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Illustration by Catherine Chan
In my mind’s eye I see titles of books on my mother’s shelves, long ago in another house. Some, such as Heloise and Abelard or Wuthering Heights, she’d had since her university days. She was a cultivated bookworm and, apart from summertime cottage reading, there were no drugstore novels in her collection.
My mom read with a coloured felt pen in hand for marking points as she went along. Sometimes she added words of her own. I saw the word COURAGE, for example, written in her exquisite cursive in the margins of Margaret Atwood’s poem A Red Shirt. My mother suffered many hardships but that never took from her love of every expression of beauty.
When I read a book that her hands once held, I see flurries of pink or purple check marks on the pages, like butterflies as tiny as the letters themselves. In this way I connect to what was meaningful to her. More than any teacher, Mom made me excited to read Atwood, Findley, du Maurier, Didion and so many others. Looking back, I don’t recall her ever mentioning Alice Munro.
In the days after Munro’s death I got the feeling I was the only Canadian woman never to have read a single one of her books. Years ago someone gave me a collection of Munro’s that I just couldn’t get into. In the wake of her death I determined to read my mother’s copy of that book from start to finish.
Inside the cover Mom had written her name, date, place of purchase and age at the time of reading. She did this in all of her books, as if to document her co-ordinates at the time. But unlike each of her other books this one hardly has any marks of her own. Only a few pink checks are there, spaced pages apart. They stop entirely 36 pages in. I think I know why. It isn’t because there was nothing relatable there. On the contrary, it is because it was all too relatable.
My mother was raised in a small Ontario town, like a character out of one of Munro’s novels. She described dreamy summers on the veranda of the multigenerational house her grandfather built, where she drew pictures of the Bible stories she was listening to on the radio. I know every friend, the names of each of her cats and all of her grandmother’s idioms. I know who the prominent families were and which houses belonged to them. She told a thousand stories about her Depression childhood, all rich and delightful. Other stories were not told but hung invisibly around the ones that were.
I keep hearing about the themes of secrecy, repression, shame and betrayal running through Munro’s work. Mom never shared details of her town’s scandals. One was encouraged then not to notice the questionable behaviour of others. It was easier to call an accuser crazy, especially if that person was female, than it was to consequence a transgressor. That would be impolite. Being impolite was worse than just about anything.
I’ve long suspected something must have happened specifically to her. There were clues in her abhorrence of hypocrisy; her discomfort with her physicality, beautiful as she was; her lack of agency and the lilting voice of a child that followed her to adulthood.
Let’s talk about it: How do you solve a problem like Alice Munro?
A few times I tried getting her to talk about her own experiences, but she’d look away and change the subject.
She could not expose the felted secrets of that time and place, at least not with words. So the secrets turned into shame, which she wore like a bulky sweater.
Not long after Munro’s death, just as I was trying to get through that book of my mother’s, there began a different kind of outpouring from her readers. With her daughter’s exposure of unattended historical abuse, praise quickly turned to outrage. In the latter I could clearly see my mother’s aversion to the failure of adults to protect the children in their care. I took a second look at the scant check marks to see where they’d landed: by a paragraph describing the busy hands of women tending to the work of houses and gardens. There is also a check beside the image of adults playing cards around a table at night, the children hovering in rooms above them, unable to sleep. Who was watching the children? I wondered. Mom could have been thinking the same.
In the days after Munro’s daughter’s story broke, I couldn’t look away from the swirl of reaction in newspapers and magazines.
I clipped an especially poignant opinion piece out of a magazine and slipped it between the pages of the book I am still unable to read. I want Mom to know I believe whatever it was forbidden to say. Sometimes gestures, like saving newspaper clippings inside a book, are the same as prayers. In the rush of support for Munro’s child from disillusioned readers, I hoped Mom would have felt relief at knowing the shame she was tasked with carrying too young never belonged to her. At knowing it’s okay to put down a book if it upsets you to read. And, oh, most importantly, stories are only dark until they’re spoken into light.
Martha Mallory lives in London, Ont.
