Alice Munro's "Amundsen" Part2

Every afternoon was free. My pupils went down for long naps, and I sometimes felt like doing the same. But my room was cold, and the bedcovers were thin—surely people with tuberculosis needed something cozier. I, of course, did not have tuberculosis. Maybe they skimped on provisions for people like me. I was drowsy but couldn’t sleep. Overhead there was the rumble of bed carts being wheeled to the porches for the icy afternoon exposure. The building, the trees, the lake were never again the same to me as they had been on that first day, when I was caught by their mystery and authority. On that day I had believed myself invisible. Now it seemed as if that were never true. There’s the teacher. What’s she up to? She’s looking at the lake. What for? Nothing better to do. Some people are lucky.

Once in a while I skipped lunch, even though it was part of my salary, and went in to Amundsen, where I ate in a coffee shop. The coffee was Postum and the best bet for a sandwich was tinned salmon, if they had any. The chicken salad had to be examined carefully for bits of skin and gristle. Nevertheless, I felt more at ease there, as if nobody would know who I was. About that I was probably mistaken. The coffee shop didn’t have a ladies’ room, so you had to go next door to the hotel, then past the entrance to the beer parlor, always dark and noisy and giving out a smell of beer and whiskey, a blast of cigarette and cigar smoke fit to knock you down. But the loggers, the men from the sawmill, would never yelp at you the way the soldiers and the airmen in Toronto did. They were deep in a world of men, bawling out their own stories, not here to look for women. Possibly more eager, in fact, to get away from that company now or forever. The doctor had an office on the main street. Just a small one-story building, so he lived elsewhere. I had picked up from the aides that there was no Mrs. Fox. On the only side street, I found a house that might have belonged to him—a stucco-covered house, with a dormer window above the front door, books stacked on the sill of that window. There was a bleak but orderly look to the place, a suggestion of the minimal but precise comfort that a lone man—a regulated lone man—might contrive. The town school was at the end of that residential street. One afternoon I spotted Mary in the yard there, taking part in a snowball fight. It seemed to be girls against boys. When she saw me, she cried out loudly, “Hey, Teach,” and gave the balls in both hands a random toss, then ambled across the street. “See you tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder, more or less as a warning that nobody was to follow. “You on your way home?” she said. “Me, too. I used to ride in Reddy’s car, but he’s got too late leaving. What do you do, take the tram?” I said yes, and Mary said, “Oh, I can show you the shortcut and you can save your money. The bush road.” She took me up a narrow but passable lane that ran above the town, through the woods, and past the sawmill. “This is the way Reddy goes,” she said. After the sawmill, beneath us, were some ugly cuts in the woods and a few shacks, apparently inhabited, because they had woodpiles and clotheslines and rising smoke. From one of them, a big wolfish dog ran out with a great display of barking and snarling. “You shut your face!” Mary yelled. In no time she had packed and flung a snowball, which caught the animal between the eyes. It whirled around, and she had another snowball ready to hit it in the rump. A woman in an apron came out and shouted, “You could’ve killed him.” “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” “I’ll get my old man after you.” “That’ll be the day. Your old man can’t hit a shithouse.” The dog followed at a distance, with some insincere threatening. “I can take care of any dog, don’t worry,” Mary said. “I bet I could take care of a bear if we ran into one.” “Don’t bears tend to hibernate at this time of year?” I had been quite scared by the dog but affected carelessness. “Yeah, but you never know. One came out early once, and it got into the garbage down at the San. My mom turned around and there it was. Reddy got his gun and shot it. Reddy used to take me and Anabel out on the sled, and sometimes other kids, too, and he had a special whistle that scared off bears. It was pitched too high for human ears.” “Really. What did it look like?”“It wasn’t that kind of whistle. I meant one he could do with his mouth.” I thought of his performance in the classroom. “I don’t know, maybe he just said that to keep Anabel from getting scared. She couldn’t ride on the sled. He had to pull her on a toboggan. Sometimes I’d jump on the toboggan, too, and he’d say, ‘What’s the matter with this thing? It weighs a ton.’ Then he’d try to turn around quick and catch me, but he never did. And he’d ask Anabel, ‘What makes it so heavy? What did you have for breakfast?’ But she never told. She was the best friend I ever will have.” “What about the girls at school? Aren’t they friends?” “I just hang around with them when there’s nobody else. They’re nothing. Anabel and me had our birthdays in the same month. June. Our eleventh birthday, Reddy took us out on the lake in a boat. He taught us swimming. Well, me. He always had to hold Anabel—she couldn’t really learn. Once he went swimming way out by himself, and we filled his shoes up with sand. And then, our twelfth birthday, we couldn’t go anywhere like that, but we went to his house and had a cake. She couldn’t eat even a little bit of it, so he took us in his car and we threw pieces out the window for the seagulls. They were fighting and screaming. We were laughing ourselves crazy, and he had to stop and hold Anabel so she wouldn’t have a hemorrhage. “And after that,” she said, “after that I wasn’t allowed to see her anymore. My mom never wanted me to hang around with kids that had TB anyway. But Reddy talked her into it. He said he’d stop it when he had to. So he did, and I got mad. But she wouldn’t have been any fun anymore—she was too sick. I’d show you her grave but there isn’t anything to mark it yet. Reddy and me are going to make something when he gets time. If we’d have gone straight along on the road, instead of turning where we did, we would have come to her graveyard.” By this time we were down on level ground, approaching the San. She said, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and pulled out a fistful of tickets. “For Valentine’s Day. We’re putting on this play at school and it’s called ‘Pinafore.’ I got all these to sell and you can be my first sale. I’m in it.”

I was right about the house in Amundsen being where the doctor lived. He took me there for supper. The invitation seemed to come rather on the spur of the moment when he bumped into me in the hall one day. Perhaps he had an uneasy memory of saying that we would get together to talk about teaching ideas. The evening he proposed was the one for which I had bought a ticket for “Pinafore.” I told him that, and he said, “Well, I did, too. It doesn’t mean we have to show up.” “I sort of feel as if I promised her.” “Well, now you can sort of un-promise her. It will be dreadful, believe me.” I did as he said, though I did not see Mary to tell her. I waited where he had instructed me to wait, on the porch outside the front door of the San. I was wearing my best dress, a dark-green crêpe, with little pearl buttons and a real lace collar, and had rammed my feet into suède high-heeled shoes inside my snow boots. I waited past the time he’d mentioned—worried, first, that Matron would come out of her office and spot me, and, second, that he had forgotten all about it. But then he came along, buttoning up his overcoat, and apologized. “Always a few bits and bobs to clear up,” he said, and led me around the building to his car. “Are you steady?” he asked, and when I said yes—despite the suède shoes—he did not offer his arm. His car was old and shabby, as most cars were those days. It didn’t have a heater. When he said that we were going to his house, I was relieved. I could not see how we would manage with the crowd at the hotel, and I had hoped not to have to make do with the sandwiches at the café. At his house, he told me not to take off my coat until the place had warmed up a bit. And he got busy at once making a fire in the woodstove. “I’m your janitor and your cook and your server,” he said. “It’ll soon be comfortable here, and the meal won’t take me long. Don’t offer to help. I prefer to work alone. Where would you like to wait? If you want to, you could look over the books in the front room. It shouldn’t be too unbearable in there with your coat on. The light switch is just inside the door. You don’t mind if I listen to the news? It’s a habit I’ve got into.” I went into the front room, feeling as if I had more or less been ordered to, leaving the kitchen door open. He came and closed it, saying, “Just until we get a bit of warmth in the kitchen,” and went back to the sombrely dramatic, almost religious voice of the CBC, giving out the news of the war. There were quantities of books to look at. Not just on bookshelves but on tables and chairs and windowsills and piled on the floor. After I had examined several of them, I concluded that he favored buying books in batches and probably belonged to several book clubs. The Harvard Classics. The histories of Will Durant. Fiction and poetry seemed in short supply, though there were a few surprising children’s classics. Books on the American Civil War, the South African War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peloponnesian War, the campaigns of Julius Caesar. Explorations of the Amazon and the Arctic. Shackleton caught in the ice. John Franklin’s doomed expedition, the Donner Party, and the Lost Tribes, Newton, and alchemy, the secrets of the Hindu Kush. Books suggesting someone anxious to know, to possess great scattered lumps of knowledge. Perhaps not someone whose tastes were firm and exacting. So it was possible that when he had asked me, “Which Russian novel?,” he had not had so solid a platform as I’d thought. When he called “Ready,” and I opened the door, I was armed with this new skepticism. I said, “Who do you agree with, Naphta or Settembrini?” “I beg your pardon?” “In ‘The Magic Mountain.’ Do you like Naphta best, or Settembrini?” “To be honest, I’ve always thought they were a pair of windbags. You?” “Settembrini is more humane, but Naphta is more interesting.” “They tell you that in school?” “I never read it in school,” I said coolly. He gave me a quick look, that eyebrow raised. “Pardon me. If there’s anything in there that interests you, feel free. Please feel free to come down here and read in your time off. There’s an electric heater I could set up, since I imagine you are not experienced with woodstoves. Shall we think about that? I can rustle you up an extra key.” “Thank you.” Pork chops, instant mashed potatoes, canned peas. Dessert was an apple pie from the bakery, which would have been better if he’d thought to heat it up. He asked me about my life in Toronto, my university courses, my family. He said that he supposed I had been brought up on the straight and narrow. “My grandfather is a liberal clergyman, sort of in the Paul Tillich mold.” “And you? Liberal little Christian granddaughter?” “No.” “Touché. Do you think I’m rude?” “That depends. If you are interviewing me as an employer, no.” “So I’ll go on. Do you have a boyfriend?” “Yes.” “In the forces, I suppose.” I said, “In the Navy.” That struck me as a good choice, to account for my not knowing where he was and not receiving regular letters. The doctor got up and fetched the tea. “What sort of boat is he on?” “Corvette.” Another good choice. After a while, I could have him torpedoed, as was always happening to corvettes. “Brave fellow. Milk or sugar in your tea?” “Neither, thanks.” “That’s good, because I haven’t got any. You know, it shows when you’re lying—you get red in the face.” If I hadn’t got red before, I did then. My flush rose from my feet up, and sweat trickled down under my arms. I hoped the dress would not be ruined. “I always go hot when I drink tea.” “Oh, I see.” Things could not get any worse, so I resolved to face him down. I changed the subject on him, asking about how he operated on people. Did he remove lungs, as I had heard? He could have answered that with more teasing, more superiority—possibly this was his notion of flirtation—and I believe that if he had done so I would have put on my coat and walked out into the cold. Perhaps he knew that. He began to talk about thoracoplasty. Of course, removal of the lobe had also become popular recently. “But don’t you lose some patients?” I said. He must have thought it was time to joke again. “But of course. Running off and hiding in the bush—we don’t know where they get to. Jumping in the lake. Or did you mean don’t they die? There are cases where surgery doesn’t work, yes.” But great things were coming, he said. The surgery he went in for was going to become as obsolete as bloodletting. A new drug was on the way. Streptomycin. Already used in trial. There were some problems—naturally, there would be problems. Toxicity of the nervous system. But a way would be found to deal with that. “Put the sawbones like me out of business.” He washed the dishes; I dried. He put a dishtowel around my waist to protect my dress. When the ends were efficiently tied, he laid his hand against my upper back. Such firm pressure, fingers separated—he might almost have been taking stock of my body in a professional way. When I went to bed that night, I could still feel the pressure. I felt it develop its intensity from the little finger to the hard thumb. I enjoyed it. It was more important, really, than the kiss placed on my forehead later, the moment before I got out of his car. A dry-lipped kiss, brief and formal, set upon me with hasty authority. The key to his house showed up on the floor of my room, slipped under the door when I wasn’t there. But I couldn’t use it after all. If anybody else had made this offer, I would have jumped at the chance. Especially if it included a heater. But, in this case, his past and future presence in the house would draw all ordinary comfort out of the situation and replace it with a pleasure that was nerve-racking rather than expansive. I doubted whether I’d be able to read a word.

I expected Mary to come by to scold me for missing “Pinafore.” I thought of saying that I had not been well. I’d had a cold. But then I remembered that colds were serious business in this place, involving masks and disinfectant, banishment. And soon I understood that there was no hope of hiding my visit to the doctor’s house. It was a secret from nobody, not even from the nurses, who said nothing, either because they were too lofty and discreet or because such carrying on had ceased to interest them. But the aides teased me. “Enjoy your supper the other night?” Their tone was friendly; they seemed to approve. My stock had risen. Whatever else I was, at least I might turn out to be a woman with a man. Mary did not put in an appearance all week.

xpected Mary to come by to scold me for missing “Pinafore.” I thought of saying that I had not been well. I’d had a cold. But then I remembered that colds were serious business in this place, involving masks and disinfectant, banishment. And soon I understood that there was no hope of hiding my visit to the doctor’s house. It was a secret from nobody, not even from the nurses, who said nothing, either because they were too lofty and discreet or because such carrying on had ceased to interest them. But the aides teased me. “Enjoy your supper the other night?” Their tone was friendly; they seemed to approve. My stock had risen. Whatever else I was, at least I might turn out to be a woman with a man. Mary did not put in an appearance all week.

"Next Saturday” were the words that had been said, just before he administered the kiss. So I waited again on the front porch, and this time he was not late. We drove to the house, and I went into the front room while he got the fire going. There I noticed the dusty electric heater. “Didn’t take me up on my offer,” he said. “Did you think I didn’t mean it? I always mean what I say.” I said that I hadn’t wanted to come into town for fear of meeting Mary. “Because of missing her concert.” “That’s if you’re going to arrange your life to suit Mary,” he said. The menu was much the same as before. Pork chops, instant mashed potatoes, corn niblets instead of peas. This time he let me help in the kitchen, even asking me to set the table. “You may as well learn where things are. It’s all fairly logical, I believe.” This meant that I could watch him working at the stove. His easy concentration, economical movements, setting off in me a procession of sparks and chills. We had just begun the meal when there was a knock at the door. He got up and drew the bolt and in burst Mary. She was carrying a cardboard box, which she set on the table. Then she threw off her coat and displayed herself in a red-and-yellow costume. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said. “You never came to see me in the concert, so I brought the concert to you.” She stood on one foot to kick off first one boot, then the other. She pushed them out of her way and began to prance around the table, singing at the same time in a plaintive but vigorous young voice: I’m called Little Buttercup, Dear little Buttercup, Though I could never tell why. But still I’m called Buttercup, Poor little Buttercup Sweet little Buttercup I— The doctor had got up even before she began to sing. He was standing at the stove, busy scraping at the frying pan that had held the pork chops. I applauded. I said, “What a gorgeous costume.” It was, indeed. Red skirt, bright-yellow petticoat, fluttering white apron, embroidered bodice. “My mom made it.” “Even the embroidery?” “Sure. She stayed up till four o’clock to get it done the night before.” There was further whirling and stomping to show it off. The dishes tinkled on the shelves. I applauded some more. Both of us wanted only one thing. We wanted the doctor to turn around and stop ignoring us. For him to say, even grudgingly, one polite word. “And lookit what else,” Mary said. “For a Valentine.” She tore open the cardboard box and there were Valentine cookies, all cut into heart shapes and plastered with thick red icing. “How splendid,” I said, and Mary resumed her prancing: I am the Captain of the Pinafore. And a right good captain, too. You’re very very good, and be it understood, I command a right good crew. The doctor turned at last, and she saluted him. “All right,” he said. “That’s enough.” She ignored him: Then give three cheers and one cheer more For the hardy captain of the Pinafore. “I said that’s enough.” “For the captain of the Pinafore—” “Mary. We are eating supper. And you are not invited. Do you understand that? Not invited.” She was quiet at last. But only for a moment. “Well, pooh on you, then. You’re not very nice.” “And you could just as well do without any of those cookies. You’re on your way to getting as plump as a young pig.” Mary’s face was puffed up as if she were about to cry, but instead she said, “Look who’s talking. You got one eye crooked to the other.” “That’s enough.” “Well, you have.” The doctor picked up her boots and set them down in front of her. “Put these on.” She did so, with her eyes full of tears and her nose running. She snuffled mightily. He picked up her coat and did not help her as she flailed her way into it and found the buttons. “That’s right. Now, how did you get here?” She refused to answer. “Walked, did you? Well, I can drive you home. So you don’t get a chance to fling yourself into a snowbank and freeze to death out of self-pity.” I did not say a word. Mary did not look at me once. The moment was too full of shock for goodbyes. When I heard the car start, I began clearing the table. We had not got to dessert, which was apple pie again. Perhaps he did not know of any other kind, or perhaps it was all the bakery made. I picked up one of the heart-shaped cookies and ate it. The icing was horribly sweet. No berry or cherry flavor, just sugar and red food coloring. I ate another and another. I knew that I should have said goodbye at least. I should have said thank you for the cookies. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I told myself that it wouldn’t have mattered. The performance had not been for me. Or perhaps only a small part of it had been for me. He had been brutal. It shocked me that he had been so brutal. To one so much in need. But he had done it for me, in a way. So that his time with me should not be taken away. This thought flattered me, and I was ashamed that it flattered me. I did not know what I would say to him when he got back. He did not want me to say anything. He took me to bed. Had this been in the cards all along, or was it as much of a surprise to him as it was to me? My state of virginity, at least, did not appear to be unexpected—he provided a towel, as well as a condom—and he persisted, going as easily as he could. My passion was the surprise, to us both. “I do intend to marry you,” he said. Before he took me home, he tossed all the cookies, all those red hearts, out into the snow to feed the winter birds."