The Love of a Good Woman
Read The Love of a Good Woman Online
Authors: Alice Munro
ACCLAIM FOR
Alice Munro’s
THE LOVE OF
A GOOD WOMAN
“Masterly … miraculous in their detail and startlingly true to life…. Munro demonstrates an understanding of human nature that goes beyond what the rest of us are ordinarily able to grasp.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“Splendid … spectacular … [Munro is] a writer for the ages.”
—
Newsday
“Full-blooded … beguiling … [Munro] seems to write whole novels in a few thousand words and leaves you wondering what conventional novelists do with all those extra pages.”
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The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Alice Munro is one of the best short-story writers working today. Her tales leave one musing over the secret of a magic which is her own.”
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The Washington Times
“Shimmering … emotionally rending … [Munro] attacks big themes—love and death, passion and betrayal, expectation and disappointment—in richly detailed, unassuming prose.”
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The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Munro’s austere and magisterial stories of lust and loss are, if anything, more enigmatic than ever, and yet their opacity occasionally gestures toward something akin to hope.”
—The New Yorker
“Astonishing … thrillingly unpredictable Munro is not only one of the world’s greatest writers, she’s also one of its toughest, fearlessly exploring the difficult truths of female experience.”
—Francine Prose,
Elle
“A triumph … her books get better and better, spilling with the kind of secrets we instantly recognize, and with generous consolations as well.”
—
Mirabella
“Munro’s fiction is intelligence-gathering of a high order that feeds the reader’s need to know but never violates or debases the essential mystery that is at the source of all great art…. She has brought to light some of the most beautifully embellished, long short fictional shapes this century has seen.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“[Munro’s] stories are like pulsars, a few dazzling teaspoons of which weigh tons … all the complexity and nuance of a novel, concentrated within several dozen pages.”
—The Plain Dealer
“She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries.”
—Cynthia Ozick
Alice Munro
THE LOVE OF
A GOOD WOMAN
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten collections of stories, as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women.
During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three Governor General’s Literary Awards—Canada’s highest; the Lannan Literary Award; the W. H. Smith Award, given to
Open Secrets
as the best book published in the United Kingdom in 1995; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Love of a Good Woman.
Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.
ALSO BY
Alice Munro
Selected Stories
Open Secrets
Friend of My Youth
The Progress of Love
The Moons of Jupiter
The Beggar Maid
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
Lives of Girls and Women
Dance of the Happy Shades
For Ann Close
My valued editor and constant friend
For certain expert information essential to these stories, my thanks to Ruth Roy, Mary Carr, and D. C. Coleman. And for his inspired and ingenious research on many occasions, I thank Reg Thompson.
Stories included in this collection that were previously published in
The New Yorker
appeared there in very different form.
A GOOD WOMAN
F
OR
the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley, dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an old dentist’s chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the pretty little porcelain-and-glass insulators that were used on telegraph poles.
Also there is a red box, which has the letters D. M. W
ILLENS
, O
PTOMETRIST
printed on it, and a note beside it, saying, “This box of optometrist’s instruments though not very old has considerable local significance, since it belonged to Mr. D. M. Willens, who drowned in the Peregrine River, 1951. It escaped the catastrophe and was found, presumably by the anonymous donor, who dispatched it to be a feature of our collection.”
The ophthalmoscope could make you think of a snowman. The top part, that is—the part that’s fastened onto the hollow handle. A large disk, with a smaller disk on top. In the large disk a hole to look through, as the various lenses are moved. The handle is heavy because the batteries are still inside. If you took the batteries
out and put in the rod that is provided, with a disk on either end, you could plug in an electric cord. But it might have been necessary to use the instrument in places where there wasn’t any electricity.
The retinoscope looks more complicated. Underneath the round forehead clamp is something like an elf’s head, with a round flat face and a pointed metal cap. This is tilted at a forty-five-degree angle to a slim column, and out of the top of the column a tiny light is supposed to shine. The flat face is made of glass and is a dark sort of mirror.
Everything is black, but that is only paint. In some places where the optometrist’s hand must have rubbed most often, the paint has disappeared and you can see a patch of shiny silver metal.
T
HIS
place was called Jutland. There had been a mill once, and some kind of small settlement, but that had all gone by the end of the last century, and the place had never amounted to much at any time. Many people believed that it had been named in honor of the famous sea battle fought during the First World War, but actually everything had been in ruins years before that battle ever took place.
The three boys who came out here on a Saturday morning early in the spring of 1951 believed, as most children did, that the name came from the old wooden planks that jutted out of the earth of the riverbank and from the other straight thick boards that stood up in the nearby water, making an uneven palisade. (These were in fact the remains of a dam, built before the days of cement.) The planks and a heap of foundation stones and a lilac bush and some huge apple trees deformed by black knot and the shallow ditch of
the millrace that filled up with nettles every summer were the only other signs of what had been here before.
There was a road, or a track, coming back from the township road, but it had never been gravelled, and appeared on the maps only as a dotted line, a road allowance. It was used quite a bit in the summer by people driving to the river to swim or at night by couples looking for a place to park. The turnaround spot came before you got to the ditch, but the whole area was so overrun by nettles, and cow parsnip, and woody wild hemlock in a wet year, that cars would sometimes have to back out all the way to the proper road.
The car tracks to the water’s edge on that spring morning were easy to spot but were not taken notice of by these boys, who were thinking only about swimming. At least, they would call it swimming; they would go back to town and say that they had been swimming at Jutland before the snow was off the ground.