Alice Munros Best

temple and his cheek. He apologized for it, but said it was fading as he got older. When he was forty, it would have faded away. It was not the birthmark that cancelled out his good looks, Rose thought. (Something did cancel them out, or at least diminish them, for her; she had to keep reminding herself they were there.) There was something edgy, jumpy, disconcerting about him. His voice would break under stress – with her, it seemed he was always under stress – he knocked dishes and cups off tables, spilled drinks and bowls of peanuts, like a comedian. He was not a comedian; nothing could be further from his intentions. He came from British Columbia. His family was rich.
    He arrived early to pick Rose up, when they were going to the movies. He wouldn’t knock, he knew he was early. He sat on the step outside Dr. Henshawe’s door. This was in the winter, it was dark out, but there was a little coach lamp beside the door.
    “Oh, Rose! Come and look!” called Dr. Henshawe, in her soft, amused voice, and they looked down together from the dark window of the study. “The poor young man,” said Dr. Henshawe tenderly. Dr. Henshawe was in her seventies. She was a former English professor, fastidious and lively. She had a lame leg, but a still youthfully, charmingly tilted head, with white braids wound around it.
    She called Patrick poor because he was in love, and perhaps also because he was a male, doomed to push and blunder. Even from up here he looked stubborn and pitiable, determined and dependent, sitting out there in the cold.
    “Guarding the door,” Dr. Henshawe said. “Oh, Rose!”
    Another time she said disturbingly, “Oh, dear, I’m afraid he is after the wrong girl.”
    Rose didn’t like her saying that. She didn’t like her laughing at Patrick. She didn’t like Patrick sitting out on the steps that way, either. He was asking to be laughed at. He was the most vulnerable person Rose had ever known; he made himself so, didn’t know anything about protecting himself. But he was also full of cruel judgments, he was full of conceit.
    “ YOU ARE A SCHOLAR , Rose,” Dr. Henshawe would say. “This will interest you.” Then she would read aloud something from the paper, or, more likely, something from
Canadian Forum
or the
Atlantic Monthly.
Dr. Henshawe had at one time headed the city’s school board, she was a founding member of Canada’s Socialist Party. She still sat on committees, wrote letters to the paper, reviewed books. Her father and mother had been medical missionaries; she had been born in China. Her house was small and perfect. Polished floors, glowing rugs, Chinese vases, bowls, and landscapes, black carved screens. Much that Rose could not appreciate, at the time.
    She could not really distinguish between the little jade animals on Dr. Henshawe’s mantelpiece and the ornaments displayed in thejewelry-store window in Hanratty, though she could now distinguish between either of these and the things Flo bought from the five-and-ten. She could not really decide how much she liked being at Dr. Henshawe’s. At times she felt discouraged, sitting in the dining room with a linen napkin on her knee, eating from fine white plates on blue placemats. For one thing, there was never enough to eat, and she had taken to buying doughnuts and chocolate bars and hiding them in her room. The canary swung on its perch in the dining-room window and Dr. Henshawe directed conversation. She talked about politics, about writers. She mentioned Frank Scott and Dorothy Livesay. She said Rose must read them. Rose must read this, she must read that. Rose became sullenly determined not to. She was reading Thomas Mann. She was reading Tolstoy.
    Before she came to Dr. Henshawe’s, Rose had never heard of the working class. She took the designation home.
    “This would have to be the last part of town where they put the sewers,” Flo said.
    “Of course,” Rose said coolly. “This is the working-class part of town.”
    “
Working
class?” said Flo. “Not if the ones around here can help it.”
    Dr. Henshawe’s house had done one thing. It had destroyed the naturalness, the taken-for-granted background, of home. To go back there was to go quite literally into a crude light. Flo had put fluorescent lights in the store and the kitchen. There was also, in a corner of the kitchen, a floor lamp Flo had won at Bingo; its shade was permanently wrapped in wide strips of cellophane. What Dr. Henshawe’s house and