The Children Stay by Alice Munro. Part 4.
Watch on KineScope.
When she said that she had to go away for the two-week holiday Jeffrey looked thunderstruck, as if he had never imagined that things like holidays could come into her life. Then he turned grim and slightly satirical, as if this was just another blow that he might have expected. Pauline explained that she would miss only the one Sunday-the one in the middle of the two weeks-because she and Brian were driving up the island on a Monday and coming back on a Sunday morning. She promised to get back in time for rehearsal. Privately she wondered how she would do this—it always took so much longer than you expected to pack up and get away. She wondered if she could possibly come back by herself on the morning bus. That would probably be too much to ask for. She didn’t mention it.
She couldn’t ask him if it was only the play he was thinking about, only her absence from a rehearsal that caused the thundercloud. At the moment, it very likely was. When he spoke to her at rehearsals there was never any suggestion that he ever spoke to her in any other way. The only difference in his treatment of her was that perhaps he expected less of her, of her acting, than he did of the others. And that would be understandable to anybody. She was the only one chosen out of the blue, for the way she looked-the others had all shown up at the audition he had advertised on the signs put up in cafés and bookstores around town. From her he appeared to want an immobility or awkwardness that he didn’t want from the rest of them. Perhaps it was because, in the latter part of the play, she was supposed to be a person who had already died.
Yet she thought they all knew, the rest of the cast all knew, what was going on, in spite of Jeffrey’s offhand and abrupt and none too civil ways. They knew that after every one of them had straggled off home, he would walk across the room and bolt the staircase door. (At first Pauline had pretended to leave with the rest and had even got into her car and circled the block, but later such a trick had come to seem insulting, not just to herself and Jeffrey, but to the others whom she was sure would never betray her, bound as they all were under the temporary but potent spell of the play.)
Jeffrey crossed the room and bolted the door. Every time, this was like a new decision, which he had to make. Until it was done, she wouldn’t look at him. The sound of the bolt being pushed into place, the ominous or fatalistic sound of the metal hitting metal, gave her a localized shock of capitulation. But she didn’t make a move, she waited for him to come back to her with the whole story of the afternoon’s labor draining out of his face, the expression of matter-of-fact and customary disappointment cleared away, replaced by the live energy she always found surprising.
“So. Tell us what this play of yours is about,” Brian’s father said. “Is it one of those ones where they take their clothes off on the stage?”
“Now don’t tease her,” said Brian’s mother.
Brian and Pauline had put the children to bed and walked over to his parents’ cottage for an evening drink. The sunset was behind them, behind the forests of Vancouver Island, but the mountains in front of them, all clear now and hard-cut against the sky, shone in its pink light. Some high inland mountains were capped with pink summer snow.
“Nobody takes their clothes off, Dad,” said Brian in his booming schoolroom voice. “You know why? Because they haven’t got any clothes on in the first place. It’s the latest style. They’re going to put on a bare-naked Hamlet next. Bare-naked Romeo and Juliet. Boy, that balcony scene where Romeo is climbing up the trellis and he gets stuck in the rosebushes—”
“Oh, Brian,” said his mother.
“The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is that Eurydice died,” Pauline said. “And Orpheus goes down to the underworld to try to get her back. And his wish is granted, but only if he promises not to look at her. Not to look back at her. She’s walking behind him—”
“Twelve paces,” said Brian. “As is only right.”
“It’s a Greek story, but it’s set in modern times,” said Pauline. “At least this version is. More or less modern. Orpheus is a musician travelling around with his father-they’re both musicians-and Eurydice is an actress. This is in France.”
“Translated?” Brian’s father said.
“No,” said Brian. “But don’t worry, it’s not in French. It was written in Transylvanian.”
“It’s so hard to make sense of anything,” Brian’s mother said with a worried laugh. “It’s so hard, with Brian around.”
“It’s in English,” Pauline said.
“And you’re what’s-her-name?”
She said, “I’m Eurydice.”
“He get you back okay?”
“No,” she said. “He looks back at me, and then I have to stay dead.”
“Oh, an unhappy ending,” Brian’s mother said
“You’re so gorgeous?” said Brian’s father skeptically. “He can’t stop himself from looking back?”
“It’s not that,” said Pauline. But at this point she felt that something had been achieved by her father-in-law, he had done what he meant to do, which was the same thing that he nearly always meant to do, in any conversation she had with him. And that was to break through the structure of some explanation he had asked her for, and she had unwillingly but patiently given, and, with a seemingly negligent kick, knock it into rubble. He had been dangerous to her for a long time in this way, but he wasn’t particularly so tonight.
But Brian did not know that. Brian was still figuring out how to come to her rescue.
“Pauline is gorgeous,” Brian said.
“Yes indeed,” said his mother.
“Maybe if she’d go to the hairdresser,” his father said. But Pauline’s long hair was such an old objection of his that it had become a family joke. Even Pauline laughed. She said, “I can’t afford to till we get the veranda roof fixed.” And Brian laughed boisterously, full of relief that she was able to take all this as a joke. It was what he had always told her to do.
“Just kid him back,” he said. “It’s the only way to handle him.”
“Yeah, well, if you’d got yourselves a decent house,” said his father. But this like Pauline’s hair was such a familiar sore point that it couldn’t rouse anybody. Brian and Pauline had bought a handsome house in bad repair on a street in Victoria where old mansions were being turned into ill-used apartment buildings. The house, the street, the messy old Garry oaks, the fact that no basement had been blasted out under the house, were all a horror to Brian’s father. Brian usually agreed with him and tried to go him one further. If his father pointed at the house next door all crisscrossed with black fire escapes, and asked what kind of neighbors they had, Brian said, “Really poor people, Dad. Drug addicts.” And when his father wanted to know how it was heated, he’d said, “Coal furnace. Hardly any of them left these days, you can get coal really cheap. Of course it’s dirty and it kind of stinks.” So what his father said now about a decent house might be some kind of peace signal. Or could be taken so.