Alice Munro's "Amundsen" Part3

I had not been there a week before all the events of the first day seemed unique and unlikely. The kitchen, the kitchen cloakroom where the workers kept their clothes and concealed their thefts were rooms I hadn’t seen again and probably wouldn’t. The doctor’s office was similarly out of bounds, Matron’s room being the proper place for all inquiries, complaints, and ordinary arrangements. Matron herself was short and stout, pink-faced, with rimless glasses and heavy breathing. Whatever you asked for seemed to astonish her and cause difficulties, but eventually it was seen to or provided. Sometimes she ate in the nurses’ dining room, where she was served a special junket, and cast a pall. Mostly she kept to her own quarters. Besides Matron, there were three other registered nurses, not one of them within thirty years of my age. They had come out of retirement to serve, doing their wartime duty. Then, there were the nurses’ aides, who were my age or even younger, most of them married or engaged or working on being engaged, generally to men in the forces. They talked all the time if Matron and the nurses weren’t there. They didn’t have the least interest in me. They didn’t want to know what Toronto was like, though some of them knew people who had gone there on their honeymoon, and they did not care how my teaching was going or what I had done before. It wasn’t that they were rude—they passed me the butter (it was called butter but it was really orange-streaked margarine, colored in the kitchen) and they warned me off the shepherd’s pie, which they said had groundhog in it. It was just that whatever happened in places they didn’t know had to be discounted; it got in their way and under their skin. Every time the news came on the radio, they switched it to music. Dance with a dolly with a hole in her stockin’ . . . Yet they were in awe of Dr. Fox, partly because he had read so many books. They also said that there was nobody like him for tearing a strip off you if he felt like it. I couldn’t figure out if they thought there was a connection between reading a lot of books and tearing a strip off.

The number of students who showed up varied. Fifteen, or down to half a dozen. Mornings only, from nine o’clock till noon. Children were kept away if their temperature had risen or if they were undergoing tests. When they were present, they were quiet and tractable but not particularly involved. They had caught on right away that this was a pretend school, where they were free of all requirement to learn anything, just as they were free of times tables and memory work. This freedom didn’t make them uppity, or lazy in any troublesome way, just docile and dreamy. They sang rounds softly. They played X’s and O’s. There was a shadow of defeat over the improvised classroom. I decided to take the doctor at his word. Or some of his words, such as those about boredom being the enemy. In the janitor’s cubbyhole, I had seen a globe. I asked to have it brought out. I started on simple geography. The oceans, the continents, the climates. Why not the winds and the currents? The countries and the cities? The Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn? Why not, after all, the rivers of South America? Some children had learned such things before, but they had nearly forgotten them. The world beyond the lake and the forest had dropped away. The lessons seemed to cheer them up, as if they were making friends again with whatever they used to know. I didn’t dump everything on them at once, of course. And I had to go easy with the ones who had never learned such things because they had got sick too soon. But that was all right. It could be a game. I separated them into teams, got them calling out answers while I darted here and there with the pointer. I was careful not to let the excitement go on too long. But one day the doctor walked in, fresh from morning surgery, and I was caught. I could not stop things cold, but I tried to dampen the competition. He sat down, looking somewhat tired and withdrawn. He made no objection. After a few minutes, he joined in the game, calling out quite ridiculous answers, names that were not just mistaken but imaginary. Then gradually he let his voice die down. Down, down, first to a mumble, then to a whisper, then to complete inaudibility. In this way, with this absurdity, he took control of the room. The whole class took to mouthing, in order to imitate him. Their eyes were fixed on his lips. Suddenly he let out a low growl that had them all laughing. “Why the deuce is everybody looking at me? Is that what Miss Hyde teaches you? To stare at people who aren’t bothering anybody?” Most laughed, but some couldn’t stop watching him even for that. They were hungry for further antics. “Go on. Go off and misbehave yourselves somewhere else.” He apologized to me for breaking up the class. I began to explain to him my reasons for making this more like real school. “Though I do agree with you about stress,” I said earnestly. “I agree with what you said in your instructions. I just thought—” “What instructions? Oh, that was just some bits and pieces that went through my head. I never meant them to be set in stone.” “I mean as long as they’re not too sick—” “I’m sure you’re right. I don’t suppose it matters.” “Otherwise they seem sort of listless.” “There’s no need to make a song and dance about it,” he said, and walked away. Then turned to make a barely halfhearted apology. “We can have a talk about it some other time.” That time, I thought, would never come. He evidently thought me a bother and a fool. I discovered at lunch, from the aides, that somebody had not survived an operation that morning. So my anger turned out not to be justified, and for that reason I felt even more of a fool.

So it was settled. Our engagement—though he was a little wary of the word—was a private agreed-upon fact. The wedding would take place whenever he could get a couple of consecutive days off. A bare-bones wedding, he said. I was not to write a word to my grandparents. I was to understand that the idea of a ceremony, carried on in the presence of others whose ideas he did not respect, and who would inflict on us all that snickering and simpering, was more than he was prepared to put up with. Nor was he in favor of diamond rings. I told him that I had never wanted one, which was true, because I had never thought about it. He said that was good. He had known that I was not that sort of idiotic, conventional girl. It would be better to stop having supper together, he said, not just because of the talk but because it was hard to get enough meat for two people on one ration card. My card was not available, having been handed over to the kitchen authorities—to Mary’s mother—as soon as I began to eat at the San. Better not to call attention.

Of course, everybody suspected something. The elderly nurses turned cordial, and even Matron gave me a pained smile. I did preen in a modest way, almost without meaning to. I took to folding myself in, with a velvet stillness, eyes rather cast down. It did not quite occur to me that these older women were watching to see what direction this intimacy might take and that they were ready to turn righteous if the doctor should decide to drop me. It was the aides who were whole-heartedly on my side, and teased me that they saw wedding bells in my tea leaves. The month of March was grim and busy behind the hospital doors. It was always the worst month, the aides said. For some reason, people took it into their heads to die then, after making it through the attacks of winter. If a child did not show up for class, I did not know if there had been a major turn for the worse or just a bedding down with the suspicion of a cold. Time was found, however, for the doctor to make some arrangements. He slipped a note under the door of my room, instructing me to be ready by the first week of April. Unless there was some real crisis, he could manage a couple of days then.

We are going to Huntsville. Going to Huntsville—our code for getting married. I have my green crêpe, dry-cleaned and rolled up carefully in my overnight bag. I suppose I will have to change my clothes in some ladies’ toilet. I am watching to see if there are any early wildflowers along the road that I can pick to make a bouquet. Would he agree to my having a bouquet? But it’s too early even for marsh marigolds. Nothing is to be seen but skinny black spruce trees and islands of spreading juniper and bogs. And, in the road cuts, a chaotic jumble of the rocks that have become familiar to me here—bloodstained iron and slanting shelves of granite. The car radio is on and playing triumphal music, because the Allies are getting closer and closer to Berlin. The doctor says that they are delaying to let the Russians get there first. He says they’ll be sorry. Now that we are away from Amundsen, I find that I can call him Alister. This is the longest drive we have ever taken together, and I am aroused by his male unawareness of me—which I know can quickly shift to its opposite—and by his casual skill as a driver. I find it exciting that he is a surgeon, though I would never admit that. Right now, I believe I would lie down for him in any bog or mucky hole or feel my spine crushed against any roadside rock, should he require an upright encounter. I know, too, that I must keep these feelings to myself. I turn my mind to the future. Once we get to Huntsville, I expect that we will find a minister and stand side by side in a living room, which will have the modest gentility of the living rooms I have known all my life. Cartoon “I wish I could help, but all your tax dollars were used in defense spending.” BUY THE PRINT » But, when we get there, I discover that there are other ways to get married, and that my bridegroom has another aversion that I hadn’t grasped. He won’t have anything to do with a minister. At the town hall in Huntsville, we fill out forms that swear to our single state and we make an appointment to be married by a justice of the peace. Time for lunch. Alister stops outside a restaurant that could be a first cousin to the coffee shop in Amundsen. “This’ll do?” But, on looking into my face, he does change his mind. “No?” he says. “O.K.” We end up eating lunch in the chilly front room of one of the genteel houses that advertise chicken dinners. The plates are icy cold, there are no other diners, and there is no radio music but only the clink of our cutlery as we try to separate parts of the stringy chicken. I am sure he is thinking that we might have done better in the restaurant he suggested in the first place. Nonetheless, I find the nerve to ask about the ladies’ room, and there, in cold air even more discouraging than that of the front room, I shake out my green dress and put it on, repaint my mouth, and fix my hair. When I come out, Alister stands up to greet me and smiles and squeezes my hand and says I look pretty. We walk stiffly back to the car, holding hands. He opens the door for me, goes around and gets in, settles himself and turns the key in the ignition, then turns it off.

The car is parked in front of a hardware store. Snow shovels are on sale at half price. There is still a sign in the window that says that skates can be sharpened inside. Across the street there is a wooden house painted an oily yellow. Its front steps have become unsafe, and two boards forming an X have been nailed across them. The truck parked in front of Alister’s car is a prewar model, with a running board and a fringe of rust on its fenders. A man in overalls comes out of the hardware store and gets into it. After some engine complaint, then some rattling and bounding in place, it is driven away. Now a delivery truck with the store’s name on it tries to park in the space left vacant. There is not quite enough room. The driver gets out and comes and raps on Alister’s window. Alister is surprised—if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window, and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along? “Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. “We were just leaving.” We. He has said “we.” For a moment, I cling to that word. Then I think, It’s the last time. The last time I’ll be included in his “we.” It’s not the “we” that matters; that is not what makes the truth clear to me. It’s his male-to-male tone with the driver, his calm and reasonable apology. I almost wish now to go back to what he was saying before, when he did not even notice the van trying to park. What he was saying then was terrible but at least his tight grip on the wheel, his grip and his abstraction and his voice had pain in them. No matter what he was saying, he was speaking out of the same deep place then that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives all his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van, as if there were no more to be said or managed. “I can’t do it,” he has said. He can’t go through with it. He can’t explain this. Only that he feels it would be a mistake. It occurs to me that I will never be able to look at curly “S”s like those on the skate-sharpening sign, or at rough boards knocked into an X, like those across the steps of the yellow house, without hearing this voice. “I’m going to drive you to the station now. I’ll buy your ticket to Toronto. I’m pretty sure there’s a train to Toronto late in the afternoon. I’ll think up some very plausible story and I’ll get somebody to pack up your things. You’ll need to give me your Toronto address. I don’t think I’ve kept it. Oh, and I’ll write you a reference. You’ve done a good job. You wouldn’t have finished out the term anyway—I hadn’t told you yet but the children are going to be moved to another sanatorium. All kinds of big changes going on.” A new tone in his voice, almost jaunty. A tone of relief. He is trying to hold that in, not let the relief out until I am gone. I watch the streets. It’s like being driven to my own execution. Not yet. A little while yet. Not yet do I hear his voice for the last time. Not yet. He doesn’t have to ask the way to the station. I wonder out loud if he has put girls on the train before. “Don’t be like that,” he says. Every turn is like a shearing off of what’s left of my life. There is a train to Toronto at five o’clock. I wait in the car, while he goes in to check. He comes out with the ticket in his hand and what I think is a lighter step. He must realize this, because as he approaches the car he becomes more sedate. “It’s nice and warm in the station. There’s a special ladies’ waiting room.” He has opened the car door for me. “Or would you rather I waited and saw you off? Maybe there’s a place where we can get a decent piece of pie. That was a horrible dinner.” This makes me stir myself. I get out and walk ahead of him into the station. He points out the ladies’ waiting room. He raises his eyebrow at me and tries to make a final joke. “Maybe someday you’ll count this one of the luckiest days of your life.”

I choose a bench in the waiting room that has a view of the station’s front doors. So that I’ll be able to see him if he comes back. Perhaps he will tell me that this was all a joke. Or a test, as in some medieval drama. Or perhaps he will have a change of heart. Driving down the highway, seeing the pale spring sunlight on the rocks that we so recently looked at together. Struck by the realization of his folly, he will turn and come speeding back. It is an hour at least before the Toronto train comes into the station, but it seems hardly any time at all. And even now fantasies are running through my mind. I board the train as if there were chains on my ankles. I press my face to the window to look along the platform as the whistle blows for our departure. It is not too late for me to jump from the train. Jump free and run through the station to the street, where he has just parked the car and is bounding up the steps, thinking, Not too late, pray not too late. Me running to meet him. Not too late. Now there is a commotion, shouting, hollering, not one but a gaggle of latecomers pounding between the seats. High-school girls in athletic outfits, hooting at the trouble they have caused. The conductor displeased and hurrying them along as they scramble for their seats. One of them, and perhaps the loudest, is Mary. I turn my head and do not look at them again. But here she is, crying out my name and wanting to know where I have been. To visit a friend, I tell her. She plunks herself down beside me and tells me that they have been playing basketball against Huntsville. It was a riot. They lost. “We lost, didn’t we?” she calls out in apparent delight, and others groan and giggle. She mentions the score, which is indeed quite shocking. “You’re all dressed up,” she says. But she doesn’t much care; she seems to take my explanation without real interest. She barely notices when I say that I am going on to Toronto to see my grandparents. Not a word about Alister. Not even a bad word. She has not forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away, in a closet with her other former selves. Or maybe she really is a person who can deal recklessly with humiliation. I am grateful to her now, even if I was not able to feel such a thing at the time. Left to myself, what might I have done when we got to Amundsen? Abandoned the train and run to his house and demanded to know why, why. What shame on me forever. As it was, the stop there was barely long enough for the team to get themselves collected, while being warned by the conductor that if they didn’t get a move on they would be riding to Toronto.

For years, I thought I might run into him. I lived, and still live, in Toronto. It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto, at least for a little while. Then, more than a decade later, it finally happened. Crossing a crowded street where we could not even slow down. Going in opposite directions. Staring, at the same time, a bald shock on our time-damaged faces. He called out, “How are you?,” and I answered, “Fine.” Then added, for good measure, “Happy.” At the time, this was only generally true. I was having some kind of dragged-out row with my husband, about our paying a debt run up by one of his children. I had gone that afternoon to a show at the Art Gallery, to get myself into a more comfortable frame of mind. He called back to me once more. “Good for you,” he said. It still seemed as if we would make our way out of that crowd, as if in just a moment we would be together. But it was just as certain, also, that we would carry on in the directions we were going, and so we did. No breathless cry, no hand on my shoulder when I reached the sidewalk. Just the flash that I had caught when one of his eyes opened wider than the other. It was the left eye—always the left, as I remembered. And it always looked so strange, alert and wondering, as if some crazy impossibility had occurred to him that almost made him laugh. That was all. I went on home. Feeling the same as when I’d left Amundsen. The train dragging me, disbelieving. Nothing changes, apparently, about love. ♦