激情

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Passion

Alice Munro

When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.

Now there is a village. Or perhaps it’s a suburb, because she does not see a post office or even the most unpromising convenience store. The settlement lies four or five streets deep along the lake, with houses strung close together on small lots. Some of them are undoubtedly summer places—the windows already boarded up, as they always were for the winter. But many others show all the signs of year-round habitation—habitation, in many cases, by people who have filled the yards with plastic gym sets and outdoor grills and training bikes and motorcycles and picnic tables, where some of them sit now having lunch or beer on this warm September day. There are other people, not so visible—students, maybe, or old hippies living alone—who have put up flags or sheets of tinfoil for curtains. Small, mostly decent, cheap houses, some fixed to withstand the winter and some not.

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Grace would have turned back if she hadn’t caught sight of the octagonal house with the fretwork along the roof and doors in every other wall. The Woods house. She has always remembered it as having eight doors, but it seems there are only four. She was never inside, to see how, or if, the space is divided into rooms. Mr. and Mrs. Woods were old—as Grace is now—and did not seem to be visited by any children or friends. Their quaint, original house now has a forlorn, mistaken look. Neighbors with their ghetto blasters and their half-dismembered vehicles, their toys and washing, are pushed up against either side of it.

It is the same with the Travers house, when she finds it, a quarter of a mile farther on. The road goes past it now, instead of ending there, and the houses next door are only a few feet away from its deep, wraparound veranda.

It was the first house of its kind that Grace had ever seen—one story high, the roof continuing without a break out over that veranda, on all sides—a style that makes you think of hot summers. She has since seen many like it, in Australia.

It used to be possible to run from the veranda across the dusty end of the driveway, through a sandy, trampled patch of weeds and wild strawberries, and then jump—no, actually, wade—into the lake. Now Grace can hardly even see the lake, because a substantial house—one of the few regular suburban houses here, with a two-car garage—has been built across that very route.

                                 

What was Grace really looking for when she undertook this expedition? Perhaps the worst thing would have been to find exactly what she thought she was after—the sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
                        

And what if it had been gone altogether? She might have made a fuss, if anybody had come along to listen to her; she might have bewailed the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief have passed over her, too, of old confusions and obligations wiped away?

  

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Mr. Travers had built the house—that is, he’d had it built—as a surprise wedding present for Mrs. Travers. When Grace first saw it, it was perhaps thirty years old. Mrs. Travers’s children were widely spaced: Gretchen, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, already married and a mother herself; Maury, twenty-one, going into his last year of college; and then there was Neil, in his mid-thirties. But Neil was not a Travers. He was Neil Borrow. Mrs. Travers had been married before, to a man who had died. For a few years, she had earned her living, and supported her child, as a teacher of business English at a secretarial school. Mr. Travers, when he referred to this period in her life before he’d met her, spoke of it as a time of hardship almost like penal servitude, something that would barely be made up for by a whole lifetime of comfort, which he would happily provide.

                                                                                                                                      -

Mrs. Travers herself didn’t speak of it that way at all. She had lived with Neil in a big old house broken up into apartments, not far from the railway tracks in the town of Pembroke, and many of the stories she told at the dinner table were about events there, about her fellow-tenants, and the French-Canadian landlord, whose harsh French and tangled English she imitated. The stories could have had titles, like the stories by James Thurber that Grace had read in “The Anthology of American Humor,” found unaccountably on the library shelf at the back of her grade-ten classroom. The Night Old Mrs. Cromarty Got Out on the Roof. How the Postman Courted Miss Flowers. The Dog Who Ate Sardines.

                                                                                                                                                                    -

Mr. Travers never told stories and had little to say at dinner, but if he came upon you looking, for instance, at the fieldstone fireplace he might say, “Are you interested in rocks?” and tell you how he had searched and searched for that particular pink granite, because Mrs. Travers had once exclaimed over a rock like that, glimpsed in a road cut. Or he might show you the not really unusual features that he personally had added to the house—the corner cupboard shelves swinging outward in the kitchen, the storage space under the window seats. He was a tall, stooped man with a soft voice and thin hair slicked over his scalp. He wore bathing shoes when he went into the water and, though he did not look fat in his clothes, a pancake fold of white flesh slopped over the top of his bathing trunks.

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Grace was working that summer at the hotel at Bailey’s Falls, just north of Sabot Lake. Early in the season, the Travers family had come to dinner there. She had not noticed them—it was a busy night, and they were not at one of her tables. She was setting up a table for a new party when she realized that someone was waiting to speak to her.

-

It was Maury. He said, “I was wondering if you would like to go out with me sometime.”

-

Grace barely looked up from shooting out the silverware. She said, “Is this a dare?” Because his voice was high and nervous, and he stood there stiffly, as if forcing himself. And it was known that sometimes a party of young men from the cottages would dare one another to ask a waitress out. It wasn’t entirely a joke—they really would show up, if accepted, though sometimes they only meant to park, without taking you to a movie or even for coffee. So it was considered rather shameful, rather hard up, of a girl to agree.

-

“What?” he said painfully, and then Grace did stop and look at him. It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined.

-

“O.K.,” she said quickly. She might have meant, O.K., calm down, I can see it’s not a dare. Or, O.K., I’ll go out with you. She herself hardly knew which. But he took it as agreement, and at once arranged—without lowering his voice, or noticing the looks that he was getting from the diners around them—to pick her up after work the following night.

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He did take her to the movies. They saw “Father of the Bride.” Grace hated it. She hated girls like Elizabeth Taylor’s character—spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked but that they wheedle and demand. Maury said that it was just a comedy, but she told him that that was not the point. She could not quite make clear what her point was. Anybody would have assumed that it was because she worked as a waitress and was too poor to go to college, and because, if she wanted that kind of wedding, she would have to save up for years to pay for it herself. (Maury did think this, and was stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.)

                                                              -

She could not explain or even quite understand that it wasn’t jealousy she felt; it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that but because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men—people, everybody—thought they should be like: beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl had to be, to be fallen in love with. Then she’d become a mother and be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.

                                                     -

Grace was fuming about this while sitting beside a boy who had fallen in love with her because he had believed—instantly—in the integrity and uniqueness of her mind and soul, had seen her poverty as a romantic gloss on that. (He would have known she was poor not just because of her job but because of her strong Ottawa Valley accent.)

                                                 -

He honored her feelings about the movie. Indeed, now that he had listened to her angry struggles to explain, he struggled to tell her something in turn. He said he saw now that it was not anything so simple, so feminine, as jealousy. He saw that. It was that she would not stand for frivolity, was not content to be like most girls. She was special.

                                    -

Grace was wearing a dark-blue ballerina skirt, a white blouse, through whose eyelet frills the upper curve of her breasts was visible, and a wide rose-colored elasticized belt. There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged. But nothing about her was dainty or pert or polished, in the style of the time. A bit ragged around the edges, in fact. Giving herself Gypsy airs, with the very cheapest silver-painted bangles, and the long, wild-looking, curly dark hair that she had to put into a snood when she waited on tables.

                             -

Special.

                                                      -

He told his mother about her, and his mother said, “You must bring this Grace of yours to dinner.”

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