Alice Munro - Open Secrets

Muriel was over thirty and had never been married. Getting married was something she talked about openly, jokingly, and plaintively, particularly when Porter was around. “Don’t you know any men, Porter?” she would say. “Can’t you dig up just one decent man for me?” Porter would say maybe he could, but maybe she wouldn’t think they were so decent. In the summers Muriel went to visit a sister in Montreal, and once she went to stay with some cousins she had never met, only written to, in Philadelphia. The first thing she reported on, when she got back, was the man situation.

“Terrible. They all get married young, they’re Catholics, and the wives never die — they’re too busy having babies.

“Oh, they had somebody lined up for me but I saw right away he would never pan out. He was one of those ones with the mothers.

“I did meet one, but he had an awful failing. He didn’t cut his toenails. Big yellow toenails. Well? Aren’t you going to ask me how I found out?”

Muriel was always dressed in some shade of blue. A woman should pick a color that really suits her and wear it all the time, she said. Like your perfume. It should be your signature. Blue was widely thought to be a color for blondes, but that was incorrect. Blue often made a blonde look more washed-out than she was to start with. It suited best a warm-looking skin, like Muriel’s — skin that took a good tan and never entirely lost it. It suited brown hair and brown eyes, which were hers as well. She never skimped on clothes — it was a mistake to. Her fingernails were always painted — a rich and distracting color, apricot or blood-ruby or even gold. She was small and round, she did exercises to keep her tidy waistline. She had a dark mole on the front of her neck, like a jewel on an invisible chain, and another like a tear at the corner of one eye.

“The word for you is not pretty,” Millicent said one day, surprising herself. “It’s bewitching. ” Then she flushed at her own tribute, knowing she sounded childish and excessive.

Muriel flushed a little too, but with pleasure. She drank in admiration, frankly courted it. Once, she dropped in on her way to a concert in Walley, which she hoped would yield rewards. She had an ice-blue dress on that shimmered.

“And that isn’t all,” she said. “Everything I have on is new, and everything is silk.”

It wasn’t true that she never found a man. She found one fairly often but hardly ever one that she could bring to supper. She found them in other towns, where she took her choirs to massed concerts, in Toronto at piano recitals to which she might take a promising student. Sometimes she found them in the students’ own homes. They were the uncles, the fathers, the grandfathers, and the reason that they would not come into Millicent’s house, but only wave — sometimes curtly, sometimes with bravado — from a waiting car, was that they were married. A bedridden wife, a drinking wife, a vicious shrew of a wife? Perhaps. Sometimes no mention at all — a ghost of a wife. They escorted Muriel to musical events, an interest in music being the ready excuse. Sometimes there was even a performing child, to act as chaperon. They took her to dinners in restaurants in distant towns. They were referred to as friends. Millicent defended her. How could there be any harm when it was all so out in the open? But it wasn’t, quite, and it would all end in misunderstandings, harsh words, unkindness. A warning from the school board. Miss Snow will have to mend her ways. A bad example. A wife on the phone. Miss Snow, I am sorry we are cancelling — Or simply silence. A date not kept, a note not answered, a name never to be mentioned again.

“I don’t expect so much,” Muriel said. “I expect a friend to be a friend. Then they hightail it off at the first whiff of trouble after saying they would always stand up for me. Why is that?”

“Well, you know, Muriel,” Millicent said once, “a wife is a wife. It’s all well and good to have friends, but a marriage is a marriage.”

Muriel blew up at that, she said that Millicent thought the worst of her like everybody else, and was she never to be permitted to have a good time, an innocent good time? She banged the door and ran her car over the calla lilies, surely on purpose. For a day Millicent’s face was blotchy from weeping. But enmity did not last and Muriel was back, tearful as well, and taking blame on herself.

“I was a fool from the start,” she said, and went into the front room to play the piano. Millicent got to know the pattern. When Muriel was happy and had a new friend, she played mournful tender songs, like “Flowers of the Forest.” Or:

Then when she was disappointed, she came down hard and fast on the keys, she sang scornfully.

Sometimes Millicent asked people to supper (though not the Finnegans or the Nesbitts or the Douds), and then she liked to ask Dorrie and Muriel as well. Dorrie was a help to wash up the pots and pans afterward, and Muriel could entertain on the piano.

She asked the Anglican minister to come on Sunday, after evensong, and bring the friend she had heard was staying with him. The Anglican minister was a bachelor, but Muriel had given up on him early. Neither fish nor fowl, she said. Too bad. Millicent liked him, chiefly for his voice. She had been brought up an Anglican, and though she’d switched to United, which was what Porter said he was (so was everybody else, so were all the important and substantial people in the town), she still favored Anglican customs. Evensong, the church bell, the choir coming up the aisle in as stately a way as they could manage, singing — instead of just all clumping in together and sitting down. Best of all the words. But thou O God have mercy upon us miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O Lord, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent, according to the Promise.…

Porter went with her once and hated it.

Preparations for this evening supper were considerable. The damask was brought out, the silver serving-spoon, the black dessert plates painted with pansies by hand. The cloth had to be pressed and all the silverware polished, and then there was the apprehension that a tiny smear of polish might remain, a gray gum on the tines of a fork or among the grapes round the rim of the wedding teapot. All day Sunday, Millicent was torn between pleasure and agony, hope and suspense. The things that could go wrong multiplied. The Bavarian cream might not set (they had no refrigerator yet and had to chill things in summer by setting them on the cellar floor). The angel food cake might not rise to its full glory. If it did rise, it might be dry. The biscuits might taste of tainted flour or a beetle might crawl out of the salad. By five o’clock she was in such a state of tension and misgiving that nobody could stay in the kitchen with her. Muriel had arrived early to help out, but she had not chopped the potatoes finely enough, and had managed to scrape her knuckles while grating carrots, so she was told off for being useless, and sent to play the piano.

Muriel was dressed up in turquoise crêpe and smelled of her Spanish perfume. She might have written off the minister but she had not seen his visitor yet. A bachelor, perhaps, or a widower, since he was travelling alone. Rich, or he would not be travelling at all, not so far. He came from England, people said. Someone had said no, Australia.

She was trying to get up the “Polovtsian Dances.”

Dorrie was late. It threw a crimp in things. The jellied salad had to be taken down cellar again, lest it should soften. The biscuits put to warm in the oven had to be taken out, for fear of getting too hard. The three men sat on the veranda — the meal was to be eaten there, buffet style — and drank fizzy lemonade. Millicent had seen what drink did in her own family — her father had died of it when she was ten — and she had required a promise from Porter, before they married, that he would never touch it again. Of course he did — he kept a bottle in the granary — but when he drank he kept his distance and she truly believed the promise had been kept. This was a fairly common pattern at that time, at least among farmers — drinking in the barn, abstinence in the house. Most men would have felt there was something the matter with a woman who didn’t lay down such a law.