Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

without a saucer. She was just sitting and waiting for me to come home and tell her everything that had happened.” When the narrator saw her mother there, she remembers, “with her sleepy but doggedly expectant face, I understood what a mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time, and she would not know.” 34 So the story ends.
    “Red Dress – 1946” was first published in 1965 in the
Montrealer
, so it was written after Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death in February 1959. Mrs. Laidlaw’s illness is not present in “Red Dress – 1946,” yet her dressmaking abilities – such as they were, in contrast with those of Aunt Maud, who was a professional seamstress before she married, and Sadie Laidlaw – and some of her personal history are evident. Her expectations for her daughter’s social success, and the daughter’s “oppressive obligation” to be happy, are the quite usual ones, irrespective of traceable biographical facts. “Red Dress – 1946,” really, is a mother-daughter story untouched by the effects of disease; Munro imagined her mother, as well she might wish to, without it.
    Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s illness and her gradual decline coloured all of her daughter’s high school years. Learning of Mrs. Laidlaw’s condition, the people of Wingham generally rallied with awareness and sympathy, although it was soon recognized that there was not a greatdeal anyone could do. A major effect of the Parkinsonism was that Anne Laidlaw gradually lost her ability to speak clearly, although her mind was fine. The doctors were not able to give her anything to help control the tremors. As the condition advanced, when Mrs. Laidlaw called people on the telephone, she had difficulty making herself understood. Still, she continued to go out; sometimes she would spend a night or two with Donna Henry’s mother in town both for the company and to give Bob Laidlaw a break. To those who knew the Laidlaws, it was evident that being isolated in Lower Town away from Wingham proper was very difficult for her as an interested, active, gregarious woman. That had always been the case, but once she became sick her need for social contact became more pronounced.
    For Munro, the overall social situation of her high school years seems to be accurately presented in “Red Dress – 1946.” The high school in Wingham was farther east, and up a hill, from the public school – so Munro’s already long walk to and from home was slightly extended. In another draft of “Changes and Ceremonies” from
Lives of Girls and Women
, this one called “I Am the Daughter of a River God,” Munro details the route as she walked from Wingham to Lower Town:
    Lonnie and I walked home together, always the same way, down the hill from the High School, along two blocks of the main street, and out Victoria Street past the glove factory, the junkyard, some deteriorating houses, in one of which bad women had lived, when we were young and the war was on, but we never saw them, only the dark-green blinds and geraniums growing in their windows. We crossed the narrow silver bridge, hung like a cage over the Wawanash river. Here was the end of town, no more street-lights, and the sidewalk turned into a plain dirt path. There was a grocery-store, Agnew’s, covered with haphazard signs and insubstantial looking as a cardboard box stood on end, then the Flats Road running past the old fair-grounds and the widely separated houses, small, commonplace, covered with sheets of painted tin or, since the wartime prosperity, with imitation brick, with their yards, henhouses, apple trees, smallbarns and broken-down trucks. Every house we called by name, Miller’s, Beggs’, Castle’s, and so on, and each had a look of the people who lived in them, Miller’s having the tightly shut-up, evil look of a bootlegger’s, and Boyd’s, where two children died in accidents, one falling into the wash-water and one shot by Denny Boyd practicing with a hunting rifle, had a look of falling-apart hopelessness and carelessness turning hopelessly into disaster.
    Munro’s geography here traces her exact route, one she walked twice each school day for ten years, but for the one winter spent in town. She did so observing and understanding the people and conditions she saw along the way, she recognized the social differences between Wingham and Lower Town. Given such a route, and given