Alice Munro: Dear Life

“Pick them up and bring them with you, I don’t know where they’ll be putting you. You better keep your coat on, too, there’s no heating in the cloakroom.”

No heat, no light, except what came through a little window I could not reach. It was like being punished at school. Sent-to-the-cloakroom. Yes. The same smell of winter clothing that never really dried out, of boots soaked through to dirty socks, unwashed feet.

I climbed up on a bench but still could not see out. On the shelf where caps and scarves were thrown I found a bag with some figs and dates in it. Somebody must have stolen them and stashed them here to take home. All of a sudden I was hungry. Nothing to eat since morning, except for a dry cheese sandwich on the Ontario Northland. I considered the ethics of stealing from a thief. But the figs would catch in my teeth, to betray me.

I got myself down just in time. Somebody was entering the cloakroom. Not any of the kitchen help but a schoolgirl in a bulky winter coat, with a scarf over her hair. She came in with a rush—books thrown on the bench so they scattered on the floor, scarf snatched so her hair sprung out in a bush and at the same time, it seemed, boots kicked loose one after the other and sent skittering across the cloakroom floor. Nobody had got hold of her, apparently, to make her take them off at the kitchen door.

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to hit you,” the girl said. “It’s so dark in here after outside you don’t know what you’re doing. Aren’t you freezing? Are you waiting for somebody to get off work?”

“I’m waiting to see Dr. Fox.”

“Well you won’t have to wait long, I just rode from town with him. You’re not sick, are you? If you’re sick you can’t come here, you have to see him in town.”

“I’m the teacher.”

“Are you? Are you from Toronto?”

“Yes.”

There was a certain pause, perhaps of respect.

But no. An examination of my coat.

“That’s really nice. What’s that fur on the collar?”

“Persian lamb. Actually it’s imitation.”

“Could have fooled me. I don’t know what they put you in here for, it’ll freeze your butt off. Excuse me. You want to see the doctor, I can show you. I know where everything is, I’ve lived here practically since I was born. My mother runs the kitchen. My name is Mary. What’s yours?”

“Vivi. Vivien.”

“If you are a teacher shouldn’t it be Miss? Miss what?”

“Miss Hyde.”

“Tan your hide,” she said. “Sorry, I just thought that up. I’d like if you could be my teacher but I have to go to school in town. It’s the stupid rules. Because I have not got TB.”

She was leading me while she talked, through the door at the far end of the cloakroom, then along a regular hospital corridor. Waxed linoleum. Dull green paint, an antiseptic smell.

“Now you’re here maybe I’ll get Reddy to let me switch.”

“Who is Reddy?”

“Reddy Fox. It’s out of a book. Me and Anabel just started calling him that.”

“Who is Anabel?”

“Nobody now. She’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. It happens around here. I’m in high school this year. Anabel never really got to go to school at all. When I was just in public school Reddy got the town teacher to let me stay home a lot, so I could keep her company.”

She stopped at a half-opened door and whistled.

“Hey. I brought the teacher.”

A man’s voice said, “Okay Mary. Enough out of you for one day.”

“Okay. I heard you.”

She sauntered away and left me facing a spare man of ordinary height, whose reddish fair hair was cut very short and glistened in the artificial light from the hallway.

“You’ve met Mary,” he said. “She has a lot to say for herself. She won’t be in your class so you won’t have to undergo that every day. People either take to her or they don’t.”

He struck me as between ten and fifteen years older than myself and at first he talked to me just in the way an older man would do. A preoccupied future employer. He asked about my trip, about the arrangements for my suitcase. He wanted to know how I would like living up here in the woods, after Toronto, whether I would be bored.

Not in the least, I said, and added that it was beautiful.

“It’s like—it’s like being inside a Russian novel.”

He looked at me attentively for the first time.

“Is it really? Which Russian novel?”

His eyes were a light, bright grayish blue. One eyebrow had risen, like a little peaked cap.

It was not that I hadn’t read Russian novels. I had read some all through and some partway. But because of that eyebrow, and his amused but confrontational expression, I could not remember any title except War and Peace . I did not want to say that because it was what anybody would remember.

“War and Peace.”

“Well, it’s only the Peace we’ve got here, I’d say. But if it was the War you were hankering after I suppose you would have joined one of those women’s outfits and got yourself overseas.”

I was angry and humiliated because I had not really been showing off. Or not only showing off. I had wanted to say what a wonderful effect this scenery had on me.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

“I guess I was really expecting some sort of old lady teacher come out of the woodwork,” he said, in some slight apology. “As if everybody of reasonable age and qualifications would have got back into the system these days. You didn’t study to be a teacher, did you? Just what were you planning to do once you got your B.A.?”

“Work on my M.A.,” I said shortly.

“So what changed your mind?”

“I thought I should earn some money.”

“Sensible idea. Though I’m afraid you won’t earn much here. Sorry to pry. I just wanted to make sure you were not going to run off and leave us in the lurch. Not planning to get married, are you?”

“No.”

“All right. All right. You’re off the hook now. Didn’t discourage you, did I?”

I had turned my head away.

“No.”

“Go down the hall to Matron’s office and she’ll tell you all you need to know. You’ll eat your meals with the nurses. She’ll let you know where you sleep. Just try not to get a cold. I don’t suppose you have any experience with tuberculosis?”

“Well I’ve read—”

“I know. I know. You’ve read The Magic Mountain .” Another trap sprung, and he seemed restored. “Things have moved on a bit from that, I hope. Here, I’ve got some things I’ve written out about the kids here and what I was thinking you might try to do with them. Sometimes I’d rather express myself in writing. Matron will give you the lowdown.”

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 see. The doctor’s office was similarly out of bounds, Matron’s room being the proper place for all inquiries, complaints, and ordinary rearrangements. 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 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 nurse’s aides, who were my age or even younger, mostly 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 honeymoons, and they did not care how my teaching was going or what I had done before I came to work at the San. 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 as was the only legal way in those days) 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 or to people they didn’t know or in times they didn’t know had to be discounted. It got in their way and under their skin. They turned off the radio news every chance they got and tried to get music.