Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories by Alice Munro Page B

coast, what year was the settlement abandoned, what was the route of the first logging railway – she would say irritably, “I don’t know. How would I know about that?” This irritation was the strongest note that ever got into her words.
    Neither did Patrick’s father care for this concern about the past. Many things, most things, about Patrick seemed to strike him as bad signs.
    “What do you want to know all that for?” he shouted down the table. He was a short square-shouldered man, red-faced, astonishingly belligerent. Patrick looked like his mother, who was tall, fair, and elegant in the most muted way possible, as if her clothes, her makeup, her style, were chosen with an ideal neutrality in mind.
    “Because I am interested in history,” said Patrick in an angry, pompous, but nervously breaking voice.
    “Because-I-am-interested-in-history,” said his sister Marion in an immediate parody, break and all. “History!”
    The sisters Joan and Marion were younger than Patrick, older than Rose. Unlike Patrick they showed no nervousness, no cracks in self-satisfaction. At an earlier meal they had questioned Rose.
    “Do you ride?”
    “No.”
    “Do you sail?”
    “No.”
    “Play tennis? Play golf? Play badminton?”
    No. No. No.
    “Perhaps she is an intellectual genius, like Patrick,” the father said. And Patrick, to Rose’s horror and embarrassment, began to shout at the table in general an account of her scholarships and prizes. What did he hope for? Was he so witless as to think such bragging would subdue them, would bring out anything but further scorn? Against Patrick, against his shouted boasts, his contempt for sports and television, his so-called intellectual interests, the family seemed united. But this alliance was only temporary. The father’s dislike of his daughters was minor only in comparison with his dislike of Patrick. He railed at them too, when he could spare a moment; he jeered at the amount of time they spent at their games, complained about the cost of their equipment, their boats, their horses. And they wrangled with each other on obscure questions of scores and borrowings and damages. All complained to the mother about the food, which was plentiful and delicious. The mother spoke as little as possible to anyone and to tell the truth Rose did not blame her. She had never imagined so much true malevolence collected in one place. Billy Pope was a bigot and a grumbler, Flo was capricious, unjust, and gossipy, her father, when he was alive, had been capable of cold judgments and unremitting disapproval; but compared to Patrick’s family, all Rose’s people seemed jovial and content.
    “Are they always like this?” she said to Patrick. “Is it me? They don’t like me.”
    “They don’t like you because I chose you,” said Patrick with some satisfaction.
    They lay on the stony beach after dark, in their raincoats, hugged and kissed and uncomfortably, unsuccessfully, attempted more. Rose gotseaweed stains on Dr. Henshawe’s coat. Patrick said, “You see why I need you? I need you so much!”
    SHE TOOK HIM to Hanratty. It was just as bad as she had thought it would be. Flo had gone to great trouble, and cooked a meal of scalloped potatoes, turnips, big country sausages which were a special present from Billy Pope, from the butcher shop. Patrick detested coarse-textured food, and made no pretense of eating it. The table was spread with a plastic cloth, they ate under the tube of fluorescent light. The centerpiece was new and especially for the occasion. A plastic swan, lime green in color, with slits in the wings, in which were stuck folded, colored paper napkins. Billy Pope, reminded to take one, grunted, refused. Otherwise he was on dismally good behavior. Word had reached him, word had reached both Flo and Billy, of Rose’s triumph. It had come from their superiors in Hanratty; otherwise they could not have believed it. Customers in the butcher shop – formidable ladies, the