Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

organization. His aesthetic and literary interests were at odds with the expected corporate norms; though he made money for Eaton’s, his colleagues and superiors did not much care. It was his view that they preferred someone who played golf. 22
    The draft beginning “We were married during the Christmas vacation” describes the narrator and her new husband, the two just arrived in Vancouver, going to dinner at “the Kellands, who were friends of Richard’s parents.… They were generous people and they wanted to be kind to us for Richard’s parents’ sake and also because the way in which we lived, in three dark rooms in Kitsilano, without a car, seemed amazing, foolhardy.” Another draft story offers a similar situation, this one connected to “The Turkey Season”; it pauses after the turkey-gutters in that story sing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”:
    In Vancouver our Sundays stretched from Kitsilano to Kerrisdale. We lived in Kitsilano in three rooms in an old wooden house. On Sundays we got up late and [ate] pancakes with honey and [drank] a large pot of coffee and listened to theradio which played baroque music and gave reviews of books and plays and serious analysis of what was going on in the world. I used to think of the poem “Sunday Morning” particularly if the sun was shining and there was a patch of sunlight on the faded rug in our living-room. Up until about noon I was always hopeful that some marvelous expedition would take place. I wanted to go on a boat or take the chair-lift up Grouse Mountain.
    Munro then details the possibilities that attract the narrator, who recognizes that all the things she wants to do cost money and, besides, they may not really be all that enticing. In any case, after they discuss various possibilities, “what Andrew often said was, ‘Well, could we get back in time.’ He did not go on to say ‘in time to get to Kerrisdale’ or ‘in time to get to the Adams.’ ” That assumption is implied, however, because
    every Sunday we went to the Adams for dinner. Andrew liked to go early to play ping-pong or checkers with Graham Adams, his best friend. Going to the Adams’ was a subject we were careful about. I never complained about going there but sometimes I would say, “Do you think they really want us there every Sunday?” I never made any criticism of Graham or of Mr. and Mrs. Adams who besides being Graham’s parents were friends of Andrew’s mother; but often I said sharp things about Susan Adams, Graham’s sister, and Andrew hastened to agree with me that she was a very boring, annoying girl, a “sorority girl.” Often Andrew would comment on something about the Adams that he thought I would approve of – “I see they take the Atlantic Monthly” – or he would say that he hoped I wasn’t too tired (we had been married only a few months and I was already pregnant). And when I said that I wasn’t tired or made some favorable remark about the Adams he would be relieved and grateful and I would feel generous.
    Again, Munro was drawing from her memories of those early years in Vancouver. One of Jim’s good friends from Oakville, Bill MacKendrick,had moved to Vancouver and lived, as Munro writes here, in the Kerrisdale section of the city, a better part of town. Another family, the Careys, were friends of Jim’s aunt and uncle from Winnipeg. Jim recalls that “we went there for dinner on Sunday afternoons. The Careys sort of adopted us; we went there more often than we didn’t.” For her part, Munro remembers these visits as “simply wonderful. We played word games after dinner and it was fun.” Mary Carey became one of Alice’s great friends, a person she visited regularly in Vancouver until the older woman’s death. She is one of three departed friends to whom Munro dedicated Runaway. 23
    After she returned to Ontario in 1973, she frequently created characters with husbands who condescend to their wives’ rural backgrounds: there is Patrick in “The Beggar Maid” saying “You were right,” as he and Rose leave Hanratty on the bus after his first visit there. “It is a dump. You must be glad to get away.” Or Richard the lawyer in “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection” pronouncing the narrator’s visiting cousin Iris “a pathetic old tart” and “pointing out the grammatical mistakes she had made, of the would-be genteel variety”; for this outburst, he gets whacked by a piece of lemon meringue his wife throws