Moons of Jupiter (16 page)

O
N SATURDAY MORNING
Frances found a note in her mailbox, asking her to let Ted into the church that night. She was as nervous all day as she had been when waiting to meet him for the first time, in Beattie's Bush. She waited, in the dark, by the Sunday-schoolroom door. It was a bad night, Saturday, either the minister or the janitor was likely to be there, and both had been, earlier, when Frances was distractedly playing the organ. They had gone home, she hoped for good.

They usually made love here in the dark, but tonight Frances thought they would need a light on, they would need to talk. She led the way at once to a Sunday-school classroom behind the choir loft. It was a long, narrow, stuffy room with no outside windows. The Sunday-school chairs had been stacked in one corner. There was a strange thing on the teacher's table—an ash tray with two cigarette stubs in it. Frances held it up.

“Somebody else must come here, too.”

She had to talk about something besides the accident, because she was sure she could never say the right thing about that.

“Whole relay of lovers,” said Ted, to her relief. “I wouldn't be surprised.” He named some possible pairs. The school secretary and the principal. Frances' sister-in-law and the minister of this church. But he spoke drearily.

“We'll have to set up a schedule.”

They didn't bother taking the chairs down, but sat on the floor with their backs against the wall, under a picture of Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee.

“I have never put in such a week in my life,” Ted said. “I don't know where to start. We came back from London Tuesday, and Wednesday, Greta's family descended on us. They drove all night, two nights. I don't know how they did it. They commandeered a snowplow to go ahead of them for about fifty miles in one place. Those women are capable of anything. The father's just a shadow. The women are terrors. Kartrud is the worst. She has eight children of her own and she's never stopped running her sisters and her sisters' families and anybody else who'll allow her. Greta is just useless against her.”

He said that trouble had started right away, about the funeral. Ted had decided on a nonreligious funeral. He had made up his mind long ago that if any of his family died, he would not call in the church. The undertaker didn't like it, but agreed. Greta said it was all right. Ted wrote out a few memorial paragraphs he intended to read himself. That would be all. No hymn-singing, no prayers. There was nothing new about this. They all knew how he felt. Greta knew. Her family knew. Nevertheless, they started to carry on as if this was a new and horrifying revelation. They acted as if atheism itself was an unheard-of position. They had tried to tell him a funeral of this sort was illegal, that he could go to jail.

“They'd brought this old fellow with them, who I just assumed was some uncle or cousin or other. I haven't met them all, it's an enormous family. So after I told them my plans for the funeral they explained to me that he's their minister. A Finnish Lutheran minister they carted four hundred miles to intimidate me with. He was in bad shape, too, the poor old bugger. He'd caught cold. They were running around putting mustard plasters on him and soaking his feet and trying to keep him fit to perform. Serve them right if he'd conked out on them.”

Ted was up by this time, walking back and forth in the Sunday-school room. He said there was no way he was going to be intimidated. They could have brought the whole congregation and the Lutheran Church itself on a flatcar. He told them that. He meant to bury his own son in his own way. By this time Greta had caved in, she had gone over to their side. Not that she had an ounce of religious feeling, it was just the weeping and recriminations and the weakness in the face of her family that she always had. Nor was it left to the family. Various Hanratty busybodies got into it. The house was full of them. The United Church minister, the minister of this church, showed up at one point for a consultation with the Lutheran. Ted threw him out. Later on he found out it wasn't exactly the minister's fault, he hadn't come on his own. Kartrud had summoned him, saying there was a desperate situation, her sister was having a nervous breakdown.

“Was she?” said Frances.

“What?”

“Was she—your wife—having a nervous breakdown?” “Anybody would be having a nervous breakdown with that pack of maniacs in the house.”

The funeral was private, Ted said, but that didn't seem to prevent anybody who wanted from showing up. He himself stood up beside the casket ready to knock down anyone who interfered. His sister-inlaw—with pleasure—or the ailing old minister or even Greta if they pushed her into it.

“Oh, no,” said Frances involuntarily.

“I knew she wouldn't. But Kartrud might have. Or the old mother.

I didn't know what was going to happen. I knew I couldn't show a moment's hesitation. It was horrible. I started to talk and the old mother started to rock and wail. I had to shout over her. The louder she got in Finnish the louder I got in English. It was insane.”

While he talked he dumped the cigarette stubs from the ash tray into his hand and back, was pitching them back and forth.

Frances said, after a pause, “But Greta was his mother.”

“How do you mean?”

“If she did want an ordinary funeral.”

“Oh, she didn't.”

“How do you know?”

“I know her. She doesn't have any opinions one way or the other.

She just caved in in front of Kartrud; she always will.”

He did it all for himself, Frances was thinking. He wasn't thinking of Greta for a moment. Or of Bobby. He was thinking of himself and his beliefs and not giving in to his enemies. That was what mattered to him. She could not help seeing this and she did not like it. She could not help seeing how much she did not like it. That did not mean that she had stopped liking him; at least, she had not stopped loving him. But there was a change. When she thought about it later, it seemed to her that up to that point she had been involved in something childish and embarrassing. She had managed it all for her own delight, seeing him as she wanted to, paying attention when she wanted to, not taking him seriously, although she thought she did; she would have said he was the most important thing in her life.

She wasn't going to be allowed that any more, that indolence and deception.

For the first time, she was surprised when he wanted to make love. She was not ready, she could not comprehend him yet, but he seemed too intent to notice.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Sunday, when she played for services, was the last time Frances ever played in the United Church.

On Monday Ted was called into the principal's office. What had happened was that Greta's sister Kartrud had got to know the women of Hanratty better in five days than Greta had in eighteen months, and that someone had told her about Ted and Frances. Frances thought afterward that it would have been Adelaide who told, it must have been Adelaide, but she was wrong. Adelaide presented herself at the Makkavala house, but she was not the one who told; somebody else had got there before her. In a rage already from the struggle over the funeral, and her loss there, Kartrud went to visit both the principal of the high school and the minister of the United Church. She inquired of them what steps they meant to take. Neither the minister nor the principal wanted to take any. Both of them had known about the affair, and been nervous about it, and hoped it would blow over. Ted and Frances were both valuable to them. Both of them said to Kartrud that surely now, after the death of the child, husband and wife would draw together and this other business would be forgotten. A pity to make a fuss now, they said, when the family had suffered such a loss and the damage could be mended, with the wife none the wiser. But Kartrud promised she would be the wiser. She meant to tell Greta, she said, before she left for home, she meant to persuade Greta to go with her, if something had not been done to stop this. She was a powerful woman, physically and vocally. Both men were cowed by her.

The principal said to Ted that an unfortunate matter had come to his attention, been brought to his attention. He apologized for bringing it up so soon after the bereavement but said he had no choice. He said that he hoped Ted could guess the matter he had in mind, which concerned a lady of this town who had previously had everyone's
respect and he hoped would have it again. He said he imagined that Ted himself might have already decided to put an end to things. He was expecting that Ted would make some embarrassed ambiguous statement to the effect that he had, or would, put an end to things, and no matter how convincing or unconvincing this statement sounded, the principal was prepared to accept it. He was only carrying out his promise; so that Kartrud would get out of town without starting more trouble.

Ted jumped up, to the principal's amazement, and said this was harassment, and he would not put up with it. He said he knew who was behind it. He said that he would brook no interference, his relationships were entirely his own affair, and marriage was nothing anyway but an antiquated custom promoted by the authorities of the church, just like everything else they rammed down people's throats. Rather inconsistently, he followed this up by stating that he was leaving Greta anyway, he was leaving the school, his job, Hanratty; he was going to marry Frances.

No, no, the principal kept saying, have a drink of water. You don't mean that, what nonsense. You can't make up your mind when you're in a state like this.

“My mind was made up long ago,” said Ted. He believed that was true.

“I
COULD AT LEAST
have asked you first,” said Ted to Frances. They were sitting in the living room of the apartment, in the late afternoon. Frances had not gone to the high school that Monday; she had ordered the glee club to meet at the Town Hall, so that she could rehearse them there, get them used to the stage. She came home rather late and her mother said, “There's a man waiting for you in the front room. He said his name but I forget.” Her mother also forgot to say that the minister had phoned and wanted Frances to call him back. Frances never did know that.

She thought it was probably the insurance agent. There was some problem about the fire insurance for the building. The agent had called last week and asked if he could come to see her when he was next in town. Going through the hall, she tried to clear her mind to
talk to him, wondering if she would have to find another place to live. Then she saw Ted sitting by the window, with his overcoat on. He had not turned on the lights. But some light from the street came in, some red and green Christmas rainbows played on him.

She knew as soon as she saw him what had happened. She knew not in detail but in substance. How else could he be sitting here in her mother's living room in front of the old ferny wallpaper and
The Angelus?

“This is an old-fashioned room,” he said gently, as if picking up her thoughts. He had run down, he was in the strange, weakened, dreamy state that follows terrible rows or irrevocable decisions. “It's not a bit like you.”

“It's my mother's room,” said Frances, wanting to ask—but it wasn't the time—what sort of room would have been like her. What did she seem like, to him, how much had he really noticed about her? She drew the curtains and turned on two wall bracket lights.

“Is that your corner?” said Ted politely, as she closed the music on the piano. She closed it so it wouldn't bother him, or to protect it from him; he had no interest in music.

“It is sort of. That's Mozart,” she said hurriedly, touching the cheap bust on a side table. “My favorite composer.”

What an idiotic, schoolgirl sort of thing to say. She felt her apologies should not be to Ted, but to this corner of her life, the piano and Mozart and the dark print of
A View of Toledo,
which she was very fond of, and was now ready to expose and betray.

Ted began to tell her of the day's events, what the principal had said, what he had said, as well as he could remember. In the telling, his replies were somewhat cooler, more controlled and thoughtful, than they had been in fact.

“So, I said I was going to marry you, and then I thought, of all the presumption. What if she says no?”

“Oh, well. You knew I wouldn't,” said Frances. “Say no.”

Of course he had known that. They were going through with it, nothing could stop them. Not Frances' mother, who sat in the kitchen reading and not knowing she was under sentence of death (for that was what it amounted to; she would go to Clark and Adelaide and the
confusion in their house would finish her; they would forget about her library books and she would go to bed and die). Not Ted's young daughters, who were skating this afternoon at the outdoor rink, to the blurry music “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and enjoying, in a subdued and guilty way, the attention their brother's death was bringing to them.

“Would you like coffee?” said Frances. “Oh, I don't know if we have any. We save all the ration coupons for tea. Would you like tea?”

“We save all ours for coffee. No. It's all right.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't really want anything.”

“We're stunned,” said Frances. “We're both stunned.”

“It would have happened anyway. Sooner or later we would have decided.”

“Do you think so?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Ted impatiently. “Of course we would.” But it didn't seem so to Frances, and she wondered if he said it just because he could not bear the thought of anything being set in motion outside his control—and so wastefully, so cruelly—and because he felt bound to conceal from her how small a part she herself had played in all this. No, not a small part; an ambiguous part. There was a long chain of things, many of them hidden from her, that brought him here to propose to her in the most proper place, her mother's living room. She had been made necessary. And it was quite useless to think, would anyone else have done as well, would it have happened if the chain had not been linked exactly as it was? Because it was linked as it was, and it was not anybody else. It was Frances, who had always believed something was going to happen to her, some clearly dividing moment would come, and she would be presented with her future. She had foreseen that, and she could have foreseen some scandal; but not the weight, the disturbance, the possibility of despair, that was at the heart of it.