Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [60]
A flattering outpouring when I at last retired. People wrote that they were bereft, they felt as if they had lost a close friend or member of the family. What they meant was that a certain amount of time had been filled for them five days a week. Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful. And surprisingly, I shared in their emotion. I would have to be careful of my voice, so that I would not choke up as I read some of their letters on the air.
And yet memory of the program, and of myself, faded rapidly. New allegiances were formed. I had made a complete break, refusing to chair charity auctions or give nostalgic speeches. My mother had died after living to a great age, but I had not sold the house, only rented it. Now I prepared to sell it, and gave the tenants notice. I meant to live there myself for the time it took to get the place—particularly the garden—into shape.
I had not been lonely in these years. Aside from my audience I had friends. I had women too. Some women of course specialize in those men they imagine in need of bucking up—they are eager to sport you around as a sign of their own munificence. I was on the watch for them. The woman I was closest to in those years was a receptionist at the station, a nice sensible person, left on her own with four children. There was some feeling that we would move in together once the youngest was off her hands. But the youngest was a daughter, who managed to have a child of her own without ever leaving home, and somehow our expectation, our affair, dwindled. We kept in touch by e-mail after I retired and came back to my old home. I invited her to come to see me. Then there was a sudden announcement that she was getting married and going to live in Ireland. I was too surprised and perhaps too much knocked off my perch to ask whether the daughter and the baby were going too.
· · ·
The garden is in a great mess. But I feel more at ease there than in the house, which looks the same on the outside but is drastically altered on the inside. My mother had the back parlor made into a bedroom, and the pantry into a full bathroom, and later on the ceilings were lowered, cheap doors hung, garish geometric wallpaper pasted on, to accommodate tenants. In the garden there were no such alterations, merely neglect on a grand scale. Old perennials still straggle up among the weeds, ragged leaves larger than umbrellas mark the place of a sixty-or seventy-year-old rhubarb bed, and a half-dozen apple trees remain, bearing little wormy apples of some variety whose name I don’t remember. The patches I clear look minute, yet the piles of weeds and brush I have collected seem mountainous. They must be hauled away, furthermore, at my expense. The town no longer allows bonfires.
All this used to be looked after by a gardener named Pete. I have forgotten his last name. He dragged one leg after him and carried his head always bent to one side. I don’t know if he had had an accident or suffered a stroke. He worked slowly but diligently and was more or less always in a bad temper. My mother spoke to him with soft-voiced respect, but she proposed—and got—certain changes in the flower beds which he did not think much of. And he disliked me because I was constantly riding my tricycle where I shouldn’t be and making hideouts under the apple trees and because he probably knew that I called him Sneaky Pete under my breath. I don’t know where I got that. Was it from a comic strip?
Another reason for his growling dislike