Loading summary
Transcript99 lines
- [00:01]
Deborah Treisman
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting to get your money back, which turned into worrying about getting your money back. Now Taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes today and help you get up to a $4,000 refund advance loan fast. Get an expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service refund has $0 loan fees and 0% APR refund advance loans may be issued by a 1st Century Bank NA or we term supplies subject to credit approval. This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. In this month's episode, a special tribute to Alice Munro, who died in May at age 92, will hear Monroe's story Before the Change, which appeared in the New Yorker in August of 1998.
- [01:03]
Andre Alexis
How do you think I didn't know it was right in front of my eyes all the time? If I had gone to school here, I'd surely have known. If I'd had friends, there's no way one of the high school girls, one of the older girls, wouldn't have made sure I knew.
- [01:18]
Deborah Treisman
The story was chosen by Andrea Alexis, whose works of fiction include the novels Fifteen Dogs, which won the Giller Prize, and Days by moonlight, and the story collection the Night Piece, which was published in 2020. Hi, Andre, welcome.
- [01:33]
Andre Alexis
Hi, Deborah.
- [01:34]
Deborah Treisman
I'm glad we could do this. Let's start with why we are here taping a podcast about Alice Munro's work today. You are a fellow writer who grew up, I think, less than 100 miles away from the small town in southwestern Ontario where Monroe grew up. The territory is familiar to you, though in a later time. What has her work meant to you and for how long?
- [02:02]
Andre Alexis
Well, it's not a difficult question, but it's one of those questions that's like, well, when did you start breathing air? Since the time I wanted to be a writer, Alice Munro has been part of my landscape. And I want to preface this by saying that as a Canadian writer, because I am also Trinidadian and Canadian, but mostly Canadian, the landscape for me as to what fiction was was large. The province of women. Margaret Lawrence, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison, Adele Wiseman, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro. I was very aware as a writer that I was entering into a province that was best done by women. I was talking to a friend of mine, Katharine Bush, and she Said that when she started writing for her, she thought of these as her foremothers. And there's something of that, I think, for all of us of our generation. So when I'm talking about Alice Munro, there are times when I'm talking about specific stories, but mostly, or just as much, I'm talking about the climate, the literariness, the way that generation of women directed and determined what literature and literary writing was for me. And so I feel very much like I'm writing after her. When you say the name Alice Munro, for someone of my generation, it's more than just there are a handful of good stories. It's something else.
- [03:30]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, but I think for you, too, it's more localized than being Canadian. It's being in Ontario. It's being in southwestern Ontario. It's being in a small town.
- [03:42]
Andre Alexis
Yes. When I read her descriptions of the landscape, I know where I am. And I suppose you could argue that that's helpful or not helpful, I don't know. But I'm burrowed into the stories because I know exactly what southern Ontario looks like, you know, the flatness of some of those towns. I know how it feels to be in those town towns. And she does an almost frightening rendition of them, but also, strangely, a comforting rendition of them because they are, in fact, a kind of restitution of my childhood as well, at the same time as they're kind of a confirmation that, yes, where you grew up was a little strange.
- [04:23]
Deborah Treisman
Well, so before the Change came up in conversation between us, because I happen to be reading it and noticed a parallel with a moment in your recent story, Consolation, you hadn't read before the Change at that point, and then you did, and you asked to read it on the podcast. What is it that most hits you about this story?
- [04:45]
Andre Alexis
Well, there are parallels with Consolation, especially the father being a doctor, and the intimacy of doctor to community just feels absolutely right. And so I felt very closely to that. Even though her father is a difficult man, as was mine, to some extent, I feel very connected to that idea of growing up as the child of a doctor. I don't know if she did.
- [05:12]
Deborah Treisman
No, Alice did not.
- [05:13]
Andre Alexis
Yeah, no, it's interesting. She gets it pretty good here. And so there is that intimacy, too. Yeah, it's on all levels. It's something that hits me.
- [05:26]
Deborah Treisman
Do you think it's representative of Monroe's work? Do you think it's an outlier?
- [05:32]
Andre Alexis
I think we'll talk after it about some of its brutalisms. But there is a strain in her work of such a frankness about the body that I adore, frankly, it's not polite. It's not Chekhovian. It's something else. And I really do think that this is, in that sense, in its concentration on the body. It's very like a lot of her other works, the female body, but I think also in its thoughtfulness about the world and about what things mean and what it means when somebody looks at you this way, or when you see something over there that's meaningful, but you don't know how. Those are very much part of her aesthetic, trying to figure out what's going on. Walker Brothers Cowboy, which is probably the stories of hers that has meant the most to me, is a daughter trying to piece what's going on as she's going out for a drive with her father, who goes to a former lover's house. And there's everything suggested. And also the kind of strangeness of that. The strangeness of how adults relate. And that goes through a lot of her work. You know, the sexual, but also the emotionally strange.
- [06:51]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Everything that you said is characteristic of before the Change and Alice's other stories. What's interesting to me in this one is that the focus is entirely internal. We spend the whole story in the internal thoughts of the main character. It's involved with the internal mind and involved with the internal body. And these two things are at such extremes in the story. And we should probably warn people that there are quite vividly described medical procedures. And if you are squeamish or don't feel you can listen to that, then probably this is not the podcast episode for you.
- [07:42]
Andre Alexis
Now's a good time to get out. Yes. Because it is incredibly vivid. Let's just say it's one of the most vivid descriptions of a medical procedure that I've ever read. And I think the first you go through it, it might make you feel that the story is about that, but it really isn't. So much more is going on there. It starts in mystery, and the mystery deepens. A lot of the themes of not being sure who is who, what's in authority, and even who you're addressing is part of the cloud of unknowing that is this story.
- [08:25]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. We'll talk some more after the reading. And now here's Andre Alexis reading Before the Change by Alice Munro.
- [08:34]
Andre Alexis
Before the Change. Dear R. My father and I watched Kennedy debate Nixon. He's got a television since you were here, a small screen and rabbit ears. It sits out in front of the sideboard in the dining room so that there's no easy way now to get at the good silver or the table linen even if anybody wanted to. Why in the dining room where there's not one really comfortable chair? Because it's a while since they've remembered they have a living room. Do you remember this room? Heavy side curtains with wine coloured leaves on a beige ground and the net curtains in between. Picture of Sir Galahad leading his horse and picture of Glencoe with a herd of red deer instead of the massacre. The old filing cabinet moved in years ago from my father's office but still no place found for it so it just sits there, not even pushed back against the wall. And my mother's closed sewing machine, the only time he ever mentions her when he says your mother's sewing machine with the same or what looks like the same array of plants in clay pots or tin cans, not flourishing and not dying. So I'm home now. Nobody has broached the question as to how long for. I just stuffed the mini with all my books and papers and clothes and drove here from Ottawa in one day. I had told my father on the phone that I was finished with my thesis. I've actually given it up, but I didn't bother telling him that and that I thought I needed a break. Break, he said, as if he'd never heard of such a thing. Well, as long as it isn't a nervous break. That's the way he still refers to panic attacks and depression and personal collapse. Nervous breakdown. There wasn't any big welcome when I got here, but no consternation either. I'd thought of kissing him. More bravado than an upsurge of affection. More this is the way I do things now. But by the time my shoes hit the gravel I knew I couldn't. There was Mrs. B. Standing halfway between the drive and the kitchen door. So I went and threw my arms around her instead and nuzzled the bizarre black hair cut in a Chinese sort of bob around her small withered face. I could smell her stuffy cardigan and bleach on her apron and feel her old toothpick bones. She hardly came up to my collarbone. Flustered, I said, it's a beautiful day. It's been the most beautiful drive. So it was. So it had been. The trees not turned yet, just rusting at the edges and the stubble fields like gold. So why does this benevolence of landscape fade in my father's presence and in his territory? When the debate was over, my father got up and turned off the television. He won't watch commercials unless Mrs. B. Is there and speaks up in favor. Whatever she enjoys is permitted, even dancing cornflakes. And he may even say, well, in its own way it's clever. This, I think, is a kind of warning to me. What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon? Ah, they're just a couple of Americans. I tried to open the conversation up a bit. How do you mean just a couple of Americans? He said, as if the words might have got by me the first time. So we sit there, not talking, but not in silence, because, as you may recall, he is a noisy breather. R the waiting room walls are scuffed all round where generations of patients have leaned their chairs back against them. The Reader's Digests are in rags on the table. The patient's files are in cardboard boxes under the examining table. And in the house it's no better. I asked what color paint he'd like for the office walls. Light green, I said. Or light yellow, he said. Who's going to paint them? I am. I never knew you were a painter. I've painted places I've lived in. Maybe so, but I haven't seen them. What are you going to do about my patients while you're painting? I'll do it on a Sunday. Some of them wouldn't care for that when they heard about it. Are you kidding? In this day and age it may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here. All I got to do in the end was throw out the Reader's Digest and put out some copies of Maclean's and Time and Saturday Night. And then he mentioned there'd been complaints they missed, looking up the jokes they remembered in the Reader's Digest. Too bad, I said, and I couldn't believe that my voice was shaking. Then I tried to tackle the filing cabinet in the dining room. I thought it was probably full of the phials of patients who were long dead. Mrs. B. Saw what I was doing and went and got my father. Not a word to me, he said. Who told you you could go poking around in there? I didn't. R the two days you were here last year Mrs. B. Was off for Christmas with her family. She has a husband who has been sick with emphysema, it seems, for half his life, and no children but a horde of nieces and nephews and connections. I don't think you saw her at all. But she saw you. She said to me Yesterday, where's that Mr. So and so you were supposed to be engaged to? She'd noticed I Wasn't wearing my ring, I imagine in Toronto. I said I was up at my niece's last Christmas and we seen you and him walking up by the standpipe. And my niece said, I wonder where them two are going. This is exactly how she talks and it already sounds quite normal to me, except if I write it down. I guess the implication is that we were going somewhere to carry on. But if you remember, we were just getting outside so we could continue our fight which could only be bottled up for so long. Mrs. B. Started to work for my father about the same time I went away to school. Before that we had some young women I liked, but they left to get married or to work in war plants. When I was 9 or 10 and had been to some of my school friends houses. I said to my father, why does Mrs. Barry have to eat with us? Other people's maids don't eat with them. My father said, if you don't like to eat with Mrs. Barry, you can go and eat in the woodshed. Then I took to hanging around and getting her to talk. She wouldn't much, but when she did it could be rewarding. I had a fine time imitating her at school. Your hair is really black, Mrs. Barry. Mrs. B. Everyone in my family has got black hair. They all got black hair and it never ever gets gray. That's on my mother's side. When my grandpa died, they kept him in the place in the cemetery all winter while the ground was froze and come spring they was going to put him in the ground and one or other of us says, let's take a look, see how he made it through the winter. So we got the fellow to lift the lid and there he was with his face not dark or caved in or anything and his hair was black. I could even do the little laughs she does, little barks not to indicate that anything is funny, but as a kind of punctuation. By the time I met you I'd got sick of myself doing this. After Mrs. B. Told me all about her hair, I met her one day coming out of the upstairs bathroom. She was hurrying to get the phone, which I wasn't allowed allowed to answer. Her hair was bundled up in a towel and a dark purplish trickle was running down the side of her face. Your head's bleeding, I said. And she said, oh, get out of my road and scrambled past to get the phone. I went on into the bathroom and saw purple streaks in the basin and the hair dye on the shelf. Not a word was said about this and she continued to talk about how everybody on her mother's side of the family had black hair in their coffins, and she would too. My father had an odd way of noticing me in those years. He might be passing through a room where I was, and he'd say, as if he hadn't seen me there, the chief defect of Henry King was chewing little bits of string or Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday, and then he'd jab a finger at me to take it up. Christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday, took ill on Thursday, worse on Friday, died on Saturday, buried on Sunday, then both together thunderously, and that was the end of Solomon Grundy, never an introduction and no comment afterward. For a joke I tried calling him Solomon Grundy. The fourth or fifth time he said, that's enough. That's not my name. I'm your father. After that we probably didn't do the rhyme anymore. The first time I met you on the campus and you were alone and I was alone, you looked as if you remembered me but weren't sure about acknowledging it. You had just taught that one class, filling in when our regular man was sick and you had to do the lecture on logical positivism. You joked about it being a funny thing to bring somebody over from the theological college to do. You seemed to hesitate about saying hello, so I said, the former King of France is bald. That was the example you'd given us of a statement that makes no sense because the subject doesn't exist, but you gave me a truly startled and cornered look that you then covered up with a professional smile. What did you think of me, Smart Alec arrived? My stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hands. Otherwise I'm okay. My weight is back to normal, or a little below. I think I look older, though. I think I look older than 24. Anyway, I've started going on long walks around town for exercise. The horse barns have been torn down and there are new suburbs that could be suburbs anywhere, which is what everybody likes about them. Nobody walks now. Everybody drives. The suburbs don't have sidewalks, and the sidewalks along the old back streets are unused and cracked and up, tilted by frost and disappearing under earth and grass. The long dirt path under the pine trees along our lane is lost now under drifts of pine needles and rogue saplings and wild raspberry canes. People have walked up that path for decades to see the doctor, because there's been a doctor living in this house since the End of the last century. All sorts of noisy grubby patients, children and mothers and old people all afternoon and quieter patients coming singly in the evenings. I used to sit out where there was a pear tree trapped in a clump of lilac bushes and I'd spy on them because young girls like to spy. I'd spy on the ladies who got dressed up at that time for a visit to the doctor. I remember the clothes from soon after the warlong full skirts and cinch belts and puffed up blouses and sometimes short white gloves for gloves were worn then in summer. And not just to church hats, not just to church either. Pastel straw hats that framed the face. Not having a mother may have had something to do with how I felt, but I didn't know anybody who had a mother who looked the way they did. I'd crouch under the bushes eating the spotty yellow pears and worshipping. One of our teachers had got us reading old ballads like Patrick Spence and the Twa Corbis and there'd been a rash of ballad making at school. I'm going down the corridor, my good friend, for to see. I'm going to the lavatory to have myself a pea. So with my mouth full of mushy pear I made up more. A lady walks on a long, long path. She's left the behind. She's left her home and her father's wrath, her destiny for to find. When the wasps started bothering me too much, I went into the house. Mrs. Barry would be in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio until my father called her. She stayed till the last patient had left and the place had been tidied up. If there was a yelp from the office she might give her own little yelping laugh and say, go ahead and holler. I never bothered describing to her the clothes or the looks of the women I'd seen because I knew she'd never admire anybody for being beautiful or well dressed any more than she'd admire them for knowing something nobody needed to know, like a foreign language. Good card players she admired, and fast knitters that was about all. Many people she had no use for. My father said that too. He had no use. That made me want to ask if they did have a use, what would the use be? But I knew neither one would tell me. Instead they'd tell me not to be so smart. His uncle came on Franklin Hyde, carousing in the dirt. He shook him hard from side to side and hit him till it hurt. If I decided to send all this to you? Where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope, I'm paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where is worse. Dear Robin, how do you think I didn't know it was right in front of my eyes all the time? If I had gone to school here, I'd surely have known. If I'd had friends, there's no way one of the high school girls, one of the older girls wouldn't have made sure I knew. Now that I think of it, I knew that some of those evening patients, those ladies, came on the train. I associated them in their beautiful clothes with the evening train and there was a late night train they must have left on. Of course there could just as easily have been a car that dropped them off at the end of the lane. And I was told, by Mrs. B, I think not by him, that they came to my father for vitamin shots. I know that because I would think, now she's getting a shot whenever we heard a woman make a noise. And I would be a little surprised that women so sophisticated and self controlled were not more stoical about needles. Even now. It has taken me weeks through all this time spent getting used to the ways of the house, to the point where I would never dream of picking up a paint brush and would hesit. Hesitate to straighten a drawer or throw out an old grocery Receipt without consulting Mrs. B. Who can never make up her mind about it. Anyway, at lunch today, Sunday, my father laid a check beside my plate. Mrs. Barry is never here. On Sundays we have a cold lunch of sliced meat and bread and tomatoes and pickles and cheese, which I fix when my father gets back from church. He never asks me to go to church with him, probably thinking that would just give me a chance to air some views he doesn't care to hear. The check was for $5,000. That's for you, he said. So you'll have something. You can put it in the bank or invest it how you like, see how the rates are. I don't keep up. Of course you'll get the house too. All in the fullness of time, as they say. A bribe, I thought. Money to start a little business with, go on a trip with money for the down payment on a little house of my own, or to go back to university to get some more of what he has called my unnegotiable degrees, $5,000 to get rid of me. I thanked him, and more or less for conversation's sake, I asked him what he did with his money. He said that was neither here nor there. Ask Billy Snyder if you're looking for advice. Then he remembered that Billy Snyder was no longer in the accounting business. He had retired. There's some new fellow there with a queer name, said. It's like Ypsilanti, but it's not Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti's a town in Michigan, I said. It's a town in Michigan. But it was a man's name before it was a town in Michigan, my father said. It seems it was the name of a Greek leader who fought against the Turks early in the 1800s, I said. Oh, in Byron's war. Byron's war, said my father. What makes you call it that? Byron didn't fight in any war. He died at typhus then. Once he's dead, he's the big hero. He died for the Greeks and so on. He said this contentiously, as if I had been one of those responsible for this mistake, this big fuss over Byron. But then he calmed down and recounted for me, or recalled for himself the progress of the war against the Ottoman Empire. It's always best not to interrupt when he starts to talk like this. There's the sense of a truce or breathing spell in an undeclared underground war. I was sitting facing the window and I could see through the net curtains the heaps of yellow brown leaves on the ground in the rich generous sunlight. Maybe the last of those days we'll get for a long time by the sound of the wind to night, and it brought to mind my relief as a child, my secret pleasure whenever I could get him going by asking a question or by accident on a spiel like this. Last night I came in about 10 o'clock. I'd been out at a meeting of the Historical Society, or rather had a meeting to try and organize one. Five people showed up and two of them walked with canes. When I opened the kitchen door I saw Mrs. B. Framed in the doorway to the back hall, the hall that leads from the office to the washroom and the front part of the house. She had a covered basin in her hands. She was on her way to the washroom, and she could have gone on passing the kitchen as I came in. I would hardly have noticed her, but she stopped in her tracks and stood there, partly turned towards me. She made a grimace of dismay. Uh oh. Caught out. Then she Scurried away toward the toilet. This was an act. The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away. Even the way she held the basin out so that I had to notice it. That was all deliberate. I could hear the rumble of my father's voice in the office talking to a patient. I had seen the office lights on anyway. I had seen the patient's car parked outside. I took off my coat and went on upstairs. All I seemed to be concerned about was not letting Mrs. B. Have it her way. No questions, no shocked realization. No. What is that you have in the basin, Mrs. B? Oh. What have you and my daddy been up to? Not that I ever called him my daddy. I got busy at once, rooting around in one of the boxes of books I still hadn't unpacked. I was looking for the journals of Anna Jamieson. I had promised it to the other person under 70 who had been at the meeting. A man who is a photographer and knows something about the history of Upper Canada. He would like to have been a history teacher but has a stammer that prevented him. He told me this in the half hour we stood out on the sidewalk talking instead of taking the more decisive step of going for coffee. As we said good night, he told me that he'd like to have asked me for coffee but he had to get home and spell his wife because the baby had cholic. I unpacked the whole box of books before I was through. It was like looking at relics from a bygone age. I looked through them till the patient was gone and my father had taken Mrs. B home and had come upstairs and used the bathroom and gone to bed. I read till I was so groggy I almost fell asleep on the floor. At lunch today, I finally said, I think I know what's going on here. His head reared up and he snorted, he really did, like an old horse. You do, do you? You think you know what I said. I'm not accusing you. I don't disapprove. Is that so? I believe in abortion, I said. I believe it should be legal. I don't want you to use that word again in this house. Why not? Because I'm the one who says what words are used in this house. You don't understand what I'm saying. I understand that you've got too loose a tongue. You've got too loose a tongue and not enough sense, too much education and not enough ordinary brains. I still did not shut up. I said, people must know. Must they? There's a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all. We did not speak for the rest of the day. I don't think he finds this difficult at all. I cooked the usual roast for dinner and we ate it and did not speak. It's obviously time that I got out of here. The young man last night told me that when he felt relaxed, his stammer practically disappeared, like when I'm talking to you. He said I could probably make him fall in love with me to a certain extent. I could do that just for recreation. That's the sort of life I could get into here. Dear R. I haven't left. The Mini wasn't fit for it. I took it in to be overhauled. Also, the weather has changed. The wind has got into an autumn rampage, scooping up the lake and battering the beach. It caught Mrs. Barry on her own front steps, the wind did, and knocked her sideways and shattered her elbow. It's her left elbow, and she said she could work with her right arm. But my father told her it was a complicated fracture and he wanted her to rest for a month. He asked me if I would mind postponing my departure. Those were his words, postponing your departure. He hasn't asked where I'm planning to go and I don't know. I said all right, I'd stay while I could be useful. So we're on decent speaking terms. In fact, it's fairly comfortable. I try to do just about what Mrs. B would do in house. I cook the meat and the vegetables in her way and never think about bringing home an avocado or a jar of artichoke hearts or a garlic bulb, though I see all those things are now for sale in the supermarket. It I hold the oven door shut the way Mrs. B does with a couple of heavy medical textbooks set on a stool pushed up against it. I make the coffee from the powder in the jar. I'm allowed to answer the phone, but if it's a woman asking for my father and not volunteering details, I'm supposed to take the number and say that the doctor will phone back. So I do, and sometimes the woman just hangs up. When I tell my father this, he says she'll likely call again. There aren't many of those patients. The one he calls the Specials maybe one a month. Mostly he's dealing with sore throats and cramped colons and peeling ears and so on. Jumpy hearts, kidney stones, sour digestions. R Tonight he knocked on my door. He knocked, though it wasn't all the way closed. I was reading he asked. Not in a supplicating way, of course, but I would say with reasonable respect if I could give him a hand in the office. The first special since Mrs. B. Has been away. I asked what he wanted me to do just more or less to keep her steady. He said, she's young and she's not used to it yet. Give your hands a good scrub, too. Used the soap in the bottle in the toilet downstairs. The patient was lying flat on the examining table with a sheet over her from the waist down. The top part of her was fully dressed in a dark blue buttoned up cardigan and a white blouse with a lace trimmed collar. These clothes lay loosely over her sharp collarbone and nearly flat chest. Her hair was black, pulled tightly back from her face and braided and pinned on top of her head. This prim and severe style made her neck look long and emphasized the regal bone structure of her white face, so that from a distance she could be taken for a woman of 45. Close up you could see that she was quite young, probably around 20. Her pleated skirt was hung up on the back of the door. I could see the rim of white panties that she had thoughtfully hung underneath. She was shivering hard, though the office wasn't cold. Now, Madeline, my father said, the first thing is we've got to get your knees up. I wondered if he knew her, or did he just ask for a name and use whatever the woman gave him? Easy, he said. Easy. Easy. He got the stirrups in place and her feet into them. She was still wearing her loafers. Her knees shook so much in this new position that they clapped together. You'll have to hold steadier than that, my father said. You know now I can't do my job unless you do yours. Do you want a blanket over you? He said to me. Get her a blanket off the bottom shelf there. I arranged the blanket to cover the top part of Madeline's body. She didn't look at me. Her teeth rattled. She clenched her mouth shut. Now just slide down this way a bit, my father said, and to me, hold her knees. Get them apart. Just hold her. Easy. I put my hands on the knobs of the girl's knees and moved them apart as gently as I could. My father's breathing filled the room with its busy unintelligible comments. I had to hold Madeline's knees quite firmly to keep them from jerking together. Where's that old woman? She said. I said, she's at home. She's had a falls. I'm here instead. So she had been here before. She's rough, she said. Her voice was matter of fact, almost a growl, not so nervous as I would have expected from the agitation of her body. My father had picked up a thin rod like a knitting needle. Now this is the hard part, he said. He spoke in a conversational tone, milder, I think, than any I've ever heard from him. And the more you tighten up, the harder it will be. So just easy there, easy. Good girl. Good girl. I was trying to think of something to say that would ease her or distract her. I could see now what my father was doing. Laid out on a white cloth on the table beside him, he had a series of rods, all of the same length but of a graduated thickness. These were what he would use one after the other to open and stretch the cervix. From my station behind the sheeted barrier beyond the girl's knees, I could not see the actual intimate progress of these instruments, but I could feel it from the arriving waves of pain in her body that beat down the spasms of apprehension and actually made her quieter. Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Do you have a job? I had noticed her wedding ring, but quite possibly they all wore wedding rings. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Why would she want to answer any of that, even if she weren't in pain? She sucked her breath back through her teeth and widened her eyes at the ceiling. I know, I said. I know. Getting there, my father said. You're a good girl. Good, quiet girl. Won't be long now, I said. I was going to paint this room, but I never got around to it. If you were going to paint it, what color would you choose? Ho, said Madeline. Ho. A sudden startled expulsion of breath. Yellow, I said. I thought a light yellow or a light green. By the time we got to the thickest rod, Madeline had thrust her head back into the flat cushion, stretching out her long neck and stretching her mouth, too, lips wide and tight over her teeth. Think of your favorite movie. What's your favorite movie? A nurse said that to me just as I reached the unbelievable interminable plateau of pain and was convinced that relief would not come, not this time. How could movies exist anymore in the world now? I'd said the same thing to Madeline, and Madeline's eyes flickered over me with the coldly distracted expression of someone who sees that a human being can be about as much use as a stopped clock. I risked taking one hand off her knee and touched her hand. I was surprised at how quickly and fiercely she grabbed it and mashed the fingers together. Some use after all. Now then, my father said. Now we're someplace. She had closed her eyes. I thought I was going to be afraid of dying because of my mother dying that way in childbirth. But once I got onto that plateau I found that dying and living were both irrelevant notions, like favorite movies. I was stretched to the limit and convinced that I couldn't do a thing to move what felt like a giant egg or a flaming planet, not like a baby at all. It was stuck, and I was stuck in a place and time that could just go on forever. There was no reason that I should ever get out, and all my protests had already been annihilated. Now I need you, my father said. I need you around here. Get the basin. I held in place the same basin that I had seen Mrs. Barry holding. I held it while he scraped out the girl's womb with a clever sort of kitchen implement. I don't mean that it was a kitchen implement, but that it had a slightly homely look. To me, the lower part of even a thin young girl can look large and meaty in this raw state. In the days after my labor in the maternity ward, women lay carelessly, even defiantly, with their fiery cuts or tears exposed, their black stitch wounds and sorry flaps and big helpless haunches. It was a sight to see. Out of the womb now came plops of wine, jelly, and blood, and somewhere in there the fetus, like the bauble in a cereal box or the prize in the popcorn, a tiny plastic doll as negligible as a fingernail. I didn't look for it. I held my head up, away from the smell. Bathroom, my father said. There's a cover. He meant the folded cloth that lay beside the soiled rods. I carried the basin along the hall to the downstairs toilet, dumped the contents, flushed twice, rinsed the basin, and brought it back. My father by this time was bandaging up the girl and giving her some instructions. He's good at this job, I thought. He does it well. But his face looked heavy, weary enough to drop off the bones. It occurred to me that he had wanted me here all through the procedure, in case he should collapse. If he had collapsed, I don't know what I'd have done. He patted Madeline's legs and told her she should lie flat. Don't try to get up for a few minutes, he said. Have you got your ride arranged for? He's supposed to have been out there all the time, she said in a weak but spiteful voice. He wasn't supposed to have gone anyplace. My father took off his smock and walked to the window of the waiting room. You bet, he said. Right there. He let out a complicated groan, said, where's the laundry basket? Remembered that it was back in the bright room where he'd been working, came back and deposited the smock, and said to me, I'd be very obliged if you could tidy this up. Tidy up meant doing the sterilizing and mopping up in general. Good, he said. I'll say good night now. My daughter will see you out when you're ready to go. I was somewhat surprised to hear him say my daughter instead of my name. Of course I'd heard him say that before, if he had to introduce me, for instance. Still, I was surprised. Madeline swung her legs off the table the minute he was out of the room. Then she staggered and I went to help her. She said, okay, okay. Just got off of the table too quick. Where'd I put my skirt? I don't want to stand around looking like this. I got her the skirt and panties off the back of the door and she put them on without help, but very shakily. I said, you could rest a minute. Your husband will wait. My husband's working in the bush up near Kenora, she said, I'm going there next week. He's found a place we can stay now. I laid my coat down somewheres. She said, my favorite movie, as you ought to know, and if I could have thought of it when the nurse asked me, is Wild Strawberries. I remember the moldy little theater where we used to see all those Swedish and Japanese and Indian and Italian movies, and I remember that it had recently switched over from showing Carry On Movies and Martin and Lewis, but the name of it I can't remember. Since you were teaching philosophy to future ministers, your favorite movie should have been the Seventh Seal. But was it? Actually, I think it was Japanese, and I forget what it was about. Do you remember those fervent conversations we used to have when we walked home from the theater those couple of miles about human love and selfishness and God and faith and desperation? When we got to my rooming house we had to shut up. We had to go softly, softly up the stairs to my room. Ah, you would say gratefully and wonderingly as you got in. I would have been very nervous about bringing you here last Christmas if we hadn't already been deep into our fight. I would have felt too protective of you to expose you to my father. But in fact you got along pretty well together. You had a discussion about some great conflict between different orders of monks in the seventh century, wasn't that it? The row those monks had was about how they should shave their heads. A curly headed beanpole was what he called you. Coming from him that was almost complimentary. When I told him on the phone that you and I would not be getting married after all, he said, uh oh, do you think you'll ever manage to get another one? If I'd objected to his saying that, he would naturally have said it was a joke. Mrs. Barry is back. She's back in less than three weeks, though it was supposed to have been a month. But she has to work shorter days than she did before. It takes her so long to get dressed and to do her own housework that she seldom gets here delivered by her nephew or her nephew's wife until around 10 o'clock in the morning. Her father looks poorly, was the first thing she said to me. I think she's right. Maybe he should take a rest, I said. Too many people bothering him. She said. The Mini is out of the garage and the money is in my bank account. What I should do is take off, but I think, what if we get another special? How can Mrs. B help him? She can't use her left hand yet and she could never hold on to the basin with just her right hand. R this day was after the first big snowfall. It all happened overnight and in the morning the sky was clear blue. There was no wind and the brightness was preposterous. I went for an early walk under the pine trees. The highway had already been plowed and so had our lane. Some cars went by in and out of town as on any other morning before I went back into the house I just wanted to see if the Mini would start. And it did. I stomped my boots free of snow outside the back door and reminded myself that I must put a broom out. The kitchen had filled up with the day's blast of light. I thought I knew what my father would say out contemplating nature. He was sitting at the table with his hat and coat on. Usually by this time he had left to see his patients in the hospital. He said, have they got the road plowed yet? What about the lane? I said that both were plowed and clear. I put the kettle on and asked if he'd like another cup of coffee before he went out. All right, he said. Just so long as it's plowed so I can get out. What a day. I said. All right, if you don't have to shovel yourself out of It I made the two cups of coffee and then I sat down facing the window and the incoming light. He sat at the end of the table. He'd shifted his chair so that the light was at his back. I couldn't see what the expression on his face was, but his breathing kept me company as usual. I started to tell my father about myself. I hadn't intended to do this at all. I had meant to say something about my going away, but I opened my mouth and things began to come out that I heard with equal amounts of dismay and satisfaction, the way you hear things you say when you're drunk. You never knew I had a baby, I said. I had it on the 7th of July in Ottawa. I'd been thinking how ironical that was. I told him that the baby had been adopted right away and that I didn't know whether it had been a boy or a girl, that I had asked not to be told and I had asked not to have to see it. I stayed with Josie, I said. You remember me speaking about my friend Josie? She's in England now, but she was all alone then in her parents house. Her parents had been posted to South Africa. That was a godsend. I told him you were the father of the baby, in case he wondered, and that since you and I were already engaged, even officially engaged, I had thought that all we had to do was get married. But you thought differently. You said that we had to find a doctor, a doctor who would give me an abortion. He did not remind me that I was never supposed to say that word in his house. I told him that you had said we could not just go ahead and get married because anybody who could count would know that I had been pregnant before the wedding. We could not get married until I was definitely not pregnant anymore. Otherwise you might lose your job at the theological college. They could bring you up before a committee that might judge you as morally unfit, morally unfit for the job of teaching young ministers. And even supposing this did not happen, that you were only reprimanded or were not even reprimanded, you would still never be promoted. There would be a stain on your record. Even if nobody said anything to you, they would have something on you and you could not stand that the new students coming in would hear about you from the older ones. There'd be jokes passed on. Surely not, I'd said. Oh yes, Never underestimate the meanness there is in people's souls. And for me too it would be devastating. The wives controlled so much. The older professors, wives they'd never let me forget. Even when they were being kind. Especially when they were being kind. But we could just pick up and go somewhere else, I said. Somewhere where nobody would know. They'd know. There's always somebody who makes sure that people know. Besides, that would mean you'd have to start at the bottom again. You'd have to start at a lower salary, a pitiful salary. And how could we manage with a baby in that case? I was astonished at these arguments which did not seem to be consistent with the ideas of the person I loved. The books we had read, the movies we had seen, the things we had talked about. I asked if that meant nothing to you. You said, of course it did. But this was life. It was winter, like now, January or February. We were walking away from the rooming house. I threw my diamond ring on the street and it rolled under a parked car. But the battle dragged on after that. I was supposed to find out about an abortion from a friend who had a friend who was rumored to have had one. I'd given in. I said I'd do it, but then I lied. I said the doctor had moved away. Then I admitted lying. I can't do it, I said. But was that because of the baby? Never. It was because I believed I was right in the argument. I had contempt. I had contempt when I saw you scrambling to get under the parked car with the tails of your overcoat flapping around your buttocks. You were clawing in the snow to find the ring and you were so relieved when you found it. You were ready to hug me and laugh, thinking I'd be relieved too, and we'd make up on the spot. I told you you would never do anything admirable in your whole life. Hypocrite, I said. Sniveler. Philosophy teacher. Not that that was the end, for we did make up, but we didn't forgive each other and we didn't take steps. And then it got to be too late and we just walked away from each other. And that was a relief for us both and also a kind of victory. So isn't that ironic, I said to my father, considering I could hear Mrs. Barry outside stomping her boots. So I said this in a hurry. My father had sat all the time rigid with embarrassment. So I thought, or with profound distaste. Mrs. Barry opened the door, saying, ought to get a broom out there. Then she cried out, what are you doing sitting there? What's the matter with you? Can't you see the man's dead? He wasn't dead. What she had seen and what I would have seen even against the light, if I had not been avoiding looking at him whilst I told my tale was that he had suffered a blinding and paralyzing stroke. He sat tilted slightly forward, the table pressing into the firm curve of his stomach. When we tried to move him from his chair we managed only to jar him so that his head came down on the table with a majestic reluctance. His hat stayed on and his coffee cup stayed in place a couple of inches from his unseeing eye. It was still about half full. I said we couldn't do anything with him. He was too heavy. I went to the phone and called the hospital to get one of the other doctors to drive out. There's no ambulance yet in this town. Mrs. B paid no attention to what I said. She gave me the look of a spitting cat and kept pulling at my father's clothes, undoing buttons and yanking at the overcoat and grunting and whimpering with the exertion. A doctor came. He and I together were able to pull my father out to the car and get him into the back seat. I got in beside him to keep him from toppling over. The sound of his breathing was more peremptory than ever and seemed to be criticizing whatever we did. But you could take hold of him now and shove him around and manage his body as you had to, and this seemed very odd. Mrs. B. Had fallen back and quieted down as soon as she saw the other doctor. She didn't even follow us out of the house to see my father loaded into the car this afternoon. He died at about 5:00, I was told. It was very lucky for all concerned. I was full of other things to say. Just when Mrs. Barry came in I was going to say to my father, what if the law should change? The law might change soon, I was going to say. Maybe not, but it might. He'd be out of business then or out of one part of his business. Would that make a great difference to him? Would he find some other risk, some other knot to make in his life, some other underground and problematic act of mercy? What could I expect him to answer? Speaking of business, that is none of yours. But if that law could change, other things could change. I'm thinking about you now, how it could happen that you wouldn't be ashamed to marry a pregnant woman. There'd be no shame to it. Move ahead a few years, just a few years, and it could be a celebration. The pregnant bride is garlanded and led to the altar. Even in the chapel of the theological college. R There's enough money in my father's bank account to cover his funeral expenses. Enough to bury him, as they say. But there isn't much more. There are no stock certificates in his safe deposit box and no record of investments. Nothing. No bequest to the hospital or to his church. Most shocking of all, there is no money left to Mrs. Barry. The house and its contents are mine. And that's all there is. I have my $5,000. My father's lawyer seems embarrassed painfully embarrassed and worried about this state of affairs. Perhaps he think I might suspect him of misconduct try to blacken his name. He wants to know if there's a safe in my My father's house. Any hiding place at all for a large amount of cash. I say there isn't. He tries to suggest to me in such a discreet and roundabout way that I don't know at first what he's talking about that there might be reasons for my father's wanting to keep the amount of his earnings a secret. A large amount of cash hauled away somewhere is therefore a possibility. Perhaps you could go home and take a very good look. He said. Don't neglect the obvious places. It could be in a cookie tin or in a box under the bed. Surprising the places people can pick even the most sensible and intelligent people. Or in a pillow slip. He's saying as I go out the door, a woman on the phone wants to speak to the doctor. I'm sorry, he's dead. Have I got the right doctor? Yes, but I'm sorry, he's dead. Is there anyone. Does he by any chance have a partner I could talk to? Is there anybody else there? No. No partner. Could you give me any other number I could call? Isn't there some other doctor that can. No, I haven't any number. There isn't anybody that I know of. You must know what this is about. It's very crucial. There are very special circumstances. I'm sorry. There isn't any problem about money. Please try to think of somebody. If you do think of somebody later on, could you give me a call? I'll leave you my number. You shouldn't do that. I don't care. I trust you. Anyway, it's not for myself. I know everybody must say that, but really it's not. It's for my daughter who's in a very bad condition. Mentally. She's in a very bad condition. I'm sorry. If you knew what I went through to get this number, you would try to help me. Sorry. Please, I'm sorry. Perhaps he didn't always charge, I say to the lawyer. Perhaps he worked for nothing sometimes the lawyer is getting used to me now, he says. Perhaps. Or possibly an actual charity, I say. A charity he supported without keeping any record of it. The lawyer holds my eyes for a moment. Well, I haven't dug up the cellar floor yet, I say, and he smiles wincingly at this levity. Mrs. Barry hasn't given her notice. She just hasn't shown up. There was nothing in particular for her to do since the funeral was in the church and the reception was in the church hall. She didn't come to the funeral. None of her family came. So many people were there that I wouldn't have noticed if somebody hadn't said to me, I didn't see any of the Barry connections, did you? I phoned her several days afterwards and she said I never went to the church because I had too bad a cold. I said that that wasn't why I'd called. I said I could manage quite well but wondered what she planned to do. Oh, I don't see no need for me to come back there now. I said that she should come and get something from the house, a keepsake. I wanted to tell her I felt bad about the money, but I didn't know how to say that. She said, I got some stuff I left there. I'll come out when I can. She came out the next morning. The things she had to collect were mops and pails and scrub brushes and a clothes basket. It was hard to believe she would care about retrieving articles like these, and hard to believe she wanted them for sentimental reasons, but maybe she did. They were things she had used for years, during all her years in this house. Is there anything else? I said, for a keepsake? She looked around the kitchen, chewing on her bottom lip. She might have been chewing back a smile. I don't think there's nothing here I'd have much use for, she said. I had a check ready for her. I just needed to write the amount. I hadn't been able to decide how much of the $5,000 to share with her. A thousand? Now that seemed shameful. I thought I'd better double it. I got out the check which I had hidden in a drawer. I found a pen. I made it out for $4,000. This is for you, I said. And thank you for everything. She took the check in her hand and glanced at it and stuffed it in her pocket. I thought maybe she hadn't been able to read how much it was for Then I saw the darkening flush, the tide of embarrassment, the difficulty of being grateful. She managed to pick up all the things she was taking, using her one good arm. I opened the door for her. I was so anxious for her to say something more that I almost said, sorry, that's all. Instead I said, your elbow's not better yet. It'll never be better, she said. She ducked her head as if she were afraid of another of my kisses. She said, well, thanks very much. Goodbye. I watched her making her way to the car, but it was not the usual car. The thought crossed my mind that she might have a new employer, bad arm or not, a new and rich employer. That would account for her haste, her cranky embarrassment. But it was the nephew's wife who got out to help with the load. I waved, but she was too busy stowing the mops and pails. Gorgeous car, I called out, because I thought that was a compliment both women would appreciate. I didn't know what make it was, but it was new and large and glamorous, a silvery lilac color. Shivering in my indoor clothes, I stood there and waved the car out of sight. I couldn't settle down to do anything after that. I decided to go out skiing. I put on the old wooden skis that my father used to wear in the days when the back roads were not plowed out in winter and you might have to go across the fields to deliver a baby or take out an appendix. There were only cross straps to hold your feet in place. I skied back to the gravel pits at the back of our property. The slopes had been padded with grass over the years, and now they're covered with snow. There were dog tracks and bird tracks, but no sign of humans. I went up and down, up and down. I fell now and then on the fresh, plentiful snow, and between one moment of falling and the next of getting to my feet, I found out that I knew something. I knew where the money had gone. Gorgeous car, a charity, and $4,000 out. Since that moment I've been happy. I have the feeling of seeing money thrown over a bridge or high up into the air. Money, hopes, love letters, all such things can be tossed into the air. The thing I can't imagine is my father caving in to blackmail, particularly not to people who wouldn't be very credible or clevernot when the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence. What I can imagine, though, is a grand, perverse gesture to forestall demand. Maybe, or Just to show he didn't care. Looking forward to the lawyer's shock and to my trying even harder to figure him out once he was dead. No, I don't think he'd be thinking of that. I don't think I'd have come into his thoughts so much. Never so much as I'd like to believe. What I've been shying away from is that it could have been done for love. Never ruled that out. I climbed out of the gravel pit and as soon as I came out on the fields, the wind hit me. Wind was blowing snow over the resolute dog tracks and the faint circles made by a skittering vole. And the trail that will likely be it, the last ever to be broken by my father's skis. Dear Robin, what should be the last thing I say to you? Goodbye and good luck. I send you my love. What if people really did that? Sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A heap of roses, still more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open. Take care of yourself. Remember the present king of France is bald.
- [64:28]
Deborah Treisman
That was Andre Alexis reading Before the Change by Alice Munro. The story was published in the New Yorker in August of 1998 and was included in Monroe's collection the Love of a Good Woman, which came out later that year.
- [64:42]
David Remnick
Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards and they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films@newyorker.com video.
- [65:20]
Deborah Treisman
So, Andre, maybe we can just start with the form of the story. You know, this epistolary structure. Monroe wrote quite a few epistolary stories, actually, but this is. I don't think it's unique, but it's one of very few in which all the letters are from one person. It's not an exchange of letters. What do you think is the appeal for a writer of this kind of narrative structure?
- [65:46]
Andre Alexis
Well, I can speak. In general, it's great to be able to assume a voice and to have a character that knows and doesn't know at the same time. And usually it's progressive knowledge. June 15, 1962. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then August 16, 1962. Oh, actually, I was wrong. You know, you get to progress a narrative through a kind of enlightenment that happens. This one is tricky, tricky, tricky. Right from the start, Dear R, we don't know who R is, and then we basically discover that this isn't epistolary in the sense that this is going to be sent. She knows she's not sending it. She doesn't know where to send it if she wanted to send it. So this is very much faux epistolary in the sense that this is someone writing a diary by other means. So it's incredibly clever to choose Dear R not knowing the name. All of this not knowing, including, in fact, it's not being a real letter.
- [67:01]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And we never know the narrator's name.
- [67:04]
Andre Alexis
No.
- [67:05]
Deborah Treisman
She never signs her letters.
- [67:07]
Andre Alexis
This is a voice talking to a voice, but is in fact talking to.
- [67:11]
Deborah Treisman
Herself and writing to herself.
- [67:15]
Andre Alexis
Writing to herself. You're right.
- [67:17]
Deborah Treisman
Being letters, these are written documents. She's not just thinking. The thoughts are more organized. And by sticking Dear R at the beginning, she's telling us that these things are written with a reader in mind, even if he's never going to read them. They're written to someone and for someone, and might not be exactly the same things she would write if she were writing in a diary or to herself.
- [67:45]
Andre Alexis
On one level, I find it also fascinating that there are two sets of ignorances here in some ways, because we know that the narrator doesn't know certain things and is only made aware of them as we go along. But then we're also aware, I think, of an authorial voice, like when she repeats the Bertrand Russell quote. When she's insisting on this culture and that culture, she feels like there's an Alice Munro tussling with whoever this narrator is. At the same time, it's a strange feeling that I got that there are dual minds at work in this story. But it's a deeply unsettling story. I mean, I said to you that, though the way that you don't know what is going on is very much like a Henry James story for me. You know, I have. I have a problem with people calling her, you know, our Chekhov, because I frankly feel that she's as much our Kafka or our Henry James or our Borges in how she deals with ideas. Actually should probably talk about the Monrovian, in fact, because it is very sui generis.
- [68:53]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. You know, what we have going on in terms of ignorance or knowing. It's complicated on so many levels because there's the moment, first when she says, how could I not have known this? How could I have never realized? And maybe on some level she did realize. Who knows? And then we have. The level of, you know, knowing is different from yapping what her father says. But I think one thing that we never know and never will know is what is driving the father. You know, we hear about the letter writer, the narrator's experience. We hear her opinion that she feels abortion should be legalized.
- [69:42]
Andre Alexis
And yet she refused to have one because Robin suggested that she did, and she did not.
- [69:48]
Deborah Treisman
It seems she refused to have it simply to tell him that he was wrong in what he was asking. You know, it was almost to prove a point, that he was being absurd or inhuman. But I think we never know why the father does this.
- [70:07]
Andre Alexis
No.
- [70:07]
Deborah Treisman
And there are so many possible reasons. We don't know if it's humanitarian. We don't know if it's because he lost his wife to childbirth. He wants to spare other women that pain. We don't know if it's benevolent in that way. In one letter, the narrator says something about if he didn't have this, he might have found another way to put a knot in his life or assume risk.
- [70:33]
Andre Alexis
But it's an awfully strange way to deal with his wife's death in childbirth by aborting children for women in dire situations. So is that constantly saying, my wife was worth more than these things that come out? It's a very, very odd dynamic if that's the case. If he's aborting these women as a kind of testimony for his love for his wife?
- [70:59]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, well, he doesn't really have much love for his daughter. He seems to resent her presence and so on. And he hasn't forgiven her for, in a sense, killing her mother, his wife.
- [71:11]
Andre Alexis
But do we know that, or do we just know that she doesn't feel his affection for her?
- [71:16]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, well, that's a good question.
- [71:18]
Andre Alexis
Is she interpreting the father for us? Was the father like that? It's hard to say. We're very much stuck in her perspective vis a vis the father. And also, although I think Mrs. Barry would be universally accepted as a problematic character, to put it politely, she's problematic as described by our narrator. Is the narrator suspicious immediately of Mrs. Barry's relationship to her father and therefore jealous? What's going on in her descriptions of Mrs. Barry? It's very, very shaky ground. And I feel sort of. If you go online and read People's response to the. To the story. Mostly they're looking for ways to make it grounded. So it's about Anna Jameson, the. Not a suffragette, but a woman's writer that is mentioned here. Or it's about Bertrand Russell. You know, you want to find some anchor to make it a story that. Well, is it feminist or is it philosophical? But I don't think that it's a story that allows itself to be read with any kind of sureness. Even when we talk about something as primary as abortion. You could take the story in the horror of how the abortion is described as a plea for a legalization and a regularization of abortion, but she refuses to have one. Even that is kind of not given to us. And I think it's appropriate because what the story does, in a way, is it reproduces this feeling that you have when a child is coming. You don't know the child. You haven't decided the child's name. You don't know if the child will be born with heads, hands and feet. You are just in a state of unknowing. And this story, in a way, is a very good objectification of that state of anticipation, anxiety and unknowing that precedes the coming of the child.
- [73:17]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, I think you're right to say the story is not a political story. It's not a story with an agenda. It's not trying to convince the reader of anything. As a reader, you walk away from it feeling, you know, of course, that this situation is appalling. No girl should have to go through this in this way. At least that's how I walk away from it. But you can't say that there is an argument being made. No, it's very specific. It's about this specific doctor, this specific daughter and her specific experience.
- [73:56]
Andre Alexis
Right. And we don't even know who the father of Madeline's child is, by the way. Her husband's in Kenora preparing a place for them. But who's the guy that's waiting to pick her up?
- [74:05]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, exactly.
- [74:06]
Andre Alexis
Whose child has just been aborted? Don't know. It's really about the uncertainty.
- [74:12]
Deborah Treisman
We were talking about the father's sort of seeming distaste for the daughter, which we don't know what's driving it. We don't know what he's actually feeling. But it does raise a long lasting Monroe theme, which is this absolute hatred of pretension. Of what seems like pretension. How one's supposed to be down to earth and real and not have these highfalutin thoughts or ambitions. Clearly, he disapproves of the fact she's gone off to get college degrees, which he says are unique. He says she has too much education and not enough ordinary brains. And he just thinks she puts on airs. He just doesn't like her. That's what comes through, or that's what she feels. And then there's this moment when he gives her the check, which actually. A significant sum. $5,000.
- [75:11]
Andre Alexis
Yes. Yeah, it would have been a lot.
- [75:13]
Deborah Treisman
Today's dollars, it's about 50,000. And she interprets that as him basically paying her to go away. We never get a moment of affection between them. She doesn't feel she can give him a kiss when she arrives home. She's just come from an intensely traumatic experience. Not only losing her relationship with her fiance, but going through pregnancy and childbirth alone, giving up the child. She's fresh from that. It's early fall, I think, when she arrives, and this happened in July, she's in a very vulnerable state. And yet there's just nothing. There's no warmth for her in that household at all.
- [75:56]
Andre Alexis
But there is a counter to that, and it's in the mention of Wild Strawberries, the Bergman. It's Victor Schusterm, another film director that. That acted beautifully in it. But he's old and beautifully an old man going back to a place in the woods where he had spent summers and remembering that past life. And there's a great deal of sadness as well as a remembering of the beauty of the past. And if we think of the one old man that's in this story, it would be the father. And so very obliquely, if you know Wild Strawberries and you think of the father as being like the Victor Shostram character, then there is affection there. But also, if in her looking back, if she's actually like the Victor Sjostrom character in Wild Strawberries, she's anticipating looking back on her own life, perhaps ultimately with some tenderness. And at the end, that begins to happen. There is the freedom after she has given away the money. There is the possibility that love is at issue in terms of what the father's relationship to Mrs. Barry is. There is the possibility of love, to court just love as a guiding force, which of course, it is in Wild Strawberry as well.
- [77:25]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, she is the one who has just come home for summers. She's sent away to school at 9 or 10 and home sitting by the path, watching patients arrive, you know, in the summers. I do note that the one moment of kindness, the father Expresses is with Madeline, it's not with his daughter, it's when he says, she's a good girl, she's a good quiet girl, he's encouraging her and there is never, never a moment of tenderness like that with his own daughter.
- [78:02]
Andre Alexis
Even that is a double edged sword because he may be shushing her, given the procedure and not wanting her to scream out. And so calling her a good girl for being quiet is rather pointed in that situation. I take it as a kindness, I take it as a kind of, you're alright, everything is going to be all right, you're a good girl, girl. But it's very possible to take it as trying to get her to be quiet so that they are not discovered.
- [78:32]
Deborah Treisman
Right. That's another strain that's threaded throughout this story, which is this hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of Robin saying, I can't marry you because we've clearly had premarital sex and I'll be judged immoral and I'll never have a career. And in saying this and doing this, this is the most immoral thing he's done in his life. And by his standards, with the Church, suggesting that she has to have an abortion is even worse.
- [79:04]
Andre Alexis
For him to do that at that time is incredibly perverse given his professed religiousness. The Church is of course anti abortion and he, as someone who wants to look as if he's a good human, a proper person to teach at a theological college, is doing something that would be akin to evil in that environment. So it's a really weird moment with Robin. Robin is. She's right about him. I don't think he's ever going to amount to much because he's pusillanimous.
- [79:40]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. He's weak. He's morally weak. He can't stand up to his own actions.
- [79:46]
Andre Alexis
So when we look at it in terms of the morality, Mrs. Barry, is she good? Does she provide tenderness to the father? Is she the father's lover? Or is she simply someone who's potentially a blackmailer of the father, someone who has her hooks in him? Whether someone is good or bad, it's very shifting sense throughout the story. I think Robin is probably the only one that you would say, you know what, you're a dick.
- [80:16]
Deborah Treisman
I mean, the father can be, but Mrs. Barry, I mean, she's quite evil in her own way.
- [80:23]
Andre Alexis
Yes.
- [80:25]
Deborah Treisman
What do you think of her? What is going on there?
- [80:28]
Andre Alexis
Part of my initial reaction to the reading was such a revulsion with that woman. The way she grabs the check, the Way you see the new car and you know exactly what's going on with the new car, and yet she still grasps at the $4,000 that are given. Given to her. As you say, it's a lot of money in 1960. Yeah. I think she's dastardly. And actually, Madeleine says, you know, the old woman is rough, so she feels like a very unpleasant character. But then I ask myself, well, is the narrator jealous of the closeness that the father has with her? There is an element of wanting to be in the office, of wanting to do this with her father. And it doesn't mean that I, in the end, think Mrs. Barry is nicer than she's been presented, but it makes me question the nature of the narrator's view of Mrs. Barry and whether she's being entirely honest about the woman or not.
- [81:31]
Deborah Treisman
Right. I mean, there's that childhood moment where she says, why other people don't eat with their maids. Why is Mrs. Barry eating with us?
- [81:39]
Andre Alexis
Yes, that's true. That's true.
- [81:41]
Deborah Treisman
It's very clear that Mrs. Barry has a complicated standing in the household that is not the expected one.
- [81:49]
Andre Alexis
You would suspect, would you not, that the relationship between Mrs. Barry and her father is sexual. You know, when Mrs. Barry reports that she's moving around drawers and stuff in the. In the living room, and her father says, nobody told you to move anything. Anything around. There's a complicity between Mrs. Barry and the father that feels like they're intimates.
- [82:13]
Deborah Treisman
Mm. Mm. But why do you think Mrs. Barry does this whole act with the basin and grimacing and running away, which the daughter assumes is an act, is fake, and that she actually really made a point of making it clear what was happening. Perhaps, you know, it's a power struggle between these two women in the household over who is more important and who has dominance. And so perhaps it's Mrs. Barry showing off.
- [82:40]
Andre Alexis
Yes. But there's another moment that is very significant between the two, which is Mrs. Barry saying that, you know, all of her relatives have dyed with dark hair. Even in the coffin, their hair is still black. And then you discover she's dyeing her hair. So there is a moment of Mrs. Barry being aware of her appearance that is also kind of puzzling. On the one hand, okay, she's being hypocritical, but there's also. Who is she being hypocritical for? Who is she dyeing her hair for? It does feel like there's a very odd dynamic between the three of them. Once the narrator comes back to her home, which is not her home. Although she manages to get the house out of the father.
- [83:29]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, well, she didn't try for it. Let's jump to that ending because, you know, Mrs. Barry has triumphed. She's gotten all the money for whatever reasons, for reasons we'll never know for sure. And suddenly the narrator is the happiest she's ever been. You know, she's free, she's liberated. Why does she feel that euphoria?
- [83:54]
Andre Alexis
For me, if I had to guess, and I guess the whole thing about this story is that you are guessing. It's that the weight of the secrecy, the weight of the resentment, the weight of the feeling no love from the father. And also the weight of the money. She's liberated from the things that the father represents. Abortion, money, concern for how others are viewing her. Even in the end, as she tells the father about, you know, her having given up the baby for adoption. Even that she's liberated from because he's dead. You know how people talk about how horrible it is to have your home catch fire and to lose everything. And at the same time, the next minute they'll tell you, yes, but God, what a liberation. All these things are no longer an anchor to me. And it feels a little bit like one of those moments. With the death of the father comes the death of all of the concerns and the pettiness and the worry about whether he loves her or not. There's just a going away. And it's accompanied by skiing, which is, you know, like this. Freedom.
- [85:06]
Deborah Treisman
Let's look at the title of the story before the change, which on a literal level comes up in the sense of this is before the law changed and before abortion became legal. But so many changes in this story. She's changed from being engaged to being single. She's changed from being pregnant to being not pregnant. She's changed from living a somewhat independent student life to living with her father and Mrs. Barry and City to country. And I suppose maybe the change at the end is she's gone from having her life dominated by men to being able to choose her own future.
- [85:48]
Andre Alexis
Yes, that's quite possible. But the last thing she says, ironically, is, remember, the present king of France is bald. Which is referring to who A man. Bertrand Russell. And the notion of the truth content of a statement or not. So she's going explicitly back to the manly, the reasonable, the rational, as a joke. But the ending of the story puts the emphasis on trying to determine the truth quotient within a phrase and the falseness of it. She may be saying it in an amusing way, in an amused way, but I don't know. It's the thing that she remembered of Robin, like the first time that she met him at a lecture that he was given. This is what she held from him. And the last thing that she says.
- [86:43]
Deborah Treisman
To him, very tricky because it's as knotted up as his wanting her to abort the child so that he can be seen as viral. It's as conflicted. And the opposite is also bad.
- [86:56]
Andre Alexis
Yes.
- [86:57]
Deborah Treisman
I think she's saying goodbye to statements that are self contradicting. It's a farewell to that kind of argument.
- [87:08]
Andre Alexis
Hmm. So you would say that last phrase, the present king of France is bald, is part of the feeling of liberation that belongs to you, Robin, but no longer to me.
- [87:20]
Deborah Treisman
This is a goodbye to Robin. It's a separating of herself from him. And yes, it comes at a time when she feels empowered. She feels oddly empowered by having given away the money, lost her father. Yes, she can lose him too. In the beginning, she's wondering where she could send the letters. She doesn't even want to think of him going through somewhere that she doesn't know, life together. And now she's. She doesn't care.
- [87:51]
Andre Alexis
I think that's probably the right reading, isn't it? That she's throwing this back at him because it belongs to him, not her.
- [87:57]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. It's not her argument. No, I think it's telling that she goes out skiing, she falls down and she gets up. She falls a few times and she gets up. I feel that this story does what so many Alice Munro stories do, which is there isn't one climactic scene. Things happen, they're shocking. You think that is the moment in the story. That's the revelation. That's what we're going to take away from this. And then there's another one. And then there's another one.
- [88:31]
Andre Alexis
Yes, yes. Saying goodbye to Robin finally, as she has said goodbye to her father and his money and all of the stuff that means, you know, the small town that she's living in, it's gone now. And I do feel it's also the oppressiveness of the community. You know, it is the father, but I think the father and the community are explicitly tied together. The community knows what the father does, but tolerates it. He is part of that community. And so it's a freedom from that community as well. When, you know, Mrs. Barry leaves and the father is dead, I think the next step for her is going, if you had to project into the future, you can't see her staying there and becoming a happy community member and selling butter tarts at the fair and having.
- [89:17]
Deborah Treisman
Tea with Mrs. Barry.
- [89:19]
Andre Alexis
No, no, that doesn't seem a possibility at all. Do you know, while I have you, I want to ask you some questions because I know normally it's talking exclusively about the story, but I'd really love to ask you about your relationship to Alice. When did you first meet her?
- [89:39]
Deborah Treisman
That's a good question. I don't know what year exactly I met her. I was at the Harborfront Festival in Toronto. I met her in New York. We definitely had a lunch probably in the early or mid 2000s.
- [89:54]
Andre Alexis
Was that before you started editing her or after?
- [89:58]
Deborah Treisman
No, no, I started editing her. It's funny, I don't know the year I know the story. You know, I do know I worked on about two dozen stories with her. Most of that working with her was conducted by telephone. She would send her stories and, you know, often I would read it, read one, and, you know, decide we were going to publish this, and then. But think, oh, there's something a little wrong in this ending, and there's something she's not quite getting at in this spot. And before I even talked to her, there would be a fax saying, I've redone this ending or I've redone that. She was always, always working on her stories. And it shows also in the fact that she often went on working on them after they were published in magazine form and changed things by the time they came out in book form.
- [90:56]
Andre Alexis
Was she a person that you would make suggestions about, diction, word choices? Was she amenable to those kinds of changes? Or once you were presented with the text, was it fairly settled in terms of its language?
- [91:11]
Deborah Treisman
Well, her voice is her voice, but yeah, there was a lot of fair amount of editing. And sometimes it was pointing out that something wasn't quite working and she would fix it, and sometimes it was making suggestions. But no good editor inserts their own diction or their own chosen voice into a story. So it was never editing in that sense. But she was very receptive to being told that a sentence needed work.
- [91:37]
Andre Alexis
I'm more curious about the state at which you received the story. So did you get her fiction, like, almost done, but then you would just go through a fine tuning? Or did she prefer to go through that fine tuning with you? I mean, I know sometimes for myself, I love the idea of when I'm with an editor, leaving enough there so that the editing process is a creative one as opposed to, you know, you Hear about Nabokov, for instance, you know, being withering. If somebody suggests a comma should be moved, I don't feel that that's the case with her, but I don't know.
- [92:10]
Deborah Treisman
No, not at all. And we often made some, you know, cuts. She was very open to it. She didn't feel threatened because she was always still working on a story. So it was a work in progress for her. I mean, I would send her proofs by FedEx. And then when she got the proof with all the notes, she wanted to go through it page by page on the phone. It wasn't just a matter of checking it off and sending it back. And so we would talk through some of the changes. A lot of it was me sitting on the phone while she looked at a page. And she would say, yes, yes. Oh, much better. Much better, yes, I think I'm going to keep this one. And when she got to the bottom of the page, I think she would, like, throw it over her shoulder onto the floor. So sometimes we'd be close to the end of the story, and something would come up that related to something on an earlier page, and she would say, I'm just going to put the phone down for a minute. And then she would scrabble around on the floor trying to find that. It was very funny.
- [93:21]
Andre Alexis
A strange question.
- [93:22]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah.
- [93:24]
Andre Alexis
Was she aware of herself as Alice Munro? This is a very strange question, I know, but, you know, as a Canadian, we're so used to, like, going, no, no, it's okay. Don't look at me. And I kind of wonder if she had any idea of how good a writer she was or whether it was just simply something that she did. And the less about who she was and her reputation, the better.
- [93:46]
Deborah Treisman
Well, it was something that she did, I think. She couldn't not have been aware that she did it. Well, I know she was always painfully aware of the reporters who would camp outside her house the night before the Nobel announcement. That was sort of excruciating to her. But she chose to live in a small town. She didn't choose to live in Toronto or. Or Vancouver or any of the other cities she might have lived in. So she was, in a sense, choosing to be out of the public eye. But she had confidence. Often, if people are squeamish about editing and feel nervous about changing a comma, that's a lack of confidence.
- [94:31]
Andre Alexis
Yes.
- [94:32]
Deborah Treisman
It's not confidence in the work. She knew what was good about what she was doing. So did she know she was a good writer? Yes, she knew. She was a good writer, I would say, you know, I do remember having a conversation with her. New Yorker didn't take every story that Alice wrote. And she admitted probably, you know, I suppose she would have been in her 70s. She said, it hurts, you know, the rejection still hurts. And maybe you can speak to that as a writer. I mean, maybe you never outgrow that, even if you have confidence in what you do.
- [95:15]
Andre Alexis
Well, I think it shatters your confidence. You know, you sort of think, well, I mean, every time you come to the end of a draft that you want to show somebody else, it's always like, this is almost done. And then you find out, no, it's not almost done. No, it's almost far from done. And so you do, for that moment, question whether you know what done means, which is exactly what you're saying about Alice. I mean, she goes on rewriting them until they're in the book, and then basically they're forcibly removed from her hands. The thing is, our stories are living documents and they don't die even when they're published in the. In the pages of the New Yorker or even in a book. You know, they go on haunting you and they call up questions that you answer with the stories that come after.
- [95:59]
Deborah Treisman
I suppose I think everyone is different. Some people almost forget their stories once they're published. They've moved on and, you know, you can cite lines at them and they cannot recognize them. And she wasn't like that. I feel like these characters went on.
- [96:15]
Andre Alexis
Living for her afterwards.
- [96:18]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And I'll say the one place where she was self critical was feeling unable to really write a novel. You know, she would send me a story and it would be 40 pages. And I'd say, alice, this is. I can't do 40 pages of the magazine. I don't get that much space for fiction. And she would say, well, I just thought I was writing a novel. And then it turned out not to be one. So she would embark on what she thought was a novel, and it turned out really just to be a story. You know, I think she wasn't interested in the filler that you have in novels, in the obligation of getting the reader from one place to another. She just jumped.
- [96:59]
Andre Alexis
That's such an interesting thing that happens to some writers. I think of Philip Larkin, a writer I, despite his problems, I admire deeply. But it was a surprise to hear that he started off wanting to be a novelist and then does poetry, because that's a thing that he can do. I mean, it's not like it's the second drawer. It's something that he obviously worked on and it was brilliant on. But to find that he wanted to write novels, he wanted to be more like Kingsley Amos, I guess in the end is the same thing as finding out that Alice wants to be a novelist. Like, who did she want to be like, like William Faulkner or James Joyce or Jane Austen? Is that her ideal? It's kind of interesting that she's not able to reach that version of the literary, but the version of the literary that comes easily to her, that comes to her is, well, it's magnificent. It's really lasting. And it will have a lasting influence on Canadian literature from now and Reverend Ever, as long as there is a Canada. I think. Yeah, I think she's a great writer for the rest of the world too. But it has a special kind of significance for a Canadian that I'm, I'm, I'm really grateful for. I'm grateful for her life.
- [98:17]
Deborah Treisman
Well, thank you, Andre. Alice Munro, who died at age 92 in May of 2024, was the author of more than a dozen short story collections, including Dear Life, the View from Castle Rock, and the Love of a Good Woman, among other awards. She won the Giller Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, the Ray Award for the short story, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. She published more than 50 stories in the New Yorker between 1977 and 2012. Andrea Lexis, a playwright and fiction writer, received the Wyndham Campbell Prize in Fiction in 2017. His novel novels include Fifteen Dogs, which won the Giller Prize, Days by Moonlight and Ring. His story collection the Nightpiece, was published in 2020. A new collection of stories, Other Worlds, will be published next year. You can Download more than 200 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free and Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You you can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by Michelle Moses. I'm Debra Treisman. Thanks for listening.
- [99:46]
David Remnick
Hi, this is David Remnick and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not a robot. A live action short film from the New Yorker's Screening Room series has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This thought provoking film grapples with questions that we can all relate to about identity and technology. And what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films@newyorker.com video.
- [100:17]
Andre Alexis
From PRX.