Alice Munro - Open Secrets

Eunie’s mother said, “Won’t Bill Proctor be in church?” She was speaking of the editor of the Carstairs Argus .

“Bill Proctor can cool his heels,” Aunt Muriel said. “I’m phoning the London Free Press !”

She did that, but she did not get to talk to the right person — only to some sort of caretaker, because of its being Sunday. “They’ll be sorry!” she said. “I’m going to go over their heads right to the Toronto Star !”

She had taken charge of the story. Eunie let her. Eunie seemed satisfied. When she was finished telling them, she sat with a look of indifferent satisfaction. It did not occur to her to ask that anybody take charge of her, and try to protect her, give her respect and kindness through whatever lay ahead. But Billy Doud had already made up his mind to do that.

Eunie had some fame, for a while. Reporters came. A book-writer came. A photographer took pictures of the fairgrounds and especially of the racetrack, which was supposed to be the mark left by the spaceship. There was also a picture taken of the grandstand, said to have been knocked down in the course of the landing.

Interest in this sort of story reached a peak years ago, then gradually dwindled.

“Who knows what really happened?” Rhea’s father said, in a letter he wrote to Calgary. “One sure thing is, Eunie Morgan never made a cent out of it.”

He was writing this letter to Rhea. Soon after they got to Calgary, Rhea and Wayne were married. You had to be married then, to get an apartment together — at least in Calgary — and they had discovered that they did not want to live separately. That would continue to be the way they felt most of the time, though they would discuss it — living separately — and threaten it, and give it a couple of brief tries.

Wayne left the paper and went into television. For years you might see him on the late news, sometimes in rain or snow on Parliament Hill, delivering some rumor or piece of information. Later he travelled to foreign cities and did the same thing there, and still later he got to be one of the people who sit indoors and discuss what the news means and who is telling lies.

(Eunie became very fond of television but she never saw Wayne, because she hated it when people just talked — she always switched at once to something happening.)

Back in Carstairs on a brief visit and wandering in the cemetery, looking to see who has moved in since her last inspection, Rhea spots Lucille Flagg’s name on a stone. But it is all right — Lucille isn’t dead. Her husband is, and Lucille has had her own name and date of birth cut on the stone along with his, ahead of time. A lot of people do this, because the cost of stonecutting is always going up.

Rhea remembers the hats and rosebuds, and feels a tenderness for Lucille that cannot ever be returned.

At this time Rhea and Wayne have lived together for far more than half their lives. They have had three children, and between them, counting everything, five times as many lovers. And now abruptly, surprisingly, all this turbulence and fruitfulness and uncertain but lively expectation has receded and she knows they are beginning to be old. There in the cemetery she says out loud, “I can’t get used to it.”

They look up the Douds, who are friends of theirs, in a way, and together the two couples drive out to where the old fairgrounds used to be.

Rhea says the same thing there.

The river houses all gone. The Morgans’ house, the Monks’ house — everything gone of that first mistaken settlement. The land is now a floodplain, under the control of the Peregrine River Authority. Nothing can be built there anymore. A spacious parkland, a shorn and civilized riverbank — nothing left but a few of the same old trees standing around, their leaves still green but weighed down by a diffuse golden moisture that is in the air, on this September afternoon not many years before the end of the century.

“I can’t get used to it,” says Rhea.

They are white-haired now, all four of them. Rhea is a thin and darting sort of woman, whose lively and cajoling ways have come in handy teaching English as a second language. Wayne is thin, too, with a fine white beard and a mild manner. When he’s not appearing on television, he might remind you of a Tibetan monk. In front of the camera he turns caustic, even brutal.

The Douds are big people, stately and fresh-faced, with a cushioning of wholesome fat.

Billy Doud smiles at Rhea’s vehemence, and looks around with distracted approval.

“Time marches on,” he says.

He pats his wife on her broad back, responding to a low grumble that the others haven’t heard. He tells her they’ll be going home in a minute, she won’t miss the show she watches every afternoon.

Rhea’s father was right about Eunie not making any money out of her experiences, and he was right too in what he had predicted about Billy Doud. After Billy’s mother died, problems multiplied and Billy sold out. Soon the people who had bought the factory from him sold out in their turn and the plant was closed down. There were no more pianos made in Carstairs. Billy went to Toronto and got a job, which Rhea’s father said had something to do with schizophrenics or drug addicts or Christianity.

In fact, Billy was working at Halfway Houses and Group Homes, and Wayne and Rhea knew this. Billy had kept up the friendship. He had also kept up his special friendship with Eunie. He hired her to look after his sister Bea when Bea began drinking a little too much to look after herself. (Billy was not drinking at all anymore.)

When Bea died, Billy inherited the house and made it over into a home for old people and disabled people who were not so old or disabled that they needed to be in bed. He meant to make it a place where they could get comfort and kindness and little treats and entertainments. He came back to Carstairs and settled in to run it.

He asked Eunie Morgan to marry him.

“I wouldn’t want for there to be anything going on, or anything,” Eunie said.

“Oh, my dear!” said Billy. “Oh, my dear, dear Eunie!”

“Liza, my dear, I have never written you yet to thank you for going out to our house (poor old Dismal, I guess it really deserves the name now) in the teeth or anyway the aftermath of the storm last February and for letting me know what you found there. Thank your husband, too, for taking you there on his snowmobile, also if as I suspect he was the one to board up the broken window to keep out the savage beasts, etc. Lay not up treasure on earth where moth and dust not to mention teenagers doth corrupt. I hear you are a Christian now, Liza, what a splendid thing to be! Are you born again? I always liked the sound of that!

“Oh, Liza, I know it’s boring of me but I still think of you and poor little Kenny as pretty sunburned children slipping out from behind the trees to startle me and leaping and diving in the pond.

“Ladner had not the least premonition of death on the night before his operation — or maybe it was the night before that, whenever I phoned you. It is not very often nowadays that people die during a simple bypass and also he really did not think about being mortal. He was just worried about things like whether he had turned the water off. He was obsessed more and more by that sort of detail. The one way his age showed. Though I suppose it is not such a detail if you consider the pipes bursting, that would be a calamity. But a calamity occurred anyway. I have been out there just once to look at it and the odd thing was it just looked natural to me. On top of Ladner’s death, it seemed almost the right way for things to be. What would seem unnatural would be to get to work and clean it up, though I suppose I shall have to do that, or hire somebody. I am tempted just to light a match and let everything go up in smoke, but I imagine that if I did that I would find myself locked up.