I like the emotional reticence with which ‘Leaving Maverly’ in Alice’s Munro’s collection, Dear Life begins.
I like it because it’s so unpromising. Alice Munro leads you to expect very little and then offers you a great deal.
The story begins as an exercise in nostalgia: “In the old days when”. When there was a movie theater in every town, often called the “Capital”, as Maverly’s was. “There was one in this town”. So there’s only one. You know what kind of a town it is. A town that can support one movie house. Sounds like we’re in a dull town, doesn’t it?
We’re introduced to Morgan Holly, the owner and projectionist. Morgan is put out when “the girl” who takes the tickets quits. She’s the only other employee.
She was pregnant and in those days, Munro tells us, women didn’t appear in public when they had begun to show. I’m used to seeing women in advanced stages of pregnancy standing in subway cars because no one would give them a seat. So I feel I’m returning to Mayberry in this story.
Another layer of insularity, Morgan Holly doesn’t like to deal with the public. “He preferred to sit in his upstairs cubbyhole managing the story…” Morgan disliked the idea that people had private lives. He feels his employee’s pregnancy as a imposition.
That’s a notable way of putting it: “managing the story”. Sounds like Alice Munro is projecting herself into this character, the writer as the manager or projectionist of the tale that they are telling.
Leah is hired as the girl’s replacement. It’s choice that the plain style of her hair and lack of makeup is a signal of the religious conservatism in her family. Munro makes this an active noticing. That is, it’s Morgan who’s said to notice how Leah looks. That’s more effective than describing Leah in a neutral third person voice. He asks her what kind of a name Leah is and is told it’s from the Bible.
We will see that Munro has set up Maverly’s insularity so she could have the opportunity to puncture it. This is an ensemble piece. Munro opens the whole town up before she’s through. In the triad of tales that I’ve reviewed; this is the last, Munro puts into play a school of characters, like a school of fish. I feel like I’m looking into a koi pond, only it’s people.
There’s so much, there’s so much that I can’t specify it all. Leah can only take an evening job because during the day she has to help her mother look after the younger children. So you can sense how burdened the dutiful daughter is by obligations, day and evening. The feeling that something was about to break out was under the surface as I read.
Leah is allowed by to take the job in the ticket booth only after her parents are assured that there is no possibility that Leah will see the movie. They need the extra money. What Leah’s parents don’t realize is that Leah can hear the movie. Morgan has lied to them and said that the theater is soundproofed.
A local policeman, Ray Elliott, is employed to escort Leah back to her parent’s house in the late evenings since he breaks his night rounds in order to catch some of the movie anyway. (There’s always a careful explanation of a character’s circumstances in an Alice Munro story.) Ray’s protection is superfluous in the quiescent Maverly. But the extra security for Leah pays due respect to her family’s conservatism.
Ray has taken the night job as policeman so that he can help his wife, Isabel, manage during the day. They have no children but his wife has a progressive illness. Ray is sleep-deprived. He doesn’t end up using his valuable rest time at home since he and his wife get to talking and the time passes. I liked that touch, a signal of Ray’s devotion and the closeness of the marriage.
Ray’s backstory, quite extensive, adds more depth to what Munro is going to tell us about what happens to Leah and what happens in the private space of Ray and Isabel’s marriage.
And it’s not what you might expect. Alice Munro is very busy being eloquent. Long extended commitments between people fade from the scene, like you can watch a beautiful summer fade from a wood that you know has seen many such. Go back to the woods and you can see that something recurrent seems to remain. You have to look close to the ground to find it but it’s quietly there. I’ve read whole novels that haven’t satisfied me as much as “Leaving Maverly”.
