Free Open Secrets by Alice Munro

found a man. She found one fairly often but hardly ever one that she could bring to supper. She found them in other towns, where she took her choirs to massed concerts, in Toronto at piano recitals to which she might take a promising student. Sometimes she found them in the students’ own homes. They were the uncles, the fathers, the grandfathers, and the reason that they would not come into Millicent’s house, but only wave—sometimes curtly, sometimes with bravado—from a waiting car, was that they were married. A bedridden wife, a drinking wife, a vicious shrew of a wife? Perhaps. Sometimes no mention at all—a ghost of a wife. They escorted Muriel to musical events, an interest in music being the ready excuse. Sometimes there waseven a performing child, to act as chaperon. They took her to dinners in restaurants in distant towns. They were referred to as friends. Millicent defended her. How could there be any harm when it was all so out in the open? But it wasn’t, quite, and it would all end in misunderstandings, harsh words, unkindness. A warning from the school board. Miss Snow will have to mend her ways. A bad example. A wife on the phone. Miss Snow, I am sorry we are cancelling—Or simply silence. A date not kept, a note not answered, a name never to be mentioned again.
    “I don’t expect so much,” Muriel said. “I expect a friend to be a friend. Then they hightail it off at the first whiff of trouble after saying they would always stand up for me. Why is that?”
    “Well, you know, Muriel,” Millicent said once, “a wife is a wife. It’s all well and good to have friends, but a marriage is a marriage.”
    Muriel blew up at that, she said that Millicent thought the worst of her like everybody else, and was she never to be permitted to have a good time, an innocent good time? She banged the door and ran her car over the calla lilies, surely on purpose. For a day Millicent’s face was blotchy from weeping. But enmity did not last and Muriel was back, tearful as well, and taking blame on herself.
    “I was a fool from the start,” she said, and went into the front room to play the piano. Millicent got to know the pattern. When Muriel was happy and had a new friend, she played mournful tender songs, like “Flowers of the Forest.” Or:
    “
She dressed herself in male attire
,
And gaily she was dressed—
”
    Then when she was disappointed, she came down hard and fast on the keys, she sang scornfully.
    “
Hey Johnny Cope are ye waukin’ yet?
”
    Sometimes Millicent asked people to supper (though not the Finnegans or the Nesbitts or the Douds), and then she liked to ask Dorrie and Muriel as well. Dorrie was a help to wash up the pots and pans afterward, and Muriel could entertain on the piano.
    She asked the Anglican minister to come on Sunday, after evensong, and bring the friend she had heard was staying with him. The Anglican minister was a bachelor, but Muriel had given up on him early. Neither fish nor fowl, she said. Too bad. Millicent liked him, chiefly for his voice. She had been brought up an Anglican, and though she’d switched to United, which was what Porter said he was (so was everybody else, so were all the important and substantial people in the town), she still favored Anglican customs. Evensong, the church bell, the choir coming up the aisle in as stately a way as they could manage, singing—instead of just all clumping in together and sitting down. Best of all the words.
But thou O God have mercy upon us miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O Lord, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent, according to the Promise.…
    Porter went with her once and hated it.
    Preparations for this evening supper were considerable. The damask was brought out, the silver serving-spoon, the black dessert plates painted with pansies by hand. The cloth had to be pressed and all the silverware polished, and then there was the apprehension that a tiny smear of polish might remain,