Alice Munros Best

she could summon a rudeness of her own to knock anybody flat.
    Flora was not present at the dance.
    “My sister-in-law is not a dancer,” said Nurse Atkinson. “She is stuck in the olden times.” She invited them to laugh at Flora, whom she always called her sister-in-law, though she had no right to do so.
    My mother wrote a letter to Flora after hearing about all these things. Being removed from the scene, and perhaps in a flurry of importance due to her own newly married state, she may have lost sight of the kind of person she was writing to. She offered sympathy and showed outrage, and said blunt disparaging things about the woman who had – as my mother saw it – dealt Flora such a blow. Back came a letter from Flora saying that she did not know where my mother had been getting her information, but that it seemed she had misunderstood, or listened to malicious people, or jumped to unjustified conclusions. What happened in Flora’s family was nobody else’s business, and certainly nobody needed to feel sorry for her or angry on her behalf. Flora said that she was happy and satisfied in her life, as she always had been, and she did not interfere with what others did or wanted, because such things did not concern her. She wished my mother all happiness in her marriage and hoped that she would soon be too busy with her own responsibilities to worry about the lives of people that she used to know.
    This well-written letter cut my mother, as she said, to the quick. She and Flora stopped corresponding. My mother did become busy with her own life and finally a prisoner in it.
    But she thought about Flora. In later years, when she sometimes talked about the things she might have been, or done, she would say, “If I could have been a writer – I do think I could have been; I could have been a writer – then I would have written the story of Flora’s life. And do you know what I would have called it? ‘The Maiden Lady.’”
    The Maiden Lady.
She said these words in a solemn and sentimental tone of voice that I had no use for. I knew, or thought I knew, exactly the value she found in them. The stateliness and mystery. The hint of derision turning to reverence. I was fifteen or sixteen years old by that time, and I believed that I could see into my mother’s mind. I could see what she would do with Flora, what she had already done. She would make her into a noble figure, one who accepts defection, treachery, who forgives and stands aside, not once but twice. Never a moment of complaint. Flora goes about her cheerful labors, she cleans the house and shovels out the cow byre, she removes some bloody mess from her sister’s bed, and when at last the future seems to openup for her – Ellie will die and Robert will beg forgiveness and Flora will silence him with the proud gift of herself – it is time for Audrey Atkinson to drive into the yard and shut Flora out again, more inexplicably and thoroughly the second time than the first. She must endure the painting of the house, the electric lights, all the prosperous activity next door. “Make-Believe Ballroom,” “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” No more Scottish comedies or ancient sermons. She must see them drive off to the dance – her old lover and that coldhearted, stupid, by no means beautiful woman in the white satin wedding dress. She is mocked. (And of course she has made over the farm to Ellie and Robert, of course he has inherited it, and now everything belongs to Audrey Atkinson.) The wicked flourish. But it is all right. It is all right – the elect are veiled in patience and humility and lighted by a certainty that events cannot disturb.
    That was what I believed my mother would make of things. In her own plight her notions had turned mystical, and there was sometimes a hush, a solemn thrill in her voice that grated on me, alerted me to what seemed a personal danger. I felt a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking, an incontestable crippled-mother power, which could capture and choke me. There would be no end to it. I had to keep myself sharp-tongued and cynical, arguing and deflating. Eventually I gave up even that recognition and opposed her in silence.
    This is a fancy way of saying that I was no comfort and poor company to her when she had almost nowhere else to turn.
    I had my own ideas about Flora’s story. I didn’t think that I could have written a novel but that I would write one. I would take a different tack. I saw through my mother’s