For readers familiar with Alice Munro’s most recent collection, Dear Life, the title of this story will immediately recall “Night”, which she described as being “not quite” a story about her relationship with her father.
Vintage, 2006
“Night” is part of a group of four tales, which she feels are “the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life”.
And, yet, here is “Fathers”, which seems to declare it is the quintessential “not-quite story” about fathering in her oeuvre, appearing in a work said to be rooted in the “truth of a life”.
The story begins, however, with describing father not-her-own: Bunt Newcombe.
Well, technically, his house is described. In unflattering terms. And in this way we, as readers, gain an understanding of the man.
“(Though the house, like the man himself, had a look of bad temper. There were dark-green blinds pulled most of the way, or all the way, down on the windows, no curtains visible, and a scar along the front wall where the porch had been torn away. The front door which must at one time have opened onto that porch now opened three feet above weeds and rubble.)”
Carrying on the theme of town and country, from “Working for a Living”, the young Alice makes reference to other divisions of privilege as well, in discussing her relationship (is it a friendship?) with one of Bunt’s daughters.
“The first two years that Dahlia was at high school and I was still at public school we must have walked the same route, though we would not have walked together—it was not done, high school and public school students walking together.”
Dahlia’s relationship with her father is fraught. Bunt is bad tempereed, scarred and scarring, abusive to others and to himself.
“I kept thinking about whether she could really kill her father. I had a strange idea that she was too young to do that—as if killing somebody was like driving a car or voting or getting married, you had to be a certain age to manage it.”
How vulnerable is Dahlia truly? In some respects, terribly. But she is also afforded a kind of agency in this story. Even as the fates of other women, also vulnerable, albeit in different ways, are considered.
“Also the old women left on their own. Mrs. Currie. Mrs. Horne. Bessie Stewart.
Mrs. Currie raised dogs who raced about barking insanely all day in a wire pen, and at night were taken inside her house which was partly built into the bank of a hill, and must have been very dark and smelly. Mrs. Horne raised flowers, and her tiny house and yard in the summer were like an embroidery sampler—clematis vines, rose of Sharon, every sort of rose and phlox and delphinium. Bessie Stewart dressed smartly and went uptown in the afternoons to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee in the Paragon Restaurant. Though unmarried, she was said to have a Friend.”
Vulnerability and shame are so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable for the young Alice.
“Living out at the end of that road as I did, and being easily embarrassed, yet a show-off, as I improbably was, I could never stand up for anybody who was being humiliated. I could never rise above a feeling of relief that it was not me.”
She had discovered, however, a way of negotiating troublesome territory, which masked her true feelings and allegiances.
“I had mastered a deadpan, even demure style that could make people laugh even when they thought they shouldn’t and that made it hard to tell whether I was innocent or malicious.”
But this is not all the protection that she needs. Her disguise does not solve the problems which simmer beneath the deadpan, even demure, surface.
“My mother said that it was a shame, what a man like that had made of his daughter.
It seems strange to me now that we could conduct this conversation so easily, without its seeming ever to enter our heads that my father had beaten me, at times, and that I had screamed out not that I wanted to kill him, but that I wanted to die.”
Readers familiar with “Royal Beatings” will realize that young Alice’s pain lives on, as did Rose’s: “”like a boiled egg…with the shell left on”.
Even peeling away the layer of shell, in order to read a single story, simply reminds us that the truth more likely resides in a concatenation of stories.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories in The View from Castle Rock as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and this is the sixth story in this collection. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. Next week, “Lying Under the Apple Tree”.
Note: There are spoilers in the comments below.
Yes, it almost seems as though we as readers begin to feel more comfortable as we move closer to our own time and so now we relax and recognize the voice that we have identified with throughout a number of collections. I don’t think it is necessarily the readers’difficulty connecting with the characters from an earlier time although that may be part of it. I agree that there is a “concrete difference in the author’s scenic narrative” in Part Two. I looked back at the last sentence in Part One to see if it might contain a clue to the answer: “There they spoke the dialect of their childhood – discarded as they became men – which none of their descendants could understand.” Is Munro trying to tell us something in that sentence? What is it that their descendants cannot understand?
I was interested in the attitude of neighbours etc to what they saw was the case at the Newcombe’s place: “no one thought to intervene then” and the feeling that “people let themselves in for being made miserable”. Found myself wondering just how different it is now. Reading the daily news for instance on one of the myriad moving screens for instance and wondering why or how on earth some of the items qualify as “news”: perhaps they are just our windows on the other realities of our societies and the nature of the medium is to treat them as something we have little or nothing to do with. The matter of with whom one could be seen walking with to school seems similar to me: at what age are we free to decide for ourselves who our friends will be? And of course, there is the larger question: “I could never rise above a feeling of relief that it was not me”. And the matter of “inappropriate” behaviour for adults demonstrated by Frances’ parents and the fact that Alice’s father beat her but they thought of themselves as “decent” people. So much judging and so little compassion. Have we changed much or do we just hide it more cleverly?
On another note I was surprised by the name of the funeral home, Reavie Brothers, for Reavie was a well-known name when I lived and worked in this same geographical area and I knew some of the family members. This was some time after the time of this particular story.
Interesting comments. My neighbours, on either side, appear to be miserable whenever I see them. There are frequent squabbles when the couples are together, tiffs about who is supposed to be doing what and how in the yard, but more often the people are seen separately, never smiling, most often alone (and they do not appear to be enjoying their solitude). And I don’t have any regular conversation with them beyond the occasional ‘nice day’, so I am as far removed from them, in most ways, as we are from the people on those news screens you’ve described. It must be fun to spot the details, like the Reavie Brothers Funeral Home on the page. It might make for an interesting excursion, to the regional archives, to see what specifics could be found in historical photographs and newspapers from the time.
I am enjoying the stories more as the timeline moves closer to our own; I hope that isn’t simply a reflection of my personal difficulty connecting with characters removed from my own time and place, but that there is a concrete difference in the author’s scenic narrative, which results in my/readers’ more consistent engagement with the story/characters. Perhaps the collection is, at least, starting to grow on me?