Alice Munro - Open Secrets

We better get you to the doctor, he said then. He phoned them up at work. I got to take my wife to the doctor.

Marian said, What if she just boiled a needle and he could lance it? But he could not stand to hurt her, and anyway he was afraid he might do something wrong. So they got in the truck and drove in to see Dr. Sands. Dr. Sands was out, they had to wait. Other people waiting told them the news. Everybody was amazed they didn’t know. But they hadn’t had the radio on. She was the one who always turned it on and she couldn’t stand the noise, the way she felt. And they hadn’t noticed any groups of men, anything peculiar, on the road.

Dr. Sands fixed the boil but he didn’t lance it. His way of dealing with a boil was to strike it a sharp blow, knock it on the head, when you thought he was just looking at it. There! he said, that’s less fuss than the needle and not so painful overall because you didn’t have time to get in a sweat. He cleaned it out and put the dressing on and said she’d soon be feeling better.

And so she was, but sleepy. She was so useless and foggy in the head that she went back to bed and slept till her husband came up around four o’clock with a cup of tea. It was then she thought of those girls, coming in with Miss Johnstone on Saturday morning, wanting a drink. She had lots of Coca-Cola and she gave it to them in flowered glasses, with ice cubes. Miss Johnstone would only take water. He let them play with the hose, they jumped around and squirted each other and had a great time. They were trying to skip the streams of water, and they were a bit on the wild side when Miss Johnstone wasn’t looking. He had to practically wrestle the hose away from them, and give them a few squirts of water to make them behave.

She was trying to picture which girl it was. She knew the minister’s daughter and Dr. Sands’ daughter and the Trowells — with their little sheep eyes you would know a Trowell anywhere. But which of the others? She recalled one who was very noisy and jumping up trying to get the hose even when he took it away, and one was doing cartwheels and one was a skinny pretty little thing with blond hair. But maybe she was thinking of Robin Sands — Robin had blond hair. She asked her husband that night did he know which one, but he was worse than she was — he didn’t know people here and couldn’t separate out any of them.

Also she told him about Mr. Siddicup. It all came back to her now. The way he was upset, the pumping, the way he pointed. It bothered her what that could mean. They talked about it and wondered about it and got themselves into a state of wondering so they hardly got any sleep. Until she finally said to him, Well, I know what we have to do. We have to go and talk to Lawyer Stephens.

So they got up and came as soon as they could.

“Police,” said Lawyer Stephens now. “Police. Who should gone to see.”

The husband spoke. He said, “We didn’t know if we should ought to do that or not.” He had both hands on the table, fingers spread, pressed down, pulling at the cloth.

“Not accusation.” Lawyer Stephens said. “Information.”

He had talked in that abbreviated way even before his stroke. And Maureen had noticed, long ago, how just a few words of his, spoken in no very friendly tone — spoken, in fact, in a tone of brusque chastisement — could cheer people up and lift a weight off them.

She had been thinking of the other reason why the women stopped going to visit Mr. Siddicup. They didn’t like the clothes. Women’s clothes, underwear — old frayed slips and brassières and worn-out underpants and nubbly stockings, hanging from the backs of chairs or from a line above the heater, or just in a heap on the table. All these things must have belonged to his wife, of course, and at first it looked as if he might be washing and drying them and sorting them out, prior to getting rid of them. But they were there week after week, and the women started to wonder: Did he leave them lying around to suggest things? Did he put them on himself next to his skin? Was he a pervert?

Now all that would come out, they’d chalk that up against him.

Pervert . Maybe they were right. Maybe he would lead them to where he’d strangled or beat Heather to death in a sexual fit, or they would find something of hers in his house. And people would say in horrid, hushed voices that no, they weren’t surprised. I wasn’t surprised, were you?

Lawyer Stephens had asked some question about the job at Douglas Point, and Marian said, “He works in Maintenance. Every day when he comes out he’s got to go through the check for X-rays, and even the rags he cleans off his boots with, they have to be buried underground.”

When Maureen shut the door on the pair of them and saw their shapes wobble away through the pebbled glass, she was not quite satisfied. She climbed three steps to the landing on the stairs, where there was a little arched window. She watched them.

No car was in sight, or truck or whatever they had. They must have left it parked on the main street or in the lot behind the Town Hall. Possibly they did not want it to be seen in front of Lawyer Stephens’ house.

The Town Hall was where the Police Office was. They did turn in that direction, but then they crossed the street diagonally and, still within Maureen’s sight, they sat down on the low stone wall that ran around the old cemetery and flower plot called Pioneer Park.

Why should they feel a need to sit down after sitting in the dining room for what must have been at least an hour? They didn’t talk, or look at each other, but seemed united, as if taking a rest in the midst of hard shared labors.

Lawyer Stephens, when in a reminiscing mood, would talk about how people used to rest on that wall. Farm women who had to walk into town to sell chickens or butter. Country girls on their way to high school, before there was any such thing as a school bus. They would stop and hide their galoshes and retrieve them on the way home.

At other times he had no patience with reminiscing.

“Olden times. Who wants ’em back?”

Now Marian took out some pins and carefully lifted off her hat. So that was it — her hat was hurting her. She set it in her lap, and her husband reached over. He took it away, as if anxious to take away anything that might be a burden to her. He settled it in his lap. He bent over and started to stroke it, in a comforting way. He stroked that hat made of horrible brown feathers as if he were pacifying a little scared hen.

But Marian stopped him. She said something to him, she clamped a hand down on his. The way a mother might interrupt the carrying-on of a simple-minded child — with a burst of abhorrence, a moment’s break in her tired-out love.

Maureen felt a shock. She felt a shrinking in her bones.

Her husband came out of the dining room. She didn’t want him to catch her looking at them. She turned around the vase of dried grasses that was on the window ledge. She said, “I thought she’d never get done talking.”

He hadn’t noticed. His mind was on something else.

“Come on down here,” he said.

Early in their marriage Maureen’s husband had mentioned to her that he and the first Mrs. Stephens gave up sleeping together after Helena, the younger child, was born. “We’d got our boy and our girl,” he said, meaning there was no need to try for more. Maureen did not understand then that he might intend some similar cutoff for her. She was in love when she married him. It was true that when he first put his arm around her waist, in the office, she thought he must believe that she was headed for the wrong door and was redirecting her — but that was a conclusion she came to because of his propriety, not because she hadn’t longed to feel his arm there. People who thought she was making an advantageous, though kindly, marriage, would have been amazed at how happy she was on her honeymoon — and that was in spite of having to learn to play bridge. She knew his power — the way he used it and the way he held it back. He was attractive to her — never mind his age, ungainliness, nicotine stains on his teeth and fingers. His skin was warm. A couple of years into the marriage she miscarried and bled so heavily that her tubes had been tied, to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. After that the intimate part of her life with her husband came to an end. It seemed that he had been mostly obliging her, because he felt that it was wrong to deny a woman the chance to have a child.