\nby Alice Munro<\/span>
\nfrom Open Secrets<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]H[\/fusion_dropcap]ere we are finishing up another of Alice Munro’s great short story collections. While we are about to move on to The Love of a Good Woman<\/em>, it is not at all tempting to just “get through” what may be one of Munro’s greatest stories, “Vandals.”\u00a0I had not read “Vandals” until recently as part of this project with Betsy. I was missing out. I’ve reread it a few times and I’ve been amazed and shocked while looking through its many layers.<\/p>\n The story begins with a seemingly straightforward letter. Bea Doud (we’ve met a few of the Douds in prior stories) has just lost Ladner. She met Ladner later in life, after a series of flings that didn’t go anywhere, and she feels she can live “inside his insanity.” He is a reclusive, ornery veteran who has set up his home almost as a natural preserve, though he is the god who goes in and manipulates everything and who stuffs the animals as if it’s more of a museum. When the story begins, Ladner has died in the hospital, and Bea is left with her thoughts. Her letter is one of appreciation to a young woman named Liza, a former neighbor. When Bea and Ladner rushed away for Ladner’s final visit to the hospital, a blizzard hit their little home out in the country, so Liza drove there to check on things. From Bea’s letter we gather that Liza discovered the home had been vandalized by teens. Liza boarded up the home, and Bea thanks her.<\/p>\n The letter continues on, though, touching on a strange dream Bea has where she goes to a graveyard seven years after Ladner’s death to collect his bones, unsure if this was a pagan act or a Christian one. Many others are also in the cemetery, practically celebrating, “tossing their plastic bags in the air.” As dreams do, things subtly shift around and Bea realizes she is not carrying Ladner’s bones — the bag is too light. No, she’s toting around the bones of someone much smaller. Some around her ask if she has the bones of the little girl, and she doesn’t know whom they’re talking about. She wonders if they’re talking about the little boy, Kenny.<\/p>\n Who is Kenny? What happened to him. She realizes it’s been seven years since “the accident” and says she knows that when the accident happened Kenny wasn’t that little anymore. What is going on? The first time I read “Vandals,” of course, I had no idea. But I was fine with this. Still, I didn’t expect the power and pain that Munro was delicately exploring.<\/p>\n Perhaps realizing she’s touched on something beyond gratitude, Bea never does send this letter to Liza. This is for the best, even if Bea herself never allows herself to fully acknowledge why.<\/p>\n “Vandals” goes around and around the central issue of open secrets, things buried, never mentioned, and the permanent damage such things exact on a long (or short) life. We learn how Bea and Ladner meet. We find out that at the time Liza and Kenny were their young neighbors, and they’d known Ladner for years. Liza and Kenny were welcome to come to Ladner’s whenever they wanted. Though on the outside Ladner didn’t appear friendly to anyone, for some reason he accepts Liza and Kenny almost as part of the household, and he teaches them day after day about the plants and animals and stars.<\/p>\n We don’t necessarily know that anything strange and painful has gone on until Munro goes back and shows us that it is Liza herself who vandalizes the home after the blizzard. When she gets there after the blizzard with her husband Warren (a name that continues to suggest a kind of wild, reclusive space), things are okay. Then Liza starts breaking things, and Warren, probably not understanding why but happy for a bit of chaos, joins in.<\/p>\n Again, on a first read you just have to kind of go with it. Most of what we’ve seen till that point suggests this comes out of the blue. But slowly and with extreme subtlety Munro lets us know that this is just one act of vandalism that is just the barest shadow of truly horrific acts of desecration and destruction that have taken place in the past and permanently altered Liza.<\/p>\n Ladner is not who Bea thinks he is. But it’s clear even Bea know this. Her letter of appreciation must also be one of apology, an attempt at expiation. She has made such an attempt before by paying for Liza to go to college. She knows the open secret — that Ladner sexually abused Liza for years, a maybe Kenny too; at the very least, Kenny was a witness. And the topography of Ladner’s land is a complicated web of delight and pain, education in the worst ways:<\/p>\n Here are the scenes of serious instruction where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut and a start from a planet, and places also where they have run and hollered and hung from branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n These are the explicit memories Liza recollects as she walks Ladner’s land. But here she is sensing the worst memories almost more than recalling them:<\/p>\n And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And just look at this terrible scene of shame Liza feels though she has done nothing wrong:<\/p>\n When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in on jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose from its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Ladner has, it seems, been doing this for years before Bea comes along. They first met Ladner when they were seven and eight. Going to her dream, and the bag of bones that turn into both Liza and Kenny,\u00a0it seems Bea knows but doesn’t accept what she knows. That she couldn’t send the letter suggests she knew even more than that. Does she also know who vandalized the home? Probably. Is she also a bit more at peace now that Ladner is dead and gone? It’s much more complicated than that. Others see her as if she has drifted off and is in a steady decline. To her, though, her last years feel “sadly pleasurable, like a convalescence.”<\/p>\n What a phenomenal exploration of pain and open secrets and the desire to ignore them, as well as the lifelong impact of each. Now, on to Betsy’s fantastic analysis of Bea’s decision to withdraw and ignore what’s going on right in front of her.<\/p>\n Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n I<\/strong><\/p>\n [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[\/fusion_dropcap]n her great 1981 book, Father-Daughter Incest<\/em>, American psychiatrist Judith Herman discusses the way in which a certain kind of parental relationship fosters the possibility for incest. The authoritarian father imposes an imbalance of power on the family, and either out of fear or choice, the submissive mother withdraws.<\/p>\n Instead of prohibiting seductive or sexualized behaviors on the part of the father, mothers resist \u201cseeing\u201d the open secret which is hidden in plain sight. Herman delineates the multiple abuses taking place: the seduction, the physical abuse and the secrecy imposed on the child by the father; the lack of protection, solace, or action from the ineffectual mother; the lack of help from any quarter; and the active denial by various elements in society that such a thing could ever happen.<\/p>\n Herman posits that recovery for the daughter begins with a \u201csafe therapeutic place.”<\/p>\n Some of Herman\u2019s critics attacked the sexual politics implicit in her therapeutic theory. These critics claimed that reliance on the feminist position — that an authoritarian, paternalistic family structure is the precursor to incest — invalidated her argument. In effect, the critics denied<\/em> that such a pattern existed.<\/p>\n Herman\u2019s book has been in print for almost 40 years, however, and it maintains its magisterial lead in the research into father-daughter incest.<\/p>\n II<\/strong><\/p>\n Open Secrets<\/em>, the collection of stories published by Alice Munro in 1994, addresses the way women endure and survive <\/em>the various kinds of paternalistic, entitled, and authoritarian mistreatment of women and girls by some men and some elements of society.<\/p>\n \u201cVandals,\u201d the last story in Open Secrets<\/em>, investigates the assault and rape of two children and the course of their lives post-trauma. This story is Munro\u2019s assay into what incest might look and feel like, although in this case, the mother and daughter are a constructed relationship rather than a biological relationship. The advantage of this design is that the story gives us, through the real father and the adopted \u201cfather\u201d and through the dead real mother and the barely present adopted \u201cmother, a deeper sense of profound neglect and equally profound refusals \u201cto see.\u201d This is what predation requires.<\/p>\n \u201cVandals\u201d also deepens the horror of the abuse by making the objects of rape not only the girl but also her brother. The horror of the abuse is additionally deepened by Munro\u2019s flat methods of story-telling. Grandiosity of any kind does not suit Munro. Instead, she depends upon the ordinary strangeness of life to make her points.<\/p>\n Liza and Kenny are two kids who live out in the bush with their neglectful, widowed father. They seek out the strange man across the way, the man who lures children onto his property with peculiar stuffed animals that he has killed and stuffed himself. Thus he is much like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, although what Liza and Kenny are hungry for is not food but attention, and in Liza\u2019s case, learning. Ladner taught them a lot about science. But he also taught them a lot about selfishness, seeing as he regularly abused them. There were places in the woods where Liza saw \u201ca bruise on the ground\u201d because of the \u201csecret life she had with him.\u201d<\/p>\n What is your way out of sexual predation? One way is for society to intervene. But we know that society will not intervene. A local school principal has gone out to Ladner\u2019s to see if he will allow some kids to visit him. Ladner is admired <\/em>by the establishment, the way Thoreau was admired or the way a priest is admired. This principal wanted to bring kids to Ladner.<\/p>\n Another way out of sexual predation is for an adult to intervene. But we see that Bea has chosen Ladner without any question regarding these children he has hanging around. Bea has spent so much time drinking and having affairs that children are not something she\u2019s given any thought to. She doesn\u2019t question in any way what these kids are doing hanging out with Ladner. What she sees is a rigid locked man whose immense \u201cblocks of solid darkness\u201d will provide her with the threat and structure that will keep her away from bars, keep her away from the men who tempt her.<\/p>\n Bea, as Liza says, \u201cdoes not see what she was sent to see.\u201d<\/p>\n Lacking the protections of society or individual adults, what is the way out of the abuse? One way out is suicide, and Kenny\u2019s death by car accident feels close to suicide. Another is the wildness that Liza pursued, like Kenny, until suddenly she was surprised by a safe place \u2013 her fundamentalist church and the safety of her fundamentalist husband. \u201cYou saved me,\u201d Liza tells her husband.<\/p>\n But Ladner\u2019s predation leaves its indelible marks: terrible anger, terrible constriction, and a kind of death.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Open-Secrets.jpg?resize=340%2C530\")
Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
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