room. I knew about it now, though I didn’t think of it as a place to go back to. And indeed, without Beryl’s or Mr. Florence’s money, I couldn’t. But I knew it was there.

The next time I was in the Wildwood Inn, in fact, was after I was married. The Lions Club had a banquet and dance there. The man I had married, Dan Casey, was a Lion. You could get a drink there by that time. Dan Casey wouldn’t have gone anywhere you couldn’t. Then the place was remodelled into the Hideaway, and now they have strippers every night but Sunday. On Thursday nights, they have a male stripper. I go there with people from the real-estate office to celebrate birthdays or other big events.

The farm was sold for five thousand dollars in 1965. A man from Toronto bought it, for a hobby farm or just an investment. After a couple of years, he rented it to a commune. They stayed there, different people drifting on and off, for a dozen years or
so. They raised goats and sold the milk to the health-food store that had opened up in town. They painted a rainbow across the side of the barn that faced the road. They hung tie-dyed sheets over the windows, and let the long grass and flowering weeds reclaim the yard. My parents had finally got electricity in, but these people didn’t use it. They preferred oil lamps and the wood stove, and taking their dirty clothes to town. People said they wouldn’t know how to handle lamps or wood fires, and they would burn the place down. But they didn’t. In fact, they didn’t manage badly. They kept the house and barn in some sort of repair and they worked a big garden. They even dusted their potatoes against blight—though I heard that there was some sort of row about this and some of the stricter members left. The place actually looked a lot better than many of the farms round about that were still in the hands of the original families. The McAllister son had started a wrecking business on their place. My own brothers were long gone.

I knew I was not being reasonable, but I had the feeling that I’d rather see the farm suffer outright neglect—I’d sooner see it in the hands of hoodlums and scroungers—than see that rainbow on the barn, and some letters that looked Egyptian painted on the wall of the house. That seemed a mockery. I even disliked the sight of those people when they came to town—the men with their hair in ponytails, and with holes in their overalls that I believed were cut on purpose, and the women with long hair and no makeup and their meek, superior expressions. What do you know about life, I felt like asking them. What makes you think you can come here and mock my father and mother and their life and their poverty? But when I thought of the rainbow and those letters, I knew they weren’t trying to mock or imitate my parents’ life. They had displaced that life, hardly knowing it existed. They had set up in its place
these beliefs and customs of their own, which I hoped would fail them.

That happened, more or less. The commune disintegrated. The goats disappeared. Some of the women moved to town, cut their hair, put on makeup, and got jobs as waitresses or cashiers to support their children. The Toronto man put the place up for sale, and after about a year it was sold for more than ten times what he had paid for it. A young couple from Ottawa bought it. They have painted the outside a pale gray with oyster trim, and have put in skylights and a handsome front door with carriage lamps on either side. Inside, they’ve changed it around so much that I’ve been told I’d never recognize it.

I did get in once, before this happened, during the year that the house was empty and for sale. The company I work for was handling it, and I had a key, though the house was being shown by another agent. I let myself in on a Sunday afternoon. I had a man with me, not a client but a friend—Bob Marks, whom I was seeing a lot at the time.

“This is that hippie place,” Bob Marks said when I stopped the car. “I’ve been by here before.”

He was a lawyer, a Catholic, separated from his wife. He thought he wanted to settle down and start up a practice here in town. But there already was one Catholic lawyer. Business was slow. A couple of times a week, Bob Marks would be fairly drunk before supper.

“It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s where I was born. Where I grew up.” We walked through the weeds, and I unlocked the door.

He said that he had thought, from the way I talked, that it would be farther out.

“It seemed farther then.”

All the rooms were bare, and the floors swept clean. The
woodwork was freshly painted—I was surprised to see no smudges on the glass. Some new panes, some old wavy ones. Some of the walls had been stripped of their paper and painted. A wall in the kitchen was painted a deep blue, with an enormous dove on it. On a wall in the front room, giant sunflowers appeared, and a butterfly of almost the same size.

Bob Marks whistled. “Somebody was an artist.”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” I said, and turned back to the kitchen. The same wood stove was there. “My mother once burned up three thousand dollars,” I said. “She burned three thousand dollars in that stove.”

He whistled again, differently. “What do you mean? She threw in a check?”

“No, no. It was bills. She did it deliberately. She went into town to the bank and she had them give it all to her, in a shoebox. She brought it home and put it in the stove. She put it in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.”

“What are you talking about?” said Bob Marks. “I thought you were so poor.”

“We were. We were very poor.”

“So how come she had three thousand dollars? That would be like thirty thousand today. Easily. More than thirty thousand today.”

“It was her legacy,” I said. “It was what she got from her father. Her father died in Seattle and left her three thousand dollars, and she burned it up because she hated him. She didn’t want his money. She hated him.”

“That’s a lot of hate,” Bob Marks said.

“That isn’t the point. Her hating him, or whether he was bad enough for her to have a right to hate him. Not likely he was. That isn’t the point.”

“Money,” he said. “Money’s always the point.”

“No. My father letting her do it is the point. To me it is. My father stood and watched and he never protested. If anybody had tried to stop her, he would have protected her. I consider that love.”

“Some people would consider it lunacy.”

I remember that that had been Beryl’s opinion, exactly.

I went into the front room and stared at the butterfly, with its pink-and-orange wings. Then I went into the front bedroom and found two human figures painted on the wall. A man and a woman holding hands and facing straight ahead. They were naked, and larger than life size.

“It reminds me of that John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture,” I said to Bob Marks, who had come in behind me. “That record cover, wasn’t it?” I didn’t want him to think that anything he had said in the kitchen had upset me.

Bob Marks said, “Different color hair.”

That was true. Both figures had yellow hair painted in a solid mass, the way they do it in the comic strips. Horsetails of yellow hair curling over their shoulders and little pigs’ tails of yellow hair decorating their not so private parts. Their skin was a flat beige pink and their eyes a staring blue, the same blue that was on the kitchen wall.

I noticed that they hadn’t quite finished peeling the wallpaper away before making this painting. In the corner, there was some paper left that matched the paper on the other walls—a modernistic design of intersecting pink and gray and mauve bubbles. The man from Toronto must have put that on. The paper underneath hadn’t been stripped off when this new paper went on. I could see an edge of it, the cornflowers on a white ground.

“I guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,” Bob Marks said, in a tone familiar to me. That thickened,
sad, uneasy, but determined tone. The not particularly friendly lust of middle-aged respectable men.

I didn’t say anything. I worked away some of the bubble paper to see more of the cornflowers. Suddenly I hit a loose spot, and ripped away a big swatch of it. But the cornflower paper came, too, and a little shower of dried plaster.

“Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words ‘hippie’ or ‘commune’ and all you guys can think about is screwing! As if there wasn’t anything at all behind it but orgies and fancy combinations and non-stop screwing! I get so sick of that—it’s all so stupid it just makes me sick!”

In the car on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before—the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me. Their heated bodies pressed against me, through cloth; their smells crowded out the smells of the cedar bush we passed through, and the pockets of bog, where Beryl exclaimed at the water lilies. Beryl smelled of all those things in pots and bottles. My mother smelled of flour and hard soap and the warm crêpe of her good dress and the kerosene she had used to take the spots off.

“A lovely meal,” my mother said. “Thank you, Beryl. Thank you, Mr. Florence.”

“I don’t know who is going to be fit to do the milking,” my father said. “Now that we’ve all ate in such style.”

“Speaking of money,” said Beryl—though nobody actually had been—“do you mind my asking what you did with yours? I put mine in real estate. Real estate in California—you can’t
lose. I was thinking you could get an electric stove, so you wouldn’t have to bother with a fire in summer or fool with that coal-oil thing, either one.”

All the other people in the car laughed, even Mr. Florence.

“That’s a good idea, Beryl,” said my father. “We could use it to set things on till we get the electricity.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Beryl. “How stupid can I get?”

“And we don’t actually have the money, either,” my mother said cheerfully, as if she was continuing the joke.

But Beryl spoke sharply. “You wrote me you got it. You got the same as me.”

My father half turned in his seat. “What money are you talking about?” he said. “What’s this money?”

“From Daddy’s will,” Beryl said. “That you got last year. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. If you had to pay something off, that’s still a good use, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. We’re all family here. Practically.”

“We didn’t have to use it to pay anything off,” my mother said. “I burned it.”

Then she told how she went into town in the truck, one day almost a year ago, and got them to give her the money in a box she had brought along for the purpose. She took it home, and put it in the stove and burned it.

My father turned around and faced the road ahead.

I could feel Beryl twisting beside me while my mother talked. She was twisting, and moaning a little, as if she had a pain she couldn’t suppress. At the end of the story, she let out a sound of astonishment and suffering, an angry groan.

“So you burned up money!” she said. “You burned up money in the stove.”

My mother was still cheerful. “You sound as if I’d burned up one of my children.”

“You burned their chances. You burned up everything the money could have got for them.”

“The last thing my children need is money. None of us need his money.”

“That’s criminal,” Beryl said harshly. She pitched her voice into the front seat: “Why did you let her?”

“He wasn’t there,” my mother said. “Nobody was there.”

My father said, “It was her money, Beryl.”

“Never mind,” Beryl said. “That’s criminal.”

“Criminal is for when you call in the police,” Mr. Florence said. Like other things he had said that day, this created a little island of surprise and a peculiar gratitude.

Gratitude not felt by all.

“Don’t you pretend this isn’t the craziest thing you ever heard of,” Beryl shouted into the front seat. “Don’t you pretend you don’t think so! Because it is, and you do. You think just the same as me!”

My father did not stand in the kitchen watching my mother feed the money into the flames. It wouldn’t appear so. He did not know about it—it seems fairly clear, if I remember everything, that he did not know about it until that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Florence’s Chrysler, when my mother told them all together. Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others—he was not the first)? I see my father standing by the table in the middle of the room—the table with the drawer in it for knives and forks, and the scrubbed oilcloth on top—and there is the box of money on the table. My mother is carefully dropping the bills into the fire. She holds the stove lid by the blackened lifter in one hand. And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her
to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene, but not crazy. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.