LEAVING MAVERLEY

Characters:

            Morgan Holly – Theatre Owner 

            Leah – A young girl

            Ray Eliot – A policeman

            Isabella – wife of Ray

  

Plot Summary:

                        The story begins with a description of an old movie theatre named the Capital.  Munro introduced Morgan Holly, paradoxically, owner of the Capital movie theatre in Maverley, who occupies the opening scene of the story.  He does not leave the town, but all other character leaves.  He was upset when his single employees were resigning out of her pregnancy.  Morgan doesn’t like to deal with the public.  “He preferred to sit in his upstairs cubbyhole managing the story”.  He dislikes the idea that people had private lives.  He feels his employee’s herself through the character of Morgan Holly.  By noting him as “managing the story”, she refers to herself as the writer as the manager or projection of the tale they weave.

                        Leah, a quiet girl from an orthodox family had a recommendation of replacement by the pregnant employee.  Morgan liked the nature of the girl because he didn’t want someone gabbing with the customers.  Morgan was a principled man.  He was happier out of Leah’s strict father’s comment, she wasn’t allowed to watch or hear the movies.  So there is no way for her to get distracted.  The one problem to walk home alone so late on a Saturday night.  Morgan gave a solution through the local police officer, Ray Eliot, “who often broke his rounds to watch a little of the movie”, would walk along with her those weekend nights.

                        After a description of Ray character,  Munro proceeds to give us Ray Eliot’s back-story, A Veteran, “he came home with a vague idea that he had to do something meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him”.  Munro economically develops the relationship between Ray and Isabel who was his teacher at school, thirty years old and married.  She got divorced out of the reason was that both were in love.  After the back story of Ray, the story shifts back to Leah.  Leah is actually involved- running away with the minister’s son, this was only known through Ray.  He is surprised that Leah had not mentioned it – “Even though, compared with the theatre is hardly an encounter with the world but rather an encounter with a pretend world and even that at a distance”.  After a few years later, when after Isabel’s illness has necessitated hiring a nurse, Ray finds Leah on the street two-year-old baby boy and a little girl.  There was a tacit connection between Leah and Ray, it is not something can be articulated.  When Isabel gets worse.  Ray takes her to the hospital in the city.  After the disability of his wife, Ray goes back to Maverley and sells his house and leaves.

                        The story again flashbacks to Leah which leads her to leave Maverley.  The United Church Minister wants his wife to divorce him out of adultery with Leah.  The Minister says his congregation that he did not believe all his own mouthing’s of the Gospels, that all his preaching’s about love and sex had been a timid and conventional and he was now a free man, thanks to Leah.  Ray gets an apartment and works in the city and for four years visits Isabel even though she had lapsed into a coma.  Again, he met Leah in the hospital accidentally, where she does recreation for the cancer patients.  Again there was a tacit connection in-between the two.  Leah offers to cook for Ray.  Although he demurs, saying his place is too small, Leah does not seem discouraged.  Later Ray geta a word his wife “gone”.  Ray thinks that his wife had left the hospital.  Ray feels the “emptiness in place of her was astounding”.  She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever.  Ray feels now a lack, something like a lack of air, or proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.

            The story ends with Ray thinking of the girl he had been talking to, about how she had to be used to the loss of her children after her divorce.  “An expert at losing she might be called – himself a novice by comparison.  And now to could not remember her name.  had lost her name, though he’d known it well.  Losing, lost.  A joke on him, if you wanted one”.  Then as he goes up against his steps, he remembers her name, Leah.  “A relief out of all proportion, to remember her”