How i met my husband by alice munro analysis

Exploring Literary Concepts in Short Stories

“A story is not like a road to follow . . . it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and dis-

covering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are

altered as well by being in this enclosed space.”

—Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Identify and describe elements of plot and point of view in a work of literature. • Analyze the themes and concepts presented in this chapter's literary selections. • Identify the use of irony in characters and plot development. • Identify the theme or themes and symbols present in a work of literature, describing plot

and character details that support those themes. • Recognize the use of existential thought in a work of literature.

Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7

This brief anthology provides an opportunity for you to read additional stories, explore the liter- ary concepts and techniques that we have considered, and gain life-applicable insights through engagement in the imaginative world that each one presents.

7.1 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View In “How I Met My Husband,” even the title hints at the importance that events and decisions are likely to have in the development of the story. But, because the narrator is looking back at situa- tions and actions, her insights and feelings are also prominent, creating a reflective tone.

Alice Munro (1931—)

Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, a small town in southern Ontario, Canada. She began publishing short stories when she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. Since then, she has published seven collections of her stories, three of which received the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 in rec- ognition of her distinctive craft and contributions to short story writing. Much of her work reflects perceptions she gained from observing the ordi- nary happenings and relationships of people in her small town and its rural surroundings. Speaking subtly to realities in today’s world, Munro’s work has a “looking back” quality, developed not with nostalgia but with clarity, humor, and insight, especially about women. ASSOCIATED PRESS/Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press

How I Met My Husband Alice Munro (1974)

We heard the plane come over at noon, roaring through the radio news, and we were sure it was going to hit the house, so we all ran out into the yard. We saw it come in over the tree tops, all red and silver, the first close-up plane I ever saw. Mrs. Peebles screamed.

“Crash landing,” their little boy said. Joey was his name.

“It’s okay,” said Dr. Peebles. “He knows what he’s doing.” Dr. Peebles was only an animal doctor, but had a calming way of talk- ing, like any doctor.

This was my first job—working for Dr. and Mrs. Peebles, who had bought an old house out on the Fifth Line, about five miles out of town. It was just when the trend was starting of town people buy- ing up old farms, not to work them but to live on them.

We watched the plane land across the road, where the fairgrounds used to be. It did make a good landing field, nice and level for the old race track, and the barns and display sheds torn down for scrap lumber so there was nothing in the way. Even the old grandstand bays had burned.

“All right,” said Mrs. Peebles, snappy as she always was when she got over her nerves. “Let’s go back in the house. Let’s not stand here gawking like a set of farmers.”

Note that this story uses a first-person point of view.

Everything is seen through the eyes of a woman who is

looking back at an experi- ence she had as a teenager.

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She didn’t say that to hurt my feelings. It never occurred to her.

I was just setting the dessert down when Loretta Bird arrived, out of breath, at the screen door.

“I thought it was going to crash into the house and kill youse all!”

She lived on the next place and the Peebleses thought she was a country-woman, they didn’t know the difference. She and her hus- band didn’t farm, he worked on the roads and had a bad name for drinking. They had seven children and couldn’t get credit at the HiWay Grocery. The Peebleses made her welcome, not knowing any better, as I say, and offered her dessert.

Dessert was never anything to write home about, at their place. A dish of Jell-O or sliced bananas or fruit out of a tin. “Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,” my mother used to say, but Mrs. Peebles operated differently.

Loretta Bird saw me getting the can of peaches.

“Oh, never mind,” she said. “I haven’t got the right kind of a stomach to trust what comes out of those tins, I can only eat home canning.”

I could have slapped her. I bet she never put down fruit in her life.

“I know what he’s landed here for,” she said. “He’s got permis- sion to use the fairgrounds and take people up for rides. It costs a dollar. It’s the same fellow who was over at Palmerston last week and was up the lakeshore before that. I wouldn’t go up, if you paid me.”

“I’d jump at the chance,” Dr. Peebles said. “I’d like to see this neighborhood from the air.”

Mrs. Peebles said she would just as soon see it from the ground. Joey said he wanted to go and Heather did, too. Joey was nine and Heather was seven.

“Would you, Edie?” Heather said.

I said I didn’t know. I was scared but I never admitted that, espe- cially in front of children I was taking care of.

“People are going to be coming out here in their cars raising dust and trampling your property, if I was you I would complain,” Loretta said. She hooked her legs around the chair rung and I knew we were in for a lengthy visit.

After Dr. Peebles went back to his office or out on his next call and Mrs. Peebles went for her nap, she would hang around me while I was trying to do the dishes. She would pass remarks about the Peebleses in their own house.

“She wouldn’t find time to lay down in the middle of the day, if she had seven kids like I got.”

She asked me did they fight and did they keep things in the dresser drawer not to have babies with. She said it was a sin if they did. I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about.

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I was fifteen and away from home for the first time. My parents had made the effort and sent me to high school for a year, but I didn’t like it, I was shy of strangers and the work was hard, they didn’t make it nice for you or explain the way they do now. At the end of the year the averages were published in the paper, and mine came out at the very bottom, 37 percent. My father said that’s enough and I didn’t blame him. The last thing I wanted, anyway, was to go on and end up teaching school. It happened the very day the paper came out with my disgrace in it, Dr. Peebles was staying at our place for dinner, having just helped one of our cows have twins, and he said I looked smart to him and his wife was looking for a girl to help. He said she felt tied down, with the two children, out in the country. I guess she would, my mother said, being polite, though I could tell from her face she was won- dering what on earth it would be like to have only two children and no barn work, and then to be complaining.

When I went home I would describe to them the work I had to do, and it made everybody laugh. Mrs. Peebles had an automatic washer and dryer, the first I ever saw. I have had those in my own home for such a long time now it’s hard to remember how much of a miracle it was to me, not having to struggle with the wringer and hang up and haul down. Let alone not having to heat water. Then there was practically no baking. Mrs. Peebles said she couldn’t make pie crust, the most amazing thing I ever heard a woman admit. I could, of course, and I could make light biscuits and a white cake and a dark cake, but they didn’t want it, she said they watched their figures. The only thing I didn’t like about work- ing there, in fact, was feeling half hungry a lot of the time. I used to bring back a box of doughnuts made out at home, and hide them under my bed. The children found out, and I didn’t mind sharing, but I thought I better bind them to secrecy.

The day after the plane landed Mrs. Peebles put both children in the car and drove over to Chesley to get their hair cut. There was a good woman then at Chesley for doing hair. She got hers done at the same place Mrs. Peebles did, and that meant they would be gone a good while. She had to pick a day Dr. Peebles wasn’t going out into the country, she didn’t have her own car. Cars were still in short supply then, after the war.

I loved being left in the house alone, to do my work at leisure. The kitchen was all white and bright yellow, with fluorescent lights. That was before they ever thought of making the appliances all different colors and doing the cupboards like dark old wood and hiding the lighting. I loved light. I loved the double sink. So would anybody new-come from washing dishes in a dish pan with a rag- plugged hole on an oilcloth-covered table by light of a coal-oil lamp. I kept everything shining.

The bathroom too. I had a bath in there once a week. They wouldn’t have minded if I took one oftener, but to me it seemed like asking too much, or maybe risking making it less wonderful. The basin and the tub and the toilet were all pink, and there were glass doors with flamingoes painted on them, to shut off the tub. The light had a rosy cast and the mat sank under your feet like

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snow, except that it was warm. The mirror was three-way. With the mirror all steamed up and the air like a perfume cloud, from things I was allowed to use, I stood up on the side of the tub and admired myself naked, from three directions. Sometimes I thought about the way we lived out at home and the way we lived here and how one way was so hard to imagine when you were living the other way. But I thought it was still a lot easier living the way we lived at home, to picture something like this, the painted flamingoes and the warmth and the soft mat, than it was for anybody knowing only things like this to picture how it was the other way. And why was that?

I was through my jobs in no time, and had the vegetables peeled for supper and sitting in cold water besides. Then I went into Mrs. Peebles’ bedroom. I had been in there plenty of times, cleaning, and I always took a good look in her closet, at the clothes she had hanging there. I wouldn’t have looked in her drawers, but a closet is open to anybody. That’s a lie. I would have looked in drawers, but I would have felt worse doing it and been more scared she could tell.

Some clothes in her closet she wore all the time, I was quite famil- iar with them. Others she never put on, they were pushed to the back. I was disappointed to see no wedding dress. But there was one long dress I could just see the skirt of, and I was hungering to see the rest. Now I took note of where it hung and lifted it out. It was satin, a lovely weight on my arm, light bluish-green in color, almost silvery. It had a fitted, pointed waist and a full skirt and an off-the-shoulder fold hiding the little sleeves.

Next thing was easy. I got out of my own things and slipped it on. I was slimmer at fifteen than anybody would believe who knows me now and the fit was beautiful. I didn’t, of course, have a strap- less bra on, which was what it needed, I just had to slide my straps down my arms under the material. Then I tried pinning up my hair, to get the effect. One thing led to another. I put on rouge and lip- stick and eyebrow pencil from her dresser. The heat of the day and the weight of the satin and all the excitement made me thirsty, and I went out to the kitchen, got-up as I was, to get a glass of ginger ale with ice cubes from the refrigerator. The Peebles drank ginger ale, or fruit drinks, all day, like water, and I was getting so I did too. Also there was no limit on ice cubes, which I was so fond of I would even put them in a glass of milk.

I turned from putting the ice tray back and saw a man watching me through the screen. It was the luckiest thing in the world I didn’t spill the ginger ale down the front of me then and there.

“I never meant to scare you. I knocked but you were getting the ice out, you didn’t hear me.”

I couldn’t see what he looked like, he was dark the way somebody is pressed up against a screen door with the bright daylight behind them. I only knew he wasn’t from around here.

“I’m from the plane over there. My name is Chris Watters and what I was wondering was if I could use that pump.”

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There was a pump in the yard. That was the way the people used to get their water. Now I noticed he was carrying a pail.

“You’re welcome,” I said, “I can get it from the tap and save you pumping.” I guess I wanted him to know we had piped water, didn’t pump ourselves.

“I don’t mind the exercise.” He didn’t move, though, and finally he said, “Were you going to a dance?”

Seeing a stranger there had made me entirely forget how I was dressed.

“Or is that the way ladies around here generally get dressed up in the afternoon?”

I didn’t know how to joke back then. I was too embarrassed.

“You live here? Are you the lady of the house?”

“I’m the hired girl.”

Some people change when they find that out, their whole way of looking at you and speaking to you changes, but his didn’t.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you you look very nice. I was so sur- prised when I looked in the door and saw you. Just because you looked so nice and beautiful.”

I wasn’t even old enough then to realize how out of the common it is, for a man to say something like that to a woman, or some- body he is treating like a woman. For a man to say a word like beautiful. I wasn’t old enough to realize or to say anything back, or in fact to do anything but wish he would go away. Not that I didn’t like him, but just that it upset me so, having him look at me, and me trying to think of something to say.

He must have understood. He said good-bye, and thanked me, and went and started filling his pail from the pump. I stood behind the Venetian blinds in the dining room, watching him. When he had gone, I went into the bedroom and took the dress off and put it back in the same place. I dressed in my own clothes and took my hair down and washed my face, wiping it on Kleenex, which I threw in the wastebasket.

r The Peebleses asked me what kind of man he was. Young, middle- aged, short, tall? I couldn’t say.

“Good-looking?” Dr. Peebles teased me.

I couldn’t think a thing but that he would be coming to get his water again, he would be talking to Dr. or Mrs. Peebles making friends with them, and he would mention seeing me that first afternoon dressed up. Why not mention it? He would think it was funny. And no idea of the trouble it would get me into.

After supper the Peebleses drove into town to go to a movie. She wanted to go somewhere with her hair fresh done. I sat in my bright kitchen wondering what to do, knowing I would never

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sleep. Mrs. Peebles might not fire me, when she found out, but it would give her a different feeling about me altogether. This was the first place I ever worked but I already had picked up things about the way people feel when you are working for them. They like to think you aren’t curious. Not just that you aren’t dishonest, that isn’t enough. They like to feel you don’t notice things, that you don’t think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they like things ironed, and so on. I don’t mean they weren’t kind to me, because they were. They had me eat my meals with them (to tell the truth I expected to, I didn’t know there were families who don’t) and sometimes they took me along in the car. But all the same.

I went up and checked on the children being asleep and then I went out. I had to do it. I crossed the road and went in the old fair- grounds gate. The plane looked unnatural sitting there, and shin- ing with the moon. Off at the far side of the fairgrounds, where the bush was taking over, I saw his tent.

He was sitting outside it smoking a cigarette. He saw me coming.

“Hello, were you looking for a plane ride? I don’t start taking people up till tomorrow.” Then he looked again and said, “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t know you without your long dress on.”

My heart was knocking away, my tongue was dried up. I had to say something. But I couldn’t. My throat was closed and I was like a deaf-and-dumb.

“Did you want a ride? Sit down. Have a cigarette.”

I couldn’t even shake my head to say no, so he gave me one.

“Put it in your mouth or I can’t light it. It’s a good thing I’m used to shy ladies.”

I did. It wasn’t the first time I had smoked a cigarette, actually. My girlfriend out home, Muriel Lowe, used to steal them from her brother.

“Look at your hand shaking. Did you just want to have a chat, or what?”

In one burst I said, “I wisht you wouldn’t say anything about that dress.”

“What dress? Oh, the long dress.”

“It’s Mrs. Peebles’.”

“Whose? Oh, the lady you work for? Is that it? She wasn’t home so you got dressed up in her dress, eh? You got dressed up and played queen. I don’t blame you. You’re not smoking the cigarette right. Don’t just puff. Draw it in. Did anybody ever show you how to inhale? Are you scared I’ll tell on you? Is that it?”

I was so ashamed at having to ask him to connive this way I couldn’t nod. I just looked at him and he saw yes.

“Well I won’t. I won’t in the slightest way mention it or embarrass you. I give you my word of honor.”

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Then he changed the subject, to help me out, seeing I couldn’t even thank him.

“What do you think of this sign?”

It was a board sign lying practically at my feet. SEE THE WORLD FROM THE SKY. ADULTS $1.00, CHILDREN 50¢. QUALIFIED PILOT.

“My old sign was getting pretty beat up, I thought I’d make a new one. That’s what I’ve been doing with my time today.”

The lettering wasn’t all that handsome, I thought. I could have done a better one in half an hour.

“I’m not an expert at signmaking.”

“It’s very good,” I said.

“I don’t need it for publicity, word of mouth is usually enough. I turned away two carloads tonight. I felt like taking it easy. I didn’t tell them ladies were dropping in to visit me.”

Now I remembered the children and I was scared again, in case one of them had waked up and called me and I wasn’t there.

“Do you have to go so soon?”

I remembered some manners. “Thank you for the cigarette.”

“Don’t forget. You have my word of honor.”

I tore off across the fairgrounds, scared I’d see the car heading home from town. My sense of time was mixed up, I didn’t know how long I’d been out of the house. But it was all right, it wasn’t late, the children were asleep. I got in bed myself and lay think- ing what a lucky end to the day, after all, and among things to be grateful for I could be grateful Loretta Bird hadn’t been the one who caught me.

r The yard and borders didn’t get trampled, it wasn’t as bad as that. All the same it seemed very public, around the house. The sign was on the fairgrounds gate. People came mostly after supper but a good many in the afternoon, too. The Bird children all came with- out fifty cents between them and hung on the gate. We got used to the excitement of the plane coming in and taking off, it wasn’t excitement any more. I never went over, after that one time, but would see him when he came to get his water. I would be out on the steps doing sitting-down work, like preparing vegetables, if I could.

“Why don’t you come over? I’ll take you up in my plane.”

“I’m saving my money,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“For what? For getting married?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll take you up for free if you come sometime when it’s slack. I thought you would come, and have another cigarette.”

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I made a face to hush him, because you never could tell when the children would be sneaking around the porch, or Mrs. Peebles herself listening in the house. Sometimes she came out and had a conversation with him. He told her things he hadn’t bothered to tell me. But then I hadn’t thought to ask. He told her he had been in the War, that was where he learned to fly a plane, and now he couldn’t settle down to ordinary life, this was what he liked. She said she couldn’t imagine anybody liking such a thing. Though sometimes, she said, she was almost bored enough to try anything herself, she wasn’t brought up to living in the country. It’s all my husband’s idea, she said. This was news to me.

“Maybe you ought to give flying lessons,” she said.

“Would you take them?”

She just laughed.

r Sunday was a busy flying day in spite of it being preached against from two pulpits. We were all sitting out watching. Joey and Heather were over on the fence with the Bird kids. Their father had said they could go, after their mother saying all week they couldn’t.

A car came down the road past the parked cars and pulled up right in the drive. It was Loretta Bird who got out, all importance, and on the driver’s side another woman got out, more sedately. She was wearing sunglasses.

“This is a lady looking for the man that flies the plane,” Loretta Bird said. “I heard her inquire in the hotel coffee shop where I was having a Coke and I brought her out.”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the lady said. “I’m Alice Kelling, Mr. Watters’ fiancée.”

This Alice Kelling had on a pair of brown and white checked slacks and a yellow top. Her bust looked to me rather low and bumpy. She had a worried face. Her hair had had a permanent, but had grown out, and she wore a yellow band to keep it off her face. Nothing in the least pretty or even young-looking about her. But you could tell from how she talked she was from the city, or edu- cated, or both.

Dr. Peebles stood up and introduced himself and his wife and me and asked her to be seated.

“He’s up in the air right now, but you’re welcome to sit and wait. He gets his water here and he hasn’t been yet. He’ll probably take his break about five.”

“That is him, then?” said Alice Kelling, wrinkling and straining at the sky.

“He’s not in the habit of running out on you, taking a different name?” Dr. Peebles laughed. He was the one, not his wife, to offer iced tea. Then she sent me into the kitchen to fix it. She smiled. She was wearing sunglasses too.

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“He never mentioned his fiancée,” she said.

I loved fixing iced tea with lots of ice and slices of lemon in tall glasses. I ought to have mentioned before, Dr. Peebles was an abstainer, at least around the house, or I wouldn’t have been allowed to take the place. I had to fix a glass for Loretta Bird, too, though it galled me, and when I went out she had settled in my lawn chair, leaving me the steps.

“I knew you was a nurse when I first heard you in that coffee shop.”

“How would you know a thing like that?”

“I get my hunches about people. Was that how you met him, nursing?”

“Chris? Well yes. Yes, it was.”

“Oh, were you overseas?” said Mrs. Peebles.

“No, it was before he went overseas. I nursed him when he was stationed at Centralia and had a ruptured appendix. We got engaged and then he went overseas. My, this is refreshing, after a long drive.”

“He’ll be glad to see you,” Dr. Peebles said, “It’s a rackety kind of life, isn’t it, not staying in one place long enough to really make friends.”

“Youse’ve had a long engagement,” Loretta Bird said.

Alice Kelling passed that over. “I was going to get a room at the hotel, but when I was offered directions I came on out. Do you think I could phone them?”

“No need,” Dr. Peebles said. “You’re five miles away from him if you stay at the hotel. Here, you’re right across the road. Stay with us. We’ve got rooms on rooms, look at this big house.”

Asking people to stay, just like that, is certainly a country thing, and maybe seemed natural to him now, but not to Mrs. Peebles, from the way she said, oh yes, we have plenty of room. Or to Alice Kelling, who kept protesting, but let herself be worn down. I got the feeling it was a temptation to her, to be that close. I was trying for a look at her ring. Her nails were painted red, her fingers were freckled and wrinkled. It was a tiny stone. Muriel Lowe’s cousin had one twice as big.

Chris came to get his water, later in the afternoon just as Dr. Peebles had predicted. He must have recognized the car from a way off. He came smiling.

“Here I am chasing after you to see what you’re up to,” called Alice Kelling. She got up and went to meet him and they kissed, just touched, in front of us.

“You’re going to spend a lot on gas that way,” Chris said.

Dr. Peebles invited Chris to stay for supper, since he had already put up the sign that said: NO MORE RIDES TILL 7 P.M. Mrs. Peebles wanted it served in the yard, in spite of bugs. One thing strange

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to anybody from the country is this eating outside. I had made a potato salad earlier and she had made a jellied salad, that was one thing she could do, so it was just a matter of getting those out, and some sliced meat and cucumbers and fresh leaf lettuce. Loretta Bird hung around for some time saying, “Oh, well. I guess I better get home to those yappers,” and, “It’s so nice just sitting here, I sure hate to get up,” but nobody invited her, I was relieved to see, and finally she had to go.

That night after rides were finished Alice Kelling and Chris went off somewhere in her car. I lay awake till they got back. When I saw the car lights sweep my ceiling I got up to look down on them through the slats of my blind. I don’t know what I thought I was going to see. Muriel Lowe and I used to sleep on her front veranda and watch her sister and her sister’s boyfriend saying good night. Afterwards we couldn’t get to sleep, for longing for somebody to kiss us and rub up against us and we would talk about suppose you were out in a boat with a boy and he wouldn’t bring you in to shore unless you did it, or what if somebody got you trapped in a barn, you would have to, wouldn’t you, it wouldn’t be your fault. Muriel said her two girl cousins used to try with a toilet paper roll that one of them was a boy. We wouldn’t do anything like that; just lay and wondered.

All that happened was that Chris got out on one side and she got out on the other and they walked off separately—him towards the fairgrounds and her toward the house. I got back in bed and imag- ined about me coming home with him, not like that.

Next morning Alice Kelling got up late and I fixed a grapefruit for her the way I had learned and Mrs. Peebles sat down with her to visit and have another cup of coffee. Mrs. Peebles seemed pleased enough now, having company. Alice Kelling said she guessed she better get used to putting in a day just watching Chris take off and come down, and Mrs. Peebles said she didn’t know if she should suggest it because Alice Kelling was the one with the car, but the lake was only twenty-five miles away and what a good day for a picnic.

Alice Kelling took her up on the idea and by eleven o’clock they were in the car, with Joey and Heather and a sandwich lunch I had made. The only thing was that Chris hadn’t come down, and she wanted to tell him where they were going.

“Edie’ll go over and tell him,” Mrs. Peebles said. “There’s no problem.”

Alice Kelling wrinkled her face and agreed.

“Be sure and tell him we’ll be back by five!”

I didn’t see that he would be concerned about knowing this right away, and I thought of him eating whatever he ate over there, alone, cooking on his camp stove, so I got to work and mixed up a crumb cake and baked it, in between the other work I had to do; then, when it was a bit cooled, wrapped it in a tea towel. I didn’t do anything to myself but take off my apron and comb my hair. I would like to have put some makeup on, but I was too afraid

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it would remind him of the way he first saw me, and that would humiliate me all over again.

He had come and put another sign on the gate: NO RIDES THIS P.M. APOLOGIES. I worried that he wasn’t feeling well. No sign of him outside and the tent flap was down. I knocked on the pole.

“Come in,” he said, in a voice that would just as soon have said Stay out.

I lifted the flap.

“Oh, it’s you. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”

He had been just sitting on the side of the bed, smoking. Why not at least sit and smoke in the fresh air?

“I brought a cake and hope you’re not sick,” I said.

“Why would I be sick? Oh—that sign. That’s all right. I’m just tired of talking to people. I don’t mean you. Have a seat.” He pinned back the tent flap. “Get some fresh air in here.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, there was no place else. It was one of those fold-up cots, really; I remembered and gave him his fiancée’s message.

He ate some of the cake. “Good.”

“Put the rest away for when you’re hungry later.”

“I’ll tell you a secret. I won’t be around here much longer.”

“Are you getting married?”

“Ha ha. What time did you say they’d be back?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Well, by that time this place will have seen the last of me. A plane can get further than a car.” He unwrapped the cake and ate another piece of it, absent-mindedly.

“Now you’ll be thirsty.”

“There’s some water in the pail.”

“It won’t be very cold. I could bring some fresh. I could bring some ice from the refrigerator.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to go. I want a nice long time of saying good-bye to you.”

He put the cake away carefully and sat beside me and started those little kisses so soft I can’t ever let myself think about them, such kindness in his face and lovely kisses, all over my eyelids and neck and ears, all over, then me kissing back as well as I could (I had only kissed a boy on a dare before, and kissed my own arms for practice) and we lay back on the cot and pressed together, just gently, and he did some other things, not bad things or not in a bad way. It was lovely in the tent, that smell of grass and hot tent cloth with the sun beating down on it, and he said, “I wouldn’t do you any harm for the world.” Once, when he had rolled on top of me and we were sort of rocking together on the cot, he said softly,

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“Oh, no,” and freed himself and jumped up and got the water pail. He splashed some of it on his neck and face, and the little bit left, on me lying there.

“That’s to cool us off, miss.”

When we said good-bye I wasn’t at all sad, because he held my face and said, “I’m going to write you a letter. I’ll tell you where I am and maybe you can come and see me. Would you like that? Okay then. You wait.” I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn’t get the pleasure of till I considered them alone.

r No consternation at first about the plane being gone. They thought he had taken somebody up, and I didn’t enlighten them. Dr. Peebles had phoned he had to go to the country, so there was just us having supper, and then Loretta Bird thrusting her head in the door and saying, “I see he’s took off.”

“What?” said Alice Kelling, and pushed back her chair.

“The kids come and told me this afternoon he was taking down his tent. Did he think he’d run through all the business there was around here? He didn’t take off without letting you know, did he?”

“He’ll send me word,” Alice Kelling said. “He’ll probably phone tonight. He’s terribly restless, since the war.”

“Edie, he didn’t mention to you, did he?” Mrs. Kelling said, “When you took over the message?”

“Yes,” I said. So far so true.

“Well, why didn’t you say?” All of them were looking at me. “Did he say where he was going?”

“He said he might try Bayfield,” I said. What made me tell such a lie? I didn’t intend it.

“Bayfield, how far is that?” said Alice Kelling.

Mrs. Peebles said, “Thirty, thirty-five miles.”

“That’s not far. Oh, well, that’s really not far at all. It’s on the lake, isn’t it?”

You’d think I’d be ashamed of myself setting her on the wrong track. I did it to give him more time, whatever time he needed. I lied for him, and also, I have to admit, for me. Women should stick together and not do things like that. I see that now, but didn’t then. I never thought of myself as being in any way like her, or coming to the same troubles, ever.

She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. I thought she suspected my lie.

“When did he mention this to you?”

“Earlier.”

“When you were over at the plane?”

“Yes.”

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“You must’ve stayed and had a chat.” She smiled at me, not a nice smile. “You must’ve stayed and had a little visit with him.”

“I took a cake,” I said, thinking that telling some truth would spare me telling the rest.

“We didn’t have a cake,” said Mrs. Peebles rather sharply.

“I baked one.”

Alice Kelling said, “That was very friendly of you.”

“Did you get permission,” said Loretta Bird. “You never know what these girls’ll do next,” she said. “It’s not they mean harm so much, as they’re ignorant.”

“The cake is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Peebles broke in. “Edie, I wasn’t aware you knew Chris that well.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not surprised,” Alice Kelling said in a high voice. “I knew by the look of her as soon as I saw her. We get them at the hospital all the time.” She looked hard at me with her stretched smile. “Having their babies. We have to put them in a special ward because of their diseases. Little country tramps. Fourteen and fif- teen years old. You should see the babies they have, too.”

“There was a bad woman here in town had a baby that pus was running out of its eyes,” Loretta Bird put in.

“Wait a minute,” said Mrs. Peebles. “What is this talk? Edie. What about you and Mr. Watters? Were you intimate with him?”

“Yes,” I said. I was thinking of us lying on the cot and kissing, wasn’t that intimate? And I would never deny it.

They were all one minute quiet, even Loretta Bird.

“Well,” said Mrs. Peebles, “I am surprised. I think I need a ciga- rette. This is the first of any such tendencies I’ve seen in her,” she said, speaking to Alice Kelling, but Alice Kelling was looking at me.

“Loose little bitch.” Tears ran down her face. “Loose little bitch, aren’t you? I knew as soon as I saw you. Men despise girls like you. He just made use of you and went off, you know that, don’t you? Girls like you are just nothing, they’re just public conveniences, just filthy little rags!”

“Oh, now,” said Mrs. Peebles.

“Filthy,” Alice Kelling sobbed. “Filthy little rag!”

“Don’t get yourself upset,” Loretta Bird said. She was swollen up with pleasure at being in on this scene. “Men are all the same.”

“Edie, I’m very surprised,” Mrs. Peebles said. “I thought your par- ents were so strict. You don’t want to have a baby, do you?”

I’m still ashamed of what happened next. I lost control, just like a six-year-old, I started howling. “You don’t get a baby from just doing that!”

“You see. Some of them are that ignorant,” Loretta Bird said.

But Mrs. Peebles jumped up and caught my arms and shook me.

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“Calm down. Don’t get hysterical. Calm down. Stop crying. Listen to me. Listen. I’m wondering, if you know what being intimate means. Now tell me. What did you think it meant?”

“Kissing,” I howled.

She let go. “Oh, Edie. Stop it. Don’t be silly. It’s all right. It’s all a misunderstanding. Being intimate means a lot more than that. Oh, I wondered.”

“She’s trying to cover up, now,” said Alice Kelling. “Yes. She’s not so stupid. She sees she got herself in trouble.”

“I believe her,” Mrs. Peebles said. “This is an awful scene.”

“Well there is one way to find out,” said Alice Kelling, getting up. “After all, I am a nurse.”

Mrs. Peebles drew a breath and said, “No. No. Go to your room, Edie. And stop that noise. This is too disgusting.”

I heard the car start in a little while. I tried to stop crying, pulling back each wave as it started over me. Finally, I succeeded, and lay heaving on the bed.

Mrs. Peebles came and stood in the doorway.

“She’s gone,” she said. “That Bird woman too. Of course, you know you should never have gone near that man and that is the cause of all this trouble. I have a headache. As soon as you can, go and wash your face in cold water and get at the dishes and we will not say any more about this.”

r Nor we didn’t. I didn’t figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from. Mrs. Peebles was not very friendly to me afterward, but she was fair. Not very friendly is the wrong way of describing what she was. She never had been very friendly. It was just that now she had to see me all the time and it got on her nerves, a little.

As for me, I put it all out of my mind like a bad dream and concen- trated on waiting for my letter. The mail came every day except Sunday, between one-thirty and two in the afternoon, a good time for me because Mrs. Peebles was always having her nap. I would get the kitchen all cleaned and then go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. I was perfectly happy, waiting. I for- got all about Alice Kelling and her misery and awful talk and Mrs. Peebles and her chilliness and the embarrassment of whether she had told Dr. Peebles and the face of Loretta Bird, getting her fill of other people’s troubles. I was always smiling when the mailman got there, and continued smiling even after he gave me the mail and I saw today wasn’t the day. The mailman was a Carmichael. I knew by his face because there are a lot of Carmichaels living out by us and so many of them have a sort of sticking-out top lip. So I asked his name (he was a young man, shy, but good humored, anybody could ask him anything) and then I said, “I knew by your face!” He was pleased by that and always glad to see me and got a little less shy. “You’ve got the smile I’ve been waiting on all day!” he used to holler out the car window.

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It never crossed my mind for a long time a letter might not come. I believed in it coming just like I believed the sun would rise in the morning. I just put off my hope from day to day, and there was the goldenrod out around the mailbox and the children gone back to school, and the leaves turning, and I was wearing a sweater when I went to wait. One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full- blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me: No letter was ever going to come. It was an impossible idea to get used to. No, not impossible. If I thought about Chris’s face when he said he was going to write to me, it was impossible, but if I forgot that and thought about the actual tin mailbox, empty, it was plain and true. I kept on going to meet the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead. I only smiled because I thought of the mailman counting on it, and he didn’t have an easy life, with the winter driving ahead.

Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mail- boxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to get gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. Even though there might be things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it still is better.

I was surprised when the mailman phoned the Peebleses’ place in the evening and asked for me. He said he missed me. He asked if I would like to go to Goderich, where some well-known movie was on, I forget now what. So I said yes, and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a year more while I got my things together, and then we did marry. He always tells the children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox every day, and naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy.

“How I Met My Husband” by Alice Munro (1974) (7,247 words), from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro, Random House.

R E S P O N S E A N D R E F L E C T I O N Q U E S T I O N S

Exploring Point of View

1. This story is told in the first person by a woman who is looking back at an experience she had as a teenager. What are the strengths and limitations of such a narrator?

2. Edie makes this statement in the opening of the last section of the story: “I didn’t figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from.” What does this statement reveal about her reliability as a narrator, especially in regard to Chris?

Exploring Plot

3. The arrival of Chris and his plane initiates the action, and his appearance at the window while Edie is dressing up in Mrs. Peebles’s clothes provides a jolting start to their relationship. What other means does Munro use to advance the plot?

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7.2 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony

“The Diamond Necklace” illustrates how irony can be used as the central element in developing plot in a story. Particular assumptions that the protagonist makes about social acceptance and about personal sacrifice create drama, reveal character, and provide ironic surprise.

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893)

Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy, France, to wealthy parents. He studied law at the University of Paris. Gustave Flaubert, one of France’s most prominent novelists, was a close friend of de Maupassant’s mother and a strong influence on the writer, inviting him into the literary community. De Maupassant, considered one of the fathers of the short story form, was a prolific writer. In addition to six novels, he wrote plays and poetry—and nearly 300 short stories. “The Diamond Necklace” was first published in 1884 in Le Gaulois, a French daily newspaper.

© adoc-photos/Historical/Corbis

The Diamond Necklace Guy de Maupassant (1884), Translated by Albert M. C. McMaster,

B.A.; A.E. Henderson, B.A.; Mme. Quesada; and others

The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no way of being known, understood, loved, married by any rich and distinguished man; so she let herself be married to a little clerk of the Ministry of Public Instruction.

She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was unhappy as if she had really fallen from a higher station; since with women there is neither caste nor rank, for beauty, grace and charm take the place of family and birth. Natural ingenuity, instinct for what is elegant, a supple mind are their sole hierarchy, and often make of women of the people the equals of the very greatest ladies.

Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries. She was distressed at the poverty of her dwelling, at the bareness of the walls, at the shabby chairs, the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework aroused in her despairing regrets and bewildering dreams. She thought of silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, illumined by tall bronze candelabra, and of two great footmen in knee breeches who sleep in the big armchairs, made drowsy by the oppressive heat of the stove. She

Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7

thought of long reception halls hung with ancient silk, of the dainty cabinets containing priceless curiosities and of the little coquettish perfumed reception rooms made for chatting at five o’clock with intimate friends, with men famous and sought after, whom all women envy and whose attention they all desire.

When she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth in use three days, opposite her husband, who uncov- ered the soup tureen and declared with a delighted air, “Ah, the good soup! I don’t know anything better than that,” she thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware, of tapestry that peopled the walls with ancient personages and with strange birds flying in the midst of a fairy forest; and she thought of delicious dishes served on marvellous plates and of the whispered gallantries to which you listen with a sphinxlike smile while you are eating the pink meat of a trout or the wings of a quail.

She had no gowns, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that. She felt made for that. She would have liked so much to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after.

She had a friend, a former schoolmate at the convent, who was rich, and whom she did not like to go to see any more because she felt so sad when she came home.

But one evening her husband reached home with a triumphant air and holding a large envelope in his hand.

“There,” said he, “there is something for you.”

She tore the paper quickly and drew out a printed card which bore these words:

The Minister of Public Instruction and Madame Georges Ramponneau request the honor of M. and Madame Loisel’s company at the palace of the Ministry on Monday evening, January 18th.

Instead of being delighted, as her husband had hoped, she threw the invitation on the table crossly, muttering:

“What do you wish me to do with that?”

“Why, my dear, I thought you would be glad. You never go out, and this is such a fine opportunity. I had great trouble to get it. Every one wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there.”

She looked at him with an irritated glance and said impatiently: “And what do you wish me to put on my back?”

He had not thought of that. He stammered:

“Why, the gown you go to the theatre in. It looks very well to me.”

He stopped, distracted, seeing that his wife was weeping. Two great tears ran slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the cor- ners of her mouth.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” he answered.

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By a violent effort she conquered her grief and replied in a calm voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks:

“Nothing. Only I have no gown, and, therefore, I can’t go to this ball. Give your card to some colleague whose wife is better equipped than I am.”

He was in despair. He resumed:

“Come, let us see, Mathilde. How much would it cost, a suitable gown, which you could use on other occasions—something very simple?”

She reflected several seconds, making her calculations and won- dering also what sum she could ask without drawing on herself an immediate refusal and a frightened exclamation from the eco- nomical clerk.

Finally she replied hesitating:

“I don’t know exactly, but I think I could manage it with four hun- dred francs.”

He grew a little pale, because he was laying aside just that amount to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre, with several friends who went to shoot larks there of a Sunday.

But he said:

“Very well. I will give you four hundred francs. And try to have a pretty gown.”

The day of the ball drew near and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy, anxious. Her frock was ready, however. Her husband said to her one evening:

“What is the matter? Come, you have seemed very queer these last three days.”

And she answered:

“It annoys me not to have a single piece of jewelry, not a single ornament, nothing to put on. I shall look poverty-stricken. I would almost rather not go at all.”

“You might wear natural flowers,” said her husband. “They’re very stylish at this time of year. For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent roses.”

She was not convinced.

“No; there’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.”

“How stupid you are!” her husband cried. “Go look up your friend, Madame Forestier, and ask her to lend you some jewels. You’re intimate enough with her to do that.”

She uttered a cry of joy:

“True! I never thought of it.”

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The next day she went to her friend and told her of her distress. Madame Forestier went to a wardrobe with a mirror, took out a large jewel box, brought it back, opened it and said to Madame Loisel:

“Choose, my dear.”

She saw first some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian gold cross set with precious stones, of admirable work- manship. She tried on the ornaments before the mirror, hesitated and could not make up her mind to part with them, to give them back. She kept asking:

“Haven’t you any more?”

“Why, yes. Look further; I don’t know what you like.”

Suddenly she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb diamond necklace, and her heart throbbed with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it round her throat, outside her high-necked waist, and was lost in ecstasy at her reflection in the mirror.

Then she asked, hesitating, filled with anxious doubt:

“Will you lend me this, only this?”

“Why, yes, certainly.”

She threw her arms round her friend’s neck, kissed her passion- ately, then fled with her treasure.

The night of the ball arrived. Madame Loisel was a great success. She was prettier than any other woman present, elegant, grace- ful, smiling and wild with joy. All the men looked at her, asked her name, sought to be introduced. All the attaches of the Cabinet wished to waltz with her. She was remarked by the minister himself.

She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her suc- cess, in a sort of cloud of happiness comprised of all this homage, admiration, these awakened desires and of that sense of triumph which is so sweet to woman’s heart.

She left the ball about four o’clock in the morning. Her husband had been sleeping since midnight in a little deserted anteroom with three other gentlemen whose wives were enjoying the ball.

He threw over her shoulders the wraps he had brought, the mod- est wraps of common life, the poverty of which contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress. She felt this and wished to escape so as not to be remarked by the other women, who were envelop- ing themselves in costly furs.

Loisel held her back, saying: “Wait a bit. You will catch cold out- side. I will call a cab.”

But she did not listen to him and rapidly descended the stairs. When they reached the street they could not find a carriage and

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began to look for one, shouting after the cabmen passing at a distance.

They went toward the Seine in despair, shivering with cold. At last they found on the quay one of those ancient night cabs which, as though they were ashamed to show their shabbiness during the day, are never seen round Paris until after dark.

It took them to their dwelling in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they mounted the stairs to their flat. All was ended for her. As to him, he reflected that he must be at the ministry at ten o’clock that morning.

She removed her wraps before the glass so as to see herself once more in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She no longer had the necklace around her neck!

“What is the matter with you?” demanded her husband, already half undressed.

She turned distractedly toward him.

“I have—I have—I’ve lost Madame Forestier’s necklace,” she cried.

He stood up, bewildered.

“What!—how? Impossible!”

They looked among the folds of her skirt, of her cloak, in her pock- ets, everywhere, but did not find it.

“You’re sure you had it on when you left the ball?” he asked.

“Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the minister’s house.”

“But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall. It must be in the cab.”

“Yes, probably. Did you take his number?”

“No. And you—didn’t you notice it?”

“No.”

They looked, thunderstruck, at each other. At last Loisel put on his clothes.

“I shall go back on foot,” said he, “over the whole route, to see whether I can find it.”

He went out. She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without any fire, without a thought.

Her husband returned about seven o’clock. He had found nothing.

He went to police headquarters, to the newspaper offices to offer a reward; he went to the cab companies—everywhere, in fact, whither he was urged by the least spark of hope.

She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this terrible calamity.

Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face. He had discov- ered nothing.

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“You must write to your friend,” said he, “that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give us time to turn round.”

At the end of a week they had lost all hope. Loisel, who had aged five years, declared:

“We must consider how to replace that ornament.”

The next day they took the box that had contained it and went to the jeweler whose name was found within. He consulted his books.

“It was not I, madame, who sold that necklace; I must simply have furnished the case.”

Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like the other, trying to recall it, both sick with chagrin and grief.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds that seemed to them exactly like the one they had lost. It was worth forty thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.

So they begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days yet. And they made a bargain that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand francs, in case they should find the lost necklace before the end of February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He would borrow the rest.

He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up ruinous obligations, dealt with usurers and all the race of lenders. He compromised all the rest of his life, risked signing a note with- out even knowing whether he could meet it; and, frightened by the trouble yet to come, by the black misery that was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privations and moral tortures that he was to suffer, he went to get the new necklace, laying upon the jeweler’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.

When Madame Loisel took back the necklace Madame Forestier said to her with a chilly manner:

“You should have returned it sooner; I might have needed it.”

She did not open the case, as her friend had so much feared. If she had detected the substitution, what would she have thought, what would she have said? Would she not have taken Madame Loisel for a thief?

Thereafter Madame Loisel knew the horrible existence of the needy. She bore her part, however, with sudden heroism. That dreadful debt must be paid. She would pay it. They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings; they rented a garret under the roof.

She came to know what heavy housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, using her dainty fin- gers and rosy nails on greasy pots and pans. She washed the soiled linen, the shirts and the dishcloths, which she dried upon a line;

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she carried the slops down to the street every morning and carried up the water, stopping for breath at every landing. And dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, a basket on her arm, bargaining, meeting with imper- tinence, defending her miserable money, sou by sou.

Every month they had to meet some notes, renew others, obtain more time.

Her husband worked evenings, making up a tradesman’s accounts, and late at night he often copied manuscript for five sous a page.

This life lasted ten years.

At the end of ten years they had paid everything, everything, with the rates of usury and the accumulations of the compound interest.

Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished households—strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down near the win- dow and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so admired.

What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!

But one Sunday, having gone to take a walk in the Champs Elysees,1 to refresh herself after the labors of the week, she sud- denly perceived a woman who was leading a child. It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still charming.

Madame Loisel felt moved. Should she speak to her? Yes, cer- tainly. And now that she had paid, she would tell her all about it. Why not?

She went up.

“Good-day, Jeanne.”

The other, astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain good-wife, did not recognize her at all and stammered:

“But—madame!—I do not know—You must have mistaken.”

“No. I am Mathilde Loisel.”

Her friend uttered a cry.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are changed!”

“Yes, I have had a pretty hard life, since I last saw you, and great poverty—and that because of you!”

“Of me! How so?”

“Do you remember that diamond necklace you lent me to wear at the ministerial ball?”

1 A prestigious avenue in Paris.

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“Yes. Well?”

“Well, I lost it.”

“What do you mean? You brought it back.”

“I brought you back another exactly like it. And it has taken us ten years to pay for it. You can understand that it was not easy for us, for us who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad.”

Madame Forestier had stopped.

“You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?”

“Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very similar.”

And she smiled with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her hands.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most only five hundred francs!”

This selection is in the public domain.

R E S P O N S E A N D R E F L E C T I O N Q U E S T I O N S

Exploring Plot

1. Are the events in the plot plausible? Or does the plot seem contrived to illustrate the narrator’s opening observation about fate, which allowed Mme. Loisel, “as if by a mistake of destiny,” to be born into a family of clerks?

2. Plot is developed through conflict—either external conflict, when one person opposes another, or internal conflict, when a person must make a difficult choice between his or her own oppos- ing aspirations or ideals. At what points in the story is the plot driven by internal conflict? By external conflict?

Exploring Point of View

3. De Maupassant uses a third-person point of view with limited omniscience to give the reader an intimate look at what’s happening in Mme. Loisel’s mind. What evidence suggests that the narra- tor’s point of view is sympathetic toward Mme. Loisel? Unsympathetic to her?

4. How is this point of view used effectively to provide insights on happiness, on beauty, on materialism?

Exploring Irony

5. Discuss de Maupassant’s use of irony in the following instances: a. The diamonds in Mme. Forestier’s necklace being fake b. The invitation to the ball c. Mme. Loisel’s decision to pay the debt (“She took her part, moreover, all of a sudden, with

heroism.”) 6. Explain the author’s use of irony in the story’s masterful ending. How does he use irony to make

serious observations?

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7.3 Exploring Theme and Symbolism As you read Raymond Carver’s short story, consider how the major symbol, the cathedral, serves to illuminate the theme. Consider, too, the role of blindness, sight, and insight.

Raymond Carver (1938–1988)

Carver was born in Oregon and worked with his father in sawmills before graduating from Humboldt State College in California. Carver began writ- ing while in college, worked in the publishing field, and taught at various universities. He was widely praised as a fiction writer, particularly for his skill in short story writing. His struggle with alcoholism limited his productivity for extended periods. After meeting the American poet Tess Gallagher, he changed his life patterns. Where I’m Calling From, a collection of 37 stories, was published in 1988. Carver died of cancer when he was 50. His poem “Gravy,” etched on his gravestone, includes these lines:

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy. Gravy, these past ten years. Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman.

Excerpts from "Gravy" from A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1988 by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989, 2000 by Tess. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC and of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

© Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/ Corbis

Cathedral Raymond Carver (1981)

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of tire summer was in officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’d worked with this blind man all sum- mer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service

Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7

department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.

When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read.

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer-to- be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So, okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the military. She told the blind man she loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out.

But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance. In time, she put it all on a tape and sent the tape to the blind man. Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off lickety-split. Next to writ- ing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about

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her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him everything, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know. And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—” But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.

Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.

“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.

“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.

“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!”

I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.

“Was his wife a Negro?” I asked.

“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or some- thing?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m just asking,” I said.

Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place.

Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man had themselves a church wedding. It was a little wed- ding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been carrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight years—my wife’s word, inseparable—Beulah’s health went into a rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand, They’d married,

Theme: The narrator, a self- absorbed person, admits

his own “blindness” (lack of insight) about blind people.

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lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compli- ment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better. Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference to him? She could, if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter. And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes streaming tears—I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave. Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty-peso Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her. Pathetic.

So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick him up. With nothing to do but wait—sure, I blamed him for that—I was having a drink and watching the TV when I heard the car pull into the drive. I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look.

I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amaz- ing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the back seat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talk- ing all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.

My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my hus- band. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve.

The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand. I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go.

“I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed.

“Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said, “Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little group, from the porch into the living room, my wife was guiding him by the arm. The blind man was carrying his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said things like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this sofa two weeks ago.”

I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But I didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say something else, small-talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How

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