Free Vintage Munro by Alice Munro Page A

But think of the effort that went into it. The creativity. The young chap was an artist by profession. I believe he thought of himself as an artist. I don’t know how she got hold of him, actually. She knew people. He supported himself doing this kind of thing, I imagine. He did a good job. He laid the pipes, everything. He showed up every day. Every day he came in when he was finished and had tea and talked to her. Well, in my opinion, they didn’t just have tea. To my knowledge, not just tea. He would bring a little substance, they would have a little smoke. I told Maya she should write it all down.
    “But you know, the instant he was finished, off he went. Offhe went. I don’t know. Maybe he got another job. It didn’t seem to me that it was my place to ask. But I did think that even if he had got a job he could have come back and visited her now and then. Or if he’d gone off on a trip somewhere he could have written letters. I thought he could have. I expected that much of him. It wouldn’t have been any skin off his back. Not as I see it. It would have been nice of him to make her think that it hadn’t been just a case of—of hired friendship, you know, all along.”
    Raymond is smiling. He cannot repress, or perhaps is not aware of, this smile.
    “For that was the conclusion she must have come to,” he says. “After all that nice time and imagining together and egging each other on. She must have been disappointed. She must have been. Even at that stage, such a thing would matter a lot to her. You and I know it, Georgia. It would have mattered. He could have treated her a little more kindly. It wouldn’t have had to be for very long.”
    Maya died a year ago, in the fall, but Georgia did not hear about it until Christmas. She got the news in Hilda’s Christmas letter. Hilda, who used to be married to Harvey, is now married to another doctor, in a town in the interior of British Columbia. A few years ago she and Georgia, both visitors, met by chance on a Vancouver street, and they have written occasional letters since.
    Of course you knew Maya so much better than I did
, Hilda wrote.
But I’ve been surprised how often I’ve thought about her. I’ve been thinking of all of us, really, how we were, fifteen or so years ago, and I think we were just as vulnerable in some ways as the kids with their acid trips and so on, that were supposed to be marked for life. Weren’t we marked—all of us smashing up our marriages and going out lookingfor adventure? Of course, Maya didn’t smash up her marriage, she of all people stayed where she was, so I suppose it doesn’t make much sense what I’m saying. But Maya seemed the most vulnerable person of all to me, so gifted and brittle. I remember I could hardly bear to look at that vein in her temple where she parted her hair
.
    What an odd letter for Hilda to write, thought Georgia. She remembered Hilda’s expensive pastel plaid shirtdresses, her neat, short, fair hair, her good manners. Did Hilda really think she had smashed up her marriage and gone out looking for adventure under the influence of dope and rock music and revolutionary costumes? Georgia’s impression was that Hilda had left Harvey, once she found out what he was up to—or some of what he was up to—and gone to the town in the interior where she sensibly took up her old profession of nursing and in due time married another, presumably more trustworthy doctor. Maya and Georgia had never thought of Hilda as a woman like themselves. And Hilda and Maya had not been close—they had particular reason not to be. But Hilda had kept track; she knew of Maya’s death, she wrote these generous words. Without Hilda, Georgia would not have known. She would still have been thinking that someday she might write to Maya, there might come a time when their friendship could be mended.
    The first time that Ben and Georgia went to Maya’s house, Harvey and Hilda were there. Maya was having a dinner party for just