The last story discussed here, “The Albanian Virgin”, leaves the reader with a single, haunting question: which version of the events is the reader intended to believe?
1994; Penguin, 2007
Readers are left with uncertainty. Even the narrator does not weigh heavily on either side, indeed, it is her doubt, or, at least, the space in which doubt can develop, which echoes as the story ends.
Alice Munro’s readers are accustomed to open-endedness, to a myriad of possible resolutions. “The Albanian Virgin” is no exception.
In “Open Secrets”, unanswered questions trumpet and wail, even at the end of the story.
Many of Alice Munro’s stories invite a re-read. Some even nudge readers towards re-reading, like “The Albanian Virgin”. But “Open Secrets”? It demands it.
Readers long to put their fingers on that “moment…an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it”.
Mary Johnstone is in her ’60s when it happens. She is leading the C.G.I.T. (the Canadian Girls in Training) on their annual hike to the Falls on the Peregrine River.
Aside: I can’t say much about what happens, can’t discuss the open secret, without spoilers. But talk of the story’s setting is spoiler-free, so I digress.
I can’t think of a waterfall in the area about which Alice Munro is writing which fits the description in the text: the falls about six or seven feet high, falling over limestone shelves, with a hard-falling curtain of water you can stand behind.
The falls near Goderich (Walley in Munro country), like the Maitland Falls, are basically water rushing over large rocks in a river, without a drop. That doesn’t fit my idea of the setting.
There is a waterfall near Arkona that would provide a place for the C.G.I.T. girls to walk behind, but it doesn’t strike me as sufficiently shelf-like. It’s more like a cove, with smaller falls alongside.
I like to imagine that the girls are hiking to Ball’s Falls, further along the Escarpment, with its single shelf-like drop, its neat-and-tidy falling curtain, its shallow pools warmed by the sun against the rock.
And this suits my imagining because the area is known for visitors’ sightings of Peregrine falcons seasonally (though in early September, not June).
The hike is an annual event. Maureen, the narrator of “Open Secrets”, followed the same route when Mary Johnstone led the troupe twenty years earlier. The girls stepped in the footsteps of the girls who came before.
But what of “poor Heather Bell”? She does not return from that trip.
Mary Johnstone allows her to go back and fetch her sweater. “Yes, but hurry. Hurry and catch up.”
A girl missing. Although she was an “innocent” is something debated by some townsfolk, some of the girls.
“Now the search parties were out. Douds was closed, so that every man who wanted to go could go. Dogs had been added. There was talk of dragging the river downstream from the Falls.”
And Mary Johnstone was in charge. Mary, who “devoted her spare time to girls, often saying that she had never met a bad one, just some who were confused”.
But Mary had no children of her own. Nor did Maureen, the story’s narrator, girl-hiker from another time.
Depending on one’s perspective, perhaps they were not fully grown-up, adult, unchanged.
“Having children changed you. It gave you the necessary stake in being grown-up, so that certain parts of you — old parts — could be altogether eliminated and abandoned. Jobs, marriage didn’t quite do it — just made you act as if you’d forgotten things.”
But there is much to be said on the matter of care-taking in this story. On the ways in which one meets the needs of another (or, falls short — sorry). Boils, burns and headaches, barking dogs and hissy fits: there is much talk of damage as well.
What choices are made — by the innocent, by the experienced — which lead to pain and loss, grief and confusion.
What knowledge is shared — about saviors and visitations, about boys and urges — which leads to wisdom and uncertainty.
What happens in another “life just as long and complicated and strange and dull as this one”.
Readers might want to put their fingers on that moment, that open secret, but, instead, those fingers will hover above the text, dallying, circling, querying.
“Open Secrets” is a puzzle.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and this is the fourth story in Open Secrets. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company.
I’m so glad to have found this site. I feel challenged and mesmerized by Alice Munro. She brings my mother back to me.
I am quite surprised that most readers seem have to reread ‘Open Secrets’ to figure out the secret. I thought I was the only one.
It rankled me to not know the answer but later, I ruminated that either the vision of the hand on the stove had to mean something, or else it was one of those open ended texts that slightly drove you wild with anticipation and dissatisfaction at the end. Haruki Murakami’s novels and short stories have the same effect.
I didn’t enjoy this one as much as some of the others in the book, but it does bring up a lot of unanswered questions, it makes you think about what other hidden secrets are in the book, that are right in front of you. The short title lives up to its title, looking back at it and having time to think about it does make me appreciate it a lot more, but it wasn’t my favourite.
I do love how it reflects the small town life and how I can dig out which town the author has used to base it upon. Goderich is a beautiful town. When reading this, I couldn’t help the feeling that the author was trying to relate it to a murder case that occurred decades ago in the area – The Truscott (sp?) case. But, perhaps I’m stretching for that one.
Note: I don’t think there are any spoilers but readers who read between the lines might want to be warned.
I couldn’t agree more: Open Secrets is indeed a puzzle. One of the things about the setting that struck a chord with me was Marian Hubbert’s reference to the back kitchen which was “all jumbled up with everything”. The house I grew up in had a back kitchen: it adjoined the kitchen and included the back door of the house. It was also as big as the “real” kitchen where eating and cooking took place. The back kitchen also contained another full size stove but it was gas not electric as well as a washing machine, a dryer, an old kitchen table with a grinder attached, an old twenties style cupboard with a pull-out chopping surface, boxes of tools, a tall cupboard attached to the wall and filled with a horrible jumble of small tools, jumbled cords and ropes and wires etc. etc. The garbage was kept in the back kitchen,of course, just by the door into the kitchen proper. I guess the back kitchen was the forerunner to the mud rooms of the present (somewhat).
Here’s something Alice Munro had to say about the stories in this collection in an interview in 1995: “I wanted these stories to be open. I wanted to challenge what people want to know. Or expect to know. Or anticipate knowing. And as profoundly, what I think I know.” Quoted in Coral Ann Howell’s Alice Munro (Contemporary World Writers series)
To challenge us Munro presents Maureen’s memories and her experiences as a wife along with those of Frances Wall whose granddaughter was on the hike and then the observations of Marian Hubbert whose farm the girls stopped at on the hike and who also witnessed Mr. Siddicup’s behaviour the day of Heather’s disappearance. Carol Ann Howell, in the book listed above compares this story to the father’s remark in Moons of Jupiter : “The answer’s there but I can’t see all the connections my mind’s making to get it.”
Munro is definitely challenging us, and I ask myself “What do I want to know? In all the confusion, how can I possibly know what happened?” And this too: “The older I get, the less I think I know about anything.” I also think,however, about the delicacy of certain memories and Munro’s statement during her description of Maureen’s experience “when she is just going to sleep but not quite asleep, not dreaming yet, she has caught something.” And this “What she(Maureen) sees now isn’t in any life of her own.” How exactly is this related to the story? Did Maureen not want to know something? If she did know would it have changed the outcome?
That’s a terrific quote about Munro’s intentions with this collection (in Howells’ work); this is the third time that I’ve read this collection, but I feel as though I find more questions – not answers – with every reading. Unlike the father in MoJ, I’m not convinced that the answer is in my mind to start with, but I’m certain that I’m not seeing all the connections there to be seen.
One of the pivotal moments in the story is, for me, Maureen with the stove-top burner, her memory of her hand being pressed uppn it, “just long enough to scorch the flesh on the red coil, to scorch but not to maim”. There is, too, the image of the boil which needs lancing, another instance of something about to cross the line from injury to open wound. In the latter instance, the threat is from within, the toxins rising beneath the skin, but with the stove-top, the threat is from without.
Of course there is the feeble argument at the beginning which suggests that Heather Bell may have met a man and gone off with him (blame the victim, anyone?), but otherwise, it is assumed that some threat from without has claimed Heather Bell. This makes me wonder if the story doesn’t have its roots in the story which also inspired Ann Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies?
I just read “Open Secrets”, and then read it again since I felt so puzzled…
I’m just quickly replying to your comment, Buried in Print: Maureen’s memory is not of her own hand being pressed upon the stove-top burner, I think she is talking about Theo Slater’s hand… “She sees one of those thick-fingered hands that pressed into her table cloth and that had worked among the feathers…”
Can we talk here about what happened in the story or would it be a spoiler? What a strange and fascinating story!
I would be happy to hear from you!
That’s certainly possible. I think Munro affords a variety of possibilities there because that scene has a kind of fantasy-feel to it (perhaps memory, perhaps imaginings, perhaps a little of both). Ironically, I feel as though that scene is both pivotal and amorphous, as though it holds all the secrets but isn’t going to reveal any one of them concretely. Every time I re-read it, I feel like I fall in a slightly different place in terms of understanding it.
I’m not sure which story I would need to re-read more often (this or “Vandals”) to feel as though I have a sense of what “truly” happened. And I suppose that’s partly the point? That we, as readers, even with a sort of objectivity to enjoy that the characters do not possess, because they each have their own motivations for believing and disbelieving some of the possibilities presented, cannot put a finger on the “real” story?
Are you reading the collection as a whole? Or is it this story in particular which interests you?