Open Secrets by Alice Munro Page A

the ice tinkling in their glasses and them laughing behind the hedge. Oh, Mud, they say when they see me, Oh, poor Mud, sit down here, get her a drink! They call me Mud because that was my son’s name for me when he was a baby. But they are neither of them babies now. The house is cool when I come home—it’s a lovely house if you remember, built in three tiers like a wedding cake. Mosaic tiles in the entrance hall. But I am always thinking about the factory, that is what fills my mind. What should we do to stay afloat? There are only five factories in Canada making pianos now, and three of them are in Quebec with the low cost of labor. No doubt you know all about that. When I talk to Arthur in my head, it is always about the same thing. I am very close to him still but it is hardly in a mystical way. Youwould think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled. What a thing to talk to a dead man about.”
    She stopped, she was embarrassed. But she was not sure that he had listened to all of this, and in fact she was not sure that she had said all of it.
    “What started me off—” he said. “What got me going in the first place, with whatever I have managed to do, was the Library. So I owe you a great deal.”
    He put his hands on his knees, let his head fall.
    “Ah, rubbish,” he said.
    He groaned, and ended up with a laugh.
    “My father,” he said, “You wouldn’t remember my father?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Well. Sometimes I think he had the right idea.”
    Then he lifted his head, gave it a shake, and made a pronouncement.
    “Love never dies.”
    She felt impatient to the point of taking offense. This is what all the speechmaking turns you into, she thought, a person who can say things like that. Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid—it might as well be dead.
    “Arthur used to come and sit in the Library,” she said. “In the beginning I was very provoked with him. I used to look at the back of his neck and think, Ha, what if something should hit you there! None of that would make sense to you. It wouldn’t make sense. And it turned out to be something else I wanted entirely. I wanted to marry him and get into a normal life.
    “A normal life,” she repeated—and a giddiness seemed to be taking over, a widespread forgiveness of folly, alerting the skin of her spotty hand, her dry thick fingers that lay not farfrom his, on the seat of the chair between them. An amorous flare-up of the cells, of old intentions.
Oh, never dies
.
    Across the gravelled yard came a group of oddly dressed folk. They moved all together, a clump of black. The women did not show their hair—they had black shawls or bonnets covering their heads. The men wore broad hats and black braces. The children were dressed just like their elders, even to the bonnets and hats. How hot they all looked in those clothes—how hot and dusty and wary and shy.
    “The Tolpuddle Martyrs,” he said, in a faintly joking, resigned, and compassionate voice. “Ah, I guess I’d better go over. I’d better go over there and have a word with them.”
    That edge of a joke, the uneasy kindness, made her think of somebody else. Who was it? When she saw the breadth of his shoulders from behind, and the broad flat buttocks, she knew who.
    Jim Frarey.
    Oh, what kind of a trick was being played on her, or what kind of trick was she playing on herself! She would not have it. She pulled herself up tightly, she saw all those black clothes melt into a puddle. She was dizzy and humiliated. She would not have it.
    But not all black, now that they were getting closer. She could see dark blue, those were the men’s shirts, and dark blue and purple in some of the women’s dresses. She could see faces—the men’s behind beards, the women’s in their deep-brimmed bonnets. And now she knew who they were.