Alice Munro - Open Secrets

People in Carstairs were just growing out of the habit of calling lawyers Lawyer So-and-So, just as you would always call a doctor by his title. They no longer referred to any of the younger lawyers as Lawyer, but they always called Maureen’s husband Lawyer Stephens. Maureen herself often thought of him that way, though she called him Alvin. He dressed every day just as he used to dress to go to his office — in a three-piece gray or brown suit — and his clothes, though they cost enough money, never seemed to fit well or to smooth out his long, lumpy body. Nor did they ever seem to be free of a faint sifting of cigarette ashes, crumbs, maybe even flecks of shed skin. His head wagged downward, his face sagged with preoccupation, his expression was shrewd and absentminded — you could never be sure which. People liked that — they liked that he looked a little unkempt and at a loss and then could flash out with some fearsome detail. He knows the Law, they said. He doesn’t have to look it up. He’s got it all in his head. His stroke hadn’t shaken their faith, and it really hadn’t altered his appearance or his manner much, just accentuated what was already there.

Everyone believed he could have been a judge if he had played his cards right. He could have been a senator. But he was too honorable. He wouldn’t kowtow. He was a man in a million.

Maureen sat down on the hassock near him to write shorthand. His name for her, in the office, had been the Jewel, because she was intelligent and dependable, in fact quite able to draw up documents and write letters on her own. Even in the household, his wife and the two children, Helena and Gordon, had used that name for her. The children still used it sometimes, though they were grown up and lived away. Helena used it affectionately and provocatively, Gordon with a solemn, self-congratulatory kindness. Helena was an unsettled single woman who came home seldom and got into arguments when she did. Gordon was a teacher at a military college, who liked to bring his wife and children back to Carstairs, making rather a display of the place, and of his father and Maureen, their backwater virtues.

Maureen could still enjoy being the Jewel. Or at least she found it comfortable. Part of her thoughts could slip off on their own. She was thinking now of the way the night’s long adventure began, at camp, with Miss Johnstone’s abdicating snores, and its objective — staying awake till dawn, and all the strategies and entertainments that were relied on to achieve that, though she had never heard that they were successful. The girls played cards, they told jokes, they smoked cigarettes, and around midnight began the great games of Truth or Dare. Some Dares were: take off your pajama top and show your boobs; eat a cigarette butt; swallow dirt; stick your head in the water pail and try to count to a hundred; go and pee in front of Miss Johnstone’s tent. Questions requiring Truth were: Do you hate your mother? Father? Sister? Brother? How many peckers have you seen and whose were they? Have you ever lied? Stolen? Touched anything dead? The sick and dizzy feeling of having smoked too many cigarettes too quickly came back to Maureen, also the smell of the smoke under the heavy canvas that had been soaking up the day’s sun, the smell of girls who had swum for hours in the river and run and hidden in the reeds along the banks and had to burn leeches off their legs.

She remembered how noisy she had been then. A shrieker, a dare-taker. Just before she hit high school, a giddiness either genuine or faked or half-and-half became available to her. Soon it vanished, her bold body vanished inside this ample one, and she became a studious, shy girl, a blusher. She developed the qualities her husband would see and value when hiring and proposing.

I dare you to run away . Was it possible? There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc — that was the lost hope of girls.

From the chintz-covered hassock at her husband’s side she looked out at the old copper-beech trees, seeing behind them not the sunny lawn but the unruly trees along the river — the dense cedars and shiny-leaved oaks and glittery poplars. A ragged sort of wall with hidden doorways, and hidden paths behind it where animals went, and lone humans sometimes, becoming different from what they were outside, charged with different responsibilities, certainties, intentions. She could imagine vanishing. But of course you didn’t vanish, and there was always the other person on a path to intersect yours and his head was full of plans for you even before you met.

When she went to the Post Office that afternoon to send off her husband’s letters, Maureen heard two new reports. A light-haired young girl had been seen getting into a black car on the Bluewater Highway north of Walley at about one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. She might have been hitchhiking. Or waiting for just one car. That was twenty miles away from the Falls, and it would take about five hours to walk it, across the country. It could be done. Or she could have got a ride in another car.

But some people tidying up family graves in a forsaken country churchyard in the swampy northeastern corner of the country had heard a cry, a scream, in the middle of the afternoon. Who was that? they remembered saying to each other. Not what but who. Who was that? But later on they thought that it might have been a fox.

Also, the grass was beaten down in a spot close to the camp, and there were fresh cigarette butts lying around. But what did that prove — people were always out there. Lovers. Young boys planning mischief.

On Tuesday morning, while Frances was getting breakfast and Maureen was helping her husband to finish dressing, there was a knock at the front door, by someone who did not notice or trust the bell. It was not unheard-of for people to drop by this early, but it made difficulties, because Lawyer Stephens was apt to have more trouble with his speech early in the morning, and his mind, too, took a little time to get warmed up.

Through the pebbled glass in the front door Maureen saw the blurry outlines of a man and a woman. Dressed up, at least the woman was — wearing a hat. That meant serious business. But serious business, to the people involved, might still seem humdrum to others. Death threats had been issued over the ownership of a chest of drawers, and a property owner could pop a blood vessel over a six-inch overlap of a driveway. Missing firewood, barking dogs, a nasty letter — all that could fire people up and bring them knocking. Go and ask Lawyer Stephens. Go and ask about the Law .

Of course there was a slim chance this pair might be peddling religion.

Not so.

“We’ve come to see the Lawyer,” the woman said.

“Well,” said Maureen. “It’s early.” She did not know who they were right away.

“Sorry, but we got something to tell him,” the woman said, and somehow she had stepped into the front hall and Maureen had stepped backward. The man shook his head as if in discomfort or apology, indicating that he had no choice but to follow his wife.