Read Online The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro - Free Book Online Page B

cancerous—she began an overwhelming nosebleed, the first and last she ever suffered in her life. The red blood was whipping out of her, she said, like streamers.
    She had the nurses running for help up and down the hall. It seemed as if nothing could stop it. When she lifted her head it shot right on the sick woman’s bed, when she lowered her head it streamed down on the floor. They had to put her in ice packs, finally. She never got to say good-bye to the woman in the bed.
    “I never did say good-bye to her.”
    “Would you want to?”
    “Well yes,” said Flo. “Oh yes. I would.”
    R ose brought a pile of books home every night. Latin, Algebra, Ancient and Medieval History, French, Geography. The Merchant of Venice, A Tale of Two Cities, Shorter Poems, Macbeth. Flo expressed hostility to them as she did toward all books. The hostility seemed to increase with a book’s weight and size, the darkness and gloominess of its binding and the length and difficulty of the words in its title. Shorter Poems enraged her, because she opened it and found a poem that was five pages long.
    She made rubble out of the titles. Rose believed she deliberately mispronounced. Ode came out Odd and Ulysses had a long shh in it, as if the hero was drunk.
    Rose’s father had to come downstairs to go to the bathroom. He hung on to the banister and moved slowly but without halting. Hewore a brown wool bathrobe with a tasseled tie. Rose avoided looking at his face. This was not particularly because of the alterations his sickness might have made, but because of the bad opinion of herself she was afraid she would find written there. It was for him she brought the books, no doubt about it, to show off to him. And he did look at them, he could not walk past any book in the world without picking it up and looking at its title. But all he said was, “Look out you don’t get too smart for your own good.”
    Rose believed he said that to please Flo, in case she might be listening. She was in the store at the time. But Rose imagined that no matter where Flo was, he would speak as if she might be listening. He was anxious to please Flo, to anticipate her objections. He had made a decision, it seemed. Safety lay with Flo.
    Rose never answered him back. When he spoke she automatically bowed her head, tightened her lips in an expression that was secretive, but carefully not disrespectful. She was circumspect. But all her need for flaunting, her high hopes for herself, her gaudy ambitions, were not hidden from him. He knew them all, and Rose was ashamed, just to be in the same room with him. She felt that she disgraced him, had disgraced him somehow from the time she was born, and would disgrace him still more thoroughly in the future. But she was not repenting. She knew her own stubbornness; she did not mean to change.
    Flo was his idea of what a woman ought to be. Rose knew that, and indeed he often said it. A woman ought to be energetic, practical, clever at making and saving; she ought to be shrewd, good at bargaining and bossing and seeing through people’s pretensions. At the same time she should be naive intellectually, childlike, contemptuous of maps and long words and anything in books, full of charming jumbled notions, superstitions, traditional beliefs.
    “Women’s minds are different,” he said to Rose during one of the calm, even friendly periods, when she was a bit younger. Perhaps he forgot that Rose was, or would be, a woman herself. “They believe what they have to believe. You can’t follow their thought.” He was saying this in connection with a belief of Flo’s, that wearing rubbers in the house would make you go blind. “But they can manage life some ways, that’s their talent, it’s not in their heads, there’s something they are smarter at than a man.”
    So part of Rose’s disgrace was that she was female but mistakenlyso, would not turn out to be the right kind of woman. But there was more to it. The real problem was