Alice Munros Best

“Knit up good and tight to keep him warm!”
    ONE OF THE GIRLS in this group was Grace Horne. She was a shy but resolute-looking girl, nineteen years old, with a broad face, thin lips often pressed together, brown hair cut in a straight bang, and an attractively mature body. She had become engaged to Jack Agnew before he went overseas, but they had agreed not to say anything about it.
SPANISH FLU
    LOUISA HAD MADE friends with some of the travellers who stayed regularly at the hotel. One of these was Jim Frarey, who sold typewriters and office equipment and books and all sorts of stationery supplies. He was a fair-haired, rather round-shouldered but strongly built man in his middle forties. You would think by the look of him that he sold something heavier and more important in the masculine world, like farm implements.
    Jim Frarey kept travelling all through the Spanish flu epidemic, though you never knew then if stores would be open for business or not. Occasionally the hotels too would be closed, like the schools and movie houses and even – Jim Frarey thought this a scandal – the churches.
    “They ought to be ashamed of themselves, the cowards,” he said to Louisa. “What good does it do anybody to lurk around home and wait for it to strike? Now you never closed the Library, did you?”
    Louisa said only when she herself was sick. A mild case, hardly lasting a week, but of course she had to go to the hospital. They wouldn’t let her stay in the hotel.
    “Cowards,” he said. “If you’re going to be taken, you’ll be taken. Don’t you agree?”
    They discussed the crush in the hospitals, the deaths of doctors and nurses, the unceasing drear spectacle of the funerals. Jim Frarey lived down the street from an undertaking establishment in Toronto. He said they still got out the black horses, the black carriage, the works, to bury such personages as warranted a fuss.
    “Day and night they went on,” he said. “Day and night.” He raised his glass and said, “Here’s to health, then. You look well yourself.”
    He thought that in fact Louisa was looking better than she used to. Maybe she had started putting on rouge. She had a pale-olive skin, and it seemed to him that her cheeks used to be without color. She dressed with more dash too, and took more trouble to be friendly. She used to be very on-again, off-again, just as she chose. She was drinking whisky now too, though she would not try it without drowning it in water. It used to be only a glass of wine. He wondered if it was a boyfriend that had made the difference. But a boyfriend might perk up her looks without increasing her interest in all and sundry, which was what he was pretty sure had happened. It was more likely time running out and the husband prospects thinned out so dreadfully by the war. That could set a woman stirring. She was smarter and better company and better-looking too than most of the married ones. What happened with a woman like that? Sometimes just bad luck. Or bad judgment at a time when it mattered. A little too sharp and self-assured, in the old days, making the men uneasy?
    “Life can’t be brought to a standstill all the same,” he said. “You did the right thing, keeping the Library open.”
    This was in the early winter of 1919, when there had been a fresh outbreak of flu after the danger was supposed to be past. They seemed to be all alone in the hotel. It was only about nine o’clock but the hotel-keeper had gone to bed. His wife was in the hospital with the flu. Jim Frarey had brought the bottle of whisky from the bar, which was closedfor fear of contagion – and they sat at a table beside the window, in the dining room. A winter fog had collected outside and was pressing against the window. You could barely see the streetlights or the few cars that trundled cautiously over the bridge.
    “Oh, it was not a matter of principle,” Louisa said. “That I kept the Library open. It was a more personal reason than you think.”
    Then she laughed and promised him a peculiar story. “Oh, the whisky must have loosened my tongue,” she said.
    “I am not a gossip,” said Jim Frarey.
    She gave him a hard laughing look and said that when a person announced they weren’t a gossip, they almost invariably were. The same when they promised never to tell a soul.
    “You can tell this where and when you like just as long as you leave out the real names and don’t tell it around here,” she said. “That I hope I can